Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced widespread adoption across scientific and industrial domains due to their versatility and utility for diverse tasks. Nevertheless, deploying and serving these models at scale with optimal throughput and latency remains a significant challenge, primarily because of the high computational and memory demands associated with LLMs. To tackle this limitation, we introduce Expert Router, a system designed to orchestrate multiple expert models efficiently, thereby enhancing scalability. Expert Router is a parallel inference system with a central routing gateway that distributes incoming requests using a clustering method. This approach effectively partitions incoming requests among available LLMs, maximizing overall throughput. Our extensive evaluations encompassed up to 1,000 concurrent users, providing comprehensive insights into the system's behavior from user and infrastructure perspectives. The results demonstrate Expert Router's effectiveness in handling high-load scenarios and achieving higher throughput rates, particularly under many concurrent users.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently gained substantial attention in both industrial and academic fields for their superior visual generation capabilities, outperforming traditional diffusion models that use U-Net. However,the enhanced performance of DiTs also comes with high parameter counts and implementation costs, seriously restricting their use on resource-limited devices such as mobile phones. To address these challenges, we introduce the Hybrid Floating-point Quantization for DiT(HQ-DiT), an efficient post-training quantization method that utilizes 4-bit floating-point (FP) precision on both weights and activations for DiT inference. Compared to fixed-point quantization (e.g., INT8), FP quantization, complemented by our proposed clipping range selection mechanism, naturally aligns with the data distribution within DiT, resulting in a minimal quantization error. Furthermore, HQ-DiT also implements a universal identity mathematical transform to mitigate the serious quantization error caused by the outliers. The experimental results demonstrate that DiT can achieve extremely low-precision quantization (i.e., 4 bits) with negligible impact on performance. Our approach marks the first instance where both weights and activations in DiTs are quantized to just 4 bits, with only a 0.12 increase in sFID on ImageNet.
Gradient Inversion Attacks invert the transmitted gradients in Federated Learning (FL) systems to reconstruct the sensitive data of local clients and have raised considerable privacy concerns. A majority of gradient inversion methods rely heavily on explicit prior knowledge (e.g., a well pre-trained generative model), which is often unavailable in realistic scenarios. To alleviate this issue, researchers have proposed to leverage the implicit prior knowledge of an over-parameterized network. However, they only utilize a fixed neural architecture for all the attack settings. This would hinder the adaptive use of implicit architectural priors and consequently limit the generalizability. In this paper, we further exploit such implicit prior knowledge by proposing Gradient Inversion via Neural Architecture Search (GI-NAS), which adaptively searches the network and captures the implicit priors behind neural architectures. Extensive experiments verify that our proposed GI-NAS can achieve superior attack performance compared to state-of-the-art gradient inversion methods, even under more practical settings with high-resolution images, large-sized batches, and advanced defense strategies.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in cybersecurity applications but have also caused lower confidence due to problems like hallucinations and a lack of truthfulness. Existing benchmarks provide general evaluations but do not sufficiently address the practical and applied aspects of LLM performance in cybersecurity-specific tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the SECURE (Security Extraction, Understanding \& Reasoning Evaluation), a benchmark designed to assess LLMs performance in realistic cybersecurity scenarios. SECURE includes six datasets focussed on the Industrial Control System sector to evaluate knowledge extraction, understanding, and reasoning based on industry-standard sources. Our study evaluates seven state-of-the-art models on these tasks, providing insights into their strengths and weaknesses in cybersecurity contexts, and offer recommendations for improving LLMs reliability as cyber advisory tools.
The attention mechanism is a critical component of Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows tokens in a sequence to interact with each other, but is order-invariant. Incorporating position encoding (PE) makes it possible to address by position, such as attending to the i-th token. However, current PE methods use token counts to derive position, and thus cannot generalize to higher levels of abstraction, such as attending to the i-th sentence. In this paper, we propose a new position encoding method, Contextual Position Encoding (CoPE), that allows positions to be conditioned on context by incrementing position only on certain tokens determined by the model. This allows more general position addressing such as attending to the $i$-th particular word, noun, or sentence. We show that CoPE can solve the selective copy, counting and Flip-Flop tasks where popular position embeddings fail, and improves perplexity on language modeling and coding tasks.
AI legal assistants based on Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide accessible legal consulting services, but the hallucination problem poses potential legal risks. This paper presents Chatlaw, an innovative legal assistant utilizing a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model and a multi-agent system to enhance the reliability and accuracy of AI-driven legal services. By integrating knowledge graphs with artificial screening, we construct a high-quality legal dataset to train the MoE model. This model utilizes different experts to address various legal issues, optimizing the accuracy of legal responses. Additionally, Standardized Operating Procedures (SOP), modeled after real law firm workflows, significantly reduce errors and hallucinations in legal services. Our MoE model outperforms GPT-4 in the Lawbench and Unified Qualification Exam for Legal Professionals by 7.73% in accuracy and 11 points, respectively, and also surpasses other models in multiple dimensions during real-case consultations, demonstrating our robust capability for legal consultation.
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. 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 LLM-based scenarios, 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 Trie-based retrieval and verification mechanism to be able to accept several tokens at a forward step. 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. Our framework is widely deployed in Alipay since April 2023, and obtain remarkable 2.66x to 6.26x speedup. Our code is available at //github.com/alipay/PainlessInferenceAcceleration.
Preference optimization, particularly through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has achieved significant success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human intentions. Unlike offline alignment with a fixed dataset, online feedback collection from humans or AI on model generations typically leads to more capable reward models and better-aligned LLMs through an iterative process. However, achieving a globally accurate reward model requires systematic exploration to generate diverse responses that span the vast space of natural language. Random sampling from standard reward-maximizing LLMs alone is insufficient to fulfill this requirement. To address this issue, we propose a bilevel objective optimistically biased towards potentially high-reward responses to actively explore out-of-distribution regions. By solving the inner-level problem with the reparameterized reward function, the resulting algorithm, named Self-Exploring Language Models (SELM), eliminates the need for a separate RM and iteratively updates the LLM with a straightforward objective. Compared to Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), the SELM objective reduces indiscriminate favor of unseen extrapolations and enhances exploration efficiency. Our experimental results demonstrate that when finetuned on Zephyr-7B-SFT and Llama-3-8B-Instruct models, SELM significantly boosts the performance on instruction-following benchmarks such as MT-Bench and AlpacaEval 2.0, as well as various standard academic benchmarks in different settings. Our code and models are available at //github.com/shenao-zhang/SELM.
Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.
Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval (RSITR) is pivotal for knowledge services and data mining in the remote sensing (RS) domain. Considering the multi-scale representations in image content and text vocabulary can enable the models to learn richer representations and enhance retrieval. Current multi-scale RSITR approaches typically align multi-scale fused image features with text features, but overlook aligning image-text pairs at distinct scales separately. This oversight restricts their ability to learn joint representations suitable for effective retrieval. We introduce a novel Multi-Scale Alignment (MSA) method to overcome this limitation. Our method comprises three key innovations: (1) Multi-scale Cross-Modal Alignment Transformer (MSCMAT), which computes cross-attention between single-scale image features and localized text features, integrating global textual context to derive a matching score matrix within a mini-batch, (2) a multi-scale cross-modal semantic alignment loss that enforces semantic alignment across scales, and (3) a cross-scale multi-modal semantic consistency loss that uses the matching matrix from the largest scale to guide alignment at smaller scales. We evaluated our method across multiple datasets, demonstrating its efficacy with various visual backbones and establishing its superiority over existing state-of-the-art methods. The GitHub URL for our project is: //github.com/yr666666/MSA
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.