We present the first local problem that shows a super-constant separation between the classical randomized LOCAL model of distributed computing and its quantum counterpart. By prior work, such a separation was known only for an artificial graph problem with an inherently global definition [Le Gall et al. 2019]. We present a problem that we call iterated GHZ, which is defined using only local constraints. Formally, it is a family of locally checkable labeling problems [Naor and Stockmeyer 1995]; in particular, solutions can be verified with a constant-round distributed algorithm. We show that in graphs of maximum degree $\Delta$, any classical (deterministic or randomized) LOCAL model algorithm will require $\Omega(\Delta)$ rounds to solve the iterated GHZ problem, while the problem can be solved in $1$ round in quantum-LOCAL. We use the round elimination technique to prove that the iterated GHZ problem requires $\Omega(\Delta)$ rounds for classical algorithms. This is the first work that shows that round elimination is indeed able to separate the two models, and this also demonstrates that round elimination cannot be used to prove lower bounds for quantum-LOCAL. To apply round elimination, we introduce a new technique that allows us to discover appropriate problem relaxations in a mechanical way; it turns out that this new technique extends beyond the scope of the iterated GHZ problem and can be used to e.g. reproduce prior results on maximal matchings [FOCS 2019, PODC 2020] in a systematic manner.
Although the current different types of SAM adaptation methods have achieved promising performance for various downstream tasks, such as prompt-based ones and adapter-based ones, most of them belong to the one-step adaptation paradigm. In real-world scenarios, we are generally confronted with the dynamic scenario where the data comes in a streaming manner. Driven by the practical need, in this paper, we first propose a novel Continual SAM adaptation (CoSAM) benchmark with 8 different task domains and carefully analyze the limitations of the existing SAM one-step adaptation methods in the continual segmentation scenario. Then we propose a novel simple-yet-effective Mixture of Domain Adapters (MoDA) algorithm which utilizes the Global Feature Tokens (GFT) and Global Assistant Tokens (GAT) modules to help the SAM encoder extract well-separated features for different task domains, and then provide the accurate task-specific information for continual learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed MoDA obviously surpasses the existing classic continual learning methods, as well as prompt-based and adapter-based approaches for continual segmentation. Moreover, after sequential learning on the CoSAM benchmark with diverse data distributions, our MoDA maintains highly competitive results in the natural image domain, approaching the zero-shot performance of the original SAM, demonstrating its superior capability in knowledge preservation. Notably, the proposed MoDA can be seamlessly integrated into various one-step adaptation methods of SAM, which can consistently bring obvious performance gains. Code is available at \url{//github.com/yangjl1215/CoSAM}
We introduce Causal Diffusion as the autoregressive (AR) counterpart of Diffusion models. It is a next-token(s) forecasting framework that is friendly to both discrete and continuous modalities and compatible with existing next-token prediction models like LLaMA and GPT. While recent works attempt to combine diffusion with AR models, we show that introducing sequential factorization to a diffusion model can substantially improve its performance and enables a smooth transition between AR and diffusion generation modes. Hence, we propose CausalFusion - a decoder-only transformer that dual-factorizes data across sequential tokens and diffusion noise levels, leading to state-of-the-art results on the ImageNet generation benchmark while also enjoying the AR advantage of generating an arbitrary number of tokens for in-context reasoning. We further demonstrate CausalFusion's multimodal capabilities through a joint image generation and captioning model, and showcase CausalFusion's ability for zero-shot in-context image manipulations. We hope that this work could provide the community with a fresh perspective on training multimodal models over discrete and continuous data.
Training modern neural networks or models typically requires averaging over a sample of high-dimensional vectors. Poisoning attacks can skew or bias the average vectors used to train the model, forcing the model to learn specific patterns or avoid learning anything useful. Byzantine robust aggregation is a principled algorithmic defense against such biasing. Robust aggregators can bound the maximum bias in computing centrality statistics, such as mean, even when some fraction of inputs are arbitrarily corrupted. Designing such aggregators is challenging when dealing with high dimensions. However, the first polynomial-time algorithms with strong theoretical bounds on the bias have recently been proposed. Their bounds are independent of the number of dimensions, promising a conceptual limit on the power of poisoning attacks in their ongoing arms race against defenses. In this paper, we show a new attack called HIDRA on practical realization of strong defenses which subverts their claim of dimension-independent bias. HIDRA highlights a novel computational bottleneck that has not been a concern of prior information-theoretic analysis. Our experimental evaluation shows that our attacks almost completely destroy the model performance, whereas existing attacks with the same goal fail to have much effect. Our findings leave the arms race between poisoning attacks and provable defenses wide open.
We present DeepSeek-VL2, an advanced series of large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Vision-Language Models that significantly improves upon its predecessor, DeepSeek-VL, through two key major upgrades. For the vision component, we incorporate a dynamic tiling vision encoding strategy designed for processing high-resolution images with different aspect ratios. For the language component, we leverage DeepSeekMoE models with the Multi-head Latent Attention mechanism, which compresses Key-Value cache into latent vectors, to enable efficient inference and high throughput. Trained on an improved vision-language dataset, DeepSeek-VL2 demonstrates superior capabilities across various tasks, including but not limited to visual question answering, optical character recognition, document/table/chart understanding, and visual grounding. Our model series is composed of three variants: DeepSeek-VL2-Tiny, DeepSeek-VL2-Small and DeepSeek-VL2, with 1.0B, 2.8B and 4.5B activated parameters respectively. DeepSeek-VL2 achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance with similar or fewer activated parameters compared to existing open-source dense and MoE-based models. Codes and pre-trained models are publicly accessible at //github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-VL2.
We propose a novel formalism for describing Structural Causal Models (SCMs) as fixed-point problems on causally ordered variables, eliminating the need for Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), and establish the weakest known conditions for their unique recovery given the topological ordering (TO). Based on this, we design a two-stage causal generative model that first infers in a zero-shot manner a valid TO from observations, and then learns the generative SCM on the ordered variables. To infer TOs, we propose to amortize the learning of TOs on synthetically generated datasets by sequentially predicting the leaves of graphs seen during training. To learn SCMs, we design a transformer-based architecture that exploits a new attention mechanism enabling the modeling of causal structures, and show that this parameterization is consistent with our formalism. Finally, we conduct an extensive evaluation of each method individually, and show that when combined, our model outperforms various baselines on generated out-of-distribution problems. The code is available on \href{//github.com/microsoft/causica/tree/main/research_experiments/fip}{Github}.
We present a significant advancement in the field of Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) methods by introducing the Inexact Proximal Langevin Algorithm (IPLA). This novel algorithm broadens the scope of problems that LMC can effectively address while maintaining controlled computational costs. IPLA extends LMC's applicability to potentials that are convex, strongly convex in the tails, and exhibit polynomial growth, beyond the conventional $L$-smoothness assumption. Moreover, we extend LMC's applicability to super-quadratic potentials and offer improved convergence rates over existing algorithms. Additionally, we provide bounds on all moments of the Markov chain generated by IPLA, enhancing its analytical robustness.
With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.
In recent years, larger and deeper models are springing up and continuously pushing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across various fields like natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). However, despite promising results, it needs to be noted that the computations required by SOTA models have been increased at an exponential rate. Massive computations not only have a surprisingly large carbon footprint but also have negative effects on research inclusiveness and deployment on real-world applications. Green deep learning is an increasingly hot research field that appeals to researchers to pay attention to energy usage and carbon emission during model training and inference. The target is to yield novel results with lightweight and efficient technologies. Many technologies can be used to achieve this goal, like model compression and knowledge distillation. This paper focuses on presenting a systematic review of the development of Green deep learning technologies. We classify these approaches into four categories: (1) compact networks, (2) energy-efficient training strategies, (3) energy-efficient inference approaches, and (4) efficient data usage. For each category, we discuss the progress that has been achieved and the unresolved challenges.
Contextual embeddings, such as ELMo and BERT, move beyond global word representations like Word2Vec and achieve ground-breaking performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Contextual embeddings assign each word a representation based on its context, thereby capturing uses of words across varied contexts and encoding knowledge that transfers across languages. In this survey, we review existing contextual embedding models, cross-lingual polyglot pre-training, the application of contextual embeddings in downstream tasks, model compression, and model analyses.
Adversarial attacks to image classification systems present challenges to convolutional networks and opportunities for understanding them. This study suggests that adversarial perturbations on images lead to noise in the features constructed by these networks. Motivated by this observation, we develop new network architectures that increase adversarial robustness by performing feature denoising. Specifically, our networks contain blocks that denoise the features using non-local means or other filters; the entire networks are trained end-to-end. When combined with adversarial training, our feature denoising networks substantially improve the state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness in both white-box and black-box attack settings. On ImageNet, under 10-iteration PGD white-box attacks where prior art has 27.9% accuracy, our method achieves 55.7%; even under extreme 2000-iteration PGD white-box attacks, our method secures 42.6% accuracy. A network based on our method was ranked first in Competition on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses (CAAD) 2018 --- it achieved 50.6% classification accuracy on a secret, ImageNet-like test dataset against 48 unknown attackers, surpassing the runner-up approach by ~10%. Code and models will be made publicly available.