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Fine-tuning pre-trained contextualized embedding models has become an integral part of the NLP pipeline. At the same time, probing has emerged as a way to investigate the linguistic knowledge captured by pre-trained models. Very little is,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can enable agents to learn complex tasks. However, it is difficult to interpret the knowledge and reuse it across tasks. Inductive biases can address such issues by explicitly providing generic yet useful…
While social media offers freedom of self-expression, abusive language carry significant negative social impact. Driven by the importance of the issue, research in the automated detection of abusive language has witnessed growth and…
We probe pre-trained transformer language models for bridging inference. We first investigate individual attention heads in BERT and observe that attention heads at higher layers prominently focus on bridging relations in-comparison with…
A common approach to mechanistic interpretability is to causally manipulate model representations via targeted interventions in order to understand what those representations encode. Here we ask whether such interventions create…
Pretrained language models like BERT have achieved good results on NLP tasks, but are impractical on resource-limited devices due to memory footprint. A large fraction of this footprint comes from the input embeddings with large input…
A growing body of research has demonstrated that the behavior of large language models can be effectively controlled at inference time by directly modifying their internal states, either through vector additions to their activations or…
Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces.…
Since the popularization of the Transformer as a general-purpose feature encoder for NLP, many studies have attempted to decode linguistic structure from its novel multi-head attention mechanism. However, much of such work focused almost…
We analyze the operation of transformer language adapters, which are small modules trained on top of a frozen language model to adapt its predictions to new target languages. We show that adapted predictions mostly evolve in the source…
Transformers underlie almost all state-of-the-art language models in computational linguistics, yet their cognitive adequacy as models of human sentence processing remains disputed. In this work, we use a surprisal-based linking mechanism…
The success of large pretrained language models (LMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa has sparked interest in probing their representations, in order to unveil what types of knowledge they implicitly capture. While prior research focused on…
The transformer is a state-of-the-art neural translation model that uses attention to iteratively refine lexical representations with information drawn from the surrounding context. Lexical features are fed into the first layer and…
Large language models are increasingly used as behavioral simulators, but it remains unclear when their outputs reflect human-like cognitive mechanisms rather than prompt-sensitive surface patterns. We study this question through the…
Transformer models systematically favor certain token positions, yet the architectural origins of this position bias remain poorly understood. This bias is closely connected to the Lost-in-the-Middle phenomenon, where models underutilize…
Most commonly used language models (LMs) are instruction-tuned and aligned using a combination of fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, causing them to refuse users requests deemed harmful by the model. However, jailbreak prompts can…
Authorship attribution models fine-tuned with the same pretrained encoder, data, and loss can differ four-fold in performance depending only on their scoring mechanism. We use mechanistic interpretability tools to explain this gap.…
To reduce the inference cost of large language models, model compression is increasingly used to create smaller scalable models. However, little is known about their robustness to minority subgroups defined by the labels and attributes of a…
An agent's intention often remains hidden behind the black-box nature of embodied policies. Communication using natural language statements that describe the next action can provide transparency towards the agent's behavior. We aim to…
Transformer-based models are now predominant in NLP. They outperform approaches based on static models in many respects. This success has in turn prompted research that reveals a number of biases in the language models generated by…