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Imitation learning suffers from causal confusion. This phenomenon occurs when learned policies attend to features that do not causally influence the expert actions but are instead spuriously correlated. Causally confused agents produce low…
Transformer-based models have been widely adopted for sentiment analysis tasks due to their exceptional ability to capture contextual information. However, these methods often exhibit suboptimal accuracy in certain scenarios. By analyzing…
Multilingual transformer-based models demonstrate remarkable zero and few-shot transfer across languages by learning and reusing language-agnostic features. However, as a fixed-size model acquires more languages, its performance across all…
Large, self-supervised transformer-based language representation models have recently received significant amounts of attention, and have produced state-of-the-art results across a variety of tasks simply by scaling up pre-training on…
The performance of autoregressive models on natural language generation tasks has dramatically improved due to the adoption of deep, self-attentive architectures. However, these gains have come at the cost of hindering inference speed,…
Word representations induced from models with discrete latent variables (e.g.\ HMMs) have been shown to be beneficial in many NLP applications. In this work, we exploit labeled syntactic dependency trees and formalize the induction problem…
Training Transformers on algorithmic tasks frequently demonstrates an intriguing abrupt learning phenomenon: an extended performance plateau followed by a sudden, sharp improvement. This work investigates the underlying mechanisms for such…
A hallmark property of explainable AI models is the ability to teach other agents, communicating knowledge of how to perform a task. While Large Language Models perform complex reasoning by generating explanations for their predictions, it…
Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form,…
The use of positional embeddings in transformer language models is widely accepted. However, recent research has called into question the necessity of such embeddings. We further extend this inquiry by demonstrating that a randomly…
Encoding implicit language presents a challenge for language models, especially in high-risk domains where maintaining high precision is important. Automated detection of online child grooming is one such critical domain, where predators…
People are regularly confronted with potentially deceptive statements (e.g., fake news, misleading product reviews, or lies about activities). Only few works on automated text-based deception detection have exploited the potential of deep…
Following the recent success of word embeddings, it has been argued that there is no such thing as an ideal representation for words, as different models tend to capture divergent and often mutually incompatible aspects like…
Large language models have led to significant progress across many NLP tasks, although their massive sizes often incur substantial computational costs. Distillation has become a common practice to compress these large and highly capable…
Pre-trained language models perform well on a variety of linguistic tasks that require symbolic reasoning, raising the question of whether such models implicitly represent abstract symbols and rules. We investigate this question using the…
In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…
Subliminal learning describes a student language model inheriting a behavioral bias by fine-tuning on seemingly innocuous data generated by a biased teacher model. Prior work has begun to characterize this phenomenon but leaves open…
Language models are pretrained as passive predictors with no incentive to model the consequences of their own outputs. Post-training changes this: a model producing its own responses can benefit from recognizing that it is on-policy. We…
Decision analysis deals with modeling and enhancing decision processes. A principal challenge in improving behavior is in obtaining a transparent description of existing behavior in the first place. In this paper, we develop an expressive,…
Transformer-based language models have achieved impressive success in various natural language processing tasks due to their ability to capture complex dependencies and contextual information using self-attention mechanisms. However, they…