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Full-parameter fine-tuning of large language models is constrained by substantial GPU memory requirements. Low-rank adaptation methods mitigate this challenge by updating only a subset of parameters. However, these approaches often limit…
As world knowledge advances and new task schemas emerge, Continual Learning (CL) becomes essential for keeping Large Language Models (LLMs) current and addressing their shortcomings. This process typically involves continual instruction…
Since the inception of Large Language Models (LLMs), the quest to efficiently train them for superior reasoning capabilities has been a pivotal challenge. The dominant training paradigm for LLMs is based on next token prediction (NTP).…
Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are widely used to assess medical students' communication skills, but scoring interview-based assessments is time-consuming and potentially subject to human bias. This study explored the…
Automatic evaluation of sequence generation, traditionally reliant on metrics like BLEU and ROUGE, often fails to capture the semantic accuracy of generated text sequences due to their emphasis on n-gram overlap. A promising solution to…
The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which is the simplest first-order optimizer for training deep neural networks, depends on not only the learning rate but also the batch size. They both affect the number of iterations…
The prohibitive training costs of Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a significant bottleneck in the development of next-generation LLMs. In this paper, we show that it is possible to significantly reduce the training costs of…
Loss spikes often occur during pre-training of large language models. The spikes degrade the performance of large language models and sometimes ruin the pre-training. Since the pre-training needs a vast computational budget, we should avoid…
Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in continual learning, in which a model loses prior knowledge when it is fine-tuned on new tasks. This problem is particularly critical for large language models (LLMs) undergoing continual…
Curriculum learning plays a crucial role in enhancing the training efficiency of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks. However, existing methods often fail to adequately account for variations in prompt difficulty or rely on…
Curriculum learning changes the order of pretraining data, but it remains unclear how ordering changes the learning dynamics. We pretrain models from 14M to 1B parameters for 300B tokens under three linguistically motivated…
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly better at a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP), such as text generation and understanding. Recently, these models have extended their capabilities to coding tasks,…
Adam is known to perform significantly better than Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in language models, a phenomenon for which a number of explanations have been proposed. In this work, we revisit this "optimizer gap" through a series of…
Large-batch SGD is important for scaling training of deep neural networks. However, without fine-tuning hyperparameter schedules, the generalization of the model may be hampered. We propose to use batch augmentation: replicating instances…
Long-horizon interactions require language models to manage accumulating information: when to update their state, when to preserve their state, and what to ignore. We study this challenge as \textbf{Contextual Belief Management (CBM)}:…
This report examines the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in improving the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by previous studies \cite{Min2022RethinkingWork}, we analyze the impact of…
We study the compute-optimal trade-off between model and training data set sizes for large neural networks. Our result suggests a linear relation similar to that supported by the empirical analysis of chinchilla. While that work studies…
Choosing appropriate step sizes is critical for reducing the computational cost of training large-scale neural network models. Mini-batch sub-sampling (MBSS) is often employed for computational tractability. However, MBSS introduces a…
Children can acquire language from less than 100 million words of input. Large language models are far less data-efficient: they typically require 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more data and still do not perform as well as humans on many…
We study trends in model size of notable machine learning systems over time using a curated dataset. From 1950 to 2018, model size in language models increased steadily by seven orders of magnitude. The trend then accelerated, with model…