---
title: "ACL2025 Keynote: Luke Zettemoyer"
source: https://www.jemoka.com/posts/kbhacl2025_keynote/
---

Naively: &ldquo;almost everything comes from pretraining.&rdquo; How much simple supervision will it radically change the behavior of our language model.
Key Directions data long-tail: tokenizer free LLMs data modules: how to we specialize quickly? Tokenizer-Free LM Byte-Level LMs are just more expensive (i.e., there is just a bunch more residual streams! and that&rsquo;s pretty bad). High level intution: takes the input bytes, create some &ldquo;strides&rdquo;/&ldquo;patches&rdquo;, and then send the patches through a transformer, and then unpatch
Insight: BLP &mdash; create &ldquo;patches&rdquo; wherever there are high entropy.
http://github.com/facebookresearch/blt
Specialize on Data Quickly &ldquo;Modular language models&rdquo;: specialize different parts of the model (i.e., MoE-esque &ldquo;experts&rdquo; to different domains of data.
Naive: different FFNs for different data.
Smarter approaches:
start with unlabeled data corpus cluster and perform unsupervised domain discovery train on each? separately? High level solution notion: how do we have MoE where we can add/remove experts dynamically. &ldquo;Domain-informed non-parametric route.&rdquo; Each of the branches, we can just do a binary-classification problem of \(C_{\text{pub}}\), a &ldquo;public/default expert&rdquo; versus \(C_{j}\) for each of the experts. At inference time, we perform a multi-class classifictaion to be able to do routing.
i.e., we try to learn to push the classification decision boundary.
LIMA Less is more for alignment. SFT using very careful dataset could radically change the model behavior.
Spurious Rewards in RLVF RLVF makes models better, even if the rewards are random.
