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A supervised learning algorithm has access to a distribution of labeled examples, and needs to return a function (hypothesis) that correctly labels the examples. The hypothesis of the learner is taken from some fixed class of functions…

The allure of superhuman-level capabilities has led to considerable interest in language models like GPT-3 and T5, wherein the research has, by and large, revolved around new model architectures, training tasks, and loss objectives, along…

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a problem modeling and solving framework for several problems in KR with growing industrial applications. Also for studies of computational complexity and deeper insights into the hardness and its sources,…

Meta-learning aims to learn general knowledge with diverse training tasks conducted from limited data, and then transfer it to new tasks. It is commonly believed that increasing task diversity will enhance the generalization ability of…

Sparse representation models a signal as a linear combination of a small number of dictionary atoms. As a generative model, it requires the dictionary to be highly redundant in order to ensure both a stable high sparsity level and a low…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a critical step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human instructions and values, yet many aspects of SFT remain poorly understood. We trained a wide range of base models on a variety of datasets…

Recent advances in the field of abstractive summarization leverage pre-trained language models rather than train a model from scratch. However, such models are sluggish to train and accompanied by a massive overhead. Researchers have…

Machine learning methods adapt the parameters of a model, constrained to lie in a given model class, by using a fixed learning procedure based on data or active observations. Adaptation is done on a per-task basis, and retraining is needed…

Recent works on instruction tuning (IT) have achieved great performance with zero-shot generalizability to unseen tasks. With additional context (e.g., task definition, examples) provided to models for fine-tuning, they achieved much higher…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained for downstream tasks by updating their parameters (e.g., via RL). However, updating parameters forces them to absorb task-specific information, which can result in catastrophic forgetting and loss of…

Catastrophic forgetting remains a fundamental challenge in continual learning for large language models. Recent work revealed that performance degradation may stem from spurious forgetting caused by task alignment disruption rather than…

Meta-Learning aims to speed up the learning process on new tasks by acquiring useful inductive biases from datasets of related learning tasks. While, in practice, the number of related tasks available is often small, most of the existing…

Pre-training has achieved remarkable success when transferred to downstream tasks. In machine learning, we care about not only the good performance of a model but also its behavior under reasonable shifts of condition. The same philosophy…

Training data compositions for Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly affect their downstream performance. However, a thorough data ablation study exploring large sets of candidate data mixtures is typically prohibitively expensive…

Transfer learning has become a popular task adaptation method in the era of foundation models. However, many foundation models require large storage and computing resources, which makes off-the-shelf deployment impractical. Post-training…

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to learn novel tasks with very few labeled samples by leveraging experience from \emph{related} training tasks. In this paper, we try to understand FSL by delving into two key questions: (1) How to quantify the…

Diverse studies in systems neuroscience begin with extended periods of curriculum training known as `shaping' procedures. These involve progressively studying component parts of more complex tasks, and can make the difference between…

Autoregressive language models, pretrained using large text corpora to do well on next word prediction, have been successful at solving many downstream tasks, even with zero-shot usage. However, there is little theoretical understanding of…

We provide new statistical guarantees for transfer learning via representation learning--when transfer is achieved by learning a feature representation shared across different tasks. This enables learning on new tasks using far less data…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like instruction-following abilities, particularly those exceeding 100 billion parameters. The combined capability of some smaller, resource-friendly LLMs can address most of the…