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Ahmet Üstün

16 accepted papers

2026

EAGer: Entropy-Aware GEneRation for Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling

ICML 2026poster

With the rise of reasoning language models and test-time scaling methods as a paradigm for improving model performance, substantial computation is often required to generate multiple candidate sequences from the same prompt. This enables exploration of different reasoning paths toward the correct so…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

To Code or Not To Code? Exploring Impact of Code in Pre-training

ICLR 2025poster

Including code in the pre-training data mixture, even for models not specifically designed for code, has become a common practice in LLMs pre-training. While there has been anecdotal consensus among practitioners that code data plays a vital role in general LLMs' performance, there is only limited w…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

Treasure Hunt: Real-time Targeting of the Long Tail using Training-Time Markers

NeurIPS 2025poster

One of the most profound challenges of modern machine learning is performing well on the long-tail of rare and underrepresented features. Large general-purpose models are trained for many tasks, but work best on high-frequency use cases. After training, it is hard to adapt a model to perform well on…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning

ACL 2024long

Datasets are foundational to many breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. Many recent achievements in the space of natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to the fine-tuning of pre-trained models on a diverse set of tasks that enables a large language model (LLM) to respond to i…

Cited by 94SourcePDFScholar
2024

Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

ACL 2024long

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have centered around a handful of data-rich languages. What does it take to broaden access to breakthroughs beyond first-class citizen languages? Our work introduces Aya, a massively multilingual generative language model that follows instructions…

Cited by 181SourcePDFScholar
2024

BAM! Just Like That: Simple and Efficient Parameter Upcycling for Mixture of Experts

NeurIPS 2024poster

Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework has become a popular architecture for large language models due to its superior performance compared to dense models. However, training MoEs from scratch in a large-scale regime is prohibitively expensive. Previous work addresses this challenge by independently tra…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Back to Basics: Revisiting REINFORCE-Style Optimization for Learning from Human Feedback in LLMs

ACL 2024long

AI alignment in the shape of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly treated as a crucial ingredient for high performance large language models. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been installed by the seminal literature as the standard method for the RL part of RLHF. H…

Cited by 174SourcePDFScholar
2024

How Does Quantization Affect Multilingual LLMs?

EMNLP 2024finding

Quantization techniques are widely used to improve inference speed and deployment of large language models. While a wide body of work examines the impact of quantization on LLMs in English, none have evaluated across languages. We conduct a thorough analysis of quantized multilingual LLMs, focusing…

2024

Pushing Mixture of Experts to the Limit: Extremely Parameter Efficient MoE for Instruction Tuning

ICLR 2024poster

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a widely known neural architecture where an ensemble of specialized sub-models optimizes overall performance with a constant computational cost. However, conventional MoEs pose challenges at scale due to the need to store all experts in memory. In this paper, we push…

2024

RLHF Can Speak Many Languages: Unlocking Multilingual Preference Optimization for LLMs

EMNLP 2024main

Preference optimization techniques have become a standard final stage for training state-of-art large language models (LLMs). However, despite widespread adoption, the vast majority of work to-date has focused on a small set of high-resource languages like English and Chinese. This captures a small…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

Intriguing Properties of Quantization at Scale

NeurIPS 2023poster

Emergent properties have been widely adopted as a term to describe behavior not present in smaller models but observed in larger models (Wei et al., 2022a). Recent work suggests that the trade-off incurred by quantization is also an emergent property, with sharp drops in performance in models over…

Cited by 38SourcePDFScholar
2022

Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer

EMNLP 2022main

Massively multilingual models are promising for transfer learning across tasks and languages. However, existing methods are unable to fully leverage training data when it is available in different task-language combinations. To exploit such heterogeneous supervision, we propose Hyper-X, a single hyp…

2022

When does Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Work for Machine Translation?

EMNLP 2022main

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods (PEFTs) offer the promise of adapting large pre-trained models while only tuning a small number of parameters. They have been shown to be competitive with full model fine-tuning for many downstream tasks. However, prior work indicates that PEFTs may not work a…

2021

From Masked Language Modeling to Translation: Non-English Auxiliary Tasks Improve Zero-shot Spoken Language Understanding

NAACL 2021long

The lack of publicly available evaluation data for low-resource languages limits progress in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). As key tasks like intent classification and slot filling require abundant training data, it is desirable to reuse existing data in high-resource languages to develop mode…

2021

Multilingual Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Denoising Adapters

EMNLP 2021main

We consider the problem of multilingual unsupervised machine translation, translating to and from languages that only have monolingual data by using auxiliary parallel language pairs. For this problem the standard procedure so far to leverage the monolingual data is _back-translation_, which is comp…