With the flourishing of social media platforms, vision-language pre-training (VLP) recently has received great attention and many remarkable progresses have been achieved. The success of VLP largely benefits from the information complementation and enhancement between different modalities. However, most of recent studies focus on cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) to promote image-text alignment by pulling embeddings of positive sample pairs together while pushing those of negative pairs apart, which ignores the natural asymmetry property between different modalities and requires large-scale image-text corpus to achieve arduous progress. To mitigate this predicament, we propose CMAL, a Cross-Modal Associative Learning framework with anchor points detection and cross-modal associative learning for VLP. Specifically, we first respectively embed visual objects and textual tokens into separate hypersphere spaces to learn intra-modal hidden features, and then design a cross-modal associative prompt layer to perform anchor point masking and swap feature filling for constructing a hybrid cross-modal associative prompt. Afterwards, we exploit a unified semantic encoder to learn their cross-modal interactive features for context adaptation. Finally, we design an associative mapping classification layer to learn potential associative mappings between modalities at anchor points, within which we develop a fresh self-supervised associative mapping classification task to boost CMAL's performance. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of CMAL, showing that it achieves competitive performance against previous CMCL-based methods on four common downstream vision-and-language tasks, with significantly fewer corpus. Especially, CMAL obtains new state-of-the-art results on SNLI-VE and REC (testA).
Despite the recent success of two-stage prototypical networks in few-shot named entity recognition (NER), challenges such as over/under-detected false spans in the span detection stage and unaligned entity prototypes in the type classification stage persist. Additionally, LLMs have not proven to be effective few-shot information extractors in general. In this paper, we propose an approach called Boundary-Aware LLMs for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition to address these issues. We introduce a boundary-aware contrastive learning strategy to enhance the LLM's ability to perceive entity boundaries for generalized entity spans. Additionally, we utilize LoRAHub to align information from the target domain to the source domain, thereby enhancing adaptive cross-domain classification capabilities. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that our framework outperforms prior methods, validating its effectiveness. In particular, the proposed strategies demonstrate effectiveness across a range of LLM architectures. The code and data are released on //github.com/UESTC-GQJ/BANER.
Business intelligence (BI) transforms large volumes of data within modern organizations into actionable insights for informed decision-making. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have streamlined the BI workflow by automatically performing task planning, reasoning, and actions in executable environments based on natural language (NL) queries. However, existing approaches primarily focus on individual BI tasks such as NL2SQL and NL2VIS. The fragmentation of tasks across different data roles and tools lead to inefficiencies and potential errors due to the iterative and collaborative nature of BI. In this paper, we introduce DataLab, a unified BI platform that integrates a one-stop LLM-based agent framework with an augmented computational notebook interface. DataLab supports a wide range of BI tasks for different data roles by seamlessly combining LLM assistance with user customization within a single environment. To achieve this unification, we design a domain knowledge incorporation module tailored for enterprise-specific BI tasks, an inter-agent communication mechanism to facilitate information sharing across the BI workflow, and a cell-based context management strategy to enhance context utilization efficiency in BI notebooks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DataLab achieves state-of-the-art performance on various BI tasks across popular research benchmarks. Moreover, DataLab maintains high effectiveness and efficiency on real-world datasets from Tencent, achieving up to a 58.58% increase in accuracy and a 61.65% reduction in token cost on enterprise-specific BI tasks.
Rotating the activation and weight matrices to reduce the influence of outliers in large language models (LLMs) has recently attracted significant attention, particularly in the context of model quantization. Prior studies have shown that in low-precision quantization scenarios, such as 4-bit weights and 4-bit activations (W4A4), randomized Hadamard transforms can achieve significantly higher accuracy than randomized orthogonal transforms. Notably, the reason behind this phenomena remains unknown. In this paper, we find that these transformations show substantial improvement in eliminating outliers for common tokens and achieve similar quantization error. The primary reason for the accuracy difference lies in the fact that randomized Hadamard transforms can slightly reduce the quantization error for tokens with massive activations while randomized orthogonal transforms increase the quantization error. Due to the extreme rarity of these tokens and their critical impact on model accuracy, we consider this a long-tail optimization problem, and therefore construct a simple yet effective method: a weighted loss function. Additionally, we propose an optimization strategy for the rotation matrix that involves alternating optimization of quantization parameters while employing orthogonal Procrustes transforms to refine the rotation matrix. This makes the distribution of the rotated activation values more conducive to quantization, especially for tokens with massive activations. Our method enhances the Rotated LLMs by achieving dual free, Outlier-Free and Massive Activation-Free, dubbed as DFRot. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DFRot. By tuning the rotation matrix using just a single sample, DFRot achieves a perplexity improvement of 0.25 and 0.21 on W4A4KV4 and W4A4KV16, respectively, for LLaMA3-8B, a model known for its quantization challenges.
The pervasiveness of proprietary language models has raised privacy concerns for users' sensitive data, emphasizing the need for private inference (PI), where inference is performed directly on encrypted inputs. However, current PI methods face prohibitively higher communication and latency overheads, primarily due to nonlinear operations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis to understand the role of nonlinearities in transformer-based decoder-only language models. We introduce AERO, a four-step architectural optimization framework that refines the existing LLM architecture for efficient PI by systematically removing nonlinearities such as LayerNorm and GELU and reducing FLOPs counts. For the first time, we propose a Softmax-only architecture with significantly fewer FLOPs tailored for efficient PI. Furthermore, we devise a novel entropy regularization technique to improve the performance of Softmax-only models. AERO achieves up to 4.23$\times$ communication and 1.94$\times$ latency reduction. We validate the effectiveness of AERO by benchmarking it against the state-of-the-art.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong performance across visual tasks, but their efficiency is hindered by significant computational and memory demands from processing long contexts in multimodal inputs. To address this, we introduce PAR (Prompt-Aware Token Reduction), a novel and plug-and-play approach that reduces visual tokens efficiently without compromising model performance. Unlike previous methods that rely heavily on attention mechanisms and overlooking cross-modal interactions , we uses a prompt-aware strategy to adpative identify and cluster essential visual tokens. PAR categorizes visual context redundancy into two types: external and internal. External redundancy is minimized through semantic retrieval, while internal redundancy is addressed using a token routing mechanism. This method substantially reduces computational load without requiring additional training or complex architectural modifications. \textbf{Experimental results demonstrate that across various visual question answering tasks, PAR reduces FLOPs by 83\% with a compression ratio of 89\%, while retaining 97\% of baseline accuracy.} The adaptive design of PAR achieves a 2x token reduction ratio compared to prior approaches, enabling a better balance between performance and efficiency.
Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), a technique inspired by cognitive models of computation, has been proposed as an efficient and robust alternative basis for machine learning. HDC programs are often manually written in low-level and target specific languages targeting CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs - these codes cannot be easily retargeted onto HDC-specific accelerators. No previous programming system enables productive development of HDC programs and generates efficient code for several hardware targets. We propose a heterogeneous programming system for HDC: a novel programming language, HDC++, for writing applications using a unified programming model, including HDC-specific primitives to improve programmability, and a heterogeneous compiler, HPVM-HDC, that provides an intermediate representation for compiling HDC programs to many hardware targets. We implement two tuning optimizations, automatic binarization and reduction perforation, that exploit the error resilient nature of HDC. Our evaluation shows that HPVM-HDC generates performance-competitive code for CPUs and GPUs, achieving a geomean speed-up of 1.17x over optimized baseline CUDA implementations with a geomean reduction in total lines of code of 1.6x across CPUs and GPUs. Additionally, HPVM-HDC targets an HDC Digital ASIC and an HDC ReRAM accelerator simulator, enabling the first execution of HDC applications on these devices.
In the research area of image super-resolution, Swin-transformer-based models are favored for their global spatial modeling and shifting window attention mechanism. However, existing methods often limit self-attention to non overlapping windows to cut costs and ignore the useful information that exists across channels. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel model, the Hybrid Attention Aggregation Transformer (HAAT), designed to better leverage feature information. HAAT is constructed by integrating Swin-Dense-Residual-Connected Blocks (SDRCB) with Hybrid Grid Attention Blocks (HGAB). SDRCB expands the receptive field while maintaining a streamlined architecture, resulting in enhanced performance. HGAB incorporates channel attention, sparse attention, and window attention to improve nonlocal feature fusion and achieve more visually compelling results. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that HAAT surpasses state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Keywords: Image super-resolution, Computer vision, Attention mechanism, Transformer
Recently, human motion analysis has experienced great improvement due to inspiring generative models such as the denoising diffusion model and large language model. While the existing approaches mainly focus on generating motions with textual descriptions and overlook the reciprocal task. In this paper, we present~\textbf{MoTe}, a unified multi-modal model that could handle diverse tasks by learning the marginal, conditional, and joint distributions of motion and text simultaneously. MoTe enables us to handle the paired text-motion generation, motion captioning, and text-driven motion generation by simply modifying the input context. Specifically, MoTe is composed of three components: Motion Encoder-Decoder (MED), Text Encoder-Decoder (TED), and Moti-on-Text Diffusion Model (MTDM). In particular, MED and TED are trained for extracting latent embeddings, and subsequently reconstructing the motion sequences and textual descriptions from the extracted embeddings, respectively. MTDM, on the other hand, performs an iterative denoising process on the input context to handle diverse tasks. Experimental results on the benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method on text-to-motion generation and competitive performance on motion captioning.
In the post-deep learning era, the Transformer architecture has demonstrated its powerful performance across pre-trained big models and various downstream tasks. However, the enormous computational demands of this architecture have deterred many researchers. To further reduce the complexity of attention models, numerous efforts have been made to design more efficient methods. Among them, the State Space Model (SSM), as a possible replacement for the self-attention based Transformer model, has drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this paper, we give the first comprehensive review of these works and also provide experimental comparisons and analysis to better demonstrate the features and advantages of SSM. Specifically, we first give a detailed description of principles to help the readers quickly capture the key ideas of SSM. After that, we dive into the reviews of existing SSMs and their various applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, graph, multi-modal and multi-media, point cloud/event stream, time series data, and other domains. In addition, we give statistical comparisons and analysis of these models and hope it helps the readers to understand the effectiveness of different structures on various tasks. Then, we propose possible research points in this direction to better promote the development of the theoretical model and application of SSM. More related works will be continuously updated on the following GitHub: //github.com/Event-AHU/Mamba_State_Space_Model_Paper_List.
We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with masked tokens, we rely on conventional masks to learn inter-relations between corrupted tokens and context via autoencoding, and pseudo masks to learn intra-relations between masked spans via partially autoregressive modeling. With well-designed position embeddings and self-attention masks, the context encodings are reused to avoid redundant computation. Moreover, conventional masks used for autoencoding provide global masking information, so that all the position embeddings are accessible in partially autoregressive language modeling. In addition, the two tasks pre-train a unified language model as a bidirectional encoder and a sequence-to-sequence decoder, respectively. Our experiments show that the unified language models pre-trained using PMLM achieve new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks across several widely used benchmarks.