Always surprised that so few people actually read the FineTasks blog, on ✨how to select training evals with the highest signal✨
If you're serious about training models without wasting compute on shitty runs, you absolutely should read it!!
An high signal eval actually tells you precisely, during training, how wel & what your model is learning, allowing you to discard the bad runs/bad samplings/...!
The blog covers in depth prompt choice, metrics, dataset, across languages/capabilities, and my fave section is "which properties should evals have"👌 (to know on your use case how to select the best evals for you)
Gemma3 family is out! Reading the tech report, and this section was really interesting to me from a methods/scientific fairness pov.
Instead of doing over-hyped comparisons, they clearly state that **results are reported in a setup which is advantageous to their models**. (Which everybody does, but people usually don't say)
For a tech report, it makes a lot of sense to report model performance when used optimally! On leaderboards on the other hand, comparison will be apples to apples, but in a potentially unoptimal way for a given model family (like some user interact sub-optimally with models)
Also contains a cool section (6) on training data memorization rate too! Important to see if your model will output the training data it has seen as such: always an issue for privacy/copyright/... but also very much for evaluation!
Because if your model knows its evals by heart, you're not testing for generalization.