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Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…
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…
As language models become more powerful and sophisticated, it is crucial that they remain trustworthy and reliable. There is concerning preliminary evidence that models may attempt to deceive or keep secrets from their operators. To explore…
Learned dynamic weighting of the conditioning signal (attention) has been shown to improve neural language generation in a variety of settings. The weights applied when generating a particular output sequence have also been viewed as…
Linguistic representation learning in deep neural language models (LMs) has been studied for decades, for both practical and theoretical reasons. However, finding representations in LMs remains an unsolved problem, in part due to a dilemma…
Language places subtle constraints on how we make inductive inferences. Developmental evidence by Gelman et al. (2002) has shown children (4 years and older) to differentiate among generic statements ("Bears are daxable"), universally…
The usage of transformers has grown from learning about language semantics to forming meaningful visiolinguistic representations. These architectures are often over-parametrized, requiring large amounts of computation. In this work, we…
Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive…
Modern neural models trained on textual data rely on pre-trained representations that emerge without direct supervision. As these representations are increasingly being used in real-world applications, the inability to \emph{control} their…
There is increasing focus on adapting predictive models into agent-like systems, most notably AI assistants based on language models. We outline two structural reasons for why these models can fail when turned into agents. First, we discuss…
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with self-supervision on vast corpora of web text fit to the social biases of that text. Without intervention, these social biases persist in the model's predictions in downstream tasks, leading to…
The neural attention mechanism plays an important role in many natural language processing applications. In particular, the use of multi-head attention extends single-head attention by allowing a model to jointly attend information from…
Transformer models have become the dominant backbone for sequence modeling, leveraging self-attention to produce contextualized token representations. These are typically aggregated into fixed-size vectors via pooling operations for…
Despite the extensive success of pretrained language models as encoders for building NLP systems, they haven't seen prominence as decoders for sequence generation tasks. We explore the question of whether these models can be adapted to be…
Transformers, originally proposed for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, have recently achieved great success in automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, adjacent acoustic units (i.e., frames) are highly correlated, and…
Prediction head is a crucial component of Transformer language models. Despite its direct impact on prediction, this component has often been overlooked in analyzing Transformers. In this study, we investigate the inner workings of the…
Learning with limited data is one of the biggest problems of machine learning. Current approaches to this issue consist in learning general representations from huge amounts of data before fine-tuning the model on a small dataset of…
Transformer models pre-trained with a masked-language-modeling objective (e.g., BERT) encode commonsense knowledge as evidenced by behavioral probes; however, the extent to which this knowledge is acquired by systematic inference over the…
The success of Transformer language models is widely credited to their dot-product attention mechanism, which interweaves a set of key design principles: mixing information across positions (enabling multi-token interactions),…