8 papers
Disentangling Geometry, Performance, and Training in Language Models
Atharva Kulkarni, Jacob Mitchell Springer, Arjun Subramonian +1
Geometric properties of Transformer weights, particularly the unembedding matrix, have been widely useful in language model interpretability research. Yet, their utility for estima…
Early Data Exposure Improves Robustness to Subsequent Fine-Tuning
Lawrence Feng, Gaurav R. Ghosal, Jacob Mitchell Springer +2
How can we train models whose post-trained capabilities survive subsequent fine-tuning? Rather than focusing on downstream interventions to mitigate forgetting of upstream capabili…
Annotations Mitigate Post-Training Mode Collapse
Jacob Mitchell Springer, Madhu Advani, Lukas Aichberger +7
Post-training (via supervised fine-tuning) improves instruction-following, but often induces semantic mode collapse by biasing models toward low-entropy fine-tuning data at the exp…
Sharpness-Aware Pretraining Mitigates Catastrophic Forgetting
Ishaan Watts, Catherine Li, Sachin Goyal +2
Pretraining optimizers are tuned to produce the strongest possible base model, on the assumption that a stronger starting point yields a stronger model after subsequent changes lik…
Understanding the Influence of Synthetic Data for Text Embedders
Jacob Mitchell Springer, Vaibhav Adlakha, Siva Reddy +2
Recent progress in developing general purpose text embedders has been driven by training on ever-growing corpora of synthetic LLM-generated data. Nonetheless, no publicly available…
Repetition Improves Language Model Embeddings
Jacob Mitchell Springer, Suhas Kotha, Daniel Fried +2
Bidirectional models are considered essential for strong text embeddings. Recent approaches to adapt autoregressive language models (LMs) into strong text embedding models have lar…