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Efficient Knowledge Distillation from Model Checkpoints

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we observe that an intermediate model, i.e., a checkpoint in the middle of the training procedure, often serves as a better teacher compared to the fully converged model, although the former has much lower accuracy.


Induced Model Matching: Restricted Models Help Train Full-Featured Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider scenarios where a very accurate (often small) predictive model using restricted features is available when training a full-featured (often larger) model. This restricted model may be thought of as ``side-information'', and can come either from an auxiliary dataset or from the same dataset by forcing the restriction. How can the restricted model be useful to the full model? To answer this, we introduce a methodology called Induced Model Matching (IMM). IMM aligns the context-restricted, or induced, version of the large model with the restricted model.


Bigram Subnetworks: Mapping to Next Tokens in Transformer Language Models

Chang, Tyler A., Bergen, Benjamin K.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In Transformer language models, activation vectors transform from current token embeddings to next token predictions as they pass through the model. To isolate a minimal form of this transformation, we identify language model subnetworks that make bigram predictions, naive next token predictions based only on the current token. We find that bigram subnetworks can be found in fully trained language models up to 1B parameters, and these subnetworks are critical for model performance even when they consist of less than 0.2% of model parameters. Bigram subnetworks are concentrated in the first Transformer MLP layer, and they overlap significantly with subnetworks trained to optimally prune a given model. Mechanistically, the bigram subnetworks often recreate a pattern from the full models where the first layer induces a sharp change that aligns activations with next token predictions rather than current token representations. Our results demonstrate that bigram subnetworks comprise a minimal subset of parameters that are both necessary and sufficient for basic next token predictions in language models, and they help drive the transformation from current to next token activations in the residual stream. These subnetworks can lay a foundation for studying more complex language model circuits by building up from a minimal circuit.


Question Asking as Program Generation

Anselm Rothe, Brenden M. Lake, Todd Gureckis

Neural Information Processing Systems

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to ask rich, creative, and revealing questions. Here we introduce a cognitive model capable of constructing humanlike questions. Our approach treats questions as formal programs that, when executed on the state of the world, output an answer. The model specifies a probability distribution over a complex, compositional space of programs, favoring concise programs that help the agent learn in the current context. We evaluate our approach by modeling the types of open-ended questions generated by humans who were attempting to learn about an ambiguous situation in a game. We find that our model predicts what questions people will ask, and can creatively produce novel questions that were not present in the training set. In addition, we compare a number of model variants, finding that both question informativeness and complexity are important for producing human-like questions.