Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) cover image

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Daniel Franzen & Jan Disselhoff - ARC Prize 2024 winners

Feb 12, 2025
Daniel Franzen and Jan Disselhoff, the winners of the ARC Prize 2024, dive into their innovative approaches with large language models. They discuss achieving a surprising 53.5% accuracy using novel techniques like depth-first search for token selection and test-time training. Their insights into model training complexities, ethical considerations, and the balance between performance and accuracy provide a fascinating look at cutting-edge AI research. Additionally, they share the importance of rapid innovation under competitive pressures and the challenges faced in algorithm development.
01:09:04

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • Daniel Franzen and Jan Disselhoff achieved a remarkable 53.5% accuracy through innovative techniques involving large language models and depth-first search methods.
  • The team utilized extensive data augmentation strategies to enhance their model's performance by generating various perspectives from input tasks.

Deep dives

Initial Successes and Refinements

The initial solution involved fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) with 12 billion parameters, achieving a decent score of 41 points. As the competition progressed, the team experimented with integrating external computational steps that significantly enhanced their model's performance, pushing the score to 53.5 points. They specifically used a method of tokenizing grid-based ARC tasks, converting pixel colors into text without complex pre-processing, which yielded surprisingly effective results. However, they faced challenges with the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, prompting the implementation of test-time fine-tuning that leveraged validation set examples to further improve scores.

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