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Tianxiang Sun

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5 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Data Mixing Laws: Optimizing Data Mixtures by Predicting Language Modeling Performance

Jiasheng Ye
Peiju Liu
Tianxiang Sun
Jun Zhan
Yunhua Zhou
Xipeng Qiu

Pretraining data of large language models composes multiple domains (e.g., web texts, academic papers, codes), whose mixture proportions crucially impact the competence of outcome models. While existing endeavors rely on heuristics or qualitative strategies to tune the proportions, we discover the quantitative predictability of model performance regarding the mixture proportions in function forms, which we refer to as the data mixing laws. Fitting such functions on sample mixtures unveils model performance on unseen mixtures before actual runs, thus guiding the selection of an ideal data mixture. Furthermore, we propose nested use of the scaling laws of training steps, model sizes, and our data mixing laws to predict the performance of large models trained on massive data under various mixtures with only small-scale training. Experimental results verify that our method effectively optimizes the training mixture of a 1B model trained for 100B tokens in RedPajama, reaching a performance comparable to the one trained for 48% more steps on the default mixture. Extending the application of data mixing laws to continual training accurately predicts the critical mixture proportion that avoids catastrophic forgetting and outlooks the potential for dynamic data schedules.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Can AI Assistants Know What They Don't Know?

Qinyuan Cheng
Tianxiang Sun
Xiangyang Liu
Wenwei Zhang
Zhangyue Yin
Shimin Li
Linyang Li
Zhengfu He

AI assistants powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various tasks. However, LLMs still make factual errors in knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering. These untruthful responses from AI assistants can pose significant risks in practical applications. Therefore, in this paper, we ask the question Can AI assistants know what they don’t know and express this awareness through natural language? To investigate this, we construct a model-specific "I don’t know" (Idk) dataset. This dataset includes Supervised Fine-tuning data and preference data, categorizing questions based on whether the assistant knows or does not know the answers. Then, we align the assistant with its corresponding Idk dataset using different alignment methods, including Supervised Fine-tuning and preference optimization. Experimental results show that, after alignment with the Idk dataset, the assistant is more capable of declining to answer questions outside its knowledge scope. The assistant aligned with the Idk dataset shows significantly higher truthfulness than the original assistant.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

DenoSent: A Denoising Objective for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Learning

Xinghao Wang
Junliang He
Pengyu Wang
Yunhua Zhou
Tianxiang Sun
Xipeng Qiu

Contrastive-learning-based methods have dominated sentence representation learning. These methods regularize the representation space by pulling similar sentence representations closer and pushing away the dissimilar ones and have been proven effective in various NLP tasks, e.g., semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. However, it is challenging for these methods to learn fine-grained semantics as they only learn from the inter-sentence perspective, i.e., their supervision signal comes from the relationship between data samples. In this work, we propose a novel denoising objective that inherits from another perspective, i.e., the intra-sentence perspective. By introducing both discrete and continuous noise, we generate noisy sentences and then train our model to restore them to their original form. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that this approach delivers competitive results on both semantic textual similarity (STS) and a wide range of transfer tasks, standing up well in comparison to contrastive-learning-based methods. Notably, the proposed intra-sentence denoising objective complements existing inter-sentence contrastive methodologies and can be integrated with them to further enhance performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xinghaow99/DenoSent.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Black-Box Tuning for Language-Model-as-a-Service

Tianxiang Sun
Yunfan Shao
Hong Qian
Xuanjing Huang 0001
Xipeng Qiu

Extremely large pre-trained language models (PTMs) such as GPT-3 are usually released as a service. It allows users to design task-specific prompts to query the PTMs through some black-box APIs. In such a scenario, which we call Language-Model-as-a-Service (LMaaS), the gradients of PTMs are usually unavailable. Can we optimize the task prompts by only accessing the model inference APIs? This paper proposes the black-box tuning framework to optimize the continuous prompt prepended to the input text via derivative-free optimization. Instead of optimizing in the original high-dimensional prompt space, which is intractable for traditional derivative-free optimization, we perform optimization in a randomly generated subspace due to the low intrinsic dimensionality of large PTMs. The experimental results show that the black-box tuning with RoBERTa on a few labeled samples not only significantly outperforms manual prompt and GPT-3’s in-context learning, but also surpasses the gradient-based counterparts, i. e. , prompt tuning and full model tuning.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning Sparse Sharing Architectures for Multiple Tasks

Tianxiang Sun
Yunfan Shao
Xiaonan Li
Pengfei Liu
Hang Yan
Xipeng Qiu
Xuanjing Huang

Most existing deep multi-task learning models are based on parameter sharing, such as hard sharing, hierarchical sharing, and soft sharing. How choosing a suitable sharing mechanism depends on the relations among the tasks, which is not easy since it is difﬁcult to understand the underlying shared factors among these tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel parameter sharing mechanism, named Sparse Sharing. Given multiple tasks, our approach automatically ﬁnds a sparse sharing structure. We start with an over-parameterized base network, from which each task extracts a subnetwork. The subnetworks of multiple tasks are partially overlapped and trained in parallel. We show that both hard sharing and hierarchical sharing can be formulated as particular instances of the sparse sharing framework. We conduct extensive experiments on three sequence labeling tasks. Compared with single-task models and three typical multi-task learning baselines, our proposed approach achieves consistent improvement while requiring fewer parameters.

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