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.
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.
Pretraining reinforcement learning methods with demonstrations has been an important concept in the study of reinforcement learning since a large amount of computing power is spent on online simulations with existing reinforcement learning algorithms. Pretraining reinforcement learning remains a significant challenge i…
Denoised smoothing defends pretrained classifiers against adversarial attacks.
problem Adversarial attacks on pretrained classifiers.
method Prepending a denoiser to any off-the-shelf classifier using randomized smoothing.
result Guaranteed ℓ p \ell_p ℓ p -robustness to adversarial examples without modifying the pretrained classifier. 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.
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.
Pretraining method enhances dialogue representation learning across various tasks.
problem Scarce labeled data for specific dialogue tasks.
method Multi-task unsupervised pretraining with natural training objectives.
result Significant improvement in downstream tasks without encoder discrimination.
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.
Pretraining with expert demonstrations have been found useful in speeding up the training process of deep reinforcement learning algorithms since less online simulation data is required. Some people use supervised learning to speed up the process of feature learning, others pretrain the policies by imitating expert dem…
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.
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.
Data-efficient PDE operator learning without expensive simulations.
problem Expensive numerical PDE solutions limit data efficiency in machine learning.
method Unsupervised pretraining and in-context learning.
result Highly data-efficient and more generalizable than conventional models.
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.
We introduce a pretraining technique called Selfie, which stands for SELFie supervised Image Embedding. Selfie generalizes the concept of masked language modeling of BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) to continuous data, such as images, by making use of the Contrastive Predictive Coding loss (Oord et al., 2018). Given masked-o…
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
GAPA method provides efficient uncertainty quantification for pretrained networks.
problem Reliable uncertainty estimates for pretrained models are challenging.
method Post-hoc Gaussian Process Activations (GAPA) method that shifts Bayesian modeling from weights to activations.
result GAPA method provides efficient uncertainty quantification without altering the backbone's predictions.
New method guides pretrained diffusion models without additional training.
problem Guidance methods for diffusion models often require extra training or are task-specific.
method Variational Control using Diffusion Trajectory Matching (DTM)
result Achieves state-of-the-art results on various problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A new method prevents forgetting during knowledge transfer.
problem Catastrophic forgetting in transfer learning.
method Transfer without Forgetting (TwF) using a fixed pretrained network.
result TwF outperforms other CL methods by 4.81% in Class-Incremental accuracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New methods predict neural network quality without access to training data.
problem Predicting neural network quality without access to training or testing data.
method Meta-analysis of pretrained models using norm and power law based metrics.
result Power law based metrics can better distinguish well-trained from poorly-trained models.
A method merges two pretrained diffusion experts to improve image quality and likelihood.
problem Trade-off between image quality and data likelihood in diffusion models.
method Combining two pretrained diffusion experts by switching between them along the denoising trajectory.
result The merged model consistently matches or outperforms its base components, improving or preserving both likelihood and sample quality.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Robust reinforcement learning agents generalize well to out-of-distribution settings using pretrained representations.
problem Achieving sample-efficient reinforcement learning agents that generalize to real-world settings.
method Trained 240 representations and 10,000 RL policies on a simulated robotic setup, evaluating different pretrained VAE-based representations' effects on OOD generalization.
result Many reinforcement learning agents are surprisingly robust to realistic distribution shifts, including sim-to-real cases.
The dissertation establishes a contexture theory to mathematically characterize representation learning.
problem The lack of a scientific understanding of representation learning in foundation models.
method Introduces the contexture theory as a unified framework for analyzing representation learning methods.
result Representation learning is optimal when the association between input and context is neither too strong nor too weak.
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.
Study shows pretraining and finetuning can effectively tackle covariate shift in linear regression.
problem Linear regression under covariate shift where source and target distributions differ but conditional distribution remains similar.
method Pretraining on source data and finetuning on target data using online SGD.
result Transfer learning with O ( N 2 ) O(N^2) O ( N 2 ) source data is as effective as supervised learning with N N N target data. 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.