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Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form,…
Current Reinforcement Fine-tuning (RFT) paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from sample inefficiency due to the redundant exposure of identical queries under uniform data sampling. While previous work has explored curriculum…
Many machine learning algorithms are based on the assumption that training examples are drawn independently. However, this assumption does not hold anymore when learning from a networked sample because two or more training examples may…
We propose Autolearn, a framework that enables language models to learn from documents they read, with no external supervision. Passages that produce anomalously high per-token loss are flagged, verified through a self-generated Q&A chain,…
Imitation learning trains control policies by mimicking pre-recorded expert demonstrations. In partially observable settings, imitation policies must rely on observation histories, but many seemingly paradoxical results show better…
Modern deep artificial neural networks have achieved great success in the domain of computer vision and beyond. However, their application to many real-world tasks is undermined by certain limitations, such as overconfident uncertainty…
In this thesis we discuss machine learning methods performing automated variable selection for learning sparse predictive models. There are multiple reasons for promoting sparsity in the predictive models. By relying on a limited set of…
We present an empirical analysis of the state-of-the-art systems for referring expression recognition -- the task of identifying the object in an image referred to by a natural language expression -- with the goal of gaining insight into…
Accurate predictions of when a component will fail are crucial when planning maintenance, and by modeling the distribution of these failure times, survival models have shown to be particularly useful in this context. The presented…
The ability of Variational Autoencoders to learn disentangled representations has made them appealing for practical applications. However, their mean representations, which are generally used for downstream tasks, have recently been shown…
Machine learning models increasingly generate their own training data -- online bandits, reinforcement learning, and post-training pipelines for language models are leading examples. In these adaptive settings, a single training observation…
Active learning is a powerful tool when labelling data is expensive, but it introduces a bias because the training data no longer follows the population distribution. We formalize this bias and investigate the situations in which it can be…
Recent research has revealed that deep neural networks often take dataset biases as a shortcut to make decisions rather than understand tasks, leading to failures in real-world applications. In this study, we focus on the spurious…
Datasets scraped from the internet have been critical to the successes of large-scale machine learning. Yet, this very success puts the utility of future internet-derived datasets at potential risk, as model outputs begin to replace human…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the creation of online content, creating feedback loops as subsequent generations of models will be trained on this synthetic data. Such loops were shown to lead to distribution shifts -…
Post-training alignment often reduces LLM diversity, leading to a phenomenon known as mode collapse. Unlike prior work that attributes this effect to algorithmic limitations, we identify a fundamental, pervasive data-level driver:…
Machine unlearning aims to remove specific content from trained models while preserving overall performance. However, the phenomenon of benign relearning, in which forgotten information reemerges even from benign fine-tuning data, reveals…
We consider structure discovery of undirected graphical models from observational data. Inferring likely structures from few examples is a complex task often requiring the formulation of priors and sophisticated inference procedures.…
Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled…
State-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models often learn to model dataset biases and surface form correlations instead of features that target the intended underlying task. Previous work has demonstrated effective methods to…