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Jerry Huang

jerry.huang@mila.quebec
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e
Sarath Chandar Anbil Parthipan

Publications

Promoting Exploration in Memory-Augmented Adam using Critical Momenta
Pranshu Malviya
Goncalo Mordido
Aristide Baratin
Reza Babanezhad Harikandeh
Jerry Huang
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Razvan Pascanu
Sarath Chandar Anbil Parthipan
Adaptive gradient-based optimizers, particularly Adam, have left their mark in training large-scale deep learning models. The strength of su… (voir plus)ch optimizers is that they exhibit fast convergence while being more robust to hyperparameter choice. However, they often generalize worse than non-adaptive methods. Recent studies have tied this performance gap to flat minima selection: adaptive methods tend to find solutions in sharper basins of the loss landscape, which in turn hurts generalization. To overcome this issue, we propose a new memory-augmented version of Adam that promotes exploration towards flatter minima by using a buffer of critical momentum terms during training. Intuitively, the use of the buffer makes the optimizer overshoot outside the basin of attraction if it is not wide enough. We empirically show that our method improves the performance of several variants of Adam on standard supervised language modelling and image classification tasks.
2024-06-09
TMLR (accepté)
doi.org
openreview.net
Towards Practical Tool Usage for Continually Learning LLMs
Jerry Huang
Prasanna Parthasarathi
Mehdi Rezagholizadeh
Sarath Chandar Anbil Parthipan
Large language models (LLMs) show an innate skill for solving language based tasks. But insights have suggested an inability to adjust for i… (voir plus)nformation or task-solving skills becoming outdated, as their knowledge, stored directly within their parameters, remains static in time. Tool use helps by offloading work to systems that the LLM can access through an interface, but LLMs that use them still must adapt to nonstationary environments for prolonged use, as new tools can emerge and existing tools can change. Nevertheless, tools require less specialized knowledge, therefore we hypothesize they are better suited for continual learning (CL) as they rely less on parametric memory for solving tasks and instead focus on learning when to apply pre-defined tools. To verify this, we develop a synthetic benchmark and follow this by aggregating existing NLP tasks to form a more realistic testing scenario. While we demonstrate scaling model size is not a solution, regardless of tool usage, continual learning techniques can enable tool LLMs to both adapt faster while forgetting less, highlighting their potential as continual learners.
2024-04-14
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
EpiK-Eval: Evaluation for Language Models as Epistemic Models
Gabriele Prato
Jerry Huang
Prasanna Parthasarathi
Shagun Sodhani
Sarath Chandar Anbil Parthipan
In the age of artificial intelligence, the role of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly central. Despite their growing prev… (voir plus)alence, their capacity to consolidate knowledge from different training documents—a crucial ability in numerous applications—remains unexplored. This paper presents the first study examining the capability of LLMs to effectively combine such information within their parameter space. We introduce EpiK-Eval, a novel question-answering benchmark tailored to evaluate LLMs' proficiency in formulating a coherent and consistent knowledge representation from segmented narratives. Evaluations across various LLMs reveal significant weaknesses in this domain. We contend that these shortcomings stem from the intrinsic nature of prevailing training objectives. Consequently, we advocate for refining the approach towards knowledge consolidation, as it harbors the potential to dramatically improve their overall effectiveness and performance. The findings from this study offer insights for developing more robust and reliable LLMs. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/EpiK-Eval
2023-10-07
EMNLP/2023/Conference (accepté)
doi.org
openreview.net