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Matthew L Leavitt

4 accepted papers

2025

Perplexed by Perplexity: Perplexity-Based Data Pruning With Small Reference Models

ICLR 2025poster

In this work, we investigate whether small language models can determine high-quality subsets of large-scale text datasets that improve the performance of larger language models. While existing work has shown that pruning based on the perplexity of a larger model can yield high-quality data, we inve…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2024

Sudden Drops in the Loss: Syntax Acquisition, Phase Transitions, and Simplicity Bias in MLMs

ICLR 2024spotlight

Most interpretability research in NLP focuses on understanding the behavior and features of a fully trained model. However, certain insights into model behavior may only be accessible by observing the trajectory of the training process. We present a case study of syntax acquisition in masked languag…

2021

ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases

ICML 2021spotlight

Convolutional architectures have proven extremely successful for vision tasks. Their hard inductive biases enable sample-efficient learning, but come at the cost of a potentially lower performance ceiling. Vision Transformers (ViTs) rely on more flexible self-attention layers, and have recently outp…

2021

Selectivity considered harmful: evaluating the causal impact of class selectivity in DNNs

ICLR 2021poster

The properties of individual neurons are often analyzed in order to understand the biological and artificial neural networks in which they're embedded. Class selectivity—typically defined as how different a neuron's responses are across different classes of stimuli or data samples—is commonly used f…

Cited by 58SourcePDFScholar