papers

Publications (23)

cs.CL2022

Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners

Jason Wei, Maarten Bosma, Vincent Y. Zhao +6

This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection…

cs.CL2025

The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text

Nikhil Kandpal, Brian Lester, Colin Raffel +24

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…

cs.LG2024

Realistic Evaluation of Model Merging for Compositional Generalization

Derek Tam, Yash Kant, Brian Lester +2

Merging has become a widespread way to cheaply combine individual models into a single model that inherits their capabilities and attains better performance. This popularity has sp…

cs.CL2022

SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer

Tu Vu, Brian Lester, Noah Constant +2

There has been growing interest in parameter-efficient methods to apply pre-trained language models to downstream tasks. Building on the Prompt Tuning approach of Lester et al. (20…

cs.CE2025

Advancements in Constitutive Model Calibration: Leveraging the Power of Full-Field DIC Measurements and In-Situ Load Path Selection for Reliable Parameter Inference

Denielle Ricciardi, D. Tom Seidl, Brian Lester +2

Accurate material characterization and model calibration are essential for computationally-supported engineering decisions. Current characterization and calibration methods (1) use…

quant-ph2024

Dynamics of magnetization at infinite temperature in a Heisenberg spin chain

Eliott Rosenberg, Trond Andersen, Rhine Samajdar +178

Understanding universal aspects of quantum dynamics is an unresolved problem in statistical mechanics. In particular, the spin dynamics of the 1D Heisenberg model were conjectured…

cs.CL2020

iobes: A Library for Span-Level Processing

Brian Lester

Many tasks in natural language processing, such as named entity recognition and slot-filling, involve identifying and labeling specific spans of text. In order to leverage common m…

cs.CL2020

Leader: Prefixing a Length for Faster Word Vector Serialization

Brian Lester

Two competing file formats have become the de facto standards for distributing pre-trained word embeddings. Both are named after the most popular pre-trained embeddings that are di…

cs.CL2022

Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation

Tu Vu, Aditya Barua, Brian Lester +3

In this paper, we explore the challenging problem of performing a generative task in a target language when labeled data is only available in English, using summarization as a case…

cs.CL2020

Constrained Decoding for Computationally Efficient Named Entity Recognition Taggers

Brian Lester, Daniel Pressel, Amy Hemmeter +2

Current state-of-the-art models for named entity recognition (NER) are neural models with a conditional random field (CRF) as the final layer. Entities are represented as per-token…

cs.LG2019

An Effective Label Noise Model for DNN Text Classification

Ishan Jindal, Daniel Pressel, Brian Lester +1

Because large, human-annotated datasets suffer from labeling errors, it is crucial to be able to train deep neural networks in the presence of label noise. While training image cla…

cs.CL2021

The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning

Brian Lester, Rami Al-Rfou, Noah Constant

In this work, we explore "prompt tuning", a simple yet effective mechanism for learning "soft prompts" to condition frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. Unl…

cs.CL2022

Reducing Retraining by Recycling Parameter-Efficient Prompts

Brian Lester, Joshua Yurtsever, Siamak Shakeri +1

Parameter-efficient methods are able to use a single frozen pre-trained large language model (LLM) to perform many tasks by learning task-specific soft prompts that modulate model…

cs.LG2022

Scaling Up Models and Data with and

Adam Roberts, Hyung Won Chung, Anselm Levskaya +40

Recent neural network-based language models have benefited greatly from scaling up the size of training datasets and the number of parameters in the models themselves. Scaling can…

cs.CL2021

Intent Features for Rich Natural Language Understanding

Brian Lester, Sagnik Ray Choudhury, Rashmi Prasad +1

Complex natural language understanding modules in dialog systems have a richer understanding of user utterances, and thus are critical in providing a better user experience. Howeve…

cs.CL2026

TokSuite: Measuring the Impact of Tokenizer Choice on Language Model Behavior

Gül Sena Altıntaş, Malikeh Ehghaghi, Brian Lester +4

Tokenizers provide the fundamental basis through which text is represented and processed by language models (LMs). Despite the importance of tokenization, its role in LM performanc…

cs.LG2023

Git-Theta: A Git Extension for Collaborative Development of Machine Learning Models

Nikhil Kandpal, Brian Lester, Mohammed Muqeeth +6

Currently, most machine learning models are trained by centralized teams and are rarely updated. In contrast, open-source software development involves the iterative development of…

cs.CL2024

Training LLMs over Neurally Compressed Text

Brian Lester, Jaehoon Lee, Alex Alemi +4

In this paper, we explore the idea of training large language models (LLMs) over highly compressed text. While standard subword tokenizers compress text by a small factor, neural t…

cs.CL2021

Computationally Efficient NER Taggers with Combined Embeddings and Constrained Decoding

Brian Lester, Daniel Pressel, Amy Hemmeter +1

Current State-of-the-Art models in Named Entity Recognition (NER) are neural models with a Conditional Random Field (CRF) as the final network layer, and pre-trained "contextual em…

physics.atom-ph2011

Search for plant biomagnetism with a sensitive atomic magnetometer

Eric Corsini, Victor Acosta, Nicolas Baddour +6

We report what we believe is the first experimental limit placed on plant biomagnetism. Measurements with a sensitive atomic magnetometer were performed on the Titan arum (Amorphop…

cs.CL2020

Multiple Word Embeddings for Increased Diversity of Representation

Brian Lester, Daniel Pressel, Amy Hemmeter +2

Most state-of-the-art models in natural language processing (NLP) are neural models built on top of large, pre-trained, contextual language models that generate representations of…

quant-ph2026

Precision quantum simulation of magnon spectra and interactions

Trond I. Andersen, Nikita Astrakhantsev, Jeronimo Martinez +329

Quantum simulation promises to advance materials discovery by accurately simulating complex states of matter, their microscopic excitations, and macroscopic response functions. The…

cs.CE2023

Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design for Constitutive Model Calibration

Denielle Ricciardi, Tom Seidl, Brian Lester +2

Computational simulation is increasingly relied upon for high-consequence engineering decisions, and a foundational element to solid mechanics simulations, such as finite element a…