Learning visual representations from natural language supervision has recently shown great promise in a number of pioneering works. In general, these language-augmented visual models demonstrate strong transferability to a variety of datasets and tasks. However, it remains challenging to evaluate the transferablity of these models due to the lack of easy-to-use evaluation toolkits and public benchmarks. To tackle this, we buildELEVATER 1, the first benchmark and toolkit for evaluating (pre-trained) language-augmented visual models. ELEVATERis composed of three components.

Knowledge distillation is an effective approach to learn compact models (students) with the supervision of large and strong models (teachers). As empirically there exists a strong correlation between the performance of teacher and student models, it is commonly believed that a high performing teacher is preferred. Consequently, practitioners tend to use a well trained network or an ensemble of them as the teacher. 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. More surprisingly, a weak snapshot ensemble of several intermediate models from a same training trajectory can outperform a strong ensemble of independently trained and fully converged models, when they are used as teachers. We show that this phenomenon can be partially explained by the information bottleneck principle: the feature representations of intermediate models can have higher mutual information regarding the input, and thus contain more ``dark knowledge'' for effective distillation. We further propose an optimal intermediate teacher selection algorithm based on maximizing the total task-related mutual information. Experiments verify its effectiveness and applicability.

We curate a 16 - class corpus (~47k images) by merging Kaggle, ImageNet, and web - cr awled data, and create six balanced variants via SMOTE oversampling and targeted undersampling. Lightweight ensembles, such as Random Forest, AdaBoost, and a soft - voting combiner built on MobileNet - V2 features are benchmarked against a configurable ResNet - style CNN trained with strong augmentation and label smoothing. The best ensemble (SMOTE - combined) attains 74.8% test accuracy, while the CNN achieves 79.19% on the full test set and 81.25% on an unseen inferen ce batch, confirming the advantage of deep models. Nonetheless, the most under - represented class (Barge) remains a failure mode, highlighting the limits of rebalancing alone. Results suggest prioritizing additional minority - class collection and cost - sensit ive objectives (e.g., focal loss) and exploring hybrid ensemble or CNN pipelines to combine interpretability with representational power. The best ensemble (SMOTE - combined) reached 74.8% test accuracy, while the final checkpoint of CNN achieved 79.1 9 % on the full test set and 81. 25 % on an unseen EE531 inference batch, confirming that deep models excel overall but still falter on the most under - represented class ( Barge), underscoring the persistent challenge of extreme imbalance.

This project performs multimodal sentiment analysis using the CMU-MOSEI dataset, using transformer-based models with early fusion to integrate text, audio, and visual modalities. We employ BERTbased encoders for each modality, extracting embed-dings that are concatenated before classification. The model achieves strong performance, with 97.87% 7-class accuracy and a 0.9682 F1-score on the test set, demonstrating the effectiveness of early fusion in capturing cross-modal interactions. The training utilized Adam optimization (lr=1e-4), dropout (0.3), and early stopping to ensure generalization and robustness. Results highlight the superiority of transformer architectures in modeling multimodal sentiment, with a low MAE (0.1060) indicating precise sentiment intensity prediction. Future work may compare fusion strategies or enhance interpretability.

Modern language models often have open weights but closed training data. We formalize the problem of data approximation from model weights and propose several baselines and metrics. We develop a gradient-based approach that selects the highest-matching data from a large public text corpus and show its effectiveness at recovering useful data given only weights of the original and finetuned models. Even when none of the true training data is known, our method is able to locate a small subset of public Web documents can be used to train a model to close to the original model performance given models trained for both classification and supervised-finetuning. On the AG News classification task, our method improves performance from 65% (using randomly selected data) to 80%, approaching the expert benchmark of 88%. When applied to a model trained with SFT on MSMARCO web documents, our method reduces perplexity from 3.3 to 2.3, compared to an expert LLAMA model's perplexity of 2.0.

A fundamental open challenge in modern LLM scaling is the lack of understanding around emergent capabilities. In particular, language model pretraining loss is known to be highly predictable as a function of compute. However, downstream capabilities are far less predictable -- sometimes even exhibiting emergent jumps -- which makes it challenging to anticipate the capabilities of future models. In this work, we first pose the task of emergence prediction: given access to current LLMs that have random few-shot accuracy on a task, can we predict whether future models (GPT-N+1) will have non-trivial accuracy on that task? We then discover a simple insight for this problem: finetuning LLMs on a given task can shift the point in scaling at which emergence occurs towards less capable models. To operationalize this insight, we can finetune LLMs with varying amounts of data and fit a parametric function that predicts when emergence will occur (i.e., "emergence laws"). We validate this approach using four standard NLP benchmarks where large-scale open-source LLMs already demonstrate emergence (MMLU, GSM8K, CommonsenseQA, and CoLA). Using only small-scale LLMs, we find that, in some cases, we can accurately predict whether models trained with up to 4x more compute have emerged. Finally, we present a case study of two realistic uses for emergence prediction.

Therefore, directly sampling from the models, comparing the methods or becoming acquainted with them may present challenges. To mitigate this issue we introduce models - contains the models currently implemented Symbotunes, an open-source unified hub for symbolic in our hub. Each model is in a separate sub-directory, music generative models. Symbotunes contains modern which also contains an example training script, Python implementations of well-known methods for data - contains all the data handling utilities available symbolic music generation, as well as a unified pipeline in the hub - datasets, tokenizers, and data transforms.

Knowledge distillation is an effective approach to learn compact models (students) with the supervision of large and strong models (teachers). As empirically there exists a strong correlation between the performance of teacher and student models, it is commonly believed that a high performing teacher is preferred. Consequently, practitioners tend to use a well trained network or an ensemble of them as the teacher. 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. More surprisingly, a weak snapshot ensemble of several intermediate models from a same training trajectory can outperform a strong ensemble of independently trained and fully converged models, when they are used as teachers.

LLMs have become a go-to solution not just for text generation, but also for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Acquiring extensive knowledge through language modeling on web-scale corpora, they excel on English NLU, yet struggle to extend their NLU capabilities to underrepresented languages. In contrast, machine translation models (MT) produce excellent multilingual representations, resulting in strong translation performance even for low-resource languages. MT encoders, however, lack the knowledge necessary for comprehensive NLU that LLMs obtain through language modeling training on immense corpora. In this work, we get the best both worlds by integrating MT encoders directly into LLM backbones via sample-efficient self-distillation. The resulting MT-LLMs preserve the inherent multilingual representational alignment from the MT encoder, allowing lower-resource languages to tap into the rich knowledge embedded in English-centric LLMs. Merging the MT encoder and LLM in a single model, we mitigate the propagation of translation errors and inference overhead of MT decoding inherent to discrete translation-based cross-lingual transfer (e.g., translate-test). Evaluation spanning three prominent NLU tasks and 127 predominantly low-resource languages renders MT-LLMs highly effective in cross-lingual transfer. MT-LLMs substantially and consistently outperform translate-test based on the same MT model, showing that we truly unlock multilingual language understanding for LLMs.

We introduce the LiLiuM series of large language models (LLMs): 1B, 7B, and 13B parameter models developed 100% in-house to fit eBay's specific needs in the e-commerce domain. This gives eBay full control over all aspects of the models including license, data, vocabulary, and architecture. We expect these models to be used as a foundation for fine-tuning and instruction-tuning, eliminating dependencies to external models. The LiLiuM LLMs have been trained on 3 trillion tokens of multilingual text from general and e-commerce domain. They perform similar to the popular LLaMA-2 models on English natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks. At the same time, we outperform LLaMA-2 on non-English NLU tasks, machine translation and on e-commerce specific downstream tasks. As part of our data mixture, we utilize the newly released RedPajama-V2 dataset for training and share our insights regarding data filtering and deduplication. We also discuss in detail how to serialize structured data for use in autoregressive language modeling. We provide insights on the effects of including code and parallel machine translation data in pre-training. Furthermore, we develop our own tokenizer and model vocabulary, customized towards e-commerce. This way, we can achieve up to 34% speed-up in text generation on eBay-specific downstream tasks compared to LLaMA-2. Finally, in relation to LLM pretraining, we show that checkpoint averaging can further improve over the best individual model checkpoint.