Related papers: Learning to Recall with Transformers Beyond Orthog…

Fine-tuning LLM-based text embedders via contrastive learning maps inputs and outputs into a new representational space, discarding the LLM's output semantics. We propose LLM2Vec-Gen, a self-supervised alternative that instead produces…

Transformers have achieved great success across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundations underlying their success remain largely unexplored. To demystify the strong capacities of transformers applied to versatile…

As large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive datasets, they have raised significant privacy and ethical concerns due to their potential to inadvertently retain sensitive information. Unlearning seeks to selectively remove specific…

Autoregressive language models (LMs) generate one token at a time, yet human reasoning operates over higher-level abstractions - sentences, propositions, and concepts. This contrast raises a central question- Can LMs likewise learn to…

From extracting features to generating text, the outputs of large language models (LLMs) typically rely on the final layers, following the conventional wisdom that earlier layers capture only low-level cues. However, our analysis shows that…

Autoregressive language models have demonstrated a remarkable ability to extract latent structure from text. The embeddings from large language models have been shown to capture aspects of the syntax and semantics of language. But what…

The success of large language models (LLMs) can be attributed in part to their ability to efficiently store factual knowledge as key-value mappings within their MLP parameters. Recent work has proposed explicit weight constructions to build…

The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…

Understanding what knowledge is implicitly encoded in deep learning models is essential for improving the interpretability of AI systems. This paper examines common methods to explain the knowledge encoded in word embeddings, which are core…

Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…

Large language models (LLMs) contain substantial factual knowledge which is commonly elicited by multiple-choice question-answering prompts. Internally, such models process the prompt through multiple transformer layers, building varying…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to solve complex tasks through In-Context Learning (ICL), where models learn from a few input-output pairs without explicit fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore the capacity of…

As retrieval-augmented generation prevails in large language models, embedding models are becoming increasingly crucial. Despite the growing number of general embedding models, prior work often overlooks the critical role of training data…

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTM), and Memory Networks which contain memory are popularly used to learn patterns in sequential data. Sequential data has long sequences that hold relationships. RNN can…

Modular exponentiation is crucial to number theory and cryptography, yet remains largely unexplored from a mechanistic interpretability standpoint. We train a 4-layer encoder-decoder Transformer model to perform this operation and…

Transformers excel at discovering patterns in sequential data, yet their fundamental limitations and learning mechanisms remain crucial topics of investigation. In this paper, we study the ability of Transformers to learn pseudo-random…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance as text embedding models when finetuned with supervised contrastive training. However, their large size balloons inference time and memory requirements. In this paper, we show that…

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…

The relationship between memorization and generalization in large language models (LLMs) remains an open area of research, with growing evidence that the two are deeply intertwined. In this work, we investigate this relationship by…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive capacity to recall a vast range of factual knowledge. However, understanding their underlying reasoning and internal mechanisms in exploiting this knowledge remains a key research area.…