Related papers: Chunky Post-Training: Data Driven Failures of Gene…

We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned)…

Supervised and preference-based fine-tuning techniques have become popular for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user intent and correctness criteria. However, real-world training data often exhibits spurious correlations --…

Neural networks are known to use spurious correlations such as background information for classification. While prior work has looked at spurious correlations that are widespread in the training data, in this work, we investigate how…

What happens if we train a new Large Language Model (LLM) using data that are at least partially generated by other LLMs? The explosive success of LLMs means that a substantial amount of content online will be generated by LLMs rather than…

Synthetic data has been proposed as a solution to address the issue of high-quality data scarcity in the training of large language models (LLMs). Studies have shown that synthetic data can effectively improve the performance of LLMs on…

Large language models (LLMs) serve as giant information stores, often including personal or copyrighted data, and retraining them from scratch is not a viable option. This has led to the development of various fast, approximate unlearning…

Deep neural networks have been shown to learn and rely on spurious correlations present in the data that they are trained on. Reliance on such correlations can cause these networks to malfunction when deployed in the real world, where these…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as surrogates for human participants, but it remains unclear which models best capture human behavior and why. To address this, we introduce Psych-201, a novel dataset that enables us to…

Artificial intelligence models trained from data can only be as good as the underlying data is. Biases in training data propagating through to the output of a machine learning model are a well-documented and well-understood phenomenon, but…

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are prone to learning spurious features that correlate with the label during training but are irrelevant to the learning problem. This hurts model generalization and poses problems when deploying them in…

Adapting to latent confounded shift remains a core challenge in modern AI. This setting is driven by hidden variables that induce spurious correlations between inputs and outputs during training, leading models to rely on non-causal…

Causal inference is essential for decision-making but remains challenging for non-experts. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in this domain, their precise causal estimation capabilities are still limited, and the impact of…

Counterfactual tuning (CFT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning by training models to generate alternative fictitious knowledge in place of undesired content. However, in this work, we find that…

Through pretraining on a corpus with various sources, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained impressive performance. However, the impact of each component of the pretraining corpus remains opaque. As a result, the organization of the…

Back-translation is a critical component of Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (UNMT), which generates pseudo parallel data from target monolingual data. A UNMT model is trained on the pseudo parallel data with translated source, and…

Existing Large Language Model (LLM) benchmarks primarily focus on syntactically correct inputs, leaving a significant gap in evaluation on imperfect text. In this work, we study how word-boundary corruption affects how LLMs detect targeted…

The unauthorized use of personal data in model training has emerged as a growing privacy threat. Unlearnable examples (UEs) address this issue by embedding imperceptible perturbations into benign examples to obstruct feature learning.…

We explore the training dynamics of neural networks in a structured non-IID setting where documents are presented cyclically in a fixed, repeated sequence. Typically, networks suffer from catastrophic interference when training on a…

Federated Learning (FL) enables training models across decentralized data silos while preserving client data privacy. Recent research has explored efficient methods for post-training large language models (LLMs) within FL to address…

Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are due…