16 accepted papers
Knowledge distillation is crucial for compressing large Vision–Language Models (VLMs) into efficient architectures. While prior VLM research has primarily focused on reasoning tasks like visual question answering, multimodal embedding learning, a key component for large-scale retrieval, has received…
Recent work suggests that LLMs can improve their abilities through \textit{self-evolution}, using only internally generated supervision. A central open question, however, is not whether self-evolution can help, but: \textit{how far is it from oracle-supervised training under minimal assumptions?} To…
We introduce SealQA, a challenge benchmark for evaluating SEarch-Augmented Language models on fact-seeking questions where web search yields conflicting, noisy, or unhelpful results. SealQA comes in three flavors: (1) SEAL-0 (main) and (2) SEAL-HARD, both of which assess factual accuracy and reasoni…
Knowledge distillation (KD) is crucial for compressing large text embedding models, but faces challenges when teacher and student models use different tokenizers (Cross-Tokenizer KD - CTKD). Vocabulary mismatches impede the transfer of relational knowledge encoded in deep representations, such as hi
Modern LLMs face a major obstacle: each new pre-trained model version requires expensive and repetitive alignment. We propose a method that transfers fine-tuning updates across model versions. The key idea is to extract the *diff vector*, which is the difference in parameters induced by fine-tuning,
Recent advances in neural topic models (NTMs) have improved topic quality but still face challenges: weak document-topic alignment, high inference costs due to large pretrained language models (PLMs), and limited modeling of hierarchical topic structures. To address these issues, we introduce HiCOT…
Discovering topics and learning document representations in topic space are two crucial aspects of topic modeling, particularly in the short-text setting, where inferring topic proportions for individual documents is highly challenging. Despite significant progress in neural topic modeling, effectiv…
As large language models (LLMs) evolve, evaluating their output reliably becomes increasingly difficult due to the high cost of human evaluation. To address this, we introduce FLAMe, a family of Foundational Large Autorater Models. FLAMe is trained on a diverse set of over 100 quality assessment tas…
Since most large language models (LLMs) are trained once and never updated, they struggle to dynamically adapt to our ever-changing world. In this work, we present FreshQA, a dynamic QA benchmark that tests a model’s ability to answer questions that may require reasoning over up-to-date world knowle…
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a neural architecture design that adds learnable parameters to Large Language Models (LLMs) without increasing computational complexity (FLOPs). Instruction tuning is a technique for training LLMs to follow instructions. We advocate combining these two approaches,…
Text generation metrics that are not robust to dialect variation make it impossible to tell how well systems perform for many groups of users, and can even penalize systems for producing text in lower-resource dialects. In this paper, we introduce a suite of methods to assess whether metrics are dia…
We study the design decision of publicly available instruction tuning methods, by reproducing and breaking down the development of Flan 2022 (Chung et al., 2022). Through careful ablation studies on the Flan Collection of tasks and methods, we tease apart the effect of design decisions which enable…
The ability of generative language models (GLMs) to generate text has improved considerably in the last few years, enabling their use for generative data augmentation. In this work, we propose CONDA, an approach to further improve GLM’s ability to generate synthetic data by reformulating data genera…
In this paper, we explore the challenging problem of performing a generative task in a target language when labeled data is only available in English, using summarization as a case study. We assume a strict setting with no access to parallel data or machine translation and find that common transfer…
There has been growing interest in parameter-efficient methods to apply pre-trained language models to downstream tasks. Building on the Prompt Tuning approach of Lester et al. (2021), which learns task-specific soft prompts to condition a frozen pre-trained model to perform different tasks, we prop…
Despite their recent successes in tackling many NLP tasks, large-scale pre-trained language models do not perform as well in few-shot settings where only a handful of training examples are available. To address this shortcoming, we propose STraTA, which stands for Self-Training with Task Augmentatio…