17 accepted papers
Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) is a widely used criterion for training supervised sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models. It learns the alignments between the input and output sequences by marginalizing over the perfect alignments (that yield the ground truth), at the expense of the impe…
An important aspect in developing language models that interact with humans is aligning their behavior to be useful and unharmful for their human users. This is usually achieved by tuning the model in a way that enhances desired behaviors and inhibits undesired ones, a process referred to as alignme…
When applied to processing long text, Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited by their context window. Existing efforts to address this limitation involve training specialized architectures, and cannot be easily applied to off- the-shelf LLMs. We present Parallel Context Windows (PCW), a method tha…
The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has experienced a dramatic leap in capabilities with the recent introduction of huge Language Models (LMs). Despite this success, natural language problems that involve several compounded steps are still practically unlearnable, even by the largest LMs.…
In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various downstream natural language tasks simply by including concate…
Pretraining Neural Language Models (NLMs) over a large corpus involves chunking the text into training examples, which are contiguous text segments of sizes processable by the neural architecture. We highlight a bias introduced by this common practice: we prove that the pretrained NLM can model much…
After their successful debut in natural language processing, Transformer architectures are now becoming the de-facto standard in many domains. An obstacle for their deployment over new modalities is the architectural configuration: the optimal depth-to-width ratio has been shown to dramatically vary…
Self-attention architectures, which are rapidly pushing the frontier in natural language processing, demonstrate a surprising depth-inefficient behavior: Empirical signals indicate that increasing the internal representation (network width) is just as useful as increasing the number of self-attentio…
The key attribute that drives the unprecedented success of modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) on learning tasks which involve sequential data, is their ever-improving ability to model intricate long-term temporal dependencies. However, a well established measure of RNNs' long-term memory capaci…
The driving force behind deep networks is their ability to compactly represent rich classes of functions. The primary notion for formally reasoning about this phenomenon is expressive efficiency, which refers to a situation where one network must grow unfeasibly large in order to replicate functions…
Formal understanding of the inductive bias behind deep convolutional networks, i.e. the relation between the network's architectural features and the functions it is able to model, is limited. In this work, we establish a fundamental connection between the fields of quantum physics and deep learning…
Expressive efficiency refers to the relation between two architectures A and B, whereby any function realized by B could be replicated by A, but there exists functions realized by A, which cannot be replicated by B unless its size grows significantly larger. For example, it is known that deep networ…
We present a novel tractable generative model that extends Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) and significantly boosts their power. We call it Sum-Product-Quotient Networks (SPQNs), whose core concept is to incorporate conditional distributions into the model by direct computation using quotient nodes, e.…
Our formal understanding of the inductive bias that drives the success of convolutional networks on computer vision tasks is limited. In particular, it is unclear what makes hypotheses spaces born from convolution and pooling operations so suitable for natural images. In this paper we study the abil…
Convolutional rectifier networks, i.e. convolutional neural networks with rectified linear activation and max or average pooling, are the cornerstone of modern deep learning. However, despite their wide use and success, our theoretical understanding of the expressive properties that drive these netw…
We present a deep layered architecture that generalizes convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). The architecture, called SimNets, is driven by two operators: (i) a similarity function that generalizes inner-product, and (ii) a log-mean-exp function called MEX that generalizes maximum and average.…
This work is motivated by the engineering task of achieving a near state-of-the-art face recognition on a minimal computing budget running on an embedded system. Our main technical contribution centers around a novel training method, called Multibatch, for similarity learning, i.e., for the task of…