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Cross-model Control: Improving Multiple Large Language Models in One-time Training

Neural Information Processing Systems

The number of large language models (LLMs) with varying parameter scales and vocabularies is increasing. While they deliver powerful performance, they also face a set of common optimization needs to meet specific requirements or standards, such as instruction following or avoiding the output of sensitive information from the real world. However, how to reuse the fine-tuning outcomes of one model to other models to reduce training costs remains a challenge. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cross-model Control (CMC), a method that improves multiple LLMs in one-time training with a portable tiny language model. Specifically, we have observed that the logit shift before and after fine-tuning is remarkably similar across different models.



On The Role of Intentionality in Knowledge Representation: Analyzing Scene Context for Cognitive Agents with a Tiny Language Model

Burgess, Mark

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cognitive abilities, which include ideas like intentionality and consciousness, have long been viewed in Western philosophy as exclusive to the human realm. Intent is roundly considered justifiable only with minimum requirements for self-awareness or situational comprehension. However, such hard line views have softened gradually with modern enlightenment, and more of us are likely to accept that terms such as'agency', 'intelligence', and even'emotion' can apply for other species too. Even plants lean into sunlight in an intentional way; the identification of an intention doesn't have to arise from the plant to be true. Latterly their possibility has been extended even to artificial systems, which some find more acceptable, though a modern version of the privilege argument persists in a distinction between'simple' machinery and'complex' biology, which many believe still holds some principled leap in understanding. Ideological'blood-brain barriers', like these, continue to undermine efforts to form a rational causal explanation of intent, leading extremists to clutch at esoteric straws like quantum mechanics or complexity theory to account for perceived magic. In this note, I address another apparent schism that may shed light on these questions: the difference between process dynamics (the realm of physics) and interpretive semantics (the realm of linguistics and philosophy), and the suggestion that (deep down) intentionality might be a relatively simple phenomenon with an energetic explanation (as trust has been shown to be [9]). The recent acceptance of attention mechanisms in Large Language Models is related example [19, 22].


Cross-model Control: Improving Multiple Large Language Models in One-time Training

Neural Information Processing Systems

The number of large language models (LLMs) with varying parameter scales and vocabularies is increasing. While they deliver powerful performance, they also face a set of common optimization needs to meet specific requirements or standards, such as instruction following or avoiding the output of sensitive information from the real world. However, how to reuse the fine-tuning outcomes of one model to other models to reduce training costs remains a challenge. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cross-model Control (CMC), a method that improves multiple LLMs in one-time training with a portable tiny language model. Specifically, we have observed that the logit shift before and after fine-tuning is remarkably similar across different models.


TinyHelen's First Curriculum: Training and Evaluating Tiny Language Models in a Simpler Language Environment

Yang, Ke, Kindratenko, Volodymyr, Zhai, ChengXiang

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Training language models (LMs) and their application agents is increasingly costly due to large datasets and models, making test failures difficult to bear. Simplified language environments serve as primordial training and testing grounds, retaining essential commonsense and communication skills but in a more digestible form, potentially enhancing the learning efficiency of LMs, and thus reducing the required model size and data volume for effective training and evaluation. In these simplified language environments, workable strategies for small models, datasets, and agents may be adaptable to larger models, datasets, and agents in complex language environments. To create such environments, we focus on two aspects: i) minimizing language dataset noise and complexity, and ii) preserving the essential text distribution characteristics. Unlike previous methods, we propose a pipeline to refine text data by eliminating noise, minimizing vocabulary, and maintaining genre-specific patterns (e.g., for books, conversation, code, etc.). Implementing this pipeline with large LMs, we have created a leaner suite of LM training and evaluation datasets: 71M Leaner-Pretrain, 7M Leaner-Instruct, Leaner-Glue for assessing linguistic proficiency, and Leaner-Eval for testing instruction-following ability. Our experiments show that leaner pre-training boosts LM learning efficiency. Tiny LMs trained on these datasets outperform those trained on original datasets in instruction-following across different language granularity levels. Moreover, the Leaner-Pretrain dataset's alignment with conventional large LM training sets enables resource-optimized analysis of how learning objectives, model architectures, and training techniques impact performance on language modeling and downstream tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/EmpathYang/TinyHelen.git.


Cross-model Control: Improving Multiple Large Language Models in One-time Training

Wu, Jiayi, Sun, Hao, Cai, Hengyi, Su, Lixin, Wang, Shuaiqiang, Yin, Dawei, Li, Xiang, Gao, Ming

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The number of large language models (LLMs) with varying parameter scales and vocabularies is increasing. While they deliver powerful performance, they also face a set of common optimization needs to meet specific requirements or standards, such as instruction following or avoiding the output of sensitive information from the real world. However, how to reuse the fine-tuning outcomes of one model to other models to reduce training costs remains a challenge. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cross-model Control (CMC), a method that improves multiple LLMs in one-time training with a portable tiny language model. Specifically, we have observed that the logit shift before and after fine-tuning is remarkably similar across different models. Based on this insight, we incorporate a tiny language model with a minimal number of parameters. By training alongside a frozen template LLM, the tiny model gains the capability to alter the logits output by the LLMs. To make this tiny language model applicable to models with different vocabularies, we propose a novel token mapping strategy named PM-MinED. We have conducted extensive experiments on instruction tuning and unlearning tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of CMC. Our code is available at https://github.com/wujwyi/CMC.


Rethinking Optimization and Architecture for Tiny Language Models

Tang, Yehui, Liu, Fangcheng, Ni, Yunsheng, Tian, Yuchuan, Bai, Zheyuan, Hu, Yi-Qi, Liu, Sichao, Jui, Shangling, Han, Kai, Wang, Yunhe

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The power of large language models (LLMs) has been demonstrated through numerous data and computing resources. However, the application of language models on mobile devices is facing huge challenge on the computation and memory costs, that is, tiny language models with high performance are urgently required. Limited by the highly complex training process, there are many details for optimizing language models that are seldom studied carefully. In this study, based on a tiny language model with 1B parameters, we carefully design a series of empirical study to analyze the effect of each component. Three perspectives are mainly discussed, \ie, neural architecture, parameter initialization, and optimization strategy. Several design formulas are empirically proved especially effective for tiny language models, including tokenizer compression, architecture tweaking, parameter inheritance and multiple-round training. Then we train PanGu-$\pi$-1B Pro and PanGu-$\pi$-1.5B Pro on 1.6T multilingual corpora, following the established formulas. Experimental results demonstrate the improved optimization and architecture yield a notable average improvement of 8.87 on benchmark evaluation sets for PanGu-$\pi$-1B Pro. Besides, PanGu-$\pi$-1.5B Pro surpasses a range of SOTA models with larger model sizes, validating its superior performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YuchuanTian/RethinkTinyLM.