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Diffusion Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in class-conditional and multimodal generation, yet the structure of their learned conditional embeddings remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first…
State-of-the-art training algorithms for deep learning models are based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recently, many variations have been explored: perturbing parameters for better accuracy (such as in Extragradient), limiting SGD…
Unlike human reasoning in abstract conceptual spaces, large language models (LLMs) typically reason by generating discrete tokens, which potentially limit their expressive power. The recent work Soft Thinking has shown that LLMs' latent…
Softmax is an output activation function for modeling categorical probability distributions in many applications of deep learning. However, a recent study revealed that softmax can be a bottleneck of representational capacity of neural…
An important class of problems involves training deep neural networks with sparse prediction targets of very high dimension D. These occur naturally in e.g. neural language models or the learning of word-embeddings, often posed as…
The burgeoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have underscored the need for alignment to ensure these models act in accordance with human values and intentions. Existing alignment frameworks present constraints either in the…
Although gradient descent with Polyak's momentum is widely used in modern machine and deep learning, a concrete understanding of its effects on the training trajectory remains elusive. In this work, we empirically show that for linear…
Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned for specific domains exhibit strong performance; however, the underlying mechanisms by which this fine-tuning reshapes their parametric space are not well understood. Prior works primarily focus on…
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally rely on final-layer loss for training and final-layer representations for predictions, potentially overlooking the predictive power embedded in intermediate layers. Surprisingly,…
Large language models (LLMs) have brought about significant transformations in human society. Among the crucial computations in LLMs, the softmax unit holds great importance. Its helps the model generating a probability distribution on…
Curriculum learning changes the order of pretraining data, but it remains unclear how ordering changes the learning dynamics. We pretrain models from 14M to 1B parameters for 300B tokens under three linguistically motivated…
Large Language Models exhibit mode collapse, producing homogeneous outputs that fail to explore valid solution spaces. We present QD-LLM, a framework for parameter-efficient neuroevolution that evolves prompt embeddings, compact neural…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet undergo significant performance degradation when modified for deployment through quantization, pruning, or decoding strategy…
Accelerator memory and networking constraints have emerged as dominant bottlenecks when training large language models LLMs with billions of parameters. Existing low rank gradient estimators such as GaLoRE and FLORA compress gradients and…
Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to dominant autoregressive approaches. Although they achieve competitive performance on several tasks, a substantial gap remains in open-ended text generation.…
Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…
Embedding parameterized optimization problems as layers into machine learning architectures serves as a powerful inductive bias. Training such architectures with stochastic gradient descent requires care, as degenerate derivatives of the…
Deep neural network architectures have recently produced excellent results in a variety of areas in artificial intelligence and visual recognition, well surpassing traditional shallow architectures trained using hand-designed features. The…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In…
Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…