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Dramatic increases in the capabilities of neural network models in recent years are driven by scaling model size, training data, and corresponding computational resources. To develop the exceedingly large networks required in modern…
The Warmup Stable Decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler has recently become popular, largely due to its good performance and flexibility when training large language models. It remains an open question whether the remarkable performance of…
Data curriculums have become central to successful LLM training, yet principles governing optimal data placement remain unclear. We introduce the *training re-evaluation curve (TREC)*, a diagnostic that retrospectively evaluates training…
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely-used parameter-efficient finetuning method for large language models. LoRA saves memory by training only low rank perturbations to selected weight matrices. In this work, we compare the performance of…
Training large language representation models has become a standard in the natural language processing community. This allows for fine tuning on any number of specific tasks, however, these large high capacity models can continue to train…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored for their reasoning capabilities, yet their ability to perform structured, constraint-based optimization from natural language remains insufficiently understood. This study evaluates…
We study the empirical scaling laws of a family of encoder-decoder autoregressive transformer models on the task of joint motion forecasting and planning in the autonomous driving domain. Using a 500 thousand hours driving dataset, we…
We conjecture that the inherent difference in generalisation between adaptive and non-adaptive gradient methods in deep learning stems from the increased estimation noise in the flattest directions of the true loss surface. We demonstrate…
During long-duration Large Language Model (LLM) training runs the gradient norm increases rapidly near the end of training. In this short note, we show that this increase is due to an unintended interaction between weight decay,…
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling and text generation, with improvements scaling proportionally with model size. However, the limitations of GPU memory have…
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has improved text understanding and generation but poses challenges in computational resources. This study proposes a curriculum learning-inspired, data-centric training strategy that…
Hard-label classification is usually trained with smooth surrogate losses, most prominently softmax cross-entropy. We isolate an asymptotic mechanism by which this mismatch between smooth surrogate and discrete labels produces power-law…
Scaling laws play a central role in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling the prediction of model performance relative to compute budgets prior to training. While Transformers have been the dominant architecture, recent…
We prove that Riemannian contraction in a supervised learning setting implies generalization. Specifically, we show that if an optimizer is contracting in some Riemannian metric with rate $\lambda > 0$, it is uniformly algorithmically…
The delta-bar-delta algorithm is recognized as a learning rate adaptation technique that enhances the convergence speed of the training process in optimization by dynamically scheduling the learning rate based on the difference between the…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we investigate the…
In recent years there has been a collective research effort to find new formulations of reinforcement learning that are simultaneously more efficient and more amenable to analysis. This paper concerns one approach that builds on the linear…
This thesis explores the benefits machine learning algorithms can bring to online planning and scheduling for autonomous vehicles in off-road situations. Mainly, we focus on typical problems of interest which include computing itineraries…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…