veekaybee

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts of models in prod eagerly sought.

Foundational Concepts

Pre-Transformer Models

yoavg

Reinforcement Learning for Language Models

Yoav Goldberg, April 2023.

Why RL?

With the release of the ChatGPT model and followup large language models (LLMs), there was a lot of discussion of the importance of "RLHF training", that is, "reinforcement learning from human feedback". I was puzzled for a while as to why RL (Reinforcement Learning) is better than learning from demonstrations (a.k.a supervised learning) for training language models. Shouldn't learning from demonstrations (or, in language model terminology "instruction fine tuning", learning to immitate human written answers) be sufficient? I came up with a theoretical argument that was somewhat convincing. But I came to realize there is an additional argumment which not only supports the case of RL training, but also requires it, in particular for models like ChatGPT. This additional argument is spelled out in (the first half of) a talk by John Schulman from OpenAI. This post pretty much

karpathy

"""
stable diffusion dreaming
creates hypnotic moving videos by smoothly walking randomly through the sample space

example way to run this script:

$ python stablediffusionwalk.py --prompt "blueberry spaghetti" --name blueberry

to stitch together the images, e.g.:
$ ffmpeg -r 10 -f image2 -s 512x512 -i blueberry/frame%06d.jpg -vcodec libx264 -crf 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p blueberry.mp4

1duo

Download CMake from: https://cmake.org/download/

wget https://cmake.org/files/v3.12/cmake-3.12.3.tar.gz

Compile from source and install

tar zxvf cmake-3.*

kevinzakka

"""
Create train, valid, test iterators for CIFAR-10 [1].
Easily extended to MNIST, CIFAR-100 and Imagenet.

[1]: https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/feedback-on-pytorch-for-kaggle-competitions/2252/4
"""

import torch
import numpy as np

mariocj89

Introduction

When applications are running in production, they become black boxes that need to be traced and monitored. One of the simplest, yet main, ways to do so is logging. Logging allows us - at the time we develop our software - to instruct the program to emit information while the system is running that will be useful for us and our sysadmins.

rondy

FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.

---

Effective Engineer - Notes

• By Edmond Lau
• Highly Recommended 👍
• http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/

What's an Effective Engineer?

sloria

The Best of the Best Practices (BOBP) Guide for Python

A "Best of the Best Practices" (BOBP) guide to developing in Python.

In General

Values

• "Build tools for others that you want to be built for you." - Kenneth Reitz
• "Simplicity is alway better than functionality." - Pieter Hintjens

bwhite

"""Information Retrieval metrics

Useful Resources:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mooney/ir-course/slides/Evaluation.ppt
http://www.nii.ac.jp/TechReports/05-014E.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs276/handouts/EvaluationNew-handout-6-per.pdf
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/72/67/60/PDF/07-busa-fekete.pdf
Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval (Tie-Yan Liu)
"""
import numpy as np