Related papers: What do Language Models Learn and When? The Implic…
In-context learning (ICL) research often considers learning a function in-context through a uniform sample of input-output pairs. Here, we investigate how presenting a compositional subtask curriculum in context may alter the computations a…
We lack a systematic understanding of the effects of fine-tuning (via methods such as instruction-tuning or reinforcement learning from human feedback), particularly on tasks outside the narrow fine-tuning distribution. In a simplified…
In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…
Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training…
Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM…
Large language models (LLMs) work by manipulating the geometry of input embedding vectors over multiple layers. Here, we ask: how are the input vocabulary representations of language models structured, and how and when does this structure…
Recent work has shown that large pretrained Language Models (LMs) can not only perform remarkably well on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also start improving on reasoning tasks such as arithmetic induction, symbolic…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential as tools for scientific discovery. This has engendered growing interest in their use in humanistic disciplines, such as historical linguistics and literary studies. These fields often…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential for in-context learning, where LLMs learn a new task simply by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (prompts). Despite their potential, our understanding of the factors…
In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLM's response,…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to function as collaborative partners, engaging in back-and-forth dialogue to solve complex, ambiguous problems. However, current LLMs often falter in real-world settings, defaulting to…
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…
Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…
Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least…
The growing emphasis on 21st-century competencies in postsecondary education, intensified by the transformative impact of generative AI, underscores the need to evaluate how these competencies are embedded in curricula and how effectively…
The quality of training data impacts the performance of pre-trained large language models (LMs). Given a fixed budget of tokens, we study how to best select data that leads to good downstream model performance across tasks. We develop a new…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in educational technologies for a variety of tasks, from generating instructional materials and assisting with assessment design to tutoring. While prior work has investigated how models…
Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses…
This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…