106 accepted papers
The ubiquity of closed-weight language models with public-facing APIs has generated interest in forensic methods, both for extracting hidden model details (e.g., parameters) and identifying models by their outputs. One successful approach to these goals has been to exploit the geometric constraints…
Large language models demonstrate the intriguing ability to perform unseen tasks via in-context learning. However, it remains unclear what mechanisms inside the model drive such task-level generalization. In this work, we approach this question through the lens of off-by-one addition (i.e., 1+1=3, 2…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), particularly with algorithms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has proven highly effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, a critical bottleneck in current pipelines lies in the limited di…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong reasoning performance by generating long chains of thought (CoTs), yet only a small fraction of these traces meaningfully contributes to answer prediction, while the majority contains repetitive or truncated content. Such output redundancy is further prop…
Today, large language models are widely used as judges to evaluate responses from other language models. Hence, it is imperative to benchmark and improve these LLM-judges on real-world language model usage: a typical human-assistant conversation is lengthy, and shows significant diversity in topics,
In open-ended generative tasks like narrative writing or dialogue, large language models often exhibit cultural biases, showing limited knowledge and generating templated outputs for less prevalent cultures. Recent works show that these biases may stem from uneven cultural representation in pretrain…
Language model inversion seeks to recover hidden prompts using only language model outputs. This capability has implications for security and accountability in language model deployments, such as leaking private information from an API-protected language model’s system message. We propose a new meth…
Authorship Verification (AV) (do two documents have the same author?) is essential in many real-life applications. AV is often used in privacy-sensitive domains that require an offline proprietary model that is deployed on premises, making publicly served online models (APIs) a suboptimal choice. Cu…
Large Language models (LLMs) suffer from forgetting of upstream knowledge when fine-tuned. Despite efforts on mitigating forgetting, few have investigated how forgotten upstream examples are dependent on newly learned tasks. Insights on such dependencies enable efficient and targeted mitigation of f…
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on reasoning benchmarks but often fail when inputs alter slightly, raising concerns about the extent to which their success relies on memorization. This issue is especially acute in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, where spurious memorized patterns can trig
We examine diverging preferences in human-labeled preference datasets. We develop a taxonomy of disagreement sources spanning ten categories across four high-level classes and find that the majority of disagreements are due to factors such as task underspecification or response style. Our findings c…
Language models today are widely used in education, yet their ability to tailor responses for learners with varied informational needs and knowledge backgrounds remains under-explored. To this end, we introduce ELI-Why, a benchmark of 13.4K “Why” questions to evaluate the pedagogical capabilities of…
Language models prompted with a user description or persona have been used to predict the user’s preferences and opinions. However, existing approaches to building personas mostly rely on a user’s demographic attributes and/or prior judgments, but not on any underlying reasoning behind a user’s judg
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, but their generated rationales often suffer from issues such as reasoning inconsistency and factual errors, undermining their reliability. Prior work has explored improving rationale quality via multi-reward fine-tuning o
The ability to communicate uncertainty and knowledge limitations is crucial for the safety of large language models (LLMs). Current evaluations of these abilities typically examine the correspondence between model accuracy and its internal probabilities or linguistic outputs. However, evaluation of…
Backdoor attacks, in which a model behaves maliciously when given an attacker-specified trigger, pose a major security risk for practitioners who depend on publicly released language models. As a countermeasure, backdoor detection methods aim to detect whether a released model contains a backdoor. W
Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved multi-step reasoning by generating free-text rationales, but these models tend to lose focus over the middle of long contexts. This raises concerns that as reasoning progresses, LLMs may overlook information in earlier steps when decoding subseq
Making inferences in text comprehension to understand the meaning is essential in language processing. This work studies the entailment verification (EV) problem of complex, multi-sentence premises requiring a system to make multiple inferences implicitly. Modern applications of EV in detecting inco…
Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a ubiquitous platform for open-ended applications due to their ability to modulate responses based on human instructions. The widespread use of LLMs holds significant potential for shaping public perception, yet also risks being maliciously…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive human-like performance across various reasoning tasks. However, their mastery of underlying inferential rules still falls short of human capabilities. To investigate this, we propose a logic scaffolding inferential rule generation framework, to c…
To effectively use large language models (LLMs) for real-world queries, it is imperative that they generalize to the long-tail distribution, i.e. rare examples where models exhibit low confidence. In this work, we take the first step towards evaluating LLMs in the long-tail distribution of inferenti…
While instruction-tuned models have shown remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, accurately evaluating their ability to follow instructions remains challenging. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during tra…
The ability to derive underlying principles from a handful of observations and then generalize to novel situations---known as inductive reasoning---is central to human intelligence. Prior work suggests that language models (LMs) often fall short on inductive reasoning, despite achieving impressive s…
Procedural planning, which entails decomposing a high-level goal into a sequence of temporally ordered steps, is an important yet intricate task for machines. It involves integrating common-sense knowledge to reason about complex and often contextualized situations, e.g. ``scheduling a doctor's appo…
As natural language becomes the default interface for human-AI interaction, there is a need for LMs to appropriately communicate uncertainties in downstream applications. In this work, we investigate how LMs incorporate confidence in responses via natural language and how downstream users behave in…
We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning mod…
We introduce Lifelong ICL, a problem setting that challenges long-context language models (LMs) to learn a sequence of language tasks through in-context learning (ICL). We further introduce Task Haystack, an evaluation suite dedicated to assessing and diagnosing how long-context LMs utilizes context…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning performance but struggle with multi-step deductive reasoning involving a series of rule application steps, especially when rules are presented non-sequentially. Our preliminary analysis shows that while LLMs excel in single-step rule appli…
Large language models (LMs) are capable of generating free-text rationales to aid question answering. However, prior work 1) suggests that useful self-rationalization is emergent only at significant scales (e.g., 175B parameter GPT-3); and 2) focuses largely on downstream performance, ignoring the s…
Language models deployed in the wild make errors. However, simply updating the model with the corrected error instances causes catastrophic forgetting---the updated model makes errors on instances learned during the instruction tuning or upstream training phase. Randomly replaying upstream data yiel…
Chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT are now serving millions of users. Despite their widespread use, there remains a lack of public datasets showcasing how these tools are used by a population of users in practice. To bridge this gap, we offered free access to ChatGPT for online users in exchange for…
The increasing availability of real-world conversation data offers exciting opportunities for researchers to study user-chatbot interactions. However, the sheer volume of this data makes manually examining individual conversations impractical. To overcome this challenge, we introduce WildVis, an int…
Logical reasoning over text is an important ability that requires understanding the semantics of the text and reasoning through them to arrive at correct inferences. Prior works on pretraining language models to improve the logical reasoning ability require complex processing of training data (e.g.,…
Among the remarkable emergent capabilities of large language models (LMs) is free-text rationalization; beyond certain scale, large LMs are capable of generating seemingly useful rationalizations, which in turn, can dramatically enhance their performances on leaderboards. This phenomenon raises a qu…
Backdoor attacks have become an emerging threat to NLP systems. By providing poisoned training data, the adversary can embed a “backdoor” into the victim model, which allows input instances satisfying certain textual patterns (e.g., containing a keyword) to be predicted as a target label of the adve…
We propose BOSS, an approach that automatically learns to solve new long-horizon, complex, and meaningful tasks by growing a learned skill library with minimal supervision. Prior work in reinforcement learning require expert supervision, in the form of demonstrations or rich reward functions, to lea…
In many task settings, text classification models are likely to encounter examples from novel classes on which they cannot predict correctly. Selective prediction, in which models abstain on low-confidence examples, provides a possible solution, but existing models are often overly confident on unse…
The longstanding goal of multi-lingual learning has been to develop a universal cross-lingual model that can withstand the changes in multi-lingual data distributions. There has been a large amount of work to adapt such multi-lingual models to unseen target languages. However, the majority of work i…
Fine-tuning pre-trained language models has become the prevalent paradigm for building downstream NLP models. Oftentimes fine-tuned models are readily available but their training data is not, due to data privacy or intellectual property concerns. This creates a barrier to fusing knowledge across in…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) from only a few examples, but the success of ICL varies widely from task to task. Thus, it is important to quickly determine whether ICL is applicable to a new task, but directly evaluating ICL acc…
Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they si…
Large pre-trained models are capable of few-shot in-context learning (ICL), i.e., performing a new task by prepending a few demonstrations before the test input. However, the concatenated demonstrations are often excessively long and induce additional computation. Inspired by fusion-in-decoder (FiD)…
We investigate the predictability of large language model (LLM) capabilities: given records of past experiments using different model families, numbers of parameters, tasks, and numbers of in-context examples, can we accurately predict LLM performance on new experiment configurations? Answering this…
We propose a novel task, G4C, to study teacher-student natural language interactions in a goal-driven and grounded environment. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a role-playing game, provides an ideal setting to investigate such interactions. Here, the Dungeon Master (DM), i.e., the teacher, guides the ac…
While extreme-scale language models have demonstrated exceptional performance on a variety of language tasks, the degree of control over these language models through pure prompting can often be limited. Directly fine-tuning such language models can be effective for tailoring them, but it can be eit…
We present LLM-Blender, an ensembling framework designed to attain consistently superior performance by leveraging the diverse strengths of multiple open-source large language models (LLMs). Our framework consists of two modules: PairRanker and GenFuser, addressing the observation that optimal LLMs…
Language models (LMs) have demonstrated their capability in possessing commonsense knowledge of the physical world, a crucial aspect of performing tasks in everyday life. However, it remains unclear whether they have the capacity to generate grounded, executable plans for embodied tasks. This is a c…
Neural language models (LMs) have achieved impressive results on various language-based reasoning tasks by utilizing latent knowledge encoded in their own pretrained parameters. To make this reasoning process more explicit, recent works retrieve a rationalizing LM's internal knowledge by training or…
Generating free-text rationales is a promising step towards explainable NLP, yet evaluating such rationales remains a challenge. Existing metrics have mostly focused on measuring the association between the rationale and a given label. We argue that an ideal metric should focus on the new informatio…
Large language models (LMs) beyond a certain scale, demonstrate the emergent capability of generating free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While CoT can yield dramatically improved performance, such gains are only observed for sufficiently large LMs. Even…
We introduce SwiftSage, a novel agent framework inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, designed to excel in action planning for complex interactive reasoning tasks. SwiftSage integrates the strengths of behavior cloning and prompting large language models (LLMs) to enhance task comp…
Chain-of-thought prompting (e.g., “Let’s think step-by-ste”) primes large language models to verbalize rationalization for their predictions. While chain-of-thought can lead to dramatic performance gains, benefits appear to emerge only for sufficiently large models (beyond 50B parameters). We show t…
Large pre-trained vision-language (VL) models can learn a new task with a handful of examples and generalize to a new task without fine-tuning. However, these VL models are hard to deploy for real-world applications due to their impractically huge sizes and slow inference speed. To solve this limita…
Humans use natural language to compose common concepts from their environment into plausible, day-to-day scene descriptions. However, such generative commonsense reasoning (GCSR) skills are lacking in state-of-the-art text generation methods. Descriptive sentences about arbitrary concepts generated…
By explaining how humans would solve a given task, human rationales can provide strong learning signal for neural language models (NLMs). Explanation regularization (ER) aims to improve NLM generalization by pushing the NLM’s machine rationales (Which input tokens did the NLM focus on?) to align wit…
Recent works suggest that transformer models are capable of multi-tasking on diverse NLP tasks and adapt to new tasks efficiently. However, the potential of these multi-task models may be limited as they use the same set of parameters for all tasks. In contrast, humans tackle tasks in a more flexibl…
Transformers have been shown to be able to perform deductive reasoning on a logical rulebase containing rules and statements written in natural language. Recent works show that such models can also produce the reasoning steps (i.e., the proof graph) that emulate the model’s logical reasoning process…
Increasing concerns and regulations about data privacy and sparsity necessitate the study of privacy-preserving, decentralized learning methods for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Federated learning (FL) provides promising approaches for a large number of clients (e.g., personal devices or…
Recent advances in prompt-based learning have shown strong results on few-shot text classification by using cloze-style templates. Similar attempts have been made on named entity recognition (NER) which manually design templates to predict entity types for every text span in a sentence. However, suc…
Current Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) models typically include a retrieving module and a reading module, where the retriever selects potentially relevant passages from open-source documents for a given question, and the reader produces an answer based on the retrieved passages. The recently…
Pre-trained language models are still far from human performance in tasks that need understanding of properties (e.g. appearance, measurable quantity) and affordances of everyday objects in the real world since the text lacks such information due to reporting bias. In this work, we study whether int…
Pretrained language models (PTLMs) are typically learned over a large, static corpus and further fine-tuned for various downstream tasks. However, when deployed in the real world, a PTLM-based model must deal with data distributions that deviates from what the PTLM was initially trained on. In this…
Current Machine Translation (MT) models still struggle with more challenging input, such as noisy data and tail-end words and phrases. Several works have addressed this robustness issue by identifying specific categories of noise and variation then tuning models to perform better on them. An importa…
Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional sente…
News article revision histories provide clues to narrative and factual evolution in news articles. To facilitate analysis of this evolution, we present the first publicly available dataset of news revision histories, NewsEdits. Our dataset is large-scale and multilingual; it contains 1.2 million art…
Real-world natural language processing (NLP) models need to be continually updated to fix the prediction errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) data streams while overcoming catastrophic forgetting. However, existing continual learning (CL) problem setups cannot cover such a realistic and complex scena…
We study the robustness of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models to entity renaming—do models make more wrong predictions when the same questions are asked about an entity whose name has been changed? Such failures imply that models overly rely on entity information to answer questions, and thu…
Human communication relies on common ground (CG), the mutual knowledge and beliefs shared by participants, to produce coherent and interesting conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate that current response generation (RG) models produce generic and dull responses in dialogues because they act re…
Transformers have been shown to be able to perform deductive reasoning on inputs containing rules and statements written in the English natural language. However, it is unclear if these models indeed follow rigorous logical reasoning to arrive at the prediction or rely on spurious correlation patter…
Distilling state-of-the-art transformer models into lightweight student models is an effective way to reduce computation cost at inference time. The student models are typically compact transformers with fewer parameters, while expensive operations such as self-attention persist. Therefore, the impr…
Implicit knowledge, such as common sense, is key to fluid human conversations. Current neural response generation (RG) models are trained to generate responses directly, omitting unstated implicit knowledge. In this paper, we present Think-Before-Speaking (TBS), a generative approach to first extern…
An extractive rationale explains a language model’s (LM’s) prediction on a given task instance by highlighting the text inputs that most influenced the prediction. Ideally, rationale extraction should be faithful (reflective of LM’s actual behavior) and plausible (convincing to humans), without comp…
Humans can perform unseen tasks by recalling relevant skills acquired previously and then generalizing them to the target tasks, even if there is no supervision at all. In this paper, we aim to improve this kind of cross-task generalization ability of massive multi-task language models, such as T0 a…
Automatic extraction of product attribute values is an important enabling technology in e-Commerce platforms. This task is usually modeled using sequence labeling architectures, with several extensions to handle multi-attribute extraction. One line of previous work constructs attribute-specific mode…
Commonsense reasoning research has so far been limited to English. We aim to evaluate and improve popular multilingual language models (ML-LMs) to help advance commonsense reasoning (CSR) beyond English. We collect the Mickey corpus, consisting of 561k sentences in 11 different languages, which can…
We study the power of cross-attention in the Transformer architecture within the context of transfer learning for machine translation, and extend the findings of studies into cross-attention when training from scratch. We conduct a series of experiments through fine-tuning a translation model on dat…
Humans can learn a new language task efficiently with only few examples, by leveraging their knowledge obtained when learning prior tasks. In this paper, we explore whether and how such cross-task generalization ability can be acquired, and further applied to build better few-shot learners across di…
Current commonsense reasoning research focuses on developing models that use commonsense knowledge to answer multiple-choice questions. However, systems designed to answer multiple-choice questions may not be useful in applications that do not provide a small list of candidate answers to choose from…
As a prominent attribution-based explanation algorithm, Integrated Gradients (IG) is widely adopted due to its desirable explanation axioms and the ease of gradient computation. It measures feature importance by averaging the model’s output gradient interpolated along a straight-line path in the inp…
While pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved noticeable success on many NLP tasks, they still struggle for tasks that require event temporal reasoning, which is essential for event-centric applications. We present a continual pre-training approach that equips PTLMs with targeted knowledge…
Prior studies on text-to-text generation typically assume that the model could figure out what to attend to in the input and what to include in the output via seq2seq learning, with only the parallel training data and no additional guidance. However, it remains unclear whether current models can pre…
Event forecasting is a challenging, yet important task, as humans seek to constantly plan for the future. Existing automated forecasting studies rely mostly on structured data, such as time-series or event-based knowledge graphs, to help predict future events. In this work, we aim to formulate a tas…
We explore task-free continual learning (CL), in which a model is trained to avoid catastrophic forgetting in the absence of explicit task boundaries or identities. Among many efforts on task-free CL, a notable family of approaches are memory-based that store and replay a subset of training examples…
Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PTLMs), such as BERT and its better variant RoBERTa, has been a common practice for advancing performance in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Recent advance in representation learning shows that isotropic (i.e., unit-variance and uncorrelated) embe…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Commonsense knowledge bases (CSKB) are increasingly used for various natural language processing tasks. Since CSKBs are mostly human-generated and may reflect societal biases, it is important to ensure that such biases are not…
The ability to continuously expand knowledge over time and utilize it to rapidly generalize to new tasks is a key feature of human linguistic intelligence. Existing models that pursue rapid generalization to new tasks (e.g., few-shot learning methods), however, are mostly trained in a single shot on…
Knowledge graphs (KGs) have helped neural models improve performance on various knowledge-intensive tasks, like question answering and item recommendation. By using attention over the KG, such KG-augmented models can also "explain" which KG information was most relevant for making a given prediction…
Pre-trained text-to-text transformers such as BART have achieved impressive performance across a range of NLP tasks. Recent study further shows that they can learn to generalize to novel tasks, by including task descriptions as part of the source sequence and training the model with (source, target)…
To reduce a model size but retain performance, we often rely on knowledge distillation (KD) which transfers knowledge from a large “teacher” model to a smaller “student” model. However, KD on multimodal datasets such as vision-language tasks is relatively unexplored, and digesting multimodal informa…
Fine-tuned language models have been shown to exhibit biases against protected groups in a host of modeling tasks such as text classification and coreference resolution. Previous works focus on detecting these biases, reducing bias in data representations, and using auxiliary training objectives to…
Current NLP models are predominantly trained through a two-stage “pre-train then fine-tune” pipeline. Prior work has shown that inserting an intermediate pre-training stage, using heuristic masking policies for masked language modeling (MLM), can significantly improve final performance. However, it…
Pretrained language models (PTLM) have achieved impressive results in a range of natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks that require a syntactic and semantic understanding of the text. However, current pre-training objectives such as masked token prediction (for BERT-style P…
Humans use commonsense reasoning (CSR) implicitly to produce natural and coherent responses in conversations. Aiming to close the gap between current response generation (RG) models and human communication abilities, we want to understand why RG models respond as they do by probing RG model’s unders…
Pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved impressive performance on commonsense inference benchmarks, but their ability to employ commonsense to make robust inferences, which is crucial for effective communications with humans, is debated. In the pursuit of advancing fluid human-AI communica…
Pre-trained language models have been successful on text classification tasks, but are prone to learning spurious correlations from biased datasets, and are thus vulnerable when making inferences in a new domain. Prior work reveals such spurious patterns via post-hoc explanation algorithms which com…
To audit the robustness of named entity recognition (NER) models, we propose RockNER, a simple yet effective method to create natural adversarial examples. Specifically, at the entity level, we replace target entities with other entities of the same semantic class in Wikidata; at the context level,…
Augmenting pre-trained language models with knowledge graphs (KGs) has achieved success on various commonsense reasoning tasks. However, for a given task instance, the KG, or certain parts of the KG, may not be useful. Although KG-augmented models often use attention to focus on specific KG componen…
Hierarchical multi-label text classification (HMTC) aims to tag each document with a set of classes from a taxonomic class hierarchy. Most existing HMTC methods train classifiers using massive human-labeled documents, which are often too costly to obtain in real-world applications. In this paper, we…
Multilingual models, such as M-BERT and XLM-R, have gained increasing popularity, due to their zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning capabilities. However, their generalization ability is still inconsistent for typologically diverse languages and across different benchmarks. Recently, meta-learn…
The recent success of Distant Supervision (DS) brings abundant labeled data for the task of fine-grained entity typing (FET) without human annotation. However, the heuristically generated labels inevitably bring a significant distribution gap, namely dataset shift, between the distantly labeled trai…
While deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, these data-hungry models heavily rely on labeled data, which restricts their applications in scenarios where data annotation is expensive. Natural language (NL) explanations have been demonstrated very useful ad…
Time series prediction is an important problem in machine learning. Previous methods for time series prediction did not involve additional information. With a lot of dynamic knowledge graphs available, we can use this additional information to predict the time series better. Recently, there has been…
The impressive performance of neural networks on natural language processing tasks attributes to their ability to model complicated word and phrase compositions. To explain how the model handles semantic compositions, we study hierarchical explanation of neural network predictions. We identify non-a…
Modeling and generating graphs is fundamental for studying networks in biology, engineering, and social sciences. However, modeling complex distributions over graphs and then efficiently sampling from these distributions is challenging due to the non-unique, high-dimensional nature of graphs and the…
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do n…
In this paper, we present a new estimator for precision matrix in high dimensional Gaussian graphical models. At the core of the proposed estimator is a collection of node-wise linear regression with nonconvex penalty. In contrast to existing estimators for Gaussian graphical models with O(s\sqrt\lo…