Related papers: Pre-training under infinite compute
We introduce the technique of adaptive discretization to design an efficient model-based episodic reinforcement learning algorithm in large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on optimistic one-step value…
Large Language Models improve with increasing amounts of high-quality training data. However, leveraging larger datasets requires balancing quality, quantity, and diversity across sources. After evaluating nine baseline methods under both…
Varying data augmentation policies and regularization over the course of optimization has led to performance improvements over using fixed values. We show that population based training is a useful tool to continuously search those…
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 access to high-quality, domain-specific data grows increasingly scarce, multi-epoch training has become a practical strategy for adapting large language models (LLMs). However, autoregressive models often suffer from performance…
The brain prepares for learning even before interacting with the environment, by refining and optimizing its structures through spontaneous neural activity that resembles random noise. However, the mechanism of such a process has yet to be…
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…
We study efficient reasoning under tight compute. We ask how to make structured, correct decisions without increasing test time cost. We add two training only components to small and medium Transformers that also transfer to broader…
Maximizing the likelihood of the next token is an established, statistically sound objective for pre-training language models. In this paper we show that we can train better models faster by pre-aggregating the corpus with a collapsed…
Generalization is one of the fundamental issues in machine learning. However, traditional techniques like uniform convergence may be unable to explain generalization under overparameterization. As alternative approaches, techniques based on…
Pre-training and fine-tuning is a paradigm for alleviating the data scarcity problem in end-to-end speech translation (E2E ST). The commonplace "modality gap" between speech and text data often leads to inconsistent inputs between…
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…
Studies on generalization performance of machine learning algorithms under the scope of information theory suggest that compressed representations can guarantee good generalization, inspiring many compression-based regularization methods.…
Prompt tuning (PT), where a small amount of trainable soft (continuous) prompt vectors is affixed to the input of language models (LM), has shown promising results across various tasks and models for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT).…
Careful curation of data sources can significantly improve the performance of LLM pre-training, but predominant approaches rely heavily on intuition or costly trial-and-error, making them difficult to generalize across different data…
Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained code models such as CodeBERT on downstream tasks has achieved great success in many software testing and analysis tasks. While effective and prevalent, fine-tuning the pre-trained parameters incurs a large…
Conventional continual pretraining (CPT) for large language model (LLM) domain adaptation often suffers from catastrophic forgetting and limited domain capacity. Existing strategies adopt layer expansion, introducing additional trainable…
Current approaches to reducing undesired capabilities in language models are largely post hoc, and can thus be easily bypassed by adversaries. A natural alternative is to shape capabilities during pretraining itself. On the proxy task of…
In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of nonlinear systems with continuous state and action spaces. We present an episodic learning algorithm, where we for each episode use convex optimization to find a two-layer neural network…
Self-supervised methods such as Contrastive predictive Coding (CPC) have greatly improved the quality of the unsupervised representations. These representations significantly reduce the amount of labeled data needed for downstream task…