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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 2022
LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models
arXiv
LAION-5B is an openly available dataset of 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs, released so that researchers outside a handful of labs could study and reproduce large vision-language models.
- 2022
FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness
arXiv
FlashAttention is an exact attention algorithm built around GPU memory traffic: by tiling computation so intermediates stay on chip, it cuts reads and writes to high bandwidth memory, training Transformers faster and enabling longer sequences.
- 2022
Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models (Chinchilla)
NeurIPS
A DeepMind study showing that, for a fixed computing budget, language models should be trained on far more data than was then standard; its 70-billion-parameter Chinchilla beat larger contemporaries.
- 2022
Magnetic control of tokamak plasmas through deep reinforcement learning
Nature
A 2022 Nature paper by Degrave, Felici and colleagues showing that a deep reinforcement learning controller can learn on its own to command all of a tokamak's magnetic control coils, producing and holding a range of plasma shapes.
- 2021
Program Synthesis with Large Language Models (MBPP)
arXiv
A 2021 arXiv paper by Austin, Odena, Nye and eight other authors that introduced MBPP, a benchmark of 974 short Python programming tasks, and measured how language models from 244M to 137B parameters turn natural-language descriptions into working code.
- 2021
Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code (Codex / HumanEval)
arXiv
A 2021 paper from OpenAI introduces Codex, a GPT model fine-tuned on public GitHub code, and HumanEval, an evaluation set that judges generated Python programs by whether they work rather than by how closely they match a reference.
- 2021
Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity
arXiv
A 2021 paper by Fedus, Zoph and Shazeer that simplifies Mixture-of-Experts routing so that language models can hold up to a trillion parameters while keeping per-example computation roughly constant.
- 2020
The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
arXiv
The Pile is an 825 GiB English text dataset of 22 combined sources, released by EleutherAI on 31 December 2020 with an arXiv paper. It became the training data for several of the group's open models.
- 2020
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale (ViT)
arXiv
A 2020 paper showing that a plain Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches, with no convolution at all, can match state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification.
- 2020
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
arXiv 2010.11929 (ICLR 2021)
A 2020 paper by Alexey Dosovitskiy and colleagues showing that a pure Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches — the Vision Transformer, or ViT — matches state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification when pre-trained on large amounts of data.
- 2020
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
NeurIPS
A 2020 paper by Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain and Pieter Abbeel that trained a U-Net to reverse a gradual noising process, making diffusion models a practical rival to GANs and paving the way for DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion.
- 2020
ELECTRA: Pre-training Text Encoders as Discriminators Rather Than Generators
arXiv
A 2020 paper by Clark, Luong, Le and Manning that pre-trains text encoders by detecting replaced tokens instead of filling in masked ones, matching much larger baselines with far less compute.
- 2019
Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model
Nature
MuZero is a DeepMind reinforcement-learning algorithm that learns a model of its environment and plans inside that model, mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi without being given the rules of those games.
- 2019
C4: Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (T5 paper)
JMLR
A 2019 paper that casts every language task as text-to-text, systematically compares transfer-learning choices, releases the C4 corpus and models, and reports state-of-the-art results on summarization, question answering, and classification.
- 2019
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer (T5)
JMLR
A 2019 Google paper that frames every language task as text in, text out, using one encoder-decoder Transformer and one training setup. It also introduced the C4 dataset, and the released T5 models became common research starting points.
- 2019
RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach
arXiv
A replication study of BERT pretraining that measures how much key hyperparameters and training data size matter, finds BERT was significantly undertrained, and shows a properly trained BERT matches or beats later models, reaching state of the art on GLUE, RACE and SQuAD.
- 2019
XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding
arXiv
XLNet is a generalized autoregressive pretraining method from a 2019 paper. It learns bidirectional contexts by maximizing expected likelihood over all factorization-order permutations and outperforms BERT on 20 tasks under comparable settings.
- 2019
SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems
arXiv
SuperGLUE is a benchmark for general-purpose language understanding, released in 2019 as a harder successor to GLUE. It bundles eight tasks, a single-number metric, an analysis toolkit and a public leaderboard.
- 2018
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
NAACL
Google's 2018 BERT paper introduced an encoder-only Transformer that reads text in both directions and is pre-trained by hiding words. It set new results on eleven language tasks and made download-and-fine-tune the default workflow.
- 2018
Neural Ordinary Differential Equations
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Chen, Rubanova, Bettencourt and Duvenaud that replaces a fixed sequence of hidden layers with a neural network describing the derivative of the hidden state, so outputs are computed by an ODE solver — yielding continuous-depth models with constant memory cost.[^1]