Related papers: Scaling Laws for Forgetting during Finetuning with…

As language models scale, the amount of data they require grows -- yet many target data sources, such as low-resource languages or specialized domains, are inherently limited in size. A common strategy is to mix this scarce but valuable…

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 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…

Scaling laws for language models have often focused on finding the optimal model size and token count for training from scratch. However, achieving this optimal balance requires significant compute resources due to the extensive data…

Real-world model deployments demand strong performance on narrow domains where data is often scarce. Typically, practitioners finetune models to specialize them, but this risks overfitting to the domain and forgetting general knowledge. We…

To obtain a language model for a target domain (e.g. math), the current paradigm is to pre-train on a vast amount of generic web text and then fine-tune on the relatively limited amount of target data. Typically, generic data is only mixed…

Scaling laws predict the loss of a target machine learning model by extrapolating from easier-to-train models with fewer parameters or smaller training sets. This provides an efficient way for practitioners and researchers alike to compare…

Large foundation models are typically trained on data from multiple domains, with the data mixture--the proportion of each domain used--playing a critical role in model performance. The standard approach to selecting this mixture relies on…

Low precision training and inference affect both the quality and cost of language models, but current scaling laws do not account for this. In this work, we devise "precision-aware" scaling laws for both training and inference. We propose…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

We study empirical scaling laws for transfer learning between distributions in an unsupervised, fine-tuning setting. When we train increasingly large neural networks from-scratch on a fixed-size dataset, they eventually become data-limited…

Upweighting high-quality data in LLM pretraining often improves performance, but in datalimited regimes, especially under overtraining, stronger upweighting increases repetition and can degrade performance. However, standard scaling laws do…

Domain adaptation of neural networks commonly relies on three training phases: pretraining, selected data training and then fine tuning. Data selection improves target domain generalization by training further on pretraining data identified…

Pretraining data of large language models composes multiple domains (e.g., web texts, academic papers, codes), whose mixture proportions crucially impact the competence of outcome models. While existing endeavors rely on heuristics or…

Scaling laws for language model training traditionally characterize how performance scales with model size and dataset volume. Prior work has explored architecture variants and data treatments such as dataset filtering and noise injection…

As a dominant paradigm, fine-tuning a pre-trained model on the target data is widely used in many deep learning applications, especially for small data sets. However, recent studies have empirically shown that training from scratch has the…

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…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

For most languages of the world, language model pre-training operates in a data-constrained regime where models must repeat their training data many times, degrading generalization. Two remedies exist: aggressive hyperparameter tuning such…

Scaling laws provide important insights that can guide the design of large language models (LLMs). Existing work has primarily focused on studying scaling laws for pretraining (upstream) loss. However, in transfer learning settings, in…