Akhmed Sakip

Jonibek Mansurov, Akhmed Sakip, Alham Fikri Aji

In this paper, we show that knowledge distillation can be subverted to manipulate language model benchmark scores, revealing a critical vulnerability in current evaluation practices. We introduce "Data Laundering," a process that enables the covert transfer of benchmark-specific knowledge through seemingly legitimate intermediate training steps. Through extensive experiments with a 2-layer BERT student model, we show how this approach can achieve substantial improvements in benchmark accuracy (up to 75\% on GPQA) without developing genuine reasoning capabilities. Notably, this method can be exploited intentionally or even unintentionally, as researchers may inadvertently adopt this method and inflate scores without realising the implications. While our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique, we present them as a cautionary tale highlighting the urgent need for more robust evaluation methods in AI. This work aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about evaluation integrity in AI development and the need for benchmarks that more accurately reflect true model capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/data_laundering.

Akhmed Sakip, Erland Hilman Fuadi, Omar Sayedelahl et al.

Training large language models requires jointly configuring two interdependent aspects of the system: the global batch size, which governs statistical efficiency, and the 3D parallelism strategy, which governs hardware throughput. Existing approaches make these decisions independently: optimization work adapts the batch size to track the evolving critical batch size while keeping parallelism fixed, and systems work selects the fastest parallelism for a given fixed batch size without anticipating that the optimal batch size could change. We show that these decisions are tightly coupled: the throughput-optimal parallelism strategy may shift as the global batch size changes, so any method that fixes one while adapting the other operates with a suboptimal configuration for part of the training run. We present COPUS, a system that adaptively tunes the global batch size, parallelism strategy, and micro-batch size as training evolves. COPUS is guided by Goodput, the product of throughput and statistical efficiency, which models both hardware and statistical effects jointly and directly measures useful convergence per unit of wall-clock time. The system combines online gradient noise scale estimation under 3D parallelism with throughput-aware evaluation of candidate configurations, and supports efficient reconfiguration of both batch size and parallelism during training. We evaluate COPUS on LLM pre-training workloads across 1-4 nodes of 8xH100 and 8xMI210 GPUs and model sizes from 3B to 32B parameters, demonstrating average time-to-convergence speedups of 3.9-8.0% over the fastest baseline across four configurations, with peak gains up to 11.1%, including system overheads.

Mukhammed Togmanov, Nurdaulet Mukhituly, Diana Turmakhan et al.

Despite having a population of twenty million, Kazakhstan's culture and language remain underrepresented in the field of natural language processing. Although large language models (LLMs) continue to advance worldwide, progress in Kazakh language has been limited, as seen in the scarcity of dedicated models and benchmark evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce KazMMLU, the first MMLU-style dataset specifically designed for Kazakh language. KazMMLU comprises 23,000 questions that cover various educational levels, including STEM, humanities, and social sciences, sourced from authentic educational materials and manually validated by native speakers and educators. The dataset includes 10,969 Kazakh questions and 12,031 Russian questions, reflecting Kazakhstan's bilingual education system and rich local context. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art multilingual models (Llama-3.1, Qwen-2.5, GPT-4, and DeepSeek V3) demonstrates substantial room for improvement, as even the best-performing models struggle to achieve competitive performance in Kazakh and Russian. These findings underscore significant performance gaps compared to high-resource languages. We hope that our dataset will enable further research and development of Kazakh-centric LLMs. Data and code will be made available upon acceptance.

Fajri Koto, Rituraj Joshi, Nurdaulet Mukhituly et al.

Llama-3.1-Sherkala-8B-Chat, or Sherkala-Chat (8B) for short, is a state-of-the-art instruction-tuned open generative large language model (LLM) designed for Kazakh. Sherkala-Chat (8B) aims to enhance the inclusivity of LLM advancements for Kazakh speakers. Adapted from the LLaMA-3.1-8B model, Sherkala-Chat (8B) is trained on 45.3B tokens across Kazakh, English, Russian, and Turkish. With 8 billion parameters, it demonstrates strong knowledge and reasoning abilities in Kazakh, significantly outper-forming existing open Kazakh and multilingual models of similar scale while achieving competitive performance in English. To ensure effective and responsible alignment, we leverage translated instruction datasets, a Kazakhstan-specific instruction dataset that is automatically constructed and manually verified, and Kazakh-specific safety data. We release Sherkala-Chat (8B) as an open-weight model, along with a detailed description of its training, alignment, and evaluation, to support research and real-world applications for Kazakh speakers.