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Sham Kakade

@shamkakade.bsky.social
941 followers 89 following 5 posts

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

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Reposted by Sham Kakade
Kempner Institute at Harvard University @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
NEW blog post: Do modern #LLMs capture the conceptual diversity of human populations? #KempnerInstitute researchers find #alignment reduces conceptual diversity of language models. bit.ly/4hNjtiI
bit.ly
Alignment reduces conceptual diversity of language models - Kempner Institute
As large language models (LLMs) have become more sophisticated, there’s been growing interest in using LLM-generated responses in place of human data for tasks such as polling, user studies, and […]
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Reposted by Sham Kakade
Kempner Institute at Harvard University @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
NEW in the #KempnerInstitute blog: learn about ProCyon, a multimodal foundation model to model, generate & predict protein phenotypes. Read it here: bit.ly/4fA8xUk
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Reposted by Sham Kakade
Kempner Institute at Harvard University @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Calling college grads interested in intelligence research: the application for the #KempnerInstitute's post-bac program w/ the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging is now open! Apply by Feb. 1, 2025. t.co/jdJrzRegL0
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https://bit.ly/4iohnqE
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Reposted by Sham Kakade
Kempner Institute at Harvard University @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
NEW in the #KempnerInstitute blog: A method to predict how #LLMs scale w/ compute across different datasets. Read it here:
bit.ly
Loss-to-Loss Prediction - Kempner Institute
Scaling laws – which reliably predict the performance of large language models (LLMs) as a function of their size and the amount of data they have been trained on – […]
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Reposted by Sham Kakade
Yuda Song @yus167.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
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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Reposted by Sham Kakade
Kempner Institute at Harvard University @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
NEW: we have an exciting opportunity for a tenure-track professor at the #KempnerInstitute and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Read the full description & apply today: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/14362 #ML #AI
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Sham Kakade @shamkakade.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
(5/n) 🤝 Shoutout to some great collaborators: @hanlin_zhang, @depen_morwani, @vyasnikhil96, @uuujingfeng, @difanzou, @udayaghai #AI #ML #ScalingLaws
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Sham Kakade @shamkakade.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
(4/n) 🧠 Want theory? We provide rigorous justifications, provide critical hyperparameters, and characterize lr decay to the overtraining regime. Check out the details here: 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2410.21676 📝 Blog: tinyurl.com/ysufbwsr
arxiv.org
How Does Critical Batch Size Scale in Pre-training?
Training large-scale models under given resources requires careful design of parallelism strategies. In particular, the efficiency notion of critical batch size (CBS), concerning the compromise betwee...
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Sham Kakade @shamkakade.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
(3/n) 📊 From our controlled experiments on language models: 📈CBS increases as dataset size grows 🤏CBS remains weakly dependent on model size Data size, not model size, drives parallel efficiency for large-scale pre-training.
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Sham Kakade @shamkakade.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
(2/n) 🤔 How does CBS scale with model size and data size in pre-training? We find that CBS scales with data size and is largely invariant to model size. Prior beliefs that CBS scales with model size may have stemmed from Chinchilla’s coupled N-D scaling.
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Sham Kakade @shamkakade.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
(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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Reposted by Sham Kakade
David Brandfonbrener @brandfonbrener.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
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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