4 papers
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…
Beyond Multi-Token Prediction: Pretraining LLMs with Future Summaries
Divyat Mahajan, Sachin Goyal, Badr Youbi Idrissi +4
Next-token prediction (NTP) has driven the success of large language models (LLMs), but it struggles with long-horizon reasoning, planning, and creative writing, with these limitat…
A Granular Study of Safety Pretraining under Model Abliteration
Shashank Agnihotri, Jonas Jakubassa, Priyam Dey +4
Open-weight LLMs can be modified at inference time with simple activation edits, which raises a practical question for safety: do common safety interventions like refusal training…
Distilled Pretraining: A modern lens of Data, In-Context Learning and Test-Time Scaling
Sachin Goyal, David Lopez-Paz, Kartik Ahuja
In the past year, distillation has seen a renewed prominence in large language model (LLM) pretraining, exemplified by the Llama-3.2 and Gemma model families. While distillation ha…