Related papers: Transformation-Based Learning in the Fast Lane
Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architectures, while achieving state-of-the-art results on a large number of NLP tasks, can still suffer from overfitting during training. In practice, this is usually countered either by applying…
Neural machine translation is known to require large numbers of parallel training sentences, which generally prevent it from excelling on low-resource language pairs. This thesis explores the use of cross-lingual transfer learning on neural…
Transfer Learning (TL) offers the potential to accelerate learning by transferring knowledge across tasks. However, it faces critical challenges such as negative transfer, domain adaptation and inefficiency in selecting solid source…
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting,…
Machine learning methods adapt the parameters of a model, constrained to lie in a given model class, by using a fixed learning procedure based on data or active observations. Adaptation is done on a per-task basis, and retraining is needed…
Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…
Pretraining language models on formal language can improve their acquisition of natural language. Which features of the formal language impart an inductive bias that leads to effective transfer? Drawing on insights from linguistics and…
In recent years some researchers have explored the use of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms as key components in the solution of various natural language processing tasks. For instance, some of these algorithms leveraging deep neural…
Gradient-based meta-learning has proven to be highly effective at learning model initializations, representations, and update rules that allow fast adaptation from a few samples. The core idea behind these approaches is to use fast…
Transformer-based models are the state-of-the-art for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) applications. Models are getting bigger and better on various tasks. However, Transformer models remain computationally challenging since they are…
We develop an approach to efficiently grow neural networks, within which parameterization and optimization strategies are designed by considering their effects on the training dynamics. Unlike existing growing methods, which follow simple…
Most classroom engagements with generative AI focus on prompting pre-trained models, leaving the role of training data and model mechanics opaque. We developed a browser-based tool that allows students to train a small transformer language…
Deep learning has shown that learned functions can dramatically outperform hand-designed functions on perceptual tasks. Analogously, this suggests that learned optimizers may similarly outperform current hand-designed optimizers, especially…
Transfer learning has fundamentally changed the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) research. Many existing state-of-the-art models are first pre-trained on a large text corpus and then fine-tuned on downstream tasks. However,…
The remarkable capability of over-parameterised neural networks to generalise effectively has been explained by invoking a ``simplicity bias'': neural networks prevent overfitting by initially learning simple classifiers before progressing…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…
The current standard approach for fine-tuning transformer-based language models includes a fixed number of training epochs and a linear learning rate schedule. In order to obtain a near-optimal model for the given downstream task, a search…
The success of modern deep learning is attributed to two key elements: huge amounts of training data and large model sizes. Where a vast amount of data allows the model to learn more features, the large model architecture boosts the…
We focus on the robustness of neural networks for classification. To permit a fair comparison between methods to achieve robustness, we first introduce a standard based on the mensuration of a classifier's degradation. Then, we propose…
Learning from human feedback has gained traction in fields like robotics and natural language processing in recent years. While prior works mostly rely on human feedback in the form of comparisons, language is a preferable modality that…