We present a series of long-context LLMs that support effective context windows of up to 32,768 tokens. Our model series are built through continual pretraining from Llama 2 with longer training sequences and on a dataset where long texts are upsampled. We perform extensive evaluation on language modeling, synthetic context probing tasks, and a wide range of research benchmarks. On research benchmarks, our models achieve consistent improvements on most regular tasks and significant improvements on long-context tasks over Llama 2. Notably, with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that does not require human-annotated long instruction data, the 70B variant can already surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on a suite of long-context tasks. Alongside these results, we provide an in-depth analysis on the individual components of our method. We delve into Llama's position encodings and discuss its limitation in modeling long dependencies. We also examine the impact of various design choices in the pretraining process, including the data mix and the training curriculum of sequence lengths -- our ablation experiments suggest that having abundant long texts in the pretrain dataset is not the key to achieving strong performance, and we empirically verify that long context continual pretraining is more efficient and similarly effective compared to pretraining from scratch with long sequences.

In Africa, and the world at large, there is an increasing focus on developing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to overcome language barriers. NMT for Low-resource language is particularly compelling as it involves learning with limited labelled data. However, obtaining a well-aligned parallel corpus for low-resource languages can be challenging. The disparity between the technological advancement of a few global languages and the lack of research on NMT for local languages in Chad is striking. End-to-end NMT trials on low-resource Chad languages have not been attempted. Additionally, there is a dearth of online and well-structured data gathering for research in Natural Language Processing, unlike some African languages. However, a guided approach for data gathering can produce bitext data for many Chadian language translation pairs with well-known languages that have ample data. In this project, we created the first sba-Fr Dataset, which is a corpus of Ngambay-to-French translations, and fine-tuned three pre-trained models using this dataset. Our experiments show that the M2M100 model outperforms other models with high BLEU scores on both original and original+synthetic data. The publicly available bitext dataset can be used for research purposes.

In this work, we develop and release Llama 2, a collection of pretrained and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) ranging in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. Our fine-tuned LLMs, called Llama 2-Chat, are optimized for dialogue use cases. Our models outperform open-source chat models on most benchmarks we tested, and based on our human evaluations for helpfulness and safety, may be a suitable substitute for closed-source models. We provide a detailed description of our approach to fine-tuning and safety improvements of Llama 2-Chat in order to enable the community to build on our work and contribute to the responsible development of LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Existing metrics for evaluating the quality of automatically generated questions such as BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, and BLEURT compare the reference and predicted questions, providing a high score when there is a considerable lexical overlap or semantic similarity between the candidate and the reference questions. This approach has two major shortcomings. First, we need expensive human-provided reference questions. Second, it penalises valid questions that may not have high lexical or semantic similarity to the reference questions. In this paper, we propose a new metric, RQUGE, based on the answerability of the candidate question given the context. The metric consists of a question-answering and a span scorer modules, using pre-trained models from existing literature, thus it can be used without any further training. We demonstrate that RQUGE has a higher correlation with human judgment without relying on the reference question. Additionally, RQUGE is shown to be more robust to several adversarial corruptions. Furthermore, we illustrate that we can significantly improve the performance of QA models on out-of-domain datasets by fine-tuning on synthetic data generated by a question generation model and re-ranked by RQUGE.

Machine Translation (MT) has been widely used for cross-lingual classification, either by translating the test set into English and running inference with a monolingual model (translate-test), or translating the training set into the target languages and finetuning a multilingual model (translate-train). However, most research in the area focuses on the multilingual models rather than the MT component. We show that, by using a stronger MT system and mitigating the mismatch between training on original text and running inference on machine translated text, translate-test can do substantially better than previously assumed. The optimal approach, however, is highly task dependent, as we identify various sources of cross-lingual transfer gap that affect different tasks and approaches differently. Our work calls into question the dominance of multilingual models for cross-lingual classification, and prompts to pay more attention to MT-based baselines.

Attention mechanisms have shown promising results in sequence modeling tasks that require long-term memory. Recent work investigated mechanisms to reduce the computational cost of preserving and storing memories. However, not all content in the past is equally important to remember. We propose Expire-Span, a method that learns to retain the most important information and expire the irrelevant information. This forgetting of memories enables Transformers to scale to attend over tens of thousands of previous timesteps efficiently, as not all states from previous timesteps are preserved. We demonstrate that Expire-Span can help models identify and retain critical information and show it can achieve strong performance on reinforcement learning tasks specifically designed to challenge this functionality. Next, we show that Expire-Span can scale to memories that are tens of thousands in size, setting a new state of the art on incredibly long context tasks such as character-level language modeling and a frame-by-frame moving objects task. Finally, we analyze the efficiency of Expire-Span compared to existing approaches and demonstrate that it trains faster and uses less memory.

One of the biggest challenges hindering progress in low-resource and multilingual machine translation is the lack of good evaluation benchmarks. Current evaluation benchmarks either lack good coverage of low-resource languages, consider only restricted domains, or are low quality because they are constructed using semi-automatic procedures. In this work, we introduce the FLORES-101 evaluation benchmark, consisting of 3001 sentences extracted from English Wikipedia and covering a variety of different topics and domains. These sentences have been translated in 101 languages by professional translators through a carefully controlled process. The resulting dataset enables better assessment of model quality on the long tail of low-resource languages, including the evaluation of many-to-many multilingual translation systems, as all translations are multilingually aligned. By publicly releasing such a high-quality and high-coverage dataset, we hope to foster progress in the machine translation community and beyond.

We tackle the problem of producing compact models, maximizing their accuracy for a given model size. A standard solution is to train networks with Quantization Aware Training (Jacob et al., 2018), where the weights are quantized during training and the gradients approximated with the Straight-Through Estimator (Bengio et al., 2013). In this paper, we extend this approach to work beyond int8 fixedpoint quantization with extreme compression methods where the approximations introduced by STE are severe, such as Product Quantization. Our proposal is to only quantize a different random subset of weights during each forward, allowing for unbiased gradients to flow through the other weights. Controlling the amount of noise and its form allows for extreme compression rates while maintaining the performance of the original model. As a result we establish new state-of-the-art compromises between accuracy and model size both in natural language processing and image classification. For example, applying our method to state-of-the-art Transformer and ConvNet architectures, we can achieve 82.5% accuracy on MNLI by compressing RoBERTa to 14 MB and 80.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet by compressing an EfficientNet-B3 to 3.3 MB. Many of the best performing neural network architectures in real-world applications have a large number of parameters. For example, the current standard machine translation architecture, Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017), has layers that contain millions of parameters. Even models that are designed to jointly optimize the performance and the parameter efficiency, such as EfficientNets (Tan & Le, 2019), still require dozens to hundreds of megabytes, which limits their applications to domains like robotics or virtual assistants. Model compression schemes reduce the memory footprint of overparametrized models. Pruning (LeCun et al., 1990) and distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) remove parameters by reducing the number of network weights. In contrast, quantization focuses on reducing the bits per weight.

Challenging problems such as open-domain question answering, fact checking, slot filling and entity linking require access to large, external knowledge sources. While some models do well on individual tasks, developing general models is difficult as each task might require computationally expensive indexing of custom knowledge sources, in addition to dedicated infrastructure. To catalyze research on models that condition on specific information in large textual resources, we present a benchmark for knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT). All tasks in KILT are grounded in the same snapshot of Wikipedia, reducing engineering turnaround through the re-use of components, as well as accelerating research into task-agnostic memory architectures. We test both task-specific and general baselines, evaluating downstream performance in addition to the ability of the models to provide provenance. We find that a shared dense vector index coupled with a seq2seq model is a strong baseline, outperforming more tailor-made approaches for fact checking, open-domain question answering and dialogue, and yielding competitive results on entity linking and slot filling, by generating disambiguated text. KILT data and code are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/KILT.