Accelerate
Updated
03/01/24


Attention Is All You Need
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.
BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5% (7.7% point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).

Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, Peter J. Liu
Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new ``Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus'', we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.

Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need
Noam Shazeer
Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to parallelizability across the length of the sequence, incremental inference (where such paralleization is impossible) is often slow, due to the memory-bandwidth cost of repeatedly loading the large "keys" and "values" tensors. We propose a variant called multi-query attention, where the keys and values are shared across all of the different attention "heads", greatly reducing the size of these tensors and hence the memory bandwidth requirements of incremental decoding. We verify experimentally that the resulting models can indeed be much faster to decode, and incur only minor quality degradation from the baseline.

GLU Variants Improve Transformer
Noam Shazeer
Gated Linear Units (arXiv:1612.08083) consist of the component-wise product of two linear projections, one of which is first passed through a sigmoid function. Variations on GLU are possible, using different nonlinear (or even linear) functions in place of sigmoid. We test these variants in the feed-forward sublayers of the Transformer (arXiv:1706.03762) sequence-to-sequence model, and find that some of them yield quality improvements over the typically-used ReLU or GELU activations.

Talking-Heads Attention
Noam Shazeer, Zhenzhong Lan, Youlong Cheng, Nan Ding, Le Hou
We introduce "talking-heads attention" - a variation on multi-head attention which includes linearprojections across the attention-heads dimension, immediately before and after the softmax operation.While inserting only a small number of additional parameters and a moderate amount of additionalcomputation, talking-heads attention leads to better perplexities on masked language modeling tasks, aswell as better quality when transfer-learning to language comprehension and question answering tasks.

Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition
Anmol Gulati, James Qin, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Niki Parmar, Yu Zhang, Jiahui Yu, Wei Han, Shibo Wang, Zhengdong Zhang, Yonghui Wu, Ruoming Pang
Recently Transformer and Convolution neural network (CNN) based models have shown promising results in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), outperforming Recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Transformer models are good at capturing content-based global interactions, while CNNs exploit local features effectively. In this work, we achieve the best of both worlds by studying how to combine convolution neural networks and transformers to model both local and global dependencies of an audio sequence in a parameter-efficient way. To this regard, we propose the convolution-augmented transformer for speech recognition, named Conformer. Conformer significantly outperforms the previous Transformer and CNN based models achieving state-of-the-art accuracies. On the widely used LibriSpeech benchmark, our model achieves WER of 2.1%/4.3% without using a language model and 1.9%/3.9% with an external language model on test/testother. We also observe competitive performance of 2.7%/6.3% with a small model of only 10M parameters.

Efficient Transformers: A Survey
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Dara Bahri, Donald Metzler
Transformer model architectures have garnered immense interest lately due to their effectiveness across a range of domains like language, vision and reinforcement learning. In the field of natural language processing for example, Transformers have become an indispensable staple in the modern deep learning stack. Recently, a dizzying number of "X-former" models have been proposed - Reformer, Linformer, Performer, Longformer, to name a few - which improve upon the original Transformer architecture, many of which make improvements around computational and memory efficiency. With the aim of helping the avid researcher navigate this flurry, this paper characterizes a large and thoughtful selection of recent efficiency-flavored "X-former" models, providing an organized and comprehensive overview of existing work and models across multiple domains.

RealFormer: Transformer Likes Residual Attention
Ruining He, Anirudh Ravula, Bhargav Kanagal, Joshua Ainslie
Transformer is the backbone of modern NLP models. In this paper, we propose RealFormer, a simple and generic technique to create Residual Attention Layer Transformer networks that significantly outperform the canonical Transformer and its variants (BERT, ETC, etc.) on a wide spectrum of tasks including Masked Language Modeling, GLUE, SQuAD, Neural Machine Translation, WikiHop, HotpotQA, Natural Questions, and OpenKP. We also observe empirically that RealFormer stabilizes training and leads to models with sparser attention. Source code and pre-trained checkpoints for RealFormer can be found at this https URL.

Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity
William Fedus, Barret Zoph, Noam Shazeer
In deep learning, models typically reuse the same parameters for all inputs. Mixture of Experts (MoE) defies this and instead selects different parameters for each incoming example. The result is a sparsely-activated model -- with outrageous numbers of parameters -- but a constant computational cost. However, despite several notable successes of MoE, widespread adoption has been hindered by complexity, communication costs and training instability -- we address these with the Switch Transformer. We simplify the MoE routing algorithm and design intuitive improved models with reduced communication and computational costs. Our proposed training techniques help wrangle the instabilities and we show large sparse models may be trained, for the first time, with lower precision (bfloat16) formats. We design models based off T5-Base and T5-Large to obtain up to 7x increases in pre-training speed with the same computational resources. These improvements extend into multilingual settings where we measure gains over the mT5-Base version across all 101 languages. Finally, we advance the current scale of language models by pre-training up to trillion parameter models on the "Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus" and achieve a 4x speedup over the T5-XXL model.

Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners
Jason Wei, Maarten Bosma, Vincent Y. Zhao, Kelvin Guu, Adams Wei Yu, Brian Lester, Nan Du, Andrew M. Dai, Quoc V. Le
This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks.
We take a 137B parameter pretrained language model and instruction-tune it on over 60 NLP tasks verbalized via natural language instruction templates. We evaluate this instruction-tuned model, which we call FLAN, on unseen task types. FLAN substantially improves the performance of its unmodified counterpart and surpasses zero-shot 175B GPT-3 on 20 of 25 tasks that we evaluate. FLAN even outperforms few-shot GPT-3 by a large margin on ANLI, RTE, BoolQ, AI2-ARC, OpenbookQA, and StoryCloze. Ablation studies reveal that number of finetuning datasets, model scale, and natural language instructions are key to the success of instruction tuning.

Primer: Searching for Efficient Transformers for Language Modeling
David R. So, Wojciech Mańke, Hanxiao Liu, Zihang Dai, Noam Shazeer, Quoc V. Le
Large Transformer models have been central to recent advances in natural language processing. The training and inference costs of these models, however, have grown rapidly and become prohibitively expensive. Here we aim to reduce the costs of Transformers by searching for a more efficient variant. Compared to previous approaches, our search is performed at a lower level, over the primitives that define a Transformer TensorFlow program. We identify an architecture, named Primer, that has a smaller training cost than the original Transformer and other variants for auto-regressive language modeling. Primer's improvements can be mostly attributed to two simple modifications: squaring ReLU activations and adding a depthwise convolution layer after each Q, K, and V projection in self-attention.
Experiments show Primer's gains over Transformer increase as compute scale grows and follow a power law with respect to quality at optimal model sizes. We also verify empirically that Primer can be dropped into different codebases to significantly speed up training without additional tuning. For example, at a 500M parameter size, Primer improves the original T5 architecture on C4 auto-regressive language modeling, reducing the training cost by 4X. Furthermore, the reduced training cost means Primer needs much less compute to reach a target one-shot performance. For instance, in a 1.9B parameter configuration similar to GPT-3 XL, Primer uses 1/3 of the training compute to achieve the same one-shot performance as Transformer. We open source our models and several comparisons in T5 to help with reproducibility.

Sparse is Enough in Scaling Transformers
Sebastian Jaszczur, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Afroz Mohiuddin, Łukasz Kaiser, Wojciech Gajewski, Henryk Michalewski, Jonni Kanerva
Large Transformer models yield impressive results on many tasks, but are expensive to train, or even fine-tune, and so slow at decoding that their use and study becomes out of reach. We address this problem by leveraging sparsity. We study sparse variants for all layers in the Transformer and propose Scaling Transformers, a family of next generation Transformer models that use sparse layers to scale efficiently and perform unbatched decoding much faster than the standard Transformer as we scale up the model size. Surprisingly, the sparse layers are enough to obtain the same perplexity as the standard Transformer with the same number of parameters. We also integrate with prior sparsity approaches to attention and enable fast inference on long sequences even with limited memory. This results in performance competitive to the state-of-the-art on long text summarization.

GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts
Nan Du, Yanping Huang, Andrew M. Dai, Simon Tong, Dmitry Lepikhin, Yuanzhong Xu, Maxim Krikun, Yanqi Zhou, Adams Wei Yu, Orhan Firat, Barret Zoph, Liam Fedus, Maarten Bosma, Zongwei Zhou, Tao Wang, Yu Emma Wang, Kellie Webster, Marie Pellat, Kevin Robinson, Kathleen Meier-Hellstern, Toju Duke, Lucas Dixon, Kun Zhang, Quoc V Le, Yonghui Wu, Zhifeng Chen, Claire Cui
Scaling language models with more data, compute and parameters has driven significant progress in natural language processing. For example, thanks to scaling, GPT-3 was able to achieve strong results on in-context learning tasks. However, training these large dense models requires significant amounts of computing resources. In this paper, we propose and develop a family of language models named GLaM (Generalist Language Model), which uses a sparsely activated mixture-of-experts architecture to scale the model capacity while also incurring substantially less training cost compared to dense variants. The largest GLaM has 1.2 trillion parameters, which is approximately 7x larger than GPT-3. It consumes only 1/3 of the energy used to train GPT-3 and requires half of the computation flops for inference, while still achieving better overall zero-shot and one-shot performance across 29 NLP tasks.

LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications
Romal Thoppilan, Daniel De Freitas, Jamie Hall, Noam Shazeer, Apoorv Kulshreshtha, Heng-Tze Cheng, Alicia Jin, Taylor Bos, Leslie Baker, Yu Du, YaGuang Li, Hongrae Lee, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Amin Ghafouri, Marcelo Menegali, Yanping Huang, Maxim Krikun, Dmitry Lepikhin, James Qin, Dehao Chen, Yuanzhong Xu, Zhifeng Chen, Adam Roberts, Maarten Bosma, Vincent Zhao, Yanqi Zhou, Chung-Ching Chang, Igor Krivokon, Will Rusch, Marc Pickett, Pranesh Srinivasan, Laichee Man, Kathleen Meier-Hellstern, Meredith Ringel Morris, Tulsee Doshi, Renelito Delos Santos, Toju Duke, Johnny Soraker, Ben Zevenbergen, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Mark Diaz, Ben Hutchinson, Kristen Olson, Alejandra Molina, Erin Hoffman-John, Josh Lee, Lora Aroyo, Ravi Rajakumar, Alena Butryna, Matthew Lamm, Viktoriya Kuzmina, Joe Fenton, Aaron Cohen, Rachel Bernstein, Ray Kurzweil, Blaise Aguera-Arcas, Claire Cui, Marian Croak, Ed Chi, Quoc Le
We present LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. LaMDA is a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, which have up to 137B parameters and are pre-trained on 1.56T words of public dialog data and web text. While model scaling alone can improve quality, it shows less improvements on safety and factual grounding. We demonstrate that fine-tuning with annotated data and enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources can lead to significant improvements towards the two key challenges of safety and factual grounding. The first challenge, safety, involves ensuring that the model's responses are consistent with a set of human values, such as preventing harmful suggestions and unfair bias. We quantify safety using a metric based on an illustrative set of human values, and we find that filtering candidate responses using a LaMDA classifier fine-tuned with a small amount of crowdworker-annotated data offers a promising approach to improving model safety. The second challenge, factual grounding, involves enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources, such as an information retrieval system, a language translator, and a calculator. We quantify factuality using a groundedness metric, and we find that our approach enables the model to generate responses grounded in known sources, rather than responses that merely sound plausible. Finally, we explore the use of LaMDA in the domains of education and content recommendations, and analyze their helpfulness and role consistency.

Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Brian Ichter, Fei Xia, Ed Chi, Quoc Le, Denny Zhou
We explore how generating a chain of thought -- a series of intermediate reasoning steps -- significantly improves the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning. In particular, we show how such reasoning abilities emerge naturally in sufficiently large language models via a simple method called chain of thought prompting, where a few chain of thought demonstrations are provided as exemplars in prompting. Experiments on three large language models show that chain of thought prompting improves performance on a range of arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks. The empirical gains can be striking. For instance, prompting a 540B-parameter language model with just eight chain of thought exemplars achieves state of the art accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing even finetuned GPT-3 with a verifier.

PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways
Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Jacob Devlin, Maarten Bosma, Gaurav Mishra, Adam Roberts, Paul Barham, Hyung Won Chung, Charles Sutton, Sebastian Gehrmann, Parker Schuh, Kensen Shi, Sasha Tsvyashchenko, Joshua Maynez, Abhishek Rao, Parker Barnes, Yi Tay, Noam Shazeer, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Emily Reif, Nan Du, Ben Hutchinson, Reiner Pope, James Bradbury, Jacob Austin, Michael Isard, Guy Gur-Ari, Pengcheng Yin, Toju Duke, Anselm Levskaya, Sanjay Ghemawat, Sunipa Dev, Henryk Michalewski, Xavier Garcia, Vedant Misra, Kevin Robinson, Liam Fedus, Denny Zhou, Daphne Ippolito, David Luan, Hyeontaek Lim, Barret Zoph, Alexander Spiridonov, Ryan Sepassi, David Dohan, Shivani Agrawal, Mark Omernick, Andrew M. Dai, Thanumalayan Sankaranarayana Pillai, Marie Pellat, Aitor Lewkowycz, Erica Moreira, Rewon Child, Oleksandr Polozov, Katherine Lee, Zongwei Zhou, Xuezhi Wang, Brennan Saeta, Mark Diaz, Orhan Firat, Michele Catasta, Jason Wei, Kathy Meier-Hellstern, Douglas Eck, Jeff Dean, Slav Petrov, Noah Fiedel
Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning, which drastically reduces the number of task-specific training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model PaLM. We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly efficient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued benefits of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the finetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A significant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies.

Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models
Hyung Won Chung, Le Hou, Shayne Longpre, Barret Zoph, Yi Tay, William Fedus, Yunxuan Li, Xuezhi Wang, Mostafa Dehghani, Siddhartha Brahma, Albert Webson, Shixiang Shane Gu, Zhuyun Dai, Mirac Suzgun, Xinyun Chen, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Alex Castro-Ros, Marie Pellat, Kevin Robinson, Dasha Valter, Sharan Narang, Gaurav Mishra, Adams Yu, Vincent Zhao, Yanping Huang, Andrew Dai, Hongkun Yu, Slav Petrov, Ed H. Chi, Jeff Dean, Jacob Devlin, Adam Roberts, Denny Zhou, Quoc V. Le, Jason Wei
Finetuning language models on a collection of datasets phrased as instructions has been shown to improve model performance and generalization to unseen tasks. In this paper we explore instruction finetuning with a particular focus on (1) scaling the number of tasks, (2) scaling the model size, and (3) finetuning on chain-of-thought data. We find that instruction finetuning with the above aspects dramatically improves performance on a variety of model classes (PaLM, T5, U-PaLM), prompting setups (zero-shot, few-shot, CoT), and evaluation benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, TyDiQA, MGSM, open-ended generation). For instance, Flan-PaLM 540B instruction-finetuned on 1.8K tasks outperforms PALM 540B by a large margin (+9.4% on average). Flan-PaLM 540B achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, such as 75.2% on five-shot MMLU. We also publicly release Flan-T5 checkpoints, which achieve strong few-shot performance even compared to much larger models, such as PaLM 62B. Overall, instruction finetuning is a general method for improving the performance and usability of pretrained language models.

Towards Better Few-Shot and Finetuning Performance with Forgetful Causal Language Models
Hao Liu, Xinyang Geng, Lisa Lee, Igor Mordatch, Sergey Levine, Sharan Narang, Pieter Abbeel
Large language models (LLM) trained using the next-token-prediction objective, such as GPT3 and PaLM, have revolutionized natural language processing in recent years by showing impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities across a wide range of tasks. In this work, we propose a simple technique that significantly boosts the performance of LLMs without adding computational cost. Our key observation is that, by performing the next token prediction task with randomly selected past tokens masked out, we can improve the quality of the learned representations for downstream language understanding tasks. We hypothesize that randomly masking past tokens prevents over-attending to recent tokens and encourages attention to tokens in the distant past. We find that our method, Forgetful Causal Masking (FCM), significantly improves both few-shot and finetuning performance of PaLM. We further consider a simple extension, T-FCM, which introduces bidirectional context to causal language model without altering the sequence order, and further improves finetuning performance.

Large Language Models Can Self-Improve
Jiaxin Huang, Shixiang Shane Gu, Le Hou, Yuexin Wu, Xuezhi Wang, Hongkun Yu, Jiawei Han
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performances in various tasks. However, fine-tuning an LLM requires extensive supervision. Human, on the other hand, may improve their reasoning abilities by self-thinking without external inputs. In this work, we demonstrate that an LLM is also capable of self-improving with only unlabeled datasets. We use a pre-trained LLM to generate "high-confidence" rationale-augmented answers for unlabeled questions using Chain-of-Thought prompting and self-consistency, and fine-tune the LLM using those self-generated solutions as target outputs. We show that our approach improves the general reasoning ability of a 540B-parameter LLM (74.4%->82.1% on GSM8K, 78.2%->83.0% on DROP, 90.0%->94.4% on OpenBookQA, and 63.4%->67.9% on ANLI-A3) and achieves state-of-the-art-level performance, without any ground truth label. We conduct ablation studies and show that fine-tuning on reasoning is critical for self-improvement.

Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference
Reiner Pope, Sholto Douglas, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Jacob Devlin, James Bradbury, Anselm Levskaya, Jonathan Heek, Kefan Xiao, Shivani Agrawal, Jeff Dean
We study the problem of efficient generative inference for Transformer models, in one of its most challenging settings: large deep models, with tight latency targets and long sequence lengths. Better understanding of the engineering tradeoffs for inference for large Transformer-based models is important as use cases of these models are growing rapidly throughout application areas. We develop a simple analytical model for inference efficiency to select the best multi-dimensional partitioning techniques optimized for TPU v4 slices based on the application requirements. We combine these with a suite of low-level optimizations to achieve a new Pareto frontier on the latency and model FLOPS utilization (MFU) tradeoffs on 500B+ parameter models that outperforms the FasterTransformer suite of benchmarks. We further show that with appropriate partitioning, the lower memory requirements of multiquery attention (i.e. multiple query heads share single key/value head) enables scaling up to 32x larger context lengths. Finally, we achieve a low-batch-size latency of 29ms per token during generation (using int8 weight quantization) and a 76% MFU during large-batch-size processing of input tokens, while supporting a long 2048-token context length on the PaLM 540B parameter model.

Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding
Yaniv Leviathan, Matan Kalman, Yossi Matias
Inference from large autoregressive models like Transformers is slow - decoding K tokens takes K serial runs of the model. In this work we introduce speculative decoding - an algorithm to sample from autoregressive models faster without any changes to the outputs, by computing several tokens in parallel. At the heart of our approach lie the observations that (1) hard language-modeling tasks often include easier subtasks that can be approximated well by more efficient models, and (2) using speculative execution and a novel sampling method, we can make exact decoding from the large models faster, by running them in parallel on the outputs of the approximation models, potentially generating several tokens concurrently, and without changing the distribution. Our method can accelerate existing off-the-shelf models without retraining or architecture changes. We demonstrate it on T5-XXL and show a 2X-3X acceleration compared to the standard T5X implementation, with identical outputs.

Symbolic Discovery of Optimization Algorithms
Xiangning Chen, Chen Liang, Da Huang, Esteban Real, Kaiyuan Wang, Yao Liu, Hieu Pham, Xuanyi Dong, Thang Luong, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Yifeng Lu, Quoc V. Le
We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program space. To bridge the large generalization gap between proxy and target tasks, we also introduce program selection and simplification strategies. Our method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm, Lion (EvoLved Sign Momentum). It is more memory-efficient than Adam as it only keeps track of the momentum. Different from adaptive optimizers, its update has the same magnitude for each parameter calculated through the sign operation. We compare Lion with widely used optimizers, such as Adam and Adafactor, for training a variety of models on different tasks. On image classification, Lion boosts the accuracy of ViT by up to 2% on ImageNet and saves up to 5x the pre-training compute on JFT. On vision-language contrastive learning, we achieve 88.3% zero-shot and 91.1% fine-tuning accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the previous best results by 2% and 0.1%, respectively. On diffusion models, Lion outperforms Adam by achieving a better FID score and reducing the training compute by up to 2.3x. For autoregressive, masked language modeling, and fine-tuning, Lion exhibits a similar or better performance compared to Adam. Our analysis of Lion reveals that its performance gain grows with the training batch size. It also requires a smaller learning rate than Adam due to the larger norm of the update produced by the sign function. Additionally, we examine the limitations of Lion and identify scenarios where its improvements are small or not statistically significant. Lion is also successfully deployed in production systems such as Google search ads CTR model.

PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model
Danny Driess, Fei Xia, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Corey Lynch, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Brian Ichter, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Quan Vuong, Tianhe Yu, Wenlong Huang, Yevgen Chebotar, Pierre Sermanet, Daniel Duckworth, Sergey Levine, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karol Hausman, Marc Toussaint, Klaus Greff, Andy Zeng, Igor Mordatch, Pete Florence
Large language models excel at a wide range of complex tasks. However, enabling general inference in the real world, e.g., for robotics problems, raises the challenge of grounding. We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate real-world continuous sensor modalities into language models and thereby establish the link between words and percepts. Input to our embodied language model are multi-modal sentences that interleave visual, continuous state estimation, and textual input encodings. We train these encodings end-to-end, in conjunction with a pre-trained large language model, for multiple embodied tasks including sequential robotic manipulation planning, visual question answering, and captioning. Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. Our largest model, PaLM-E-562B with 562B parameters, in addition to being trained on robotics tasks, is a visual-language generalist with state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA, and retains generalist language capabilities with increasing scale.

Conditional Adapters: Parameter-efficient Transfer Learning with Fast Inference
Tao Lei, Junwen Bai, Siddhartha Brahma, Joshua Ainslie, Kenton Lee, Yanqi Zhou, Nan Du, Vincent Y. Zhao, Yuexin Wu, Bo Li, Yu Zhang, Ming-Wei Chang
We propose Conditional Adapter (CoDA), a parameter-efficient transfer learning method that also improves inference efficiency. CoDA generalizes beyond standard adapter approaches to enable a new way of balancing speed and accuracy using conditional computation. Starting with an existing dense pretrained model, CoDA adds sparse activation together with a small number of new parameters and a light-weight training phase. Our experiments demonstrate that the CoDA approach provides an unexpectedly efficient way to transfer knowledge. Across a variety of language, vision, and speech tasks, CoDA achieves a 2x to 8x inference speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art Adapter approaches with moderate to no accuracy loss and the same parameter efficiency.

Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes
Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Chun-Liang Li, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Hootan Nakhost, Yasuhisa Fujii, Alexander Ratner, Ranjay Krishna, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for training small models within a multi-task framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to few-shot prompted LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our finetuned 770M T5 model outperforms the few-shot prompted 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark, whereas standard finetuning the same T5 model struggles to match even by using 100% of the dataset. We release the code at: this https URL .

FormNetV2: Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning for Form Document Information Extraction
Chen-Yu Lee, Chun-Liang Li, Hao Zhang, Timothy Dozat, Vincent Perot, Guolong Su, Xiang Zhang, Kihyuk Sohn, Nikolai Glushnev, Renshen Wang, Joshua Ainslie, Shangbang Long, Siyang Qin, Yasuhisa Fujii, Nan Hua, Tomas Pfister
The recent advent of self-supervised pre-training techniques has led to a surge in the use of multimodal learning in form document understanding. However, existing approaches that extend the mask language modeling to other modalities require careful multi-task tuning, complex reconstruction target designs, or additional pre-training data. In FormNetV2, we introduce a centralized multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy to unify self-supervised pre-training for all modalities in one loss. The graph contrastive objective maximizes the agreement of multimodal representations, providing a natural interplay for all modalities without special customization. In addition, we extract image features within the bounding box that joins a pair of tokens connected by a graph edge, capturing more targeted visual cues without loading a sophisticated and separately pre-trained image embedder. FormNetV2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on FUNSD, CORD, SROIE and Payment benchmarks with a more compact model size.

PaLM 2 Technical Report
Rohan Anil, Andrew M. Dai, Orhan Firat, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Lepikhin, Alexandre Passos, Siamak Shakeri, Emanuel Taropa, Paige Bailey, Zhifeng Chen, Eric Chu, Jonathan H. Clark, Laurent El Shafey, Yanping Huang, Kathy Meier-Hellstern, Gaurav Mishra, Erica Moreira, Mark Omernick, Kevin Robinson, Sebastian Ruder, Yi Tay, Kefan Xiao, Yuanzhong Xu, Yujing Zhang, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Junwhan Ahn, Jacob Austin, Paul Barham, Jan Botha, James Bradbury, Siddhartha Brahma, Kevin Brooks, Michele Catasta, Yong Cheng, Colin Cherry, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Clément Crepy, Shachi Dave, Mostafa Dehghani, Sunipa Dev, Jacob Devlin, Mark Díaz, Nan Du, Ethan Dyer, Vlad Feinberg, Fangxiaoyu Feng, Vlad Fienber, Markus Freitag, Xavier Garcia, Sebastian Gehrmann, Lucas Gonzalez, Guy Gur-Ari, Steven Hand, Hadi Hashemi, Le Hou, Joshua Howland, Andrea Hu, Jeffrey Hui, Jeremy Hurwitz, Michael Isard, Abe Ittycheriah, Matthew Jagielski, Wenhao Jia, Kathleen Kenealy, Maxim Krikun, Sneha Kudugunta, Chang Lan, Katherine Lee, Benjamin Lee, Eric Li, Music Li, Wei Li, YaGuang Li, Jian Li, Hyeontaek Lim, Hanzhao Lin, Zhongtao Liu, Frederick Liu, Marcello Maggioni, Aroma Mahendru, Joshua Maynez, Vedant Misra, Maysam Moussalem, Zachary Nado, John Nham, Eric Ni, Andrew Nystrom, Alicia Parrish, Marie Pellat, Martin Polacek, Alex Polozov, Reiner Pope, Siyuan Qiao, Emily Reif, Bryan Richter, Parker Riley, Alex Castro Ros, Aurko Roy, Brennan Saeta et al. (28 additional authors not shown)
We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities.
When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report.

Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models
Jerry Wei, Le Hou, Andrew Lampinen, Xiangning Chen, Da Huang, Yi Tay, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma, Quoc V. Le
We present symbol tuning - finetuning language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels (e.g., "positive/negative sentiment") are replaced with arbitrary symbols (e.g., "foo/bar"). Symbol tuning leverages the intuition that when a model cannot use instructions or natural language labels to figure out a task, it must instead do so by learning the input-label mappings.
We experiment with symbol tuning across Flan-PaLM models up to 540B parameters and observe benefits across various settings. First, symbol tuning boosts performance on unseen in-context learning tasks and is much more robust to underspecified prompts, such as those without instructions or without natural language labels. Second, symbol-tuned models are much stronger at algorithmic reasoning tasks, with up to 18.2% better performance on the List Functions benchmark and up to 15.3% better performance on the Simple Turing Concepts benchmark. Finally, symbol-tuned models show large improvements in following flipped-labels presented in-context, meaning that they are more capable of using in-context information to override prior semantic knowledge.

Mixture-of-Experts Meets Instruction Tuning:A Winning Combination for Large Language Models
Sheng Shen, Le Hou, Yanqi Zhou, Nan Du, Shayne Longpre, Jason Wei, Hyung Won Chung, Barret Zoph, William Fedus, Xinyun Chen, Tu Vu, Yuexin Wu, Wuyang Chen, Albert Webson, Yunxuan Li, Vincent Zhao, Hongkun Yu, Kurt Keutzer, Trevor Darrell, Denny Zhou
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a neural architecture design that can be utilized to add learnable parameters to Large Language Models (LLMs) without increasing inference cost. Instruction tuning is a technique for training LLMs to follow instructions. We advocate combining these two approaches, as we find that MoE models benefit more from instruction tuning than dense models. In particular, we conduct empirical studies across three experimental setups: (i) Direct finetuning on individual downstream tasks devoid of instruction tuning; (ii) Instructiontuning followed by in-context few-shot or zero-shot generalization on downstream tasks; and (iii) Instruction tuning supplemented by further finetuning on individual downstream tasks. In the first scenario, MoE models overall underperform dense models of identical computational capacity. This narrative, however, dramatically changes with the introduction of instruction tuning (second and third scenario), used independently or in conjunction with task-specific finetuning. Our most powerful model, FLAN-MOE-32B, surpasses the performance of FLAN-PALM-62B on four benchmark tasks, while using only a third of the FLOPs. The advancements embodied byFLAN-MOE inspire a reevaluation of the design principles of large-scale, high-performance language models in the framework of task-agnostic learning.

Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models
Karan Singhal, Tao Tu, Juraj Gottweis, Rory Sayres, Ellery Wulczyn, Le Hou, Kevin Clark, Stephen Pfohl, Heather Cole-Lewis, Darlene Neal, Mike Schaekermann, Amy Wang, Mohamed Amin, Sami Lachgar, Philip Mansfield, Sushant Prakash, Bradley Green, Ewa Dominowska, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Nenad Tomasev, Yun Liu, Renee Wong, Christopher Semturs, S. Sara Mahdavi, Joelle Barral, Dale Webster, Greg S. Corrado, Yossi Matias, Shekoofeh Azizi, Alan Karthikesalingam, Vivek Natarajan
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge.
Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach.
Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets.
We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations.
While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.

DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining
Sang Michael Xie, Hieu Pham, Xuanyi Dong, Nan Du, Hanxiao Liu, Yifeng Lu, Percy Liang, Quoc V. Le, Tengyu Ma, Adams Wei Yu
The mixture proportions of pretraining data domains (e.g., Wikipedia, books, web text) greatly affect language model (LM) performance. In this paper, we propose Domain Reweighting with Minimax Optimization (DoReMi), which first trains a small proxy model using group distributionally robust optimization (Group DRO) over domains to produce domain weights (mixture proportions) without knowledge of downstream tasks. We then resample a dataset with these domain weights and train a larger, full-sized model. In our experiments, we use DoReMi on a 280M-parameter proxy model to set the domain weights for training an 8B-parameter model (30x larger) more efficiently. On The Pile, DoReMi improves perplexity across all domains, even when it downweights a domain. DoReMi improves average few-shot downstream accuracy by 6.5% points over a baseline model trained using The Pile's default domain weights and reaches the baseline accuracy with 2.6x fewer training steps. On the GLaM dataset, DoReMi, which has no knowledge of downstream tasks, even matches the performance of using domain weights tuned on downstream tasks.

How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages?
Ronak Pradeep, Kai Hui, Jai Gupta, Adam D. Lelkes, Honglei Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler, Vinh Q. Tran
Popularized by the Differentiable Search Index, the emerging paradigm of generative retrieval re-frames the classic information retrieval problem into a sequence-to-sequence modeling task, forgoing external indices and encoding an entire document corpus within a single Transformer. Although many different approaches have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of generative retrieval, they have only been evaluated on document corpora on the order of 100k in size. We conduct the first empirical study of generative retrieval techniques across various corpus scales, ultimately scaling up to the entire MS MARCO passage ranking task with a corpus of 8.8M passages and evaluating model sizes up to 11B parameters. We uncover several findings about scaling generative retrieval to millions of passages; notably, the central importance of using synthetic queries as document representations during indexing, the ineffectiveness of existing proposed architecture modifications when accounting for compute cost, and the limits of naively scaling model parameters with respect to retrieval performance. While we find that generative retrieval is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora, scaling to millions of passages remains an important and unsolved challenge. We believe these findings will be valuable for the community to clarify the current state of generative retrieval, highlight the unique challenges, and inspire new research directions.

GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints
Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebrón, Sumit Sanghai
Multi-query attention (MQA), which only uses a single key-value head, drastically speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA can lead to quality degradation, and moreover it may not be desirable to train a separate model just for faster inference. We (1) propose a recipe for uptraining existing multi-head language model checkpoints into models with MQA using 5% of original pre-training compute, and (2) introduce grouped-query attention (GQA), a generalization of multi-query attention which uses an intermediate (more than one, less than number of query heads) number of key-value heads. We show that uptrained GQA achieves quality close to multi-head attention with comparable speed to MQA.

Small Language Models Improve Giants by Rewriting Their Outputs
Giorgos Vernikos, Arthur Bražinskas, Jakub Adamek, Jonathan Mallinson, Aliaksei Severyn, Eric Malmi
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning capabilities, but they often underperform compared to fine-tuned models on challenging tasks. Furthermore, their large size and restricted access only through APIs make task-specific fine-tuning impractical. Moreover, LLMs are sensitive to different aspects of prompts (e.g., the selection and order of demonstrations) and can thus require time-consuming prompt engineering. In this light, we propose a method to correct LLM outputs without relying on their weights. First, we generate a pool of candidates by few-shot prompting an LLM. Second, we refine the LLM-generated outputs using a smaller model, the LM-corrector (LMCor), which is trained to rank, combine and rewrite the candidates to produce the final target output. Our experiments demonstrate that even a small LMCor model (250M) substantially improves the few-shot performance of LLMs (62B) across diverse tasks. Moreover, we illustrate that the LMCor exhibits robustness against different prompts, thereby minimizing the need for extensive prompt engineering. Finally, we showcase that the LMCor can be seamlessly integrated with different LLMs at inference time, serving as a plug-and-play module to improve their performance.

StableRep: Synthetic Images from Text-to-Image Models Make Strong Visual Representation Learners
Yonglong Tian, Lijie Fan, Phillip Isola, Huiwen Chang, Dilip Krishnan
We investigate the potential of learning visual representations using synthetic images generated by text-to-image models. This is a natural question in the light of the excellent performance of such models in generating high-quality images. We consider specifically the Stable Diffusion, one of the leading open source text-to-image models. We show that (1) when the generative model is configured with proper classifier-free guidance scale, training self-supervised methods on synthetic images can match or beat the real image counterpart; (2) by treating the multiple images generated from the same text prompt as positives for each other, we develop a multi-positive contrastive learning method, which we call StableRep. With solely synthetic images, the representations learned by StableRep surpass the performance of representations learned by SimCLR and CLIP using the same set of text prompts and corresponding real images, on large scale datasets. When we further add language supervision, StableRep trained with 20M synthetic images achieves better accuracy than CLIP trained with 50M real images.

AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen
Paul K. Rubenstein, Chulayuth Asawaroengchai, Duc Dung Nguyen, Ankur Bapna, Zalán Borsos, Félix de Chaumont Quitry, Peter Chen, Dalia El Badawy, Wei Han, Eugene Kharitonov, Hannah Muckenhirn, Dirk Padfield, James Qin, Danny Rozenberg, Tara Sainath, Johan Schalkwyk, Matt Sharifi, Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Marco Tagliasacchi, Alexandru Tudor, Mihajlo Velimirović, Damien Vincent, Jiahui Yu, Yongqiang Wang, Vicky Zayats, Neil Zeghidour, Yu Zhang, Zhishuai Zhang, Lukas Zilka, Christian Frank
We introduce AudioPaLM, a large language model for speech understanding and generation. AudioPaLM fuses text-based and speech-based language models, PaLM-2 [Anil et al., 2023] and AudioLM [Borsos et al., 2022], into a unified multimodal architecture that can process and generate text and speech with applications including speech recognition and speech-to-speech translation. AudioPaLM inherits the capability to preserve paralinguistic information such as speaker identity and intonation from AudioLM and the linguistic knowledge present only in text large language models such as PaLM-2. We demonstrate that initializing AudioPaLM with the weights of a text-only large language model improves speech processing, successfully leveraging the larger quantity of text training data used in pretraining to assist with the speech tasks. The resulting model significantly outperforms existing systems for speech translation tasks and has the ability to perform zero-shot speech-to-text translation for many languages for which input/target language combinations were not seen in training. AudioPaLM also demonstrates features of audio language models, such as transferring a voice across languages based on a short spoken prompt. We release examples of our method at this https URL

Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting
Zhen Qin, Rolf Jagerman, Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Junru Wu, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Jialu Liu, Donald Metzler, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky
Ranking documents using Large Language Models (LLMs) by directly feeding the query and candidate documents into the prompt is an interesting and practical problem. However, there has been limited success so far, as researchers have found it difficult to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets. We analyze pointwise and listwise ranking prompts used by existing methods and argue that off-the-shelf LLMs do not fully understand these ranking formulations, possibly due to the nature of how LLMs are trained. In this paper, we propose to significantly reduce the burden on LLMs by using a new technique called Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP). Our results are the first in the literature to achieve state-of-the-art ranking performance on standard benchmarks using moderate-sized open-sourced LLMs. On TREC-DL2020, PRP based on the Flan-UL2 model with 20B parameters outperforms the previous best approach in the literature, which is based on the blackbox commercial GPT-4 that has 50x (estimated) model size, by over 5% at NDCG@1. On TREC-DL2019, PRP is only inferior to the GPT-4 solution on the NDCG@5 and NDCG@10 metrics, while outperforming other existing solutions, such as InstructGPT which has 175B parameters, by over 10% for nearly all ranking metrics. Furthermore, we propose several variants of PRP to improve efficiency and show that it is possible to achieve competitive results even with linear complexity. We also discuss other benefits of PRP, such as supporting both generation and scoring LLM APIs, as well as being insensitive to input ordering.

HyperDreamBooth: HyperNetworks for Fast Personalization of Text-to-Image Models
Nataniel Ruiz, Yuanzhen Li, Varun Jampani, Wei Wei, Tingbo Hou, Yael Pritch, Neal Wadhwa, Michael Rubinstein, Kfir Aberman
Personalization has emerged as a prominent aspect within the field of generative AI, enabling the synthesis of individuals in diverse contexts and styles, while retaining high-fidelity to their identities. However, the process of personalization presents inherent challenges in terms of time and memory requirements. Fine-tuning each personalized model needs considerable GPU time investment, and storing a personalized model per subject can be demanding in terms of storage capacity. To overcome these challenges, we propose HyperDreamBooth-a hypernetwork capable of efficiently generating a small set of personalized weights from a single image of a person. By composing these weights into the diffusion model, coupled with fast finetuning, HyperDreamBooth can generate a person's face in various contexts and styles, with high subject details while also preserving the model's crucial knowledge of diverse styles and semantic modifications. Our method achieves personalization on faces in roughly 20 seconds, 25x faster than DreamBooth and 125x faster than Textual Inversion, using as few as one reference image, with the same quality and style diversity as DreamBooth. Also our method yields a model that is 10000x smaller than a normal DreamBooth model. Project page: this https URL

Uncovering mesa-optimization algorithms in Transformers
Johannes von Oswald, Eyvind Niklasson, Maximilian Schlegel, Seijin Kobayashi, Nicolas Zucchet, Nino Scherrer, Nolan Miller, Mark Sandler, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Max Vladymyrov, Razvan Pascanu, João Sacramento
Transformers have become the dominant model in deep learning, but the reason for their superior performance is poorly understood. Here, we hypothesize that the strong performance of Transformers stems from an architectural bias towards mesa-optimization, a learned process running within the forward pass of a model consisting of the following two steps: (i) the construction of an internal learning objective, and (ii) its corresponding solution found through optimization. To test this hypothesis, we reverse-engineer a series of autoregressive Transformers trained on simple sequence modeling tasks, uncovering underlying gradient-based mesa-optimization algorithms driving the generation of predictions. Moreover, we show that the learned forward-pass optimization algorithm can be immediately repurposed to solve supervised few-shot tasks, suggesting that mesa-optimization might underlie the in-context learning capabilities of large language models. Finally, we propose a novel self-attention layer, the mesa-layer, that explicitly and efficiently solves optimization problems specified in context. We find that this layer can lead to improved performance in synthetic and preliminary language modeling experiments, adding weight to our hypothesis that mesa-optimization is an important operation hidden within the weights of trained Transformers.

Think before you speak: Training Language Models With Pause Tokens
Sachin Goyal, Ziwei Ji, Ankit Singh Rawat, Aditya Krishna Menon, Sanjiv Kumar, Vaishnavh Nagarajan
Language models generate responses by producing a series of tokens in immediate succession: the (K+1)th token is an outcome of manipulating K hidden vectors per layer, one vector per preceding token. What if instead we were to let the model manipulate say, K+10 hidden vectors, before it outputs the (K+1)th token? We operationalize this idea by performing training and inference on language models with a (learnable) pause token, a sequence of which is appended to the input prefix. We then delay extracting the model's outputs until the last pause token is seen, thereby allowing the model to process extra computation before committing to an answer. We empirically evaluate pause-training on decoder-only models of 1B and 130M parameters with causal pretraining on C4, and on downstream tasks covering reasoning, question-answering, general understanding and fact recall. Our main finding is that inference-time delays show gains when the model is both pre-trained and finetuned with delays. For the 1B model, we witness gains on 8 of 9 tasks, most prominently, a gain of 18% EM score on the QA task of SQuAD, 8% on CommonSenseQA and 1% accuracy on the reasoning task of GSM8k. Our work raises a range of conceptual and practical future research questions on making delayed next-token prediction a widely applicable new paradigm.

SpecTr: Fast Speculative Decoding via Optimal Transport
Ziteng Sun, Ananda Theertha Suresh, Jae Hun Ro, Ahmad Beirami, Himanshu Jain, Felix Yu
Autoregressive sampling from large language models has led to state-of-the-art results in several natural language tasks. However, autoregressive sampling generates tokens one at a time making it slow, and even prohibitive in certain tasks. One way to speed up sampling is speculative decoding: use a small model to sample a draft (block or sequence of tokens), and then score all tokens in the draft by the large language model in parallel. A subset of the tokens in the draft are accepted (and the rest rejected) based on a statistical method to guarantee that the final output follows the distribution of the large model. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of speculative decoding through the lens of optimal transport (OT) with membership cost. This framework can be viewed as an extension of the well-known maximal-coupling problem. This new formulation enables us to generalize the speculative decoding method to allow for a set of k candidates at the token-level, which leads to an improved optimal membership cost. We show that the optimal draft selection algorithm (transport plan) can be computed via linear programming, whose best-known runtime is exponential in k. We then propose a valid draft selection algorithm whose acceptance probability is (1−1/e)-optimal multiplicatively. Moreover, it can be computed in time almost linear with size of domain of a single token. Using this newdraftselection algorithm, we develop a new autoregressive sampling algorithm called SpecTr, which provides speedup in decoding while ensuring that there is no quality degradation in the decoded output. We experimentally demonstrate that for state-of-the-art large language models, the proposed approach achieves a wall clock speedup of 2.13X, a further 1.37X speedup over speculative decoding on standard benchmarks.

UFOGen: You Forward Once Large Scale Text-to-Image Generation via Diffusion GANs
Yanwu Xu, Yang Zhao, Zhisheng Xiao, Tingbo Hou
Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in transforming textual prompts into coherent images, yet the computational cost of their inference remains a persistent challenge. To address this issue, we present UFOGen, a novel generative model designed for ultra-fast, one-step text-to-image synthesis. In contrast to conventional approaches that focus on improving samplers or employing distillation techniques for diffusion models, UFOGen adopts a hybrid methodology, integrating diffusion models with a GAN objective. Leveraging a newly introduced diffusion-GAN objective and initialization with pre-trained diffusion models, UFOGen excels in efficiently generating high-quality images conditioned on textual descriptions in a single step. Beyond traditional text-to-image generation, UFOGen showcases versatility in applications. Notably, UFOGen stands among the pioneering models enabling one-step text-to-image generation and diverse downstream tasks, presenting a significant advancement in the landscape of efficient generative models.

Automatic Engineering of Long Prompts
Cho-Jui Hsieh, Si Si, Felix X. Yu, Inderjit S. Dhillon
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex open-domain tasks, guided by comprehensive instructions and demonstrations provided in the form of prompts. However, these prompts can be lengthy, often comprising hundreds of lines and thousands of tokens, and their design often requires considerable human effort. Recent research has explored automatic prompt engineering for short prompts, typically consisting of one or a few sentences. However, the automatic design of long prompts remains a challenging problem due to its immense search space. In this paper, we investigate the performance of greedy algorithms and genetic algorithms for automatic long prompt engineering. We demonstrate that a simple greedy approach with beam search outperforms other methods in terms of search efficiency. Moreover, we introduce two novel techniques that utilize search history to enhance the effectiveness of LLM-based mutation in our search algorithm. Our results show that the proposed automatic long prompt engineering algorithm achieves an average of 9.2% accuracy gain on eight tasks in Big Bench Hard, highlighting the significance of automating prompt designs to fully harness the capabilities of LLMs.

Beyond ChatBots: ExploreLLM for Structured Thoughts and Personalized Model Responses
Xiao Ma, Swaroop Mishra, Ariel Liu, Sophie Su, Jilin Chen, Chinmay Kulkarni, Heng-Tze Cheng, Quoc Le, Ed Chi
Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the interaction is textual, users have little scaffolding in the way of structure, informational "scent", or ability to specify high-level preferences or goals. We introduce ExploreLLM that allows users to structure thoughts, help explore different options, navigate through the choices and recommendations, and to more easily steer models to generate more personalized responses. We conduct a user study and show that users find it helpful to use ExploreLLM for exploratory or planning tasks, because it provides a useful schema-like structure to the task, and guides users in planning. The study also suggests that users can more easily personalize responses with high-level preferences with ExploreLLM. Together, ExploreLLM points to a future where users interact with LLMs beyond the form of chatbots, and instead designed to support complex user tasks with a tighter integration between natural language and graphical user interfaces.

Style Aligned Image Generation via Shared Attention
Amir Hertz, Andrey Voynov, Shlomi Fruchter, Daniel Cohen-Or
Large-scale Text-to-Image (T2I) models have rapidly gained prominence across creative fields, generating visually compelling outputs from textual prompts. However, controlling these models to ensure consistent style remains challenging, with existing methods necessitating fine-tuning and manual intervention to disentangle content and style. In this paper, we introduce StyleAligned, a novel technique designed to establish style alignment among a series of generated images. By employing minimal `attention sharing' during the diffusion process, our method maintains style consistency across images within T2I models. This approach allows for the creation of style-consistent images using a reference style through a straightforward inversion operation. Our method's evaluation across diverse styles and text prompts demonstrates high-quality synthesis and fidelity, underscoring its efficacy in achieving consistent style across various inputs.

Stabilizing Transformers for Reinforcement Learning
Emilio Parisotto, H. Francis Song, Jack W. Rae, Razvan Pascanu, Caglar Gulcehre, Siddhant M. Jayakumar, Max Jaderberg, Raphael Lopez Kaufman, Aidan Clark, Seb Noury, Matthew M. Botvinick, Nicolas Heess, Raia Hadsell
Owing to their ability to both effectively integrate information over long time horizons and scale to massive amounts of data, self-attention architectures have recently shown breakthrough success in natural language processing (NLP), achieving state-of-the-art results in domains such as language modeling and machine translation. Harnessing the transformer's ability to process long time horizons of information could provide a similar performance boost in partially observable reinforcement learning (RL) domains, but the large-scale transformers used in NLP have yet to be successfully applied to the RL setting. In this work we demonstrate that the standard transformer architecture is difficult to optimize, which was previously observed in the supervised learning setting but becomes especially pronounced with RL objectives. We propose architectural modifications that substantially improve the stability and learning speed of the original Transformer and XL variant. The proposed architecture, the Gated Transformer-XL (GTrXL), surpasses LSTMs on challenging memory environments and achieves state-of-the-art results on the multi-task DMLab-30 benchmark suite, exceeding the performance of an external memory architecture. We show that the GTrXL, trained using the same losses, has stability and performance that consistently matches or exceeds a competitive LSTM baseline, including on more reactive tasks where memory is less critical. GTrXL offers an easy-to-train, simple-to-implement but substantially more expressive architectural alternative to the standard multi-layer LSTM ubiquitously used for RL agents in partially observable environments.

Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher
Jack W. Rae, Sebastian Borgeaud, Trevor Cai, Katie Millican, Jordan Hoffmann, Francis Song, John Aslanides, Sarah Henderson, Roman Ring, Susannah Young, Eliza Rutherford, Tom Hennigan, Jacob Menick, Albin Cassirer, Richard Powell, George van den Driessche, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Maribeth Rauh, Po-Sen Huang, Amelia Glaese, Johannes Welbl, Sumanth Dathathri, Saffron Huang, Jonathan Uesato, John Mellor, Irina Higgins, Antonia Creswell, Nat McAleese, Amy Wu, Erich Elsen, Siddhant Jayakumar, Elena Buchatskaya, David Budden, Esme Sutherland, Karen Simonyan, Michela Paganini, Laurent Sifre, Lena Martens, Xiang Lorraine Li, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Aida Nematzadeh, Elena Gribovskaya, Domenic Donato, Angeliki Lazaridou, Arthur Mensch, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Maria Tsimpoukelli, Nikolai Grigorev, Doug Fritz, Thibault Sottiaux, Mantas Pajarskas, Toby Pohlen, Zhitao Gong, Daniel Toyama, Cyprien de Masson d'Autume, Yujia Li, Tayfun Terzi, Vladimir Mikulik, Igor Babuschkin, Aidan Clark, Diego de Las Casas, Aurelia Guy, Chris Jones, James Bradbury, Matthew Johnson, Blake Hechtman, Laura Weidinger, Iason Gabriel, William Isaac, Ed Lockhart, Simon Osindero, Laura Rimell, Chris Dyer, Oriol Vinyals, Kareem Ayoub, Jeff Stanway, Lorrayne Bennett, Demis Hassabis, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Geoffrey Irving
Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens
Sebastian Borgeaud, Arthur Mensch, Jordan Hoffmann, Trevor Cai, Eliza Rutherford, Katie Millican, George van den Driessche, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Bogdan Damoc, Aidan Clark, Diego de Las Casas, Aurelia Guy, Jacob Menick, Roman Ring, Tom Hennigan, Saffron Huang, Loren Maggiore, Chris Jones, Albin Cassirer, Andy Brock, Michela Paganini, Geoffrey Irving, Oriol Vinyals, Simon Osindero, Karen Simonyan, Jack W. Rae, Erich Elsen, Laurent Sifre
We enhance auto-regressive language models by conditioning on document chunks retrieved from a large corpus, based on local similarity with preceding tokens. With a 2 trillion token database, our Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) obtains comparable performance to GPT-3 and Jurassic-1 on the Pile, despite using 25× fewer parameters. After fine-tuning, RETRO performance translates to downstream knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering. RETRO combines a frozen Bert retriever, a differentiable encoder and a chunked cross-attention mechanism to predict tokens based on an order of magnitude more data than what is typically consumed during training. We typically train RETRO from scratch, yet can also rapidly RETROfit pre-trained transformers with retrieval and still achieve good performance. Our work opens up new avenues for improving language models through explicit memory at unprecedented scale.

Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode
Yujia Li, David Choi, Junyoung Chung, Nate Kushman, Julian Schrittwieser, Rémi Leblond, Tom Eccles, James Keeling, Felix Gimeno, Agustin Dal Lago, Thomas Hubert, Peter Choy, Cyprien de Masson d'Autume, Igor Babuschkin, Xinyun Chen, Po-Sen Huang, Johannes Welbl, Sven Gowal, Alexey Cherepanov, James Molloy, Daniel J. Mankowitz, Esme Sutherland Robson, Pushmeet Kohli, Nando de Freitas, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Oriol Vinyals
Programming is a powerful and ubiquitous problem-solving tool. Developing systems that can assist programmers or even generate programs independently could make programming more productive and accessible, yet so far incorporating innovations in AI has proven challenging. Recent large-scale language models have demonstrated an impressive ability to generate code, and are now able to complete simple programming tasks. However, these models still perform poorly when evaluated on more complex, unseen problems that require problem-solving skills beyond simply translating instructions into code. For example, competitive programming problems which require an understanding of algorithms and complex natural language remain extremely challenging. To address this gap, we introduce AlphaCode, a system for code generation that can create novel solutions to these problems that require deeper reasoning. In simulated evaluations on recent programming competitions on the Codeforces platform, AlphaCode achieved on average a ranking of top 54.3% in competitions with more than 5,000 participants. We found that three key components were critical to achieve good and reliable performance: (1) an extensive and clean competitive programming dataset for training and evaluation, (2) large and efficient-to-sample transformer-based architectures, and (3) large-scale model sampling to explore the search space, followed by filtering based on program behavior to a small set of submissions.

Unified Scaling Laws for Routed Language Models
Aidan Clark, Diego de las Casas, Aurelia Guy, Arthur Mensch, Michela Paganini, Jordan Hoffmann, Bogdan Damoc, Blake Hechtman, Trevor Cai, Sebastian Borgeaud, George van den Driessche, Eliza Rutherford, Tom Hennigan, Matthew Johnson, Katie Millican, Albin Cassirer, Chris Jones, Elena Buchatskaya, David Budden, Laurent Sifre, Simon Osindero, Oriol Vinyals, Jack Rae, Erich Elsen, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Karen Simonyan
The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their parameters while processing an input. For these models, parameter count and computational requirement form two independent axes along which an increase leads to better performance. In this work we derive and justify scaling laws defined on these two variables which generalize those known for standard language models and describe the performance of a wide range of routing architectures trained via three different techniques. Afterwards we provide two applications of these laws: first deriving an Effective Parameter Count along which all models scale at the same rate, and then using the scaling coefficients to give a quantitative comparison of the three routing techniques considered. Our analysis derives from an extensive evaluation of Routing Networks across five orders of magnitude of size, including models with hundreds of experts and hundreds of billions of parameters.

Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models
Jordan Hoffmann, Sebastian Borgeaud, Arthur Mensch, Elena Buchatskaya, Trevor Cai, Eliza Rutherford, Diego de Las Casas, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Johannes Welbl, Aidan Clark, Tom Hennigan, Eric Noland, Katie Millican, George van den Driessche, Bogdan Damoc, Aurelia Guy, Simon Osindero, Karen Simonyan, Erich Elsen, Jack W. Rae, Oriol Vinyals, Laurent Sifre
We investigate the optimal model size and number of tokens for training a transformer language model under a given compute budget. We find that current large language models are significantly undertrained, a consequence of the recent focus on scaling language models whilst keeping the amount of training data constant. By training over 400 language models ranging from 70 million to over 16 billion parameters on 5 to 500 billion tokens, we find that for compute-optimal training, the model size and the number of training tokens should be scaled equally: for every doubling of model size the number of training tokens should also be doubled. We test this hypothesis by training a predicted compute-optimal model, Chinchilla, that uses the same compute budget as Gopher but with 70B parameters and 4× more more data. Chinchilla uniformly and significantly outperforms Gopher (280B), GPT-3 (175B), Jurassic-1 (178B), and Megatron-Turing NLG (530B) on a large range of downstream evaluation tasks. This also means that Chinchilla uses substantially less compute for fine-tuning and inference, greatly facilitating downstream usage. As a highlight, Chinchilla reaches a state-of-the-art average accuracy of 67.5% on the MMLU benchmark, greater than a 7% improvement over Gopher.

Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning
Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Jeff Donahue, Pauline Luc, Antoine Miech, Iain Barr, Yana Hasson, Karel Lenc, Arthur Mensch, Katie Millican, Malcolm Reynolds, Roman Ring, Eliza Rutherford, Serkan Cabi, Tengda Han, Zhitao Gong, Sina Samangooei, Marianne Monteiro, Jacob Menick, Sebastian Borgeaud, Andrew Brock, Aida Nematzadeh, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Mikolaj Binkowski, Ricardo Barreira, Oriol Vinyals, Andrew Zisserman, Karen Simonyan
Building models that can be rapidly adapted to novel tasks using only a handful of annotated examples is an open challenge for multimodal machine learning research. We introduce Flamingo, a family of Visual Language Models (VLM) with this ability. We propose key architectural innovations to: (i) bridge powerful pretrained vision-only and language-only models, (ii) handle sequences of arbitrarily interleaved visual and textual data, and (iii) seamlessly ingest images or videos as inputs. Thanks to their flexibility, Flamingo models can be trained on large-scale multimodal web corpora containing arbitrarily interleaved text and images, which is key to endow them with in-context few-shot learning capabilities. We perform a thorough evaluation of our models, exploring and measuring their ability to rapidly adapt to a variety of image and video tasks. These include open-ended tasks such as visual question-answering, where the model is prompted with a question which it has to answer; captioning tasks, which evaluate the ability to describe a scene or an event; and close-ended tasks such as multiple-choice visual question-answering. For tasks lying anywhere on this spectrum, a single Flamingo model can achieve a new state of the art with few-shot learning, simply by prompting the model with task-specific examples. On numerous benchmarks, Flamingo outperforms models fine-tuned on thousands of times more task-specific data.

A Generalist Agent
Scott Reed, Konrad Zolna, Emilio Parisotto, Sergio Gomez Colmenarejo, Alexander Novikov, Gabriel Barth-Maron, Mai Gimenez, Yury Sulsky, Jackie Kay, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Tom Eccles, Jake Bruce, Ali Razavi, Ashley Edwards, Nicolas Heess, Yutian Chen, Raia Hadsell, Oriol Vinyals, Mahyar Bordbar, Nando de Freitas
Inspired by progress in large-scale language modeling, we apply a similar approach towards building a single generalist agent beyond the realm of text outputs. The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens. In this report we describe the model and the data, and document the current capabilities of Gato.

Formal Algorithms for Transformers
Mary Phuong, Marcus Hutter
This document aims to be a self-contained, mathematically precise overview of transformer architectures and algorithms (*not* results). It covers what transformers are, how they are trained, what they are used for, their key architectural components, and a preview of the most prominent models. The reader is assumed to be familiar with basic ML terminology and simpler neural network architectures such as MLPs.

Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
Charlie Chen, Sebastian Borgeaud, Geoffrey Irving, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Laurent Sifre, John Jumper
We present speculative sampling, an algorithm for accelerating transformer decoding by enabling the generation of multiple tokens from each transformer call. Our algorithm relies on the observation that the latency of parallel scoring of short continuations, generated by a faster but less powerful draft model, is comparable to that of sampling a single token from the larger target model. This is combined with a novel modified rejection sampling scheme which preserves the distribution of the target model within hardware numerics. We benchmark speculative sampling with Chinchilla, a 70 billion parameter language model, achieving a 2-2.5x decoding speedup in a distributed setup, without compromising the sample quality or making modifications to the model itself.

Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models
Shunyu Yao, Dian Yu, Jeffrey Zhao, Izhak Shafran, Thomas L. Griffiths, Yuan Cao, Karthik Narasimhan
Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions play a pivotal role. To surmount these challenges, we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving. ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices. Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models' problem-solving abilities on three novel tasks requiring non-trivial planning or search: Game of 24, Creative Writing, and Mini Crosswords. For instance, in Game of 24, while GPT-4 with chain-of-thought prompting only solved 4% of tasks, our method achieved a success rate of 74%. Code repo with all prompts: this https URL.

Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi, Jonathan Pilault, Orhan Firat, Christopher Pal, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Ross Goroshin
State space models (SSMs) have shown impressive results on tasks that require modeling long-range dependencies and efficiently scale to long sequences owing to their subquadratic runtime complexity. Originally designed for continuous signals, SSMs have shown superior performance on a plethora of tasks, in vision and audio; however, SSMs still lag Transformer performance in Language Modeling tasks. In this work, we propose a hybrid layer named Block-State Transformer (BST), that internally combines an SSM sublayer for long-range contextualization, and a Block Transformer sublayer for short-term representation of sequences. We study three different, and completely parallelizable, variants that integrate SSMs and block-wise attention. We show that our model outperforms similar Transformer-based architectures on language modeling perplexity and generalizes to longer sequences. In addition, the Block-State Transformer demonstrates more than tenfold increase in speed at the layer level compared to the Block-Recurrent Transformer when model parallelization is employed.

Randomized Positional Encodings Boost Length Generalization of Transformers
Anian Ruoss, Grégoire Delétang, Tim Genewein, Jordi Grau-Moya, Róbert Csordás, Mehdi Bennani, Shane Legg, Joel Veness
Transformers have impressive generalization capabilities on tasks with a fixed context length. However, they fail to generalize to sequences of arbitrary length, even for seemingly simple tasks such as duplicating a string. Moreover, simply training on longer sequences is inefficient due to the quadratic computation complexity of the global attention mechanism. In this work, we demonstrate that this failure mode is linked to positional encodings being out-of-distribution for longer sequences (even for relative encodings) and introduce a novel family of positional encodings that can overcome this problem. Concretely, our randomized positional encoding scheme simulates the positions of longer sequences and randomly selects an ordered subset to fit the sequence's length. Our large-scale empirical evaluation of 6000 models across 15 algorithmic reasoning tasks shows that our method allows Transformers to generalize to sequences of unseen length (increasing test accuracy by 12.0% on average).

From Sparse to Soft Mixtures of Experts
Joan Puigcerver, Carlos Riquelme, Basil Mustafa, Neil Houlsby
Sparse mixture of expert architectures (MoEs) scale model capacity without large increases in training or inference costs. Despite their success, MoEs suffer from a number of issues: training instability, token dropping, inability to scale the number of experts, or ineffective finetuning. In this work, we proposeSoft MoE, a fully-differentiable sparse Transformer that addresses these challenges, while maintaining the benefits of MoEs. Soft MoE performs an implicit soft assignment by passing different weighted combinations of all input tokens to each expert. As in other MoE works, experts in Soft MoE only process a subset of the (combined) tokens, enabling larger model capacity at lower inference cost. In the context of visual recognition, Soft MoE greatly outperforms standard Transformers (ViTs) and popular MoE variants (Tokens Choice and Experts Choice). For example, Soft MoE-Base/16 requires 10.5x lower inference cost (5.7x lower wall-clock time) than ViT-Huge/14 while matching its performance after similar training. Soft MoE also scales well: Soft MoE Huge/14 with 128 experts in 16 MoE layers has over 40x more parameters than ViT Huge/14, while inference time cost grows by only 2%, and it performs substantially better.

Large Language Models as Optimizers
Chengrun Yang, Xuezhi Wang, Yifeng Lu, Hanxiao Liu, Quoc V. Le, Denny Zhou, Xinyun Chen
Optimization is ubiquitous. While derivative-based algorithms have been powerful tools for various problems, the absence of gradient imposes challenges on many real-world applications. In this work, we propose Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO), a simple and effective approach to leverage large language models (LLMs) as optimizers, where the optimization task is described in natural language. In each optimization step, the LLM generates new solutions from the prompt that contains previously generated solutions with their values, then the new solutions are evaluated and added to the prompt for the next optimization step. We first showcase OPRO on linear regression and traveling salesman problems, then move on to prompt optimization where the goal is to find instructions that maximize the task accuracy. With a variety of LLMs, we demonstrate that the best prompts optimized by OPRO outperform human-designed prompts by up to 8% on GSM8K, and by up to 50% on Big-Bench Hard tasks. Code at this https URL.

MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset
Sneha Kudugunta, Isaac Caswell, Biao Zhang, Xavier Garcia, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Katherine Lee, Derrick Xin, Aditya Kusupati, Romi Stella, Ankur Bapna, Orhan Firat
We introduce MADLAD-400, a manually audited, general domain 3T token monolingual dataset based on CommonCrawl, spanning 419 languages. We discuss the limitations revealed by self-auditing MADLAD-400, and the role data auditing had in the dataset creation process. We then train and release a 10.7B-parameter multilingual machine translation model on 250 billion tokens covering over 450 languages using publicly available data, and find that it is competitive with models that are significantly larger, and report the results on different domains. In addition, we train a 8B-parameter language model, and assess the results on few-shot translation. We make the baseline models available to the research community.

Scaling Laws for Sparsely-Connected Foundation Models
Elias Frantar, Carlos Riquelme, Neil Houlsby, Dan Alistarh, Utku Evci
We explore the impact of parameter sparsity on the scaling behavior of Transformers trained on massive datasets (i.e., "foundation models"), in both vision and language domains. In this setting, we identify the first scaling law describing the relationship between weight sparsity, number of non-zero parameters, and amount of training data, which we validate empirically across model and data scales; on ViT/JFT-4B and T5/C4. These results allow us to characterize the "optimal sparsity", the sparsity level which yields the best performance for a given effective model size and training budget. For a fixed number of non-zero parameters, we identify that the optimal sparsity increases with the amount of data used for training. We also extend our study to different sparsity structures (such as the hardware-friendly n:m pattern) and strategies (such as starting from a pretrained dense model). Our findings shed light on the power and limitations of weight sparsity across various parameter and computational settings, offering both theoretical understanding and practical implications for leveraging sparsity towards computational efficiency improvements.

Language Modeling Is Compression
Grégoire Delétang, Anian Ruoss, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Elliot Catt, Tim Genewein, Christopher Mattern, Jordi Grau-Moya, Li Kevin Wenliang, Matthew Aitchison, Laurent Orseau, Marcus Hutter, Joel Veness
It has long been established that predictive models can be transformed into lossless compressors and vice versa. Incidentally, in recent years, the machine learning community has focused on training increasingly large and powerful self-supervised (language) models. Since these large language models exhibit impressive predictive capabilities, they are well-positioned to be strong compressors. In this work, we advocate for viewing the prediction problem through the lens of compression and evaluate the compression capabilities of large (foundation) models. We show that large language models are powerful general-purpose predictors and that the compression viewpoint provides novel insights into scaling laws, tokenization, and in-context learning. For example, Chinchilla 70B, while trained primarily on text, compresses ImageNet patches to 43.4% and LibriSpeech samples to 16.4% of their raw size, beating domain-specific compressors like PNG (58.5%) or FLAC (30.3%), respectively. Finally, we show that the prediction-compression equivalence allows us to use any compressor (like gzip) to build a conditional generative model.

Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution
Chrisantha Fernando, Dylan Banarse, Henryk Michalewski, Simon Osindero, Tim Rocktäschel
Popular prompt strategies like Chain-of-Thought Prompting can dramatically improve the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various domains. However, such hand-crafted prompt-strategies are often sub-optimal. In this paper, we present Promptbreeder, a general-purpose self-referential self-improvement mechanism that evolves and adapts prompts for a given domain. Driven by an LLM, Promptbreeder mutates a population of task-prompts, and subsequently evaluates them for fitness on a training set. Crucially, the mutation of these task-prompts is governed by mutation-prompts that the LLM generates and improves throughout evolution in a self-referential way. That is, Promptbreeder is not just improving task-prompts, but it is also improving the mutationprompts that improve these task-prompts. Promptbreeder outperforms state-of-the-art prompt strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve Prompting on commonly used arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, Promptbreeder is able to evolve intricate task-prompts for the challenging problem of hate speech classification.

Large Language Models as Analogical Reasoners
Michihiro Yasunaga, Xinyun Chen, Yujia Li, Panupong Pasupat, Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang, Ed H. Chi, Denny Zhou
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting for language models demonstrates impressive performance across reasoning tasks, but typically needs labeled exemplars of the reasoning process. In this work, we introduce a new prompting approach, Analogical Prompting, designed to automatically guide the reasoning process of large language models. Inspired by analogical reasoning, a cognitive process in which humans draw from relevant past experiences to tackle new problems, our approach prompts language models to self-generate relevant exemplars or knowledge in the context, before proceeding to solve the given problem. This method presents several advantages: it obviates the need for labeling or retrieving exemplars, offering generality and convenience; it can also tailor the generated exemplars and knowledge to each problem, offering adaptability. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms 0-shot CoT and manual few-shot CoT in a variety of reasoning tasks, including math problem solving in GSM8K and MATH, code generation in Codeforces, and other reasoning tasks in BIG-Bench.

Controlled Decoding from Language Models
Sidharth Mudgal, Jong Lee, Harish Ganapathy, YaGuang Li, Tao Wang, Yanping Huang, Zhifeng Chen, Heng-Tze Cheng, Michael Collins, Trevor Strohman, Jilin Chen, Alex Beutel, Ahmad Beirami
We propose controlled decoding (CD), a novel off-policy reinforcement learning method to control the autoregressive generation from language models towards high reward outcomes. CD solves an off-policy reinforcement learning problem through a value function for the reward, which we call a prefix scorer. The prefix scorer is used at inference time to steer the generation towards higher reward outcomes. We show that the prefix scorer may be trained on (possibly) off-policy data to predict the expected reward when decoding is continued from a partially decoded response. We empirically demonstrate that CD is effective as a control mechanism on Reddit conversations corpus. We also show that the modularity of the design of CD makes it possible to control for multiple rewards, effectively solving a multi-objective reinforcement learning problem with no additional complexity. Finally, we show that CD can be applied in a novel blockwise fashion at inference-time, again without the need for any training-time changes, essentially bridging the gap between the popular best-of-K strategy and token-level reinforcement learning. This makes CD a promising approach for alignment of language models.

A General Theoretical Paradigm to Understand Learning from Human Preferences
Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar, Mark Rowland, Bilal Piot, Daniel Guo, Daniele Calandriello, Michal Valko, Rémi Munos
The prevalent deployment of learning from human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) relies on two important approximations: the first assumes that pairwise preferences can be substituted with pointwise rewards. The second assumes that a reward model trained on these pointwise rewards can generalize from collected data to out-of-distribution data sampled by the policy. Recently, Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) has been proposed as an approach that bypasses the second approximation and learn directly a policy from collected data without the reward modelling stage. However, this method still heavily relies on the first approximation.
In this paper we try to gain a deeper theoretical understanding of these practical algorithms. In particular we derive a new general objective called ΨPO for learning from human preferences that is expressed in terms of pairwise preferences and therefore bypasses both approximations. This new general objective allows us to perform an in-depth analysis of the behavior of RLHF and DPO (as special cases of ΨPO) and to identify their potential pitfalls. We then consider another special case for ΨPO by setting Ψ simply to Identity, for which we can derive an efficient optimisation procedure, prove performance guarantees and demonstrate its empirical superiority to DPO on some illustrative examples.

Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable
Multimodal Models
Gemini Team, Google1
This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks — notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

AlphaCode 2 Technical Report
AlphaCode Team, Google DeepMind
AlphaCode (Li et al., 2022) was the first AI system to perform at the level of the median competitor in competitive programming, a difficult reasoning task involving advanced maths, logic and computer science. This paper introduces AlphaCode 2, a new and enhanced system with massively improved performance, powered by Gemini (Gemini Team, Google, 2023). AlphaCode 2 relies on the combination of powerful language models and a bespoke search and reranking mechanism. When evaluated on the same platform as the original AlphaCode, we found that AlphaCode 2 solved 1.7× more problems, and performed better than 85% of competition participants.

Chain of Code: Reasoning with a Language Model-Augmented Code Emulator
Chengshu Li, Jacky Liang, Andy Zeng, Xinyun Chen, Karol Hausman, Dorsa Sadigh, Sergey Levine, Li Fei-Fei, Fei Xia, Brian Ichter
Code provides a general syntactic structure to build complex programs and perform precise computations when paired with a code interpreter - we hypothesize that language models (LMs) can leverage code-writing to improve Chain of Thought reasoning not only for logic and arithmetic tasks, but also for semantic ones (and in particular, those that are a mix of both). For example, consider prompting an LM to write code that counts the number of times it detects sarcasm in an essay: the LM may struggle to write an implementation for "detect_sarcasm(string)" that can be executed by the interpreter (handling the edge cases would be insurmountable). However, LMs may still produce a valid solution if they not only write code, but also selectively "emulate" the interpreter by generating the expected output of "detect_sarcasm(string)" and other lines of code that cannot be executed. In this work, we propose Chain of Code (CoC), a simple yet surprisingly effective extension that improves LM code-driven reasoning. The key idea is to encourage LMs to format semantic sub-tasks in a program as flexible pseudocode that the interpreter can explicitly catch undefined behaviors and hand off to simulate with an LM (as an "LMulator"). Experiments demonstrate that Chain of Code outperforms Chain of Thought and other baselines across a variety of benchmarks; on BIG-Bench Hard, Chain of Code achieves 84%, a gain of 12% over Chain of Thought. CoC scales well with large and small models alike, and broadens the scope of reasoning questions that LMs can correctly answer by "thinking in code". Project webpage: this https URL.

Beyond Human Data: Scaling Self-Training for Problem-Solving with Language Models
Avi Singh, John D. Co-Reyes, Rishabh Agarwal, Ankesh Anand, Piyush Patil, Xavier Garcia, Peter J. Liu, James Harrison, Jaehoon Lee, Kelvin Xu, Aaron Parisi, Abhishek Kumar, Alex Alemi, Alex Rizkowsky, Azade Nova, Ben Adlam, Bernd Bohnet, Gamaleldin Elsayed, Hanie Sedghi, Igor Mordatch, Isabelle Simpson, Izzeddin Gur, Jasper Snoek, Jeffrey Pennington, Jiri Hron, Kathleen Kenealy, Kevin Swersky, Kshiteej Mahajan, Laura Culp, Lechao Xiao, Maxwell L. Bileschi, Noah Constant, Roman Novak, Rosanne Liu, Tris Warkentin, Yundi Qian, Yamini Bansal, Ethan Dyer, Behnam Neyshabur, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Noah Fiedel
Fine-tuning language models~(LMs) on human-generated data remains a prevalent practice. However, the performance of such models is often limited by the quantity and diversity of high-quality human data. In this paper, we explore whether we can go beyond human data on tasks where we have access to scalar feedback, for example, on math problems where one can verify correctness. To do so, we investigate a simple self-training method based on expectation-maximization, which we call ReSTEM, where we (1) generate samples from the model and filter them using binary feedback, (2) fine-tune the model on these samples, and (3) repeat this process a few times. Testing on advanced MATH reasoning and APPS coding benchmarks using PaLM-2 models, we find that ReSTEM scales favorably with model size and significantly surpasses fine-tuning only on human data. Overall, our findings suggest self-training with feedback can substantially reduce dependence on human-generated data.

Bad Students Make Great Teachers: Active Learning Accelerates Large-Scale Visual Understanding
Talfan Evans, Shreya Pathak, Hamza Merzic, Jonathan Schwarz, Ryutaro Tanno, Olivier J. Henaff
We propose a method for accelerating large-scale pre-training with online data selection policies. For the first time, we demonstrate that model-based data selection can reduce the total computation needed to reach the performance of models trained with uniform sampling. The key insight which enables this "compute-positive" regime is that small models provide good proxies for the loss of much larger models, such that computation spent on scoring data can be drastically scaled down but still significantly accelerate training of the learner.. These data selection policies also strongly generalize across datasets and tasks, opening an avenue for further amortizing the overhead of data scoring by re-using off-the-shelf models and training sequences. Our methods, ClassAct and ActiveCLIP, require 46% and 51% fewer training updates and up to 25% less total computation when training visual classifiers on JFT and multimodal models on ALIGN, respectively. Finally, our paradigm seamlessly applies to the curation of large-scale image-text datasets, yielding a new state-of-the-art in several multimodal transfer tasks and pre-training regimes.

fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling
Myle Ott, Sergey Edunov, Alexei Baevski, Angela Fan, Sam Gross, Nathan Ng, David Grangier, Michael Auli
fairseq is an open-source sequence modeling toolkit that allows researchers and developers to train custom models for translation, summarization, language modeling, and other text generation tasks. The toolkit is based on PyTorch and supports distributed training across multiple GPUs and machines. We also support fast mixed-precision training and inference on modern GPUs. A demo video can be found at this https URL

Augmenting Self-attention with Persistent Memory
Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Edouard Grave, Guillaume Lample, Herve Jegou, Armand Joulin
Transformer networks have lead to important progress in language modeling and machine translation. These models include two consecutive modules, a feed-forward layer and a self-attention layer. The latter allows the network to capture long term dependencies and are often regarded as the key ingredient in the success of Transformers. Building upon this intuition, we propose a new model that solely consists of attention layers. More precisely, we augment the self-attention layers with persistent memory vectors that play a similar role as the feed-forward layer. Thanks to these vectors, we can remove the feed-forward layer without degrading the performance of a transformer. Our evaluation shows the benefits brought by our model on standard character and word level language modeling benchmarks.

Improving Transformer Models by Reordering their Sublayers
Ofir Press, Noah A. Smith, Omer Levy
Multilayer transformer networks consist of interleaved self-attention and feedforward sublayers. Could ordering the sublayers in a different pattern lead to better performance? We generate randomly ordered transformers and train them with the language modeling objective. We observe that some of these models are able to achieve better performance than the interleaved baseline, and that those successful variants tend to have more self-attention at the bottom and more feedforward sublayers at the top. We propose a new transformer pattern that adheres to this property, the sandwich transformer, and show that it improves perplexity on multiple word-level and character-level language modeling benchmarks, at no cost in parameters, memory, or training time. However, the sandwich reordering pattern does not guarantee performance gains across every task, as we demonstrate on machine translation models. Instead, we suggest that further exploration of task-specific sublayer reorderings is needed in order to unlock additional gains.

Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation
Ofir Press, Noah A. Smith, Mike Lewis
Since the introduction of the transformer model by Vaswani et al. (2017), a fundamental question has yet to be answered: how does a model achieve extrapolation at inference time for sequences that are longer than it saw during training? We first show that extrapolation can be enabled by simply changing the position representation method, though we find that current methods do not allow for efficient extrapolation. We therefore introduce a simpler and more efficient position method, Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi). ALiBi does not add positional embeddings to word embeddings; instead, it biases query-key attention scores with a penalty that is proportional to their distance. We show that this method trains a 1.3 billion parameter model on input sequences of length 1024 that extrapolates to input sequences of length 2048, achieving the same perplexity as a sinusoidal position embedding model trained on inputs of length 2048 but training 11% faster and using 11% less memory. ALiBi's inductive bias towards recency also leads it to outperform multiple strong position methods on the WikiText-103 benchmark.

OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models
Susan Zhang, Stephen Roller, Naman Goyal, Mikel Artetxe, Moya Chen, Shuohui Chen, Christopher Dewan, Mona Diab, Xian Li, Xi Victoria Lin, Todor Mihaylov, Myle Ott, Sam Shleifer, Kurt Shuster, Daniel Simig, Punit Singh Koura, Anjali Sridhar, Tianlu Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer
Large language models, which are often trained for hundreds of thousands of compute days, have shown remarkable capabilities for zero- and few-shot learning. Given their computational cost, these models are difficult to replicate without significant capital. For the few that are available through APIs, no access is granted to the full model weights, making them difficult to study. We present Open Pre-trained Transformers (OPT), a suite of decoder-only pre-trained transformers ranging from 125M to 175B parameters, which we aim to fully and responsibly share with interested researchers. We show that OPT-175B is comparable to GPT-3, while requiring only 1/7th the carbon footprint to develop. We are also releasing our logbook detailing the infrastructure challenges we faced, along with code for experimenting with all of the released models.

Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning
Ben Sorscher, Robert Geirhos, Shashank Shekhar, Surya Ganguli, Ari S. Morcos
Widely observed neural scaling laws, in which error falls off as a power of the training set size, model size, or both, have driven substantial performance improvements in deep learning. However, these improvements through scaling alone require considerable costs in compute and energy. Here we focus on the scaling of error with dataset size and show how in theory we can break beyond power law scaling and potentially even reduce it to exponential scaling instead if we have access to a high-quality data pruning metric that ranks the order in which training examples should be discarded to achieve any pruned dataset size. We then test this improved scaling prediction with pruned dataset size empirically, and indeed observe better than power law scaling in practice on ResNets trained on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet. Next, given the importance of finding high-quality pruning metrics, we perform the first large-scale benchmarking study of ten different data pruning metrics on ImageNet. We find most existing high performing metrics scale poorly to ImageNet, while the best are computationally intensive and require labels for every image. We therefore developed a new simple, cheap and scalable self-supervised pruning metric that demonstrates comparable performance to the best supervised metrics. Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of good data-pruning metrics may provide a viable path forward to substantially improved neural scaling laws, thereby reducing the resource costs of modern deep learning.

Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science
Ross Taylor, Marcin Kardas, Guillem Cucurull, Thomas Scialom, Anthony Hartshorn, Elvis Saravia, Andrew Poulton, Viktor Kerkez, Robert Stojnic
Information overload is a major obstacle to scientific progress. The explosive growth in scientific literature and data has made it ever harder to discover useful insights in a large mass of information. Today scientific knowledge is accessed through search engines, but they are unable to organize scientific knowledge alone. In this paper we introduce Galactica: a large language model that can store, combine and reason about scientific knowledge. We train on a large scientific corpus of papers, reference material, knowledge bases and many other sources. We outperform existing models on a range of scientific tasks. On technical knowledge probes such as LaTeX equations, Galactica outperforms the latest GPT-3 by 68.2% versus 49.0%. Galactica also performs well on reasoning, outperforming Chinchilla on mathematical MMLU by 41.3% to 35.7%, and PaLM 540B on MATH with a score of 20.4% versus 8.8%. It also sets a new state-of-the-art on downstream tasks such as PubMedQA and MedMCQA dev of 77.6% and 52.9%. And despite not being trained on a general corpus, Galactica outperforms BLOOM and OPT-175B on BIG-bench. We believe these results demonstrate the potential for language models as a new interface for science. We open source the model for the benefit of the scientific community.

Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture
Mahmoud Assran, Quentin Duval, Ishan Misra, Piotr Bojanowski, Pascal Vincent, Michael Rabbat, Yann LeCun, Nicolas Ballas
This paper demonstrates an approach for learning highly semantic image representations without relying on hand-crafted data-augmentations. We introduce the Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (I-JEPA), a non-generative approach for self-supervised learning from images. The idea behind I-JEPA is simple: from a single context block, predict the representations of various target blocks in the same image. A core design choice to guide I-JEPA towards producing semantic representations is the masking strategy; specifically, it is crucial to (a) sample target blocks with sufficiently large scale (semantic), and to (b) use a sufficiently informative (spatially distributed) context block. Empirically, when combined with Vision Transformers, we find I-JEPA to be highly scalable. For instance, we train a ViT-Huge/14 on ImageNet using 16 A100 GPUs in under 72 hours to achieve strong downstream performance across a wide range of tasks, from linear classification to object counting and depth prediction.

LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models
Hugo Touvron, Thibaut Lavril, Gautier Izacard, Xavier Martinet, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Timothée Lacroix, Baptiste Rozière, Naman Goyal, Eric Hambro, Faisal Azhar, Aurelien Rodriguez, Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, Guillaume Lample
We introduce LLaMA, a collection of foundation language models ranging from 7B to 65B parameters. We train our models on trillions of tokens, and show that it is possible to train state-of-the-art models using publicly available datasets exclusively, without resorting to proprietary and inaccessible datasets. In particular, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 (175B) on most benchmarks, and LLaMA-65B is competitive with the best models, Chinchilla-70B and PaLM-540B. We release all our models to the research community.

Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools
Timo Schick, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Roberto Dessì, Roberta Raileanu, Maria Lomeli, Luke Zettlemoyer, Nicola Cancedda, Thomas Scialom
Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale. They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller models excel. In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to use external tools via simple APIs and achieve the best of both worlds. We introduce Toolformer, a model trained to decide which APIs to call, when to call them, what arguments to pass, and how to best incorporate the results into future token prediction. This is done in a self-supervised way, requiring nothing more than a handful of demonstrations for each API. We incorporate a range of tools, including a calculator, a Q\&A system, two different search engines, a translation system, and a calendar. Toolformer achieves substantially improved zero-shot performance across a variety of downstream tasks, often competitive with much larger models, without sacrificing its core language modeling abilities.

Scaling Expert Language Models with Unsupervised Domain Discovery
Suchin Gururangan, Margaret Li, Mike Lewis, Weijia Shi, Tim Althoff, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer
Large language models are typically trained densely: all parameters are updated with respect to all inputs. This requires synchronization of billions of parameters across thousands of GPUs. We introduce a simple but effective method to asynchronously train large, sparse language models on arbitrary text corpora. Our method clusters a corpus into sets of related documents, trains a separate expert language model on each cluster, and combines them in a sparse ensemble for inference. This approach generalizes embarrassingly parallel training by automatically discovering the domains for each expert, and eliminates nearly all the communication overhead of existing sparse language models. Our technique outperforms dense baselines on multiple corpora and few-shot tasks, and our analysis shows that specializing experts to meaningful clusters is key to these gains. Performance also improves with the number of experts and size of training data, suggesting this is a highly efficient and accessible approach to training large language models.

SemDeDup: Data-efficient learning at web-scale through semantic deduplication
Amro Abbas, Kushal Tirumala, Dániel Simig, Surya Ganguli, Ari S. Morcos
Progress in machine learning has been driven in large part by massive increases in data. However, large web-scale datasets such as LAION are largely uncurated beyond searches for exact duplicates, potentially leaving much redundancy. Here, we introduce SemDeDup, a method which leverages embeddings from pre-trained models to identify and remove semantic duplicates: data pairs which are semantically similar, but not exactly identical. Removing semantic duplicates preserves performance and speeds up learning. Analyzing a subset of LAION, we show that SemDeDup can remove 50% of the data with minimal performance loss, effectively halving training time. Moreover, performance increases out of distribution. Also, analyzing language models trained on C4, a partially curated dataset, we show that SemDeDup improves over prior approaches while providing efficiency gains. SemDeDup provides an example of how simple ways of leveraging quality embeddings can be used to make models learn faster with less data.

Segment Anything
Alexander Kirillov, Eric Mintun, Nikhila Ravi, Hanzi Mao, Chloe Rolland, Laura Gustafson, Tete Xiao, Spencer Whitehead, Alexander C. Berg, Wan-Yen Lo, Piotr Dollár, Ross Girshick
We introduce the Segment Anything (SA) project: a new task, model, and dataset for image segmentation. Using our efficient model in a data collection loop, we built the largest segmentation dataset to date (by far), with over 1 billion masks on 11M licensed and privacy respecting images. The model is designed and trained to be promptable, so it can transfer zero-shot to new image distributions and tasks. We evaluate its capabilities on numerous tasks and find that its zero-shot performance is impressive -- often competitive with or even superior to prior fully supervised results. We are releasing the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and corresponding dataset (SA-1B) of 1B masks and 11M images at this https URL to foster research into foundation models for computer vision.

A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning
Randall Balestriero, Mark Ibrahim, Vlad Sobal, Ari Morcos, Shashank Shekhar, Tom Goldstein, Florian Bordes, Adrien Bardes, Gregoire Mialon, Yuandong Tian, Avi Schwarzschild, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Jonas Geiping, Quentin Garrido, Pierre Fernandez, Amir Bar, Hamed Pirsiavash, Yann LeCun, Micah Goldblum
Self-supervised learning, dubbed the dark matter of intelligence, is a promising path to advance machine learning. Yet, much like cooking, training SSL methods is a delicate art with a high barrier to entry. While many components are familiar, successfully training a SSL method involves a dizzying set of choices from the pretext tasks to training hyper-parameters. Our goal is to lower the barrier to entry into SSL research by laying the foundations and latest SSL recipes in the style of a cookbook. We hope to empower the curious researcher to navigate the terrain of methods, understand the role of the various knobs, and gain the know-how required to explore how delicious SSL can be.

Learning to Reason and Memorize with Self-Notes
Jack Lanchantin, Shubham Toshniwal, Jason Weston, Arthur Szlam, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Large language models have been shown to struggle with multi-step reasoning, and do not retain previous reasoning steps for future use. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes. Unlike recent chain-of-thought or scratchpad approaches, the model can deviate from the input context at any time to explicitly think and write down its thoughts. This allows the model to perform reasoning on the fly as it reads the context and even integrate previous reasoning steps, thus enhancing its memory with useful information and enabling multi-step reasoning. Experiments across a wide variety of tasks demonstrate that our method can outperform chain-of-thought and scratchpad methods by taking Self-Notes that interleave the input text.

ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All
Rohit Girdhar, Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Zhuang Liu, Mannat Singh, Kalyan Vasudev Alwala, Armand Joulin, Ishan Misra
We present ImageBind, an approach to learn a joint embedding across six different modalities - images, text, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU data. We show that all combinations of paired data are not necessary to train such a joint embedding, and only image-paired data is sufficient to bind the modalities together. ImageBind can leverage recent large scale vision-language models, and extends their zero-shot capabilities to new modalities just by using their natural pairing with images. It enables novel emergent applications 'out-of-the-box' including cross-modal retrieval, composing modalities with arithmetic, cross-modal detection and generation. The emergent capabilities improve with the strength of the image encoder and we set a new state-of-the-art on emergent zero-shot recognition tasks across modalities, outperforming specialist supervised models. Finally, we show strong few-shot recognition results outperforming prior work, and that ImageBind serves as a new way to evaluate vision models for visual and non-visual tasks.

MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers
Lili Yu, Dániel Simig, Colin Flaherty, Armen Aghajanyan, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis
Autoregressive transformers are spectacular models for short sequences but scale poorly to long sequences such as high-resolution images, podcasts, code, or books. We proposed Megabyte, a multi-scale decoder architecture that enables end-to-end differentiable modeling of sequences of over one million bytes. Megabyte segments sequences into patches and uses a local submodel within patches and a global model between patches. This enables sub-quadratic self-attention, much larger feedforward layers for the same compute, and improved parallelism during decoding -- unlocking better performance at reduced cost for both training and generation. Extensive experiments show that Megabyte allows byte-level models to perform competitively with subword models on long context language modeling, achieve state-of-the-art density estimation on ImageNet, and model audio from raw files. Together, these results establish the viability of tokenization-free autoregressive sequence modeling at scale.

LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment
Chunting Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Puxin Xu, Srini Iyer, Jiao Sun, Yuning Mao, Xuezhe Ma, Avia Efrat, Ping Yu, Lili Yu, Susan Zhang, Gargi Ghosh, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Omer Levy
Large language models are trained in two stages: (1) unsupervised pretraining from raw text, to learn general-purpose representations, and (2) large scale instruction tuning and reinforcement learning, to better align to end tasks and user preferences. We measure the relative importance of these two stages by training LIMA, a 65B parameter LLaMa language model fine-tuned with the standard supervised loss on only 1,000 carefully curated prompts and responses, without any reinforcement learning or human preference modeling. LIMA demonstrates remarkably strong performance, learning to follow specific response formats from only a handful of examples in the training data, including complex queries that range from planning trip itineraries to speculating about alternate history. Moreover, the model tends to generalize well to unseen tasks that did not appear in the training data. In a controlled human study, responses from LIMA are either equivalent or strictly preferred to GPT-4 in 43% of cases; this statistic is as high as 58% when compared to Bard and 65% versus DaVinci003, which was trained with human feedback. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that almost all knowledge in large language models is learned during pretraining, and only limited instruction tuning data is necessary to teach models to produce high quality output.

Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages
Expanding the language coverage of speech technology has the potential to improve access to information for many more people. However, current speech technology is restricted to about one hundred languages which is a small fraction of the over 7,000 languages spoken around the world. The Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project increases the number of supported languages by 10-40x, depending on the task. The main ingredients are a new dataset based on readings of publicly available religious texts and effectively leveraging self-supervised learning. We built pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models covering 1,406 languages, a single multilingual automatic speech recognition model for 1,107 languages, speech synthesis models for the same number of languages, as well as a language identification model for 4,017 languages. Experiments show that our multilingual speech recognition model more than halves the word error rate of Whisper on 54 languages of the FLEURS benchmark while being trained on a small fraction of the labeled data.

READ: Recurrent Adaptation of Large Transformers
Sid Wang, John Nguyen, Ke Li, Carole-Jean Wu
Fine-tuning large-scale Transformers has led to the explosion of many AI applications across Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision tasks. However, fine-tuning all pre-trained model parameters becomes impractical as the model size and number of tasks increase. Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods aim to address these challenges. While effective in reducing the number of trainable parameters, PETL methods still require significant energy and computational resources to fine-tune. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{RE}current \textbf{AD}aption (READ) -- a lightweight and memory-efficient fine-tuning method -- to overcome the limitations of the current PETL approaches. Specifically, READ inserts a small RNN network alongside the backbone model so that the model does not have to back-propagate through the large backbone network. Through comprehensive empirical evaluation of the GLUE benchmark, we demonstrate READ can achieve a 56% reduction in the training memory consumption and an 84% reduction in the GPU energy usage while retraining high model quality compared to full-tuning. Additionally, the model size of READ does not grow with the backbone model size, making it a highly scalable solution for fine-tuning large Transformers.

LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models
Zechun Liu, Barlas Oguz, Changsheng Zhao, Ernie Chang, Pierre Stock, Yashar Mehdad, Yangyang Shi, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
Several post-training quantization methods have been applied to large language models (LLMs), and have been shown to perform well down to 8-bits. We find that these methods break down at lower bit precision, and investigate quantization aware training for LLMs (LLM-QAT) to push quantization levels even further. We propose a data-free distillation method that leverages generations produced by the pre-trained model, which better preserves the original output distribution and allows quantizing any generative model independent of its training data, similar to post-training quantization methods. In addition to quantizing weights and activations, we also quantize the KV cache, which is critical for increasing throughput and support long sequence dependencies at current model sizes. We experiment with LLaMA models of sizes 7B, 13B, and 30B, at quantization levels down to 4-bits. We observe large improvements over training-free methods, especially in the low-bit settings.

Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles
Chaitanya Ryali, Yuan-Ting Hu, Daniel Bolya, Chen Wei, Haoqi Fan, Po-Yao Huang, Vaibhav Aggarwal, Arkabandhu Chowdhury, Omid Poursaeed, Judy Hoffman, Jitendra Malik, Yanghao Li, Christoph Feichtenhofer
Modern hierarchical vision transformers have added several vision-specific components in the pursuit of supervised classification performance. While these components lead to effective accuracies and attractive FLOP counts, the added complexity actually makes these transformers slower than their vanilla ViT counterparts. In this paper, we argue that this additional bulk is unnecessary. By pretraining with a strong visual pretext task (MAE), we can strip out all the bells-and-whistles from a state-of-the-art multi-stage vision transformer without losing accuracy. In the process, we create Hiera, an extremely simple hierarchical vision transformer that is more accurate than previous models while being significantly faster both at inference and during training. We evaluate Hiera on a variety of tasks for image and video recognition. Our code and models are available at this https URL.

Simple and Controllable Music Generation
Jade Copet, Felix Kreuk, Itai Gat, Tal Remez, David Kant, Gabriel Synnaeve, Yossi Adi, Alexandre Défossez
We tackle the task of conditional music generation. We introduce MusicGen, a single Language Model (LM) that operates over several streams of compressed discrete music representation, i.e., tokens. Unlike prior work, MusicGen is comprised of a single-stage transformer LM together with efficient token interleaving patterns, which eliminates the need for cascading several models, e.g., hierarchically or upsampling. Following this approach, we demonstrate how MusicGen can generate high-quality samples, both mono and stereo, while being conditioned on textual description or melodic features, allowing better controls over the generated output. We conduct extensive empirical evaluation, considering both automatic and human studies, showing the proposed approach is superior to the evaluated baselines on a standard text-to-music benchmark. Through ablation studies, we shed light over the importance of each of the components comprising MusicGen. Music samples, code, and models are available at this https URL

Improving Open Language Models by Learning from Organic Interactions
Jing Xu, Da Ju, Joshua Lane, Mojtaba Komeili, Eric Michael Smith, Megan Ung, Morteza Behrooz, William Ngan, Rashel Moritz, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Y-Lan Boureau, Jason Weston, Kurt Shuster
We present BlenderBot 3x, an update on the conversational model BlenderBot 3, which is now trained using organic conversation and feedback data from participating users of the system in order to improve both its skills and safety. We are publicly releasing the participating de-identified interaction data for use by the research community, in order to spur further progress. Training models with organic data is challenging because interactions with people "in the wild" include both high quality conversations and feedback, as well as adversarial and toxic behavior. We study techniques that enable learning from helpful teachers while avoiding learning from people who are trying to trick the model into unhelpful or toxic responses. BlenderBot 3x is both preferred in conversation to BlenderBot 3, and is shown to produce safer responses in challenging situations. While our current models are still far from perfect, we believe further improvement can be achieved by continued use of the techniques explored in this work.

Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation
Shouyuan Chen, Sherman Wong, Liangjian Chen, Yuandong Tian
We present Position Interpolation (PI) that extends the context window sizes of RoPE-based pretrained LLMs such as LLaMA models to up to 32768 with minimal fine-tuning (within 1000 steps), while demonstrating strong empirical results on various tasks that require long context, including passkey retrieval, language modeling, and long document summarization from LLaMA 7B to 65B. Meanwhile, the extended model by Position Interpolation preserve quality relatively well on tasks within its original context window. To achieve this goal, Position Interpolation linearly down-scales the input position indices to match the original context window size, rather than extrapolating beyond the trained context length which may lead to catastrophically high attention scores that completely ruin the self-attention mechanism. Our theoretical study shows that the upper bound of interpolation is at least ∼600× smaller than that of extrapolation, further demonstrating its stability. Models extended via Position Interpolation retain its original architecture and can reuse most pre-existing optimization and infrastructure.

Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale
Matthew Le, Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Brian Karrer, Leda Sari, Rashel Moritz, Mary Williamson, Vimal Manohar, Yossi Adi, Jay Mahadeokar, Wei-Ning Hsu
Large-scale generative models such as GPT and DALL-E have revolutionized the research community. These models not only generate high fidelity outputs, but are also generalists which can solve tasks not explicitly taught. In contrast, speech generative models are still primitive in terms of scale and task generalization. In this paper, we present Voicebox, the most versatile text-guided generative model for speech at scale. Voicebox is a non-autoregressive flow-matching model trained to infill speech, given audio context and text, trained on over 50K hours of speech that are not filtered or enhanced. Similar to GPT, Voicebox can perform many different tasks through in-context learning, but is more flexible as it can also condition on future context. Voicebox can be used for mono or cross-lingual zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis, noise removal, content editing, style conversion, and diverse sample generation. In particular, Voicebox outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS model VALL-E on both intelligibility (5.9% vs 1.9% word error rates) and audio similarity (0.580 vs 0.681) while being up to 20 times faster. Audio samples can be found in \url{this https URL}.

Scaling Autoregressive Multi-Modal Models: Pretraining and Instruction Tuning
Lili Yu, Bowen Shi, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Benjamin Muller, Olga Golovneva, Tianlu Wang, Arun Babu, Binh Tang, Brian Karrer, Shelly Sheynin, Candace Ross, Adam Polyak, Russell Howes, Vasu Sharma, Puxin Xu, Hovhannes Tamoyan, Oron Ashual, Uriel Singer, Shang-Wen Li, Susan Zhang, Richard James, Gargi Ghosh, Yaniv Taigman, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Asli Celikyilmaz, Luke Zettlemoyer, Armen Aghajanyan
We present CM3Leon (pronounced "Chameleon"), a retrieval-augmented, token-based, decoder-only multi-modal language model capable of generating and infilling both text and images. CM3Leon uses the CM3 multi-modal architecture but additionally shows the extreme benefits of scaling up and tuning on more diverse instruction-style data. It is the first multi-modal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. It is also a general-purpose model that can do both text-to-image and image-to-text generation, allowing us to introduce self-contained contrastive decoding methods that produce high-quality outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this recipe is highly effective for multi-modal models. CM3Leon achieves state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image generation with 5x less training compute than comparable methods (zero-shot MS-COCO FID of 4.88). After SFT, CM3Leon can also demonstrate unprecedented levels of controllability in tasks ranging from language-guided image editing to image-controlled generation and segmentation.

Llama 2: open source, free for research and commercial use
We're unlocking the power of these large language models. Our latest version of Llama – Llama 2 – is now accessible to individuals, creators, researchers, and businesses so they can experiment, innovate, and scale their ideas responsibly.

SeamlessM4T—Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation
What does it take to create the Babel Fish, a tool that can help individuals translate speech between any two languages? While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. More specifically, conventional speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded systems composed of multiple subsystems performing translation progressively, putting scalable and high-performing unified speech translation systems out of reach. To address these gaps, we introduce SeamlessM4T—Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation—a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages. To build this, we used 1 million hours of open speech audio data to learn self-supervised speech representations with w2v-BERT 2.0. Subsequently, we created a multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations, dubbed SeamlessAlign. Filtered and combined with human labeled and pseudo-labeled data (totaling 406,000 hours), we developed the first multilingual system capable of translating from and into English for both speech and text. On Fleurs, SeamlessM4T sets a new standard for translations into multiple target languages, achieving an improvement of 20% BLEU over the previous state-of-the-art in direct speech-to-text translation. Compared to strong cascaded models, SeamlessM4T improves the quality of into-English translation by 1.3 BLEU points in speech-to-text and by 2.6 ASR-BLEU points in speech-to-speech. On CVSS and compared to a 2-stage cascaded model for speech-to-speech translation, SeamlessM4T-Large’s performance is stronger by 58%. Preliminary human evaluations of speech-to-text translation outputs evinced similarly impressive results; for translations from English, XSTS scores for 24 evaluated languages are consistently above 4 (out of 5). For into English directions, we see significant improvement over WhisperLarge-v2’s baseline for 7 out of 24 languages. To further evaluate our system, we developed Blaser 2.0, which enables evaluation across speech and text with similar accuracy compared to its predecessor when it comes to quality estimation. Tested for robustness, our system performs better against background noises and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks (average improvements of 38% and 49%, respectively) compared to the current state-of-the-art model. Critically, we evaluated SeamlessM4T on gender bias and added toxicity to assess translation safety. Compared to the state-of-the-art, we report up to 63% of reduction in added toxicity in our translation outputs. 

D4: Improving LLM Pretraining via Document De-Duplication and Diversification
Kushal Tirumala, Daniel Simig, Armen Aghajanyan, Ari S. Morcos
Over recent years, an increasing amount of compute and data has been poured into training large language models (LLMs), usually by doing one-pass learning on as many tokens as possible randomly selected from large-scale web corpora. While training on ever-larger portions of the internet leads to consistent performance improvements, the size of these improvements diminishes with scale, and there has been little work exploring the effect of data selection on pre-training and downstream performance beyond simple de-duplication methods such as MinHash. Here, we show that careful data selection (on top of de-duplicated data) via pre-trained model embeddings can speed up training (20% efficiency gains) and improves average downstream accuracy on 16 NLP tasks (up to 2%) at the 6.7B model scale. Furthermore, we show that repeating data intelligently consistently outperforms baseline training (while repeating random data performs worse than baseline training). Our results indicate that clever data selection can significantly improve LLM pre-training, calls into question the common practice of training for a single epoch on as much data as possible, and demonstrates a path to keep improving our models past the limits of randomly sampling web data.

Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code
We release Code Llama, a family of large language models for code based on Llama 2 providing state-of-the-art performance among open models, infilling capabilities, support for large input contexts, and zero-shot instruction following ability for programming tasks. We provide multiple flavors to cover a wide range of applications: foundation models (Code Llama), Python specializations (Code Llama - Python), and instruction-following models (Code Llama - Instruct) with 7B, 13B and 34B parameters each. All models are trained on sequences of 16k tokens and show improvements on inputs with up to 100k tokens. 7B and 13B Code Llama and Code Llama - Instruct variants support infilling based on surrounding content. Code Llama reaches state-of-the-art performance among open models on several code benchmarks, with scores of up to 53% and 55% on HumanEval and MBPP, respectively. Notably, Code Llama - Python 7B outperforms Llama 2 70B on HumanEval and MBPP, and all our models outperform every other publicly available model on MultiPL-E. We release Code Llama under a permissive license that allows for both research and commercial use

Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents
Lukas Blecher, Guillem Cucurull, Thomas Scialom, Robert Stojnic
Scientific knowledge is predominantly stored in books and scientific journals, often in the form of PDFs. However, the PDF format leads to a loss of semantic information, particularly for mathematical expressions. We propose Nougat (Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents), a Visual Transformer model that performs an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) task for processing scientific documents into a markup language, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a new dataset of scientific documents. The proposed approach offers a promising solution to enhance the accessibility of scientific knowledge in the digital age, by bridging the gap between human-readable documents and machine-readable text. We release the models and code to accelerate future work on scientific text recognition.

Contrastive Decoding Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models
Sean O'Brien, Mike Lewis
We demonstrate that Contrastive Decoding -- a simple, computationally light, and training-free text generation method proposed by Li et al 2022 -- achieves large out-of-the-box improvements over greedy decoding on a variety of reasoning tasks. Originally shown to improve the perceived quality of long-form text generation, Contrastive Decoding searches for strings that maximize a weighted difference in likelihood between strong and weak models. We show that Contrastive Decoding leads LLaMA-65B to outperform LLaMA 2, GPT-3.5 and PaLM 2-L on the HellaSwag commonsense reasoning benchmark, and to outperform LLaMA 2, GPT-3.5 and PaLM-540B on the GSM8K math word reasoning benchmark, in addition to improvements on a collection of other tasks. Analysis suggests that Contrastive Decoding improves over existing methods by preventing some abstract reasoning errors, as well as by avoiding simpler modes such as copying sections of the input during chain-of-thought. Overall, Contrastive Decoding outperforms nucleus sampling for long-form generation and greedy decoding for reasoning tasks, making it a powerful general purpose method for generating text from language models.

Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models
Wenhan Xiong, Jingyu Liu, Igor Molybog, Hejia Zhang, Prajjwal Bhargava, Rui Hou, Louis Martin, Rashi Rungta, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Barlas Oguz, Madian Khabsa, Han Fang, Yashar Mehdad, Sharan Narang, Kshitiz Malik, Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Mike Lewis, Sinong Wang, Hao Ma
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.

AnyMAL: An Efficient and Scalable Any-Modality Augmented Language Model
Seungwhan Moon, Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Tushar Nagarajan, Matt Smith, Shashank Jain, Chun-Fu Yeh, Prakash Murugesan, Peyman Heidari, Yue Liu, Kavya Srinet, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar
We present Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (AnyMAL), a unified model that reasons over diverse input modality signals (i.e. text, image, video, audio, IMU motion sensor), and generates textual responses. AnyMAL inherits the powerful text-based reasoning abilities of the state-of-the-art LLMs including LLaMA-2 (70B), and converts modality-specific signals to the joint textual space through a pre-trained aligner module. To further strengthen the multimodal LLM's capabilities, we fine-tune the model with a multimodal instruction set manually collected to cover diverse topics and tasks beyond simple QAs. We conduct comprehensive empirical analysis comprising both human and automatic evaluations, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on various multimodal tasks.

Vision Transformers Need Registers
Timothée Darcet, Maxime Oquab, Julien Mairal, Piotr Bojanowski
Transformers have recently emerged as a powerful tool for learning visual representations. In this paper, we identify and characterize artifacts in feature maps of both supervised and self-supervised ViT networks. The artifacts correspond to high-norm tokens appearing during inference primarily in low-informative background areas of images, that are repurposed for internal computations. We propose a simple yet effective solution based on providing additional tokens to the input sequence of the Vision Transformer to fill that role. We show that this solution fixes that problem entirely for both supervised and self-supervised models, sets a new state of the art for self-supervised visual models on dense visual prediction tasks, enables object discovery methods with larger models, and most importantly leads to smoother feature maps and attention maps for downstream visual processing.

RA-DIT: Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning
Xi Victoria Lin, Xilun Chen, Mingda Chen, Weijia Shi, Maria Lomeli, Rich James, Pedro Rodriguez, Jacob Kahn, Gergely Szilvasy, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Scott Yih
Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) improve performance by accessing long-tail and up-to-date knowledge from external data stores, but are challenging to build. Existing approaches require either expensive retrieval-specific modifications to LM pre-training or use post-hoc integration of the data store that leads to suboptimal performance. We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning (RA-DIT), a lightweight fine-tuning methodology that provides a third option by retrofitting any LLM with retrieval capabilities. Our approach operates in two distinct fine-tuning steps: (1) one updates a pre-trained LM to better use retrieved information, while (2) the other updates the retriever to return more relevant results, as preferred by the LM. By fine-tuning over tasks that require both knowledge utilization and contextual awareness, we demonstrate that each stage yields significant performance improvements, and using both leads to additional gains. Our best model, RA-DIT 65B, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of knowledge-intensive zero- and few-shot learning benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing in-context RALM approaches by up to +8.9% in 0-shot setting and +1.4% in 5-shot setting on average.

Branch-Solve-Merge Improves Large Language Model Evaluation and Generation
Swarnadeep Saha, Omer Levy, Asli Celikyilmaz, Mohit Bansal, Jason Weston, Xian Li
Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently used for multi-faceted language generation and evaluation tasks that involve satisfying intricate user constraints or taking into account multiple aspects and criteria. However, their performance can fall short, due to the model's lack of coherence and inability to plan and decompose the problem. We propose Branch-Solve-Merge (BSM), a Large Language Model program (Schlag et al., 2023) for tackling such challenging natural language tasks. It consists of branch, solve, and merge modules that are parameterized with specific prompts to the base LLM. These three modules plan a decomposition of the task into multiple parallel sub-tasks, independently solve them, and fuse the solutions to the sub-tasks. We apply our method to the tasks of LLM response evaluation and constrained text generation and evaluate its effectiveness with multiple LLMs, including Vicuna, LLaMA-2-chat, and GPT-4. BSM improves the evaluation correctness and consistency for each LLM by enhancing human-LLM agreement by up to 26%, reducing length and pairwise position biases by up to 50%, and allowing LLaMA-2-chat to match or outperform GPT-4 on most domains. On the constraint story generation task, BSM improves the coherence of the stories while also improving constraint satisfaction by 12%.

Generative Pre-training for Speech with Flow Matching
Alexander H. Liu, Matt Le, Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Andros Tjandra, Wei-Ning Hsu
Generative models have gained more and more attention in recent years for their remarkable success in tasks that required estimating and sampling data distribution to generate high-fidelity synthetic data. In speech, text-to-speech synthesis and neural vocoder are good examples where generative models have shined. While generative models have been applied to different applications in speech, there exists no general-purpose generative model that models speech directly. In this work, we take a step toward this direction by showing a single pre-trained generative model can be adapted to different downstream tasks with strong performance. Specifically, we pre-trained a generative model, named SpeechFlow, on 60k hours of untranscribed speech with Flow Matching and masked conditions. Experiment results show the pre-trained generative model can be fine-tuned with task-specific data to match or surpass existing expert models on speech enhancement, separation, and synthesis. Our work suggested a foundational model for generation tasks in speech can be built with generative pre-training.

Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks
Shelly Sheynin, Adam Polyak, Uriel Singer, Yuval Kirstain, Amit Zohar, Oron Ashual, Devi Parikh, Yaniv Taigman
Instruction-based image editing holds immense potential for a variety of applications, as it enables users to perform any editing operation using a natural language instruction. However, current models in this domain often struggle with accurately executing user instructions. We present Emu Edit, a multi-task image editing model which sets state-of-the-art results in instruction-based image editing. To develop Emu Edit we train it to multi-task across an unprecedented range of tasks, such as region-based editing, free-form editing, and Computer Vision tasks, all of which are formulated as generative tasks. Additionally, to enhance Emu Edit's multi-task learning abilities, we provide it with learned task embeddings which guide the generation process towards the correct edit type. Both these elements are essential for Emu Edit's outstanding performance. Furthermore, we show that Emu Edit can generalize to new tasks, such as image inpainting, super-resolution, and compositions of editing tasks, with just a few labeled examples. This capability offers a significant advantage in scenarios where high-quality samples are scarce. Lastly, to facilitate a more rigorous and informed assessment of instructable image editing models, we release a new challenging and versatile benchmark that includes seven different image editing tasks.

Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts
Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Matthew Le, Andros Tjandra, Yi-Chiao Wu, Baishan Guo, Jiemin Zhang, Xinyue Zhang, Robert Adkins, William Ngan, Jeff Wang, Ivan Cruz, Bapi Akula, Akinniyi Akinyemi, Brian Ellis, Rashel Moritz, Yael Yungster, Alice Rakotoarison, Liang Tan, Chris Summers, Carleigh Wood, Joshua Lane, Mary Williamson, Wei-Ning Hsu
Audio is an essential part of our life, but creating it often requires expertise and is time-consuming. Research communities have made great progress over the past year advancing the performance of large scale audio generative models for a single modality (speech, sound, or music) through adopting more powerful generative models and scaling data. However, these models lack controllability in several aspects: speech generation models cannot synthesize novel styles based on text description and are limited on domain coverage such as outdoor environments; sound generation models only provide coarse-grained control based on descriptions like "a person speaking" and would only generate mumbling human voices. This paper presents Audiobox, a unified model based on flow-matching that is capable of generating various audio modalities. We design description-based and example-based prompting to enhance controllability and unify speech and sound generation paradigms. We allow transcript, vocal, and other audio styles to be controlled independently when generating speech. To improve model generalization with limited labels, we adapt a self-supervised infilling objective to pre-train on large quantities of unlabeled audio. Audiobox sets new benchmarks on speech and sound generation (0.745 similarity on Librispeech for zero-shot TTS; 0.77 FAD on AudioCaps for text-to-sound) and unlocks new methods for generating audio with novel vocal and acoustic styles. We further integrate Bespoke Solvers, which speeds up generation by over 25 times compared to the default ODE solver for flow-matching, without loss of performance on several tasks. Our demo is available at this https URL

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun
Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers---8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers.
The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

DeepSpeed-MoE: Advancing Mixture-of-Experts Inference and Training to Power Next-Generation AI Scale
Samyam Rajbhandari, Conglong Li, Zhewei Yao, Minjia Zhang, Reza Yazdani Aminabadi, Ammar Ahmad Awan, Jeff Rasley, Yuxiong He
As the training of giant dense models hits the boundary on the availability and capability of the hardware resources today, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models become one of the most promising model architectures due to their significant training cost reduction compared to a quality-equivalent dense model. Its training cost saving is demonstrated from encoder-decoder models (prior works) to a 5x saving for auto-aggressive language models (this work along with parallel explorations). However, due to the much larger model size and unique architecture, how to provide fast MoE model inference remains challenging and unsolved, limiting its practical usage. To tackle this, we present DeepSpeed-MoE, an end-to-end MoE training and inference solution as part of the DeepSpeed library, including novel MoE architecture designs and model compression techniques that reduce MoE model size by up to 3.7x, and a highly optimized inference system that provides 7.3x better latency and cost compared to existing MoE inference solutions. DeepSpeed-MoE offers an unprecedented scale and efficiency to serve massive MoE models with up to 4.5x faster and 9x cheaper inference compared to quality-equivalent dense models. We hope our innovations and systems help open a promising path to new directions in the large model landscape, a shift from dense to sparse MoE models, where training and deploying higher-quality models with fewer resources becomes more widely possible.


EL-Attention: Memory Efficient Lossless Attention for Generation
Yu Yan, Jiusheng Chen, Weizhen Qi, Nikhil Bhendawade, Yeyun Gong, Nan Duan, Ruofei Zhang
Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We propose memory-efficient lossless attention (called EL-attention) to address this issue. It avoids heavy operations for building multi-head keys and values, cache for them is not needed. EL-attention constructs an ensemble of attention results by expanding query while keeping key and value shared. It produces the same result as multi-head attention with less GPU memory and faster inference speed. We conduct extensive experiments on Transformer, BART, and GPT-2 for summarization and question generation tasks. The results show EL-attention speeds up existing models by 1.6x to 5.3x without accuracy loss.

DeepNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000 Layers
Hongyu Wang, Shuming Ma, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Furu Wei
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to stabilize extremely deep Transformers. Specifically, we introduce a new normalization function (DeepNorm) to modify the residual connection in Transformer, accompanying with theoretically derived initialization. In-depth theoretical analysis shows that model updates can be bounded in a stable way. The proposed method combines the best of two worlds, i.e., good performance of Post-LN and stable training of Pre-LN, making DeepNorm a preferred alternative. We successfully scale Transformers up to 1,000 layers (i.e., 2,500 attention and feed-forward network sublayers) without difficulty, which is one order of magnitude deeper than previous deep Transformers. Remarkably, on a multilingual benchmark with 7,482 translation directions, our 200-layer model with 3.2B parameters significantly outperforms the 48-layer state-of-the-art model with 12B parameters by 5 BLEU points, which indicates a promising scaling direction.

A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer
Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Barun Patra, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Alon Benhaim, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song, Furu Wei
Position modeling plays a critical role in Transformers. In this paper, we focus on length extrapolation, i.e., training on short texts while evaluating longer sequences. We define attention resolution as an indicator of extrapolation. Then we propose two designs to improve the above metric of Transformers. Specifically, we introduce a relative position embedding to explicitly maximize attention resolution. Moreover, we use blockwise causal attention during inference for better resolution. We evaluate different Transformer variants with language modeling. Experimental results show that our model achieves strong performance in both interpolation and extrapolation settings. The code will be available at this https URL.

Understanding INT4 Quantization for Transformer Models: Latency Speedup, Composability, and Failure Cases
Xiaoxia Wu, Cheng Li, Reza Yazdani Aminabadi, Zhewei Yao, Yuxiong He
Improving the deployment efficiency of transformer-based language models has been challenging given their high computation and memory cost. While INT8 quantization has recently been shown to be effective in reducing both the memory cost and latency while preserving model accuracy, it remains unclear whether we can leverage INT4 (which doubles peak hardware throughput) to achieve further latency improvement. In this study, we explore the feasibility of employing INT4 weight and activation (W4A4) quantization for language models. Our findings indicate that W4A4 quantization introduces no to negligible accuracy degradation for encoder-only and encoder-decoder models, but causes a significant accuracy drop for decoder-only models. To materialize the performance gain using W4A4, we develop a highly optimized end-to-end W4A4 encoder inference pipeline supporting different quantization strategies. Our INT4 pipeline is 8.5× faster for latency-oriented scenarios and up to 3× for throughput-oriented scenarios compared to the inference of FP16, and improves the SOTA BERT INT8 performance from FasterTransformer by up to 1.7×. We provide insights into the failure cases when applying W4A4 to decoder-only models, and further explore the compatibility of INT4 quantization with other compression methods, like pruning and layer reduction.

Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models
Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Wenhui Wang, Yaru Hao, Saksham Singhal, Shuming Ma, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Owais Khan Mohammed, Barun Patra, Qiang Liu, Kriti Aggarwal, Zewen Chi, Johan Bjorck, Vishrav Chaudhary, Subhojit Som, Xia Song, Furu Wei
A big convergence of language, multimodal perception, action, and world modeling is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. In this work, we introduce Kosmos-1, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that can perceive general modalities, learn in context (i.e., few-shot), and follow instructions (i.e., zero-shot). Specifically, we train Kosmos-1 from scratch on web-scale multimodal corpora, including arbitrarily interleaved text and images, image-caption pairs, and text data. We evaluate various settings, including zero-shot, few-shot, and multimodal chain-of-thought prompting, on a wide range of tasks without any gradient updates or finetuning. Experimental results show that Kosmos-1 achieves impressive performance on (i) language understanding, generation, and even OCR-free NLP (directly fed with document images), (ii) perception-language tasks, including multimodal dialogue, image captioning, visual question answering, and (iii) vision tasks, such as image recognition with descriptions (specifying classification via text instructions). We also show that MLLMs can benefit from cross-modal transfer, i.e., transfer knowledge from language to multimodal, and from multimodal to language. In addition, we introduce a dataset of Raven IQ test, which diagnoses the nonverbal reasoning capability of MLLMs.

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Scott Lundberg, Harsha Nori, Hamid Palangi, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Yi Zhang
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4, was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google's PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions.

TaskMatrix.AI: Completing Tasks by Connecting Foundation Models with Millions of APIs
Yaobo Liang, Chenfei Wu, Ting Song, Wenshan Wu, Yan Xia, Yu Liu, Yang Ou, Shuai Lu, Lei Ji, Shaoguang Mao, Yun Wang, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Nan Duan
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made incredible progress recently. On the one hand, advanced foundation models like ChatGPT can offer powerful conversation, in-context learning and code generation abilities on a broad range of open-domain tasks. They can also generate high-level solution outlines for domain-specific tasks based on the common sense knowledge they have acquired. However, they still face difficulties with some specialized tasks because they lack enough domain-specific data during pre-training or they often have errors in their neural network computations on those tasks that need accurate executions. On the other hand, there are also many existing models and systems (symbolic-based or neural-based) that can do some domain-specific tasks very well. However, due to the different implementation or working mechanisms, they are not easily accessible or compatible with foundation models. Therefore, there is a clear and pressing need for a mechanism that can leverage foundation models to propose task solution outlines and then automatically match some of the sub-tasks in the outlines to the off-the-shelf models and systems with special functionalities to complete them. Inspired by this, we introduce this http URL as a new AI ecosystem that connects foundation models with millions of APIs for task completion. Unlike most previous work that aimed to improve a single AI model, this http URL focuses more on using existing foundation models (as a brain-like central system) and APIs of other AI models and systems (as sub-task solvers) to achieve diversified tasks in both digital and physical domains. As a position paper, we will present our vision of how to build such an ecosystem, explain each key component, and use study cases to illustrate both the feasibility of this vision and the main challenges we need to address next.

Instruction Tuning with GPT-4
Baolin Peng, Chunyuan Li, Pengcheng He, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao
Prior work has shown that finetuning large language models (LLMs) using machine-generated instruction-following data enables such models to achieve remarkable zero-shot capabilities on new tasks, and no human-written instructions are needed. In this paper, we present the first attempt to use GPT-4 to generate instruction-following data for LLM finetuning. Our early experiments on instruction-tuned LLaMA models show that the 52K English and Chinese instruction-following data generated by GPT-4 leads to superior zero-shot performance on new tasks to the instruction-following data generated by previous state-of-the-art models. We also collect feedback and comparison data from GPT-4 to enable a comprehensive evaluation and reward model training. We make our data generated using GPT-4 as well as our codebase publicly available.

Inference with Reference: Lossless Acceleration of Large Language Models
Nan Yang, Tao Ge, Liang Wang, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Linjun Yang, Rangan Majumder, Furu Wei
We propose LLMA, an LLM accelerator to losslessly speed up Large Language Model (LLM) inference with references. LLMA is motivated by the observation that there are abundant identical text spans between the decoding result by an LLM and the reference that is available in many real world scenarios (e.g., retrieved documents). LLMA first selects a text span from the reference and copies its tokens to the decoder and then efficiently checks the tokens' appropriateness as the decoding result in parallel within one decoding step. The improved computational parallelism allows LLMA to achieve over 2x speed-up for LLMs with identical generation results as greedy decoding in many practical generation scenarios where significant overlap between in-context reference and outputs exists (e.g., search engines and multi-turn conversations).

Low-code LLM: Visual Programming over LLMs
Yuzhe Cai, Shaoguang Mao, Wenshan Wu, Zehua Wang, Yaobo Liang, Tao Ge, Chenfei Wu, Wang You, Ting Song, Yan Xia, Jonathan Tien, Nan Duan
Effectively utilizing LLMs for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It incorporates six types of simple low-code visual programming interactions, all supported by clicking, dragging, or text editing, to achieve more controllable and stable responses. Through visual interaction with a graphical user interface, users can incorporate their ideas into the workflow without writing trivial prompts. The proposed Low-code LLM framework consists of a Planning LLM that designs a structured planning workflow for complex tasks, which can be correspondingly edited and confirmed by users through low-code visual programming operations, and an Executing LLM that generates responses following the user-confirmed workflow. We highlight three advantages of the low-code LLM: controllable generation results, user-friendly human-LLM interaction, and broadly applicable scenarios. We demonstrate its benefits using four typical applications. By introducing this approach, we aim to bridge the gap between humans and LLMs, enabling more effective and efficient utilization of LLMs for complex tasks. Our system will be soon publicly available at LowCodeLLM.

Universal Pyramid Adversarial Training for Improved ViT Performance
Ping-yeh Chiang, Yipin Zhou, Omid Poursaeed, Satya Narayan Shukla, Ashish Shah, Tom Goldstein, Ser-Nam Lim
Recently, Pyramid Adversarial training (Herrmann et al., 2022) has been shown to be very effective for improving clean accuracy and distribution-shift robustness of vision transformers. However, due to the iterative nature of adversarial training, the technique is up to 7 times more expensive than standard training. To make the method more efficient, we propose Universal Pyramid Adversarial training, where we learn a single pyramid adversarial pattern shared across the whole dataset instead of the sample-wise patterns. With our proposed technique, we decrease the computational cost of Pyramid Adversarial training by up to 70% while retaining the majority of its benefit on clean performance and distribution-shift robustness. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, we are also the first to find that universal adversarial training can be leveraged to improve clean model performance.

WizardLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Follow Complex Instructions
Can Xu, Qingfeng Sun, Kai Zheng, Xiubo Geng, Pu Zhao, Jiazhan Feng, Chongyang Tao, Daxin Jiang
Training large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instruction following data brings colossal success. However, manually creating such instruction data is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, humans may struggle to produce high-complexity instructions. In this paper, we show an avenue for creating large amounts of instruction data with varying levels of complexity using LLM instead of humans. Starting with an initial set of instructions, we use our proposed Evol-Instruct to rewrite them step by step into more complex instructions. Then, we mix all generated instruction data to fine-tune LLaMA. We call the resulting model WizardLM. Human evaluations on a complexity-balanced test bed and Vicuna's testset show that instructions from Evol-Instruct are superior to human-created ones. By analyzing the human evaluation results of the high complexity part, we demonstrate that outputs from our WizardLM are preferred to outputs from OpenAI ChatGPT. In GPT-4 automatic evaluation, WizardLM achieves more than 90\% capacity of ChatGPT on 17 out of 29 skills. Even though WizardLM still lags behind ChatGPT in some aspects, our findings suggest that fine-tuning with AI-evolved instructions is a promising direction for enhancing LLMs. Our code and data are public at this https URL

MLCopilot: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Solving Machine Learning Tasks
Lei Zhang, Yuge Zhang, Kan Ren, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang
The field of machine learning (ML) has gained widespread adoption, leading to a significant demand for adapting ML to specific scenarios, which is yet expensive and non-trivial. The predominant approaches towards the automation of solving ML tasks (e.g., AutoML) are often time consuming and hard to understand for human developers. In contrast, though human engineers have the incredible ability to understand tasks and reason about solutions, their experience and knowledge are often sparse and difficult to utilize by quantitative approaches. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between machine intelligence and human knowledge by introducing a novel framework MLCopilot, which leverages the state-of-the-art LLMs to develop ML solutions for novel tasks. We showcase the possibility of extending the capability of LLMs to comprehend structured inputs and perform thorough reasoning for solving novel ML tasks. And we find that, after some dedicated design, the LLM can (i) observe from the existing experiences of ML tasks and (ii) reason effectively to deliver promising results for new tasks. The solution generated can be used directly to achieve high levels of competitiveness.

ResiDual: Transformer with Dual Residual Connections
Shufang Xie, Huishuai Zhang, Junliang Guo, Xu Tan, Jiang Bian, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Arul Menezes, Tao Qin, Rui Yan
Transformer networks have become the preferred architecture for many tasks due to their state-of-the-art performance. However, the optimal way to implement residual connections in Transformer, which are essential for effective training, is still debated. Two widely used variants are the Post-Layer-Normalization (Post-LN) and Pre-Layer-Normalization (Pre-LN) Transformers, which apply layer normalization after each residual block's output or before each residual block's input, respectively. While both variants enjoy their advantages, they also suffer from severe limitations: Post-LN causes gradient vanishing issue that hinders training deep Transformers, and Pre-LN causes representation collapse issue that limits model capacity. In this paper, we propose ResiDual, a novel Transformer architecture with Pre-Post-LN (PPLN), which fuses the connections in Post-LN and Pre-LN together and inherits their advantages while avoids their limitations. We conduct both theoretical analyses and empirical experiments to verify the effectiveness of ResiDual. Theoretically, we prove that ResiDual has a lower bound on the gradient to avoid the vanishing issue due to the residual connection from Pre-LN. Moreover, ResiDual also has diverse model representations to avoid the collapse issue due to the residual connection from Post-LN. Empirically, ResiDual outperforms both Post-LN and Pre-LN on several machine translation benchmarks across different network depths and data sizes. Thanks to the good theoretical and empirical performance, ResiDual Transformer can serve as a foundation architecture for different AI models (e.g., large language models). Our code is available at this https URL.

Small Models are Valuable Plug-ins for Large Language Models
Canwen Xu, Yichong Xu, Shuohang Wang, Yang Liu, Chenguang Zhu, Julian McAuley
Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 are powerful but their weights are often publicly unavailable and their immense sizes make the models difficult to be tuned with common hardware. As a result, effectively tuning these models with large-scale supervised data can be challenging. As an alternative, In-Context Learning (ICL) can only use a small number of supervised examples due to context length limits. In this paper, we propose Super In-Context Learning (SuperICL) which allows black-box LLMs to work with locally fine-tuned smaller models, resulting in superior performance on supervised tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that SuperICL can improve performance beyond state-of-the-art fine-tuned models while addressing the instability problem of in-context learning. Furthermore, SuperICL can enhance the capabilities of smaller models, such as multilinguality and interpretability.

CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing
Zhibin Gou, Zhihong Shao, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Yujiu Yang, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen
Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have been impressive. However, these models sometimes show inconsistencies and problematic behavior, such as hallucinating facts, generating flawed code, or creating offensive and toxic content. Unlike these models, humans typically utilize external tools to cross-check and refine their initial content, like using a search engine for fact-checking, or a code interpreter for debugging. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a framework called CRITIC that allows LLMs, which are essentially "black boxes" to validate and progressively amend their own outputs in a manner similar to human interaction with tools. More specifically, starting with an initial output, CRITIC interacts with appropriate tools to evaluate certain aspects of the text, and then revises the output based on the feedback obtained during this validation process. Comprehensive evaluations involving free-form question answering, mathematical program synthesis, and toxicity reduction demonstrate that CRITIC consistently enhances the performance of LLMs. Meanwhile, our research highlights the crucial importance of external feedback in promoting the ongoing self-improvement of LLMs.

Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4
Subhabrata Mukherjee, Arindam Mitra, Ganesh Jawahar, Sahaj Agarwal, Hamid Palangi, Ahmed Awadallah
Recent research has focused on enhancing the capability of smaller models through imitation learning, drawing on the outputs generated by large foundation models (LFMs). A number of issues impact the quality of these models, ranging from limited imitation signals from shallow LFM outputs; small scale homogeneous training data; and most notably a lack of rigorous evaluation resulting in overestimating the small model's capability as they tend to learn to imitate the style, but not the reasoning process of LFMs. To address these challenges, we develop Orca (We are working with our legal team to publicly release a diff of the model weights in accordance with LLaMA's release policy to be published at this https URL), a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs. Orca learns from rich signals from GPT-4 including explanation traces; step-by-step thought processes; and other complex instructions, guided by teacher assistance from ChatGPT. To promote this progressive learning, we tap into large-scale and diverse imitation data with judicious sampling and selection. Orca surpasses conventional state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models such as Vicuna-13B by more than 100% in complex zero-shot reasoning benchmarks like Big-Bench Hard (BBH) and 42% on AGIEval. Moreover, Orca reaches parity with ChatGPT on the BBH benchmark and shows competitive performance (4 pts gap with optimized system message) in professional and academic examinations like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT, both in zero-shot settings without CoT; while trailing behind GPT-4. Our research indicates that learning from step-by-step explanations, whether these are generated by humans or more advanced AI models, is a promising direction to improve model capabilities and skills.

Augmenting Language Models with Long-Term Memory
Weizhi Wang, Li Dong, Hao Cheng, Xiaodong Liu, Xifeng Yan, Jianfeng Gao, Furu Wei
Existing large language models (LLMs) can only afford fix-sized inputs due to the input length limit, preventing them from utilizing rich long-context information from past inputs. To address this, we propose a framework, Language Models Augmented with Long-Term Memory (LongMem), which enables LLMs to memorize long history. We design a novel decoupled network architecture with the original backbone LLM frozen as a memory encoder and an adaptive residual side-network as a memory retriever and reader. Such a decoupled memory design can easily cache and update long-term past contexts for memory retrieval without suffering from memory staleness. Enhanced with memory-augmented adaptation training, LongMem can thus memorize long past context and use long-term memory for language modeling. The proposed memory retrieval module can handle unlimited-length context in its memory bank to benefit various downstream tasks. Typically, LongMem can enlarge the long-form memory to 65k tokens and thus cache many-shot extra demonstration examples as long-form memory for in-context learning. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong long-context models on ChapterBreak, a challenging long-context modeling benchmark, and achieves remarkable improvements on memory-augmented in-context learning over LLMs. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in helping language models to memorize and utilize long-form contents. Our code is open-sourced at this https URL.

Code Execution with Pre-trained Language Models
Chenxiao Liu, Shuai Lu, Weizhu Chen, Daxin Jiang, Alexey Svyatkovskiy, Shengyu Fu, Neel Sundaresan, Nan Duan
Code execution is a fundamental aspect of programming language semantics that reflects the exact behavior of the code. However, most pre-trained models for code intelligence ignore the execution trace and only rely on source code and syntactic structures. In this paper, we investigate how well pre-trained models can understand and perform code execution. We develop a mutation-based data augmentation technique to create a large-scale and realistic Python dataset and task for code execution, which challenges existing models such as Codex. We then present CodeExecutor, a Transformer model that leverages code execution pre-training and curriculum learning to enhance its semantic comprehension. We evaluate CodeExecutor on code execution and show its promising performance and limitations. We also demonstrate its potential benefits for code intelligence tasks such as zero-shot code-to-code search and text-to-code generation. Our analysis provides insights into the learning and generalization abilities of pre-trained models for code execution.

WizardCoder: Empowering Code Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct
Ziyang Luo, Can Xu, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Xiubo Geng, Wenxiang Hu, Chongyang Tao, Jing Ma, Qingwei Lin, Daxin Jiang
Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs), such as StarCoder, have demonstrated exceptional performance in code-related tasks. However, most existing models are solely pre-trained on extensive raw code data without instruction fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce WizardCoder, which empowers Code LLMs with complex instruction fine-tuning, by adapting the Evol-Instruct method to the domain of code. Through comprehensive experiments on four prominent code generation benchmarks, namely HumanEval, HumanEval+, MBPP, and DS-1000, we unveil the exceptional capabilities of our model. It surpasses all other open-source Code LLMs by a substantial margin. Moreover, our model even outperforms the largest closed LLMs, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Bard, on HumanEval and HumanEval+. Our code, model weights, and data are public at this https URL

Textbooks Are All You Need
Suriya Gunasekar, Yi Zhang, Jyoti Aneja, Caio César Teodoro Mendes, Allie Del Giorno, Sivakanth Gopi, Mojan Javaheripi, Piero Kauffmann, Gustavo de Rosa, Olli Saarikivi, Adil Salim, Shital Shah, Harkirat Singh Behl, Xin Wang, Sébastien Bubeck, Ronen Eldan, Adam Tauman Kalai, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li
We introduce phi-1, a new large language model for code, with significantly smaller size than competing models: phi-1 is a Transformer-based model with 1.3B parameters, trained for 4 days on 8 A100s, using a selection of ``textbook quality" data from the web (6B tokens) and synthetically generated textbooks and exercises with GPT-3.5 (1B tokens). Despite this small scale, phi-1 attains pass@1 accuracy 50.6% on HumanEval and 55.5% on MBPP. It also displays surprising emergent properties compared to phi-1-base, our model before our finetuning stage on a dataset of coding exercises, and phi-1-small, a smaller model with 350M parameters trained with the same pipeline as phi-1 that still achieves 45% on HumanEval.

In-context Autoencoder for Context Compression in a Large Language Model
Tao Ge, Jing Hu, Lei Wang, Xun Wang, Si-Qing Chen, Furu Wei
We propose the In-context Autoencoder (ICAE), leveraging the power of a large language models (LLM) to compress a long context into short compact memory slots that can be directly conditioned on by the LLM for various purposes. ICAE is first pretrained using both autoencoding and language modeling objectives on massive text data, enabling it to generate memory slots that accurately and comprehensively represent the original context; Then, it is fine-tuned on instruction data for producing desirable responses to various prompts. Experiments demonstrate that our lightweight ICAE, introducing fewer than 1% additional parameters, effectively achieves 4X context compression based on Llama, offering advantages in both improved latency and GPU memory cost during inference, and showing an interesting insight in memorization as well as potential for scalability. These promising results imply a novel perspective on the connection between working memory in cognitive science and representation learning in LLMs, revealing ICAE's significant implications in addressing the long context problem and suggesting further research in LLM context management. Our data, code and model are released at this https URL.

Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models
Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuqing Xia, Jilong Xue, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
In this work, we propose Retentive Network (RetNet) as a foundation architecture for large language models, simultaneously achieving training parallelism, low-cost inference, and good performance. We theoretically derive the connection between recurrence and attention. Then we propose the retention mechanism for sequence modeling, which supports three computation paradigms, i.e., parallel, recurrent, and chunkwise recurrent. Specifically, the parallel representation allows for training parallelism. The recurrent representation enables low-cost O(1) inference, which improves decoding throughput, latency, and GPU memory without sacrificing performance. The chunkwise recurrent representation facilitates efficient long-sequence modeling with linear complexity, where each chunk is encoded parallelly while recurrently summarizing the chunks. Experimental results on language modeling show that RetNet achieves favorable scaling results, parallel training, low-cost deployment, and efficient inference. The intriguing properties make RetNet a strong successor to Transformer for large language models. Code will be available at this https URL.

Pre-gated MoE: An Algorithm-System Co-Design for Fast and Scalable Mixture-of-Expert Inference
Ranggi Hwang, Jianyu Wei, Shijie Cao, Changho Hwang, Xiaohu Tang, Ting Cao, Mao Yang
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.

Efficient RLHF: Reducing the Memory Usage of PPO
Michael Santacroce, Yadong Lu, Han Yu, Yuanzhi Li, Yelong Shen
Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has revolutionized language modeling by aligning models with human preferences. However, the RL stage, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), requires over 3x the memory of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), making it infeasible to use for most practitioners. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive analysis the memory usage, performance, and training time of memory-savings techniques for PPO. We introduce Hydra-RLHF by first integrating the SFT and Reward models and then dynamically turning LoRA "off" during training. Our experiments show: 1. Using LoRA during PPO reduces its memory usage to be smaller than SFT while improving alignment across four public benchmarks, and 2. Hydra-PPO reduces the latency per sample of LoRA-PPO by up to 65% while maintaining its performance. Our results demonstrate that Hydra-PPO is a simple and promising solution for enabling more widespread usage of RLHF.

DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models
Yung-Sung Chuang, Yujia Xie, Hongyin Luo, Yoon Kim, James Glass, Pengcheng He
Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations, i.e., generating content that deviates from facts seen during pretraining. We propose a simple decoding strategy for reducing hallucinations with pretrained LLMs that does not require conditioning on retrieved external knowledge nor additional fine-tuning. Our approach obtains the next-token distribution by contrasting the differences in logits obtained from projecting the later layers versus earlier layers to the vocabulary space, exploiting the fact that factual knowledge in an LLMs has generally been shown to be localized to particular transformer layers. We find that this Decoding by Contrasting Layers (DoLa) approach is able to better surface factual knowledge and reduce the generation of incorrect facts. DoLa consistently improves the truthfulness across multiple choices tasks and open-ended generation tasks, for example improving the performance of LLaMA family models on TruthfulQA by 12-17% absolute points, demonstrating its potential in making LLMs reliably generate truthful facts.

Textbooks Are All You Need II: phi-1.5 technical report
Yuanzhi Li, Sébastien Bubeck, Ronen Eldan, Allie Del Giorno, Suriya Gunasekar, Yin Tat Lee
We continue the investigation into the power of smaller Transformer-based language models as initiated by \textbf{TinyStories} -- a 10 million parameter model that can produce coherent English -- and the follow-up work on \textbf{phi-1}, a 1.3 billion parameter model with Python coding performance close to the state-of-the-art. The latter work proposed to use existing Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate ``textbook quality" data as a way to enhance the learning process compared to traditional web data. We follow the ``Textbooks Are All You Need" approach, focusing this time on common sense reasoning in natural language, and create a new 1.3 billion parameter model named \textbf{phi-1.5}, with performance on natural language tasks comparable to models 5x larger, and surpassing most non-frontier LLMs on more complex reasoning tasks such as grade-school mathematics and basic coding. More generally, \textbf{phi-1.5} exhibits many of the traits of much larger LLMs, both good -- such as the ability to ``think step by step" or perform some rudimentary in-context learning -- and bad, including hallucinations and the potential for toxic and biased generations -- encouragingly though, we are seeing improvement on that front thanks to the absence of web data. We open-source \textbf{phi-1.5} to promote further research on these urgent topics.

PoSE: Efficient Context Window Extension of LLMs via Positional Skip-wise Training
Dawei Zhu, Nan Yang, Liang Wang, Yifan Song, Wenhao Wu, Furu Wei, Sujian Li
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with a pre-defined context length, restricting their use in scenarios requiring long inputs. Previous efforts for adapting LLMs to a longer length usually requires fine-tuning with this target length (Full-length fine-tuning), suffering intensive training cost. To decouple train length from target length for efficient context window extension, we propose Positional Skip-wisE (PoSE) training that smartly simulates long inputs using a fixed context window. This is achieved by first dividing the original context window into several chunks, then designing distinct skipping bias terms to manipulate the position indices of each chunk. These bias terms and the lengths of each chunk are altered for every training example, allowing the model to adapt to all positions within target length. Experimental results show that PoSE greatly reduces memory and time overhead compared with Full-length fine-tuning, with minimal impact on performance. Leveraging this advantage, we have successfully extended the LLaMA model to 128k tokens using a 2k training context window. Furthermore, we empirically confirm that PoSE is compatible with all RoPE-based LLMs and position interpolation strategies. Notably, our method can potentially support infinite length, limited only by memory usage in inference. With ongoing progress for efficient inference, we believe PoSE can further scale the context window beyond 128k.

A Paradigm Shift in Machine Translation: Boosting Translation Performance of Large Language Models
Haoran Xu, Young Jin Kim, Amr Sharaf, Hany Hassan Awadalla
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in various NLP tasks. However, these advances have not been reflected in the translation task, especially those with moderate model sizes (i.e., 7B or 13B parameters), which still lag behind conventional supervised encoder-decoder translation models. Previous studies have attempted to improve the translation capabilities of these moderate LLMs, but their gains have been limited. In this study, we propose a novel fine-tuning approach for LLMs that is specifically designed for the translation task, eliminating the need for the abundant parallel data that traditional translation models usually depend on. Our approach consists of two fine-tuning stages: initial fine-tuning on monolingual data followed by subsequent fine-tuning on a small set of high-quality parallel data. We introduce the LLM developed through this strategy as Advanced Language Model-based trAnslator (ALMA). Based on LLaMA-2 as our underlying model, our results show that the model can achieve an average improvement of more than 12 BLEU and 12 COMET over its zero-shot performance across 10 translation directions from the WMT'21 (2 directions) and WMT'22 (8 directions) test datasets. The performance is significantly better than all prior work and even superior to the NLLB-54B model and GPT-3.5-text-davinci-003, with only 7B or 13B parameters. This method establishes the foundation for a novel training paradigm in machine translation.

Attention Satisfies: A Constraint-Satisfaction Lens on Factual Errors of Language Models
Mert Yuksekgonul, Varun Chandrasekaran, Erik Jones, Suriya Gunasekar, Ranjita Naik, Hamid Palangi, Ece Kamar, Besmira Nushi
We investigate the internal behavior of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) when they generate factually incorrect text. We propose modeling factual queries as Constraint Satisfaction Problems and use this framework to investigate how the model interacts internally with factual constraints. Specifically, we discover a strong positive relation between the model's attention to constraint tokens and the factual accuracy of its responses. In our curated suite of 11 datasets with over 40,000 prompts, we study the task of predicting factual errors with the Llama-2 family across all scales (7B, 13B, 70B). We propose SAT Probe, a method probing self-attention patterns, that can predict constraint satisfaction and factual errors, and allows early error identification. The approach and findings demonstrate how using the mechanistic understanding of factuality in LLMs can enhance reliability.

Sparse Backpropagation for MoE Training
Liyuan Liu, Jianfeng Gao, Weizhu Chen
One defining characteristic of Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) models is their capacity for conducting sparse computation via expert routing, leading to remarkable scalability. However, backpropagation, the cornerstone of deep learning, requires dense computation, thereby posting challenges in MoE gradient computations. Here, we introduce SparseMixer, a scalable gradient estimator that bridges the gap between backpropagation and sparse expert routing. Unlike typical MoE training which strategically neglects certain gradient terms for the sake of sparse computation and scalability, SparseMixer provides scalable gradient approximations for these terms, enabling reliable gradient estimation in MoE training. Grounded in a numerical ODE framework, SparseMixer harnesses the mid-point method, a second-order ODE solver, to deliver precise gradient approximations with negligible computational overhead. Applying SparseMixer to Switch Transformer on both pre-training and machine translation tasks, SparseMixer showcases considerable performance gain, accelerating training convergence up to 2 times.

Nugget 2D: Dynamic Contextual Compression for Scaling Decoder-only Language Models
Guanghui Qin, Corby Rosset, Ethan C. Chau, Nikhil Rao, Benjamin Van Durme
Standard Transformer-based language models (LMs) scale poorly to long contexts. We propose a solution based on dynamic contextual compression, which extends the Nugget approach of Qin & Van Durme (2023) from BERT-like frameworks to decoder-only LMs. Our method models history as compressed "nuggets" which are trained to allow for reconstruction, and it can be initialized with off-the-shelf models such as LLaMA. We demonstrate through experiments in language modeling, question answering, and summarization that Nugget2D retains capabilities in these tasks, while drastically reducing the overhead during decoding in terms of time and space. For example, in the experiments of autoencoding, Nugget2D can shrink context at a 20x compression ratio with a BLEU score of 98% for reconstruction, achieving nearly lossless encoding.

Mixture of Quantized Experts (MoQE): Complementary Effect of Low-bit Quantization and Robustness
Young Jin Kim, Raffy Fahim, Hany Hassan Awadalla
Large Mixture of Experts (MoE) models could achieve state-of-the-art quality on various language tasks, including machine translation task, thanks to the efficient model scaling capability with expert parallelism. However, it has brought a fundamental issue of larger memory consumption and increased memory bandwidth bottleneck at deployment time. In this paper, we propose Mixture of Quantized Experts (MoQE) which is a simple weight-only quantization method applying ultra low-bit down to 2-bit quantizations only to expert weights for mitigating the increased memory and latency issues of MoE models. We show that low-bit quantization together with the MoE architecture delivers a reliable model performance while reducing the memory size significantly even without any additional training in most cases. In particular, expert layers in MoE models are much more robust to the quantization than conventional feedforward networks (FFN) layers. In our comprehensive analysis, we show that MoE models with 2-bit expert weights can deliver better model performance than the dense model trained on the same dataset. As a result of low-bit quantization, we show the model size can be reduced by 79.6% of the original half precision floating point (fp16) MoE model. Combined with an optimized GPU runtime implementation, it also achieves 1.24X speed-up on A100 GPUs.

Augmented Embeddings for Custom Retrievals
Anirudh Khatry, Yasharth Bajpai, Priyanshu Gupta, Sumit Gulwani, Ashish Tiwari
Information retrieval involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and corpus elements are both natural language (NL) utterances (homogeneous) and the goal is to pick most relevant elements from the corpus in the Top-K, where K is large, such as 10, 25, 50 or even 100 (relaxed). Recently, retrieval is being used extensively in preparing prompts for large language models (LLMs) to enable LLMs to perform targeted tasks. These new applications of retrieval are often heterogeneous and strict -- the queries and the corpus contain different kinds of entities, such as NL and code, and there is a need for improving retrieval at Top-K for small values of K, such as K=1 or 3 or 5. Current dense retrieval techniques based on pretrained embeddings provide a general-purpose and powerful approach for retrieval, but they are oblivious to task-specific notions of similarity of heterogeneous artifacts. We introduce Adapted Dense Retrieval, a mechanism to transform embeddings to enable improved task-specific, heterogeneous and strict retrieval. Adapted Dense Retrieval works by learning a low-rank residual adaptation of the pretrained black-box embedding. We empirically validate our approach by showing improvements over the state-of-the-art general-purpose embeddings-based baseline.

Guiding Language Model Reasoning with Planning Tokens
Xinyi Wang, Lucas Caccia, Oleksiy Ostapenko, Xingdi Yuan, Alessandro Sordoni
Large language models (LLMs) have recently attracted considerable interest for their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, such as chain-of-thought reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches to enhance this ability rely heavily on data-driven methods, while neglecting the structural aspects of the model's reasoning capacity. We find that while LLMs can manage individual reasoning steps well, they struggle with maintaining consistency across an entire reasoning chain. To solve this, we introduce 'planning tokens' at the start of each reasoning step, serving as a guide for the model. These token embeddings are then fine-tuned along with the rest of the model parameters. Our approach requires a negligible increase in trainable parameters (just 0.001%) and can be applied through either full fine-tuning or a more parameter-efficient scheme. We demonstrate our method's effectiveness by applying it to three different LLMs, showing notable accuracy improvements across three math word problem datasets w.r.t. plain chain-of-thought fine-tuning baselines.

Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V
Jianwei Yang, Hao Zhang, Feng Li, Xueyan Zou, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao
We present Set-of-Mark (SoM), a new visual prompting method, to unleash the visual grounding abilities of large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V. As illustrated in Fig. 1 (right), we employ off-the-shelf interactive segmentation models, such as SEEM/SAM, to partition an image into regions at different levels of granularity, and overlay these regions with a set of marks e.g., alphanumerics, masks, boxes. Using the marked image as input, GPT-4V can answer the questions that require visual grounding. We perform a comprehensive empirical study to validate the effectiveness of SoM on a wide range of fine-grained vision and multimodal tasks. For example, our experiments show that GPT-4V with SoM in zero-shot setting outperforms the state-of-the-art fully-finetuned referring expression comprehension and segmentation model on RefCOCOg. Code for SoM prompting is made public at: this https URL.

CodeFusion: A Pre-trained Diffusion Model for Code Generation
Mukul Singh, José Cambronero, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Carina Negreanu, Gust Verbruggen
Imagine a developer who can only change their last line of code, how often would they have to start writing a function from scratch before it is correct? Auto-regressive models for code generation from natural language have a similar limitation: they do not easily allow reconsidering earlier tokens generated. We introduce CodeFusion, a pre-trained diffusion code generation model that addresses this limitation by iteratively denoising a complete program conditioned on the encoded natural language. We evaluate CodeFusion on the task of natural language to code generation for Bash, Python, and Microsoft Excel conditional formatting (CF) rules. Experiments show that CodeFusion (75M parameters) performs on par with state-of-the-art auto-regressive systems (350M-175B parameters) in top-1 accuracy and outperforms them in top-3 and top-5 accuracy due to its better balance in diversity versus quality.

LoRAShear: Efficient Large Language Model Structured Pruning and Knowledge Recovery
Tianyi Chen, Tianyu Ding, Badal Yadav, Ilya Zharkov, Luming Liang
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the landscape of artificial intelligence, while their enormous size presents significant challenges in terms of computational costs. We introduce LoRAShear, a novel efficient approach to structurally prune LLMs and recover knowledge. Given general LLMs, LoRAShear at first creates the dependency graphs over LoRA modules to discover minimally removal structures and analyze the knowledge distribution. It then proceeds progressive structured pruning on LoRA adaptors and enables inherent knowledge transfer to better preserve the information in the redundant structures. To recover the lost knowledge during pruning, LoRAShear meticulously studies and proposes a dynamic fine-tuning schemes with dynamic data adaptors to effectively narrow down the performance gap to the full models. Numerical results demonstrate that by only using one GPU within a couple of GPU days, LoRAShear effectively reduced footprint of LLMs by 20% with only 1.0% performance degradation and significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts. The source code will be available at this https URL.

FP8-LM: Training FP8 Large Language Models
Houwen Peng, Kan Wu, Yixuan Wei, Guoshuai Zhao, Yuxiang Yang, Ze Liu, Yifan Xiong, Ziyue Yang, Bolin Ni, Jingcheng Hu, Ruihang Li, Miaosen Zhang, Chen Li, Jia Ning, Ruizhe Wang, Zheng Zhang, Shuguang Liu, Joe Chau, Han Hu, Peng Cheng
In this paper, we explore FP8 low-bit data formats for efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Our key insight is that most variables, such as gradients and optimizer states, in LLM training can employ low-precision data formats without compromising model accuracy and requiring no changes to hyper-parameters. Specifically, we propose a new FP8 automatic mixed-precision framework for training LLMs. This framework offers three levels of FP8 utilization to streamline mixed-precision and distributed parallel training for LLMs. It gradually incorporates 8-bit gradients, optimizer states, and distributed learning in an incremental manner. Experiment results show that, during the training of GPT-175B model on H100 GPU platform, our FP8 mixed-precision training framework not only achieved a remarkable 39% reduction in real memory usage but also ran 75% faster than the widely adopted BF16 framework (i.e., Megatron-LM), surpassing the speed of Nvidia Transformer Engine by 37%. This largely reduces the training costs for large foundation models. Furthermore, our FP8 mixed-precision training methodology is generic. It can be seamlessly applied to other tasks such as LLM instruction tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback, offering savings in fine-tuning expenses. Our FP8 low-precision training framework is open-sourced at {this https URL}{this http URL}.

Orca 2: Teaching Small Language Models How to Reason
Arindam Mitra, Luciano Del Corro, Shweti Mahajan, Andres Codas, Clarisse Simoes, Sahaj Agarwal, Xuxi Chen, Anastasia Razdaibiedina, Erik Jones, Kriti Aggarwal, Hamid Palangi, Guoqing Zheng, Corby Rosset, Hamed Khanpour, Ahmed Awadallah
Orca 1 learns from rich signals, such as explanation traces, allowing it to outperform conventional instruction-tuned models on benchmarks like BigBench Hard and AGIEval. In Orca 2, we continue exploring how improved training signals can enhance smaller LMs' reasoning abilities. Research on training small LMs has often relied on imitation learning to replicate the output of more capable models. We contend that excessive emphasis on imitation may restrict the potential of smaller models. We seek to teach small LMs to employ different solution strategies for different tasks, potentially different from the one used by the larger model. For example, while larger models might provide a direct answer to a complex task, smaller models may not have the same capacity. In Orca 2, we teach the model various reasoning techniques (step-by-step, recall then generate, recall-reason-generate, direct answer, etc.). More crucially, we aim to help the model learn to determine the most effective solution strategy for each task. We evaluate Orca 2 using a comprehensive set of 15 diverse benchmarks (corresponding to approximately 100 tasks and over 36,000 unique prompts). Orca 2 significantly surpasses models of similar size and attains performance levels similar or better to those of models 5-10x larger, as assessed on complex tasks that test advanced reasoning abilities in zero-shot settings. make Orca 2 weights publicly available at this http URL to support research on the development, evaluation, and alignment of smaller LMs

ZeroQuant(4+2): Redefining LLMs Quantization with a New FP6-Centric Strategy for Diverse Generative Tasks
Xiaoxia Wu, Haojun Xia, Stephen Youn, Zhen Zheng, Shiyang Chen, Arash Bakhtiari, Michael Wyatt, Reza Yazdani Aminabadi, Yuxiong He, Olatunji Ruwase, Leon Song, Zhewei Yao
This study examines 4-bit quantization methods like GPTQ in large language models (LLMs), highlighting GPTQ's overfitting and limited enhancement in Zero-Shot tasks. While prior works merely focusing on zero-shot measurement, we extend task scope to more generative categories such as code generation and abstractive summarization, in which we found that INT4 quantization can significantly underperform. However, simply shifting to higher precision formats like FP6 has been particularly challenging, thus overlooked, due to poor performance caused by the lack of sophisticated integration and system acceleration strategies on current AI hardware. Our results show that FP6, even with a coarse-grain quantization scheme, performs robustly across various algorithms and tasks, demonstrating its superiority in accuracy and versatility. Notably, with the FP6 quantization, \codestar-15B model performs comparably to its FP16 counterpart in code generation, and for smaller models like the 406M it closely matches their baselines in summarization. Neither can be achieved by INT4. To better accommodate various AI hardware and achieve the best system performance, we propose a novel 4+2 design for FP6 to achieve similar latency to the state-of-the-art INT4 fine-grain quantization. With our design, FP6 can become a promising solution to the current 4-bit quantization methods used in LLMs.

The Truth is in There: Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction
Pratyusha Sharma, Jordan T. Ash, Dipendra Misra
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a fixture in modern machine learning. Correspondingly, significant resources are allocated towards research that aims to further advance this technology, typically resulting in models of increasing size that are trained on increasing amounts of data. This work, however, demonstrates the surprising result that it is often possible to significantly improve the performance of LLMs by selectively removing higher-order components of their weight matrices. This simple intervention, which we call LAyer-SElective Rank reduction (LASER), can be done on a model after training has completed, and requires no additional parameters or data. We show extensive experiments demonstrating the generality of this finding across language models and datasets, and provide in-depth analyses offering insights into both when LASER is effective and the mechanism by which it operates.

Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
John Schulman, Filip Wolski, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alec Radford, Oleg Klimov
We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent. Whereas standard policy gradient methods perform one gradient update per data sample, we propose a novel objective function that enables multiple epochs of minibatch updates. The new methods, which we call proximal policy optimization (PPO), have some of the benefits of trust region policy optimization (TRPO), but they are much simpler to implement, more general, and have better sample complexity (empirically). Our experiments test PPO on a collection of benchmark tasks, including simulated robotic locomotion and Atari game playing, and we show that PPO outperforms other online policy gradient methods, and overall strikes a favorable balance between sample complexity, simplicity, and wall-time.

Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers
Rewon Child, Scott Gray, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever
Transformers are powerful sequence models, but require time and memory that grows quadratically with the sequence length. In this paper we introduce sparse factorizations of the attention matrix which reduce this to O(nn−−√). We also introduce a) a variation on architecture and initialization to train deeper networks, b) the recomputation of attention matrices to save memory, and c) fast attention kernels for training. We call networks with these changes Sparse Transformers, and show they can model sequences tens of thousands of timesteps long using hundreds of layers. We use the same architecture to model images, audio, and text from raw bytes, setting a new state of the art for density modeling of Enwik8, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet-64. We generate unconditional samples that demonstrate global coherence and great diversity, and show it is possible in principle to use self-attention to model sequences of length one million or more.

Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Henighan, Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Chess, Rewon Child, Scott Gray, Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Dario Amodei
We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are significantly more sample-efficient, such that optimally compute-efficient training involves training very large models on a relatively modest amount of data and stopping significantly before convergence.

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel M. Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Christopher Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei
Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains on many NLP tasks and benchmarks by pre-training on a large corpus of text followed by fine-tuning on a specific task. While typically task-agnostic in architecture, this method still requires task-specific fine-tuning datasets of thousands or tens of thousands of examples. By contrast, humans can generally perform a new language task from only a few examples or from simple instructions - something which current NLP systems still largely struggle to do. Here we show that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieves strong performance on many NLP datasets, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, as well as several tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation, such as unscrambling words, using a novel word in a sentence, or performing 3-digit arithmetic. At the same time, we also identify some datasets where GPT-3's few-shot learning still struggles, as well as some datasets where GPT-3 faces methodological issues related to training on large web corpora. Finally, we find that GPT-3 can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans. We discuss broader societal impacts of this finding and of GPT-3 in general.

Grokking: Generalization Beyond Overfitting on Small Algorithmic Datasets
Alethea Power, Yuri Burda, Harri Edwards, Igor Babuschkin, Vedant Misra
In this paper we propose to study generalization of neural networks on small algorithmically generated datasets. In this setting, questions about data efficiency, memorization, generalization, and speed of learning can be studied in great detail. In some situations we show that neural networks learn through a process of "grokking" a pattern in the data, improving generalization performance from random chance level to perfect generalization, and that this improvement in generalization can happen well past the point of overfitting. We also study generalization as a function of dataset size and find that smaller datasets require increasing amounts of optimization for generalization. We argue that these datasets provide a fertile ground for studying a poorly understood aspect of deep learning: generalization of overparametrized neural networks beyond memorization of the finite training dataset.


Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll L. Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, John Schulman, Jacob Hilton, Fraser Kelton, Luke Miller, Maddie Simens, Amanda Askell, Peter Welinder, Paul Christiano, Jan Leike, Ryan Lowe
Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these models are not aligned with their users. In this paper, we show an avenue for aligning language models with user intent on a wide range of tasks by fine-tuning with human feedback. Starting with a set of labeler-written prompts and prompts submitted through the OpenAI API, we collect a dataset of labeler demonstrations of the desired model behavior, which we use to fine-tune GPT-3 using supervised learning. We then collect a dataset of rankings of model outputs, which we use to further fine-tune this supervised model using reinforcement learning from human feedback. We call the resulting models InstructGPT. In human evaluations on our prompt distribution, outputs from the 1.3B parameter InstructGPT model are preferred to outputs from the 175B GPT-3, despite having 100x fewer parameters. Moreover, InstructGPT models show improvements in truthfulness and reductions in toxic output generation while having minimal performance regressions on public NLP datasets. Even though InstructGPT still makes simple mistakes, our results show that fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.

Efficient Training of Language Models to Fill in the Middle
Mohammad Bavarian, Heewoo Jun, Nikolas Tezak, John Schulman, Christine McLeavey, Jerry Tworek, Mark Chen
We show that autoregressive language models can learn to infill text after we apply a straightforward transformation to the dataset, which simply moves a span of text from the middle of a document to its end. While this data augmentation has garnered much interest in recent years, we provide extensive evidence that training models with a large fraction of data transformed in this way does not harm the original left-to-right generative capability, as measured by perplexity and sampling evaluations across a wide range of scales. Given the usefulness, simplicity, and efficiency of training models to fill-in-the-middle (FIM), we suggest that future autoregressive language models be trained with FIM by default. To this end, we run a series of ablations on key hyperparameters, such as the data transformation frequency, the structure of the transformation, and the method of selecting the infill span. We use these ablations to prescribe strong default settings and best practices to train FIM models. We have released our best infilling model trained with best practices in our API, and release our infilling benchmarks to aid future research.

GPT-4 Technical Report
OpenAI: Josh Achiam, Steven Adler, Sandhini Agarwal, Lama Ahmad, Ilge Akkaya, Florencia Leoni Aleman, Diogo Almeida, Janko Altenschmidt, Sam Altman, Shyamal Anadkat, Red Avila, Igor Babuschkin, Suchir Balaji, Valerie Balcom, Paul Baltescu, Haiming Bao, Mo Bavarian, Jeff Belgum, Irwan Bello, Jake Berdine, Gabriel Bernadett-Shapiro, Christopher Berner, Lenny Bogdonoff, Oleg Boiko, Madelaine Boyd, Anna-Luisa Brakman, Greg Brockman, Tim Brooks, Miles Brundage, Kevin Button, Trevor Cai, Rosie Campbell, Andrew Cann, Brittany Carey, Chelsea Carlson, Rory Carmichael, Brooke Chan, Che Chang, Fotis Chantzis, Derek Chen, Sully Chen, Ruby Chen, Jason Chen, Mark Chen, Ben Chess, Chester Cho, Casey Chu, Hyung Won Chung, Dave Cummings, Jeremiah Currier, Yunxing Dai, Cory Decareaux, Thomas Degry, Noah Deutsch, Damien Deville, Arka Dhar, David Dohan, Steve Dowling, Sheila Dunning, Adrien Ecoffet, Atty Eleti, Tyna Eloundou, David Farhi, Liam Fedus, Niko Felix, Simón Posada Fishman, Juston Forte, Isabella Fulford, Leo Gao, Elie Georges, Christian Gibson, Vik Goel, Tarun Gogineni, Gabriel Goh, Rapha Gontijo-Lopes, Jonathan Gordon, Morgan Grafstein, Scott Gray, Ryan Greene, Joshua Gross, Shixiang Shane Gu, Yufei Guo, Chris Hallacy, Jesse Han, Jeff Harris, Yuchen He, Mike Heaton, Johannes Heidecke, Chris Hesse, Alan Hickey, Wade Hickey, Peter Hoeschele, Brandon Houghton, Kenny Hsu, Shengli Hu, Xin Hu, Joost Huizinga, Shantanu Jain, Shawn Jain et al. (181 additional authors not shown)
We report the development of GPT-4, a large-scale, multimodal model which can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs. While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. GPT-4 is a Transformer-based model pre-trained to predict the next token in a document. The post-training alignment process results in improved performance on measures of factuality and adherence to desired behavior. A core component of this project was developing infrastructure and optimization methods that behave predictably across a wide range of scales. This allowed us to accurately predict some aspects of GPT-4's performance based on models trained with no more than 1/1,000th the compute of GPT-4.

Consistency Models
Yang Song, Prafulla Dhariwal, Mark Chen, Ilya Sutskever
Diffusion models have significantly advanced the fields of image, audio, and video generation, but they depend on an iterative sampling process that causes slow generation. To overcome this limitation, we propose consistency models, a new family of models that generate high quality samples by directly mapping noise to data. They support fast one-step generation by design, while still allowing multistep sampling to trade compute for sample quality. They also support zero-shot data editing, such as image inpainting, colorization, and super-resolution, without requiring explicit training on these tasks. Consistency models can be trained either by distilling pre-trained diffusion models, or as standalone generative models altogether. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that they outperform existing distillation techniques for diffusion models in one- and few-step sampling, achieving the new state-of-the-art FID of 3.55 on CIFAR-10 and 6.20 on ImageNet 64x64 for one-step generation. When trained in isolation, consistency models become a new family of generative models that can outperform existing one-step, non-adversarial generative models on standard benchmarks such as CIFAR-10, ImageNet 64x64 and LSUN 256x256.

Let's Verify Step by Step
Hunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yura Burda, Harri Edwards, Bowen Baker, Teddy Lee, Jan Leike, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, Karl Cobbe
In recent years, large language models have greatly improved in their ability to perform complex multi-step reasoning. However, even state-of-the-art models still regularly produce logical mistakes. To train more reliable models, we can turn either to outcome supervision, which provides feedback for a final result, or process supervision, which provides feedback for each intermediate reasoning step. Given the importance of training reliable models, and given the high cost of human feedback, it is important to carefully compare the both methods. Recent work has already begun this comparison, but many questions still remain. We conduct our own investigation, finding that process supervision significantly outperforms outcome supervision for training models to solve problems from the challenging MATH dataset. Our process-supervised model solves 78% of problems from a representative subset of the MATH test set. Additionally, we show that active learning significantly improves the efficacy of process supervision. To support related research, we also release PRM800K, the complete dataset of 800,000 step-level human feedback labels used to train our best reward model.

Improving Image Generation with Better Captions
We show that prompt following abilities of text-to-image models can be substantially improved by training on highly descriptive generated image captions. Existing text-to-image models struggle to follow detailed image descriptions and often ignore words or confuse the meaning of prompts. We hypothesize that this issue stems from noisy and inaccurate image captions in the training dataset. We address this by training a bespoke image captioner and use it to recaption the training dataset. We then train several text-to-image models and find that training on these synthetic captions reliably improves prompt following ability. Finally, we use these findings to build DALL-E 3: a new text-to-image generation system, and benchmark its performance on an evaluation designed to measure prompt following, coherence, and aesthetics, finding that it compares favorably to competitors. We publish samples and code for these evaluations so that future research can continue optimizing this important aspect of text-to-image systems.

Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces
Albert Gu, Karan Goel, Christopher Ré
A central goal of sequence modeling is designing a single principled model that can address sequence data across a range of modalities and tasks, particularly on long-range dependencies. Although conventional models including RNNs, CNNs, and Transformers have specialized variants for capturing long dependencies, they still struggle to scale to very long sequences of 10000 or more steps. A promising recent approach proposed modeling sequences by simulating the fundamental state space model (SSM) \( x'(t) = Ax(t) + Bu(t), y(t) = Cx(t) + Du(t) \), and showed that for appropriate choices of the state matrix \( A \), this system could handle long-range dependencies mathematically and empirically. However, this method has prohibitive computation and memory requirements, rendering it infeasible as a general sequence modeling solution. We propose the Structured State Space sequence model (S4) based on a new parameterization for the SSM, and show that it can be computed much more efficiently than prior approaches while preserving their theoretical strengths. Our technique involves conditioning \( A \) with a low-rank correction, allowing it to be diagonalized stably and reducing the SSM to the well-studied computation of a Cauchy kernel. S4 achieves strong empirical results across a diverse range of established benchmarks, including (i) 91\% accuracy on sequential CIFAR-10 with no data augmentation or auxiliary losses, on par with a larger 2-D ResNet, (ii) substantially closing the gap to Transformers on image and language modeling tasks, while performing generation 60× faster (iii) SoTA on every task from the Long Range Arena benchmark, including solving the challenging Path-X task of length 16k that all prior work fails on, while being as efficient as all competitors.

Monarch: Expressive Structured Matrices for Efficient and Accurate Training
Tri Dao, Beidi Chen, Nimit Sohoni, Arjun Desai, Michael Poli, Jessica Grogan, Alexander Liu, Aniruddh Rao, Atri Rudra, Christopher Ré
Large neural networks excel in many domains, but they are expensive to train and fine-tune. A popular approach to reduce their compute or memory requirements is to replace dense weight matrices with structured ones (e.g., sparse, low-rank, Fourier transform). These methods have not seen widespread adoption (1) in end-to-end training due to unfavorable efficiency--quality tradeoffs, and (2) in dense-to-sparse fine-tuning due to lack of tractable algorithms to approximate a given dense weight matrix. To address these issues, we propose a class of matrices (Monarch) that is hardware-efficient (they are parameterized as products of two block-diagonal matrices for better hardware utilization) and expressive (they can represent many commonly used transforms). Surprisingly, the problem of approximating a dense weight matrix with a Monarch matrix, though nonconvex, has an analytical optimal solution. These properties of Monarch matrices unlock new ways to train and fine-tune sparse and dense models. We empirically validate that Monarch can achieve favorable accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs in several end-to-end sparse training applications: speeding up ViT and GPT-2 training on ImageNet classification and Wikitext-103 language modeling by 2x with comparable model quality, and reducing the error on PDE solving and MRI reconstruction tasks by 40%. In sparse-to-dense training, with a simple technique called "reverse sparsification," Monarch matrices serve as a useful intermediate representation to speed up GPT-2 pretraining on OpenWebText by 2x without quality drop. The same technique brings 23% faster BERT pretraining than even the very optimized implementation from Nvidia that set the MLPerf 1.1 record. In dense-to-sparse fine-tuning, as a proof-of-concept, our Monarch approximation algorithm speeds up BERT fine-tuning on GLUE by 1.7x with comparable accuracy.

FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness
Tri Dao, Daniel Y. Fu, Stefano Ermon, Atri Rudra, Christopher Ré
Transformers are slow and memory-hungry on long sequences, since the time and memory complexity of self-attention are quadratic in sequence length. Approximate attention methods have attempted to address this problem by trading off model quality to reduce the compute complexity, but often do not achieve wall-clock speedup. We argue that a missing principle is making attention algorithms IO-aware -- accounting for reads and writes between levels of GPU memory. We propose FlashAttention, an IO-aware exact attention algorithm that uses tiling to reduce the number of memory reads/writes between GPU high bandwidth memory (HBM) and GPU on-chip SRAM. We analyze the IO complexity of FlashAttention, showing that it requires fewer HBM accesses than standard attention, and is optimal for a range of SRAM sizes. We also extend FlashAttention to block-sparse attention, yielding an approximate attention algorithm that is faster than any existing approximate attention method. FlashAttention trains Transformers faster than existing baselines: 15% end-to-end wall-clock speedup on BERT-large (seq. length 512) compared to the MLPerf 1.1 training speed record, 3× speedup on GPT-2 (seq. length 1K), and 2.4× speedup on long-range arena (seq. length 1K-4K). FlashAttention and block-sparse FlashAttention enable longer context in Transformers, yielding higher quality models (0.7 better perplexity on GPT-2 and 6.4 points of lift on long-document classification) and entirely new capabilities: the first Transformers to achieve better-than-chance performance on the Path-X challenge (seq. length 16K, 61.4% accuracy) and Path-256 (seq. length 64K, 63.1% accuracy).

Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models
Daniel Y. Fu, Tri Dao, Khaled K. Saab, Armin W. Thomas, Atri Rudra, Christopher Ré
State space models (SSMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art sequence modeling performance in some modalities, but underperform attention in language modeling. Moreover, despite scaling nearly linearly in sequence length instead of quadratically, SSMs are still slower than Transformers due to poor hardware utilization. In this paper, we make progress on understanding the expressivity gap between SSMs and attention in language modeling, and on reducing the hardware barrier between SSMs and attention. First, we use synthetic language modeling tasks to understand the gap between SSMs and attention. We find that existing SSMs struggle with two capabilities: recalling earlier tokens in the sequence and comparing tokens across the sequence. To understand the impact on language modeling, we propose a new SSM layer, H3, that is explicitly designed for these abilities. H3 matches attention on the synthetic languages and comes within 0.4 PPL of Transformers on OpenWebText. Furthermore, a hybrid 125M-parameter H3-attention model that retains two attention layers surprisingly outperforms Transformers on OpenWebText by 1.0 PPL. Next, to improve the efficiency of training SSMs on modern hardware, we propose FlashConv. FlashConv uses a fused block FFT algorithm to improve efficiency on sequences up to 8K, and introduces a novel state passing algorithm that exploits the recurrent properties of SSMs to scale to longer sequences. FlashConv yields 2× speedup on the long-range arena benchmark and allows hybrid language models to generate text 2.4× faster than Transformers. Using FlashConv, we scale hybrid H3-attention language models up to 2.7B parameters on the Pile and find promising initial results, achieving lower perplexity than Transformers and outperforming Transformers in zero- and few-shot learning on a majority of tasks in the SuperGLUE benchmark.

Simple Hardware-Efficient Long Convolutions for Sequence Modeling
Daniel Y. Fu, Elliot L. Epstein, Eric Nguyen, Armin W. Thomas, Michael Zhang, Tri Dao, Atri Rudra, Christopher Ré
State space models (SSMs) have high performance on long sequence modeling but require sophisticated initialization techniques and specialized implementations for high quality and runtime performance. We study whether a simple alternative can match SSMs in performance and efficiency: directly learning long convolutions over the sequence. We find that a key requirement to achieving high performance is keeping the convolution kernels smooth. We find that simple interventions--such as squashing the kernel weights--result in smooth kernels and recover SSM performance on a range of tasks including the long range arena, image classification, language modeling, and brain data modeling. Next, we develop FlashButterfly, an IO-aware algorithm to improve the runtime performance of long convolutions. FlashButterfly appeals to classic Butterfly decompositions of the convolution to reduce GPU memory IO and increase FLOP utilization. FlashButterfly speeds up convolutions by 2.2×, and allows us to train on Path256, a challenging task with sequence length 64K, where we set state-of-the-art by 29.1 points while training 7.2× faster than prior work. Lastly, we introduce an extension to FlashButterfly that learns the coefficients of the Butterfly decomposition, increasing expressivity without increasing runtime. Using this extension, we outperform a Transformer on WikiText103 by 0.2 PPL with 30% fewer parameters.

Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli, Stefano Massaroli, Eric Nguyen, Daniel Y. Fu, Tri Dao, Stephen Baccus, Yoshua Bengio, Stefano Ermon, Christopher Ré
Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.

TART: A plug-and-play Transformer module for task-agnostic reasoning
Kush Bhatia, Avanika Narayan, Christopher De Sa, Christopher Ré
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit in-context learning abilities which enable the same model to perform several tasks without any task-specific training. In contrast, traditional adaptation approaches, such as fine-tuning, modify the underlying models for each specific task. In-context learning, however, consistently underperforms task-specific tuning approaches even when presented with the same examples. While most existing approaches (e.g., prompt engineering) focus on the LLM's learned representations to patch this performance gap, our analysis actually reveal that LLM representations contain sufficient information to make good predictions. As such, we focus on the LLM's reasoning abilities and demonstrate that this performance gap exists due to their inability to perform simple probabilistic reasoning tasks. This raises an intriguing question: Are LLMs actually capable of learning how to reason in a task-agnostic manner? We answer this in the affirmative and propose TART which generically improves an LLM's reasoning abilities using a synthetically trained Transformer-based reasoning module. TART trains this reasoning module in a task-agnostic manner using only synthetic logistic regression tasks and composes it with an arbitrary real-world pre-trained model without any additional training. With a single inference module, TART improves performance across different model families (GPT-Neo, Pythia, BLOOM), model sizes (100M - 6B), tasks (14 NLP binary classification tasks), and even across different modalities (audio and vision). Additionally, on the RAFT Benchmark, TART improves GPT-Neo (125M)'s performance such that it outperforms BLOOM (176B), and is within 4% of GPT-3 (175B). Our code and models are available at this https URL .

FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning
Scaling Transformers to longer sequence lengths has been a major problem in the last several years, promising to improve performance in language modeling and high-resolution image understanding, as well as to unlock new applications in code, audio, and video generation. The attention layer is the main bottleneck in scaling to longer sequences, as its runtime and memory increase quadratically in the sequence length. FlashAttention [5] exploits the asymmetric GPU memory hierarchy to bring significant memory saving (linear instead of quadratic) and runtime speedup (2-4× compared to optimized baselines), with no approximation. However, FlashAttention is still not nearly as fast as optimized matrix-multiply (GEMM) operations, reaching only 25-40% of the theoretical maximum FLOPs/s. We observe that the inefficiency is due to suboptimal work partitioning between different thread blocks and warps on the GPU, causing either low-occupancy or unnecessary shared memory reads/writes. We propose FlashAttention-2, with better work partitioning to address these issues. In particular, we (1) tweak the algorithm to reduce the number of non-matmul FLOPs (2) parallelize the attention computation, even for a single head, across different thread blocks to increase occupancy, and (3) within each thread block, distribute the work between warps to reduce communication through shared memory. These yield around 2× speedup compared to FlashAttention, reaching 50-73% of the theoretical maximum FLOPs/s on A100 and getting close to the efficiency of GEMM operations. We empirically validate that when used end-to-end to train GPT-style models, FlashAttention-2 reaches training speed of up to 225 TFLOPs/s per A100 GPU (72% model FLOPs utilization).1

FlashFFTConv: Efficient Convolutions for Long Sequences with Tensor Cores
Daniel Y. Fu, Hermann Kumbong, Eric Nguyen, Christopher Ré
Convolution models with long filters have demonstrated state-of-the-art reasoning abilities in many long-sequence tasks but lag behind the most optimized Transformers in wall-clock time. A major bottleneck is the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)--which allows long convolutions to run in O(NlogN) time in sequence length N but has poor hardware utilization. In this paper, we study how to optimize the FFT convolution. We find two key bottlenecks: the FFT does not effectively use specialized matrix multiply units, and it incurs expensive I/O between layers of the memory hierarchy. In response, we propose FlashFFTConv. FlashFFTConv uses a matrix decomposition that computes the FFT using matrix multiply units and enables kernel fusion for long sequences, reducing I/O. We also present two sparse convolution algorithms--1) partial convolutions and 2) frequency-sparse convolutions--which can be implemented simply by skipping blocks in the matrix decomposition, enabling further opportunities for memory and compute savings. FlashFFTConv speeds up exact FFT convolutions by up to 7.93× over PyTorch and achieves up to 4.4× speedup end-to-end. Given the same compute budget, FlashFFTConv allows Hyena-GPT-s to achieve 2.3 points better perplexity on the PILE and M2-BERT-base to achieve 3.3 points higher GLUE score--matching models with twice the parameter count. FlashFFTConv also achieves 96.1% accuracy on Path-512, a high-resolution vision task where no model had previously achieved better than 50%. Furthermore, partial convolutions enable longer-sequence models--yielding the first DNA model that can process the longest human genes (2.3M base pairs)--and frequency-sparse convolutions speed up pretrained models while maintaining or improving model quality.

GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model
Aohan Zeng, Xiao Liu, Zhengxiao Du, Zihan Wang, Hanyu Lai, Ming Ding, Zhuoyi Yang, Yifan Xu, Wendi Zheng, Xiao Xia, Weng Lam Tam, Zixuan Ma, Yufei Xue, Jidong Zhai, Wenguang Chen, Peng Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
We introduce GLM-130B, a bilingual (English and Chinese) pre-trained language model with 130 billion parameters. It is an attempt to open-source a 100B-scale model at least as good as GPT-3 (davinci) and unveil how models of such a scale can be successfully pre-trained. Over the course of this effort, we face numerous unexpected technical and engineering challenges, particularly on loss spikes and divergence. In this paper, we introduce the training process of GLM-130B including its design choices, training strategies for both efficiency and stability, and engineering efforts. The resultant GLM-130B model offers significant outperformance over GPT-3 175B (davinci) on a wide range of popular English benchmarks while the performance advantage is not observed in OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B. It also consistently and significantly outperforms ERNIE TITAN 3.0 260B -- the largest Chinese language model -- across related benchmarks. Finally, we leverage a unique scaling property of GLM-130B to reach INT4 quantization without post training, with almost no performance loss, making it the first among 100B-scale models and more importantly, allowing its effective inference on 4×RTX 3090 (24G) or 8×RTX 2080 Ti (11G) GPUs, the most affordable GPUs required for using 100B-scale models. The GLM-130B model weights are publicly accessible and its code, training logs, related toolkit, and lessons learned are open-sourced at \url{this https URL}.


CodeGeeX: A Pre-Trained Model for Code Generation with Multilingual Evaluations on HumanEval-X
Qinkai Zheng, Xiao Xia, Xu Zou, Yuxiao Dong, Shan Wang, Yufei Xue, Zihan Wang, Lei Shen, Andi Wang, Yang Li, Teng Su, Zhilin Yang, Jie Tang
Large pre-trained code generation models, such as OpenAI Codex, can generate syntax- and function-correct code, making the coding of programmers more productive and our pursuit of artificial general intelligence closer. In this paper, we introduce CodeGeeX, a multilingual model with 13 billion parameters for code generation. CodeGeeX is pre-trained on 850 billion tokens of 23 programming languages as of June 2022. Our extensive experiments suggest that CodeGeeX outperforms multilingual code models of similar scale for both the tasks of code generation and translation on HumanEval-X. Building upon HumanEval (Python only), we develop the HumanEval-X benchmark for evaluating multilingual models by hand-writing the solutions in C++, Java, JavaScript, and Go. In addition, we build CodeGeeX-based extensions on Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Cloud Studio, generating 4.7 billion tokens for tens of thousands of active users per week. Our user study demonstrates that CodeGeeX can help to increase coding efficiency for 83.4% of its users. Finally, CodeGeeX is publicly accessible and in Sep. 2022, we open-sourced its code, model weights (the version of 850B tokens), API, extensions, and HumanEval-X at this https URL.

DoctorGLM: Fine-tuning your Chinese Doctor is not a Herculean Task
Honglin Xiong, Sheng Wang, Yitao Zhu, Zihao Zhao, Yuxiao Liu, Linlin Huang, Qian Wang, Dinggang Shen
The recent progress of large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and GPT-4, in comprehending and responding to human instructions has been remarkable. Nevertheless, these models typically perform better in English and have not been explicitly trained for the medical domain, resulting in suboptimal precision in diagnoses, drug recommendations, and other medical advice. Additionally, training and deploying a dialogue model is still believed to be impossible for hospitals, hindering the promotion of LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we have collected databases of medical dialogues in Chinese with ChatGPT's help and adopted several techniques to train an easy-deploy LLM. Remarkably, we were able to fine-tune the ChatGLM-6B on a single A100 80G in 13 hours, which means having a healthcare-purpose LLM can be very affordable. DoctorGLM is currently an early-stage engineering attempt and contain various mistakes. We are sharing it with the broader community to invite feedback and suggestions to improve its healthcare-focused capabilities: this https URL.

WebGLM: Towards An Efficient Web-Enhanced Question Answering System with Human Preferences
Xiao Liu, Hanyu Lai, Hao Yu, Yifan Xu, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Peng Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
We present WebGLM, a web-enhanced question-answering system based on the General Language Model (GLM). Its goal is to augment a pre-trained large language model (LLM) with web search and retrieval capabilities while being efficient for real-world deployments. To achieve this, we develop WebGLM with strategies for the LLM-augmented retriever, bootstrapped generator, and human preference-aware scorer. Specifically, we identify and address the limitations of WebGPT (OpenAI), through which WebGLM is enabled with accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness advantages. In addition, we propose systematic criteria for evaluating web-enhanced QA systems. We conduct multi-dimensional human evaluation and quantitative ablation studies, which suggest the outperformance of the proposed WebGLM designs over existing systems. WebGLM with the 10-billion-parameter GLM (10B) is shown to perform better than the similar-sized WebGPT (13B) and even comparably to WebGPT (175B) in human evaluation. The code, demo, and data are at \url{this https URL}.

GPT Can Solve Mathematical Problems Without a Calculator
Zhen Yang, Ming Ding, Qingsong Lv, Zhihuan Jiang, Zehai He, Yuyi Guo, Jinfeng Bai, Jie Tang
Previous studies have typically assumed that large language models are unable to accurately perform arithmetic operations, particularly multiplication of >8 digits, and operations involving decimals and fractions, without the use of calculator tools. This paper aims to challenge this misconception. With sufficient training data, a 2 billion-parameter language model can accurately perform multi-digit arithmetic operations with almost 100% accuracy without data leakage, significantly surpassing GPT-4 (whose multi-digit multiplication accuracy is only 4.3%). We also demonstrate that our MathGLM, fine-tuned from GLM-10B on a dataset with additional multi-step arithmetic operations and math problems described in text, achieves similar performance to GPT-4 on a 5,000-samples Chinese math problem test set. Our code and data are public at this https URL.

AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMs
Aohan Zeng, Mingdao Liu, Rui Lu, Bowen Wang, Xiao Liu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
Open large language models (LLMs) with great performance in various tasks have significantly advanced the development of LLMs. However, they are far inferior to commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 when acting as agents to tackle complex tasks in the real world. These agent tasks employ LLMs as the central controller responsible for planning, memorization, and tool utilization, necessitating both fine-grained prompting methods and robust LLMs to achieve satisfactory performance. Though many prompting methods have been proposed to complete particular agent tasks, there is lack of research focusing on improving the agent capabilities of LLMs themselves without compromising their general abilities. In this work, we present AgentTuning, a simple and general method to enhance the agent abilities of LLMs while maintaining their general LLM capabilities. We construct AgentInstruct, a lightweight instruction-tuning dataset containing high-quality interaction trajectories. We employ a hybrid instruction-tuning strategy by combining AgentInstruct with open-source instructions from general domains. AgentTuning is used to instruction-tune the Llama 2 series, resulting in AgentLM. Our evaluations show that AgentTuning enables LLMs' agent capabilities without compromising general abilities. The AgentLM-70B is comparable to GPT-3.5-turbo on unseen agent tasks, demonstrating generalized agent capabilities. We open source the AgentInstruct and AgentLM-7B, 13B, and 70B models at this https URL, serving open and powerful alternatives to commercial LLMs for agent tasks.

CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models
Weihan Wang, Qingsong Lv, Wenmeng Yu, Wenyi Hong, Ji Qi, Yan Wang, Junhui Ji, Zhuoyi Yang, Lei Zhao, Xixuan Song, Jiazheng Xu, Bin Xu, Juanzi Li, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding, Jie Tang
We introduce CogVLM, a powerful open-source visual language foundation model. Different from the popular shallow alignment method which maps image features into the input space of language model, CogVLM bridges the gap between the frozen pretrained language model and image encoder by a trainable visual expert module in the attention and FFN layers. As a result, CogVLM enables deep fusion of vision language features without sacrificing any performance on NLP tasks. CogVLM-17B achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 classic cross-modal benchmarks, including NoCaps, Flicker30k captioning, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, Visual7W, GQA, ScienceQA, VizWiz VQA and TDIUC, and ranks the 2nd on VQAv2, OKVQA, TextVQA, COCO captioning, etc., surpassing or matching PaLI-X 55B. Codes and checkpoints are available at this https URL.

CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents
Wenyi Hong, Weihan Wang, Qingsong Lv, Jiazheng Xu, Wenmeng Yu, Junhui Ji, Yan Wang, Zihan Wang, Yuxuan Zhang, Juanzi Li, Bin Xu, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding, Jie Tang
People are spending an enormous amount of time on digital devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs), e.g., computer or smartphone screens. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can assist people in tasks like writing emails, but struggle to understand and interact with GUIs, thus limiting their potential to increase automation levels. In this paper, we introduce CogAgent, an 18-billion-parameter visual language model (VLM) specializing in GUI understanding and navigation. By utilizing both low-resolution and high-resolution image encoders, CogAgent supports input at a resolution of 1120*1120, enabling it to recognize tiny page elements and text. As a generalist visual language model, CogAgent achieves the state of the art on five text-rich and four general VQA benchmarks, including VQAv2, OK-VQA, Text-VQA, ST-VQA, ChartQA, infoVQA, DocVQA, MM-Vet, and POPE. CogAgent, using only screenshots as input, outperforms LLM-based methods that consume extracted HTML text on both PC and Android GUI navigation tasks -- Mind2Web and AITW, advancing the state of the art. The model and codes are available at this https URL .

CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis
Erik Nijkamp, Bo Pang, Hiroaki Hayashi, Lifu Tu, Huan Wang, Yingbo Zhou, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
Program synthesis strives to generate a computer program as a solution to a given problem specification, expressed with input-output examples or natural language descriptions. The prevalence of large language models advances the state-of-the-art for program synthesis, though limited training resources and data impede open access to such models. To democratize this, we train and release a family of large language models up to 16.1B parameters, called CODEGEN, on natural language and programming language data, and open source the training library JAXFORMER. We show the utility of the trained model by demonstrating that it is competitive with the previous state-of-the-art on zero-shot Python code generation on HumanEval. We further investigate the multi-step paradigm for program synthesis, where a single program is factorized into multiple prompts specifying subproblems. To this end, we construct an open benchmark, Multi-Turn Programming Benchmark (MTPB), consisting of 115 diverse problem sets that are factorized into multi-turn prompts. Our analysis on MTPB shows that the same intent provided to CODEGEN in multi-turn fashion significantly improves program synthesis over that provided as a single turn. We make the training library JAXFORMER and model checkpoints available as open source contribution: this https URL.

GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model
Sid Black, Stella Biderman, Eric Hallahan, Quentin Anthony, Leo Gao, Laurence Golding, Horace He, Connor Leahy, Kyle McDonell, Jason Phang, Michael Pieler, USVSN Sai Prashanth, Shivanshu Purohit, Laria Reynolds, Jonathan Tow, Ben Wang, Samuel Weinbach
We introduce GPT-NeoX-20B, a 20 billion parameter autoregressive language model trained on the Pile, whose weights will be made freely and openly available to the public through a permissive license. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest dense autoregressive model that has publicly available weights at the time of submission. In this work, we describe \model{}'s architecture and training and evaluate its performance on a range of language-understanding, mathematics, and knowledge-based tasks. We find that GPT-NeoX-20B is a particularly powerful few-shot reasoner and gains far more in performance when evaluated five-shot than similarly sized GPT-3 and FairSeq models. We open-source the training and evaluation code, as well as the model weights, at this https URL.

Pythia: A Customizable Hardware Prefetching Framework Using Online Reinforcement Learning
Rahul Bera, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Anant V. Nori, Taha Shahroodi, Sreenivas Subramoney, Onur Mutlu
Past research has proposed numerous hardware prefetching techniques, most of which rely on exploiting one specific type of program context information (e.g., program counter, cacheline address) to predict future memory accesses. These techniques either completely neglect a prefetcher's undesirable effects (e.g., memory bandwidth usage) on the overall system, or incorporate system-level feedback as an afterthought to a system-unaware prefetch algorithm. We show that prior prefetchers often lose their performance benefit over a wide range of workloads and system configurations due to their inherent inability to take multiple different types of program context and system-level feedback information into account while prefetching. In this paper, we make a case for designing a holistic prefetch algorithm that learns to prefetch using multiple different types of program context and system-level feedback information inherent to its design.
To this end, we propose Pythia, which formulates the prefetcher as a reinforcement learning agent. For every demand request, Pythia observes multiple different types of program context information to make a prefetch decision. For every prefetch decision, Pythia receives a numerical reward that evaluates prefetch quality under the current memory bandwidth usage. Pythia uses this reward to reinforce the correlation between program context information and prefetch decision to generate highly accurate, timely, and system-aware prefetch requests in the future. Our extensive evaluations using simulation and hardware synthesis show that Pythia outperforms multiple state-of-the-art prefetchers over a wide range of workloads and system configurations, while incurring only 1.03% area overhead over a desktop-class processor and no software changes in workloads. The source code of Pythia can be freely downloaded from this https URL.

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model
BigScience Workshop: Teven Le Scao, Angela Fan, Christopher Akiki, Ellie Pavlick, Suzana Ilić, Daniel Hesslow, Roman Castagné, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, François Yvon, Matthias Gallé, Jonathan Tow, Alexander M. Rush, Stella Biderman, Albert Webson, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Thomas Wang, Benoît Sagot, Niklas Muennighoff, Albert Villanova del Moral, Olatunji Ruwase, Rachel Bawden, Stas Bekman, Angelina McMillan-Major, Iz Beltagy, Huu Nguyen, Lucile Saulnier, Samson Tan, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Victor Sanh, Hugo Laurençon, Yacine Jernite, Julien Launay, Margaret Mitchell, Colin Raffel, Aaron Gokaslan, Adi Simhi, Aitor Soroa, Alham Fikri Aji, Amit Alfassy, Anna Rogers, Ariel Kreisberg Nitzav, Canwen Xu, Chenghao Mou, Chris Emezue, Christopher Klamm, Colin Leong, Daniel van Strien, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Dragomir Radev, Eduardo González Ponferrada, Efrat Levkovizh, Ethan Kim, Eyal Bar Natan, Francesco De Toni, Gérard Dupont, Germán Kruszewski, Giada Pistilli, Hady Elsahar, Hamza Benyamina, Hieu Tran, Ian Yu, Idris Abdulmumin, Isaac Johnson, Itziar Gonzalez-Dios, Javier de la Rosa, Jenny Chim, Jesse Dodge, Jian Zhu, Jonathan Chang, Jörg Frohberg, Joseph Tobing, Joydeep Bhattacharjee, Khalid Almubarak, Kimbo Chen, Kyle Lo, Leandro Von Werra, Leon Weber, Long Phan, Loubna Ben allal, Ludovic Tanguy, Manan Dey, Manuel Romero Muñoz, Maraim Masoud, María Grandury, Mario Šaško, Max Huang, Maximin Coavoux, Mayank Singh, Mike Tian-Jian Jiang, Minh Chien Vu, Mohammad A. Jauhar, Mustafa Ghaleb, Nishant Subramani, Nora Kassner, Nurulaqilla Khamis, Olivier Nguyen, Omar Espejel, Ona de Gibert, Paulo Villegas et al. (293 additional authors not shown)
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Visual Instruction Tuning
Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Qingyang Wu, Yong Jae Lee
Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) using machine-generated instruction-following data has improved zero-shot capabilities on new tasks, but the idea is less explored in the multimodal field. In this paper, we present the first attempt to use language-only GPT-4 to generate multimodal language-image instruction-following data. By instruction tuning on such generated data, we introduce LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model that connects a vision encoder and LLM for general-purpose visual and language understanding.Our early experiments show that LLaVA demonstrates impressive multimodel chat abilities, sometimes exhibiting the behaviors of multimodal GPT-4 on unseen images/instructions, and yields a 85.1% relative score compared with GPT-4 on a synthetic multimodal instruction-following dataset. When fine-tuned on Science QA, the synergy of LLaVA and GPT-4 achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 92.53%. We make GPT-4 generated visual instruction tuning data, our model and code base publicly available.

StarCoder: may the source be with you!
Raymond Li, Loubna Ben Allal, Yangtian Zi, Niklas Muennighoff, Denis Kocetkov, Chenghao Mou, Marc Marone, Christopher Akiki, Jia Li, Jenny Chim, Qian Liu, Evgenii Zheltonozhskii, Terry Yue Zhuo, Thomas Wang, Olivier Dehaene, Mishig Davaadorj, Joel Lamy-Poirier, João Monteiro, Oleh Shliazhko, Nicolas Gontier, Nicholas Meade, Armel Zebaze, Ming-Ho Yee, Logesh Kumar Umapathi, Jian Zhu, Benjamin Lipkin, Muhtasham Oblokulov, Zhiruo Wang, Rudra Murthy, Jason Stillerman, Siva Sankalp Patel, Dmitry Abulkhanov, Marco Zocca, Manan Dey, Zhihan Zhang, Nour Fahmy, Urvashi Bhattacharyya, Wenhao Yu, Swayam Singh, Sasha Luccioni, Paulo Villegas, Maxim Kunakov, Fedor Zhdanov, Manuel Romero, Tony Lee, Nadav Timor, Jennifer Ding, Claire Schlesinger, Hailey Schoelkopf, Jan Ebert, Tri Dao, Mayank Mishra, Alex Gu, Jennifer Robinson, Carolyn Jane Anderson, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Danish Contractor, Siva Reddy, Daniel Fried, Dzmitry Bahdanau, Yacine Jernite, Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, Sean Hughes, Thomas Wolf, Arjun Guha, Leandro von Werra, Harm de Vries
The BigCode community, an open-scientific collaboration working on the responsible development of Large Language Models for Code (Code LLMs), introduces StarCoder and StarCoderBase: 15.5B parameter models with 8K context length, infilling capabilities and fast large-batch inference enabled by multi-query attention. StarCoderBase is trained on 1 trillion tokens sourced from The Stack, a large collection of permissively licensed GitHub repositories with inspection tools and an opt-out process. We fine-tuned StarCoderBase on 35B Python tokens, resulting in the creation of StarCoder. We perform the most comprehensive evaluation of Code LLMs to date and show that StarCoderBase outperforms every open Code LLM that supports multiple programming languages and matches or outperforms the OpenAI code-cushman-001 model. Furthermore, StarCoder outperforms every model that is fine-tuned on Python, can be prompted to achieve 40\% pass@1 on HumanEval, and still retains its performance on other programming languages. We take several important steps towards a safe open-access model release, including an improved PII redaction pipeline and a novel attribution tracing tool, and make the StarCoder models publicly available under a more commercially viable version of the Open Responsible AI Model license.

CodeGen2: Lessons for Training LLMs on Programming and Natural Languages
Erik Nijkamp, Hiroaki Hayashi, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Yingbo Zhou
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in representation learning for program synthesis and understanding tasks. The quality of the learned representations appears to be dictated by the neural scaling laws as a function of the number of model parameters and observations, while imposing upper bounds on the model performance by the amount of available data and compute, which is costly.
In this study, we attempt to render the training of LLMs for program synthesis more efficient by unifying four key components: (1) model architectures, (2) learning methods, (3) infill sampling, and, (4) data distributions. Specifically, for the model architecture, we attempt to unify encoder and decoder-based models into a single prefix-LM. For learning methods, (i) causal language modeling, (ii) span corruption, (iii) infilling are unified into a simple learning algorithm. For infill sampling, we explore the claim of a "free lunch" hypothesis. For data distributions, the effect of a mixture distribution and multi-epoch training of programming and natural languages on model performance is explored.
We conduct a comprehensive series of empirical experiments on 1B LLMs, for which failures and successes of this exploration are distilled into five lessons. We will provide a final recipe for training and release CodeGen2 models in size 1B, 3.7B, 7B, and, 16B parameters, along with the training framework as open-source: this https URL.

Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning
Bo Li, Yuanhan Zhang, Liangyu Chen, Jinghao Wang, Jingkang Yang, Ziwei Liu
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant universal capabilities as few/zero-shot learners in various tasks due to their pre-training on vast amounts of text data, as exemplified by GPT-3, which boosted to InstrctGPT and ChatGPT, effectively following natural language instructions to accomplish real-world tasks. In this paper, we propose to introduce instruction tuning into multi-modal models, motivated by the Flamingo model's upstream interleaved format pretraining dataset. We adopt a similar approach to construct our MultI-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuning (MIMIC-IT) dataset. We then introduce Otter, a multi-modal model based on OpenFlamingo (open-sourced version of DeepMind's Flamingo), trained on MIMIC-IT and showcasing improved instruction-following ability and in-context learning. We also optimize OpenFlamingo's implementation for researchers, democratizing the required training resources from 1× A100 GPU to 4× RTX-3090 GPUs, and integrate both OpenFlamingo and Otter into Huggingface Transformers for more researchers to incorporate the models into their customized training and inference pipelines.

InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning
Wenliang Dai, Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Anthony Meng Huat Tiong, Junqi Zhao, Weisheng Wang, Boyang Li, Pascale Fung, Steven Hoi
Large-scale pre-training and instruction tuning have been successful at creating general-purpose language models with broad competence. However, building general-purpose vision-language models is challenging due to the rich input distributions and task diversity resulting from the additional visual input. Although vision-language pretraining has been widely studied, vision-language instruction tuning remains under-explored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic and comprehensive study on vision-language instruction tuning based on the pretrained BLIP-2 models. We gather 26 publicly available datasets, covering a wide variety of tasks and capabilities, and transform them into instruction tuning format. Additionally, we introduce an instruction-aware Query Transformer, which extracts informative features tailored to the given instruction. Trained on 13 held-in datasets, InstructBLIP attains state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all 13 held-out datasets, substantially outperforming BLIP-2 and larger Flamingo models. Our models also lead to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned on individual downstream tasks (e.g., 90.7% accuracy on ScienceQA questions with image contexts). Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate the advantages of InstructBLIP over concurrent multimodal models. All InstructBLIP models are open-sourced at this https URL.

CodeT5+: Open Code Large Language Models for Code Understanding and Generation
Yue Wang, Hung Le, Akhilesh Deepak Gotmare, Nghi D.Q. Bui, Junnan Li, Steven C.H. Hoi
Large language models (LLMs) pretrained on vast source code have achieved prominent progress in code intelligence. However, existing code LLMs have two main limitations in terms of architecture and pretraining tasks. First, they often adopt a specific architecture (encoder-only or decoder-only) or rely on a unified encoder-decoder network for different downstream tasks. The former paradigm is limited by inflexibility in applications while in the latter, the model is treated as a single system for all tasks, leading to suboptimal performance on a subset of tasks. Secondly, they often employ a limited set of pretraining objectives which might not be relevant to some downstream tasks and hence result in substantial performance degrade. To address these limitations, we propose ``CodeT5+'', a family of encoder-decoder LLMs for code in which component modules can be flexibly combined to suit a wide range of downstream code tasks. Such flexibility is enabled by our proposed mixture of pretraining objectives to mitigate the pretrain-finetune discrepancy. These objectives cover span denoising, contrastive learning, text-code matching, and causal LM pretraining tasks, on both unimodal and bimodal multilingual code corpora. Furthermore, we propose to initialize CodeT5+ with frozen off-the-shelf LLMs without training from scratch to efficiently scale up our models, and explore instruction-tuning to align with natural language instructions. We extensively evaluate CodeT5+ on over 20 code-related benchmarks in different settings, including zero-shot, finetuning, and instruction-tuning. We observe state-of-the-art (SoTA) model performance on various code-related tasks, such as code generation and completion, math programming, and text-to-code retrieval tasks. Particularly, our instruction-tuned CodeT5+ 16B achieves new SoTA results on HumanEval code generation task against other open code LLMs.

ONE-PEACE: Exploring One General Representation Model Toward Unlimited Modalities
Peng Wang, Shijie Wang, Junyang Lin, Shuai Bai, Xiaohuan Zhou, Jingren Zhou, Xinggang Wang, Chang Zhou
In this work, we explore a scalable way for building a general representation model toward unlimited modalities. We release ONE-PEACE, a highly extensible model with 4B parameters that can seamlessly align and integrate representations across vision, audio, and language modalities. The architecture of ONE-PEACE comprises modality adapters, shared self-attention layers, and modality FFNs. This design allows for the easy extension of new modalities by adding adapters and FFNs, while also enabling multi-modal fusion through self-attention layers. To pretrain ONE-PEACE, we develop two modality-agnostic pretraining tasks, cross-modal aligning contrast and intra-modal denoising contrast, which align the semantic space of different modalities and capture fine-grained details within modalities concurrently. With the scaling-friendly architecture and pretraining tasks, ONE-PEACE has the potential to expand to unlimited modalities. Without using any vision or language pretrained model for initialization, ONE-PEACE achieves leading results on a wide range of uni-modal and multi-modal tasks, including image classification (ImageNet), semantic segmentation (ADE20K), audio-text retrieval (AudioCaps, Clotho), audio classification (ESC-50, FSD50K, VGGSound), audio question answering (AVQA), image-text retrieval (MSCOCO, Flickr30K), and visual grounding (RefCOCO/+/g). Code is available at this https URL.

RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era
Bo Peng, Eric Alcaide, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Samuel Arcadinho, Stella Biderman, Huanqi Cao, Xin Cheng, Michael Chung, Matteo Grella, Kranthi Kiran GV, Xuzheng He, Haowen Hou, Jiaju Lin, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Jan Kocon, Jiaming Kong, Bartlomiej Koptyra, Hayden Lau, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Ferdinand Mom, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Xiangru Tang, Bolun Wang, Johan S. Wind, Stanislaw Wozniak, Ruichong Zhang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Qihang Zhao, Peng Zhou, Qinghua Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
Transformers have revolutionized almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks but suffer from memory and computational complexity that scales quadratically with sequence length. In contrast, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit linear scaling in memory and computational requirements but struggle to match the same performance as Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. We propose a novel model architecture, Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV), that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs.
Our approach leverages a linear attention mechanism and allows us to formulate the model as either a Transformer or an RNN, thus parallelizing computations during training and maintains constant computational and memory complexity during inference. We scale our models as large as 14 billion parameters, by far the largest dense RNN ever trained, and find RWKV performs on par with similarly sized Transformers, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. This work presents a significant step towards reconciling trade-offs between computational efficiency and model performance in sequence processing tasks.

Lion: Adversarial Distillation of Proprietary Large Language Models
Yuxin Jiang, Chunkit Chan, Mingyang Chen, Wei Wang
The practice of transferring knowledge from a sophisticated, proprietary large language model (LLM) to a compact, open-source LLM has garnered considerable attention. Previous works have focused on a unidirectional knowledge distillation way by aligning the responses of the student model with those of the teacher model to a set of instructions. Nevertheless, they overlooked the possibility of incorporating any reciprocal "feedback"--identifying challenging instructions where the student model's performance falls short--to boost the student model's proficiency iteratively. To this end, we propose a novel adversarial distillation framework for a more efficient knowledge transfer. Leveraging the versatile role adaptability of LLMs, we prompt the teacher model to identify "hard" instructions and generate new "hard" instructions for the student model, creating a three-stage adversarial loop of imitation, discrimination, and generation. By applying this adversarial framework, we successfully transfer knowledge from ChatGPT to a student model (named Lion), using a mere 70k training data. Our results show that Lion-13B not only achieves comparable open-ended generation capabilities to ChatGPT but surpasses conventional state-of-the-art (SOTA) instruction-tuned models like Vicuna-13B by 55.4% in challenging zero-shot reasoning benchmarks such as BIG-Bench Hard (BBH) and 16.7% on AGIEval. Code and model can be found at this https URL.

MERT: Acoustic Music Understanding Model with Large-Scale Self-supervised Training
Yizhi Li, Ruibin Yuan, Ge Zhang, Yinghao Ma, Xingran Chen, Hanzhi Yin, Chenghua Lin, Anton Ragni, Emmanouil Benetos, Norbert Gyenge, Roger Dannenberg, Ruibo Liu, Wenhu Chen, Gus Xia, Yemin Shi, Wenhao Huang, Yike Guo, Jie Fu
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for training generalisable models on large-scale data in the fields of vision, text, and speech. Although SSL has been proven effective in speech and audio, its application to music audio has yet to be thoroughly explored. This is primarily due to the distinctive challenges associated with modelling musical knowledge, particularly its tonal and pitched characteristics of music. To address this research gap, we propose an acoustic Music undERstanding model with large-scale self-supervised Training (MERT), which incorporates teacher models to provide pseudo labels in the masked language modelling (MLM) style acoustic pre-training. In our exploration, we identified a superior combination of teacher models, which outperforms conventional speech and audio approaches in terms of performance. This combination includes an acoustic teacher based on Residual Vector Quantization - Variational AutoEncoder (RVQ-VAE) and a musical teacher based on the Constant-Q Transform (CQT). These teachers effectively guide our student model, a BERT-style transformer encoder, to better model music audio. In addition, we introduce an in-batch noise mixture augmentation to enhance the representation robustness. Furthermore, we explore a wide range of settings to overcome the instability in acoustic language model pre-training, which allows our designed paradigm to scale from 95M to 330M parameters. Experimental results indicate that our model can generalise and perform well on 14 music understanding tasks and attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) overall scores. The code and models are online: this https URL.

Segment Anything in High Quality
Lei Ke, Mingqiao Ye, Martin Danelljan, Yifan Liu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang, Fisher Yu
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a big leap in scaling up segmentation models, allowing for powerful zero-shot capabilities and flexible prompting. Despite being trained with 1.1 billion masks, SAM's mask prediction quality falls short in many cases, particularly when dealing with objects that have intricate structures. We propose HQ-SAM, equipping SAM with the ability to accurately segment any object, while maintaining SAM's original promptable design, efficiency, and zero-shot generalizability. Our careful design reuses and preserves the pre-trained model weights of SAM, while only introducing minimal additional parameters and computation. We design a learnable High-Quality Output Token, which is injected into SAM's mask decoder and is responsible for predicting the high-quality mask. Instead of only applying it on mask-decoder features, we first fuse them with early and final ViT features for improved mask details. To train our introduced learnable parameters, we compose a dataset of 44K fine-grained masks from several sources. HQ-SAM is only trained on the introduced detaset of 44k masks, which takes only 4 hours on 8 GPUs. We show the efficacy of HQ-SAM in a suite of 10 diverse segmentation datasets across different downstream tasks, where 8 out of them are evaluated in a zero-shot transfer protocol. Our code and pretrained models are at this https URL.

Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding
Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Lidong Bing
We present Video-LLaMA a multi-modal framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of understanding both visual and auditory content in the video. Video-LLaMA bootstraps cross-modal training from the frozen pre-trained visual and audio encoders and the frozen LLMs. Unlike previous works that complement LLMs to process the visual or audio signals only, Video-LLaMA enables video comprehension by tackling two challenges: (1) capturing the temporal changes in visual scenes, (2) integrating audio-visual signals. To counter the first challenge, we propose a Video Q-former to assemble a pre-trained image encoder into our video encoder and introduce a video-to-text generation task to learn video-language correspondence. For the second challenge, we leverage ImageBind, a universal embedding model aligning multiple modalities, as the pre-trained audio encoder and introduce an Audio Q-former on top of ImageBind to learn reasonable auditory query embeddings for the LLM module. To align the output of both visual and audio encoders with LLM's embedding space, we first train Video-LLaMA on massive video/image-caption pairs and then tune our model with visual-instruction datasets of moderate amount but higher quality. We found Video-LLaMA shows the ability to perceive and comprehend video content and generate meaningful responses grounded in the visual and auditory information presented in the videos.

High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN
Rithesh Kumar, Prem Seetharaman, Alejandro Luebs, Ishaan Kumar, Kundan Kumar
Language models have been successfully used to model natural signals, such as images, speech, and music. A key component of these models is a high quality neural compression model that can compress high-dimensional natural signals into lower dimensional discrete tokens. To that end, we introduce a high-fidelity universal neural audio compression algorithm that achieves ~90x compression of 44.1 KHz audio into tokens at just 8kbps bandwidth. We achieve this by combining advances in high-fidelity audio generation with better vector quantization techniques from the image domain, along with improved adversarial and reconstruction losses. We compress all domains (speech, environment, music, etc.) with a single universal model, making it widely applicable to generative modeling of all audio. We compare with competing audio compression algorithms, and find our method outperforms them significantly. We provide thorough ablations for every design choice, as well as open-source code and trained model weights. We hope our work can lay the foundation for the next generation of high-fidelity audio modeling.

StyleTTS 2: Towards Human-Level Text-to-Speech through Style Diffusion and Adversarial Training with Large Speech Language Models
Yinghao Aaron Li, Cong Han, Vinay S. Raghavan, Gavin Mischler, Nima Mesgarani
In this paper, we present StyleTTS 2, a text-to-speech (TTS) model that leverages style diffusion and adversarial training with large speech language models (SLMs) to achieve human-level TTS synthesis. StyleTTS 2 differs from its predecessor by modeling styles as a latent random variable through diffusion models to generate the most suitable style for the text without requiring reference speech, achieving efficient latent diffusion while benefiting from the diverse speech synthesis offered by diffusion models. Furthermore, we employ large pre-trained SLMs, such as WavLM, as discriminators with our novel differentiable duration modeling for end-to-end training, resulting in improved speech naturalness. StyleTTS 2 surpasses human recordings on the single-speaker LJSpeech dataset and matches it on the multispeaker VCTK dataset as judged by native English speakers. Moreover, when trained on the LibriTTS dataset, our model outperforms previous publicly available models for zero-shot speaker adaptation. This work achieves the first human-level TTS on both single and multispeaker datasets, showcasing the potential of style diffusion and adversarial training with large SLMs. The audio demos and source code are available at this https URL.

Anticipatory Music Transformer
John Thickstun, David Hall, Chris Donahue, Percy Liang
We introduce anticipation: a method for constructing a controllable generative model of a temporal point process (the event process) conditioned asynchronously on realizations of a second, correlated process (the control process). We achieve this by interleaving sequences of events and controls, such that controls appear following stopping times in the event sequence. This work is motivated by problems arising in the control of symbolic music generation. We focus on infilling control tasks, whereby the controls are a subset of the events themselves, and conditional generation completes a sequence of events given the fixed control events. We train anticipatory infilling models using the large and diverse Lakh MIDI music dataset. These models match the performance of autoregressive models for prompted music generation, with the additional capability to perform infilling control tasks, including accompaniment. Human evaluators report that an anticipatory model produces accompaniments with similar musicality to even music composed by humans over a 20-second clip.

RepoFusion: Training Code Models to Understand Your Repository
Disha Shrivastava, Denis Kocetkov, Harm de Vries, Dzmitry Bahdanau, Torsten Scholak
Despite the huge success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, these models struggle to understand the context present in the repository (e.g., imports, parent classes, files with similar names, etc.), thereby producing inaccurate code completions. This effect is more pronounced when using these assistants for repositories that the model has not seen during training, such as proprietary software or work-in-progress code projects. Recent work has shown the promise of using context from the repository during inference. In this work, we extend this idea and propose RepoFusion, a framework to train models to incorporate relevant repository context. Experiments on single-line code completion show that our models trained with repository context significantly outperform much larger code models as CodeGen-16B-multi (∼73× larger) and closely match the performance of the ∼70× larger StarCoderBase model that was trained with the Fill-in-the-Middle objective. We find these results to be a novel and compelling demonstration of the gains that training with repository context can bring. We carry out extensive ablation studies to investigate the impact of design choices such as context type, number of contexts, context length, and initialization within our framework. Lastly, we release Stack-Repo, a dataset of 200 Java repositories with permissive licenses and near-deduplicated files that are augmented with three types of repository contexts. Additionally, we are making available the code and trained checkpoints for our work. Our released resources can be found at \url{this https URL}.

Vec2Vec: A Compact Neural Network Approach for Transforming Text Embeddings with High Fidelity
Andrew Kean Gao
Vector embeddings have become ubiquitous tools for many language-related tasks. A leading embedding model is OpenAI's text-ada-002 which can embed approximately 6,000 words into a 1,536-dimensional vector. While powerful, text-ada-002 is not open source and is only available via API. We trained a simple neural network to convert open-source 768-dimensional MPNet embeddings into text-ada-002 embeddings. We compiled a subset of 50,000 online food reviews. We calculated MPNet and text-ada-002 embeddings for each review and trained a simple neural network to for 75 epochs. The neural network was designed to predict the corresponding text-ada-002 embedding for a given MPNET embedding. Our model achieved an average cosine similarity of 0.932 on 10,000 unseen reviews in our held-out test dataset. We manually assessed the quality of our predicted embeddings for vector search over text-ada-002-embedded reviews. While not as good as real text-ada-002 embeddings, predicted embeddings were able to retrieve highly relevant reviews. Our final model, Vec2Vec, is lightweight (<80 MB) and fast. Future steps include training a neural network with a more sophisticated architecture and a larger dataset of paired embeddings to achieve greater performance. The ability to convert between and align embedding spaces may be helpful for interoperability, limiting dependence on proprietary models, protecting data privacy, reducing costs, and offline operations.

ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation
Dhruv Shah, Ajay Sridhar, Nitish Dashora, Kyle Stachowicz, Kevin Black, Noriaki Hirose, Sergey Levine
General-purpose pre-trained models ("foundation models") have enabled practitioners to produce generalizable solutions for individual machine learning problems with datasets that are significantly smaller than those required for learning from scratch. Such models are typically trained on large and diverse datasets with weak supervision, consuming much more training data than is available for any individual downstream application. In this paper, we describe the Visual Navigation Transformer (ViNT), a foundation model that aims to bring the success of general-purpose pre-trained models to vision-based robotic navigation. ViNT is trained with a general goal-reaching objective that can be used with any navigation dataset, and employs a flexible Transformer-based architecture to learn navigational affordances and enable efficient adaptation to a variety of downstream navigational tasks. ViNT is trained on a number of existing navigation datasets, comprising hundreds of hours of robotic navigation from a variety of different robotic platforms, and exhibits positive transfer, outperforming specialist models trained on singular datasets. ViNT can be augmented with diffusion-based subgoal proposals to explore novel environments, and can solve kilometer-scale navigation problems when equipped with long-range heuristics. ViNT can also be adapted to novel task specifications with a technique inspired by prompt-tuning, where the goal encoder is replaced by an encoding of another task modality (e.g., GPS waypoints or routing commands) embedded into the same space of goal tokens. This flexibility and ability to accommodate a variety of downstream problem domains establishes ViNT as an effective foundation model for mobile robotics. For videos, code, and model checkpoints, see our project page at this https URL.

How Long Can Open-Source LLMs Truly Promise on Context Length?
In this blogpost, we introduce our latest series of chatbot models, LongChat-7B and LongChat-13B, featuring a new level of extended context length up to 16K tokens. Evaluation results show that the long-range retrieval accuracy of LongChat-13B is up to 2x higher than other long context open models such as MPT-7B-storywriter (65K), MPT-30B-chat (8K), and ChatGLM2-6B (32k). LongChat shows promising results in closing the gap between open models and proprietary long context models such as Claude-100K and GPT-4-32K.

Hierarchical Open-vocabulary Universal Image Segmentation
Xudong Wang, Shufan Li, Konstantinos Kallidromitis, Yusuke Kato, Kazuki Kozuka, Trevor Darrell
Open-vocabulary image segmentation aims to partition an image into semantic regions according to arbitrary text descriptions. However, complex visual scenes can be naturally decomposed into simpler parts and abstracted at multiple levels of granularity, introducing inherent segmentation ambiguity. Unlike existing methods that typically sidestep this ambiguity and treat it as an external factor, our approach actively incorporates a hierarchical representation encompassing different semantic-levels into the learning process. We propose a decoupled text-image fusion mechanism and representation learning modules for both "things" and "stuff". Additionally, we systematically examine the differences that exist in the textual and visual features between these types of categories. Our resulting model, named HIPIE, tackles HIerarchical, oPen-vocabulary, and unIvErsal segmentation tasks within a unified framework. Benchmarked on over 40 datasets, e.g., ADE20K, COCO, Pascal-VOC Part, RefCOCO/RefCOCOg, ODinW and SeginW, HIPIE achieves the state-of-the-art results at various levels of image comprehension, including semantic-level (e.g., semantic segmentation), instance-level (e.g., panoptic/referring segmentation and object detection), as well as part-level (e.g., part/subpart segmentation) tasks. Our code is released at this https URL.

Focused Transformer: Contrastive Training for Context Scaling
Szymon Tworkowski, Konrad Staniszewski, Mikołaj Pacek, Yuhuai Wu, Henryk Michalewski, Piotr Miłoś
Large language models have an exceptional capability to incorporate new information in a contextual manner. However, the full potential of such an approach is often restrained due to a limitation in the effective context length. One solution to this issue is to endow an attention layer with access to an external memory, which comprises of (key, value) pairs. Yet, as the number of documents increases, the proportion of relevant keys to irrelevant ones decreases, leading the model to focus more on the irrelevant keys. We identify a significant challenge, dubbed the distraction issue, where keys linked to different semantic values might overlap, making them hard to distinguish. To tackle this problem, we introduce the Focused Transformer (FoT), a technique that employs a training process inspired by contrastive learning. This novel approach enhances the structure of the (key, value) space, enabling an extension of the context length. Our method allows for fine-tuning pre-existing, large-scale models to lengthen their effective context. This is demonstrated by our fine-tuning of 3B and 7B OpenLLaMA checkpoints. The resulting models, which we name LongLLaMA, exhibit advancements in tasks requiring a long context. We further illustrate that our LongLLaMA models adeptly manage a 256k context length for passkey retrieval.

Rhythm Modeling for Voice Conversion
Benjamin van Niekerk, Marc-André Carbonneau, Herman Kamper
Voice conversion aims to transform source speech into a different target voice. However, typical voice conversion systems do not account for rhythm, which is an important factor in the perception of speaker identity. To bridge this gap, we introduce Urhythmic-an unsupervised method for rhythm conversion that does not require parallel data or text transcriptions. Using self-supervised representations, we first divide source audio into segments approximating sonorants, obstruents, and silences. Then we model rhythm by estimating speaking rate or the duration distribution of each segment type. Finally, we match the target speaking rate or rhythm by time-stretching the speech segments. Experiments show that Urhythmic outperforms existing unsupervised methods in terms of quality and prosody. Code and checkpoints: this https URL. Audio demo page: this https URL.

Scaling TransNormer to 175 Billion Parameters
Zhen Qin, Dong Li, Weigao Sun, Weixuan Sun, Xuyang Shen, Xiaodong Han, Yunshen Wei, Baohong Lv, Fei Yuan, Xiao Luo, Yu Qiao, Yiran Zhong
We present TransNormerLLM, the first linear attention-based Large Language Model (LLM) that outperforms conventional softmax attention-based models in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. TransNormerLLM evolves from the previous linear attention architecture TransNormer by making advanced modifications that include positional embedding, linear attention acceleration, gating mechanism, tensor normalization, inference acceleration and stabilization. Specifically, we use LRPE together with an exponential decay to avoid attention dilution issues while allowing the model to retain global interactions between tokens. Additionally, we propose Lightning Attention, a cutting-edge technique that accelerates linear attention by more than twice in runtime and reduces memory usage by a remarkable four times. To further enhance the performance of TransNormer, we leverage a gating mechanism to smooth training and a new tensor normalization scheme to accelerate the model, resulting in an impressive acceleration of over 20%. Furthermore, we have developed a robust inference algorithm that ensures numerical stability and consistent inference speed, regardless of the sequence length, showcasing superior efficiency during both training and inference stages. Scalability is at the heart of our model's design, enabling seamless deployment on large-scale clusters and facilitating expansion to even more extensive models, all while maintaining outstanding performance metrics. Rigorous validation of our model design is achieved through a series of comprehensive experiments on our self-collected corpus, boasting a size exceeding 6TB and containing over 2 trillion tokens. To ensure data quality and relevance, we implement a new self-cleaning strategy to filter our collected data. Our pre-trained models will be released to foster community advancements in efficient LLMs.

Separate Anything You Describe
Xubo Liu, Qiuqiang Kong, Yan Zhao, Haohe Liu, Yi Yuan, Yuzhuo Liu, Rui Xia, Yuxuan Wang, Mark D. Plumbley, Wenwu Wang
Language-queried audio source separation (LASS) is a new paradigm for computational auditory scene analysis (CASA). LASS aims to separate a target sound from an audio mixture given a natural language query, which provides a natural and scalable interface for digital audio applications. Recent works on LASS, despite attaining promising separation performance on specific sources (e.g., musical instruments, limited classes of audio events), are unable to separate audio concepts in the open domain. In this work, we introduce AudioSep, a foundation model for open-domain audio source separation with natural language queries. We train AudioSep on large-scale multimodal datasets and extensively evaluate its capabilities on numerous tasks including audio event separation, musical instrument separation, and speech enhancement. AudioSep demonstrates strong separation performance and impressive zero-shot generalization ability using audio captions or text labels as queries, substantially outperforming previous audio-queried and language-queried sound separation models. For reproducibility of this work, we will release the source code, evaluation benchmark and pre-trained model at: this https URL.

StableLLaVA: Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning with Synthesized Image-Dialogue Data
Yanda Li, Chi Zhang, Gang Yu, Zhibin Wang, Bin Fu, Guosheng Lin, Chunhua Shen, Ling Chen, Yunchao Wei
The remarkable multimodal capabilities demonstrated by OpenAI's GPT-4 have sparked significant interest in the development of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). A primary research objective of such models is to align visual and textual modalities effectively while comprehending human instructions. Current methodologies often rely on annotations derived from benchmark datasets to construct image-dialogue datasets for training purposes, akin to instruction tuning in LLMs. However, these datasets often exhibit domain bias, potentially constraining the generative capabilities of the models. In an effort to mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel data collection methodology that synchronously synthesizes images and dialogues for visual instruction tuning. This approach harnesses the power of generative models, marrying the abilities of ChatGPT and text-to-image generative models to yield a diverse and controllable dataset with varied image content. Additionally, datasets can be arbitrarily scaled. This not only provides greater flexibility compared to existing methodologies but also significantly enhances several model capabilities. Our research includes comprehensive experiments conducted on various datasets. The results emphasize substantial enhancements in more than ten commonly assessed capabilities. Additionally, our model achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple widely recognized multimodal benchmarks.

RADIO: Reference-Agnostic Dubbing Video Synthesis
Dongyeun Lee, Chaewon Kim, Sangjoon Yu, Jaejun Yoo, Gyeong-Moon Park
One of the most challenging problems in audio-driven talking head generation is achieving high-fidelity detail while ensuring precise synchronization. Given only a single reference image, extracting meaningful identity attributes becomes even more challenging, often causing the network to mirror the facial and lip structures too closely. To address these issues, we introduce RADIO, a framework engineered to yield high-quality dubbed videos regardless of the pose or expression in reference images. The key is to modulate the decoder layers using latent space composed of audio and reference features. Additionally, we incorporate ViT blocks into the decoder to emphasize high-fidelity details, especially in the lip region. Our experimental results demonstrate that RADIO displays high synchronization without the loss of fidelity. Especially in harsh scenarios where the reference frame deviates significantly from the ground truth, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness.

Matcha-TTS: A fast TTS architecture with conditional flow matching
Shivam Mehta, Ruibo Tu, Jonas Beskow, Éva Székely, Gustav Eje Henter
We introduce Matcha-TTS, a new encoder-decoder architecture for speedy TTS acoustic modelling, trained using optimal-transport conditional flow matching (OT-CFM). This yields an ODE-based decoder capable of high output quality in fewer synthesis steps than models trained using score matching. Careful design choices additionally ensure each synthesis step is fast to run. The method is probabilistic, non-autoregressive, and learns to speak from scratch without external alignments. Compared to strong pre-trained baseline models, the Matcha-TTS system has the smallest memory footprint, rivals the speed of the fastest models on long utterances, and attains the highest mean opinion score in a listening test. Please see this https URL for audio examples, code, and pre-trained models.

DreamLLM: Synergistic Multimodal Comprehension and Creation
Runpei Dong, Chunrui Han, Yuang Peng, Zekun Qi, Zheng Ge, Jinrong Yang, Liang Zhao, Jianjian Sun, Hongyu Zhou, Haoran Wei, Xiangwen Kong, Xiangyu Zhang, Kaisheng Ma, Li Yi
This paper presents DreamLLM, a learning framework that first achieves versatile Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) empowered with frequently overlooked synergy between multimodal comprehension and creation. DreamLLM operates on two fundamental principles. The first focuses on the generative modeling of both language and image posteriors by direct sampling in the raw multimodal space. This approach circumvents the limitations and information loss inherent to external feature extractors like CLIP, and a more thorough multimodal understanding is obtained. Second, DreamLLM fosters the generation of raw, interleaved documents, modeling both text and image contents, along with unstructured layouts. This allows DreamLLM to learn all conditional, marginal, and joint multimodal distributions effectively. As a result, DreamLLM is the first MLLM capable of generating free-form interleaved content. Comprehensive experiments highlight DreamLLM's superior performance as a zero-shot multimodal generalist, reaping from the enhanced learning synergy.

Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models
Aiyuan Yang, Bin Xiao, Bingning Wang, Borong Zhang, Ce Bian, Chao Yin, Chenxu Lv, Da Pan, Dian Wang, Dong Yan, Fan Yang, Fei Deng, Feng Wang, Feng Liu, Guangwei Ai, Guosheng Dong, Haizhou Zhao, Hang Xu, Haoze Sun, Hongda Zhang, Hui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Jian Xie, JunTao Dai, Kun Fang, Lei Su, Liang Song, Lifeng Liu, Liyun Ru, Luyao Ma, Mang Wang, Mickel Liu, MingAn Lin, Nuolan Nie, Peidong Guo, Ruiyang Sun, Tao Zhang, Tianpeng Li, Tianyu Li, Wei Cheng, Weipeng Chen, Xiangrong Zeng, Xiaochuan Wang, Xiaoxi Chen, Xin Men, Xin Yu, Xuehai Pan, Yanjun Shen, Yiding Wang, Yiyu Li, Youxin Jiang, Yuchen Gao, Yupeng Zhang, Zenan Zhou, Zhiying Wu
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on a variety of natural language tasks based on just a few examples of natural language instructions, reducing the need for extensive feature engineering. However, most powerful LLMs are closed-source or limited in their capability for languages other than English. In this technical report, we present Baichuan 2, a series of large-scale multilingual language models containing 7 billion and 13 billion parameters, trained from scratch, on 2.6 trillion tokens. Baichuan 2 matches or outperforms other open-source models of similar size on public benchmarks like MMLU, CMMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Furthermore, Baichuan 2 excels in vertical domains such as medicine and law. We will release all pre-training model checkpoints to benefit the research community in better understanding the training dynamics of Baichuan 2.

QWEN TECHNICAL REPORT
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, enabling natural language processing tasks that were previously thought to be exclusive to humans. In this work, we introduce QWEN1 , the first installment of our large language model series. QWEN is a comprehensive language model series that encompasses distinct models with varying parameter counts. It includes QWEN, the base pretrained language models, and QWEN-CHAT, the chat models finetuned with human alignment techniques. The base language models consistently demonstrate superior performance across a multitude of downstream tasks, and the chat models, particularly those trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are highly competitive. The chat models possess advanced tool-use and planning capabilities for creating agent applications, showcasing impressive performance even when compared to bigger models on complex tasks like utilizing a code interpreter. Furthermore, we have developed coding-specialized models, CODE-QWEN and CODE-QWEN-CHAT, as well as mathematics-focused models, MATH-QWEN-CHAT, which are built upon base language models. These models demonstrate significantly improved performance in comparison with open-source models, and slightly fall behind the proprietary models.

Mistral 7B
We introduce Mistral 7B v0.1, a 7–billion-parameter language model engineered for superior performance and efficiency. Mistral 7B outperforms Llama 2 13B across all evaluated benchmarks, and Llama 1 34B in reasoning, mathematics, and code generation. Our model leverages grouped-query attention (GQA) for faster inference, coupled with sliding window attention (SWA) to effectively handle sequences of arbitrary length with a reduced inference cost. We also provide a model fine-tuned to follow instructions, Mistral 7B – Instruct, that surpasses the Llama 2 13B – Chat model both on human and automated benchmarks. Our models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.

MathCoder: Seamless Code Integration in LLMs for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning
Ke Wang, Houxing Ren, Aojun Zhou, Zimu Lu, Sichun Luo, Weikang Shi, Renrui Zhang, Linqi Song, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
The recently released GPT-4 Code Interpreter has demonstrated remarkable proficiency in solving challenging math problems, primarily attributed to its ability to seamlessly reason with natural language, generate code, execute code, and continue reasoning based on the execution output. In this paper, we present a method to fine-tune open-source language models, enabling them to use code for modeling and deriving math equations and, consequently, enhancing their mathematical reasoning abilities. We propose a method of generating novel and high-quality datasets with math problems and their code-based solutions, referred to as MathCodeInstruct. Each solution interleaves natural language, code, and execution results. We also introduce a customized supervised fine-tuning and inference approach. This approach yields the MathCoder models, a family of models capable of generating code-based solutions for solving challenging math problems. Impressively, the MathCoder models achieve state-of-the-art scores among open-source LLMs on the MATH (45.2%) and GSM8K (83.9%) datasets, substantially outperforming other open-source alternatives. Notably, the MathCoder model not only surpasses ChatGPT-3.5 and PaLM-2 on GSM8K and MATH but also outperforms GPT-4 on the competition-level MATH dataset. The dataset and models will be released at this https URL.

Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning
Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yuheng Li, Yong Jae Lee
Large multimodal models (LMM) have recently shown encouraging progress with visual instruction tuning. In this note, we show that the fully-connected vision-language cross-modal connector in LLaVA is surprisingly powerful and data-efficient. With simple modifications to LLaVA, namely, using CLIP-ViT-L-336px with an MLP projection and adding academic-task-oriented VQA data with simple response formatting prompts, we establish stronger baselines that achieve state-of-the-art across 11 benchmarks. Our final 13B checkpoint uses merely 1.2M publicly available data, and finishes full training in ~1 day on a single 8-A100 node. We hope this can make state-of-the-art LMM research more accessible. Code and model will be publicly available.

LLark: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Music
Josh Gardner, Simon Durand, Daniel Stoller, Rachel M. Bittner
Music has a unique and complex structure which is challenging for both expert humans and existing AI systems to understand, and presents unique challenges relative to other forms of audio. We present LLark, an instruction-tuned multimodal model for music understanding. We detail our process for dataset creation, which involves augmenting the annotations of diverse open-source music datasets and converting them to a unified instruction-tuning format. We propose a multimodal architecture for LLark, integrating a pretrained generative model for music with a pretrained language model. In evaluations on three types of tasks (music understanding, captioning, and reasoning), we show that our model matches or outperforms existing baselines in zero-shot generalization for music understanding, and that humans show a high degree of agreement with the model's responses in captioning and reasoning tasks. LLark is trained entirely from open-source music data and models, and we make our training code available along with the release of this paper. Additional results and audio examples are at this https URL, and our source code is available at this https URL .

SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models
Changli Tang, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Xianzhao Chen, Tian Tan, Wei Li, Lu Lu, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
Hearing is arguably an essential ability of artificial intelligence (AI) agents in the physical world, which refers to the perception and understanding of general auditory information consisting of at least three types of sounds: speech, audio events, and music. In this paper, we propose SALMONN, a speech audio language music open neural network, built by integrating a pre-trained text-based large language model (LLM) with speech and audio encoders into a single multimodal model. SALMONN enables the LLM to directly process and understand general audio inputs and achieve competitive performances on a number of speech and audio tasks used in training, such as automatic speech recognition and translation, auditory-information-based question answering, emotion recognition, speaker verification, and music and audio captioning \textit{etc.} SALMONN also has a diverse set of emergent abilities unseen in the training, which includes but is not limited to speech translation to untrained languages, speech-based slot filling, spoken-query-based question answering, audio-based storytelling, and speech audio co-reasoning \textit{etc}. The presence of the cross-modal emergent abilities is studied, and a novel few-shot activation tuning approach is proposed to activate such abilities of SALMONN. To our knowledge, SALMONN is the first model of its type and can be regarded as a step towards AI with generic hearing abilities. An interactive demo of SALMONN is available at \texttt{\url{this https URL}}, and the training code and model checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.

Jina Embeddings 2: 8192-Token General-Purpose Text Embeddings for Long Documents
Michael Günther, Jackmin Ong, Isabelle Mohr, Alaeddine Abdessalem, Tanguy Abel, Mohammad Kalim Akram, Susana Guzman, Georgios Mastrapas, Saba Sturua, Bo Wang, Maximilian Werk, Nan Wang, Han Xiao
Text embedding models have emerged as powerful tools for transforming sentences into fixed-sized feature vectors that encapsulate semantic information. While these models are essential for tasks like information retrieval, semantic clustering, and text re-ranking, most existing open-source models, especially those built on architectures like BERT, struggle to represent lengthy documents and often resort to truncation. One common approach to mitigate this challenge involves splitting documents into smaller paragraphs for embedding. However, this strategy results in a much larger set of vectors, consequently leading to increased memory consumption and computationally intensive vector searches with elevated latency.
To address these challenges, we introduce Jina Embeddings 2, an open-source text embedding model capable of accommodating up to 8192 tokens. This model is designed to transcend the conventional 512-token limit and adeptly process long documents. Jina Embeddings 2 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of embedding-related tasks in the MTEB benchmark but also matches the performance of OpenAI's proprietary ada-002 model. Additionally, our experiments indicate that an extended context can enhance performance in tasks such as NarrativeQA.

Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models
Yunfei Chu, Jin Xu, Xiaohuan Zhou, Qian Yang, Shiliang Zhang, Zhijie Yan, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for audio interaction with humans. However, the absence of pre-trained audio models capable of handling diverse audio types and tasks has hindered progress in this field. Consequently, most existing works have only been able to support a limited range of interaction capabilities. In this paper, we develop the Qwen-Audio model and address this limitation by scaling up audio-language pre-training to cover over 30 tasks and various audio types, such as human speech, natural sounds, music, and songs, to facilitate universal audio understanding abilities. However, directly co-training all tasks and datasets can lead to interference issues, as the textual labels associated with different datasets exhibit considerable variations due to differences in task focus, language, granularity of annotation, and text structure. To overcome the one-to-many interference, we carefully design a multi-task training framework by conditioning on a sequence of hierarchical tags to the decoder for encouraging knowledge sharing and avoiding interference through shared and specified tags respectively. Remarkably, Qwen-Audio achieves impressive performance across diverse benchmark tasks without requiring any task-specific fine-tuning, surpassing its counterparts. Building upon the capabilities of Qwen-Audio, we further develop Qwen-Audio-Chat, which allows for input from various audios and text inputs, enabling multi-turn dialogues and supporting various audio-central scenarios.

UniRepLKNet: A Universal Perception Large-Kernel ConvNet for Audio, Video, Point Cloud, Time-Series and Image Recognition
Xiaohan Ding, Yiyuan Zhang, Yixiao Ge, Sijie Zhao, Lin Song, Xiangyu Yue, Ying Shan
Large-kernel convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have recently received extensive research attention, but there are two unresolved and critical issues that demand further investigation. 1) The architectures of existing large-kernel ConvNets largely follow the design principles of conventional ConvNets or transformers, while the architectural design for large-kernel ConvNets remains under-addressed. 2) As transformers have dominated multiple modalities, it remains to be investigated whether ConvNets also have a strong universal perception ability in domains beyond vision. In this paper, we contribute from two aspects. 1) We propose four architectural guidelines for designing large-kernel ConvNets, the core of which is to exploit the essential characteristics of large kernels that distinguish them from small kernels - they can see wide without going deep. Following such guidelines, our proposed large-kernel ConvNet shows leading performance in image recognition. For example, our models achieve an ImageNet accuracy of 88.0%, ADE20K mIoU of 55.6%, and COCO box AP of 56.4%, demonstrating better performance and higher speed than a number of recently proposed powerful competitors. 2) We discover that large kernels are the key to unlocking the exceptional performance of ConvNets in domains where they were originally not proficient. With certain modality-related preprocessing approaches, the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on time-series forecasting and audio recognition tasks even without modality-specific customization to the architecture. Code and all the models at this https URL.

YUAN 2.0: A Large Language Model with Localized Filtering-based Attention
Shaohua Wu, Xudong Zhao, Shenling Wang, Jiangang Luo, Lingjun Li, Xi Chen, Bing Zhao, Wei Wang, Tong Yu, Rongguo Zhang, Jiahua Zhang, Chao Wang
In this work, we develop and release Yuan 2.0, a series of large language models with parameters ranging from 2.1 billion to 102.6 billion. The Localized Filtering-based Attention (LFA) is introduced to incorporate prior knowledge of local dependencies of natural language into Attention. A data filtering and generating system is presented to build pre-training and fine-tuning dataset in high quality. A distributed training method with non-uniform pipeline parallel, data parallel, and optimizer parallel is proposed, which greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements of intra-node communication, and achieves good performance in large-scale distributed training. Yuan 2.0 models display impressive ability in code generation, math problem-solving, and chatting compared with existing models. The latest version of YUAN 2.0, including model weights and source code, is accessible at Github.

Making Large Multimodal Models Understand Arbitrary Visual Prompts
Mu Cai, Haotian Liu, Siva Karthik Mustikovela, Gregory P. Meyer, Yuning Chai, Dennis Park, Yong Jae Lee
While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
Albert Gu, Tri Dao
Foundation models, now powering most of the exciting applications in deep learning, are almost universally based on the Transformer architecture and its core attention module. Many subquadratic-time architectures such as linear attention, gated convolution and recurrent models, and structured state space models (SSMs) have been developed to address Transformers' computational inefficiency on long sequences, but they have not performed as well as attention on important modalities such as language. We identify that a key weakness of such models is their inability to perform content-based reasoning, and make several improvements. First, simply letting the SSM parameters be functions of the input addresses their weakness with discrete modalities, allowing the model to selectively propagate or forget information along the sequence length dimension depending on the current token. Second, even though this change prevents the use of efficient convolutions, we design a hardware-aware parallel algorithm in recurrent mode. We integrate these selective SSMs into a simplified end-to-end neural network architecture without attention or even MLP blocks (Mamba). Mamba enjoys fast inference (5× higher throughput than Transformers) and linear scaling in sequence length, and its performance improves on real data up to million-length sequences. As a general sequence model backbone, Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance across several modalities such as language, audio, and genomics. On language modeling, our Mamba-3B model outperforms Transformers of the same size and matches Transformers twice its size, both in pretraining and downstream evaluation.

OpenVoice: Versatile Instant Voice Cloning
Zengyi Qin, Wenliang Zhao, Xumin Yu, Xin Sun
We introduce OpenVoice, a versatile voice cloning approach that requires only a short audio clip from the reference speaker to replicate their voice and generate speech in multiple languages. OpenVoice represents a significant advancement in addressing the following open challenges in the field: 1) Flexible Voice Style Control. OpenVoice enables granular control over voice styles, including emotion, accent, rhythm, pauses, and intonation, in addition to replicating the tone color of the reference speaker. The voice styles are not directly copied from and constrained by the style of the reference speaker. Previous approaches lacked the ability to flexibly manipulate voice styles after cloning. 2) Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Voice Cloning. OpenVoice achieves zero-shot cross-lingual voice cloning for languages not included in the massive-speaker training set. Unlike previous approaches, which typically require extensive massive-speaker multi-lingual (MSML) dataset for all languages, OpenVoice can clone voices into a new language without any massive-speaker training data for that language. OpenVoice is also computationally efficient, costing tens of times less than commercially available APIs that offer even inferior performance. To foster further research in the field, we have made the source code and trained model publicly accessible. We also provide qualitative results in our demo website. Prior to its public release, our internal version of OpenVoice was used tens of millions of times by users worldwide between May and October 2023, serving as the backend of MyShell.

Sequential Modeling Enables Scalable Learning for Large Vision Models
Yutong Bai, Xinyang Geng, Karttikeya Mangalam, Amir Bar, Alan Yuille, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Alexei A Efros
We introduce a novel sequential modeling approach which enables learning a Large Vision Model (LVM) without making use of any linguistic data. To do this, we define a common format, "visual sentences", in which we can represent raw images and videos as well as annotated data sources such as semantic segmentations and depth reconstructions without needing any meta-knowledge beyond the pixels. Once this wide variety of visual data (comprising 420 billion tokens) is represented as sequences, the model can be trained to minimize a cross-entropy loss for next token prediction. By training across various scales of model architecture and data diversity, we provide empirical evidence that our models scale effectively. Many different vision tasks can be solved by designing suitable visual prompts at test time.

Magicoder: Source Code Is All You Need
Yuxiang Wei, Zhe Wang, Jiawei Liu, Yifeng Ding, Lingming Zhang
We introduce Magicoder, a series of fully open-source (code, weights, and data) Large Language Models (LLMs) for code that significantly closes the gap with top code models while having no more than 7B parameters. Magicoder models are trained on 75K synthetic instruction data using OSS-Instruct, a novel approach to enlightening LLMs with open-source code snippets to generate high-quality instruction data for code. Our main motivation is to mitigate the inherent bias of the synthetic data generated by LLMs by empowering them with a wealth of open-source references for the production of more diverse, realistic, and controllable data. The orthogonality of OSS-Instruct and other data generation methods like Evol-Instruct further enables us to build an enhanced MagicoderS. Both Magicoder and MagicoderS substantially outperform state-of-the-art code models with similar or even larger sizes on a wide range of coding benchmarks, including Python text-to-code generation, multilingual coding, and data-science program completion. Notably, MagicoderS-CL-7B based on CodeLlama even surpasses the prominent ChatGPT on HumanEval+ (66.5 vs. 65.9 in pass@1). Overall, OSS-Instruct opens a new direction for low-bias and high-quality instruction tuning using abundant open-source references.

Paving the way to efficient architectures: StripedHyena-7B, open source models offering a glimpse into a world beyond Transformers
One of the focus areas at Together Research is new architectures for long context, improved training, and inference performance over the Transformer architecture. Spinning out of a research program from our team and academic collaborators, with roots in signal processing-inspired sequence models, we are excited to introduce the StripedHyena models. This release includes StripedHyena-Hessian-7B (SH 7B), a base model, and StripedHyena-Nous-7B (SH-N 7B), a chat model. StripedHyena builds on the many lessons learned in the past year on designing efficient sequence modeling architectures: H3, Hyena, HyenaDNA, and Monarch Mixer.

MMM: Generative Masked Motion Model
Ekkasit Pinyoanuntapong, Pu Wang, Minwoo Lee, Chen Chen
Recent advances in text-to-motion generation using diffusion and autoregressive models have shown promising results. However, these models often suffer from a trade-off between real-time performance, high fidelity, and motion editability. To address this gap, we introduce MMM, a novel yet simple motion generation paradigm based on Masked Motion Model. MMM consists of two key components: (1) a motion tokenizer that transforms 3D human motion into a sequence of discrete tokens in latent space, and (2) a conditional masked motion transformer that learns to predict randomly masked motion tokens, conditioned on the pre-computed text tokens. By attending to motion and text tokens in all directions, MMM explicitly captures inherent dependency among motion tokens and semantic mapping between motion and text tokens. During inference, this allows parallel and iterative decoding of multiple motion tokens that are highly consistent with fine-grained text descriptions, therefore simultaneously achieving high-fidelity and high-speed motion generation. In addition, MMM has innate motion editability. By simply placing mask tokens in the place that needs editing, MMM automatically fills the gaps while guaranteeing smooth transitions between editing and non-editing parts. Extensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that MMM surpasses current leading methods in generating high-quality motion (evidenced by superior FID scores of 0.08 and 0.429), while offering advanced editing features such as body-part modification, motion in-betweening, and the synthesis of long motion sequences. In addition, MMM is two orders of magnitude faster on a single mid-range GPU than editable motion diffusion models. Our project page is available at \url{this https URL}.

4M: Massively Multimodal Masked Modeling
David Mizrahi, Roman Bachmann, Oğuzhan Fatih Kar, Teresa Yeo, Mingfei Gao, Afshin Dehghan, Amir Zamir
Current machine learning models for vision are often highly specialized and limited to a single modality and task. In contrast, recent large language models exhibit a wide range of capabilities, hinting at a possibility for similarly versatile models in computer vision. In this paper, we take a step in this direction and propose a multimodal training scheme called 4M. It consists of training a single unified Transformer encoder-decoder using a masked modeling objective across a wide range of input/output modalities - including text, images, geometric, and semantic modalities, as well as neural network feature maps. 4M achieves scalability by unifying the representation space of all modalities through mapping them into discrete tokens and performing multimodal masked modeling on a small randomized subset of tokens.
4M leads to models that exhibit several key capabilities: (1) they can perform a diverse set of vision tasks out of the box, (2) they excel when fine-tuned for unseen downstream tasks or new input modalities, and (3) they can function as a generative model that can be conditioned on arbitrary modalities, enabling a wide variety of expressive multimodal editing capabilities with remarkable flexibility.
Through experimental analyses, we demonstrate the potential of 4M for training versatile and scalable foundation models for vision tasks, setting the stage for further exploration in multimodal learning for vision and other domains.

LLM360: Towards Fully Transparent Open-Source LLMs
Zhengzhong Liu, Aurick Qiao, Willie Neiswanger, Hongyi Wang, Bowen Tan, Tianhua Tao, Junbo Li, Yuqi Wang, Suqi Sun, Omkar Pangarkar, Richard Fan, Yi Gu, Victor Miller, Yonghao Zhuang, Guowei He, Haonan Li, Fajri Koto, Liping Tang, Nikhil Ranjan, Zhiqiang Shen, Xuguang Ren, Roberto Iriondo, Cun Mu, Zhiting Hu, Mark Schulze, Preslav Nakov, Tim Baldwin, Eric P. Xing
The recent surge in open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), such as LLaMA, Falcon, and Mistral, provides diverse options for AI practitioners and researchers. However, most LLMs have only released partial artifacts, such as the final model weights or inference code, and technical reports increasingly limit their scope to high-level design choices and surface statistics. These choices hinder progress in the field by degrading transparency into the training of LLMs and forcing teams to rediscover many details in the training process. We present LLM360, an initiative to fully open-source LLMs, which advocates for all training code and data, model checkpoints, and intermediate results to be made available to the community. The goal of LLM360 is to support open and collaborative AI research by making the end-to-end LLM training process transparent and reproducible by everyone. As a first step of LLM360, we release two 7B parameter LLMs pre-trained from scratch, Amber and CrystalCoder, including their training code, data, intermediate checkpoints, and analyses (at this https URL). We are committed to continually pushing the boundaries of LLMs through this open-source effort. More large-scale and stronger models are underway and will be released in the future.

SOLAR 10.7B: Scaling Large Language Models with Simple yet Effective Depth Up-Scaling
Dahyun Kim, Chanjun Park, Sanghoon Kim, Wonsung Lee, Wonho Song, Yunsu Kim, Hyeonwoo Kim, Yungi Kim, Hyeonju Lee, Jihoo Kim, Changbae Ahn, Seonghoon Yang, Sukyung Lee, Hyunbyung Park, Gyoungjin Gim, Mikyoung Cha, Hwalsuk Lee, Sunghun Kim
We introduce SOLAR 10.7B, a large language model (LLM) with 10.7 billion parameters, demonstrating superior performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Inspired by recent efforts to efficiently up-scale LLMs, we present a method for scaling LLMs called depth up-scaling (DUS), which encompasses depthwise scaling and continued pretraining. In contrast to other LLM up-scaling methods that use mixture-of-experts, DUS does not require complex changes to train and inference efficiently. We show experimentally that DUS is simple yet effective in scaling up high-performance LLMs from small ones. Building on the DUS model, we additionally present SOLAR 10.7B-Instruct, a variant fine-tuned for instruction-following capabilities, surpassing Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. SOLAR 10.7B is publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting broad access and application in the LLM field.

DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism
DeepSeek-AI: Xiao Bi, Deli Chen, Guanting Chen, Shanhuang Chen, Damai Dai, Chengqi Deng, Honghui Ding, Kai Dong, Qiushi Du, Zhe Fu, Huazuo Gao, Kaige Gao, Wenjun Gao, Ruiqi Ge, Kang Guan, Daya Guo, Jianzhong Guo, Guangbo Hao, Zhewen Hao, Ying He, Wenjie Hu, Panpan Huang, Erhang Li, Guowei Li, Jiashi Li, Yao Li, Y.K. Li, Wenfeng Liang, Fangyun Lin, A.X. Liu, Bo Liu, Wen Liu, Xiaodong Liu, Xin Liu, Yiyuan Liu, Haoyu Lu, Shanghao Lu, Fuli Luo, Shirong Ma, Xiaotao Nie, Tian Pei, Yishi Piao, Junjie Qiu, Hui Qu, Tongzheng Ren, Zehui Ren, Chong Ruan, Zhangli Sha, Zhihong Shao, Junxiao Song, Xuecheng Su, Jingxiang Sun, Yaofeng Sun, Minghui Tang, Bingxuan Wang, Peiyi Wang, Shiyu Wang, Yaohui Wang, Yongji Wang, Tong Wu, Y. Wu, Xin Xie, Zhenda Xie, Ziwei Xie, Yiliang Xiong, Hanwei Xu, R.X. Xu, Yanhong Xu, Dejian Yang, Yuxiang You, Shuiping Yu, Xingkai Yu, B. Zhang, Haowei Zhang, Lecong Zhang, Liyue Zhang, Mingchuan Zhang, Minghua Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Yichao Zhang, Chenggang Zhao, Yao Zhao, Shangyan Zhou, Shunfeng Zhou, Qihao Zhu, Yuheng Zou
The rapid development of open-source large language models (LLMs) has been truly remarkable. However, the scaling law described in previous literature presents varying conclusions, which casts a dark cloud over scaling LLMs. We delve into the study of scaling laws and present our distinctive findings that facilitate scaling of large scale models in two commonly used open-source configurations, 7B and 67B. Guided by the scaling laws, we introduce DeepSeek LLM, a project dedicated to advancing open-source language models with a long-term perspective. To support the pre-training phase, we have developed a dataset that currently consists of 2 trillion tokens and is continuously expanding. We further conduct supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on DeepSeek LLM Base models, resulting in the creation of DeepSeek Chat models. Our evaluation results demonstrate that DeepSeek LLM 67B surpasses LLaMA-2 70B on various benchmarks, particularly in the domains of code, mathematics, and reasoning. Furthermore, open-ended evaluations reveal that DeepSeek LLM 67B Chat exhibits superior performance compared to GPT-3.5.

Mixtral of Experts
Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Antoine Roux, Arthur Mensch, Blanche Savary, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Emma Bou Hanna, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Bour, Guillaume Lample, Lélio Renard Lavaud, Lucile Saulnier, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Pierre Stock, Sandeep Subramanian, Sophia Yang, Szymon Antoniak, Teven Le Scao, Théophile Gervet, Thibaut Lavril, Thomas Wang, Timothée Lacroix, William El Sayed
We introduce Mixtral 8x7B, a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) language model. Mixtral has the same architecture as Mistral 7B, with the difference that each layer is composed of 8 feedforward blocks (i.e. experts). For every token, at each layer, a router network selects two experts to process the current state and combine their outputs. Even though each token only sees two experts, the selected experts can be different at each timestep. As a result, each token has access to 47B parameters, but only uses 13B active parameters during inference. Mixtral was trained with a context size of 32k tokens and it outperforms or matches Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 across all evaluated benchmarks. In particular, Mixtral vastly outperforms Llama 2 70B on mathematics, code generation, and multilingual benchmarks. We also provide a model fine-tuned to follow instructions, Mixtral 8x7B - Instruct, that surpasses GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude-2.1, Gemini Pro, and Llama 2 70B - chat model on human benchmarks. Both the base and instruct models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.

EAT: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Efficient Audio Transformer
Wenxi Chen, Yuzhe Liang, Ziyang Ma, Zhisheng Zheng, Xie Chen
Audio self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training, which aims to learn good representations from unlabeled audio, has made remarkable progress. However, the extensive computational demands during pre-training pose a significant barrier to the potential application and optimization of audio SSL models. In this paper, inspired by the success of data2vec 2.0 in image modality and Audio-MAE in audio modality, we introduce Efficient Audio Transformer (EAT) to further improve the effectiveness and efficiency in audio SSL. The proposed EAT adopts the bootstrap self-supervised training paradigm to the audio domain. A novel Utterance-Frame Objective (UFO) is designed to enhance the modeling capability of acoustic events. Furthermore, we reveal that the masking strategy is critical in audio SSL pre-training, and superior audio representations can be obtained with large inverse block masks. Experiment results demonstrate that EAT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on a range of audio-related tasks, including AudioSet (AS-2M, AS-20K), ESC-50, and SPC-2, along with a significant pre-training speedup up to ~15x compared to existing audio SSL models.

Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate
Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, Yoshua Bengio
Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.

Understanding and Improving Transformer From a Multi-Particle Dynamic System Point of View
Yiping Lu, Zhuohan Li, Di He, Zhiqing Sun, Bin Dong, Tao Qin, Liwei Wang, Tie-Yan Liu
The Transformer architecture is widely used in natural language processing. Despite its success, the design principle of the Transformer remains elusive. In this paper, we provide a novel perspective towards understanding the architecture: we show that the Transformer can be mathematically interpreted as a numerical Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver for a convection-diffusion equation in a multi-particle dynamic system. In particular, how words in a sentence are abstracted into contexts by passing through the layers of the Transformer can be interpreted as approximating multiple particles' movement in the space using the Lie-Trotter splitting scheme and the Euler's method. Given this ODE's perspective, the rich literature of numerical analysis can be brought to guide us in designing effective structures beyond the Transformer. As an example, we propose to replace the Lie-Trotter splitting scheme by the Strang-Marchuk splitting scheme, a scheme that is more commonly used and with much lower local truncation errors. The Strang-Marchuk splitting scheme suggests that the self-attention and position-wise feed-forward network (FFN) sub-layers should not be treated equally. Instead, in each layer, two position-wise FFN sub-layers should be used, and the self-attention sub-layer is placed in between. This leads to a brand new architecture. Such an FFN-attention-FFN layer is "Macaron-like", and thus we call the network with this new architecture the Macaron Net. Through extensive experiments, we show that the Macaron Net is superior to the Transformer on both supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. The reproducible codes and pretrained models can be found at this https URL

Root Mean Square Layer Normalization
Biao Zhang, Rico Sennrich
Layer normalization (LayerNorm) has been successfully applied to various deep neural networks to help stabilize training and boost model convergence because of its capability in handling re-centering and re-scaling of both inputs and weight matrix. However, the computational overhead introduced by LayerNorm makes these improvements expensive and significantly slows the underlying network, e.g. RNN in particular. In this paper, we hypothesize that re-centering invariance in LayerNorm is dispensable and propose root mean square layer normalization, or RMSNorm. RMSNorm regularizes the summed inputs to a neuron in one layer according to root mean square (RMS), giving the model re-scaling invariance property and implicit learning rate adaptation ability. RMSNorm is computationally simpler and thus more efficient than LayerNorm. We also present partial RMSNorm, or pRMSNorm where the RMS is estimated from p% of the summed inputs without breaking the above properties. Extensive experiments on several tasks using diverse network architectures show that RMSNorm achieves comparable performance against LayerNorm but reduces the running time by 7%~64% on different models. Source code is available at this https URL.

Transformers without Tears: Improving the Normalization of Self-Attention
Toan Q. Nguyen, Julian Salazar
We evaluate three simple, normalization-centric changes to improve Transformer training. First, we show that pre-norm residual connections (PreNorm) and smaller initializations enable warmup-free, validation-based training with large learning rates. Second, we propose ℓ2 normalization with a single scale parameter (ScaleNorm) for faster training and better performance. Finally, we reaffirm the effectiveness of normalizing word embeddings to a fixed length (FixNorm). On five low-resource translation pairs from TED Talks-based corpora, these changes always converge, giving an average +1.1 BLEU over state-of-the-art bilingual baselines and a new 32.8 BLEU on IWSLT'15 English-Vietnamese. We observe sharper performance curves, more consistent gradient norms, and a linear relationship between activation scaling and decoder depth. Surprisingly, in the high-resource setting (WMT'14 English-German), ScaleNorm and FixNorm remain competitive but PreNorm degrades performance.

Explicit Sparse Transformer: Concentrated Attention Through Explicit Selection
Guangxiang Zhao, Junyang Lin, Zhiyuan Zhang, Xuancheng Ren, Qi Su, Xu Sun
Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of irrelevant information in the context. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel model called \textbf{Explicit Sparse Transformer}. Explicit Sparse Transformer is able to improve the concentration of attention on the global context through an explicit selection of the most relevant segments. Extensive experimental results on a series of natural language processing and computer vision tasks, including neural machine translation, image captioning, and language modeling, all demonstrate the advantages of Explicit Sparse Transformer in model performance. We also show that our proposed sparse attention method achieves comparable or better results than the previous sparse attention method, but significantly reduces training and testing time. For example, the inference speed is twice that of sparsemax in Transformer model. Code will be available at \url{this https URL}

Explicit Sparse Transformer: Concentrated Attention Through Explicit Selection
Guangxiang Zhao, Junyang Lin, Zhiyuan Zhang, Xuancheng Ren, Qi Su, Xu Sun
Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of irrelevant information in the context. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel model called \textbf{Explicit Sparse Transformer}. Explicit Sparse Transformer is able to improve the concentration of attention on the global context through an explicit selection of the most relevant segments. Extensive experimental results on a series of natural language processing and computer vision tasks, including neural machine translation, image captioning, and language modeling, all demonstrate the advantages of Explicit Sparse Transformer in model performance. We also show that our proposed sparse attention method achieves comparable or better results than the previous sparse attention method, but significantly reduces training and testing time. For example, the inference speed is twice that of sparsemax in Transformer model. Code will be available at \url{this https URL}

On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture
Ruibin Xiong, Yunchang Yang, Di He, Kai Zheng, Shuxin Zheng, Chen Xing, Huishuai Zhang, Yanyan Lan, Liwei Wang, Tie-Yan Liu
The Transformer is widely used in natural language processing tasks. To train a Transformer however, one usually needs a carefully designed learning rate warm-up stage, which is shown to be crucial to the final performance but will slow down the optimization and bring more hyper-parameter tunings. In this paper, we first study theoretically why the learning rate warm-up stage is essential and show that the location of layer normalization matters. Specifically, we prove with mean field theory that at initialization, for the original-designed Post-LN Transformer, which places the layer normalization between the residual blocks, the expected gradients of the parameters near the output layer are large. Therefore, using a large learning rate on those gradients makes the training unstable. The warm-up stage is practically helpful for avoiding this problem. On the other hand, our theory also shows that if the layer normalization is put inside the residual blocks (recently proposed as Pre-LN Transformer), the gradients are well-behaved at initialization. This motivates us to remove the warm-up stage for the training of Pre-LN Transformers. We show in our experiments that Pre-LN Transformers without the warm-up stage can reach comparable results with baselines while requiring significantly less training time and hyper-parameter tuning on a wide range of applications.

Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer
Iz Beltagy, Matthew E. Peters, Arman Cohan
Transformer-based models are unable to process long sequences due to their self-attention operation, which scales quadratically with the sequence length. To address this limitation, we introduce the Longformer with an attention mechanism that scales linearly with sequence length, making it easy to process documents of thousands of tokens or longer. Longformer's attention mechanism is a drop-in replacement for the standard self-attention and combines a local windowed attention with a task motivated global attention. Following prior work on long-sequence transformers, we evaluate Longformer on character-level language modeling and achieve state-of-the-art results on text8 and enwik8. In contrast to most prior work, we also pretrain Longformer and finetune it on a variety of downstream tasks. Our pretrained Longformer consistently outperforms RoBERTa on long document tasks and sets new state-of-the-art results on WikiHop and TriviaQA. We finally introduce the Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED), a Longformer variant for supporting long document generative sequence-to-sequence tasks, and demonstrate its effectiveness on the arXiv summarization dataset.

Memory Transformer
Mikhail S. Burtsev, Yuri Kuratov, Anton Peganov, Grigory V. Sapunov
Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. The self-attention architecture allows transformer to combine information from all elements of a sequence into context-aware representations. However, information about the context is stored mostly in the same element-wise representations. This might limit the processing of properties related to the sequence as a whole more difficult. Adding trainable memory to selectively store local as well as global representations of a sequence is a promising direction to improve the Transformer model. Memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) extend traditional neural architectures with general-purpose memory for representations. MANNs have demonstrated the capability to learn simple algorithms like Copy or Reverse and can be successfully trained via backpropagation on diverse tasks from question answering to language modeling outperforming RNNs and LSTMs of comparable complexity. In this work, we propose and study few extensions of the Transformer baseline (1) by adding memory tokens to store non-local representations, (2) creating memory bottleneck for the global information, (3) controlling memory update with dedicated layer. We evaluate these memory augmented Transformers and demonstrate that presence of memory positively correlates with the model performance for machine translation and language modelling tasks. Augmentation of pre-trained masked language model with memory tokens shows mixed results for tasks from GLUE benchmark. Visualization of attention patterns over the memory suggest that it improves the model's ability to process a global context.

Mirostat: A Neural Text Decoding Algorithm that Directly Controls Perplexity
Sourya Basu, Govardana Sachitanandam Ramachandran, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Lav R. Varshney
Neural text decoding is important for generating high-quality texts using language models. To generate high-quality text, popular decoding algorithms like top-k, top-p (nucleus), and temperature-based sampling truncate or distort the unreliable low probability tail of the language model. Though these methods generate high-quality text after parameter tuning, they are ad hoc. Not much is known about the control they provide over the statistics of the output, which is important since recent reports show text quality is highest for a specific range of likelihoods. Here, first we provide a theoretical analysis of perplexity in top-k, top-p, and temperature sampling, finding that cross-entropy behaves approximately linearly as a function of p in top-p sampling whereas it is a nonlinear function of k in top-k sampling, under Zipfian statistics. We use this analysis to design a feedback-based adaptive top-k text decoding algorithm called mirostat that generates text (of any length) with a predetermined value of perplexity, and thereby high-quality text without any tuning. Experiments show that for low values of k and p in top-k and top-p sampling, perplexity drops significantly with generated text length, which is also correlated with excessive repetitions in the text (the boredom trap). On the other hand, for large values of k and p, we find that perplexity increases with generated text length, which is correlated with incoherence in the text (confusion trap). Mirostat avoids both traps: experiments show that cross-entropy has a near-linear relation with repetition in generated text. This relation is almost independent of the sampling method but slightly dependent on the model used. Hence, for a given language model, control over perplexity also gives control over repetitions. Experiments with human raters for fluency, coherence, and quality further verify our findings.

ERNIE-Doc: A Retrospective Long-Document Modeling Transformer
Siyu Ding, Junyuan Shang, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Transformers are not suited for processing long documents, due to their quadratically increasing memory and time consumption. Simply truncating a long document or applying the sparse attention mechanism will incur the context fragmentation problem or lead to an inferior modeling capability against comparable model sizes. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-Doc, a document-level language pretraining model based on Recurrence Transformers. Two well-designed techniques, namely the retrospective feed mechanism and the enhanced recurrence mechanism, enable ERNIE-Doc, which has a much longer effective context length, to capture the contextual information of a complete document. We pretrain ERNIE-Doc to explicitly learn the relationships among segments with an additional document-aware segment-reordering objective. Various experiments were conducted on both English and Chinese document-level tasks. ERNIE-Doc improved the state-of-the-art language modeling result of perplexity to 16.8 on WikiText-103. Moreover, it outperformed competitive pretraining models by a large margin on most language understanding tasks, such as text classification and question answering.

Sparsity in Deep Learning: Pruning and growth for efficient inference and training in neural networks
Torsten Hoefler, Dan Alistarh, Tal Ben-Nun, Nikoli Dryden, Alexandra Peste
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.

RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding
Jianlin Su, Yu Lu, Shengfeng Pan, Ahmed Murtadha, Bo Wen, Yunfeng Liu
Position encoding recently has shown effective in the transformer architecture. It enables valuable supervision for dependency modeling between elements at different positions of the sequence. In this paper, we first investigate various methods to integrate positional information into the learning process of transformer-based language models. Then, we propose a novel method named Rotary Position Embedding(RoPE) to effectively leverage the positional information. Specifically, the proposed RoPE encodes the absolute position with a rotation matrix and meanwhile incorporates the explicit relative position dependency in self-attention formulation. Notably, RoPE enables valuable properties, including the flexibility of sequence length, decaying inter-token dependency with increasing relative distances, and the capability of equipping the linear self-attention with relative position encoding. Finally, we evaluate the enhanced transformer with rotary position embedding, also called RoFormer, on various long text classification benchmark datasets. Our experiments show that it consistently overcomes its alternatives. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis to explain some experimental results. RoFormer is already integrated into Huggingface: \url{this https URL}.

LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
Edward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, Yuanzhi Li, Shean Wang, Lu Wang, Weizhu Chen
An important paradigm of natural language processing consists of large-scale pre-training on general domain data and adaptation to particular tasks or domains. As we pre-train larger models, full fine-tuning, which retrains all model parameters, becomes less feasible. Using GPT-3 175B as an example -- deploying independent instances of fine-tuned models, each with 175B parameters, is prohibitively expensive. We propose Low-Rank Adaptation, or LoRA, which freezes the pre-trained model weights and injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks. Compared to GPT-3 175B fine-tuned with Adam, LoRA can reduce the number of trainable parameters by 10,000 times and the GPU memory requirement by 3 times. LoRA performs on-par or better than fine-tuning in model quality on RoBERTa, DeBERTa, GPT-2, and GPT-3, despite having fewer trainable parameters, a higher training throughput, and, unlike adapters, no additional inference latency. We also provide an empirical investigation into rank-deficiency in language model adaptation, which sheds light on the efficacy of LoRA. We release a package that facilitates the integration of LoRA with PyTorch models and provide our implementations and model checkpoints for RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and GPT-2 at this https URL.

CrossFormer: A Versatile Vision Transformer Hinging on Cross-scale Attention
Wenxiao Wang, Lu Yao, Long Chen, Binbin Lin, Deng Cai, Xiaofei He, Wei Liu
Transformers have made great progress in dealing with computer vision tasks. However, existing vision transformers do not yet possess the ability of building the interactions among features of different scales, which is perceptually important to visual inputs. The reasons are two-fold: (1) Input embeddings of each layer are equal-scale, so no cross-scale feature can be extracted; (2) to lower the computational cost, some vision transformers merge adjacent embeddings inside the self-attention module, thus sacrificing small-scale (fine-grained) features of the embeddings and also disabling the cross-scale interactions. To this end, we propose Cross-scale Embedding Layer (CEL) and Long Short Distance Attention (LSDA). On the one hand, CEL blends each embedding with multiple patches of different scales, providing the self-attention module itself with cross-scale features. On the other hand, LSDA splits the self-attention module into a short-distance one and a long-distance counterpart, which not only reduces the computational burden but also keeps both small-scale and large-scale features in the embeddings. Through the above two designs, we achieve cross-scale attention. Besides, we put forward a dynamic position bias for vision transformers to make the popular relative position bias apply to variable-sized images. Hinging on the cross-scale attention module, we construct a versatile vision architecture, dubbed CrossFormer, which accommodates variable-sized inputs. Extensive experiments show that CrossFormer outperforms the other vision transformers on image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation tasks. The code has been released: this https URL.

Memorizing Transformers
Yuhuai Wu, Markus N. Rabe, DeLesley Hutchins, Christian Szegedy
Language models typically need to be trained or finetuned in order to acquire new knowledge, which involves updating their weights. We instead envision language models that can simply read and memorize new data at inference time, thus acquiring new knowledge immediately. In this work, we extend language models with the ability to memorize the internal representations of past inputs. We demonstrate that an approximate kNN lookup into a non-differentiable memory of recent (key, value) pairs improves language modeling across various benchmarks and tasks, including generic webtext (C4), math papers (arXiv), books (PG-19), code (Github), as well as formal theorems (Isabelle). We show that the performance steadily improves when we increase the size of memory up to 262K tokens. On benchmarks including code and mathematics, we find that the model is capable of making use of newly defined functions and theorems during test time.

UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Vinh Q. Tran, Xavier Garcia, Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Hyung Won Chung, Siamak Shakeri, Dara Bahri, Tal Schuster, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Denny Zhou, Neil Houlsby, Donald Metzler
Existing pre-trained models are generally geared towards a particular class of problems. To date, there seems to be still no consensus on what the right architecture and pre-training setup should be. This paper presents a unified framework for pre-training models that are universally effective across datasets and setups. We begin by disentangling architectural archetypes with pre-training objectives -- two concepts that are commonly conflated. Next, we present a generalized & unified perspective for self-supervision in NLP and show how different pre-training objectives can be cast as one another and how interpolating between different objectives can be effective. We then propose Mixture-of-Denoisers (MoD), a pre-training objective that combines diverse pre-training paradigms together. We furthermore introduce a notion of mode switching, wherein downstream fine-tuning is associated with specific pre-training schemes. We conduct extensive ablative experiments to compare multiple pre-training objectives and find that our method pushes the Pareto-frontier by outperforming T5 & GPT-like models across multiple diverse setups. By scaling our model up to 20B parameters, we achieve SOTA performance on 50 well-established supervised finetuning based NLP tasks. Our model also achieve strong results at in-context learning, outperforming 175B GPT-3 on zero-shot SuperGLUE and tripling the performance of T5-XXL on one-shot summarization. On 0-shot MMLU, UL2 20B outperforms T0 and T5 models. UL2 20B also works well with chain-of-thought prompting and reasoning, making it an appealing choice for research into reasoning at a small to medium scale of 20B parameters. Finally, we apply FLAN instruction tuning to the UL2 20B model, achieving MMLU and Big-Bench scores competitive to FLAN-PaLM 62B. We release Flax-based T5X checkpoints for the UL2 20B & Flan-UL2 20B.

Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning
Haokun Liu, Derek Tam, Mohammed Muqeeth, Jay Mohta, Tenghao Huang, Mohit Bansal, Colin Raffel
Few-shot in-context learning (ICL) enables pre-trained language models to perform a previously-unseen task without any gradient-based training by feeding a small number of training examples as part of the input. ICL incurs substantial computational, memory, and storage costs because it involves processing all of the training examples every time a prediction is made. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) (e.g. adapter modules, prompt tuning, sparse update methods, etc.) offers an alternative paradigm where a small set of parameters are trained to enable a model to perform the new task. In this paper, we rigorously compare few-shot ICL and PEFT and demonstrate that the latter offers better accuracy as well as dramatically lower computational costs. Along the way, we introduce a new PEFT method called (IA)3 that scales activations by learned vectors, attaining stronger performance while only introducing a relatively tiny amount of new parameters. We also propose a simple recipe based on the T0 model called T-Few that can be applied to new tasks without task-specific tuning or modifications. We validate the effectiveness of T-Few on completely unseen tasks by applying it to the RAFT benchmark, attaining super-human performance for the first time and outperforming the state-of-the-art by 6% absolute. All of the code used in our experiments is publicly available.

nuQmm: Quantized MatMul for Efficient Inference of Large-Scale Generative Language Models
LUT-GEMM: Quantized Matrix Multiplication based on LUTs for Efficient Inference in Large-Scale Generative Language Models
Gunho Park, Baeseong Park, Minsub Kim, Sungjae Lee, Jeonghoon Kim, Beomseok Kwon, Se Jung Kwon, Byeongwook Kim, Youngjoo Lee, Dongsoo Lee
The recent advancements in self-supervised learning, combined with the Transformer architecture, have enabled natural language processing (NLP) to achieve remarkably low perplexity. However, powerful NLP models necessitate increasing model size, leading to substantial computational and memory requirements. In this paper, we introduce an efficient inference framework tailored for large-scale generative language models. To reduce the model size, we employ a weight-only quantization strategy while preserving full precision for activations. As a result, we attain sub-4-bit quantization for each weight through non-uniform or uniform quantization techniques. Our proposed kernel, called LUT-GEMM, then accelerates quantized matrix multiplications, offering a flexible balance between compression ratio and accuracy. Unlike earlier matrix multiplication kernels that accommodated weight-only quantization, LUT-GEMM efficiently eliminates the resource-demanding dequantization process for both uniform and non-uniform quantization methods. By reducing the latency of individual GPUs and the overall inference process for large-scale language models, LUT-GEMM provides significant performance improvements in inference. The impact of LUT-GEMM is facilitated by implementing high compression ratios through low-bit quantization and efficient LUT-based operations, which decreases the number of required GPUs. For the OPT-175B model with 3-bit quantization, we show that LUT-GEMM accelerates the latency for generating each token by 2.1x compared to OPTQ, which requires costly dequantization. Consequently, LUT-GEMM enables inference of the OPT-175B model on a single GPU without noticeable degradation in accuracy or performance, while the non-quantized OPT-175B model requires a minimum of 8 GPUs.

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
Saurav Kadavath, Tom Conerly, Amanda Askell, Tom Henighan, Dawn Drain, Ethan Perez, Nicholas Schiefer, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Nova DasSarma, Eli Tran-Johnson, Scott Johnston, Sheer El-Showk, Andy Jones, Nelson Elhage, Tristan Hume, Anna Chen, Yuntao Bai, Sam Bowman, Stanislav Fort, Deep Ganguli, Danny Hernandez, Josh Jacobson, Jackson Kernion, Shauna Kravec, Liane Lovitt, Kamal Ndousse, Catherine Olsson, Sam Ringer, Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Nicholas Joseph, Ben Mann, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Jared Kaplan
We study whether language models can evaluate the validity of their own claims and predict which questions they will be able to answer correctly. We first show that larger models are well-calibrated on diverse multiple choice and true/false questions when they are provided in the right format. Thus we can approach self-evaluation on open-ended sampling tasks by asking models to first propose answers, and then to evaluate the probability "P(True)" that their answers are correct. We find encouraging performance, calibration, and scaling for P(True) on a diverse array of tasks. Performance at self-evaluation further improves when we allow models to consider many of their own samples before predicting the validity of one specific possibility. Next, we investigate whether models can be trained to predict "P(IK)", the probability that "I know" the answer to a question, without reference to any particular proposed answer. Models perform well at predicting P(IK) and partially generalize across tasks, though they struggle with calibration of P(IK) on new tasks. The predicted P(IK) probabilities also increase appropriately in the presence of relevant source materials in the context, and in the presence of hints towards the solution of mathematical word problems. We hope these observations lay the groundwork for training more honest models, and for investigating how honesty generalizes to cases where models are trained on objectives other than the imitation of human writing.

LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale
Tim Dettmers, Mike Lewis, Younes Belkada, Luke Zettlemoyer
Large language models have been widely adopted but require significant GPU memory for inference. We develop a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers, which cut the memory needed for inference by half while retaining full precision performance. With our method, a 175B parameter 16/32-bit checkpoint can be loaded, converted to Int8, and used immediately without performance degradation. This is made possible by understanding and working around properties of highly systematic emergent features in transformer language models that dominate attention and transformer predictive performance. To cope with these features, we develop a two-part quantization procedure, LLM.int8(). We first use vector-wise quantization with separate normalization constants for each inner product in the matrix multiplication, to quantize most of the features. However, for the emergent outliers, we also include a new mixed-precision decomposition scheme, which isolates the outlier feature dimensions into a 16-bit matrix multiplication while still more than 99.9% of values are multiplied in 8-bit. Using LLM.int8(), we show empirically it is possible to perform inference in LLMs with up to 175B parameters without any performance degradation. This result makes such models much more accessible, for example making it possible to use OPT-175B/BLOOM on a single server with consumer GPUs. We open-source our software.

Petals: Collaborative Inference and Fine-tuning of Large Models
Alexander Borzunov, Dmitry Baranchuk, Tim Dettmers, Max Ryabinin, Younes Belkada, Artem Chumachenko, Pavel Samygin, Colin Raffel
Many NLP tasks benefit from using large language models (LLMs) that often have more than 100 billion parameters. With the release of BLOOM-176B and OPT-175B, everyone can download pretrained models of this scale. Still, using these models requires high-end hardware unavailable to many researchers. In some cases, LLMs can be used more affordably via RAM offloading or hosted APIs. However, these techniques have innate limitations: offloading is too slow for interactive inference, while APIs are not flexible enough for research that requires access to weights, attention or logits. In this work, we propose Petals - a system for inference and fine-tuning of large models collaboratively by joining the resources of multiple parties. We demonstrate that this strategy outperforms offloading for very large models, running inference of BLOOM-176B on consumer GPUs with ≈ 1 step per second, which is enough for many interactive LLM applications. Unlike most inference APIs, Petals also natively exposes hidden states of served models, allowing to train and share custom model extensions based on efficient fine-tuning methods.

GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers
Elias Frantar, Saleh Ashkboos, Torsten Hoefler, Dan Alistarh
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 this https URL.

Truncation Sampling as Language Model Desmoothing
John Hewitt, Christopher D. Manning, Percy Liang
Long samples of text from neural language models can be of poor quality. Truncation sampling algorithms--like top-p or top-k -- address this by setting some words' probabilities to zero at each step. This work provides framing for the aim of truncation, and an improved algorithm for that aim. We propose thinking of a neural language model as a mixture of a true distribution and a smoothing distribution that avoids infinite perplexity. In this light, truncation algorithms aim to perform desmoothing, estimating a subset of the support of the true distribution. Finding a good subset is crucial: we show that top-p unnecessarily truncates high-probability words, for example causing it to truncate all words but Trump for a document that starts with Donald. We introduce η-sampling, which truncates words below an entropy-dependent probability threshold. Compared to previous algorithms, η-sampling generates more plausible long English documents according to humans, is better at breaking out of repetition, and behaves more reasonably on a battery of test distributions.

DyLoRA: Parameter Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation
Mojtaba Valipour, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Ivan Kobyzev, Ali Ghodsi
With the ever-growing size of pretrained models (PMs), fine-tuning them has become more expensive and resource-hungry. As a remedy, low-rank adapters (LoRA) keep the main pretrained weights of the model frozen and just introduce some learnable truncated SVD modules (so-called LoRA blocks) to the model. While LoRA blocks are parameter-efficient, they suffer from two major problems: first, the size of these blocks is fixed and cannot be modified after training (for example, if we need to change the rank of LoRA blocks, then we need to re-train them from scratch); second, optimizing their rank requires an exhaustive search and effort. In this work, we introduce a dynamic low-rank adaptation (DyLoRA) technique to address these two problems together. Our DyLoRA method trains LoRA blocks for a range of ranks instead of a single rank by sorting the representation learned by the adapter module at different ranks during training. We evaluate our solution on different natural language understanding (GLUE benchmark) and language generation tasks (E2E, DART and WebNLG) using different pretrained models such as RoBERTa and GPT with different sizes. Our results show that we can train dynamic search-free models with DyLoRA at least 4 to 7 times (depending to the task) faster than LoRA without significantly compromising performance. Moreover, our models can perform consistently well on a much larger range of ranks compared to LoRA.

An Algorithm for Routing Vectors in Sequences
Franz A. Heinsen
We propose a routing algorithm that takes a sequence of vectors and computes a new sequence with specified length and vector size. Each output vector maximizes "bang per bit," the difference between a net benefit to use and net cost to ignore data, by better predicting the input vectors. We describe output vectors as geometric objects, as latent variables that assign credit, as query states in a model of associative memory, and as agents in a model of a Society of Mind. We implement the algorithm with optimizations that reduce parameter count, computation, and memory use by orders of magnitude, enabling us to route sequences of greater length than previously possible. We evaluate our implementation on natural language and visual classification tasks, obtaining competitive or state-of-the-art accuracy and end-to-end credit assignments that are interpretable.

MegaBlocks: Efficient Sparse Training with Mixture-of-Experts
Trevor Gale, Deepak Narayanan, Cliff Young, Matei Zaharia
We present MegaBlocks, a system for efficient Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training on GPUs. Our system is motivated by the limitations of current frameworks, which restrict the dynamic routing in MoE layers to satisfy the constraints of existing software and hardware. These formulations force a tradeoff between model quality and hardware efficiency, as users must choose between dropping tokens from the computation or wasting computation and memory on padding. To address these limitations, we reformulate MoE computation in terms of block-sparse operations and develop new block-sparse GPU kernels that efficiently handle the dynamism present in MoEs. Our approach never drops tokens and maps efficiently to modern hardware, enabling end-to-end training speedups of up to 40% over MoEs trained with the state-of-the-art Tutel library and 2.4x over DNNs trained with the highly-optimized Megatron-LM framework.

Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions
Yizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu, Noah A. Smith, Daniel Khashabi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
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 introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off their own generations. Our pipeline generates instructions, input, and output samples from a language model, then filters invalid or similar ones before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to the vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT-001, which was trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT-001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning. Our code and data are available at this https URL.

Parallel Context Windows for Large Language Models
Nir Ratner, Yoav Levine, Yonatan Belinkov, Ori Ram, Inbal Magar, Omri Abend, Ehud Karpas, Amnon Shashua, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Yoav Shoham
When applied to processing long text, Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited by their context window. Existing efforts to address this limitation involve training specialized architectures, and cannot be easily applied to off-the-shelf LLMs. We present Parallel Context Windows (PCW), a method that alleviates the context window restriction for any off-the-shelf LLM without further training. The key to the approach is to carve a long context into chunks (``windows''), restrict the attention mechanism to apply only within each window, and re-use the positional embeddings across the windows. Our main results test the PCW approach on in-context learning with models that range in size between 750 million and 178 billion parameters, and show substantial improvements for tasks with diverse input and output spaces. We show additional benefits in other settings where long context windows may be beneficial: multi-hop questions and retrieval-augmented question answering with multiple retrieved documents. Our results highlight Parallel Context Windows as a promising method for applying off-the-shelf LLMs in a range of settings that require long text sequences. We make our code publicly available at this https URL.

Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor
Or Honovich, Thomas Scialom, Omer Levy, Timo Schick
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.

Pretraining Without Attention
Junxiong Wang, Jing Nathan Yan, Albert Gu, Alexander M. Rush
Transformers have been essential to pretraining success in NLP. While other architectures have been used, downstream accuracy is either significantly worse, or requires attention layers to match standard benchmarks such as GLUE. This work explores pretraining without attention by using recent advances in sequence routing based on state-space models (SSMs). Our proposed model, Bidirectional Gated SSM (BiGS), combines SSM layers with a multiplicative gating architecture that has been effective in simplified sequence modeling architectures. The model learns static layers that do not consider pair-wise interactions. Even so, BiGS is able to match BERT pretraining accuracy on GLUE and can be extended to long-form pretraining of 4096 tokens without approximation. Analysis shows that while the models have similar average accuracy, the approach has different inductive biases than BERT in terms of interactions and syntactic representations. All models from this work are available at this https URL.

The case for 4-bit precision: k-bit Inference Scaling Laws
Tim Dettmers, Luke Zettlemoyer
Quantization methods reduce the number of bits required to represent each parameter in a model, trading accuracy for smaller memory footprints and inference latencies. However, the final model size depends on both the number of parameters of the original model and the rate of compression. For example, a 30B 8-bit model and a 60B 4-bit model have the same number of bits but may have very different zero-shot accuracies. In this work, we study this trade-off by developing inference scaling laws of zero-shot performance in Large Language Models (LLMs) to determine the bit-precision and model size that maximizes zero-shot performance. We run more than 35,000 experiments with 16-bit inputs and k-bit parameters to examine which zero-shot quantization methods improve scaling for 3 to 8-bit precision at scales of 19M to 176B parameters across the LLM families BLOOM, OPT, NeoX/Pythia, and GPT-2. We find that it is challenging to improve the bit-level scaling trade-off, with the only improvements being the use of a small block size -- splitting the parameters into small independently quantized blocks -- and the quantization data type being used (e.g., Int vs Float). Overall, our findings show that {4-bit} precision is almost universally optimal for total model bits and zero-shot accuracy.

Prompting Is Programming: A Query Language for Large Language Models
Luca Beurer-Kellner, Marc Fischer, Martin Vechev
Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance on a wide range of tasks such as question answering and code generation. On a high level, given an input, a language model can be used to automatically complete the sequence in a statistically-likely way. Based on this, users prompt these models with language instructions or examples, to implement a variety of downstream tasks. Advanced prompting methods can even imply interaction between the language model, a user, and external tools such as calculators. However, to obtain state-of-the-art performance or adapt language models for specific tasks, complex task- and model-specific programs have to be implemented, which may still require ad-hoc interaction.
Based on this, we present the novel idea of Language Model Programming (LMP). LMP generalizes language model prompting from pure text prompts to an intuitive combination of text prompting and scripting. Additionally, LMP allows constraints to be specified over the language model output. This enables easy adaption to many tasks while abstracting language model internals and providing high-level semantics.
To enable LMP, we implement LMQL(short for Language Model Query Language), which leverages the constraints and control flow from an LMP prompt to generate an efficient inference procedure that minimizes the number of expensive calls to the underlying language model.
We show that LMQL can capture a wide range of state-of-the-art prompting methods in an intuitive way, especially facilitating interactive flows that are challenging to implement with existing high-level APIs. Our evaluation shows that we retain or increase the accuracy on several downstream tasks, while also significantly reducing the required amount of computation or cost in the case of pay-to-use APIs (26-85% cost savings).

SWARM Parallelism: Training Large Models Can Be Surprisingly Communication-Efficient
Max Ryabinin, Tim Dettmers, Michael Diskin, Alexander Borzunov
Many deep learning applications benefit from using large models with billions of parameters. Training these models is notoriously expensive due to the need for specialized HPC clusters. In this work, we consider alternative setups for training large models: using cheap "preemptible" instances or pooling existing resources from multiple regions. We analyze the performance of existing model-parallel algorithms in these conditions and find configurations where training larger models becomes less communication-intensive. Based on these findings, we propose SWARM parallelism, a model-parallel training algorithm designed for poorly connected, heterogeneous and unreliable devices. SWARM creates temporary randomized pipelines between nodes that are rebalanced in case of failure. We empirically validate our findings and compare SWARM parallelism with existing large-scale training approaches. Finally, we combine our insights with compression strategies to train a large Transformer language model with 1B shared parameters (approximately 13B before sharing) on preemptible T4 GPUs with less than 200Mb/s network.

SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot
Elias Frantar, Dan Alistarh
We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved via a new pruning method called SparseGPT, specifically designed to work efficiently and accurately on massive GPT-family models. We can execute SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, in under 4.5 hours, and can reach 60% unstructured sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time. SparseGPT generalizes to semi-structured (2:4 and 4:8) patterns, and is compatible with weight quantization approaches. The code is available at: this https URL.

Memory Augmented Large Language Models are Computationally Universal
Dale Schuurmans
We show that transformer-based large language models are computationally universal when augmented with an external memory. Any deterministic language model that conditions on strings of bounded length is equivalent to a finite automaton, hence computationally limited. However, augmenting such models with a read-write memory creates the possibility of processing arbitrarily large inputs and, potentially, simulating any algorithm. We establish that an existing large language model, Flan-U-PaLM 540B, can be combined with an associative read-write memory to exactly simulate the execution of a universal Turing machine, U15,2. A key aspect of the finding is that it does not require any modification of the language model weights. Instead, the construction relies solely on designing a form of stored instruction computer that can subsequently be programmed with a specific set of prompts.

Progress measures for grokking via mechanistic interpretability
Neel Nanda, Lawrence Chan, Tom Lieberum, Jess Smith, Jacob Steinhardt
Neural networks often exhibit emergent behavior, where qualitatively new capabilities arise from scaling up the amount of parameters, training data, or training steps. One approach to understanding emergence is to find continuous \textit{progress measures} that underlie the seemingly discontinuous qualitative changes. We argue that progress measures can be found via mechanistic interpretability: reverse-engineering learned behaviors into their individual components. As a case study, we investigate the recently-discovered phenomenon of ``grokking'' exhibited by small transformers trained on modular addition tasks. We fully reverse engineer the algorithm learned by these networks, which uses discrete Fourier transforms and trigonometric identities to convert addition to rotation about a circle. We confirm the algorithm by analyzing the activations and weights and by performing ablations in Fourier space. Based on this understanding, we define progress measures that allow us to study the dynamics of training and split training into three continuous phases: memorization, circuit formation, and cleanup. Our results show that grokking, rather than being a sudden shift, arises from the gradual amplification of structured mechanisms encoded in the weights, followed by the later removal of memorizing components.

The Wisdom of Hindsight Makes Language Models Better Instruction Followers
Tianjun Zhang, Fangchen Liu, Justin Wong, Pieter Abbeel, Joseph E. Gonzalez
Reinforcement learning has seen wide success in finetuning large language models to better align with instructions via human feedback. The so-called algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) demonstrates impressive performance on the GPT series models. However, the underlying Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm is complex and requires an additional training pipeline for reward and value networks. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach: converting feedback to instruction by relabeling the original one and training the model for better alignment in a supervised manner. Such an algorithm doesn't require any additional parameters except for the original language model and maximally reuses the pretraining pipeline. To achieve this, we formulate instruction alignment problem for language models as a goal-reaching problem in decision making. We propose Hindsight Instruction Relabeling (HIR), a novel algorithm for aligning language models with instructions. The resulting two-stage algorithm shed light to a family of reward-free approaches that utilize the hindsightly relabeled instructions based on feedback. We evaluate the performance of HIR extensively on 12 challenging BigBench reasoning tasks and show that HIR outperforms the baseline algorithms and is comparable to or even surpasses supervised finetuning.

The Stable Entropy Hypothesis and Entropy-Aware Decoding: An Analysis and Algorithm for Robust Natural Language Generation
Kushal Arora, Timothy J. O'Donnell, Doina Precup, Jason Weston, Jackie C.K.Cheung
State-of-the-art language generation models can degenerate when applied to open-ended generation problems such as text completion, story generation, or dialog modeling. This degeneration usually shows up in the form of incoherence, lack of vocabulary diversity, and self-repetition or copying from the context. In this paper, we postulate that ``human-like'' generations usually lie in a narrow and nearly flat entropy band, and violation of these entropy bounds correlates with degenerate behavior. Our experiments show that this stable narrow entropy zone exists across models, tasks, and domains and confirm the hypothesis that violations of this zone correlate with degeneration. We then use this insight to propose an entropy-aware decoding algorithm that respects these entropy bounds resulting in less degenerate, more contextual, and "human-like" language generation in open-ended text generation settings.

CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation
Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontañón, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai
Many natural language processing tasks benefit from long inputs, but processing long documents with Transformers is expensive -- not only due to quadratic attention complexity but also from applying feedforward and projection layers to every token. However, not all tokens are equally important, especially for longer documents. We propose CoLT5, a long-input Transformer model that builds on this intuition by employing conditional computation, devoting more resources to important tokens in both feedforward and attention layers. We show that CoLT5 achieves stronger performance than LongT5 with much faster training and inference, achieving SOTA on the long-input SCROLLS benchmark. Moreover, CoLT5 can effectively and tractably make use of extremely long inputs, showing strong gains up to 64k input length.

Colossal-Auto: Unified Automation of Parallelization and Activation Checkpoint for Large-scale Models
In recent years, large-scale models have demonstrated stateof-the-art performance across various domains. However, training such models requires the use of various techniques to address the problem of limited computing power and memory on devices such as GPU. Some commonly used techniques include pipeline parallelism, tensor parallelism and activation checkpointing. While existing works have focused on finding efficient distributed execution plans[37] and activation checkpoint scheduling[11][2], there has been no method proposed to jointly optimize these two plans. Moreover, ahead-of-time compilation relies heavily on accurate memory and computing overhead estimation, which is often time-consuming and misleading. Existing training systems and machine learning pipelines either physically execute each operand or estimate memory usage with a scaled input tensor. To address these challenges, we introduce a system that can jointly optimize distributed execution and gradient checkpointing plans. Additionally, we provide an easy-to-use symbolic profiler that generates memory and computing statistics for any PyTorch model with the minimal time cost. Our approach allows the user to parallelize their model training on the given hardware with minimum code change based. T

The Low-Rank Simplicity Bias in Deep Networks
Modern deep neural networks are highly over-parameterized compared to the data on which they are trained, yet they often generalize remarkably well. A flurry of recent work has asked: why do deep networks not overfit to their training data? In this work, we make a series of empirical observations that investigate and extend the hypothesis that deeper networks are inductively biased to find solutions with lower effective rank embeddings. We conjecture that this bias exists because the volume of functions that maps to low effective rank embedding increases with depth. We show empirically that our claim holds true on finite width linear and non-linear models on practical learning paradigms and show that on natural data, these are often the solutions that generalize well. We then show that the simplicity bias exists at both initialization and after training and is resilient to hyper-parameters and learning methods. We further demonstrate how linear over-parameterization of deep non-linear models can be used to induce low-rank bias, improving generalization performance on CIFAR and ImageNet without changing the modeling capacity.

FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU
Ying Sheng, Lianmin Zheng, Binhang Yuan, Zhuohan Li, Max Ryabinin, Daniel Y. Fu, Zhiqiang Xie, Beidi Chen, Clark Barrett, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Percy Liang, Christopher Ré, Ion Stoica, Ce Zhang
The high computational and memory requirements of large language model (LLM) inference make it feasible only with multiple high-end accelerators. Motivated by the emerging demand for latency-insensitive tasks with batched processing, this paper initiates the study of high-throughput LLM inference using limited resources, such as a single commodity GPU. We present FlexGen, a high-throughput generation engine for running LLMs with limited GPU memory. FlexGen can be flexibly configured under various hardware resource constraints by aggregating memory and computation from the GPU, CPU, and disk. By solving a linear programming problem, it searches for efficient patterns to store and access tensors. FlexGen further compresses the weights and the attention cache to 4 bits with negligible accuracy loss. These techniques enable FlexGen to have a larger space of batch size choices and thus significantly increase maximum throughput. As a result, when running OPT-175B on a single 16GB GPU, FlexGen achieves significantly higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art offloading systems, reaching a generation throughput of 1 token/s for the first time with an effective batch size of 144. On the HELM benchmark, FlexGen can benchmark a 30B model with a 16GB GPU on 7 representative sub-scenarios in 21 hours. The code is available at this https URL

Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning
Noah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Edward Berman, Ashwin Gopinath, Karthik Narasimhan, Shunyu Yao
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, compilers, APIs) as goal-driven agents. However, it remains challenging for these language agents to quickly and efficiently learn from trial-and-error as traditional reinforcement learning methods require extensive training samples and expensive model fine-tuning. We propose Reflexion, a novel framework to reinforce language agents not by updating weights, but instead through linguistic feedback. Concretely, Reflexion agents verbally reflect on task feedback signals, then maintain their own reflective text in an episodic memory buffer to induce better decision-making in subsequent trials. Reflexion is flexible enough to incorporate various types (scalar values or free-form language) and sources (external or internally simulated) of feedback signals, and obtains significant improvements over a baseline agent across diverse tasks (sequential decision-making, coding, language reasoning). For example, Reflexion achieves a 91% pass@1 accuracy on the HumanEval coding benchmark, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art GPT-4 that achieves 80%. We also conduct ablation and analysis studies using different feedback signals, feedback incorporation methods, and agent types, and provide insights into how they affect performance.

Scaling Down to Scale Up: A Guide to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Vladislav Lialin, Vijeta Deshpande, Anna Rumshisky
This paper presents a systematic overview and comparison of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods covering over 40 papers published between February 2019 and February 2023. These methods aim to resolve the infeasibility and impracticality of fine-tuning large language models by only training a small set of parameters. We provide a taxonomy that covers a broad range of methods and present a detailed method comparison with a specific focus on real-life efficiency and fine-tuning multibillion-scale language models.

FP8 versus INT8 for efficient deep learning inference
Mart van Baalen, Andrey Kuzmin, Suparna S Nair, Yuwei Ren, Eric Mahurin, Chirag Patel, Sundar Subramanian, Sanghyuk Lee, Markus Nagel, Joseph Soriaga, Tijmen Blankevoort
Recently, the idea of using FP8 as a number format for neural network training has been floating around the deep learning world. Given that most training is currently conducted with entire networks in FP32, or sometimes FP16 with mixed-precision, the step to having some parts of a network run in FP8 with 8-bit weights is an appealing potential speed-up for the generally costly and time-intensive training procedures in deep learning. A natural question arises regarding what this development means for efficient inference on edge devices. In the efficient inference device world, workloads are frequently executed in INT8. Sometimes going even as low as INT4 when efficiency calls for it. In this whitepaper, we compare the performance for both the FP8 and INT formats for efficient on-device inference. We theoretically show the difference between the INT and FP formats for neural networks and present a plethora of post-training quantization and quantization-aware-training results to show how this theory translates to practice. We also provide a hardware analysis showing that the FP formats are somewhere between 50-180% less efficient in terms of compute in dedicated hardware than the INT format. Based on our research and a read of the research field, we conclude that although the proposed FP8 format could be good for training, the results for inference do not warrant a dedicated implementation of FP8 in favor of INT8 for efficient inference. We show that our results are mostly consistent with previous findings but that important comparisons between the formats have thus far been lacking. Finally, we discuss what happens when FP8-trained networks are converted to INT8 and conclude with a brief discussion on the most efficient way for on-device deployment and an extensive suite of INT8 results for many models.

Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback
Aman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan, Luyu Gao, Sarah Wiegreffe, Uri Alon, Nouha Dziri, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Yiming Yang, Shashank Gupta, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Katherine Hermann, Sean Welleck, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Peter Clark
Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through iterative feedback and refinement. The main idea is to generate an initial output using an LLMs; then, the same LLMs provides feedback for its output and uses it to refine itself, iteratively. Self-Refine does not require any supervised training data, additional training, or reinforcement learning, and instead uses a single LLM as the generator, refiner, and feedback provider. We evaluate Self-Refine across 7 diverse tasks, ranging from dialog response generation to mathematical reasoning, using state-of-the-art (GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) LLMs. Across all evaluated tasks, outputs generated with Self-Refine are preferred by humans and automatic metrics over those generated with the same LLM using conventional one-step generation, improving by ~20% absolute on average in task performance. Our work demonstrates that even state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 can be further improved at test time using our simple, standalone approach.

RPTQ: Reorder-based Post-training Quantization for Large Language Models
Zhihang Yuan, Lin Niu, Jiawei Liu, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang, Yuzhang Shang, Guangyu Sun, Qiang Wu, Jiaxiang Wu, Bingzhe Wu
Large-scale language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance, but their deployment presents challenges due to their significant memory usage. This issue can be alleviated through quantization. In this paper, we identify that the challenge in quantizing activations in LLMs arises from varying ranges across channels, rather than solely the presence of outliers. To address this challenge, we introduce a quantization method called RPTQ, which utilizes a reorder-based approach. By rearranging the channels and quantizing them in clusters, RPTQ effectively mitigates the impact of range differences between channels. To minimize the overhead of the reorder operation, we fuse it into the layer norm operation and weights in linear layers. In our experiments, RPTQ achieved a significant breakthrough by utilizing 3-bit activation in LLMs for the first time, resulting in a substantial reduction in memory usage. For instance, quantizing OPT-175b can lead to a memory consumption reduction of up to 80%.

REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representations
Debjit Paul, Mete Ismayilzada, Maxime Peyrard, Beatriz Borges, Antoine Bosselut, Robert West, Boi Faltings
Language models (LMs) have recently shown remarkable performance on reasoning tasks by explicitly generating intermediate inferences, e.g., chain-of-thought prompting. However, these intermediate inference steps may be inappropriate deductions from the initial context and lead to incorrect final predictions. Here we introduce REFINER, a framework for finetuning LMs to explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps while interacting with a critic model that provides automated feedback on the reasoning. Specifically, the critic provides structured feedback that the reasoning LM uses to iteratively improve its intermediate arguments. Empirical evaluations of REFINER on three diverse reasoning tasks show significant improvements over baseline LMs of comparable scale. Furthermore, when using GPT3.5 as the reasoner, the trained critic significantly improves reasoning without finetuning the reasoner. Finally, our critic model is trained without expensive human-in-the-loop data but can be substituted with humans at inference time.

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O'Brien, Carrie J. Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang, Michael S. Bernstein
Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents--computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture--observation, planning, and reflection--each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.

Meet in the Middle: A New Pre-training Paradigm
Anh Nguyen, Nikos Karampatziakis, Weizhu Chen
Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, assuming that the next token only depends on the preceding ones. However, this assumption ignores the potential benefits of using the full sequence information during training, and the possibility of having context from both sides during inference. In this paper, we propose a new pre-training paradigm with techniques that jointly improve the training data efficiency and the capabilities of the LMs in the infilling task. The first is a training objective that aligns the predictions of a left-to-right LM with those of a right-to-left LM, trained on the same data but in reverse order. The second is a bidirectional inference procedure that enables both LMs to meet in the middle. We show the effectiveness of our pre-training paradigm with extensive experiments on both programming and natural language models, outperforming strong baselines.\

Compressed Regression over Adaptive Networks
Marco Carpentiero, Vincenzo Matta, Ali H. Sayed
In this work we derive the performance achievable by a network of distributed agents that solve, adaptively and in the presence of communication constraints, a regression problem. Agents employ the recently proposed ACTC (adapt-compress-then-combine) diffusion strategy, where the signals exchanged locally by neighboring agents are encoded with randomized differential compression operators. We provide a detailed characterization of the mean-square estimation error, which is shown to comprise a term related to the error that agents would achieve without communication constraints, plus a term arising from compression. The analysis reveals quantitative relationships between the compression loss and fundamental attributes of the distributed regression problem, in particular, the stochastic approximation error caused by the gradient noise and the network topology (through the Perron eigenvector). We show that knowledge of such relationships is critical to allocate optimally the communication resources across the agents, taking into account their individual attributes, such as the quality of their data or their degree of centrality in the network topology. We devise an optimized allocation strategy where the parameters necessary for the optimization can be learned online by the agents. Illustrative examples show that a significant performance improvement, as compared to a blind (i.e., uniform) resource allocation, can be achieved by optimizing the allocation by means of the provided mean-square-error formulas.

A Cheaper and Better Diffusion Language Model with Soft-Masked Noise
Jiaao Chen, Aston Zhang, Mu Li, Alex Smola, Diyi Yang
Diffusion models that are based on iterative denoising have been recently proposed and leveraged in various generation tasks like image generation. Whereas, as a way inherently built for continuous data, existing diffusion models still have some limitations in modeling discrete data, e.g., languages. For example, the generally used Gaussian noise can not handle the discrete corruption well, and the objectives in continuous spaces fail to be stable for textual data in the diffusion process especially when the dimension is high. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a novel diffusion model for language modeling, Masked-Diffuse LM, with lower training cost and better performances, inspired by linguistic features in languages. Specifically, we design a linguistic-informed forward process which adds corruptions to the text through strategically soft-masking to better noise the textual data. Also, we directly predict the categorical distribution with cross-entropy loss function in every diffusion step to connect the continuous space and discrete space in a more efficient and straightforward way. Through experiments on 5 controlled generation tasks, we demonstrate that our Masked-Diffuse LM can achieve better generation quality than the state-of-the-art diffusion models with better efficiency.

RRHF: Rank Responses to Align Language Models with Human Feedback without tears
Zheng Yuan, Hongyi Yuan, Chuanqi Tan, Wei Wang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) facilitates the alignment of large language models with human preferences, significantly enhancing the quality of interactions between humans and models. InstructGPT implements RLHF through several stages, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), reward model training, and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). However, PPO is sensitive to hyperparameters and requires multiple models in its standard implementation, making it hard to train and scale up to larger parameter counts. In contrast, we propose a novel learning paradigm called RRHF, which scores sampled responses from different sources via a logarithm of conditional probabilities and learns to align these probabilities with human preferences through ranking loss. RRHF can leverage sampled responses from various sources including the model responses from itself, other large language model responses, and human expert responses to learn to rank them. RRHF only needs 1 to 2 models during tuning and can efficiently align language models with human preferences robustly without complex hyperparameter tuning. Additionally, RRHF can be considered an extension of SFT and reward model training while being simpler than PPO in terms of coding, model counts, and hyperparameters. We evaluate RRHF on the Helpful and Harmless dataset, demonstrating comparable alignment performance with PPO by reward model score and human labeling. Extensive experiments show that the performance of RRHF is highly related to sampling quality which suggests RRHF is a best-of-n learner. Codes available at this https URL.

CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society
Guohao Li, Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Hani Itani, Dmitrii Khizbullin, Bernard Ghanem
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This paper explores the potential of building scalable techniques to facilitate autonomous cooperation among communicative agents, and provides insight into their "cognitive" processes. To address the challenges of achieving autonomous cooperation, we propose a novel communicative agent framework named role-playing. Our approach involves using inception prompting to guide chat agents toward task completion while maintaining consistency with human intentions. We showcase how role-playing can be used to generate conversational data for studying the behaviors and capabilities of a society of agents, providing a valuable resource for investigating conversational language models. In particular, we conduct comprehensive studies on instruction-following cooperation in multi-agent settings. Our contributions include introducing a novel communicative agent framework, offering a scalable approach for studying the cooperative behaviors and capabilities of multi-agent systems, and open-sourcing our library to support research on communicative agents and beyond: this https URL.

Automatic Gradient Descent: Deep Learning without Hyperparameters
Jeremy Bernstein, Chris Mingard, Kevin Huang, Navid Azizan, Yisong Yue
The architecture of a deep neural network is defined explicitly in terms of the number of layers, the width of each layer and the general network topology. Existing optimisation frameworks neglect this information in favour of implicit architectural information (e.g. second-order methods) or architecture-agnostic distance functions (e.g. mirror descent). Meanwhile, the most popular optimiser in practice, Adam, is based on heuristics. This paper builds a new framework for deriving optimisation algorithms that explicitly leverage neural architecture. The theory extends mirror descent to non-convex composite objective functions: the idea is to transform a Bregman divergence to account for the non-linear structure of neural architecture. Working through the details for deep fully-connected networks yields automatic gradient descent: a first-order optimiser without any hyperparameters. Automatic gradient descent trains both fully-connected and convolutional networks out-of-the-box and at ImageNet scale. A PyTorch implementation is available at this https URL and also in Appendix B. Overall, the paper supplies a rigorous theoretical foundation for a next-generation of architecture-dependent optimisers that work automatically and without hyperparameters.

SPDF: Sparse Pre-training and Dense Fine-tuning for Large Language Models
Vithursan Thangarasa, Abhay Gupta, William Marshall, Tianda Li, Kevin Leong, Dennis DeCoste, Sean Lie, Shreyas Saxena
The pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm has contributed to a number of breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Instead of directly training on a downstream task, language models are first pre-trained on large datasets with cross-domain knowledge (e.g., Pile, MassiveText, etc.) and then fine-tuned on task-specific data (e.g., natural language generation, text summarization, etc.). Scaling the model and dataset size has helped improve the performance of LLMs, but unfortunately, this also lead to highly prohibitive computational costs. Pre-training LLMs often require orders of magnitude more FLOPs than fine-tuning and the model capacity often remains the same between the two phases. To achieve training efficiency w.r.t training FLOPs, we propose to decouple the model capacity between the two phases and introduce Sparse Pre-training and Dense Fine-tuning (SPDF). In this work, we show the benefits of using unstructured weight sparsity to train only a subset of weights during pre-training (Sparse Pre-training) and then recover the representational capacity by allowing the zeroed weights to learn (Dense Fine-tuning). We demonstrate that we can induce up to 75% sparsity into a 1.3B parameter GPT-3 XL model resulting in a 2.5x reduction in pre-training FLOPs, without a significant loss in accuracy on the downstream tasks relative to the dense baseline. By rigorously evaluating multiple downstream tasks, we also establish a relationship between sparsity, task complexity and dataset size. Our work presents a promising direction to train large GPT models at a fraction of the training FLOPs using weight sparsity, while retaining the benefits of pre-trained textual representations for downstream tasks.

Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study
Boxin Wang, Wei Ping, Peng Xu, Lawrence McAfee, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Bo Li, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar, Bryan Catanzaro
Large decoder-only language models (LMs) can be largely improved in terms of perplexity by retrieval (e.g., RETRO), but its impact on text generation quality and downstream task accuracy is unclear. Thus, it is still an open question: shall we pretrain large autoregressive LMs with retrieval? To answer it, we perform a comprehensive study on a scalable pre-trained retrieval-augmented LM (i.e., RETRO) compared with standard GPT and retrieval-augmented GPT incorporated at fine-tuning or inference stages. We first provide the recipe to reproduce RETRO up to 9.5B parameters while retrieving a text corpus with 330B tokens. Based on that, we have the following novel findings: i) RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with much less degeneration (i.e., repetition), moderately higher factual accuracy, and slightly lower toxicity with a nontoxic retrieval database. ii) On the LM Evaluation Harness benchmark, RETRO largely outperforms GPT on knowledge-intensive tasks, but is on par with GPT on other tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a simple variant of the model, RETRO++, which largely improves open-domain QA results of original RETRO (e.g., EM score +8.6 on Natural Question) and significantly outperforms retrieval-augmented GPT in both fine-tuning and zero-shot evaluation settings. Our findings highlight the promising direction of pretraining autoregressive LMs with retrieval as future foundation models. We release our code and model at: this https URL

Outlier Suppression+: Accurate quantization of large language models by equivalent and optimal shifting and scaling
Xiuying Wei, Yunchen Zhang, Yuhang Li, Xiangguo Zhang, Ruihao Gong, Jinyang Guo, Xianglong Liu
Post-training quantization~(PTQ) of transformer language models faces significant challenges due to the existence of detrimental outliers in activations. We observe that these outliers are concentrated in specific channels and are asymmetric across channels. To address this issue, we propose the Outlier Suppression+~(OS+) framework, which contains the channel-wise shifting for asymmetry and channel-wise scaling for concentration. We show that these operations can be seamlessly migrated into subsequent modules while maintaining equivalence. Second, we propose a fast and stable scheme to calculate effective shifting and scaling values. The channel-wise shifting aligns the center of each channel for removal of outlier asymmetry. The channel-wise scaling quantitatively evaluates changes brought by migration and quantization for better quantization burden balance. We validate our OS+ under both standard and fine-grained quantization settings with models including BERT, OPT, BLOOM, BLOOMZ, and LLaMA. Comprehensive results across various tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Especially, with standard quantization, OS+ can achieve near-floating-point performance on both small models and large language models on 8-bit and 6-bit. Besides, we establish a new state-of-the-art for 4-bit BERT with 15.5\% improvement. Our code is available at \url{this https URL}.

Scaling Transformer to 1M tokens and beyond with RMT
Aydar Bulatov, Yuri Kuratov, Mikhail S. Burtsev
This technical report presents the application of a recurrent memory to extend the context length of BERT, one of the most effective Transformer-based models in natural language processing. By leveraging the Recurrent Memory Transformer architecture, we have successfully increased the model's effective context length to an unprecedented two million tokens, while maintaining high memory retrieval accuracy. Our method allows for the storage and processing of both local and global information and enables information flow between segments of the input sequence through the use of recurrence. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which holds significant potential to enhance long-term dependency handling in natural language understanding and generation tasks as well as enable large-scale context processing for memory-intensive applications.

Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought
Ori Yoran, Tomer Wolfson, Ben Bogin, Uri Katz, Daniel Deutch, Jonathan Berant
Modern systems for multi-hop question answering (QA) typically break questions into a sequence of reasoning steps, termed chain-of-thought (CoT), before arriving at a final answer. Often, multiple chains are sampled and aggregated through a voting mechanism over the final answers, but the intermediate steps themselves are discarded. While such approaches improve performance, they do not consider the relations between intermediate steps across chains and do not provide a unified explanation for the predicted answer. We introduce Multi-Chain Reasoning (MCR), an approach which prompts large language models to meta-reason over multiple chains of thought, rather than aggregating their answers. MCR examines different reasoning chains, mixes information between them and selects the most relevant facts in generating an explanation and predicting the answer. MCR outperforms strong baselines on 7 multi-hop QA datasets. Moreover, our analysis reveals that MCR explanations exhibit high quality, enabling humans to verify its answers.

Towards Multi-Modal DBMSs for Seamless Querying of Texts and Tables
Matthias Urban, Carsten Binnig
In this paper, we propose Multi-Modal Databases (MMDBs), which is a new class of database systems that can seamlessly query text and tables using SQL. To enable seamless querying of textual data using SQL in an MMDB, we propose to extend relational databases with so-called multi-modal operators (MMOps) which are based on the advances of recent large language models such as GPT-3. The main idea of MMOps is that they allow text collections to be treated as tables without the need to manually transform the data. As we show in our evaluation, our MMDB prototype can not only outperform state-of-the-art approaches such as text-to-table in terms of accuracy and performance but it also requires significantly less training data to fine-tune the model for an unseen text collection.

We're Afraid Language Models Aren't Modeling Ambiguity
Alisa Liu, Zhaofeng Wu, Julian Michael, Alane Suhr, Peter West, Alexander Koller, Swabha Swayamdipta, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi
Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language models (LMs) are increasingly employed as dialogue interfaces and writing aids, handling ambiguous language is critical to their success. We characterize ambiguity in a sentence by its effect on entailment relations with another sentence, and collect AmbiEnt, a linguist-annotated benchmark of 1,645 examples with diverse kinds of ambiguity. We design a suite of tests based on AmbiEnt, presenting the first evaluation of pretrained LMs to recognize ambiguity and disentangle possible meanings. We find that the task remains extremely challenging, including for GPT-4, whose generated disambiguations are considered correct only 32% of the time in human evaluation, compared to 90% for disambiguations in our dataset. Finally, to illustrate the value of ambiguity-sensitive tools, we show that a multilabel NLI model can flag political claims in the wild that are misleading due to ambiguity. We encourage the field to rediscover the importance of ambiguity for NLP.

The Internal State of an LLM Knows When It's Lying
Amos Azaria, Tom Mitchell
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance in various tasks, one of their most prominent drawbacks is generating inaccurate or false information with a confident tone. In this paper, we provide evidence that the LLM's internal state can be used to reveal the truthfulness of statements. This includes both statements provided to the LLM, and statements that the LLM itself generates. Our approach is to train a classifier that outputs the probability that a statement is truthful, based on the hidden layer activations of the LLM as it reads or generates the statement. Experiments demonstrate that given a set of test sentences, of which half are true and half false, our trained classifier achieves an average of 71\% to 83\% accuracy labeling which sentences are true versus false, depending on the LLM base model. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between our classifier's performance and approaches based on the probability assigned to the sentence by the LLM. We show that while LLM-assigned sentence probability is related to sentence truthfulness, this probability is also dependent on sentence length and the frequencies of words in the sentence, resulting in our trained classifier providing a more reliable approach to detecting truthfulness, highlighting its potential to enhance the reliability of LLM-generated content and its practical applicability in real-world scenarios.

Search-in-the-Chain: Towards Accurate, Credible and Traceable Large Language Models for Knowledge-intensive Tasks
Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng, Tat-Seng Chua
Making the contents generated by Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT, accurate, credible and traceable is crucial, especially in complex knowledge-intensive tasks that require multi-step reasoning and each of which needs knowledge to solve. Introducing Information Retrieval (IR) to provide LLM with external knowledge is good potential to solve this problem. However, where and how to introduce IR into LLM is a big challenge. Previous work has the disadvantage that the wrong knowledge retrieved by IR misleads the LLM or breaks the reasoning chain of LLM. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Search-in-the-Chain (SearChain) for the interaction between LLM and IR to solve the challenges. First, LLM generates the global reasoning chain called Chain-of-Query (CoQ) where each node consists of an IR-oriented query and the answer to the query. Second, IR verifies the answer of each node of CoQ, it corrects the answer that is not consistent with the retrieved information when IR gives high confidence, which improves the credibility. Third, LLM can mark its missing knowledge in CoQ and IR can provide this knowledge to LLM. These three operations improve the accuracy of LLM for complex knowledge-intensive tasks in terms of reasoning ability and knowledge. Finally, SearChain generates the reasoning process and marks references to supporting documents for each reasoning step, which improves traceability. SearChain transforms the topology of reasoning from chain to tree, which can modify the reasoning direction. Experiment shows that SearChain outperforms baselines on complex knowledge-intensive tasks including multi-hop question-answering, slot filling, fact checking, and long-form question-answering.

Towards Unbiased Training in Federated Open-world Semi-supervised Learning
Jie Zhang, Xiaosong Ma, Song Guo, Wenchao Xu
Federated Semi-supervised Learning (FedSSL) has emerged as a new paradigm for allowing distributed clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model over scarce labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. However, existing works for FedSSL rely on a closed-world assumption that all local training data and global testing data are from seen classes observed in the labeled dataset. It is crucial to go one step further: adapting FL models to an open-world setting, where unseen classes exist in the unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Federatedopen-world Semi-Supervised Learning (FedoSSL) framework, which can solve the key challenge in distributed and open-world settings, i.e., the biased training process for heterogeneously distributed unseen classes. Specifically, since the advent of a certain unseen class depends on a client basis, the locally unseen classes (exist in multiple clients) are likely to receive differentiated superior aggregation effects than the globally unseen classes (exist only in one client). We adopt an uncertainty-aware suppressed loss to alleviate the biased training between locally unseen and globally unseen classes. Besides, we enable a calibration module supplementary to the global aggregation to avoid potential conflicting knowledge transfer caused by inconsistent data distribution among different clients. The proposed FedoSSL can be easily adapted to state-of-the-art FL methods, which is also validated via extensive experiments on benchmarks and real-world datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and CINIC-10).

Unlimiformer: Long-Range Transformers with Unlimited Length Input
Amanda Bertsch, Uri Alon, Graham Neubig, Matthew R. Gormley
Since the proposal of transformers, these models have been limited to bounded input lengths, because of their need to attend to every token in the input. In this work, we propose Unlimiformer: a general approach that wraps any existing pretrained encoder-decoder transformer, and offloads the cross-attention computation to a single k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) index, while the returned kNN distances are the attention dot-product scores. This kNN index can be kept on either the GPU or CPU memory and queried in sub-linear time; this way, we can index practically unlimited input sequences, while every attention head in every decoder layer retrieves its top-k keys, instead of attending to every key. We evaluate Unlimiformer on several long-document and book-summarization benchmarks, showing that it can process even 500k token-long inputs from the BookSum dataset, without any input truncation at test time. We demonstrate that Unlimiformer improves pretrained models such as BART and Longformer by extending them to unlimited inputs without additional learned weights and without modifying their code. We make our code and models publicly available at this https URL .

FreeLM: Fine-Tuning-Free Language Model
Xiang Li, Xin Jiang, Xuying Meng, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP tasks. Despite the great success, mainstream solutions largely follow the pre-training then finetuning paradigm, which brings in both high deployment costs and low training efficiency. Nevertheless, fine-tuning on a specific task is essential because PLMs are only pre-trained with language signal from large raw data. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-tuning-free strategy for language models, to consider both language signal and teacher signal. Teacher signal is an abstraction of a battery of downstream tasks, provided in a unified proposition format. Trained with both language and strong task-aware teacher signals in an interactive manner, our FreeLM model demonstrates strong generalization and robustness. FreeLM outperforms large models e.g., GPT-3 and InstructGPT, on a range of language understanding tasks in experiments. FreeLM is much smaller with 0.3B parameters, compared to 175B in these models.

Cuttlefish: Low-Rank Model Training without All the Tuning
Hongyi Wang, Saurabh Agarwal, Pongsakorn U-chupala, Yoshiki Tanaka, Eric P. Xing, Dimitris Papailiopoulos
Recent research has shown that training low-rank neural networks can effectively reduce the total number of trainable parameters without sacrificing predictive accuracy, resulting in end-to-end speedups. However, low-rank model training necessitates adjusting several additional factorization hyperparameters, such as the rank of the factorization at each layer. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing Cuttlefish, an automated low-rank training approach that eliminates the need for tuning factorization hyperparameters. Cuttlefish leverages the observation that after a few epochs of full-rank training, the stable rank (i.e., an approximation of the true rank) of each layer stabilizes at a constant value. Cuttlefish switches from full-rank to low-rank training once the stable ranks of all layers have converged, setting the dimension of each factorization to its corresponding stable rank. Our results show that Cuttlefish generates models up to 5.6 times smaller than full-rank models, and attains up to a 1.2 times faster end-to-end training process while preserving comparable accuracy. Moreover, Cuttlefish outperforms state-of-the-art low-rank model training methods and other prominent baselines. The source code for our implementation can be found at: this https URL.

AttentionViz: A Global View of Transformer Attention
Catherine Yeh, Yida Chen, Aoyu Wu, Cynthia Chen, Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg
Transformer models are revolutionizing machine learning, but their inner workings remain mysterious. In this work, we present a new visualization technique designed to help researchers understand the self-attention mechanism in transformers that allows these models to learn rich, contextual relationships between elements of a sequence. The main idea behind our method is to visualize a joint embedding of the query and key vectors used by transformer models to compute attention. Unlike previous attention visualization techniques, our approach enables the analysis of global patterns across multiple input sequences. We create an interactive visualization tool, AttentionViz (demo: this http URL), based on these joint query-key embeddings, and use it to study attention mechanisms in both language and vision transformers. We demonstrate the utility of our approach in improving model understanding and offering new insights about query-key interactions through several application scenarios and expert feedback.

Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models
Lei Wang, Wanyu Xu, Yihuai Lan, Zhiqiang Hu, Yunshi Lan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Ee-Peng Lim
Large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to deliver impressive performance in various NLP tasks. To tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting includes a few manually crafted step-by-step reasoning demonstrations which enable LLMs to explicitly generate reasoning steps and improve their reasoning task accuracy. To eliminate the manual effort, Zero-shot-CoT concatenates the target problem statement with "Let's think step by step" as an input prompt to LLMs. Despite the success of Zero-shot-CoT, it still suffers from three pitfalls: calculation errors, missing-step errors, and semantic misunderstanding errors. To address the missing-step errors, we propose Plan-and-Solve (PS) Prompting. It consists of two components: first, devising a plan to divide the entire task into smaller subtasks, and then carrying out the subtasks according to the plan. To address the calculation errors and improve the quality of generated reasoning steps, we extend PS prompting with more detailed instructions and derive PS+ prompting. We evaluate our proposed prompting strategy on ten datasets across three reasoning problems. The experimental results over GPT-3 show that our proposed zero-shot prompting consistently outperforms Zero-shot-CoT across all datasets by a large margin, is comparable to or exceeds Zero-shot-Program-of-Thought Prompting, and has comparable performance with 8-shot CoT prompting on the math reasoning problem. The code can be found at this https URL.

A Frustratingly Easy Improvement for Position Embeddings via Random Padding
Mingxu Tao, Yansong Feng, Dongyan Zhao
Position embeddings, encoding the positional relationships among tokens in text sequences, make great contributions to modeling local context features in Transformer-based pre-trained language models. However, in Extractive Question Answering, position embeddings trained with instances of varied context lengths may not perform well as we expect. Since the embeddings of rear positions are updated fewer times than the front position embeddings, the rear ones may not be properly trained. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective strategy, Random Padding, without any modifications to architectures of existing pre-trained language models. We adjust the token order of input sequences when fine-tuning, to balance the number of updating times of every position embedding. Experiments show that Random Padding can significantly improve model performance on the instances whose answers are located at rear positions, especially when models are trained on short contexts but evaluated on long contexts. Our code and data will be released for future research.

Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision
Zhiqing Sun, Yikang Shen, Qinhong Zhou, Hongxin Zhang, Zhenfang Chen, David Cox, Yiming Yang, Chuang Gan
Recent AI-assistant agents, such as ChatGPT, predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring they are helpful, ethical, and reliable. However, this dependence can significantly constrain the true potential of AI-assistant agents due to the high cost of obtaining human supervision and the related issues on quality, reliability, diversity, self-consistency, and undesirable biases. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called SELF-ALIGN, which combines principle-driven reasoning and the generative power of LLMs for the self-alignment of AI agents with minimal human supervision. Our approach encompasses four stages: first, we use an LLM to generate synthetic prompts, and a topic-guided method to augment the prompt diversity; second, we use a small set of human-written principles for AI models to follow, and guide the LLM through in-context learning from demonstrations (of principles application) to produce helpful, ethical, and reliable responses to user's queries; third, we fine-tune the original LLM with the high-quality self-aligned responses so that the resulting model can generate desirable responses for each query directly without the principle set and the demonstrations anymore; and finally, we offer a refinement step to address the issues of overly-brief or indirect responses. Applying SELF-ALIGN to the LLaMA-65b base language model, we develop an AI assistant named Dromedary. With fewer than 300 lines of human annotations (including < 200 seed prompts, 16 generic principles, and 5 exemplars for in-context learning). Dromedary significantly surpasses the performance of several state-of-the-art AI systems, including Text-Davinci-003 and Alpaca, on benchmark datasets with various settings.

Explanation-based Finetuning Makes Models More Robust to Spurious Cues
Josh Magnus Ludan, Yixuan Meng, Tai Nguyen, Saurabh Shah, Qing Lyu, Marianna Apidianaki, Chris Callison-Burch
Large Language Models (LLMs) are so powerful that they sometimes learn correlations between labels and features that are irrelevant to the task, leading to poor generalization on out-of-distribution data. We propose explanation-based finetuning as a general approach to mitigate LLMs' reliance on spurious correlations. Unlike standard finetuning where the model only predicts the answer given the input, we finetune the model to additionally generate a free-text explanation supporting its answer. To evaluate our method, we finetune the model on artificially constructed training sets containing different types of spurious cues, and test it on a test set without these cues. Compared to standard finetuning, our method makes GPT-3 (davinci) remarkably more robust against spurious cues in terms of accuracy drop across four classification tasks: ComVE (+1.2), CREAK (+9.1), e-SNLI (+15.4), and SBIC (+6.5). The efficacy generalizes across multiple model families and scales, with greater gains for larger models. Finally, our method also works well with explanations generated by the model, implying its applicability to more datasets without human-written explanations.

An automatically discovered chain-of-thought prompt generalizes to novel models and datasets
Konstantin Hebenstreit, Robert Praas, Louis P Kiesewetter, Matthias Samwald
Emergent chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities promise to improve performance and explainability of large language models (LLMs). However, uncertainties remain about how reasoning strategies formulated for previous model generations generalize to new model generations and different datasets. In this small-scale study, we compare different reasoning strategies induced by zero-shot prompting across six recently released LLMs (davinci-002, davinci-003, GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, Flan-T5-xxl and Cohere command-xlarge) on a mixture of six question-answering datasets, including datasets from scientific and medical domains. Our findings demonstrate that while some variations in effectiveness occur, gains from CoT reasoning strategies remain robust across different models and datasets. GPT-4 has the most benefit from current state-of-the-art reasoning strategies and exhibits the best performance by applying a prompt previously discovered through automated discovery.

Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval
Shashank Rajput, Nikhil Mehta, Anima Singh, Raghunandan H. Keshavan, Trung Vu, Lukasz Heldt, Lichan Hong, Yi Tay, Vinh Q. Tran, Jonah Samost, Maciej Kula, Ed H. Chi, Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy
Modern recommender systems perform large-scale retrieval by first embedding queries and item candidates in the same unified space, followed by approximate nearest neighbor search to select top candidates given a query embedding. In this paper, we propose a novel generative retrieval approach, where the retrieval model autoregressively decodes the identifiers of the target candidates. To that end, we create semantically meaningful tuple of codewords to serve as a Semantic ID for each item. Given Semantic IDs for items in a user session, a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model is trained to predict the Semantic ID of the next item that the user will interact with. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Semantic ID-based generative model for recommendation tasks. We show that recommender systems trained with the proposed paradigm significantly outperform the current SOTA models on various datasets. In addition, we show that incorporating Semantic IDs into the sequence-to-sequence model enhances its ability to generalize, as evidenced by the improved retrieval performance observed for items with no prior interaction history.

Fast Distributed Inference Serving for Large Language Models
Bingyang Wu, Yinmin Zhong, Zili Zhang, Gang Huang, Xuanzhe Liu, Xin Jin
Large language models (LLMs) power a new generation of interactive AI applications exemplified by ChatGPT. The interactive nature of these applications demand low job completion time (JCT) for model inference. Existing LLM serving systems use run-to-completion processing for inference jobs, which suffers from head-of-line blocking and long JCT. We present FastServe, a distributed inference serving system for LLMs. FastServe exploits the autoregressive pattern of LLM inference to enable preemption at the granularity of each output token. FastServe uses preemptive scheduling to minimize JCT with a novel skip-join Multi-Level Feedback Queue scheduler. Based on the new semi information-agnostic setting of LLM inference, the scheduler leverages the input length information to assign an appropriate initial queue for each arrival job to join. The higher priority queues than the joined queue are skipped to reduce demotions. We design an efficient GPU memory management mechanism that proactively offloads and uploads intermediate states between GPU memory and host memory for LLM inference. We build a system prototype of FastServe based on NVIDIA FasterTransformer. Experimental results show that compared to the state-of-the-art solution Orca, FastServe improves the average and tail JCT by up to 5.1× and 6.4×, respectively.

Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models
Hongyuan Lu, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Haoran Yang, Wai Lam, Furu Wei
Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even when trained without parallel data. Yet, despite the fact that the amount of training data is gigantic, they still struggle with translating rare words, particularly for low-resource languages. Even worse, it is usually unrealistic to retrieve relevant demonstrations for in-context learning with low-resource languages on LLMs, which restricts the practical use of LLMs for translation -- how should we mitigate this problem? To this end, we present a novel method, CoD, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that augmenting ChatGPT with CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x chrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We further demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot demonstration for low-resource languages.

Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach
Junjie Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Yupeng Hou, Wayne Xin Zhao, Leyu Lin, Ji-Rong Wen
In the past decades, recommender systems have attracted much attention in both research and industry communities, and a large number of studies have been devoted to developing effective recommendation models. Basically speaking, these models mainly learn the underlying user preference from historical behavior data, and then estimate the user-item matching relationships for recommendations. Inspired by the recent progress on large language models (LLMs), we take a different approach to developing the recommendation models, considering recommendation as instruction following by LLMs. The key idea is that the preferences or needs of a user can be expressed in natural language descriptions (called instructions), so that LLMs can understand and further execute the instruction for fulfilling the recommendation task. Instead of using public APIs of LLMs, we instruction tune an open-source LLM (3B Flan-T5-XL), in order to better adapt LLMs to recommender systems. For this purpose, we first design a general instruction format for describing the preference, intention, task form and context of a user in natural language. Then we manually design 39 instruction templates and automatically generate a large amount of user-personalized instruction data (252K instructions) with varying types of preferences and intentions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we instantiate the instruction templates into several widely-studied recommendation (or search) tasks, and conduct extensive experiments on these tasks with real-world datasets. Experiment results show that the proposed approach can outperform several competitive baselines, including the powerful GPT-3.5, on these evaluation tasks. Our approach sheds light on developing more user-friendly recommender systems, in which users can freely communicate with the system and obtain more accurate recommendations via natural language instructions.

Active Retrieval Augmented Generation
Zhengbao Jiang, Frank F. Xu, Luyu Gao, Zhiqing Sun, Qian Liu, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yiming Yang, Jamie Callan, Graham Neubig
Despite the remarkable ability of large language models (LMs) to comprehend and generate language, they have a tendency to hallucinate and create factually inaccurate output. Augmenting LMs by retrieving information from external knowledge resources is one promising solution. Most existing retrieval augmented LMs employ a retrieve-and-generate setup that only retrieves information once based on the input. This is limiting, however, in more general scenarios involving generation of long texts, where continually gathering information throughout generation is essential. In this work, we provide a generalized view of active retrieval augmented generation, methods that actively decide when and what to retrieve across the course of the generation. We propose Forward-Looking Active REtrieval augmented generation (FLARE), a generic method which iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content, which is then utilized as a query to retrieve relevant documents to regenerate the sentence if it contains low-confidence tokens. We test FLARE along with baselines comprehensively over 4 long-form knowledge-intensive generation tasks/datasets. FLARE achieves superior or competitive performance on all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Code and datasets are available at this https URL.

Scalable Coupling of Deep Learning with Logical Reasoning
Marianne Defresne, Sophie Barbe, Thomas Schiex
In the ongoing quest for hybridizing discrete reasoning with neural nets, there is an increasing interest in neural architectures that can learn how to solve discrete reasoning or optimization problems from natural inputs. In this paper, we introduce a scalable neural architecture and loss function dedicated to learning the constraints and criteria of NP-hard reasoning problems expressed as discrete Graphical Models. Our loss function solves one of the main limitations of Besag's pseudo-loglikelihood, enabling learning of high energies. We empirically show it is able to efficiently learn how to solve NP-hard reasoning problems from natural inputs as the symbolic, visual or many-solutions Sudoku problems as well as the energy optimization formulation of the protein design problem, providing data efficiency, interpretability, and \textit{a posteriori} control over predictions.

Interpretability at Scale: Identifying Causal Mechanisms in Alpaca
Zhengxuan Wu, Atticus Geiger, Christopher Potts, Noah D. Goodman
Obtaining human-interpretable explanations of large, general-purpose language models is an urgent goal for AI safety. However, it is just as important that our interpretability methods are faithful to the causal dynamics underlying model behavior and able to robustly generalize to unseen inputs. Distributed Alignment Search (DAS) is a powerful gradient descent method grounded in a theory of causal abstraction that uncovered perfect alignments between interpretable symbolic algorithms and small deep learning models fine-tuned for specific tasks. In the present paper, we scale DAS significantly by replacing the remaining brute-force search steps with learned parameters -- an approach we call DAS. This enables us to efficiently search for interpretable causal structure in large language models while they follow instructions. We apply DAS to the Alpaca model (7B parameters), which, off the shelf, solves a simple numerical reasoning problem. With DAS, we discover that Alpaca does this by implementing a causal model with two interpretable boolean variables. Furthermore, we find that the alignment of neural representations with these variables is robust to changes in inputs and instructions. These findings mark a first step toward deeply understanding the inner-workings of our largest and most widely deployed language models.

StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data
Jinhao Jiang, Kun Zhou, Zican Dong, Keming Ye, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
In this paper, we study how to improve the zero-shot reasoning ability of large language models~(LLMs) over structured data in a unified way. Inspired by the study on tool augmentation for LLMs, we develop an \emph{Iterative Reading-then-Reasoning~(IRR)} approach for solving question answering tasks based on structured data, called \textbf{StructGPT}. In our approach, we construct the specialized function to collect relevant evidence from structured data (\ie \emph{reading}), and let LLMs concentrate the reasoning task based on the collected information (\ie \emph{reasoning}). Specially, we propose an \emph{invoking-linearization-generation} procedure to support LLMs in reasoning on the structured data with the help of the external interfaces. By iterating this procedures with provided interfaces, our approach can gradually approach the target answer to a given query. Extensive experiments conducted on three types of structured data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which can significantly boost the performance of ChatGPT and achieve comparable performance against the full-data supervised-tuning baselines. Our codes and data are publicly available at~\url{this https URL}.

Pre-Training to Learn in Context
Yuxian Gu, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Minlie Huang
In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully exploited because language models are not explicitly trained to learn in context. To this end, we propose PICL (Pre-training for In-Context Learning), a framework to enhance the language models' in-context learning ability by pre-training the model on a large collection of "intrinsic tasks" in the general plain-text corpus using the simple language modeling objective. PICL encourages the model to infer and perform tasks by conditioning on the contexts while maintaining task generalization of pre-trained models. We evaluate the in-context learning performance of the model trained with PICL on seven widely-used text classification datasets and the Super-NaturalInstrctions benchmark, which contains 100+ NLP tasks formulated to text generation. Our experiments show that PICL is more effective and task-generalizable than a range of baselines, outperforming larger language models with nearly 4x parameters. The code is publicly available at this https URL.

ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddings
Shibo Hao, Tianyang Liu, Zhen Wang, Zhiting Hu
Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to solving complex problems. However, traditional methods, which finetune LLMs with tool demonstration data, can be both costly and restricted to a predefined set of tools. Recent in-context learning paradigm alleviates these issues, but the limited context length only allows for a few shots of demonstrations, leading to suboptimal understandings of the tools. Moreover, when there are numerous tools to choose from, in-context learning could completely fail to work. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, ToolkenGPT, which combines the benefits of both sides. Our approach represents each tool–––– as a token–––– (toolken) and learns an embedding for it, enabling tool calls in the same way as generating a regular word token. Once a toolken is triggered, the LLM is prompted to complete arguments for the tool to execute. ToolkenGPT offers the flexibility to plug in an arbitrary number of tools by expanding the set of toolkens on the fly. In addition, it improves tool use by allowing extensive demonstration data for learning the toolken embeddings. In diverse domains, including numerical reasoning, knowledge-based question answering, and embodied plan generation, our approach effectively augments LLMs with tools and substantially outperforms various latest baselines. ToolkenGPT demonstrates the promising ability to use relevant tools from a large tool set in complex scenarios.

Accelerating Transformer Inference for Translation via Parallel Decoding
Andrea Santilli, Silvio Severino, Emilian Postolache, Valentino Maiorca, Michele Mancusi, Riccardo Marin, Emanuele Rodolà
Autoregressive decoding limits the efficiency of transformers for Machine Translation (MT). The community proposed specific network architectures and learning-based methods to solve this issue, which are expensive and require changes to the MT model, trading inference speed at the cost of the translation quality. In this paper, we propose to address the problem from the point of view of decoding algorithms, as a less explored but rather compelling direction. We propose to reframe the standard greedy autoregressive decoding of MT with a parallel formulation leveraging Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel fixed-point iteration methods for fast inference. This formulation allows to speed up existing models without training or modifications while retaining translation quality. We present three parallel decoding algorithms and test them on different languages and models showing how the parallelization introduces a speedup up to 38% w.r.t. the standard autoregressive decoding and nearly 2x when scaling the method on parallel resources. Finally, we introduce a decoding dependency graph visualizer (DDGviz) that let us see how the model has learned the conditional dependence between tokens and inspect the decoding procedure.

Cooperation Is All You Need
Ahsan Adeel, Junaid Muzaffar, Khubaib Ahmed, Mohsin Raza
Going beyond 'dendritic democracy', we introduce a 'democracy of local processors', termed Cooperator. Here we compare their capabilities when used in permutation-invariant neural networks for reinforcement learning (RL), with machine learning algorithms based on Transformers, such as ChatGPT. Transformers are based on the long-standing conception of integrate-and-fire 'point' neurons, whereas Cooperator is inspired by recent neurobiological breakthroughs suggesting that the cellular foundations of mental life depend on context-sensitive pyramidal neurons in the neocortex which have two functionally distinct points. We show that when used for RL, an algorithm based on Cooperator learns far quicker than that based on Transformer, even while having the same number of parameters.

PTQD: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Models
Yefei He, Luping Liu, Jing Liu, Weijia Wu, Hong Zhou, Bohan Zhuang
Diffusion models have recently dominated image synthesis tasks. However, the iterative denoising process is expensive in computations at inference time, making diffusion models less practical for low-latency and scalable real-world applications. Post-training quantization (PTQ) of diffusion models can significantly reduce the model size and accelerate the sampling process without re-training. Nonetheless, applying existing PTQ methods directly to low-bit diffusion models can significantly impair the quality of generated samples. Specifically, for each denoising step, quantization noise leads to deviations in the estimated mean and mismatches with the predetermined variance schedule. As the sampling process proceeds, the quantization noise may accumulate, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) during the later denoising steps. To address these challenges, we propose a unified formulation for the quantization noise and diffusion perturbed noise in the quantized denoising process. Specifically, we first disentangle the quantization noise into its correlated and residual uncorrelated parts regarding its full-precision counterpart. The correlated part can be easily corrected by estimating the correlation coefficient. For the uncorrelated part, we subtract the bias from the quantized results to correct the mean deviation and calibrate the denoising variance schedule to absorb the excess variance resulting from quantization. Moreover, we introduce a mixed-precision scheme for selecting the optimal bitwidth for each denoising step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous post-training quantized diffusion models, with only a 0.06 increase in FID score compared to full-precision LDM-4 on ImageNet 256x256, while saving 19.9x bit operations. Code is available at this https URL.

LLM-Pruner: On the Structural Pruning of Large Language Models
Xinyin Ma, Gongfan Fang, Xinchao Wang
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, such impressive capability typically comes with a substantial model size, which presents significant challenges in both the deployment, inference, and training stages. With LLM being a general-purpose task solver, we explore its compression in a task-agnostic manner, which aims to preserve the multi-task solving and language generation ability of the original LLM. One challenge to achieving this is the enormous size of the training corpus of LLM, which makes both data transfer and model post-training over-burdensome. Thus, we tackle the compression of LLMs within the bound of two constraints: being task-agnostic and minimizing the reliance on the original training dataset. Our method, named LLM-Pruner, adopts structural pruning that selectively removes non-critical coupled structures based on gradient information, maximally preserving the majority of the LLM's functionality. To this end, the performance of pruned models can be efficiently recovered through tuning techniques, LoRA, in merely 3 hours, requiring only 50K data. We validate the LLM-Pruner on three LLMs, including LLaMA, Vicuna, and ChatGLM, and demonstrate that the compressed models still exhibit satisfactory capabilities in zero-shot classification and generation. The code is available at: this https URL

SelfzCoT: a Self-Prompt Zero-shot CoT from Semantic-level to Code-level for a Better Utilization of LLMs
Ioktong Lei, Zhidong Deng
This paper show a work on better use of LLMs with SelfzCoT a self-prompt zero-shot CoT. Specifically, on the zero-shot arithmetic reasoning tasks, the accuracy of the proposed SelfzCoT is improved with GSM8K from 40.50% to 82.34%, with MultiArith from 79.3% to 94.7%, with ADDSUB from 74.70% to 94.10%, with SingleEq from 78.70% to 91.30%, with AQUA from 31.90% to 82.33%, and with SVAMP from 63.70% to 79.70%. Totally, using the first two lasting path activations to LLM and particularly, the code-level self-prompt, the SelfzCoT has a huge improvement on all six zero-shot arithmetic reasoning tasks. Additionally, our modified zero-shot CoT (MzCoT) also achieves remarkable performance in the reasoning tasks. The accuracy of the proposed MzCoT is enhanced with GSM8K from 40.50% to 76.32%, with MultiArith from 79.3% to 96.97%, with ADDSUB from 74.70% to 92.39%, with SingleEq from 78.70% to 94.60%, with AQUA from 31.90% to 79.90%, and with SVAMP from 63.70% to 81.50%. Notably, SelfzCoT has the best performance on GSM8K among all the recent zero-shot methods.

QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs
Tim Dettmers, Artidoro Pagnoni, Ari Holtzman, Luke Zettlemoyer
We present QLoRA, an efficient finetuning approach that reduces memory usage enough to finetune a 65B parameter model on a single 48GB GPU while preserving full 16-bit finetuning task performance. QLoRA backpropagates gradients through a frozen, 4-bit quantized pretrained language model into Low Rank Adapters~(LoRA). Our best model family, which we name Guanaco, outperforms all previous openly released models on the Vicuna benchmark, reaching 99.3% of the performance level of ChatGPT while only requiring 24 hours of finetuning on a single GPU. QLoRA introduces a number of innovations to save memory without sacrificing performance: (a) 4-bit NormalFloat (NF4), a new data type that is information theoretically optimal for normally distributed weights (b) double quantization to reduce the average memory footprint by quantizing the quantization constants, and (c) paged optimziers to manage memory spikes. We use QLoRA to finetune more than 1,000 models, providing a detailed analysis of instruction following and chatbot performance across 8 instruction datasets, multiple model types (LLaMA, T5), and model scales that would be infeasible to run with regular finetuning (e.g. 33B and 65B parameter models). Our results show that QLoRA finetuning on a small high-quality dataset leads to state-of-the-art results, even when using smaller models than the previous SoTA. We provide a detailed analysis of chatbot performance based on both human and GPT-4 evaluations showing that GPT-4 evaluations are a cheap and reasonable alternative to human evaluation. Furthermore, we find that current chatbot benchmarks are not trustworthy to accurately evaluate the performance levels of chatbots. A lemon-picked analysis demonstrates where Guanaco fails compared to ChatGPT. We release all of our models and code, including CUDA kernels for 4-bit training.

"According to ..." Prompting Language Models Improves Quoting from Pre-Training Data
Orion Weller, Marc Marone, Nathaniel Weir, Dawn Lawrie, Daniel Khashabi, Benjamin Van Durme
Large Language Models (LLMs) may hallucinate and generate fake information, despite pre-training on factual data. Inspired by the journalistic device of "according to sources", we propose according-to prompting: directing LLMs to ground responses against previously observed text. To quantify this grounding, we propose a novel evaluation metric (QUIP-Score) that measures the extent to which model-produced answers are directly found in underlying text corpora. We illustrate with experiments on Wikipedia that these prompts improve grounding under our metrics, with the additional benefit of often improving end-task performance. Furthermore, prompts that ask the model to decrease grounding (or to ground to other corpora) decrease grounding, indicating the ability of language models to increase or decrease grounded generations on request.

Sophia: A Scalable Stochastic Second-order Optimizer for Language Model Pre-training
Hong Liu, Zhiyuan Li, David Hall, Percy Liang, Tengyu Ma
Given the massive cost of language model pre-training, a non-trivial improvement of the optimization algorithm would lead to a material reduction on the time and cost of training. Adam and its variants have been state-of-the-art for years, and more sophisticated second-order (Hessian-based) optimizers often incur too much per-step overhead. In this paper, we propose Sophia, Second-order Clipped Stochastic Optimization, a simple scalable second-order optimizer that uses a light-weight estimate of the diagonal Hessian as the pre-conditioner. The update is the moving average of the gradients divided by the moving average of the estimated Hessian, followed by element-wise clipping. The clipping controls the worst-case update size and tames the negative impact of non-convexity and rapid change of Hessian along the trajectory. Sophia only estimates the diagonal Hessian every handful of iterations, which has negligible average per-step time and memory overhead. On language modeling with GPT models of sizes ranging from 125M to 1.5B, Sophia achieves a 2x speed-up compared to Adam in the number of steps, total compute, and wall-clock time, achieving the same perplexity with 50% fewer steps, less total compute, and reduced wall-clock time. Theoretically, we show that Sophia, in a much simplified setting, adapts to the heterogeneous curvatures in different parameter dimensions, and thus has a run-time bound that does not depend on the condition number of the loss.

Landmark Attention: Random-Access Infinite Context Length for Transformers
Amirkeivan Mohtashami, Martin Jaggi
While Transformers have shown remarkable success in natural language processing, their attention mechanism's large memory requirements have limited their ability to handle longer contexts. Prior approaches, such as recurrent memory or retrieval-based augmentation, have either compromised the random-access flexibility of attention (i.e., the capability to select any token in the entire context) or relied on separate mechanisms for relevant context retrieval, which may not be compatible with the model's attention. In this paper, we present a novel approach that allows access to the complete context while retaining random-access flexibility, closely resembling running attention on the entire context. Our method uses a landmark token to represent each block of the input and trains the attention to use it for selecting relevant blocks, enabling retrieval of blocks directly through the attention mechanism instead of by relying on a separate mechanism. Our approach seamlessly integrates with specialized data structures and the system's memory hierarchy, enabling processing of arbitrarily long context lengths. We demonstrate that our method can obtain comparable performance with Transformer-XL while significantly reducing the number of retrieved tokens in each step. Finally, we show that fine-tuning LLaMA 7B with our method successfully extends its context length capacity to over 32k tokens, allowing for inference at the context lengths of GPT-4. We release the implementation of landmark attention and the code to reproduce our experiments at this https URL.

Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models
Niklas Muennighoff, Alexander M. Rush, Boaz Barak, Teven Le Scao, Aleksandra Piktus, Nouamane Tazi, Sampo Pyysalo, Thomas Wolf, Colin Raffel
The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling language models in data-constrained regimes. Specifically, we run a large set of experiments varying the extent of data repetition and compute budget, ranging up to 900 billion training tokens and 9 billion parameter models. We find that with constrained data for a fixed compute budget, training with up to 4 epochs of repeated data yields negligible changes to loss compared to having unique data. However, with more repetition, the value of adding compute eventually decays to zero. We propose and empirically validate a scaling law for compute optimality that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated tokens and excess parameters. Finally, we experiment with approaches mitigating data scarcity, including augmenting the training dataset with code data or removing commonly used filters. Models and datasets from our 400 training runs are freely available at this https URL.

Fine-Tuning Language Models with Just Forward Passes
Sadhika Malladi, Tianyu Gao, Eshaan Nichani, Alex Damian, Jason D. Lee, Danqi Chen, Sanjeev Arora
Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has yielded success on diverse downstream tasks, but as LMs grow in size, backpropagation requires a prohibitively large amount of memory. Zeroth-order (ZO) methods can in principle estimate gradients using only two forward passes but are theorized to be catastrophically slow for optimizing large models. In this work, we propose a memory-efficient zerothorder optimizer (MeZO), adapting the classical ZO-SGD method to operate in-place, thereby fine-tuning LMs with the same memory footprint as inference. For example, with a single A100 80GB GPU, MeZO can train a 30-billion parameter model, whereas fine-tuning with backpropagation can train only a 2.7B LM with the same budget. We conduct comprehensive experiments across model types (masked and autoregressive LMs), model scales (up to 66B), and downstream tasks (classification, multiple-choice, and generation). Our results demonstrate that (1) MeZO significantly outperforms in-context learning and linear probing; (2) MeZO achieves comparable performance to fine-tuning with backpropagation across multiple tasks, with up to 12x memory reduction and up to 2x GPU-hour reduction in our implementation; (3) MeZO is compatible with both full-parameter and parameter-efficient tuning techniques such as LoRA and prefix tuning; (4) MeZO can effectively optimize non-differentiable objectives (e.g., maximizing accuracy or F1). We support our empirical findings with theoretical insights, highlighting how adequate pre-training and task prompts enable MeZO to fine-tune huge models, despite classical ZO analyses suggesting otherwise.

Intriguing Properties of Quantization at Scale
Arash Ahmadian, Saurabh Dash, Hongyu Chen, Bharat Venkitesh, Stephen Gou, Phil Blunsom, Ahmet Üstün, Sara Hooker
Emergent properties have been widely adopted as a term to describe behavior not present in smaller models but observed in larger models. Recent work suggests that the trade-off incurred by quantization is also an emergent property, with sharp drops in performance in models over 6B parameters. In this work, we ask "are quantization cliffs in performance solely a factor of scale?" Against a backdrop of increased research focus on why certain emergent properties surface at scale, this work provides a useful counter-example. We posit that it is possible to optimize for a quantization friendly training recipe that suppresses large activation magnitude outliers. Here, we find that outlier dimensions are not an inherent product of scale, but rather sensitive to the optimization conditions present during pre-training. This both opens up directions for more efficient quantization, and poses the question of whether other emergent properties are inherent or can be altered and conditioned by optimization and architecture design choices. We successfully quantize models ranging in size from 410M to 52B with minimal degradation in performance.

Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Time
Zichang Liu, Aditya Desai, Fangshuo Liao, Weitao Wang, Victor Xie, Zhaozhuo Xu, Anastasios Kyrillidis, Anshumali Shrivastava
Large language models(LLMs) have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. Hosting these models at scale requires significant memory resources. One crucial memory bottleneck for the deployment stems from the context window. It is commonly recognized that model weights are memory hungry; however, the size of key-value embedding stored during the generation process (KV cache) can easily surpass the model size. The enormous size of the KV cache puts constraints on the inference batch size, which is crucial for high throughput inference workload. Inspired by an interesting observation of the attention scores, we hypothesize the persistence of importance: only pivotal tokens, which had a substantial influence at one step, will significantly influence future generations. Based on our empirical verification and theoretical analysis around this hypothesis, we propose Scissorhands, a system that maintains the memory usage of the KV cache at a fixed budget without finetuning the model. In essence, Scissorhands manages the KV cache by storing the pivotal tokens with a higher probability. We validate that Scissorhands reduces the inference memory usage of the KV cache by up to 5X without compromising model quality. We further demonstrate that Scissorhands can be combined with 4-bit quantization, traditionally used to compress model weights, to achieve up to 20X compression.

Blockwise Parallel Transformer for Large Context Models
Hao Liu, Pieter Abbeel
Transformers have emerged as the cornerstone of state-of-the-art natural language processing models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands posed by the self-attention mechanism and the large feedforward network in Transformers limit their ability to handle long sequences, thereby creating challenges for tasks involving multiple long sequences or long-term dependencies. We present a distinct approach, Blockwise Parallel Transformer (BPT), that leverages blockwise computation of self-attention and feedforward network fusion to minimize memory costs. By processing longer input sequences while maintaining memory efficiency, BPT enables training sequences 32 times longer than vanilla Transformers and up to 4 times longer than previous memory-efficient methods. Extensive experiments on language modeling and reinforcement learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of BPT in reducing memory requirements and improving performance.

The Impact of Positional Encoding on Length Generalization in Transformers
Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Inkit Padhi, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Payel Das, Siva Reddy
Length generalization, the ability to generalize from small training context sizes to larger ones, is a critical challenge in the development of Transformer-based language models. Positional encoding (PE) has been identified as a major factor influencing length generalization, but the exact impact of different PE schemes on extrapolation in downstream tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study comparing the length generalization performance of decoder-only Transformers with five different position encoding approaches including Absolute Position Embedding (APE), T5's Relative PE, ALiBi, and Rotary, in addition to Transformers without positional encoding (NoPE). Our evaluation encompasses a battery of reasoning and mathematical tasks. Our findings reveal that the most commonly used positional encoding methods, such as ALiBi, Rotary, and APE, are not well suited for length generalization in downstream tasks. More importantly, NoPE outperforms other explicit positional encoding methods while requiring no additional computation. We theoretically demonstrate that NoPE can represent both absolute and relative PEs, but when trained with SGD, it mostly resembles T5's relative PE attention patterns. Finally, we find that scratchpad is not always helpful to solve length generalization and its format highly impacts the model's performance. Overall, our work suggests that explicit position embeddings are not essential for decoder-only Transformers to generalize well to longer sequences.

Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts
Alexis Chevalier, Alexander Wettig, Anirudh Ajith, Danqi Chen
Transformer-based language models (LMs) are powerful and widely-applicable tools, but their usefulness is constrained by a finite context window and the expensive computational cost of processing long text documents. We propose to adapt pre-trained LMs into AutoCompressors. These language models are capable of compressing long contexts into compact summary vectors, which are then accessible to the model as soft prompts. Summary vectors are trained with an unsupervised objective, whereby long documents are processed in segments, and summary vectors from all previous segments are used in language modeling. We fine-tune OPT and Llama-2 models on sequences of up to 30,720 tokens and show that AutoCompressors can utilize long contexts to improve perplexity. We evaluate AutoCompressors on in-context learning by compressing task demonstrations and find that summary vectors are good substitutes for plain-text demonstrations, increasing accuracy while reducing inference costs. Finally, we explore the benefits of pre-computing summary vectors for large corpora by applying summary vectors to retrievalaugmented language modeling and a passage re-ranking task. Overall, AutoCompressors emerge as a simple and inexpensive solution to extend the context window of LMs while speeding up inference over long contexts.

Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model
Rafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Stefano Ermon, Christopher D. Manning, Chelsea Finn
While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing methods for gaining such steerability collect human labels of the relative quality of model generations and fine-tune the unsupervised LM to align with these preferences, often with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF is a complex and often unstable procedure, first fitting a reward model that reflects the human preferences, and then fine-tuning the large unsupervised LM using reinforcement learning to maximize this estimated reward without drifting too far from the original model. In this paper we introduce a new parameterization of the reward model in RLHF that enables extraction of the corresponding optimal policy in closed form, allowing us to solve the standard RLHF problem with only a simple classification loss. The resulting algorithm, which we call Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), is stable, performant, and computationally lightweight, eliminating the need for sampling from the LM during fine-tuning or performing significant hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that DPO can fine-tune LMs to align with human preferences as well as or better than existing methods. Notably, fine-tuning with DPO exceeds PPO-based RLHF in ability to control sentiment of generations, and matches or improves response quality in summarization and single-turn dialogue while being substantially simpler to implement and train.

AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration
Ji Lin, Jiaming Tang, Haotian Tang, Shang Yang, Xingyu Dang, Chuang Gan, Song Han
Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various tasks, but the astronomical model size raises the hardware barrier for serving (memory size) and slows down token generation (memory bandwidth). In this paper, we propose Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ), a hardware-friendly approach for LLM low-bit weight-only quantization. Our method is based on the observation that weights are not equally important: protecting only 1% of salient weights can greatly reduce quantization error. We then propose to search for the optimal per-channel scaling that protects the salient weights by observing the activation, not weights. AWQ does not rely on any backpropagation or reconstruction, so it can well preserve LLMs' generalization ability on different domains and modalities, without overfitting to the calibration set. AWQ outperforms existing work on various language modeling and domain-specific benchmarks. Thanks to better generalization, it achieves excellent quantization performance for instruction-tuned LMs and, for the first time, multi-modal LMs. Alongside AWQ, we implement an efficient and flexible inference framework tailored for LLMs on the edge, offering more than 3x speedup over the Huggingface FP16 implementation on both desktop and mobile GPUs. It also democratizes the deployment of the 70B Llama-2 model on mobile GPU (NVIDIA Jetson Orin 64GB).

Faster Causal Attention Over Large Sequences Through Sparse Flash Attention
Matteo Pagliardini, Daniele Paliotta, Martin Jaggi, François Fleuret
Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention -- which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t. the sequence length -- becomes a central concern. While many works have proposed schemes to sparsify the attention patterns and reduce the computational overhead of self-attention, those are often limited by implementations concerns and end up imposing a simple and static structure over the attention matrix. Conversely, implementing more dynamic sparse attentions often results in runtimes significantly slower than computing the full attention using the Flash implementation from Dao et al. (2022). We extend FlashAttention to accommodate a large class of attention sparsity patterns that, in particular, encompass key/query dropping and hashing-based attention. This leads to implementations with no computational complexity overhead and a multi-fold runtime speedup on top of FlashAttention. Even with relatively low degrees of sparsity, our method improves visibly upon FlashAttention as the sequence length increases. Without sacrificing perplexity, we increase the training speed of a transformer language model by 2.0× and 3.3× for sequences of respectively 8k and 16k tokens.

Fine-Grained Human Feedback Gives Better Rewards for Language Model Training
Zeqiu Wu, Yushi Hu, Weijia Shi, Nouha Dziri, Alane Suhr, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Noah A. Smith, Mari Ostendorf, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) - where human preference judgments on LM outputs are transformed into a learning signal - has recently shown promise in addressing these issues. However, such holistic feedback conveys limited information on long text outputs; it does not indicate which aspects of the outputs influenced user preference; e.g., which parts contain what type(s) of errors. In this paper, we use fine-grained human feedback (e.g., which sentence is false, which sub-sentence is irrelevant) as an explicit training signal. We introduce Fine-Grained RLHF, a framework that enables training and learning from reward functions that are fine-grained in two respects: (1) density, providing a reward after every segment (e.g., a sentence) is generated; and (2) incorporating multiple reward models associated with different feedback types (e.g., factual incorrectness, irrelevance, and information incompleteness). We conduct experiments on detoxification and long-form question answering to illustrate how learning with such reward functions leads to improved performance, supported by both automatic and human evaluation. Additionally, we show that LM behaviors can be customized using different combinations of fine-grained reward models. We release all data, collected human feedback, and codes at this https URL.

SpQR: A Sparse-Quantized Representation for Near-Lossless LLM Weight Compression
Tim Dettmers, Ruslan Svirschevski, Vage Egiazarian, Denis Kuznedelev, Elias Frantar, Saleh Ashkboos, Alexander Borzunov, Torsten Hoefler, Dan Alistarh
Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining have led to high-quality LLMs with impressive abilities. By compressing such LLMs via quantization to 3-4 bits per parameter, they can fit into memory-limited devices such as laptops and mobile phones, enabling personalized use. However, quantization down to 3-4 bits per parameter usually leads to moderate-to-high accuracy losses, especially for smaller models in the 1-10B parameter range, which are well-suited for edge deployments. To address this accuracy issue, we introduce the Sparse-Quantized Representation (SpQR), a new compressed format and quantization technique which enables for the first time near-lossless compression of LLMs across model scales, while reaching similar compression levels to previous methods. SpQR works by identifying and isolating outlier weights, which cause particularly-large quantization errors, and storing them in higher precision, while compressing all other weights to 3-4 bits, and achieves relative accuracy losses of less than 1% in perplexity for highly-accurate LLaMA and Falcon LLMs. This makes it possible to run 33B parameter LLM on a single 24 GB consumer GPU without any performance degradation at 15% speedup thus making powerful LLMs available to consumer without any downsides. SpQR comes with efficient algorithms for both encoding weights into its format, as well as decoding them efficiently at runtime. Specifically, we provide an efficient GPU inference algorithm for SpQR which yields faster inference than 16-bit baselines at similar accuracy, while enabling memory compression gains of more than 4x.

Fine-Tuning Language Models with Advantage-Induced Policy Alignment
Banghua Zhu, Hiteshi Sharma, Felipe Vieira Frujeri, Shi Dong, Chenguang Zhu, Michael I. Jordan, Jiantao Jiao
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most widely used methods. Despite its popularity, however, PPO may suffer from mode collapse, instability, and poor sample efficiency. We show that these issues can be alleviated by a novel algorithm that we refer to as Advantage-Induced Policy Alignment (APA), which leverages a squared error loss function based on the estimated advantages. We demonstrate empirically that APA consistently outperforms PPO in language tasks by a large margin, when a separate reward model is employed as the evaluator. In addition, compared with PPO, APA offers a more stable form of control over the deviation from the model's initial policy, ensuring that the model improves its performance without collapsing to deterministic output. In addition to empirical results, we also provide a theoretical justification supporting the design of our loss function.

Rewarded soups: towards Pareto-optimal alignment by interpolating weights fine-tuned on diverse rewards
Alexandre Ramé, Guillaume Couairon, Mustafa Shukor, Corentin Dancette, Jean-Baptiste Gaya, Laure Soulier, Matthieu Cord
Foundation models are first pre-trained on vast unsupervised datasets and then fine-tuned on labeled data. Reinforcement learning, notably from human feedback (RLHF), can further align the network with the intended usage. Yet the imperfections in the proxy reward may hinder the training and lead to suboptimal results; the diversity of objectives in real-world tasks and human opinions exacerbate the issue. This paper proposes embracing the heterogeneity of diverse rewards by following a multi-policy strategy. Rather than focusing on a single a priori reward, we aim for Pareto-optimal generalization across the entire space of preferences. To this end, we propose rewarded soup, first specializing multiple networks independently (one for each proxy reward) and then interpolating their weights linearly. This succeeds empirically because we show that the weights remain linearly connected when fine-tuned on diverse rewards from a shared pre-trained initialization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for text-to-text (summarization, Q&A, helpful assistant, review), text-image (image captioning, text-to-image generation, visual grounding, VQA), and control (locomotion) tasks. We hope to enhance the alignment of deep models, and how they interact with the world in all its diversity.

Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model
Kenneth Li, Oam Patel, Fernanda Viégas, Hanspeter Pfister, Martin Wattenberg
We introduce Inference-Time Intervention (ITI), a technique designed to enhance the "truthfulness" of large language models (LLMs). ITI operates by shifting model activations during inference, following a set of directions across a limited number of attention heads. This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark. On an instruction-finetuned LLaMA called Alpaca, ITI improves its truthfulness from 32.5% to 65.1%. We identify a tradeoff between truthfulness and helpfulness and demonstrate how to balance it by tuning the intervention strength. ITI is minimally invasive and computationally inexpensive. Moreover, the technique is data efficient: while approaches like RLHF require extensive annotations, ITI locates truthful directions using only few hundred examples. Our findings suggest that LLMs may have an internal representation of the likelihood of something being true, even as they produce falsehoods on the surface.

Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters: Decoupling and Injecting Domain Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Models Memories
Shizhe Diao, Tianyang Xu, Ruijia Xu, Jiawei Wang, Tong Zhang
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities to understand texts in the generic domain while struggling in a specific domain. Although continued pre-training on a large domain-specific corpus is effective, it is costly to tune all the parameters on the domain. In this paper, we investigate whether we can adapt PLMs both effectively and efficiently by only tuning a few parameters. Specifically, we decouple the feed-forward networks (FFNs) of the Transformer architecture into two parts: the original pre-trained FFNs to maintain the old-domain knowledge and our novel domain-specific adapters to inject domain-specific knowledge in parallel. Then we adopt a mixture-of-adapters gate to fuse the knowledge from different domain adapters dynamically. Our proposed Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters (MixDA) employs a two-stage adapter-tuning strategy that leverages both unlabeled data and labeled data to help the domain adaptation: i) domain-specific adapter on unlabeled data; followed by ii) the task-specific adapter on labeled data. MixDA can be seamlessly plugged into the pretraining-finetuning paradigm and our experiments demonstrate that MixDA achieves superior performance on in-domain tasks (GLUE), out-of-domain tasks (ChemProt, RCT, IMDB, Amazon), and knowledge-intensive tasks (KILT). Further analyses demonstrate the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our method. The code is available at this https URL.

Boosting Fast and High-Quality Speech Synthesis with Linear Diffusion
Haogeng Liu, Tao Wang, Jie Cao, Ran He, Jianhua Tao
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models have shown extraordinary ability on various generative tasks. However, their slow inference speed renders them impractical in speech synthesis. This paper proposes a linear diffusion model (LinDiff) based on an ordinary differential equation to simultaneously reach fast inference and high sample quality. Firstly, we employ linear interpolation between the target and noise to design a diffusion sequence for training, while previously the diffusion path that links the noise and target is a curved segment. When decreasing the number of sampling steps (i.e., the number of line segments used to fit the path), the ease of fitting straight lines compared to curves allows us to generate higher quality samples from a random noise with fewer iterations. Secondly, to reduce computational complexity and achieve effective global modeling of noisy speech, LinDiff employs a patch-based processing approach that partitions the input signal into small patches. The patch-wise token leverages Transformer architecture for effective modeling of global information. Adversarial training is used to further improve the sample quality with decreased sampling steps. We test proposed method with speech synthesis conditioned on acoustic feature (Mel-spectrograms). Experimental results verify that our model can synthesize high-quality speech even with only one diffusion step. Both subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that our model can synthesize speech of a quality comparable to that of autoregressive models with faster synthesis speed (3 diffusion steps).

Word sense extension
Lei Yu, Yang Xu
Humans often make creative use of words to express novel senses. A long-standing effort in natural language processing has been focusing on word sense disambiguation (WSD), but little has been explored about how the sense inventory of a word may be extended toward novel meanings. We present a paradigm of word sense extension (WSE) that enables words to spawn new senses toward novel context. We develop a framework that simulates novel word sense extension by first partitioning a polysemous word type into two pseudo-tokens that mark its different senses, and then inferring whether the meaning of a pseudo-token can be extended to convey the sense denoted by the token partitioned from the same word type. Our framework combines cognitive models of chaining with a learning scheme that transforms a language model embedding space to support various types of word sense extension. We evaluate our framework against several competitive baselines and show that it is superior in predicting plausible novel senses for over 7,500 English words. Furthermore, we show that our WSE framework improves performance over a range of transformer-based WSD models in predicting rare word senses with few or zero mentions in the training data.

Mitigating Transformer Overconfidence via Lipschitz Regularization
Wenqian Ye, Yunsheng Ma, Xu Cao, Kun Tang
Though Transformers have achieved promising results in many computer vision tasks, they tend to be over-confident in predictions, as the standard Dot Product Self-Attention (DPSA) can barely preserve distance for the unbounded input domain. In this work, we fill this gap by proposing a novel Lipschitz Regularized Transformer (LRFormer). Specifically, we present a new similarity function with the distance within Banach Space to ensure the Lipschitzness and also regularize the term by a contractive Lipschitz Bound. The proposed method is analyzed with a theoretical guarantee, providing a rigorous basis for its effectiveness and reliability. Extensive experiments conducted on standard vision benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art single forward pass approaches in prediction, calibration, and uncertainty estimation.

Recurrent Attention Networks for Long-text Modeling
Xianming Li, Zongxi Li, Xiaotian Luo, Haoran Xie, Xing Lee, Yingbin Zhao, Fu Lee Wang, Qing Li
Self-attention-based models have achieved remarkable progress in short-text mining. However, the quadratic computational complexities restrict their application in long text processing. Prior works have adopted the chunking strategy to divide long documents into chunks and stack a self-attention backbone with the recurrent structure to extract semantic representation. Such an approach disables parallelization of the attention mechanism, significantly increasing the training cost and raising hardware requirements. Revisiting the self-attention mechanism and the recurrent structure, this paper proposes a novel long-document encoding model, Recurrent Attention Network (RAN), to enable the recurrent operation of self-attention. Combining the advantages from both sides, the well-designed RAN is capable of extracting global semantics in both token-level and document-level representations, making it inherently compatible with both sequential and classification tasks, respectively. Furthermore, RAN is computationally scalable as it supports parallelization on long document processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the long-text encoding ability of the proposed RAN model on both classification and sequential tasks, showing its potential for a wide range of applications.

One-for-All: Generalized LoRA for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning
Arnav Chavan, Zhuang Liu, Deepak Gupta, Eric Xing, Zhiqiang Shen
We present Generalized LoRA (GLoRA), an advanced approach for universal parameter-efficient fine-tuning tasks. Enhancing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), GLoRA employs a generalized prompt module to optimize pre-trained model weights and adjust intermediate activations, providing more flexibility and capability across diverse tasks and datasets. Moreover, GLoRA facilitates efficient parameter adaptation by employing a scalable, modular, layer-wise structure search that learns individual adapter of each layer. Originating from a unified mathematical formulation, GLoRA exhibits strong transfer learning, few-shot learning and domain generalization abilities, as it adapts to new tasks through not only weights but also additional dimensions like activations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GLoRA outperforms all previous methods in natural, specialized, and structured vision benchmarks, achieving superior accuracy with fewer parameters and computations. The proposed method on LLaMA-1 and LLaMA-2 also show considerable enhancements compared to the original LoRA in the language domain. Furthermore, our structural re-parameterization design ensures that GLoRA incurs no extra inference cost, rendering it a practical solution for resource-limited applications. Code and models are available at: this https URL.

SqueezeLLM: Dense-and-Sparse Quantization
Sehoon Kim, Coleman Hooper, Amir Gholami, Zhen Dong, Xiuyu Li, Sheng Shen, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable results for a wide range of tasks. However, deploying these models for inference has been a significant challenge due to their unprecedented resource requirements. This has forced existing deployment frameworks to use multi-GPU inference pipelines, which are often complex and costly, or to use smaller and less performant models. In this work, we demonstrate that the main bottleneck for generative inference with LLMs is memory bandwidth, rather than compute, specifically for single batch inference. While quantization has emerged as a promising solution by representing model weights with reduced precision, previous efforts have often resulted in notable performance degradation. To address this, we introduce SqueezeLLM, a post-training quantization framework that not only enables lossless compression to ultra-low precisions of up to 3-bit, but also achieves higher quantization performance under the same memory constraint. Our framework incorporates two novel ideas: (i) sensitivity-based non-uniform quantization, which searches for the optimal bit precision assignment based on second-order information; and (ii) the Dense-and-Sparse decomposition that stores outliers and sensitive weight values in an efficient sparse format. When applied to the LLaMA models, our 3-bit quantization significantly reduces the perplexity gap from the FP16 baseline by up to 2.1x as compared to the state-of-the-art methods with the same memory requirement. Furthermore, when deployed on an A6000 GPU, our quantized models achieve up to 2.3x speedup compared to the baseline. Our code is open-sourced and available online.

Tune As You Scale: Hyperparameter Optimization For Compute Efficient Training
Abraham J. Fetterman, Ellie Kitanidis, Joshua Albrecht, Zachary Polizzi, Bryden Fogelman, Maksis Knutins, Bartosz Wróblewski, James B. Simon, Kanjun Qiu
Hyperparameter tuning of deep learning models can lead to order-of-magnitude performance gains for the same amount of compute. Despite this, systematic tuning is uncommon, particularly for large models, which are expensive to evaluate and tend to have many hyperparameters, necessitating difficult judgment calls about tradeoffs, budgets, and search bounds. To address these issues and propose a practical method for robustly tuning large models, we present Cost-Aware Pareto Region Bayesian Search (CARBS), a Bayesian optimization algorithm that performs local search around the performance-cost Pareto frontier. CARBS does well even in unbounded search spaces with many hyperparameters, learns scaling relationships so that it can tune models even as they are scaled up, and automates much of the "black magic" of tuning. Among our results, we effectively solve the entire ProcGen benchmark just by tuning a simple baseline (PPO, as provided in the original ProcGen paper). We also reproduce the model size vs. training tokens scaling result from the Chinchilla project (Hoffmann et al. 2022), while simultaneously discovering scaling laws for every other hyperparameter, via an easy automated process that uses significantly less compute and is applicable to any deep learning problem (not just language models).

Propagating Knowledge Updates to LMs Through Distillation
Shankar Padmanabhan, Yasumasa Onoe, Michael J.Q. Zhang, Greg Durrett, Eunsol Choi
Modern language models have the capacity to store and use immense amounts of knowledge about real-world entities, but it remains unclear how to update such knowledge stored in model parameters. While prior methods for updating knowledge in LMs successfully inject atomic facts, updated LMs fail to make inferences based on injected facts. In this work, we demonstrate that a context distillation-based approach can both impart knowledge about entities and propagate that knowledge to enable broader inferences. Our approach consists of two stages: transfer set generation and distillation on the transfer set. We first generate a transfer set by prompting a language model to generate continuations from the entity definition. Then, we update the model parameters so that the distribution of the LM (the student) matches the distribution of the LM conditioned on the definition (the teacher) on the transfer set. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach is more effective at propagating knowledge updates than fine-tuning and other gradient-based knowledge-editing methods. Moreover, it does not compromise performance in other contexts, even when injecting the definitions of up to 150 entities at once.

Full Parameter Fine-tuning for Large Language Models with Limited Resources
Kai Lv, Yuqing Yang, Tengxiao Liu, Qinghui Gao, Qipeng Guo, Xipeng Qiu
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) but demand massive GPU resources for training. Lowering the threshold for LLMs training would encourage greater participation from researchers, benefiting both academia and society. While existing approaches have focused on parameter-efficient fine-tuning, which tunes or adds a small number of parameters, few have addressed the challenge of tuning the full parameters of LLMs with limited resources. In this work, we propose a new optimizer, LOw-Memory Optimization (LOMO), which fuses the gradient computation and the parameter update in one step to reduce memory usage. By integrating LOMO with existing memory saving techniques, we reduce memory usage to 10.8% compared to the standard approach (DeepSpeed solution). Consequently, our approach enables the full parameter fine-tuning of a 65B model on a single machine with 8 RTX 3090, each with 24GB memory.

A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models
Mingjie Sun, Zhuang Liu, Anna Bair, J. Zico Kolter
As their size increases, Large Languages Models (LLMs) are natural candidates for network pruning methods: approaches that drop a subset of network weights while striving to preserve performance. Existing methods, however, require either retraining, which is rarely affordable for billion-scale LLMs, or solving a weight reconstruction problem reliant on second-order information, which may also be computationally expensive. In this paper, we introduce a novel, straightforward yet effective pruning method, termed Wanda (Pruning by Weights and activations), designed to induce sparsity in pretrained LLMs. Motivated by the recent observation of emergent large magnitude features in LLMs, our approach prunes weights with the smallest magnitudes multiplied by the corresponding input activations, on a per-output basis. Notably, Wanda requires no retraining or weight update, and the pruned LLM can be used as is. We conduct a thorough evaluation of our method Wanda on LLaMA and LLaMA-2 across various language benchmarks. Wanda significantly outperforms the established baseline of magnitude pruning and performs competitively against recent method involving intensive weight update. Code is available at this https URL.

InRank: Incremental Low-Rank Learning
Jiawei Zhao, Yifei Zhang, Beidi Chen, Florian Schäfer, Anima Anandkumar
The theory of greedy low-rank learning (GLRL) aims to explain the impressive generalization capabilities of deep learning. It proves that stochastic gradient-based training implicitly regularizes neural networks towards low-rank solutions through a gradual increase of the rank during training. However, there is a gap between theory and practice since GLRL requires an infinitesimal initialization of the weights, which is not practical due to the fact that it is a saddle point. In this work, we remove the assumption of infinitesimal initialization by focusing on cumulative weight updates. We prove the cumulative weight updates follow an incremental low-rank trajectory for arbitrary orthogonal initialization of weights in a three-layer linear network. Empirically, we demonstrate that our theory holds on a broad range of neural networks (e.g., transformers) and standard training algorithms (e.g., SGD, Adam). However, existing training algorithms do not exploit the low-rank property to improve computational efficiency as the networks are not parameterized in low-rank. To remedy this, we design a new training algorithm Incremental Low-Rank Learning (InRank), which explicitly expresses cumulative weight updates as low-rank matrices while incrementally augmenting their ranks during training. We evaluate InRank on GPT-2, and our results indicate that InRank achieves comparable prediction performance as the full-rank counterpart while requiring at most 33% of the total ranks throughout training. We also propose an efficient version of InRank that achieves a reduction of 37% in total training time and 36% in model size when training GPT-medium on WikiText-103 from scratch.

Evaluating the Zero-shot Robustness of Instruction-tuned Language Models
Jiuding Sun, Chantal Shaib, Byron C. Wallace
Instruction fine-tuning has recently emerged as a promising approach for improving the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on new tasks. This technique has shown particular strength in improving the performance of modestly sized LLMs, sometimes inducing performance competitive with much larger model variants. In this paper we ask two questions: (1) How sensitive are instruction-tuned models to the particular phrasings of instructions, and, (2) How can we make them more robust to such natural language variation? To answer the former, we collect a set of 319 instructions manually written by NLP practitioners for over 80 unique tasks included in widely used benchmarks, and we evaluate the variance and average performance of these instructions as compared to instruction phrasings observed during instruction fine-tuning. We find that using novel (unobserved) but appropriate instruction phrasings consistently degrades model performance, sometimes substantially so. Further, such natural instructions yield a wide variance in downstream performance, despite their semantic equivalence. Put another way, instruction-tuned models are not especially robust to instruction re-phrasings. We propose a simple method to mitigate this issue by introducing ``soft prompt'' embedding parameters and optimizing these to maximize the similarity between representations of semantically equivalent instructions. We show that this method consistently improves the robustness of instruction-tuned models.

Learning to Generate Better Than Your LLM
Jonathan D. Chang, Kiante Brantley, Rajkumar Ramamurthy, Dipendra Misra, Wen Sun
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for text generation. In particular, recent LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 can engage in fluent conversations with users after finetuning with RL. Capitalizing on key properties of text generation, we seek to investigate RL algorithms beyond general purpose algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). In particular, we extend RL algorithms to allow them to interact with a dynamic black-box guide LLM and propose RL with guided feedback (RLGF), a suite of RL algorithms for LLM fine-tuning. We provide two ways for the guide LLM to interact with the LLM to be optimized for maximizing rewards. The guide LLM can generate text which serves as additional starting states for the RL optimization procedure. The guide LLM can also be used to complete the partial sentences generated by the LLM that is being optimized, treating the guide LLM as an expert to imitate and surpass eventually. We experiment on the IMDB positive sentiment, CommonGen, and TL;DR summarization tasks. We show that our RL algorithms achieve higher performance than supervised learning (SL) and the RL baseline PPO, demonstrating the benefit of interaction with the guide LLM. On both CommonGen and TL;DR, we not only outperform our SL baselines but also improve upon PPO across a variety of metrics beyond the one we optimized for. Our code can be found at this https URL.

Quantizable Transformers: Removing Outliers by Helping Attention Heads Do Nothing
Yelysei Bondarenko, Markus Nagel, Tijmen Blankevoort
Transformer models have been widely adopted in various domains over the last years, and especially large language models have advanced the field of AI significantly. Due to their size, the capability of these networks has increased tremendously, but this has come at the cost of a significant increase in necessary compute. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to reduce the computational time and memory consumption of neural networks. Many studies have shown, however, that modern transformer models tend to learn strong outliers in their activations, making them difficult to quantize. To retain acceptable performance, the existence of these outliers requires activations to be in higher bitwidth or the use of different numeric formats, extra fine-tuning, or other workarounds. We show that strong outliers are related to very specific behavior of attention heads that try to learn a "no-op" or just a partial update of the residual. To achieve the exact zeros needed in the attention matrix for a no-update, the input to the softmax is pushed to be larger and larger during training, causing outliers in other parts of the network. Based on these observations, we propose two simple (independent) modifications to the attention mechanism - clipped softmax and gated attention. We empirically show that models pre-trained using our methods learn significantly smaller outliers while maintaining and sometimes even improving the floating-point task performance. This enables us to quantize transformers to full INT8 quantization of the activations without any additional effort. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on both language models (BERT, OPT) and vision transformers.

H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models
Zhenyu Zhang, Ying Sheng, Tianyi Zhou, Tianlong Chen, Lianmin Zheng, Ruisi Cai, Zhao Song, Yuandong Tian, Christopher Ré, Clark Barrett, Zhangyang Wang, Beidi Chen
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their recent impressive accomplishments, are notably cost-prohibitive to deploy, particularly for applications involving long-content generation, such as dialogue systems and story writing. Often, a large amount of transient state information, referred to as the KV cache, is stored in GPU memory in addition to model parameters, scaling linearly with the sequence length and batch size. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for implementing the KV cache which significantly reduces its memory footprint. Our approach is based on the noteworthy observation that a small portion of tokens contributes most of the value when computing attention scores. We call these tokens Heavy Hitters (H2). Through a comprehensive investigation, we find that (i) the emergence of H2 is natural and strongly correlates with the frequent co-occurrence of tokens in the text, and (ii) removing them results in significant performance degradation. Based on these insights, we propose Heavy Hitter Oracle (H2O), a KV cache eviction policy that dynamically retains a balance of recent and H2 tokens. We formulate the KV cache eviction as a dynamic submodular problem and prove (under mild assumptions) a theoretical guarantee for our novel eviction algorithm which could help guide future work. We validate the accuracy of our algorithm with OPT, LLaMA, and GPT-NeoX across a wide range of tasks. Our implementation of H2O with 20% heavy hitters improves the throughput over three leading inference systems DeepSpeed Zero-Inference, Hugging Face Accelerate, and FlexGen by up to 29×, 29×, and 3× on OPT-6.7B and OPT-30B. With the same batch size, H2O can reduce the latency by up to 1.9×. The code is available at this https URL.

FLuRKA: Fast fused Low-Rank & Kernel Attention
Ahan Gupta, Yueming Yuan, Yanqi Zhou, Charith Mendis
Many efficient approximate self-attention techniques have become prevalent since the inception of the transformer architecture. Two popular classes of these techniques are low-rank and kernel methods. Each of these methods has its own strengths. We observe these strengths synergistically complement each other and exploit these synergies to fuse low-rank and kernel methods, producing a new class of transformers: FLuRKA (Fast Low-Rank and Kernel Attention). FLuRKA provide sizable performance gains over these approximate techniques and are of high quality. We theoretically and empirically evaluate both the runtime performance and quality of FLuRKA. Our runtime analysis posits a variety of parameter configurations where FLuRKA exhibit speedups and our accuracy analysis bounds the error of FLuRKA with respect to full-attention. We instantiate three FLuRKA variants which experience empirical speedups of up to 3.3x and 1.7x over low-rank and kernel methods respectively. This translates to speedups of up to 30x over models with full-attention. With respect to model quality, FLuRKA can match the accuracy of low-rank and kernel methods on GLUE after pre-training on wiki-text 103. When pre-training on a fixed time budget, FLuRKA yield better perplexity scores than models with full-attention.

Stay on topic with Classifier-Free Guidance
Guillaume Sanchez, Honglu Fan, Alexander Spangher, Elad Levi, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Stella Biderman
Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has recently emerged in text-to-image generation as a lightweight technique to encourage prompt-adherence in generations. In this work, we demonstrate that CFG can be used broadly as an inference-time technique in pure language modeling. We show that CFG (1) improves the performance of Pythia, GPT-2 and LLaMA-family models across an array of tasks: Q\&A, reasoning, code generation, and machine translation, achieving SOTA on LAMBADA with LLaMA-7B over PaLM-540B; (2) brings improvements equivalent to a model with twice the parameter-count; (3) can stack alongside other inference-time methods like Chain-of-Thought and Self-Consistency, yielding further improvements in difficult tasks; (4) can be used to increase the faithfulness and coherence of assistants in challenging form-driven and content-driven prompts: in a human evaluation we show a 75\% preference for GPT4All using CFG over baseline.

AutoST: Training-free Neural Architecture Search for Spiking Transformers
Ziqing Wang, Qidong Zhao, Jinku Cui, Xu Liu, Dongkuan Xu
Spiking Transformers have gained considerable attention because they achieve both the energy efficiency of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and the high capacity of Transformers. However, the existing Spiking Transformer architectures, derived from Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), exhibit a notable architectural gap, resulting in suboptimal performance compared to their ANN counterparts. Manually discovering optimal architectures is time-consuming. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoST, a training-free NAS method for Spiking Transformers, to rapidly identify high-performance Spiking Transformer architectures. Unlike existing training-free NAS methods, which struggle with the non-differentiability and high sparsity inherent in SNNs, we propose to utilize Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) as a performance metric, which is independent of model computations and training dynamics, leading to a stronger correlation with performance. Our extensive experiments show that AutoST models outperform state-of-the-art manually or automatically designed SNN architectures on static and neuromorphic datasets. Full code, model, and data are released for reproduction.

Single Sequence Prediction over Reasoning Graphs for Multi-hop QA
Gowtham Ramesh, Makesh Sreedhar, Junjie Hu
Recent generative approaches for multi-hop question answering (QA) utilize the fusion-in-decoder method~\cite{izacard-grave-2021-leveraging} to generate a single sequence output which includes both a final answer and a reasoning path taken to arrive at that answer, such as passage titles and key facts from those passages. While such models can lead to better interpretability and high quantitative scores, they often have difficulty accurately identifying the passages corresponding to key entities in the context, resulting in incorrect passage hops and a lack of faithfulness in the reasoning path. To address this, we propose a single-sequence prediction method over a local reasoning graph (\model)\footnote{Code/Models will be released at \url{this https URL}} that integrates a graph structure connecting key entities in each context passage to relevant subsequent passages for each question. We use a graph neural network to encode this graph structure and fuse the resulting representations into the entity representations of the model. Our experiments show significant improvements in answer exact-match/F1 scores and faithfulness of grounding in the reasoning path on the HotpotQA dataset and achieve state-of-the-art numbers on the Musique dataset with only up to a 4\% increase in model parameters.

Shifting Attention to Relevance: Towards the Uncertainty Estimation of Large Language Models
Jinhao Duan, Hao Cheng, Shiqi Wang, Alex Zavalny, Chenan Wang, Renjing Xu, Bhavya Kailkhura, Kaidi Xu
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in natural language generation and instruction following, a persistent challenge lies in their susceptibility to "hallucinations", which erodes trust in their outputs. Although Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) presents a promising solution, its accurate implementation within the context of LLMs remains a significant hurdle. To address this critical roadblock, our research originates from a fundamental heuristic insight: tokens within auto-regressive LLM-generated text do not equally reflect the underlying meaning. Some tokens carry greater relevance and representativeness than others, owing to the phenomenon of "linguistic redundancy", wherein a select few keywords suffice to convey the essence of lengthy sentences. Regrettably, existing methodologies treat all tokens with equal importance when estimating uncertainty, disregarding these inherent generative inequalities. Our analysis reveals a significant issue with state-of-the-art: numerous tokens (and sentences) of limited semantic significance receive equal or even excessive weighting during uncertainty estimation. To rectify this bias, we propose to jointly Shifting Attention to more Relevant (SAR) components, at both the token- and the sentence-levels for accurate uncertainty estimation. We conduct extensive experiments involving a range of popular "off-the-shelf" LLMs, including instruction-tuned LLMs such as Vicuna, WizardLM, and LLaMA-2-chat, as well as pretrained LLMs like OPT and LLaMA, with model sizes extending up to 33B parameters. We carry out evaluation across various free-form question-answering tasks, encompassing domains such as reading comprehension, science Q&A, and medical Q&A. Our experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of SAR in addressing the challenges of uncertainty estimation within the realm of LLMs.

Facing Off World Model Backbones: RNNs, Transformers, and S4
Fei Deng, Junyeong Park, Sungjin Ahn
World models are a fundamental component in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). To perform temporally extended and consistent simulations of the future in partially observable environments, world models need to possess long-term memory. However, state-of-the-art MBRL agents, such as Dreamer, predominantly employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as their world model backbone, which have limited memory capacity. In this paper, we seek to explore alternative world model backbones for improving long-term memory. In particular, we investigate the effectiveness of Transformers and Structured State Space Sequence (S4) models, motivated by their remarkable ability to capture long-range dependencies in low-dimensional sequences and their complementary strengths. We propose S4WM, the first world model compatible with parallelizable SSMs including S4 and its variants. By incorporating latent variable modeling, S4WM can efficiently generate high-dimensional image sequences through latent imagination. Furthermore, we extensively compare RNN-, Transformer-, and S4-based world models across four sets of environments, which we have tailored to assess crucial memory capabilities of world models, including long-term imagination, context-dependent recall, reward prediction, and memory-based reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that S4WM outperforms Transformer-based world models in terms of long-term memory, while exhibiting greater efficiency during training and imagination. These results pave the way for the development of stronger MBRL agents.

Improving Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Data Importance Learning
Xiaozhong Lyu, Stefan Grafberger, Samantha Biegel, Shaopeng Wei, Meng Cao, Sebastian Schelter, Ce Zhang
Retrieval augmentation enables large language models to take advantage of external knowledge, for example on tasks like question answering and data imputation. However, the performance of such retrieval-augmented models is limited by the data quality of their underlying retrieval corpus. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on multilinear extension for evaluating the data importance of retrieved data points. There are exponentially many terms in the multilinear extension, and one key contribution of this paper is a polynomial time algorithm that computes exactly, given a retrieval-augmented model with an additive utility function and a validation set, the data importance of data points in the retrieval corpus using the multilinear extension of the model's utility function. We further proposed an even more efficient ({\epsilon}, {\delta})-approximation algorithm. Our experimental results illustrate that we can enhance the performance of large language models by only pruning or reweighting the retrieval corpus, without requiring further training. For some tasks, this even allows a small model (e.g., GPT-JT), augmented with a search engine API, to outperform GPT-3.5 (without retrieval augmentation). Moreover, we show that weights based on multilinear extension can be computed efficiently in practice (e.g., in less than ten minutes for a corpus with 100 million elements).

Teaching Arithmetic to Small Transformers
Nayoung Lee, Kartik Sreenivasan, Jason D. Lee, Kangwook Lee, Dimitris Papailiopoulos
Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token prediction objective. This study investigates how small transformers, trained from random initialization, can efficiently learn arithmetic operations such as addition, multiplication, and elementary functions like square root, using the next-token prediction objective. We first demonstrate that conventional training data is not the most effective for arithmetic learning, and simple formatting changes can significantly improve accuracy. This leads to sharp phase transitions as a function of training data scale, which, in some cases, can be explained through connections to low-rank matrix completion. Building on prior work, we then train on chain-of-thought style data that includes intermediate step results. Even in the complete absence of pretraining, this approach significantly and simultaneously improves accuracy, sample complexity, and convergence speed. We also study the interplay between arithmetic and text data during training and examine the effects of few-shot prompting, pretraining, and model scale. Additionally, we discuss length generalization challenges. Our work highlights the importance of high-quality, instructive data that considers the particular characteristics of the next-word prediction objective for rapidly eliciting arithmetic capabilities.

QIGen: Generating Efficient Kernels for Quantized Inference on Large Language Models
Tommaso Pegolotti, Elias Frantar, Dan Alistarh, Markus Püschel
We present ongoing work on a new automatic code generation approach for supporting quantized generative inference on LLMs such as LLaMA or OPT on off-the-shelf CPUs. Our approach is informed by the target architecture and a performance model, including both hardware characteristics and method-specific accuracy constraints. Results on CPU-based inference for LLaMA models show that our approach can lead to high performance and high accuracy, comparing favorably to the best existing open-source solution. A preliminary implementation is available at this https URL.

ReLoRA: High-Rank Training Through Low-Rank Updates
Vladislav Lialin, Namrata Shivagunde, Sherin Muckatira, Anna Rumshisky
Despite the dominance and effectiveness of scaling, resulting in large networks with hundreds of billions of parameters, the necessity to train overparameterized models remains poorly understood, while training costs grow exponentially. In this paper, we explore parameter-efficient training techniques as an approach to training large neural networks. We introduce a novel method called ReLoRA, which utilizes low-rank updates to train high-rank networks. We apply ReLoRA to training transformer language models with up to 1.3B parameters and demonstrate comparable performance to regular neural network training. ReLoRA saves up to 5.5Gb of RAM per GPU and improves training speed by 9-40% depending on the model size and hardware setup. Our findings show the potential of parameter-efficient techniques for large-scale pre-training.

Copy Is All You Need
Tian Lan, Deng Cai, Yan Wang, Heyan Huang, Xian-Ling Mao
The dominant text generation models compose the output by sequentially selecting words from a fixed vocabulary. In this paper, we formulate text generation as progressively copying text segments (e.g., words or phrases) from an existing text collection. We compute the contextualized representations of meaningful text segments and index them using efficient vector search toolkits. The task of text generation is then decomposed into a series of copy-and-paste operations: at each time step, we seek suitable text spans from the text collection rather than selecting from a standalone vocabulary. Experiments on the standard language modeling benchmark (WikiText-103) show that our approach achieves better generation quality according to both automatic and human evaluations. Besides, its inference efficiency is comparable to token-level autoregressive models thanks to the reduction of decoding steps. We also show that our approach allows for effective domain adaptation by simply switching to domain-specific text collection without extra training. Finally, we observe that our approach attains additional performance gains by simply scaling up to larger text collections, again without further training.\footnote{Our source codes are publicly available at \url{this https URL}.}

Multi-Method Self-Training: Improving Code Generation With Text, And Vice Versa
Shriyash K. Upadhyay, Etan J. Ginsberg
Large Language Models have many methods for solving the same problem. This introduces novel strengths (different methods may work well for different problems) and weaknesses (it may be difficult for users to know which method to use). In this paper, we introduce Multi-Method Self-Training (MMST), where one method is trained on the filtered outputs of another, allowing us to augment the strengths and ameliorate the weaknesses of each method. Using a 176B parameter model trained on both language and code, we show that MMST can 1) improve the less performant method (up to 30%) making the model easier to use, 2) improve the more performant method (up to 32.2%) making the model more performant, and 3) improve the performance of related but distinct tasks (up to 10.3%) by improving the ability of the model to generate rationales. We then conduct ablation analyses to explore why MMST works. We show that MMST generates more data than traditional self-training, but the improvement in performance is driven by the use of multiple methods. We also analyze prompt-engineering and anti-correlated performance between methods as means of making MMST more effective. We hope the evidence from our paper motivates machine learning researchers to explore ways in which advances in language models allow for new forms of training.

Divide & Bind Your Attention for Improved Generative Semantic Nursing
Yumeng Li, Margret Keuper, Dan Zhang, Anna Khoreva
Emerging large-scale text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion (SD), have exhibited overwhelming results with high fidelity. Despite the magnificent progress, current state-of-the-art models still struggle to generate images fully adhering to the input prompt. Prior work, Attend & Excite, has introduced the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN), aiming to optimize cross-attention during inference time to better incorporate the semantics. It demonstrates promising results in generating simple prompts, e.g., ``a cat and a dog''. However, its efficacy declines when dealing with more complex prompts, and it does not explicitly address the problem of improper attribute binding. To address the challenges posed by complex prompts or scenarios involving multiple entities and to achieve improved attribute binding, we propose Divide & Bind. We introduce two novel loss objectives for GSN: a novel attendance loss and a binding loss. Our approach stands out in its ability to faithfully synthesize desired objects with improved attribute alignment from complex prompts and exhibits superior performance across multiple evaluation benchmarks.

Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models
Jean Kaddour, Joshua Harris, Maximilian Mozes, Herbie Bradley, Roberta Raileanu, Robert McHardy
Large Language Models (LLMs) went from non-existent to ubiquitous in the machine learning discourse within a few years. Due to the fast pace of the field, it is difficult to identify the remaining challenges and already fruitful application areas. In this paper, we aim to establish a systematic set of open problems and application successes so that ML researchers can comprehend the field's current state more quickly and become productive.

Soft Prompt Tuning for Augmenting Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models
Zhiyuan Peng, Xuyang Wu, Yi Fang
Dense retrieval (DR) converts queries and documents into dense embeddings and measures the similarity between queries and documents in vector space. One of the challenges in DR is the lack of domain-specific training data. While DR models can learn from large-scale public datasets like MS MARCO through transfer learning, evidence shows that not all DR models and domains can benefit from transfer learning equally. Recently, some researchers have resorted to large language models (LLMs) to improve the zero-shot and few-shot DR models. However, the hard prompts or human-written prompts utilized in these works cannot guarantee the good quality of generated weak queries. To tackle this, we propose soft prompt tuning for augmenting DR (SPTAR): For each task, we leverage soft prompt-tuning to optimize a task-specific soft prompt on limited ground truth data and then prompt the LLMs to tag unlabeled documents with weak queries, yielding enough weak document-query pairs to train task-specific dense retrievers. We design a filter to select high-quality example document-query pairs in the prompt to further improve the quality of weak tagged queries. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work utilizing soft prompt tuning to augment DR models. The experiments demonstrate that SPTAR outperforms the unsupervised baselines BM25 and the recently proposed LLMs-based augmentation method for DR.

QuIP: 2-Bit Quantization of Large Language Models With Guarantees
Jerry Chee, Yaohui Cai, Volodymyr Kuleshov, Christopher De Sa
This work studies post-training parameter quantization in large language models (LLMs). We introduce quantization with incoherence processing (QuIP), a new method based on the insight that quantization benefits from incoherent weight and Hessian matrices, i.e., from the weights and the directions in which it is important to round them accurately being unaligned with the coordinate axes. QuIP consists of two steps: (1) an adaptive rounding procedure minimizing a quadratic proxy objective; (2) efficient pre- and post-processing that ensures weight and Hessian incoherence via multiplication by random orthogonal matrices. We complement QuIP with the first theoretical analysis for an LLM-scale quantization algorithm, and show that our theory also applies to an existing method, OPTQ. Empirically, we find that our incoherence preprocessing improves several existing quantization algorithms and yields the first LLM quantization methods that produce viable results using only two bits per weight. Our code can be found at this https URL .

CoRe Optimizer: An All-in-One Solution for Machine Learning
Marco Eckhoff, Markus Reiher
The optimization algorithm and its hyperparameters can significantly affect the training speed and resulting model accuracy in machine learning applications. The wish list for an ideal optimizer includes fast and smooth convergence to low error, low computational demand, and general applicability. Our recently introduced continual resilient (CoRe) optimizer has shown superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art first-order gradient-based optimizers for training lifelong machine learning potentials. In this work we provide an extensive performance comparison of the CoRe optimizer and nine other optimization algorithms including the Adam optimizer and resilient backpropagation (RPROP) for diverse machine learning tasks. We analyze the influence of different hyperparameters and provide generally applicable values. The CoRe optimizer yields best or competitive performance in every investigated application, while only one hyperparameter needs to be changed depending on mini-batch or batch learning.

Deja Vu: Contextual Sparsity for Efficient LLMs at Inference Time
Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. However, they are computationally expensive at inference time. Sparsity is a natural approach to reduce this cost, but existing methods either require costly retraining, have to forgo LLM's in-context learning ability, or do not yield wall-clock time speedup on modern hardware. We hypothesize that contextual sparsity, which are small, input-dependent sets of attention heads and MLP parameters that yield approximately the same output as the dense model for a given input, can address these issues. We show that contextual sparsity exists, that it can be accurately predicted, and that we can exploit it to speed up LLM inference in wall-clock time without compromising LLM's quality or in-context learning ability. Based on these insights, we propose DejaVu, a system that uses a low-cost algorithm to predict contextual sparsity on the fly given inputs to each layer, along with an asynchronous and hardware-aware implementation that speeds up LLM inference. We validate that DejaVu can reduce the inference latency of OPT-175B by over 2 × × compared to the state-of-the-art FasterTransformer, and over 6 × × compared to the widely used Hugging Face implementation, without compromising model quality.

ReCLIP: Refine Contrastive Language Image Pre-Training with Source Free Domain Adaptation
Xuefeng Hu, Ke Zhang, Lu Xia, Albert Chen, Jiajia Luo, Yuyin Sun, Ken Wang, Nan Qiao, Xiao Zeng, Min Sun, Cheng-Hao Kuo, Ram Nevatia
Large-scale Pre-Training Vision-Language Model such as CLIP has demonstrated outstanding performance in zero-shot classification, e.g. achieving 76.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet without seeing any example, which leads to potential benefits to many tasks that have no labeled data. However, while applying CLIP to a downstream target domain, the presence of visual and text domain gaps and cross-modality misalignment can greatly impact the model performance. To address such challenges, we propose ReCLIP, the first source-free domain adaptation method for vision-language models, which does not require any source data or target labeled data. ReCLIP first learns a projection space to mitigate the misaligned visual-text embeddings and learns pseudo labels, and then deploys cross-modality self-training with the pseudo labels, to update visual and text encoders, refine labels and reduce domain gaps and misalignments iteratively. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate ReCLIP reduces the average error rate of CLIP from 30.17% to 25.06% on 22 image classification benchmarks. Code available at this https URL.

EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models
Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xie, Yunzhi Yao, Bozhong Tian, Mengru Wang, Zekun Xi, Siyuan Cheng, Kangwei Liu, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
Large Language Models (LLMs) usually suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to the outdated/noisy data. To this end, many knowledge editing approaches for LLMs have emerged -- aiming to subtly inject/edit updated knowledge or adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. Nevertheless, due to significant differences among various knowledge editing methods and the variations in task setups, there is no standard implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners to apply knowledge editing to applications. To address these issues, we propose EasyEdit, an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for LLMs. It supports various cutting-edge knowledge editing approaches and can be readily apply to many well-known LLMs such as T5, GPT-J, LlaMA, etc. Empirically, we report the knowledge editing results on LlaMA-2 with EasyEdit, demonstrating that knowledge editing surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. We have released the source code on GitHub at this https URL, along with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documentation for beginners to get started. Besides, we present an online system for real-time knowledge editing, and a demo video at this http URL.

Activation Addition: Steering Language Models Without Optimization
Alexander Matt Turner, Lisa Thiergart, David Udell, Gavin Leech, Ulisse Mini, Monte MacDiarmid
Reliably controlling the behavior of large language models is a pressing open problem. Existing methods include supervised finetuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, prompt engineering and guided decoding. We instead investigate activation engineering: modifying activations at inference-time to predictably alter model behavior. We bias the forward pass with a 'steering vector' implicitly specified through natural language. Past work learned these steering vectors; our Activation Addition (ActAdd) method instead computes them by taking the activation differences which result from pairs of prompts.
We demonstrate ActAdd on GPT-2 on OpenWebText and ConceptNet, and replicate the effect on Llama-13B and GPT-J-6B. Our approach yields inference-time control over high-level properties of output & preserves performance on off-target topics. The method requires far less compute and implementation effort than finetuning and RLHF, allows for natural language specification by users, and its overhead scales naturally with model size.

OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models
Wenqi Shao, Mengzhao Chen, Zhaoyang Zhang, Peng Xu, Lirui Zhao, Zhiqian Li, Kaipeng Zhang, Peng Gao, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing tasks. However, their practical deployment is hindered by their immense memory and computation requirements. Although recent post-training quantization (PTQ) methods are effective in reducing memory footprint and improving the computational efficiency of LLM, they hand-craft quantization parameters, which leads to low performance and fails to deal with extremely low-bit quantization. To tackle this issue, we introduce an Omnidirectionally calibrated Quantization (OmniQuant) technique for LLMs, which achieves good performance in diverse quantization settings while maintaining the computational efficiency of PTQ by efficiently optimizing various quantization parameters. OmniQuant comprises two innovative components including Learnable Weight Clipping (LWC) and Learnable Equivalent Transformation (LET). LWC modulates the extreme values of weights by optimizing the clipping threshold. Meanwhile, LET tackles activation outliers by shifting the challenge of quantization from activations to weights through a learnable equivalent transformation. Operating within a differentiable framework using block-wise error minimization, OmniQuant can optimize the quantization process efficiently for both weight-only and weight-activation quantization. For instance, the LLaMA-2 model family with the size of 7-70B can be processed with OmniQuant on a single A100-40G GPU within 1-16 hours using 128 samples. Extensive experiments validate OmniQuant's superior performance across diverse quantization configurations such as W4A4, W6A6, W4A16, W3A16, and W2A16. Additionally, OmniQuant demonstrates effectiveness in instruction-tuned models and delivers notable improvements in inference speed and memory reduction on real devices. Codes and models are available at \url{this https URL}.

Accelerating LLM Inference with Staged Speculative Decoding
Benjamin Spector, Chris Re
Recent advances with large language models (LLM) illustrate their diverse capabilities. We propose a novel algorithm, staged speculative decoding, to accelerate LLM inference in small-batch, on-device scenarios. We address the low arithmetic intensity of small-batch inference by improving upon previous work in speculative decoding. First, we restructure the speculative batch as a tree, which reduces generation costs and increases the expected tokens per batch. Second, we add a second stage of speculative decoding. Taken together, we reduce single-batch decoding latency by 3.16x with a 762M parameter GPT-2-L model while perfectly preserving output quality.

YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models
Bowen Peng, Jeffrey Quesnelle, Honglu Fan, Enrico Shippole
Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) have been shown to effectively encode positional information in transformer-based language models. However, these models fail to generalize past the sequence length they were trained on. We present YaRN (Yet another RoPE extensioN method), a compute-efficient method to extend the context window of such models, requiring 10x less tokens and 2.5x less training steps than previous methods. Using YaRN, we show that LLaMA models can effectively utilize and extrapolate to context lengths much longer than their original pre-training would allow, while also surpassing previous the state-of-the-art at context window extension. In addition, we demonstrate that YaRN exhibits the capability to extrapolate beyond the limited context of a fine-tuning dataset. The models fine-tuned using YaRN has been made available and reproduced online up to 128k context length at this https URL

LM-Infinite: Simple On-the-Fly Length Generalization for Large Language Models
Chi Han, Qifan Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Yu Chen, Heng Ji, Sinong Wang
In recent years, there have been remarkable advancements in the performance of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains. As these LLMs are deployed for increasingly complex domains, they often face the need to follow longer user prompts or generate longer texts. In these situations, the length generalization failure of LLMs on long sequences becomes more prominent. Most pre-training schemes truncate training sequences to a fixed length. LLMs often struggle to generate fluent and coherent texts after longer contexts, even with relative positional encoding specifically designed to cope with this problem. Common solutions such as finetuning on longer corpora often involve daunting hardware and time costs and require careful training process design. To more efficiently extrapolate existing LLMs' generation quality to longer texts, we theoretically and empirically investigate the main out-of-distribution (OOD) factors contributing to this problem. Inspired by this diagnosis, we propose a simple yet effective solution for on-the-fly length generalization, LM-Infinite. It involves only a Λ-shaped attention mask (to avoid excessive attended tokens) and a distance limit (to avoid unseen distances) while requiring no parameter updates or learning. We find it applicable to a variety of LLMs using relative-position encoding methods. LM-Infinite is computationally efficient with O(n) time and space, and demonstrates consistent text generation fluency and quality to as long as 128k tokens on ArXiv and OpenWebText2 datasets, with 2.72x decoding speedup. We will make the codes publicly available following publication.

Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Alignment
Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Liang Chen, Feifan Song, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
Reasoning is a cognitive process of using evidence to reach a sound conclusion. The reasoning capability is essential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as the brain of the artificial general intelligence agent. Recent studies reveal that fine-tuning LLMs on data with the chain of thought (COT) reasoning process can significantly enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, we find that the fine-tuned LLMs suffer from an \textit{Assessment Misalignment} problem, i.e., they frequently assign higher scores to subpar COTs, leading to potential limitations in their reasoning abilities. To address this problem, we introduce an \textit{Alignment Fine-Tuning (AFT)} paradigm, which involves three steps: 1) fine-tuning LLMs with COT training data; 2) generating multiple COT responses for each question, and categorizing them into positive and negative ones based on whether they achieve the correct answer; 3) calibrating the scores of positive and negative responses given by LLMs with a novel constraint alignment loss. Specifically, the constraint alignment loss has two objectives: a) Alignment, which guarantees that positive scores surpass negative scores to encourage answers with high-quality COTs; b) Constraint, which keeps the negative scores confined to a reasonable range to prevent the model degradation. Beyond just the binary positive and negative feedback, the constraint alignment loss can be seamlessly adapted to the ranking situations when ranking feedback is accessible. Furthermore, we also delve deeply into recent ranking-based alignment methods, such as DPO, RRHF, and PRO, and discover that the constraint, which has been overlooked by these approaches, is also crucial for their performance. Extensive experiments on four reasoning benchmarks with both binary and ranking feedback demonstrate the effectiveness of AFT.

Data-Juicer: A One-Stop Data Processing System for Large Language Models
Daoyuan Chen, Yilun Huang, Zhijian Ma, Hesen Chen, Xuchen Pan, Ce Ge, Dawei Gao, Yuexiang Xie, Zhaoyang Liu, Jinyang Gao, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou
The immense evolution in Large Language Models (LLMs) has underscored the importance of massive, heterogeneous, and high-quality data. A data recipe is a mixture of data from different sources for training LLMs, which plays a vital role in LLMs' performance. Existing open-source tools for LLM data processing are mostly tailored for specific data recipes. To continuously uncover the potential of LLMs, incorporate data from new sources, and improve LLMs' performance, we build a new system named Data-Juicer, with which we can efficiently generate diverse data recipes, explore different possibilities in forming data mixtures, and evaluate their effects on model performance. Different from traditional data-analytics pipelines, Data-Juicer faces some unique challenges. Firstly, the possible data sources for forming data recipes are truly heterogeneous and massive with various qualities. Secondly, it is extremely expensive to precisely evaluate data recipes' impact on LLMs' performance. Thirdly, the end users of Data-Juicer, model developers, need sufficient flexibility to configure and evaluate different data recipes.
Data-Juicer features a fine-grained abstraction of pipelines for constructing data recipes, with over 50 built-in operators for easy composition and extension. By incorporating visualization and auto-evaluation capabilities, Data-Juicer enables a timely feedback loop for both LLM pre-training and fine-tuning. Further, Data-Juicer is optimized and integrated with ecosystems for LLM training, evaluation, and distributed computing. The data recipes derived with Data-Juicer gain notable improvements on state-of-the-art LLMs, by up to 7.45% increase in averaged score across 16 LLM benchmarks and 17.5% higher win rate in pair-wise GPT-4 evaluations. Our system, data recipes, and tutorials are released, calling for broader data-centric research on training and understanding LLMs.

Delta-LoRA: Fine-Tuning High-Rank Parameters with the Delta of Low-Rank Matrices
Bojia Zi, Xianbiao Qi, Lingzhi Wang, Jianan Wang, Kam-Fai Wong, Lei Zhang
In this paper, we present Delta-LoRA, which is a novel parameter-efficient approach to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). In contrast to LoRA and other low-rank adaptation methods such as AdaLoRA, Delta-LoRA not only updates the low-rank matrices $\bA$ and $\bB$, but also propagate the learning to the pre-trained weights $\bW$ via updates utilizing the delta of the product of two low-rank matrices ($\bA^{(t+1)}\bB^{(t+1)} - \bA^{(t)}\bB^{(t)}$). Such a strategy effectively addresses the limitation that the incremental update of low-rank matrices is inadequate for learning representations capable for downstream tasks. Moreover, as the update of $\bW$ does not need to compute the gradients of $\bW$ and store their momentums, Delta-LoRA shares comparable memory requirements and computational costs with LoRA. Extensive experiments show that Delta-LoRA significantly outperforms existing low-rank adaptation methods. We further support these results with comprehensive analyses that underscore the effectiveness of Delta-LoRA.

SLiMe: Segment Like Me
Aliasghar Khani, Saeid Asgari Taghanaki, Aditya Sanghi, Ali Mahdavi Amiri, Ghassan Hamarneh
Significant strides have been made using large vision-language models, like Stable Diffusion (SD), for a variety of downstream tasks, including image editing, image correspondence, and 3D shape generation. Inspired by these advancements, we explore leveraging these extensive vision-language models for segmenting images at any desired granularity using as few as one annotated sample by proposing SLiMe. SLiMe frames this problem as an optimization task. Specifically, given a single training image and its segmentation mask, we first extract attention maps, including our novel "weighted accumulated self-attention map" from the SD prior. Then, using the extracted attention maps, the text embeddings of Stable Diffusion are optimized such that, each of them, learn about a single segmented region from the training image. These learned embeddings then highlight the segmented region in the attention maps, which in turn can then be used to derive the segmentation map. This enables SLiMe to segment any real-world image during inference with the granularity of the segmented region in the training image, using just one example. Moreover, leveraging additional training data when available, i.e. few-shot, improves the performance of SLiMe. We carried out a knowledge-rich set of experiments examining various design factors and showed that SLiMe outperforms other existing one-shot and few-shot segmentation methods.

Norm Tweaking: High-performance Low-bit Quantization of Large Language Models
Liang Li, Qingyuan Li, Bo Zhang, Xiangxiang Chu
As the size of large language models (LLMs) continues to grow, model compression without sacrificing accuracy has become a crucial challenge for deployment. While some quantization methods, such as GPTQ, have made progress in achieving acceptable 4-bit weight-only quantization, attempts at lower-bit quantization often result in severe performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce a technique called norm tweaking, which can be used as a plugin in current PTQ methods to achieve high precision while being cost-efficient. Our approach is inspired by the observation that rectifying the quantized activation distribution to match its float counterpart can readily restore accuracy for LLMs. To achieve this, we carefully design a tweaking strategy that includes calibration data generation and channel-wise distance constraint to update the weights of normalization layers for better generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets using several open-sourced LLMs. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in both weight-only quantization and joint quantization of weights and activations, surpassing existing PTQ methods. On GLM-130B and OPT-66B, our method even achieves the same level of accuracy at 2-bit quantization as their float ones. Our simple and effective approach makes it more practical for real-world applications.

When Less is More: Investigating Data Pruning for Pretraining LLMs at Scale
Max Marion, Ahmet Üstün, Luiza Pozzobon, Alex Wang, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker
Large volumes of text data have contributed significantly to the development of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. This data is typically acquired by scraping the internet, leading to pretraining datasets comprised of noisy web text. To date, efforts to prune these datasets down to a higher quality subset have relied on hand-crafted heuristics encoded as rule-based filters. In this work, we take a wider view and explore scalable estimates of data quality that can be used to systematically measure the quality of pretraining data. We perform a rigorous comparison at scale of the simple data quality estimator of perplexity, as well as more sophisticated and computationally intensive estimates of the Error L2-Norm and memorization. These metrics are used to rank and prune pretraining corpora, and we subsequently compare LLMs trained on these pruned datasets. Surprisingly, we find that the simple technique of perplexity outperforms our more computationally expensive scoring methods. We improve over our no-pruning baseline while training on as little as 30% of the original training dataset. Our work sets the foundation for unexplored strategies in automatically curating high quality corpora and suggests the majority of pretraining data can be removed while retaining performance.

Optimize Weight Rounding via Signed Gradient Descent for the Quantization of LLMs
Wenhua Cheng, Weiwei Zhang, Haihao Shen, Yiyang Cai, Xin He, Kaokao Lv
Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven their exceptional capabilities in performing language-related tasks. However, their deployment poses significant challenges due to their considerable memory and storage requirements. In response to this issue, weight-only quantization, particularly 3 and 4-bit weight-only quantization, has emerged as one of the most viable solutions. As the number of bits decreases, the quantization grid broadens, thus emphasizing the importance of up and down rounding. While previous studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning up and down rounding with the addition of perturbations can enhance accuracy in some scenarios, our study is driven by the precise and limited boundary of these perturbations, where only the threshold for altering the rounding value is of significance. Consequently, we propose a concise and highly effective approach for optimizing the weight rounding task. Our method, named SignRound, involves lightweight block-wise tuning using signed gradient descent, enabling us to achieve outstanding results within 400 steps. SignRound competes impressively against recent methods without introducing additional inference overhead. The source code will be publicly available at \url{this https URL} soon.

Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention
Woosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Ying Sheng, Lianmin Zheng, Cody Hao Yu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Hao Zhang, Ion Stoica
High throughput serving of large language models (LLMs) requires batching sufficiently many requests at a time. However, existing systems struggle because the key-value cache (KV cache) memory for each request is huge and grows and shrinks dynamically. When managed inefficiently, this memory can be significantly wasted by fragmentation and redundant duplication, limiting the batch size. To address this problem, we propose PagedAttention, an attention algorithm inspired by the classical virtual memory and paging techniques in operating systems. On top of it, we build vLLM, an LLM serving system that achieves (1) near-zero waste in KV cache memory and (2) flexible sharing of KV cache within and across requests to further reduce memory usage. Our evaluations show that vLLM improves the throughput of popular LLMs by 2-4× with the same level of latency compared to the state-of-the-art systems, such as FasterTransformer and Orca. The improvement is more pronounced with longer sequences, larger models, and more complex decoding algorithms. vLLM's source code is publicly available at this https URL

Cure the headache of Transformers via Collinear Constrained Attention
CoCA: Fusing position embedding with Collinear Constrained Attention for fine-tuning free context window extending
Shiyi Zhu, Jing Ye, Wei Jiang, Qi Zhang, Yifan Wu, Jianguo Li
Self-attention and position embedding are two key modules in Transformer based LLMs. The potential relationship among them are far from well studied, especially for context window extending. In this paper, we introduce collinear constrained relationship to fuse RoPE and self-attention, and name it as Collinear Constrained Attention (CoCA). We've analyzed the computational and spatial complexity of CoCA and have determined that it adds only minimal additional overhead compared to the original Transformer-based models. We provide an efficient implementation of CoCA, and make it drop-in replacement for any existing position embedding and attention modules in Transformer based models. Experiments show that CoCA performs extraordinary well on context window extending. For instance, a CoCA based GPT model trained with 512 context length can extend the context window up to 8K without perplexity diverging. This indicates more than 16x context window extending without any fine-tuning. Our code is released here: this https URL

Flash-LLM: Enabling Cost-Effective and Highly-Efficient Large Generative Model Inference with Unstructured Sparsity
Haojun Xia, Zhen Zheng, Yuchao Li, Donglin Zhuang, Zhongzhu Zhou, Xiafei Qiu, Yong Li, Wei Lin, Shuaiwen Leon Song
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.

LongLoRA: Efficient Fine-tuning of Long-Context Large Language Models
Yukang Chen, Shengju Qian, Haotian Tang, Xin Lai, Zhijian Liu, Song Han, Jiaya Jia
We present LongLoRA, an efficient fine-tuning approach that extends the context sizes of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), with limited computation cost. Typically, training LLMs with long context sizes is computationally expensive, requiring extensive training hours and GPU resources. For example, training on the context length of 8192 needs 16x computational costs in self-attention layers as that of 2048. In this paper, we speed up the context extension of LLMs in two aspects. On the one hand, although dense global attention is needed during inference, fine-tuning the model can be effectively and efficiently done by sparse local attention. The proposed shifted sparse attention (S2-Attn) effectively enables context extension, leading to non-trivial computation saving with similar performance to fine-tuning with vanilla attention. Particularly, it can be implemented with only two lines of code in training, while being optional in inference. On the other hand, we revisit the parameter-efficient fine-tuning regime for context expansion. Notably, we find that LoRA for context extension works well under the premise of trainable embedding and normalization. LongLoRA combines this improved LoRA with S2-Attn. LongLoRA demonstrates strong empirical results on various tasks on Llama2 models from 7B/13B to 70B. LongLoRA adopts Llama2 7B from 4k context to 100k, or Llama2 70B to 32k on a single 8x A100 machine. LongLoRA extends models' context while retaining their original architectures, and is compatible with most existing techniques, like Flash-Attention2. In addition, we further conduct supervised fine-tuning with LongLoRA and our long instruction-following LongAlpaca dataset.

MosaicFusion: Diffusion Models as Data Augmenters for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation
Jiahao Xie, Wei Li, Xiangtai Li, Ziwei Liu, Yew Soon Ong, Chen Change Loy
We present MosaicFusion, a simple yet effective diffusion-based data augmentation approach for large vocabulary instance segmentation. Our method is training-free and does not rely on any label supervision. Two key designs enable us to employ an off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion model as a useful dataset generator for object instances and mask annotations. First, we divide an image canvas into several regions and perform a single round of diffusion process to generate multiple instances simultaneously, conditioning on different text prompts. Second, we obtain corresponding instance masks by aggregating cross-attention maps associated with object prompts across layers and diffusion time steps, followed by simple thresholding and edge-aware refinement processing. Without bells and whistles, our MosaicFusion can produce a significant amount of synthetic labeled data for both rare and novel categories. Experimental results on the challenging LVIS long-tailed and open-vocabulary benchmarks demonstrate that MosaicFusion can significantly improve the performance of existing instance segmentation models, especially for rare and novel categories. Code will be released at this https URL.

Rethinking Channel Dimensions to Isolate Outliers for Low-bit Weight Quantization of Large Language Models
Jung Hwan Heo, Jeonghoon Kim, Beomseok Kwon, Byeongwook Kim, Se Jung Kwon, Dongsoo Lee
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated a remarkable success across various tasks. However, efficiently serving LLMs has been a challenge due to its large memory bottleneck, specifically in small batch inference settings (e.g. mobile devices). Weight-only quantization can be a promising approach, but sub-4 bit quantization remains a challenge due to large-magnitude activation outliers. To mitigate the undesirable outlier effect, we first propose per-IC quantization, a simple yet effective method that creates quantization groups within each input channel (IC) rather than the conventional per-output channel (OC). Our method is motivated by the observation that activation outliers affect the input dimension of the weight matrix, so similarly grouping the weights in the IC direction can isolate outliers to be within a group. We also find that activation outliers do not dictate quantization difficulty, and inherent weight sensitivities also exist. With per-IC quantization as a new outlier-friendly scheme, we then propose Adaptive Dimensions (AdaDim), a versatile quantization framework that can adapt to various weight sensitivity patterns. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaDim by augmenting prior methods such as Round-To-Nearest and GPTQ, showing significant improvements across various language modeling benchmarks for both base (up to +4.7% on MMLU) and instruction-tuned (up to +10% on HumanEval) LLMs.

Improving Code Generation by Dynamic Temperature Sampling
Hot or Cold? Adaptive Temperature Sampling for Code Generation with Large Language Models
Yuqi Zhu, Jia Li, Ge Li, YunFei Zhao, Jia Li, Zhi Jin, Hong Mei
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in code generation. However, existing LLMs' decoding strategies are designed for Natural Language (NL) generation, overlooking the differences between NL and programming languages (PL). Due to this oversight, a better decoding strategy for code generation remains an open question. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study to explore a decoding strategy specialized in code generation. With an analysis of loss distributions of code tokens, we find that code tokens can be divided into two categories: challenging tokens that are difficult to predict and confident tokens that can be easily inferred. Among them, the challenging tokens mainly appear at the beginning of a code block. Inspired by the above findings, we propose a simple yet effective method: Adaptive Temperature (AdapT) sampling, which dynamically adjusts the temperature coefficient when decoding different tokens. We apply a larger temperature when sampling for challenging tokens, allowing LLMs to explore diverse choices. We employ a smaller temperature for confident tokens avoiding the influence of tail randomness noises. We apply AdapT sampling to LLMs with different sizes and conduct evaluations on two popular datasets. Results show that AdapT sampling significantly outperforms state-of-the-art decoding strategy.

Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks
Guangxuan Xiao, Yuandong Tian, Beidi Chen, Song Han, Mike Lewis
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous tokens' Key and Value states (KV) consumes extensive memory. Secondly, popular LLMs cannot generalize to longer texts than the training sequence length. Window attention, where only the most recent KVs are cached, is a natural approach -- but we show that it fails when the text length surpasses the cache size. We observe an interesting phenomenon, namely attention sink, that keeping the KV of initial tokens will largely recover the performance of window attention. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the emergence of attention sink is due to the strong attention scores towards initial tokens as a ``sink'' even if they are not semantically important. Based on the above analysis, we introduce StreamingLLM, an efficient framework that enables LLMs trained with a finite length attention window to generalize to infinite sequence lengths without any fine-tuning. We show that StreamingLLM can enable Llama-2, MPT, Falcon, and Pythia to perform stable and efficient language modeling with up to 4 million tokens and more. In addition, we discover that adding a placeholder token as a dedicated attention sink during pre-training can further improve streaming deployment. In streaming settings, StreamingLLM outperforms the sliding window recomputation baseline by up to 22.2x speedup. Code and datasets are provided at this https URL.

DataInf: Efficiently Estimating Data Influence in LoRA-tuned LLMs and Diffusion Models
Yongchan Kwon, Eric Wu, Kevin Wu, James Zou
Quantifying the impact of training data points is crucial for understanding the outputs of machine learning models and for improving the transparency of the AI pipeline. The influence function is a principled and popular data attribution method, but its computational cost often makes it challenging to use. This issue becomes more pronounced in the setting of large language models and text-to-image models. In this work, we propose DataInf, an efficient influence approximation method that is practical for large-scale generative AI models. Leveraging an easy-to-compute closed-form expression, DataInf outperforms existing influence computation algorithms in terms of computational and memory efficiency. Our theoretical analysis shows that DataInf is particularly well-suited for parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA. Through systematic empirical evaluations, we show that DataInf accurately approximates influence scores and is orders of magnitude faster than existing methods. In applications to RoBERTa-large, Llama-2-13B-chat, and stable-diffusion-v1.5 models, DataInf effectively identifies the most influential fine-tuning examples better than other approximate influence scores. Moreover, it can help to identify which data points are mislabeled.

GrowLength: Accelerating LLMs Pretraining by Progressively Growing Training Length
Hongye Jin, Xiaotian Han, Jingfeng Yang, Zhimeng Jiang, Chia-Yuan Chang, Xia Hu
The evolving sophistication and intricacies of Large Language Models (LLMs) yield unprecedented advancements, yet they simultaneously demand considerable computational resources and incur significant costs. To alleviate these challenges, this paper introduces a novel, simple, and effective method named ``\growlength'' to accelerate the pretraining process of LLMs. Our method progressively increases the training length throughout the pretraining phase, thereby mitigating computational costs and enhancing efficiency. For instance, it begins with a sequence length of 128 and progressively extends to 4096. This approach enables models to process a larger number of tokens within limited time frames, potentially boosting their performance. In other words, the efficiency gain is derived from training with shorter sequences optimizing the utilization of resources. Our extensive experiments with various state-of-the-art LLMs have revealed that models trained using our method not only converge more swiftly but also exhibit superior performance metrics compared to those trained with existing methods. Furthermore, our method for LLMs pretraining acceleration does not require any additional engineering efforts, making it a practical solution in the realm of LLMs.

Ground-A-Video: Zero-shot Grounded Video Editing using Text-to-image Diffusion Models
Hyeonho Jeong, Jong Chul Ye
Recent endeavors in video editing have showcased promising results in single-attribute editing or style transfer tasks, either by training text-to-video (T2V) models on text-video data or adopting training-free methods. However, when confronted with the complexities of multi-attribute editing scenarios, they exhibit shortcomings such as omitting or overlooking intended attribute changes, modifying the wrong elements of the input video, and failing to preserve regions of the input video that should remain intact. To address this, here we present a novel grounding-guided video-to-video translation framework called Ground-A-Video for multi-attribute video editing. Ground-A-Video attains temporally consistent multi-attribute editing of input videos in a training-free manner without aforementioned shortcomings. Central to our method is the introduction of Cross-Frame Gated Attention which incorporates groundings information into the latent representations in a temporally consistent fashion, along with Modulated Cross-Attention and optical flow guided inverted latents smoothing. Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate that Ground-A-Video's zero-shot capacity outperforms other baseline methods in terms of edit-accuracy and frame consistency. Further results and codes are provided at our project page (this http URL).

Elephant Neural Networks: Born to Be a Continual Learner
Qingfeng Lan, A. Rupam Mahmood
Catastrophic forgetting remains a significant challenge to continual learning for decades. While recent works have proposed effective methods to mitigate this problem, they mainly focus on the algorithmic side. Meanwhile, we do not fully understand what architectural properties of neural networks lead to catastrophic forgetting. This study aims to fill this gap by studying the role of activation functions in the training dynamics of neural networks and their impact on catastrophic forgetting. Our study reveals that, besides sparse representations, the gradient sparsity of activation functions also plays an important role in reducing forgetting. Based on this insight, we propose a new class of activation functions, elephant activation functions, that can generate both sparse representations and sparse gradients. We show that by simply replacing classical activation functions with elephant activation functions, we can significantly improve the resilience of neural networks to catastrophic forgetting. Our method has broad applicability and benefits for continual learning in regression, class incremental learning, and reinforcement learning tasks. Specifically, we achieves excellent performance on Split MNIST dataset in just one single pass, without using replay buffer, task boundary information, or pre-training.

Ring Attention with Blockwise Transformers for Near-Infinite Context
Hao Liu, Matei Zaharia, Pieter Abbeel
Transformers have emerged as the architecture of choice for many state-of-the-art AI models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands imposed by Transformers limit their ability to handle long sequences, thereby posing challenges in utilizing videos, actions, and other long-form sequences and modalities in complex environments. We present a novel approach, Ring Attention with Blockwise Transformers (Ring Attention), which leverages blockwise computation of self-attention and feedforward to distribute long sequences across multiple devices while fully overlapping the communication of key-value blocks with the computation of blockwise attention. Our approach enables training and inference of sequences that are up to device count times longer than those achievable by prior memory-efficient Transformers, without resorting to approximations or incurring additional communication and computation overheads. Extensive experiments on language modeling and reinforcement learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in allowing millions of tokens context size and improving performance.

Retrieval meets Long Context Large Language Models
Peng Xu, Wei Ping, Xianchao Wu, Lawrence McAfee, Chen Zhu, Zihan Liu, Sandeep Subramanian, Evelina Bakhturina, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
Extending the context window of large language models (LLMs) is getting popular recently, while the solution of augmenting LLMs with retrieval has existed for years. The natural questions are: i) Retrieval-augmentation versus long context window, which one is better for downstream tasks? ii) Can both methods be combined to get the best of both worlds? In this work, we answer these questions by studying both solutions using two state-of-the-art pretrained LLMs, i.e., a proprietary 43B GPT and LLaMA2-70B. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that LLM with 4K context window using simple retrieval-augmentation at generation can achieve comparable performance to finetuned LLM with 16K context window via positional interpolation on long context tasks, while taking much less computation. More importantly, we demonstrate that retrieval can significantly improve the performance of LLMs regardless of their extended context window sizes. Our best model, retrieval-augmented LLaMA2-70B with 32K context window, outperforms GPT-3.5-turbo-16k and Davinci003 in terms of average score on seven long context tasks including question answering and query-based summarization. It also outperforms its non-retrieval LLaMA2-70B-32k baseline by a margin, while being much faster at generation. Our study provides general insights on the choice of retrieval-augmentation versus long context extension of LLM for practitioners.

Retrieval meets Long Context Large Language Models
Peng Xu, Wei Ping, Xianchao Wu, Lawrence McAfee, Chen Zhu, Zihan Liu, Sandeep Subramanian, Evelina Bakhturina, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
Extending the context window of large language models (LLMs) is getting popular recently, while the solution of augmenting LLMs with retrieval has existed for years. The natural questions are: i) Retrieval-augmentation versus long context window, which one is better for downstream tasks? ii) Can both methods be combined to get the best of both worlds? In this work, we answer these questions by studying both solutions using two state-of-the-art pretrained LLMs, i.e., a proprietary 43B GPT and LLaMA2-70B. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that LLM with 4K context window using simple retrieval-augmentation at generation can achieve comparable performance to finetuned LLM with 16K context window via positional interpolation on long context tasks, while taking much less computation. More importantly, we demonstrate that retrieval can significantly improve the performance of LLMs regardless of their extended context window sizes. Our best model, retrieval-augmented LLaMA2-70B with 32K context window, outperforms GPT-3.5-turbo-16k and Davinci003 in terms of average score on seven long context tasks including question answering and query-based summarization. It also outperforms its non-retrieval LLaMA2-70B-32k baseline by a margin, while being much faster at generation. Our study provides general insights on the choice of retrieval-augmentation versus long context extension of LLM for practitioners.

DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines
Omar Khattab, Arnav Singhvi, Paridhi Maheshwari, Zhiyuan Zhang, Keshav Santhanam, Sri Vardhamanan, Saiful Haq, Ashutosh Sharma, Thomas T. Joshi, Hanna Moazam, Heather Miller, Matei Zaharia, Christopher Potts
The ML community is rapidly exploring techniques for prompting language models (LMs) and for stacking them into pipelines that solve complex tasks. Unfortunately, existing LM pipelines are typically implemented using hard-coded "prompt templates", i.e. lengthy strings discovered via trial and error. Toward a more systematic approach for developing and optimizing LM pipelines, we introduce DSPy, a programming model that abstracts LM pipelines as text transformation graphs, i.e. imperative computational graphs where LMs are invoked through declarative modules. DSPy modules are parameterized, meaning they can learn (by creating and collecting demonstrations) how to apply compositions of prompting, finetuning, augmentation, and reasoning techniques. We design a compiler that will optimize any DSPy pipeline to maximize a given metric. We conduct two case studies, showing that succinct DSPy programs can express and optimize sophisticated LM pipelines that reason about math word problems, tackle multi-hop retrieval, answer complex questions, and control agent loops. Within minutes of compiling, a few lines of DSPy allow GPT-3.5 and llama2-13b-chat to self-bootstrap pipelines that outperform standard few-shot prompting (generally by over 25% and 65%, respectively) and pipelines with expert-created demonstrations (by up to 5-46% and 16-40%, respectively). On top of that, DSPy programs compiled to open and relatively small LMs like 770M-parameter T5 and llama2-13b-chat are competitive with approaches that rely on expert-written prompt chains for proprietary GPT-3.5. DSPy is available at this https URL

LightSeq: Sequence Level Parallelism for Distributed Training of Long Context Transformers
Dacheng Li, Rulin Shao, Anze Xie, Eric P. Xing, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, Xuezhe Ma, Hao Zhang
Increasing the context length of large language models (LLMs) unlocks fundamentally new capabilities, but also significantly increases the memory footprints of training. Previous model-parallel systems such as Megatron-LM partition and compute different attention heads in parallel, resulting in large communication volumes, so they cannot scale beyond the number of attention heads, thereby hindering its adoption. In this paper, we introduce a new approach, LightSeq, for long-context LLMs training. LightSeq has many notable advantages. First, LightSeq partitions over the sequence dimension, hence is agnostic to model architectures and readily applicable for models with varying numbers of attention heads, such as Multi-Head, Multi-Query and Grouped-Query attention. Second, LightSeq not only requires up to 4.7x less communication than Megatron-LM on popular LLMs but also overlaps the communication with computation. To further reduce the training time, LightSeq features a novel gradient checkpointing scheme to bypass an forward computation for memory-efficient attention. We evaluate LightSeq on Llama-7B and its variants with sequence lengths from 32K to 512K. Through comprehensive experiments on single and cross-node training, we show that LightSeq achieves up to 1.24-2.01x end-to-end speedup, and a 2-8x longer sequence length on models with fewer heads, compared to Megatron-LM. Codes will be available at this https URL.

Amortizing intractable inference in large language models
Edward J. Hu, Moksh Jain, Eric Elmoznino, Younesse Kaddar, Guillaume Lajoie, Yoshua Bengio, Nikolay Malkin
Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This limits tractable querying of this knowledge to start-to-end autoregressive sampling. However, many tasks of interest -- including sequence continuation, infilling, and other forms of constrained generation -- involve sampling from intractable posterior distributions. We address this limitation by using amortized Bayesian inference to sample from these intractable posteriors. Such amortization is algorithmically achieved by fine-tuning LLMs via diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms: generative flow networks (GFlowNets). We empirically demonstrate that this distribution-matching paradigm of LLM fine-tuning can serve as an effective alternative to maximum-likelihood training and reward-maximizing policy optimization. As an important application, we interpret chain-of-thought reasoning as a latent variable modeling problem and demonstrate that our approach enables data-efficient adaptation of LLMs to tasks that require multi-step rationalization and tool use.

SteerLM: Attribute Conditioned SFT as an (User-Steerable) Alternative to RLHF
Yi Dong, Zhilin Wang, Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Xianchao Wu, Oleksii Kuchaiev
Model alignment with human preferences is an essential step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) helpful and consistent with human values. It typically consists of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) stages. However, RLHF faces inherent limitations stemming from a complex training setup and its tendency to align the model with implicit values that end users cannot control at run-time. Moreover, reward models in RLHF stage commonly rely on single-dimensional feedback as opposed to explicit, multifaceted signals that indicate attributes such as helpfulness, humor, and toxicity. To address these limitations, we propose SteerLM, a supervised fine-tuning method that empowers end-users to control responses during inference. SteerLM conditions responses to conform to an explicitly defined multi-dimensional set of attributes, thereby empowering a steerable AI capable of generating helpful and high-quality responses while maintaining customizability. Experiments show that SteerLM trained on open source datasets generates responses that are preferred by human and automatic evaluators to many state-of-the-art baselines trained with RLHF while being much easier to train. Try SteerLM at this https URL

Outlier Weighed Layerwise Sparsity (OWL): A Missing Secret Sauce for Pruning LLMs to High Sparsity
Lu Yin, You Wu, Zhenyu Zhang, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Yaqing Wang, Yiling Jia, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Yi Liang, Zhangyang Wang, Shiwei Liu
Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their remarkable performance, present a challenge due to their colossal model size when it comes to practical deployment. In response to this challenge, efforts have been directed toward the application of traditional network pruning techniques to LLMs, uncovering a massive number of parameters can be pruned in one-shot without hurting performance. Building upon insights gained from pre-LLM models, prevailing LLM pruning strategies have consistently adhered to the practice of uniformly pruning all layers at equivalent sparsity. However, this observation stands in contrast to the prevailing trends observed in the field of vision models, where non-uniform layerwise sparsity typically yields substantially improved results. To elucidate the underlying reasons for this disparity, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the distribution of token features within LLMs. In doing so, we discover a strong correlation with the emergence of outliers, defined as features exhibiting significantly greater magnitudes compared to their counterparts in feature dimensions. Inspired by this finding, we introduce a novel LLM pruning methodology that incorporates a tailored set of non-uniform layerwise sparsity ratios specifically designed for LLM pruning, termed as Outlier Weighed Layerwise sparsity (OWL). The sparsity ratio of OWL is directly proportional to the outlier ratio observed within each layer, facilitating a more effective alignment between layerwise weight sparsity and outlier ratios. Our empirical evaluation, conducted across the LLaMA-V1 family and OPT, spanning various benchmarks, demonstrates the distinct advantages offered by OWL over previous methods. For instance, our approach exhibits a remarkable performance gain, surpassing the state-of-the-art Wanda and SparseGPT by 61.22 and 6.80 perplexity at a high sparsity level of 70%, respectively.

Let Models Speak Ciphers: Multiagent Debate through Embeddings
Chau Pham, Boyi Liu, Yingxiang Yang, Zhengyu Chen, Tianyi Liu, Jianbo Yuan, Bryan A. Plummer, Zhaoran Wang, Hongxia Yang
Discussion and debate among Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention due to their potential to enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs. Although natural language is an obvious choice for communication due to LLM's language understanding capability, the token sampling step needed when generating natural language poses a potential risk of information loss, as it uses only one token to represent the model's belief across the entire vocabulary. In this paper, we introduce a communication regime named CIPHER (Communicative Inter-Model Protocol Through Embedding Representation) to address this issue. Specifically, we remove the token sampling step from LLMs and let them communicate their beliefs across the vocabulary through the expectation of the raw transformer output embeddings. Remarkably, by deviating from natural language, CIPHER offers an advantage of encoding a broader spectrum of information without any modification to the model weights. While the state-of-the-art LLM debate methods using natural language outperforms traditional inference by a margin of 1.5-8%, our experiment results show that CIPHER debate further extends this lead by 1-3.5% across five reasoning tasks and multiple open-source LLMs of varying sizes. This showcases the superiority and robustness of embeddings as an alternative "language" for communication among LLMs.

InstructRetro: Instruction Tuning post Retrieval-Augmented Pretraining
Boxin Wang, Wei Ping, Lawrence McAfee, Peng Xu, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
Pretraining auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) with retrieval demonstrates better perplexity and factual accuracy by leveraging external databases. However, the size of existing pretrained retrieval-augmented LLM is still limited (e.g., Retro has 7.5B parameters), which limits the effectiveness of instruction tuning and zero-shot generalization. In this work, we introduce Retro 48B, the largest LLM pretrained with retrieval before instruction tuning. Specifically, we continue to pretrain the 43B GPT model on additional 100 billion tokens using the Retro augmentation method by retrieving from 1.2 trillion tokens. The obtained foundation model, Retro 48B, largely outperforms the original 43B GPT in terms of perplexity. After instruction tuning on Retro, InstructRetro demonstrates significant improvement over the instruction tuned GPT on zero-shot question answering (QA) tasks. Specifically, the average improvement of InstructRetro is 7% over its GPT counterpart across 8 short-form QA tasks, and 10% over GPT across 4 challenging long-form QA tasks. Surprisingly, we find that one can ablate the encoder from InstructRetro architecture and directly use its decoder backbone, while achieving comparable results. We hypothesize that pretraining with retrieval makes its decoder good at incorporating context for QA. Our results highlights the promising direction to obtain a better GPT decoder for QA through continued pretraining with retrieval before instruction tuning.

CacheGen: Fast Context Loading for Language Model Applications
Yuhan Liu, Hanchen Li, Kuntai Du, Jiayi Yao, Yihua Cheng, Yuyang Huang, Shan Lu, Michael Maire, Henry Hoffmann, Ari Holtzman, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Junchen Jiang
As large language models (LLMs) take on more complex tasks, their inputs incorporate longer contexts to respond to questions that require domain knowledge or user-specific conversational histories. Yet, using long contexts poses a challenge for responsive LLM systems, as nothing can be generated until all the contexts are fetched to and processed by the LLM. Existing systems optimize only the computation delay in context processing (e.g., by caching intermediate key-value features of the text context) but often cause longer network delays in context fetching (e.g., key-value features consume orders of magnitude larger bandwidth than the text context).
This paper presents CacheGen to minimize the delays in fetching and processing contexts for LLMs. CacheGen reduces the bandwidth needed for transmitting long contexts' key-value (KV) features through a novel encoder that compresses KV features into more compact bitstream representations. The encoder combines adaptive quantization with a tailored arithmetic coder, taking advantage of the KV features' distributional properties, such as locality across tokens. Furthermore, CacheGen minimizes the total delay in fetching and processing a context by using a controller that determines when to load the context as compressed KV features or raw text and picks the appropriate compression level if loaded as KV features. We test CacheGen on three models of various sizes and three datasets of different context lengths. Compared to recent methods that handle long contexts, CacheGen reduces bandwidth usage by 3.7-4.3x and the total delay in fetching and processing contexts by 2.7-3x while maintaining similar LLM performance on various tasks as loading the text contexts.

MatFormer: Nested Transformer for Elastic Inference
Devvrit, Sneha Kudugunta, Aditya Kusupati, Tim Dettmers, Kaifeng Chen, Inderjit Dhillon, Yulia Tsvetkov, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Sham Kakade, Ali Farhadi, Prateek Jain
Transformer models are deployed in a wide range of settings, from multi-accelerator clusters to standalone mobile phones. The diverse inference constraints in these scenarios necessitate practitioners to train foundation models such as PaLM 2, Llama, & ViTs as a series of models of varying sizes. Due to significant training costs, only a select few model sizes are trained and supported, limiting more fine-grained control over relevant tradeoffs, including latency, cost, and accuracy. This work introduces MatFormer, a nested Transformer architecture designed to offer elasticity in a variety of deployment constraints. Each Feed Forward Network (FFN) block of a MatFormer model is jointly optimized with a few nested smaller FFN blocks. This training procedure allows for the Mix'n'Match of model granularities across layers -- i.e., a trained universal MatFormer model enables extraction of hundreds of accurate smaller models, which were never explicitly optimized. We empirically demonstrate MatFormer's effectiveness across different model classes (decoders & encoders), modalities (language & vision), and scales (up to 2.6B parameters). We find that a 2.6B decoder-only MatFormer language model (MatLM) allows us to extract smaller models spanning from 1.5B to 2.6B, each exhibiting comparable validation loss and one-shot downstream evaluations to their independently trained counterparts. Furthermore, we observe that smaller encoders extracted from a universal MatFormer-based ViT (MatViT) encoder preserve the metric-space structure for adaptive large-scale retrieval. Finally, we showcase that speculative decoding with the accurate and consistent submodels extracted from MatFormer can further reduce inference latency.

LoftQ: LoRA-Fine-Tuning-Aware Quantization for Large Language Models
Yixiao Li, Yifan Yu, Chen Liang, Pengcheng He, Nikos Karampatziakis, Weizhu Chen, Tuo Zhao
Quantization is an indispensable technique for serving Large Language Models (LLMs) and has recently found its way into LoRA fine-tuning. In this work we focus on the scenario where quantization and LoRA fine-tuning are applied together on a pre-trained model. In such cases it is common to observe a consistent gap in the performance on downstream tasks between full fine-tuning and quantization plus LoRA fine-tuning approach. In response, we propose LoftQ (LoRA-Fine-Tuning-aware Quantization), a novel quantization framework that simultaneously quantizes an LLM and finds a proper low-rank initialization for LoRA fine-tuning. Such an initialization alleviates the discrepancy between the quantized and full-precision model and significantly improves generalization in downstream tasks. We evaluate our method on natural language understanding, question answering, summarization, and natural language generation tasks. Experiments show that our method is highly effective and outperforms existing quantization methods, especially in the challenging 2-bit and 2/4-bit mixed precision regimes. The code is available on this https URL.

QUIK: Towards End-to-End 4-Bit Inference on Generative Large Language Models
Saleh Ashkboos, Ilia Markov, Elias Frantar, Tingxuan Zhong, Xincheng Wang, Jie Ren, Torsten Hoefler, Dan Alistarh
Large Language Models (LLMs) from the GPT family have become extremely popular, leading to a race towards reducing their inference costs to allow for efficient local computation. Yet, the vast majority of existing work focuses on weight-only quantization, which can reduce runtime costs in the memory-bound one-token-at-a-time generative setting, but does not address them in compute-bound scenarios, such as batched inference or prompt processing. In this paper, we address the general quantization problem, where both weights and activations should be quantized. We show, for the first time, that the majority of inference computations for large generative models such as LLaMA, OPT, and Falcon can be performed with both weights and activations being cast to 4 bits, in a way that leads to practical speedups, while at the same time maintaining good accuracy. We achieve this via a hybrid quantization strategy called QUIK, which compresses most of the weights and activations to 4-bit, while keeping some outlier weights and activations in higher-precision. The key feature of our scheme is that it is designed with computational efficiency in mind: we provide GPU kernels matching the QUIK format with highly-efficient layer-wise runtimes, which lead to practical end-to-end throughput improvements of up to 3.4x relative to FP16 execution. We provide detailed studies for models from the OPT, LLaMA-2 and Falcon families, as well as a first instance of accurate inference using quantization plus 2:4 sparsity. Code is available at: this https URL.

Microscaling Data Formats for Deep Learning
Bita Darvish Rouhani, Ritchie Zhao, Ankit More, Mathew Hall, Alireza Khodamoradi, Summer Deng, Dhruv Choudhary, Marius Cornea, Eric Dellinger, Kristof Denolf, Stosic Dusan, Venmugil Elango, Maximilian Golub, Alexander Heinecke, Phil James-Roxby, Dharmesh Jani, Gaurav Kolhe, Martin Langhammer, Ada Li, Levi Melnick, Maral Mesmakhosroshahi, Andres Rodriguez, Michael Schulte, Rasoul Shafipour, Lei Shao, Michael Siu, Pradeep Dubey, Paulius Micikevicius, Maxim Naumov, Colin Verrilli, Ralph Wittig, Doug Burger, Eric Chung
Narrow bit-width data formats are key to reducing the computational and storage costs of modern deep learning applications. This paper evaluates Microscaling (MX) data formats that combine a per-block scaling factor with narrow floating-point and integer types for individual elements. MX formats balance the competing needs of hardware efficiency, model accuracy, and user friction. Empirical results on over two dozen benchmarks demonstrate practicality of MX data formats as a drop-in replacement for baseline FP32 for AI inference and training with low user friction. We also show the first instance of training generative language models at sub-8-bit weights, activations, and gradients with minimal accuracy loss and no modifications to the training recipe.

xVal: A Continuous Number Encoding for Large Language Models
Siavash Golkar, Mariel Pettee, Michael Eickenberg, Alberto Bietti, Miles Cranmer, Geraud Krawezik, Francois Lanusse, Michael McCabe, Ruben Ohana, Liam Parker, Bruno Régaldo-Saint Blancard, Tiberiu Tesileanu, Kyunghyun Cho, Shirley Ho
Large Language Models have not yet been broadly adapted for the analysis of scientific datasets due in part to the unique difficulties of tokenizing numbers. We propose xVal, a numerical encoding scheme that represents any real number using just a single token. xVal represents a given real number by scaling a dedicated embedding vector by the number value. Combined with a modified number-inference approach, this strategy renders the model end-to-end continuous when considered as a map from the numbers of the input string to those of the output string. This leads to an inductive bias that is generally more suitable for applications in scientific domains. We empirically evaluate our proposal on a number of synthetic and real-world datasets. Compared with existing number encoding schemes, we find that xVal is more token-efficient and demonstrates improved generalization.

An Emulator for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models using Small Language Models
Eric Mitchell, Rafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Chelsea Finn, Christopher D. Manning
Widely used language models (LMs) are typically built by scaling up a two-stage training pipeline: a pre-training stage that uses a very large, diverse dataset of text and a fine-tuning (sometimes, 'alignment') stage that uses targeted examples or other specifications of desired behaviors. While it has been hypothesized that knowledge and skills come from pre-training, and fine-tuning mostly filters this knowledge and skillset, this intuition has not been extensively tested. To aid in doing so, we introduce a novel technique for decoupling the knowledge and skills gained in these two stages, enabling a direct answer to the question, "What would happen if we combined the knowledge learned by a large model during pre-training with the knowledge learned by a small model during fine-tuning (or vice versa)?" Using an RL-based framework derived from recent developments in learning from human preferences, we introduce emulated fine-tuning (EFT), a principled and practical method for sampling from a distribution that approximates (or 'emulates') the result of pre-training and fine-tuning at different scales. Our experiments with EFT show that scaling up fine-tuning tends to improve helpfulness, while scaling up pre-training tends to improve factuality. Beyond decoupling scale, we show that EFT enables test-time adjustment of competing behavioral traits like helpfulness and harmlessness without additional training. Finally, a special case of emulated fine-tuning, which we call LM up-scaling, avoids resource-intensive fine-tuning of large pre-trained models by ensembling them with small fine-tuned models, essentially emulating the result of fine-tuning the large pre-trained model. Up-scaling consistently improves helpfulness and factuality of instruction-following models in the Llama, Llama-2, and Falcon families, without additional hyperparameters or training.

Frozen Transformers in Language Models Are Effective Visual Encoder Layers
Ziqi Pang, Ziyang Xie, Yunze Man, Yu-Xiong Wang
This paper reveals that large language models (LLMs), despite being trained solely on textual data, are surprisingly strong encoders for purely visual tasks in the absence of language. Even more intriguingly, this can be achieved by a simple yet previously overlooked strategy -- employing a frozen transformer block from pre-trained LLMs as a constituent encoder layer to directly process visual tokens. Our work pushes the boundaries of leveraging LLMs for computer vision tasks, significantly departing from conventional practices that typically necessitate a multi-modal vision-language setup with associated language prompts, inputs, or outputs. We demonstrate that our approach consistently enhances performance across a diverse range of tasks, encompassing pure 2D and 3D visual recognition tasks (e.g., image and point cloud classification), temporal modeling tasks (e.g., action recognition), non-semantic tasks (e.g., motion forecasting), and multi-modal tasks (e.g., 2D/3D visual question answering and image-text retrieval). Such improvements are a general phenomenon, applicable to various types of LLMs (e.g., LLaMA and OPT) and different LLM transformer blocks. We additionally propose the information filtering hypothesis to explain the effectiveness of pre-trained LLMs in visual encoding -- the pre-trained LLM transformer blocks discern informative visual tokens and further amplify their effect. This hypothesis is empirically supported by the observation that the feature activation, after training with LLM transformer blocks, exhibits a stronger focus on relevant regions. We hope that our work inspires new perspectives on utilizing LLMs and deepening our understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Code is available at this https URL.

LoBaSS: Gauging Learnability in Supervised Fine-tuning Data
Haotian Zhou, Tingkai Liu, Qianli Ma, Jianbo Yuan, Pengfei Liu, Yang You, Hongxia Yang
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) serves as a crucial phase in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific task prerequisites. The selection of fine-tuning data profoundly influences the model's performance, whose principle is traditionally grounded in data quality and distribution. In this paper, we introduce a new dimension in SFT data selection: learnability. This new dimension is motivated by the intuition that SFT unlocks capabilities acquired by a LLM during the pretraining phase. Given that different pretrained models have disparate capabilities, the SFT data appropriate for one may not suit another. Thus, we introduce the term learnability to define the suitability of data for effective learning by the model. We present the Loss Based SFT Data Selection (LoBaSS) method, utilizing data learnability as the principal criterion for the selection SFT data. This method provides a nuanced approach, allowing the alignment of data selection with inherent model capabilities, ensuring optimal compatibility and learning efficiency. In experimental comparisons involving 7B and 13B models, our LoBaSS method is able to surpass full-data fine-tuning at merely 6% of the total training data. When employing 16.7% of the data, LoBaSS harmonizes the model's capabilities across conversational and mathematical domains, proving its efficacy and adaptability.

Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback
Herbie Bradley, Andrew Dai, Hannah Teufel, Jenny Zhang, Koen Oostermeijer, Marco Bellagente, Jeff Clune, Kenneth Stanley, Grégory Schott, Joel Lehman
In many text-generation problems, users may prefer not only a single response, but a diverse range of high-quality outputs from which to choose. Quality-diversity (QD) search algorithms aim at such outcomes, by continually improving and diversifying a population of candidates. However, the applicability of QD to qualitative domains, like creative writing, has been limited by the difficulty of algorithmically specifying measures of quality and diversity. Interestingly, recent developments in language models (LMs) have enabled guiding search through AI feedback, wherein LMs are prompted in natural language to evaluate qualitative aspects of text. Leveraging this development, we introduce Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback (QDAIF), wherein an evolutionary algorithm applies LMs to both generate variation and evaluate the quality and diversity of candidate text. When assessed on creative writing domains, QDAIF covers more of a specified search space with high-quality samples than do non-QD controls. Further, human evaluation of QDAIF-generated creative texts validates reasonable agreement between AI and human evaluation. Our results thus highlight the potential of AI feedback to guide open-ended search for creative and original solutions, providing a recipe that seemingly generalizes to many domains and modalities. In this way, QDAIF is a step towards AI systems that can independently search, diversify, evaluate, and improve, which are among the core skills underlying human society's capacity for innovation.

DoGE: Domain Reweighting with Generalization Estimation
Simin Fan, Matteo Pagliardini, Martin Jaggi
The coverage and composition of the pretraining data corpus significantly impacts the generalization ability of large language models. Conventionally, the pretraining corpus is composed of various source domains (e.g. CommonCrawl, Wikipedia, Github etc.) according to certain sampling probabilities (domain weights). However, current methods lack a principled way to optimize domain weights for ultimate goal for generalization. We propose DOmain reweighting with Generalization Estimation (DoGE), where we reweigh the sampling probability from each domain based on its contribution to the final generalization objective assessed by a gradient-based generalization estimation function. First, we train a small-scale proxy model with a min-max optimization to obtain the reweighted domain weights. At each step, the domain weights are updated to maximize the overall generalization gain by mirror descent. Finally we use the obtained domain weights to train a larger scale full-size language model. On SlimPajama-6B dataset, with universal generalization objective, DoGE achieves better average perplexity and zero-shot reasoning accuracy. On out-of-domain generalization tasks, DoGE reduces perplexity on the target domain by a large margin. We further apply a parameter-selection scheme which improves the efficiency of generalization estimation.

E-Sparse: Boosting the Large Language Model Inference through Entropy-based N:M Sparsity
Yun Li, Lin Niu, Xipeng Zhang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Zhanhui Kang
Traditional pruning methods are known to be challenging to work in Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative AI because of their unaffordable training process and large computational demands. For the first time, we introduce the information entropy of hidden state features into a pruning metric design, namely E-Sparse, to improve the accuracy of N:M sparsity on LLM. E-Sparse employs the information richness to leverage the channel importance, and further incorporates several novel techniques to put it into effect: (1) it introduces information entropy to enhance the significance of parameter weights and input feature norms as a novel pruning metric, and performs N:M sparsity without modifying the remaining weights. (2) it designs global naive shuffle and local block shuffle to quickly optimize the information distribution and adequately cope with the impact of N:M sparsity on LLMs' accuracy. E-Sparse is implemented as a Sparse-GEMM on FasterTransformer and runs on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs. Extensive experiments on the LLaMA family and OPT models show that E-Sparse can significantly speed up the model inference over the dense model (up to 1.53X) and obtain significant memory saving (up to 43.52%), with acceptable accuracy loss.

Mixture of Tokens: Efficient LLMs through Cross-Example Aggregation
Szymon Antoniak, Sebastian Jaszczur, Michał Krutul, Maciej Pióro, Jakub Krajewski, Jan Ludziejewski, Tomasz Odrzygóźdź, Marek Cygan
Despite the promise of Mixture of Experts (MoE) models in increasing parameter counts of Transformer models while maintaining training and inference costs, their application carries notable drawbacks. The key strategy of these models is to, for each processed token, activate at most a few experts - subsets of an extensive feed-forward layer. But this approach is not without its challenges. The operation of matching experts and tokens is discrete, which makes MoE models prone to issues like training instability and uneven expert utilization. Existing techniques designed to address these concerns, such as auxiliary losses or balance-aware matching, result either in lower model performance or are more difficult to train. In response to these issues, we propose Mixture of Tokens, a fully-differentiable model that retains the benefits of MoE architectures while avoiding the aforementioned difficulties. Rather than routing tokens to experts, this approach mixes tokens from different examples prior to feeding them to experts, enabling the model to learn from all token-expert combinations. Importantly, this mixing can be disabled to avoid mixing of different sequences during inference. Crucially, this method is fully compatible with both masked and causal Large Language Model training and inference.

Personas as a Way to Model Truthfulness in Language Models
Nitish Joshi, Javier Rando, Abulhair Saparov, Najoung Kim, He He
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, which contains both factual and misleading information about the world. Can language models discern truth from falsehood in this contradicting data? Expanding on the view that LLMs can model different communicative agents, we present the persona hypothesis: LLMs can cluster agents into personas using common features of their generations. For instance, a truthful persona is a group of agents that are likely to produce truthful text and that share similar features like formal writing styles and scientific references. By modeling this persona, LLMs can generalize truthfulness beyond the specific contexts in which each agent generated the training text. For example, the model can infer that the agent "Wikipedia" will behave truthfully on topics that were only generated by "Science" because they both belong to the truthful persona. We show evidence for the persona hypothesis via two observations: (1) we can probe whether a model's answer will be truthful before it is generated; (2) finetuning a model on a set of facts improves its truthfulness on unseen topics. Next, using arithmetics as a synthetic environment, we show that language models can separate true and false statements, and generalize truthfulness across agents; but only if agents in the training data share a truthful generative process that enables the creation of a truthful persona. Overall, our findings suggest that models can exploit hierarchical structures in the data to learn abstract concepts like truthfulness.

Atom: Low-bit Quantization for Efficient and Accurate LLM Serving
Yilong Zhao, Chien-Yu Lin, Kan Zhu, Zihao Ye, Lequn Chen, Size Zheng, Luis Ceze, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tianqi Chen, Baris Kasikci
The growing demand for Large Language Models (LLMs) in applications such as content generation, intelligent chatbots, and sentiment analysis poses considerable challenges for LLM service providers. To efficiently use GPU resources and boost throughput, batching multiple requests has emerged as a popular paradigm; to further speed up batching, LLM quantization techniques reduce memory consumption and increase computing capacity. However, prevalent quantization schemes (e.g., 8-bit weight-activation quantization) cannot fully leverage the capabilities of modern GPUs, such as 4-bit integer operators, resulting in sub-optimal performance.
To maximize LLMs' serving throughput, we introduce Atom, a low-bit quantization method that achieves high throughput improvements with negligible accuracy loss. Atom significantly boosts serving throughput by using low-bit operators and considerably reduces memory consumption via low-bit quantization. It attains high accuracy by applying a novel mixed-precision and fine-grained quantization process. We evaluate Atom on 4-bit weight-activation quantization setups in the serving context. Atom improves end-to-end throughput by up to 7.73× compared to the FP16 and by 2.53× compared to INT8 quantization, while maintaining the same latency target.

QMoE: Practical Sub-1-Bit Compression of Trillion-Parameter Models
Elias Frantar, Dan Alistarh
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a general solution to the high inference costs of large language models (LLMs) via sparse routing, bringing faster and more accurate models, at the cost of massive parameter counts. For example, the SwitchTransformer-c2048 model has 1.6 trillion parameters, requiring 3.2TB of accelerator memory to run efficiently, which makes practical deployment challenging and expensive. In this paper, we present a solution to this memory problem, in form of a new compression and execution framework called QMoE. Specifically, QMoE consists of a scalable algorithm which accurately compresses trillion-parameter MoEs to less than 1 bit per parameter, in a custom format co-designed with bespoke GPU decoding kernels to facilitate efficient end-to-end compressed inference, with minor runtime overheads relative to uncompressed execution. Concretely, QMoE can compress the 1.6 trillion parameter SwitchTransformer-c2048 model to less than 160GB (20x compression, 0.8 bits per parameter) at only minor accuracy loss, in less than a day on a single GPU. This enables, for the first time, the execution of a trillion-parameter model on affordable commodity hardware, like a single server with 4x NVIDIA A6000 or 8x NVIDIA 3090 GPUs, at less than 5% runtime overhead relative to ideal uncompressed inference. The source code and compressed models are available at this http URL.

AWEQ: Post-Training Quantization with Activation-Weight Equalization for Large Language Models
Baisong Li, Xingwang Wang, Haixiao Xu
Large language models(LLMs) exhibit excellent performance across a variety of tasks, but they come with significant computational and storage costs. Quantizing these models is an effective way to alleviate this issue. However, existing methods struggle to strike a balance between model accuracy and hardware efficiency. This is where we introduce AWEQ, a post-training method that requires no additional training overhead. AWEQ excels in both ultra-low-bit quantization and 8-bit weight and activation (W8A8) quantization. There is an observation that weight quantization is less challenging than activation quantization. AWEQ transfers the difficulty of activation quantization to weights using channel equalization, achieving a balance between the quantization difficulties of both, and thereby maximizing performance. We have further refined the equalization method to mitigate quantization bias error, ensuring the robustness of the model. Extensive experiments on popular models such as LLaMA and OPT demonstrate that AWEQ outperforms all existing post-training quantization methods for large models.

FlashDecoding++: Faster Large Language Model Inference on GPUs
Ke Hong, Guohao Dai, Jiaming Xu, Qiuli Mao, Xiuhong Li, Jun Liu, Kangdi Chen, Yuhan Dong, Yu Wang
As the Large Language Model (LLM) becomes increasingly important in various domains. However, the following challenges still remain unsolved in accelerating LLM inference: (1) Synchronized partial softmax update. The softmax operation requires a synchronized update operation among each partial softmax result, leading to ~20% overheads for the attention computation in LLMs. (2) Under-utilized computation of flat GEMM. The shape of matrices performing GEMM in LLM inference is flat, leading to under-utilized computation and >50% performance loss after padding zeros in previous designs. (3) Performance loss due to static dataflow. Kernel performance in LLM depends on varied input data features, hardware configurations, etc. A single and static dataflow may lead to a 50.25% performance loss for GEMMs of different shapes in LLM inference.
We present FlashDecoding++, a fast LLM inference engine supporting mainstream LLMs and hardware back-ends. To tackle the above challenges, FlashDecoding++ creatively proposes: (1) Asynchronized softmax with unified max value. FlashDecoding++ introduces a unified max value technique for different partial softmax computations to avoid synchronization. (2) Flat GEMM optimization with double buffering. FlashDecoding++ points out that flat GEMMs with different shapes face varied bottlenecks. Then, techniques like double buffering are introduced. (3) Heuristic dataflow with hardware resource adaptation. FlashDecoding++ heuristically optimizes dataflow using different hardware resource considering input dynamics. Due to the versatility of optimizations in FlashDecoding++, FlashDecoding++ can achieve up to 4.86x and 2.18x speedup on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs compared to Hugging Face implementations. FlashDecoding++ also achieves an average speedup of 1.37x compared to state-of-the-art LLM inference engines on mainstream LLMs.

Divergent Token Metrics: Measuring degradation to prune away LLM components -- and optimize quantization
Björn Deiseroth, Max Meuer, Nikolas Gritsch, Constantin Eichenberg, Patrick Schramowski, Matthias Aßenmacher, Kristian Kersting
Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped natural language processing with their impressive capabilities. Their ever-increasing size, however, raised concerns about their effective deployment and the need for LLM compressions. This study introduces the Divergent Token metrics (DTMs), a novel approach for assessing compressed LLMs, addressing the limitations of traditional perplexity or accuracy measures that fail to accurately reflect text generation quality. DTMs focus on token divergence, that allow deeper insights into the subtleties of model compression, i.p. when evaluating component's impacts individually. Utilizing the First Divergent Token metric (FDTM) in model sparsification reveals that a quarter of all attention components can be pruned beyond 90% on the Llama-2 model family, still keeping SOTA performance. For quantization FDTM suggests that over 80% of parameters can naively be transformed to int8 without special outlier management. These evaluations indicate the necessity of choosing appropriate compressions for parameters individually-and that FDTM can identify those-while standard metrics result in deteriorated outcomes.

Tell Your Model Where to Attend: Post-hoc Attention Steering for LLMs
Qingru Zhang, Chandan Singh, Liyuan Liu, Xiaodong Liu, Bin Yu, Jianfeng Gao, Tuo Zhao
In human-written articles, we often leverage the subtleties of text style, such as bold and italics, to guide the attention of readers. These textual emphases are vital for the readers to grasp the conveyed information. When interacting with large language models (LLMs), we have a similar need - steering the model to pay closer attention to user-specified information, e.g., an instruction. Existing methods, however, are constrained to process plain text and do not support such a mechanism. This motivates us to introduce PASTA - Post-hoc Attention STeering Approach, a method that allows LLMs to read text with user-specified emphasis marks. To this end, PASTA identifies a small subset of attention heads and applies precise attention reweighting on them, directing the model attention to user-specified parts. Like prompting, PASTA is applied at inference time and does not require changing any model parameters. Experiments demonstrate that PASTA can substantially enhance an LLM's ability to follow user instructions or integrate new knowledge from user inputs, leading to a significant performance improvement on a variety of tasks, e.g., an average accuracy improvement of 22% for LLAMA-7B. Our code is publicly available at this https URL .

REST: Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding
Zhenyu He, Zexuan Zhong, Tianle Cai, Jason D Lee, Di He
We introduce Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding (REST), a novel algorithm designed to speed up language model generation. The key insight driving the development of REST is the observation that the process of text generation often includes certain common phases and patterns. Unlike previous methods that rely on a draft language model for speculative decoding, REST harnesses the power of retrieval to generate draft tokens. This method draws from the reservoir of existing knowledge, retrieving and employing relevant tokens based on the current context. Its plug-and-play nature allows for seamless integration and acceleration of any language models, all without necessitating additional training. When benchmarked on 7B and 13B language models in a single-batch setting, REST achieves a significant speedup of 1.62X to 2.36X on code or text generation. The code of REST is available at this https URL.

DynaPipe: Optimizing Multi-task Training through Dynamic Pipelines
Chenyu Jiang, Zhen Jia, Shuai Zheng, Yida Wang, Chuan Wu
Multi-task model training has been adopted to enable a single deep neural network model (often a large language model) to handle multiple tasks (e.g., question answering and text summarization). Multi-task training commonly receives input sequences of highly different lengths due to the diverse contexts of different tasks. Padding (to the same sequence length) or packing (short examples into long sequences of the same length) is usually adopted to prepare input samples for model training, which is nonetheless not space or computation efficient. This paper proposes a dynamic micro-batching approach to tackle sequence length variation and enable efficient multi-task model training. We advocate pipeline-parallel training of the large model with variable-length micro-batches, each of which potentially comprises a different number of samples. We optimize micro-batch construction using a dynamic programming-based approach, and handle micro-batch execution time variation through dynamic pipeline and communication scheduling, enabling highly efficient pipeline training. Extensive evaluation on the FLANv2 dataset demonstrates up to 4.39x higher training throughput when training T5, and 3.25x when training GPT, as compared with packing-based baselines. DynaPipe's source code is publicly available at this https URL.

Token-Level Adaptation of LoRA Adapters for Downstream Task Generalization
Joshua Belofsky
This paper introduces a method for adapting LoRA adapters in smaller-sized language models to arbitrary downstream tasks. Unlike standard mixture-of-expert architectures, our method employs a gradient-free routing function to choose a weighted combination of experts without increasing the compute requirements for training or inference. The results show that token-level adaptation of LoRA adapters outperforms the base Llama-2-7b model across mathematical (GSM8K), scientific (ARC-Challenge), reading comprehension (SQuAD), and coding (CodeAlpaca-20k) tasks. Further evaluations also show that the average performance of token-level adaptation outperforms individual models fine-tuned for each of the tasks with the best performance observed in adaptation of every-other token during inference. The code for this study is made available through a public repository.

Exponentially Faster Language Modelling
Peter Belcak, Roger Wattenhofer
Language models only really need to use an exponential fraction of their neurons for individual inferences. As proof, we present UltraFastBERT, a BERT variant that uses 0.3% of its neurons during inference while performing on par with similar BERT models. UltraFastBERT selectively engages just 12 out of 4095 neurons for each layer inference. This is achieved by replacing feedforward networks with fast feedforward networks (FFFs). While no truly efficient implementation currently exists to unlock the full acceleration potential of conditional neural execution, we provide high-level CPU code achieving 78x speedup over the optimized baseline feedforward implementation, and a PyTorch implementation delivering 40x speedup over the equivalent batched feedforward inference. We publish our training code, benchmarking setup, and model weights.

MultiLoRA: Democratizing LoRA for Better Multi-Task Learning
Yiming Wang, Yu Lin, Xiaodong Zeng, Guannan Zhang
LoRA achieves remarkable resource efficiency and comparable performance when adapting LLMs for specific tasks. Since ChatGPT demonstrated superior performance on various tasks, there has been a growing desire to adapt one model for all tasks. However, the explicit low-rank of LoRA limits the adaptation performance in complex multi-task scenarios. LoRA is dominated by a small number of top singular vectors while fine-tuning decomposes into a set of less important unitary transforms. In this paper, we propose MultiLoRA for better multi-task adaptation by reducing the dominance of top singular vectors observed in LoRA. MultiLoRA scales LoRA modules horizontally and change parameter initialization of adaptation matrices to reduce parameter dependency, thus yields more balanced unitary subspaces. We unprecedentedly construct specialized training data by mixing datasets of instruction follow, natural language understanding, world knowledge, to cover semantically and syntactically different samples. With only 2.5% of additional parameters, MultiLoRA outperforms single LoRA counterparts and fine-tuning on multiple benchmarks and model scales. Further investigation into weight update matrices of MultiLoRA exhibits reduced dependency on top singular vectors and more democratic unitary transform contributions.

LQ-LoRA: Low-rank Plus Quantized Matrix Decomposition for Efficient Language Model Finetuning
Han Guo, Philip Greengard, Eric P. Xing, Yoon Kim
We propose a simple approach for memory-efficient adaptation of pretrained language models. Our approach uses an iterative algorithm to decompose each pretrained matrix into a high-precision low-rank component and a memory-efficient quantized component. During finetuning, the quantized component remains fixed and only the low-rank component is updated. We present an integer linear programming formulation of the quantization component which enables dynamic configuration of quantization parameters (e.g., bit-width, block size) for each matrix given an overall target memory budget. We further explore a data-aware version of the algorithm which uses an approximation of the Fisher information matrix to weight the reconstruction objective during matrix decomposition. Experiments on adapting RoBERTa and LLaMA-2 (7B and 70B) demonstrate that our low-rank plus quantized matrix decomposition approach (LQ-LoRA) outperforms strong QLoRA and GPTQ-LoRA baselines and moreover enables more aggressive quantization. For example, on the OpenAssistant benchmark LQ-LoRA is able to learn a 2.5-bit LLaMA-2 model that is competitive with a model finetuned with 4-bit QLoRA. When finetuned on a language modeling calibration dataset, LQ-LoRA can also be used for model compression; in this setting our 2.75-bit LLaMA-2-70B model (which has 2.85 bits on average when including the low-rank components and requires 27GB of GPU memory) is competitive with the original model in full precision.

Token Recycling for Efficient Sequential Inference with Vision Transformers
Jan Olszewski, Dawid Rymarczyk, Piotr Wójcik, Mateusz Pach, Bartosz Zieliński
Vision Transformers (ViTs) overpass Convolutional Neural Networks in processing incomplete inputs because they do not require the imputation of missing values. Therefore, ViTs are well suited for sequential decision-making, e.g. in the Active Visual Exploration problem. However, they are computationally inefficient because they perform a full forward pass each time a piece of new sequential information arrives.
To reduce this computational inefficiency, we introduce the TOken REcycling (TORE) modification for the ViT inference, which can be used with any architecture. TORE divides ViT into two parts, iterator and aggregator. An iterator processes sequential information separately into midway tokens, which are cached. The aggregator processes midway tokens jointly to obtain the prediction. This way, we can reuse the results of computations made by iterator.
Except for efficient sequential inference, we propose a complementary training policy, which significantly reduces the computational burden associated with sequential decision-making while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy.

Enabling Fast 2-bit LLM on GPUs: Memory Alignment and Asynchronous Dequantization
Jinhao Li, Shiyao Li, Jiaming Xu, Shan Huang, Yaoxiu Lian, Jun Liu, Yu Wang, Guohao Dai
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in various domains while the inference cost is expensive. The state-of-the-art methods use 2-bit quantization for mainstream LLMs. However, challenges still exist: (1) Nonnegligible accuracy loss for 2-bit quantization. Weights are quantized by groups, while the ranges of weights are large in some groups, resulting in large quantization errors and nonnegligible accuracy loss (e.g. >3% for Llama2-7b with 2-bit quantization in GPTQ and Greenbit). (2) Limited accuracy improvement by adding 4-bit weights. Increasing 10% extra average bit more 4-bit weights only leads to <0.5% accuracy improvement on a quantized Llama2-7b. (3) Time-consuming dequantization operations on GPUs. The dequantization operations lead to >50% execution time, hindering the potential of reducing LLM inference cost. To tackle these challenges, we propose the following techniques: (1) We only quantize a small fraction of groups with the larger range using 4-bit with memory alignment consideration on GPUs.(2) We design the asynchronous dequantization on GPUs, leading to up to 3.92X speedup. We conduct extensive experiments on different model sizes. We achieve 2.85-bit for each weight and the end-to-end speedup for Llama2-7b is 1.74X over the original model, and we reduce both runtime cost and hardware cost by up to 2.70X and 2.81X with less GPU requirements.

GIFT: Generative Interpretable Fine-Tuning Transformers
Chinmay Savadikar, Xi Song, Tianfu Wu
We present GIFT (Generative Interpretable Fine-tuning Transformers) for fine-tuning pretrained (often large) Transformer models at downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient way with built-in interpretability. Our GIFT is a deep parameter-residual learning method, which addresses two problems in fine-tuning a pretrained Transformer model: Where to apply the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to be extremely lightweight yet sufficiently expressive, and How to learn the PEFT to better exploit the knowledge of the pretrained model in a direct way? For the former, we select the final projection (linear) layer in the multi-head self-attention of a Transformer model, and verify its effectiveness. For the latter, in contrast to the prior art that directly introduce new model parameters (often in low-rank approximation form) to be learned in fine-tuning with downstream data, we propose a method for learning to generate the fine-tuning parameters. Our GIFT is a hyper-Transformer which take as input the pretrained parameters of the projection layer to generate its fine-tuning parameters using a proposed Parameter-to-Cluster Attention (PaCa). The PaCa results in a simple clustering-based forward explainer that plays the role of semantic segmentation in testing. In experiments, our proposed GIFT is tested on the VTAB benchmark and the fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) benchmark. It obtains significantly better performance than the prior art. Our code is available at this https URL

PEFA: Parameter-Free Adapters for Large-scale Embedding-based Retrieval Models
Wei-Cheng Chang, Jyun-Yu Jiang, Jiong Zhang, Mutasem Al-Darabsah, Choon Hui Teo, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Hsiang-Fu Yu, S.V.N. Vishwanathan
Embedding-based Retrieval Models (ERMs) have emerged as a promising framework for large-scale text retrieval problems due to powerful large language models. Nevertheless, fine-tuning ERMs to reach state-of-the-art results can be expensive due to the extreme scale of data as well as the complexity of multi-stages pipelines (e.g., pre-training, fine-tuning, distillation). In this work, we propose the PEFA framework, namely ParamEter-Free Adapters, for fast tuning of ERMs without any backward pass in the optimization. At index building stage, PEFA equips the ERM with a non-parametric k-nearest neighbor (kNN) component. At inference stage, PEFA performs a convex combination of two scoring functions, one from the ERM and the other from the kNN. Based on the neighborhood definition, PEFA framework induces two realizations, namely PEFA-XL (i.e., extra large) using double ANN indices and PEFA-XS (i.e., extra small) using a single ANN index. Empirically, PEFA achieves significant improvement on two retrieval applications. For document retrieval, regarding Recall@100 metric, PEFA improves not only pre-trained ERMs on Trivia-QA by an average of 13.2%, but also fine-tuned ERMs on NQ-320K by an average of 5.5%, respectively. For product search, PEFA improves the Recall@100 of the fine-tuned ERMs by an average of 5.3% and 14.5%, for PEFA-XS and PEFA-XL, respectively. Our code is available at this https URL.

Improving Activation Steering in Language Models with Mean-Centring
Ole Jorgensen, Dylan Cope, Nandi Schoots, Murray Shanahan
Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how features are represented in these models. We seek to address this issue by applying the idea of mean-centring to steering vectors. We find that taking the average of activations associated with a target dataset, and then subtracting the mean of all training activations, results in effective steering vectors. We test this method on a variety of models on natural language tasks by steering away from generating toxic text, and steering the completion of a story towards a target genre. We also apply mean-centring to extract function vectors, more effectively triggering the execution of a range of natural language tasks by a significant margin (compared to previous baselines). This suggests that mean-centring can be used to easily improve the effectiveness of activation steering in a wide range of contexts.

A Rank Stabilization Scaling Factor for Fine-Tuning with LoRA
Damjan Kalajdzievski
As large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly compute and memory intensive, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are now a common strategy to fine-tune LLMs. A popular PEFT method is Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), which adds trainable low-rank "adapters" to selected layers. Each adapter consists of a low-rank matrix product, multiplicatively scaled by a rank-dependent factor. This scaling factor, which divides adapters by a factor of the rank, results in slowed learning and stunted performance for LoRA with higher-rank adapters. Consequently, the use of LoRA in practice has generally been limited to very low ranks. In this work, we study the impact of the scaling factor on the learning process and prove that LoRA adapters should be divided by a factor of the square root of the rank. Modifying LoRA with the appropriate scaling factor, which we call the rank-stabilized LoRA (rsLoRA) method, easily provides for a fine-tuning compute/performance trade-off, where larger ranks can be used to trade off increased computational resources during training for better fine-tuning performance, with no change in inference computing cost.

SparQ Attention: Bandwidth-Efficient LLM Inference
Luka Ribar, Ivan Chelombiev, Luke Hudlass-Galley, Charlie Blake, Carlo Luschi, Douglas Orr
Generative large language models (LLMs) have opened up numerous novel possibilities, but due to their significant computational requirements their ubiquitous use remains challenging. Some of the most useful applications require processing large numbers of samples at a time and using long contexts, both significantly increasing the memory communication load of the models. We introduce SparQ Attention, a technique for increasing the inference throughput of LLMs by reducing the memory bandwidth requirements within the attention blocks through selective fetching of the cached history. Our proposed technique can be applied directly to off-the-shelf LLMs during inference, without requiring any modification to the pre-training setup or additional fine-tuning. We show how SparQ Attention can decrease the attention memory bandwidth requirements up to eight times without any loss in accuracy by evaluating Llama 2 and Pythia models on a wide range of downstream tasks.

ESPN: Memory-Efficient Multi-Vector Information Retrieval
Susav Shrestha, Narasimha Reddy, Zongwang Li
Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in information retrieval (IR) tasks. While many neural IR systems encode queries and documents into single-vector representations, multi-vector models elevate the retrieval quality by producing multi-vector representations and facilitating similarity searches at the granularity of individual tokens. However, these models significantly amplify memory and storage requirements for retrieval indices by an order of magnitude. This escalation in index size renders the scalability of multi-vector IR models progressively challenging due to their substantial memory demands. We introduce Embedding from Storage Pipelined Network (ESPN) where we offload the entire re-ranking embedding tables to SSDs and reduce the memory requirements by 5-16x. We design a software prefetcher with hit rates exceeding 90%, improving SSD based retrieval up to 6.4x, and demonstrate that we can maintain near memory levels of query latency even for large query batch sizes.

Aligner: One Global Token is Worth Millions of Parameters When Aligning Large Language Models
Zhou Ziheng, Yingnian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu, Demetri Terzopoulos (University of California, Los Angeles)
We introduce Aligner, a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method for aligning multi-billion-parameter-sized Large Language Models (LLMs). Aligner employs a unique design that constructs a globally shared set of tunable tokens that modify the attention of every layer. Remarkably with this method, even when using one token accounting for a mere 5,000 parameters, Aligner can still perform comparably well to state-of-the-art LLM adaptation methods like LoRA that require millions of parameters. This capacity is substantiated in both instruction following and value alignment tasks. Besides the multiple order-of-magnitude improvement in parameter efficiency, the insight Aligner provides into the internal mechanisms of LLMs is also valuable. The architectural features and efficacy of our method, in addition to our experiments demonstrate that an LLM separates its internal handling of "form" and "knowledge" in a somewhat orthogonal manner. This finding promises to motivate new research into LLM mechanism understanding and value alignment.

CBQ: Cross-Block Quantization for Large Language Models
Xin Ding, Xiaoyu Liu, Yun Zhang, Zhijun Tu, Wei Li, Jie Hu, Hanting Chen, Yehui Tang, Zhiwei Xiong, Baoqun Yin, Yunhe Wang
Post-training quantization (PTQ) has driven attention to producing efficient large language models (LLMs) with ultra-low costs. Since hand-craft quantization parameters lead to low performance in low-bit quantization, recent methods optimize the quantization parameters through block-wise reconstruction between the floating-point and quantized models. However, these methods suffer from two challenges: accumulated errors from independent one-by-one block quantization and reconstruction difficulties from extreme weight and activation outliers. To address these two challenges, we propose CBQ, a cross-block reconstruction-based PTQ method for LLMs. To reduce error accumulation, we introduce a cross-block dependency with the aid of a homologous reconstruction scheme to build the long-range dependency between adjacent multi-blocks with overlapping. To reduce reconstruction difficulty, we design a coarse-to-fine pre-processing (CFP) to truncate weight outliers and dynamically scale activation outliers before optimization, and an adaptive rounding scheme, called LoRA-Rounding, with two low-rank learnable matrixes to further rectify weight quantization errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) CBQ pushes both activation and weight quantization to low-bit settings W4A4, W4A8, and W2A16. (2) CBQ achieves better performance than the existing state-of-the-art methods on various LLMs and benchmark datasets.

SwitchHead: Accelerating Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts Attention
Róbert Csordás, Piotr Piękos, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber
The costly self-attention layers in modern Transformers require memory and compute quadratic in sequence length. Existing approximation methods usually underperform and fail to obtain significant speedups in practice. Here we present SwitchHead - a novel method that reduces both compute and memory requirements and achieves wall-clock speedup, while matching the language modeling performance of baseline Transformers with the same parameter budget. SwitchHead uses Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers for the value and output projections and requires 4 to 8 times fewer attention matrices than standard Transformers. Our novel attention can also be combined with MoE MLP layers, resulting in an efficient fully-MoE "SwitchAll" Transformer model. Our code is public.

Weight subcloning: direct initialization of transformers using larger pretrained ones
Mohammad Samragh, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Sachin Mehta, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Fartash Faghri, Devang Naik, Oncel Tuzel, Mohammad Rastegari
Training large transformer models from scratch for a target task requires lots of data and is computationally demanding. The usual practice of transfer learning overcomes this challenge by initializing the model with weights of a pretrained model of the same size and specification to increase the convergence and training speed. However, what if no pretrained model of the required size is available? In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective technique to transfer the knowledge of a pretrained model to smaller variants. Our approach called weight subcloning expedites the training of scaled-down transformers by initializing their weights from larger pretrained models.
Weight subcloning involves an operation on the pretrained model to obtain the equivalent initialized scaled-down model. It consists of two key steps: first, we introduce neuron importance ranking to decrease the embedding dimension per layer in the pretrained model. Then, we remove blocks from the transformer model to match the number of layers in the scaled-down network. The result is a network ready to undergo training, which gains significant improvements in training speed compared to random initialization. For instance, we achieve 4x faster training for vision transformers in image classification and language models designed for next token prediction.

Cascade Speculative Drafting for Even Faster LLM Inference
Ziyi Chen, Xiaocong Yang, Jiacheng Lin, Chenkai Sun, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang
Speculative decoding enhances the efficiency of large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a draft model to draft for a larger target model to review. However, drafting in speculative decoding involves slow autoregressive generation and generating tokens of different importance with the same time allocation. These two inefficiencies lead to its suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we introduce Cascade Speculative Drafting (CS. Drafting), a novel approach that employs two types of cascades. The Vertical Cascade eliminates autoregressive generation from neural models. The Horizontal Cascade constitutes efficient time allocation in drafting with its optimality supported by our theoretical analysis. Combining both cascades, our CS. Drafting algorithm has achieved up to 72 percent additional speedup over speculative decoding in our experiments while keeping the same output distribution.

PowerInfer: Fast Large Language Model Serving with a Consumer-grade GPU
Yixin Song, Zeyu Mi, Haotong Xie, Haibo Chen
This paper introduces PowerInfer, a high-speed Large Language Model (LLM) inference engine on a personal computer (PC) equipped with a single consumer-grade GPU. The key underlying the design of PowerInfer is exploiting the high locality inherent in LLM inference, characterized by a power-law distribution in neuron activation. This distribution indicates that a small subset of neurons, termed hot neurons, are consistently activated across inputs, while the majority, cold neurons, vary based on specific inputs. PowerInfer exploits such an insight to design a GPU-CPU hybrid inference engine: hot-activated neurons are preloaded onto the GPU for fast access, while cold-activated neurons are computed on the CPU, thus significantly reducing GPU memory demands and CPU-GPU data transfers. PowerInfer further integrates adaptive predictors and neuron-aware sparse operators, optimizing the efficiency of neuron activation and computational sparsity. Evaluation shows that PowerInfer attains an average token generation rate of 13.20 tokens/s, with a peak of 29.08 tokens/s, across various LLMs (including OPT-175B) on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, only 18% lower than that achieved by a top-tier server-grade A100 GPU. This significantly outperforms llama.cpp by up to 11.69x while retaining model accuracy.

ConsistentEE: A Consistent and Hardness-Guided Early Exiting Method for Accelerating Language Models Inference
Ziqian Zeng, Yihuai Hong, Hongliang Dai, Huiping Zhuang, Cen Chen
Early Exiting is one of the most popular methods to achieve efficient inference. Current early exiting methods adopt the (weighted) sum of the cross entropy loss of all internal classifiers during training, imposing all these classifiers to predict all instances correctly. However, during inference, as long as one internal classifier predicts an instance correctly, it can accelerate without losing accuracy. Thus, there is a notable gap between training and inference. We propose ConsistentEE, an early exiting method that is consistent in training and inference. ConsistentEE formulates the early exiting process as a reinforcement learning problem. A policy network is added to decide whether an instance should exit or continue. The training objective of ConsistentEE only require each instance to be predicted correctly by one internal classifier. Additionally, we introduce the concept Memorize Layer to measure the hardness of an instance. We incorporate memorized layer into reward function design, which allows ``easy'' instances to focus more on acceleration while ``hard'' instances to focus more on accuracy. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other baselines on various natural language understanding and generation tasks.

Lookahead: An Inference Acceleration Framework for Large Language Model with Lossless Generation Accuracy
Yao Zhao, Zhitian Xie, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu
As Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements across various tasks, such as question answering, translation, text summarization, and dialogue systems, the need for accuracy in information becomes crucial, especially for serious financial products serving billions of users like Alipay. To address this, Alipay has developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that grounds LLMs on the most accurate and up-to-date information. However, for a real-world product serving millions of users, the inference speed of LLMs becomes a critical factor compared to a mere experimental model.
Hence, this paper presents a generic framework for accelerating the inference process, resulting in a substantial increase in speed and cost reduction for our RAG system, with lossless generation accuracy. In the traditional inference process, each token is generated sequentially by the LLM, leading to a time consumption proportional to the number of generated tokens. To enhance this process, our framework, named \textit{lookahead}, introduces a \textit{multi-branch} strategy. Instead of generating a single token at a time, we propose a \textit{Trie-based Retrieval} (TR) process that enables the generation of multiple branches simultaneously, each of which is a sequence of tokens. Subsequently, for each branch, a \textit{Verification and Accept} (VA) process is performed to identify the longest correct sub-sequence as the final output. Our strategy offers two distinct advantages: (1) it guarantees absolute correctness of the output, avoiding any approximation algorithms, and (2) the worst-case performance of our approach is equivalent to the conventional process. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the significant improvements achieved by applying our inference acceleration framework. Code is avaliable: this https URL.

A Semantic Space is Worth 256 Language Descriptions: Make Stronger Segmentation Models with Descriptive Properties
Junfei Xiao, Ziqi Zhou, Wenxuan Li, Shiyi Lan, Jieru Mei, Zhiding Yu, Alan Yuille, Yuyin Zhou, Cihang Xie
This paper introduces ProLab, a novel approach using property-level label space for creating strong interpretable segmentation models. Instead of relying solely on category-specific annotations, ProLab uses descriptive properties grounded in common sense knowledge for supervising segmentation models. It is based on two core designs. First, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) and carefully crafted prompts to generate descriptions of all involved categories that carry meaningful common sense knowledge and follow a structured format. Second, we introduce a description embedding model preserving semantic correlation across descriptions and then cluster them into a set of descriptive properties (e.g., 256) using K-Means. These properties are based on interpretable common sense knowledge consistent with theories of human recognition. We empirically show that our approach makes segmentation models perform stronger on five classic benchmarks (e.g., ADE20K, COCO-Stuff, Pascal Context, Cityscapes, and BDD). Our method also shows better scalability with extended training steps than category-level supervision. Our interpretable segmentation framework also emerges with the generalization ability to segment out-of-domain or unknown categories using only in-domain descriptive properties. Code is available at this https URL.

Algebraic Positional Encodings
Konstantinos Kogkalidis, Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Vikas Garg
We introduce a novel positional encoding strategy for Transformer-style models, addressing the shortcomings of existing, often ad hoc, approaches. Our framework provides a flexible mapping from the algebraic specification of a domain to an interpretation as orthogonal operators. This design preserves the algebraic characteristics of the source domain, ensuring that the model upholds the desired structural properties. Our scheme can accommodate various structures, including sequences, grids and trees, as well as their compositions. We conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach. Results suggest performance on par with or surpassing the current state-of-the-art, without hyperparameter optimizations or ``task search'' of any kind. Code will be made available at \url{this http URL}.

Preference as Reward, Maximum Preference Optimization with Importance Sampling
Zaifan Jiang, Xing Huang, Chao Wei
Preference learning is a key technology for aligning language models with human values. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a model based algorithm to optimize preference learning, which first fitting a reward model for preference score, and then optimizing generating policy with on-policy PPO algorithm to maximize the reward. The processing of RLHF is complex, time-consuming and unstable. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm using off-policy algorithm to direct optimize generating policy and eliminating the need for reward model, which is data efficient and stable. DPO use Bradley-Terry model and log-loss which leads to over-fitting to the preference data at the expense of ignoring KL-regularization term when preference is deterministic. IPO uses a root-finding MSE loss to solve the ignoring KL-regularization problem. In this paper, we'll figure out, although IPO fix the problem when preference is deterministic, but both DPO and IPO fails the KL-regularization term because the support of preference distribution not equal to reference distribution. Then, we design a simple and intuitive off-policy preference optimization algorithm from an importance sampling view, which we call Maximum Preference Optimization (MPO), and add off-policy KL-regularization terms which makes KL-regularization truly effective. The objective of MPO bears resemblance to RLHF's objective, and likes IPO, MPO is off-policy. So, MPO attains the best of both worlds. To simplify the learning process and save memory usage, MPO eliminates the needs for both reward model and reference policy.

LLM Maybe LongLM: Self-Extend LLM Context Window Without Tuning
Hongye Jin, Xiaotian Han, Jingfeng Yang, Zhimeng Jiang, Zirui Liu, Chia-Yuan Chang, Huiyuan Chen, Xia Hu
This work elicits LLMs' inherent ability to handle long contexts without fine-tuning. The limited length of the training sequence during training may limit the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) on long input sequences for inference. In this work, we argue that existing LLMs themselves have inherent capabilities for handling long contexts. Based on this argument, we suggest extending LLMs' context window by themselves to fully utilize the inherent ability.We propose Self-Extend to stimulate LLMs' long context handling potential. The basic idea is to construct bi-level attention information: the group level and the neighbor level. The two levels are computed by the original model's self-attention, which means the proposed does not require any training. With only four lines of code modification, the proposed method can effortlessly extend existing LLMs' context window without any fine-tuning. We conduct comprehensive experiments and the results show that the proposed method can effectively extend existing LLMs' context window's length.

Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models
Zixiang Chen, Yihe Deng, Huizhuo Yuan, Kaixuan Ji, Quanquan Gu
Harnessing the power of human-annotated data through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is pivotal for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we delve into the prospect of growing a strong LLM out of a weak one without the need for acquiring additional human-annotated data. We propose a new fine-tuning method called Self-Play fIne-tuNing (SPIN), which starts from a supervised fine-tuned model. At the heart of SPIN lies a self-play mechanism, where the LLM refines its capability by playing against instances of itself. More specifically, the LLM generates its own training data from its previous iterations, refining its policy by discerning these self-generated responses from those obtained from human-annotated data. Our method progressively elevates the LLM from a nascent model to a formidable one, unlocking the full potential of human-annotated demonstration data for SFT. Theoretically, we prove that the global optimum to the training objective function of our method is achieved only when the LLM policy aligns with the target data distribution. Empirically, we evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets including the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard, MT-Bench, and datasets from Big-Bench. Our results show that SPIN can significantly improve the LLM's performance across a variety of benchmarks and even outperform models trained through direct preference optimization (DPO) supplemented with extra GPT-4 preference data. This sheds light on the promise of self-play, enabling the achievement of human-level performance in LLMs without the need for expert opponents.

LLaMA Pro: Progressive LLaMA with Block Expansion
Chengyue Wu, Yukang Gan, Yixiao Ge, Zeyu Lu, Jiahao Wang, Ye Feng, Ping Luo, Ying Shan
Humans generally acquire new skills without compromising the old; however, the opposite holds for Large Language Models (LLMs), e.g., from LLaMA to CodeLLaMA. To this end, we propose a new post-pretraining method for LLMs with an expansion of Transformer blocks. We tune the expanded blocks using only new corpus, efficiently and effectively improving the model's knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we experiment on the corpus of code and math, yielding LLaMA Pro-8.3B, a versatile foundation model initialized from LLaMA2-7B, excelling in general tasks, programming, and mathematics. LLaMA Pro and its instruction-following counterpart (LLaMA Pro-Instruct) achieve advanced performance among various benchmarks, demonstrating superiority over existing open models in the LLaMA family and the immense potential of reasoning and addressing diverse tasks as an intelligent agent. Our findings provide valuable insights into integrating natural and programming languages, laying a solid foundation for developing advanced language agents that operate effectively in various environments.

Fast and Optimal Weight Update for Pruned Large Language Models
Vladimír Boža
Pruning large language models (LLMs) is a challenging task due to their enormous size. The primary difficulty is fine-tuning the model after pruning, which is needed to recover the lost performance caused by dropping weights. Recent approaches have either ignored fine-tuning entirely, focusing on efficient pruning criteria, or attempted layer-wise weight updates, preserving the behavior of each layer. However, even layer-wise weight updates can be costly for LLMs, and previous works have resorted to various approximations.
In our paper, we propose a fast and optimal weight update algorithm for pruned layers based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Coupled with a simple iterative pruning mask selection, our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance across a wide range of LLMs. Code is available at this https URL.

Soaring from 4K to 400K: Extending LLM's Context with Activation Beacon
Peitian Zhang, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao, Ninglu Shao, Qiwei Ye, Zhicheng Dou
The utilization of long contexts poses a big challenge for large language models due to their limited context window length. Although the context window can be extended through fine-tuning, it will result in a considerable cost at both training and inference time, and exert an unfavorable impact to the LLM's original capabilities. In this work, we propose Activation Beacon, which condenses LLM's raw activations into more compact forms such that it can perceive a much longer context with a limited context window. Activation Beacon is introduced as a plug-and-play module for the LLM. It fully preserves the LLM's original capability on short contexts while extending the new capability on processing longer contexts. Besides, it works with short sliding windows to process the long context, which achieves a competitive memory and time efficiency in both training and inference. Activation Beacon is learned by the auto-regression task conditioned on a mixture of beacons with diversified condensing ratios. Thanks to such a treatment, it can be efficiently trained purely with short-sequence data in just 10K steps, which consumes less than 9 hours on a single 8xA800 GPU machine. The experimental studies show that Activation Beacon is able to extend Llama-2-7B's context length by ×100 times (from 4K to 400K), meanwhile achieving a superior result on both long-context generation and understanding tasks. Our model and code will be available at the BGE repository.

MoE-Mamba: Efficient Selective State Space Models with Mixture of Experts
Maciej Pióro, Kamil Ciebiera, Krystian Król, Jan Ludziejewski, Sebastian Jaszczur
State Space Models (SSMs) have become serious contenders in the field of sequential modeling, challenging the dominance of Transformers. At the same time, Mixture of Experts (MoE) has significantly improved Transformer-based LLMs, including recent state-of-the-art open-source models. We propose that to unlock the potential of SSMs for scaling, they should be combined with MoE. We showcase this on Mamba, a recent SSM-based model that achieves remarkable, Transformer-like performance. Our model, MoE-Mamba, outperforms both Mamba and Transformer-MoE. In particular, MoE-Mamba reaches the same performance as Mamba in 2.2x less training steps while preserving the inference performance gains of Mamba against the Transformer.

Chain of LoRA: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models via Residual Learning
Wenhan Xia, Chengwei Qin, Elad Hazan
Fine-tuning is the primary methodology for tailoring pre-trained large language models to specific tasks. As the model's scale and the diversity of tasks expand, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods are of paramount importance. One of the most widely used family of methods is low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants. LoRA encodes weight update as the product of two low-rank matrices. Despite its advantages, LoRA falls short of full-parameter fine-tuning in terms of generalization error for certain tasks.
We introduce Chain of LoRA (COLA), an iterative optimization framework inspired by the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, to bridge the gap between LoRA and full parameter fine-tuning, without incurring additional computational costs or memory overheads. COLA employs a residual learning procedure where it merges learned LoRA modules into the pre-trained language model parameters and re-initilize optimization for new born LoRA modules. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees as well as empirical results to validate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Across various models (OPT and llama-2) and seven benchmarking tasks, we demonstrate that COLA can consistently outperform LoRA without additional computational or memory costs.

RoSA: Accurate Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Robust Adaptation
Mahdi Nikdan, Soroush Tabesh, Dan Alistarh
We investigate parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods that can provide good accuracy under limited computational and memory budgets in the context of large language models (LLMs). We present a new PEFT method called Robust Adaptation (RoSA) inspired by robust principal component analysis (PCA) that jointly trains low-rank and highly-sparse components on top of a set of fixed pretrained weights to efficiently approximate the performance of a full-fine-tuning (FFT) solution. Across a series of challenging generative tasks such as grade-school math and SQL query generation, which require fine-tuning for good performance, we show that RoSA outperforms both LoRA and pure sparse fine-tuning, at the same parameter budget. We provide system support for RoSA to complement the training algorithm, specifically in the form of sparse GPU kernels which enable memory- and computationally-efficient training. 

A Minimaximalist Approach to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Gokul Swamy, Christoph Dann, Rahul Kidambi, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Alekh Agarwal
We present Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPO), an algorithm for reinforcement learning from human feedback. Our approach is minimalist in that it does not require training a reward model nor unstable adversarial training and is therefore rather simple to implement. Our approach is maximalist in that it provably handles non-Markovian, intransitive, and stochastic preferences while being robust to the compounding errors that plague offline approaches to sequential prediction. To achieve the preceding qualities, we build upon the concept of a Minimax Winner (MW), a notion of preference aggregation from the social choice theory literature that frames learning from preferences as a zero-sum game between two policies. By leveraging the symmetry of this game, we prove that rather than using the traditional technique of dueling two policies to compute the MW, we can simply have a single agent play against itself while maintaining strong convergence guarantees. Practically, this corresponds to sampling multiple trajectories from a policy, asking a rater or preference model to compare them, and then using the proportion of wins as the reward for a particular trajectory. We demonstrate that on a suite of continuous control tasks, we are able to learn significantly more efficiently than reward-model based approaches while maintaining robustness to the intransitive and stochastic preferences that frequently occur in practice when aggregating human judgments.

Lightning Attention-2: A Free Lunch for Handling Unlimited Sequence Lengths in Large Language Models
Zhen Qin, Weigao Sun, Dong Li, Xuyang Shen, Weixuan Sun, Yiran Zhong
Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in theory, can handle sequences of unlimited length without sacrificing speed, i.e., maintaining a constant training speed for various sequence lengths with a fixed memory consumption. However, due to the issue with cumulative summation (cumsum), current linear attention algorithms cannot demonstrate their theoretical advantage in a causal setting. In this paper, we present Lightning Attention-2, the first linear attention implementation that enables linear attention to realize its theoretical computational benefits. To achieve this, we leverage the thought of tiling, separately handling the intra-block and inter-block components in linear attention calculation. Specifically, we utilize the conventional attention computation mechanism for the intra-blocks and apply linear attention kernel tricks for the inter-blocks. A tiling technique is adopted through both forward and backward procedures to take full advantage of the GPU hardware. We implement our algorithm in Triton to make it IO-aware and hardware-friendly. Various experiments are conducted on different model sizes and sequence lengths. Lightning Attention-2 retains consistent training and inference speed regardless of input sequence length and is significantly faster than other attention mechanisms.

AUTOACT: Automatic Agent Learning from Scratch via Self-Planning
Shuofei Qiao, Ningyu Zhang, Runnan Fang, Yujie Luo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Chengfei Lv, Huajun Chen
Language agents have achieved considerable performance on various complex tasks. Despite the incessant exploration in this field, existing language agent systems still struggle with costly, non-reproducible data reliance and face the challenge of compelling a single model for multiple functions. To this end, we introduce AutoAct, an automatic agent learning framework that does not rely on large-scale annotated data and synthetic trajectories from closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4). Given limited data with a tool library, AutoAct first automatically synthesizes planning trajectories without any assistance from humans or strong closed-source models. Then, AutoAct leverages a division-of-labor strategy to automatically differentiate based on the target task information and synthesized trajectories, producing a sub-agent group to complete the task. We conduct comprehensive experiments with different LLMs, which demonstrates that AutoAct yields better or parallel performance compared to various strong baselines. We even notice that AutoAct, when using the Llama-2-13b model, can achieve performance comparable to that of the GPT-3.5-Turbo agent.

Extreme Compression of Large Language Models via Additive Quantization
Vage Egiazarian, Andrei Panferov, Denis Kuznedelev, Elias Frantar, Artem Babenko, Dan Alistarh
The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has led to a race towards quantization techniques for such models enabling execution on end-user devices. In this paper, we revisit the problem of "extreme" LLM compression--defined as targeting extremely low bit counts, such as 2 to 3 bits per parameter, from the point of view of classic methods in Multi-Codebook Quantization (MCQ). Our work builds on top of Additive Quantization, a classic algorithm from the MCQ family, and adapts it to the quantization of language models. The resulting algorithm advances the state-of-the-art in LLM compression, outperforming all recently-proposed techniques in terms of accuracy at a given compression budget. For instance, when compressing Llama 2 models to 2 bits per parameter, our algorithm quantizes the 7B model to 6.93 perplexity (a 1.29 improvement relative to the best prior work, and 1.81 points from FP16), the 13B model to 5.70 perplexity (a .36 improvement) and the 70B model to 3.94 perplexity (a .22 improvement) on WikiText2. We release our implementation of Additive Quantization for Language Models AQLM as a baseline to facilitate future research in LLM quantization.

Knowledge Translation: A New Pathway for Model Compression
Wujie Sun, Defang Chen, Jiawei Chen, Yan Feng, Chun Chen, Can Wang
Deep learning has witnessed significant advancements in recent years at the cost of increasing training, inference, and model storage overhead. While existing model compression methods strive to reduce the number of model parameters while maintaining high accuracy, they inevitably necessitate the re-training of the compressed model or impose architectural constraints. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel framework, termed \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{T}ranslation (KT), wherein a ``translation'' model is trained to receive the parameters of a larger model and generate compressed parameters. The concept of KT draws inspiration from language translation, which effectively employs neural networks to convert different languages, maintaining identical meaning. Accordingly, we explore the potential of neural networks to convert models of disparate sizes, while preserving their functionality. We propose a comprehensive framework for KT, introduce data augmentation strategies to enhance model performance despite restricted training data, and successfully demonstrate the feasibility of KT on the MNIST dataset. 

Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts for Instruction Tuning on General Tasks
Haoyuan Wu, Haisheng Zheng, Bei Yu
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Instruction tuning, a successful paradigm, enhances the ability of LLMs to follow natural language instructions and exhibit robust generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, these models often encounter performance limitations across multiple tasks due to constrained model capacity. Expanding this capacity during the instruction tuning phase poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach, Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting (PESC), which transitions dense models to sparse models using a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. PESC integrates adapters into the MoE layers of sparse models, differentiating experts without altering the individual weights within these layers. This method significantly reduces computational costs and GPU memory requirements, facilitating model capacity expansion through a minimal increase in parameters via the inserted adapters. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the PESC method. Using PESC during instruction tuning, our sparse models, dubbed Camelidae outperform all other opensource sparse models and exhibit superior general capabilities compared to GPT3.5.

DDColor: Towards Photo-Realistic Image Colorization via Dual Decoders
Xiaoyang Kang, Tao Yang, Wenqi Ouyang, Peiran Ren, Lingzhi Li, Xuansong Xie
Image colorization is a challenging problem due to multi-modal uncertainty and high ill-posedness. Directly training a deep neural network usually leads to incorrect semantic colors and low color richness. While transformer-based methods can deliver better results, they often rely on manually designed priors, suffer from poor generalization ability, and introduce color bleeding effects. To address these issues, we propose DDColor, an end-to-end method with dual decoders for image colorization. Our approach includes a pixel decoder and a query-based color decoder. The former restores the spatial resolution of the image, while the latter utilizes rich visual features to refine color queries, thus avoiding hand-crafted priors. Our two decoders work together to establish correlations between color and multi-scale semantic representations via cross-attention, significantly alleviating the color bleeding effect. Additionally, a simple yet effective colorfulness loss is introduced to enhance the color richness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDColor achieves superior performance to existing state-of-the-art works both quantitatively and qualitatively

Efficient Deformable ConvNets: Rethinking Dynamic and Sparse Operator for Vision Applications
Yuwen Xiong, Zhiqi Li, Yuntao Chen, Feng Wang, Xizhou Zhu, Jiapeng Luo, Wenhai Wang, Tong Lu, Hongsheng Li, Yu Qiao, Lewei Lu, Jie Zhou, Jifeng Dai
We introduce Deformable Convolution v4 (DCNv4), a highly efficient and effective operator designed for a broad spectrum of vision applications. DCNv4 addresses the limitations of its predecessor, DCNv3, with two key enhancements: 1. removing softmax normalization in spatial aggregation to enhance its dynamic property and expressive power and 2. optimizing memory access to minimize redundant operations for speedup. These improvements result in a significantly faster convergence compared to DCNv3 and a substantial increase in processing speed, with DCNv4 achieving more than three times the forward speed. DCNv4 demonstrates exceptional performance across various tasks, including image classification, instance and semantic segmentation, and notably, image generation. When integrated into generative models like U-Net in the latent diffusion model, DCNv4 outperforms its baseline, underscoring its possibility to enhance generative models. In practical applications, replacing DCNv3 with DCNv4 in the InternImage model to create FlashInternImage results in up to 80% speed increase and further performance improvement without further modifications. The advancements in speed and efficiency of DCNv4, combined with its robust performance across diverse vision tasks, show its potential as a foundational building block for future vision models.

APAR: LLMs Can Do Auto-Parallel Auto-Regressive Decoding
Mingdao Liu, Aohan Zeng, Bowen Wang, Peng Zhang, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
The massive adoption of large language models (LLMs) demands efficient deployment strategies. However, the auto-regressive decoding process, which is fundamental to how most LLMs generate text, poses challenges to achieve efficient serving. In this work, we introduce a parallel auto-regressive generation method. By instruct-tuning on general domain data that contains hierarchical structures, we enable LLMs to independently plan their generation process and perform auto-parallel auto-regressive (APAR) generation, significantly reducing the number of generation steps. APAR alone can achieve up to 2x speed-up, and when combined with speculative decoding, the speed-up can reach up to 4x. In addition, APAR reduces the key-value cache consumption and attention computation during generation. This leads to a throughput increase of 20-70% and a latency reduce of 20-35% in high-throughput scenarios, compared to state-of-the-art serving frameworks.

Transformers are Multi-State RNNs
Matanel Oren, Michael Hassid, Yossi Adi, Roy Schwartz
Transformers are considered conceptually different compared to the previous generation of state-of-the-art NLP models - recurrent neural networks (RNNs). In this work, we demonstrate that decoder-only transformers can in fact be conceptualized as infinite multi-state RNNs - an RNN variant with unlimited hidden state size. We further show that pretrained transformers can be converted into finite multi-state RNNs by fixing the size of their hidden state. We observe that several existing transformers cache compression techniques can be framed as such conversion policies, and introduce a novel policy, TOVA, which is simpler compared to these policies. Our experiments with several long range tasks indicate that TOVA outperforms all other baseline policies, while being nearly on par with the full (infinite) model, and using in some cases only 18 of the original cache size. Our results indicate that transformer decoder LLMs often behave in practice as RNNs. They also lay out the option of mitigating one of their most painful computational bottlenecks - the size of their cache memory. 

Solving olympiad geometry without human demonstrations
Trieu H. Trinh, Yuhuai Wu, Quoc V. Le, He He & Thang Luong 
Proving mathematical theorems at the olympiad level represents a notable milestone in human-level automated reasoning1,2,3,4, owing to their reputed difficulty among the world’s best talents in pre-university mathematics. Current machine-learning approaches, however, are not applicable to most mathematical domains owing to the high cost of translating human proofs into machine-verifiable format. The problem is even worse for geometry because of its unique translation challenges1,5, resulting in severe scarcity of training data. We propose AlphaGeometry, a theorem prover for Euclidean plane geometry that sidesteps the need for human demonstrations by synthesizing millions of theorems and proofs across different levels of complexity. AlphaGeometry is a neuro-symbolic system that uses a neural language model, trained from scratch on our large-scale synthetic data, to guide a symbolic deduction engine through infinite branching points in challenging problems. On a test set of 30 latest olympiad-level problems, AlphaGeometry solves 25, outperforming the previous best method that only solves ten problems and approaching the performance of an average International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) gold medallist. Notably, AlphaGeometry produces human-readable proofs, solves all geometry problems in the IMO 2000 and 2015 under human expert evaluation and discovers a generalized version of a translated IMO theorem in 2004.

Scalable Pre-training of Large Autoregressive Image Models
Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Michal Klein, Shuangfei Zhai, Miguel Angel Bautista, Alexander Toshev, Vaishaal Shankar, Joshua M Susskind, Armand Joulin
This paper introduces AIM, a collection of vision models pre-trained with an autoregressive objective. These models are inspired by their textual counterparts, i.e., Large Language Models (LLMs), and exhibit similar scaling properties. Specifically, we highlight two key findings: (1) the performance of the visual features scale with both the model capacity and the quantity of data, (2) the value of the objective function correlates with the performance of the model on downstream tasks. We illustrate the practical implication of these findings by pre-training a 7 billion parameter AIM on 2 billion images, that achieves 84.0% on ImageNet-1k with a frozen trunk. Interestingly, even at this scale, we observe no sign of saturation in performance, suggesting that AIM potentially represents a new frontier for training large-scale vision models. The pre-training of AIM is similar to the pre-training of LLMs, and does not require any image-specific strategy to stabilize the training at scale.

Extending LLMs' Context Window with 100 Samples
Yikai Zhang, Junlong Li, Pengfei Liu
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to have limited extrapolation ability beyond their pre-trained context window, constraining their application in downstream tasks with lengthy inputs. Recent studies have sought to extend LLMs' context window by modifying rotary position embedding (RoPE), a popular position encoding method adopted by well-known LLMs such as LLaMA, PaLM, and GPT-NeoX. However, prior works like Position Interpolation (PI) and YaRN are resource-intensive and lack comparative experiments to assess their applicability. In this work, we identify the inherent need for LLMs' attention entropy (i.e. the information entropy of attention scores) to maintain stability and introduce a novel extension to RoPE which combines adjusting RoPE's base frequency and scaling the attention logits to help LLMs efficiently adapt to a larger context window. We validate the superiority of our method in both fine-tuning performance and robustness across different context window sizes on various context-demanding tasks. Notably, our method extends the context window of LLaMA-2-7B-Chat to 16,384 with only 100 samples and 6 training steps, showcasing extraordinary efficiency. Finally, we also explore how data compositions and training curricula affect context window extension for specific downstream tasks, suggesting fine-tuning LLMs with lengthy conversations as a good starting point. 

Self-Rewarding Language Models
Weizhe Yuan, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Kyunghyun Cho, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jing Xu, Jason Weston
We posit that to achieve superhuman agents, future models require superhuman feedback in order to provide an adequate training signal. Current approaches commonly train reward models from human preferences, which may then be bottlenecked by human performance level, and secondly these separate frozen reward models cannot then learn to improve during LLM training. In this work, we study Self-Rewarding Language Models, where the language model itself is used via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting to provide its own rewards during training. We show that during Iterative DPO training that not only does instruction following ability improve, but also the ability to provide high-quality rewards to itself. Fine-tuning Llama 2 70B on three iterations of our approach yields a model that outperforms many existing systems on the AlpacaEval 2.0 leaderboard, including Claude 2, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 0613. While only a preliminary study, this work opens the door to the possibility of models that can continually improve in both axes.

ChatQA: Building GPT-4 Level Conversational QA Models
Zihan Liu, Wei Ping, Rajarshi Roy, Peng Xu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
In this work, we introduce ChatQA, a family of conversational question answering (QA) models, that obtain GPT-4 level accuracies. Specifically, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning method that can significantly improve the zero-shot conversational QA results from large language models (LLMs). To handle retrieval in conversational QA, we fine-tune a dense retriever on a multi-turn QA dataset, which provides comparable results to using the state-of-the-art query rewriting model while largely reducing deployment cost. Notably, our ChatQA-70B can outperform GPT-4 in terms of average score on 10 conversational QA datasets (54.14 vs. 53.90), without relying on any synthetic data from OpenAI GPT models.

Orion-14B: Open-source Multilingual Large Language Models
In this study, we introduce Orion-14B, a collection of multilingual large language models with 14 billion parameters. We utilize a data scheduling approach to train a foundational model on a diverse corpus of 2.5 trillion tokens, sourced from texts in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. Additionally, we fine-tuned a series of models tailored for conversational applications and other specific use cases. Our evaluation results demonstrate that Orion-14B achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. We make the Orion- 14B model family and its associated code publicly accessible1, aiming to inspire future research and practical applications in the field.

Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads
Tianle Cai, Yuhong Li, Zhengyang Geng, Hongwu Peng, Jason D. Lee, Deming Chen, Tri Dao
The inference process in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often limited due to the absence of parallelism in the auto-regressive decoding process, resulting in most operations being restricted by the memory bandwidth of accelerators. While methods such as speculative decoding have been suggested to address this issue, their implementation is impeded by the challenges associated with acquiring and maintaining a separate draft model. In this paper, we present Medusa, an efficient method that augments LLM inference by adding extra decoding heads to predict multiple subsequent tokens in parallel. Using a tree-based attention mechanism, Medusa constructs multiple candidate continuations and verifies them simultaneously in each decoding step. By leveraging parallel processing, Medusa introduces only minimal overhead in terms of single-step latency while substantially reducing the number of decoding steps required.
We present two levels of fine-tuning procedures for Medusa to meet the needs of different use cases: Medusa-1: Medusa is directly fine-tuned on top of a frozen backbone LLM, enabling lossless inference acceleration. Medusa-2: Medusa is fine-tuned together with the backbone LLM, enabling better prediction accuracy of Medusa heads and higher speedup but needing a special training recipe that preserves the backbone model's capabilities.
Moreover, we propose several extensions that improve or expand the utility of Medusa, including a self-distillation to handle situations where no training data is available and a typical acceptance scheme to boost the acceptance rate while maintaining generation quality. We evaluate Medusa on models of various sizes and training procedures. Our experiments demonstrate that Medusa-1 can achieve over 2.2x speedup without compromising generation quality, while Medusa-2 further improves the speedup to 2.3-3.6x.

Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data
Lihe Yang, Bingyi Kang, Zilong Huang, Xiaogang Xu, Jiashi Feng, Hengshuang Zhao
This work presents Depth Anything, a highly practical solution for robust monocular depth estimation. Without pursuing novel technical modules, we aim to build a simple yet powerful foundation model dealing with any images under any circumstances. To this end, we scale up the dataset by designing a data engine to collect and automatically annotate large-scale unlabeled data (~62M), which significantly enlarges the data coverage and thus is able to reduce the generalization error. We investigate two simple yet effective strategies that make data scaling-up promising. First, a more challenging optimization target is created by leveraging data augmentation tools. It compels the model to actively seek extra visual knowledge and acquire robust representations. Second, an auxiliary supervision is developed to enforce the model to inherit rich semantic priors from pre-trained encoders. We evaluate its zero-shot capabilities extensively, including six public datasets and randomly captured photos. It demonstrates impressive generalization ability. Further, through fine-tuning it with metric depth information from NYUv2 and KITTI, new SOTAs are set. Our better depth model also results in a better depth-conditioned ControlNet.

AutoChunk: Automated Activation Chunk for Memory-Efficient Long Sequence Inference
Xuanlei Zhao, Shenggan Cheng, Guangyang Lu, Jiarui Fang, Haotian Zhou, Bin Jia, Ziming Liu, Yang You
Large deep learning models have achieved impressive performance across a range of applications. However, their large memory requirements, including parameter memory and activation memory, have become a significant challenge for their practical serving. While existing methods mainly address parameter memory, the importance of activation memory has been overlooked. Especially for long input sequences, activation memory is expected to experience a significant exponential growth as the length of sequences increases. In this approach, we propose AutoChunk, an automatic and adaptive compiler system that efficiently reduces activation memory for long sequence inference by chunk strategies. The proposed system generates chunk plans by optimizing through multiple stages. In each stage, the chunk search pass explores all possible chunk candidates and the chunk selection pass identifies the optimal one. At runtime, AutoChunk employs code generation to automatically apply chunk strategies. The experiments demonstrate that AutoChunk can reduce over 80\% of activation memory while maintaining speed loss within 10%, extend max sequence length by 3.2x to 11.7x, and outperform state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

VMamba: Visual State Space Model
Yue Liu, Yunjie Tian, Yuzhong Zhao, Hongtian Yu, Lingxi Xie, Yaowei Wang, Qixiang Ye, Yunfan Liu
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) stand as the two most popular foundation models for visual representation learning. While CNNs exhibit remarkable scalability with linear complexity w.r.t. image resolution, ViTs surpass them in fitting capabilities despite contending with quadratic complexity. A closer inspection reveals that ViTs achieve superior visual modeling performance through the incorporation of global receptive fields and dynamic weights. This observation motivates us to propose a novel architecture that inherits these components while enhancing computational efficiency. To this end, we draw inspiration from the recently introduced state space model and propose the Visual State Space Model (VMamba), which achieves linear complexity without sacrificing global receptive fields. To address the encountered direction-sensitive issue, we introduce the Cross-Scan Module (CSM) to traverse the spatial domain and convert any non-causal visual image into order patch sequences. Extensive experimental results substantiate that VMamba not only demonstrates promising capabilities across various visual perception tasks, but also exhibits more pronounced advantages over established benchmarks as the image resolution increases.

Contrastive Preference Optimization: Pushing the Boundaries of LLM Performance in Machine Translation
Haoran Xu, Amr Sharaf, Yunmo Chen, Weiting Tan, Lingfeng Shen, Benjamin Van Durme, Kenton Murray, Young Jin Kim
Moderate-sized large language models (LLMs) -- those with 7B or 13B parameters -- exhibit promising machine translation (MT) performance. However, even the top-performing 13B LLM-based translation models, like ALMA, does not match the performance of state-of-the-art conventional encoder-decoder translation models or larger-scale LLMs such as GPT-4. In this study, we bridge this performance gap. We first assess the shortcomings of supervised fine-tuning for LLMs in the MT task, emphasizing the quality issues present in the reference data, despite being human-generated. Then, in contrast to SFT which mimics reference translations, we introduce Contrastive Preference Optimization (CPO), a novel approach that trains models to avoid generating adequate but not perfect translations. Applying CPO to ALMA models with only 22K parallel sentences and 12M parameters yields significant improvements. The resulting model, called ALMA-R, can match or exceed the performance of the WMT competition winners and GPT-4 on WMT'21, WMT'22 and WMT'23 test datasets.

BiTA: Bi-Directional Tuning for Lossless Acceleration in Large Language Models
Feng Lin, Hanling Yi, Hongbin Li, Yifan Yang, Xiaotian Yu, Guangming Lu, Rong Xiao
Large language models (LLMs) commonly employ autoregressive generation during inference, leading to high memory bandwidth demand and consequently extended latency. To mitigate this inefficiency, we present Bi-directional Tuning for lossless Acceleration (BiTA), an innovative method expediting LLMs via streamlined semi-autoregressive generation and draft verification. Inspired by the concept of prompt tuning, we enhance LLMs with a parameter-efficient design called bi-directional tuning for the capability in semi-autoregressive generation. Employing efficient tree-based decoding, the models perform draft candidate generation and verification in parallel, ensuring outputs identical to their autoregressive counterparts under greedy sampling. BiTA serves as a lightweight plug-in module, seamlessly boosting the inference efficiency of existing LLMs without requiring additional assistance models or incurring significant extra memory costs. Applying the proposed BiTA, LLaMA-2-70B-Chat achieves a 2.7× speedup on the MT-Bench benchmark. Extensive experiments confirm our method surpasses state-of-the-art acceleration techniques.

Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment
Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
Considerable efforts have been invested in augmenting the role-playing proficiency of open-source large language models (LLMs) by emulating proprietary counterparts. Nevertheless, we posit that LLMs inherently harbor role-play capabilities, owing to the extensive knowledge of characters and potential dialogues ingrained in their vast training corpora. Thus, in this study, we introduce Ditto, a self-alignment method for role-play. Ditto capitalizes on character knowledge, encouraging an instruction-following LLM to simulate role-play dialogues as a variant of reading comprehension. This method creates a role-play training set comprising 4,000 characters, surpassing the scale of currently available datasets by tenfold regarding the number of roles. Subsequently, we fine-tune the LLM using this self-generated dataset to augment its role-playing capabilities. Upon evaluating our meticulously constructed and reproducible role-play benchmark and the roleplay subset of MT-Bench, Ditto, in various parameter scales, consistently maintains a consistent role identity and provides accurate role-specific knowledge in multi-turn role-play conversations. Notably, it outperforms all open-source role-play baselines, showcasing performance levels comparable to advanced proprietary chatbots. Furthermore, we present the first comprehensive cross-supervision alignment experiment in the role-play domain, revealing that the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs confine the knowledge within role-play. Meanwhile, the role-play styles can be easily acquired with the guidance of smaller models. 

Dynamic Layer Tying for Parameter-Efficient Transformers
Tamir David Hay, Lior Wolf
In the pursuit of reducing the number of trainable parameters in deep transformer networks, we employ Reinforcement Learning to dynamically select layers during training and tie them together. Every few iterations, the RL agent is asked whether to train each layer i independently or to copy the weights of a previous layer j<i. This facilitates weight sharing, reduces the number of trainable parameters, and also serves as an effective regularization technique. Experimental evaluations validate that our model modestly outperforms the baseline transformer model with regard to perplexity and drastically reduces the number of trainable parameters. In particular, the memory consumption during training is up to one order of magnitude less than the conventional training method.

MambaByte: Token-free Selective State Space Model
Junxiong Wang, Tushaar Gangavarapu, Jing Nathan Yan, Alexander M Rush
Token-free language models learn directly from raw bytes and remove the bias of subword tokenization. Operating on bytes, however, results in significantly longer sequences, and standard autoregressive Transformers scale poorly in such settings. We experiment with MambaByte, a token-free adaptation of the Mamba state space model, trained autoregressively on byte sequences. Our experiments indicate the computational efficiency of MambaByte compared to other byte-level models. We also find MambaByte to be competitive with and even outperform state-of-the-art subword Transformers. Furthermore, owing to linear scaling in length, MambaByte benefits from fast inference compared to Transformers. Our findings establish the viability of MambaByte in enabling token-free language modeling.

DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence
Daya Guo, Qihao Zhu, Dejian Yang, Zhenda Xie, Kai Dong, Wentao Zhang, Guanting Chen, Xiao Bi, Y. Wu, Y.K. Li, Fuli Luo, Yingfei Xiong, Wenfeng Liang
The rapid development of large language models has revolutionized code intelligence in software development. However, the predominance of closed-source models has restricted extensive research and development. To address this, we introduce the DeepSeek-Coder series, a range of open-source code models with sizes from 1.3B to 33B, trained from scratch on 2 trillion tokens. These models are pre-trained on a high-quality project-level code corpus and employ a fill-in-the-blank task with a 16K window to enhance code generation and infilling. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that DeepSeek-Coder not only achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source code models across multiple benchmarks but also surpasses existing closed-source models like Codex and GPT-3.5. Furthermore, DeepSeek-Coder models are under a permissive license that allows for both research and unrestricted commercial use.

FP6-LLM: Efficiently Serving Large Language Models Through FP6-Centric Algorithm-System Co-Design
Haojun Xia, Zhen Zheng, Xiaoxia Wu, Shiyang Chen, Zhewei Yao, Stephen Youn, Arash Bakhtiari, Michael Wyatt, Donglin Zhuang, Zhongzhu Zhou, Olatunji Ruwase, Yuxiong He, Shuaiwen Leon Song
Six-bit quantization (FP6) can effectively reduce the size of large language models (LLMs) and preserve the model quality consistently across varied applications. However, existing systems do not provide Tensor Core support for FP6 quantization and struggle to achieve practical performance improvements during LLM inference. It is challenging to support FP6 quantization on GPUs due to (1) unfriendly memory access of model weights with irregular bit-width and (2) high runtime overhead of weight de-quantization. To address these problems, we propose TC-FPx, the first full-stack GPU kernel design scheme with unified Tensor Core support of float-point weights for various quantization bit-width. We integrate TC-FPx kernel into an existing inference system, providing new end-to-end support (called FP6-LLM) for quantized LLM inference, where better trade-offs between inference cost and model quality are achieved. Experiments show that FP6-LLM enables the inference of LLaMA-70b using only a single GPU, achieving 1.69x-2.65x higher normalized inference throughput than the FP16 baseline. The source code will be publicly available soon.

Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Serving with Speculation
Zhihao Zhang, Alan Zhu, Lijie Yang, Yihua Xu, Lanting Li, Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, Zhihao Jia
Retrieval-augmented language models (RaLM) have demonstrated the potential to solve knowledge-intensive natural language processing (NLP) tasks by combining a non-parametric knowledge base with a parametric language model. Instead of fine-tuning a fully parametric model, RaLM excels at its low-cost adaptation to the latest data and better source attribution mechanisms. Among various RaLM approaches, iterative RaLM delivers a better generation quality due to a more frequent interaction between the retriever and the language model. Despite the benefits, iterative RaLM usually encounters high overheads due to the frequent retrieval step. To this end, we propose RaLMSpec, a speculation-inspired framework that provides generic speed-up over iterative RaLM while preserving the same model outputs through speculative retrieval and batched verification. By further incorporating prefetching, optimal speculation stride scheduler, and asynchronous verification, RaLMSpec can automatically exploit the acceleration potential to the fullest. For naive iterative RaLM serving, extensive evaluations over three language models on four downstream QA datasets demonstrate that RaLMSpec can achieve a speed-up ratio of 1.75-2.39x, 1.04-1.39x, and 1.31-1.77x when the retriever is an exact dense retriever, approximate dense retriever, and sparse retriever respectively compared with the baseline. For KNN-LM serving, RaLMSpec can achieve a speed-up ratio up to 7.59x and 2.45x when the retriever is an exact dense retriever and approximate dense retriever, respectively, compared with the baseline.

Multimodal Pathway: Improve Transformers with Irrelevant Data from Other Modalities
Yiyuan Zhang, Xiaohan Ding, Kaixiong Gong, Yixiao Ge, Ying Shan, Xiangyu Yue
We propose to improve transformers of a specific modality with irrelevant data from other modalities, e.g., improve an ImageNet model with audio or point cloud datasets. We would like to highlight that the data samples of the target modality are irrelevant to the other modalities, which distinguishes our method from other works utilizing paired (e.g., CLIP) or interleaved data of different modalities. We propose a methodology named Multimodal Pathway - given a target modality and a transformer designed for it, we use an auxiliary transformer trained with data of another modality and construct pathways to connect components of the two models so that data of the target modality can be processed by both models. In this way, we utilize the universal sequence-to-sequence modeling abilities of transformers obtained from two modalities. As a concrete implementation, we use a modality-specific tokenizer and task-specific head as usual but utilize the transformer blocks of the auxiliary model via a proposed method named Cross-Modal Re-parameterization, which exploits the auxiliary weights without any inference costs. On the image, point cloud, video, and audio recognition tasks, we observe significant and consistent performance improvements with irrelevant data from other modalities. 

EAGLE: Speculative Sampling Requires Rethinking Feature Uncertainty
Yuhui Li, Fangyun Wei, Chao Zhang, Hongyang Zhang
Auto-regressive decoding makes the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) time-consuming. We propose a simple framework, EAGLE (Extrapolation Algorithm for Greater Language-model Efficiency), for lossless acceleration. Unlike traditional speculative sampling methods, EAGLE operates the drafting process auto-regressively at the more regular (second-top-layer) feature level and addresses the sampling uncertainty issues in the next-feature prediction problems by integrating tokens from one time step ahead. The acceleration provided by EAGLE is lossless: it involves no fine-tuning of the target LLM, and the generated text maintains the same distribution as that of vanilla auto-regressive decoding. As of the submission of this paper, EAGLE is the fastest known framework within the speculative sampling family. On MT-bench, EAGLE is 3x faster than vanilla decoding, 2x faster than Lookahead, and 1.6x faster than Medusa. Using gpt-fast, EAGLE attains on average 160 tokens/s with LLaMA2-Chat 13B on a single RTX 3090 GPU, compared to 24 tokens/s of Huggingface's implementations.

SliceGPT: Compress Large Language Models by Deleting Rows and Columns
Saleh Ashkboos, Maximilian L. Croci, Marcelo Gennari do Nascimento, Torsten Hoefler, James Hensman
Large language models have become the cornerstone of natural language processing, but their use comes with substantial costs in terms of compute and memory resources. Sparsification provides a solution to alleviate these resource constraints, and recent works have shown that trained models can be sparsified post-hoc. Existing sparsification techniques face challenges as they need additional data structures and offer constrained speedup with current hardware. In this paper we present SliceGPT, a new post-training sparsification scheme which replaces each weight matrix with a smaller (dense) matrix, reducing the embedding dimension of the network. Through extensive experimentation, we show that SliceGPT can remove up to 25% of the model parameters (including embeddings) for LLAMA2-70B, OPT 66B and Phi-2 models while maintaining 99%, 99% and 90% zero-shot task performance of the dense model respectively. Our sliced models run on fewer GPUs and run faster without any additional code optimization: on 24GB consumer GPUs we reduce the total compute for inference on LLAMA2-70B to 64% of that of the dense model; on 40GB A100 GPUs we reduce it to 66%. We offer a new insight, computational invariance in transformer networks, which enables SliceGPT and we hope it will inspire and enable future avenues to reduce memory and computation demands for pre-trained models. 

With Greater Text Comes Greater Necessity: Inference-Time Training Helps Long Text Generation
Y. Wang, D. Ma, D. Cai
Long text generation, such as novel writing or discourse-level translation with extremely long contexts, presents significant challenges to current language models. Existing methods mainly focus on extending the model's context window through strategies like length extrapolation. However, these approaches demand substantial hardware resources during the training and/or inference phases. Our proposed method, Temp-Lora, introduces an alternative concept. Instead of relying on the KV cache to store all context information, Temp-Lora embeds this information directly into the model's parameters. In the process of long text generation, we use a temporary Lora module, progressively trained with text generated previously. This approach not only efficiently preserves contextual knowledge but also prevents any permanent alteration to the model's parameters given that the module is discarded post-generation. Extensive experiments on the PG19 language modeling benchmark and the GuoFeng discourse-level translation benchmark validate the effectiveness of Temp-Lora. Our results show that: 1) Temp-Lora substantially enhances generation quality for long texts, as indicated by a 13.2% decrease in perplexity on a subset of PG19, and a 29.6% decrease in perplexity along with a 53.2% increase in BLEU score on GuoFeng, 2) Temp-Lora is compatible with and enhances most existing long text generation methods, and 3) Temp-Lora can greatly reduce computational costs by shortening the context window. While ensuring a slight improvement in generation quality (a decrease of 3.8% in PPL), it enables a reduction of 70.5% in the FLOPs required for inference and a 51.5% decrease in latency.

YODA: Teacher-Student Progressive Learning for Language Models
Jianqiao Lu, Wanjun Zhong, Yufei Wang, Zhijiang Guo, Qi Zhu, Wenyong Huang, Yanlin Wang, Fei Mi, Baojun Wang, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated adeptness in a range of tasks, they still lag behind human learning efficiency. This disparity is often linked to the inherent human capacity to learn from basic examples, gradually generalize and handle more complex problems, and refine their skills with continuous feedback. Inspired by this, this paper introduces YODA, a novel teacher-student progressive learning framework that emulates the teacher-student education process to improve the efficacy of model fine-tuning. The framework operates on an interactive \textit{basic-generalized-harder} loop. The teacher agent provides tailored feedback on the student's answers, and systematically organizes the education process. This process unfolds by teaching the student basic examples, reinforcing understanding through generalized questions, and then enhancing learning by posing questions with progressively enhanced complexity. With the teacher's guidance, the student learns to iteratively refine its answer with feedback, and forms a robust and comprehensive understanding of the posed questions. The systematic procedural data, which reflects the progressive learning process of humans, is then utilized for model training. Taking math reasoning as a testbed, experiments show that training LLaMA2 with data from YODA improves SFT with significant performance gain (+17.01\% on GSM8K and +9.98\% on MATH). In addition, we find that training with curriculum learning further improves learning robustness.

MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models
Bin Lin, Zhenyu Tang, Yang Ye, Jiaxi Cui, Bin Zhu, Peng Jin, Junwu Zhang, Munan Ning, Li Yuan
For Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), scaling the model can effectively improve performance. However, expanding model parameters significantly increases the training and inferring costs, as all model parameters are activated for each token in the calculation. In this work, we propose a novel training strategy MoE-tuning for LVLMs, which can constructing a sparse model with an outrageous number of parameter but a constant computational cost, and effectively addresses the performance degradation typically associated with multi-modal learning and model sparsity. Furthermore, we present the MoE-LLaVA framework, a MoE-based sparse LVLM architecture. This framework uniquely activates only the top-k experts through routers during deployment, keeping the remaining experts inactive. Our extensive experiments highlight the excellent capabilities of MoE-LLaVA in visual understanding and its potential to reduce hallucinations in model outputs. Remarkably, with just 3 billion sparsely activated parameters, MoE-LLaVA demonstrates performance comparable to the LLaVA-1.5-7B on various visual understanding datasets and even surpasses the LLaVA-1.5-13B in object hallucination benchmarks. Through MoE-LLaVA, we aim to establish a baseline for sparse LVLMs and provide valuable insights for future research in developing more efficient and effective multi-modal learning systems. 

KVQuant: Towards 10 Million Context Length LLM Inference with KV Cache Quantization
Coleman Hooper, Sehoon Kim, Hiva Mohammadzadeh, Michael W. Mahoney, Yakun Sophia Shao, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami
LLMs are seeing growing use for applications such as document analysis and summarization which require large context windows, and with these large context windows KV cache activations surface as the dominant contributor to memory consumption during inference. Quantization is a promising approach for compressing KV cache activations; however, existing solutions fail to represent activations accurately in ultra-low precisions, such as sub-4-bit. In this work, we present KVQuant, which addresses this problem by incorporating novel methods for quantizing cached KV activations, including: (i) Per-Channel Key Quantization, where we adjust the dimension along which we quantize the Key activations to better match the distribution; (ii) Pre-RoPE Key Quantization, where we quantize Key activations before the rotary positional embedding to mitigate its impact on quantization; (iii) Non-Uniform KV Cache Quantization, where we derive per-layer sensitivity-weighted non-uniform datatypes that better represent the distributions; (iv) Per-Vector Dense-and-Sparse Quantization, where we isolate outliers separately for each vector to minimize skews in quantization ranges; and (v) Q-Norm, where we normalize quantization centroids in order to mitigate distribution shift, providing additional benefits for 2-bit quantization. By applying our method to the LLaMA, LLaMA-2, and Mistral models, we achieve <0.1 perplexity degradation with 3-bit quantization on both Wikitext-2 and C4, outperforming existing approaches. Our method enables serving the LLaMA-7B model with a context length of up to 1 million on a single A100-80GB GPU and up to 10 million on an 8-GPU system.

LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models
Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Yuze He, Ji Qi, Lei Hou, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong, Juanzi Li
Extending large language models to effectively handle long contexts requires instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length. To address this, we present LongAlign -- a recipe of the instruction data, training, and evaluation for long context alignment. First, we construct a long instruction-following dataset using Self-Instruct. To ensure the data diversity, it covers a broad range of tasks from various long context sources. Second, we adopt the packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-tuning on data with varied length distributions. Additionally, we develop a loss weighting method to balance the contribution to the loss across different sequences during packing training. Third, we introduce the LongBench-Chat benchmark for evaluating instruction-following capabilities on queries of 10k-100k in length. Experiments show that LongAlign outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by up to 30\%, while also maintaining their proficiency in handling short, generic tasks.

LOCOST: State-Space Models for Long Document Abstractive Summarization
Florian Le Bronnec, Song Duong, Mathieu Ravaut, Alexandre Allauzen, Nancy F. Chen, Vincent Guigue, Alberto Lumbreras, Laure Soulier, Patrick Gallinari
State-space models are a low-complexity alternative to transformers for encoding long sequences and capturing long-term dependencies. We propose LOCOST: an encoder-decoder architecture based on state-space models for conditional text generation with long context inputs. With a computational complexity of O(LlogL), this architecture can handle significantly longer sequences than state-of-the-art models that are based on sparse attention patterns. We evaluate our model on a series of long document abstractive summarization tasks. The model reaches a performance level that is 93-96% comparable to the top-performing sparse transformers of the same size while saving up to 50% memory during training and up to 87% during inference. Additionally, LOCOST effectively handles input texts exceeding 600K tokens at inference time, setting new state-of-the-art results on full-book summarization and opening new perspectives for long input processing.

Convolution Meets LoRA: Parameter Efficient Finetuning for Segment Anything Model
Zihan Zhong, Zhiqiang Tang, Tong He, Haoyang Fang, Chun Yuan
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) stands as a foundational framework for image segmentation. While it exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalization in typical scenarios, its advantage diminishes when applied to specialized domains like medical imagery and remote sensing. To address this limitation, this paper introduces Conv-LoRA, a simple yet effective parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach. By integrating ultra-lightweight convolutional parameters into Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Conv-LoRA can inject image-related inductive biases into the plain ViT encoder, further reinforcing SAM's local prior assumption. Notably, Conv-LoRA not only preserves SAM's extensive segmentation knowledge but also revives its capacity of learning high-level image semantics, which is constrained by SAM's foreground-background segmentation pretraining. Comprehensive experimentation across diverse benchmarks spanning multiple domains underscores Conv-LoRA's superiority in adapting SAM to real-world semantic segmentation tasks.

RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval
Parth Sarthi, Salman Abdullah, Aditi Tuli, Shubh Khanna, Anna Goldie, Christopher D. Manning
Retrieval-augmented language models can better adapt to changes in world state and incorporate long-tail knowledge. However, most existing methods retrieve only short contiguous chunks from a retrieval corpus, limiting holistic understanding of the overall document context. We introduce the novel approach of recursively embedding, clustering, and summarizing chunks of text, constructing a tree with differing levels of summarization from the bottom up. At inference time, our RAPTOR model retrieves from this tree, integrating information across lengthy documents at different levels of abstraction. Controlled experiments show that retrieval with recursive summaries offers significant improvements over traditional retrieval-augmented LMs on several tasks. On question-answering tasks that involve complex, multi-step reasoning, we show state-of-the-art results; for example, by coupling RAPTOR retrieval with the use of GPT-4, we can improve the best performance on the QuALITY benchmark by 20% in absolute accuracy.

EE-Tuning: An Economical yet Scalable Solution for Tuning Early-Exit Large Language Models
Xuchen Pan, Yanxi Chen, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou
This work introduces EE-Tuning, a lightweight and economical solution to training/tuning early-exit large language models (LLMs). In contrast to the common approach of full-parameter pre-training, EE-Tuning augments any pre-trained (and possibly fine-tuned) standard LLM with additional early-exit layers that are tuned in a parameter-efficient manner, which requires significantly less computational resources and training data. Our implementation of EE-Tuning achieves outstanding training efficiency via extensive performance optimizations, as well as scalability due to its full compatibility with 3D parallelism. Results of systematic experiments validate the efficacy of EE-Tuning, confirming that effective early-exit LLM inference can be achieved with a limited training budget. 

Graph-Mamba: Towards Long-Range Graph Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
Chloe Wang, Oleksii Tsepa, Jun Ma, Bo Wang
Attention mechanisms have been widely used to capture long-range dependencies among nodes in Graph Transformers. Bottlenecked by the quadratic computational cost, attention mechanisms fail to scale in large graphs. Recent improvements in computational efficiency are mainly achieved by attention sparsification with random or heuristic-based graph subsampling, which falls short in data-dependent context reasoning. State space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have gained prominence for their effectiveness and efficiency in modeling long-range dependencies in sequential data. However, adapting SSMs to non-sequential graph data presents a notable challenge. In this work, we introduce Graph-Mamba, the first attempt to enhance long-range context modeling in graph networks by integrating a Mamba block with the input-dependent node selection mechanism. Specifically, we formulate graph-centric node prioritization and permutation strategies to enhance context-aware reasoning, leading to a substantial improvement in predictive performance. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that Graph-Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods in long-range graph prediction tasks, with a fraction of the computational cost in both FLOPs and GPU memory consumption.

RAG vs Fine-tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoffs, and a Case Study on Agriculture
Angels Balaguer, Vinamra Benara, Renato Luiz de Freitas Cunha, Roberto de M. Estevão Filho, Todd Hendry, Daniel Holstein, Jennifer Marsman, Nick Mecklenburg, Sara Malvar, Leonardo O. Nunes, Rafael Padilha, Morris Sharp, Bruno Silva, Swati Sharma, Vijay Aski, Ranveer Chandra
There are two common ways in which developers are incorporating proprietary and domain-specific data when building applications of Large Language Models (LLMs): Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Fine-Tuning. RAG augments the prompt with the external data, while fine-Tuning incorporates the additional knowledge into the model itself. However, the pros and cons of both approaches are not well understood. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for fine-tuning and RAG, and present the tradeoffs of both for multiple popular LLMs, including Llama2-13B, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Our pipeline consists of multiple stages, including extracting information from PDFs, generating questions and answers, using them for fine-tuning, and leveraging GPT-4 for evaluating the results. We propose metrics to assess the performance of different stages of the RAG and fine-Tuning pipeline. We conduct an in-depth study on an agricultural dataset. Agriculture as an industry has not seen much penetration of AI, and we study a potentially disruptive application - what if we could provide location-specific insights to a farmer? Our results show the effectiveness of our dataset generation pipeline in capturing geographic-specific knowledge, and the quantitative and qualitative benefits of RAG and fine-tuning. We see an accuracy increase of over 6 p.p. when fine-tuning the model and this is cumulative with RAG, which increases accuracy by 5 p.p. further. In one particular experiment, we also demonstrate that the fine-tuned model leverages information from across geographies to answer specific questions, increasing answer similarity from 47% to 72%. Overall, the results point to how systems built using LLMs can be adapted to respond and incorporate knowledge across a dimension that is critical for a specific industry, paving the way for further applications of LLMs in other industrial domains.

MoDE: A Mixture-of-Experts Model with Mutual Distillation among the Experts
Zhitian Xie, Yinger Zhang, Chenyi Zhuang, Qitao Shi, Zhining Liu, Jinjie Gu, Guannan Zhang
The application of mixture-of-experts (MoE) is gaining popularity due to its ability to improve model's performance. In an MoE structure, the gate layer plays a significant role in distinguishing and routing input features to different experts. This enables each expert to specialize in processing their corresponding sub-tasks. However, the gate's routing mechanism also gives rise to narrow vision: the individual MoE's expert fails to use more samples in learning the allocated sub-task, which in turn limits the MoE to further improve its generalization ability. To effectively address this, we propose a method called Mixture-of-Distilled-Expert (MoDE), which applies moderate mutual distillation among experts to enable each expert to pick up more features learned by other experts and gain more accurate perceptions on their original allocated sub-tasks. We conduct plenty experiments including tabular, NLP and CV datasets, which shows MoDE's effectiveness, universality and robustness. Furthermore, we develop a parallel study through innovatively constructing "expert probing", to experimentally prove why MoDE works: moderate distilling knowledge can improve each individual expert's test performances on their assigned tasks, leading to MoE's overall performance improvement.

Audio Flamingo: A Novel Audio Language Model with Few-Shot Learning and Dialogue Abilities
Zhifeng Kong, Arushi Goel, Rohan Badlani, Wei Ping, Rafael Valle, Bryan Catanzaro
Augmenting large language models (LLMs) to understand audio -- including non-speech sounds and non-verbal speech -- is critically important for diverse real-world applications of LLMs. In this paper, we propose Audio Flamingo, a novel audio language model with 1) strong audio understanding abilities, 2) the ability to quickly adapt to unseen tasks via in-context learning and retrieval, and 3) strong multi-turn dialogue abilities. We introduce a series of training techniques, architecture design, and data strategies to enhance our model with these abilities. Extensive evaluations across various audio understanding tasks confirm the efficacy of our method, setting new state-of-the-art benchmarks.

LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization through Learning-to-Rank
Tianqi Liu, Zhen Qin, Junru Wu, Jiaming Shen, Misha Khalman, Rishabh Joshi, Yao Zhao, Mohammad Saleh, Simon Baumgartner, Jialu Liu, Peter J. Liu, Xuanhui Wang
Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) approach. In practice, human feedback often comes in a format of a ranked list over multiple responses to amortize the cost of reading prompt. Multiple responses can also be ranked by reward models or AI feedback. There lacks such a study on directly fitting upon a list of responses. In this work, we formulate the LM alignment as a listwise ranking problem and describe the Listwise Preference Optimization (LiPO) framework, where the policy can potentially learn more effectively from a ranked list of plausible responses given the prompt. This view draws an explicit connection to Learning-to-Rank (LTR), where most existing preference optimization work can be mapped to existing ranking objectives, especially pairwise ones. Following this connection, we provide an examination of ranking objectives that are not well studied for LM alignment withDPO and SLiC as special cases when list size is two. In particular, we highlight a specific method, LiPO-{\lambda}, which leverages a state-of-the-art listwise ranking objective and weights each preference pair in a more advanced manner. We show that LiPO-{\lambda} can outperform DPO and SLiC by a clear margin on two preference alignment tasks.

BlackMamba: Mixture of Experts for State-Space Models
Quentin Anthony, Yury Tokpanov, Paolo Glorioso, Beren Millidge
State-space models (SSMs) have recently demonstrated competitive performance to transformers at large-scale language modeling benchmarks while achieving linear time and memory complexity as a function of sequence length. Mamba, a recently released SSM model, shows impressive performance in both language modeling and long sequence processing tasks. Simultaneously, mixture-of-expert (MoE) models have shown remarkable performance while significantly reducing the compute and latency costs of inference at the expense of a larger memory footprint. In this paper, we present BlackMamba, a novel architecture that combines the Mamba SSM with MoE to obtain the benefits of both. We demonstrate that BlackMamba performs competitively against both Mamba and transformer baselines, and outperforms in inference and training FLOPs. We fully train and open-source 340M/1.5B and 630M/2.8B BlackMamba models on 300B tokens of a custom dataset. We show that BlackMamba inherits and combines both of the benefits of SSM and MoE architectures, combining linear-complexity generation from SSM with cheap and fast inference from MoE. We release all weights, checkpoints, and inference code open-source. 

HiQA: A Hierarchical Contextual Augmentation RAG for Massive Documents QA
Xinyue Chen, Pengyu Gao, Jiangjiang Song, Xiaoyang Tan
As language model agents leveraging external tools rapidly evolve, significant progress has been made in question-answering(QA) methodologies utilizing supplementary documents and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach. This advancement has improved the response quality of language models and alleviates the appearance of hallucination. However, these methods exhibit limited retrieval accuracy when faced with massive indistinguishable documents, presenting notable challenges in their practical application. In response to these emerging challenges, we present HiQA, an advanced framework for multi-document question-answering (MDQA) that integrates cascading metadata into content as well as a multi-route retrieval mechanism. We also release a benchmark called MasQA to evaluate and research in MDQA. Finally, HiQA demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance in multi-document environments.

Time-, Memory- and Parameter-Efficient Visual Adaptation
Otniel-Bogdan Mercea, Alexey Gritsenko, Cordelia Schmid, Anurag Arnab
As foundation models become more popular, there is a growing need to efficiently finetune them for downstream tasks. Although numerous adaptation methods have been proposed, they are designed to be efficient only in terms of how many parameters are trained. They, however, typically still require backpropagating gradients throughout the model, meaning that their training-time and -memory cost does not reduce as significantly. We propose an adaptation method which does not backpropagate gradients through the backbone. We achieve this by designing a lightweight network in parallel that operates on features from the frozen, pretrained backbone. As a result, our method is efficient not only in terms of parameters, but also in training-time and memory usage. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy-parameter trade-offs on the popular VTAB benchmark, and we further show how we outperform prior works with respect to training-time and -memory usage too. We further demonstrate the training efficiency and scalability of our method by adapting a vision transformer backbone of 4 billion parameters for the computationally demanding task of video classification, without any intricate model parallelism. Here, we outperform a prior adaptor-based method which could only scale to a 1 billion parameter backbone, or fully-finetuning a smaller backbone, with the same GPU and less training time.

KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache
Zirui Liu, Jiayi Yuan, Hongye Jin, Shaochen Zhong, Zhaozhuo Xu, Vladimir Braverman, Beidi Chen, Xia Hu
Efficiently serving large language models (LLMs) requires batching many requests together to reduce the cost per request. Yet, the key-value (KV) cache, which stores attention keys and values to avoid re-computations, significantly increases memory demands and becomes the new bottleneck in speed and memory usage. This memory demand increases with larger batch sizes and longer context lengths. Additionally, the inference speed is limited by the size of KV cache, as the GPU's SRAM must load the entire KV cache from the main GPU memory for each token generated, causing the computational core to be idle during this process. A straightforward and effective solution to reduce KV cache size is quantization, which decreases the total bytes taken by KV cache. However, there is a lack of in-depth studies that explore the element distribution of KV cache to understand the hardness and limitation of KV cache quantization. To fill the gap, we conducted a comprehensive study on the element distribution in KV cache of popular LLMs. Our findings indicate that the key cache should be quantized per-channel, i.e., group elements along the channel dimension and quantize them together. In contrast, the value cache should be quantized per-token. From this analysis, we developed a tuning-free 2bit KV cache quantization algorithm, named KIVI. With the hardware-friendly implementation, KIVI can enable Llama (Llama-2), Falcon, and Mistral models to maintain almost the same quality while using 2.6× less peak memory usage (including the model weight). This reduction in memory usage enables up to 4× larger batch size, bringing 2.35×∼3.47× throughput on real LLM inference workload. 

DiffEditor: Boosting Accuracy and Flexibility on Diffusion-based Image Editing
Chong Mou, Xintao Wang, Jiechong Song, Ying Shan, Jian Zhang
Large-scale Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have revolutionized image generation over the last few years. Although owning diverse and high-quality generation capabilities, translating these abilities to fine-grained image editing remains challenging. In this paper, we propose DiffEditor to rectify two weaknesses in existing diffusion-based image editing: (1) in complex scenarios, editing results often lack editing accuracy and exhibit unexpected artifacts; (2) lack of flexibility to harmonize editing operations, e.g., imagine new content. In our solution, we introduce image prompts in fine-grained image editing, cooperating with the text prompt to better describe the editing content. To increase the flexibility while maintaining content consistency, we locally combine stochastic differential equation (SDE) into the ordinary differential equation (ODE) sampling. In addition, we incorporate regional score-based gradient guidance and a time travel strategy into the diffusion sampling, further improving the editing quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can efficiently achieve state-of-the-art performance on various fine-grained image editing tasks, including editing within a single image (e.g., object moving, resizing, and content dragging) and across images (e.g., appearance replacing and object pasting). 

DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
Zhihong Shao, Peiyi Wang, Qihao Zhu, Runxin Xu, Junxiao Song, Mingchuan Zhang, Y.K. Li, Y. Wu, Daya Guo
Mathematical reasoning poses a significant challenge for language models due to its complex and structured nature. In this paper, we introduce DeepSeekMath 7B, which continues pre-training DeepSeek-Coder-Base-v1.5 7B with 120B math-related tokens sourced from Common Crawl, together with natural language and code data. DeepSeekMath 7B has achieved an impressive score of 51.7% on the competition-level MATH benchmark without relying on external toolkits and voting techniques, approaching the performance level of Gemini-Ultra and GPT-4. Self-consistency over 64 samples from DeepSeekMath 7B achieves 60.9% on MATH. The mathematical reasoning capability of DeepSeekMath is attributed to two key factors: First, we harness the significant potential of publicly available web data through a meticulously engineered data selection pipeline. Second, we introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a variant of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), that enhances mathematical reasoning abilities while concurrently optimizing the memory usage of PPO.

Break the Sequential Dependency of LLM Inference Using Lookahead Decoding
Yichao Fu, Peter Bailis, Ion Stoica, Hao Zhang
Autoregressive decoding of large language models (LLMs) is memory bandwidth bounded, resulting in high latency and significant wastes of the parallel processing power of modern accelerators. Existing methods for accelerating LLM decoding often require a draft model (e.g., speculative decoding), which is nontrivial to obtain and unable to generalize. In this paper, we introduce Lookahead decoding, an exact, parallel decoding algorithm that accelerates LLM decoding without needing auxiliary models or data stores. It allows trading per-step log(FLOPs) to reduce the number of total decoding steps, is more parallelizable on single or multiple modern accelerators, and is compatible with concurrent memory-efficient attention (e.g., FlashAttention). Our implementation of Lookahead decoding can speed up autoregressive decoding by up to 1.8x on MT-bench and 4x with strong scaling on multiple GPUs in code completion tasks. 

QuIP#: Even Better LLM Quantization with Hadamard Incoherence and Lattice Codebooks
Albert Tseng, Jerry Chee, Qingyao Sun, Volodymyr Kuleshov, Christopher De Sa
Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces the memory footprint of LLMs by quantizing their weights to low-precision. In this work, we introduce QuIP#, a weight-only PTQ method that achieves state-of-the-art results in extreme compression regimes (≤ 4 bits per weight) using three novel techniques. First, QuIP# improves the incoherence processing from QuIP by using the randomized Hadamard transform, which is faster and has better theoretical properties. Second, QuIP# uses vector quantization techniques to take advantage of the ball-shaped sub-Gaussian distribution that incoherent weights possess: specifically, we introduce a set of hardware-efficient codebooks based on the highly symmetric E8 lattice, which achieves the optimal 8-dimension unit ball packing. Third, QuIP# uses fine-tuning to improve fidelity to the original model. Our experiments show that QuIP# outperforms existing PTQ methods, enables new behaviors in PTQ scaling, and supports fast inference.

Hydragen: High-Throughput LLM Inference with Shared Prefixes
Jordan Juravsky, Bradley Brown, Ryan Ehrlich, Daniel Y. Fu, Christopher Ré, Azalia Mirhoseini
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) are now deployed to hundreds of millions of users. LLM inference is commonly performed on batches of sequences that share a prefix, such as few-shot examples or a chatbot system prompt. Decoding in this large-batch setting can be bottlenecked by the attention operation, which reads large key-value (KV) caches from memory and computes inefficient matrix-vector products for every sequence in the batch. In this work, we introduce Hydragen, a hardware-aware exact implementation of attention with shared prefixes. Hydragen computes attention over the shared prefix and unique suffixes separately. This decomposition enables efficient prefix attention by batching queries together across sequences, reducing redundant memory reads and enabling the use of hardware-friendly matrix multiplications. Our method can improve end-to-end LLM throughput by up to 32x against competitive baselines, with speedup growing with the batch size and shared prefix length. Hydragen also enables the use of very long shared contexts: with a high batch size, increasing the prefix length from 1K to 16K tokens decreases Hydragen throughput by less than 15%, while the throughput of baselines drops by over 90%. Hydragen generalizes beyond simple prefix-suffix decomposition and can be applied to tree-based prompt sharing patterns, allowing us to further reduce inference time on competitive programming problems by 55%.

LESS: Selecting Influential Data for Targeted Instruction Tuning
Mengzhou Xia, Sadhika Malladi, Suchin Gururangan, Sanjeev Arora, Danqi Chen
Instruction tuning has unlocked powerful capabilities in large language models (LLMs), effectively using combined datasets to develop generalpurpose chatbots. However, real-world applications often require a specialized suite of skills (e.g., reasoning). The challenge lies in identifying the most relevant data from these extensive datasets to effectively develop specific capabilities, a setting we frame as targeted instruction tuning. We propose LESS, an optimizer-aware and practically efficient algorithm to effectively estimate data influences and perform Low-rank gradiEnt Similarity Search for instruction data selection. Crucially, LESS adapts existing influence formulations to work with the Adam optimizer and variable-length instruction data. LESS first constructs a highly reusable and transferable gradient datastore with low-dimensional gradient features and then selects examples based on their similarity to few-shot examples embodying a specific capability. Experiments show that training on a LESS-selected 5% of the data can often outperform training on the full dataset across diverse downstream tasks. Furthermore, the selected data is highly transferable: smaller models can be leveraged to select useful data for larger models and models from different families. Our qualitative analysis shows that our method goes beyond surface form cues to identify data that exemplifies the necessary reasoning skills for the intended downstream application.

Hydra: Sequentially-Dependent Draft Heads for Medusa Decoding
Zachary Ankner, Rishab Parthasarathy, Aniruddha Nrusimha, Christopher Rinard, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, William Brandon
To combat the memory bandwidth-bound nature of autoregressive LLM inference, previous research has proposed the speculative decoding framework. To perform speculative decoding, a small draft model proposes candidate continuations of the input sequence, that are then verified in parallel by the base model. One way to specify the draft model, as used in the recent Medusa decoding framework, is as a collection of light-weight heads, called draft heads, that operate on the base model's hidden states. To date, all existing draft heads have been sequentially independent, meaning that they speculate tokens in the candidate continuation independently of any preceding tokens in the candidate continuation. In this work, we propose Hydra heads, a sequentially dependent, drop-in replacement for standard draft heads that significantly improves speculation accuracy. Decoding with Hydra heads improves throughput compared to Medusa decoding with standard draft heads. We further explore the design space of Hydra head training objectives and architectures, and propose a carefully-tuned Hydra head recipe, which we call Hydra++, that improves decoding throughput by 1.31x and 2.71x compared to Medusa decoding and autoregressive decoding, respectively. Overall, Hydra heads are a simple intervention on standard draft heads that significantly improve the end-to-end speed of draft head based speculative decoding.

EfficientViT-SAM: Accelerated Segment Anything Model Without Performance Loss
Zhuoyang Zhang, Han Cai, Song Han
We present EfficientViT-SAM, a new family of accelerated segment anything models. We retain SAM's lightweight prompt encoder and mask decoder while replacing the heavy image encoder with EfficientViT. For the training, we begin with the knowledge distillation from the SAM-ViT-H image encoder to EfficientViT. Subsequently, we conduct end-to-end training on the SA-1B dataset. Benefiting from EfficientViT's efficiency and capacity, EfficientViT-SAM delivers 48.9x measured TensorRT speedup on A100 GPU over SAM-ViT-H without sacrificing performance.

Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
Anian Ruoss, Grégoire Delétang, Sourabh Medapati, Jordi Grau-Moya, Li Kevin Wenliang, Elliot Catt, John Reid, Tim Genewein
The recent breakthrough successes in machine learning are mainly attributed to scale: namely large-scale attention-based architectures and datasets of unprecedented scale. This paper investigates the impact of training at scale for chess. Unlike traditional chess engines that rely on complex heuristics, explicit search, or a combination of both, we train a 270M parameter transformer model with supervised learning on a dataset of 10 million chess games. We annotate each board in the dataset with action-values provided by the powerful Stockfish 16 engine, leading to roughly 15 billion data points. Our largest model reaches a Lichess blitz Elo of 2895 against humans, and successfully solves a series of challenging chess puzzles, without any domain-specific tweaks or explicit search algorithms. We also show that our model outperforms AlphaZero's policy and value networks (without MCTS) and GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct. A systematic investigation of model and dataset size shows that strong chess performance only arises at sufficient scale. To validate our results, we perform an extensive series of ablations of design choices and hyperparameters.

Accurate LoRA-Finetuning Quantization of LLMs via Information Retention
Haotong Qin, Xudong Ma, Xingyu Zheng, Xiaoyang Li, Yang Zhang, Shouda Liu, Jie Luo, Xianglong Liu, Michele Magno
The LoRA-finetuning quantization of LLMs has been extensively studied to obtain accurate yet compact LLMs for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. However, existing methods cause the quantized LLM to severely degrade and even fail to benefit from the finetuning of LoRA. This paper proposes a novel IR-QLoRA for pushing quantized LLMs with LoRA to be highly accurate through information retention. The proposed IR-QLoRA mainly relies on two technologies derived from the perspective of unified information: (1) statistics-based Information Calibration Quantization allows the quantized parameters of LLM to retain original information accurately; (2) finetuning-based Information Elastic Connection makes LoRA utilizes elastic representation transformation with diverse information. Comprehensive experiments show that IR-QLoRA can significantly improve accuracy across LLaMA and LLaMA2 families under 2-4 bit-widths, e.g., 4- bit LLaMA-7B achieves 1.4% improvement on MMLU compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The significant performance gain requires only a tiny 0.31% additional time consumption, revealing the satisfactory efficiency of our IRQLoRA. We highlight that IR-QLoRA enjoys excellent versatility, compatible with various frameworks (e.g., NormalFloat and Integer quantization) and brings general accuracy gains.

AttnLRP: Attention-Aware Layer-wise Relevance Propagation for Transformers
Reduan Achtibat, Sayed Mohammad Vakilzadeh Hatefi, Maximilian Dreyer, Aakriti Jain, Thomas Wiegand, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek
Large Language Models are prone to biased predictions and hallucinations, underlining the paramount importance of understanding their model-internal reasoning process. However, achieving faithful attributions for the entirety of a black-box transformer model and maintaining computational efficiency is an unsolved challenge. By extending the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation attribution method to handle attention layers, we address these challenges effectively. While partial solutions exist, our method is the first to faithfully and holistically attribute not only input but also latent representations of transformer models with the computational efficiency similar to a singular backward pass. Through extensive evaluations against existing methods on Llama 2, Flan-T5 and the Vision Transformer architecture, we demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses alternative methods in terms of faithfulness and enables the understanding of latent representations, opening up the door for concept-based explanations. 

GenTranslate: Large Language Models are Generative Multilingual Speech and Machine Translators
Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Ruizhe Li, Dong Zhang, Zhehuai Chen, Eng Siong Chng
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stepped forward the development of multilingual speech and machine translation by its reduced representation errors and incorporated external knowledge. However, both translation tasks typically utilize beam search decoding and top-1 hypothesis selection for inference. These techniques struggle to fully exploit the rich information in the diverse N-best hypotheses, making them less optimal for translation tasks that require a single, high-quality output sequence. In this paper, we propose a new generative paradigm for translation tasks, namely "GenTranslate", which builds upon LLMs to generate better results from the diverse translation versions in N-best list. Leveraging the rich linguistic knowledge and strong reasoning abilities of LLMs, our new paradigm can integrate the rich information in N-best candidates to generate a higher-quality translation result. Furthermore, to support LLM finetuning, we build and release a HypoTranslate dataset that contains over 592K hypotheses-translation pairs in 11 languages. Experiments on various speech and machine translation benchmarks (e.g., FLEURS, CoVoST-2, WMT) demonstrate that our GenTranslate significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model.

X-LoRA: Mixture of Low-Rank Adapter Experts, a Flexible Framework for Large Language Models with Applications in Protein Mechanics and Design
Eric L. Buehler, Markus J. Buehler
We report a mixture of expert strategy to create fine-tuned large language models using a deep layer-wise token-level approach based on low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Starting with a set of pre-trained LoRA adapters, we propose a gating strategy that uses the hidden states to dynamically mix adapted layers, allowing the resulting X-LoRA model to draw upon different capabilities and create never-before-used deep layer-wise combinations of adaptations are established to solve specific tasks. The design is inspired by the biological principles of universality and diversity, where neural network building blocks are reused in different hierarchical manifestations. Hence, the X-LoRA model can be easily implemented for any existing large language model (LLM) without a need for modifications of the underlying structure. We develop a tailored X-LoRA model that offers scientific capabilities including forward/inverse analysis tasks and enhanced reasoning capability, focused on biomaterial analysis, protein mechanics and design. The impact of this work include access to readily expandable, adaptable and changeable models with strong domain knowledge and the capability to integrate across areas of knowledge. With the X-LoRA model featuring experts in biology, mathematics, reasoning, bio-inspired materials, mechanics and materials, chemistry, and protein mechanics we conduct a series of physics-focused case studies. We examine knowledge recall, protein mechanics forward/inverse tasks, protein design, and adversarial agentic modeling including ontological knowledge graphs. The model is capable not only of making quantitative predictions of nanomechanical properties of proteins, but also reasons over the results and correctly predicts likely mechanisms that explain distinct molecular behaviors.

Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models via Classifier-Free Guidance
Linxi Zhao, Yihe Deng, Weitong Zhang, Quanquan Gu
The advancement of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has increasingly highlighted the critical issue of their tendency to hallucinate non-existing objects in the images. To address this issue, previous works focused on using specially curated datasets or powerful LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5) to rectify the outputs of LVLMs. However, these approaches require either expensive training/fine-tuning or API access to advanced LLMs to correct the model's output post-generation. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing a framework called Mitigating hallucinAtion via classifieR-Free guIdaNcE (MARINE), which is both training-free and API-free, and can effectively and efficiently reduce object hallucinations during the generation process. Specifically, MARINE enriches the visual context of LVLMs by integrating existing open-source vision models, and employs classifier-free guidance to incorporate the additional object grounding features to improve the precision of LVLMs' generations. Through comprehensive evaluations across 6 popular LVLMs with diverse evaluation metrics, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MARINE, which even outperforms existing fine-tuning-based methods. Remarkably, it not only reduces hallucinations but also improves the detailedness of LVLMs' generations, as assessed by GPT-4V.

BASE TTS: Lessons from building a billion-parameter Text-to-Speech model on 100K hours of data
Mateusz Łajszczak, Guillermo Cámbara, Yang Li, Fatih Beyhan, Arent van Korlaar, Fan Yang, Arnaud Joly, Álvaro Martín-Cortinas, Ammar Abbas, Adam Michalski, Alexis Moinet, Sri Karlapati, Ewa Muszyńska, Haohan Guo, Bartosz Putrycz, Soledad López Gambino, Kayeon Yoo, Elena Sokolova, Thomas Drugman
We introduce a text-to-speech (TTS) model called BASE TTS, which stands for Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities. BASE TTS is the largest TTS model to-date, trained on 100K hours of public domain speech data, achieving a new state-of-the-art in speech naturalness. It deploys a 1-billion-parameter autoregressive Transformer that converts raw texts into discrete codes ("speechcodes") followed by a convolution-based decoder which converts these speechcodes into waveforms in an incremental, streamable manner. Further, our speechcodes are built using a novel speech tokenization technique that features speaker ID disentanglement and compression with byte-pair encoding. Echoing the widely-reported "emergent abilities" of large language models when trained on increasing volume of data, we show that BASE TTS variants built with 10K+ hours and 500M+ parameters begin to demonstrate natural prosody on textually complex sentences. We design and share a specialized dataset to measure these emergent abilities for text-to-speech. We showcase state-of-the-art naturalness of BASE TTS by evaluating against baselines that include publicly available large-scale text-to-speech systems: YourTTS, Bark and TortoiseTTS. 

Get More with LESS: Synthesizing Recurrence with KV Cache Compression for Efficient LLM Inference
Harry Dong, Xinyu Yang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhangyang Wang, Yuejie Chi, Beidi Chen
Many computational factors limit broader deployment of large language models. In this paper, we focus on a memory bottleneck imposed by the key-value (KV) cache, a computational shortcut that requires storing previous KV pairs during decoding. While existing KV cache methods approach this problem by pruning or evicting large swaths of relatively less important KV pairs to dramatically reduce the memory footprint of the cache, they can have limited success in tasks that require recollecting a majority of previous tokens. To alleviate this issue, we propose LESS, a simple integration of a (nearly free) constant sized cache with eviction-based cache methods, such that all tokens can be queried at later decoding steps. Its ability to retain information throughout time shows merit on a variety of tasks where we demonstrate LESS can help reduce the performance gap from caching everything, sometimes even matching it, all while being efficient.

Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context
In this report, we present the latest model of the Gemini family, Gemini 1.5 Pro, a highly compute-efficient multimodal mixture-of-experts model capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improves the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and matches or surpasses Gemini 1.0 Ultra’s state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5 Pro’s long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 2.1 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person learning from the same content.

How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs
Noveen Sachdeva, Benjamin Coleman, Wang-Cheng Kang, Jianmo Ni, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi, James Caverlee, Julian McAuley, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng
The training of large language models (LLMs) is expensive. In this paper, we study data-efficient approaches for pre-training LLMs, i.e., techniques that aim to optimize the Pareto frontier of model quality and training resource/data consumption. We seek to understand the tradeoffs associated with data selection routines based on (i) expensive-to-compute data-quality estimates, and (ii) maximization of coverage and diversity-based measures in the feature space. Our first technique, Ask-LLM, leverages the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs to directly assess the quality of a training example. To target coverage, we propose Density sampling, which models the data distribution to select a diverse sample. In our comparison of 19 samplers, involving hundreds of evaluation tasks and pre-training runs, we find that Ask-LLM and Density are the best methods in their respective categories. Coverage sampling can recover the performance of the full data, while models trained on Ask-LLM data consistently outperform full-data training -- even when we reject 90% of the original dataset, while converging up to 70% faster.

Uncertainty Decomposition and Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models
Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Xuchao Zhang, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, Haifeng Chen
In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLM's response, such as hallucination, have also been actively discussed. Existing works have been devoted to quantifying the uncertainty in LLM's response, but they often overlook the complex nature of LLMs and the uniqueness of in-context learning. In this work, we delve into the predictive uncertainty of LLMs associated with in-context learning, highlighting that such uncertainties may stem from both the provided demonstrations (aleatoric uncertainty) and ambiguities tied to the model's configurations (epistemic uncertainty). We propose a novel formulation and corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the decomposition.

RS-DPO: A Hybrid Rejection Sampling and Direct Preference Optimization Method for Alignment of Large Language Models
Saeed Khaki, JinJin Li, Lan Ma, Liu Yang, Prathap Ramachandra
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been extensively employed to align large language models with user intent. However, proximal policy optimization (PPO) based RLHF is occasionally unstable requiring significant hyperparameter finetuning, and computationally expensive to maximize the estimated reward during alignment. Recently, direct preference optimization (DPO) is proposed to address those challenges. However, DPO relies on contrastive responses generated from human annotator and alternative LLM, instead of the policy model, limiting the effectiveness of the RLHF. In this paper, we addresses both challenges by systematically combining rejection sampling (RS) and DPO. Our proposed method, RS-DPO, initiates with the development of a supervised fine-tuned policy model (SFT). A varied set of k responses per prompt are sampled directly from the SFT model. RS-DPO identifies pairs of contrastive samples based on their reward distribution. Finally, we apply DPO with the contrastive samples to align the model to human preference. Our experiments indicate that our proposed method effectively fine-tunes LLMs with limited resource environments, leading to improved alignment with user intent. Furthermore, it outperforms existing methods, including RS, PPO, and DPO.

Zero-Shot Unsupervised and Text-Based Audio Editing Using DDPM Inversion
Hila Manor, Tomer Michaeli
Editing signals using large pre-trained models, in a zero-shot manner, has recently seen rapid advancements in the image domain. However, this wave has yet to reach the audio domain. In this paper, we explore two zero-shot editing techniques for audio signals, which use DDPM inversion on pre-trained diffusion models. The first, adopted from the image domain, allows text-based editing. The second, is a novel approach for discovering semantically meaningful editing directions without supervision. When applied to music signals, this method exposes a range of musically interesting modifications, from controlling the participation of specific instruments to improvisations on the melody. 

BitDelta: Your Fine-Tune May Only Be Worth One Bit
James Liu, Guangxuan Xiao, Kai Li, Jason D. Lee, Song Han, Tri Dao, Tianle Cai
Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained in two phases: pre-training on large internet-scale datasets, and fine-tuning for downstream tasks. Given the higher computational demand of pre-training, it's intuitive to assume that fine-tuning adds less new information to the model, and is thus more compressible. We explore this assumption by decomposing the weights of fine-tuned models into their pre-trained components and an additional delta. We introduce a simple method, BitDelta, which successfully quantizes this delta down to 1 bit without compromising performance. This interesting finding not only highlights the potential redundancy of information added during fine-tuning, but also has significant implications for the multi-tenant serving and multi-tenant storage of fine-tuned models. By enabling the use of a single high-precision base model accompanied by multiple 1-bit deltas, BitDelta dramatically reduces GPU memory requirements by more than 10x, which can also be translated to enhanced generation latency in multi-tenant settings. We validate BitDelta through experiments across Llama-2 and Mistral model families, and on models up to 70B parameters, showcasing minimal performance degradation over all tested settings.

Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video
This paper explores feature prediction as a stand-alone objective for unsupervised learning from video and introduces V-JEPA, a collection of vision models trained solely using a feature prediction objective, without the use of pretrained image encoders, text, negative examples, reconstruction, or other sources of supervision. The models are trained on 2 million videos collected from public datasets and are evaluated on downstream image and video tasks. Our results show that learning by predicting video features leads to versatile visual representations that perform well on both motion and appearance-based tasks, without adaption of the model’s parameters; e.g., using a frozen backbone, our largest model, a ViT-H/16 trained only on videos, obtains 81.9% on Kinetics-400, 72.2% on Something-Something-v2, and 77.9% on ImageNet1K.

Recurrent Memory Transformer
Transformer-based models show their effectiveness across multiple domains and tasks. The self-attention allows to combine information from all sequence elements into context-aware representations. However, global and local information has to be stored mostly in the same element-wise representations. Moreover, the length of an input sequence is limited by quadratic computational complexity of selfattention. In this work, we propose and study a memory-augmented segment-level recurrent Transformer (RMT). Memory allows to store and process local and global information as well as to pass information between segments of the long sequence with the help of recurrence. We implement a memory mechanism with no changes to Transformer model by adding special memory tokens to the input or output sequence. Then the model is trained to control both memory operations and sequence representations processing. Results of experiments show that RMT performs on par with the Transformer-XL on language modeling for smaller memory sizes and outperforms it for tasks that require longer sequence processing. We show that adding memory tokens to Tr-XL is able to improve its performance. This makes Recurrent Memory Transformer a promising architecture for applications that require learning of long-term dependencies and general purpose in memory processing, such as algorithmic tasks and reasoning.

A Human-Inspired Reading Agent with Gist Memory of Very Long Contexts
Kuang-Huei Lee, Xinyun Chen, Hiroki Furuta, John Canny, Ian Fischer
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are not only limited to some maximum context length, but also are not able to robustly consume long inputs. To address these limitations, we propose ReadAgent, an LLM agent system that increases effective context length up to 20x in our experiments. Inspired by how humans interactively read long documents, we implement ReadAgent as a simple prompting system that uses the advanced language capabilities of LLMs to (1) decide what content to store together in a memory episode, (2) compress those memory episodes into short episodic memories called gist memories, and (3) take actions to look up passages in the original text if ReadAgent needs to remind itself of relevant details to complete a task. We evaluate ReadAgent against baselines using retrieval methods, using the original long contexts, and using the gist memories. These evaluations are performed on three long-document reading comprehension tasks: QuALITY, NarrativeQA, and QMSum. ReadAgent outperforms the baselines on all three tasks while extending the effective context window by 3-20x.

DoRA: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation
Shih-Yang Liu, Chien-Yi Wang, Hongxu Yin, Pavlo Molchanov, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Min-Hung Chen
Among the widely used parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods, LoRA and its variants have gained considerable popularity because of avoiding additional inference costs. However, there still often exists an accuracy gap between these methods and full fine-tuning (FT). In this work, we first introduce a novel weight decomposition analysis to investigate the inherent differences between FT and LoRA. Aiming to resemble the learning capacity of FT from the findings, we propose Weight-Decomposed LowRank Adaptation (DoRA). DoRA decomposes the pre-trained weight into two components, magnitude and direction, for fine-tuning, specifically employing LoRA for directional updates to efficiently minimize the number of trainable parameters. By employing DoRA, we enhance both the learning capacity and training stability of LoRA while avoiding any additional inference overhead. DoRA consistently outperforms LoRA on fine-tuning LLaMA, LLaVA, and VL-BART on various downstream tasks, such as commonsense reasoning, visual instruction tuning, and image/video-text understanding.

In Search of Needles in a 10M Haystack: Recurrent Memory Finds What LLMs Miss
Yuri Kuratov, Aydar Bulatov, Petr Anokhin, Dmitry Sorokin, Artyom Sorokin, Mikhail Burtsev
This paper addresses the challenge of processing long documents using generative transformer models. To evaluate different approaches, we introduce BABILong, a new benchmark designed to assess model capabilities in extracting and processing distributed facts within extensive texts. Our evaluation, which includes benchmarks for GPT-4 and RAG, reveals that common methods are effective only for sequences up to 104 elements. In contrast, fine-tuning GPT-2 with recurrent memory augmentations enables it to handle tasks involving up to 107 elements. This achievement marks a substantial leap, as it is by far the longest input processed by any open neural network model to date, demonstrating a significant improvement in the processing capabilities for long sequences.

Brant-2: Foundation Model for Brain Signals
Zhizhang Yuan, Daoze Zhang, Junru Chen, Geifei Gu, Yang Yang
Foundational models benefit from pre-training on large amounts of unlabeled data and enable strong performance in a wide variety of applications with a small amount of labeled data. Such models can be particularly effective in analyzing brain signals, as this field encompasses numerous application scenarios, and it is costly to perform large-scale annotation. In this work, we present the largest foundation model in brain signals, Brant-2. Compared to Brant, a foundation model designed for intracranial neural signals, Brant-2 not only exhibits robustness towards data variations and modeling scales but also can be applied to a broader range of brain neural data. By experimenting on an extensive range of tasks, we demonstrate that Brant-2 is adaptive to various application scenarios in brain signals. Further analyses reveal the scalability of the Brant-2, validate each component's effectiveness, and showcase our model's ability to maintain performance in scenarios with scarce labels. 

WKVQuant: Quantizing Weight and Key/Value Cache for Large Language Models Gains More
Yuxuan Yue, Zhihang Yuan, Haojie Duanmu, Sifan Zhou, Jianlong Wu, Liqiang Nie
Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant deployment challenges due to their substantial memory requirements and the computational demands of auto-regressive text generation process. This paper addresses these challenges by focusing on the quantization of LLMs, a technique that reduces memory consumption by converting model parameters and activations into low-bit integers. We critically analyze the existing quantization approaches, identifying their limitations in balancing the accuracy and efficiency of the quantized LLMs. To advance beyond these limitations, we propose WKVQuant, a PTQ framework especially designed for quantizing weights and the key/value (KV) cache of LLMs. Specifically, we incorporates past-only quantization to improve the computation of attention. Additionally, we introduce two-dimensional quantization strategy to handle the distribution of KV cache, along with a cross-block reconstruction regularization for parameter optimization. Experiments show that WKVQuant achieves almost comparable memory savings to weight-activation quantization, while also approaching the performance of weight-only quantization.

Relative Preference Optimization: Enhancing LLM Alignment through Contrasting Responses across Identical and Diverse Prompts
Yueqin Yin, Zhendong Wang, Yi Gu, Hai Huang, Weizhu Chen, Mingyuan Zhou
In the field of large language models (LLMs), aligning models with the diverse preferences of users is a critical challenge. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has played a key role in this area. It works by using pairs of preferences derived from the same prompts, and it functions without needing an additional reward model. However, DPO does not fully reflect the complex nature of human learning, which often involves understanding contrasting responses to not only identical but also similar questions. To overcome this shortfall, we propose Relative Preference Optimization (RPO). RPO is designed to discern between more and less preferred responses derived from both identical and related prompts. It introduces a contrastive weighting mechanism, enabling the tuning of LLMs using a broader range of preference data, including both paired and unpaired sets. This approach expands the learning capabilities of the model, allowing it to leverage insights from a more varied set of prompts. Through empirical tests, including dialogue and summarization tasks, and evaluations using the AlpacaEval2.0 leaderboard, RPO has demonstrated a superior ability to align LLMs with user preferences and to improve their adaptability during the training process. 

Generation Meets Verification: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Smart Parallel Auto-Correct Decoding
Hanling Yi, Feng Lin, Hongbin Li, Peiyang Ning, Xiaotian Yu, Rong Xiao
This research aims to accelerate the inference speed of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters. We propose \textbf{S}mart \textbf{P}arallel \textbf{A}uto-\textbf{C}orrect d\textbf{E}coding (SPACE), an innovative approach designed for achieving lossless acceleration of LLMs. By integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities, SPACE uniquely enables autoregressive LLMs to parallelize token generation and verification. This is realized through a specialized semi-autoregressive supervised fine-tuning process that equips existing LLMs with the ability to simultaneously predict multiple tokens. Additionally, an auto-correct decoding algorithm facilitates the simultaneous generation and verification of token sequences within a single model invocation. Through extensive experiments on a range of LLMs, SPACE has demonstrated inference speedup ranging from 2.7x-4.0x on HumanEval-X while maintaining output quality.

Aligning Modalities in Vision Large Language Models via Preference Fine-tuning
Yiyang Zhou, Chenhang Cui, Rafael Rafailov, Chelsea Finn, Huaxiu Yao
Instruction-following Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved significant progress recently on a variety of tasks. These approaches merge strong pre-trained vision models and large language models (LLMs). Since these components are trained separately, the learned representations need to be aligned with joint training on additional image-language pairs. This procedure is not perfect and can cause the model to hallucinate - provide answers that do not accurately reflect the image, even when the core LLM is highly factual and the vision backbone has sufficiently complete representations. In this work, we frame the hallucination problem as an alignment issue, tackle it with preference tuning. Specifically, we propose POVID to generate feedback data with AI models. We use ground-truth instructions as the preferred response and a two-stage approach to generate dispreferred data. First, we prompt GPT-4V to inject plausible hallucinations into the correct answer. Second, we distort the image to trigger the inherent hallucination behavior of the VLLM. This is an automated approach, which does not rely on human data generation or require a perfect expert, which makes it easily scalable. Finally, both of these generation strategies are integrated into an RLHF pipeline via Direct Preference Optimization. In experiments across broad benchmarks, we show that we can not only reduce hallucinations, but improve model performance across standard benchmarks, outperforming prior approaches. 

Data Engineering for Scaling Language Models to 128K Context
Yao Fu, Rameswar Panda, Xinyao Niu, Xiang Yue, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yoon Kim, Hao Peng
We study the continual pretraining recipe for scaling language models' context lengths to 128K, with a focus on data engineering. We hypothesize that long context modeling, in particular \textit{the ability to utilize information at arbitrary input locations}, is a capability that is mostly already acquired through large-scale pretraining, and that this capability can be readily extended to contexts substantially longer than seen during training~(e.g., 4K to 128K) through lightweight continual pretraining on appropriate data mixture. We investigate the \textit{quantity} and \textit{quality} of the data for continual pretraining: (1) for quantity, we show that 500 million to 5 billion tokens are enough to enable the model to retrieve information anywhere within the 128K context; (2) for quality, our results equally emphasize \textit{domain balance} and \textit{length upsampling}. Concretely, we find that naively upsampling longer data on certain domains like books, a common practice of existing work, gives suboptimal performance, and that a balanced domain mixture is important. We demonstrate that continual pretraining of the full model on 1B-5B tokens of such data is an effective and affordable strategy for scaling the context length of language models to 128K. Our recipe outperforms strong open-source long-context models and closes the gap to frontier models like GPT-4 128K.

Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology
This work introduces Gemma, a family of lightweight, state-of-the art open models built from the research and technology used to create Gemini models. Gemma models demonstrate strong performance across academic benchmarks for language understanding, reasoning, and safety. We release two sizes of models (2 billion and 7 billion parameters), and provide both pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints. Gemma outperforms similarly sized open models on 11 out of 18 text-based tasks, and we present comprehensive evaluations of safety and responsibility aspects of the models, alongside a detailed description of model development. We believe the responsible release of LLMs is critical for improving the safety of frontier models, and for enabling the next wave of LLM innovations.

Smaug: Fixing Failure Modes of Preference Optimisation with DPO-Positive
Arka Pal, Deep Karkhanis, Samuel Dooley, Manley Roberts, Siddartha Naidu, Colin White
Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) is effective at significantly improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks such as reasoning, summarisation, and alignment. Using pairs of preferred and dispreferred data, DPO models the \textit{relative} probability of picking one response over another. In this work, first we show theoretically that the standard DPO loss can lead to a \textit{reduction} of the model's likelihood of the preferred examples, as long as the relative probability between the preferred and dispreferred classes increases. We then show empirically that this phenomenon occurs when fine-tuning LLMs on common datasets, especially datasets in which the edit distance between pairs of completions is low. Using these insights, we design DPO-Positive (DPOP), a new loss function and training procedure which avoids this failure mode. Surprisingly, we also find that DPOP significantly outperforms DPO across a wide variety of datasets and downstream tasks, including datasets with high edit distances between completions. By fine-tuning with DPOP, we create and release Smaug-34B and Smaug-72B, which achieve state-of-the-art open-source performance. Notably, Smaug-72B is nearly 2\% better than any other open-source model on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard and becomes the first open-source LLM to surpass an average accuracy of 80\%.

Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE
Zhiyuan Zeng, Qipeng Guo, Zhaoye Fei, Zhangyue Yin, Yunhua Zhou, Linyang Li, Tianxiang Sun, Hang Yan, Dahua Lin, Xipeng Qiu
Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are popular for training large language models due to their computational efficiency. However, the commonly used top-k routing mechanism suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to the unbalanced routing. Some experts are overflow, where the exceeding tokens are dropped. While some experts are vacant, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. To address the dropped tokens and padding, we propose the Rectify-Router, comprising the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification. The Intra-GPU Rectification handles dropped tokens, efficiently routing them to experts within the GPU where they are located to avoid inter-GPU communication. The Fill-in Rectification addresses padding by replacing padding tokens with the tokens that have high routing scores. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification effectively handle dropped tokens and padding, respectively. Furthermore, the combination of them achieves superior performance, surpassing the accuracy of the vanilla top-1 router by 4.7%.

HyperMoE: Towards Better Mixture of Experts via Transferring Among Experts
Hao Zhao, Zihan Qiu, Huijia Wu, Zili Wang, Zhaofeng He, Jie Fu
The Mixture of Experts (MoE) for language models has been proven effective in augmenting the capacity of models by dynamically routing each input token to a specific subset of experts for processing. Despite the success, most existing methods face a challenge for balance between sparsity and the availability of expert knowledge: enhancing performance through increased use of expert knowledge often results in diminishing sparsity during expert selection. To mitigate this contradiction, we propose HyperMoE, a novel MoE framework built upon Hypernetworks. This framework integrates the computational processes of MoE with the concept of knowledge transferring in multi-task learning. Specific modules generated based on the information of unselected experts serve as supplementary information, which allows the knowledge of experts not selected to be used while maintaining selection sparsity. Our comprehensive empirical evaluations across multiple datasets and backbones establish that HyperMoE significantly outperforms existing MoE methods under identical conditions concerning the number of experts.

EBFT: Effective and Block-Wise Fine-Tuning for Sparse LLMs
Song Guo, Fan Wu, Lei Zhang, Xiawu Zheng, Shengchuan Zhang, Fei Chao, Yiyu Shi, Rongrong Ji
Existing methods for fine-tuning sparse LLMs often suffer from resource-intensive requirements and high retraining costs. Additionally, many fine-tuning methods often rely on approximations or heuristic optimization strategies, which may lead to suboptimal solutions. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and fast framework for fine-tuning sparse LLMs based on minimizing reconstruction error. Our approach involves sampling a small dataset for calibration and utilizing backpropagation to iteratively optimize block-wise reconstruction error, on a block-by-block basis, aiming for optimal solutions. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superiority of our method over other baselines. For instance, on the Wikitext2 dataset with LlamaV1-7B at 70% sparsity, our proposed EBFT achieves a perplexity of 16.88, surpassing the state-of-the-art DSnoT with a perplexity of 75.14. Moreover, with a structured sparsity ratio of 26\%, EBFT achieves a perplexity of 16.27, outperforming LoRA (perplexity 16.44). Furthermore, the fine-tuning process of EBFT for LlamaV1-7B only takes approximately 30 minutes, and the entire framework can be executed on a single 16GB GPU. 

LongRoPE: Extending LLM Context Window Beyond 2 Million Tokens
Yiran Ding, Li Lyna Zhang, Chengruidong Zhang, Yuanyuan Xu, Ning Shang, Jiahang Xu, Fan Yang, Mao Yang
Large context window is a desirable feature in large language models (LLMs). However, due to high fine-tuning costs, scarcity of long texts, and catastrophic values introduced by new token positions, current extended context windows are limited to around 128k tokens. This paper introduces LongRoPE that, for the first time, extends the context window of pre-trained LLMs to an impressive 2048k tokens, with up to only 1k fine-tuning steps at within 256k training lengths, while maintaining performance at the original short context window. This is achieved by three key innovations: (i) we identify and exploit two forms of non-uniformities in positional interpolation through an efficient search, providing a better initialization for fine-tuning and enabling an 8x extension in non-fine-tuning scenarios; (ii) we introduce a progressive extension strategy that first fine-tunes a 256k length LLM and then conducts a second positional interpolation on the fine-tuned extended LLM to achieve a 2048k context window; (iii) we readjust LongRoPE on 8k length to recover the short context window performance. Extensive experiments on LLaMA2 and Mistral across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Models extended via LongRoPE retain the original architecture with minor modifications to the positional embedding, and can reuse most pre-existing optimizations.

Q-Probe: A Lightweight Approach to Reward Maximization for Language Models
Kenneth Li, Samy Jelassi, Hugh Zhang, Sham Kakade, Martin Wattenberg, David Brandfonbrener
We present an approach called Q-probing to adapt a pre-trained language model to maximize a task-specific reward function. At a high level, Q-probing sits between heavier approaches such as finetuning and lighter approaches such as few shot prompting, but can also be combined with either. The idea is to learn a simple linear function on a model's embedding space that can be used to reweight candidate completions. We theoretically show that this sampling procedure is equivalent to a KL-constrained maximization of the Q-probe as the number of samples increases. To train the Q-probes we consider either reward modeling or a class of novel direct policy learning objectives based on importance weighted policy gradients. With this technique, we see gains in domains with ground-truth rewards (code generation) as well as implicit rewards defined by preference data, even outperforming finetuning in data-limited regimes. Moreover, a Q-probe can be trained on top of an API since it only assumes access to sampling and embeddings. 

Take the Bull by the Horns: Hard Sample-Reweighted Continual Training Improves LLM Generalization
Xuxi Chen, Zhendong Wang, Daouda Sow, Junjie Yang, Tianlong Chen, Yingbin Liang, Mingyuan Zhou, Zhangyang Wang
In the rapidly advancing arena of large language models (LLMs), a key challenge is to enhance their capabilities amid a looming shortage of high-quality training data. Our study starts from an empirical strategy for the light continual training of LLMs using their original pre-training data sets, with a specific focus on selective retention of samples that incur moderately high losses. These samples are deemed informative and beneficial for model refinement, contrasting with the highest-loss samples, which would be discarded due to their correlation with data noise and complexity. We then formalize this strategy into a principled framework of Instance-Reweighted Distributionally Robust Optimization (IR-DRO). IR-DRO is designed to dynamically prioritize the training focus on informative samples through an instance reweighting mechanism, streamlined by a closed-form solution for straightforward integration into established training protocols. Through rigorous experimentation with various models and datasets, our findings indicate that our sample-targeted methods significantly improve LLM performance across multiple benchmarks, in both continual pre-training and instruction tuning scenarios.

Genie: Generative Interactive Environments
Jake Bruce, Michael Dennis, Ashley Edwards, Jack Parker-Holder, Yuge Shi, Edward Hughes, Matthew Lai, Aditi Mavalankar, Richie Steigerwald, Chris Apps, Yusuf Aytar, Sarah Bechtle, Feryal Behbahani, Stephanie Chan, Nicolas Heess, Lucy Gonzalez, Simon Osindero, Sherjil Ozair, Scott Reed, Jingwei Zhang, Konrad Zolna, Jeff Clune, Nando de Freitas, Satinder Singh, Tim Rocktäschel
We introduce Genie, the first generative interactive environment trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled Internet videos. The model can be prompted to generate an endless variety of action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches. At 11B parameters, Genie can be considered a foundation world model. It is comprised of a spatiotemporal video tokenizer, an autoregressive dynamics model, and a simple and scalable latent action model. Genie enables users to act in the generated environments on a frame-by-frame basis despite training without any ground-truth action labels or other domain-specific requirements typically found in the world model literature. Further the resulting learned latent action space facilitates training agents to imitate behaviors from unseen videos, opening the path for training generalist agents of the future.

MemoryPrompt: A Light Wrapper to Improve Context Tracking in Pre-trained Language Models
Nathanaël Carraz Rakotonirina, Marco Baroni
Transformer-based language models (LMs) track contextual information through large, hard-coded input windows. We introduce MemoryPrompt, a leaner approach in which the LM is complemented by a small auxiliary recurrent network that passes information to the LM by prefixing its regular input with a sequence of vectors, akin to soft prompts, without requiring LM finetuning. Tested on a task designed to probe a LM's ability to keep track of multiple fact updates, a MemoryPrompt-augmented LM outperforms much larger LMs that have access to the full input history. We also test MemoryPrompt on a long-distance dialogue dataset, where its performance is comparable to that of a model conditioned on the entire conversation history. In both experiments we also observe that, unlike full-finetuning approaches, MemoryPrompt does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting when adapted to new tasks, thus not disrupting the generalist capabilities of the underlying LM.

Fine-tuning CLIP Text Encoders with Two-step Paraphrasing
Hyunjae Kim, Seunghyun Yoon, Trung Bui, Handong Zhao, Quan Tran, Franck Dernoncourt, Jaewoo Kang
Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated considerable success across various vision-language tasks, such as text-to-image retrieval, where the model is required to effectively process natural language input to produce an accurate visual output. However, current models still face limitations in dealing with linguistic variations in input queries, such as paraphrases, making it challenging to handle a broad range of user queries in real-world applications. In this study, we introduce a straightforward fine-tuning approach to enhance the representations of CLIP models for paraphrases. Our approach involves a two-step paraphrase generation process, where we automatically create two categories of paraphrases from web-scale image captions by leveraging large language models. Subsequently, we fine-tune the CLIP text encoder using these generated paraphrases while freezing the image encoder. Our resulting model, which we call ParaCLIP, exhibits significant improvements over baseline CLIP models across various tasks, including paraphrased retrieval (with rank similarity scores improved by up to 2.0% and 5.6%), Visual Genome Relation and Attribution, as well as seven semantic textual similarity tasks.

BESA: Pruning Large Language Models with Blockwise Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Allocation
Peng Xu, Wenqi Shao, Mengzhao Chen, Shitao Tang, Kaipeng Zhang, Peng Gao, Fengwei An, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in various tasks, such as text summarization, text question-answering, and etc. While their performance is impressive, the computational footprint due to their vast number of parameters can be prohibitive. Existing solutions such as SparseGPT and Wanda attempt to alleviate this issue through weight pruning. However, their layer-wise approach results in significant perturbation to the model's output and requires meticulous hyperparameter tuning, such as the pruning rate, which can adversely affect overall model performance. To address this, this paper introduces a novel LLM pruning technique dubbed blockwise parameter-efficient sparsity allocation (BESA) by applying a blockwise reconstruction loss. In contrast to the typical layer-wise pruning techniques, BESA is characterized by two distinctive attributes: i) it targets the overall pruning error with respect to individual transformer blocks, and ii) it allocates layer-specific sparsity in a differentiable manner, both of which ensure reduced performance degradation after pruning. Our experiments show that BESA achieves state-of-the-art performance, efficiently pruning LLMs like LLaMA1, and LLaMA2 with 7B to 70B parameters on a single A100 GPU in just five hours. 

The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits
Shuming Ma, Hongyu Wang, Lingxiao Ma, Lei Wang, Wenhui Wang, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Ruiping Wang, Jilong Xue, Furu Wei
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.

No Token Left Behind: Reliable KV Cache Compression via Importance-Aware Mixed Precision Quantization
June Yong Yang, Byeongwook Kim, Jeongin Bae, Beomseok Kwon, Gunho Park, Eunho Yang, Se Jung Kwon, Dongsoo Lee
Key-Value (KV) Caching has become an essential technique for accelerating the inference speed and throughput of generative Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, the memory footprint of the KV cache poses a critical bottleneck in LLM deployment as the cache size grows with batch size and sequence length, often surpassing even the size of the model itself. Although recent methods were proposed to select and evict unimportant KV pairs from the cache to reduce memory consumption, the potential ramifications of eviction on the generative process are yet to be thoroughly examined. In this paper, we examine the detrimental impact of cache eviction and observe that unforeseen risks arise as the information contained in the KV pairs is exhaustively discarded, resulting in safety breaches, hallucinations, and context loss. Surprisingly, we find that preserving even a small amount of information contained in the evicted KV pairs via reduced precision quantization substantially recovers the incurred degradation. On the other hand, we observe that the important KV pairs must be kept at a relatively higher precision to safeguard the generation quality. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textit{Mixed-precision KV cache}~(MiKV), a reliable cache compression method that simultaneously preserves the context details by retaining the evicted KV pairs in low-precision and ensure generation quality by keeping the important KV pairs in high-precision. Experiments on diverse benchmarks and LLM backbones show that our proposed method offers a state-of-the-art trade-off between compression ratio and performance, compared to other baselines.

DropBP: Accelerating Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models by Dropping Backward Propagation
Sunghyeon Woo, Baeseong Park, Byeongwook Kim, Minjung Jo, Sejung Kwon, Dongsuk Jeon, Dongsoo Lee
Training deep neural networks typically involves substantial computational costs during both forward and backward propagation. The conventional layer dropping techniques drop certain layers during training for reducing the computations burden. However, dropping layers during forward propagation adversely affects the training process by degrading accuracy. In this paper, we propose Dropping Backward Propagation (DropBP), a novel approach designed to reduce computational costs while maintaining accuracy. DropBP randomly drops layers during the backward propagation, which does not deviate forward propagation. Moreover, DropBP calculates the sensitivity of each layer to assign appropriate drop rate, thereby stabilizing the training process. DropBP is designed to enhance the efficiency of the training process with backpropagation, thereby enabling the acceleration of both full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning using backpropagation. Specifically, utilizing DropBP in QLoRA reduces training time by 44%, increases the convergence speed to the identical loss level by 1.5×, and enables training with a 6.2× larger sequence length on a single NVIDIA-A100 80GiB GPU in LLaMA2-70B. T

CoDream: Exchanging dreams instead of models for federated aggregation with heterogeneous models
Abhishek Singh, Gauri Gupta, Ritvik Kapila, Yichuan Shi, Alex Dang, Sheshank Shankar, Mohammed Ehab, Ramesh Raskar
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative optimization of machine learning models across decentralized data by aggregating model parameters. Our approach extends this concept by aggregating "knowledge" derived from models, instead of model parameters. We present a novel framework called CoDream, where clients collaboratively optimize randomly initialized data using federated optimization in the input data space, similar to how randomly initialized model parameters are optimized in FL. Our key insight is that jointly optimizing this data can effectively capture the properties of the global data distribution. Sharing knowledge in data space offers numerous benefits: (1) model-agnostic collaborative learning, i.e., different clients can have different model architectures; (2) communication that is independent of the model size, eliminating scalability concerns with model parameters; (3) compatibility with secure aggregation, thus preserving the privacy benefits of federated learning; (4) allowing of adaptive optimization of knowledge shared for personalized learning. We empirically validate CoDream on standard FL tasks, demonstrating competitive performance despite not sharing model parameters.

Humanoid Locomotion as Next Token Prediction
Ilija Radosavovic, Bike Zhang, Baifeng Shi, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Sarthak Kamat, Trevor Darrell, Koushil Sreenath, Jitendra Malik
We cast real-world humanoid control as a next token prediction problem, akin to predicting the next word in language. Our model is a causal transformer trained via autoregressive prediction of sensorimotor trajectories. To account for the multi-modal nature of the data, we perform prediction in a modality-aligned way, and for each input token predict the next token from the same modality. This general formulation enables us to leverage data with missing modalities, like video trajectories without actions. We train our model on a collection of simulated trajectories coming from prior neural network policies, model-based controllers, motion capture data, and YouTube videos of humans. We show that our model enables a full-sized humanoid to walk in San Francisco zero-shot. Our model can transfer to the real world even when trained on only 27 hours of walking data, and can generalize to commands not seen during training like walking backward. These findings suggest a promising path toward learning challenging real-world control tasks by generative modeling of sensorimotor trajectories.

ResLoRA: Identity Residual Mapping in Low-Rank Adaption
Shuhua Shi, Shaohan Huang, Minghui Song, Zhoujun Li, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
As one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is commonly applied to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). However, updating the weights of LoRA blocks effectively and expeditiously is challenging due to the long calculation path in the original model. To address this, we propose ResLoRA, an improved framework of LoRA. By adding residual paths during training and using merging approaches to eliminate these extra paths during inference, our method can achieve better results in fewer training steps without any extra trainable parameters or inference cost compared to LoRA. The experiments on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To the best of our knowledge, ResLoRA is the first work that combines the residual path with LoRA. 

Griffin: Mixing Gated Linear Recurrences with Local Attention for Efficient Language Models
Soham De, Samuel L. Smith, Anushan Fernando, Aleksandar Botev, George Cristian-Muraru, Albert Gu, Ruba Haroun, Leonard Berrada, Yutian Chen, Srivatsan Srinivasan, Guillaume Desjardins, Arnaud Doucet, David Budden, Yee Whye Teh, Razvan Pascanu, Nando De Freitas, Caglar Gulcehre
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have fast inference and scale efficiently on long sequences, but they are difficult to train and hard to scale. We propose Hawk, an RNN with gated linear recurrences, and Griffin, a hybrid model that mixes gated linear recurrences with local attention. Hawk exceeds the reported performance of Mamba on downstream tasks, while Griffin matches the performance of Llama-2 despite being trained on over 6 times fewer tokens. We also show that Griffin can extrapolate on sequences significantly longer than those seen during training. Our models match the hardware efficiency of Transformers during training, and during inference they have lower latency and significantly higher throughput. We scale Griffin up to 14B parameters, and explain how to shard our models for efficient distributed training.

Confident Adaptive Language Modeling
Tal Schuster, Adam Fisch, Jai Gupta, Mostafa Dehghani, Dara Bahri, Vinh Q. Tran, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler
Recent advances in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have led to significant performance improvements across many tasks. These gains come with a drastic increase in the models' size, potentially leading to slow and costly use at inference time. In practice, however, the series of generations made by LLMs is composed of varying levels of difficulty. While certain predictions truly benefit from the models' full capacity, other continuations are more trivial and can be solved with reduced compute. In this work, we introduce Confident Adaptive Language Modeling (CALM), a framework for dynamically allocating different amounts of compute per input and generation timestep. Early exit decoding involves several challenges that we address here, such as: (1) what confidence measure to use; (2) connecting sequence-level constraints to local per-token exit decisions; and (3) attending back to missing hidden representations due to early exits in previous tokens. Through theoretical analysis and empirical experiments on three diverse text generation tasks, we demonstrate the efficacy of our framework in reducing compute -- potential speedup of up to ×3 -- while provably maintaining high performance.

Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models
Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Ting-En Lin, Ang Lv, Yuchuan Wu, Xin Gao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Yongbin Li
In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models in such domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise supervisory signals from human labeling, larger models, or self-sampling, although at a high cost. Conversely, we develop a method that avoids external resources, relying instead on introducing perturbations to the input. Our training approach randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought, a technique we found to be particularly effective for reasoning tasks. When applied to fine-tuning with GSM8K, this method achieved a 5% improvement in accuracy over standard supervised fine-tuning with a few codes modified and no additional labeling effort. Furthermore, it is complementary to existing methods. When integrated with related data augmentation methods, it leads to an average improvement of 3% improvement in GSM8K accuracy and 1% improvement in MATH accuracy across five datasets of various quality and size, as well as two base models. We further investigate the mechanisms behind this improvement through case studies and quantitative analysis, suggesting that our approach may provide superior support for the model in capturing long-distance dependencies, especially those related to questions. This enhancement could deepen understanding of premises in questions and prior steps.

Not all Layers of LLMs are Necessary during Inference
Siqi Fan, Xin Jiang, Xiang Li, Xuying Meng, Peng Han, Shuo Shang, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang, Zhongyuan Wang
The inference phase of Large Language Models (LLMs) is very expensive. An ideal inference stage of LLMs could utilize fewer computational resources while still maintaining its capabilities (e.g., generalization and in-context learning ability). In this paper, we try to answer the question, "During LLM inference, can we use shallow layers for easy instances; and deep layers for hard ones?" To answer this question, we first indicate that Not all Layers are Necessary during Inference by statistically analyzing the activated layers across tasks. Then, we propose a simple algorithm named AdaInfer to determine the inference termination moment based on the input instance adaptively. More importantly, AdaInfer does not alter LLM parameters and maintains generalizability across tasks. Experiments on well-known LLMs (i.e., Llama2 series and OPT) show that AdaInfer saves an average of 14.8% of computational resources, even up to 50% on sentiment tasks, while maintaining comparable performance. Additionally, this method is orthogonal to other model acceleration techniques, potentially boosting inference efficiency further.

DenseMamba: State Space Models with Dense Hidden Connection for Efficient Large Language Models
Wei He, Kai Han, Yehui Tang, Chengcheng Wang, Yujie Yang, Tianyu Guo, Yunhe Wang
Large language models (LLMs) face a daunting challenge due to the excessive computational and memory requirements of the commonly used Transformer architecture. While state space model (SSM) is a new type of foundational network architecture offering lower computational complexity, their performance has yet to fully rival that of Transformers. This paper introduces DenseSSM, a novel approach to enhance the flow of hidden information between layers in SSMs. By selectively integrating shallowlayer hidden states into deeper layers, DenseSSM retains fine-grained information crucial for the final output. Dense connections enhanced DenseSSM still maintains the training parallelizability and inference efficiency. The proposed method can be widely applicable to various SSM types like RetNet and Mamba. With similar model size, DenseSSM achieves significant improvements, exemplified by DenseRetNet outperforming the original RetNet with up to 5% accuracy improvement on public benchmarks.

Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis (SD3) 
Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations.

Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild
Fanghua Yu, Jinjin Gu, Zheyuan Li, Jinfan Hu, Xiangtao Kong, Xintao Wang, Jingwen He, Yu Qiao, Chao Dong
We introduce SUPIR (Scaling-UP Image Restoration), a groundbreaking image restoration method that harnesses generative prior and the power of model scaling up. Leveraging multi-modal techniques and advanced generative prior, SUPIR marks a significant advance in intelligent and realistic image restoration. As a pivotal catalyst within SUPIR, model scaling dramatically enhances its capabilities and demonstrates new potential for image restoration. We collect a dataset comprising 20 million high-resolution, high-quality images for model training, each enriched with descriptive text annotations. SUPIR provides the capability to restore images guided by textual prompts, broadening its application scope and potential. Moreover, we introduce negative-quality prompts to further improve perceptual quality. We also develop a restoration-guided sampling method to suppress the fidelity issue encountered in generative-based restoration. Experiments demonstrate SUPIR's exceptional restoration effects and its novel capacity to manipulate restoration through textual prompts.

GaLore: Memory-Efficient LLM Training by Gradient Low-Rank Projection
Jiawei Zhao, Zhenyu Zhang, Beidi Chen, Zhangyang Wang, Anima Anandkumar, Yuandong Tian
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant memory challenges, predominantly due to the growing size of weights and optimizer states. Common memory-reduction approaches, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA), add a trainable low-rank matrix to the frozen pre-trained weight in each layer, reducing trainable parameters and optimizer states. However, such approaches typically underperform training with full-rank weights in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages since they limit the parameter search to a low-rank subspace and alter the training dynamics, and further, may require full-rank warm start. In this work, we propose Gradient Low-Rank Projection (GaLore), a training strategy that allows full-parameter learning but is more memory-efficient than common low-rank adaptation methods such as LoRA. Our approach reduces memory usage by up to 65.5% in optimizer states while maintaining both efficiency and performance for pre-training on LLaMA 1B and 7B architectures with C4 dataset with up to 19.7B tokens, and on fine-tuning RoBERTa on GLUE tasks. Our 8-bit GaLore further reduces optimizer memory by up to 82.5% and total training memory by 63.3%, compared to a BF16 baseline. Notably, we demonstrate, for the first time, the feasibility of pre-training a 7B model on consumer GPUs with 24GB memory (e.g., NVIDIA RTX 4090) without model parallel, checkpointing, or offloading strategies.

Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI
01.AI: Alex Young, Bei Chen, Chao Li, Chengen Huang, Ge Zhang, Guanwei Zhang, Heng Li, Jiangcheng Zhu, Jianqun Chen, Jing Chang, Kaidong Yu, Peng Liu, Qiang Liu, Shawn Yue, Senbin Yang, Shiming Yang, Tao Yu, Wen Xie, Wenhao Huang, Xiaohui Hu, Xiaoyi Ren, Xinyao Niu, Pengcheng Nie, Yuchi Xu, Yudong Liu, Yue Wang, Yuxuan Cai, Zhenyu Gu, Zhiyuan Liu, Zonghong Dai
We introduce the Yi model family, a series of language and multimodal models that demonstrate strong multi-dimensional capabilities. The Yi model family is based on 6B and 34B pretrained language models, then we extend them to chat models, 200K long context models, depth-upscaled models, and vision-language models. Our base models achieve strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks like MMLU, and our finetuned chat models deliver strong human preference rate on major evaluation platforms like AlpacaEval and Chatbot Arena. Building upon our scalable super-computing infrastructure and the classical transformer architecture, we attribute the performance of Yi models primarily to its data quality resulting from our data-engineering efforts. For pretraining, we construct 3.1 trillion tokens of English and Chinese corpora using a cascaded data deduplication and quality filtering pipeline. For finetuning, we polish a small scale (less than 10K) instruction dataset over multiple iterations such that every single instance has been verified directly by our machine learning engineers. For vision-language, we combine the chat language model with a vision transformer encoder and train the model to align visual representations to the semantic space of the language model. We further extend the context length to 200K through lightweight continual pretraining and demonstrate strong needle-in-a-haystack retrieval performance. We show that extending the depth of the pretrained checkpoint through continual pretraining further improves performance. We believe that given our current results, continuing to scale up model parameters using thoroughly optimized data will lead to even stronger frontier models.

TripoSR: Fast 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image
Dmitry Tochilkin, David Pankratz, Zexiang Liu, Zixuan Huang, Adam Letts, Yangguang Li, Ding Liang, Christian Laforte, Varun Jampani, Yan-Pei Cao
This technical report introduces TripoSR, a 3D reconstruction model leveraging transformer architecture for fast feed-forward 3D generation, producing 3D mesh from a single image in under 0.5 seconds. Building upon the LRM network architecture, TripoSR integrates substantial improvements in data processing, model design, and training techniques. Evaluations on public datasets show that TripoSR exhibits superior performance, both quantitatively and qualitatively, compared to other open-source alternatives. Released under the MIT license, TripoSR is intended to empower researchers, developers, and creatives with the latest advancements in 3D generative AI.

Found in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts Better via Plug-and-Play Positional Encoding
Zhenyu Zhang, Runjin Chen, Shiwei Liu, Zhewei Yao, Olatunji Ruwase, Beidi Chen, Xiaoxia Wu, Zhangyang Wang
This paper aims to overcome the "lost-in-the-middle" challenge of large language models (LLMs). While recent advancements have successfully enabled LLMs to perform stable language modeling with up to 4 million tokens, the persistent difficulty faced by most LLMs in identifying relevant information situated in the middle of the context has not been adequately tackled. To address this problem, this paper introduces Multi-scale Positional Encoding (Ms-PoE) which is a simple yet effective plug-and-play approach to enhance the capacity of LLMs to handle the relevant information located in the middle of the context, without fine-tuning or introducing any additional overhead. Ms-PoE leverages the position indice rescaling to relieve the long-term decay effect introduced by RoPE, while meticulously assigning distinct scaling ratios to different attention heads to preserve essential knowledge learned during the pre-training step, forming a multi-scale context fusion from short to long distance. Extensive experiments with a wide range of LLMs demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Notably, Ms-PoE achieves an average accuracy gain of up to 3.8 on the Zero-SCROLLS benchmark over the original LLMs. 

DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding
Haoyu Lu, Wen Liu, Bo Zhang, Bingxuan Wang, Kai Dong, Bo Liu, Jingxiang Sun, Tongzheng Ren, Zhuoshu Li, Hao Yang, Yaofeng Sun, Chengqi Deng, Hanwei Xu, Zhenda Xie, Chong Ruan
We present DeepSeek-VL, an open-source Vision-Language (VL) Model designed for real-world vision and language understanding applications. Our approach is structured around three key dimensions:
We strive to ensure our data is diverse, scalable, and extensively covers real-world scenarios including web screenshots, PDFs, OCR, charts, and knowledge-based content, aiming for a comprehensive representation of practical contexts. Further, we create a use case taxonomy from real user scenarios and construct an instruction tuning dataset accordingly. The fine-tuning with this dataset substantially improves the model's user experience in practical applications. Considering efficiency and the demands of most real-world scenarios, DeepSeek-VL incorporates a hybrid vision encoder that efficiently processes high-resolution images (1024 x 1024), while maintaining a relatively low computational overhead. This design choice ensures the model's ability to capture critical semantic and detailed information across various visual tasks. We posit that a proficient Vision-Language Model should, foremost, possess strong language abilities. To ensure the preservation of LLM capabilities during pretraining, we investigate an effective VL pretraining strategy by integrating LLM training from the beginning and carefully managing the competitive dynamics observed between vision and language modalities.
The DeepSeek-VL family (both 1.3B and 7B models) showcases superior user experiences as a vision-language chatbot in real-world applications, achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of visual-language benchmarks at the same model size while maintaining robust performance on language-centric benchmarks. We have made both 1.3B and 7B models publicly accessible to foster innovations based on this foundation model.

Scattered Mixture-of-Experts Implementation
Shawn Tan, Yikang Shen, Rameswar Panda, Aaron Courville
We present ScatterMoE, an implementation of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) on GPUs. ScatterMoE builds upon existing implementations, and overcoming some of the limitations to improve inference and training speed, and memory footprint. This implementation achieves this by avoiding padding and making excessive copies of the input. We introduce ParallelLinear, the main component we use to build our implementation and the various kernels used to speed up the operation. We benchmark our implementation against Megablocks, and show that it enables a higher throughput and lower memory footprint. We also show how ParallelLinear enables extension of the Mixture-of-Experts concept by demonstrating with an implementation of Mixture of Attention.

Branch-Train-MiX: Mixing Expert LLMs into a Mixture-of-Experts LLM
Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Olga Golovneva, Vasu Sharma, Hu Xu, Xi Victoria Lin, Baptiste Rozière, Jacob Kahn, Daniel Li, Wen-tau Yih, Jason Weston, Xian Li
We investigate efficient methods for training Large Language Models (LLMs) to possess capabilities in multiple specialized domains, such as coding, math reasoning and world knowledge. Our method, named Branch-Train-MiX (BTX), starts from a seed model, which is branched to train experts in embarrassingly parallel fashion with high throughput and reduced communication cost. After individual experts are asynchronously trained, BTX brings together their feedforward parameters as experts in Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) layers and averages the remaining parameters, followed by an MoE-finetuning stage to learn token-level routing. BTX generalizes two special cases, the Branch-Train-Merge method, which does not have the MoE finetuning stage to learn routing, and sparse upcycling, which omits the stage of training experts asynchronously. Compared to alternative approaches, BTX achieves the best accuracy-efficiency tradeoff.

AutoLoRA: Automatically Tuning Matrix Ranks in Low-Rank Adaptation Based on Meta Learning
Ruiyi Zhang, Rushi Qiang, Sai Ashish Somayajula, Pengtao Xie
Large-scale pretraining followed by task-specific finetuning has achieved great success in various NLP tasks. Since finetuning all parameters of large pretrained models poses substantial computational and memory challenges, several efficient finetuning methods have been developed. Among them, low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which finetunes low-rank incremental update matrices on top of frozen pretrained weights, has proven particularly effective. Nonetheless, LoRA's uniform rank assignment across all layers, along with its reliance on an exhaustive search to find the best rank, leads to high computation costs and suboptimal finetuning performance. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoLoRA, a meta learning based framework for automatically identifying the optimal rank of each LoRA layer. AutoLoRA associates each rank-1 matrix in a low-rank update matrix with a selection variable, which determines whether the rank-1 matrix should be discarded. A meta learning based method is developed to learn these selection variables. The optimal rank is determined by thresholding the values of these variables. Our comprehensive experiments on natural language understanding, generation, and sequence labeling demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoLoRA.

BurstAttention: An Efficient Distributed Attention Framework for Extremely Long Sequences
Sun Ao, Weilin Zhao, Xu Han, Cheng Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Chuan Shi, Maosong Sun, Shengnan Wang, Teng Su
Effective attention modules have played a crucial role in the success of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but the quadratic time and memory complexities of these attention modules also pose a challenge when processing long sequences. One potential solution for the long sequence problem is to utilize distributed clusters to parallelize the computation of attention modules across multiple devices (e.g., GPUs). However, adopting a distributed approach inevitably introduces extra memory overheads to store local attention results and incurs additional communication costs to aggregate local results into global ones. In this paper, we propose a distributed attention framework named ``BurstAttention'' to optimize memory access and communication operations at both the global cluster and local device levels. In our experiments, we compare BurstAttention with other competitive distributed attention solutions for long sequence processing. The experimental results under different length settings demonstrate that BurstAttention offers significant advantages for processing long sequences compared with these competitive baselines, reducing 40% communication overheads and achieving 2 X speedup during training 32K sequence length on 8 X A100.

Bifurcated Attention for Single-Context Large-Batch Sampling
Ben Athiwaratkun, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Haifeng Qian, Hantian Ding, Qing Sun, Jun Wang, Jiacheng Guo, Liangfu Chen, Parminder Bhatia, Ramesh Nallapati, Sudipta Sengupta, Bing Xiang
In our study, we present bifurcated attention, a method developed for language model inference in single-context batch sampling contexts. This approach aims to reduce redundant memory IO costs, a significant factor in latency for high batch sizes and long context lengths. Bifurcated attention achieves this by dividing the attention mechanism during incremental decoding into two distinct GEMM operations, focusing on the KV cache from prefill and the decoding process. This method ensures precise computation and maintains the usual computational load (FLOPs) of standard attention mechanisms, but with reduced memory IO. Bifurcated attention is also compatible with multi-query attention mechanism known for reduced memory IO for KV cache, further enabling higher batch size and context length. The resulting efficiency leads to lower latency, improving suitability for real-time applications, e.g., enabling massively-parallel answer generation without substantially increasing latency, enhancing performance when integrated with postprocessing techniques such as reranking.

Keyformer: KV Cache Reduction through Key Tokens Selection for Efficient Generative Inference
Muhammad Adnan, Akhil Arunkumar, Gaurav Jain, Prashant J. Nair, Ilya Soloveychik, Purushotham Kamath
Transformers have emerged as the underpinning architecture for Large Language Models (LLMs). In generative language models, the inference process involves two primary phases: prompt processing and token generation. Token generation, which constitutes the majority of the computational workload, primarily entails vector-matrix multiplications and interactions with the Key-Value (KV) Cache. This phase is constrained by memory bandwidth due to the overhead of transferring weights and KV cache values from the memory system to the computing units. This memory bottleneck becomes particularly pronounced in applications that require long-context and extensive text generation, both of which are increasingly crucial for LLMs.
This paper introduces "Keyformer", an innovative inference-time approach, to mitigate the challenges associated with KV cache size and memory bandwidth utilization. Keyformer leverages the observation that approximately 90% of the attention weight in generative inference focuses on a specific subset of tokens, referred to as "key" tokens. Keyformer retains only the key tokens in the KV cache by identifying these crucial tokens using a novel score function. This approach effectively reduces both the KV cache size and memory bandwidth usage without compromising model accuracy. We evaluate Keyformer's performance across three foundational models: GPT-J, Cerebras-GPT, and MPT, which employ various positional embedding algorithms. Our assessment encompasses a variety of tasks, with a particular emphasis on summarization and conversation tasks involving extended contexts. Keyformer's reduction of KV cache reduces inference latency by 2.1x and improves token generation throughput by 2.4x, while preserving the model's accuracy.

Glyph-ByT5: A Customized Text Encoder for Accurate Visual Text Rendering
Zeyu Liu, Weicong Liang, Zhanhao Liang, Chong Luo, Ji Li, Gao Huang, Yuhui Yuan
Visual text rendering poses a fundamental challenge for contemporary text-to-image generation models, with the core problem lying in text encoder deficiencies. To achieve accurate text rendering, we identify two crucial requirements for text encoders: character awareness and alignment with glyphs. Our solution involves crafting a series of customized text encoder, Glyph-ByT5, by fine-tuning the character-aware ByT5 encoder using a meticulously curated paired glyph-text dataset. We present an effective method for integrating Glyph-ByT5 with SDXL, resulting in the creation of the Glyph-SDXL model for design image generation. This significantly enhances text rendering accuracy, improving it from less than 20% to nearly 90% on our design image benchmark. Noteworthy is Glyph-SDXL's newfound ability for text paragraph rendering, achieving high spelling accuracy for tens to hundreds of characters with automated multi-line layouts. Finally, through fine-tuning Glyph-SDXL with a small set of high-quality, photorealistic images featuring visual text, we showcase a substantial improvement in scene text rendering capabilities in open-domain real images. These compelling outcomes aim to encourage further exploration in designing customized text encoders for diverse and challenging tasks.

VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding
Kunchang Li, Xinhao Li, Yi Wang, Yinan He, Yali Wang, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao
Addressing the dual challenges of local redundancy and global dependencies in video understanding, this work innovatively adapts the Mamba to the video domain. The proposed VideoMamba overcomes the limitations of existing 3D convolution neural networks and video transformers. Its linear-complexity operator enables efficient long-term modeling, which is crucial for high-resolution long video understanding. Extensive evaluations reveal VideoMamba's four core abilities: (1) Scalability in the visual domain without extensive dataset pretraining, thanks to a novel self-distillation technique; (2) Sensitivity for recognizing short-term actions even with fine-grained motion differences; (3) Superiority in long-term video understanding, showcasing significant advancements over traditional feature-based models; and (4) Compatibility with other modalities, demonstrating robustness in multi-modal contexts. Through these distinct advantages, VideoMamba sets a new benchmark for video understanding, offering a scalable and efficient solution for comprehensive video understanding. 

LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression
Zhuoshi Pan, Qianhui Wu, Huiqiang Jiang, Menglin Xia, Xufang Luo, Jue Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Victor Rühle, Yuqing Yang, Chin-Yew Lin, H. Vicky Zhao, Lili Qiu, Dongmei Zhang
This paper focuses on task-agnostic prompt compression for better generalizability and efficiency. Considering the redundancy in natural language, existing approaches compress prompts by removing tokens or lexical units according to their information entropy obtained from a causal language model such as LLaMa-7B. The challenge is that information entropy may be a suboptimal compression metric: (i) it only leverages unidirectional context and may fail to capture all essential information needed for prompt compression; (ii) it is not aligned with the prompt compression objective.
To address these issues, we propose a data distillation procedure to derive knowledge from an LLM to compress prompts without losing crucial information, and meantime, introduce an extractive text compression dataset. We formulate prompt compression as a token classification problem to guarantee the faithfulness of the compressed prompt to the original one, and use a Transformer encoder as the base architecture to capture all essential information for prompt compression from the full bidirectional context. Our approach leads to lower latency by explicitly learning the compression objective with smaller models such as XLM-RoBERTa-large and mBERT.
We evaluate our method on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, including MeetingBank, LongBench, ZeroScrolls, GSM8K, and BBH. Despite its small size, our model shows significant performance gains over strong baselines and demonstrates robust generalization ability across different LLMs. Additionally, our model is 3x-6x faster than existing prompt compression methods, while accelerating the end-to-end latency by 1.6x-2.9x with compression ratios of 2x-5x.

Recurrent Drafter for Fast Speculative Decoding in Large Language Models
Aonan Zhang, Chong Wang, Yi Wang, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunfei Cheng
In this paper, we introduce an improved approach of speculative decoding aimed at enhancing the efficiency of serving large language models. Our method capitalizes on the strengths of two established techniques: the classic two-model speculative decoding approach, and the more recent single-model approach, Medusa. Drawing inspiration from Medusa, our approach adopts a single-model strategy for speculative decoding. However, our method distinguishes itself by employing a single, lightweight draft head with a recurrent dependency design, akin in essence to the small, draft model uses in classic speculative decoding, but without the complexities of the full transformer architecture. And because of the recurrent dependency, we can use beam search to swiftly filter out undesired candidates with the draft head. The outcome is a method that combines the simplicity of single-model design and avoids the need to create a data-dependent tree attention structure only for inference in Medusa. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on several popular open source language models, along with a comprehensive analysis of the trade-offs involved in adopting this approach.

PERL: Parameter Efficient Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Hakim Sidahmed, Samrat Phatale, Alex Hutcheson, Zhuonan Lin, Zhang Chen, Zac Yu, Jarvis Jin, Roman Komarytsia, Christiane Ahlheim, Yonghao Zhu, Simral Chaudhary, Bowen Li, Saravanan Ganesh, Bill Byrne, Jessica Hoffmann, Hassan Mansoor, Wei Li, Abhinav Rastogi, Lucas Dixon
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has proven to be a strong method to align Pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. But training models with RLHF is computationally expensive, and an overall complex process. In this work, we study RLHF where the underlying models are trained using the parameter efficient method of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) introduced by Hu et al. [2021]. We investigate the setup of "Parameter Efficient Reinforcement Learning" (PERL), in which we perform reward model training and reinforcement learning using LoRA. We compare PERL to conventional fine-tuning (full-tuning) across various configurations for 7 benchmarks, including 2 novel datasets, of reward modeling and reinforcement learning. We find that PERL performs on par with the conventional RLHF setting, while training faster, and with less memory. This enables the high performance of RLHF, while reducing the computational burden that limits its adoption as an alignment technique for Large Language Models. We also release 2 novel thumbs up/down preference datasets: "Taskmaster Coffee", and "Taskmaster Ticketing" to promote research around RLHF.

BiLoRA: A Bi-level Optimization Framework for Overfitting-Resilient Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Pre-trained Models
Rushi Qiang, Ruiyi Zhang, Pengtao Xie
Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a popular method for fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models in downstream tasks by learning low-rank incremental matrices. Though LoRA and its variants effectively reduce the number of trainable parameters compared to full fine-tuning methods, they often overfit training data, resulting in sub-optimal generalization on test data. To address this problem, we introduce BiLoRA, an overfitting-alleviating fine-tuning approach based on bi-level optimization (BLO). BiLoRA employs pseudo singular value decomposition to parameterize low-rank incremental matrices and splits the training of pseudo singular vectors and values across two different subsets of training data. This division, embedded within separate levels of the BLO framework, mitigates the risk of overfitting to a single dataset. Tested on ten datasets covering natural language understanding and generation tasks and applied to various well-known large pre-trained models, BiLoRA significantly outperforms LoRA methods and other fine-tuning approaches, with similar amounts of trainable parameters.

Rotary Position Embedding for Vision Transformer
Byeongho Heo, Song Park, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) performs remarkably on language models, especially for length extrapolation of Transformers. However, the impacts of RoPE on computer vision domains have been underexplored, even though RoPE appears capable of enhancing Vision Transformer (ViT) performance in a way similar to the language domain. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of RoPE when applied to ViTs, utilizing practical implementations of RoPE for 2D vision data. The analysis reveals that RoPE demonstrates impressive extrapolation performance, i.e., maintaining precision while increasing image resolution at inference. It eventually leads to performance improvement for ImageNet-1k, COCO detection, and ADE-20k segmentation. We believe this study provides thorough guidelines to apply RoPE into ViT, promising improved backbone performance with minimal extra computational overhead. 

Arcee's MergeKit: A Toolkit for Merging Large Language Models
Charles Goddard, Shamane Siriwardhana, Malikeh Ehghaghi, Luke Meyers, Vlad Karpukhin, Brian Benedict, Mark McQuade, Jacob Solawetz
The rapid expansion of the open-source language model landscape presents an opportunity to merge the competencies of these model checkpoints by combining their parameters. Advances in transfer learning, the process of fine-tuning pre-trained models for specific tasks, has resulted in the development of vast amounts of task-specific models, typically specialized in individual tasks and unable to utilize each other's strengths. Model merging facilitates the creation of multitask models without the need for additional training, offering a promising avenue for enhancing model performance and versatility. By preserving the intrinsic capabilities of the original models, model merging addresses complex challenges in AI - including the difficulties of catastrophic forgetting and multi-task learning. To support this expanding area of research, we introduce MergeKit, a comprehensive, open-source library designed to facilitate the application of model merging strategies. MergeKit offers an extensible framework to efficiently merge models on any hardware, providing utility to researchers and practitioners. To date, thousands of models have been merged by the open-source community, leading to the creation of some of the worlds most powerful open-source model checkpoints, as assessed by the Open LLM Leaderboard.

VOICECRAFT: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild
We introduce VOICECRAFT, a token infilling neural codec language model, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both speech editing and zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) on audiobooks, internet videos, and podcasts1 . VOICECRAFT employs a Transformer decoder architecture and introduces a token rearrangement procedure that combines causal masking and delayed stacking to enable generation within an existing sequence. On speech editing tasks, VOICECRAFT produces edited speech that is nearly indistinguishable from unedited recordings in terms of naturalness, as evaluated by humans; for zero-shot TTS, our model outperforms prior SotA models including VALLE and the popular commercial model XTTS v2. Crucially, the models are evaluated on challenging and realistic datasets, that consist of diverse accents, speaking styles, recording conditions, and background noise and music, and our model performs consistently well compared to other models and real recordings. In particular, for speech editing evaluation, we introduce a high quality, challenging, and realistic dataset named REALEDIT.

Efficient Video Diffusion Models via Content-Frame Motion-Latent Decomposition
Sihyun Yu, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Boyi Li, Jinwoo Shin, Anima Anandkumar
Video diffusion models have recently made great progress in generation quality, but are still limited by the high memory and computational requirements. This is because current video diffusion models often attempt to process high-dimensional videos directly. To tackle this issue, we propose content-motion latent diffusion model (CMD), a novel efficient extension of pretrained image diffusion models for video generation. Specifically, we propose an autoencoder that succinctly encodes a video as a combination of a content frame (like an image) and a low-dimensional motion latent representation. The former represents the common content, and the latter represents the underlying motion in the video, respectively. We generate the content frame by fine-tuning a pretrained image diffusion model, and we generate the motion latent representation by training a new lightweight diffusion model. A key innovation here is the design of a compact latent space that can directly utilizes a pretrained image diffusion model, which has not been done in previous latent video diffusion models. This leads to considerably better quality generation and reduced computational costs. For instance, CMD can sample a video 7.7× faster than prior approaches by generating a video of 512×1024 resolution and length 16 in 3.1 seconds. Moreover, CMD achieves an FVD score of 212.7 on WebVid-10M, 27.3% better than the previous state-of-the-art of 292.4.

DreamReward: Text-to-3D Generation with Human Preference
Junliang Ye, Fangfu Liu, Qixiu Li, Zhengyi Wang, Yikai Wang, Xinzhou Wang, Yueqi Duan, Jun Zhu
3D content creation from text prompts has shown remarkable success recently. However, current text-to-3D methods often generate 3D results that do not align well with human preferences. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework, coined DreamReward, to learn and improve text-to-3D models from human preference feedback. To begin with, we collect 25k expert comparisons based on a systematic annotation pipeline including rating and ranking. Then, we build Reward3D -- the first general-purpose text-to-3D human preference reward model to effectively encode human preferences. Building upon the 3D reward model, we finally perform theoretical analysis and present the Reward3D Feedback Learning (DreamFL), a direct tuning algorithm to optimize the multi-view diffusion models with a redefined scorer. Grounded by theoretical proof and extensive experiment comparisons, our DreamReward successfully generates high-fidelity and 3D consistent results with significant boosts in prompt alignment with human intention. Our results demonstrate the great potential for learning from human feedback to improve text-to-3D models.

Evolutionary Optimization of Model Merging Recipes
Takuya Akiba, Makoto Shing, Yujin Tang, Qi Sun, David Ha
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.

When Do We Not Need Larger Vision Models?
Baifeng Shi, Ziyang Wu, Maolin Mao, Xin Wang, Trevor Darrell
Scaling up the size of vision models has been the de facto standard to obtain more powerful visual representations. In this work, we discuss the point beyond which larger vision models are not necessary. First, we demonstrate the power of Scaling on Scales (S2), whereby a pre-trained and frozen smaller vision model (e.g., ViT-B or ViT-L), run over multiple image scales, can outperform larger models (e.g., ViT-H or ViT-G) on classification, segmentation, depth estimation, Multimodal LLM (MLLM) benchmarks, and robotic manipulation. Notably, S2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in detailed understanding of MLLM on the V* benchmark, surpassing models such as GPT-4V. We examine the conditions under which S2 is a preferred scaling approach compared to scaling on model size. While larger models have the advantage of better generalization on hard examples, we show that features of larger vision models can be well approximated by those of multi-scale smaller models. This suggests most, if not all, of the representations learned by current large pre-trained models can also be obtained from multi-scale smaller models. Our results show that a multi-scale smaller model has comparable learning capacity to a larger model, and pre-training smaller models with S2 can match or even exceed the advantage of larger models. 

SiMBA: Simplified Mamba-Based Architecture for Vision and Multivariate Time series
Badri N. Patro, Vijay S. Agneeswaran
Transformers have widely adopted attention networks for sequence mixing and MLPs for channel mixing, playing a pivotal role in achieving breakthroughs across domains. However, recent literature highlights issues with attention networks, including low inductive bias and quadratic complexity concerning input sequence length. State Space Models (SSMs) like S4 and others (Hippo, Global Convolutions, liquid S4, LRU, Mega, and Mamba), have emerged to address the above issues to help handle longer sequence lengths. Mamba, while being the state-of-the-art SSM, has a stability issue when scaled to large networks for computer vision datasets. We propose SiMBA, a new architecture that introduces Einstein FFT (EinFFT) for channel modeling by specific eigenvalue computations and uses the Mamba block for sequence modeling. Extensive performance studies across image and time-series benchmarks demonstrate that SiMBA outperforms existing SSMs, bridging the performance gap with state-of-the-art transformers. Notably, SiMBA establishes itself as the new state-of-the-art SSM on ImageNet and transfer learning benchmarks such as Stanford Car and Flower as well as task learning benchmarks as well as seven time series benchmark datasets. 

GRM: Large Gaussian Reconstruction Model for Efficient 3D Reconstruction and Generation
Yinghao Xu, Zifan Shi, Wang Yifan, Hansheng Chen, Ceyuan Yang, Sida Peng, Yujun Shen, Gordon Wetzstein
We introduce GRM, a large-scale reconstructor capable of recovering a 3D asset from sparse-view images in around 0.1s. GRM is a feed-forward transformer-based model that efficiently incorporates multi-view information to translate the input pixels into pixel-aligned Gaussians, which are unprojected to create a set of densely distributed 3D Gaussians representing a scene. Together, our transformer architecture and the use of 3D Gaussians unlock a scalable and efficient reconstruction framework. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over alternatives regarding both reconstruction quality and efficiency. We also showcase the potential of GRM in generative tasks, i.e., text-to-3D and image-to-3D, by integrating it with existing multi-view diffusion models.

FeatUp: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Features at Any Resolution
Stephanie Fu, Mark Hamilton, Laura Brandt, Axel Feldman, Zhoutong Zhang, William T. Freeman
Deep features are a cornerstone of computer vision research, capturing image semantics and enabling the community to solve downstream tasks even in the zero- or few-shot regime. However, these features often lack the spatial resolution to directly perform dense prediction tasks like segmentation and depth prediction because models aggressively pool information over large areas. In this work, we introduce FeatUp, a task- and model-agnostic framework to restore lost spatial information in deep features. We introduce two variants of FeatUp: one that guides features with high-resolution signal in a single forward pass, and one that fits an implicit model to a single image to reconstruct features at any resolution. Both approaches use a multi-view consistency loss with deep analogies to NeRFs. Our features retain their original semantics and can be swapped into existing applications to yield resolution and performance gains even without re-training. We show that FeatUp significantly outperforms other feature upsampling and image super-resolution approaches in class activation map generation, transfer learning for segmentation and depth prediction, and end-to-end training for semantic segmentation.

ALISA: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference via Sparsity-Aware KV Caching
Youpeng Zhao, Di Wu, Jun Wang
The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) and has been foundational in developing large language models (LLMs) such as LLaMA and OPT, which have come to dominate a broad range of NLP tasks. Despite their superior accuracy, LLMs present unique challenges in practical inference, concerning the compute and memory-intensive nature. Thanks to the autoregressive characteristic of LLM inference, KV caching for the attention layers in Transformers can effectively accelerate LLM inference by substituting quadratic-complexity computation with linear-complexity memory accesses. Yet, this approach requires increasing memory as demand grows for processing longer sequences. The overhead leads to reduced throughput due to I/O bottlenecks and even out-of-memory errors, particularly on resource-constrained systems like a single commodity GPU. In this paper, we propose ALISA, a novel algorithm-system co-design solution to address the challenges imposed by KV caching. On the algorithm level, ALISA prioritizes tokens that are most important in generating a new token via a Sparse Window Attention (SWA) algorithm. SWA introduces high sparsity in attention layers and reduces the memory footprint of KV caching at negligible accuracy loss. On the system level, ALISA employs three-phase token-level dynamical scheduling and optimizes the trade-off between caching and recomputation, thus maximizing the overall performance in resource-constrained systems. In a single GPU-CPU system, we demonstrate that under varying workloads, ALISA improves the throughput of baseline systems such as FlexGen and vLLM by up to 3X and 1.9X, respectively.

The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of the Deeper Layers
Andrey Gromov, Kushal Tirumala, Hassan Shapourian, Paolo Glorioso, Daniel A. Roberts
We empirically study a simple layer-pruning strategy for popular families of open-weight pretrained LLMs, finding minimal degradation of performance on different question-answering benchmarks until after a large fraction (up to half) of the layers are removed. To prune these models, we identify the optimal block of layers to prune by considering similarity across layers; then, to "heal" the damage, we perform a small amount of finetuning. In particular, we use parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods, specifically quantization and Low Rank Adapters (QLoRA), such that each of our experiments can be performed on a single A100 GPU. From a practical perspective, these results suggest that layer pruning methods can complement other PEFT strategies to further reduce computational resources of finetuning on the one hand, and can improve the memory and latency of inference on the other hand. From a scientific perspective, the robustness of these LLMs to the deletion of layers implies either that current pretraining methods are not properly leveraging the parameters in the deeper layers of the network or that the shallow layers play a critical role in storing knowledge.

Reverse Training to Nurse the Reversal Curse
Olga Golovneva, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, Jason Weston, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Large language models (LLMs) have a surprising failure: when trained on "A has a feature B", they do not generalize to "B is a feature of A", which is termed the Reversal Curse. Even when training with trillions of tokens this issue still appears due to Zipf's law - hence even if we train on the entire internet. This work proposes an alternative training scheme, called reverse training, whereby all words are used twice, doubling the amount of available tokens. The LLM is trained in both forward and reverse directions by reversing the training strings while preserving (i.e., not reversing) chosen substrings, such as entities. We show that data-matched reverse-trained models provide superior performance to standard models on standard tasks, and compute-matched reverse-trained models provide far superior performance on reversal tasks, helping resolve the reversal curse issue.

AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation
Huawei Wei, Zejun Yang, Zhisheng Wang
In this study, we propose AniPortrait, a novel framework for generating high-quality animation driven by audio and a reference portrait image. Our methodology is divided into two stages. Initially, we extract 3D intermediate representations from audio and project them into a sequence of 2D facial landmarks. Subsequently, we employ a robust diffusion model, coupled with a motion module, to convert the landmark sequence into photorealistic and temporally consistent portrait animation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of AniPortrait in terms of facial naturalness, pose diversity, and visual quality, thereby offering an enhanced perceptual experience. Moreover, our methodology exhibits considerable potential in terms of flexibility and controllability, which can be effectively applied in areas such as facial motion editing or face reenactment. 

Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model
Opher Lieber, Barak Lenz, Hofit Bata, Gal Cohen, Jhonathan Osin, Itay Dalmedigos, Erez Safahi, Shaked Meirom, Yonatan Belinkov, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Omri Abend, Raz Alon, Tomer Asida, Amir Bergman, Roman Glozman, Michael Gokhman, Avashalom Manevich, Nir Ratner, Noam Rozen, Erez Shwartz, Mor Zusman, Yoav Shoham
We present Jamba, a new base large language model based on a novel hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Specifically, Jamba interleaves blocks of Transformer and Mamba layers, enjoying the benefits of both model families. MoE is added in some of these layers to increase model capacity while keeping active parameter usage manageable. This flexible architecture allows resource- and objective-specific configurations. In the particular configuration we have implemented, we end up with a powerful model that fits in a single 80GB GPU. Built at large scale, Jamba provides high throughput and small memory footprint compared to vanilla Transformers, and at the same time state-of-the-art performance on standard language model benchmarks and long-context evaluations. Remarkably, the model presents strong results for up to 256K tokens context length. We study various architectural decisions, such as how to combine Transformer and Mamba layers, and how to mix experts, and show that some of them are crucial in large scale modeling. We also describe several interesting properties of these architectures which the training and evaluation of Jamba have revealed, and plan to release checkpoints from various ablation runs, to encourage further exploration of this novel architecture.

LLM-ABR: Designing Adaptive Bitrate Algorithms via Large Language Models
Zhiyuan He, Aashish Gottipati, Lili Qiu, Francis Y. Yan, Xufang Luo, Kenuo Xu, Yuqing Yang
We present LLM-ABR, the first system that utilizes the generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to autonomously design adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms tailored for diverse network characteristics. Operating within a reinforcement learning framework, LLM-ABR empowers LLMs to design key components such as states and neural network architectures. We evaluate LLM-ABR across diverse network settings, including broadband, satellite, 4G, and 5G. LLM-ABR consistently outperforms default ABR algorithms.

Prompt-prompted Mixture of Experts for Efficient LLM Generation
Harry Dong, Beidi Chen, Yuejie Chi
With the development of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), they have been applied to many fields due to their remarkable utility, but this comes at a considerable computational cost at deployment. Fortunately, some methods such as pruning or constructing a mixture of experts (MoE) aim at exploiting sparsity in transformer feedforward (FF) blocks to gain boosts in speed and reduction in memory requirements. However, these techniques can be very costly and inflexible in practice, as they often require training or are restricted to specific types of architectures. To address this, we introduce GRIFFIN, a novel training-free MoE that selects unique FF experts at the sequence level for efficient generation across a plethora of LLMs with different non-ReLU activation functions. This is possible due to a critical observation that many trained LLMs naturally produce highly structured FF activation patterns within a sequence, which we call flocking. Despite our method's simplicity, we show with 50\% of the FF parameters, GRIFFIN maintains the original model's performance with little to no degradation on a variety of classification and generation tasks, all while improving latency (e.g. 1.25× speed-up in Llama 2 13B on an NVIDIA L40). 

Advancing LLM Reasoning Generalists with Preference Trees
Lifan Yuan, Ganqu Cui, Hanbin Wang, Ning Ding, Xingyao Wang, Jia Deng, Boji Shan, Huimin Chen, Ruobing Xie, Yankai Lin, Zhenghao Liu, Bowen Zhou, Hao Peng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
We introduce Eurus, a suite of large language models (LLMs) optimized for reasoning. Finetuned from Mistral-7B and CodeLlama-70B, Eurus models achieve state-of-the-art results among open-source models on a diverse set of benchmarks covering mathematics, code generation, and logical reasoning problems. Notably, Eurus-70B beats GPT-3.5 Turbo in reasoning through a comprehensive benchmarking across 12 tests covering five tasks, and achieves a 33.3% pass@1 accuracy on LeetCode and 32.6% on TheoremQA, two challenging benchmarks, substantially outperforming existing open-source models by margins more than 13.3%. The strong performance of Eurus can be primarily attributed to UltraInteract, our newly-curated large-scale, high-quality alignment dataset specifically designed for complex reasoning tasks. UltraInteract can be used in both supervised fine-tuning and preference learning. For each instruction, it includes a preference tree consisting of (1) reasoning chains with diverse planning strategies in a unified format, (2) multi-turn interaction trajectories with the environment and the critique, and (3) pairwise data to facilitate preference learning. UltraInteract allows us to conduct an in-depth exploration of preference learning for reasoning tasks. Our investigation reveals that some well-established preference learning algorithms may be less suitable for reasoning tasks compared to their effectiveness in general conversations. Inspired by this, we derive a novel reward modeling objective which, together with UltraInteract, leads to a strong reward model.

QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs
Saleh Ashkboos, Amirkeivan Mohtashami, Maximilian L. Croci, Bo Li, Martin Jaggi, Dan Alistarh, Torsten Hoefler, James Hensman
We introduce QuaRot, a new Quantization scheme based on Rotations, which is able to quantize LLMs end-to-end, including all weights, activations, and KV cache in 4 bits. QuaRot rotates LLMs in a way that removes outliers from the hidden state without changing the output, making quantization easier. This computational invariance is applied to the hidden state (residual) of the LLM, as well as to the activations of the feed-forward components, aspects of the attention mechanism and to the KV cache. The result is a quantized model where all matrix multiplications are performed in 4-bits, without any channels identified for retention in higher precision. Our quantized LLaMa2-70B model has losses of at most 0.29 WikiText-2 perplexity and retains 99% of the zero-shot performance.

Noise Contrastive Alignment of Language Models with Explicit Rewards
Huayu Chen, Guande He, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
User intentions are typically formalized as evaluation rewards to be maximized when fine-tuning language models (LMs). Existing alignment methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are mainly tailored for pairwise preference data where rewards are implicitly defined rather than explicitly given. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for LM alignment, leveraging Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) to bridge the gap in handling reward datasets explicitly annotated with scalar evaluations. Our framework comprises two parallel algorithms, NCA and InfoNCA, both enabling the direct extraction of an LM policy from reward data as well as preference data. Notably, we show that the DPO loss is a special case of our proposed InfoNCA objective under pairwise preference settings, thereby integrating and extending current alignment theories. By contrasting NCA and InfoNCA, we show that InfoNCA and DPO adjust relative likelihood across different responses to a single instruction, while NCA optimizes absolute likelihood for each response. We apply our methods to align a 7B language model with a GPT-4 annotated reward dataset. Experimental results suggest that InfoNCA surpasses the DPO baseline in GPT-4 evaluations, while NCA enjoys better training stability with competitive performance.

KTO: Model Alignment as Prospect Theoretic Optimization
Kawin Ethayarajh, Winnie Xu, Niklas Muennighoff, Dan Jurafsky, Douwe Kiela
Kahneman & Tversky's prospect theory tells us that humans perceive random variables in a biased but well-defined manner; for example, humans are famously loss-averse. We show that objectives for aligning LLMs with human feedback implicitly incorporate many of these biases -- the success of these objectives (e.g., DPO) over cross-entropy minimization can partly be ascribed to them being human-aware loss functions (HALOs). However, the utility functions these methods attribute to humans still differ from those in the prospect theory literature. Using a Kahneman-Tversky model of human utility, we propose a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, as current methods do. We call this approach Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO), and it matches or exceeds the performance of preference-based methods at scales from 1B to 30B. Crucially, KTO does not need preferences -- only a binary signal of whether an output is desirable or undesirable for a given input. This makes it far easier to use in the real world, where preference data is scarce and expensive.

BAdam: A Memory Efficient Full Parameter Training Method for Large Language Models
Qijun Luo, Hengxu Yu, Xiao Li
This work presents BAdam, an optimizer that leverages the block coordinate optimization framework with Adam as the inner solver. BAdam offers a memory efficient approach to the full parameter finetuning of large language models and reduces running time of the backward process thanks to the chain rule property. Experimentally, we apply BAdam to instruction-tune the Llama 2-7B model on the Alpaca-GPT4 dataset using a single RTX3090-24GB GPU. The results indicate that BAdam exhibits superior convergence behavior in comparison to LoRA and LOMO. Furthermore, our downstream performance evaluation of the instruction-tuned models using the MT-bench shows that BAdam modestly surpasses LoRA and more substantially outperforms LOMO. Finally, we compare BAdam with Adam on a medium-sized task, i.e., finetuning RoBERTa-large on the SuperGLUE benchmark. The results demonstrate that BAdam is capable of narrowing the performance gap with Adam. 

Mixture-of-Depths: Dynamically allocating compute in transformer-based language models
David Raposo, Sam Ritter, Blake Richards, Timothy Lillicrap, Peter Conway Humphreys, Adam Santoro
Transformer-based language models spread FLOPs uniformly across input sequences. In this work we demonstrate that transformers can instead learn to dynamically allocate FLOPs (or compute) to specific positions in a sequence, optimising the allocation along the sequence for different layers across the model depth. Our method enforces a total compute budget by capping the number of tokens (k) that can participate in the self-attention and MLP computations at a given layer. The tokens to be processed are determined by the network using a top-k routing mechanism. Since k is defined a priori, this simple procedure uses a static computation graph with known tensor sizes, unlike other conditional computation techniques. Nevertheless, since the identities of the k tokens are fluid, this method can expend FLOPs non-uniformly across the time and model depth dimensions. Thus, compute expenditure is entirely predictable in sum total, but dynamic and context-sensitive at the token-level. Not only do models trained in this way learn to dynamically allocate compute, they do so efficiently. These models match baseline performance for equivalent FLOPS and wall-clock times to train, but require a fraction of the FLOPs per forward pass, and can be upwards of 50\% faster to step during post-training sampling.

DiPaCo: Distributed Path Composition
Arthur Douillard, Qixuan Feng, Andrei A. Rusu, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Yani Donchev, Rachita Chhaparia, Ionel Gog, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Jiajun Shen, Arthur Szlam
Progress in machine learning (ML) has been fueled by scaling neural network models. This scaling has been enabled by ever more heroic feats of engineering, necessary for accommodating ML approaches that require high bandwidth communication between devices working in parallel. In this work, we propose a co-designed modular architecture and training approach for ML models, dubbed DIstributed PAth COmposition (DiPaCo). During training, DiPaCo distributes computation by paths through a set of shared modules. Together with a Local-SGD inspired optimization (DiLoCo) that keeps modules in sync with drastically reduced communication, Our approach facilitates training across poorly connected and heterogeneous workers, with a design that ensures robustness to worker failures and preemptions. At inference time, only a single path needs to be executed for each input, without the need for any model compression. We consider this approach as a first prototype towards a new paradigm of large-scale learning, one that is less synchronous and more modular. Our experiments on the widely used C4 benchmark show that, for the same amount of training steps but less wall-clock time, DiPaCo exceeds the performance of a 1 billion-parameter dense transformer language model by choosing one of 256 possible paths, each with a size of 150 million parameters.

Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction
Keyu Tian, Yi Jiang, Zehuan Yuan, Bingyue Peng, Liwei Wang
We present Visual AutoRegressive modeling (VAR), a new generation paradigm that redefines the autoregressive learning on images as coarse-to-fine "next-scale prediction" or "next-resolution prediction", diverging from the standard raster-scan "next-token prediction". This simple, intuitive methodology allows autoregressive (AR) transformers to learn visual distributions fast and generalize well: VAR, for the first time, makes AR models surpass diffusion transformers in image generation. On ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, VAR significantly improve AR baseline by improving Frechet inception distance (FID) from 18.65 to 1.80, inception score (IS) from 80.4 to 356.4, with around 20x faster inference speed. It is also empirically verified that VAR outperforms the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in multiple dimensions including image quality, inference speed, data efficiency, and scalability. Scaling up VAR models exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs, with linear correlation coefficients near -0.998 as solid evidence. VAR further showcases zero-shot generalization ability in downstream tasks including image in-painting, out-painting, and editing. These results suggest VAR has initially emulated the two important properties of LLMs: Scaling Laws and zero-shot task generalization. We have released all models and codes to promote the exploration of AR/VAR models for visual generation and unified learning.

SqueezeAttention: 2D Management of KV-Cache in LLM Inference via Layer-wise Optimal Budget
Zihao Wang, Shaoduo Gan
Optimizing the Key-Value (KV) cache of the Large Language Model (LLM) has been considered critical to saving the cost of inference. Most of the existing KV-cache compression algorithms attempted to sparsify the sequence of tokens by taking advantage of the different importance of tokens. In this work, we found that by identifying the importance of attention layers, we could optimize the KV-cache jointly from two dimensions. Based on our observations regarding layer-wise importance in inference, we propose SqueezeAttention to precisely optimize the allocation of KV-cache budget among layers on-the-fly and then incorporate three representative token sparsification algorithms to compress the KV-cache for each layer with its very own budget. By optimizing the KV-cache from both sequence's and layer's dimensions, SqueezeAttention achieves around 30% to 70% of the memory reductions and up to 2.2 times of throughput improvements in a wide range of LLMs and benchmarks

Physics of Language Models: Part 3.3, Knowledge Capacity Scaling Laws
Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, Yuanzhi Li
Scaling laws describe the relationship between the size of language models and their capabilities. Unlike prior studies that evaluate a model's capability via loss or benchmarks, we estimate the number of knowledge bits a model stores. We focus on factual knowledge represented as tuples, such as (USA, capital, Washington D.C.) from a Wikipedia page. Through multiple controlled datasets, we establish that language models can and only can store 2 bits of knowledge per parameter, even when quantized to int8, and such knowledge can be flexibly extracted for downstream applications. Consequently, a 7B model can store 14B bits of knowledge, surpassing the English Wikipedia and textbooks combined based on our estimation. More broadly, we present 12 results on how (1) training duration, (2) model architecture, (3) quantization, (4) sparsity constraints such as MoE, and (5) data signal-to-noise ratio affect a model's knowledge storage capacity. Notable insights include: * The GPT-2 architecture, with rotary embedding, matches or even surpasses LLaMA/Mistral architectures in knowledge storage, particularly over shorter training durations. This arises because LLaMA/Mistral uses GatedMLP, which is less stable and harder to train. * Prepending training data with domain names (e.g., this http URL) significantly increases a model's knowledge capacity. Language models can autonomously identify and prioritize domains rich in knowledge, optimizing their storage capacity.

CodecLM: Aligning Language Models with Tailored Synthetic Data
Zifeng Wang, Chun-Liang Li, Vincent Perot, Long T. Le, Jin Miao, Zizhao Zhang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
Instruction tuning has emerged as the key in aligning large language models (LLMs) with specific task instructions, thereby mitigating the discrepancy between the next-token prediction objective and users' actual goals. To reduce the labor and time cost to collect or annotate data by humans, researchers start to explore the use of LLMs to generate instruction-aligned synthetic data. Recent works focus on generating diverse instructions and applying LLM to increase instruction complexity, often neglecting downstream use cases. It remains unclear how to tailor high-quality data to elicit better instruction-following abilities in different target instruction distributions and LLMs. To this end, we introduce CodecLM, a general framework for adaptively generating high-quality synthetic data for LLM alignment with different downstream instruction distributions and LLMs. Drawing on the Encode-Decode principles, we use LLMs as codecs to guide the data generation process. We first encode seed instructions into metadata, which are concise keywords generated on-the-fly to capture the target instruction distribution, and then decode metadata to create tailored instructions. We also introduce Self-Rubrics and Contrastive Filtering during decoding to tailor data-efficient samples. Extensive experiments on four open-domain instruction following benchmarks validate the effectiveness of CodecLM over the current state-of-the-arts.

Continuous Language Model Interpolation for Dynamic and Controllable Text Generation
Sara Kangaslahti, David Alvarez-Melis
As large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity for a variety of use cases, making them adaptable and controllable has become increasingly important, especially for user-facing applications. While the existing literature on LLM adaptation primarily focuses on finding a model (or models) that optimizes a single predefined objective, here we focus on the challenging case where the model must dynamically adapt to diverse -- and often changing -- user preferences. For this, we leverage adaptation methods based on linear weight interpolation, casting them as continuous multi-domain interpolators that produce models with specific prescribed generation characteristics on-the-fly. Specifically, we use low-rank updates to fine-tune a base model to various different domains, yielding a set of anchor models with distinct generation profiles. Then, we use the weight updates of these anchor models to parametrize the entire (infinite) class of models contained within their convex hull. We empirically show that varying the interpolation weights yields predictable and consistent change in the model outputs with respect to all of the controlled attributes. We find that there is little entanglement between most attributes and identify and discuss the pairs of attributes for which this is not the case. Our results suggest that linearly interpolating between the weights of fine-tuned models facilitates predictable, fine-grained control of model outputs with respect to multiple stylistic characteristics simultaneously.

Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs
Bowen Jin, Chulin Xie, Jiawei Zhang, Kashob Kumar Roy, Yu Zhang, Suhang Wang, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han
Large language models (LLMs), while exhibiting exceptional performance, suffer from hallucinations, especially on knowledge-intensive tasks. Existing works propose to augment LLMs with individual text units retrieved from external knowledge corpora to alleviate the issue. However, in many domains, texts are interconnected (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic graph are linked by citations and co-authorships) which form a (text-attributed) graph. The knowledge in such graphs is encoded not only in single texts/nodes but also in their associated connections. To facilitate the research of augmenting LLMs with graphs, we manually construct a Graph Reasoning Benchmark dataset called GRBench, containing 1,740 questions that can be answered with the knowledge from 10 domain graphs. Then, we propose a simple and effective framework called Graph Chain-of-thought (Graph-CoT) to augment LLMs with graphs by encouraging LLMs to reason on the graph iteratively. Each Graph-CoT iteration consists of three sub-steps: LLM reasoning, LLM-graph interaction, and graph execution. We conduct systematic experiments with three LLM backbones on GRBench, where Graph-CoT outperforms the baselines consistently. 

Superposition Prompting: Improving and Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Thomas Merth, Qichen Fu, Mohammad Rastegari, Mahyar Najibi
Despite the successes of large language models (LLMs), they exhibit significant drawbacks, particularly when processing long contexts. Their inference cost scales quadratically with respect to sequence length, making it expensive for deployment in some real-world text processing applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Additionally, LLMs also exhibit the "distraction phenomenon," where irrelevant context in the prompt degrades output quality. To address these drawbacks, we propose a novel RAG prompting methodology, superposition prompting, which can be directly applied to pre-trained transformer-based LLMs without the need for fine-tuning. At a high level, superposition prompting allows the LLM to process input documents in parallel prompt paths, discarding paths once they are deemed irrelevant. We demonstrate the capability of our method to simultaneously enhance time efficiency across a variety of question-answering benchmarks using multiple pre-trained LLMs. Furthermore, our technique significantly improves accuracy when the retrieved context is large relative the context the model was trained on. For example, our approach facilitates an 93x reduction in compute time while improving accuracy by 43\% on the NaturalQuestions-Open dataset with the MPT-7B instruction-tuned model over naive RAG.

Eagle and Finch: RWKV with Matrix-Valued States and Dynamic Recurrence
Bo Peng, Daniel Goldstein, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Eric Alcaide, Stella Biderman, Eugene Cheah, Teddy Ferdinan, Haowen Hou, Przemysław Kazienko, Kranthi Kiran GV, Jan Kocoń, Bartłomiej Koptyra, Satyapriya Krishna, Ronald McClelland Jr., Niklas Muennighoff, Fares Obeid, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Haoqin Tu, Stanisław Woźniak, Ruichong Zhang, Bingchen Zhao, Qihang Zhao, Peng Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
We present Eagle (RWKV-5) and Finch (RWKV-6), sequence models improving upon the RWKV (RWKV-4) architecture. Our architectural design advancements include multi-headed matrix-valued states and a dynamic recurrence mechanism that improve expressivity while maintaining the inference efficiency characteristics of RNNs. We introduce a new multilingual corpus with 1.12 trillion tokens and a fast tokenizer based on greedy matching for enhanced multilinguality. We trained four Eagle models, ranging from 0.46 to 7.5 billion parameters, and two Finch models with 1.6 and 3.1 billion parameters and find that they achieve competitive performance across a wide variety of benchmarks. We release all our models on HuggingFace under the Apache 2.0 license.

RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?
Cheng-Ping Hsieh, Simeng Sun, Samuel Kriman, Shantanu Acharya, Dima Rekesh, Fei Jia, Boris Ginsburg
The needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) test, which examines the ability to retrieve a piece of information (the "needle") from long distractor texts (the "haystack"), has been widely adopted to evaluate long-context language models (LMs). However, this simple retrieval-based test is indicative of only a superficial form of long-context understanding. To provide a more comprehensive evaluation of long-context LMs, we create a new synthetic benchmark RULER with flexible configurations for customized sequence length and task complexity. RULER expands upon the vanilla NIAH test to encompass variations with diverse types and quantities of needles. Moreover, RULER introduces new task categories multi-hop tracing and aggregation to test behaviors beyond searching from context. We evaluate ten long-context LMs with 13 representative tasks in RULER. Despite achieving nearly perfect accuracy in the vanilla NIAH test, all models exhibit large performance drops as the context length increases. While these models all claim context sizes of 32K tokens or greater, only four models (GPT-4, Command-R, Yi-34B, and Mixtral) can maintain satisfactory performance at the length of 32K. Our analysis of Yi-34B, which supports context length of 200K, reveals large room for improvement as we increase input length and task complexity. We open source RULER to spur comprehensive evaluation of long-context LMs.

Megalodon: Efficient LLM Pretraining and Inference with Unlimited Context Length
Xuezhe Ma, Xiaomeng Yang, Wenhan Xiong, Beidi Chen, Lili Yu, Hao Zhang, Jonathan May, Luke Zettlemoyer, Omer Levy, Chunting Zhou
The quadratic complexity and weak length extrapolation of Transformers limits their ability to scale to long sequences, and while sub-quadratic solutions like linear attention and state space models exist, they empirically underperform Transformers in pretraining efficiency and downstream task accuracy. We introduce Megalodon, a neural architecture for efficient sequence modeling with unlimited context length. Megalodon inherits the architecture of Mega (exponential moving average with gated attention), and further introduces multiple technical components to improve its capability and stability, including complex exponential moving average (CEMA), timestep normalization layer, normalized attention mechanism and pre-norm with two-hop residual configuration. In a controlled head-to-head comparison with Llama2, Megalodon achieves better efficiency than Transformer in the scale of 7 billion parameters and 2 trillion training tokens. Megalodon reaches a training loss of 1.70, landing mid-way between Llama2-7B (1.75) and 13B (1.67). 

TransformerFAM: Feedback attention is working memory
Dongseong Hwang, Weiran Wang, Zhuoyuan Huo, Khe Chai Sim, Pedro Moreno Mengibar
While Transformers have revolutionized deep learning, their quadratic attention complexity hinders their ability to process infinitely long inputs. We propose Feedback Attention Memory (FAM), a novel Transformer architecture that leverages a feedback loop to enable the network to attend to its own latent representations. This design fosters the emergence of working memory within the Transformer, allowing it to process indefinitely long sequences. TransformerFAM requires no additional weights, enabling seamless integration with pre-trained models. Our experiments show that TransformerFAM significantly improves Transformer performance on long-context tasks across various model sizes (1B, 8B, and 24B). These results showcase the potential to empower Large Language Models (LLMs) to process sequences of unlimited length.

CATS: Contextually-Aware Thresholding for Sparsity in Large Language Models
Je-Yong Lee, Donghyun Lee, Genghan Zhang, Mo Tiwari, Azalia Mirhoseini
Large Language Models (LLMs) have dramatically advanced AI applications, yet their deployment remains challenging due to their immense inference costs. Recent studies ameliorate the computational costs of LLMs by increasing their activation sparsity but suffer from significant performance degradation on downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce a new framework for sparsifying the activations of base LLMs and reducing inference costs, dubbed Contextually Aware Thresholding for Sparsity (CATS). CATS is relatively simple, easy to implement, and highly effective. At the heart of our framework is a new non-linear activation function. We demonstrate that CATS can be applied to various base models, including Mistral-7B and Llama2-7B, and outperforms existing sparsification techniques in downstream task performance. More precisely, CATS-based models often achieve downstream task performance within 1-2% of their base models without any fine-tuning and even at activation sparsity levels of 50%. Furthermore, CATS-based models converge faster and display better task performance than competing techniques when fine-tuning is applied. Finally, we develop a custom GPU kernel for efficient implementation of CATS that translates the activation of sparsity of CATS to real wall-clock time speedups. Our custom kernel implementation of CATS results in a ~15% improvement in wall-clock inference latency of token generation on both Llama-7B and Mistral-7B.

On Speculative Decoding for Multimodal Large Language Models
Mukul Gagrani, Raghavv Goel, Wonseok Jeon, Junyoung Park, Mingu Lee, Christopher Lott
Inference with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is slow due to their large-language-model backbone which suffers from memory bandwidth bottleneck and generates tokens auto-regressively. In this paper, we explore the application of speculative decoding to enhance the inference efficiency of MLLMs, specifically the LLaVA 7B model. We show that a language-only model can serve as a good draft model for speculative decoding with LLaVA 7B, bypassing the need for image tokens and their associated processing components from the draft model. Our experiments across three different tasks show that speculative decoding can achieve a memory-bound speedup of up to 2.37× using a 115M parameter language model that we trained from scratch. Additionally, we introduce a compact LLaVA draft model incorporating an image adapter, which shows marginal performance gains in image captioning while maintaining comparable results in other tasks.

Prepacking: A Simple Method for Fast Prefilling and Increased Throughput in Large Language Models
Siyan Zhao, Daniel Israel, Guy Van den Broeck, Aditya Grover
During inference for transformer-based large language models (LLM), prefilling is the computation of the key-value (KV) cache for input tokens in the prompt prior to autoregressive generation. For longer input prompt lengths, prefilling will incur a significant overhead on decoding time. In this work, we highlight the following pitfall of prefilling: for batches containing high-varying prompt lengths, significant computation is wasted by the standard practice of padding sequences to the maximum length. As LLMs increasingly support longer context lengths, potentially up to 10 million tokens, variations in prompt lengths within a batch become more pronounced. To address this, we propose Prepacking, a simple yet effective method to optimize prefilling computation. To avoid redundant computation on pad tokens, prepacking combines prompts of varying lengths into a sequence and packs multiple sequences into a compact batch using a bin-packing algorithm. It then modifies the attention mask and positional encoding to compute multiple prefilled KV-caches for multiple prompts within a single sequence. On standard curated dataset containing prompts with varying lengths, we obtain a significant speed and memory efficiency improvements as compared to the default padding-based prefilling computation within Huggingface across a range of base model configurations and inference serving scenarios.

Hierarchical Context Merging: Better Long Context Understanding for Pre-trained LLMs
Woomin Song, Seunghyuk Oh, Sangwoo Mo, Jaehyung Kim, Sukmin Yun, Jung-Woo Ha, Jinwoo Shin
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, a primary constraint they face is the context limit, i.e., the maximum number of tokens they can process. Previous works have explored architectural changes and modifications in positional encoding to relax the constraint, but they often require expensive training or do not address the computational demands of self-attention. In this paper, we present Hierarchical cOntext MERging (HOMER), a new training-free scheme designed to overcome the limitations. HOMER uses a divide-and-conquer algorithm, dividing long inputs into manageable chunks. Each chunk is then processed collectively, employing a hierarchical strategy that merges adjacent chunks at progressive transformer layers. A token reduction technique precedes each merging, ensuring memory usage efficiency. We also propose an optimized computational order reducing the memory requirement to logarithmically scale with respect to input length, making it especially favorable for environments with tight memory restrictions. Our experiments demonstrate the proposed method's superior performance and memory efficiency, enabling the broader use of LLMs in contexts requiring extended context.

Fewer Truncations Improve Language Modeling
Hantian Ding, Zijian Wang, Giovanni Paolini, Varun Kumar, Anoop Deoras, Dan Roth, Stefano Soatto
In large language model training, input documents are typically concatenated together and then split into sequences of equal length to avoid padding tokens. Despite its efficiency, the concatenation approach compromises data integrity -- it inevitably breaks many documents into incomplete pieces, leading to excessive truncations that hinder the model from learning to compose logically coherent and factually consistent content that is grounded on the complete context. To address the issue, we propose Best-fit Packing, a scalable and efficient method that packs documents into training sequences through length-aware combinatorial optimization. Our method completely eliminates unnecessary truncations while retaining the same training efficiency as concatenation. Empirical results from both text and code pre-training show that our method achieves superior performance (e.g., relatively +4.7% on reading comprehension; +16.8% in context following; and +9.2% on program synthesis), and reduces closed-domain hallucination effectively by up to 58.3%.

TriForce: Lossless Acceleration of Long Sequence Generation with Hierarchical Speculative Decoding
Hanshi Sun, Zhuoming Chen, Xinyu Yang, Yuandong Tian, Beidi Chen
With large language models (LLMs) widely deployed in long content generation recently, there has emerged an increasing demand for efficient long-sequence inference support. However, key-value (KV) cache, which is stored to avoid re-computation, has emerged as a critical bottleneck by growing linearly in size with the sequence length. Due to the auto-regressive nature of LLMs, the entire KV cache will be loaded for every generated token, resulting in low utilization of computational cores and high latency. While various compression methods for KV cache have been proposed to alleviate this issue, they suffer from degradation in generation quality. We introduce TriForce, a hierarchical speculative decoding system that is scalable to long sequence generation. This approach leverages the original model weights and dynamic sparse KV cache via retrieval as a draft model, which serves as an intermediate layer in the hierarchy and is further speculated by a smaller model to reduce its drafting latency. TriForce not only facilitates impressive speedups for Llama2-7B-128K, achieving up to 2.31× on an A100 GPU but also showcases scalability in handling even longer contexts. For the offloading setting on two RTX 4090 GPUs, TriForce achieves 0.108s/token—only half as slow as the auto-regressive baseline on an A100, which attains 7.78× on our optimized offloading system. Additionally, TriForce performs 4.86× than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference on a single RTX 4090 GPU. TriForce's robustness is highlighted by its consistently outstanding performance across various temperatures. 

When LLMs are Unfit Use FastFit: Fast and Effective Text Classification with Many Classes
Asaf Yehudai, Elron Bendel
We present FastFit, a method, and a Python package design to provide fast and accurate few-shot classification, especially for scenarios with many semantically similar classes. FastFit utilizes a novel approach integrating batch contrastive learning and token-level similarity score. Compared to existing few-shot learning packages, such as SetFit, Transformers, or few-shot prompting of large language models via API calls, FastFit significantly improves multiclass classification performance in speed and accuracy across FewMany, our newly curated English benchmark, and Multilingual datasets. FastFit demonstrates a 3-20x improvement in training speed, completing training in just a few seconds. The FastFit package is now available on GitHub and PyPi, presenting a user-friendly solution for NLP practitioners.

LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval
Dawei Zhu, Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Yifan Song, Wenhao Wu, Furu Wei, Sujian Li
Embedding models play a pivot role in modern NLP applications such as IR and RAG. While the context limit of LLMs has been pushed beyond 1 million tokens, embedding models are still confined to a narrow context window not exceeding 8k tokens, refrained from application scenarios requiring long inputs such as legal contracts. This paper explores context window extension of existing embedding models, pushing the limit to 32k without requiring additional training. First, we examine the performance of current embedding models for long context retrieval on our newly constructed LongEmbed benchmark. LongEmbed comprises two synthetic tasks and four carefully chosen real-world tasks, featuring documents of varying length and dispersed target information. Benchmarking results underscore huge room for improvement in these models. Based on this, comprehensive experiments show that training-free context window extension strategies like position interpolation can effectively extend the context window of existing embedding models by several folds, regardless of their original context being 512 or beyond 4k. Furthermore, for models employing absolute position encoding (APE), we show the possibility of further fine-tuning to harvest notable performance gains while strictly preserving original behavior for short inputs. For models using rotary position embedding (RoPE), significant enhancements are observed when employing RoPE-specific methods, such as NTK and SelfExtend, indicating RoPE's superiority over APE for context window extension. To facilitate future research, we release E5-Base-4k and E5-RoPE-Base, along with the LongEmbed benchmark.

Learn2Talk: 3D Talking Face Learns from 2D Talking Face
Yixiang Zhuang, Baoping Cheng, Yao Cheng, Yuntao Jin, Renshuai Liu, Chengyang Li, Xuan Cheng, Jing Liao, Juncong Lin
Speech-driven facial animation methods usually contain two main classes, 3D and 2D talking face, both of which attract considerable research attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, the research on 3D talking face does not go deeper as 2D talking face, in the aspect of lip-synchronization (lip-sync) and speech perception. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose a learning framework named Learn2Talk, which can construct a better 3D talking face network by exploiting two expertise points from the field of 2D talking face. Firstly, inspired by the audio-video sync network, a 3D sync-lip expert model is devised for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motion. Secondly, a teacher model selected from 2D talking face methods is used to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network to yield more 3D vertex accuracy. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and speech perception, compared with state-of-the-arts. Finally, we show two applications of the proposed framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting based avatar animation.

Groma: Localized Visual Tokenization for Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models
Chuofan Ma, Yi Jiang, Jiannan Wu, Zehuan Yuan, Xiaojuan Qi
We introduce Groma, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with grounded and fine-grained visual perception ability. Beyond holistic image understanding, Groma is adept at region-level tasks such as region captioning and visual grounding. Such capabilities are built upon a localized visual tokenization mechanism, where an image input is decomposed into regions of interest and subsequently encoded into region tokens. By integrating region tokens into user instructions and model responses, we seamlessly enable Groma to understand user-specified region inputs and ground its textual output to images. Besides, to enhance the grounded chat ability of Groma, we curate a visually grounded instruction dataset by leveraging the powerful GPT-4V and visual prompting techniques. Compared with MLLMs that rely on the language model or external module for localization, Groma consistently demonstrates superior performances in standard referring and grounding benchmarks, highlighting the advantages of embedding localization into image tokenization. 

decoupleQ: Towards 2-bit Post-Training Uniform Quantization via decoupling Parameters into Integer and Floating Points
Yi Guo, Fanliu Kong, Xiaoyang Li, Hui Li, Wei Chen, Xiaogang Tian, Jinping Cai, Yang Zhang, Shouda Liu
Quantization emerges as one of the most promising compression technologies for deploying efficient large models for various real time application in recent years. Considering that the storage and IO of weights take up the vast majority of the overhead inside a large model, weight only quantization can lead to large gains. However, existing quantization schemes suffer from significant accuracy degradation at very low bits, or require some additional computational overhead when deployed, making it difficult to be applied to large-scale applications in industry. In this paper, we propose decoupleQ, achieving a substantial increase in model accuracy, especially at very low bits. decoupleQ abandons the traditional heuristic quantization paradigm and decouples the model parameters into integer and floating-point parts, thus transforming the quantization problem into a traditional mathematical optimization problem with constraints, which is then solved alternatively by off-the-shelf optimization methods.
Quantization via decoupleQ is linear and uniform, making it hardware-friendlier than non-uniform counterpart, and enabling the idea to be migrated to high-bit quantization to enhance its robustness. Our method has achieved well on-line accuracy near fp16/bf16 on the 2-bit quantization of large speech models in ByteDance. 

RAGCache: Efficient Knowledge Caching for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Chao Jin, Zili Zhang, Xuanlin Jiang, Fangyue Liu, Xin Liu, Xuanzhe Liu, Xin Jin
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown significant improvements in various natural language processing tasks by integrating the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and external knowledge databases. However, RAG introduces long sequence generation and leads to high computation and memory costs. We propose Thoth, a novel multilevel dynamic caching system tailored for RAG. Our analysis benchmarks current RAG systems, pinpointing the performance bottleneck (i.e., long sequence due to knowledge injection) and optimization opportunities (i.e., caching knowledge's intermediate states). Based on these insights, we design Thoth, which organizes the intermediate states of retrieved knowledge in a knowledge tree and caches them in the GPU and host memory hierarchy. Thoth proposes a replacement policy that is aware of LLM inference characteristics and RAG retrieval patterns. It also dynamically overlaps the retrieval and inference steps to minimize the end-to-end latency. We implement Thoth and evaluate it on vLLM, a state-of-the-art LLM inference system and Faiss, a state-of-the-art vector database. The experimental results show that Thoth reduces the time to first token (TTFT) by up to 4x and improves the throughput by up to 2.1x compared to vLLM integrated with Faiss.

Lossless Acceleration of Large Language Model via Adaptive N-gram Parallel Decoding
Jie Ou, Yueming Chen, Wenhong Tian
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities, they are hindered by significant resource consumption and considerable latency due to autoregressive processing. In this study, we introduce Adaptive N-gram Parallel Decoding (ANPD), an innovative and lossless approach that accelerates inference by allowing the simultaneous generation of multiple tokens. ANPD incorporates a two-stage approach: it begins with a rapid drafting phase that employs an N-gram module, which adapts based on the current interactive context, followed by a verification phase, during which the original LLM assesses and confirms the proposed tokens. Consequently, ANPD preserves the integrity of the LLM's original output while enhancing processing speed. We further leverage a multi-level architecture for the N-gram module to enhance the precision of the initial draft, consequently reducing inference latency. ANPD eliminates the need for retraining or extra GPU memory, making it an efficient and plug-and-play enhancement. In our experiments, models such as LLaMA and its fine-tuned variants have shown speed improvements up to 3.67x, validating the effectiveness of our proposed ANPD.

Mixture of LoRA Experts
Xun Wu, Shaohan Huang, Furu Wei
LoRA has gained widespread acceptance in the fine-tuning of large pre-trained models to cater to a diverse array of downstream tasks, showcasing notable effectiveness and efficiency, thereby solidifying its position as one of the most prevalent fine-tuning techniques. Due to the modular nature of LoRA's plug-and-play plugins, researchers have delved into the amalgamation of multiple LoRAs to empower models to excel across various downstream tasks. Nonetheless, extant approaches for LoRA fusion grapple with inherent challenges. Direct arithmetic merging may result in the loss of the original pre-trained model's generative capabilities or the distinct identity of LoRAs, thereby yielding suboptimal outcomes. On the other hand, Reference tuning-based fusion exhibits limitations concerning the requisite flexibility for the effective combination of multiple LoRAs. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces the Mixture of LoRA Experts (MoLE) approach, which harnesses hierarchical control and unfettered branch selection. The MoLE approach not only achieves superior LoRA fusion performance in comparison to direct arithmetic merging but also retains the crucial flexibility for combining LoRAs effectively. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted in both the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Vision & Language (V&L) domains substantiate the efficacy of MoLE.

MARVEL: Multidimensional Abstraction and Reasoning through Visual Evaluation and Learning
Yifan Jiang, Jiarui Zhang, Kexuan Sun, Zhivar Sourati, Kian Ahrabian, Kaixin Ma, Filip Ilievski, Jay Pujara
While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress on many popular visual reasoning benchmarks, whether they possess abstract visual reasoning abilities remains an open question. Similar to the Sudoku puzzles, abstract visual reasoning (AVR) problems require finding high-level patterns (e.g., repetition constraints) that control the input shapes (e.g., digits) in a specific task configuration (e.g., matrix). However, existing AVR benchmarks only considered a limited set of patterns (addition, conjunction), input shapes (rectangle, square), and task configurations (3 by 3 matrices). To evaluate MLLMs' reasoning abilities comprehensively, we introduce MARVEL, a multidimensional AVR benchmark with 770 puzzles composed of six core knowledge patterns, geometric and abstract shapes, and five different task configurations. To inspect whether the model accuracy is grounded in perception and reasoning, MARVEL complements the general AVR question with perception questions in a hierarchical evaluation framework. We conduct comprehensive experiments on MARVEL with nine representative MLLMs in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal that all models show near-random performance on the AVR question, with significant performance gaps (40%) compared to humans across all patterns and task configurations. Further analysis of perception questions reveals that MLLMs struggle to comprehend the visual features (near-random performance) and even count the panels in the puzzle ( <45%), hindering their ability for abstract reasoning. We release our entire code and dataset.

Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone
We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training, a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide some initial parameter-scaling results with a 7B and 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small and phi-3-medium, both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75% and 78% on MMLU, and 8.7 and 8.9 on MT-bench).

XFT: Unlocking the Power of Code Instruction Tuning by Simply Merging Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts
Yifeng Ding, Jiawei Liu, Yuxiang Wei, Terry Yue Zhuo, Lingming Zhang
We introduce XFT, a simple yet powerful training scheme, by simply merging upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to unleash the performance limit of instruction-tuned code Large Language Models (LLMs). While vanilla sparse upcycling fails to improve instruction tuning, XFT introduces a shared expert mechanism with a novel routing weight normalization strategy into sparse upcycling, which significantly boosts instruction tuning. After fine-tuning the upcycled MoE model, XFT introduces a learnable model merging mechanism to compile the upcycled MoE model back to a dense model, achieving upcycled MoE-level performance with only dense-model compute. By applying XFT to a 1.3B model, we create a new state-of-the-art tiny code LLM (<3B) with 67.1 and 64.6 pass@1 on HumanEval and HumanEval+ respectively. With the same data and model architecture, XFT improves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) by 13% on HumanEval+, along with consistent improvements from 2% to 13% on MBPP+, MultiPL-E, and DS-1000, demonstrating its generalizability. XFT is fully orthogonal to existing techniques such as Evol-Instruct and OSS-Instruct, opening a new dimension for improving code instruction tuning.

Layer Skip: Enabling Early Exit Inference and Self-Speculative Decoding
Mostafa Elhoushi, Akshat Shrivastava, Diana Liskovich, Basil Hosmer, Bram Wasti, Liangzhen Lai, Anas Mahmoud, Bilge Acun, Saurabh Agarwal, Ahmed Roman, Ahmed A Aly, Beidi Chen, Carole-Jean Wu
We present LayerSkip, an end-to-end solution to speed-up inference of large language models (LLMs). First, during training we apply layer dropout, with low dropout rates for earlier layers and higher dropout rates for later layers, and an early exit loss where all transformer layers share the same exit. Second, during inference, we show that this training recipe increases the accuracy of early exit at earlier layers, without adding any auxiliary layers or modules to the model. Third, we present a novel self-speculative decoding solution where we exit at early layers and verify and correct with remaining layers of the model. Our proposed self-speculative decoding approach has less memory footprint than other speculative decoding approaches and benefits from shared compute and activations of the draft and verification stages. We run experiments on different Llama model sizes on different types of training: pretraining from scratch, continual pretraining, finetuning on specific data domain, and finetuning on specific task. We implement our inference solution and show speedups of up to 2.16x on summarization for CNN/DM documents, 1.82x on coding, and 2.0x on TOPv2 semantic parsing task.

MoDE: CLIP Data Experts via Clustering
Jiawei Ma, Po-Yao Huang, Saining Xie, Shang-Wen Li, Luke Zettlemoyer, Shih-Fu Chang, Wen-Tau Yih, Hu Xu
The success of contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) relies on the supervision from the pairing between images and captions, which tends to be noisy in web-crawled data. We present Mixture of Data Experts (MoDE) and learn a system of CLIP data experts via clustering. Each data expert is trained on one data cluster, being less sensitive to false negative noises in other clusters. At inference time, we ensemble their outputs by applying weights determined through the correlation between task metadata and cluster conditions. To estimate the correlation precisely, the samples in one cluster should be semantically similar, but the number of data experts should still be reasonable for training and inference. As such, we consider the ontology in human language and propose to use fine-grained cluster centers to represent each data expert at a coarse-grained level. Experimental studies show that four CLIP data experts on ViT-B/16 outperform the ViT-L/14 by OpenAI CLIP and OpenCLIP on zero-shot image classification but with less (<35\%) training cost. Meanwhile, MoDE can train all data expert asynchronously and can flexibly include new data experts.

Retrieval Head Mechanistically Explains Long-Context Factuality
Wenhao Wu, Yizhong Wang, Guangxuan Xiao, Hao Peng, Yao Fu
Despite the recent progress in long-context language models, it remains elusive how transformer-based models exhibit the capability to retrieve relevant information from arbitrary locations within the long context. This paper aims to address this question. Our systematic investigation across a wide spectrum of models reveals that a special type of attention heads are largely responsible for retrieving information, which we dub retrieval heads. We identify intriguing properties of retrieval heads:(1) universal: all the explored models with long-context capability have a set of retrieval heads; (2) sparse: only a small portion (less than 5\%) of the attention heads are retrieval. (3) intrinsic: retrieval heads already exist in models pretrained with short context. When extending the context length by continual pretraining, it is still the same set of heads that perform information retrieval. (4) dynamically activated: take Llama-2 7B for example, 12 retrieval heads always attend to the required information no matter how the context is changed. The rest of the retrieval heads are activated in different contexts. (5) causal: completely pruning retrieval heads leads to failure in retrieving relevant information and results in hallucination, while pruning random non-retrieval heads does not affect the model's retrieval ability. We further show that retrieval heads strongly influence chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, where the model needs to frequently refer back the question and previously-generated context. Conversely, tasks where the model directly generates the answer using its intrinsic knowledge are less impacted by masking out retrieval heads. These observations collectively explain which internal part of the model seeks information from the input tokens. We believe our insights will foster future research on reducing hallucination, improving reasoning, and compressing the KV cache.

Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models
Jacob Pfau, William Merrill, Samuel R. Bowman
Chain-of-thought responses from language models improve performance across most benchmarks. However, it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater computation that additional tokens allow. We show that transformers can use meaningless filler tokens (e.g., '......') in place of a chain of thought to solve two hard algorithmic tasks they could not solve when responding without intermediate tokens. However, we find empirically that learning to use filler tokens is difficult and requires specific, dense supervision to converge. We also provide a theoretical characterization of the class of problems where filler tokens are useful in terms of the quantifier depth of a first-order formula. For problems satisfying this characterization, chain-of-thought tokens need not provide information about the intermediate computational steps involved in multi-token computations. In summary, our results show that additional tokens can provide computational benefits independent of token choice. The fact that intermediate tokens can act as filler tokens raises concerns about large language models engaging in unauditable, hidden computations that are increasingly detached from the observed chain-of-thought tokens.

Kangaroo: Lossless Self-Speculative Decoding via Double Early Exiting
Fangcheng Liu, Yehui Tang, Zhenhua Liu, Yunsheng Ni, Kai Han, Yunhe Wang
Speculative decoding has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the inference of large language models while maintaining a consistent sampling distribution. However, the conventional approach of training a separate draft model to achieve a satisfactory token acceptance rate can be costly. Drawing inspiration from early exiting, we propose a novel self-speculative decoding framework \emph{Kangaroo}, which uses a fixed shallow sub-network as a self-draft model, with the remaining layers serving as the larger target model. We train a lightweight and efficient adapter module on top of the sub-network to bridge the gap between the sub-network and the full model's representation ability. It is noteworthy that the inference latency of the self-draft model may no longer be negligible compared to the large model, necessitating strategies to increase the token acceptance rate while minimizing the drafting steps of the small model. To address this challenge, we introduce an additional early exiting mechanism for generating draft tokens. Specifically, we halt the small model's subsequent prediction during the drafting phase once the confidence level for the current token falls below a certain threshold. Extensive experiments on the Spec-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of Kangaroo. Under single-sequence verification, Kangaroo achieves speedups up to 1.68× on Spec-Bench, outperforming Medusa-1 with 88.7\% fewer additional parameters (67M compared to 591M).

Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction
Fabian Gloeckle, Badr Youbi Idrissi, Baptiste Rozière, David Lopez-Paz, Gabriel Synnaeve
Large language models such as GPT and Llama are trained with a next-token prediction loss. In this work, we suggest that training language models to predict multiple future tokens at once results in higher sample efficiency. More specifically, at each position in the training corpus, we ask the model to predict the following n tokens using n independent output heads, operating on top of a shared model trunk. Considering multi-token prediction as an auxiliary training task, we measure improved downstream capabilities with no overhead in training time for both code and natural language models. The method is increasingly useful for larger model sizes, and keeps its appeal when training for multiple epochs. Gains are especially pronounced on generative benchmarks like coding, where our models consistently outperform strong baselines by several percentage points. Our 13B parameter models solves 12 % more problems on HumanEval and 17 % more on MBPP than comparable next-token models. Experiments on small algorithmic tasks demonstrate that multi-token prediction is favorable for the development of induction heads and algorithmic reasoning capabilities. As an additional benefit, models trained with 4-token prediction are up to 3 times faster at inference, even with large batch sizes.

Iterative Reasoning Preference Optimization
Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Weizhe Yuan, Kyunghyun Cho, He He, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jason Weston
Iterative preference optimization methods have recently been shown to perform well for general instruction tuning tasks, but typically make little improvement on reasoning tasks (Yuan et al., 2024, Chen et al., 2024). In this work we develop an iterative approach that optimizes the preference between competing generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) candidates by optimizing for winning vs. losing reasoning steps that lead to the correct answer. We train using a modified DPO loss (Rafailov et al., 2023) with an additional negative log-likelihood term, which we find to be crucial. We show reasoning improves across repeated iterations of this scheme. While only relying on examples in the training set, our approach results in increasing accuracy for Llama-2-70B-Chat from 55.6% to 81.6% on GSM8K (and 88.7% with majority voting out of 32 samples), from 12.5% to 20.8% on MATH, and from 77.8% to 86.7% on ARC-Challenge, which outperforms other Llama-2-based models not relying on additionally sourced datasets.

When to Retrieve: Teaching LLMs to Utilize Information Retrieval Effectively
Tiziano Labruna, Jon Ander Campos, Gorka Azkune
In this paper, we demonstrate how Large Language Models (LLMs) can effectively learn to use an off-the-shelf information retrieval (IR) system specifically when additional context is required to answer a given question. Given the performance of IR systems, the optimal strategy for question answering does not always entail external information retrieval; rather, it often involves leveraging the parametric memory of the LLM itself. Prior research has identified this phenomenon in the PopQA dataset, wherein the most popular questions are effectively addressed using the LLM's parametric memory, while less popular ones require IR system usage. Following this, we propose a tailored training approach for LLMs, leveraging existing open-domain question answering datasets. Here, LLMs are trained to generate a special token, <RET>, when they do not know the answer to a question. Our evaluation of the Adaptive Retrieval LLM (Adapt-LLM) on the PopQA dataset showcases improvements over the same LLM under three configurations: (i) retrieving information for all the questions, (ii) using always the parametric memory of the LLM, and (iii) using a popularity threshold to decide when to use a retriever. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that Adapt-LLM is able to generate the <RET> token when it determines that it does not know how to answer a question, indicating the need for IR, while it achieves notably high accuracy levels when it chooses to rely only on its parametric memory.

A Careful Examination of Large Language Model Performance on Grade School Arithmetic
Hugh Zhang, Jeff Da, Dean Lee, Vaughn Robinson, Catherine Wu, Will Song, Tiffany Zhao, Pranav Raja, Dylan Slack, Qin Lyu, Sean Hendryx, Russell Kaplan, Michele (Mike)Lunati, Summer Yue
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success on many benchmarks for mathematical reasoning. However, there is growing concern that some of this performance actually reflects dataset contamination, where data closely resembling benchmark questions leaks into the training data, instead of true reasoning ability. To investigate this claim rigorously, we commission Grade School Math 1000 (GSM1k). GSM1k is designed to mirror the style and complexity of the established GSM8k benchmark, the gold standard for measuring elementary mathematical reasoning. We ensure that the two benchmarks are comparable across important metrics such as human solve rates, number of steps in solution, answer magnitude, and more. When evaluating leading open- and closed-source LLMs on GSM1k, we observe accuracy drops of up to 13%, with several families of models (e.g., Phi and Mistral) showing evidence of systematic overfitting across almost all model sizes. At the same time, many models, especially those on the frontier, (e.g., Gemini/GPT/Claude) show minimal signs of overfitting. Further analysis suggests a positive relationship (Spearman's r^2=0.32) between a model's probability of generating an example from GSM8k and its performance gap between GSM8k and GSM1k, suggesting that many models may have partially memorized GSM8k.

Clover: Regressive Lightweight Speculative Decoding with Sequential Knowledge
Bin Xiao, Chunan Shi, Xiaonan Nie, Fan Yang, Xiangwei Deng, Lei Su, Weipeng Chen, Bin Cui
Large language models (LLMs) suffer from low efficiency as the mismatch between the requirement of auto-regressive decoding and the design of most contemporary GPUs. Specifically, billions to trillions of parameters must be loaded to the GPU cache through its limited memory bandwidth for computation, but only a small batch of tokens is actually computed. Consequently, the GPU spends most of its time on memory transfer instead of computation. Recently, parallel decoding, a type of speculative decoding algorithms, is becoming more popular and has demonstrated impressive efficiency improvement in generation. It introduces extra decoding heads to large models, enabling them to predict multiple subsequent tokens simultaneously and verify these candidate continuations in a single decoding step. However, this approach deviates from the training objective of next token prediction used during pre-training, resulting in a low hit rate for candidate tokens. In this paper, we propose a new speculative decoding algorithm, Clover, which integrates sequential knowledge into the parallel decoding process. This enhancement improves the hit rate of speculators and thus boosts the overall efficiency. Clover transmits the sequential knowledge from pre-speculated tokens via the Regressive Connection, then employs an Attention Decoder to integrate these speculated tokens. Additionally, Clover incorporates an Augmenting Block that modifies the hidden states to better align with the purpose of speculative generation rather than next token prediction. The experiment results demonstrate that Clover outperforms the baseline by up to 91% on Baichuan-Small and 146% on Baichuan-Large, respectively, and exceeds the performance of the previously top-performing method, Medusa, by up to 37% on Baichuan-Small and 57% on Baichuan-Large, respectively.