Google just dropped an exciting technical report for the brand-new Gemma3 model! 🚀 Here are my personal notes highlighting the most intriguing architectural innovations, design choices, and insights from this release:
1) Architecture choices: > No more softcaping, replace by QK-Norm > Both Pre AND Post Norm > Wider MLP than Qwen2.5, ~ same depth > SWA with 5:1 and 1024 (very small and cool ablation on the paper!) > No MLA to save KV cache, SWA do the job!
2) Long context > Only increase the rope in the global layer (to 1M) > Confirmation that it's harder to do long context for smol models, no 128k for the 1B > Pretrained with 32k context? seems very high > No yarn nor llama3 like rope extension
3) Distillation > Only keep te first 256 logits for the teacher > Ablation on the teacher gap (tl;dr you need some "patience" to see that using a small teacher is better) > On policy distillation yeahh (by @agarwl_ et al), not sure if the teacher gap behave the same here, curious if someone have more info?
4) Others > Checkpoint with QAT, that's very cool > RL using improve version of BOND, WARM/WARP good excuse to look at @ramealexandre papers > Only use Zero3, no TP/PP if i understand correctly ? > Training budget relatively similar than gemma2
- Pre-training code with nanotron - Evaluation suite with lighteval - Synthetic data generation using distilabel (powers our new SFT dataset HuggingFaceTB/smoltalk) - Post-training scripts with TRL & the alignment handbook - On-device tools with llama.cpp for summarization, rewriting & agents
Apache 2.0 licensed. V2 pre-training data mix coming soon!
Wow, impressive 340B model by nvidia with a nice permissive license! 🚀 The technical report is full of insights and seems to use a different learning rate schedule than cosine, probably a variant of WSD. Hope to get more info on that! 👀
🍷 FineWeb technical report is out and so is 📚 FineWeb-Edu, a 1.3 trillion tokens dataset that outperforms all other open web datasets, with remarkable improvements on educational benchmarks such as MMLU, ARC, and OpenBookQA.
We used Llama 3 generations to train an educational quality classifier, filtering the 15 trillion tokens of FineWeb to select only those with high educational value (an approach also used in Llama 3 and Phi-3 training datasets). We're releasing both FineWeb-Edu and the classifier, along with a larger, less heavily filtered version containing 5.4 trillion tokens.
You can find more details about the dataset and the experiments we ran in the FineWeb technical report, It's a 45-minute read but it contains all the secret sauce for building high quality web datasets.
We've just published a detailed blog post on the creation of Cosmopedia dataset. We hope this will provide insights about generating synthetic data at scale for pre-training. https://huggingface.co/blog/cosmopedia
Here are some key takeaways: 🎯 Prompt curation is crucial: we want to cover many topics with few duplicates. 📚 You can leverage various resources for diversity: using different seed data, generation formats, and target audiences. ⚙️ The importance of a good technical stack: for scalable generations with tools like llm-swarm and fast model training and evaluation.