Related papers: Methods of improving LLM training stability

Recent works have demonstrated great success in pre-training large-scale autoregressive language models on massive GPUs. To reduce the wall-clock training time, a common practice is to increase the batch size and learning rate. However,…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms often require long training to become useful, especially in complex environments with sparse rewards. While techniques like reward shaping and curriculum learning exist to accelerate training, these…

Large Language Models (LLMs) that can continually improve beyond their training budgets are able to solve increasingly difficult problems by adapting at test time, a property we refer to as extrapolation. However, standard reinforcement…

Large language models (LLMs) are computationally intensive. The computation workload and the memory footprint grow quadratically with the dimension (layer width). Most of LLMs' parameters come from the linear layers of the transformer…

Large Language Models (LLMs) for public use require continuous pre-training to remain up-to-date with the latest data. The models also need to be fine-tuned with specific instructions to maintain their ability to follow instructions…

Most studies in cross-device federated learning focus on small models, due to the server-client communication and on-device computation bottlenecks. In this work, we leverage various techniques for mitigating these bottlenecks to train…

Despite scale driving substantial recent advancements in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL) methods still primarily use small value functions. Naively scaling value functions -- including with a transformer architecture, which is…

Large Language Models (LLMs), built on Transformer architectures, exhibit remarkable generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains resource-intensive due to their extensive…

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) may fail in giving reliable estimates of their predictive uncertainty. We take a close look into this problem, aiming to answer two questions: (1) Do PLMs learn to become calibrated in the training…

Due to the continuous emergence of new data, version updates have become an indispensable requirement for Large Language Models (LLMs). The training paradigms for version updates of LLMs include pre-training from scratch (PTFS) and…

Despite their impressive capabilities, aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate outputs that lack diversity. What drives this consistency in the generation? We investigate this phenomenon through the lens of probability…

Language models, characterized by their black-box nature, often hallucinate and display sensitivity to input perturbations, causing concerns about trust. To enhance trust, it is imperative to gain a comprehensive understanding of the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the de-facto paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We have developed RLAX, a scalable RL framework on TPUs. RLAX employs a parameter-server…

Recent work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate tutoring responses in mathematics, yet it remains unclear how closely their instructional behavior aligns with expert human practice. We analyze a dataset of math…

In mechanistic interpretability, recent work scrutinizes transformer "circuits" - sparse, mono or multi layer sub computations, that may reflect human understandable functions. Yet, these network circuits are rarely acid-tested for their…

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have substantially improved the training of large-scale language models, leading to significant gains in generation quality and reasoning ability. However, most existing research focuses on…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs), but they suffer from inherently much higher training variance. High variance leads to noisier gradient estimates and unstable optimization, so even…

This paper introduces an efficient strategy to transform Large Language Models (LLMs) into Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). By conceptualizing this transformation as a domain adaptation process, i.e., transitioning from text…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance through extended reasoning traces, but they often exhibit overthinking behavior for low-complexity queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this issue are fundamentally limited by…