Related papers: Weight Decay Improves Language Model Plasticity
Why do larger language models generalize better? To investigate this question, we develop generalization bounds on the pretraining objective of large language models (LLMs) in the compute-optimal regime, as described by the Chinchilla…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP tasks. Despite the great success, mainstream solutions largely follow the pre-training then finetuning paradigm, which brings in both high deployment costs and low…
Training large models is both resource-intensive and time-consuming, making it crucial to understand the quantitative relationship between model performance and hyperparameters. In this paper, we present an empirical law that describes how…
Masked language modeling (MLM) is a widely used self-supervised pretraining objective, where a model needs to predict an original token that is replaced with a mask given contexts. Although simpler and computationally efficient pretraining…
The quality of Large Language Model (LLM) pretraining depends on multiple factors, including the compute budget and the choice of optimization algorithm. Empirical scaling laws are widely used to predict loss as model size and training data…
Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…
With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have been widely adopted in various fields, becoming essential for autonomous decision-making and interactive tasks. However, current work typically relies on…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen great advance in both academia and industry, and their popularity results in numerous open-source frameworks and techniques in accelerating LLM pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. Training and…
Performance-critical machine learning models should be robust to input perturbations not seen during training. Adversarial training is a method for improving a model's robustness to some perturbations by including them in the training…
During long-duration Large Language Model (LLM) training runs the gradient norm increases rapidly near the end of training. In this short note, we show that this increase is due to an unintended interaction between weight decay,…
We investigate how different compression techniques -- such as weight and activation quantization, and weight sparsity -- affect the scaling behavior of large language models (LLMs) during pretraining. Building on previous work showing that…
Modern optimizers such as AdamW, equipped with momentum and adaptive learning rate, are designed to escape local minima and explore the vast parameter space. This exploration is beneficial for finding good loss basins when training from…
Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) display impressive performances and have captured the attention of the NLP community. Establishing best practices in pretraining has, therefore, become a major focus of NLP research, especially since…
Molecular generative models, often employing GPT-style language modeling on molecular string representations, have shown promising capabilities when scaled to large datasets and model sizes. However, it remains unclear and subject to debate…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly vulnerable to input perturbations, as even a small prompt change may result in a substantially different output. Existing methods to enhance LLM robustness are primarily focused on perturbed data…
Model growth from a given checkpoint aims to accelerate training of a larger model, offering potential resource savings. Despite recent interest, warmstarting has seen limited practical adoption in large-scale training. We attribute this to…
Self-improvement through post-training methods such as iterative preference learning has been acclaimed for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning) of Large Language Models (LLMs) without human…
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks is fundamentally constrained by the capabilities acquired during pre-training. However, traditional benchmarks like MMLU often fail to reflect a base model's plasticity in…