SoftDedup: an Efficient Data Reweighting Method for Speeding Up Language Model Pre-training

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by duplicated data in their extensive pre-training datasets. Current approaches primarily focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication. To address this, we propose a soft deduplication method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness. Central to our approach is the concept of "data commonness", a metric we introduce to quantify the degree of duplication by measuring the occurrence probabilities of samples using an n-gram model. Empirical analysis shows that this method significantly improves training efficiency, achieving comparable perplexity scores with at least a 26% reduction in required training steps. Additionally, it enhances average few-shot downstream accuracy by 1.77% when trained for an equivalent duration. Importantly, this approach consistently improves performance, even on rigorously deduplicated datasets, indicating its potential to complement existing methods and become a standard pre-training process for LLMs.

TS-Align: A Teacher-Student Collaborative Framework for Scalable Iterative Finetuning of Large Language Models

Mainstream approaches to aligning large language models (LLMs) heavily rely on human preference data, particularly when models require periodic updates. The standard process for iterative alignment of LLMs involves collecting new human feedback for each update. However, the data collection process is costly and challenging to scale. To address this issue, we introduce the "TS-Align" framework, which fine-tunes a policy model using pairwise feedback data automatically mined from its outputs. This automatic mining process is efficiently accomplished through the collaboration between a large-scale teacher model and a small-scale student model. The policy fine-tuning process can be iteratively repeated using on-policy generations within our proposed teacher-student collaborative framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our final aligned policy outperforms the base policy model with an average win rate of 69.7% across seven conversational or instruction-following datasets. Furthermore, we show that the ranking capability of the teacher is effectively distilled into the student through our pipeline, resulting in a small-scale yet effective reward model for policy model alignment.

xDial-Eval: A Multilingual Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation Benchmark

Recent advancements in reference-free learned metrics for open-domain dialogue evaluation have been driven by the progress in pre-trained language models and the availability of dialogue data with high-quality human annotations. However, current studies predominantly concentrate on English dialogues, and the generalization of these metrics to other languages has not been fully examined. This is largely due to the absence of a multilingual dialogue evaluation benchmark. To address the issue, we introduce xDial-Eval, built on top of open-source English dialogue evaluation datasets. xDial-Eval includes 12 turn-level and 6 dialogue-level English datasets, comprising 14930 annotated turns and 8691 annotated dialogues respectively. The English dialogue data are extended to nine other languages with commercial machine translation systems. On xDial-Eval, we conduct comprehensive analyses of previous BERT-based metrics and the recently-emerged large language models. Lastly, we establish strong self-supervised and multilingual baselines. In terms of average Pearson correlations over all datasets and languages, the best baseline outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT by absolute improvements of 6.5% and 4.6% at the turn and dialogue levels respectively, albeit with much fewer parameters. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/e0397123/xDial-Eval.