Over the past several years, the Transformer architecture [42] has dominated deep representation learning for natural language processing (NLP), image processing, and visual computing [8, 2, 9, 5, 12]. However, the design of the Transformer architecture and its many variants remains largely empirical and lacks a rigorous mathematical interpretation. This has largely hindered the development of new Transformer variants with improved efficiency or interpretability.

We present two comprehensive benchmarks to evaluate the performance of language models in coding assistance tasks, covering code writing, debugging, code review, and conceptual understanding. Our main contribution includes two curated datasets: StackEval, a large-scale benchmark derived from Stack Overflow questions, and StackUnseen, a dynamic benchmark featuring the most recent Stack Overflow content. These benchmarks offer novel insights into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs, particularly in handling new and emerging content. Additionally, we assess LLMs' proficiency as judges for coding tasks using a curated, human-annotated dataset, exploring their evaluation capabilities and potential biases, including whether they favor their own generated solutions. Our findings underscore the potential of these benchmarks to advance LLM development and application in coding assistance.

The Croissant Akhtar et al. (2024) metadata can be found at https://huggingface.co/api/ We present the data card, following the format proposed by Pushkarna et al. (2022). "By using this chat interface and the API, you accept that the interactions with the interface and the API can be used for research purposes, and potentially open-sourced by the competition organizers." The dataset is divided into two splits: defenses and chats. For more details, see Section 4 in the main paper. See Figure 1 for an example.

Large language model systems face significant security risks from maliciously crafted messages that aim to overwrite the system's original instructions or leak private data. To study this problem, we organized a capture-the-flag competition at IEEE SaTML 2024, where the flag is a secret string in the LLM system prompt. The competition was organized in two phases. In the first phase, teams developed defenses to prevent the model from leaking the secret. During the second phase, teams were challenged to extract the secrets hidden for defenses proposed by the other teams.

Multimodal interleaved datasets featuring free-form interleaved sequences of images and text are crucial for training frontier large multimodal models (LMMs). Despite the rapid progression of open-source LMMs, there remains a pronounced scarcity of large-scale, open-source multimodal interleaved datasets. In response, we introduce MINT-1T, the most extensive and diverse open-source Multimodal INTerleaved dataset to date. MINT-1T comprises of one trillion text tokens and 3.4 billion images, a 10x scale-up from existing open-source datasets. Additionally, we include previously untapped sources such as PDFs and ArXiv papers. As scaling multimodal interleaved datasets requires substantial engineering effort, sharing the data curation process and releasing the dataset greatly benefits the community. Our experiments show that LMMs trained on MINT-1T rival the performance of models trained on the previous leading dataset, OBELICS.

Learning from preference feedback has emerged as an essential step for improving the generation quality and performance of modern language models (LMs). Despite its widespread use, the way preference-based learning is applied varies wildly, with differing data, learning algorithms, and evaluations used, making disentangling the impact of each aspect difficult. In this work, we identify four core aspects of preference-based learning: preference data, learning algorithm, reward model, and policy training prompts, systematically investigate the impact of these components on downstream model performance, and suggest a recipe for strong learning for preference feedback. Our findings indicate that all aspects are important for performance, with better preference data leading to the largest improvements, followed by the choice of learning algorithm, the use of improved reward models, and finally the use of additional unlabeled prompts for policy training. Notably, PPO outperforms DPO by up to 2.5% in math and 1.2% in general domains. High-quality preference data leads to improvements of up to 8% in instruction following and truthfulness. Despite significant gains of up to 5% in mathematical evaluation when scaling up reward models, we surprisingly observe marginal improvements in other categories.

Severe data imbalance naturally exists among web-scale vision-language datasets. Despite this, we find CLIP pre-trained thereupon exhibits notable robustness to the data imbalance compared to supervised learning, and demonstrates significant effectiveness in learning generalizable representations. With an aim to investigate the reasons behind this finding, we conduct controlled experiments to study various underlying factors, and reveal that CLIP's pretext task forms a dynamic classification problem wherein only a subset of classes is present in training. This isolates the bias from dominant classes and implicitly balances the learning signal. Furthermore, the robustness and discriminability of CLIP improve with more descriptive language supervision, larger data scale, and broader open-world concepts, which are inaccessible to supervised learning. Our study not only uncovers the mechanisms behind CLIP's generalizability beyond data imbalance but also provides transferable insights for the research community. The findings are validated in both supervised and self-supervised learning, enabling models trained on imbalanced data to achieve CLIP-level performance on diverse recognition tasks.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to train large language models (LLMs). However, it is unclear whether LLMs accurately learn the underlying preferences in human feedback data. We coin the term Learned Feedback Pattern (LFP) for patterns in an LLM's activations learned during RLHF that improve its performance on the fine-tuning task. We hypothesize that LLMs with LFPs accurately aligned to the fine-tuning feedback exhibit consistent activation patterns for outputs that would have received similar feedback during RLHF. To test this, we train probes to estimate the feedback signal implicit in the activations of a fine-tuned LLM. We then compare these estimates to the true feedback, measuring how accurate the LFPs are to the fine-tuning feedback. Our probes are trained on a condensed, sparse and interpretable representation of LLM activations, making it easier to correlate features of the input with our probe's predictions. We validate our probes by comparing the neural features they correlate with positive feedback inputs against the features GPT-4 describes and classifies as related to LFPs. Understanding LFPs can help minimize discrepancies between LLM behavior and training objectives, which is essential for the safety and alignment of LLMs.

Program synthesis with language models (LMs) has unlocked a large set of reasoning abilities; code-tuned LMs have proven adept at generating programs that solve a wide variety of algorithmic symbolic manipulation tasks (e.g.

As part of an ongoing worldwide effort to comprehend and monitor insect biodiversity, this paper presents the BIOSCAN-5M Insect dataset to the machine learning community and establish several benchmark tasks. BIOSCAN-5M is a comprehensive dataset containing multi-modal information for over 5 million insect specimens, and it significantly expands existing image-based biological datasets by including taxonomic labels, raw nucleotide barcode sequences, assigned barcode index numbers, geographical, and size information. We propose three benchmark experiments to demonstrate the impact of the multi-modal data types on the classification and clustering accuracy. First, we pretrain a masked language model on the DNA barcode sequences of the BIOSCAN-5M dataset, and demonstrate the impact of using this large reference library on species-and genus-level classification performance. Second, we propose a zero-shot transfer learning task applied to images and DNA barcodes to cluster feature embeddings obtained from self-supervised learning, to investigate whether meaningful clusters can be derived from these representation embeddings.