Distillation of Meta's Large Concept Models Paper

post by NickyP (Nicky) · 2025-03-04T17:33:40.116Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

Contents

  "Large Concept Models" (LCM) Paper
    ARCHITECTURES
    BENCHMARKS
    CONCLUSION
None
3 comments

Note: I had this as a draft for a while. I think it is accurate, but there may be errors. I am not in any way affiliated with the authors of the paper. 

Below I briefly discuss the "Large Concept Models" paper released by Meta, which tries to change some of the paradigm of doing language modelling. It has some limitations that are not present for normal language models, but I read spent the time to read the paper in relative depth so I am here to provide a brief summary of it.

"Large Concept Models" (LCM) Paper

Large Concept Models aim to be a way to "improve language modelling" by "being more hierarchical". I think the easiest way to explain is to compare to normal decoder-only language models.

• Normal language model (LLM):
  • Take text
  • Split the text into "tokens"
  • Embed the tokens into vectors
  • Pass token embed vectors into a model
  • The model outputs a probability distribution over potential new tokens
• Large concept models (LCM):
  • Take a text
  • Split the text into sentences or "concepts". (They add a maximum limit so sentences can be split up into concepts)
  • Use a semantic embedding model, in particular SONAR [? · GW], to embed the sentences into "concept vectors"
  • Pass the concept embed vectors into a model
  • The model somehow outputs a new sentence embed vector.
  • the new sentence embed vector can be decoded using SONAR again.

A normal LLM works by passing in and getting out single tokens. For the LCM, we instead pass and get out semantic vectors. The key model that makes this possible is SONAR, which is a text auto-encoder.

The main benefit I can see is that it likely is much better at long-contexts. Otherwise, it comes with some disadvantages.

ARCHITECTURES

The key difficulty: How to output new sentence embed vectors, since it a continuous space. They try a few approaches.

• BASE LCM: They try the base case of directly predicting the expected next semantic vector using MSE.
  • The Base LCM model does not work well.
• Quant LCM: In this approach^[1], they try to make the sampling space of embedding vectors discrete by doing "Residual Vector Quantization". That is, they try to make it such that the semantic embed vector can be written as a decomposition of 64 components/"notebooks", each of which can be one of 8192 vectors/"units". These notebooks are also ordered by importance.
  • That is, a vector x would be written in terms of "units" from notebooks nb_1, ..., nb_64 like so:
  • x = nb_1[idx_1] + nb_2[idx_2] + ... nb_64[idx_64]
  • The Quant LCM variations they try work better than the Base LCM model, but not as well as Diffusion LCM.
• Diffusion LCM: Finally, they try another method based on the Diffusion. Here, they:
  • Embeds of all the previous text sections
  • Pass in a randomly generated embed
  • Pass the previous text embeds + randomly generated embed through the model
  • The model outputs a new text embed based on the randomly generated embed that is less noisy.
  • They do this "denoise" procedure multiple times to the embedding until we get a concrete prediction

They find diffusion model work significantly better. They had two variations that seemed to work equally well 

• ONE TOWER:
  • Decoder-only transformer, 32 layers, self-attention + MLPs, where one passes in good states $X_1,...X_N$, and 1 randomly initialised state state ${\hat{X}}_{N+1}^T$
  • The model improves on the state to get a new state ${\hat{X}}_{N+1}^{T-1}$
  • This is repeated until we get some clean ${\hat{X}}_{N+1}^0$
  • The new clean sentence embed state ${\hat{X}}_{N+1}^0$ is decoded, and the above is repeated to generate a new sentence.
• TWO TOWER
  • Encoder 5-layers (self-attention + MLP) + Decoder 13 layers (cross-attention + MLP)^[2]
  • Encoder converts semantic vectors X_1, ... X_N into some clean hidden states $S_1,...S_N$, using self-attention.
  • Decoder takes in a randomly initialised state ${\hat{X}}_{N+1}^T$, and uses cross-attention to compare the N+1 state to all the previous 0 to N states.
  • The Decoder gets run multiple times until we get some clean next-sentence embedding state ${\hat{X}}_{N+1}^0$, while the encoder only gets run once.
  • The new clean sentence embed state ${\hat{X}}_{N+1}^0$ is decoded, and the above is repeated to generate a new sentence.

These two models performed very similarly, so they decided to focus on the "Two Towers" architecture as it's less compute intensive.^[3]

In the rest of the paper, they try various methods for optimising hyperparameters and such, and they try scaling up the model, and compare to other normal LLM models.

 

BENCHMARKS

Disappointingly, they do not benchmark the model on any "normal benchmarks" like MMLU or anything similar. They state: "As longform text generation is the main challenge for LCM, our benchmarking is mainly focused on generative tasks". I will just provide two representitive benchmark results from the paper

First, they compare the different approaches for Large Concept Models that are instruction fine tuned. For the 1.6B size models, we see that the two diffusion models significantly outperform the other methods for Large Concept Models. However, we also see that the "SmaLLAMA" model of the same size performs better.

Metric	Coherence ↑	R-L ↑
What it measures	How naturally text flows and connects (0-1 scale)	Overlap between generated & reference text
BASE-LCM	0.482	23.69
QUANT-LCM	0.847	30.87
ONE-TOWER	0.968	33.40
TWO-TOWER	0.938	33.64
SMALLAMA	0.984	34.88

 

They scale up the model to 8B to compare against other models. 

Here is a representative benchmark that they used, which compares summary quality from LCM vs some similar sized models.

LCFO 10% - Summarise text in 10% of original length
Model	Word Ratio	R-L(↑)	OVL-3 (↑)	REP-4 (↓)	CoLA (↑)	SH-4 (↑)	SH-5 (↑)
GEMMA-7B-IT	0.150	29.25	0.164	6.427	0.667	0.377	0.194
MISTRAL-7B-V0.3-IT	0.549	25.00	0.537	6.289	0.848	0.660	0.306
LLAMA-3.1-8B-IT	0.128	42.85	0.243	3.804	0.907	0.486	0.310
TWO-TOWER-7B-IT	0.089	29.38	0.202	3.00	0.791	0.623	0.183

This table shows performance on the LCFO.10% task (long context summarization, where output should be 10% of input length). I don't intuitively understand most of the metrics that well, but they are:

• WR: Word Ratio (ratio between generated text and source text, should be close to 0.10, and we see that mistral does quite poorly here)
• R-L: ROUGE-L score (measures similarity to reference summary)
• OVL-3: 3-gram overlap with source (how much is directly copied)
• REP-4: 4-gram repetition (lower is better - measures redundancy)
• CoLA: Grammatical acceptability score
• SH-4: SEAHORSE score, measuring if information is attributable to source
• SH-5: SEAHORSE score, measuring if main ideas are captured

The model seem to be OK but maybe not spectacular. 

 

CONCLUSION

Overall, the LCM seems like an interesting model in some ways, and perhaps has the benefit of using context much more slowly than in other models, but at the moment doesn't seem like much of an improvement to other models. It loses some of the properties you get from tokenization that make training models easy. 

 

1. ^{^}

   Note that they actually have two methods for LCM-QUANT but as they don't decide to pursue either approach, I won't go into much detail here. You can see the original paper for details on that.

2. ^{^}

   Note that the diffusion decoder actually has: self-attention + cross-attention + MLP, but they do not let the token attend to any tokens other than itself, so it is pointless. They state:

   The self-attention layers in the denoiser do only attend to the current position i.e., we do not attend to the preceding noised context. The self-attention layers were kept for consistency with a standard Transformer block and for the possible extension of denoising multiple vectors at once.

3. ^{^}

   It is less compute intensive since for one-tower, you need to pass through all 32 layers for all N diffusion steps, but for the two-tower you only need to pass through the encoder once and through the decoder for the N diffusion steps.

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