Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong results on a range of NLP tasks. Typically, outputs are obtained via autoregressive sampling from the LLM's underlying distribution. We show that this inference strategy can be suboptimal for a range of tasks and associated evaluation metrics. As a remedy, we propose metric aware LLM inference: a decision theoretic approach optimizing for custom metrics at inference time. We report improvements over baselines on academic benchmarks and publicly available models.
Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by employing a faster draft model for generating multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by the larger target model, resulting in the text generated according to the target model distribution. However, identifying a compact draft model that is well-aligned with the target model is challenging. To tackle this issue, we propose DistillSpec that uses knowledge distillation to better align the draft model with the target model, before applying SD. DistillSpec makes two key design choices, which we demonstrate via systematic study to be crucial to improving the draft and target alignment: utilizing on-policy data generation from the draft model, and tailoring the divergence function to the task and decoding strategy. Notably, DistillSpec yields impressive 10 - 45% speedups over standard SD on a range of standard benchmarks, using both greedy and non-greedy sampling. Furthermore, we combine DistillSpec with lossy SD to achieve fine-grained control over the latency vs. task performance trade-off. Finally, in practical scenarios with models of varying sizes, first using distillation to boost the performance of the target model and then applying DistillSpec to train a well-aligned draft model can reduce decoding latency by 6-10x with minimal performance drop, compared to standard decoding without distillation.
The success of modern neural networks has prompted study of the connection between memorisation and generalisation: overparameterised models generalise well, despite being able to perfectly fit (memorise) completely random labels. To carefully study this issue, Feldman proposed a metric to quantify the degree of memorisation of individual training examples, and empirically computed the corresponding memorisation profile of a ResNet on image classification bench-marks. While an exciting first glimpse into what real-world models memorise, this leaves open a fundamental question: do larger neural models memorise more? We present a comprehensive empirical analysis of this question on image classification benchmarks. We find that training examples exhibit an unexpectedly diverse set of memorisation trajectories across model sizes: most samples experience decreased memorisation under larger models, while the rest exhibit cap-shaped or increasing memorisation. We show that various proxies for the Feldman memorization score fail to capture these fundamental trends. Lastly, we find that knowledge distillation, an effective and popular model compression technique, tends to inhibit memorisation, while also improving generalisation. Specifically, memorisation is mostly inhibited on examples with increasing memorisation trajectories, thus pointing at how distillation improves generalisation.
Language models generate responses by producing a series of tokens in immediate succession: the $(K+1)^{th}$ token is an outcome of manipulating $K$ hidden vectors per layer, one vector per preceding token. What if instead we were to let the model manipulate say, $K+10$ hidden vectors, before it outputs the $(K+1)^{th}$ token? We operationalize this idea by performing training and inference on language models with a (learnable) $\textit{pause}$ token, a sequence of which is appended to the input prefix. We then delay extracting the model's outputs until the last pause token is seen, thereby allowing the model to process extra computation before committing to an answer. We empirically evaluate $\textit{pause-training}$ on decoder-only models of 1B and 130M parameters with causal pretraining on C4, and on downstream tasks covering reasoning, question-answering, general understanding and fact recall. Our main finding is that inference-time delays show gains when the model is both pre-trained and finetuned with delays. For the 1B model, we witness gains on 8 of 9 tasks, most prominently, a gain of $18\%$ EM score on the QA task of SQuAD, $8\%$ on CommonSenseQA and $1\%$ accuracy on the reasoning task of GSM8k. Our work raises a range of conceptual and practical future research questions on making delayed next-token prediction a widely applicable new paradigm.
Training machine learning models with differential privacy (DP) has received increasing interest in recent years. One of the most popular algorithms for training differentially private models is differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) and its variants, where at each step gradients are clipped and combined with some noise. Given the increasing usage of DPSGD, we ask the question: is DPSGD alone sufficient to find a good minimizer for every dataset under privacy constraints? As a first step towards answering this question, we show that even for the simple case of linear classification, unlike non-private optimization, (private) feature preprocessing is vital for differentially private optimization. In detail, we first show theoretically that there exists an example where without feature preprocessing, DPSGD incurs a privacy error proportional to the maximum norm of features over all samples. We then propose an algorithm called DPSGD-F, which combines DPSGD with feature preprocessing and prove that for classification tasks, it incurs a privacy error proportional to the diameter of the features $\max_{x, x' \in D} \|x - x'\|_2$. We then demonstrate the practicality of our algorithm on image classification benchmarks.
Cascades are a classical strategy to enable inference cost to vary adaptively across samples, wherein a sequence of classifiers are invoked in turn. A deferral rule determines whether to invoke the next classifier in the sequence, or to terminate prediction. One simple deferral rule employs the confidence of the current classifier, e.g., based on the maximum predicted softmax probability. Despite being oblivious to the structure of the cascade -- e.g., not modelling the errors of downstream models -- such confidence-based deferral often works remarkably well in practice. In this paper, we seek to better understand the conditions under which confidence-based deferral may fail, and when alternate deferral strategies can perform better. We first present a theoretical characterisation of the optimal deferral rule, which precisely characterises settings under which confidence-based deferral may suffer. We then study post-hoc deferral mechanisms, and demonstrate they can significantly improve upon confidence-based deferral in settings where (i) downstream models are specialists that only work well on a subset of inputs, (ii) samples are subject to label noise, and (iii) there is distribution shift between the train and test set.
The impressive generalization performance of modern neural networks is attributed in part to their ability to implicitly memorize complex training patterns. Inspired by this, we explore a novel mechanism to improve model generalization via explicit memorization. Specifically, we propose the residual-memorization (ResMem) algorithm, a new method that augments an existing prediction model (e.g. a neural network) by fitting the model's residuals with a $k$-nearest neighbor based regressor. The final prediction is then the sum of the original model and the fitted residual regressor. By construction, ResMem can explicitly memorize the training labels. Empirically, we show that ResMem consistently improves the test set generalization of the original prediction model across various standard vision and natural language processing benchmarks. Theoretically, we formulate a stylized linear regression problem and rigorously show that ResMem results in a more favorable test risk over the base predictor.
Learning to reject (L2R) and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection are two classical problems, each of which involve detecting certain abnormal samples: in L2R, the goal is to detect "hard" samples on which to abstain, while in OOD detection, the goal is to detect "outlier" samples not drawn from the training distribution. Intriguingly, despite being developed in parallel literatures, both problems share a simple baseline: the maximum softmax probability (MSP) score. However, there is limited understanding of precisely how these problems relate. In this paper, we formally relate these problems, and show how they may be jointly solved. We first show that while MSP is theoretically optimal for L2R, it can be theoretically sub-optimal for OOD detection in some important practical settings. We then characterize the Bayes-optimal classifier for a unified formulation that generalizes both L2R and OOD detection. Based on this, we design a plug-in approach for learning to abstain on both inlier and OOD samples, while constraining the total abstention budget. Experiments on benchmark OOD datasets demonstrate that our approach yields competitive classification and OOD detection performance compared to baselines from both literatures.
Knowledge distillation has been widely-used to improve the performance of a "student" network by hoping to mimic soft probabilities of a "teacher" network. Yet, for self-distillation to work, the student must somehow deviate from the teacher (Stanton et al., 2021). But what is the nature of these deviations, and how do they relate to gains in generalization? We investigate these questions through a series of experiments across image and language classification datasets. First, we observe that distillation consistently deviates in a characteristic way: on points where the teacher has low confidence, the student achieves even lower confidence than the teacher. Secondly, we find that deviations in the initial dynamics of training are not crucial -- simply switching to distillation loss in the middle of training can recover much of its gains. We then provide two parallel theoretical perspectives to understand the role of student-teacher deviations in our experiments, one casting distillation as a regularizer in eigenspace, and another as a gradient denoiser. Our analysis bridges several gaps between existing theory and practice by (a) focusing on gradient-descent training, (b) by avoiding label noise assumptions, and (c) by unifying several disjoint empirical and theoretical findings.
Despite the popularity and efficacy of knowledge distillation, there is limited understanding of why it helps. In order to study the generalization behavior of a distilled student, we propose a new theoretical framework that leverages supervision complexity: a measure of alignment between teacher-provided supervision and the student's neural tangent kernel. The framework highlights a delicate interplay among the teacher's accuracy, the student's margin with respect to the teacher predictions, and the complexity of the teacher predictions. Specifically, it provides a rigorous justification for the utility of various techniques that are prevalent in the context of distillation, such as early stopping and temperature scaling. Our analysis further suggests the use of online distillation, where a student receives increasingly more complex supervision from teachers in different stages of their training. We demonstrate efficacy of online distillation and validate the theoretical findings on a range of image classification benchmarks and model architectures.