Related papers: Pretraining on the Test Set Is All You Need
In this paper, we study how the intrinsic nature of pre-training data contributes to the fine-tuned downstream performance. To this end, we pre-train different transformer-based masked language models on several corpora with certain…
Finetuning a pretrained model has become a standard approach for training neural networks on novel tasks, resulting in fast convergence and improved performance. In this work, we study an alternative finetuning method, where instead of…
Language models (LMs) are pretrained to imitate internet text, including content that would violate human preferences if generated by an LM: falsehoods, offensive comments, personally identifiable information, low-quality or buggy code, and…
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…
We investigate the optimal model size and number of tokens for training a transformer language model under a given compute budget. We find that current large language models are significantly undertrained, a consequence of the recent focus…
Recent studies have demonstrated that the performance of transformers on the task of language modeling obeys a power-law relationship with model size over six orders of magnitude. While transformers exhibit impressive scaling, their…
Large language models are powerful but costly. We ask whether meta-learning can make the pretraining of small language models not only better but also more interpretable. We integrate first-order MAML with subset-masked LM pretraining,…
Embedding layers in transformer-based NLP models typically account for the largest share of model parameters, scaling with vocabulary size but not yielding performance gains proportional to scale. We propose an alternative approach in which…
The recent development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been accompanied by an effervescence of novel ideas and methods to better optimize the loss of deep learning models. Claims from those methods are myriad: from faster convergence to…
To obtain high-quality sentence embeddings from pretrained language models (PLMs), they must either be augmented with additional pretraining objectives or finetuned on a large set of labeled text pairs. While the latter approach typically…
In recent times, substantial advancements have been witnessed in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, showcasing remarkable proficiency across a range of complex tasks. However, many mainstream LLMs (e.g. LLaMA) are…
Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether it is still helpful to add the self-training method in the pre-training step and the fine-tuning step. Towards…
As organizations scale adoption of generative AI, model cost optimization and operational efficiency have emerged as critical factors determining sustainability and accessibility. While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive…
Large Language Models (LLMs), originally developed for natural language processing (NLP), have demonstrated the potential to generalize across modalities and domains. With their in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, LLMs can perform…
For most natural language processing tasks, the dominant practice is to finetune large pretrained transformer models (e.g., BERT) using smaller downstream datasets. Despite the success of this approach, it remains unclear to what extent…
Large language models are pre-trained on uncurated text datasets consisting of trillions of tokens scraped from the Web. Prior work has shown that: (1) web-scraped pre-training datasets can be practically poisoned by malicious actors; and…
Language model pretraining generally targets a broad range of use cases and incorporates data from diverse sources. However, there are instances where we desire a model that excels in specific areas without markedly compromising performance…
Prompting and context-based fine-tuning methods, which we call Prefix Learning, have been proposed to enhance the performance of language models on various downstream tasks. They are empirically efficient and effective, matching the…
Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases,…
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…