Experimenting primarily with 7B-12B parameter text completion models. Not all models are intended for direct use, but aim for research and/or educational purposes.
I recently have been looking at a paper titled "Why Warmup the Learning Rate? Underlying Mechanisms and Improvements", by Dayal Singh Kalra and Maissam Barkeshli, and was struck by "warmup" being analogous to simulated annealing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09405 Taking the physical analogy further, the "warmup" is a stochastic process to knock the system out of current local minima, allowing easier transition toward newer minima. It works because it reduces "fit" and therefore "friction".
Specifically, the duplication of layers in Frankenmerges serves a purpose similar to what occurs in their recurrent-depth architecture. Successful frankenmerges that operate without additional fine-tuning are able to recover or "heal" from any damage due to abrupt transitions between layer blocks. Operational replicated layer blocks can provide functional benefits grounded in latent reasoning. Frankenmerges can also result in hybrid reasoning, by splicing together the latent reasoning of different models.
Back in April 2024, I was able to duplicate a few layers in the Llama 3 8B model, turning it into a 9B model, without harming benchmarks significantly, despite any transition damage. grimjim/llama-3-experiment-v1-9B My informal experimentation suggested that latent reasoning circuits could occupy continguous stacks of 2-4 layers, though the result was highly sensitive to the choice of transition location between layers.
