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Albert Webson

7 accepted papers

2024

In-context Learning Generalizes, But Not Always Robustly: The Case of Syntax

NAACL 2024long

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the underlying structure of the task defined by the context, or…

2024

Mixture-of-Experts Meets Instruction Tuning: A Winning Combination for Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a neural architecture design that adds learnable parameters to Large Language Models (LLMs) without increasing computational complexity (FLOPs). Instruction tuning is a technique for training LLMs to follow instructions. We advocate combining these two approaches,…

Cited by 78SourcePDFScholar
2023

Are Language Models Worse than Humans at Following Prompts? It's Complicated

EMNLP 2023short findings

Prompts have been the center of progress in advancing language models' zero-shot and few-shot performance. However, recent work finds that models can perform surprisingly well when given intentionally irrelevant or misleading prompts. Such results may be interpreted as evidence that model behavior i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning

ACL 2023long

Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. We apply MTF to the pretrained multilingual BLOOM and mT5 model families to produce finetuned varia…

2023

The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning

ICML 2023poster

We study the design decision of publicly available instruction tuning methods, by reproducing and breaking down the development of Flan 2022 (Chung et al., 2022). Through careful ablation studies on the Flan Collection of tasks and methods, we tease apart the effect of design decisions which enable…

2022

Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization

ICLR 2022spotlight

Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks (Brown et al., 2020). It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language models’ pretraining (Radford et al., 2019). Can zero-shot genera…