Related papers: Geometric Factual Recall in Transformers
How do transformer-based large language models (LLMs) store and retrieve knowledge? We focus on the most basic form of this task -- factual recall, where the model is tasked with explicitly surfacing stored facts in prompts of form `Fact:…
In recent years, pre-trained Transformers have dominated the majority of NLP benchmark tasks. Many variants of pre-trained Transformers have kept breaking out, and most focus on designing different pre-training objectives or variants of…
Transformers excel through content-addressable retrieval and the ability to exploit contexts of, in principle, unbounded length. We recast associative memory at the level of probability measures, treating a context as a distribution over…
Factual incorrectness in generated content is one of the primary concerns in ubiquitous deployment of large language models (LLMs). Prior findings suggest LLMs can (sometimes) detect factual incorrectness in their generated content (i.e.,…
Large language models demonstrate remarkable ability in factual recall, yet the fundamental limits of storing and retrieving input--output associations with neural networks remain unclear. We study these limits in a minimal setting: a…
Transformers often appear to perform Bayesian reasoning in context, but verifying this rigorously has been impossible: natural data lack analytic posteriors, and large models conflate reasoning with memorization. We address this by…
Pretrained embeddings based on the Transformer architecture have taken the NLP community by storm. We show that they can mathematically be reframed as a sum of vector factors and showcase how to use this reframing to study the impact of…
The ability of machine learning models to store input information in hidden layer vector embeddings, analogous to the concept of `memory', is widely employed but not well characterized. We find that language model embeddings typically…
Language models draw on two knowledge sources: facts baked into weights (parametric memory, PM) and information in context (working memory, WM). We study two mechanistically distinct failure modes--conflict, when PM and WM disagree and…
As deep generative models have progressed, recent work has shown them to be capable of memorizing and reproducing training datapoints when deployed. These findings call into question the usability of generative models, especially in light…
A few models have tried to tackle the link prediction problem, also known as knowledge graph completion, by embedding knowledge graphs in comparably lower dimensions. However, the state-of-the-art results are attained at the cost of…
Many models learn representations of knowledge graph data by exploiting its low-rank latent structure, encoding known relations between entities and enabling unknown facts to be inferred. To predict whether a relation holds between…
Representing words by vectors, or embeddings, enables computational reasoning and is foundational to automating natural language tasks. For example, if word embeddings of similar words contain similar values, word similarity can be readily…
Modern approaches to enhancing Large Language Models' factual accuracy and knowledge utilization face a fundamental trade-off: non-parametric retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides flexible access to external knowledge but suffers…
The storage and recall of factual associations in auto-regressive transformer language models (LMs) have drawn a great deal of attention, inspiring knowledge editing by directly modifying the located model weights. Most editing works…
Embeddings are a basic initial feature extraction step in many machine learning models, particularly in natural language processing. An embedding attempts to map data tokens to a low-dimensional space where similar tokens are mapped to…
As new knowledge rapidly accumulates, language models (LMs) with pretrained knowledge quickly become obsolete. A common approach to updating LMs is fine-tuning them directly on new knowledge. However, recent studies have shown that…
There are massive amounts of textual data residing in databases, valuable for many machine learning (ML) tasks. Since ML techniques depend on numerical input representations, word embeddings are increasingly utilized to convert symbolic…
Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…
Fact knowledge memorization is crucial for Large Language Models (LLM) to generate factual and reliable responses. However, the behaviors of LLM fact memorization remain under-explored. In this paper, we analyze the scaling laws for LLM's…