Code Needs Comments: Enhancing Code LLMs with Comment Augmentation

The programming skill is one crucial ability for Large Language Models (LLMs), necessitating a deep understanding of programming languages (PLs) and their correlation with natural languages (NLs). We examine the impact of pre-training data on code-focused LLMs' performance by assessing the comment density as a measure of PL-NL alignment. Given the scarcity of code-comment aligned data in pre-training corpora, we introduce a novel data augmentation method that generates comments for existing code, coupled with a data filtering strategy that filters out code data poorly correlated with natural language. We conducted experiments on three code-focused LLMs and observed consistent improvements in performance on two widely-used programming skill benchmarks. Notably, the model trained on the augmented data outperformed both the model used for generating comments and the model further trained on the data without augmentation.

Training Large Language Models for Reasoning through Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we propose R$^3$: Learning Reasoning through Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (RL), a novel method that employs only outcome supervision to achieve the benefits of process supervision for large language models. The core challenge in applying RL to complex reasoning is to identify a sequence of actions that result in positive rewards and provide appropriate supervision for optimization. Outcome supervision provides sparse rewards for final results without identifying error locations, whereas process supervision offers step-wise rewards but requires extensive manual annotation. R$^3$ overcomes these limitations by learning from correct demonstrations. Specifically, R$^3$ progressively slides the start state of reasoning from a demonstration's end to its beginning, facilitating easier model exploration at all stages. Thus, R$^3$ establishes a step-wise curriculum, allowing outcome supervision to offer step-level signals and precisely pinpoint errors. Using Llama2-7B, our method surpasses RL baseline on eight reasoning tasks by $4.1$ points on average. Notebaly, in program-based reasoning on GSM8K, it exceeds the baseline by $4.2$ points across three backbone models, and without any extra data, Codellama-7B + R$^3$ performs comparable to larger models or closed-source models.

CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Access to pre-trained models, courtesy of the open-source community, has made it possible to adapt these models to specific applications for enhanced performance. However, the substantial resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions. This paper introduces CoLLiE, an efficient library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models using 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, and optimizers such as Lion, Adan, Sophia, LOMO and AdaLomo. With its modular design and comprehensive functionality, CoLLiE offers a balanced blend of efficiency, ease of use, and customization. CoLLiE has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. Furthermore, we provide an empirical evaluation of the correlation between model size and GPU memory consumption under different optimization methods, as well as an analysis of the throughput. Lastly, we carry out a comprehensive comparison of various optimizers and PEFT methods within the instruction-tuning context. CoLLiE is available at https://github.com/OpenLMLab/collie.