Related papers: Silent Tokens, Loud Effects: Padding in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet little is known about their training dynamics at the token level. Evaluation typically relies on aggregated training loss, measured at the batch level, which…

This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood.…

Understanding how large language models (LLMs) internally represent and process their predictions is central to detecting uncertainty and preventing hallucinations. While several studies have shown that models encode uncertainty in their…

Effective training of today's large language models (LLMs) depends on large batches and long sequences for throughput and accuracy. To handle variable-length sequences on hardware accelerators, it is common practice to introduce padding…

Text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) have achieved excellent results in tasks such as information retrieval, semantic textual similarity, etc. In this work, we show an interesting finding: when feeding a text into the LLM-based…

In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of "selection biases" in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on problems where models are tasked with choosing the optimal option from an ordered sequence. We delve into biases related to…

Standard evaluations of Large language models (LLMs) focus on task performance, offering limited insight into whether correct behavior reflects appropriate underlying mechanisms and risking confirmation bias. We introduce a simple,…

Large audio-language models (LALMs) unify speech and text processing, but their robustness in noisy real-world settings remains underexplored. We investigate how irrelevant audio, such as silence, synthetic noise, and environmental sounds,…

Recent advances in language models (LMs) have led to significant improvements in quality on complex NLP tasks, but at the expense of increased inference costs. Cascading offers a simple strategy to achieve more favorable cost-quality…

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely employed across various application domains, yet their black-box nature poses significant challenges to understanding how these models process input data internally to make predictions. In this…

The emergence of discourse-like tokens such as "wait" and "therefore" in large language models (LLMs) has offered a unique window into their reasoning processes. However, systematic analyses of how such signals vary across training…

Prompts play a crucial role in guiding the responses of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the intricate role of individual tokens in prompts, known as input saliency, in shaping the responses remains largely underexplored. Existing…

Tokenization, the division of input text into input tokens, is an often overlooked aspect of the large language model (LLM) pipeline and could be the source of useful or harmful inductive biases. Historically, LLMs have relied on byte pair…

The computational difficulties of large language model (LLM) inference remain a significant obstacle to their widespread deployment. The need for many applications to support long input sequences and process them in large batches typically…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in language modelling due to scaling laws found in model size and the hidden dimension of the model's text representation. Yet, we demonstrate that compressed representations of…

Packing and shuffling tokens is a common practice in training auto-regressive language models (LMs) to prevent overfitting and improve efficiency. Typically documents are concatenated to chunks of maximum sequence length (MSL) and then…

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to attend heavily to the first token in the sequence -- creating a so-called attention sink. Many works have studied this phenomenon in detail, proposing various ways to either leverage or alleviate it.…

Alignment tuning has enabled large language models to excel in reasoning, instruction-following, and minimizing harmful generations. However, despite their widespread deployment, these models exhibit a monolingual bias, raising concerns…

Weight tying, i.e. sharing parameters between input and output embedding matrices, is common practice in language model design, yet its impact on the learned embedding space remains poorly understood. In this paper, we show that tied…

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…