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Model merging has emerged as a lightweight paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we analyze late-stage pre-training trajectories and uncover a…
Modern optimization algorithms that incorporate momentum and adaptive step-size offer improved performance in numerous challenging deep learning tasks. However, their effectiveness is often highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters,…
LLM-based prompt optimization, that uses LLM-provided "textual gradients" (feedback) to refine prompts, has emerged an effective method for automatic prompt engineering. However, its scalability and stability are unclear when using more…
Instruction tuning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generally involves cooperative learning between a backbone LLM and a feature encoder of non-text input modalities. The major challenge is how to efficiently find the synergy…
The advent of large-scale pre-trained language models has contributed greatly to the recent progress in natural language processing. Many state-of-the-art language models are first trained on a large text corpus and then fine-tuned on…
Training modern neural networks is increasingly fragile, with rare but severe destabilizing updates often causing irreversible divergence or silent performance degradation. Existing optimization methods primarily rely on preventive…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…
While scaling laws for Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally focus on proxy metrics like pretraining loss, predicting downstream task performance has been considered unreliable. This paper challenges that view by proposing a direct…
We study the optimization landscape and the stability properties of training problems with squared loss for neural networks and general nonlinear conic approximation schemes. It is demonstrated that, if a nonlinear conic approximation…
We propose a semi-supervised text classifier based on self-training using one positive and one negative property of neural networks. One of the weaknesses of self-training is the semantic drift problem, where noisy pseudo-labels accumulate…
Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…
Low-rank optimization has emerged as a promising approach to enabling memory-efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Existing low-rank optimization methods typically project gradients onto a low-rank subspace, reducing the…
Language models can retain dangerous knowledge and skills even after extensive safety fine-tuning, posing both misuse and misalignment risks. Recent studies show that even specialized unlearning methods can be easily reversed. To address…
In this research, we address critical concerns related to the numerical instability observed in 16-bit computations of machine learning models. Such instability, particularly when employing popular optimization algorithms like Adam, often…
Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to build general-purpose vision systems by training a single network to perform multiple tasks jointly. While promising, its potential is often hindered by "unbalanced optimization", where task interference…
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…
In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of the gradient descent algorithm in homogeneous neural networks, including fully-connected and convolutional neural networks with ReLU or LeakyReLU activations. In particular, we study…
Maximum likelihood estimation is widely used in training Energy-based models (EBMs). Training requires samples from an unnormalized distribution, which is usually intractable, and in practice, these are obtained by MCMC algorithms such as…
This paper provides a review and commentary on the past, present, and future of numerical optimization algorithms in the context of machine learning applications. Through case studies on text classification and the training of deep neural…
Current LLM unlearning methods face a critical security vulnerability that undermines their fundamental purpose: while they appear to successfully remove sensitive or harmful knowledge, this ``forgotten" information remains precariously…