AI & ML interests

LLM training in simple, pure C/CUDA

mmhamdy 
posted an update 5 days ago
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What if you could train a model on just 10 images instead of 60,000 and still get close to the same performance?

Traditional machine learning requires thousands, even millions, of data points to achieve high accuracy. But what if we could "distill" the entire dataset into just a few synthetic samples?

This is what Dataset Distillation offers. Unlike traditional knowledge distillation, we keep the model fixed and distill the knowledge contained in a massive training set into a tiny set of synthetic distilled images.

The goal is to train a model on this ultra-small set and achieve performance that almost matches what the same model would get when trained on the massive original dataset.

For example, training on only 10 distilled MNIST images (this is equivalent to a single image per class) yields 94% accuracy, compared to 99% when training on the full 60,000 images.

Interestingly, these distilled images look significantly different (as you can see in the image below) from natural images because they are optimized for model training rather than for matching the correct data distribution.

But that's not all.

Most importantly, this same method opens the door to a potent form of data poisoning. Because distilled images are specifically optimized for rapid learning, an attacker can create a tiny set of adversarial distilled images to cause a well-trained model to forget or misclassify a specific category.

What I find fascinating about dataset distillation is this: it mimics human-like learning by letting a model grasp a concept from a single example, but it does so using alien synthetic images that mean absolutely nothing to a human eye!

What about you? What are your thoughts on it?
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mmhamdy 
posted an update 11 days ago
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It was supposed to be a failed experiment. Instead, it led to the discovery of one of the most intriguing phenomena in neural networks, simply because a researcher forgot to turn it off and left it running....for a week!

In 2022, researchers at OpenAI were studying how neural networks generalize from their training data. For this task, they were training small transformer models to perform modular arithmetic.

The thing is, neural networks are weird. When a model has an abundance of parameters (like neural nets), it can easily overfit. It essentially memorizes its training data, scoring a perfect 100% accuracy when tested on it, but remains completely clueless when faced with any new instances not present in the training set (close to 0 accuracy). It is like memorizing 1 + 2 = 3 without understanding the concept of addition, so if 2 + 3 wasn't in the training set, the model fails miserably!

Usually, when a model overfits like this, people just cut their losses, turn off the experiment, and move on with their lives.

But sometimes they forget. And that is exactly what happened to our researchers at OpenAI. A week later, they checked back in, and a miracle had happened!

They discovered Grokking (And no, this has nothing to do with xAI's Grok , the term was originally coined by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein to mean understanding something so deeply that it becomes part of you). Grokking is when a neural network suddenly and abruptly learns to generalize long after it has overfitted. Just take a look at the graph in the image below!

Spooky, right! I told you neural nets are weird!
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mmhamdy 
posted an update 14 days ago
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Human brains don't recreate every pixel to understand the world!

Most current models in genomics, proteomics, and single-cell transcriptomics rely on generative objectives like masked language modeling or next token prediction. While effective, these architectures waste significant capacity reconstructing raw, noisy sequence details that may not carry functional biological meaning.

But a promising, more efficient alternative is emerging: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA)

Originally introduced by Yann LeCun for computer vision, JEPA is a non-generative, self-supervised learning (SSL) framework. Instead of predicting raw inputs, it operates as a world model that predicts abstract semantic embeddings in latent space.

Recently, the JEPA framework (and its more efficient LeJEPA variant) has been adapted into the biological sciences to develop performing foundation models and to improve on already existing ones.

It's interesting how each adaptation modified and tailored JEPA to suit its specific biological domain, whether by experimenting with different backbones or complementing the objective with other loss terms.

For example, JEPA-DNA and ProteinJEPA used JEPA as a continual pre-training framework to enhance existing foundation models without training from scratch, while Cell-JEPA and JEPA-DNA employed a hybrid objective that combines the JEPA loss with a traditional language modeling loss.

The article below provides an overview of these implementations, along with others that came out this year. As always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome and highly appreciated!

Link to the article is in the first comment 👇
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mmhamdy 
posted an update 22 days ago
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Things rarely go as we expect!

In 2017, Google released the Transformer architecture. While it was clear the model was promising, absolutely no one (including its authors) anticipated the pervasive global revolution it would create!

The authors actually viewed the Transformer as just a stepping stone for a much more ambitious project: The MultiModel.

Their ultimate goal was to build a single deep learning architecture capable of jointly learning massive, diverse tasks across entirely different domains (in 2017). A One Model To Learn Them All.

In fact, the MultiModel paper was published in the exact same month as Attention Is All You Need!

But history had other plans. The building block eclipsed the grand design!

So, have you heard about the MultiModel before? 😀
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alielfilali01 
posted an update 22 days ago
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Plans in HTML > Plans in Markdown
mmhamdy 
posted an update 5 months ago
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The new DeepSeek Engram paper is super fun! It also integrates mHC, and I suspect they're probably releasing all these papers to make the V4 report of reasonable length😄

Here's a nice short summary from Gemini
eliebak 
posted an update 10 months ago
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Super excited to announce that our research team at Hugging Face will be doing an AMA on reddit r/LocalLLaMA.

Come ask any questions to the team behind SmolLM, FineWeb and more! And who knows, maybe there’ll be a shiny new release to talk about?

Thursday 4th September, 8AM-11AM PST 🤗

science
eliebak 
posted an update 10 months ago
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Motif 2.6B tech report is pretty insane, first time i see a model with differential attention and polynorm trained at scale!

> It's trained on 2.5T of token, with a "data mixture schedule" to continuously adjust the mixture over training.
> They use WSD with a "Simple moving average" averaging the last 6 ckpt every 8B token.
> They trained on Finemath, Fineweb2, DCLM, TxT360.
> Lot of details in the finetuning data they used, for instance they used EvolKit and did some "dataset fusion" to have more compressed knowledge into the data.
> They mention they also tried Normalized GPT, QK-Norm and Cross Layer Attention.

Motif-Technologies/Motif-2.6B
eliebak 
posted an update 11 months ago
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Kimi K2 tech report is full of gems as always. Here are my notes on it:

> MuonClip: Pretty crazy how after 70k the training stabilizes and the QK-clip is basically inactive. There is also no loss in perf with QK-clip which is not trivial at all (at small scale but with aggressive threshold). Also a cool explanation of why muon makes the logit explode in appendix E (tl;dr is that muon makes the singular value of the update matrix higher)
> Sparsity scaling laws to justify their ratio, they have a very solid training infra that allows the model to be trained at this sparsity level, they could have increased even more but as sparsity increases the training becomes less efficient.
> They diminish the number of attention heads to make it more efficient for long context since attention heads are a big bottleneck for long context. They also remove 2 of the 3 "first dense" layers in the dsv3 arch.

With the sparsity and attention heads (divided by 2) they achieve 83% increased flops compared to deepseek v3 arch at 128k.

> Data: Rephrasing is KEY. They do a lot more synthetic data generation and rephrase their corpus to have different styles, for longer documents they do it by chunk. I'm (half) surprised by the fact that ONLY 1 epoch (assuming same number of training tokens I think?) of data rephrased 10 times has better accuracy than 10 epochs of the same data rephrased once.
> They do rewriting for Math and Knowledge, for Math they apply the ShallowMath recipe and instruct the model to rephrase in a "learning note" style
> They talk about diversity and probably have some internal stuff/eval to test that, as always still a bit unclear for me how to properly measure that.

The infra is also very nice, quick summary:
> PP=16 (1F1B schedule, a bit custom), EP=16, zero1
> No FP8 computation but for storage of specific layers, selective recomputation for inexpensive block, activation offloading to CPU
alielfilali01 
posted an update about 1 year ago