Many recent language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL), manifested in the LMs’ ability to perform a new task solely from natural-language instruction. Previous work curating in-context learners assumes that ICL emerges from a vast over-parametrization or the scale of multi-task training. However, recent theoretical work attributes the ICL ability to concept-dependent training data and creates functional in-context learners even in small-scale, synthetic settings.In this work, we practically explore this newly identified axis of ICL quality. We propose Concept-aware Training (CoAT), a framework for constructing training scenarios that make it beneficial for the LM to learn to utilize the analogical reasoning concepts from demonstrations. We find that by using CoAT, pre-trained transformers can learn to better utilise new latent concepts from demonstrations and that such ability makes ICL more robust to the functional deficiencies of the previous models. Finally, we show that concept-aware in-context learners are much more effective in in-context learning a majority of unseen tasks compared to traditional instruction tuning, and fare comparably also to previous in-context learners trained in large-scale multitask learning requiring magnitudes of more training data.

Despite outstanding performance in many tasks, language models are notoriously inclined to make factual errors in tasks requiring arithmetic computation. We address this deficiency by creating Calc-X, a collection of datasets that demonstrates the appropriate use of a calculator in reasoning chains. Calc-X is suitable for teaching language models to offload computations to a symbolic system. We survey and unify several existing chain-of-thought datasets into a proposed format, resulting in a standard collection of over 300,000 samples requiring arithmetic reasoning. Finally, we use the new Calc-X collection to train open-source calculator-using models and show that these models approximately double the accuracy of generating correct results compared to vanilla language model baselines.

Despite the rapid recent progress in creating accurate and compact in-context learners, most recent work focuses on in-context learning (ICL) for tasks in English. However, the ability to interact with users of languages outside English presents a great potential for broadening the applicability of language technologies to non-English speakers. In this work, we collect the infrastructure necessary for training and evaluation of ICL in a selection of Slavic languages: Czech, Polish, and Russian. We link a diverse set of datasets and cast these into a unified instructional format through a set of transformations and newly-crafted templates written purely in target languages. Using the newly-curated dataset, we evaluate a set of the most recent in-context learners and compare their results to the supervised baselines. Finally, we train, evaluate and publish a set of in-context learning models that we train on the collected resources and compare their performance to previous work. We find that ICL models tuned in English are also able to learn some tasks from non-English contexts, but multilingual instruction fine-tuning consistently improves the ICL ability. We also find that the massive multitask training can be outperformed by single-task training in the target language, uncovering the potential for specializing in-context learners to the language(s) of their application.

Large language models show an emergent ability to learn a new task from a small number of input-output demonstrations. However, recent work shows that in-context learners largely rely on their pre-trained knowledge, such as the sentiment of the labels, instead of finding new associations in the input. However, the commonly-used few-shot evaluation settings using a random selection of in-context demonstrations can not disentangle models’ ability to learn a new skill from demonstrations, as most of the randomly-selected demonstrations do not present relations informative for prediction beyond exposing the new task distribution. To disentangle models’ in-context learning ability independent of models’ memory, we introduce a Conceptual few-shot learning method selecting the demonstrations sharing a possibly-informative concept with the predicted sample. We extract a set of such concepts from annotated explanations and measure how much can models benefit from presenting these concepts in few-shot demonstrations. We find that smaller models are more sensitive to the presented concepts. While some of the models are able to benefit from concept-presenting demonstrations for each assessed concept, we find that none of the assessed in-context learners can benefit from all presented reasoning concepts consistently, leaving the in-context concept learning an open challenge.

Domain adaptation allows generative language models to address specific flaws caused by the domain shift of their application. However, the traditional adaptation by further training on in-domain data rapidly weakens the model’s ability to generalize to other domains, making the open-ended deployments of the adapted models prone to errors. This work introduces novel training objectives built upon a semantic similarity of the predicted tokens to the reference. Our results show that (1) avoiding the common assumption of a single correct prediction by constructing the training target from tokens’ semantic similarity can largely mitigate catastrophic forgetting of adaptation, while (2) preserving the adaptation in-domain quality, (3) with negligible additions to compute costs. In the broader context, the objectives grounded in a continuous token similarity pioneer the exploration of the middle ground between the efficient but naive exact-match token-level objectives and expressive but computationally- and resource-intensive sequential objectives.