https://amatriain.net/blog/hallucinations#advancedprompting
Ever curious about the challenges of embedding large language models in products? A notable issue is ‘hallucinations’ where AI outputs misleading data. This blog offers a guide on tackling these issues in user-facing products, giving a snapshot of current best practices.
A modern Large Language Model (LLM) is trained using the Transformers library, which leverages the power of the Transformer network architecture. This architecture has revolutionized the field of natural language processing and is widely adopted for training LLMs. Python, a high-level programming language, is commonly used for implementing LLMs, making them more accessible and easier to comprehend compared to lower-level frameworks such as OpenXLA’s IREE or GGML. The intuitive nature of Python allows researchers and developers to focus on the logic and algorithms of the model without getting caught up in intricate implementation details.
This rentry won’t go over pre-training LLMs (training from scratch), but rather fine-tuning and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) methods. Pre-training is prohibitively expensive, and if you have the compute for it, you’re likely smart enough not to need this rentry at all.
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) offer impressive capabilities like text generation, summarization, and coding out of the box. However, they aren’t universally suitable for all tasks. Sometimes, your LLM might struggle with a specific task. In such cases, one option is to fine-tune the LLM, which involves retraining the base model on new data. Although fine-tuning can be complex, costly, and not the initial solution, it’s a potent technique that organizations using LLMs should consider. Understanding the mechanics of fine-tuning, even if you’re not an expert, can guide you in making informed decisions.
A free Stanford course
XCS224U
Stanford School of Engineering
This project-oriented course focuses on building efficient and reliable models for understanding human language, drawing from linguistics, natural language processing, and machine learning. It covers tasks like contextual language representation, information retrieval, and NLU model evaluation. The course involves hands-on work to build baseline models and develop original models for class-wide competitions. The second half of the course is dedicated to an individual project in natural language understanding, following best practices in the field and incorporating topics like evaluations, semantic parsing, and grounded language understanding.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rOwvldxftJTmoR3kRcWkJBp&si=XsWOdyJY7KhEhDJG
The goal of this blog post is to explain flash attention in such a way that hopefully anyone who already understands attention will ask themselves:
“Why didn’t I think of this before?” followed by “It’s so easy”.
https://gordicaleksa.medium.com/eli5-flash-attention-5c44017022ad
This repo shows you how to fine-tune an embedding model to improve RAG performance even if you don’t have labelled data (i.e. positive pairs of query/relevant documents).
We walkthrough step-by-step the process of generating a synthetic dataset with LLM, finetuning an opensource embedding model, and finally evaluating the finetuned model.
We experiment with a small scale dataset of financial PDF documents, and show that finetuning the embedding model can substantially improve retrieval performance.
https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/p/advanced-prompt-engineering
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized problem-solving approaches. In the past, tasks like document reformatting or sentence classification necessitated creating specific computer programs. LLMs have transformed this process, enabling tasks to be accomplished through textual prompts. For instance, reformatting documents can be achieved by instructing an LLM. This shift was exemplified by GPT-3’s ability to achieve accurate results with minimal guidance.
As LLM research progressed, more sophisticated techniques emerged beyond basic prompting methods like zero/few-shot learning. Instruction-following LLMs (e.g., InstructGPT, ChatGPT) prompted investigations into tackling complex tasks. The goal was to extend LLMs beyond simple problems, requiring them to comprehend intricate instructions and execute multi-step reasoning. However, such challenges demand advanced prompting strategies due to their complexity.
https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-01-10-inference-optimization/#quantization
Large transformer models are mainstream nowadays, creating SoTA results for a variety of tasks. They are powerful but very expensive to train and use. The extremely high inference cost, in both time and memory, is a big bottleneck for adopting a powerful transformer for solving real-world tasks at scale.
Why is it hard to run inference for large transformer models? Besides the increasing size of SoTA models, there are two main factors contributing to the inference challenge (Pope et al. 2022):
In this post, we will look into several approaches for making transformer inference more efficient. Some are general network compression methods, while others are specific to transformer architecture.