Training Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently at scale presents a formidable challenge, driven by their ever-increasing computational demands and the need for enhanced performance. In this work, we introduce Liger-Kernel, an open-sourced set of Triton kernels developed specifically for LLM training. With kernel optimization techniques like kernel operation fusing and input chunking, our kernels achieve on average a 20% increase in training throughput and a 60% reduction in GPU memory usage for popular LLMs compared to HuggingFace implementations. In addition, Liger-Kernel is designed with modularity, accessibility, and adaptability in mind, catering to both casual and expert users. Comprehensive benchmarks and integration tests are built in to ensure compatibility, performance, correctness, and convergence across diverse computing environments and model architectures. The source code is available under a permissive license at: github.com/linkedin/Liger-Kernel.
Collaboration is a cornerstone of society. In the real world, human teammates make use of multi-sensory data to tackle challenging tasks in ever-changing environments. It is essential for embodied agents collaborating in visually-rich environments replete with dynamic interactions to understand multi-modal observations and task specifications. To evaluate the performance of generalizable multi-modal collaborative agents, we present TeamCraft, a multi-modal multi-agent benchmark built on top of the open-world video game Minecraft. The benchmark features 55,000 task variants specified by multi-modal prompts, procedurally-generated expert demonstrations for imitation learning, and carefully designed protocols to evaluate model generalization capabilities. We also perform extensive analyses to better understand the limitations and strengths of existing approaches. Our results indicate that existing models continue to face significant challenges in generalizing to novel goals, scenes, and unseen numbers of agents. These findings underscore the need for further research in this area. The TeamCraft platform and dataset are publicly available at //github.com/teamcraft-bench/teamcraft.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for 3D scene representation, offering high-fidelity renderings and reconstructions from a set of sparse and unstructured sensor data. In the context of autonomous robotics, where perception and understanding of the environment are pivotal, NeRF holds immense promise for improving performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and analysis of the state-of-the-art techniques for utilizing NeRF to enhance the capabilities of autonomous robots. We especially focus on the perception, localization and navigation, and decision-making modules of autonomous robots and delve into tasks crucial for autonomous operation, including 3D reconstruction, segmentation, pose estimation, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), navigation and planning, and interaction. Our survey meticulously benchmarks existing NeRF-based methods, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Moreover, we explore promising avenues for future research and development in this domain. Notably, we discuss the integration of advanced techniques such as 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), large language models (LLM), and generative AIs, envisioning enhanced reconstruction efficiency, scene understanding, decision-making capabilities. This survey serves as a roadmap for researchers seeking to leverage NeRFs to empower autonomous robots, paving the way for innovative solutions that can navigate and interact seamlessly in complex environments.
We introduce Simultaneous Weighted Preference Optimization (SWEPO), a novel extension of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) designed to accommodate multiple dynamically chosen positive and negative responses for each query. SWEPO employs a weighted group contrastive loss, assigning weights to responses based on their deviation from the mean reward score. This approach effectively prioritizes responses that are significantly better or worse than the average, enhancing optimization. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that simultaneously considering multiple preferences reduces alignment bias, resulting in more robust alignment. Additionally, we provide insights into the training dynamics of our loss function and a related function, InfoNCA. Empirical validation on the UltraFeedback dataset establishes SWEPO as state-of-the-art, with superior performance in downstream evaluations using the AlpacaEval dataset.
Genetic variants (GVs) are defined as differences in the DNA sequences among individuals and play a crucial role in diagnosing and treating genetic diseases. The rapid decrease in next generation sequencing cost has led to an exponential increase in patient-level GV data. This growth poses a challenge for clinicians who must efficiently prioritize patient-specific GVs and integrate them with existing genomic databases to inform patient management. To addressing the interpretation of GVs, genomic foundation models (GFMs) have emerged. However, these models lack standardized performance assessments, leading to considerable variability in model evaluations. This poses the question: How effectively do deep learning methods classify unknown GVs and align them with clinically-verified GVs? We argue that representation learning, which transforms raw data into meaningful feature spaces, is an effective approach for addressing both indexing and classification challenges. We introduce a large-scale Genetic Variant dataset, named GV-Rep, featuring variable-length contexts and detailed annotations, designed for deep learning models to learn GV representations across various traits, diseases, tissue types, and experimental contexts. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) Construction of a comprehensive dataset with 7 million records, each labeled with characteristics of the corresponding variants, alongside additional data from 17,548 gene knockout tests across 1,107 cell types, 1,808 variant combinations, and 156 unique clinically verified GVs from real-world patients. (ii) Analysis of the structure and properties of the dataset. (iii) Experimentation of the dataset with pre-trained GFMs. The results show a significant gap between GFMs current capabilities and accurate GV representation. We hope this dataset will help advance genomic deep learning to bridge this gap.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performances in recent years, setting a new paradigm for NLP research and industry. The legal domain has received some attention from the NLP community partly due to its textual nature. Some tasks from this domain are represented by question-answering (QA) tasks. This work explores the legal domain Multiple-Choice QA (MCQA) for a low-resource language. The contribution of this work is multi-fold. We first introduce JuRO, the first openly available Romanian legal MCQA dataset, comprising three different examinations and a number of 10,836 total questions. Along with this dataset, we introduce CROL, an organized corpus of laws that has a total of 93 distinct documents with their modifications from 763 time spans, that we leveraged in this work for Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. Moreover, we are the first to propose Law-RoG, a Knowledge Graph (KG) for the Romanian language, and this KG is derived from the aforementioned corpus. Lastly, we propose a novel approach for MCQA, Graph Retrieval Augmented by Facts (GRAF), which achieves competitive results with generally accepted SOTA methods and even exceeds them in most settings.
Language models have rapidly evolved, predominantly focusing on English while often neglecting extensive pretraining in other languages. This approach has required initiatives to adapt powerful, English-centric models to other linguistic contexts through finetuning. For Dutch, such a recent endeavour is ``GEITje'' a model originally derived from the English-based Mistral 7B. Building on this fundamental work, the current research extends the capabilities of GEITje by supervised finetuning on newly created high-quality synthetic conversational datasets, along with an additional preference alignment procedure on a synthetic feedback dataset. Both the developed models and the created datasets are openly available.
Continual Learning (CL) involves adapting the prior Deep Neural Network (DNN) knowledge to new tasks, without forgetting the old ones. However, modern CL techniques focus on provisioning memory capabilities to existing DNN models rather than designing new ones that are able to adapt according to the task at hand. This paper presents the novel Feedback Continual Learning Vision Transformer (FCL-ViT) that uses a feedback mechanism to generate real-time dynamic attention features tailored to the current task. The FCL-ViT operates in two Phases. In phase 1, the generic image features are produced and determine where the Transformer should attend on the current image. In phase 2, task-specific image features are generated that leverage dynamic attention. To this end, Tunable self-Attention Blocks (TABs) and Task Specific Blocks (TSBs) are introduced that operate in both phases and are responsible for tuning the TABs attention, respectively. The FCL-ViT surpasses state-of-the-art performance on Continual Learning compared to benchmark methods, while retaining a small number of trainable DNN parameters.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained to predict in the forward direction of time. However, recent works have shown that prompting these models to look back and critique their own generations can produce useful feedback. Motivated by this, we explore the question of whether LLMs can be empowered to think (predict and score) backwards to provide unsupervised feedback that complements forward LLMs. Towards this, we introduce Time Reversed Language Models (TRLMs), which can score and generate queries when conditioned on responses, effectively functioning in the reverse direction of time. Further, to effectively infer in the response to query direction, we pre-train and fine-tune a language model (TRLM-Ba) in the reverse token order from scratch. We show empirically (and theoretically in a stylized setting) that time-reversed models can indeed complement forward model predictions when used to score the query given response for re-ranking multiple forward generations. We obtain up to 5\% improvement on the widely used AlpacaEval Leaderboard over the competent baseline of best-of-N re-ranking using self log-perplexity scores. We further show that TRLM scoring outperforms conventional forward scoring of response given query, resulting in significant gains in applications such as citation generation and passage retrieval. We next leverage the generative ability of TRLM to augment or provide unsupervised feedback to input safety filters of LLMs, demonstrating a drastic reduction in false negative rate with negligible impact on false positive rates against several attacks published on the popular JailbreakBench leaderboard.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are advancing the ability to reason about complex sports scenarios by integrating textual and visual information. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce SPORTU, a benchmark designed to assess MLLMs across multi-level sports reasoning tasks. SPORTU comprises two key components: SPORTU-text, featuring 900 multiple-choice questions with human-annotated explanations for rule comprehension and strategy understanding. This component focuses on testing models' ability to reason about sports solely through question-answering (QA), without requiring visual inputs; SPORTU-video, consisting of 1,701 slow-motion video clips across 7 different sports and 12,048 QA pairs, designed to assess multi-level reasoning, from simple sports recognition to complex tasks like foul detection and rule application. We evaluate four prevalent LLMs mainly utilizing few-shot learning paradigms supplemented by chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on the SPORTU-text part. We evaluate four LLMs using few-shot learning and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on SPORTU-text. GPT-4o achieves the highest accuracy of 71%, but still falls short of human-level performance, highlighting room for improvement in rule comprehension and reasoning. The evaluation for the SPORTU-video part includes 7 proprietary and 6 open-source MLLMs. Experiments show that models fall short on hard tasks that require deep reasoning and rule-based understanding. Claude-3.5-Sonnet performs the best with only 52.6% accuracy on the hard task, showing large room for improvement. We hope that SPORTU will serve as a critical step toward evaluating models' capabilities in sports understanding and reasoning.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.