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Self-Adapting Language Models

arxiv.org

21–30 of 81 posts

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#21
It seems to me that "forgetting correctly" is rapidly becoming a more pertinent problem in this field than "learning correctly." We're making great strides in getting models to teach themselves new facts, but the state of the art in jettisoning the least relevant information given new knowledge and finite capacity is lagging far behind.

"Forgetting correctly" is something most human brains are exceptionally good at, too. I wonder how that works...

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#22

I wonder if anyone who’s really in the know could summarize where the research is at with getting LLMs to learn “on the job” (through continuous fine tuning or whatever) and what the blockers are to this being a useful deployable thing, e.g. having a model+coding agent that can actually learn a codebase over time (cost? model collapse? something else?). I’m sure this is something the big labs are trying but from the…

The real answer is that nobody trusts their automated evals enough to be confident that any given automatically-trained release actually improves performance, even if eval scores go up. So for now everyone batches up updates and vibe-checks them before rolling them out.

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#23

It seems to me that "forgetting correctly" is rapidly becoming a more pertinent problem in this field than "learning correctly." We're making great strides in getting models to teach themselves new facts, but the state of the art in jettisoning the least relevant information given new knowledge and finite capacity is lagging far behind. "Forgetting correctly" is something most human brains are exceptionally good at,…

Is it some form of least-recently-used approach? I'm running tests on my own mind trying to figure it out now :D part of what I love about this area of computer science.

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#24

I wonder if anyone who’s really in the know could summarize where the research is at with getting LLMs to learn “on the job” (through continuous fine tuning or whatever) and what the blockers are to this being a useful deployable thing, e.g. having a model+coding agent that can actually learn a codebase over time (cost? model collapse? something else?). I’m sure this is something the big labs are trying but from the…

We have no idea how to do continual learning.

Many people here are right, compute, collapse, forgetting whatever.

The only "real" way to do this would be: 1. Train a model 2. New data 3. Retrain the model in full + new data 4. Repeat 5. You still have no garuntee on the "time" aspect though.

But CL as a field basically has zero answers on how to do this in a true sense. It's crazy hard because the "solutions" are hypocritical in many ways.

We need to expand the model's representation space while keeping the previous representation space nearly the same?

Basically, you need to modify it without changing it.

Most annoying is that even the smallest of natural brains do this easily. I have a long winded theory but basically it boils down to AI likely needs to "sleep" or rest somehow.

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#25
post #8

I wonder if anyone who’s really in the know could summarize where the research is at with getting LLMs to learn “on the job” (through continuous fine tuning or whatever) and what the blockers are to this being a useful deployable thing, e.g. having a model+coding agent that can actually learn a codebase over time (cost? model collapse? something else?). I’m sure this is something the big labs are trying but from the…

The most obvious blocker is compute. This just requires a shit ton more compute.

If it was pure compute we'd have simple examples. We can't do this even on the smallest of AI models.

There are tons of benchmarks around this you can easily run with 1 gpu.

It's compute only in the sense that the only way to do it is retrain a model from scratch at every step.

If you solve CL with a CNN you just created AGI.

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#26

It seems to me that "forgetting correctly" is rapidly becoming a more pertinent problem in this field than "learning correctly." We're making great strides in getting models to teach themselves new facts, but the state of the art in jettisoning the least relevant information given new knowledge and finite capacity is lagging far behind. "Forgetting correctly" is something most human brains are exceptionally good at,…

Did an interesting study that actually LLMs "hide" internal data.

They don't just "forget" that information can come back at a later time if you continue to train.

So basically any time a model is trained you need to check it's entire memory not just a small part.

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#27

I wonder if anyone who’s really in the know could summarize where the research is at with getting LLMs to learn “on the job” (through continuous fine tuning or whatever) and what the blockers are to this being a useful deployable thing, e.g. having a model+coding agent that can actually learn a codebase over time (cost? model collapse? something else?). I’m sure this is something the big labs are trying but from the…

We have no idea how to do continual learning. Many people here are right, compute, collapse, forgetting whatever. The only "real" way to do this would be: 1. Train a model 2. New data 3. Retrain the model in full + new data 4. Repeat 5. You still have no garuntee on the "time" aspect though. But CL as a field basically has zero answers on how to do this in a true sense. It's crazy hard because the "solutions" are hyp…

[deleted]

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#29

I wonder if anyone who’s really in the know could summarize where the research is at with getting LLMs to learn “on the job” (through continuous fine tuning or whatever) and what the blockers are to this being a useful deployable thing, e.g. having a model+coding agent that can actually learn a codebase over time (cost? model collapse? something else?). I’m sure this is something the big labs are trying but from the…

The most obvious blocker is catastrophic forgetting.

Is that necessarily a blocker? As others in this thread have pointed out, this probably becomes possible only once sufficient compute is available for some form of non-public retraining, at the individual user level. In that case (and hand-waving away just how far off that is), does a model need to retain its generality?

Hypothetically (and perhaps more plausibly), a continually learning model that adapts to the context of a particular org / company / codebase / etc., could even be desirable.

Re: Self-Adapting Language Models

#30

I wonder if anyone who’s really in the know could summarize where the research is at with getting LLMs to learn “on the job” (through continuous fine tuning or whatever) and what the blockers are to this being a useful deployable thing, e.g. having a model+coding agent that can actually learn a codebase over time (cost? model collapse? something else?). I’m sure this is something the big labs are trying but from the…

We have no idea how to do continual learning. Many people here are right, compute, collapse, forgetting whatever. The only "real" way to do this would be: 1. Train a model 2. New data 3. Retrain the model in full + new data 4. Repeat 5. You still have no garuntee on the "time" aspect though. But CL as a field basically has zero answers on how to do this in a true sense. It's crazy hard because the "solutions" are hyp…

The cool thing about AI that I'm seeing as an outsider/non-academic, is that it's relatively cheap to clone. Sleeping/resting could be done by a "clone" and benefits could be distributed on a rolling schedule, right?
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