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Hyperparameter transfer allows extrapolating optimal optimization hyperparameters from small to large scales, making it critical for training large language models (LLMs). This is done either by fitting a scaling law to the hyperparameters…

Instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) has gained attention from researchers due to its ability to unlock the potential of LLMs in following instructions. While instruction tuning offers advantages for facilitating the…

Adaptive optimizers with decoupled weight decay, such as AdamW, are the de facto standard for pre-training large transformer-based generative models. Yet the quadratic nature of the $\ell_2$ penalty embedded in weight decay drives all…

Generative models of complex systems often require post-hoc parameter adjustments to produce useful outputs. For example, energy-based models for protein design are sampled at an artificially low ''temperature'' to generate novel,…

Generative models face a fundamental challenge: they must simultaneously learn high-level semantic concepts (what to generate) and low-level synthesis details (how to generate it). Conventional end-to-end training entangles these distinct,…

When using large-batch training to speed up stochastic gradient descent, learning rates must adapt to new batch sizes in order to maximize speed-ups and preserve model quality. Re-tuning learning rates is resource intensive, while fixed…

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs significant cost; hence, any strategy that accelerates model convergence is helpful. In this paper, we investigate the ability of a simple idea checkpoint averaging along the trajectory of a…

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…

Reinforcement learning improves LLM reasoning, but PPO/GRPO typically use fixed clipping and decoding temperature, which makes training brittle and tuning-heavy. We propose Adaptive Group Policy Optimization (AGPO), a critic-free refinement…

The modern paradigm in machine learning involves pre-training on diverse data, followed by task-specific fine-tuning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this translates to learning via offline RL on a diverse historical dataset, followed by…

Instruction tuning improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with data quality and scalability being the crucial factors. Most instruction tuning data come from human crowd-sourcing or GPT-4 distillation. We propose…

Large language models (LLMs) are notoriously memory-intensive during training, particularly with the popular AdamW optimizer. This memory burden necessitates using more or higher-end GPUs or reducing batch sizes, limiting training…

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

The softmax function is a fundamental component in deep learning. This study delves into the often-overlooked parameter within the softmax function, known as "temperature," providing novel insights into the practical and theoretical aspects…

This work focuses on leveraging and selecting from vast, unlabeled, open data to pre-fine-tune a pre-trained language model. The goal is to minimize the need for costly domain-specific data for subsequent fine-tuning while achieving desired…

Embedding tables are usually huge in click-through rate (CTR) prediction models. To train and deploy the CTR models efficiently and economically, it is necessary to compress their embedding tables at the training stage. To this end, we…

We consider the issue of calibration in large language models (LLM). Recent studies have found that common interventions such as instruction tuning often result in poorly calibrated LLMs. Although calibration is well-explored in traditional…

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has created a significant disparity: industrial research labs with their computational resources, expert teams, and advanced infrastructures, can effectively fine-tune LLMs, while individual…

Traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategies for sequence-to-sequence tasks often train models to directly generate the target output. Recent work has shown that guiding models with intermediate steps, such as keywords, outlines, or…

The right batch size is important when training language models at scale: a large batch size is necessary for fast training, but a batch size that is too large will harm token efficiency. To navigate this tradeoff, McCandlish et al. (2018)…