Command A: An Enterprise-Ready Large Language Model

In this report we describe the development of Command A, a powerful large language model purpose-built to excel at real-world enterprise use cases. Command A is an agent-optimised and multilingual-capable model, with support for 23 languages of global business, and a novel hybrid architecture balancing efficiency with top of the range performance. It offers best-in-class Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities with grounding and tool use to automate sophisticated business processes. These abilities are achieved through a decentralised training approach, including self-refinement algorithms and model merging techniques. We also include results for Command R7B which shares capability and architectural similarities to Command A. Weights for both models have been released for research purposes. This technical report details our original training pipeline and presents an extensive evaluation of our models across a suite of enterprise-relevant tasks and public benchmarks, demonstrating excellent performance and efficiency.

Random Gradient Masking as a Defensive Measure to Deep Leakage in Federated Learning

Federated Learning(FL), in theory, preserves privacy of individual clients' data while producing quality machine learning models. However, attacks such as Deep Leakage from Gradients(DLG) severely question the practicality of FL. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the efficacy of four defensive methods against DLG: Masking, Clipping, Pruning, and Noising. Masking, while only previously studied as a way to compress information during parameter transfer, shows surprisingly robust defensive utility when compared to the other three established methods. Our experimentation is two-fold. We first evaluate the minimum hyperparameter threshold for each method across MNIST, CIFAR-10, and lfw datasets. Then, we train FL clients with each method and their minimum threshold values to investigate the trade-off between DLG defense and training performance. Results reveal that Masking and Clipping show near to none degradation in performance while obfuscating enough information to effectively defend against DLG.