CroissantLLM: A Truly Bilingual French-English Language Model

We introduce CroissantLLM, a 1.3B language model pretrained on a set of 3T English and French tokens, to bring to the research and industrial community a high-performance, fully open-sourced bilingual model that runs swiftly on consumer-grade local hardware. To that end, we pioneer the approach of training an intrinsically bilingual model with a 1:1 English-to-French pretraining data ratio, a custom tokenizer, and bilingual finetuning datasets. We release the training dataset, notably containing a French split with manually curated, high-quality, and varied data sources. To assess performance outside of English, we craft a novel benchmark, FrenchBench, consisting of an array of classification and generation tasks, covering various orthogonal aspects of model performance in the French Language. Additionally, rooted in transparency and to foster further Large Language Model research, we release codebases, and dozens of checkpoints across various model sizes, training data distributions, and training steps, as well as fine-tuned Chat models, and strong translation models. We evaluate our model through the FMTI framework, and validate 81 % of the transparency criteria, far beyond the scores of even most open initiatives. This work enriches the NLP landscape, breaking away from previous English-centric work in order to strengthen our understanding of multilinguality in language models.

Probabilistic Jacobian-based Saliency Maps Attacks

Machine learning models have achieved spectacular performances in various critical fields including intelligent monitoring, autonomous driving and malware detection. Therefore, robustness against adversarial attacks represents a key issue to trust these models. In particular, the Jacobian-based Saliency Map Attack (JSMA) is widely used to fool neural network classifiers. In this paper, we introduce Weighted JSMA (WJSMA) and Taylor JSMA (TJSMA), simple, faster and more efficient versions of JSMA. These attacks rely upon new saliency maps involving the neural network Jacobian, its output probabilities and the input features. We demonstrate the advantages of WJSMA and TJSMA through two computer vision applications on 1) LeNet-5, a well-known Neural Network classifier (NNC), on the MNIST database and on 2) a more challenging NNC on the CIFAR-10 dataset. We obtain that WJSMA and TJSMA significantly outperform JSMA in success rate, speed and average number of changed features. For instance, on LeNet-5 (with $100\%$ and $99.49\%$ accuracies on the training and test sets), WJSMA and TJSMA respectively exceed $97\%$ and $98.60\%$ in success rate for a maximum authorised distortion of $14.5\%$, outperforming JSMA with more than $9.5$ and $11$ percentage points. The new attacks are then used to defend and create more robust models than those trained against JSMA. Like JSMA, our attacks are not scalable on large datasets such as IMAGENET but despite this fact, they remain attractive for relatively small datasets like MNIST, CIFAR-10 and may be potential tools for future applications.