PLaMo 2 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce PLaMo 2, a series of Japanese-focused large language models featuring a hybrid Samba-based architecture that transitions to full attention via continual pre-training to support 32K token contexts. Training leverages extensive synthetic corpora to overcome data scarcity, while computational efficiency is achieved through weight reuse and structured pruning. This efficient pruning methodology produces an 8B model that achieves performance comparable to our previous 100B model. Post-training further refines the models using a pipeline of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO), enhanced by synthetic Japanese instruction data and model merging techniques. Optimized for inference using vLLM and quantization with minimal accuracy loss, the PLaMo 2 models achieve state-of-the-art results on Japanese benchmarks, outperforming similarly-sized open models in instruction-following, language fluency, and Japanese-specific knowledge.

Training CLIP models on Data from Scientific Papers

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models are able to capture the semantic relationship of images and texts and have enabled a wide range of applications, from image retrieval to classification. These models are trained with datasets extracted from web crawls, which are of large quantity but limited quality. This paper explores whether limited amounts higher quality data in a specific domain improve the general performance of CLIP models. To this purpose, we extract text-image data from scientific papers hosted in the arXiv and PubMed Central repositories. Experiments on small-scale CLIP models (ViT B/32) show that model performance increases on average, but only moderately. This result indicates that using the data sources considered in the paper to train large-scale CLIP models is a worthwile research direction.