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During long-duration Large Language Model (LLM) training runs the gradient norm increases rapidly near the end of training. In this short note, we show that this increase is due to an unintended interaction between weight decay,…

It is generally accepted that starting neural networks training with large learning rates (LRs) improves generalization. Following a line of research devoted to understanding this effect, we conduct an empirical study in a controlled…

Checkpoint averaging is a simple and effective method to boost the performance of converged neural machine translation models. The calculation is cheap to perform and the fact that the translation improvement almost comes for free, makes it…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term…

A primary challenge in large language model (LLM) development is their onerous pre-training cost. Typically, such pre-training involves optimizing a self-supervised objective (such as next-token prediction) over a large corpus. This paper…

The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…

The prohibitive training costs of Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a significant bottleneck in the development of next-generation LLMs. In this paper, we show that it is possible to significantly reduce the training costs of…

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP tasks. Despite the great success, mainstream solutions largely follow the pre-training then finetuning paradigm, which brings in both high deployment costs and low…

Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger…

Large Language Model (LLM) pretraining, finetuning, and evaluation rely on input-space reconstruction and generative capabilities. Yet, it has been observed in vision that embedding-space training objectives, e.g., with Joint Embedding…

Continual learning (CL) in large language models (LLMs) is an evolving domain that focuses on developing efficient and sustainable training strategies to adapt models to emerging knowledge and achieve robustness in dynamic environments. Our…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen great advance in both academia and industry, and their popularity results in numerous open-source frameworks and techniques in accelerating LLM pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. Training and…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for tackling many language-processing tasks. Despite their success, training and fine-tuning these models is still far too computationally and memory intensive. In this…

LLMs have seen rapid adoption in all domains. They need to be trained on high-end high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures and ingest massive amounts of input data. Unsurprisingly, at such a large scale, unexpected events (e.g.,…

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across various tasks. Given the potent applications of LLMs in numerous fields, there has been a surge in LLM development. In developing LLMs, a common…

Schedule-Free Learning has shown promise as a practical anytime training method for machine learning, showing success across dozens of standard benchmark problems. However, strong performance for LLM training has only been demonstrated at…

Unsupervised pre-training of large neural models has recently revolutionized Natural Language Processing. By warm-starting from the publicly released checkpoints, NLP practitioners have pushed the state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks…

The upsurge in pre-trained large models started by ChatGPT has swept across the entire deep learning community. Such powerful models demonstrate advanced generative ability and multimodal understanding capability, which quickly set new…

Pretraining language models directly on web-scale corpora is the de facto paradigm. We study an alternative where the model is initially exposed to abstract structured data to ease the subsequent acquisition of rich semantic knowledge, much…