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The limits of open-ended generative models are unclear, yet increasingly important. What causes them to succeed and what causes them to fail? In this paper, we take a prompt-centric approach to analyzing and bounding the abilities of…
Despite the huge progress in myriad generation tasks, pretrained language models (LMs) such as GPT2 still tend to generate repetitive texts with maximization-based decoding algorithms for open-ended generation. We attribute their…
There has been recent interest in whether large language models (LLMs) can introspect about their own internal states. Such abilities would make LLMs more interpretable, and also validate the use of standard introspective methods in…
Small Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly being deployed in resource-constrained environments, yet their behavioral robustness to data contamination during instruction tuning remains poorly understood. We systematically investigate the…
Fine-tuning language models on narrowly harmful data causes emergent misalignment (EM) -- behavioral failures extending far beyond training distributions. Recent work demonstrates compartmentalization of misalignment behind contextual…
Numerous works are proposed to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents to better fulfill instructions, ensuring they are trustful and helpful. Nevertheless, some human instructions are often malicious or misleading and…
This paper discusses the problem of weakly supervised classification, in which instances are given weak labels that are produced by some label-corruption process. The goal is to derive conditions under which loss functions for weak-label…
Unsupervised on-the-fly back-translation, in conjunction with multilingual pretraining, is the dominant method for unsupervised neural machine translation. Theoretically, however, the method should not work in general. We therefore conduct…
Can in-context learning (ICL) override pre-trained label semantics, or does it merely refine an existing semantic backbone? We address this question by treating LLMs as prompt-induced classifiers and contrasting their behavior under…
Large language models (LLMs) have a surprising failure: when trained on "A has a feature B", they do not generalize to "B is a feature of A", which is termed the Reversal Curse. Even when training with trillions of tokens this issue still…
Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive language understanding and the capacity to generate responses that follow specific prompts. However, due to the computational demands associated with training these…
Contrastive learning produces coherent semantic feature embeddings by encouraging positive samples to cluster closely while separating negative samples. However, existing contrastive learning methods lack principled guarantees on coverage…
Safety alignment mechanism are essential for preventing large language models (LLMs) from generating harmful information or unethical content. However, cleverly crafted prompts can bypass these safety measures without accessing the model's…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., system-level directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a…
The role of semantics in zero-shot learning is considered. The effectiveness of previous approaches is analyzed according to the form of supervision provided. While some learn semantics independently, others only supervise the semantic…
We examine the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate salient (interesting) negative statements about real-world entities; an emerging research topic of the last few years. We probe the LLMs using zero- and k-shot unconstrained…
Instruction following aims to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent by specifying explicit constraints on how tasks should be performed. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: instruction following can…
Sentence compression reduces the length of text by removing non-essential content while preserving important facts and grammaticality. Unsupervised objective driven methods for sentence compression can be used to create customized models…
Although the word-popularity based negative sampler has shown superb performance in the skip-gram model, the theoretical motivation behind oversampling popular (non-observed) words as negative samples is still not well understood. In this…
Reinforcement learning is hard in general. Yet, in many specific environments, learning is easy. What makes learning easy in one environment, but difficult in another? We address this question by proposing a simple measure of…