Related papers: MSign: An Optimizer Preventing Training Instabilit…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in language-related tasks, but their deployment poses significant challenges due to substantial memory and storage requirements. Weight-only quantization has emerged as…
Numerous empirical evidence has corroborated that the noise plays a crucial rule in effective and efficient training of neural networks. The theory behind, however, is still largely unknown. This paper studies this fundamental problem…
The development of state-of-the-art large language models is commonly understood as a two-stage process involving pre-training and post-training. We point out the need for an additional intermediate stage called reinforcement mid-training…
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with cross-lingual tasks due to data imbalances between high-resource and low-resource languages, as well as monolingual bias in pre-training. Existing methods, such as bilingual…
The stability of recursively trained large language models (LLMs) is a foundational problem for AI safety. Prevailing theory predicts model collapse, a progressive degradation when models are trained on their own output. We challenge this…
A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences typically relies on external supervision, which faces critical limitations: human annotations are scarce and subjective, reward models are vulnerable to reward hacking, and…
Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain…
We present the design, implementation and engineering experience in building and deploying MegaScale, a production system for training large language models (LLMs) at the scale of more than 10,000 GPUs. Training LLMs at this scale brings…
One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…
LLMs are computationally expensive to pre-train due to their large scale. Model growth emerges as a promising approach by leveraging smaller models to accelerate the training of larger ones. However, the viability of these model growth…
Prompt optimization algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in multi-step reasoning but still lack effective uncertainty estimation. This paper introduces a benchmark dataset to evaluate uncertainty metrics, focusing on Answer,…
We propose ActiveLR, an optimization meta algorithm that localizes the learning rate, $\alpha$, and adapts them at each epoch according to whether the gradient at each epoch changes sign or not. This sign-conscious algorithm is aware of…
Current transformer language models are trained with uniform computational budgets across all layers, implicitly assuming layer homogeneity. We challenge this assumption through empirical analysis of SmolLM2-135M, a 30-layer, 135M-parameter…
Over-parametrization is an important technique in training neural networks. In both theory and practice, training a larger network allows the optimization algorithm to avoid bad local optimal solutions. In this paper we study a closely…
Large language models (LLMs) are initially pretrained for broad capabilities and then finetuned with instruction-following datasets to improve their performance in interacting with humans. Despite advances in finetuning, a standardized…
Uncertainty calibration is crucial for various machine learning applications, yet it remains challenging. Many models exhibit hallucinations - confident yet inaccurate responses - due to miscalibrated confidence. Here, we show that the…
We study the generalization of two-layer ReLU neural networks in a univariate nonparametric regression problem with noisy labels. This is a problem where kernels (\emph{e.g.} NTK) are provably sub-optimal and benign overfitting does not…
Training stability is a persistent challenge in the pre-training of large language models (LLMs), particularly for architectures such as Post-Norm Transformers, which are prone to gradient explosion and dissipation. In this paper, we…
Learned optimizers -- neural networks that are trained to act as optimizers -- have the potential to dramatically accelerate training of machine learning models. However, even when meta-trained across thousands of tasks at huge…