Sham Kakade

@shamkakade.bsky.social

Harvard Professor. ML and AI. Co-director of the Kempner Institute. https://shamulent.github.io

LLM self-improvement has critical implications in synthetic data, post-training and test-time inference. To understand LLMs' true capability of self-improvement, we perform large-scale experiments with multiple families of LLMs, tasks and mechanisms. Here is what we found: (1/9)

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(1/n) 💡How can we speed up the serial runtime of long pre-training runs? Enter Critical Batch Size (CBS): the tipping point where the gains of data parallelism balance with diminishing efficiency. Doubling batch size halves the optimization steps—until we hit CBS, beyond which returns diminish.

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How does test loss change as we change the training data? And how does this interact with scaling laws? We propose a methodology to approach these questions by showing that we can predict the performance across datasets and losses with simple shifted power law fits.

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