9 accepted papers
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 expense of the high-entropy pre-training distribution. Crucially, we find this trade-off worsens with scale. To close this …
Geometric properties of Transformer weights, particularly the unembedding matrix, have been widely useful in language model interpretability research. Yet, their utility for estimating downstream performance remains unclear. In this work, we systematically investigate the relationship between model …
Standard optimizer choices for pre-training are designed to minimize pre-training loss. Yet pre-trained models are routinely subjected to further transformations—such as fine-tuning to acquire new capabilities or quantization for efficiency. In this work, we evaluate optimizer choices across model s…
In retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems, each individual component—the LLM, embedder, and corpus—could introduce biases in the form of skews towards certain genders or political leanings. In this work, we study the conflict between biases of each component and their relationship to the overa…
Large language models are pre-trained on ever-growing token budgets under the assumption that better pre-training performance translates to improved downstream models. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that extended pre-training can make models harder to fine-tune, leading to degra…
Bidirectional models are considered essential for strong text embeddings. Recent approaches to adapt autoregressive language models (LMs) into strong text embedding models have largely had the requirement to modify the LM architecture to be bidirectional. We challenge this premise by introducing ``e…
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 synthetic dataset exists, posing a barrier to studying its role for generalization. To address this issue, we first rep…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising alternative optimizer to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The originally-proposed motivation behind SAM was to bias neural networks towards flatter minima that are believed to generalize better. However, recent studies have shown confli…
We lack a systematic understanding of the effects of fine-tuning (via methods such as instruction-tuning or reinforcement learning from human feedback), particularly on tasks outside the narrow fine-tuning distribution. In a simplified scenario, we demonstrate that improving performance on tasks wit…