Related papers: The Convergence Gap: Instruction-Tuned Language Mo…
Instruction Fine-tuning~(IFT) is a critical phase in building large language models~(LLMs). Previous works mainly focus on the IFT's role in the transfer of behavioral norms and the learning of additional world knowledge. However, the…
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs significant cost; hence, any strategy that accelerates model convergence is helpful. In this paper, we investigate the ability of a simple idea checkpoint averaging along the trajectory of a…
Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word)…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current…
Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…
Although massive pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP show impressive generalization capabilities for many tasks, still it often remains necessary to fine-tune them for improved performance on specific datasets. When doing so, it is…
This paper investigates various approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify gaps and misconceptions in students' self-explanations of specific instructional material, in our case explanations of code examples. This research is…
Large language models (LLMs) frequently achieve impressive scores on standardized benchmarks, yet accuracy alone offers a limited view of their capabilities. Evaluating open-source LLMs through leaderboards faces persistent issues like data…
Factual knowledge extraction aims to explicitly extract knowledge parameterized in pre-trained language models for application in downstream tasks. While prior work has been investigating the impact of supervised fine-tuning data on the…
A promising paradigm for adapting instruction-tuned language models is to learn task-specific updates on a pretrained base model and subsequently merge them into the instruction-tuned model. However, existing approaches typically treat the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable proficiency in natural language tasks, yet their frequent overconfidence-misalignment between predicted confidence and true correctness-poses significant risks in critical decision-making…
Large Language Models are traditionally finetuned on large instruction datasets. However recent studies suggest that small, high-quality datasets can suffice for general purpose instruction following. This lack of consensus surrounding…
Post-training large language models (LLMs) often suffers from catastrophic forgetting, where improvements on a target objective degrade previously acquired capabilities. Recent evidence suggests that this phenomenon is primarily driven by…
Language models are becoming the default interface to factual knowledge, yet they often verify outputs more reliably than they generate them. This generation-verification gap (GV-gap) underlies many recent advances in self-improvement and…
Benchmarks underpin how progress in large language models (LLMs) is measured and trusted. Yet our analyses reveal that apparent convergence in benchmark accuracy can conceal deep epistemic divergence. Using two major reasoning benchmarks -…
Intermediate task fine-tuning has been shown to culminate in large transfer gains across many NLP tasks. With an abundance of candidate datasets as well as pre-trained language models, it has become infeasible to run the cross-product of…
Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on…
Despite multilingual pretraining, large language models often struggle with non-English tasks, particularly in language control, the ability to respond in the intended language. We identify and characterize two key failure modes: the…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have achieved significant zero-shot performance on downstream tasks with various fine-tuning adaptation methods. However, recent studies have proven that adversarial attacks can significantly…
In this paper, we present our finding that prepending a Task-Agnostic Prefix Prompt (TAPP) to the input improves the instruction-following ability of various Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. TAPP is different from canonical…