Publications by LightOn

We introduce MonoQwen2-VL-v0.1, the first visual document reranker to enhance the quality of the retrieved visual documents and take these pipelines to the next level. Reranking a small number of candidates with MonoQwen2-VL-v0.1 achieve top results on the ViDoRe leaderboard.

DuckSearch is a lightweight Python library built on DuckDB, designed for efficient document search and filtering with Hugging Face datasets and standard documents.

Over the last few years, multi-vector retrieval methods, spearheaded by ColBERT, have become an increasingly popular approach to Neural IR. By storing representations at the token level rather than at the document level, these methods have demonstrated very strong retrieval performance, especially in out-of-domain settings. However, the storage and memory requirements necessary to store the large number of associated vectors remain an important drawback, hindering practical adoption. In this paper, we introduce a simple clustering-based token pooling approach to aggressively reduce the number of vectors that need to be stored. This method can reduce the space & memory footprint of ColBERT indexes by 50% with virtually no retrieval performance degradation. This method also allows for further reductions, reducing the vector count by 66%-to-75% , with degradation remaining below 5% on a vast majority of datasets. Importantly, this approach requires no architectural change nor query-time processing, and can be used as a simple drop-in during indexation with any ColBERT-like model.

With over 9.3 million annotated images, this dataset offers researchers and AI developers a valuable resource for creating models adapted to real world documents.

We release PyLate, a new user-friendly library for training and experimenting with ColBERT models, a family of models that exhibit strong retrieval capabilities on out-of-domain data.

This blog discusses the pre-processing recipe of the ArabicWeb24 dataset and the evaluation of the process via training different ablation models. It also outlines the impact of the different filtering pipelines on model’s output and on data’s quality.

In this blogpost we show how we can train a Mamba model interchangeably on both NVIDIA and AMD and we compare both training performance and convergence in both cases. This shows that our training stack is becoming more GPU-agnostic.

We present our explorations on training language models based on the new Mamba architecture, which deviates from the traditional Transformer architecture.

4th workshop on Neural Scaling Laws: Towards Maximally Beneficial AGI, NeurIPS 2022 – Machine Learning/NLP – LLMsAbstract not available.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.