Clara Na

Srivatsa Kundurthy, Clara Na, Colton Moraine et al.

We present BlueFin, a benchmark that tasks large language model (LLM) agents with synthesis, manipulation, and comprehension tasks over spreadsheet workbooks in the professional finance domain. Though estimates of the global population of paying users of spreadsheet software range in the hundreds of millions -- an order of magnitude more than the estimated global population of professional developers -- comparatively fewer resources have been devoted to exploring and expanding LLM capabilities in the spreadsheet domain, with fewer still dedicated to mirroring real occupational tasks encountered by those in professional finance roles. In response, we curate a set of 131 challenging, complex tasks with real-world relevance in the domain, containing 3,225 granular rubric criteria; notably, our rubric criteria and LM judge evaluations are validated by a team of expert human annotators, resulting in high-quality, granular evaluations of complex tasks that are difficult to verify programmatically but can be reliably evaluated by an LM judge agent. Our judge achieves parity with expert consensus ($α=0.826$) with a macro-F1 score of 0.839. Frontier LLMs demonstrate poor performance on the challenging benchmark, with the strongest LLMs achieving less than 50\% average scores across tasks -- models exhibit particular weaknesses in dynamic correctness. Our contributions include a dataset of examples across three categories of spreadsheet tasks, an open source harness and agentic evaluation framework, and a characterization of existing frontier models' performance on our benchmark.

Jared Fernandez, Jacob Kahn, Clara Na et al. · cmu, meta-ai

Increased focus on the computational efficiency of NLP systems has motivated the design of efficient model architectures and improvements to underlying hardware accelerators. However, the resulting increases in computational throughput and reductions in floating point operations have not directly translated to improvements in wall-clock inference latency. We demonstrate that these discrepancies can be largely attributed to bottlenecks introduced by deep learning frameworks. We denote this phenomenon as the \textit{framework tax}, and observe that the disparity is growing as hardware speed increases over time. In this work, we examine this phenomenon through a series of case studies analyzing the effects of model design decisions, framework paradigms, and hardware platforms on total model latency. Code is available at https://github.com/JaredFern/Framework-Tax.

Clara Na, Sanket Vaibhav Mehta, Emma Strubell · deepmind

Model compression by way of parameter pruning, quantization, or distillation has recently gained popularity as an approach for reducing the computational requirements of modern deep neural network models for NLP. Inspired by prior works suggesting a connection between simpler, more generalizable models and those that lie within wider loss basins, we hypothesize that optimizing for flat minima should lead to simpler parameterizations and thus more compressible models. We propose to combine sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) with various task-specific model compression methods, including iterative magnitude pruning (IMP), structured pruning with a distillation objective, and post-training dynamic quantization. Empirically, we show that optimizing for flatter minima consistently leads to greater compressibility of parameters compared to vanilla Adam when fine-tuning BERT models, with little to no loss in accuracy on the GLUE text classification and SQuAD question answering benchmarks. Moreover, SAM finds superior winning tickets during IMP that 1) are amenable to vanilla Adam optimization, and 2) transfer more effectively across tasks.

Sireesh Gururaja, Amanda Bertsch, Clara Na et al. · cmu

NLP is in a period of disruptive change that is impacting our methodologies, funding sources, and public perception. In this work, we seek to understand how to shape our future by better understanding our past. We study factors that shape NLP as a field, including culture, incentives, and infrastructure by conducting long-form interviews with 26 NLP researchers of varying seniority, research area, institution, and social identity. Our interviewees identify cyclical patterns in the field, as well as new shifts without historical parallel, including changes in benchmark culture and software infrastructure. We complement this discussion with quantitative analysis of citation, authorship, and language use in the ACL Anthology over time. We conclude by discussing shared visions, concerns, and hopes for the future of NLP. We hope that this study of our field's past and present can prompt informed discussion of our community's implicit norms and more deliberate action to consciously shape the future.

Xiaorong Wang, Clara Na, Emma Strubell et al.

Despite the popularity of the `pre-train then fine-tune' paradigm in the NLP community, existing work quantifying energy costs and associated carbon emissions has largely focused on language model pre-training. Although a single pre-training run draws substantially more energy than fine-tuning, fine-tuning is performed more frequently by many more individual actors, and thus must be accounted for when considering the energy and carbon footprint of NLP. In order to better characterize the role of fine-tuning in the landscape of energy and carbon emissions in NLP, we perform a careful empirical study of the computational costs of fine-tuning across tasks, datasets, hardware infrastructure and measurement modalities. Our experimental results allow us to place fine-tuning energy and carbon costs into perspective with respect to pre-training and inference, and outline recommendations to NLP researchers and practitioners who wish to improve their fine-tuning energy efficiency.

Jacob Morrison, Clara Na, Jared Fernandez et al. · cmu

As the performance of artificial intelligence systems has dramatically increased, so too has the environmental impact of creating these systems. While many model developers release estimates of the power consumption and carbon emissions from the final training runs for their latest models, there is comparatively little transparency into the impact of model development, hardware manufacturing, and total water usage throughout. In this work, we estimate the real-world environmental impact of developing a series of language models, ranging from 20 million to 13 billion active parameters, trained on up to 5.6 trillion tokens each. When accounting for hardware manufacturing, model development, and our final training runs, we find that our series of models released 493 metric tons of carbon emissions, equivalent to powering about 98 homes in the United States for one year, and consumed 2.769 million liters of water, equivalent to about 24.5 years of water usage by a person in the United States, even though our data center is extremely water-efficient. We measure and report the environmental impact of our model development; to the best of our knowledge we are the first to do so for LLMs, and we find that model development, the impact of which is generally not disclosed by most model developers, amounted to ~50% of that of training. By looking at detailed time series data for power consumption, we also find that power usage throughout training is not consistent, fluctuating between ~15% and ~85% of our hardware's maximum power draw, with negative implications for grid-scale planning as demand continues to grow. We close with a discussion on the continued difficulty of estimating the environmental impact of AI systems, and key takeaways for model developers and the public at large.

Jared Fernandez, Clara Na, Vashisth Tiwari et al. · cmu

As large language models (LLMs) scale in size and adoption, their computational and environmental costs continue to rise. Prior benchmarking efforts have primarily focused on latency reduction in idealized settings, often overlooking the diverse real-world inference workloads that shape energy use. In this work, we systematically analyze the energy implications of common inference efficiency optimizations across diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads, including conversational AI and code generation. We introduce a modeling approach that approximates real-world LLM workflows through a binning strategy for input-output token distributions and batch size variations. Our empirical analysis spans software frameworks, decoding strategies, GPU architectures, online and offline serving settings, and model parallelism configurations. We show that the effectiveness of inference optimizations is highly sensitive to workload geometry, software stack, and hardware accelerators, demonstrating that naive energy estimates based on FLOPs or theoretical GPU utilization significantly underestimate real-world energy consumption. Our findings reveal that the proper application of relevant inference efficiency optimizations can reduce total energy use by up to 73% from unoptimized baselines. These insights provide a foundation for sustainable LLM deployment and inform energy-efficient design strategies for future AI infrastructure.

Clara Na, Ian Magnusson, Ananya Harsh Jha et al. · allen-ai, uw

Training data compositions for Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly affect their downstream performance. However, a thorough data ablation study exploring large sets of candidate data mixtures is typically prohibitively expensive since the full effect is seen only after training the models; this can lead practitioners to settle for sub-optimal data mixtures. We propose an efficient method for approximating data ablations which trains individual models on subsets of a training corpus and reuses them across evaluations of combinations of subsets. In continued pre-training experiments, we find that, given an arbitrary evaluation set, the perplexity score of a single model trained on a candidate set of data is strongly correlated with perplexity scores of parameter averages of models trained on distinct partitions of that data. From this finding, we posit that researchers and practitioners can conduct inexpensive simulations of data ablations by maintaining a pool of models that were each trained on partitions of a large training corpus, and assessing candidate data mixtures by evaluating parameter averages of combinations of these models. This approach allows for substantial improvements in amortized training efficiency -- scaling only linearly with respect to new data -- by enabling reuse of previous training computation, opening new avenues for improving model performance through rigorous, incremental data assessment and mixing.