16 accepted papers
We study (differentially) private federated learning (FL) of language models. The language models in cross-device FL are relatively small, which can be trained with meaningful formal user-level differential privacy (DP) guarantees when massive parallelism in training is enabled by the participation…
Pretraining auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) with retrieval demonstrates better perplexity and factual accuracy by leveraging external databases. However, the size of existing pretrained retrieval-augmented LLM is still limited (e.g., Retro has 7.5B parameters), which limits the effectiv…
Large language models (LLMs) typically utilize the top-k contexts from a retriever in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In this work, we propose a novel method called RankRAG, which instruction-tunes a single LLM for both context ranking and answer generation in RAG. In particular, the instruc…
The great success of large language models has encouraged the development of large multimodal models, with a focus on image-language interaction. Despite promising results in various image-language downstream tasks, it is still challenging and unclear how to extend the capabilities of these models t…
Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for…
Large decoder-only language models (LMs) can be largely improved in terms of perplexity by retrieval (e.g., RETRO), but its impact on text generation quality and downstream task accuracy is unclear. Thus, it is still an open question: shall we pretrain large autoregressive LMs with retrieval? To ans…
Certifying the robustness of model performance under bounded data distribution drifts has recently attracted intensive interest under the umbrella of distributional robustness. However, existing techniques either make strong assumptions on the model class and loss functions that can be certified, su…
Pre-trained language models (LMs) are shown to easily generate toxic language. In this work, we systematically explore domain-adaptive training to reduce the toxicity of language models. We conduct this study on three dimensions: training corpus, model size, and parameter efficiency. For the trainin…
Intensive algorithmic efforts have been made to enable the rapid improvements of certificated robustness for complex ML models recently. However, current robustness certification methods are only able to certify under a limited perturbation radius. Given that existing pure data-driven statistical ap…
Recent studies show that pre-trained language models (LMs) are vulnerable to textual adversarial attacks. However, existing attack methods either suffer from low attack success rates or fail to search efficiently in the exponentially large perturbation space. We propose an efficient and effective fr…
Large-scale pre-trained language models have achieved tremendous success across a wide range of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, even surpassing human performance. However, recent studies reveal that the robustness of these models can be challenged by carefully crafted textual adversarial…
Deep learning models exhibit a preference for statistical fitting over logical reasoning. Spurious correlations might be memorized when there exists statistical bias in training data, which severely limits the model performance especially in small data scenarios. In this work, we introduce Counterfa…
Recent advances in machine learning have largely benefited from the massive accessible training data. However, large-scale data sharing has raised great privacy concerns. In this work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving data Generative model based on the PATE framework (G-PATE), aiming to train a…
Large-scale language models such as BERT have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. Recent studies, however, show that such BERT-based models are vulnerable facing the threats of textual adversarial attacks. We aim to address this problem from an information-theoret…
Knowledge transferability, or transfer learning, has been widely adopted to allow a pre-trained model in the source domain to be effectively adapted to downstream tasks in the target domain. It is thus important to explore and understand the factors affecting knowledge transferability. In this paper…
{\em “How much is my data worth?”} is an increasingly common question posed by organizations and individuals alike. An answer to this question could allow, for instance, fairly distributing profits among multiple data contributors and determining prospective compensation when data breaches happen. I…