arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

ALRA: Adaptive Local Relational Alignment for Logit-Based Pre-training Distillation of Autoregressive Language Models

The paper introduces Adaptive Local Relational Alignment (ALRA), a logit‑based knowledge distillation method for autoregressive language models that combines student‑generated token proposals with teacher guidance at each prediction position. ALRA dynamically selects the number of candidate tokens based on the teacher’s probability spread, uses Adaptive Local Divergence to match both mass and relative token distributions, and applies Student‑Weighted Pairwise Relational Alignment to focus on high‑probability token pairs. Experiments on The Pile show that 200M‑ and 500M‑parameter students trained with ALRA outperform the best baseline by roughly 1 percentage point and surpass pre‑training without distillation by over 2 percentage points on nine zero‑shot benchmarks.

By Quang Hoang Trung, Quang Huu Hieu, Nguyen Van Hoang Phuc, Vo Nguyen Le Duy
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

One Reference or Many? Rethinking Multi-Reference Training for Intermediate-Entropy Text Generation

The paper examines the intermediate‑entropy regime of natural language generation, where a single input can have multiple valid outputs such as in peer‑review generation and image captioning. It introduces a target‑side consolidation method that merges all references into a single target preserving every distinct information unit, and presents the MERC‑67K dataset of 36,537 papers and 31,014 images with both original and consolidated references. Human evaluations show that models trained on consolidated references achieve higher coverage and overall quality scores, outperforming multi‑reference baselines across several large language models while using fewer individual references during training.

By Maitreya Prafulla Chitale, Ketaki Mangesh Shetye, Yash More, Harshit Gupta, Manav Chaudhary, Manish Shrivastava, Vasudeva Varma
arXiv AI
Jun 24

SURGELLM: Rethinking Multi-Task Evaluation through Task-Aware Feature Gating with Class-Balanced Normalization

arXiv:2606. 24259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuned encoders deployed across heterogeneous NLP tasks face three compounding problems: mismatched inductive biases, class-imbalance corruption of feature statistics, and no mechanism to condition attention on external lexical knowledge.

By Noor Islam S. Mohammad, Ulug Bayazit
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 21

Sub-Billion, Super-Frontier: Small Language Models Rival Zero-Shot Frontier LLMs on General and Literary Relation Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong relation extraction (RE), but their computational demands and reliance on proprietary APIs limit deployment in resource-constrained or privacy-sensitive settings. We investigate how far small language models (SLMs) can close this gap across general-domain and literary text.