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The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on the huge amount of pre-training data learned in the pre-training phase. The opacity of the pre-training process and the training data causes the results of many benchmark tests…

Recent research has highlighted the importance of dataset size in scaling language models. However, large language models (LLMs) are notoriously token-hungry during pre-training, and high-quality text data on the web is approaching its…

We consider distributed learning in the presence of slow and unresponsive worker nodes, referred to as stragglers. In order to mitigate the effect of stragglers, gradient coding redundantly assigns partial computations to the worker such…

LLMs have seen rapid adoption in all domains. They need to be trained on high-end high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures and ingest massive amounts of input data. Unsurprisingly, at such a large scale, unexpected events (e.g.,…

Recent advances in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress. In particular, a series of remarkable yet often counterintuitive phenomena have been reported in LLMs, exhibiting…

Instruction tuning is a burgeoning method to elicit the general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs). While numerous studies have examined the impact of factors such as data volume and model size on English models, the scaling…

Large language models (LLMs) are typically developed through large-scale pre-training followed by task-specific fine-tuning. Recent advances highlight the importance of an intermediate mid-training stage, where models undergo multiple…

\textit{Background:} The use of large language models in software testing is growing fast as they support numerous tasks, from test case generation to automation, and documentation. However, their adoption often relies on informal…

Large language models (LLMs) like transformers demonstrate impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, allowing them to make predictions for new tasks based on prompt exemplars without parameter updates. While existing ICL theories…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential for in-context learning, where LLMs learn a new task simply by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (prompts). Despite their potential, our understanding of the factors…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained through multi-stage pipelines over heterogeneous data sources, yet developers lack a principled way to pinpoint the specific data responsible for an observed behavior. This lack of observability…

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled…

Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly trained in clusters with non-dedicated workers possessing heterogeneous resources. In such scenarios, model training efficiency can be negatively affected by stragglers -- workers that run much…

Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have introduced new requirements for efficient and robust training. As LLM clusters scale, node failures, lengthy recoveries, and bulky checkpoints erode efficiency. Infrequent…

Investigating outliers in large language models (LLMs) is crucial due to their significant impact on various aspects of LLM performance, including quantization and compression. Outliers often cause considerable quantization errors, leading…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in representation learning for program synthesis and understanding tasks. The quality of the learned representations appears to be dictated by the neural scaling laws as a…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit cognitive biases -- systematic tendencies of irrational decision-making, similar to those seen in humans. Prior work has found that these biases vary across models and can be amplified by instruction…

The training scale of large language models (LLMs) has reached tens of thousands of GPUs and is still continuously expanding, enabling faster learning of larger models. Accompanying the expansion of the resource scale is the prevalence of…

This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, yet their deployment in enterprise environments reveals a critical limitation: inconsistent adherence to custom instructions.…