Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
super hub Canonical reference
Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher
Canonical reference. 83% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.
hub tools
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- abstract Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, an
authors
co-cited works
representative citing papers
BLaIR is a new benchmark and 570M-review dataset showing that LLM performance rankings on recommendation tasks have little correlation with rankings on general embedding benchmarks like MTEB.
Pythia releases 16 identically trained LLMs with full checkpoints and data tools to study training dynamics, scaling, memorization, and bias in language models.
PCCL synthesizes near-optimal topology-aware collective algorithms for arbitrary patterns while being process group-aware and scalable to subsets of devices.
Repetition rate mismatch between small-scale proxies and target budgets is the main reason data mixture experiments do not scale; a subsampling procedure that equalizes repetition rates recovers optimal mixtures from 1/16-scale experiments.
Hebatron is the first open-weight Hebrew MoE LLM adapted from Nemotron-3, reaching 73.8% on Hebrew reasoning benchmarks while activating only 3B parameters per pass and supporting 65k-token context.
Semantic-level and verification-based uncertainty methods outperform token-level baselines for audio reasoning in ALLMs, but their relative performance on hallucination and unanswerable-question benchmarks is model- and task-dependent.
MetaKE unifies knowledge editing stages via bi-level optimization and a structural gradient proxy to improve the accuracy-editability trade-off over prior methods.
Low-precision Flash Attention fails due to similar low-rank attention representations combined with biased rounding errors that accumulate and corrupt weight updates; a minimal fix to reduce rounding bias stabilizes training.
o1-like models overthink easy tasks; self-training reduces compute use without accuracy loss on GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, and AIME.
GaLore performs full-parameter LLM training with up to 65.5% less optimizer memory by projecting gradients onto a low-rank subspace at each step, matching full-rank performance on LLaMA pre-training and RoBERTa fine-tuning.
Griffin hybrid model matches Llama-2 performance while trained on over 6 times fewer tokens and offers lower inference latency with higher throughput.
VisualWebArena benchmark demonstrates that state-of-the-art multimodal agents still exhibit significant limitations on visually grounded web tasks.
C-Pack releases a new Chinese embedding benchmark, large training dataset, and optimized models that outperform priors by up to 10% on C-MTEB while also delivering English SOTA results.
LLMs default to responses more similar to opinions from the USA and some European and South American countries; prompting for a country shifts alignment but can introduce stereotypes, while translation does not reliably match language speakers.
Speculative sampling accelerates LLM decoding 2-2.5x by letting a draft model propose short sequences that the target model scores in parallel, then applies modified rejection sampling to keep the exact target distribution.
PoT prompting improves numerical reasoning by having language models write programs executed by a computer instead of performing calculations in natural language chains of thought, with an average 12% gain over CoT.
Adding the fixed prompt 'Let's think step by step' enables large language models to achieve substantial zero-shot gains on arithmetic, symbolic, and logical reasoning benchmarks without any task-specific examples.
Imagen achieves state-of-the-art photorealistic text-to-image generation by scaling a text-only pretrained T5 language model within a diffusion framework, reaching FID 7.27 on COCO without training on it.
Gato is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy using one transformer network to handle text, vision, games, and robotics tasks.
OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.
Flamingo models reach new state-of-the-art few-shot results on image and video tasks by bridging frozen vision and language models with cross-attention layers trained on interleaved web-scale data.
SayCan combines an LLM's high-level semantic knowledge with robot skill value functions to select only feasible actions, enabling completion of abstract natural-language instructions on a real mobile manipulator.
CRAFT is a Pareto-front prompt optimizer that allocates scarce LLM validation calls to candidates near the current front using accuracy- and cost-oriented generators plus NSGA-II retention.
citing papers explorer
-
Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling
Pythia releases 16 identically trained LLMs with full checkpoints and data tools to study training dynamics, scaling, memorization, and bias in language models.
-
C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings
C-Pack releases a new Chinese embedding benchmark, large training dataset, and optimized models that outperform priors by up to 10% on C-MTEB while also delivering English SOTA results.
-
Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models
LLMs default to responses more similar to opinions from the USA and some European and South American countries; prompting for a country shifts alignment but can introduce stereotypes, while translation does not reliably match language speakers.
-
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
Speculative sampling accelerates LLM decoding 2-2.5x by letting a draft model propose short sequences that the target model scores in parallel, then applies modified rejection sampling to keep the exact target distribution.
-
Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models
Gemini Ultra reaches human-expert performance on MMLU for the first time and sets new state-of-the-art results on 30 of 32 benchmarks, including all 20 multimodal ones tested.
-
The Falcon Series of Open Language Models
Falcon-180B is a 180B-parameter open decoder-only model trained on 3.5 trillion tokens that approaches PaLM-2-Large performance at lower cost and is released with dataset extracts.
-
DeepSpeed Ulysses: System Optimizations for Enabling Training of Extreme Long Sequence Transformer Models
DeepSpeed-Ulysses keeps communication volume constant for sequence-parallel attention when sequence length and device count scale together, delivering 2.5x faster training on 4x longer sequences than prior SOTA.
-
Language Modeling Is Compression
Large language models serve as strong general-purpose lossless compressors for text, images, and audio, outperforming domain-specific methods and revealing insights into scaling, tokenization, and in-context learning.
-
Reinforced Self-Training (ReST) for Language Modeling
ReST improves LLM translation quality on benchmarks via offline RL on self-generated data, achieving gains in a compute-efficient way compared to typical RLHF.
-
AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen
AudioPaLM unifies PaLM-2 and AudioLM to outperform prior systems on speech translation while enabling zero-shot speech-to-text for many unseen language pairs and voice transfer from short prompts.
-
The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only
Properly filtered web data from CommonCrawl alone trains LLMs that significantly outperform models trained on The Pile, with 600 billion tokens and 1.3B/7.5B parameter models released.
-
Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models
Repeating training data up to 4 epochs yields negligible loss increase versus unique data for fixed compute, and a new scaling law accounts for the decaying value of repeated tokens and excess parameters.
-
Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models
Med-PaLM 2 achieves 86.5% accuracy on MedQA and approaches or exceeds prior state-of-the-art on other medical QA benchmarks while receiving higher physician preference ratings than human answers on consumer questions.
-
BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance
BloombergGPT is a 50B parameter LLM trained on a 708B token mixed financial and general dataset that outperforms prior models on financial benchmarks while preserving general LLM performance.
-
SemDeDup: Data-efficient learning at web-scale through semantic deduplication
SemDeDup removes semantic duplicates from datasets like LAION using pre-trained embeddings, cutting data by 50% with minimal performance loss and efficiency gains on C4.
-
Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models
Multimodal-CoT achieves state-of-the-art on ScienceQA by using a two-stage process that incorporates vision into chain-of-thought rationale generation for models under 1 billion parameters.
-
The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning
The Flan Collection demonstrates that task balancing, data enrichment, and mixed prompt training are critical to effective instruction tuning, yielding stronger Flan-T5 models released publicly.
-
REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models
REPLUG improves frozen black-box LMs by prepending LM-supervised retrieved documents, delivering 6.3% better language modeling on GPT-3 and 5.1% better five-shot MMLU on Codex.
-
MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning
MiniGPT-v2 adds unique task identifiers to a large language model so one system can perform image description, visual question answering, and visual grounding after three-stage training.
-
PaLM 2 Technical Report
PaLM 2 reports state-of-the-art results on language, reasoning, and multilingual tasks with improved efficiency over PaLM.
-
StarCoder: may the source be with you!
StarCoderBase matches or beats OpenAI's code-cushman-001 on multi-language code benchmarks; the Python-fine-tuned StarCoder reaches 40% pass@1 on HumanEval while retaining other-language performance.
-
PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model
Scaling a multilingual vision-language model in size and training breadth yields new state-of-the-art results on over 25 benchmarks plus emerging abilities in counting and multilingual detection.
-
A Survey of Large Language Models
This survey reviews the background, key techniques, and evaluation methods for large language models, emphasizing emergent abilities that appear at large scales.
-
A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models
A survey paper providing an overview of Large Language Models, their background, and recent advances in the field.