Locking Pretrained Weights via Deep Low-Rank Residual Distillation
The quality of open-weight language models has dramatically improved in recent years. Sharing weights greatly facilitates model adoption by enabling their use across diverse hardware and software platforms. They also allow for more open research and testing, to the extent that users can use them as checkpoints, fine-tune them according to their needs, and potentially redistribute them. In some cases, however, concerns on modifying these weights towards unauthorized uses may outweigh the pros of giving users such a freedom. Defending against such adaptation is non-trivial: since an adaptive…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but face significant challenges in widespread deployment due to their high runtime cost. In this paper, we introduce SeedLM, a novel post-training compression method that uses seeds of a pseudo-random generator to encode and compress model weights. Specifically, for each block…
Recommendation systems in multi-stakeholder environments often require optimizing for multiple objectives simultaneously to meet supplier and consumer demands. Serving recommendations in these settings relies on efficiently combining the objectives to address each stakeholder’s expectations, often through a scalarization function with pre-determined and fixed weights. In practice, selecting these weights becomes…
Foundation models are trained on large-scale web-crawled datasets, which often contain noise, biases, and irrelevant information. This motivates the use of data selection techniques, which can be divided into model-free variants -- relying on heuristic rules and downstream datasets -- and model-based, e.g., using influence functions. The former can be…