With the rising popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been an increasing interest in compression techniques that enable their efficient deployment. This study focuses on the Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) of LLMs. Drawing from recent advances, our work introduces QuantEase, a layer-wise quantization framework where individual layers undergo separate quantization. The problem is framed as a discrete-structured non-convex optimization, prompting the development of algorithms rooted in Coordinate Descent (CD) techniques. These CD-based methods provide high-quality solutions to the complex non-convex layer-wise quantization problems. Notably, our CD-based approach features straightforward updates, relying solely on matrix and vector operations, circumventing the need for matrix inversion or decomposition. We also explore an outlier-aware variant of our approach, allowing for retaining significant weights (outliers) with complete precision. Our proposal attains state-of-the-art performance in terms of perplexity and zero-shot accuracy in empirical evaluations across various LLMs and datasets, with relative improvements up to 15% over methods such as GPTQ. Particularly noteworthy is our outlier-aware algorithm's capability to achieve near or sub-3-bit quantization of LLMs with an acceptable drop in accuracy, obviating the need for non-uniform quantization or grouping techniques, improving upon methods such as SpQR by up to two times in terms of perplexity.
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm, which enables multiple and decentralized clients to collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central aggregator. Traditional FL solutions rely on the trust assumption of the centralized aggregator, which forms cohorts of clients in a fair and honest manner. However, a malicious aggregator, in reality, could abandon and replace the client's training models, or launch Sybil attacks to insert fake clients. Such malicious behaviors give the aggregator more power to control clients in the FL setting and determine the final training results. In this work, we introduce zkFL, which leverages zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to tackle the issue of a malicious aggregator during the training model aggregation process. To guarantee the correct aggregation results, the aggregator needs to provide a proof per round. The proof can demonstrate to the clients that the aggregator executes the intended behavior faithfully. To further reduce the verification cost of clients, we employ a blockchain to handle the proof in a zero-knowledge way, where miners (i.e., the nodes validating and maintaining the blockchain data) can verify the proof without knowing the clients' local and aggregated models. The theoretical analysis and empirical results show that zkFL can achieve better security and privacy than traditional FL, without modifying the underlying FL network structure or heavily compromising the training speed.
Diffusion models have recently gained popularity for accelerated MRI reconstruction due to their high sample quality. They can effectively serve as rich data priors while incorporating the forward model flexibly at inference time, and they have been shown to be more robust than unrolled methods under distribution shifts. However, diffusion models require careful tuning of inference hyperparameters on a validation set and are still sensitive to distribution shifts during testing. To address these challenges, we introduce SURE-based MRI Reconstruction with Diffusion models (SMRD), a method that performs test-time hyperparameter tuning to enhance robustness during testing. SMRD uses Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE) to estimate the mean squared error of the reconstruction during testing. SURE is then used to automatically tune the inference hyperparameters and to set an early stopping criterion without the need for validation tuning. To the best of our knowledge, SMRD is the first to incorporate SURE into the sampling stage of diffusion models for automatic hyperparameter selection. SMRD outperforms diffusion model baselines on various measurement noise levels, acceleration factors, and anatomies, achieving a PSNR improvement of up to 6 dB under measurement noise. The code is publicly available at //github.com/NVlabs/SMRD .
Privacy policies inform users about the data management practices of organizations. Yet, their complexity often renders them largely incomprehensible to the average user, necessitating the development of privacy assistants. With the advent of generative AI (genAI) technologies, there is an untapped potential to enhance privacy assistants in answering user queries effectively. However, the reliability of genAI remains a concern due to its propensity for generating incorrect or misleading information. This study introduces GenAIPABench, a novel benchmarking framework designed to evaluate the performance of Generative AI-based Privacy Assistants (GenAIPAs). GenAIPABench comprises: 1) A comprehensive set of questions about an organization's privacy policy and a data protection regulation, along with annotated answers for several organizations and regulations; 2) A robust set of evaluation metrics for assessing the accuracy, relevance, and consistency of the generated responses; and 3) An evaluation tool that generates appropriate prompts to introduce the system to the privacy document and different variations of the privacy questions to evaluate its robustness. We use GenAIPABench to assess the potential of three leading genAI systems in becoming GenAIPAs: ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing AI. Our results demonstrate significant promise in genAI capabilities in the privacy domain while also highlighting challenges in managing complex queries, ensuring consistency, and verifying source accuracy.
Intent detection and identification from multi-turn dialogue has become a widely explored technique in conversational agents, for example, voice assistants and intelligent customer services. The conventional approaches typically cast the intent mining process as a classification task. Although neural classifiers have proven adept at such classification tasks, the issue of neural network models often impedes their practical deployment in real-world settings. We present a novel graph-based multi-turn dialogue system called , which identifies a user's intent by identifying intent elements and a standard query from a dynamically constructed and extensible intent graph using reinforcement learning. In addition, we provide visualization components to monitor the immediate reasoning path for each turn of a dialogue, which greatly facilitates further improvement of the system.
Data Augmentation through generating pseudo data has been proven effective in mitigating the challenge of data scarcity in the field of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). Various augmentation strategies have been widely explored, most of which are motivated by two heuristics, i.e., increasing the distribution similarity and diversity of pseudo data. However, the underlying mechanism responsible for the effectiveness of these strategies remains poorly understood. In this paper, we aim to clarify how data augmentation improves GEC models. To this end, we introduce two interpretable and computationally efficient measures: Affinity and Diversity. Our findings indicate that an excellent GEC data augmentation strategy characterized by high Affinity and appropriate Diversity can better improve the performance of GEC models. Based on this observation, we propose MixEdit, a data augmentation approach that strategically and dynamically augments realistic data, without requiring extra monolingual corpora. To verify the correctness of our findings and the effectiveness of the proposed MixEdit, we conduct experiments on mainstream English and Chinese GEC datasets. The results show that MixEdit substantially improves GEC models and is complementary to traditional data augmentation methods.
Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years, yet current popular evaluation datasets, such as HumanEval and MBPP, predominantly focus on code completion tasks within a single file. This over-simplified setting falls short of representing the real-world software development scenario where repositories span multiple files with numerous cross-file dependencies, and accessing and understanding cross-file context is often required to complete the code correctly. To fill in this gap, we propose CrossCodeEval, a diverse and multilingual code completion benchmark that necessitates an in-depth cross-file contextual understanding to complete the code accurately. CrossCodeEval is built on a diverse set of real-world, open-sourced, permissively-licensed repositories in four popular programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, and C#. To create examples that strictly require cross-file context for accurate completion, we propose a straightforward yet efficient static-analysis-based approach to pinpoint the use of cross-file context within the current file. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art code language models like CodeGen and StarCoder demonstrate that CrossCodeEval is extremely challenging when the relevant cross-file context is absent, and we see clear improvements when adding these context into the prompt. However, despite such improvements, the pinnacle of performance remains notably unattained even with the highest-performing model, indicating that CrossCodeEval is also capable of assessing model's capability in leveraging extensive context to make better code completion. Finally, we benchmarked various methods in retrieving cross-file context, and show that CrossCodeEval can also be used to measure the capability of code retrievers.
We introduce a novel framework named ClarifyGPT, which aims to enhance code generation by empowering LLMs with the ability to identify ambiguous requirements and ask targeted clarifying questions. In particular, ClarifyGPT first detects whether a given requirement is ambiguous by performing a code consistency check. If it is ambiguous, ClarifyGPT prompts an LLM to generate targeted clarifying questions. After receiving question responses, ClarifyGPT refines the ambiguous requirement and inputs it into the same LLM to generate a final code solution. To evaluate our ClarifyGPT, we first conduct a human evaluation involving ten participants who use ClarifyGPT for code generation on two publicly available benchmarks: MBPP-sanitized and MBPP-ET. The results show that ClarifyGPT elevates the performance (Pass@1) of GPT-4 from 70.96% to 80.80% on MBPP-sanitized. Furthermore, to perform large-scale automated evaluations of ClarifyGPT across different LLMs and benchmarks without requiring user participation, we introduce a high-fidelity simulation method to simulate user responses. The automated evaluation results also demonstrate that ClarifyGPT can significantly enhance code generation performance compared to the baselines. In particular, ClarifyGPT improves the average performance of GPT-4 and ChatGPT across four benchmarks from 68.02% to 75.75% and from 58.55% to 67.22%, respectively. We believe that ClarifyGPT can effectively facilitate the practical application of LLMs in real-world development environments.
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 the 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. We will release our code.
Defensive deception is a promising approach for cyberdefense. Although defensive deception is increasingly popular in the research community, there has not been a systematic investigation of its key components, the underlying principles, and its tradeoffs in various problem settings. This survey paper focuses on defensive deception research centered on game theory and machine learning, since these are prominent families of artificial intelligence approaches that are widely employed in defensive deception. This paper brings forth insights, lessons, and limitations from prior work. It closes with an outline of some research directions to tackle major gaps in current defensive deception research.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.