Quentin Fournier

Small Encoders Can Rival Large Decoders in Detecting Groundedness

Istabrak Abbes

Gabriele Prato

Fernando Rodriguez

Alaa Boukhary

Adam Elwood

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external context significantly improves their performance in natural language processing (NLP) … (voir plus)tasks. However, LLMs struggle to answer queries reliably when the provided context lacks information, often resorting to ungrounded speculation or internal knowledge. Groundedness - generating responses strictly supported by the context - is essential for ensuring factual consistency and trustworthiness. This study focuses on detecting whether a given query is grounded in a document provided in context before the costly answer generation by LLMs. Such a detection mechanism can significantly reduce both inference time and resource consumption. We show that lightweight, task specific encoder models such as RoBERTa and NomicBERT, fine-tuned on curated datasets, can achieve accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art LLMs, such as Llama3 8B and GPT4o, in groundedness detection while reducing inference latency by orders of magnitude. The code is available at : https://github.com/chandarlab/Hallucinate-less

2025-06-26

ArXiv (prépublication)

NovoMolGen: Rethinking Molecular Language Model Pretraining

Kamran Chitsaz

Roshan Balaji

Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt

2025-06-11

ICML.cc/2025/Workshop/GenBio (poster)

openreview.net

Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model

Can Chen

David Heurtel-Depeiges

Robert M. Vernon

Christopher J. Langmead

Yoshua Bengio

2025-05-22

ArXiv (prépublication)

Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model

Can Chen

David Heurtel-Depeiges

Robert M. Vernon

Christopher J. Langmead

Yoshua Bengio

2025-05-01

arXiv (publié)

NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT

Lola Le Breton

Mariam El Mezouar

Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of … (voir plus)large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.

2025-02-26

ArXiv (prépublication)

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors Provides Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

Matthew D Riemer

Pin-Yu Chen

Payel Das

2025-01-01

Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) (publié)

NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT

Lola Le Breton

Mariam El Mezouar

John Xavier Morris

Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of … (voir plus)large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.

2025-01-01

Trans. Mach. Learn. Res. (publié)

openreview.net

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors to Achieve Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

Yash More

Matthew D Riemer

Pin-Yu Chen

Payel Das

There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruc… (voir plus)tion-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models often experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. As a solution, we introduce an efficient and effective merging-based alignment method called \textsc{MergeAlign} that interpolates the domain and alignment vectors, creating safer domain-specific models while preserving their utility. We apply \textsc{MergeAlign} on Llama3 variants that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged. We hope our findings open new research avenues and inspire more efficient development of safe expert LLMs.

2024-11-11

ArXiv (prépublication)

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors to Achieve Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

Yash More

Matthew D Riemer

Pin-Yu Chen

Payel Das

There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruc… (voir plus)tion-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models often experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. As a solution, we introduce an efficient and effective merging-based alignment method called \textsc{MergeAlign} that interpolates the domain and alignment vectors, creating safer domain-specific models while preserving their utility. We apply \textsc{MergeAlign} on Llama3 variants that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged. We hope our findings open new research avenues and inspire more efficient development of safe expert LLMs.

2024-11-11

ArXiv (prépublication)

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors to Achieve Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

Yash More

Matthew D Riemer

Pin-Yu Chen

Payel Das

Chandar Research Lab

Mila - Québec

AI Institute

U. Montŕeal

Ibm Research

Polytechnique Montréal

There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruc… (voir plus)tion-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models often experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. As a solution, we introduce an efficient and effective merging-based alignment method called \textsc{MergeAlign} that interpolates the domain and alignment vectors, creating safer domain-specific models while preserving their utility. We apply \textsc{MergeAlign} on Llama3 variants that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged. We hope our findings open new research avenues and inspire more efficient development of safe expert LLMs.

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/AFM (poster)

openreview.net

Protein Language Models: Is Scaling Necessary?

Robert M. Vernon

Almer Van Der Sloot

Benjamin Schulz

Christopher James Langmead

Public protein sequence databases contain samples from the fitness landscape explored by nature. Protein language models (pLMs) pre-trained … (voir plus)on these sequences aim to capture this landscape for tasks like property prediction and protein design. Following the same trend as in natural language processing, pLMs have continuously been scaled up. However, the premise that scale leads to better performance assumes that source databases provide accurate representation of the underlying fitness landscape, which is likely false. By developing an efficient codebase, designing a modern architecture, and addressing data quality concerns such as sample bias, we introduce AMPLIFY, a best-in-class pLM that is orders of magnitude less expensive to train and deploy than previous models. Furthermore, to support the scientific community and democratize the training of pLMs, we have open-sourced AMPLIFY’s pre-training codebase, data, and model checkpoints.

2024-09-23

bioRxiv (prépublication)