Programming Every Example: Lifting Pre-training Data Quality Like Experts at ScaleFan Zhou, Zengzhi Wang, Qian Liu et al.
Large language model pre-training has traditionally relied on human experts to craft heuristics for improving the corpora quality, resulting in numerous rules developed to date. However, these rules lack the flexibility to address the unique characteristics of individual example effectively. Meanwhile, applying tailored rules to every example is impractical for human experts. In this paper, we demonstrate that even small language models, with as few as 0.3B parameters, can exhibit substantial data refining capabilities comparable to those of human experts. We introduce Programming Every Example (ProX), a novel framework that treats data refinement as a programming task, enabling models to refine corpora by generating and executing fine-grained operations, such as string normalization, for each individual example at scale. Experimental results show that models pre-trained on ProX-curated data outperform either original data or data filtered by other selection methods by more than 2% across various downstream benchmarks. Its effectiveness spans various model sizes and pre-training corpora, including C4, RedPajama-V2, FineWeb, FineWeb-Edu, and DCLM. Furthermore, ProX exhibits significant potential in domain-specific continual pre-training: without domain specific design, models trained on OpenWebMath refined by ProX outperform human-crafted rule-based methods, improving average accuracy by 7.6% over Mistral-7B, with 14.6% for Llama-2-7B and 20.3% for CodeLlama-7B, all within 10B tokens to be comparable to models like Llemma-7B trained on 200B tokens. Further analysis highlights that ProX significantly saves training FLOPs, offering a promising path for efficient LLM pre-training. We are open-sourcing ProX with >500B corpus, models, and sharing all training and implementation details for reproducible research and future innovation. Code: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/ProX
Reformatted AlignmentRun-Ze Fan, Xuefeng Li, Haoyang Zou et al.
The quality of finetuning data is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. Current methods to improve data quality are either labor-intensive or prone to factual errors caused by LLM hallucinations. This paper explores elevating the quality of existing instruction data to better align with human values, introducing a simple and effective approach named ReAlign, which reformats the responses of instruction data into a format that better aligns with pre-established criteria and the collated evidence. This approach minimizes human annotation, hallucination, and the difficulty in scaling, remaining orthogonal to existing alignment techniques. Experimentally, ReAlign significantly boosts the general alignment ability, math reasoning, factuality, and readability of the LLMs. Encouragingly, without introducing any additional data or advanced training techniques, and merely by reformatting the response, LLaMA-2-13B's mathematical reasoning ability on GSM8K can be improved from 46.77% to 56.63% in accuracy. Additionally, a mere 5% of ReAlign data yields a 67% boost in general alignment ability measured by the Alpaca dataset. This work highlights the need for further research into the science and mechanistic interpretability of LLMs. We have made the associated code and data publicly accessible to support future studies at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/ReAlign.
Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and ChallengesJunlong Li, Huaiyuan Xu, Sijie Cheng et al.
Driven by recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) and egocentric perception research, we introduce the concept of an egocentric procedural AI assistant (EgoProceAssist) tailored to step-by-step support daily procedural tasks in a first-person view. In this work, we start by identifying three core tasks: egocentric procedural error detection, egocentric procedural learning, and egocentric procedural question answering. These tasks define the essential functions of EgoProceAssist within a new taxonomy. Specifically, our work encompasses a comprehensive review of current techniques, relevant datasets, and evaluation metrics across these three core areas. To clarify the gap between the proposed EgoProceAssist and existing VLM-based AI assistants, we introduce novel experiments and provide a comprehensive evaluation of representative VLM-based methods. Based on these findings and our technical analysis, we discuss the challenges ahead and suggest future research directions. Furthermore, an exhaustive list of this study is publicly available in an active repository that continuously collects the latest work: https://github.com/z1oong/Building-Egocentric-Procedural-AI-Assistant
DeepSeek-V3 Technical ReportDeepSeek-AI, Aixin Liu, Bei Feng et al. · stanford, tsinghua
We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token. To achieve efficient inference and cost-effective training, DeepSeek-V3 adopts Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek-V2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning stages to fully harness its capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models. Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training. In addition, its training process is remarkably stable. Throughout the entire training process, we did not experience any irrecoverable loss spikes or perform any rollbacks. The model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.