22 accepted papers
Existing retrieval benchmarks primarily consist of information-seeking queries (e.g., aggregated questions from search engines) where keyword or semantic-based retrieval is usually sufficient. However, many complex real-world queries require in-depth reasoning to identify relevant documents that go…
Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a narrow set of tasks, limited in terms of languages, domains, and task types. To circumvent this limitation and to provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) -- a large-scale community-dr…
We present PDE-Controller, a framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to control systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). Traditional LLMs have excelled in commonsense reasoning but fall short in rigorous logical reasoning. While recent AI-for-math has made strides in pu…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for training language models (LMs) on reasoning tasks that elicit emergent long chains of thought (CoTs). Unlike supervised learning, it updates the model using both correct and incorrect samples via policy gradients. To b…
Large language models (LLMs) show inherent brittleness in their safety mechanisms, as evidenced by their susceptibility to jailbreaking and even non-malicious fine-tuning. This study explores this brittleness of safety alignment by leveraging pruning and low-rank modifications. We develop methods to…
The rapid progress in open-source large language models (LLMs) is significantly advancing AI development. Extensive efforts have been made before model release to align their behavior with human values, with the primary goal of ensuring their helpfulness and harmlessness. However, even carefully ali…
Chart understanding plays a pivotal role when applying Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to real-world tasks such as analyzing scientific papers or financial reports. However, existing datasets often focus on oversimplified and homogeneous charts with template-based questions, leading to an o…
Although large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, the data used to train them is rarely disclosed. Given the incredible scale of this data, up to trillions of tokens, it is all but certain that it includes potentially problematic text such as copyrighted materials, personally identifiable i…
In-context learning (ICL) performs tasks by prompting a large language model (LLM) using an instruction and a small set of annotated examples called demonstrations. Recent work has shown that precise details of the inputs used in the ICL prompt significantly impact performance, which has incentivize…
Instruction tuning has unlocked powerful capabilities in large language models (LLMs), using combined datasets to develop general-purpose chatbots. However, real-world applications often require a specialized suite of skills (e.g., reasoning). The challenge lies in identifying the most relevant data…
NLP has recently made exciting progress toward training language models (LMs) with strong scientific problem-solving skills. However, model development has not focused on real-life use-cases of LMs for science, including applications in education that require processing long scientific documents. To…
Literature search questions, such as “where can I find research on the evaluation of consistency in generated summaries?” pose significant challenges for modern search engines and retrieval systems. These questions often require a deep understanding of research concepts and the ability to reason ove…
The popularity of LLaMA (Touvron et al., 2023a;b) and other recently emerged moderate-sized large language models (LLMs) highlights the potential of building smaller yet powerful LLMs. Regardless, the cost of training such models from scratch on trillions of tokens remains high. In this work, we stu…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm that reparameterizes reward functions in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to enhance simplicity and training stability. In this work, we propose SimPO, a simpler yet more effective approa…
Recent works attribute the capability of in-context learning (ICL) in large pre-trained language models to implicitly simulating and fine-tuning an internal model (e.g., linear or 2-layer MLP) during inference. However, such constructions require large memory overhead, which makes simulation of more…
Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger language models demonstrate more desirable behaviors? In thi…
Masked language models like BERT can perform text classification in a zero-shot fashion by reformulating downstream tasks as text infilling. However, this approach is highly sensitive to the template used to prompt the model, yet practitioners are blind when designing them in strict zero-shot settin…
Pre-trained language models encode undesirable social biases, which are further exacerbated in downstream use. To this end, we propose MABEL (a Method for Attenuating Gender Bias using Entailment Labels), an intermediate pre-training approach for mitigating gender bias in contextualized representati…
Pre-trained masked language models successfully perform few-shot learning by formulating downstream tasks as text infilling. How- ever, as a strong alternative in full-shot settings, discriminative pre-trained models like ELECTRA do not fit into the paradigm. In this work, we adapt prompt-based few-…
The growing size of neural language models has led to increased attention in model compression. The two predominant approaches are pruning, which gradually removes weights from a pre-trained model, and distillation, which trains a smaller compact model to match a larger one. Pruning methods can sign…
The combination of multilingual pre-trained representations and cross-lingual transfer learning is one of the most effective methods for building functional NLP systems for low-resource languages. However, for extremely low-resource languages without large-scale monolingual corpora for pre-training…
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a long-standing problem in natural language processing. One significant challenge in supervised all-words WSD is to classify among senses for a majority of words that lie in the long-tail distribution. For instance, 84% of the annotated words have less than 10 exam…