Brian Lester

PhD student, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto

Researcher, Google

Joined

September 2021

Names

Brian Lester (Preferred)

Emails

****@interactions.com (Confirmed)

****@gmail.com (Confirmed)

****@google.com (Confirmed)

****@gmail.com (Confirmed)

****@cs.unc.edu (Confirmed)

****@unc.edu (Confirmed)

Personal Links

Career & Education History

PhD student

Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto (cs.toronto.edu)

2023 – Present

Researcher

Google (google.com)

2020 – Present

PhD student

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (unc.edu)

2022 – 2023

Researcher

Interactions Corp. (interactions.com)

2018 – 2018

Researcher

Trove (trove.com)

2017 – 2018

Undergrad student

University of Pittsburgh (pitt.edu)

2012 – 2016

Advisors, Relations & Conflicts

No relations added

Expertise

NLP

Present

Transformers

Present

Deep Learning

Present

Publications

TokSuite: Measuring the Impact of Tokenizer Choice on Language Model Behavior
Gül Sena Altıntaş, Malikeh Ehghaghi, Brian Lester, Fengyuan Liu, Wanru Zhao, Marco Ciccone, Colin Raffel
- Submitted to ICLR 2026
- Readers: Everyone
The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text
Nikhil Kandpal, Brian Lester, Colin Raffel, Sebastian Majstorovic, Stella Biderman, Baber Abbasi, Luca Soldaini, Enrico Shippole, A. Feder Cooper, Aviya Skowron, Shayne Longpre, Lintang Sutawika, Alon Albalak, Zhenlin Xu, Guilherme Penedo, Loubna Ben allal, Elie Bakouch, John David Pressman, Honglu Fan, Dashiell Stander et al. (7 additional authors not shown)
- NeurIPS 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks Track poster
- Readers: Everyone
Realistic Evaluation of Model Merging for Compositional Generalization
Derek Tam, Yash Kant, Brian Lester, Igor Gilitschenski, Colin Raffel
- Submitted to ICLR 2025
- Readers: Everyone
Training LLMs over Neurally Compressed Text
Brian Lester, Jaehoon Lee, Alexander A Alemi, Jeffrey Pennington, Adam Roberts, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Noah Constant
- Accepted by TMLR
- Readers: Everyone
SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer
Tu Vu, Brian Lester, Noah Constant, Rami Al-Rfou', Daniel Cer
- 15 Feb 2024
- OpenReview Archive Direct Upload
- Readers: Everyone
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation
Tu Vu, Aditya Barua, Brian Lester, Daniel Cer, Mohit Iyyer, Noah Constant
- 15 Feb 2024
- OpenReview Archive Direct Upload
- Readers: Everyone
Git-Theta: A Git Extension for Collaborative Development of Machine Learning Models
Nikhil Kandpal, Brian Lester, Mohammed Muqeeth, Anisha Mascarenhas, Monty Evans, Vishal Baskaran, Tenghao Huang, Haokun Liu, Colin Raffel
- ICML 2023 Poster
- Readers: Everyone
Scaling Up Models and Data with t5x and seqio
Adam Roberts, Hyung Won Chung, Anselm Levskaya, Gaurav Mishra, James Bradbury, Daniel Andor, Sharan Narang, Brian Lester, Colin Gaffney, Afroz Mohiuddin, Curtis Hawthorne, Aitor Lewkowycz, Alex Salcianu, Marc van Zee, Jacob Austin, Sebastian Goodman, Livio Baldini Soares, Haitang Hu, Sasha Tsvyashchenko, Aakanksha Chowdhery et al. (23 additional authors not shown)
- 2022 (modified: 13 Oct 2022)
- CoRR 2022
- Readers: Everyone
Finetuned Language Models are Zero-Shot Learners
Jason Wei, Maarten Bosma, Vincent Y. Zhao, Kelvin Guu, Adams Wei Yu, Brian Lester, Nan Du, Andrew M. Dai, Quoc V. Le
- 2022 (modified: 24 Apr 2023)
- ICLR 2022
- Readers: Everyone
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation
Tu Vu, Aditya Barua, Brian Lester, Daniel Cer, Mohit Iyyer, Noah Constant
- 2022 (modified: 25 Apr 2023)
- CoRR 2022
- Readers: Everyone

View all 27 publications

Co-Authors

View all 110 co-authors