Task-agnostic data augmentation shows little benefit for pretrained transformers.
problem Evaluating the effectiveness of task-agnostic data augmentation on pretrained transformers.
method Conducted a systematic examination of two data augmentation techniques (Easy Data Augmentation and Back-Translation) across 5 tasks, 6 datasets, and 3 pretrained transformer models.
result Data augmentation techniques previously effective for non-pretrained models fail to consistently improve performance for pretrained transformers, even with limited training data.
Pretraining models improves text classification accuracy, but diminishing returns are observed with large datasets.
problem Improving text classification accuracy with pretrained models.
method Examined the benefits of pretrained models on text classification tasks with varying amounts of training data.
result As the number of training examples grows into the millions, the accuracy gap between pretrained BERT-based models and vanilla LSTM narrows to within 1%.
Paper studies how few pretraining tasks are needed for a linear model to solve new tasks.
problem How many pretraining tasks are needed for a linear model to solve new tasks?
method Pretrained a linear attention model for linear regression with a Gaussian prior.
result Effective pretraining requires a small number of independent tasks, and the model closely matches Bayes optimal.
Method constructs finance LLMs without instruction data using pretraining and model merging.
problem Developing domain-specific LLMs for finance is resource-intensive.
method Continual pretraining on financial data + model merging of instruction-tuned and domain-specific pretrained vectors.
result Successfully constructs instruction-tuned LLMs for finance without additional instruction data.
WeatherFormer learns robust weather features from small datasets.
problem Modeling complex weather dynamics from limited data.
method Pretrained transformer encoder on large satellite dataset, with spatiotemporal encoding.
result State-of-the-art performance in county-level soybean yield prediction and influenza forecasting.
Synthetic continued pretraining enhances model performance with synthetic data.
problem Data inefficiency in pretrained models when adapting to domain-specific documents.
method Synthetic data augmentation using EntiGraph to create a large synthetic corpus.
result Language models can answer questions and follow instructions without access to domain-specific documents.
Paper introduces a multi-stage influence function to track model predictions.
problem Improving natural language processing and computer vision performance.
method Develops a multi-stage influence function to track predictions from finetuned models back to pretraining data.
result Identifies pretraining examples contributing most to finetuning task predictions.
New study finds best language model architecture and pretraining objective for zero-shot tasks.
problem Evaluating which language model architectures and pretraining objectives best enable zero-shot generalization.
method Compared three model architectures and two pretraining objectives across 170 billion tokens, with and without finetuning.
result Causal decoder-only models trained on autoregressive language modeling exhibit strongest zero-shot generalization.
Theoretical analysis of data quality and synergies in LLMs.
problem Understanding why different training methods require different amounts of data.
method Theoretical analysis of transformers trained on a weight prediction task for linear regression.
result SFT excels on smaller datasets challenging for the pretrained model, while RL benefits from large, not overly difficult data.
New framework selects high-quality pretraining data without training LLMs.
problem Slow progress in understanding pretraining data due to costly experiments.
method Statistical framework based on perplexity-benchmark correlations.
result Approach outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks.
This paper enhances language models with knowledge awareness.
problem Understanding how much knowledge pretrained language models grasp.
method Inserting explicit knowledge layers into pretraining without changing transformer architecture.
result Significantly more knowledge packed into transformer parameters.
Research improves federated text models for next word prediction.
problem Training models on distributed devices efficiently and effectively.
method Employ transfer learning in federated learning for next word prediction.
result Enhancements to current baselines with pretrained embeddings and whole model pretraining.
Publicly pretraining models on Web data may undermine differential privacy.
problem The use of large Web-scraped datasets in differential privacy models.
method Critical review of leveraging pretrained models on public datasets for differential privacy.
result Publicizing pretrained models as 'private' could harm trust and generalize poorly.
Transformers can learn new tasks from diverse pretraining data but struggle with out-of-domain tasks.
problem Transformer models' ability to learn new tasks in-context is limited by their pretraining data coverage.
method Investigation of transformer models trained on ( x , f ( x ) ) (x, f(x)) ( x , f ( x )) pairs, comparing in-context learning capabilities across different task families. result Transformers can identify and learn within task families in their pretraining data but fail with out-of-domain tasks.
New research reveals how the pretraining distribution affects in-context learning in large language models.
problem Understanding how the pretraining distribution influences in-context learning in large language models.
method Developed a theoretical framework to characterize the relationship between pretraining distribution properties and in-context learning performance.
result Characterized a fundamental trade-off between robust task selection and generalization in ICL due to the pretraining distribution's statistical properties.
This study examines how the size and alignment of pretraining data affect the performance of large language models on downstream tasks.
problem Understanding how the size and alignment of pretraining data impact the performance of large language models on downstream tasks.
method Investigated the scaling behavior of large language models in a transfer learning setting, focusing on machine translation tasks.
result The size of the finetuning dataset and the distribution alignment between pretraining and downstream data significantly influence the scaling behavior of downstream performance.
MPP trains a transformer to predict multiple physical systems, improving accuracy across various tasks.
problem Training models for specific physical systems is inefficient and requires fine-tuning.
method MPP trains a shared transformer on multiple heterogeneous physical systems, projecting fields into a shared embedding space.
result A single MPP-pretrained transformer outperforms task-specific models on all pretraining sub-tasks and downstream tasks.
Analysis of pretrained models' effectiveness in downstream tasks.
problem Understanding why pretrained models perform well in NLP tasks.
method Analyzed head and prompt tuning approaches using latent variable models.
result Prompt tuning provides stronger guarantees than head tuning.
New scaling laws optimize model size, training, and inference for better performance.
problem Trade-off between model size and inference cost in modern LLMs.
method Train-to-Test ( T 2 T^2 T 2 ) scaling laws that jointly optimize model size, training tokens, and inference samples. result Optimal pretraining decisions shift into overtraining regime, leading to stronger performance.
Transformers learn to make decisions in new contexts from offline data.
problem Understanding when and how transformers can perform in-context reinforcement learning.
method Theoretical framework analyzing supervised pretraining for ICRL, including algorithm distillation and decision-pretrained transformers.
result Transformers can efficiently approximate optimal reinforcement learning algorithms for various environments.
Study shows how pretraining robustness transfers to downstream tasks.
problem Understanding how robustness is transferred from pretraining to downstream tasks.
method Theoretical analysis and practical validation of robustness constraints.
result Robustness of a linear predictor on downstream tasks can be constrained by the robustness of its underlying representation.
PPOPT uses pretraining to speed up reinforcement learning in physics simulations.
problem High computational costs and inefficiency in reinforcement learning with small training samples.
method A novel policy neural network architecture that combines pretraining and fully-connected networks.
result PPOPT outperforms classic PPO on small training samples in terms of rewards and stability.
This paper proves the theoretical advantage of unsupervised pretraining for machine learning tasks.
problem Understanding why unsupervised pretraining helps in machine learning tasks.
method A generic framework using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) for unsupervised pretraining and Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) for downstream tasks.
result Proves an excess risk of i l d e O ( C Φ / m + C Ψ / n ) ilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{\mathcal{C}_Φ/m} + \sqrt{\mathcal{C}_Ψ/n}) i l d e O ( C Φ / m + C Ψ / n ) for downstream tasks under mild conditions. This paper improves model generalization by integrating diverse pretrained models.
problem Leveraging diverse pretrained models for robust out-of-distribution generalization.
method Characterize and integrate diverse pretrained models based on diversity and correlation shifts.
result Demonstrates state-of-the-art out-of-distribution generalization performance.
Algorithm improves decision-making with partially observed contexts using pretrained models.
problem Improving decision-making with partially observed contexts in online linear contextual bandits.
method PULSE-UCB algorithm that uses pretrained models trained on auxiliary data to impute missing features.
result Achieves near-optimal performance in i.i.d. context case with Hölder-smooth missing features.
Transformer pretraining yields strong EB performance without explicit adaptation.
problem Empirical Bayes problems with unknown test distributions.
method Indirect analysis of pretrained transformer's performance under universal priors.
result Near-optimal regret bound of O ~ ( 1 n ) \widetilde{O}(\frac{1}{n}) O ( n 1 ) for arbitrary test distributions. Transformers learn to generalize out-of-distribution with diverse pretraining tasks.
problem Conditions for pretrained transformers to generalize out-of-distribution.
method Empirical study of task diversity and pretraining distribution.
result As task diversity increases, transformers transition from specialized to generalized solutions.
Enhances anomaly detection in high dimensions with pretrained networks.
problem Difficult to characterize anomaly in high-dimensional data.
method Residual adaptation to adjust pretrained networks for anomaly detection.
result Significantly outperforms existing methods on anomaly detection benchmarks.
Self-supervised pretraining for heterogeneous hypergraphs improves graph-based tasks.
problem Capturing higher-order relations in heterogeneous hypergraphs.
method SPHH framework for self-supervised pretraining of heterogeneous HyperGNNs.
result SPHH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in various downstream tasks.
Optimal feature transfer identified through bias-variance analysis.
problem Optimizing feature transfer in transfer learning.
method Simple linear model with fine-grained bias-variance decomposition.
result Optimal pretrained feature transform is naturally sparse.
CERT improves language understanding by contrastively learning sentence-level semantics.
problem Lack of sentence-level semantics in existing pretraining tasks.
method Contrastive self-supervised learning at the sentence level using back-translation augmentations.
result CERT outperforms BERT on 7 out of 11 GLUE benchmark tasks, achieving the same performance as BERT on 2 tasks.
Pretrained time-series models outperform train-from-scratch baselines in financial return forecasting.
problem Financial return forecasting
method Pretrained time-series foundation models
result Pretrained TSFMs dominate the ranking distribution, accounting for 8 of 10 task-level wins.
Fine-grained pretraining improves neural network's ability to learn rare features.
problem Improving generalization in deep learning models.
method Introducing a hierarchical multi-view structure to confine input data distribution.
result Fine-grained pretraining leads to better accuracy on hard downstream test samples.
Transformer models can solve complex math problems with less data.
problem Solving complex symbolic mathematics problems with limited data.
method Pretrain transformer models on language translation tasks and fine-tune for symbolic math.
result Pretrained transformer models achieve comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art models with less data.
New study reveals task alignment is key to ICL performance.
problem Understanding how task alignment affects generalization in in-context learning.
method Derived an exact expression for ICL generalization error in high dimensions under task covariance mismatch.
result Identified train-test task alignment as a key determinant of generalization in ICL.
URL benchmark evaluates uncertainty quantification in pretrained models.
problem Need for reliable uncertainty estimates in transferable pretrained models.
method Proposes URL benchmark to measure transferability of representations and uncertainty estimates.
result Transferable uncertainty quantification remains challenging but not contradictory to traditional goals.
Mask-reconstruction pretraining helps in downstream tasks by capturing more semantic features.
problem How mask-reconstruction pretraining helps in downstream tasks and why it surpasses supervised learning.
method Theoretical analysis and experimental validation of mask-reconstruction pretraining (MRP) on auto-encoders.
result MRP provably captures more semantic features than supervised learning, leading to better performance in downstream tasks.
A new framework pretrains a single GNN model for diverse graphs, overcoming domain-specific challenges.
problem Difficulty in generalizing across graphs from different domains using existing GNNs.
method Cross-domain pretraining framework with gating functions to choose experts for new graphs.
result Superior performance on link prediction and node classification tasks across various domains.
The ever-growing volume of data of user-generated content on social media provides a nearly unlimited corpus of unlabeled data even in languages where resources are scarce. In this paper, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art results on two Thai social text categorization tasks can be realized by pretraining a language …
Improving in-context learning for latent space Bayesian optimization by adapting pretraining on molecular latent space.
problem Improving in-context learning for latent space Bayesian optimization.
method Adapting pretraining on molecular latent space.
result Achieving strong performance on held-out molecular optimization benchmarks.
This study compares transfer learning and self-supervised learning for better model performance.
problem Choosing between transfer learning and self-supervised learning for optimal model performance.
method Comprehensive comparative study of transfer learning and self-supervised learning under various data and task properties.
result Self-supervised learning outperforms transfer learning in certain applications, and vice versa.
Efficiently compress pretrained models using RSI for improved predictive accuracy.
problem Efficiently compressing large pretrained models for practical deployment.
method Randomized subspace iteration (RSI) for low-rank approximation of pretrained models.
result RSI achieves near-optimal approximation quality and outperforms RSVD in predictive accuracy.
Recent algorithms with state-of-the-art few-shot classification results start their procedure by computing data features output by a large pretrained model. In this paper we systematically investigate which models provide the best representations for a few-shot image classification task when pretrained on the Imagenet …
In natural language processing, it has been observed recently that generalization could be greatly improved by finetuning a large-scale language model pretrained on a large unlabeled corpus. Despite its recent success and wide adoption, finetuning a large pretrained language model on a downstream task is prone to degen…
TSFMs improve financial forecasting across diverse tasks with strong transferability.
problem Complex nonlinear relationships, temporal dependencies, and limited data in financial time series forecasting.
method Pretraining on diverse time series corpora followed by task-specific adaptation.
result Tiny Time Mixers (TTM) achieved 25-50% better performance on limited data and 15-30% improvements on longer datasets.
In-Run Data Shapley offers efficient data attribution for large-scale models.
problem Existing data attribution methods are computationally intensive and cannot target specific models.
method In-Run Data Shapley, which efficiently attributes data contributions to a specific model without re-training.
result In-Run Data Shapley achieves significant efficiency, enabling data attribution for pretraining models.
New research shows deep models learn sparse features, limiting transfer learning; ensembling improves performance.
problem Sparse feature learning in deep models limits transfer learning performance.
method Developed a theoretical framework and proposed an ensembling strategy to aggregate multiple models.
result Ensembling yields a 9% improvement in transfer accuracy without extra pretraining cost.
Transformers learn to adapt to different task difficulties and resist distribution shifts.
problem Understanding and optimizing a Transformer's performance across various task difficulties and distribution shifts.
method Analyzing a pretrained Transformer on a mixture distribution of tasks, proving optimal convergence rates.
result Transformers achieve optimal convergence rates on tasks of specific difficulty levels, robust to distribution shifts.