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Due to limited supervised training data, large language models (LLMs) are typically pre-trained via a self-supervised "predict the next word" objective on a vast amount of unstructured text data. To make the resulting model useful to users,…

We study the problem of fine-tuning a language model (LM) for a target task by optimally using the information from $n$ auxiliary tasks. This problem has broad applications in NLP, such as targeted instruction tuning and data selection in…

Due to the scarcity of high-quality data, large language models (LLMs) are often trained on mixtures of data with varying quality levels, even after sophisticated data curation. A natural approach to better leverage high-quality data is…

Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, as required by current scaling laws. Most progress is made for English, given its abundance of high-quality pretraining data. For most other languages, however, such high…

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fail to respond appropriately to deterministic tasks -- such as counting or forming acronyms -- because the implicit prior distribution they have learned over sequences of tokens influences their…

Speech language models (SpeechLMs) accept speech input and produce speech output, allowing for more natural human-computer interaction compared to text-based large language models (LLMs). Traditional approaches for developing SpeechLMs are…

Large language models (LLMs) demand considerable computational, energy, and financial resources during both training and deployment. While scaling laws for training have guided much of the field's recent progress, inference costs now…

Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…

Improvements in language model capabilities are often attributed to increasing model size or training data, but in some cases smaller models trained on curated data or with different architectural decisions can outperform larger ones…

Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain…

Large language models (LLMs) are initially pretrained for broad capabilities and then finetuned with instruction-following datasets to improve their performance in interacting with humans. Despite advances in finetuning, a standardized…

Pre-training decoder-only language models relies on vast amounts of high-quality data, yet the availability of such data is increasingly reaching its limits. While metadata is commonly used to create and curate these datasets, its potential…

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced instruction-following capabilities. However, most Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) datasets are predominantly in English, limiting model performance in other languages.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a promising frontier for recommender systems, yet their development has been impeded by the absence of predictable scaling laws, which are crucial for guiding research and optimizing resource…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across tasks such as mathematics, coding, and reasoning, yet their learning ability, which is crucial for adapting to dynamic environments and acquiring new knowledge, remains…

Recently published work on rephrasing natural text data for pre-training LLMs has shown promising results when combining the original dataset with the synthetically rephrased data. We build upon previous work by replicating existing results…

Large pre-trained language models (LMs) are known to encode substantial amounts of linguistic information. However, high-level reasoning skills, such as numerical reasoning, are difficult to learn from a language-modeling objective only.…

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and…

Pretrained Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Claude, etc. have demonstrated strong capabilities in various fields of natural language generation. However, there are still many problems when using LLM in specialized…