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Dwaraknath Gnaneshwar

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

3 papers
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3

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Procedural Knowledge in Pretraining Drives Reasoning in Large Language Models

  • Laura Ruis
  • Maximilian Mozes
  • Juhan Bae
  • Siddhartha Rao Kamalakara
  • Dwaraknath Gnaneshwar
  • Acyr Locatelli
  • Robert Kirk
  • Tim Rocktäschel

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the other hand, they show surprising reasoning gaps when compared to humans, casting doubt on the robustness of their generalisation strategies. The sheer volume of data used in the design of LLMs has precluded us from applying the method traditionally used to measure generalisation: train-test set separation. To overcome this, we study what kind of generalisation strategies LLMs employ when performing reasoning tasks by investigating the pretraining data they rely on. For two models of different sizes (7B and 35B) and 2.5B of their pretraining tokens, we identify what documents influence the model outputs for three simple mathematical reasoning tasks and contrast this to the data that are influential for answering factual questions. We find that, while the models rely on mostly distinct sets of data for each factual question, a document often has a similar influence across different reasoning questions within the same task, indicating the presence of procedural knowledge. We further find that the answers to factual questions often show up in the most influential data. However, for reasoning questions the answers usually do not show up as highly influential, nor do the answers to the intermediate reasoning steps. When we characterise the top ranked documents for the reasoning questions qualitatively, we confirm that the influential documents often contain procedural knowledge, like demonstrating how to obtain a solution using formulae or code. Our findings indicate that the approach to reasoning the models use is unlike retrieval, and more like a generalisable strategy that synthesises procedural knowledge from documents doing a similar form of reasoning.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

BAM! Just Like That: Simple and Efficient Parameter Upcycling for Mixture of Experts

  • Qizhen Zhang
  • Nikolas Gritsch
  • Dwaraknath Gnaneshwar
  • Simon Guo
  • David Cairuz
  • Bharat Venkitesh
  • Jakob Foerster
  • Phil Blunsom

Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework has become a popular architecture for large language models due to its superior performance compared to dense models. However, training MoEs from scratch in a large-scale regime is prohibitively expensive. Previous work addresses this challenge by independently training multiple dense expert models and using them to initialize an MoE. In particular, state-of-the-art approaches initialize MoE layers using experts' feed-forward parameters while merging all other parameters, limiting the advantages of the specialized dense models when upcycling them as MoEs. We propose BAM (Branch-Attend-Mix), a simple yet effective improvement to MoE training. BAM makes full use of specialized dense models by not only using their feed-forward network (FFN) to initialize the MoE layers but also leveraging experts' attention weights fully by leveraging them as mixture-of-attention (MoA) layers. We explore two methods for upcycling MoA layers: 1) initializing separate attention experts from dense models including key, value, and query matrices; and 2) initializing only Q projections while sharing key-value pairs across all experts to facilitate efficient inference. Our experiments using seed models ranging from 590 million to 2 billion parameters show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under the same data and compute budget in both perplexity and downstream tasks evaluations, confirming the effectiveness of BAM.

AAAI Conference 2020 Short Paper

Leveraging BERT with Mixup for Sentence Classification (Student Abstract)

  • Amit Jindal
  • Dwaraknath Gnaneshwar
  • Ramit Sawhney
  • Rajiv Ratn Shah

Good generalization capability is an important quality of well-trained and robust neural networks. However, networks usually struggle when faced with samples outside the training distribution. Mixup is a technique that improves generalization, reduces memorization, and increases adversarial robustness. We apply a variant of Mixup called Manifold Mixup to the sentence classification problem, and present the results along with an ablation study. Our methodology outperforms CNN, LSTM, and vanilla BERT models in generalization.

v2026.09.13