Related papers: The Convergence Gap: Instruction-Tuned Language Mo…
Using responses generated by high-performing large language models (LLMs) for instruction tuning has become a widely adopted approach. However, the existing literature overlooks a property of LLM-generated responses: they conflate world…
This paper argues that generating output tokens is more effective than using pooled representations for prediction tasks because token-level generation retains more mutual information. Since LLMs are trained on massive text corpora using…
To acquire instruction-following capabilities, large language models (LLMs) undergo instruction tuning, where they are trained on instruction-response pairs using next-token prediction (NTP). Efforts to improve instruction tuning often…
We prove theoretically that generalization improves not only through data scaling but also by compressing internal representations. To operationalize this insight, we introduce the Information Bottleneck Language Modeling (IBLM) objective,…
Inference-time alignment techniques offer a lightweight alternative or complement to costly reinforcement learning, while enabling continual adaptation as alignment objectives and reward targets evolve. Existing theoretical analyses justify…
Ensuring that deep learning models are well-calibrated in terms of their predictive uncertainty is essential in maintaining their trustworthiness and reliability, yet despite increasing advances in foundation model research, the…
The theory underlying robust distributed learning algorithms, designed to resist adversarial machines, matches empirical observations when data is homogeneous. Under data heterogeneity however, which is the norm in practical scenarios,…
Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP often leads to catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge. Prior work primarily aims to mitigate forgetting during adaptation; however, forgetting often remains inevitable during…
End-to-end Large Speech Language Models (LSLMs) have demonstrated impressive conversational generation abilities, yet consistently fall short of traditional pipeline systems on semantic understanding benchmarks. In this work, we reveal…
How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families.…
Safety post-training can improve the harmfulness and policy compliance of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it may also reduce general utility, a phenomenon often described as the \emph{alignment tax}. We study this trade-off through the…
Many continual-learning methods modify gradients upstream (e.g., projection, penalty rescaling, replay mixing) while treating Adam as a neutral backend. We show this composition has a hidden failure mode. In a high-overlap, non-adaptive…
Detecting AI-generated text is an important but challenging problem. Existing likelihood-based detection methods are often sensitive to content complexity and may exhibit unstable performance. In this paper, our key insight is that modern…
We propose pre-finetuning, an additional large-scale learning stage between language model pre-training and fine-tuning. Pre-finetuning is massively multi-task learning (around 50 datasets, over 4.8 million total labeled examples), and is…
Continual learning (CL) aims to help deep neural networks learn new knowledge while retaining what has been learned. Owing to their powerful generalizability, pre-trained vision-language models such as Contrastive Language-Image…
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), become increasingly integrated into decision-making processes, the ability to trust their outputs is crucial. To earn human trust, LLMs must be well…
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with cross-lingual tasks due to data imbalances between high-resource and low-resource languages, as well as monolingual bias in pre-training. Existing methods, such as bilingual…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays as a core function module in various personalized online services. The traditional ID-based models for CTR prediction take as inputs the one-hot encoded ID features of tabular modality, which…
Many machine learning algorithms rely on iterative updates of uncertainty representations, ranging from variational inference and expectation-maximization, to reinforcement learning, continual learning, and multi-agent learning. In the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide variety of natural language tasks; however, their large size makes their inference slow and computationally expensive. Focusing on this problem, we propose to…