Related papers: Shaping capabilities with token-level data filteri…

Almost all the state-of-the-art neural networks for computer vision tasks are trained by (1) pre-training on a large-scale dataset and (2) finetuning on the target dataset. This strategy helps reduce dependence on the target dataset and…

This paper is written because I receive several inquiry emails saying it is hard to achieve good results when applying token repetition learning techniques. If REP (proposed by me) or Pointer-Mixture (proposed by Jian Li) is directly…

Understanding architectural differences in language models is challenging, especially at academic-scale pretraining (e.g., 1.3B parameters, 100B tokens), where results are often dominated by noise and randomness. To overcome this, we…

Source code is usually formatted with elements like indentation and newlines to improve readability for human developers. However, these visual aids do not seem to be beneficial for large language models (LLMs) in the same way since the…

Machine unlearning enables pre-trained models to remove the effect of certain portions of training data. Previous machine unlearning schemes have mainly focused on unlearning a cluster of instances or all instances belonging to a specific…

Dataset curation has become a basis for strong large language model (LLM) performance. While various rule-based filtering heuristics exist for English and multilingual datasets, model-based filtering techniques have primarily focused on…

Tokenization serves as a foundational step for Large Language Models (LLMs) to process text. In new domains or languages, the inefficiency of the tokenizer will slow down the training and generation of LLM. The mismatch in vocabulary also…

Commonly-used transformer language models depend on a tokenization schema which sets an unchangeable subword vocabulary prior to pre-training, destined to be applied to all downstream tasks regardless of domain shift, novel word formations,…

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…

Recent advances in image tokenizers, such as VQ-VAE, have enabled text-to-image generation using auto-regressive methods, similar to language modeling. However, these methods have yet to leverage pre-trained language models, despite their…

Tokenization -- the process of decomposing a given text into a sequence of subwords called tokens -- is one of the key components in the development of language models. Particularly, auto-regressive language models generate texts token by…

Generative recommender systems have recently attracted attention by formulating next-item prediction as an autoregressive sequence generation task. However, most existing methods optimize standard next-token likelihood and implicitly treat…

Pretraining DNA language models (DNALMs) on the full human genome is resource-intensive, yet often considered necessary for strong downstream performance. Inspired by recent findings in NLP and long-context modeling, we explore an…

Large Language Models increasingly possess capabilities that carry dual-use risks. While data filtering has emerged as a pretraining-time mitigation, it faces significant challenges: labeling whether data is harmful is expensive at scale,…

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to over-fit a dataset when being trained with noisy labels for a long enough time. To overcome this problem, we present a simple and effective method self-ensemble label filtering (SELF) to…

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…

Language models generate responses by producing a series of tokens in immediate succession: the $(K+1)^{th}$ token is an outcome of manipulating $K$ hidden vectors per layer, one vector per preceding token. What if instead we were to let…

The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning…

Model adaptation is crucial to handle the discrepancy between proxy training data and actual users data received. To effectively perform adaptation, textual data of users is typically stored on servers or their local devices, where…

Embedding layers in transformer-based NLP models typically account for the largest share of model parameters, scaling with vocabulary size but not yielding performance gains proportional to scale. We propose an alternative approach in which…