12 accepted papers
Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) approac…
Robust and effective scaling of models from small to large width typically requires the precise adjustment of many algorithmic and architectural details, such as parameterization and optimizer choices. In this work, we propose a new perspective on parameterization by investigating a key assumption i…
Teams that have trained large Transformer-based models have reported training instabilities at large scale that did not appear when training with the same hyperparameters at smaller scales. Although the causes of such instabilities are of scientific interest, the amount of resources required to repr…
Improving the alignment of language models with human preferences remains an active research challenge. Previous approaches have primarily utilized online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Recently, offline methods such as Sequence Likelihood Calibration (SLiC) and Direct Preference…
Conditional language models are predominantly trained with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), giving probability mass to sparsely observed target sequences. While MLE trained models assign high probability to plausible sequences given the context, the model probabilities often do not accurately ra…
The evaluation of abstractive summarization models typically uses test data that is identically distributed as training data. In real-world practice, documents to be summarized may contain input noise caused by text extraction artifacts or data pipeline bugs. The robustness of model performance unde…
While large pretrained Transformer models have proven highly capable at tackling natural language tasks, handling long sequence inputs still poses a significant challenge. One such task is long input summarization, where inputs are longer than the maximum input context of most models. Through an ext…
Machine learning algorithms typically assume independent and identically distributed samples in training and at test time (IID). Much work has shown that high-performing ML classifiers can degrade significantly and provide overly-confident, wrong classification predictions, particularly for out-of-…
Widely used evaluation metrics for text generation either do not work well with longer texts or fail to evaluate all aspects of text quality. In this paper, we introduce a new metric called SMART to mitigate such limitations. Specifically, we treat sentences as basic units of matching instead of tok…
Discriminative neural networks offer little or no performance guarantees when deployed on data not generated by the same process as the training distribution. On such out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, the prediction may not only be erroneous, but confidently so, limiting the safe deployment of class…
The driving force behind the recent success of LSTMs has been their ability to learn complex and non-linear relationships. Consequently, our inability to describe these relationships has led to LSTMs being characterized as black boxes. To this end, we introduce contextual decomposition (CD), an inte…
Recurrent neural network models with an attention mechanism have proven to be extremely effective on a wide variety of sequence-to-sequence problems. However, the fact that soft attention mechanisms perform a pass over the entire input sequence when producing each element in the output sequence prec…