Related papers: The Fine Line: Navigating Large Language Model Pre…

Quality pretraining data is often seen as the key to high-performance language models. However, progress in understanding pretraining data has been slow due to the costly pretraining runs required for data selection experiments. We present…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Continual Pre-training (CPT) serves as a fundamental approach for adapting foundation models to domain-specific applications. Scaling laws for pre-training define a power-law relationship between dataset size and the test loss of an LLM.…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on some task-specific datasets has been a primary use of LLMs. However, it has been empirically observed that this approach to enhancing capability inevitably compromises safety, a phenomenon also…

There remain many open questions pertaining to the scaling behaviour of Transformer architectures. These scaling decisions and findings can be critical, as training runs often come with an associated computational cost which have both…

Large language models (LLMs) are remarkably efficient across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and well beyond them. However, a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the LLMs' generalization capabilities remains elusive. In…

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating…

In recent years, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in achieving an inference-time few-shot learning capability known as in-context learning. However, existing literature has highlighted the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in diverse tasks but often underperform in specialized fields due to limited domain-specific or proprietary corpus. Continual pre-training (CPT) enhances LLM capabilities by imbuing new domain-specific or…

How can we train models whose post-trained capabilities survive subsequent fine-tuning? Rather than focusing on downstream interventions to mitigate forgetting of upstream capabilities, we study how upstream training choices - that is, the…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight a strong connection between intelligence and compression. Learned image compression, a fundamental task in modern data compression, has made significant progress in recent years.…

We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer…

Large pretrained language models (PLMs) are often domain- or task-adapted via fine-tuning or prompting. Finetuning requires modifying all of the parameters and having enough data to avoid overfitting while prompting requires no training and…

Generalization abilities of well-trained large language models (LLMs) are known to scale predictably as a function of model size. In contrast to the existence of practical scaling laws governing pre-training, the quality of LLMs after…

The output tendencies of Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) vary markedly before and after Fine-Tuning (FT) due to the updates to the model parameters. These divergences in output tendencies result in a gap in the social biases of PLMs. For…

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have become a prevalent technique in deep learning for code, utilizing a two-stage pre-training and fine-tuning procedure to acquire general knowledge about code and specialize in a variety of downstream…

Large language models are classically trained in stages: pretraining on raw text followed by post-training for instruction following and reasoning. However, this separation creates a fundamental limitation: many desirable behaviors such as…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with limited data poses a practical challenge in low-resource languages, specialized domains, and constrained deployment settings. While pre-trained LLMs provide strong foundations, effective…

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM…

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have yielded impressive reasoning improvements in language models, yet it remains unclear whether post-training truly extends a model's reasoning ability beyond what it acquires during…