4 citations · 13 across the 18 of their papers we have counts for
19 papers
Learning to Read Out: Unembedding Dynamics in Language Model Pretraining
Matteo He, William F. Shen, Alex Iacob +3
When does a language model acquire a capability? Developmental studies usually answer this by tracking when models start producing the correct token. But that prediction passes thr…
The Red Queen Gödel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators
Alex Iacob, Andrej Jovanović, William F. Shen +12
Self-improving agents are state-of-the-art on agentic coding benchmarks, yet their search methods assume a stationary evaluation criterion. This ignores a central feature of evolut…
FoMoE: Breaking the Full-Replica Barrier with a Federation of MoEs
Lorenzo Sani, Zeyu Cao, Meghdad Kurmanji +5
Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures partially…
Response-Conditioned Parallel-to-Sequential Orchestration for Multi-Agent Systems
Nurbek Tastan, Alex Iacob, Lorenzo Sani +4
Multi-agent systems can solve complex tasks through collaboration between multiple Large Language Model agents. Existing collaboration frameworks typically operate in either a para…
Rethinking Data Curation in LLM Training: Online Reweighting Offers Better Generalization than Offline Methods
Wanru Zhao, Yihong Chen, Yuzhi Tang +6
Data curation is a critical yet under-explored area in large language model (LLM) training. Existing methods, such as data selection and mixing, operate in an offline paradigm, det…
LoRDO: Distributed Low-Rank Optimization with Infrequent Communication
Andrej Jovanović, Alex Iacob, Mher Safaryan +6
Distributed training of foundation models via is limited by interconnect bandwidth. While infrequent communication strategies reduce synchronization frequency, they…
MT-DAO: Multi-Timescale Distributed Adaptive Optimizers with Local Updates
Alex Iacob, Andrej Jovanovic, Mher Safaryan +6
Training large models with distributed data parallelism (DDP) requires frequent communication of gradients across workers, which can saturate bandwidth. Infrequent communication st…
AbbIE: Autoregressive Block-Based Iterative Encoder for Efficient Sequence Modeling
Preslav Aleksandrov, Meghdad Kurmanji, Fernando Garcia Redondo +7
We introduce the Autoregressive Block-Based Iterative Encoder (AbbIE), a novel recursive generalization of the encoder-only Transformer architecture, which achieves better perplexi…
DES-LOC: Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers for Training Foundation Models
Alex Iacob, Lorenzo Sani, Mher Safaryan +8
Scaling foundation model training with Distributed Data Parallel (DDP) methods is bandwidth-limited. Existing infrequent communication methods like Local SGD were designed to synch…
SparsyFed: Sparse Adaptive Federated Training
Adriano Guastella, Lorenzo Sani, Alex Iacob +3
Sparse training is often adopted in cross-device federated learning (FL) environments where constrained devices collaboratively train a machine learning model on private data by ex…
LLM Unlearning via Neural Activation Redirection
William F. Shen, Xinchi Qiu, Meghdad Kurmanji +5
The ability to selectively remove knowledge from LLMs is highly desirable. However, existing methods often struggle with balancing unlearning efficacy and retain model utility, and…
Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training
Lorenzo Sani, Alex Iacob, Zeyu Cao +8
Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distr…
DEPT: Decoupled Embeddings for Pre-training Language Models
Alex Iacob, Lorenzo Sani, Meghdad Kurmanji +5
Language Model pre-training uses broad data mixtures to enhance performance across domains and languages. However, training on such heterogeneous text corpora requires extensive an…
Worldwide Federated Training of Language Models
Alex Iacob, Lorenzo Sani, Bill Marino +3
The reliance of language model training on massive amounts of computation and vast datasets scraped from potentially low-quality, copyrighted, or sensitive data has come into quest…
The Future of Large Language Model Pre-training is Federated
Lorenzo Sani, Alex Iacob, Zeyu Cao +8
Generative pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance over a wide range of tasks, thanks to the unprecedented amount of data they have been t…
FedAnchor: Enhancing Federated Semi-Supervised Learning with Label Contrastive Loss for Unlabeled Clients
Xinchi Qiu, Yan Gao, Lorenzo Sani +6
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that facilitates collaborative training of a shared global model across devices while keeping data localized. The deploym…
Privacy in Multimodal Federated Human Activity Recognition
Alex Iacob, Pedro P. B. Gusmão, Nicholas D. Lane +5
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) training data is often privacy-sensitive or held by non-cooperative entities. Federated Learning (FL) addresses such concerns by training ML models…
Pollen: High-throughput Federated Learning Simulation via Resource-Aware Client Placement
Lorenzo Sani, Pedro Porto Buarque de Gusmão, Alex Iacob +5
Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-focused machine learning paradigm that collaboratively trains models directly on edge devices. Simulation plays an essential role in FL adoptio…
Can Fair Federated Learning reduce the need for Personalisation?
Alex Iacob, Pedro P. B. Gusmão, Nicholas D. Lane
Federated Learning (FL) enables training ML models on edge clients without sharing data. However, the federated model's performance on local data varies, disincentivising the parti…