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dScience Lunch Seminar: Compositional Generalization in Language Models

Join the dScience lunch seminar, featuring Sondre Wold, as he explores the intriguing challenges of compositional generalisation in language models. Despite their remarkable capabilities, large language models often falter on simple tasks, exposing limitations in their ability to understand and combine basic elements into complex structures. Sondre will delve into his research and recent international work, shedding light on where these models fall short and discussing potential strategies for improvement.

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Presentation

While LLMs show impressive performance on a wide range of knowledge-intensive tasks, they also struggle on surprisingly trivial problems. One of the central critiques of the current deep learning paradigm is that our models are unable to learn representations of basic elements and rules for combining these into more complex structures. This ability, sometimes referred to as compositionally, is core to solving problems where curve fitting over a large training dataset is arguably not the best strategy. This has not only inspired a lot of recent research on compositionally and neural networks, but also research challenges, such as the ARC Prize. In this talk, Sondre will give an overview of both his own research on compositional generalization and recent works from abroad, focusing on the scenarios where current approaches fail, possible mitigations and the way forward. 

Speaker

Sondre Wold is a PhD candidate at the Language Technology Group at the Department of Informatics, researching how we can better combine language models with structured knowledge representations, such as knowledge graphs.

Program

11:30 – Doors open and lunch is served

12:00 – "Compositional Generalization in Language Models" by Sondre Wold (PhD Candidate, Department of Informatics)

This event is open for all students, PhD candidates, postdocs, and everyone else who is interested in the topic. No registration needed.

About the seminar series

Once a month, dScience will invite you to join us for lunch and professional talks at the Science Library. In addition to these, we will serve lunch in our lounge in Kristine Bonnevies house every Thursday. Due to limited space (40 people), this will be first come, first served. See how to find us here.

Our lounge can also be booked by PhDs and Postdocs on a regular basis, whether it is for a meeting or just to hang out – we have fresh coffee all day long!

Lounge Calendar

Tags: dscience, postdoc, phd, lunch seminar
Published Aug. 9, 2024 11:47 AM - Last modified Nov. 4, 2024 1:11 PM