Daily Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked significant interest in their generative capabilities, leading to the development of various commercial applications. The high cost of using the models drives application builders to maximize the value of generation under a limited inference budget. This paper presents a study of optimizing inference hyperparameters such as the number of responses, temperature and max tokens, which significantly affects the utility/cost of text generation. We design a framework named EcoOptiGen which leverages economical hyperparameter optimization and cost-based pruning. Experiments with the GPT-3.5/GPT-4 models on a variety of tasks verify its effectiveness. EcoOptiGen is implemented in the `autogen' package of the FLAML library: https://aka.ms/autogen.

The widespread of Large Language Models (LLMs) marks a significant milestone in generative AI. Nevertheless, the increasing context length and batch size in offline LLM inference escalate the memory requirement of the key-value (KV) cache, which imposes a huge burden on the GPU VRAM, especially for resource-constraint scenarios (e.g., edge computing and personal devices). Several cost-effective solutions leverage host memory or SSDs to reduce storage costs for offline inference scenarios and improve the throughput. Nevertheless, they suffer from significant performance penalties imposed by intensive KV cache accesses due to limited PCIe bandwidth. To address these issues, we propose InstInfer, a novel LLM inference system that offloads the most performance-critical computation (i.e., attention in decoding phase) and data (i.e., KV cache) parts to Computational Storage Drives (CSDs), which minimize the enormous KV transfer overheads. InstInfer designs a dedicated flash-aware in-storage attention engine with KV cache management mechanisms to exploit the high internal bandwidths of CSDs instead of being limited by the PCIe bandwidth. The optimized P2P transmission between GPU and CSDs further reduces data migration overheads. Experimental results demonstrate that for a 13B model using an NVIDIA A6000 GPU, InstInfer improves throughput for long-sequence inference by up to 11.1times, compared to existing SSD-based solutions such as FlexGen.

Large, pre-trained generative models have been increasingly popular and useful to both the research and wider communities. Specifically, BigGANs a class-conditional Generative Adversarial Networks trained on ImageNet---achieved excellent, state-of-the-art capability in generating realistic photos. However, fine-tuning or training BigGANs from scratch is practically impossible for most researchers and engineers because (1) GAN training is often unstable and suffering from mode-collapse; and (2) the training requires a significant amount of computation, 256 Google TPUs for 2 days or 8xV100 GPUs for 15 days. Importantly, many pre-trained generative models both in NLP and image domains were found to contain biases that are harmful to society. Thus, we need computationally-feasible methods for modifying and re-purposing these huge, pre-trained models for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective optimization method for improving and re-purposing BigGANs by fine-tuning only the class-embedding layer. We show the effectiveness of our model-editing approach in three tasks: (1) significantly improving the realism and diversity of samples of complete mode-collapse classes; (2) re-purposing ImageNet BigGANs for generating images for Places365; and (3) de-biasing or improving the sample diversity for selected ImageNet classes.

Instruction fine-tuning pretrained LLMs for diverse downstream tasks has demonstrated remarkable success and has captured the interest of both academics and practitioners. To ensure such fine-tuned LLMs align with human preferences, techniques such as RLHF and DPO have emerged. At the same time, there is increasing interest in smaller parameter counts for models. In this work, using OpenLLaMA 3Bv2 as a base model, we describe the recipe used to fine-tune the OpenBezoar family of models. In this recipe: We first generate synthetic instruction fine-tuning data using an open and commercially non-restrictive instruction fine-tuned variant of the Falcon-40B model under three schemes based on: LaMini-LM, WizardLM/Evol-Instruct (with databricks-dolly-15k as a seed dataset) and Orca (with the Flan Collection as a seed dataset), then filter these generations using GPT-4 as a human proxy. We then perform cost-effective QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning sequentially with each scheme. The resulting checkpoint is further fine-tuned with a subset of the HH-RLHF dataset to minimize distribution shift prior to using the DPO loss to obtain the final checkpoint. Evaluation is done with the LM Eval Harness tasks/metrics as well as on MT-Bench using the "LLM-as-a-judge" framework with Claude 2.1, with the finding that the final checkpoint, "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-DPO", demonstrates superior performance over many models at the 3B parameter scale, even outperforming the top model in one of the categories on the Huggingface Open LLM Leaderboard. We release "OpenBezoar-SFT", "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-SFT", "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-DPO" checkpoints, alongside our generated datasets on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/SurgeGlobal/open-bezoar-6620a24923e12127e9e2b9cc and our codebase at https://bitbucket.org/paladinanalytics/workspace/projects/OP.

With the fast growth of parameter size, it becomes increasingly challenging to deploy large generative models as they typically require large GPU memory consumption and massive computation. Unstructured model pruning has been a common approach to reduce both GPU memory footprint and the overall computation while retaining good model accuracy. However, the existing solutions do not provide a highly-efficient support for handling unstructured sparsity on modern GPUs, especially on the highly-structured Tensor Core hardware. Therefore, we propose Flash-LLM for enabling low-cost and highly-efficient large generative model inference with the sophisticated support of unstructured sparsity on high-performance but highly restrictive Tensor Cores. Based on our key observation that the main bottleneck of generative model inference is the several skinny matrix multiplications for which Tensor Cores would be significantly under-utilized due to low computational intensity, we propose a general Load-as-Sparse and Compute-as-Dense methodology for unstructured sparse matrix multiplication. The basic insight is to address the significant memory bandwidth bottleneck while tolerating redundant computations that are not critical for end-to-end performance on Tensor Cores. Based on this, we design an effective software framework for Tensor Core based unstructured SpMM, leveraging on-chip resources for efficient sparse data extraction and computation/memory-access overlapping. At SpMM kernel level, Flash-LLM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art library, i.e., Sputnik and SparTA by an average of 2.9x and 1.5x, respectively. At end-to-end framework level on OPT-30B/66B/175B models, for tokens per GPU-second, Flash-LLM achieves up to 3.8x and 3.6x improvement over DeepSpeed and FasterTransformer, respectively, with significantly lower inference cost.

In recent years, the size of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has grown by leaps and bounds. However, efficiency issues of these large-scale PLMs limit their utilization in real-world scenarios. We present a suite of cost-effective techniques for the use of PLMs to deal with the efficiency issues of pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. (1) We introduce knowledge inheritance to accelerate the pre-training process by exploiting existing PLMs instead of training models from scratch. (2) We explore the best practice of prompt tuning with large-scale PLMs. Compared with conventional fine-tuning, prompt tuning significantly reduces the number of task-specific parameters. (3) We implement a new inference toolkit, namely InfMoE, for using large-scale PLMs with limited computational resources. Based on our cost-effective pipeline, we pre-train two models: an encoder-decoder bilingual model with 11 billion parameters (CPM-2) and its corresponding MoE version with 198 billion parameters. In our experiments, we compare CPM-2 with mT5 on downstream tasks. Experimental results show that CPM-2 has excellent general language intelligence. Moreover, we validate the efficiency of InfMoE when conducting inference of large-scale models having tens of billions of parameters on a single GPU. All source code and model parameters are available at https://github.com/TsinghuaAI/CPM.

Bidirectional transformers excel at sentiment analysis, and Large Language Models (LLM) are effective zero-shot learners. Might they perform better as a team? This paper explores collaborative approaches between ELECTRA and GPT-4o for three-way sentiment classification. We fine-tuned (FT) four models (ELECTRA Base/Large, GPT-4o/4o-mini) using a mix of reviews from Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) and DynaSent. We provided input from ELECTRA to GPT as: predicted label, probabilities, and retrieved examples. Sharing ELECTRA Base FT predictions with GPT-4o-mini significantly improved performance over either model alone (82.74 macro F1 vs. 79.29 ELECTRA Base FT, 79.52 GPT-4o-mini) and yielded the lowest cost/performance ratio (\0.12/F1 point). However, when GPT models were fine-tuned, including predictions decreased performance. GPT-4o FT-M was the top performer (86.99), with GPT-4o-mini FT close behind (86.77) at much less cost (0.38 vs. \$1.59/F1 point). Our results show that augmenting prompts with predictions from fine-tuned encoders is an efficient way to boost performance, and a fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini is nearly as good as GPT-4o FT at 76% less cost. Both are affordable options for projects with limited resources.

Speculative decoding (SD) has attracted a significant amount of research attention due to the substantial speedup it can achieve for LLM inference. However, despite the high speedups they offer, speculative decoding methods often achieve optimal performance on high-end devices or with a substantial GPU memory overhead. Given limited memory and the necessity of quantization, a high-performing model on a high-end GPU can slow down by up to 7 times. To this end, we propose Skippy Simultaneous Speculative Decoding (or S3D), a cost-effective self-speculative SD method based on simultaneous multi-token decoding and mid-layer skipping. When compared against recent effective open-source SD systems, our method has achieved one of the top performance-memory ratios while requiring minimal architecture changes and training data. Leveraging our memory efficiency, we created a smaller yet more effective SD model based on Phi-3. It is 1.4 to 2 times faster than the quantized EAGLE model and operates in half-precision while using less VRAM.

We carried out a reproducibility study of InPars recipe for unsupervised training of neural rankers. As a by-product of this study, we developed a simple-yet-effective modification of InPars, which we called InPars-light. Unlike InPars, InPars-light uses only a freely available language model BLOOM and 7x-100x smaller ranking models. On all five English retrieval collections (used in the original InPars study) we obtained substantial (7-30%) and statistically significant improvements over BM25 in nDCG or MRR using only a 30M parameter six-layer MiniLM ranker. In contrast, in the InPars study only a 100x larger MonoT5-3B model consistently outperformed BM25, whereas their smaller MonoT5-220M model (which is still 7x larger than our MiniLM ranker), outperformed BM25 only on MS MARCO and TREC DL 2020. In a purely unsupervised setting, our 435M parameter DeBERTA v3 ranker was roughly at par with the 7x larger MonoT5-3B: In fact, on three out of five datasets, it slightly outperformed MonoT5-3B. Finally, these good results were achieved by re-ranking only 100 candidate documents compared to 1000 used in InPars. We believe that InPars-light is the first truly cost-effective prompt-based unsupervised recipe to train and deploy neural ranking models that outperform BM25.

To increase the availability and adoption of the soundscape standard, a low-cost calibration procedure for reproduction of audio stimuli over headphones was proposed as part of the global ``Soundscape Attributes Translation Project'' (SATP) for validating ISO/TS~12913-2:2018 perceived affective quality (PAQ) attribute translations. A previous preliminary study revealed significant deviations from the intended equivalent continuous A-weighted sound pressure levels (L_{A,eq}) using the open-circuit voltage (OCV) calibration procedure. For a more holistic human-centric perspective, the OCV method is further investigated here in terms of psychoacoustic parameters, including relevant exceedance levels to account for temporal effects on the same 27 stimuli from the SATP. Moreover, a within-subjects experiment with 36 participants was conducted to examine the effects of OCV calibration on the PAQ attributes in ISO/TS~12913-2:2018. Bland-Altman analysis of the objective indicators revealed large biases in the OCV method across all weighted sound level and loudness indicators; and roughness indicators at 5{\%} and 10{\%} exceedance levels. Significant perceptual differences due to the OCV method were observed in about 20{\%} of the stimuli, which did not correspond clearly with the biased acoustic indicators. A cautioned interpretation of the objective and perceptual differences due to small and unpaired samples nevertheless provide grounds for further investigation.

The introduction of ISO 12913-2:2018 has provided a framework for standardized data collection and reporting procedures for soundscape practitioners. A strong emphasis was placed on the use of calibrated head and torso simulators (HATS) for binaural audio capture to obtain an accurate subjective impression and acoustic measure of the soundscape under evaluation. To auralise the binaural recordings as recorded or at set levels, the audio stimuli and the headphone setup are usually calibrated with a HATS. However, calibrated HATS are too financially prohibitive for most research teams, inevitably diminishing the availability of the soundscape standard. With the increasing availability of soundscape binaural recording datasets, and the importance of cross-cultural validation of the soundscape ISO standards, e.g.\ via the Soundscape Attributes Translation Project (SATP), it is imperative to assess the suitability of cost-effective headphone calibration methods to maximise availability without severely compromising on accuracy. Hence, this study objectively examines an open-circuit voltage (OCV) calibration method in comparison to a calibrated HATS on various soundcard and headphone combinations. Preliminary experiments found that calibration with the OCV method differed significantly from the reference binaural recordings in sound pressure levels, whereas negligible differences in levels were observed with the HATS calibration.

The rapid progress in Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has exponentially increased demands of computational power and bandwidth. This, combined with the high costs of faster computing chips and interconnects, has significantly inflated High Performance Computing (HPC) construction costs. To address these challenges, we introduce the Fire-Flyer AI-HPC architecture, a synergistic hardware-software co-design framework and its best practices. For DL training, we deployed the Fire-Flyer 2 with 10,000 PCIe A100 GPUs, achieved performance approximating the DGX-A100 while reducing costs by half and energy consumption by 40%. We specifically engineered HFReduce to accelerate allreduce communication and implemented numerous measures to keep our Computation-Storage Integrated Network congestion-free. Through our software stack, including HaiScale, 3FS, and HAI-Platform, we achieved substantial scalability by overlapping computation and communication. Our system-oriented experience from DL training provides valuable insights to drive future advancements in AI-HPC.

As large language models (LLMs) become widespread in various application domains, a critical challenge the AI community is facing is how to train these large AI models in a cost-effective manner. Existing LLM training plans typically employ a heuristic based parallel training strategy which is based on empirical observations rather than grounded upon a thorough examination of the search space of LLM parallelization. Such limitation renders existing systems to leave significant performance left on the table, wasting millions of dollars worth of training cost. This paper presents our profiling-driven simulator called vTrain, providing AI practitioners a fast yet accurate software framework to determine an efficient and cost-effective LLM training system configuration. We demonstrate vTrain's practicality through several case studies, e.g., effectively evaluating optimal training parallelization strategies that balances training time and its associated training cost, efficient multi-tenant GPU cluster schedulers targeting multiple LLM training jobs, and determining a compute-optimal LLM model architecture given a fixed compute budget.

This paper aims to develop a novel cost-effective framework for face identification, which progressively maintains a batch of classifiers with the increasing face images of different individuals. By naturally combining two recently rising techniques: active learning (AL) and self-paced learning (SPL), our framework is capable of automatically annotating new instances and incorporating them into training under weak expert re-certification. We first initialize the classifier using a few annotated samples for each individual, and extract image features using the convolutional neural nets. Then, a number of candidates are selected from the unannotated samples for classifier updating, in which we apply the current classifiers ranking the samples by the prediction confidence. In particular, our approach utilizes the high-confidence and low-confidence samples in the self-paced and the active user-query way, respectively. The neural nets are later fine-tuned based on the updated classifiers. Such heuristic implementation is formulated as solving a concise active SPL optimization problem, which also advances the SPL development by supplementing a rational dynamic curriculum constraint. The new model finely accords with the "instructor-student-collaborative" learning mode in human education. The advantages of this proposed framework are two-folds: i) The required number of annotated samples is significantly decreased while the comparable performance is guaranteed. A dramatic reduction of user effort is also achieved over other state-of-the-art active learning techniques. ii) The mixture of SPL and AL effectively improves not only the classifier accuracy compared to existing AL/SPL methods but also the robustness against noisy data. We evaluate our framework on two challenging datasets, and demonstrate very promising results. (http://hcp.sysu.edu.cn/projects/aspl/)

Educational chatbots are a promising tool for assisting student learning. However, the development of effective chatbots in education has been challenging, as high-quality data is seldom available in this domain. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating synthetic teacher-student interactions grounded in a set of textbooks. Our approaches capture one aspect of learning interactions where curious students with partial knowledge interactively ask a teacher questions about the material in the textbook. We highlight various quality criteria that such dialogues should fulfill and compare several approaches relying on either prompting or fine-tuning large language models. We use synthetic dialogues to train educational chatbots and show benefits of further fine-tuning in different educational domains. However, human evaluation shows that our best data synthesis method still suffers from hallucinations and tends to reiterate information from previous conversations. Our findings offer insights for future efforts in synthesizing conversational data that strikes a balance between size and quality. We will open-source our data and code.

We present a series of long-context LLMs that support effective context windows of up to 32,768 tokens. Our model series are built through continual pretraining from Llama 2 with longer training sequences and on a dataset where long texts are upsampled. We perform extensive evaluation on language modeling, synthetic context probing tasks, and a wide range of research benchmarks. On research benchmarks, our models achieve consistent improvements on most regular tasks and significant improvements on long-context tasks over Llama 2. Notably, with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that does not require human-annotated long instruction data, the 70B variant can already surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on a suite of long-context tasks. Alongside these results, we provide an in-depth analysis on the individual components of our method. We delve into Llama's position encodings and discuss its limitation in modeling long dependencies. We also examine the impact of various design choices in the pretraining process, including the data mix and the training curriculum of sequence lengths -- our ablation experiments suggest that having abundant long texts in the pretrain dataset is not the key to achieving strong performance, and we empirically verify that long context continual pretraining is more efficient and similarly effective compared to pretraining from scratch with long sequences.

With the tremendous success of large transformer models in natural language understanding, down-sizing them for cost-effective deployments has become critical. Recent studies have explored the low-rank weight factorization techniques which are efficient to train, and apply out-of-the-box to any transformer architecture. Unfortunately, the low-rank assumption tends to be over-restrictive and hinders the expressiveness of the compressed model. This paper proposes, DSFormer, a simple alternative factorization scheme which expresses a target weight matrix as the product of a small dense and a semi-structured sparse matrix. The resulting approximation is more faithful to the weight distribution in transformers and therefore achieves a stronger efficiency-accuracy trade-off. Another concern with existing factorizers is their dependence on a task-unaware initialization step which degrades the accuracy of the resulting model. DSFormer addresses this issue through a novel Straight-Through Factorizer (STF) algorithm that jointly learns all the weight factorizations to directly maximize the final task accuracy. Extensive experiments on multiple natural language understanding benchmarks demonstrate that DSFormer obtains up to 40% better compression than the state-of-the-art low-rank factorizers, leading semi-structured sparsity baselines and popular knowledge distillation approaches. Our approach is also orthogonal to mainstream compressors and offers up to 50% additional compression when added to popular distilled, layer-shared and quantized transformers. We empirically evaluate the benefits of STF over conventional optimization practices.

Recent progress in vision language foundation models has shown their ability to understand multimodal data and resolve complicated vision language tasks, including robotics manipulation. We seek a straightforward way of making use of existing vision-language models (VLMs) with simple fine-tuning on robotics data. To this end, we derive a simple and novel vision-language manipulation framework, dubbed RoboFlamingo, built upon the open-source VLMs, OpenFlamingo. Unlike prior works, RoboFlamingo utilizes pre-trained VLMs for single-step vision-language comprehension, models sequential history information with an explicit policy head, and is slightly fine-tuned by imitation learning only on language-conditioned manipulation datasets. Such a decomposition provides RoboFlamingo the flexibility for open-loop control and deployment on low-performance platforms. By exceeding the state-of-the-art performance with a large margin on the tested benchmark, we show RoboFlamingo can be an effective and competitive alternative to adapt VLMs to robot control. Our extensive experimental results also reveal several interesting conclusions regarding the behavior of different pre-trained VLMs on manipulation tasks. We believe RoboFlamingo has the potential to be a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution for robotics manipulation, empowering everyone with the ability to fine-tune their own robotics policy.

There is growing interest in systems that generate captions for scientific figures. However, assessing these systems output poses a significant challenge. Human evaluation requires academic expertise and is costly, while automatic evaluation depends on often low-quality author-written captions. This paper investigates using large language models (LLMs) as a cost-effective, reference-free method for evaluating figure captions. We first constructed SCICAP-EVAL, a human evaluation dataset that contains human judgments for 3,600 scientific figure captions, both original and machine-made, for 600 arXiv figures. We then prompted LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-3 to score (1-6) each caption based on its potential to aid reader understanding, given relevant context such as figure-mentioning paragraphs. Results show that GPT-4, used as a zero-shot evaluator, outperformed all other models and even surpassed assessments made by Computer Science and Informatics undergraduates, achieving a Kendall correlation score of 0.401 with Ph.D. students rankings

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation using diffusion models have enabled cost-effective video-editing applications by leveraging pre-trained models, eliminating the need for resource-intensive training. However, the frame-independence of T2I generation often results in poor temporal consistency. Existing methods address this issue through temporal layer fine-tuning or inference-based temporal propagation, but these approaches suffer from high training costs or limited temporal coherence. To address these challenges, we propose a General and Efficient Adapter (GE-Adapter) that integrates temporal-spatial and semantic consistency with Baliteral DDIM inversion. This framework introduces three key components: (1) Frame-based Temporal Consistency Blocks (FTC Blocks) to capture frame-specific features and enforce smooth inter-frame transitions via temporally-aware loss functions; (2) Channel-dependent Spatial Consistency Blocks (SCD Blocks) employing bilateral filters to enhance spatial coherence by reducing noise and artifacts; and (3) Token-based Semantic Consistency Module (TSC Module) to maintain semantic alignment using shared prompt tokens and frame-specific tokens. Our method significantly improves perceptual quality, text-image alignment, and temporal coherence, as demonstrated on the MSR-VTT dataset. Additionally, it achieves enhanced fidelity and frame-to-frame coherence, offering a practical solution for T2V editing.

The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) has brought forth a diverse range of models with varying capabilities that excel in different tasks and domains. However, selecting the optimal LLM for user queries often involves a challenging trade-off between accuracy and cost, a problem exacerbated by the diverse demands of individual queries. In this work, we present a novel framework that formulates the LLM selection process as a multi-armed bandit problem, enabling dynamic and intelligent routing of queries to the most appropriate model. Our approach incorporates a preference-conditioned dynamic routing mechanism, allowing users to specify their preferences at inference time, thereby offering a customizable balance between performance and cost. Additionally, our selection policy is designed to generalize to unseen LLMs, ensuring adaptability to new models as they emerge. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and cost-effectiveness across various LLM platforms, showcasing the potential of our framework to adaptively optimize LLM selection in real-world scenarios.

Scaling up imitation learning for real-world applications requires efficient and cost-effective demonstration collection methods. Current teleoperation approaches, though effective, are expensive and inefficient due to the dependency on physical robot platforms. Alternative data sources like in-the-wild demonstrations can eliminate the need for physical robots and offer more scalable solutions. However, existing in-the-wild data collection devices have limitations: handheld devices offer restricted in-hand camera observation, while whole-body devices often require fine-tuning with robot data due to action inaccuracies. In this paper, we propose AirExo-2, a low-cost exoskeleton system for large-scale in-the-wild demonstration collection. By introducing the demonstration adaptor to transform the collected in-the-wild demonstrations into pseudo-robot demonstrations, our system addresses key challenges in utilizing in-the-wild demonstrations for downstream imitation learning in real-world environments. Additionally, we present RISE-2, a generalizable policy that integrates 2D and 3D perceptions, outperforming previous imitation learning policies in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks, even with limited demonstrations. By leveraging in-the-wild demonstrations collected and transformed by the AirExo-2 system, without the need for additional robot demonstrations, RISE-2 achieves comparable or superior performance to policies trained with teleoperated data, highlighting the potential of AirExo-2 for scalable and generalizable imitation learning. Project page: https://airexo.tech/airexo2

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into many online services. However, a major challenge in deploying LLMs is their high cost, due primarily to the use of expensive GPU instances. To address this problem, we find that the significant heterogeneity of GPU types presents an opportunity to increase GPU cost efficiency and reduce deployment costs. The broad and growing market of GPUs creates a diverse option space with varying costs and hardware specifications. Within this space, we show that there is not a linear relationship between GPU cost and performance, and identify three key LLM service characteristics that significantly affect which GPU type is the most cost effective: model request size, request rate, and latency service-level objective (SLO). We then present M\'elange, a framework for navigating the diversity of GPUs and LLM service specifications to derive the most cost-efficient set of GPUs for a given LLM service. We frame the task of GPU selection as a cost-aware bin-packing problem, where GPUs are bins with a capacity and cost, and items are request slices defined by a request size and rate. Upon solution, M\'elange derives the minimal-cost GPU allocation that adheres to a configurable latency SLO. Our evaluations across both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that M\'elange can reduce deployment costs by up to 77% as compared to utilizing only a single GPU type, highlighting the importance of making heterogeneity-aware GPU provisioning decisions for LLM serving. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/tyler-griggs/melange-release.

In this work, we explore a cost-effective framework for multilingual image generation. We find that, unlike models tuned on high-quality images with multilingual annotations, leveraging text encoders pre-trained on widely available, noisy Internet image-text pairs significantly enhances data efficiency in text-to-image (T2I) generation across multiple languages. Based on this insight, we introduce MuLan, Multi-Language adapter, a lightweight language adapter with fewer than 20M parameters, trained alongside a frozen text encoder and image diffusion model. Compared to previous multilingual T2I models, this framework offers: (1) Cost efficiency. Using readily accessible English data and off-the-shelf multilingual text encoders minimizes the training cost; (2) High performance. Achieving comparable generation capabilities in over 110 languages with CLIP similarity scores nearly matching those in English (38.61 for English vs. 37.61 for other languages); and (3) Broad applicability. Seamlessly integrating with compatible community tools like LoRA, LCM, ControlNet, and IP-Adapter, expanding its potential use cases.

Learning from demonstrations has shown to be an effective approach to robotic manipulation, especially with the recently collected large-scale robot data with teleoperation systems. Building an efficient teleoperation system across diverse robot platforms has become more crucial than ever. However, there is a notable lack of cost-effective and user-friendly teleoperation systems for different end-effectors, e.g., anthropomorphic robot hands and grippers, that can operate across multiple platforms. To address this issue, we develop ACE, a cross-platform visual-exoskeleton system for low-cost dexterous teleoperation. Our system utilizes a hand-facing camera to capture 3D hand poses and an exoskeleton mounted on a portable base, enabling accurate real-time capture of both finger and wrist poses. Compared to previous systems, which often require hardware customization according to different robots, our single system can generalize to humanoid hands, arm-hands, arm-gripper, and quadruped-gripper systems with high-precision teleoperation. This enables imitation learning for complex manipulation tasks on diverse platforms.

Due to the cost-prohibitive nature of training Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuning has emerged as an attractive alternative for specializing LLMs for specific tasks using limited compute resources in a cost-effective manner. In this paper, we characterize sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) based LLM fine-tuning to understand their accuracy and runtime performance on a single GPU. Our evaluation provides unique insights into the training efficacy of sparse and dense versions of MoE models, as well as their runtime characteristics, including maximum batch size, execution time breakdown, end-to-end throughput, GPU hardware utilization, and load distribution. Our study identifies the optimization of the MoE layer as crucial for further improving the performance of LLM fine-tuning. Using our profiling results, we also develop and validate an analytical model to estimate the cost of LLM fine-tuning on the cloud. This model, based on parameters of the model and GPU architecture, estimates LLM throughput and the cost of training, aiding practitioners in industry and academia to budget the cost of fine-tuning a specific model.

Query expansion has been employed for a long time to improve the accuracy of query retrievers. Earlier works relied on pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) techniques, which augment a query with terms extracted from documents retrieved in a first stage. However, the documents may be noisy hindering the effectiveness of the ranking. To avoid this, recent studies have instead used Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate additional content to expand a query. These techniques are prone to hallucination and also focus on the LLM usage cost. However, the cost may be dominated by the retrieval in several important practical scenarios, where the corpus is only available via APIs which charge a fee per retrieved document. We propose combining classic PRF techniques with LLMs and create a progressive query expansion algorithm ProQE that iteratively expands the query as it retrieves more documents. ProQE is compatible with both sparse and dense retrieval systems. Our experimental results on four retrieval datasets show that ProQE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 37% and is the most cost-effective.

In this paper, we present STRIDE, a Simple, Terrestrial, Reconfigurable, Intelligent, Dynamic, and Educational bipedal platform. STRIDE aims to propel bipedal robotics research and education by providing a cost-effective implementation with step-by-step instructions for building a bipedal robotic platform while providing flexible customizations via a modular and durable design. Moreover, a versatile terrain setup and a quantitative disturbance injection system are augmented to the robot platform to replicate natural terrains and push forces that can be used to evaluate legged locomotion in practical and adversarial scenarios. We demonstrate the functionalities of this platform by realizing an adaptive step-to-step dynamics based walking controller to achieve dynamic walking. Our work with the open-soured implementation shows that STRIDE is a highly versatile and durable platform that can be used in research and education to evaluate locomotion algorithms, mechanical designs, and robust and adaptative controls.

Neural networks have achieved remarkable performance in various application domains. Nevertheless, a large number of weights in pre-trained deep neural networks prohibit them from being deployed on smartphones and embedded systems. It is highly desirable to obtain lightweight versions of neural networks for inference in edge devices. Many cost-effective approaches were proposed to prune dense and convolutional layers that are common in deep neural networks and dominant in the parameter space. However, a unified theoretical foundation for the problem mostly is missing. In this paper, we identify the close connection between matrix spectrum learning and neural network training for dense and convolutional layers and argue that weight pruning is essentially a matrix sparsification process to preserve the spectrum. Based on the analysis, we also propose a matrix sparsification algorithm tailored for neural network pruning that yields better pruning result. We carefully design and conduct experiments to support our arguments. Hence we provide a consolidated viewpoint for neural network pruning and enhance the interpretability of deep neural networks by identifying and preserving the critical neural weights.

We propose Adam-mini, an optimizer that achieves on-par or better performance than AdamW with 45% to 50% less memory footprint. Adam-mini reduces memory by cutting down the learning rate resources in Adam (i.e., 1/v). We find that geq 90% of these learning rates in v could be harmlessly removed if we (1) carefully partition the parameters into blocks following our proposed principle on Hessian structure; (2) assign a single but good learning rate to each parameter block. We further find that, for each of these parameter blocks, there exists a single high-quality learning rate that can outperform Adam, provided that sufficient resources are available to search it out. We then provide one cost-effective way to find good learning rates and propose Adam-mini. Empirically, we verify that Adam-mini performs on par or better than AdamW on various language models sized from 125M to 7B for pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and RLHF. The reduced memory footprint of Adam-mini also alleviates communication overheads among GPUs and CPUs, thereby increasing throughput. For instance, Adam-mini achieves 49.6% higher throughput than AdamW when pre-training Llama2-7B on 2times A800-80GB GPUs, which saves 33% wall-clock time for pre-training.

his paper tackles a significant challenge faced by Vision Transformers (ViTs): their constrained scalability across different image resolutions. Typically, ViTs experience a performance decline when processing resolutions different from those seen during training. Our work introduces two key innovations to address this issue. Firstly, we propose a novel module for dynamic resolution adjustment, designed with a single Transformer block, specifically to achieve highly efficient incremental token integration. Secondly, we introduce fuzzy positional encoding in the Vision Transformer to provide consistent positional awareness across multiple resolutions, thereby preventing overfitting to any single training resolution. Our resulting model, ViTAR (Vision Transformer with Any Resolution), demonstrates impressive adaptability, achieving 83.3\% top-1 accuracy at a 1120x1120 resolution and 80.4\% accuracy at a 4032x4032 resolution, all while reducing computational costs. ViTAR also shows strong performance in downstream tasks such as instance and semantic segmentation and can easily combined with self-supervised learning techniques like Masked AutoEncoder. Our work provides a cost-effective solution for enhancing the resolution scalability of ViTs, paving the way for more versatile and efficient high-resolution image processing.

We present Jamba-1.5, new instruction-tuned large language models based on our Jamba architecture. Jamba is a hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture of experts architecture, providing high throughput and low memory usage across context lengths, while retaining the same or better quality as Transformer models. We release two model sizes: Jamba-1.5-Large, with 94B active parameters, and Jamba-1.5-Mini, with 12B active parameters. Both models are fine-tuned for a variety of conversational and instruction-following capabilties, and have an effective context length of 256K tokens, the largest amongst open-weight models. To support cost-effective inference, we introduce ExpertsInt8, a novel quantization technique that allows fitting Jamba-1.5-Large on a machine with 8 80GB GPUs when processing 256K-token contexts without loss of quality. When evaluated on a battery of academic and chatbot benchmarks, Jamba-1.5 models achieve excellent results while providing high throughput and outperforming other open-weight models on long-context benchmarks. The model weights for both sizes are publicly available under the Jamba Open Model License and we release ExpertsInt8 as open source.

With the increasing complexity of generative AI models, post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising solution for deploying hyper-scale models on edge devices such as mobile devices and TVs. Existing PTQ schemes, however, consume considerable time and resources, which could be a bottleneck in real situations where frequent model updates and multiple hyper-parameter tunings are required. As a cost-effective alternative, one-shot PTQ schemes have been proposed. Still, the performance is somewhat limited because they cannot consider the inter-layer dependency within the attention module, which is a very important feature of Transformers. In this paper, we thus propose a novel PTQ algorithm that balances accuracy and efficiency. The key idea of the proposed algorithm called aespa is to perform quantization layer-wise for efficiency while considering cross-layer dependency to preserve the attention score. Through extensive experiments on various language models and complexity analysis, we demonstrate that aespa is accurate and efficient in quantizing Transformer models.

Large language models (LLMs) are documented to struggle in settings that require complex reasoning. Nevertheless, instructing the model to break down the problem into smaller reasoning steps (Wei et al., 2022), or ensembling various generations through modifying decoding steps (Wang et al., 2023) boosts performance. Current methods assume that the input prompt is fixed and expect the decoding strategies to introduce the diversity needed for ensembling. In this work, we relax this assumption and discuss how one can create and leverage variations of the input prompt as a means to diversity of thought to improve model performance. We propose a method that automatically improves prompt diversity by soliciting feedback from the LLM to ideate approaches that fit for the problem. We then ensemble the diverse prompts in our method DIV-SE (DIVerse reasoning path Self-Ensemble) across multiple inference calls. We also propose a cost-effective alternative where diverse prompts are used within a single inference call; we call this IDIV-SE (In-call DIVerse reasoning path Self-Ensemble). Under a fixed generation budget, DIV-SE and IDIV-SE outperform the previously discussed baselines using both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on several reasoning benchmarks, without modifying the decoding process. Additionally, DIV-SE advances state-of-the-art performance on recent planning benchmarks (Valmeekam et al., 2023), exceeding the highest previously reported accuracy by at least 29.6 percentage points on the most challenging 4/5 Blocksworld task. Our results shed light on how to enforce prompt diversity toward LLM reasoning and thereby improve the pareto frontier of the accuracy-cost trade-off.

Linear transformers have emerged as a subquadratic-time alternative to softmax attention and have garnered significant interest due to their fixed-size recurrent state that lowers inference cost. However, their original formulation suffers from poor scaling and underperforms compute-matched transformers. Recent linear models such as RWKV and Mamba have attempted to address these shortcomings by proposing novel time-mixing and gating architectures, but pre-training large language models requires significant data and compute investments. Thus, the search for subquadratic architectures is limited by the availability of compute and quality pre-training datasets. As a cost-effective alternative to pre-training linear transformers, we propose Scalable UPtraining for Recurrent Attention (SUPRA). We present a method to uptrain existing large pre-trained transformers into Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with a modest compute budget. This allows us to leverage the strong pre-training data and performance of existing transformer LLMs, while requiring 5% of the training cost. We find that our linearization technique leads to competitive performance on standard benchmarks, but we identify persistent in-context learning and long-context modeling shortfalls for even the largest linear models. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/TRI-ML/linear_open_lm.

In response to the evolving challenges posed by small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which possess the potential to transport harmful payloads or independently cause damage, we introduce MMAUD: a comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset. MMAUD addresses a critical gap in contemporary threat detection methodologies by focusing on drone detection, UAV-type classification, and trajectory estimation. MMAUD stands out by combining diverse sensory inputs, including stereo vision, various Lidars, Radars, and audio arrays. It offers a unique overhead aerial detection vital for addressing real-world scenarios with higher fidelity than datasets captured on specific vantage points using thermal and RGB. Additionally, MMAUD provides accurate Leica-generated ground truth data, enhancing credibility and enabling confident refinement of algorithms and models, which has never been seen in other datasets. Most existing works do not disclose their datasets, making MMAUD an invaluable resource for developing accurate and efficient solutions. Our proposed modalities are cost-effective and highly adaptable, allowing users to experiment and implement new UAV threat detection tools. Our dataset closely simulates real-world scenarios by incorporating ambient heavy machinery sounds. This approach enhances the dataset's applicability, capturing the exact challenges faced during proximate vehicular operations. It is expected that MMAUD can play a pivotal role in advancing UAV threat detection, classification, trajectory estimation capabilities, and beyond. Our dataset, codes, and designs will be available in https://github.com/ntu-aris/MMAUD.

Large language models (LLMs) have experienced notable advancements in generating coherent and contextually relevant responses. However, hallucinations - incorrect or unfounded claims - are still prevalent, prompting the creation of automated metrics to detect these in LLM outputs. Our contributions include: introducing ChainPoll, an innovative hallucination detection method that excels compared to its counterparts, and unveiling RealHall, a refined collection of benchmark datasets to assess hallucination detection metrics from recent studies. While creating RealHall, we assessed tasks and datasets from previous hallucination detection studies and observed that many are not suitable for the potent LLMs currently in use. Overcoming this, we opted for four datasets challenging for modern LLMs and pertinent to real-world scenarios. Using RealHall, we conducted a comprehensive comparison of ChainPoll with numerous hallucination metrics from recent studies. Our findings indicate that ChainPoll outperforms in all RealHall benchmarks, achieving an overall AUROC of 0.781. This surpasses the next best theoretical method by 11% and exceeds industry standards by over 23%. Additionally, ChainPoll is cost-effective and offers greater transparency than other metrics. We introduce two novel metrics to assess LLM hallucinations: Adherence and Correctness. Adherence is relevant to Retrieval Augmented Generation workflows, evaluating an LLM's analytical capabilities within given documents and contexts. In contrast, Correctness identifies logical and reasoning errors.

Knowledge probing evaluates the extent to which a language model (LM) has acquired relational knowledge during its pre-training phase. It provides a cost-effective means of comparing LMs of different sizes and training setups and is useful for monitoring knowledge gained or lost during continual learning (CL). In prior work, we presented an improved knowledge probe called BEAR (Wiland et al., 2024), which enables the comparison of LMs trained with different pre-training objectives (causal and masked LMs) and addresses issues of skewed distributions in previous probes to deliver a more unbiased reading of LM knowledge. With this paper, we present LM-PUB- QUIZ, a Python framework and leaderboard built around the BEAR probing mechanism that enables researchers and practitioners to apply it in their work. It provides options for standalone evaluation and direct integration into the widely-used training pipeline of the Hugging Face TRANSFORMERS library. Further, it provides a fine-grained analysis of different knowledge types to assist users in better understanding the knowledge in each evaluated LM. We publicly release LM-PUB-QUIZ as an open-source project.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique used to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with contextually relevant, time-critical, or domain-specific information without altering the underlying model parameters. However, constructing RAG systems that can effectively synthesize information from large and diverse set of documents remains a significant challenge. We introduce a novel data-centric RAG workflow for LLMs, transforming the traditional retrieve-then-read system into a more advanced prepare-then-rewrite-then-retrieve-then-read framework, to achieve higher domain expert-level understanding of the knowledge base. Our methodology relies on generating metadata and synthetic Questions and Answers (QA) for each document, as well as introducing the new concept of Meta Knowledge Summary (MK Summary) for metadata-based clusters of documents. The proposed innovations enable personalized user-query augmentation and in-depth information retrieval across the knowledge base. Our research makes two significant contributions: using LLMs as evaluators and employing new comparative performance metrics, we demonstrate that (1) using augmented queries with synthetic question matching significantly outperforms traditional RAG pipelines that rely on document chunking (p < 0.01), and (2) meta knowledge-augmented queries additionally significantly improve retrieval precision and recall, as well as the final answers breadth, depth, relevancy, and specificity. Our methodology is cost-effective, costing less than $20 per 2000 research papers using Claude 3 Haiku, and can be adapted with any fine-tuning of either the language or embedding models to further enhance the performance of end-to-end RAG pipelines.

Social scientists use surveys to probe the opinions and beliefs of populations, but these methods are slow, costly, and prone to biases. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable creating computational representations or "digital twins" of populations that generate human-like responses mimicking the population's language, styles, and attitudes. We introduce Community-Cross-Instruct, an unsupervised framework for aligning LLMs to online communities to elicit their beliefs. Given a corpus of a community's online discussions, Community-Cross-Instruct automatically generates instruction-output pairs by an advanced LLM to (1) finetune an foundational LLM to faithfully represent that community, and (2) evaluate the alignment of the finetuned model to the community. We demonstrate the method's utility in accurately representing political and fitness communities on Reddit. Unlike prior methods requiring human-authored instructions, Community-Cross-Instruct generates instructions in a fully unsupervised manner, enhancing scalability and generalization across domains. This work enables cost-effective and automated surveying of diverse online communities.

Amidst the advancements in image-based Large Vision-Language Models (image-LVLM), the transition to video-based models (video-LVLM) is hindered by the limited availability of quality video data. This paper addresses the challenge by leveraging the visual commonalities between images and videos to efficiently evolve image-LVLMs into video-LVLMs. We present a cost-effective video-LVLM that enhances model architecture, introduces innovative training strategies, and identifies the most effective types of video instruction data. Our innovative weighted token sampler significantly compresses the visual token numbers of each video frame, effectively cutting computational expenses. We also find that judiciously using just 10% of the video data, compared to prior video-LVLMs, yields impressive results during various training phases. Moreover, we delve into the influence of video instruction data in limited-resource settings, highlighting the significance of incorporating video training data that emphasizes temporal understanding to enhance model performance. The resulting Fewer Tokens and Fewer Videos LVLM (FTFV-LVLM) exhibits exceptional performance across video and image benchmarks, validating our model's design and training approaches.

The use of LLMs for natural language processing has become a popular trend in the past two years, driven by their formidable capacity for context comprehension and learning, which has inspired a wave of research from academics and industry professionals. However, for certain NLP tasks, such as NER, the performance of LLMs still falls short when compared to supervised learning methods. In our research, we developed a NER processing framework called LTNER that incorporates a revolutionary Contextualized Entity Marking Gen Method. By leveraging the cost-effective GPT-3.5 coupled with context learning that does not require additional training, we significantly improved the accuracy of LLMs in handling NER tasks. The F1 score on the CoNLL03 dataset increased from the initial 85.9% to 91.9%, approaching the performance of supervised fine-tuning. This outcome has led to a deeper understanding of the potential of LLMs.

Different outdoor illumination conditions drastically alter the appearance of urban scenes, and they can harm the performance of image-based robot perception systems if not seen during training. Camera simulation provides a cost-effective solution to create a large dataset of images captured under different lighting conditions. Towards this goal, we propose LightSim, a neural lighting camera simulation system that enables diverse, realistic, and controllable data generation. LightSim automatically builds lighting-aware digital twins at scale from collected raw sensor data and decomposes the scene into dynamic actors and static background with accurate geometry, appearance, and estimated scene lighting. These digital twins enable actor insertion, modification, removal, and rendering from a new viewpoint, all in a lighting-aware manner. LightSim then combines physically-based and learnable deferred rendering to perform realistic relighting of modified scenes, such as altering the sun location and modifying the shadows or changing the sun brightness, producing spatially- and temporally-consistent camera videos. Our experiments show that LightSim generates more realistic relighting results than prior work. Importantly, training perception models on data generated by LightSim can significantly improve their performance.

LLMs such as ChatGPT and PaLM can be utilized to train on a new language and revitalize low-resource languages. However, it is evidently very costly to pretrain pr fine-tune LLMs to adopt new languages. Another challenge is the limitation of benchmark datasets and the metrics used to measure the performance of models in multilingual settings. This paper proposes cost-effective solutions to both of the aforementioned challenges. We introduce the Multilingual Instruction-Tuning Dataset (MITS), which is comprised of the translation of Alpaca-52K, Dolly-15K, and Vicuna Benchmark in 132 languages. Also, we propose a new method called TaCo: Translation-Assisted Cross-Linguality, which make uses of translation in a chain-of-thought process to instruction-tune LLMs on a new languages through a curriculum learning process. As a proof of concept, we experimented with the instruction-tuned Guanaco-33B model and performed further instruction tuning using the TaCo method in three low-resource languages and one high-resource language. Our results show that the TaCo method impresses the GPT-4 with 82% for a low-resource language in the Vicuna Benchmark dataset, and boosts performance by double in contrast to the performance of instruction tuning only. Our results show that TaCo is a promising method for creating multilingual LLMs, even for low-resource languages. We have released our datasets and the model adapters, and encourage the research community to make use of these resources towards advancing work on multilingual LLMs.

Object hallucination poses a significant challenge in vision-language (VL) models, often leading to the generation of nonsensical or unfaithful responses with non-existent objects. However, the absence of a general measurement for evaluating object hallucination in VL models has hindered our understanding and ability to mitigate this issue. In this work, we present NOPE (Negative Object Presence Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed to assess object hallucination in VL models through visual question answering (VQA). We propose a cost-effective and scalable approach utilizing large language models to generate 29.5k synthetic negative pronoun (NegP) data of high quality for NOPE. We extensively investigate the performance of 10 state-of-the-art VL models in discerning the non-existence of objects in visual questions, where the ground truth answers are denoted as NegP (e.g., "none"). Additionally, we evaluate their standard performance on visual questions on 9 other VQA datasets. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that no VL model is immune to the vulnerability of object hallucination, as all models achieve accuracy below 10\% on NegP. Furthermore, we uncover that lexically diverse visual questions, question types with large scopes, and scene-relevant objects capitalize the risk of object hallucination in VL models.

Online job ads serve as a valuable source of information for skill requirements, playing a crucial role in labor market analysis and e-recruitment processes. Since such ads are typically formatted in free text, natural language processing (NLP) technologies are required to automatically process them. We specifically focus on the task of detecting skills (mentioned literally, or implicitly described) and linking them to a large skill ontology, making it a challenging case of extreme multi-label classification (XMLC). Given that there is no sizable labeled (training) dataset are available for this specific XMLC task, we propose techniques to leverage general Large Language Models (LLMs). We describe a cost-effective approach to generate an accurate, fully synthetic labeled dataset for skill extraction, and present a contrastive learning strategy that proves effective in the task. Our results across three skill extraction benchmarks show a consistent increase of between 15 to 25 percentage points in R-Precision@5 compared to previously published results that relied solely on distant supervision through literal matches.

Temporal action segmentation in videos has drawn much attention recently. Timestamp supervision is a cost-effective way for this task. To obtain more information to optimize the model, the existing method generated pseudo frame-wise labels iteratively based on the output of a segmentation model and the timestamp annotations. However, this practice may introduce noise and oscillation during the training, and lead to performance degeneration. To address this problem, we propose a new framework for timestamp supervised temporal action segmentation by introducing a teacher model parallel to the segmentation model to help stabilize the process of model optimization. The teacher model can be seen as an ensemble of the segmentation model, which helps to suppress the noise and to improve the stability of pseudo labels. We further introduce a segmentally smoothing loss, which is more focused and cohesive, to enforce the smooth transition of the predicted probabilities within action instances. The experiments on three datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method and performs comparably against the fully-supervised methods at a much lower annotation cost.

Cross-modal alignment Learning integrates information from different modalities like text, image, audio and video to create unified models. This approach develops shared representations and learns correlations between modalities, enabling applications such as visual question answering and audiovisual content analysis. Current techniques rely on large modality-specific encoders, necessitating fine-tuning or training from scratch on vast aligned datasets (e.g., text-image, text-audio, image-audio). This approach has limitations: (i) it is very expensive due to the need for training large encoders on extensive datasets, (ii) acquiring aligned large paired datasets is challenging, and (iii) adding new modalities requires retraining the entire framework to incorporate these modalities. To address these issues, we propose OneEncoder, a lightweight framework that progressively represents and aligns four modalities (image, text, audio, video). Initially, we train a lightweight Universal Projection module (UP) to align image and text modalities. Then, we freeze the pretrained UP and progressively align future modalities to those already aligned. OneEncoder operates efficiently and cost-effectively, even in scenarios where vast aligned datasets are unavailable, due to its lightweight design. Trained on small paired datasets, it shows strong performance in tasks like classification, querying, and visual question answering, surpassing methods that rely on large datasets and specialized encoders.

We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token. To achieve efficient inference and cost-effective training, DeepSeek-V3 adopts Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek-V2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning stages to fully harness its capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models. Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training. In addition, its training process is remarkably stable. Throughout the entire training process, we did not experience any irrecoverable loss spikes or perform any rollbacks. The model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP and multimodal tasks. Despite these successes, their development faces two main challenges: (i) high computational cost; and (ii) difficulty in conducting fair and objective evaluations. LLMs are prohibitively expensive, making it feasible for only a few major players to undertake their training, thereby constraining both research and application opportunities. This underscores the importance of cost-effective LLM training. In this paper, we utilize a growth strategy to significantly reduce LLM training cost. We demonstrate that an LLM with 101B parameters and 0.31TB tokens can be trained on a 100K budget. We also adopt a systematic evaluation paradigm for the IQ evaluation of LLMs, in complement to existing evaluations that focus more on knowledge-oriented abilities. We introduce our benchmark including evaluations on important aspects of intelligence including symbolic mapping, itrule understanding, pattern mining, and anti-interference. Such evaluations minimize the potential impact of memorization. Experimental results show that our model FLM-101B, trained with a budget of 100K, achieves comparable performance to powerful and well-known models, eg GPT-3 and GLM-130B, especially in the IQ benchmark evaluations with contexts unseen in training data. The checkpoint of FLM-101B will be open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/CofeAI/FLM-101B.

In the era of advanced multimodel learning, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4V have made remarkable strides towards bridging language and visual elements. However, the closed-source nature and considerable computational demand present notable challenges for universal usage and modifications. This is where open-source MLLMs like LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 come in, presenting groundbreaking achievements across tasks. Despite these accomplishments, computational efficiency remains an unresolved issue, as these models, like LLaVA-v1.5-13B, require substantial resources. Addressing these issues, we introduce TinyGPT-V, a new-wave model marrying impressive performance with commonplace computational capacity. It stands out by requiring merely a 24G GPU for training and an 8G GPU or CPU for inference. Built upon Phi-2, TinyGPT-V couples an effective language backbone with pre-trained vision modules from BLIP-2 or CLIP. TinyGPT-V's 2.8B parameters can undergo a unique quantisation process, suitable for local deployment and inference tasks on 8G various devices. Our work fosters further developments for designing cost-effective, efficient, and high-performing MLLMs, expanding their applicability in a broad array of real-world scenarios. Furthermore this paper proposed a new paradigm of Multimodal Large Language Model via small backbones. Our code and training weights are placed at: https://github.com/DLYuanGod/TinyGPT-V and https://huggingface.co/Tyrannosaurus/TinyGPT-V respectively.

Merging Large Language Models (LLMs) is a cost-effective technique for combining multiple expert LLMs into a single versatile model, retaining the expertise of the original ones. However, current approaches often overlook the importance of safety alignment during merging, leading to highly misaligned models. This work investigates the effects of model merging on alignment. We evaluate several popular model merging techniques, demonstrating that existing methods do not only transfer domain expertise but also propagate misalignment. We propose a simple two-step approach to address this problem: (i) generating synthetic safety and domain-specific data, and (ii) incorporating these generated data into the optimization process of existing data-aware model merging techniques. This allows us to treat alignment as a skill that can be maximized in the resulting merged LLM. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of integrating alignment-related data during merging, resulting in models that excel in both domain expertise and alignment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing with exceptional task generalization capabilities. Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) offers a cost-effective fine-tuning solution, freezing the original model parameters and training only lightweight, low-rank adapter matrices. However, the memory footprint of LoRA is largely dominated by the original model parameters. To mitigate this, we propose LoRAM, a memory-efficient LoRA training scheme founded on the intuition that many neurons in over-parameterized LLMs have low training utility but are essential for inference. LoRAM presents a unique twist: it trains on a pruned (small) model to obtain pruned low-rank matrices, which are then recovered and utilized with the original (large) model for inference. Additionally, minimal-cost continual pre-training, performed by the model publishers in advance, aligns the knowledge discrepancy between pruned and original models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LoRAM across various pruning strategies and downstream tasks. For a model with 70 billion parameters, LoRAM enables training on a GPU with only 20G HBM, replacing an A100-80G GPU for LoRA training and 15 GPUs for full fine-tuning. Specifically, QLoRAM implemented by structured pruning combined with 4-bit quantization, for LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B), reduces the parameter storage cost that dominates the memory usage in low-rank matrix training by 15.81times (16.95times), while achieving dominant performance gains over both the original LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B) and LoRA-trained LLaMA-3.1-8B (LLaMA-2-13B).

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a cost-effective approach to injecting real-time knowledge into large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, constructing and validating high-quality knowledge repositories require considerable effort. We propose a pre-retrieval framework named Pseudo-Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (PG-RAG), which conceptualizes LLMs as students by providing them with abundant raw reading materials and encouraging them to engage in autonomous reading to record factual information in their own words. The resulting concise, well-organized mental indices are interconnected through common topics or complementary facts to form a pseudo-graph database. During the retrieval phase, PG-RAG mimics the human behavior in flipping through notes, identifying fact paths and subsequently exploring the related contexts. Adhering to the principle of the path taken by many is the best, it integrates highly corroborated fact paths to provide a structured and refined sub-graph assisting LLMs. We validated PG-RAG on three specialized question-answering datasets. In single-document tasks, PG-RAG significantly outperformed the current best baseline, KGP-LLaMA, across all key evaluation metrics, with an average overall performance improvement of 11.6%. Specifically, its BLEU score increased by approximately 14.3%, and the QE-F1 metric improved by 23.7%. In multi-document scenarios, the average metrics of PG-RAG were at least 2.35% higher than the best baseline. Notably, the BLEU score and QE-F1 metric showed stable improvements of around 7.55% and 12.75%, respectively. Our code: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/PGRAG.

With the recent appearance of LLMs in practical settings, having methods that can effectively detect factual inconsistencies is crucial to reduce the propagation of misinformation and improve trust in model outputs. When testing on existing factual consistency benchmarks, we find that a few large language models (LLMs) perform competitively on classification benchmarks for factual inconsistency detection compared to traditional non-LLM methods. However, a closer analysis reveals that most LLMs fail on more complex formulations of the task and exposes issues with existing evaluation benchmarks, affecting evaluation precision. To address this, we propose a new protocol for inconsistency detection benchmark creation and implement it in a 10-domain benchmark called SummEdits. This new benchmark is 20 times more cost-effective per sample than previous benchmarks and highly reproducible, as we estimate inter-annotator agreement at about 0.9. Most LLMs struggle on SummEdits, with performance close to random chance. The best-performing model, GPT-4, is still 8\% below estimated human performance, highlighting the gaps in LLMs' ability to reason about facts and detect inconsistencies when they occur.

Holographic Metasurface Transceivers (HMTs) are emerging as cost-effective substitutes to large antenna arrays for beamforming in Millimeter and TeraHertz wave communication. However, to achieve desired channel gains through beamforming in HMT, phase-shifts of a large number of elements need to be appropriately set, which is challenging. Also, these optimal phase-shifts depend on the location of the receivers, which could be unknown. In this work, we develop a learning algorithm using a {\it fixed-budget multi-armed bandit framework} to beamform and maximize received signal strength at the receiver for far-field regions. Our algorithm, named \Algo exploits the parametric form of channel gains of the beams, which can be expressed in terms of two {\it phase-shifting parameters}. Even after parameterization, the problem is still challenging as phase-shifting parameters take continuous values. To overcome this, {\it\HB} works with the discrete values of phase-shifting parameters and exploits their unimodal relations with channel gains to learn the optimal values faster. We upper bound the probability of {\it\HB} incorrectly identifying the (discrete) optimal phase-shift parameters in terms of the number of pilots used in learning. We show that this probability decays exponentially with the number of pilot signals. We demonstrate that {\it\HB} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms through extensive simulations.

This paper presents a simple and cost-effective method for synthesizing data to train question-answering systems. For training, fine-tuning GPT models is a common practice in resource-rich languages like English, however, it becomes challenging for non-English languages due to the scarcity of sufficient question-answer (QA) pairs. Existing approaches use question and answer generators trained on human-authored QA pairs, which involves substantial human expenses. In contrast, we use an instruct-tuned model to generate QA pairs in a zero-shot or few-shot manner. We conduct experiments to compare various strategies for obtaining QA pairs from the instruct-tuned model. The results demonstrate that a model trained on our proposed synthetic data achieves comparable performance to a model trained on manually curated datasets, without incurring human costs.

Dementia is a progressive cognitive syndrome with Alzheimer's disease (AD) as the leading cause. Conversation-based AD detection offers a cost-effective alternative to clinical methods, as language dysfunction is an early biomarker of AD. However, most prior research has framed AD detection as a binary classification problem, limiting the ability to identify Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)-a crucial stage for early intervention. Also, studies primarily rely on single-language datasets, mainly in English, restricting cross-language generalizability. To address this gap, we make three key contributions. First, we introduce a novel, multilingual dataset for AD detection by unifying 16 publicly available dementia-related conversational datasets. This corpus spans English, Spanish, Chinese, and Greek and incorporates both audio and text data derived from a variety of cognitive assessment tasks. Second, we perform finer-grained classification, including MCI, and evaluate various classifiers using sparse and dense text representations. Third, we conduct experiments in monolingual and multilingual settings, finding that some languages benefit from multilingual training while others perform better independently. This study highlights the challenges in multilingual AD detection and enables future research on both language-specific approaches and techniques aimed at improving model generalization and robustness.

We propose two medium-baseline, kiloton-scale neutrino experiments to study neutrinos from LHC proton-proton collisions: SINE, a surface-based scintillator panel detector observing muon neutrinos from the CMS interaction point, and UNDINE, a water Cherenkov detector submerged in lake Geneva observing all-flavor neutrinos from LHCb. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we estimate millions of neutrino interactions during the high-luminosity LHC era. We show that these datasets can constrain neutrino cross sections, charm production in pp collisions, and strangeness enhancement as a solution to the cosmic-ray muon puzzle. SINE and UNDINE thus offer a cost-effective medium-baseline complement to the proposed short-baseline forward physics facility.

Current inference scaling methods, such as Self-consistency and Best-of-N, have proven effective in improving the accuracy of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on the quality of candidate responses and are unable to produce correct answers when all candidates are incorrect. In this paper, we propose a novel inference scaling strategy, CoT-based Synthesizer, which leverages CoT reasoning to synthesize superior answers by analyzing complementary information from multiple candidate responses, even when all candidate responses are flawed. To enable a lightweight and cost-effective implementation, we introduce an automated data generation pipeline that creates diverse training data. This allows smaller LLMs trained on this data to improve the inference accuracy of larger models, including API-based LLMs. Experimental results across four benchmark datasets with seven policy models demonstrate that our method significantly enhances performance, with gains of 11.8% for Llama3-8B and 10.3% for GPT-4o on the MATH dataset. The corresponding training data and code are publicly available on https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/CoT-based-Synthesizer.

Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have become a powerful tool for bridging the gap between visual and linguistic understanding. However, the conventional learning approaches for VLMs often suffer from limitations, such as the high resource requirements of collecting and training image-text paired data. Recent research has suggested that language understanding plays a crucial role in the performance of VLMs, potentially indicating that text-only training could be a viable approach. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of enhancing fine-grained visual understanding in VLMs through text-only training. Inspired by how humans develop visual concept understanding, where rich textual descriptions can guide visual recognition, we hypothesize that VLMs can also benefit from leveraging text-based representations to improve their visual recognition abilities. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two distinct domains: fine-grained species classification and cultural visual understanding tasks. Our findings demonstrate that text-only training can be comparable to conventional image-text training while significantly reducing computational costs. This suggests a more efficient and cost-effective pathway for advancing VLM capabilities, particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements, but their monolithic nature presents challenges in terms of scalability, cost, and customization. This paper introduces the Composition of Experts (CoE), a modular compound AI system leveraging multiple expert LLMs. CoE leverages a router to dynamically select the most appropriate expert for a given input, enabling efficient utilization of resources and improved performance. We formulate the general problem of training a CoE and discuss inherent complexities associated with it. We propose a two-step routing approach to address these complexities that first uses a router to classify the input into distinct categories followed by a category-to-expert mapping to obtain desired experts. CoE offers a flexible and cost-effective solution to build compound AI systems. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of CoE in achieving superior performance with reduced computational overhead. Given that CoE comprises of many expert LLMs it has unique system requirements for cost-effective serving. We present an efficient implementation of CoE leveraging SambaNova SN40L RDUs unique three-tiered memory architecture. CoEs obtained using open weight LLMs Qwen/Qwen2-7B-Instruct, google/gemma-2-9b-it, google/gemma-2-27b-it, meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct and Qwen/Qwen2-72B-Instruct achieve a score of 59.4 with merely 31 billion average active parameters on Arena-Hard and a score of 9.06 with 54 billion average active parameters on MT-Bench.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language processing but exhibit significant performance gaps among different languages. Most existing approaches to address these disparities rely on pretraining or fine-tuning, which are resource-intensive. To overcome these limitations without incurring significant costs, we propose Inference-Time Cross-Lingual Intervention (INCLINE), a novel framework that enhances LLM performance on low-performing (source) languages by aligning their internal representations with those of high-performing (target) languages during inference. INCLINE initially learns alignment matrices using parallel sentences from source and target languages through a Least-Squares optimization, and then applies these matrices during inference to transform the low-performing language representations toward the high-performing language space. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks with five LLMs demonstrate that INCLINE significantly improves performance across diverse tasks and languages, compared to recent strong baselines. Our analysis demonstrates that INCLINE is highly cost-effective and applicable to a wide range of applications. In addition, we release the code to foster research along this line: https://github.com/weixuan-wang123/INCLINE.

Assistive technologies for the visually impaired have evolved to facilitate interaction with a complex and dynamic world. In this paper, we introduce AIris, an AI-powered wearable device that provides environmental awareness and interaction capabilities to visually impaired users. AIris combines a sophisticated camera mounted on eyewear with a natural language processing interface, enabling users to receive real-time auditory descriptions of their surroundings. We have created a functional prototype system that operates effectively in real-world conditions. AIris demonstrates the ability to accurately identify objects and interpret scenes, providing users with a sense of spatial awareness previously unattainable with traditional assistive devices. The system is designed to be cost-effective and user-friendly, supporting general and specialized tasks: face recognition, scene description, text reading, object recognition, money counting, note-taking, and barcode scanning. AIris marks a transformative step, bringing AI enhancements to assistive technology, enabling rich interactions with a human-like feel.

Recent works have shown the benefits to LLMs from fine-tuning golden-standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales or using them as correct examples in few-shot prompting. While humans can indeed imitate correct examples, learning from our mistakes is another vital aspect of human cognition. Hence, a question naturally arises: can LLMs learn and benefit from their mistakes, especially for their reasoning? This study investigates this problem from both the prompting and model-tuning perspectives. We begin by introducing CoTErrorSet, a new benchmark with 609,432 questions, each designed with both correct and error references, and demonstrating the types and reasons for making such mistakes. To explore the effectiveness of those mistakes, we design two methods: (1) Self-rethinking prompting guides LLMs to rethink whether they have made similar previous mistakes; and (2) Mistake tuning involves finetuning models in both correct and incorrect reasoning domains, rather than only tuning models to learn ground truth in traditional methodology. We conduct a series of experiments to prove LLMs can obtain benefits from mistakes in both directions. Our two methods offer potentially cost-effective strategies by leveraging errors to enhance reasoning capabilities, which costs significantly less than creating meticulously hand-crafted golden references. We ultimately make a thorough analysis of the reasons behind LLMs' errors, which provides directions that future research needs to overcome. CoTErrorSet will be published soon on \url{https://github.com/YookiTong/Learn-from-Mistakes-CotErrorSet}.

For the purpose of efficient and cost-effective large-scale data labeling, crowdsourcing is increasingly being utilized. To guarantee the quality of data labeling, multiple annotations need to be collected for each data sample, and truth inference algorithms have been developed to accurately infer the true labels. Despite previous studies having released public datasets to evaluate the efficacy of truth inference algorithms, these have typically focused on a single type of crowdsourcing task and neglected the temporal information associated with workers' annotation activities. These limitations significantly restrict the practical applicability of these algorithms, particularly in the context of long-term and online truth inference. In this paper, we introduce a substantial crowdsourcing annotation dataset collected from a real-world crowdsourcing platform. This dataset comprises approximately two thousand workers, one million tasks, and six million annotations. The data was gathered over a period of approximately six months from various types of tasks, and the timestamps of each annotation were preserved. We analyze the characteristics of the dataset from multiple perspectives and evaluate the effectiveness of several representative truth inference algorithms on this dataset. We anticipate that this dataset will stimulate future research on tracking workers' abilities over time in relation to different types of tasks, as well as enhancing online truth inference.

Embedding models are integral to AI applications like semantic search, personalized recommendations, and retrieval augmented generation for LLMs, necessitating high-quality training data. However, the limited scalability of manual data curation prompts the need for automated methods to ensure data integrity. Traditional unsupervised triplet mining automates training data generation, crucial for embedding model training, yet inadvertently injects biases and noise, thereby degrading model performance. Addressing this, we introduce GISTEmbed, a novel strategy that enhances in-batch negative selection during contrastive training through a guide model. This approach departs from reliance on random sampling and equal utility assumption of batch negatives, significantly reducing noise from data quality issues and improving model fine-tuning. Benchmarked against the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), GISTEmbed showcases consistent performance improvements across various model sizes and achieves state-of-the-art results in select categories. This framework enables significant enhancements for smaller models by leveraging the capabilities of powerful yet resource-intensive large models. GISTEmbed can potentially revolutionize the creation of highly efficient, smaller models, democratizing access to advanced AI technologies. Making these technologies more accessible and cost-effective, especially for applications constrained by resources, significantly expands the impact and accessibility of state-of-the-art AI solutions across diverse sectors.

Due to highly constrained computing power and memory, deploying 3D lidar-based detectors on edge devices equipped in autonomous vehicles and robots poses a crucial challenge. Being a convenient and straightforward model compression approach, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has been widely adopted in 2D vision tasks. However, applying it directly to 3D lidar-based tasks inevitably leads to performance degradation. As a remedy, we propose an effective PTQ method called LiDAR-PTQ, which is particularly curated for 3D lidar detection (both SPConv-based and SPConv-free). Our LiDAR-PTQ features three main components, (1) a sparsity-based calibration method to determine the initialization of quantization parameters, (2) a Task-guided Global Positive Loss (TGPL) to reduce the disparity between the final predictions before and after quantization, (3) an adaptive rounding-to-nearest operation to minimize the layerwise reconstruction error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LiDAR-PTQ can achieve state-of-the-art quantization performance when applied to CenterPoint (both Pillar-based and Voxel-based). To our knowledge, for the very first time in lidar-based 3D detection tasks, the PTQ INT8 model's accuracy is almost the same as the FP32 model while enjoying 3times inference speedup. Moreover, our LiDAR-PTQ is cost-effective being 30times faster than the quantization-aware training method. Code will be released at https://github.com/StiphyJay/LiDAR-PTQ.

The drug development pipeline for a new compound can last 10-20 years and cost over 10 billion. Drug repurposing offers a more time- and cost-effective alternative. Computational approaches based on biomedical knowledge graph representations have recently yielded new drug repurposing hypotheses. In this study, we present a novel, disease-specific hypergraph representation learning technique to derive contextual embeddings of biological pathways of various lengths but that all start at any given drug and all end at the disease of interest. Further, we extend this method to multi-disease hypergraphs. To determine the repurposing potential of each of the 1,522 drugs, we derive drug-specific distributions of cosine similarity values and ultimately consider the median for ranking. Cosine similarity values are computed between (1) all biological pathways starting at the considered drug and ending at the disease of interest and (2) all biological pathways starting at drugs currently prescribed against that disease and ending at the disease of interest. We illustrate our approach with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and two of its risk factors: hypertension (HTN) and type 2 diabetes (T2D). We compare each drug's rank across four hypergraph settings (single- or multi-disease): AD only, AD + HTN, AD + T2D, and AD + HTN + T2D. Notably, our framework led to the identification of two promising drugs whose repurposing potential was significantly higher in hypergraphs combining two diseases: dapagliflozin (antidiabetic; moved up, from top 32% to top 7%, across all considered drugs) and debrisoquine (antihypertensive; moved up, from top 76% to top 23%). Our approach serves as a hypothesis generation tool, to be paired with a validation pipeline relying on laboratory experiments and semi-automated parsing of the biomedical literature.

Developments in IoT applications are playing an important role in our day-to-day life, starting from business predictions to self driving cars. One of the area, most influenced by the field of AI and IoT is retail analytics. In Retail Analytics, Conversion Rates - a metric which is most often used by retail stores to measure how many people have visited the store and how many purchases has happened. This retail conversion rate assess the marketing operations, increasing stock, store outlet and running promotions ..etc. Our project intends to build a cost-effective people counting system with AI at Edge, where it calculates Conversion rates using total number of people counted by the system and number of transactions for the day, which helps in providing analytical insights for retail store optimization with a very minimum hardware requirements.

In recent years, transformer models have achieved great success in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Most of the current state-of-the-art NLP results are achieved by using monolingual transformer models, where the model is pre-trained using a single language unlabelled text corpus. Then, the model is fine-tuned to the specific downstream task. However, the cost of pre-training a new transformer model is high for most languages. In this work, we propose a cost-effective transfer learning method to adopt a strong source language model, trained from a large monolingual corpus to a low-resource language. Thus, using XLNet language model, we demonstrate competitive performance with mBERT and a pre-trained target language model on the cross-lingual sentiment (CLS) dataset and on a new sentiment analysis dataset for low-resourced language Tigrinya. With only 10k examples of the given Tigrinya sentiment analysis dataset, English XLNet has achieved 78.88% F1-Score outperforming BERT and mBERT by 10% and 7%, respectively. More interestingly, fine-tuning (English) XLNet model on the CLS dataset has promising results compared to mBERT and even outperformed mBERT for one dataset of the Japanese language.

In this paper we introduce the concept of what we call "NUDAR" (NeUtrino Direction and Ranging), making the point that measurements of the observed energy and direction vectors can be employed to passively deduce the exact three-dimensional location and thermal power of geophysical and anthropogenic neutrino sources from even a single detector. We present the most precise background estimates to date, all handled in full three dimensions, as functions of depth and geographical location. For the present calculations, we consider a hypothetical 138 kiloton detector which can be transported to an ocean site and deployed to an operational depth. We present a Bayesian estimation framework to incorporate any a priori knowledge of the reactor that we are trying to detect, as well as the estimated uncertainty in the background and the oscillation parameters. Most importantly, we fully employ the knowledge of the reactor spectrum and the distance-dependent effects of neutrino oscillations on such spectra. The latter, in particular, makes possible determination of range from one location, given adequate signal statistics. Further, we explore the rich potential of improving detection with even modest improvements in individual neutrino direction determination. We conclude that a 300 MWth reactor can indeed be geolocated, and its operating power estimated with one or two detectors in the hundred kiloton class at ranges out to a few hundred kilometers. We note that such detectors would have natural and non-interfering utility for scientific studies of geo-neutrinos, neutrino oscillations, and astrophysical neutrinos. This motivates the development of cost effective methods of constructing and deploying such next generation detectors.

In this report, we introduce Qwen2.5, a comprehensive series of large language models (LLMs) designed to meet diverse needs. Compared to previous iterations, Qwen 2.5 has been significantly improved during both the pre-training and post-training stages. In terms of pre-training, we have scaled the high-quality pre-training datasets from the previous 7 trillion tokens to 18 trillion tokens. This provides a strong foundation for common sense, expert knowledge, and reasoning capabilities. In terms of post-training, we implement intricate supervised finetuning with over 1 million samples, as well as multistage reinforcement learning. Post-training techniques enhance human preference, and notably improve long text generation, structural data analysis, and instruction following. To handle diverse and varied use cases effectively, we present Qwen2.5 LLM series in rich sizes. Open-weight offerings include base and instruction-tuned models, with quantized versions available. In addition, for hosted solutions, the proprietary models currently include two mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants: Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus, both available from Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. Qwen2.5 has demonstrated top-tier performance on a wide range of benchmarks evaluating language understanding, reasoning, mathematics, coding, human preference alignment, etc. Specifically, the open-weight flagship Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct outperforms a number of open and proprietary models and demonstrates competitive performance to the state-of-the-art open-weight model, Llama-3-405B-Instruct, which is around 5 times larger. Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus offer superior cost-effectiveness while performing competitively against GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o respectively. Additionally, as the foundation, Qwen2.5 models have been instrumental in training specialized models such as Qwen2.5-Math, Qwen2.5-Coder, QwQ, and multimodal models.

Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as one of the most widely adopted methods for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of Large Language Models (LLMs). LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. We aim to assess the viability of training and serving LLMs fine-tuned with LoRA in real-world applications. First, we measure the quality of LLMs fine-tuned with quantized low rank adapters across 10 base models and 31 tasks for a total of 310 models. We find that 4-bit LoRA fine-tuned models outperform base models by 34 points and GPT-4 by 10 points on average. Second, we investigate the most effective base models for fine-tuning and assess the correlative and predictive capacities of task complexity heuristics in forecasting the outcomes of fine-tuning. Finally, we evaluate the latency and concurrency capabilities of LoRAX, an open-source Multi-LoRA inference server that facilitates the deployment of multiple LoRA fine-tuned models on a single GPU using shared base model weights and dynamic adapter loading. LoRAX powers LoRA Land, a web application that hosts 25 LoRA fine-tuned Mistral-7B LLMs on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU with 80GB memory. LoRA Land highlights the quality and cost-effectiveness of employing multiple specialized LLMs over a single, general-purpose LLM.

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance in generative tasks but introduce significant challenges in real-world serving due to inefficient use of the expensive, computation-optimized accelerators. This mismatch arises from the autoregressive nature of LLMs, where the generation phase comprises operators with varying resource demands. Specifically, the attention operator is memory-intensive, exhibiting a memory access pattern that clashes with the strengths of modern accelerators, especially as context length increases. To enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of LLM serving, we introduce the concept of attention offloading. This approach leverages a collection of cheap, memory-optimized devices for the attention operator while still utilizing high-end accelerators for other parts of the model. This heterogeneous setup ensures that each component is tailored to its specific workload, maximizing overall performance and cost efficiency. Our comprehensive analysis and experiments confirm the viability of splitting the attention computation over multiple devices. Also, the communication bandwidth required between heterogeneous devices proves to be manageable with prevalent networking technologies. To further validate our theory, we develop Lamina, an LLM inference system that incorporates attention offloading. Experimental results indicate that Lamina can provide 1.48x-12.1x higher estimated throughput per dollar than homogeneous solutions.

Deep neural networks are highly performant, but might base their decision on spurious or background features that co-occur with certain classes, which can hurt generalization. To mitigate this issue, the usage of 'model guidance' has gained popularity recently: for this, models are guided to be "right for the right reasons" by regularizing the models' explanations to highlight the right features. Experimental validation of these approaches has thus far however been limited to relatively simple and / or synthetic datasets. To gain a better understanding of which model-guiding approaches actually transfer to more challenging real-world datasets, in this work we conduct an in-depth evaluation across various loss functions, attribution methods, models, and 'guidance depths' on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS COCO 2014 datasets, and show that model guidance can sometimes even improve model performance. In this context, we further propose a novel energy loss, show its effectiveness in directing the model to focus on object features. We also show that these gains can be achieved even with a small fraction (e.g. 1%) of bounding box annotations, highlighting the cost effectiveness of this approach. Lastly, we show that this approach can also improve generalization under distribution shifts. Code will be made available.

We introduce Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding (RSD), a novel framework aimed at improving the efficiency of inference in large language models (LLMs). RSD synergistically combines a lightweight draft model with a more powerful target model, incorporating a controlled bias to prioritize high-reward outputs, in contrast to existing speculative decoding methods that enforce strict unbiasedness. RSD employs a process reward model to evaluate intermediate decoding steps and dynamically decide whether to invoke the target model, optimizing the trade-off between computational cost and output quality. We theoretically demonstrate that a threshold-based mixture strategy achieves an optimal balance between resource utilization and performance. Extensive evaluations on challenging reasoning benchmarks, including Olympiad-level tasks, show that RSD delivers significant efficiency gains against decoding with the target model only (up to 4.4x fewer FLOPs), while achieving significant better accuracy than parallel decoding method on average (up to +3.5). These results highlight RSD as a robust and cost-effective approach for deploying LLMs in resource-intensive scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results, but their increasing resource demand has become a major obstacle to the development of powerful and accessible super-human intelligence. This report introduces JetMoE-8B, a new LLM trained with less than $0.1 million, using 1.25T tokens from carefully mixed open-source corpora and 30,000 H100 GPU hours. Despite its low cost, the JetMoE-8B demonstrates impressive performance, with JetMoE-8B outperforming the Llama2-7B model and JetMoE-8B-Chat surpassing the Llama2-13B-Chat model. These results suggest that LLM training can be much more cost-effective than generally thought. JetMoE-8B is based on an efficient Sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architecture, composed of attention and feedforward experts. Both layers are sparsely activated, allowing JetMoE-8B to have 8B parameters while only activating 2B for each input token, reducing inference computation by about 70% compared to Llama2-7B. Moreover, JetMoE-8B is highly open and academia-friendly, using only public datasets and training code. All training parameters and data mixtures have been detailed in this report to facilitate future efforts in the development of open foundation models. This transparency aims to encourage collaboration and further advancements in the field of accessible and efficient LLMs. The model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/myshell-ai/JetMoE.

Instruction following is a key capability for LLMs. However, recent studies have shown that LLMs often struggle with instructions containing multiple constraints (e.g. a request to create a social media post "in a funny tone" with "no hashtag"). Despite this, most evaluations focus solely on synthetic data. To address this, we introduce RealInstruct, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow real-world multi-constrained instructions by leveraging queries real users asked AI assistants. We also investigate model-based evaluation as a cost-effective alternative to human annotation for this task. Our findings reveal that even the proprietary GPT-4 model fails to meet at least one constraint on over 21% of instructions, highlighting the limitations of state-of-the-art models. To address the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models, we propose the Decompose, Critique and Refine (DeCRIM) self-correction pipeline, which enhances LLMs' ability to follow constraints. DeCRIM works by decomposing the original instruction into a list of constraints and using a Critic model to decide when and where the LLM's response needs refinement. Our results show that DeCRIM improves Mistral's performance by 7.3% on RealInstruct and 8.0% on IFEval even with weak feedback. Moreover, we demonstrate that with strong feedback, open-source LLMs with DeCRIM can outperform GPT-4 on both benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet the choice of which model to use often involves a trade-off between performance and cost. More powerful models, though effective, come with higher expenses, while less capable models are more cost-effective. To address this dilemma, we propose several efficient router models that dynamically select between a stronger and a weaker LLM during inference, aiming to optimize the balance between cost and response quality. We develop a training framework for these routers leveraging human preference data and data augmentation techniques to enhance performance. Our evaluation on widely-recognized benchmarks shows that our approach significantly reduces costs-by over 2 times in certain cases-without compromising the quality of responses. Interestingly, our router models also demonstrate significant transfer learning capabilities, maintaining their performance even when the strong and weak models are changed at test time. This highlights the potential of these routers to provide a cost-effective yet high-performance solution for deploying LLMs.

While training large language models (LLMs) from scratch can generate models with distinct functionalities and strengths, it comes at significant costs and may result in redundant capabilities. Alternatively, a cost-effective and compelling approach is to merge existing pre-trained LLMs into a more potent model. However, due to the varying architectures of these LLMs, directly blending their weights is impractical. In this paper, we introduce the notion of knowledge fusion for LLMs, aimed at combining the capabilities of existing LLMs and transferring them into a single LLM. By leveraging the generative distributions of source LLMs, we externalize their collective knowledge and unique strengths, thereby potentially elevating the capabilities of the target model beyond those of any individual source LLM. We validate our approach using three popular LLMs with different architectures--Llama-2, MPT, and OpenLLaMA--across various benchmarks and tasks. Our findings confirm that the fusion of LLMs can improve the performance of the target model across a range of capabilities such as reasoning, commonsense, and code generation. Our code, model weights, and data are public at https://github.com/fanqiwan/FuseLLM.

In the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, the concept of Red-Teaming or Jailbreaking large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a crucial area of study. This approach is especially significant in terms of assessing and enhancing the safety and robustness of these models. This paper investigates the intricate consequences of such modifications through model editing, uncovering a complex relationship between enhancing model accuracy and preserving its ethical integrity. Our in-depth analysis reveals a striking paradox: while injecting accurate information is crucial for model reliability, it can paradoxically destabilize the model's foundational framework, resulting in unpredictable and potentially unsafe behaviors. Additionally, we propose a benchmark dataset NicheHazardQA to investigate this unsafe behavior both within the same and cross topical domain. This aspect of our research sheds light on how the edits, impact the model's safety metrics and guardrails. Our findings show that model editing serves as a cost-effective tool for topical red-teaming by methodically applying targeted edits and evaluating the resultant model behavior

We present MOFI, Manifold OF Images, a new vision foundation model designed to learn image representations from noisy entity annotated images. MOFI differs from previous work in two key aspects: (i) pre-training data, and (ii) training recipe. Regarding data, we introduce a new approach to automatically assign entity labels to images from noisy image-text pairs. Our approach involves employing a named entity recognition model to extract entities from the alt-text, and then using a CLIP model to select the correct entities as labels of the paired image. It's a simple, cost-effective method that can scale to handle billions of web-mined image-text pairs. Through this method, we have created Image-to-Entities (I2E), a new dataset with 1 billion images and 2 million distinct entities, covering rich visual concepts in the wild. Building upon the I2E dataset, we study different training recipes like supervised pre-training, contrastive pre-training, and multi-task learning. For contrastive pre-training, we treat entity names as free-form text, and further enrich them with entity descriptions. Experiments show that supervised pre-training with large-scale fine-grained entity labels is highly effective for image retrieval tasks, and multi-task training further improves the performance. The final MOFI model achieves 86.66% mAP on the challenging GPR1200 dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art performance of 72.19% from OpenAI's CLIP model. Further experiments on zero-shot and linear probe image classification also show that MOFI outperforms a CLIP model trained on the original image-text data, demonstrating the effectiveness of the I2E dataset in learning strong image representations. We release our code and model weights at https://github.com/apple/ml-mofi.

In this paper cum technical report, we present PHUDGE A fine tuned Phi3 model that achieved SOTA results in 4 tasks as Feedback Test, Feedback OOD, MT Human, Preference Test surpassing each and every existing model in latency and throughput. It shows very strong correlation not only with GPT4 but with Human annotators too in unseen data as well as in both absolute and relative grading tasks. We have not only addressed the usage of small LMs for cost effective production grade systems but have also shown that Causal modelling is not only slow in nature but sometimes it can hinder models learning capabilities and should be replaced by simpler tasks whenever we can to make the overall system faster and better. We show that by following systematic ML experimentation, thoughtful data augmentation and re purposing the problem itself, we can even beat 10x bigger models even with lesser training data. To the best of our knowledge, we are re the first one to experiment and showcase the usage of generalised version of Earth Movers Distance AKA Wasserstein distance by using Minkowski Distance with a penalty to control loss smoothing and can be used as a loss function instead of Cross Entropy to get stable training and better results for grading tasks.

As energy systems transform to rely on renewable energy and electrification, they encounter stronger year-to-year variability in energy supply and demand. However, most infrastructure planning is based on a single weather year, resulting in a lack of robustness. In this paper, we optimize energy infrastructure for a European energy system designed for net-zero CO_2 emissions in 62 different weather years. Subsequently, we fix the capacity layouts and simulate their operation in every weather year, to evaluate resource adequacy and CO_2 emissions abatement. We show that interannual weather variability causes variation of pm10\% in total system cost. The most expensive capacity layout obtains the lowest net CO_2 emissions but not the highest resource adequacy. Instead, capacity layouts designed with years including compound weather events result in a more robust and cost-effective design. Deploying CO_2-emitting backup generation is a cost-effective robustness measure, which only increase CO_2 emissions marginally as the average CO_2 emissions remain less than 1\% of 1990 levels. Our findings highlight how extreme weather years drive investments in robustness measures, making them compatible with all weather conditions within six decades of historical weather data.

Accurate obstacle identification represents a fundamental challenge within the scope of near-field perception for autonomous driving. Conventionally, fisheye cameras are frequently employed for comprehensive surround-view perception, including rear-view obstacle localization. However, the performance of such cameras can significantly deteriorate in low-light conditions, during nighttime, or when subjected to intense sun glare. Conversely, cost-effective sensors like ultrasonic sensors remain largely unaffected under these conditions. Therefore, we present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end multimodal fusion model tailored for efficient obstacle perception in a bird's-eye-view (BEV) perspective, utilizing fisheye cameras and ultrasonic sensors. Initially, ResNeXt-50 is employed as a set of unimodal encoders to extract features specific to each modality. Subsequently, the feature space associated with the visible spectrum undergoes transformation into BEV. The fusion of these two modalities is facilitated via concatenation. At the same time, the ultrasonic spectrum-based unimodal feature maps pass through content-aware dilated convolution, applied to mitigate the sensor misalignment between two sensors in the fused feature space. Finally, the fused features are utilized by a two-stage semantic occupancy decoder to generate grid-wise predictions for precise obstacle perception. We conduct a systematic investigation to determine the optimal strategy for multimodal fusion of both sensors. We provide insights into our dataset creation procedures, annotation guidelines, and perform a thorough data analysis to ensure adequate coverage of all scenarios. When applied to our dataset, the experimental results underscore the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed multimodal fusion approach.

Instruction tuning enables pretrained language models to perform new tasks from inference-time natural language descriptions. These approaches rely on vast amounts of human supervision in the form of crowdsourced datasets or user interactions. In this work, we introduce Unnatural Instructions: a large dataset of creative and diverse instructions, collected with virtually no human labor. We collect 64,000 examples by prompting a language model with three seed examples of instructions and eliciting a fourth. This set is then expanded by prompting the model to rephrase each instruction, creating a total of approximately 240,000 examples of instructions, inputs, and outputs. Experiments show that despite containing a fair amount of noise, training on Unnatural Instructions rivals the effectiveness of training on open-source manually-curated datasets, surpassing the performance of models such as T0++ and Tk-Instruct across various benchmarks. These results demonstrate the potential of model-generated data as a cost-effective alternative to crowdsourcing for dataset expansion and diversification.

Accurate and consistent evaluation is crucial for decision-making across numerous fields, yet it remains a challenging task due to inherent subjectivity, variability, and scale. Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, leading to the emergence of "LLM-as-a-Judge," where LLMs are employed as evaluators for complex tasks. With their ability to process diverse data types and provide scalable, cost-effective, and consistent assessments, LLMs present a compelling alternative to traditional expert-driven evaluations. However, ensuring the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge systems remains a significant challenge that requires careful design and standardization. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of LLM-as-a-Judge, addressing the core question: How can reliable LLM-as-a-Judge systems be built? We explore strategies to enhance reliability, including improving consistency, mitigating biases, and adapting to diverse assessment scenarios. Additionally, we propose methodologies for evaluating the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge systems, supported by a novel benchmark designed for this purpose. To advance the development and real-world deployment of LLM-as-a-Judge systems, we also discussed practical applications, challenges, and future directions. This survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners in this rapidly evolving field.

Model merging has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple single-task fine-tuned models into a unified one that can perform well on multiple tasks. However, existing model merging techniques primarily focus on resolving conflicts between task-specific models, they often overlook potential security threats, particularly the risk of backdoor attacks in the open-source model ecosystem. In this paper, we first investigate the vulnerabilities of existing model merging methods to backdoor attacks, identifying two critical challenges: backdoor succession and backdoor transfer. To address these issues, we propose a novel Defense-Aware Merging (DAM) approach that simultaneously mitigates task interference and backdoor vulnerabilities. Specifically, DAM employs a meta-learning-based optimization method with dual masks to identify a shared and safety-aware subspace for model merging. These masks are alternately optimized: the Task-Shared mask identifies common beneficial parameters across tasks, aiming to preserve task-specific knowledge while reducing interference, while the Backdoor-Detection mask isolates potentially harmful parameters to neutralize security threats. This dual-mask design allows us to carefully balance the preservation of useful knowledge and the removal of potential vulnerabilities. Compared to existing merging methods, DAM achieves a more favorable balance between performance and security, reducing the attack success rate by 2-10 percentage points while sacrificing only about 1% in accuracy. Furthermore, DAM exhibits robust performance and broad applicability across various types of backdoor attacks and the number of compromised models involved in the merging process. We will release the codes and models soon.

In this paper, we propose Transformer Layer Injection (TLI), a novel method for efficiently upscaling large language models (LLMs) while minimizing computational costs and maintaining model performance. Model scale is a key factor in enhancing the quality of machine learning models, and TLI addresses the challenge of scaling by reducing initial loss, minimizing fine-tuning requirements, and preserving model complexity. Our approach improves upon the conventional Depth Up-Scaling (DUS) technique by injecting new layers into every set of K layers, enabling hidden representations to pass through transformer blocks with minimal disruption. We compare TLI with existing approaches, including Mixture of Experts (MoE) and DUS, and validate its efficiency through experiments on small LLMs (LLama3 1B, 3B, and 8B). Results show that TLI achieves better initialization, requires fewer training steps, and delivers superior accuracy on tasks such as KoBEST and KMCQA, with models performing effectively even without additional training. TLI is demonstrated to be both data-efficient and cost-effective, significantly outperforming existing methods. Its scalability and simplicity make it a promising solution for upscaling transformer-based models, with potential applications in scaling models from 10B to 405B parameters.

Most text-to-image customization techniques fine-tune models on a small set of personal concept images captured in minimal contexts. This often results in the model becoming overfitted to these training images and unable to generalize to new contexts in future text prompts. Existing customization methods are built on the success of effectively representing personal concepts as textual embeddings. Thus, in this work, we resort to diversifying the context of these personal concepts solely within the textual space by simply creating a contextually rich set of text prompts, together with a widely used self-supervised learning objective. Surprisingly, this straightforward and cost-effective method significantly improves semantic alignment in the textual space, and this effect further extends to the image space, resulting in higher prompt fidelity for generated images. Additionally, our approach does not require any architectural modifications, making it highly compatible with existing text-to-image customization methods. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our approach by combining it with four different baseline methods, achieving notable CLIP score improvements.

Instruction tuning is critical for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, and recent studies have demonstrated that small amounts of human-curated data can outperform larger datasets, challenging traditional data scaling laws. While LLM-based data quality rating systems offer a cost-effective alternative to human annotation, they often suffer from inaccuracies and biases, even in powerful models like GPT-4. In this work, we introduce DS2, a Diversity-aware Score curation method for Data Selection. By systematically modeling error patterns through a score transition matrix, DS2 corrects LLM-based scores and promotes diversity in the selected data samples. Our approach shows that a curated subset (just 3.3% of the original dataset) outperforms full-scale datasets (300k samples) across various machine-alignment benchmarks, and matches or surpasses human-aligned datasets such as LIMA with the same sample size (1k samples). These findings challenge conventional data scaling assumptions, highlighting that redundant, low-quality samples can degrade performance and reaffirming that "more can be less."

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated profound capabilities in understanding multimodal information, covering from Image LLMs to the more complex Video LLMs. Numerous studies have illustrated their exceptional cross-modal comprehension. Recently, integrating video foundation models with large language models to build a comprehensive video understanding system has been proposed to overcome the limitations of specific pre-defined vision tasks. However, the current advancements in Video LLMs tend to overlook the foundational contributions of Image LLMs, often opting for more complicated structures and a wide variety of multimodal data for pre-training. This approach significantly increases the costs associated with these methods.In response to these challenges, this work introduces an efficient method that strategically leverages the priors of Image LLMs, facilitating a resource-efficient transition from Image to Video LLMs. We propose RED-VILLM, a Resource-Efficient Development pipeline for Video LLMs from Image LLMs, which utilizes a temporal adaptation plug-and-play structure within the image fusion module of Image LLMs. This adaptation extends their understanding capabilities to include temporal information, enabling the development of Video LLMs that not only surpass baseline performances but also do so with minimal instructional data and training resources. Our approach highlights the potential for a more cost-effective and scalable advancement in multimodal models, effectively building upon the foundational work of Image LLMs.

This work introduces LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots), a novel methodology designed to overcome the scalability challenges in the instruction-tuning phase of large language model (LLM) training. Leveraging a taxonomy-guided synthetic data generation process and a multi-phase tuning framework, LAB significantly reduces reliance on expensive human annotations and proprietary models like GPT-4. We demonstrate that LAB-trained models can achieve competitive performance across several benchmarks compared to models trained with traditional human-annotated or GPT-4 generated synthetic data. Thus offering a scalable, cost-effective solution for enhancing LLM capabilities and instruction-following behaviors without the drawbacks of catastrophic forgetting, marking a step forward in the efficient training of LLMs for a wide range of applications.

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (i.e., finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is often limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We conducted a quantitative study to figure out the efficacy of machine-generated annotations, where we compare the results of a fine-tuned BERT model with human v/s machine-generated annotations. Applying our methods to the vanilla GPT-3 model, we saw that machine generated annotations were 78.54% correct and the fine-tuned model achieved a 96.01% model performance compared to the performance with human-labelled annotations. This result shows that machine-generated annotations are a resource and cost effective way to fine-tune down-stream models.

We demonstrate a compact, cost-effective snapshot spectral imaging system named Aperture Diffraction Imaging Spectrometer (ADIS), which consists only of an imaging lens with an ultra-thin orthogonal aperture mask and a mosaic filter sensor, requiring no additional physical footprint compared to common RGB cameras. Then we introduce a new optical design that each point in the object space is multiplexed to discrete encoding locations on the mosaic filter sensor by diffraction-based spatial-spectral projection engineering generated from the orthogonal mask. The orthogonal projection is uniformly accepted to obtain a weakly calibration-dependent data form to enhance modulation robustness. Meanwhile, the Cascade Shift-Shuffle Spectral Transformer (CSST) with strong perception of the diffraction degeneration is designed to solve a sparsity-constrained inverse problem, realizing the volume reconstruction from 2D measurements with Large amount of aliasing. Our system is evaluated by elaborating the imaging optical theory and reconstruction algorithm with demonstrating the experimental imaging under a single exposure. Ultimately, we achieve the sub-super-pixel spatial resolution and high spectral resolution imaging. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Krito-ex/CSST.

Prompt Tuning is emerging as a scalable and cost-effective method to fine-tune Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), which are often referred to as Large Language Models (LLMs). This study benchmarks the performance and computational efficiency of Prompt Tuning and baselines for multi-label text classification. This is applied to the challenging task of classifying companies into an investment firm's proprietary industry taxonomy, supporting their thematic investment strategy. Text-to-text classification is frequently reported to outperform task-specific classification heads, but has several limitations when applied to a multi-label classification problem where each label consists of multiple tokens: (a) Generated labels may not match any label in the label taxonomy; (b) The fine-tuning process lacks permutation invariance and is sensitive to the order of the provided labels; (c) The model provides binary decisions rather than appropriate confidence scores. Limitation (a) is addressed by applying constrained decoding using Trie Search, which slightly improves classification performance. All limitations (a), (b), and (c) are addressed by replacing the PLM's language head with a classification head, which is referred to as Prompt Tuned Embedding Classification (PTEC). This improves performance significantly, while also reducing computational costs during inference. In our industrial application, the training data is skewed towards well-known companies. We confirm that the model's performance is consistent across both well-known and less-known companies. Our overall results indicate the continuing need to adapt state-of-the-art methods to domain-specific tasks, even in the era of PLMs with strong generalization abilities. We release our codebase and a benchmarking dataset at https://github.com/EQTPartners/PTEC.

The development of efficient machine learning models for molecular systems representation is becoming crucial in scientific research. We introduce TensorNet, an innovative O(3)-equivariant message-passing neural network architecture that leverages Cartesian tensor representations. By using Cartesian tensor atomic embeddings, feature mixing is simplified through matrix product operations. Furthermore, the cost-effective decomposition of these tensors into rotation group irreducible representations allows for the separate processing of scalars, vectors, and tensors when necessary. Compared to higher-rank spherical tensor models, TensorNet demonstrates state-of-the-art performance with significantly fewer parameters. For small molecule potential energies, this can be achieved even with a single interaction layer. As a result of all these properties, the model's computational cost is substantially decreased. Moreover, the accurate prediction of vector and tensor molecular quantities on top of potential energies and forces is possible. In summary, TensorNet's framework opens up a new space for the design of state-of-the-art equivariant models.

Coaching, which involves classroom observation and expert feedback, is a widespread and fundamental part of teacher training. However, the majority of teachers do not have access to consistent, high quality coaching due to limited resources and access to expertise. We explore whether generative AI could become a cost-effective complement to expert feedback by serving as an automated teacher coach. In doing so, we propose three teacher coaching tasks for generative AI: (A) scoring transcript segments based on classroom observation instruments, (B) identifying highlights and missed opportunities for good instructional strategies, and (C) providing actionable suggestions for eliciting more student reasoning. We recruit expert math teachers to evaluate the zero-shot performance of ChatGPT on each of these tasks for elementary math classroom transcripts. Our results reveal that ChatGPT generates responses that are relevant to improving instruction, but they are often not novel or insightful. For example, 82% of the model's suggestions point to places in the transcript where the teacher is already implementing that suggestion. Our work highlights the challenges of producing insightful, novel and truthful feedback for teachers while paving the way for future research to address these obstacles and improve the capacity of generative AI to coach teachers.

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformers have made significant strides in recent years, the success of which is driven by scaling up their model size. Despite their high algorithmic performance, the computational and memory requirements of LLMs present unprecedented challenges. To tackle the high compute requirements of LLMs, the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture was introduced which is able to scale its model size without proportionally scaling up its computational requirements. Unfortunately, MoE's high memory demands and dynamic activation of sparse experts restrict its applicability to real-world problems. Previous solutions that offload MoE's memory-hungry expert parameters to CPU memory fall short because the latency to migrate activated experts from CPU to GPU incurs high performance overhead. Our proposed Pre-gated MoE system effectively tackles the compute and memory challenges of conventional MoE architectures using our algorithm-system co-design. Pre-gated MoE employs our novel pre-gating function which alleviates the dynamic nature of sparse expert activation, allowing our proposed system to address the large memory footprint of MoEs while also achieving high performance. We demonstrate that Pre-gated MoE is able to improve performance, reduce GPU memory consumption, while also maintaining the same level of model quality. These features allow our Pre-gated MoE system to cost-effectively deploy large-scale LLMs using just a single GPU with high performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving at an unprecedented pace and have exhibited considerable capability in the realm of natural language processing (NLP) with world knowledge. Benefiting from ultra-large-scale training corpora, a single LLM can manage typical NLP tasks competently. However, its performance in executing reasoning tasks is still confined by the limitations of its internal representations. To push this boundary further, we introduce Corex in this paper, a suite of novel general-purpose strategies that transform LLMs into autonomous agents pioneering multi-model collaborations for complex task-solving. Inspired by human behaviors, Corex is constituted by diverse collaboration paradigms including Debate, Review, and Retrieve modes, which collectively work towards enhancing the factuality, faithfulness, and reliability of the reasoning process. These paradigms foster task-agnostic approaches that enable LLMs to ''think outside the box,'' thereby overcoming hallucinations and providing better solutions. Through extensive experiments across four different types of reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that orchestrating multiple LLMs to work in concert yields substantially better performance compared to existing methods. Further results and in-depth analysis demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of our method, facilitating collaboration among different LLMs and promoting annotation efficiency.

We propose the concept of Intra-Query Runtime Elasticity (IQRE) for cloud-native data analysis. IQRE enables a cloud-native OLAP engine to dynamically adjust a query's Degree of Parallelism (DOP) during execution. This capability allows users to utilize cloud computing resources more cost-effectively. We present Accordion, the first IQRE query engine. Accordion can adjust the parallelism of a query at any point during query execution without pausing data processing. It features a user-friendly interface and an auto-tuner backed by a "what-if" service to allow users to adjust the DOP according to their query latency constraints. The design of Accordion follows the execution model in Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine developed at Meta. We present the implementation of Accordion and demonstrate its ease of use, showcasing how it enables users to minimize compute resource consumption while meeting their query time constraints.

Recent Blind Image Super-Resolution (BSR) methods have shown proficiency in general images. However, we find that the efficacy of recent methods obviously diminishes when employed on image data with blur, while image data with intentional blur constitute a substantial proportion of general data. To further investigate and address this issue, we developed a new super-resolution dataset specifically tailored for blur images, named the Real-world Blur-kept Super-Resolution (ReBlurSR) dataset, which consists of nearly 3000 defocus and motion blur image samples with diverse blur sizes and varying blur intensities. Furthermore, we propose a new BSR framework for blur images called Perceptual-Blur-adaptive Super-Resolution (PBaSR), which comprises two main modules: the Cross Disentanglement Module (CDM) and the Cross Fusion Module (CFM). The CDM utilizes a dual-branch parallelism to isolate conflicting blur and general data during optimization. The CFM fuses the well-optimized prior from these distinct domains cost-effectively and efficiently based on model interpolation. By integrating these two modules, PBaSR achieves commendable performance on both general and blur data without any additional inference and deployment cost and is generalizable across multiple model architectures. Rich experiments show that PBaSR achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics without incurring extra inference costs. Within the widely adopted LPIPS metrics, PBaSR achieves an improvement range of approximately 0.02-0.10 with diverse anchor methods and blur types, across both the ReBlurSR and multiple common general BSR benchmarks. Code here: https://github.com/Imalne/PBaSR.

Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB, the first single Point-based OBB generation method, for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view, we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module, respectively. In the former module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions, the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles, which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance, and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.

Gene expression can be used to subtype breast cancer with improved prediction of risk of recurrence and treatment responsiveness over that obtained using routine immunohistochemistry (IHC). However, in the clinic, molecular profiling is primarily used for ER+ breast cancer, which is costly, tissue destructive, requires specialized platforms and takes several weeks to obtain a result. Deep learning algorithms can effectively extract morphological patterns in digital histopathology images to predict molecular phenotypes quickly and cost-effectively. We propose a new, computationally efficient approach called hist2RNA inspired by bulk RNA-sequencing techniques to predict the expression of 138 genes (incorporated from six commercially available molecular profiling tests), including luminal PAM50 subtype, from hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs). The training phase involves the aggregation of extracted features for each patient from a pretrained model to predict gene expression at the patient level using annotated H&E images from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA, n=335). We demonstrate successful gene prediction on a held-out test set (n = 160, corr = 0.82 across patients, corr = 0.29 across genes) and perform exploratory analysis on an external tissue microarray (TMA) dataset (n = 498) with known IHC and survival information. Our model is able to predict gene expression and luminal PAM50 subtype (Luminal A versus Luminal B) on the TMA dataset with prognostic significance for overall survival in univariate analysis (c-index = 0.56, hazard ratio = 2.16 (95% CI 1.12-3.06), p < 5 x 10-3), and independent significance in multivariate analysis incorporating standard clinicopathological variables (c-index = 0.65, hazard ratio = 1.85 (95% CI 1.30-2.68), p < 5 x 10-3).

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of Natural Language Processing systems, but are computationally expensive. To reduce the cost without sacrificing performance, previous studies have explored various approaches to harness the potential of Small Language Models (SLMs) as cost-effective alternatives to their larger counterparts. Driven by findings that SLMs and LLMs exhibit complementary strengths in a structured knowledge extraction task, this work presents a novel SLM/LLM routing framework designed to improve computational efficiency and enhance task performance. First, exemplar pools are created to represent the types of contexts where each LM provides a more reliable answer, leveraging a sentence embedding fine-tuned so that context similarity is close to dialogue state similarity. Then, during inference, the k-nearest exemplars to the testing instance are retrieved, and the instance is routed according to majority vote. In dialogue state tracking tasks, the proposed routing framework enhances performance substantially compared to relying solely on LLMs, while reducing the computational costs by over 50%.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) with advanced video analysis capabilities have recently garnered significant attention. However, most evaluations rely on traditional methods like multiple-choice questions in benchmarks such as VideoMME and LongVideoBench, which are prone to lack the depth needed to capture the complex demands of real-world users. To address this limitation-and due to the prohibitive cost and slow pace of human annotation for video tasks-we introduce VideoAutoArena, an arena-style benchmark inspired by LMSYS Chatbot Arena's framework, designed to automatically assess LMMs' video analysis abilities. VideoAutoArena utilizes user simulation to generate open-ended, adaptive questions that rigorously assess model performance in video understanding. The benchmark features an automated, scalable evaluation framework, incorporating a modified ELO Rating System for fair and continuous comparisons across multiple LMMs. To validate our automated judging system, we construct a 'gold standard' using a carefully curated subset of human annotations, demonstrating that our arena strongly aligns with human judgment while maintaining scalability. Additionally, we introduce a fault-driven evolution strategy, progressively increasing question complexity to push models toward handling more challenging video analysis scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VideoAutoArena effectively differentiates among state-of-the-art LMMs, providing insights into model strengths and areas for improvement. To further streamline our evaluation, we introduce VideoAutoBench as an auxiliary benchmark, where human annotators label winners in a subset of VideoAutoArena battles. We use GPT-4o as a judge to compare responses against these human-validated answers. Together, VideoAutoArena and VideoAutoBench offer a cost-effective, and scalable framework for evaluating LMMs in user-centric video analysis.

Mathematical reasoning capabilities are increasing with tool-augmented language agents, but methods often rely either on closed-source or large models, external data, or extensive prompt engineering. This work introduces MATATA, a novel cost-effective method to train LLM agents for tabular data problems through reasoning, planning, and tool use. With a progressive self-improvement paradigm and an iterative weak supervision, it empowers 3.8B/8B Small Language Models (SLMs), particularly suited for local hosting and sensitive business contexts where data privacy is crucial. By employing a flexible and reusable tools across different datasets, it achieves robust performance with effective scalability across shared tasks. Experiments show that MATATA reaches state-of-the-art performances on FinQA and TAT-QA among reasoning frameworks based on open-source models. Moreover, MATATA models compete with GPT-4 based frameworks on TabMWP, while being SLMs.

The upscaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has yielded impressive advances in natural language processing, yet it also poses significant deployment challenges. Weight quantization has emerged as a widely embraced solution to reduce memory and computational demands. This paper introduces BitDistiller, a framework that synergizes Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with Knowledge Distillation (KD) to boost the performance of LLMs at ultra-low precisions (sub-4-bit). Specifically, BitDistiller first incorporates a tailored asymmetric quantization and clipping technique to maximally preserve the fidelity of quantized weights, and then proposes a novel Confidence-Aware Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CAKLD) objective, which is employed in a self-distillation manner to enable faster convergence and superior model performance. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that BitDistiller significantly surpasses existing methods in both 3-bit and 2-bit configurations on general language understanding and complex reasoning benchmarks. Notably, BitDistiller is shown to be more cost-effective, demanding fewer data and training resources. The code is available at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/BitDistiller.

The rapid advancement of deep learning has intensified the need for comprehensive data for use by autonomous driving algorithms. High-quality datasets are crucial for the development of effective data-driven autonomous driving solutions. Next-generation autonomous driving datasets must be multimodal, incorporating data from advanced sensors that feature extensive data coverage, detailed annotations, and diverse scene representation. To address this need, we present OmniHD-Scenes, a large-scale multimodal dataset that provides comprehensive omnidirectional high-definition data. The OmniHD-Scenes dataset combines data from 128-beam LiDAR, six cameras, and six 4D imaging radar systems to achieve full environmental perception. The dataset comprises 1501 clips, each approximately 30-s long, totaling more than 450K synchronized frames and more than 5.85 million synchronized sensor data points. We also propose a novel 4D annotation pipeline. To date, we have annotated 200 clips with more than 514K precise 3D bounding boxes. These clips also include semantic segmentation annotations for static scene elements. Additionally, we introduce a novel automated pipeline for generation of the dense occupancy ground truth, which effectively leverages information from non-key frames. Alongside the proposed dataset, we establish comprehensive evaluation metrics, baseline models, and benchmarks for 3D detection and semantic occupancy prediction. These benchmarks utilize surround-view cameras and 4D imaging radar to explore cost-effective sensor solutions for autonomous driving applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our low-cost sensor configuration and its robustness under adverse conditions. Data will be released at https://www.2077ai.com/OmniHD-Scenes.

Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), the massive size poses significant deployment challenges, particularly on resource-constrained hardware. While existing LLM compression methods focus on quantization, pruning remains relatively unexplored due to the high cost of training-based approaches and data collection challenges. One-shot pruning methods, although cost-effective and data-free, have become dominant in LLM pruning, but lead to performance decline under the structured pruning setting. In this work, we introduce a new paradigm for structurally pruning LLMs, called Compresso. Our approach, through the collaboration of the proposed resource-efficient pruning algorithm and the LLM itself, learns optimal pruning decisions during the training process. Compresso addresses the challenges of expensive training costs and data collection by incorporating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into the L_0 regularization during the instruction tuning process. Then, we further augment the pruning algorithm by introducing a collaborative prompt that fosters collaboration between the LLM and the pruning algorithm, significantly boosting the overall performance. To this end, Compresso prunes LLaMA-7B to 5.4B, maintaining original performance and even surpassing LLaMA-7B in reading comprehension by 2.62%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Compresso significantly outperforms one-shot pruning baselines across various sparsity ratios, achieving up to 2.21%, 11.43%, 7.04%, and 4.81% higher scores on the commonsense reasoning, reading comprehension, MMLU, and BBH benchmarks, respectively.

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for understanding their capabilities and limitations across various applications, including natural language processing and code generation. Existing benchmarks like MMLU, C-Eval, and HumanEval assess general LLM performance but lack focus on specific expert domains such as cybersecurity. Previous attempts to create cybersecurity datasets have faced limitations, including insufficient data volume and a reliance on multiple-choice questions (MCQs). To address these gaps, we propose SecBench, a multi-dimensional benchmarking dataset designed to evaluate LLMs in the cybersecurity domain. SecBench includes questions in various formats (MCQs and short-answer questions (SAQs)), at different capability levels (Knowledge Retention and Logical Reasoning), in multiple languages (Chinese and English), and across various sub-domains. The dataset was constructed by collecting high-quality data from open sources and organizing a Cybersecurity Question Design Contest, resulting in 44,823 MCQs and 3,087 SAQs. Particularly, we used the powerful while cost-effective LLMs to (1). label the data and (2). constructing a grading agent for automatic evaluation of SAQs. Benchmarking results on 16 SOTA LLMs demonstrate the usability of SecBench, which is arguably the largest and most comprehensive benchmark dataset for LLMs in cybersecurity. More information about SecBench can be found at our website, and the dataset can be accessed via the artifact link.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into services such as ChatGPT to provide responses to user queries. To mitigate potential harm and prevent misuse, there have been concerted efforts to align the LLMs with human values and legal compliance by incorporating various techniques, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), into the training of the LLMs. However, recent research has exposed that even aligned LLMs are susceptible to adversarial manipulations known as Jailbreak Attacks. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a method called Token Highlighter to inspect and mitigate the potential jailbreak threats in the user query. Token Highlighter introduced a concept called Affirmation Loss to measure the LLM's willingness to answer the user query. It then uses the gradient of Affirmation Loss for each token in the user query to locate the jailbreak-critical tokens. Further, Token Highlighter exploits our proposed Soft Removal technique to mitigate the jailbreak effects of critical tokens via shrinking their token embeddings. Experimental results on two aligned LLMs (LLaMA-2 and Vicuna-V1.5) demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively defend against a variety of Jailbreak Attacks while maintaining competent performance on benign questions of the AlpacaEval benchmark. In addition, Token Highlighter is a cost-effective and interpretable defense because it only needs to query the protected LLM once to compute the Affirmation Loss and can highlight the critical tokens upon refusal.

Small language models (SLMs) are more efficient, cost-effective, and customizable than large language models (LLMs), though they often underperform in specific areas like reasoning. Past methods for enhancing SLMs' reasoning, such as supervised fine-tuning and distillation, often depend on costly external signals, resulting in SLMs being overly confident with limited supervision signals, thus limiting their abilities. Therefore, this study enables SLMs to learn to reason from self-iterative feedback. By combining odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), we fine-tune and align SLMs using positive and negative signals generated by themselves. Additionally, we introduce process supervision for rewards in preference alignment by sampling-based inference simulation and process reward models. Compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), our method improves the performance of Gemma-2B by 12.43 (Acc) on GSM8K and 3.95 (Pass@1) on MBPP. Furthermore, the proposed method also demonstrated superior out-of-domain generalization capabilities on MMLU_Math and HumanEval.

I present Astro-HEP-BERT, a transformer-based language model specifically designed for generating contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) to study the meanings of concepts in astrophysics and high-energy physics. Built on a general pretrained BERT model, Astro-HEP-BERT underwent further training over three epochs using the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset I curated from 21.84 million paragraphs extracted from more than 600,000 scholarly articles on arXiv, all belonging to at least one of these two scientific domains. The project demonstrates both the effectiveness and feasibility of adapting a bidirectional transformer for applications in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). The entire training process was conducted using freely available code, pretrained weights, and text inputs, completed on a single MacBook Pro Laptop (M2/96GB). Preliminary evaluations indicate that Astro-HEP-BERT's CWEs perform comparably to domain-adapted BERT models trained from scratch on larger datasets for domain-specific word sense disambiguation and induction and related semantic change analyses. This suggests that retraining general language models for specific scientific domains can be a cost-effective and efficient strategy for HPSS researchers, enabling high performance without the need for extensive training from scratch.

This research explores the application of large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets for Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT) testing, a key component in evaluating user sentiment and product experience. Utilizing gpt-4o-mini, a cost-effective alternative to larger commercial LLMs, three methods, Word+Review, Review+Word, and Supply-Word, were each used to synthesize 1000 product reviews. The generated datasets were assessed for sentiment alignment, textual diversity, and data generation cost. Results demonstrated high sentiment alignment across all methods, with Pearson correlations ranging from 0.93 to 0.97. Supply-Word exhibited the highest diversity and coverage of PDT terms, although with increased generation costs. Despite minor biases toward positive sentiments, in situations with limited test data, LLM-generated synthetic data offers significant advantages, including scalability, cost savings, and flexibility in dataset production.

Multimodal systems have great potential to assist humans in procedural activities, where people follow instructions to achieve their goals. Despite diverse application scenarios, systems are typically evaluated on traditional classification tasks, e.g., action recognition or temporal action segmentation. In this paper, we present a novel evaluation dataset, ProMQA, to measure system advancements in application-oriented scenarios. ProMQA consists of 401 multimodal procedural QA pairs on user recording of procedural activities coupled with their corresponding instruction. For QA annotation, we take a cost-effective human-LLM collaborative approach, where the existing annotation is augmented with LLM-generated QA pairs that are later verified by humans. We then provide the benchmark results to set the baseline performance on ProMQA. Our experiment reveals a significant gap between human performance and that of current systems, including competitive proprietary multimodal models. We hope our dataset sheds light on new aspects of models' multimodal understanding capabilities.

Fact-checking long-form text is challenging, and it is therefore common practice to break it down into multiple atomic claims. The typical approach to fact-checking these atomic claims involves retrieving a fixed number of pieces of evidence, followed by a verification step. However, this method is usually not cost-effective, as it underutilizes the verification model's internal knowledge of the claim and fails to replicate the iterative reasoning process in human search strategies. To address these limitations, we propose FIRE, a novel agent-based framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner. Specifically, FIRE employs a unified mechanism to decide whether to provide a final answer or generate a subsequent search query, based on its confidence in the current judgment. We compare FIRE with other strong fact-checking frameworks and find that it achieves slightly better performance while reducing large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times. These results indicate that FIRE holds promise for application in large-scale fact-checking operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/fire.git.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet improving their problem-solving capabilities, particularly for complex, reasoning-intensive tasks, remains a persistent challenge. This paper introduces the REAP (Reflection, Explicit Problem Deconstruction, and Advanced Prompting) method, an innovative approach within the dynamic context generation framework. REAP guides LLMs through reflection on the query, deconstructing it into manageable components, and generating relevant context to enhance the solution process. We evaluated REAP using a dataset designed to expose LLM limitations, comparing zero-shot prompting with REAP-enhanced prompts across six state-of-the-art models: OpenAI's o1-preview, o1-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The results demonstrate notable performance gains, with o1-mini improving by 40.97%, GPT-4o by 66.26%, and GPT-4o-mini by 112.93%. Despite the already strong baseline performance of OpenAI's o1-preview, modest gains were observed. Beyond performance improvements, REAP offers a cost-effective solution; for example, GPT-4o-mini, which is approximately 100 times cheaper than o1-preview, delivered competitive results. REAP also improves the clarity of model outputs, making it easier for humans to understand the reasoning behind the results and simplifying the process of identifying and addressing any issues. These findings demonstrate REAP's potential to greatly improve the capabilities of LLMs, providing both better performance and increased cost-efficiency across a wide range of applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention in various fields for their cost-effective solutions to diverse challenges, especially with advancements in instruction tuning and quantization. E-commerce, with its complex tasks and extensive product-user interactions, presents a promising application area for LLMs. However, the domain-specific concepts and knowledge inherent in e-commerce pose significant challenges for adapting general LLMs. To address this issue, we developed EC-Guide https://github.com/fzp0424/EC-Guide-KDDUP-2024, a comprehensive e-commerce guide for instruction tuning and quantization of LLMs. We also heuristically integrated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) during inference to enhance arithmetic performance. Our approach achieved the 2nd place in Track 2 and 5th place in Track 5 at the Amazon KDD Cup'24 https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/amazon-kdd-cup-2024-multi-task-online-shopping-challenge-for-llms. Additionally, our solution is model-agnostic, enabling effective scalability across larger systems.

Powerful foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), with Transformer architectures have ushered in a new era of Generative AI across various industries. Industry and research community have witnessed a large number of new applications, based on those foundation models. Such applications include question and answer, customer services, image and video generation, and code completions, among others. However, as the number of model parameters reaches to hundreds of billions, their deployment incurs prohibitive inference costs and high latency in real-world scenarios. As a result, the demand for cost-effective and fast inference using AI accelerators is ever more higher. To this end, our tutorial offers a comprehensive discussion on complementary inference optimization techniques using AI accelerators. Beginning with an overview of basic Transformer architectures and deep learning system frameworks, we deep dive into system optimization techniques for fast and memory-efficient attention computations and discuss how they can be implemented efficiently on AI accelerators. Next, we describe architectural elements that are key for fast transformer inference. Finally, we examine various model compression and fast decoding strategies in the same context.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has recently garnered attention due to its cost-effective usability in multimedia production. However, most current advances overlook the intelligibility of lip movements, limiting the realism of facial expressions. In this paper, we introduce a method for speech-driven 3D facial animation to generate accurate lip movements, proposing an audio-visual multimodal perceptual loss. This loss provides guidance to train the speech-driven 3D facial animators to generate plausible lip motions aligned with the spoken transcripts. Furthermore, to incorporate the proposed audio-visual perceptual loss, we devise an audio-visual lip reading expert leveraging its prior knowledge about correlations between speech and lip motions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through broad experiments, showing noticeable improvements in lip synchronization and lip readability performance. Codes are available at https://3d-talking-head-avguide.github.io/.

In this work, we showcase a cost-effective method for generating training data for speech processing tasks. First, we transcribe unlabeled speech using a state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. Next, we align generated transcripts with the audio and apply segmentation on short utterances. Our focus is on ASR for low-resource languages, such as Ukrainian, using podcasts as a source of unlabeled speech. We release a new dataset UK-PODS that features modern conversational Ukrainian language. It contains over 50 hours of text audio-pairs as well as uk-pods-conformer, a 121 M parameters ASR model that is trained on MCV-10 and UK-PODS and achieves 3x reduction of Word Error Rate (WER) on podcasts comparing to publically available uk-nvidia-citrinet while maintaining comparable WER on MCV-10 test split. Both dataset UK-PODS https://huggingface.co/datasets/taras-sereda/uk-pods and ASR uk-pods-conformer https://huggingface.co/taras-sereda/uk-pods-conformer are available on the hugging-face hub.

Emotions have played an important part in many sectors, including psychology, medicine, mental health, computer science, and so on, and categorizing them has proven extremely useful in separating one emotion from another. Emotions can be classified using the following two methods: (1) The supervised method's efficiency is strongly dependent on the size and domain of the data collected. A categorization established using relevant data from one domain may not work well in another. (2) An unsupervised method that uses either domain expertise or a knowledge base of emotion types already exists. Though this second approach provides a suitable and generic categorization of emotions and is cost-effective, the literature doesn't possess a publicly available knowledge base that can be directly applied to any emotion categorization-related task. This pushes us to create a knowledge base that can be used for emotion classification across domains, and ontology is often used for this purpose. In this study, we provide TONE, an emotion-based ontology that effectively creates an emotional hierarchy based on Dr. Gerrod Parrot's group of emotions. In addition to ontology development, we introduce a semi-automated vocabulary construction process to generate a detailed collection of terms for emotions at each tier of the hierarchy. We also demonstrate automated methods for establishing three sorts of dependencies in order to develop linkages between different emotions. Our human and automatic evaluation results show the ontology's quality. Furthermore, we describe three distinct use cases that demonstrate the applicability of our ontology.

A recent trend in deep learning algorithms has been towards training large scale models, having high parameter count and trained on big dataset. However, robustness of such large scale models towards real-world settings is still a less-explored topic. In this work, we first benchmark the performance of these models under different perturbations and datasets thereby representing real-world shifts, and highlight their degrading performance under these shifts. We then discuss on how complete model fine-tuning based existing robustification schemes might not be a scalable option given very large scale networks and can also lead them to forget some of the desired characterstics. Finally, we propose a simple and cost-effective method to solve this problem, inspired by knowledge transfer literature. It involves robustifying smaller models, at a lower computation cost, and then use them as teachers to tune a fraction of these large scale networks, reducing the overall computational overhead. We evaluate our proposed method under various vision perturbations including ImageNet-C,R,S,A datasets and also for transfer learning, zero-shot evaluation setups on different datasets. Benchmark results show that our method is able to induce robustness to these large scale models efficiently, requiring significantly lower time and also preserves the transfer learning, zero-shot properties of the original model which none of the existing methods are able to achieve.

In this paper, we present Motion-X, a large-scale 3D expressive whole-body motion dataset. Existing motion datasets predominantly contain body-only poses, lacking facial expressions, hand gestures, and fine-grained pose descriptions. Moreover, they are primarily collected from limited laboratory scenes with textual descriptions manually labeled, which greatly limits their scalability. To overcome these limitations, we develop a whole-body motion and text annotation pipeline, which can automatically annotate motion from either single- or multi-view videos and provide comprehensive semantic labels for each video and fine-grained whole-body pose descriptions for each frame. This pipeline is of high precision, cost-effective, and scalable for further research. Based on it, we construct Motion-X, which comprises 13.7M precise 3D whole-body pose annotations (i.e., SMPL-X) covering 96K motion sequences from massive scenes. Besides, Motion-X provides 13.7M frame-level whole-body pose descriptions and 96K sequence-level semantic labels. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the annotation pipeline and the significant benefit of Motion-X in enhancing expressive, diverse, and natural motion generation, as well as 3D whole-body human mesh recovery.

To help the open-source community have a better understanding of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models (LLMs), we train and release OpenMoE, a series of fully open-sourced and reproducible decoder-only MoE LLMs, ranging from 650M to 34B parameters and trained on up to over 1T tokens. Our investigation confirms that MoE-based LLMs can offer a more favorable cost-effectiveness trade-off than dense LLMs, highlighting the potential effectiveness for future LLM development. One more important contribution of this study is an in-depth analysis of the routing mechanisms within our OpenMoE models, leading to three significant findings: Context-Independent Specialization, Early Routing Learning, and Drop-towards-the-End. We discovered that routing decisions in MoE models are predominantly based on token IDs, with minimal context relevance. The token-to-expert assignments are determined early in the pre-training phase and remain largely unchanged. This imperfect routing can result in performance degradation, particularly in sequential tasks like multi-turn conversations, where tokens appearing later in a sequence are more likely to be dropped. Finally, we rethink our design based on the above-mentioned observations and analysis. To facilitate future MoE LLM development, we propose potential strategies for mitigating the issues we found and further improving off-the-shelf MoE LLM designs.

Vector similarity search presents significant challenges in terms of scalability for large and high-dimensional datasets, as well as in providing native support for hybrid queries. Serverless computing and cloud functions offer attractive benefits such as elasticity and cost-effectiveness, but are difficult to apply to data-intensive workloads. Jointly addressing these two main challenges, we present SQUASH, the first fully serverless vector search solution with rich support for hybrid queries. It features OSQ, an optimized and highly parallelizable quantization-based approach for vectors and attributes. Its segment-based storage mechanism enables significant compression in resource-constrained settings and offers efficient dimensional extraction operations. SQUASH performs a single distributed pass to guarantee the return of sufficiently many vectors satisfying the filter predicate, achieving high accuracy and avoiding redundant computation for vectors which fail the predicate. A multi-level search workflow is introduced to prune most vectors early to minimize the load on Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) instances. SQUASH is designed to identify and utilize retention of relevant data in re-used runtime containers, which eliminates redundant I/O and reduces costs. Finally, we demonstrate a new tree-based method for rapid FaaS invocation, enabling the bi-directional flow of data via request/response payloads. Experiments comparing SQUASH with state-of-the-art serverless vector search solutions and server-based baselines on vector search benchmarks confirm significant performance improvements at a lower cost.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative abilities, but can they judge the quality of their own generations? A popular concept, referred to as self-refinement, postulates that LLMs can detect and correct the errors in their generations when asked to do so. However, recent empirical evidence points in the opposite direction, suggesting that LLMs often struggle to accurately identify errors when reasoning is involved. To address this, we propose a reasoning with refinement objective called ART: Ask, Refine, and Trust, which asks necessary questions to decide when an LLM should refine its output, and either affirm or withhold trust in its refinement by ranking the refinement and the initial prediction. On two multistep reasoning tasks of mathematical word problems (GSM8K) and question answering (StrategyQA), ART achieves a performance gain of +5 points over self-refinement baselines, while using a much smaller model as the decision maker. We also demonstrate the benefit of using smaller models to make refinement decisions as a cost-effective alternative to fine-tuning a larger model.

In this paper, we propose an architecture to harness the collective knowledge of multiple trained LLMs to create a new state-of-the-art. At the core of this framework is a LLM-based orchestrator that is adept at picking the right underlying LLM experts for optimal task execution. Inspired by self-play in reinforcement learning, we created a loop of query generation, orchestration, and evaluation to generate training data for the orchestrator. Our evaluation focused on the MMLU benchmark, employing models with 7B, 13B, and 34B parameters available on Hugging Face. The results demonstrate new state-of-the-art open-source models: Our Leeroo orchestrator achieves performance on par with the Mixtral model while incurring only two-thirds of its cost. Moreover, increasing the allowed cost surpasses Mixtral's accuracy by over 5% at the same cost level, reaching an accuracy of 75.9%. Further enhancements were observed when integrating GPT4 into the underlying model pool. The Leeroo orchestrator nearly matches GPT4's performance at half the cost and even exceeds GPT4's results with a 25% cost reduction. These findings illustrate the potential of our architecture in creating state-of-the-art and cost-effective LLMs by optimizing the synergy between multiple LLMs to achieve superior performance outcomes.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have been shown to improve the accuracy of Large Language Model (LLM) outputs. However, these models can often achieve low accuracy when applied to new data domains. We introduce the Automatic Local Fine Tuning of Retrieval Augmented Generation models (ALoFTRAG) framework, designed to improve the accuracy of RAG systems on a given domain by training LLMs without manually labeled data or using larger teacher models. By generating and filtering synthetic training data and performing LoRA fine-tuning, ALoFTRAG improves citation and answer accuracy across 20 datasets in 26 languages by, on average, 8.3% and 3.0% respectively. Our results demonstrate that ALoFTRAG offers a practical, cost-effective, and data-secure solution for improving RAG accuracy, making it particularly applicable to sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance.

Deep neural network (DNN) based perception models are indispensable in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, their reliance on large-scale, high-quality data is broadly recognized as a burdensome necessity due to the substantial cost of data acquisition and labeling. Further, the issue is not a one-time concern, as AVs might need a new dataset if they are to be deployed to another region (real-target domain) that the in-hand dataset within the real-source domain cannot incorporate. To mitigate this burden, we propose leveraging synthetic environments as an auxiliary domain where the characteristics of real domains are reproduced. This approach could enable indirect experience about the real-target domain in a time- and cost-effective manner. As a practical demonstration of our methodology, nuScenes and South Korea are employed to represent real-source and real-target domains, respectively. That means we construct digital twins for several regions of South Korea, and the data-acquisition framework of nuScenes is reproduced. Blending the aforementioned components within a simulator allows us to obtain a synthetic-fusion domain in which we forge our novel driving dataset, MORDA: Mixture Of Real-domain characteristics for synthetic-data-assisted Domain Adaptation. To verify the value of synthetic features that MORDA provides in learning about driving environments of South Korea, 2D/3D detectors are trained solely on a combination of nuScenes and MORDA. Afterward, their performance is evaluated on the unforeseen real-world dataset (AI-Hub) collected in South Korea. Our experiments present that MORDA can significantly improve mean Average Precision (mAP) on AI-Hub dataset while that on nuScenes is retained or slightly enhanced.

While crowdsourcing is an established solution for facilitating and scaling the collection of speech data, the involvement of non-experts necessitates protocols to ensure final data quality. To reduce the costs of these essential controls, this paper investigates the use of Speech Foundation Models (SFMs) to automate the validation process, examining for the first time the cost/quality trade-off in data acquisition. Experiments conducted on French, German, and Korean data demonstrate that SFM-based validation has the potential to reduce reliance on human validation, resulting in an estimated cost saving of over 40.0% without degrading final data quality. These findings open new opportunities for more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable speech data acquisition.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized code generation but require significant resources and often over-generalize, limiting their task-specific efficiency. Fine-tuning smaller, open-source LLMs provides a cost-effective alternative. However, standard supervised approaches rely only on correct examples, missing valuable insights from failures. We introduce CodeLutra, a framework that leverages both correct and incorrect code attempts. Instead of using only correct solutions, CodeLutra applies iterative preference-based refinement, comparing successful and failed outputs to better approximate desired results. This approach narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art larger models without requiring massive datasets or auxiliary models. For instance, on a challenging data science coding task, using only 500 samples improved Llama-3-8B's accuracy from 28.2% to 48.6%, approaching GPT-4's level. By learning from both successes and mistakes, CodeLutra provides a scalable and efficient path to high-quality code generation, making smaller open-source models more competitive with leading closed-source alternatives.

In the realm of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), vision-language connector plays a crucial role to link the pre-trained vision encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its importance, the vision-language connector has been relatively less explored. In this study, we aim to propose a strong vision-language connector that enables MLLMs to achieve high accuracy while maintain low computation cost. We first reveal the existence of the visual anchors in Vision Transformer and propose a cost-effective search algorithm to extract them. Building on these findings, we introduce the Anchor Former (AcFormer), a novel vision-language connector designed to leverage the rich prior knowledge obtained from these visual anchors during pretraining, guiding the aggregation of information. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces computational costs by nearly two-thirds compared with baseline, while simultaneously outperforming baseline methods. This highlights the effectiveness and efficiency of AcFormer.

Turkish is one of the most popular languages in the world. Wide us of this language on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, or Tiktok and strategic position of the country in the world politics makes it appealing for the social network researchers and industry. To address this need, we introduce TurkishBERTweet, the first large scale pre-trained language model for Turkish social media built using almost 900 million tweets. The model shares the same architecture as base BERT model with smaller input length, making TurkishBERTweet lighter than BERTurk and can have significantly lower inference time. We trained our model using the same approach for RoBERTa model and evaluated on two text classification tasks: Sentiment Classification and Hate Speech Detection. We demonstrate that TurkishBERTweet outperforms the other available alternatives on generalizability and its lower inference time gives significant advantage to process large-scale datasets. We also compared our models with the commercial OpenAI solutions in terms of cost and performance to demonstrate TurkishBERTweet is scalable and cost-effective solution. As part of our research, we released TurkishBERTweet and fine-tuned LoRA adapters for the mentioned tasks under the MIT License to facilitate future research and applications on Turkish social media. Our TurkishBERTweet model is available at: https://github.com/ViralLab/TurkishBERTweet

Language models that are sensitive to external context can more effectively capture the speaking patterns of individuals with specific characteristics or in particular environments. However, obtaining and leveraging such annotations can be challenging. In this work, we show how to leverage rich character and film annotations to personalise language models in a scalable manner. Our best model can reduce perplexity by up to 6.5% compared to a parameter-matched language model. Our approach performs on par with speaker-specific fine-tuning when the fine-tuning data (i.e. past dialogue) for individual speakers is available. On top of that, it also generalises well to a scenario with no such data, relying on combinations of demographic characteristics expressed via metadata. Our findings are consistent across two corpora, one of which is also a contribution of this paper: Cornell-rich contains rich manual annotations for 863 speaking characters from the Cornell Movie Dialog Corpus, including features such as characteristic quotes and character descriptions, along with six automatically extracted metadata features for over 95% of the featured films. Finally, we also present a cost-benefit analysis highlighting which annotations are most cost-effective in reducing perplexity.

The university management is perpetually in the process of innovating policies to improve the quality of service. Intellectual growth of the students, the popularity of university are some of the major areas that management strives to improve upon. Relevant historical data is needed in support of taking any decision. Furthermore, providing data to various university ranking frameworks is a frequent activity in recent years. The format of such requirement changes frequently which requires efficient manual effort. Maintaining a data warehouse can be a solution to this problem. However, both in-house and outsourced implementation of a dedicated data warehouse may not be a cost-effective and smart solution. This work proposes an educational data warehouse as a service (eDWaaS) model to store historical data for multiple universities. The proposed multi-tenant schema facilitates the universities to maintain their data warehouse in a cost-effective solution. It also addresses the scalability issues in implementing such data warehouse as a service model.

We present a novel application of evolutionary algorithms to automate the creation of powerful foundation models. While model merging has emerged as a promising approach for LLM development due to its cost-effectiveness, it currently relies on human intuition and domain knowledge, limiting its potential. Here, we propose an evolutionary approach that overcomes this limitation by automatically discovering effective combinations of diverse open-source models, harnessing their collective intelligence without requiring extensive additional training data or compute. Our approach operates in both parameter space and data flow space, allowing for optimization beyond just the weights of the individual models. This approach even facilitates cross-domain merging, generating models like a Japanese LLM with Math reasoning capabilities. Surprisingly, our Japanese Math LLM achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of established Japanese LLM benchmarks, even surpassing models with significantly more parameters, despite not being explicitly trained for such tasks. Furthermore, a culturally-aware Japanese VLM generated through our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in describing Japanese culture-specific content, outperforming previous Japanese VLMs. This work not only contributes new state-of-the-art models back to the open-source community, but also introduces a new paradigm for automated model composition, paving the way for exploring alternative, efficient approaches to foundation model development.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been well-researched in various long-context tasks. However, the scarcity of high-quality long-context summarization datasets has hindered further advancements in this area. To address this, we introduce CNNSum, a multi-scale long-context summarization benchmark based on Chinese novels, featuring human-driven annotations, which comprises four subsets totaling 695 samples, with lengths ranging from 16k to 128k. We evaluate numerous LLMs and conduct detailed case analyses. Furthermore, we conduct extensive fine-tuning experiments to explore and improve long-context summarization. In our study: (1) Advanced LLMs like GPT-4o may still generate subjective commentary, leading to vague summaries. (2) Currently, long-context summarization mainly relies on memory ability afforded by longer context lengths. The advantages of Large LLMs are hard to utilize, thus small LLMs are the most cost-effective. (3) Different prompt templates paired with various version models may cause large performance gaps. In further fine-tuning, these can be mitigated, and the Base version models perform better. (4) LLMs with RoPE-base scaled exhibit strong extrapolation potential; using short-context data can significantly improve long-context summarization performance. However, further applying other interpolation methods requires careful selection. (5) CNNSum provides more reliable and insightful evaluation results than other benchmarks. We release CNNSum to advance future research in this field. https://github.com/CxsGhost/CNNSum

Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) holds noteworthy promise for autonomous driving applications owing to the cost-effectiveness and rich visual context of monocular camera sensors. However, depth ambiguity poses a significant challenge, as it requires extracting precise 3D scene geometry from a single image, resulting in suboptimal performance when transferring knowledge from a LiDAR-based teacher model to a camera-based student model. To address this issue, we introduce {\em Monocular Teaching Assistant Knowledge Distillation (MonoTAKD)} to enhance 3D perception in Mono3D. Our approach presents a robust camera-based teaching assistant model that effectively bridges the representation gap between different modalities for teacher and student models, addressing the challenge of inaccurate depth estimation. By defining 3D spatial cues as residual features that capture the differences between the teacher and the teaching assistant models, we leverage these cues into the student model, improving its 3D perception capabilities. Experimental results show that our MonoTAKD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI3D dataset. Additionally, we evaluate the performance on nuScenes and KITTI raw datasets to demonstrate the generalization of our model to multi-view 3D and unsupervised data settings. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hoiliu-0801/MonoTAKD.

Open-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in a broad range of multimodal tasks. However, their reasoning capabilities remain constrained by existing instruction-tuning datasets, which were predominately repurposed from academic datasets such as VQA, AI2D, and ChartQA. These datasets target simplistic tasks, and only provide phrase-level answers without any intermediate rationales. To address these challenges, we introduce a scalable and cost-effective method to construct a large-scale multimodal instruction-tuning dataset with rich intermediate rationales designed to elicit CoT reasoning. Using only open models, we create a dataset containing 12M instruction-response pairs to cover diverse, reasoning-intensive tasks with detailed and faithful rationales. Experiments demonstrate that training MLLMs on this dataset significantly improves reasoning capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as MathVerse (+8.1%), MMMU-Pro (+7%), and MuirBench (+13.3%). Additionally, the model demonstrates notable improvements of up to 4% on non-reasoning-based benchmarks. Ablation studies further highlight the importance of key components, such as rewriting and self-filtering, in the dataset construction process.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks. By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs 10 times larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar. The project is released at: https://github.com/SparksJoe/Prism.

Effective training of language models (LMs) for mathematical reasoning tasks demands high-quality supervised fine-tuning data. Besides obtaining annotations from human experts, a common alternative is sampling from larger and more powerful LMs. However, this knowledge distillation approach can be costly and unstable, particularly when relying on closed-source, proprietary LMs like GPT-4, whose behaviors are often unpredictable. In this work, we demonstrate that the reasoning abilities of small-scale LMs can be enhanced through self-training, a process where models learn from their own outputs. We also show that the conventional self-training can be further augmented by a preference learning algorithm called Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). By integrating DPO into self-training, we leverage preference data to guide LMs towards more accurate and diverse chain-of-thought reasoning. We evaluate our method across various mathematical reasoning tasks using different base models. Our experiments show that this approach not only improves LMs' reasoning performance but also offers a more cost-effective and scalable solution compared to relying on large proprietary LMs.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have revolutionized visual content creation, but extending these capabilities to text-to-video (T2V) generation remains a challenge, particularly in preserving temporal consistency. Existing methods that aim to improve consistency often cause trade-offs such as reduced imaging quality and impractical computational time. To address these issues we introduce VideoGuide, a novel framework that enhances the temporal consistency of pretrained T2V models without the need for additional training or fine-tuning. Instead, VideoGuide leverages any pretrained video diffusion model (VDM) or itself as a guide during the early stages of inference, improving temporal quality by interpolating the guiding model's denoised samples into the sampling model's denoising process. The proposed method brings about significant improvement in temporal consistency and image fidelity, providing a cost-effective and practical solution that synergizes the strengths of various video diffusion models. Furthermore, we demonstrate prior distillation, revealing that base models can achieve enhanced text coherence by utilizing the superior data prior of the guiding model through the proposed method. Project Page: http://videoguide2025.github.io/

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

This paper introduces Typhoon T1, an open effort to develop an open Thai reasoning model. A reasoning model is a relatively new type of generative model built on top of large language models (LLMs). A reasoning model generates a long chain of thought before arriving at a final answer, an approach found to improve performance on complex tasks. However, details on developing such a model are limited, especially for reasoning models that can generate traces in a low-resource language. Typhoon T1 presents an open effort that dives into the details of developing a reasoning model in a more cost-effective way by leveraging supervised fine-tuning using open datasets, instead of reinforcement learning. This paper shares the details about synthetic data generation and training, as well as our dataset and model weights. Additionally, we provide insights gained from developing a reasoning model that generalizes across domains and is capable of generating reasoning traces in a low-resource language, using Thai as an example. We hope this open effort provides a foundation for further research in this field.

Large language models exhibit exceptional generalization capabilities, primarily attributed to the utilization of diversely sourced data. However, conventional practices in integrating this diverse data heavily rely on heuristic schemes, lacking theoretical guidance. This research tackles these limitations by investigating strategies based on low-cost proxies for data mixtures, with the aim of streamlining data curation to enhance training efficiency. Specifically, we propose a unified scaling law, termed BiMix, which accurately models the bivariate scaling behaviors of both data quantity and mixing proportions. We conduct systematic experiments and provide empirical evidence for the predictive power and fundamental principles of BiMix. Notably, our findings reveal that entropy-driven training-free data mixtures can achieve comparable or even better performance than more resource-intensive methods. We hope that our quantitative insights can shed light on further judicious research and development in cost-effective language modeling.

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the predominant method for controlling language model outputs, it suffers from high computational costs and training instability. Guided decoding, especially value-guided methods, offers a cost-effective alternative by controlling outputs without re-training models. However, the accuracy of the value function is crucial for value-guided decoding, as inaccuracies can lead to suboptimal decision-making and degraded performance. Existing methods struggle with accurately estimating the optimal value function, leading to less effective control. We propose Iterative Value Function Optimization, a novel framework that addresses these limitations through two key components: Monte Carlo Value Estimation, which reduces estimation variance by exploring diverse trajectories, and Iterative On-Policy Optimization, which progressively improves value estimation through collecting trajectories from value-guided policies. Extensive experiments on text summarization, multi-turn dialogue, and instruction following demonstrate the effectiveness of value-guided decoding approaches in aligning language models. These approaches not only achieve alignment but also significantly reduce computational costs by leveraging principled value function optimization for efficient and effective control.

With significant efforts in recent studies, LLM-as-a-Judge has become a cost-effective alternative to human evaluation for assessing the text generation quality in a wide range of tasks. However, there still remains a reliability gap between LLM-as-a-Judge and human evaluation. One important reason is the lack of guided oracles in the evaluation process. Motivated by the role of reference pervasively used in classic text evaluation, we introduce RevisEval, a novel text generation evaluation paradigm via the response-adapted references. RevisEval is driven by the key observation that an ideal reference should maintain the necessary relevance to the response to be evaluated. Specifically, RevisEval leverages the text revision capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to adaptively revise the response, then treat the revised text as the reference (response-adapted reference) for the subsequent evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RevisEval outperforms traditional reference-free and reference-based evaluation paradigms that use LLM-as-a-Judge across NLG tasks and open-ended instruction-following tasks. More importantly, our response-adapted references can further boost the classical text metrics, e.g., BLEU and BERTScore, compared to traditional references and even rival the LLM-as-a-Judge. A detailed analysis is also conducted to confirm RevisEval's effectiveness in bias reduction, the impact of inference cost, and reference relevance.

Real-world household tasks present significant challenges for mobile manipulation robots. An analysis of existing robotics benchmarks reveals that successful task performance hinges on three key whole-body control capabilities: bimanual coordination, stable and precise navigation, and extensive end-effector reachability. Achieving these capabilities requires careful hardware design, but the resulting system complexity further complicates visuomotor policy learning. To address these challenges, we introduce the BEHAVIOR Robot Suite (BRS), a comprehensive framework for whole-body manipulation in diverse household tasks. Built on a bimanual, wheeled robot with a 4-DoF torso, BRS integrates a cost-effective whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection and a novel algorithm for learning whole-body visuomotor policies. We evaluate BRS on five challenging household tasks that not only emphasize the three core capabilities but also introduce additional complexities, such as long-range navigation, interaction with articulated and deformable objects, and manipulation in confined spaces. We believe that BRS's integrated robotic embodiment, data collection interface, and learning framework mark a significant step toward enabling real-world whole-body manipulation for everyday household tasks. BRS is open-sourced at https://behavior-robot-suite.github.io/

The impressive development of large language models (LLMs) is expanding into the realm of large multimodal models (LMMs), which incorporate multiple types of data beyond text. However, the nature of multimodal models leads to significant expenses in the creation of training data. Furthermore, constructing multilingual data for LMMs presents its own set of challenges due to language diversity and complexity. Therefore, in this study, we propose two cost-effective methods to solve this problem: (1) vocabulary expansion and pretraining of multilingual LLM for specific languages, and (2) automatic and elaborate construction of multimodal datasets using GPT4-V. Based on015 these methods, we constructed a 91K English-Korean-Chinese multilingual, multimodal training dataset. Additionally, we developed a bilingual multimodal model that exhibits excellent performance in both Korean and English, surpassing existing approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet their performance is highly dependent on the prompting strategy and model scale. While reinforcement learning and fine-tuning have been deployed to boost reasoning, these approaches incur substantial computational and data overhead. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Graph of Thoughts (AGoT), a dynamic, graph-based inference framework that enhances LLM reasoning solely at test time. Rather than relying on fixed-step methods like Chain of Thought (CoT) or Tree of Thoughts (ToT), AGoT recursively decomposes complex queries into structured subproblems, forming an dynamic directed acyclic graph (DAG) of interdependent reasoning steps. By selectively expanding only those subproblems that require further analysis, AGoT unifies the strengths of chain, tree, and graph paradigms into a cohesive framework that allocates computation where it is most needed. We validate our approach on diverse benchmarks spanning multi-hop retrieval, scientific reasoning, and mathematical problem-solving, achieving up to 46.2% improvement on scientific reasoning tasks (GPQA) - comparable to gains achieved through computationally intensive reinforcement learning approaches and outperforming state-of-the-art iterative approaches. These results suggest that dynamic decomposition and structured recursion offer a scalable, cost-effective alternative to post-training modifications, paving the way for more robust, general-purpose reasoning in LLMs.

The popularity of LLaMA (Touvron et al., 2023a;b) and other recently emerged moderate-sized large language models (LLMs) highlights the potential of building smaller yet powerful LLMs. Regardless, the cost of training such models from scratch on trillions of tokens remains high. In this work, we study structured pruning as an effective means to develop smaller LLMs from pre-trained, larger models. Our approach employs two key techniques: (1) targeted structured pruning, which prunes a larger model to a specified target shape by removing layers, heads, and intermediate and hidden dimensions in an end-to-end manner, and (2) dynamic batch loading, which dynamically updates the composition of sampled data in each training batch based on varying losses across different domains. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by presenting the Sheared-LLaMA series, pruning the LLaMA2-7B model down to 1.3B and 2.7B parameters. Sheared-LLaMA models outperform state-of-the-art open-source models of equivalent sizes, such as Pythia, INCITE, and OpenLLaMA models, on a wide range of downstream and instruction tuning evaluations, while requiring only 3% of compute compared to training such models from scratch. This work provides compelling evidence that leveraging existing LLMs with structured pruning is a far more cost-effective approach for building smaller LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities due to their vast "world knowledge". Yet, obtaining plans that are both feasible (grounded in affordances) and cost-effective (in plan length), remains a challenge, despite recent progress. This contrasts with heuristic planning methods that employ domain knowledge (formalized in action models such as PDDL) and heuristic search to generate feasible, optimal plans. Inspired by this, we propose to combine the power of LLMs and heuristic planning by leveraging the world knowledge of LLMs and the principles of heuristic search. Our approach, SayCanPay, employs LLMs to generate actions (Say) guided by learnable domain knowledge, that evaluates actions' feasibility (Can) and long-term reward/payoff (Pay), and heuristic search to select the best sequence of actions. Our contributions are (1) a novel framing of the LLM planning problem in the context of heuristic planning, (2) integrating grounding and cost-effective elements into the generated plans, and (3) using heuristic search over actions. Our extensive evaluations show that our model surpasses other LLM planning approaches.

Large-scale AI model training divides work across thousands of GPUs, then synchronizes gradients across them at each step. This incurs a significant network burden that only centralized, monolithic clusters can support, driving up infrastructure costs and straining power systems. We propose Decentralized Diffusion Models, a scalable framework for distributing diffusion model training across independent clusters or datacenters by eliminating the dependence on a centralized, high-bandwidth networking fabric. Our method trains a set of expert diffusion models over partitions of the dataset, each in full isolation from one another. At inference time, the experts ensemble through a lightweight router. We show that the ensemble collectively optimizes the same objective as a single model trained over the whole dataset. This means we can divide the training burden among a number of "compute islands," lowering infrastructure costs and improving resilience to localized GPU failures. Decentralized diffusion models empower researchers to take advantage of smaller, more cost-effective and more readily available compute like on-demand GPU nodes rather than central integrated systems. We conduct extensive experiments on ImageNet and LAION Aesthetics, showing that decentralized diffusion models FLOP-for-FLOP outperform standard diffusion models. We finally scale our approach to 24 billion parameters, demonstrating that high-quality diffusion models can now be trained with just eight individual GPU nodes in less than a week.

Scaling large language models (LLMs) significantly improves performance but comes with prohibitive computational costs. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models offer an efficient alternative, increasing capacity without a proportional rise in compute requirements. However, training MoE models from scratch poses challenges like overfitting and routing instability. We present an efficient training recipe leveraging pre-trained dense checkpoints, training an 8-Expert Top-2 MoE model from Llama 3-8B with less than 1% of typical pre-training compute. Our approach enhances downstream performance on academic benchmarks, achieving a 2% improvement in 0-shot accuracy on MMLU, while reaching a Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) of 46.8% during training using our framework. We also integrate online upcycling in NeMo for seamless use of pre-trained weights, enabling cost-effective development of high-capacity MoE models.

This paper introduces Patched MOA (Mixture of Agents), an inference optimization technique that significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across diverse software development tasks. We evaluate three inference optimization algorithms - Best of N, Mixture of Agents, and Monte Carlo Tree Search and demonstrate that Patched MOA can boost the performance of smaller models to surpass that of larger, more expensive models. Notably, our approach improves the gpt-4o-mini model's performance on the Arena-Hard-Auto benchmark by 15.52%, outperforming gpt-4-turbo at a fraction of the cost. We also apply Patched MOA to various software development workflows, showing consistent improvements in task completion rates. Our method is model-agnostic, transparent to end-users, and can be easily integrated into existing LLM pipelines. This work contributes to the growing field of LLM optimization, offering a cost-effective solution for enhancing model performance without the need for fine-tuning or larger models.

Large language models (LLMs) encode a vast amount of world knowledge acquired from massive text datasets. Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can assist an embodied agent in solving complex sequential decision making tasks by providing high-level instructions. However, interactions with LLMs can be time-consuming. In many practical scenarios, they require a significant amount of storage space that can only be deployed on remote cloud server nodes. Additionally, using commercial LLMs can be costly since they may charge based on usage frequency. In this paper, we explore how to enable intelligent cost-effective interactions between the agent and an LLM. We propose When2Ask, a reinforcement learning based approach that learns when it is necessary to query LLMs for high-level instructions to accomplish a target task. Experiments on MiniGrid and Habitat environments that entail planning sub-goals demonstrate that When2Ask learns to solve target tasks with only a few necessary interactions with an LLM, and significantly reduces interaction costs in testing environments compared with baseline methods. Experiment results also suggest that by learning a mediator model to interact with the LLM, the agent's performance becomes more robust against partial observability of the environment. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/LLM4RL.

This paper presents a novel approach for similarity search with complex filtering capabilities on billion-scale datasets, optimized for CPU inference. Our method extends the classical IVF-Flat index structure to integrate multi-dimensional filters. The proposed algorithm combines dense embeddings with discrete filtering attributes, enabling fast retrieval in high-dimensional spaces. Designed specifically for CPU-based systems, our disk-based approach offers a cost-effective solution for large-scale similarity search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a case study, showcasing its potential for various practical uses.

Recent advances show that large language models (LLMs) generalize strong performance across different natural language benchmarks. However, the large size of LLMs makes training and inference expensive and impractical to run in resource-limited settings. This paper introduces a new approach called fine-tuning stacks of language models (FSLM), which involves stacking small language models (SLM) as an alternative to LLMs. By fine-tuning each SLM to perform a specific task, this approach breaks down high level reasoning into multiple lower-level steps that specific SLMs are responsible for. As a result, FSLM allows for lower training and inference costs, and also improves model interpretability as each SLM communicates with the subsequent one through natural language. By evaluating FSLM on common natural language benchmarks, this paper highlights promising early results toward generalizable performance using FSLM as a cost-effective alternative to LLMs.

Generating talking face videos from various conditions has recently become a highly popular research area within generative tasks. However, building a high-quality face video generation model requires a well-performing pre-trained backbone, a key obstacle that universal models fail to adequately address. Most existing works rely on universal video or image generation models and optimize control mechanisms, but they neglect the evident upper bound in video quality due to the limited capabilities of the backbones, which is a result of the lack of high-quality human face video datasets. In this work, we investigate the unsatisfactory results from related studies, gather and trim existing public talking face video datasets, and additionally collect and annotate a large-scale dataset, resulting in a comprehensive, high-quality multiracial face collection named FaceVid-1K. Using this dataset, we craft several effective pre-trained backbone models for face video generation. Specifically, we conduct experiments with several well-established video generation models, including text-to-video, image-to-video, and unconditional video generation, under various settings. We obtain the corresponding performance benchmarks and compared them with those trained on public datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our dataset. These experiments also allow us to investigate empirical strategies for crafting domain-specific video generation tasks with cost-effective settings. We will make our curated dataset, along with the pre-trained talking face video generation models, publicly available as a resource contribution to hopefully advance the research field.

This paper introduces VoxHakka, a text-to-speech (TTS) system designed for Taiwanese Hakka, a critically under-resourced language spoken in Taiwan. Leveraging the YourTTS framework, VoxHakka achieves high naturalness and accuracy and low real-time factor in speech synthesis while supporting six distinct Hakka dialects. This is achieved by training the model with dialect-specific data, allowing for the generation of speaker-aware Hakka speech. To address the scarcity of publicly available Hakka speech corpora, we employed a cost-effective approach utilizing a web scraping pipeline coupled with automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based data cleaning techniques. This process ensured the acquisition of a high-quality, multi-speaker, multi-dialect dataset suitable for TTS training. Subjective listening tests conducted using comparative mean opinion scores (CMOS) demonstrate that VoxHakka significantly outperforms existing publicly available Hakka TTS systems in terms of pronunciation accuracy, tone correctness, and overall naturalness. This work represents a significant advancement in Hakka language technology and provides a valuable resource for language preservation and revitalization efforts.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with large language models (LLMs) for Question Answering (QA) entails furnishing relevant context within the prompt to facilitate the LLM in answer generation. During the generation, inaccuracies or hallucinations frequently occur due to two primary factors: inadequate or distracting context in the prompts, and the inability of LLMs to effectively reason through the facts. In this paper, we investigate whether providing aligned context via a carefully selected passage sequence leads to better answer generation by the LLM for multi-hop QA. We introduce, "GenSco", a novel approach of selecting passages based on the predicted decomposition of the multi-hop questions}. The framework consists of two distinct LLMs: (i) Generator LLM, which is used for question decomposition and final answer generation; (ii) an auxiliary open-sourced LLM, used as the scorer, to semantically guide the Generator for passage selection. The generator is invoked only once for the answer generation, resulting in a cost-effective and efficient approach. We evaluate on three broadly established multi-hop question answering datasets: 2WikiMultiHop, Adversarial HotPotQA and MuSiQue and achieve an absolute gain of 15.1 and 5.9 points in Exact Match score with respect to the best performing baselines over MuSiQue and 2WikiMultiHop respectively.

We present an efficient method for adapting a monolingual Large Language Model (LLM) to another language, addressing challenges of catastrophic forgetting and tokenizer limitations. We focus this study on adapting Llama 2 to Arabic. Our two-stage approach begins with expanding the vocabulary and training only the embeddings matrix, followed by full model continual pre-training on a bilingual corpus. By continually pre-training on a mix of Arabic and English corpora, the model retains its proficiency in English while acquiring capabilities in Arabic. Our approach results in significant improvements in Arabic and slight enhancements in English, demonstrating cost-effective cross-lingual transfer. We perform ablations on embedding initialization techniques, data mix ratios, and learning rates and release a detailed training recipe. To demonstrate generalizability of this approach we also adapted Llama 3 8B to Arabic and Llama 2 13B to Hindi.

The development of speech technologies for languages with limited digital representation poses significant challenges, primarily due to the scarcity of available data. This issue is exacerbated in the era of large, data-intensive models. Recent research has underscored the potential of leveraging weak supervision to augment the pool of available data. In this study, we compile an 800-hour corpus of Modern Greek from podcasts and employ Whisper large-v3 to generate silver transcriptions. This corpus is utilized to fine-tune our models, aiming to assess the efficacy of this approach in enhancing ASR performance. Our analysis spans 16 distinct podcast domains, alongside evaluations on established datasets for Modern Greek. The findings indicate consistent WER improvements, correlating with increases in both data volume and model size. Our study confirms that assembling large, weakly supervised corpora serves as a cost-effective strategy for advancing speech technologies in under-resourced languages.

With the rapid development of video Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), numerous benchmarks have been proposed to assess their video understanding capability. However, due to the lack of rich events in the videos, these datasets may suffer from the short-cut bias that the answers can be deduced from a few frames, without the need to watch the entire video. To address this issue, we introduce Event-Bench, an event-oriented long video understanding benchmark built on existing datasets and human annotations. Event-Bench includes six event-related tasks and 2,190 test instances to comprehensively evaluate video event understanding ability. Additionally, we propose Video Instruction Merging~(VIM), a cost-effective method that enhances video MLLMs using merged, event-intensive video instructions, addressing the scarcity of human-annotated, event-intensive data. Extensive experiments show that the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an overall accuracy of 53.33, significantly outperforming the best open-source model by 41.42%. Leveraging an effective instruction synthesis method and an adaptive model architecture, VIM surpasses both state-of-the-art open-source models and GPT-4V on the Event-Bench. All code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Event-Bench.

WHO has declared that more than 2.2 billion people worldwide are suffering from visual disorders, such as media haze, glaucoma, and drusen. At least 1 billion of these cases could have been either prevented or successfully treated, yet they remain unaddressed due to poverty, a lack of specialists, inaccurate ocular fundus diagnoses by ophthalmologists, or the presence of a rare disease. To address this, the research has developed the Hybrid Trio-Network Model Algorithm for accurately diagnosing 12 distinct common and rare eye diseases. This algorithm utilized the RFMiD dataset of 3,200 fundus images and the Binary Relevance Method to detect diseases separately, ensuring expandability and avoiding incorrect correlations. Each detector, incorporating finely tuned hyperparameters to optimize performance, consisted of three feature components: A classical transfer learning CNN model, a two-stage CNN model, and a Siamese Network. The diagnosis was made using features extracted through this Trio-Model with Ensembled Machine Learning algorithms. The proposed model achieved an average accuracy of 97% and an AUC score of 0.96. Compared to past benchmark studies, an increase of over 10% in the F1-score was observed for most diseases. Furthermore, using the Siamese Network, the model successfully made predictions in diseases like optic disc pallor, which past studies failed to predict due to low confidence. This diagnostic tool presents a stable, adaptive, cost-effective, efficient, accessible, and fast solution for globalizing early detection of both common and rare diseases.

Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) as a pairwise mention classification task is expensive both for automated systems and manual annotations. The task's quadratic difficulty is exacerbated when using Large Language Models (LLMs), making prompt engineering for ECR prohibitively costly. In this work, we propose a graphical representation of events, X-AMR, anchored around individual mentions using a cross-document version of Abstract Meaning Representation. We then linearize the ECR with a novel multi-hop coreference algorithm over the event graphs. The event graphs simplify ECR, making it a) LLM cost-effective, b) compositional and interpretable, and c) easily annotated. For a fair assessment, we first enrich an existing ECR benchmark dataset with these event graphs using an annotator-friendly tool we introduce. Then, we employ GPT-4, the newest LLM by OpenAI, for these annotations. Finally, using the ECR algorithm, we assess GPT-4 against humans and analyze its limitations. Through this research, we aim to advance the state-of-the-art for efficient ECR and shed light on the potential shortcomings of current LLMs at this task. Code and annotations: https://github.com/ahmeshaf/gpt_coref

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are at the forefront of advances in Natural Language Processing. One widespread use case of PLMs is "prompting" - or in-context learning - where a user provides a description of a task and some completed examples of the task to a PLM as context before prompting the PLM to perform the task on a new example. Only the largest, most capable PLMs are able to perform in-context learning effectively, and these models are typically trained with a predominantly English corpus, leaving all other languages behind. The data limitations in most languages preclude the training of language-specific PLMs capable of prompting. Albeit the surge in work of prompting settings, it is still unclear how PLMs should be adapted cross-lingually specifically for prompting. We evaluate the possible methods to adapt LLaMa, a 7B parameter open-source PLM mainly trained in English, for prompting in low-resource languages, namely for Kinyarwanda, Hausa, and Luganda. We consider three methods: few-shot prompting (prompt), language-adaptive fine-tuning (LAFT), and neural machine translation (translate), and evaluate on abstractive summarization, multi-class topic classification, and named-entity recognition. Although LAFT carries the greatest compute cost and intuitively should lead to the best results, our experiments exhibit that LAFT is only occasionally the optimal choice for adapting PLMs for prompting. Rather, the translate and prompt settings are a compute-efficient and cost-effective method of few-shot prompting for the selected low-resource languages. We find that the results are task and language dependent but find that the prompting method is the best on average across all tasks and languages. Results show that the prompt setting performs better than both translating and LAFT with statistical significance for all shots when aggregated across all tasks and languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently made significant strides in complex reasoning tasks through the Chain-of-Thought technique. Despite this progress, their reasoning is often constrained by their intrinsic understanding, lacking external insights. To address this, we propose Exchange-of-Thought (EoT), a novel framework that enables cross-model communication during problem-solving. Drawing inspiration from network topology, EoT integrates four unique communication paradigms: Memory, Report, Relay, and Debate. This paper delves into the communication dynamics and volume associated with each paradigm. To counterbalance the risks of incorrect reasoning chains, we implement a robust confidence evaluation mechanism within these communications. Our experiments across diverse complex reasoning tasks demonstrate that EoT significantly surpasses established baselines, underscoring the value of external insights in enhancing LLM performance. Furthermore, we show that EoT achieves these superior results in a cost-effective manner, marking a promising advancement for efficient and collaborative AI problem-solving.

Standard Full-Data classifiers in NLP demand thousands of labeled examples, which is impractical in data-limited domains. Few-shot methods offer an alternative, utilizing contrastive learning techniques that can be effective with as little as 20 examples per class. Similarly, Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 can perform effectively with just 1-5 examples per class. However, the performance-cost trade-offs of these methods remain underexplored, a critical concern for budget-limited organizations. Our work addresses this gap by studying the aforementioned approaches over the Banking77 financial intent detection dataset, including the evaluation of cutting-edge LLMs by OpenAI, Cohere, and Anthropic in a comprehensive set of few-shot scenarios. We complete the picture with two additional methods: first, a cost-effective querying method for LLMs based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), able to reduce operational costs multiple times compared to classic few-shot approaches, and second, a data augmentation method using GPT-4, able to improve performance in data-limited scenarios. Finally, to inspire future research, we provide a human expert's curated subset of Banking77, along with extensive error analysis.

Simulation is an essential tool to develop and benchmark autonomous vehicle planning software in a safe and cost-effective manner. However, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of nuanced and complex multi-agent interactive behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce Waymax, a new data-driven simulator for autonomous driving in multi-agent scenes, designed for large-scale simulation and testing. Waymax uses publicly-released, real-world driving data (e.g., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset) to initialize or play back a diverse set of multi-agent simulated scenarios. It runs entirely on hardware accelerators such as TPUs/GPUs and supports in-graph simulation for training, making it suitable for modern large-scale, distributed machine learning workflows. To support online training and evaluation, Waymax includes several learned and hard-coded behavior models that allow for realistic interaction within simulation. To supplement Waymax, we benchmark a suite of popular imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms with ablation studies on different design decisions, where we highlight the effectiveness of routes as guidance for planning agents and the ability of RL to overfit against simulated agents.

As research in large language models (LLMs) continues to accelerate, LLM-based evaluation has emerged as a scalable and cost-effective alternative to human evaluations for comparing the ever increasing list of models. This paper investigates the efficacy of these "LLM evaluators", particularly in using them to assess instruction following, a metric that gauges how closely generated text adheres to the given instruction. We introduce a challenging meta-evaluation benchmark, LLMBar, designed to test the ability of an LLM evaluator in discerning instruction-following outputs. The authors manually curated 419 pairs of outputs, one adhering to instructions while the other diverging, yet may possess deceptive qualities that mislead an LLM evaluator, e.g., a more engaging tone. Contrary to existing meta-evaluation, we discover that different evaluators (i.e., combinations of LLMs and prompts) exhibit distinct performance on LLMBar and even the highest-scoring ones have substantial room for improvement. We also present a novel suite of prompting strategies that further close the gap between LLM and human evaluators. With LLMBar, we hope to offer more insight into LLM evaluators and foster future research in developing better instruction-following models.

NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content, in the context of a dialogue, can have severe side effects on users in open-domain dialogue systems. However, research on detecting NSFW language, especially sexually explicit content, within a dialogue context has significantly lagged behind. To address this issue, we introduce CensorChat, a dialogue monitoring dataset aimed at NSFW dialogue detection. Leveraging knowledge distillation techniques involving GPT-4 and ChatGPT, this dataset offers a cost-effective means of constructing NSFW content detectors. The process entails collecting real-life human-machine interaction data and breaking it down into single utterances and single-turn dialogues, with the chatbot delivering the final utterance. ChatGPT is employed to annotate unlabeled data, serving as a training set. Rationale validation and test sets are constructed using ChatGPT and GPT-4 as annotators, with a self-criticism strategy for resolving discrepancies in labeling. A BERT model is fine-tuned as a text classifier on pseudo-labeled data, and its performance is assessed. The study emphasizes the importance of AI systems prioritizing user safety and well-being in digital conversations while respecting freedom of expression. The proposed approach not only advances NSFW content detection but also aligns with evolving user protection needs in AI-driven dialogues.

We present a novel inference scheme, self-speculative decoding, for accelerating Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for an auxiliary model. This approach is characterized by a two-stage process: drafting and verification. The drafting stage generates draft tokens at a slightly lower quality but more quickly, which is achieved by selectively skipping certain intermediate layers during drafting Subsequently, the verification stage employs the original LLM to validate those draft output tokens in one forward pass. This process ensures the final output remains identical to that produced by the unaltered LLM, thereby maintaining output quality. The proposed method requires no additional neural network training and no extra memory footprint, making it a plug-and-play and cost-effective solution for inference acceleration. Benchmarks with LLaMA-2 and its fine-tuned models demonstrated a speedup up to 1.73times.

Recent research has highlighted the importance of dataset size in scaling language models. However, large language models (LLMs) are notoriously token-hungry during pre-training, and high-quality text data on the web is approaching its scaling limit for LLMs. To further enhance LLMs, a straightforward approach is to repeat the pre-training data for additional epochs. In this study, we empirically investigate three key aspects under this approach. First, we explore the consequences of repeating pre-training data, revealing that the model is susceptible to overfitting, leading to multi-epoch degradation. Second, we examine the key factors contributing to multi-epoch degradation, finding that significant factors include dataset size, model parameters, and training objectives, while less influential factors consist of dataset quality and model FLOPs. Finally, we explore whether widely used regularization can alleviate multi-epoch degradation. Most regularization techniques do not yield significant improvements, except for dropout, which demonstrates remarkable effectiveness but requires careful tuning when scaling up the model size. Additionally, we discover that leveraging mixture-of-experts (MoE) enables cost-effective and efficient hyper-parameter tuning for computationally intensive dense LLMs with comparable trainable parameters, potentially impacting efficient LLM development on a broader scale.

A significant barrier to progress in data-driven approaches to building dialog systems is the lack of high quality, goal-oriented conversational data. To help satisfy this elementary requirement, we introduce the initial release of the Taskmaster-1 dataset which includes 13,215 task-based dialogs comprising six domains. Two procedures were used to create this collection, each with unique advantages. The first involves a two-person, spoken "Wizard of Oz" (WOz) approach in which trained agents and crowdsourced workers interact to complete the task while the second is "self-dialog" in which crowdsourced workers write the entire dialog themselves. We do not restrict the workers to detailed scripts or to a small knowledge base and hence we observe that our dataset contains more realistic and diverse conversations in comparison to existing datasets. We offer several baseline models including state of the art neural seq2seq architectures with benchmark performance as well as qualitative human evaluations. Dialogs are labeled with API calls and arguments, a simple and cost effective approach which avoids the requirement of complex annotation schema. The layer of abstraction between the dialog model and the service provider API allows for a given model to interact with multiple services that provide similar functionally. Finally, the dataset will evoke interest in written vs. spoken language, discourse patterns, error handling and other linguistic phenomena related to dialog system research, development and design.

Software engineering is a domain characterized by intricate decision-making processes, often relying on nuanced intuition and consultation. Recent advancements in deep learning have started to revolutionize software engineering practices through elaborate designs implemented at various stages of software development. In this paper, we present an innovative paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) throughout the entire software development process, streamlining and unifying key processes through natural language communication, thereby eliminating the need for specialized models at each phase. At the core of this paradigm lies ChatDev, a virtual chat-powered software development company that mirrors the established waterfall model, meticulously dividing the development process into four distinct chronological stages: designing, coding, testing, and documenting. Each stage engages a team of agents, such as programmers, code reviewers, and test engineers, fostering collaborative dialogue and facilitating a seamless workflow. The chat chain acts as a facilitator, breaking down each stage into atomic subtasks. This enables dual roles, allowing for proposing and validating solutions through context-aware communication, leading to efficient resolution of specific subtasks. The instrumental analysis of ChatDev highlights its remarkable efficacy in software generation, enabling the completion of the entire software development process in under seven minutes at a cost of less than one dollar. It not only identifies and alleviates potential vulnerabilities but also rectifies potential hallucinations while maintaining commendable efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The potential of ChatDev unveils fresh possibilities for integrating LLMs into the realm of software development.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a promising sparse paradigm for scaling up pre-trained models (PTMs) with remarkable cost-effectiveness. However, the dynamic nature of MoE leads to rapid fluctuations and imbalances in expert loads during training, resulting in significant straggler effects that hinder training performance when using expert parallelism (EP). Existing MoE training systems attempt to mitigate these effects through expert rearrangement strategies, but they face challenges in terms of memory efficiency and timeliness of rearrangement. This paper proposes Fully Sharded Sparse Data Parallelism (FSSDP), an innovative approach that tackles the parallelization of MoE layers and potential straggler effects caused by imbalanced expert loads from a new perspective. FSSDP fully shards the parameters and optimizer states of MoE layers across devices and sparsely materializes MoE parameters from scratch in each iteration with two sparse collectives SparseAllGather and SparseReduceScatter. We build Hecate, a high-performance MoE training system that incorporates FSSDP to fully unlock its potential. Hecate introduces heterogeneous sharding, sparse materialization, and re-materialization techniques to construct flexible and efficient expert placements with low memory and communication overhead. Our evaluation reveals that Hecate achieves up to 3.54x speedup compared over state-of-the-art MoE training systems and consistently demonstrates improvements across model architectures and hardware environments.

This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evolving meanings of scientific concepts. Using the term "Planck" as a test case, I evaluate five BERT-based models with varying degrees of domain-specific pretraining, including my custom model Astro-HEP-BERT, trained on the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset containing 21.84 million paragraphs from 600,000 articles in astrophysics and high-energy physics. For this analysis, I compiled two labeled datasets: (1) the Astro-HEP-Planck Corpus, consisting of 2,900 labeled occurrences of "Planck" sampled from 1,500 paragraphs in the Astro-HEP Corpus, and (2) a physics-related Wikipedia dataset comprising 1,186 labeled occurrences of "Planck" across 885 paragraphs. Results demonstrate that the domain-adapted models outperform the general-purpose ones in disambiguating the target term, predicting its known meanings, and generating high-quality sense clusters, as measured by a novel purity indicator I developed. Additionally, this approach reveals semantic shifts in the target term over three decades in the unlabeled Astro-HEP Corpus, highlighting the emergence of the Planck space mission as a dominant sense. The study underscores the importance of domain-specific pretraining for analyzing scientific language and demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of adapting pretrained models for HPSS research. By offering a scalable and transferable method for modeling the meanings of scientific concepts, CWEs open up new avenues for investigating the socio-historical dynamics of scientific discourses.

In this paper, we propose Neural-Symbolic Collaborative Distillation (NesyCD), a novel knowledge distillation method for learning the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., \textgreater 13B). We argue that complex reasoning tasks are difficult for Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., leq 7B), as these tasks demand not only general cognitive abilities but also specialized knowledge, which is often sparse and difficult for these neural-based SLMs to effectively capture. Therefore, NesyCD distills the general capabilities and specialized knowledge in LLMs using different manners. On the one hand, we distill only general abilities from teacher LLMs into the student SLMs of parameterized neural networks. On the other hand, for the specialized abilities and uncommon knowledge of a complex reasoning task, we employ a symbolic knowledge distillation approach to obtain and store the specialized knowledge within a symbolic knowledge base (KB). By decoupling general and specialized capabilities, the proposed NesyCD can achieve superior performance cost-effectively, utilizing smaller models and blending parameterized neural networks with symbolic KB. Moreover, the specialized KB generalizes well and is comprehended and manipulated by humans. Our experiments show that NesyCD significantly boosts SLMs' complex reasoning performance on in-domain (BBH, GSM8K) and out-of-domain (AGIEval, ARC) datasets. Notably, our approach enabled the LLaMA3-8B and Qwen2-7B to surpass GPT-3.5-turbo in performance and come close to matching LLaMA3-70B, despite the latter having nine times more parameters. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/NesyCD.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers three important Model Deployment Services for model developers: SageMaker, Lambda, and Elastic Container Service (ECS). These services have critical advantages and disadvantages, influencing model developer's adoption decisions. This comparative analysis reviews the merits and drawbacks of these services. This analysis found that Lambda AWS service leads in efficiency, autoscaling aspects, and integration during model development. However, ECS was found to be outstanding in terms of flexibility, scalability, and infrastructure control; conversely, ECS is better suited when it comes to managing complex container environments during model development, as well as addressing budget concerns -- it is, therefore, the preferred option for model developers whose objective is to achieve complete freedom and framework flexibility with horizontal scaling. ECS is better suited to ensuring performance requirements align with project goals and constraints. The AWS service selection process considered factors that include but are not limited to load balance and cost-effectiveness. ECS is a better choice when model development begins from the abstract. It offers unique benefits, such as the ability to scale horizontally and vertically, making it the best preferable tool for model deployment.

LLM-based auto-annotators have become a key component of the LLM development process due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability compared to human-based evaluation. However, these auto-annotators can introduce complex biases that are hard to remove. Even simple, known confounders such as preference for longer outputs remain in existing automated evaluation metrics. We propose a simple regression analysis approach for controlling biases in auto-evaluations. As a real case study, we focus on reducing the length bias of AlpacaEval, a fast and affordable benchmark for chat LLMs that uses LLMs to estimate response quality. Despite being highly correlated with human preferences, AlpacaEval is known to favor models that generate longer outputs. We introduce a length-controlled AlpacaEval that aims to answer the counterfactual question: "What would the preference be if the model's and baseline's output had the same length?". To achieve this, we first fit a generalized linear model to predict the biased output of interest (auto-annotator preferences) based on the mediators we want to control for (length difference) and other relevant features. We then obtain length-controlled preferences by predicting preferences while conditioning the GLM with a zero difference in lengths. Length-controlling not only improves the robustness of the metric to manipulations in model verbosity, we also find that it increases the Spearman correlation with LMSYS' Chatbot Arena from 0.94 to 0.98. We release the code and leaderboard at https://tatsu-lab.github.io/alpaca_eval/ .

Supervised fine-tuning is the most common method to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but full fine-tuning LLMs requires massive computational resources. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been widely studied due to its cost-effectiveness. LoRA is one of the most widely used methods, which assumes that the optimization process is essentially low-dimensional. Although LoRA fine-tuning is effective, there is still a performance gap compared to full fine-tuning, since its weight update is limited to low-rank matrices. In order to break the low-rank bottleneck in LoRA Optimization, we propose PeriodicLoRA (PLoRA), which accumulates low-rank update matrices multiple times to achieve a higher update rank. PLoRA has multiple training stages. During each stage, we still update only the LoRA weights. However, at the end of each stage, we unload the LoRA weights into the backbone parameters and then reinitialize the LoRA states. Experimental results show that PLoRA has stronger learning ability, approximately 1.8 times that of LoRA's learning ability at most, but it does not increase memory usage. Further, we introduce a momentum-based unloading strategy for PLoRA to mitigate the training instability.

Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is a crucial component in urban traffic management, aiming to optimize road network efficiency and reduce congestion. Traditional methods in TSC, primarily based on transportation engineering and reinforcement learning (RL), often exhibit limitations in generalization across varied traffic scenarios and lack interpretability. This paper presents LLMLight, a novel framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) as decision-making agents for TSC. Specifically, the framework begins by instructing the LLM with a knowledgeable prompt detailing real-time traffic conditions. Leveraging the advanced generalization capabilities of LLMs, LLMLight engages a reasoning and decision-making process akin to human intuition for effective traffic control. Moreover, we build LightGPT, a specialized backbone LLM tailored for TSC tasks. By learning nuanced traffic patterns and control strategies, LightGPT enhances the LLMLight framework cost-effectively. Extensive experiments on nine real-world and synthetic datasets showcase the remarkable effectiveness, generalization ability, and interpretability of LLMLight against nine transportation-based and RL-based baselines.

Task-oriented conversational agents rely on semantic parsers to translate natural language to formal representations. In this paper, we propose the design and rationale of the ThingTalk formal representation, and how the design improves the development of transactional task-oriented agents. ThingTalk is built on four core principles: (1) representing user requests directly as executable statements, covering all the functionality of the agent, (2) representing dialogues formally and succinctly to support accurate contextual semantic parsing, (3) standardizing types and interfaces to maximize reuse between agents, and (4) allowing multiple, independently-developed agents to be composed in a single virtual assistant. ThingTalk is developed as part of the Genie Framework that allows developers to quickly build transactional agents given a database and APIs. We compare ThingTalk to existing representations: SMCalFlow, SGD, TreeDST. Compared to the others, the ThingTalk design is both more general and more cost-effective. Evaluated on the MultiWOZ benchmark, using ThingTalk and associated tools yields a new state of the art accuracy of 79% turn-by-turn.

Computer vision-based parking lot management methods have been extensively researched upon owing to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness. To evaluate such methods authors often employ publicly available parking lot image datasets. In this study, we surveyed and compared robust publicly available image datasets specifically crafted to test computer vision-based methods for parking lot management approaches and consequently present a systematic and comprehensive review of existing works that employ such datasets. The literature review identified relevant gaps that require further research, such as the requirement of dataset-independent approaches and methods suitable for autonomous detection of position of parking spaces. In addition, we have noticed that several important factors such as the presence of the same cars across consecutive images, have been neglected in most studies, thereby rendering unrealistic assessment protocols. Furthermore, the analysis of the datasets also revealed that certain features that should be present when developing new benchmarks, such as the availability of video sequences and images taken in more diverse conditions, including nighttime and snow, have not been incorporated.

Realistic video simulation has shown significant potential across diverse applications, from virtual reality to film production. This is particularly true for scenarios where capturing videos in real-world settings is either impractical or expensive. Existing approaches in video simulation often fail to accurately model the lighting environment, represent the object geometry, or achieve high levels of photorealism. In this paper, we propose Anything in Any Scene, a novel and generic framework for realistic video simulation that seamlessly inserts any object into an existing dynamic video with a strong emphasis on physical realism. Our proposed general framework encompasses three key processes: 1) integrating a realistic object into a given scene video with proper placement to ensure geometric realism; 2) estimating the sky and environmental lighting distribution and simulating realistic shadows to enhance the light realism; 3) employing a style transfer network that refines the final video output to maximize photorealism. We experimentally demonstrate that Anything in Any Scene framework produces simulated videos of great geometric realism, lighting realism, and photorealism. By significantly mitigating the challenges associated with video data generation, our framework offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for acquiring high-quality videos. Furthermore, its applications extend well beyond video data augmentation, showing promising potential in virtual reality, video editing, and various other video-centric applications. Please check our project website https://anythinginanyscene.github.io for access to our project code and more high-resolution video results.

Recent 3D generation models typically rely on limited-scale 3D `gold-labels' or 2D diffusion priors for 3D content creation. However, their performance is upper-bounded by constrained 3D priors due to the lack of scalable learning paradigms. In this work, we present See3D, a visual-conditional multi-view diffusion model trained on large-scale Internet videos for open-world 3D creation. The model aims to Get 3D knowledge by solely Seeing the visual contents from the vast and rapidly growing video data -- You See it, You Got it. To achieve this, we first scale up the training data using a proposed data curation pipeline that automatically filters out multi-view inconsistencies and insufficient observations from source videos. This results in a high-quality, richly diverse, large-scale dataset of multi-view images, termed WebVi3D, containing 320M frames from 16M video clips. Nevertheless, learning generic 3D priors from videos without explicit 3D geometry or camera pose annotations is nontrivial, and annotating poses for web-scale videos is prohibitively expensive. To eliminate the need for pose conditions, we introduce an innovative visual-condition - a purely 2D-inductive visual signal generated by adding time-dependent noise to the masked video data. Finally, we introduce a novel visual-conditional 3D generation framework by integrating See3D into a warping-based pipeline for high-fidelity 3D generation. Our numerical and visual comparisons on single and sparse reconstruction benchmarks show that See3D, trained on cost-effective and scalable video data, achieves notable zero-shot and open-world generation capabilities, markedly outperforming models trained on costly and constrained 3D datasets. Please refer to our project page at: https://vision.baai.ac.cn/see3d

The landscape of information retrieval has broadened from search services to a critical component in various advanced applications, where indexing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and freshness are increasingly important yet remain less explored. To address these demands, we introduce Semi-parametric Vocabulary Disentangled Retrieval (SVDR). SVDR is a novel semi-parametric retrieval framework that supports two types of indexes: an embedding-based index for high effectiveness, akin to existing neural retrieval methods; and a binary token index that allows for quick and cost-effective setup, resembling traditional term-based retrieval. In our evaluation on three open-domain question answering benchmarks with the entire Wikipedia as the retrieval corpus, SVDR consistently demonstrates superiority. It achieves a 3% higher top-1 retrieval accuracy compared to the dense retriever DPR when using an embedding-based index and an 9% higher top-1 accuracy compared to BM25 when using a binary token index. Specifically, the adoption of a binary token index reduces index preparation time from 30 GPU hours to just 2 CPU hours and storage size from 31 GB to 2 GB, achieving a 90% reduction compared to an embedding-based index.

Deep learning (DL) models have emerged as a powerful tool in avian bioacoustics to diagnose environmental health and biodiversity. However, inconsistencies in research pose notable challenges hindering progress in this domain. Reliable DL models need to analyze bird calls flexibly across various species and environments to fully harness the potential of bioacoustics in a cost-effective passive acoustic monitoring scenario. Data fragmentation and opacity across studies complicate a comprehensive evaluation of general model performance. To overcome these challenges, we present the BirdSet benchmark, a unified framework consolidating research efforts with a holistic approach for classifying bird vocalizations in avian bioacoustics. BirdSet harmonizes open-source bird recordings into a curated dataset collection. This unified approach provides an in-depth understanding of model performance and identifies potential shortcomings across different tasks. By establishing baseline results of current models, BirdSet aims to facilitate comparability, guide subsequent data collection, and increase accessibility for newcomers to avian bioacoustics.

Large language models (LLMs) call for extension of context to handle many critical applications. However, the existing approaches are prone to expensive costs and inferior quality of context extension. In this work, we proposeExtensible Embedding, which realizes high-quality extension of LLM's context with strong flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Extensible embedding stand as an enhancement of typical token embedding, which represents the information for an extensible scope of context instead of a single token. By leveraging such compact input units of higher information density, the LLM can access to a vast scope of context even with a small context window. Extensible embedding is systematically optimized in architecture and training method, which leads to multiple advantages. 1) High flexibility of context extension, which flexibly supports ad-hoc extension of diverse context lengths. 2) Strong sample efficiency of training, which enables the embedding model to be learned in a cost-effective way. 3) Superior compatibility with the existing LLMs, where the extensible embedding can be seamlessly introduced as a plug-in component. Comprehensive evaluations on long-context language modeling and understanding tasks verify extensible embedding as an effective, efficient, flexible, and compatible method to extend the LLM's context.

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensors for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and inverse SAR (ISAR) address the fundamental challenges of cost-effectiveness and scalability inherent to near-field imaging. In this paper, near-field MIMO-ISAR mmWave imaging systems are discussed and developed. The rotational ISAR (R-ISAR) regime investigated in this paper requires rotating the target at a constant radial distance from the transceiver and scanning the transceiver along a vertical track. Using a 77GHz mmWave radar, a high resolution three-dimensional (3-D) image can be reconstructed from this two-dimensional scanning taking into account the spherical near-field wavefront. While prior work in literature consists of single-input-single-output circular synthetic aperture radar (SISO-CSAR) algorithms or computationally sluggish MIMO-CSAR image reconstruction algorithms, this paper proposes a novel algorithm for efficient MIMO 3-D holographic imaging and details the design of a MIMO R-ISAR imaging system. The proposed algorithm applies a multistatic-to-monostatic phase compensation to the R-ISAR regime allowing for use of highly efficient monostatic algorithms. We demonstrate the algorithm's performance in real-world imaging scenarios on a prototyped MIMO R-ISAR platform. Our fully integrated system, consisting of a mechanical scanner and efficient imaging algorithm, is capable of pairing the scanning efficiency of the MIMO regime with the computational efficiency of single pixel image reconstruction algorithms.

Task-oriented dialogue research has mainly focused on a few popular languages like English and Chinese, due to the high dataset creation cost for a new language. To reduce the cost, we apply manual editing to automatically translated data. We create a new multilingual benchmark, X-RiSAWOZ, by translating the Chinese RiSAWOZ to 4 languages: English, French, Hindi, Korean; and a code-mixed English-Hindi language. X-RiSAWOZ has more than 18,000 human-verified dialogue utterances for each language, and unlike most multilingual prior work, is an end-to-end dataset for building fully-functioning agents. The many difficulties we encountered in creating X-RiSAWOZ led us to develop a toolset to accelerate the post-editing of a new language dataset after translation. This toolset improves machine translation with a hybrid entity alignment technique that combines neural with dictionary-based methods, along with many automated and semi-automated validation checks. We establish strong baselines for X-RiSAWOZ by training dialogue agents in the zero- and few-shot settings where limited gold data is available in the target language. Our results suggest that our translation and post-editing methodology and toolset can be used to create new high-quality multilingual dialogue agents cost-effectively. Our dataset, code, and toolkit are released open-source.

Recent research, such as BitNet, is paving the way for a new era of 1-bit Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce a 1-bit LLM variant, namely BitNet b1.58, in which every single parameter (or weight) of the LLM is ternary {-1, 0, 1}. It matches the full-precision (i.e., FP16 or BF16) Transformer LLM with the same model size and training tokens in terms of both perplexity and end-task performance, while being significantly more cost-effective in terms of latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption. More profoundly, the 1.58-bit LLM defines a new scaling law and recipe for training new generations of LLMs that are both high-performance and cost-effective. Furthermore, it enables a new computation paradigm and opens the door for designing specific hardware optimized for 1-bit LLMs.

In the past year, MultiModal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have undergone substantial advancements, augmenting off-the-shelf LLMs to support MM inputs or outputs via cost-effective training strategies. The resulting models not only preserve the inherent reasoning and decision-making capabilities of LLMs but also empower a diverse range of MM tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey aimed at facilitating further research of MM-LLMs. Specifically, we first outline general design formulations for model architecture and training pipeline. Subsequently, we provide brief introductions of 26 existing MM-LLMs, each characterized by its specific formulations. Additionally, we review the performance of MM-LLMs on mainstream benchmarks and summarize key training recipes to enhance the potency of MM-LLMs. Lastly, we explore promising directions for MM-LLMs while concurrently maintaining a real-time tracking website for the latest developments in the field. We hope that this survey contributes to the ongoing advancement of the MM-LLMs domain.

ChatGPT-like models have revolutionized various applications in artificial intelligence, from summarization and coding to translation, matching or even surpassing human performance. However, the current landscape lacks an accessible, efficient, and cost-effective end-to-end RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) training pipeline for these powerful models, particularly when training at the scale of billions of parameters. This paper introduces DeepSpeed-Chat, a novel system that democratizes RLHF training, making it accessible to the AI community. DeepSpeed-Chat offers three key capabilities: an easy-to-use training and inference experience for ChatGPT-like models, a DeepSpeed-RLHF pipeline that replicates the training pipeline from InstructGPT, and a robust DeepSpeed-RLHF system that combines various optimizations for training and inference in a unified way. The system delivers unparalleled efficiency and scalability, enabling training of models with hundreds of billions of parameters in record time and at a fraction of the cost. With this development, DeepSpeed-Chat paves the way for broader access to advanced RLHF training, even for data scientists with limited resources, thereby fostering innovation and further development in the field of AI.

We present MEGA-Bench, an evaluation suite that scales multimodal evaluation to over 500 real-world tasks, to address the highly heterogeneous daily use cases of end users. Our objective is to optimize for a set of high-quality data samples that cover a highly diverse and rich set of multimodal tasks, while enabling cost-effective and accurate model evaluation. In particular, we collected 505 realistic tasks encompassing over 8,000 samples from 16 expert annotators to extensively cover the multimodal task space. Instead of unifying these problems into standard multi-choice questions (like MMMU, MMBench, and MMT-Bench), we embrace a wide range of output formats like numbers, phrases, code, \LaTeX, coordinates, JSON, free-form, etc. To accommodate these formats, we developed over 40 metrics to evaluate these tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MEGA-Bench offers a fine-grained capability report across multiple dimensions (e.g., application, input type, output format, skill), allowing users to interact with and visualize model capabilities in depth. We evaluate a wide variety of frontier vision-language models on MEGA-Bench to understand their capabilities across these dimensions.

Complex multi-step reasoning tasks, such as solving mathematical problems or generating code, remain a significant hurdle for even the most advanced large language models (LLMs). Verifying LLM outputs with an Outcome Reward Model (ORM) is a standard inference-time technique aimed at enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. However, this still proves insufficient for reasoning tasks with a lengthy or multi-hop reasoning chain, where the intermediate outcomes are neither properly rewarded nor penalized. Process supervision addresses this limitation by assigning intermediate rewards during the reasoning process. To date, the methods used to collect process supervision data have relied on either human annotation or per-step Monte Carlo estimation, both prohibitively expensive to scale, thus hindering the broad application of this technique. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer style Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm named OmegaPRM for the efficient collection of high-quality process supervision data. This algorithm swiftly identifies the first error in the Chain of Thought (CoT) with binary search and balances the positive and negative examples, thereby ensuring both efficiency and quality. As a result, we are able to collect over 1.5 million process supervision annotations to train a Process Reward Model (PRM). Utilizing this fully automated process supervision alongside the weighted self-consistency algorithm, we have enhanced the instruction tuned Gemini Pro model's math reasoning performance, achieving a 69.4\% success rate on the MATH benchmark, a 36\% relative improvement from the 51\% base model performance. Additionally, the entire process operates without any human intervention, making our method both financially and computationally cost-effective compared to existing methods.

Using reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) has shown significant promise in fine-tuning diffusion models. Previous methods start by training a reward model that aligns with human preferences, then leverage RL techniques to fine-tune the underlying models. However, crafting an efficient reward model demands extensive datasets, optimal architecture, and manual hyperparameter tuning, making the process both time and cost-intensive. The direct preference optimization (DPO) method, effective in fine-tuning large language models, eliminates the necessity for a reward model. However, the extensive GPU memory requirement of the diffusion model's denoising process hinders the direct application of the DPO method. To address this issue, we introduce the Direct Preference for Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (D3PO) method to directly fine-tune diffusion models. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that although D3PO omits training a reward model, it effectively functions as the optimal reward model trained using human feedback data to guide the learning process. This approach requires no training of a reward model, proving to be more direct, cost-effective, and minimizing computational overhead. In experiments, our method uses the relative scale of objectives as a proxy for human preference, delivering comparable results to methods using ground-truth rewards. Moreover, D3PO demonstrates the ability to reduce image distortion rates and generate safer images, overcoming challenges lacking robust reward models.

Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. SeaLLMs are built upon the Llama-2 model and further advanced through continued pre-training with an extended vocabulary, specialized instruction and alignment tuning to better capture the intricacies of regional languages. This allows them to respect and reflect local cultural norms, customs, stylistic preferences, and legal considerations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SeaLLM-13b models exhibit superior performance across a wide spectrum of linguistic tasks and assistant-style instruction-following capabilities relative to comparable open-source models. Moreover, they outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages, such as Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese, by large margins while remaining lightweight and cost-effective to operate.

Solving complex chart Q&A tasks requires advanced visual reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Recent studies highlight that these abilities consist of two main parts: recognizing key information from visual inputs and conducting reasoning over it. Thus, a promising approach to enhance MLLMs is to construct relevant training data focusing on the two aspects. However, collecting and annotating complex charts and questions is costly and time-consuming, and ensuring the quality of annotated answers remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose Code-as-Intermediary Translation (CIT), a cost-effective, efficient and easily scalable data synthesis method for distilling visual reasoning abilities from LLMs to MLLMs. The code serves as an intermediary that translates visual chart representations into textual representations, enabling LLMs to understand cross-modal information. Specifically, we employ text-based synthesizing techniques to construct chart-plotting code and produce ReachQA, a dataset containing 3k reasoning-intensive charts and 20k Q&A pairs to enhance both recognition and reasoning abilities. Experiments show that when fine-tuned with our data, models not only perform well on chart-related benchmarks, but also demonstrate improved multimodal reasoning abilities on general mathematical benchmarks like MathVista. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/hewei2001/ReachQA.

Supply chain operations traditionally involve a variety of complex decision making problems. Over the last few decades, supply chains greatly benefited from advances in computation, which allowed the transition from manual processing to automation and cost-effective optimization. Nonetheless, business operators still need to spend substantial efforts in explaining and interpreting the optimization outcomes to stakeholders. Motivated by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study how this disruptive technology can help bridge the gap between supply chain automation and human comprehension and trust thereof. We design -- a framework that accepts as input queries in plain text, and outputs insights about the underlying optimization outcomes. Our framework does not forgo the state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization technology, but rather leverages it to quantitatively answer what-if scenarios (e.g., how would the cost change if we used supplier B instead of supplier A for a given demand?). Importantly, our design does not require sending proprietary data over to LLMs, which can be a privacy concern in some circumstances. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on a real server placement scenario within Microsoft's cloud supply chain. Along the way, we develop a general evaluation benchmark, which can be used to evaluate the accuracy of the LLM output in other scenarios.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs), epitomized by architectures like GPT-4, has reshaped the landscape of natural language processing. This paper introduces a pioneering approach to address the efficiency concerns associated with LLM pre-training, proposing the use of knowledge distillation for cross-architecture transfer. Leveraging insights from the efficient Hyena mechanism, our method replaces attention heads in transformer models by Hyena, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional pre-training while confronting the challenge of processing long contextual information, inherent in quadratic attention mechanisms. Unlike conventional compression-focused methods, our technique not only enhances inference speed but also surpasses pre-training in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. In the era of evolving LLMs, our work contributes to the pursuit of sustainable AI solutions, striking a balance between computational power and environmental impact.

We present CosmicMan, a text-to-image foundation model specialized for generating high-fidelity human images. Unlike current general-purpose foundation models that are stuck in the dilemma of inferior quality and text-image misalignment for humans, CosmicMan enables generating photo-realistic human images with meticulous appearance, reasonable structure, and precise text-image alignment with detailed dense descriptions. At the heart of CosmicMan's success are the new reflections and perspectives on data and models: (1) We found that data quality and a scalable data production flow are essential for the final results from trained models. Hence, we propose a new data production paradigm, Annotate Anyone, which serves as a perpetual data flywheel to produce high-quality data with accurate yet cost-effective annotations over time. Based on this, we constructed a large-scale dataset, CosmicMan-HQ 1.0, with 6 Million high-quality real-world human images in a mean resolution of 1488x1255, and attached with precise text annotations deriving from 115 Million attributes in diverse granularities. (2) We argue that a text-to-image foundation model specialized for humans must be pragmatic -- easy to integrate into down-streaming tasks while effective in producing high-quality human images. Hence, we propose to model the relationship between dense text descriptions and image pixels in a decomposed manner, and present Decomposed-Attention-Refocusing (Daring) training framework. It seamlessly decomposes the cross-attention features in existing text-to-image diffusion model, and enforces attention refocusing without adding extra modules. Through Daring, we show that explicitly discretizing continuous text space into several basic groups that align with human body structure is the key to tackling the misalignment problem in a breeze.

Scaling the amount of compute used to train language models has dramatically improved their capabilities. However, when it comes to inference, we often limit the amount of compute to only one attempt per problem. Here, we explore inference compute as another axis for scaling by increasing the number of generated samples. Across multiple tasks and models, we observe that coverage - the fraction of problems solved by any attempt - scales with the number of samples over four orders of magnitude. In domains like coding and formal proofs, where all answers can be automatically verified, these increases in coverage directly translate into improved performance. When we apply repeated sampling to SWE-bench Lite, the fraction of issues solved with DeepSeek-V2-Coder-Instruct increases from 15.9% with one sample to 56% with 250 samples, outperforming the single-attempt state-of-the-art of 43% which uses more capable frontier models. Moreover, using current API pricing, amplifying the cheaper DeepSeek model with five samples is more cost-effective and solves more issues than paying a premium for one sample from GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Interestingly, the relationship between coverage and the number of samples is often log-linear and can be modelled with an exponentiated power law, suggesting the existence of inference-time scaling laws. Finally, we find that identifying correct samples out of many generations remains an important direction for future research in domains without automatic verifiers. When solving math word problems from GSM8K and MATH, coverage with Llama-3 models grows to over 95% with 10,000 samples. However, common methods to pick correct solutions from a sample collection, such as majority voting or reward models, plateau beyond several hundred samples and fail to fully scale with the sample budget.

The self-improving ability of large language models (LLMs), enabled by prompting them to analyze and revise their own outputs, has garnered significant interest in recent research. However, this ability has been shown to be absent and difficult to learn for smaller models, thus widening the performance gap between state-of-the-art LLMs and more cost-effective and faster ones. To reduce this gap, we introduce TriPosT, a training algorithm that endows smaller models with such self-improvement ability, and show that our approach can improve a LLaMA-7b's performance on math and reasoning tasks by up to 7.13%. In contrast to prior work, we achieve this by using the smaller model to interact with LLMs to collect feedback and improvements on its own generations. We then replay this experience to train the small model. Our experiments on four math and reasoning datasets show that the interactive experience of learning from and correcting its own mistakes is crucial for small models to improve their performance.

The rapid increase in mobile device usage necessitates improved automation for seamless task management. However, many AI-driven frameworks struggle due to insufficient operational knowledge. Manually written knowledge helps but is labor-intensive and inefficient. To address these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-V, a framework that leverages video guidance to provide rich and cost-effective operational knowledge for mobile automation. Mobile-Agent-V enhances task execution capabilities by leveraging video inputs without requiring specialized sampling or preprocessing. Mobile-Agent-V integrates a sliding window strategy and incorporates a video agent and deep-reflection agent to ensure that actions align with user instructions. Through this innovative approach, users can record task processes with guidance, enabling the system to autonomously learn and execute tasks efficiently. Experimental results show that Mobile-Agent-V achieves a 30% performance improvement compared to existing frameworks.

Instruction tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA, using direct outputs from more powerful LLMs such as Instruct-GPT and GPT-4, has proven to be a cost-effective way to align model behaviors with human preferences. However, the instruction-tuned model has only seen one response per instruction, lacking the knowledge of potentially better responses. In this paper, we propose finetuning an instruction-tuned LLM using our novel probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking approaches to increase the likelihood of generating better responses. Probabilistic ranking enables the instruction-tuned model to inherit the relative rankings of high-quality and low-quality responses from the teacher LLM. On the other hand, learning with contextual ranking allows the model to refine its own response distribution using the contextual understanding ability of stronger LLMs. Furthermore, we apply probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking sequentially to the instruction-tuned LLM. The resulting model, which we call Tuna, consistently improves the performance on Super Natural Instructions (119 test tasks), LMentry (25 test tasks), Vicuna QA, and can even obtain better results than several strong reinforcement learning baselines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in the field of natural language processing (NLP) due to their wide range of applications. However, training LLMs for languages other than English poses significant challenges, due to the difficulty in acquiring large-scale corpus and the requisite computing resources. In this paper, we propose ChatFlow, a cross-language transfer-based LLM, to address these challenges and train large Chinese language models in a cost-effective manner. We employ a mix of Chinese, English, and parallel corpus to continuously train the LLaMA2 model, aiming to align cross-language representations and facilitate the knowledge transfer specifically to the Chinese language model. In addition, we use a dynamic data sampler to progressively transition the model from unsupervised pre-training to supervised fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach accelerates model convergence and achieves superior performance. We evaluate ChatFlow on popular Chinese and English benchmarks, the results indicate that it outperforms other Chinese models post-trained on LLaMA-2-7B.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer models, known as GPT or OPT, set themselves apart through breakthrough performance across complex language modelling tasks, but also by their extremely high computational and storage costs. Specifically, due to their massive size, even inference for large, highly-accurate GPT models may require multiple performant GPUs, which limits the usability of such models. While there is emerging work on relieving this pressure via model compression, the applicability and performance of existing compression techniques is limited by the scale and complexity of GPT models. In this paper, we address this challenge, and propose GPTQ, a new one-shot weight quantization method based on approximate second-order information, that is both highly-accurate and highly-efficient. Specifically, GPTQ can quantize GPT models with 175 billion parameters in approximately four GPU hours, reducing the bitwidth down to 3 or 4 bits per weight, with negligible accuracy degradation relative to the uncompressed baseline. Our method more than doubles the compression gains relative to previously-proposed one-shot quantization methods, preserving accuracy, allowing us for the first time to execute an 175 billion-parameter model inside a single GPU for generative inference. Moreover, we also show that our method can still provide reasonable accuracy in the extreme quantization regime, in which weights are quantized to 2-bit or even ternary quantization levels. We show experimentally that these improvements can be leveraged for end-to-end inference speedups over FP16, of around 3.25x when using high-end GPUs (NVIDIA A100) and 4.5x when using more cost-effective ones (NVIDIA A6000). The implementation is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/gptq.

Industry 4.0 has revolutionized manufacturing by driving digitalization and shifting the paradigm toward additive manufacturing (AM). Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), a key AM technology, enables the creation of highly customized, cost-effective products with minimal material waste through layer-by-layer extrusion, posing a significant challenge to traditional subtractive methods. However, the susceptibility of material extrusion techniques to errors often requires expert intervention to detect and mitigate defects that can severely compromise product quality. While automated error detection and machine learning models exist, their generalizability across diverse 3D printer setups, firmware, and sensors is limited, and deep learning methods require extensive labeled datasets, hindering scalability and adaptability. To address these challenges, we present a process monitoring and control framework that leverages pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) alongside 3D printers to detect and address printing defects. The LLM evaluates print quality by analyzing images captured after each layer or print segment, identifying failure modes and querying the printer for relevant parameters. It then generates and executes a corrective action plan. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed framework in identifying defects by comparing it against a control group of engineers with diverse AM expertise. Our evaluation demonstrated that LLM-based agents not only accurately identify common 3D printing errors, such as inconsistent extrusion, stringing, warping, and layer adhesion, but also effectively determine the parameters causing these failures and autonomously correct them without any need for human intervention.

Recent research shows the potential of enhancing the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) through the use of external tools. However, prior work along this line depends on the availability of existing tools. In this work, we take an initial step towards removing this dependency by proposing a closed-loop framework, referred to as LLMs As Tool Makers (LATM), where LLMs create their own reusable tools for problem-solving. Our approach consists of two key phases: 1) tool making: an LLM acts as the tool maker that crafts tools for given tasks, where a tool is implemented as a Python utility function. 2) tool using: an LLM acts as the tool user, which applies the tool built by the tool maker for problem-solving. The tool user can be either the same or a different LLM from the tool maker. Tool-making enables an LLM to continually generate tools that can be applied to different requests so that future requests can call the corresponding APIs when beneficial for solving the tasks. Furthermore, the division of labor among LLMs for tool-making and tool-using phases introduces the opportunity to achieve cost effectiveness without degrading the quality of generated tools and problem solutions. For example, recognizing that tool-making demands more sophisticated capabilities than tool-using, we can apply a powerful yet resource-intensive model as the tool maker, and a lightweight while cost-effective model as the tool user. We validate the effectiveness of our approach across a variety of complex reasoning tasks, including Big-Bench tasks. With GPT-4 as the tool maker and GPT-3.5 as the tool user, LATM can achieve performance that is on par with using GPT-4 for both tool making and tool using, while the inference cost is significantly reduced.

OwnThink stands as the most extensive Chinese open-domain knowledge graph introduced in recent times. Despite prior attempts in question answering over OwnThink (OQA), existing studies have faced limitations in model representation capabilities, posing challenges in further enhancing overall accuracy in question answering. In this paper, we introduce UniOQA, a unified framework that integrates two complementary parallel workflows. Unlike conventional approaches, UniOQA harnesses large language models (LLMs) for precise question answering and incorporates a direct-answer-prediction process as a cost-effective complement. Initially, to bolster representation capacity, we fine-tune an LLM to translate questions into the Cypher query language (CQL), tackling issues associated with restricted semantic understanding and hallucinations. Subsequently, we introduce the Entity and Relation Replacement algorithm to ensure the executability of the generated CQL. Concurrently, to augment overall accuracy in question answering, we further adapt the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) process to the knowledge graph. Ultimately, we optimize answer accuracy through a dynamic decision algorithm. Experimental findings illustrate that UniOQA notably advances SpCQL Logical Accuracy to 21.2% and Execution Accuracy to 54.9%, achieving the new state-of-the-art results on this benchmark. Through ablation experiments, we delve into the superior representation capacity of UniOQA and quantify its performance breakthrough.

Standardized benchmarks drive progress in machine learning. However, with repeated testing, the risk of overfitting grows as algorithms over-exploit benchmark idiosyncrasies. In our work, we seek to mitigate this challenge by compiling ever-expanding large-scale benchmarks called Lifelong Benchmarks. As exemplars of our approach, we create Lifelong-CIFAR10 and Lifelong-ImageNet, containing (for now) 1.69M and 1.98M test samples, respectively. While reducing overfitting, lifelong benchmarks introduce a key challenge: the high cost of evaluating a growing number of models across an ever-expanding sample set. To address this challenge, we also introduce an efficient evaluation framework: Sort \& Search (S&S), which reuses previously evaluated models by leveraging dynamic programming algorithms to selectively rank and sub-select test samples, enabling cost-effective lifelong benchmarking. Extensive empirical evaluations across 31,000 models demonstrate that S&S achieves highly-efficient approximate accuracy measurement, reducing compute cost from 180 GPU days to 5 GPU hours (1000x reduction) on a single A100 GPU, with low approximation error. As such, lifelong benchmarks offer a robust, practical solution to the "benchmark exhaustion" problem.

Stable diffusion is the mainstay of the text-to-image (T2I) synthesis in the community due to its generation performance and open-source nature. Recently, Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), the successor of stable diffusion, has received a lot of attention due to its significant performance improvements with a higher resolution of 1024x1024 and a larger model. However, its increased computation cost and model size require higher-end hardware(e.g., bigger VRAM GPU) for end-users, incurring higher costs of operation. To address this problem, in this work, we propose an efficient latent diffusion model for text-to-image synthesis obtained by distilling the knowledge of SDXL. To this end, we first perform an in-depth analysis of the denoising U-Net in SDXL, which is the main bottleneck of the model, and then design a more efficient U-Net based on the analysis. Secondly, we explore how to effectively distill the generation capability of SDXL into an efficient U-Net and eventually identify four essential factors, the core of which is that self-attention is the most important part. With our efficient U-Net and self-attention-based knowledge distillation strategy, we build our efficient T2I models, called KOALA-1B & -700M, while reducing the model size up to 54% and 69% of the original SDXL model. In particular, the KOALA-700M is more than twice as fast as SDXL while still retaining a decent generation quality. We hope that due to its balanced speed-performance tradeoff, our KOALA models can serve as a cost-effective alternative to SDXL in resource-constrained environments.

Throughout history, we have successfully integrated various machines into our homes. Dishwashers, laundry machines, stand mixers, and robot vacuums are a few recent examples. However, these machines excel at performing only a single task effectively. The concept of a "generalist machine" in homes - a domestic assistant that can adapt and learn from our needs, all while remaining cost-effective - has long been a goal in robotics that has been steadily pursued for decades. In this work, we initiate a large-scale effort towards this goal by introducing Dobb-E, an affordable yet versatile general-purpose system for learning robotic manipulation within household settings. Dobb-E can learn a new task with only five minutes of a user showing it how to do it, thanks to a demonstration collection tool ("The Stick") we built out of cheap parts and iPhones. We use the Stick to collect 13 hours of data in 22 homes of New York City, and train Home Pretrained Representations (HPR). Then, in a novel home environment, with five minutes of demonstrations and fifteen minutes of adapting the HPR model, we show that Dobb-E can reliably solve the task on the Stretch, a mobile robot readily available on the market. Across roughly 30 days of experimentation in homes of New York City and surrounding areas, we test our system in 10 homes, with a total of 109 tasks in different environments, and finally achieve a success rate of 81%. Beyond success percentages, our experiments reveal a plethora of unique challenges absent or ignored in lab robotics. These range from effects of strong shadows, to variable demonstration quality by non-expert users. With the hope of accelerating research on home robots, and eventually seeing robot butlers in every home, we open-source Dobb-E software stack and models, our data, and our hardware designs at https://dobb-e.com

Many large-scale systems rely on high-quality deep representations (embeddings) to facilitate tasks like retrieval, search, and generative modeling. Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) recently emerged as a solution for adaptive embedding lengths, but it requires full model retraining and suffers from noticeable performance degradations at short lengths. In this paper, we show that sparse coding offers a compelling alternative for achieving adaptive representation with minimal overhead and higher fidelity. We propose Contrastive Sparse Representation (CSR), a method that sparsifies pre-trained embeddings into a high-dimensional but selectively activated feature space. By leveraging lightweight autoencoding and task-aware contrastive objectives, CSR preserves semantic quality while allowing flexible, cost-effective inference at different sparsity levels. Extensive experiments on image, text, and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that CSR consistently outperforms MRL in terms of both accuracy and retrieval speed-often by large margins-while also cutting training time to a fraction of that required by MRL. Our results establish sparse coding as a powerful paradigm for adaptive representation learning in real-world applications where efficiency and fidelity are both paramount. Code is available at https://github.com/neilwen987/CSR_Adaptive_Rep

Active Learning (AL) has been a powerful paradigm for improving model efficiency and performance by selecting the most informative data points for labeling and training. In recent active learning frameworks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been employed not only for selection but also for generating entirely new data instances and providing more cost-effective annotations. Motivated by the increasing importance of high-quality data and efficient model training in the era of LLMs, we present a comprehensive survey on LLM-based Active Learning. We introduce an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes these techniques and discuss the transformative roles LLMs can play in the active learning loop. We further examine the impact of AL on LLM learning paradigms and its applications across various domains. Finally, we identify open challenges and propose future research directions. This survey aims to serve as an up-to-date resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to gain an intuitive understanding of LLM-based AL techniques and deploy them to new applications.

With the rise of multimodal applications, instruction data has become critical for training multimodal language models capable of understanding complex image-based queries. Existing practices rely on powerful but costly large language models (LLMs) or multimodal language models (MLMs) to produce instruction data. These are often prone to hallucinations, licensing issues and the generation process is often hard to scale and interpret. In this work, we present a programmatic approach that employs scene graphs as symbolic representations of images and human-written programs to systematically synthesize vision-centric instruction data. Our approach ensures the interpretability and controllability of the data generation process and scales efficiently while maintaining factual accuracy. By implementing a suite of 24 single-image, 14 multi-image instruction generators, and a scene graph generation pipeline, we build a scalable, cost-effective system: ProVision which produces diverse question-answer pairs concerning objects, attributes, relations, depth, etc., for any given image. Applied to Visual Genome and DataComp datasets, we generate over 10 million instruction data points, ProVision-10M, and leverage them in both pretraining and instruction tuning stages of MLMs. When adopted in the instruction tuning stage, our single-image instruction data yields up to a 7% improvement on the 2D split and 8% on the 3D split of CVBench, along with a 3% increase in performance on QBench2, RealWorldQA, and MMMU. Our multi-image instruction data leads to an 8% improvement on Mantis-Eval. Incorporation of our data in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages of xGen-MM-4B leads to an averaged improvement of 1.6% across 11 benchmarks.

Existing large video-language models (LVLMs) struggle to comprehend long videos correctly due to limited context. To address this problem, fine-tuning long-context LVLMs and employing GPT-based agents have emerged as promising solutions. However, fine-tuning LVLMs would require extensive high-quality data and substantial GPU resources, while GPT-based agents would rely on proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o). In this paper, we propose Video Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Video-RAG), a training-free and cost-effective pipeline that employs visually-aligned auxiliary texts to help facilitate cross-modality alignment while providing additional information beyond the visual content. Specifically, we leverage open-source external tools to extract visually-aligned information from pure video data (e.g., audio, optical character, and object detection), and incorporate the extracted information into an existing LVLM as auxiliary texts, alongside video frames and queries, in a plug-and-play manner. Our Video-RAG offers several key advantages: (i) lightweight with low computing overhead due to single-turn retrieval; (ii) easy implementation and compatibility with any LVLM; and (iii) significant, consistent performance gains across long video understanding benchmarks, including Video-MME, MLVU, and LongVideoBench. Notably, our model demonstrates superior performance over proprietary models like Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-4o when utilized with a 72B model.

End of semester student evaluations of teaching are the dominant mechanism for providing feedback to academics on their teaching practice. For large classes, however, the volume of feedback makes these tools impractical for this purpose. This paper explores the use of open-source generative AI to synthesise factual, actionable and appropriate summaries of student feedback from these survey responses. In our setup, we have 742 student responses ranging over 75 courses in a Computer Science department. For each course, we synthesise a summary of the course evaluations and actionable items for the instructor. Our results reveal a promising avenue for enhancing teaching practices in the classroom setting. Our contribution lies in demonstrating the feasibility of using generative AI to produce insightful feedback for teachers, thus providing a cost-effective means to support educators' development. Overall, our work highlights the possibility of using generative AI to produce factual, actionable, and appropriate feedback for teachers in the classroom setting.

Despite Portuguese being one of the most spoken languages in the world, there is a lack of high-quality information retrieval datasets in that language. We present Quati, a dataset specifically designed for the Brazilian Portuguese language. It comprises a collection of queries formulated by native speakers and a curated set of documents sourced from a selection of high-quality Brazilian Portuguese websites. These websites are frequented more likely by real users compared to those randomly scraped, ensuring a more representative and relevant corpus. To label the query-document pairs, we use a state-of-the-art LLM, which shows inter-annotator agreement levels comparable to human performance in our assessments. We provide a detailed description of our annotation methodology to enable others to create similar datasets for other languages, providing a cost-effective way of creating high-quality IR datasets with an arbitrary number of labeled documents per query. Finally, we evaluate a diverse range of open-source and commercial retrievers to serve as baseline systems. Quati is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/unicamp-dl/quati and all scripts at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/quati .

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in summary evaluation tasks, yet they face challenges such as high computational costs and the Lost-in-the-Middle problem where important information in the middle of long documents is often overlooked. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel approach, Extract-then-Evaluate, which involves extracting key sentences from a long source document and then evaluating the summary by prompting LLMs. The results reveal that the proposed method not only significantly reduces evaluation costs but also exhibits a higher correlation with human evaluations. Furthermore, we provide practical recommendations for optimal document length and sentence extraction methods, contributing to the development of cost-effective yet more accurate methods for LLM-based text generation evaluation.

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-3 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by fine-tuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLM-Adapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and can execute these adapter-based PEFT methods of LLMs for different tasks. The framework includes state-of-the-art open-access LLMs such as LLaMA, BLOOM, OPT, and GPT-J, as well as widely used adapters such as Series adapter, Parallel adapter, and LoRA. The framework is designed to be research-friendly, efficient, modular, and extendable, allowing the integration of new adapters and the evaluation of them with new and larger-scale LLMs. Furthermore, to evaluate the effectiveness of adapters in LLMs-Adapters, we conduct experiments on six math reasoning datasets. The results demonstrate that using adapter-based PEFT in smaller-scale LLMs (7B) with few extra trainable parameters yields comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to that of powerful LLMs (175B) in zero-shot inference on simple math reasoning datasets. Overall, we provide a promising framework for fine-tuning large LLMs on downstream tasks. We believe the proposed LLMs-Adapters will advance adapter-based PEFT research, facilitate the deployment of research pipelines, and enable practical applications to real-world systems.

Existing work in continual learning (CL) focuses on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, i.e., model performance deterioration on past tasks when learning a new task. However, the training efficiency of a CL system is under-investigated, which limits the real-world application of CL systems under resource-limited scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Sparse Continual Learning(SparCL), which is the first study that leverages sparsity to enable cost-effective continual learning on edge devices. SparCL achieves both training acceleration and accuracy preservation through the synergy of three aspects: weight sparsity, data efficiency, and gradient sparsity. Specifically, we propose task-aware dynamic masking (TDM) to learn a sparse network throughout the entire CL process, dynamic data removal (DDR) to remove less informative training data, and dynamic gradient masking (DGM) to sparsify the gradient updates. Each of them not only improves efficiency, but also further mitigates catastrophic forgetting. SparCL consistently improves the training efficiency of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) CL methods by at most 23X less training FLOPs, and, surprisingly, further improves the SOTA accuracy by at most 1.7%. SparCL also outperforms competitive baselines obtained from adapting SOTA sparse training methods to the CL setting in both efficiency and accuracy. We also evaluate the effectiveness of SparCL on a real mobile phone, further indicating the practical potential of our method.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) holds great promise in addressing challenges associated with long video understanding. These methods retrieve useful moments from long videos for their presented tasks, thereby enabling multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate high-quality answers in a cost-effective way. In this work, we present MomentSeeker, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate retrieval models' performance in handling general long-video moment retrieval (LVMR) tasks. MomentSeeker offers three key advantages. First, it incorporates long videos of over 500 seconds on average, making it the first benchmark specialized for long-video moment retrieval. Second, it covers a wide range of task categories (including Moment Search, Caption Alignment, Image-conditioned Moment Search, and Video-conditioned Moment Search) and diverse application scenarios (e.g., sports, movies, cartoons, and ego), making it a comprehensive tool for assessing retrieval models' general LVMR performance. Additionally, the evaluation tasks are carefully curated through human annotation, ensuring the reliability of assessment. We further fine-tune an MLLM-based LVMR retriever on synthetic data, which demonstrates strong performance on our benchmark. We perform extensive experiments with various popular multimodal retrievers based on our benchmark, whose results highlight the challenges of LVMR and limitations for existing methods. Our created resources will be shared with community to advance future research in this field.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to push the boundaries of LLM capabilities, yet they often incur significant costs and face challenges in dynamic LLM selection. Current LLM routing methods effectively reduce overhead in single-agent scenarios by customizing LLM selection for each query, but they overlook the critical decisions regarding collaboration modes and agent roles in MAS. In response to this challenge, we first introduce the problem of Multi-Agent System Routing (MASR), which integrates all components of MAS into a unified routing framework. Toward this goal, we propose MasRouter, the first high-performing, cost-effective, and inductive MASR solution. MasRouter employs collaboration mode determination, role allocation, and LLM routing through a cascaded controller network, progressively constructing a MAS that balances effectiveness and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MasRouter is (1) high-performing, achieving a 1.8%sim8.2% improvement over the state-of-the-art method on MBPP; (2) economical, reducing overhead by up to 52.07% compared to SOTA methods on HumanEval; and (3) plug-and-play, seamlessly integrating with mainstream MAS frameworks, reducing overhead by 17.21%sim28.17% via customized routing. The code is available at https://github.com/yanweiyue/masrouter.

Contemporary intelligent systems incorporate software components, including machine learning components. As they grow in complexity and data volume such machine learning systems face unique quality challenges like scalability and performance. To overcome them, engineers may often use specific architectural patterns, however their impact on ML systems is difficult to quantify. The effect of software architecture on traditional systems is well studied, however more work is needed in the area of machine learning systems. This study proposes a framework for quantitative assessment of architectural patterns in ML systems, focusing on scalability and performance metrics for cost-effective CPU-based inference. We integrate these metrics into a systematic evaluation process for selection of architectural patterns and demonstrate its application through a case study. The approach shown in the paper should enable software architects to objectively analyze and select optimal patterns, addressing key challenges in ML system design.

Evaluating the performance of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) models has become increasingly challenging, as large language model (LLM)-based GEC systems often produce corrections that diverge from provided gold references. This discrepancy undermines the reliability of traditional reference-based evaluation metrics. In this study, we propose a novel evaluation framework for GEC models, DSGram, integrating Semantic Coherence, Edit Level, and Fluency, and utilizing a dynamic weighting mechanism. Our framework employs the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in conjunction with large language models to ascertain the relative importance of various evaluation criteria. Additionally, we develop a dataset incorporating human annotations and LLM-simulated sentences to validate our algorithms and fine-tune more cost-effective models. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach enhances the effectiveness of GEC model evaluations.

Dense retrieval in most industries employs dual-tower architectures to retrieve query-relevant documents. Due to online deployment requirements, existing real-world dense retrieval systems mainly enhance performance by designing negative sampling strategies, overlooking the advantages of scaling up. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited superior performance that can be leveraged for scaling up dense retrieval. However, scaling up retrieval models significantly increases online query latency. To address this challenge, we propose ScalingNote, a two-stage method to exploit the scaling potential of LLMs for retrieval while maintaining online query latency. The first stage is training dual towers, both initialized from the same LLM, to unlock the potential of LLMs for dense retrieval. Then, we distill only the query tower using mean squared error loss and cosine similarity to reduce online costs. Through theoretical analysis and comprehensive offline and online experiments, we show the effectiveness and efficiency of ScalingNote. Our two-stage scaling method outperforms end-to-end models and verifies the scaling law of dense retrieval with LLMs in industrial scenarios, enabling cost-effective scaling of dense retrieval systems. Our online method incorporating ScalingNote significantly enhances the relevance between retrieved documents and queries.

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks directly from the given demonstrations without requiring gradient updates. While recent advances have expanded context windows to accommodate more demonstrations, this approach increases inference costs without necessarily improving performance. To mitigate these issues, We propose StreamAdapter, a novel approach that directly updates model parameters from context at test time, eliminating the need for explicit in-context demonstrations. StreamAdapter employs context mapping and weight absorption mechanisms to dynamically transform ICL demonstrations into parameter updates with minimal additional parameters. By reducing reliance on numerous in-context examples, StreamAdapter significantly reduce inference costs and allows for efficient inference with constant time complexity, regardless of demonstration count. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and model architectures demonstrate that StreamAdapter achieves comparable or superior adaptation capability to ICL while requiring significantly fewer demonstrations. The superior task adaptation and context encoding capabilities of StreamAdapter on both language understanding and generation tasks provides a new perspective for adapting LLMs at test time using context, allowing for more efficient adaptation across scenarios and more cost-effective inference

We introduce the Extract-Refine-Retrieve-Read (ERRR) framework, a novel approach designed to bridge the pre-retrieval information gap in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems through query optimization tailored to meet the specific knowledge requirements of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike conventional query optimization techniques used in RAG, the ERRR framework begins by extracting parametric knowledge from LLMs, followed by using a specialized query optimizer for refining these queries. This process ensures the retrieval of only the most pertinent information essential for generating accurate responses. Moreover, to enhance flexibility and reduce computational costs, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline that utilizes a smaller, tunable model as the query optimizer, which is refined through knowledge distillation from a larger teacher model. Our evaluations on various question-answering (QA) datasets and with different retrieval systems show that ERRR consistently outperforms existing baselines, proving to be a versatile and cost-effective module for improving the utility and accuracy of RAG systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges at inference time due to their high computational demands. To address this, we present Performance-Guided Knowledge Distillation (PGKD), a cost-effective and high-throughput solution for production text classification applications. PGKD utilizes teacher-student Knowledge Distillation to distill the knowledge of LLMs into smaller, task-specific models. PGKD establishes an active learning routine between the student model and the LLM; the LLM continuously generates new training data leveraging hard-negative mining, student model validation performance, and early-stopping protocols to inform the data generation. By employing a cyclical, performance-aware approach tailored for highly multi-class, sparsely annotated datasets prevalent in industrial text classification, PGKD effectively addresses training challenges and outperforms traditional BERT-base models and other knowledge distillation methods on several multi-class classification datasets. Additionally, cost and latency benchmarking reveals that models fine-tuned with PGKD are up to 130X faster and 25X less expensive than LLMs for inference on the same classification task. While PGKD is showcased for text classification tasks, its versatile framework can be extended to any LLM distillation task, including language generation, making it a powerful tool for optimizing performance across a wide range of AI applications.

Cross-embodiment imitation learning enables policies trained on specific embodiments to transfer across different robots, unlocking the potential for large-scale imitation learning that is both cost-effective and highly reusable. This paper presents LEGATO, a cross-embodiment imitation learning framework for visuomotor skill transfer across varied kinematic morphologies. We introduce a handheld gripper that unifies action and observation spaces, allowing tasks to be defined consistently across robots. We train visuomotor policies on task demonstrations using this gripper through imitation learning, applying transformation to a motion-invariant space for computing the training loss. Gripper motions generated by the policies are retargeted into high-degree-of-freedom whole-body motions using inverse kinematics for deployment across diverse embodiments. Our evaluations in simulation and real-robot experiments highlight the framework's effectiveness in learning and transferring visuomotor skills across various robots. More information can be found on the project page: https://ut-hcrl.github.io/LEGATO.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, instruction tuning has become critical for improving their ability to generate accurate and contextually appropriate responses. Although numerous instruction-tuning datasets have been developed to enhance LLM performance, selecting high-quality instruction data from large source datasets typically demands significant human effort. In this work, we introduce IterSelectTune, an efficient, cost-effective iterative training policy for selecting high-quality instruction data with no human involvement and limited reliance on GPT-4. By fine-tuning on approximately 20\% of the source data, our method consistently outperforms models fine-tuned on the full dataset across multiple benchmarks and public test datasets. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing LLM performance while reducing the computational resources required for instruction tuning.

The KV-Cache technique has become the standard for the inference of large language models (LLMs). It caches states of self-attention to avoid recomputation. Yet, it is widely criticized that KV-Cache can become a bottleneck of the LLM inference system, especially when confronted with ultra-large models and long-context queries. A natural remedy is to discard the KV-Cache for less important tokens, with StreamingLLM as an example, but the used static eviction strategies cannot flexibly adapt to varying contexts. Remedies like H2O leverage accumulative attention scores to perform dynamic eviction but suffer from the attention bias issue in capturing contextual information. This paper bridges this gap by devising a parameterized KV-Cache eviction mechanism, dubbed as Attention-Gate, which accepts the whole context as input and yields eviction flags for each token to realize in-context eviction. The subsequent self-attention module proceeds according to the flags and only the KV states for the remaining tokens need to be cached. The Attention-Gates can vary among different heads and layers and be trivially plugged into pre-trained LLMs, tuned by cost-effective continual pre-training or supervised fine-tuning objectives to acquire what to discard. The computational and memory overhead introduced by Attention-Gates is minimal. Our method is validated across multiple tasks, demonstrating both efficiency and adaptability. After a highly efficient continual pre-training, it achieves higher average accuracy and evicts more tokens compared to traditional training-free methods. In supervised fine-tuning, it not only evicts many tokens but also outperforms LoRA-finetuned LLMs on some datasets, such as RTE, where it improves accuracy by 13.9% while evicting 62.8% of tokens, showing that effective eviction of redundant tokens can even enhance performance.

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance across a range of natural language processing tasks, but their deployment comes at a high computational and financial cost. On the other hand, smaller language models (SLMs), which can be deployed on lower-cost edge devices, struggle to match the performance of their larger counterparts. This paper presents a novel hybrid inference approach that leverages the strengths of both model types while minimizing reliance on costly cloud-based LLMs. Unlike existing methods that route entire queries to either an SLM or a cloud LLM, our approach introduces a reward-based mechanism to dynamically determine the involvement of the cloud LLM during token generation. Specifically, each token predicted by the SLM is evaluated against a reward score, and only when this score falls below a certain threshold is the cloud LLM consulted for assistance in the next token prediction. This method not only reduces the traffic to the cloud LLM, thereby lowering costs, but also allows for flexible control over response quality depending on the reward score threshold. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces cloud LLM usage with minimal impact on overall response quality, offering a cost-effective solution for deploying high-performance language models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable image-language capabilities, but their widespread use faces challenges in cost-effective training and adaptation. Existing approaches often necessitate expensive language model retraining and limited adaptability. Additionally, the current focus on zero-shot performance improvements offers insufficient guidance for task-specific tuning. We propose CROME, an efficient vision-language instruction tuning framework. It features a novel gated cross-modal adapter that effectively combines visual and textual representations prior to input into a frozen LLM. This lightweight adapter, trained with minimal parameters, enables efficient cross-modal understanding. Notably, CROME demonstrates superior zero-shot performance on standard visual question answering and instruction-following benchmarks. Moreover, it yields fine-tuning with exceptional parameter efficiency, competing with task-specific specialist state-of-the-art methods. CROME demonstrates the potential of pre-LM alignment for building scalable, adaptable, and parameter-efficient multimodal models.

Mobile app review analysis presents unique challenges due to the low quality, subjective bias, and noisy content of user-generated documents. Extracting features from these reviews is essential for tasks such as feature prioritization and sentiment analysis, but it remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, encoder-only models based on the Transformer architecture have shown promising results for classification and information extraction tasks for multiple software engineering processes. This study explores the hypothesis that encoder-only large language models can enhance feature extraction from mobile app reviews. By leveraging crowdsourced annotations from an industrial context, we redefine feature extraction as a supervised token classification task. Our approach includes extending the pre-training of these models with a large corpus of user reviews to improve contextual understanding and employing instance selection techniques to optimize model fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that this method improves the precision and recall of extracted features and enhances performance efficiency. Key contributions include a novel approach to feature extraction, annotated datasets, extended pre-trained models, and an instance selection mechanism for cost-effective fine-tuning. This research provides practical methods and empirical evidence in applying large language models to natural language processing tasks within mobile app reviews, offering improved performance in feature extraction.

We present a principled approach to provide LLM-based evaluation with a rigorous guarantee of human agreement. We first propose that a reliable evaluation method should not uncritically rely on model preferences for pairwise evaluation, but rather assess the confidence of judge models and selectively decide when to trust its judgement. We then show that under this selective evaluation framework, human agreement can be provably guaranteed -- such that the model evaluation aligns with that of humans to a user-specified agreement level. As part of our framework, we also introduce Simulated Annotators, a novel confidence estimation method that significantly improves judge calibration and thus enables high coverage of evaluated instances. Finally, we propose Cascaded Selective Evaluation, where we use cheaper models as initial judges and escalate to stronger models only when necessary -- again, while still providing a provable guarantee of human agreement. Experimental results show that Cascaded Selective Evaluation guarantees strong alignment with humans, far beyond what LLM judges could achieve without selective evaluation. For example, on a subset of Chatbot Arena where GPT-4 almost never achieves 80% human agreement, our method, even while employing substantially cost-effective models such as Mistral-7B, guarantees over 80% human agreement with almost 80% test coverage.

Fine-tuning large-scale pretrained models is prohibitively expensive in terms of computational and memory costs. LoRA, as one of the most popular Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, offers a cost-effective alternative by fine-tuning an auxiliary low-rank model that has significantly fewer parameters. Although LoRA reduces the computational and memory requirements significantly at each iteration, extensive empirical evidence indicates that it converges at a considerably slower rate compared to full fine-tuning, ultimately leading to increased overall compute and often worse test performance. In our paper, we perform an in-depth investigation of the initialization method of LoRA and show that careful initialization (without any change of the architecture and the training algorithm) can significantly enhance both efficiency and performance. In particular, we introduce a novel initialization method, LoRA-GA (Low Rank Adaptation with Gradient Approximation), which aligns the gradients of low-rank matrix product with those of full fine-tuning at the first step. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that LoRA-GA achieves a convergence rate comparable to that of full fine-tuning (hence being significantly faster than vanilla LoRA as well as various recent improvements) while simultaneously attaining comparable or even better performance. For example, on the subset of the GLUE dataset with T5-Base, LoRA-GA outperforms LoRA by 5.69% on average. On larger models such as Llama 2-7B, LoRA-GA shows performance improvements of 0.34, 11.52%, and 5.05% on MT-bench, GSM8K, and Human-eval, respectively. Additionally, we observe up to 2-4 times convergence speed improvement compared to vanilla LoRA, validating its effectiveness in accelerating convergence and enhancing model performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Outsider565/LoRA-GA.

Recent works have shown promising results in connecting speech encoders to large language models (LLMs) for speech recognition. However, several limitations persist, including limited fine-tuning options, a lack of mechanisms to enforce speech-text alignment, and high insertion errors especially in domain mismatch conditions. This paper presents a comprehensive solution to address these issues. We begin by investigating more thoughtful fine-tuning schemes. Next, we propose a matching loss to enhance alignment between modalities. Finally, we explore training and inference methods to mitigate high insertion errors. Experimental results on the Librispeech corpus demonstrate that partially fine-tuning the encoder and LLM using parameter-efficient methods, such as LoRA, is the most cost-effective approach. Additionally, the matching loss improves modality alignment, enhancing performance. The proposed training and inference methods significantly reduce insertion errors.

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable advancements in machine translation (MT) by leveraging extensive web content. On the other hand, translation-specific LLMs are built by pre-training on domain-specific monolingual corpora and fine-tuning with human-annotated translation data. Despite the superior performance, these methods either demand an unprecedented scale of computing and data or substantial human editing and annotation efforts. In this paper, we develop MT-Ladder, a novel model-agnostic and cost-effective tool to refine the performance of general LLMs for MT. MT-Ladder is trained on pseudo-refinement triplets which can be easily obtained from existing LLMs without additional human cost. During training, we propose a hierarchical fine-tuning strategy with an easy-to-hard schema, improving MT-Ladder's refining performance progressively. The trained MT-Ladder can be seamlessly integrated with any general-purpose LLMs to boost their translation performance. By utilizing Gemma-2B/7B as the backbone, MT-Ladder-2B can elevate raw translations to the level of top-tier open-source models (e.g., refining BigTranslate-13B with +6.91 BLEU and +3.52 COMET for XX-En), and MT-Ladder-7B can further enhance model performance to be on par with the state-of-the-art GPT-4. Extensive ablation and analysis corroborate the effectiveness of MT-Ladder in diverse settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/fzp0424/Ladder

Combined electric power system and High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) models are being developed to determine the effect of a HEMP on the US power grid. The work relies primarily on deterministic methods; however, it is computationally untenable to evaluate the E1 HEMP response of large numbers of grid components distributed across a large interconnection. Further, the deterministic assessment of these components' failures are largely unachievable. E1 HEMP laboratory testing of the components is accomplished, but is expensive, leaving few data points to construct failure models of grid components exposed to E1 HEMP. The use of Bayesian priors, developed using the subject matter expertise, combined with the minimal test data in a Bayesian inference process, provides the basis for the development of more robust and cost-effective statistical component failure models. These can be used with minimal computational burden in a simulation environment such as sampling of Cumulative Distribution Functions (CDFs).

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has recently emerged as a promising tool for many agricultural applications; however, the technology cannot be directly used in a real-time system due to the extensive time needed to process large volumes of data. Consequently, the development of a simple, compact, and cost-effective imaging system is not possible with the current HSI systems. Therefore, the overall goal of this study was to reconstruct hyperspectral images from RGB images through deep learning for agricultural applications. Specifically, this study used Hyperspectral Convolutional Neural Network - Dense (HSCNN-D) to reconstruct hyperspectral images from RGB images for predicting soluble solid content (SSC) in sweet potatoes. The algorithm accurately reconstructed the hyperspectral images from RGB images, with the resulting spectra closely matching the ground-truth. The partial least squares regression (PLSR) model based on reconstructed spectra outperformed the model using the full spectral range, demonstrating its potential for SSC prediction in sweet potatoes. These findings highlight the potential of deep learning-based hyperspectral image reconstruction as a low-cost, efficient tool for various agricultural uses.

This work focuses on leveraging and selecting from vast, unlabeled, open data to pre-fine-tune a pre-trained language model. The goal is to minimize the need for costly domain-specific data for subsequent fine-tuning while achieving desired performance levels. While many data selection algorithms have been designed for small-scale applications, rendering them unsuitable for our context, some emerging methods do cater to language data scales. However, they often prioritize data that aligns with the target distribution. While this strategy may be effective when training a model from scratch, it can yield limited results when the model has already been pre-trained on a different distribution. Differing from prior work, our key idea is to select data that nudges the pre-training distribution closer to the target distribution. We show the optimality of this approach for fine-tuning tasks under certain conditions. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology across a diverse array of tasks (NLU, NLG, zero-shot) with models up to 2.7B, showing that it consistently surpasses other selection methods. Moreover, our proposed method is significantly faster than existing techniques, scaling to millions of samples within a single GPU hour. Our code is open-sourced (Code repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DV4LLM-D761/ ). While fine-tuning offers significant potential for enhancing performance across diverse tasks, its associated costs often limit its widespread adoption; with this work, we hope to lay the groundwork for cost-effective fine-tuning, making its benefits more accessible.

In this paper, we present Paramanu-Ganita, a 208 million parameter novel Auto Regressive (AR) decoder based language model on mathematics. The model is pretrained from scratch at context size of 4096 on our curated mixed mathematical corpus. We evaluate our model on both perplexity metric and GSM8k mathematical benchmark. Paramanu-Ganita despite being 35 times smaller than 7B LLMs, outperformed generalist LLMs such as LLaMa-1 7B by 28.4% points, LLaMa-2 7B by 27.6% points, Falcon 7B by 32.6% points, PaLM 8B by 35.3% points, and math specialised LLMs such as Minerva 8B by 23.2% points, and LLEMMA-7B by 3.0% points in GSM8k test accuracy metric respectively. Paramanu-Ganita also outperformed giant LLMs like PaLM 62B by 6.4% points, Falcon 40B by 19.8% points, LLaMa-1 33B by 3.8% points and Vicuna 13B by 11.8% points respectively. The large significant margin improvement in performance of our math model over the existing LLMs signifies that reasoning capabilities of language model are just not restricted to LLMs with humongous number of parameters. Paramanu-Ganita took 146 hours of A100 training whereas math specialised LLM, LLEMMA 7B, was trained for 23,000 A100 hours of training equivalent. Thus, our approach of pretraining powerful domain specialised language models from scratch for domain adaptation is much more cost-effective than performing continual training of LLMs for domain adaptation. Hence, we conclude that for strong mathematical reasoning abilities of language model, we do not need giant LLMs and immense computing power to our end. In the end, we want to point out that we have only trained Paramanu-Ganita only on a part of our entire mathematical corpus and yet to explore the full potential of our model.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) merges retrieval methods with deep learning advancements to address the static limitations of large language models (LLMs) by enabling the dynamic integration of up-to-date external information. This methodology, focusing primarily on the text domain, provides a cost-effective solution to the generation of plausible but incorrect responses by LLMs, thereby enhancing the accuracy and reliability of their outputs through the use of real-world data. As RAG grows in complexity and incorporates multiple concepts that can influence its performance, this paper organizes the RAG paradigm into four categories: pre-retrieval, retrieval, post-retrieval, and generation, offering a detailed perspective from the retrieval viewpoint. It outlines RAG's evolution and discusses the field's progression through the analysis of significant studies. Additionally, the paper introduces evaluation methods for RAG, addressing the challenges faced and proposing future research directions. By offering an organized framework and categorization, the study aims to consolidate existing research on RAG, clarify its technological underpinnings, and highlight its potential to broaden the adaptability and applications of LLMs.

Recently, several approaches successfully demonstrated that weight-sharing Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can effectively explore a search space of elastic low-rank adapters (LoRA), allowing the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and compression of large language models. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Shears, demonstrating how the integration of cost-effective sparsity and a proposed Neural Low-rank adapter Search (NLS) algorithm can further improve the efficiency of PEFT approaches. Results demonstrate the benefits of Shears compared to other methods, reaching high sparsity levels while improving or with little drop in accuracy, utilizing a single GPU for a pair of hours.