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Recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs), such as GPT4-V and LLaVA, have been substantial. LLaVA's modular architecture, in particular, offers a blend of simplicity and efficiency. Recent works mainly focus on introducing…

Large language models are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has…

In a mixture of linear regression model, the regression coefficients are treated as random vectors that may follow either a continuous or discrete distribution. We propose two Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms to estimate this prior…

Quality and diversity are two critical metrics for the training data of large language models (LLMs), positively impacting performance. Existing studies often optimize these metrics separately, typically by first applying quality filtering…

Instruction tuning is crucial for optimizing Large Language Models (LLMs), yet mainstream data selection methods heavily rely on LLMs as instruction quality scorers, leading to high computational costs and reduced data diversity. To address…

Pre-training (PT) followed by fine-tuning (FT) is an effective method for training neural networks, and has led to significant performance improvements in many domains. PT can incorporate various design choices such as task and data…

As world knowledge advances and new task schemas emerge, Continual Learning (CL) becomes essential for keeping Large Language Models (LLMs) current and addressing their shortcomings. This process typically involves continual instruction…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is essential for safe and useful LLMs. Previous works mainly adopt reinforcement learning (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) with human feedback for alignment.…

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has improved text understanding and generation but poses challenges in computational resources. This study proposes a curriculum learning-inspired, data-centric training strategy that…

Data curriculums have become central to successful LLM training, yet principles governing optimal data placement remain unclear. We introduce the *training re-evaluation curve (TREC)*, a diagnostic that retrospectively evaluates training…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks and domains, with data preparation playing a critical role in achieving these results. Pre-training data typically combines information from…

Instruction tuning is critical to improve LLMs but usually suffers from low-quality and redundant data. Data filtering for instruction tuning has proved important in improving both the efficiency and performance of the tuning process. But…

Resource-efficient training optimization techniques are becoming increasingly important as the size of large language models (LLMs) continues to grow. In particular, batch packing is commonly used in pre-training and supervised fine-tuning…

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training have led to notable improvements in large language models (LLMs), particularly in enhancing their reasoning capabilities to handle complex tasks. However, most existing…

Recently published work on rephrasing natural text data for pre-training LLMs has shown promising results when combining the original dataset with the synthetically rephrased data. We build upon previous work by replicating existing results…

Instruction tuning significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks. However, the procedure to optimizing the mixing of instruction datasets for LLM fine-tuning is still poorly understood. This…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, are garnering significant attention. During the exploration of MLLM training, we identified Modality Composition Incoherence, a phenomenon that the proportion of a certain modality…

Continual Pre-Training (CPT) is widely used for acquiring and updating factual knowledge in LLMs. This practice treats loss as a proxy for knowledge learning, while offering no grounding into how it changes during training. We study CPT as…

Gradient-based data selection offers a principled framework for estimating sample utility in large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, but existing methods are mostly designed for offline settings. They are therefore less suited to online…

Data-centric training has emerged as a promising direction for improving large language models (LLMs) by optimizing not only model parameters but also the selection, composition, and weighting of training data during optimization. However,…