papers

Publications (14)

cs.CL2022

What Makes Instruction Learning Hard? An Investigation and a New Challenge in a Synthetic Environment

Matthew Finlayson, Kyle Richardson, Ashish Sabharwal +1

The instruction learning paradigm -- where a model learns to perform new tasks from task descriptions alone -- has become popular in general-purpose model research. The capabilitie…

cs.CL2024

Logits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information

Matthew Finlayson, Xiang Ren, Swabha Swayamdipta

Large language model (LLM) providers often hide the architectural details and parameters of their proprietary models by restricting public access to a limited API. In this work we…

cs.CL2023

Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks

Tushar Khot, Harsh Trivedi, Matthew Finlayson +4

Few-shot prompting is a surprisingly powerful way to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve various tasks. However, this approach struggles as the task complexity increases or w…

cs.CL2021

Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Mechanisms in Neural Language Models

Matthew Finlayson, Aaron Mueller, Sebastian Gehrmann +3

Targeted syntactic evaluations have demonstrated the ability of language models to perform subject-verb agreement given difficult contexts. To elucidate the mechanisms by which the…

cs.CR2026

Token Rankings are Unforgeable Language Model Signatures

Matthew Finlayson, Andreas Grivas, Xiang Ren +1

Language model parameters are known to impose unique (to each model) geometric constraints on their logit outputs, which serves as a signature that identifies the model, but also l…

cs.CL2025

Better Language Model Inversion by Compactly Representing Next-Token Distributions

Murtaza Nazir, Matthew Finlayson, John X. Morris +2

Language model inversion seeks to recover hidden prompts using only language model outputs. This capability has implications for security and accountability in language model deplo…