Most multilingual question-answering benchmarks, while covering a diverse pool of languages, do not factor in regional diversity in the information they capture and tend to be Western-centric.This introduces a significant gap in fairly evaluating multilingual models' comprehension of factual information from diverse geographical locations.To address this, we introduce XNationQA for investigating the cultural literacy of multilingual LLMs.XNationQA encompasses a total of 49, 280 questions on the geography, culture, and history of nine countries, presented in seven languages.We benchmark eight standard multilingual LLMs on XNationQA and evaluate them using two novel transference metrics.Our analyses uncover a considerable discrepancy in the models' accessibility to culturally specific facts across languages.Notably, we often find that a model demonstrates greater knowledge of cultural information in English than in the dominant language of the respective culture.The models exhibit better performance in Western languages, although this does not necessarily translate to being more literate for Western countries, which is counterintuitive.Furthermore, we observe that models have a very limited ability to transfer knowledge across languages, particularly evident in open-source models 1 .

The impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have sparked debate over whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks or predominantly rely on memorizing vast amounts of pretraining data. To explore this issue, we introduce an extended concept of memorization, distributional memorization, which measures the correlation between the LLM output probabilities and the pretraining data frequency. To effectively capture task-specific pretraining data frequency, we propose a novel task-gram language model, which is built by counting the co-occurrence of semantically related $n$-gram pairs from task inputs and outputs in the pretraining corpus. Using the Pythia models trained on the Pile dataset, we evaluate four distinct tasks: machine translation, factual question answering, world knowledge understanding, and math reasoning. Our findings reveal varying levels of memorization, with the strongest effect observed in factual question answering. Furthermore, while model performance improves across all tasks as LLM size increases, only factual question answering shows an increase in memorization, whereas machine translation and reasoning tasks exhibit greater generalization, producing more novel outputs. This study demonstrates that memorization plays a larger role in simpler, knowledge-intensive tasks, while generalization is the key for harder, reasoning-based tasks, providing a scalable method for analyzing large pretraining corpora in greater depth.

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on enormous quantities of unlicensed text, a practice that has led to scrutiny due to possible intellectual property infringement and ethical concerns. Training LLMs on openly licensed text presents a first step towards addressing these issues, but prior data collection efforts have yielded datasets too small or low-quality to produce performant LLMs. To address this gap, we collect, curate, and release the Common Pile v0.1, an eight terabyte collection of openly licensed text designed for LLM pretraining. The Common Pile comprises content from 30 sources that span diverse domains including research papers, code, books, encyclopedias, educational materials, audio transcripts, and more. Crucially, we validate our efforts by training two 7 billion parameter LLMs on text from the Common Pile: Comma v0.1-1T and Comma v0.1-2T, trained on 1 and 2 trillion tokens respectively. Both models attain competitive performance to LLMs trained on unlicensed text with similar computational budgets, such as Llama 1 and 2 7B. In addition to releasing the Common Pile v0.1 itself, we also release the code used in its creation as well as the training mixture and checkpoints for the Comma v0.1 models.

We introduce DataComp for Language Models, a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models.As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad suite of 53 downstream evaluations.Participants in the DCLM benchmark can experiment with data curation strategies such as deduplication, filtering, and data mixing atmodel scales ranging from 412M to 7B parameters.As a baseline for DCLM, we conduct extensive experiments and find that model-based filtering is key to assembling a high-quality training set.The resulting dataset, DCLM-Baseline, enables training a 7B parameter language model from scratch to 63% 5-shot accuracy on MMLU with 2T training tokens.Compared to MAP-Neo, the previous state-of-the-art in open-data language models, DCLM-Baseline represents a 6 percentage point improvement on MMLU while being trained with half the compute.Our results highlight the importance of dataset design for training language models and offer a starting point for further research on data curation. We release the \dclm benchmark, framework, models, and datasets at https://www.datacomp.ai/dclm/

In this paper, we introduce Neural Probabilistic Soft Logic (NeuPSL), a novel neuro-symbolic (NeSy) framework that unites state-of-the-art symbolic reasoning with the low-level perception of deep neural networks. To model the boundary between neural and symbolic representations, we propose a family of energy-based models, NeSy Energy-Based Models, and show that they are general enough to include NeuPSL and many other NeSy approaches. Using this framework, we show how to seamlessly integrate neural and symbolic parameter learning and inference in NeuPSL. Through an extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the benefits of using NeSy methods, achieving upwards of 30% improvement over independent neural network models. On a well-established NeSy task, MNIST-Addition, NeuPSL demonstrates its joint reasoning capabilities by outperforming existing NeSy approaches by up to 10% in low-data settings. Furthermore, NeuPSL achieves a 5% boost in performance over state-of-the-art NeSy methods in a canonical citation network task with up to a 40 times speed up.

Few-shot learning is valuable in many real-world applications, but learning a generalizable model without overfitting to the few labeled datapoints is challenging. In this work, we focus on Few-shot Learning with Auxiliary Data (FLAD), a training paradigm that assumes access to auxiliary data during few-shot learning in hopes of improving generalization. Previous works have proposed automated methods for mixing auxiliary and target data, but these methods typically scale linearly (or worse) with the number of auxiliary datasets, limiting their practicality. In this work we relate FLAD to the explore-exploit dilemma that is central to the multi-armed bandit setting and derive algorithms whose computational complexity is independent of the number of auxiliary datasets, allowing us to scale to 100x more auxiliary datasets than prior methods. We propose two algorithms -- EXP3-FLAD and UCB1-FLAD -- and compare them with prior FLAD methods that either explore or exploit, finding that the combination of exploration and exploitation is crucial. Through extensive experimentation we find that our methods outperform all pre-existing FLAD methods by 4% and lead to the first 3 billion parameter language models that outperform the 175 billion parameter GPT-3. Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of better, more efficient mixing strategies for FLAD may provide a viable path towards substantially improving generalization in few-shot learning.

Alon Albalak, Yi-Lin Tuan, Pegah Jandaghi, Connor Pryor, Luke Yoffe, Deepak Ramachandran, Lise Getoor, Jay Pujara, William Yang Wang. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.

Broader disclosive transparency-truth and clarity in communication regarding the function of AI systems-is widely considered desirable.Unfortunately, it is a nebulous concept, difficult to both define and quantify.This is problematic, as previous work has demonstrated possible trade-offs and negative consequences to disclosive transparency, such as a confusion effect, where "too much information" clouds a reader's understanding of what a system description means.Disclosive transparency's subjective nature has rendered deep study into these problems and their remedies difficult.To improve this state of affairs, We introduce neural language model-based probabilistic metrics to directly model disclosive transparency, and demonstrate that they correlate with user and expert opinions of system transparency, making them a valid objective proxy.Finally, we demonstrate the use of these metrics in a pilot study quantifying the relationships between transparency, confusion, and user perceptions in a corpus of real NLP system descriptions.