A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
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%.
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 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 ildeO(CΦ/m+CΨ/n) for downstream tasks under mild conditions.
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.
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 paper develops a theory linking pretraining and fine-tuning in neural networks.
problem Understanding how initialization choices impact feature learning and generalization in neural networks.
method Analytical theory of diagonal linear networks, deriving generalization error as a function of initialization parameters and task statistics.
result Different initialization choices place networks into four fine-tuning regimes with varying abilities to support feature learning and generalization.
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…
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 …
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 …
Public pretraining improves private model training even in extreme distribution shift scenarios.
problem Improving private model training accuracy in settings with large distribution shift.
method Empirical evaluation and theoretical explanation of public representations improving private training accuracy.
result Public representations can improve private training accuracy by up to 67% over private training from scratch in settings with large distribution shift.
Self-play is an unsupervised training procedure which enables the reinforcement learning agents to explore the environment without requiring any external rewards. We augment the self-play setting by providing an external memory where the agent can store experience from the previous tasks. This enables the agent to come…