activatedgeek

letztes Jahrdiscuss

Congratulations on the strong reception of min-p. Very clever!

We may be talking about two orthogonal things here. And also to be clear, I don't care about theoretical guarantees either.

Now, min-p is solving for the inadequacies of standard sampling techniques. It is almost like a clever adaptive search which other sampling methods fail at (despite truncations like top-k/top-p).

However, one thing that I noticed in the min-p results was that lower temperatures were almost always better in the final performance (and quite expectedly the inverse for creating writing). This observation makes me think that the underlying model is generally fairly good at ranking the best tokens. What sampling allows us is a margin-for-error in cases where the model ranked a relevant next token not at the top, but slightly lower.

Therefore, my takeaway from min-p is that it solves for deficiencies of current samplers but its success is not in contradiction to the fact that logprobs are bad proxies for semantics. Sampling is the simplest form of search, and I agree with you that better sampling methods are a solid ingredient to extract information from logprobs.

activatedgeek

letztes Jahrdiscuss

That has been my understanding too. More generally, a verifier at the end certainly helps.

In our paper [1], we find that asking a follow up question like "Is the answer correct?" and taking the normalized probability of "Yes" or "No" token (or more generally any such token trained for) seems to be best bet so far to get well-calibrated probabilities out of the model.

In general, the log-probability of tokens is not a good indicator of anything other than satisfying the pre-training loss function of predicting the "next token." (it likely is very well-calibrated on that task though) Semantics of language are a much less tamable object, especially when we don't quite have a good way to estimate a normalizing constant because every answer can be paraphrased in many ways and still be correct. The volume of correct answers in the generation space of language model is just too small.

There is work that shows one way to approximate the normalizing constant via SMC [2], but I believe we are more likely to benefit from having a verifier at train-time than any other approach.

And there are stop-gap solutions to make log probabilities more reliable by only computing them on "relevant" tokens, e.g. only final numerical answer tokens for a math problem [3]. But this approach kind of side-steps the problem of actually trying to find relevant tokens. Perhaps something more in the spirit of System 2 attention which selects meaningful tokens for the generated output would be more promising [4].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08391 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17546 [3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10200 [4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11829

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Reasoning tokens are indeed billed as output tokens.

> While reasoning tokens are not visible via the API, they still occupy space in the model's context window and are billed as output tokens.

From here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/reasoning

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

This effect is very interesting.

Veritasium covered this effect in a video [1] for the interested.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY (2016)

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I use Astro + Cloudflare Pages for my website [1]. I document the key bits of my stack here [2] for completeness.

I've been very happy with Astro because it is a good example of low floor and high ceiling software. I can start with plain HTML, make it more flexible with Astro language (still very close to HTML), make authoring easier with Markdown (+ lifestyle extensions from Remark/Rehype), and extend to frameworks like React on a need basis (which I use for some pages where I use maps).

[1]: https://sanyamkapoor.com [2]: https://sanyamkapoor.com/kb/the-stack

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The best thing that one can do for themselves to develop the creative "muscle" is to _own_ their time.

Unfortunately, I am yet to feel even close to such a breakthrough. I think very few are fortunate to afford such kind of luxury (as the author alludes to as well). There is always something to deliver for, a deadline to meet (although many would argue deadlines are a forcing constraint); a life waiting to happen. With a tiny bit of envy, I feel very happy and inspired when someone does achieve the "flow" state.

On the subject of "tools" to spur creativity, I have always been skeptical. It feels similar to believing that there is a productivity app right around the corner that will unleash your potential. For me, the only true indicator of my productivity has been actually putting in the _time_, making any kind of progress along a chosen direction and then re-evaluating.

What are fellow readers here doing to _own_ their time?

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The fact that Pyinfra does not currently support a feature which can be implemented using Pyinfra philosophy does not make it different than Ansible. I believe that was what the parent comment was about.

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Any kind of provisioning doesn't seem too far a step though. It is just another "operation" with its own state management logic.

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I current use Ansible to setup both local and remote hosts. I've been very happy with it, and love that Pyinfra intends to support the Ansible connector.

My main gripe with Ansible is the YAML specification. Ansible chooses to separate the task specification and task execution. Pyinfra chooses to directly expose the Python layer, instead of using slightly ugly magic functions/variables. I like this approach more since it allows standard Pythonic control flow instead of using a new (arguably ugly and more hassle to maintain) grammar.

Excited for Pyinfra!

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

If you use HuggingFace models, then a few simpler decoding algorithms are already implemented for `generate` method of all supported models.

Here is a blog post that describes it: https://huggingface.co/blog/how-to-generate.

I will warn you though that beam search is typically what you do NOT want. Beam search approximately optimizes for the "highest likely sequence at the token level." This is rarely what you need in practice with open-ended generations (e.g. a question-answering chat bot). In practice, you need "highest likely semantic sequence," which is much harder problem.

Of course, various approximations for semantic alignment are currently in the literature, but still a wide open problem.

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Makes sense. Thank you for a the QS reference!

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I hesitate to the use description as "think," just biasing correlations for subsequent generations.

In any case, there is at least one work that shows that CoT may not be necessary and biasing the decoding path via logit probabilities is also promising. [1]

One could argue it still doesn't contradict the benefits of CoT, but I suspect there is nothing fundamental about CoT, except that we happened to have been pre-training on sequences that use certain prompts that were easy to conceive from a human's perspective.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10200

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I see. Following up on this, for the sake of being explicit: was the bottleneck here getting all the data sources in place (perhaps for instance access permissions, legal, etc.), writing the SQL query, both, or something else?

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I want to point out a tweet [1] that is very relevant to the miracle of CoT, and probably a simpler explanation.

  > Let's think "step by step"!

  > Another tidbit I like about data and prompts that miraculously work.
  > Searching for this phrase resulted in this website (among others),  
  > http://geteasysolution.com, containing many math step-by-step solutions. 
  > How common are they? Quite.

  > Makes you think.

[1]: https://twitter.com/yanaiela/status/1765077404043952516

activatedgeek

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

In AI/ML research, text to SQL always sounded to me of merely academic interest, in the sense that the outputs are easily verifiable and make for a good proof of concept of a language model's (or a translation model's) capabilities.

But looks like there are plenty of products coming out in this area, and it has me wondering: what is the actual big picture for enterprises here?

I would assume enterprises employ enough people to write yet another query for whatever use case.

- Is the expectation that in the future, we can bring the flexibility of SQL-like languages to people unfamiliar with SQL?

- Perhaps a salesperson unfamiliar with SQL would like to conduct an analysis. Is the volume and variety of such queries so high that optimizing for the turnaround time from an SQL query designed by data analyst to the salesperson to consume the results is so worthwhile?

Perhaps I am underestimating the scale of the problem but would love some insider perspective here.

activatedgeek

Submissions

Sanjeev Arora – How could a Superhuman AI mathematician come about? [video]

EconGraphs

There's a New Country Ranking and You're Not Going to Like It

Horse – The Organized Browser

Idyll

GPT Rapper

Wikifier: Semantic Annotation Service for 100 Languages

Unified Acceleration Foundation

Type the Alphabet

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