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The Fair Language Model Paradox (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Oct 24, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of judging training by the average loss over a batch, this study tracks how each word type learns, revealing a hidden bias. As weight decay grows, rare words lose accuracy faster than common ones, across models from 270M to 3B parameters.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet little is known about their training dynamics at the token level. Evaluation typically relies on aggregated training loss, measured at the batch level, which overlooks subtle per-token biases arising from (i) varying token-level dynamics and (ii) structural biases introduced by hyperparameters. While weight decay is commonly used to stabilize training, we reveal that it silently introduces performance biases detectable only at the token level. In fact, we empirically show across different dataset sizes, model architectures and sizes ranging from 270M to 3B parameters that as weight decay increases, low-frequency tokens are disproportionately depreciated. This is particularly concerning, as these neglected low-frequency tokens represent the vast majority of the token distribution in most languages, calling for novel regularization techniques that ensure fairness across all available tokens.

Andrea Pinto, Tomer Galanti, Randall Balestriero
arXiv:2410.11985 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Oct 15, 2024
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