Check out our new work on understanding length generalisation in Transformers! 🧵More details in the thread below.

I'm on the job market! Please reach out if you are looking to hire someone to work on - RLHF - Efficiency - MoE/Modular models - Synthetic Data - Test time compute - other phases of pre/post-training. If you are not hiring then I would appreciate a retweet! More details👇

Microsoft Research India is excited to announce applications are open for our Research Fellow program (deadline 15th Feb 2025). Details of the program and the application are here: 🔗 Research Fellow program: aka.ms/msrirf Microsoft Research

Language Models learn a lot about language, much more than we expected, without much built-in structure. This matters for linguistics and opens up enormous opportunities. So should we just throw out linguistics? No! Quite the opposite: we need theory and structure.

Presenting ✨ 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐄: 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 ✨ Work w/ fantastic advisors 🇺🇦 Dzmitry Bahdanau and Siva Reddy Thread 🧵:

Super long-context models with context window spanning millions of tokens are becoming commonplace (Google DeepMind Gemini, xAI Grok 3, Qwen Qwen2.5). But efficiently serving these models is tough, especially alongside short requests. Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking becomes

Super excited to share another incredible systems that we have built over the past two years! Training giant foundation models (like Llama-3 405B) costs a FORTUNE 💰 (millions of dollars)! Optimizing the training "recipe" (parallelism, memory tricks, etc.) is critical but

I did suggest leaving the bracketed part out of the title, but this is Yoonsoo's baby, and it's also very good, so highly recommend reading!

𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 paper is out! 🔥🐋 We study the reasoning chains of DeepSeek-R1 across a variety of tasks and settings and find several surprising and interesting phenomena! Incredible effort by the entire team! 🌐: mcgill-nlp.github.io/thoughtology/

How do LLMs perform in-context learning? LLMs can infer tasks from just a few examples in prompts - but how? Our new preprint proposes a two-step mechanism: first contextualize, then aggregate. 🧵

📢 New Paper! Tired 😴 of reasoning benchmarks full of math & code? In our work we consider the problem of reasoning for plot holes in stories -- inconsistencies in a storyline that break the internal logic or rules of a story’s world 🌎 W/ Melanie Sclar, and tsvetshop 1/n

I'll be presenting our paper together with Michael Hahn on Saturday morning poster session. Feel free to reach out!

Padding a transformer’s input with blank tokens (...) is a simple form of test-time compute. Can it increase the computational power of LLMs? 👀 New work with Ashish Sabharwal addresses this with *exact characterizations* of the expressive power of transformers with padding 🧵

Check out this exciting new work led by Charlie London if you're interested in the expressivity of Transformers!

Excited about this work, where we show that a simple algorithm of inverting candidate samples boosts the performance for reward guidance in diffusion, both in experiments and in theory! Check out the thread by Aayush for more details.

New on arXiv: Knee-Deep in C-RASP, by Andy J Yang, Michael Cadilhac and me. The solid stepped line is our theoretical prediction based on what problems C-RASP can solve, and the numbers/colors are what transformers (no position embedding) can learn.

Thrilled to share that our work received the Outstanding Paper Award at ICML! I will be giving the oral presentation on Tuesday at 4:15 PM. Jaeyeon (Jay) Kim @ICML and I both will be at the poster session shortly after the oral presentation. Please attend if possible!

The bitter lesson of AI infra: The hardest part about building faster LLM inference systems is not designing the systems, but rather it is evaluating if the system is actually faster! 🤔 This graph from a recent top systems venue paper about long-context serving shows average