Metric-aware LLM inference

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong results on a range of NLP tasks. Typically, outputs are obtained via autoregressive sampling from the LLM's underlying distribution. We show that this inference strategy can be suboptimal for a range of tasks and associated evaluation metrics. As a remedy, we propose metric aware LLM inference: a decision theoretic approach optimizing for custom metrics at inference time. We report improvements over baselines on academic benchmarks and publicly available models.

It's an Alignment, Not a Trade-off: Revisiting Bias and Variance in Deep Models

Classical wisdom in machine learning holds that the generalization error can be decomposed into bias and variance, and these two terms exhibit a \emph{trade-off}. However, in this paper, we show that for an ensemble of deep learning based classification models, bias and variance are \emph{aligned} at a sample level, where squared bias is approximately \emph{equal} to variance for correctly classified sample points. We present empirical evidence confirming this phenomenon in a variety of deep learning models and datasets. Moreover, we study this phenomenon from two theoretical perspectives: calibration and neural collapse. We first show theoretically that under the assumption that the models are well calibrated, we can observe the bias-variance alignment. Second, starting from the picture provided by the neural collapse theory, we show an approximate correlation between bias and variance.

What do larger image classifiers memorise?

The success of modern neural networks has prompted study of the connection between memorisation and generalisation: overparameterised models generalise well, despite being able to perfectly fit (memorise) completely random labels. To carefully study this issue, Feldman proposed a metric to quantify the degree of memorisation of individual training examples, and empirically computed the corresponding memorisation profile of a ResNet on image classification bench-marks. While an exciting first glimpse into what real-world models memorise, this leaves open a fundamental question: do larger neural models memorise more? We present a comprehensive empirical analysis of this question on image classification benchmarks. We find that training examples exhibit an unexpectedly diverse set of memorisation trajectories across model sizes: most samples experience decreased memorisation under larger models, while the rest exhibit cap-shaped or increasing memorisation. We show that various proxies for the Feldman memorization score fail to capture these fundamental trends. Lastly, we find that knowledge distillation, an effective and popular model compression technique, tends to inhibit memorisation, while also improving generalisation. Specifically, memorisation is mostly inhibited on examples with increasing memorisation trajectories, thus pointing at how distillation improves generalisation.

ResMem: Learn what you can and memorize the rest

The impressive generalization performance of modern neural networks is attributed in part to their ability to implicitly memorize complex training patterns. Inspired by this, we explore a novel mechanism to improve model generalization via explicit memorization. Specifically, we propose the residual-memorization (ResMem) algorithm, a new method that augments an existing prediction model (e.g. a neural network) by fitting the model's residuals with a $k$-nearest neighbor based regressor. The final prediction is then the sum of the original model and the fitted residual regressor. By construction, ResMem can explicitly memorize the training labels. Empirically, we show that ResMem consistently improves the test set generalization of the original prediction model across various standard vision and natural language processing benchmarks. Theoretically, we formulate a stylized linear regression problem and rigorously show that ResMem results in a more favorable test risk over the base predictor.

Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory

Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), owing to their excellent understanding and generation abilities. Remarkably, what further sets these models apart is the massive amounts of world knowledge they internalize during pretraining. While many downstream applications provide the model with an informational context to aid its performance on the underlying task, how the model's world knowledge interacts with the factual information presented in the context remains under explored. As a desirable behavior, an LLM should give precedence to the context whenever it contains task-relevant information that conflicts with the model's memorized knowledge. This enables model predictions to be grounded in the context, which can then be used to update or correct specific model predictions without frequent retraining. By contrast, when the context is irrelevant to the task, the model should ignore it and fall back on its internal knowledge. In this paper, we undertake a first joint study of the aforementioned two properties, namely controllability and robustness, in the context of LLMs. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art T5 and PaLM (both pretrained and finetuned) could exhibit poor controllability and robustness, which do not scale with increasing model size. As a solution, we propose a novel method - Knowledge Aware FineTuning (KAFT) - to strengthen both controllability and robustness by incorporating counterfactual and irrelevant contexts to standard supervised datasets. Our comprehensive evaluation showcases the utility of KAFT across model architectures and sizes.

Preserving In-Context Learning ability in Large Language Model Fine-tuning

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are strong in-context learners that are able to perform few-shot learning without changing model parameters. However, as we show, fine-tuning an LLM on any specific task generally destroys its in-context ability. We discover an important cause of this loss, format specialization, where the model overfits to the format of the fine-tuned task and is unable to output anything beyond this format. We further show that format specialization happens at the beginning of fine-tuning. To solve this problem, we propose Prompt Tuning with MOdel Tuning (ProMoT), a simple yet effective two-stage fine-tuning framework that preserves in-context abilities of the pretrained model. ProMoT first trains a soft prompt for the fine-tuning target task, and then fine-tunes the model itself with this soft prompt attached. ProMoT offloads task-specific formats into the soft prompt that can be removed when doing other in-context tasks. We fine-tune mT5 XXL with ProMoT on natural language inference (NLI) and English-French translation and evaluate the in-context abilities of the resulting models on 8 different NLP tasks. ProMoT achieves similar performance on the fine-tuned tasks compared with vanilla fine-tuning, but with much less reduction of in-context learning performances across the board. More importantly, ProMoT shows remarkable generalization ability on tasks that have different formats, e.g. fine-tuning on a NLI binary classification task improves the model's in-context ability to do summarization (+0.53 Rouge-2 score compared to the pretrained model), making ProMoT a promising method to build general purpose capabilities such as grounding and reasoning into LLMs with small but high quality datasets. When extended to sequential or multi-task training, ProMoT can achieve even better out-of-domain generalization performance.

Robust Distillation for Worst-class Performance

Knowledge distillation has proven to be an effective technique in improving the performance a student model using predictions from a teacher model. However, recent work has shown that gains in average efficiency are not uniform across subgroups in the data, and in particular can often come at the cost of accuracy on rare subgroups and classes. To preserve strong performance across classes that may follow a long-tailed distribution, we develop distillation techniques that are tailored to improve the student's worst-class performance. Specifically, we introduce robust optimization objectives in different combinations for the teacher and student, and further allow for training with any tradeoff between the overall accuracy and the robust worst-class objective. We show empirically that our robust distillation techniques not only achieve better worst-class performance, but also lead to Pareto improvement in the tradeoff between overall performance and worst-class performance compared to other baseline methods. Theoretically, we provide insights into what makes a good teacher when the goal is to train a robust student.

HD-cos Networks: Efficient Neural Architectures for Secure Multi-Party Computation

Multi-party computation (MPC) is a branch of cryptography where multiple non-colluding parties execute a well designed protocol to securely compute a function. With the non-colluding party assumption, MPC has a cryptographic guarantee that the parties will not learn sensitive information from the computation process, making it an appealing framework for applications that involve privacy-sensitive user data. In this paper, we study training and inference of neural networks under the MPC setup. This is challenging because the elementary operations of neural networks such as the ReLU activation function and matrix-vector multiplications are very expensive to compute due to the added multi-party communication overhead. To address this, we propose the HD-cos network that uses 1) cosine as activation function, 2) the Hadamard-Diagonal transformation to replace the unstructured linear transformations. We show that both of the approaches enjoy strong theoretical motivations and efficient computation under the MPC setup. We demonstrate on multiple public datasets that HD-cos matches the quality of the more expensive baselines.

Leveraging redundancy in attention with Reuse Transformers

Pairwise dot product-based attention allows Transformers to exchange information between tokens in an input-dependent way, and is key to their success across diverse applications in language and vision. However, a typical Transformer model computes such pairwise attention scores repeatedly for the same sequence, in multiple heads in multiple layers. We systematically analyze the empirical similarity of these scores across heads and layers and find them to be considerably redundant, especially adjacent layers showing high similarity. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel architecture that reuses attention scores computed in one layer in multiple subsequent layers. Experiments on a number of standard benchmarks show that reusing attention delivers performance equivalent to or better than standard transformers, while reducing both compute and memory usage.

Teacher's pet: understanding and mitigating biases in distillation

Knowledge distillation is widely used as a means of improving the performance of a relatively simple student model using the predictions from a complex teacher model. Several works have shown that distillation significantly boosts the student's overall performance; however, are these gains uniform across all data subgroups? In this paper, we show that distillation can harm performance on certain subgroups, e.g., classes with few associated samples. We trace this behaviour to errors made by the teacher distribution being transferred to and amplified by the student model. To mitigate this problem, we present techniques which soften the teacher influence for subgroups where it is less reliable. Experiments on several image classification benchmarks show that these modifications of distillation maintain boost in overall accuracy, while additionally ensuring improvement in subgroup performance.