The Mixture of Experts (MoE) paradigm provides a powerful way to decompose dense layers into smaller, modular computations often more amenable to human interpretation, debugging, and editability. However, a major challenge lies in the computational cost of scaling the number of experts high enough to achieve fine-grained specialization. In this paper, we propose the Multilinear Mixture of Experts ($\mu$MoE) layer to address this, focusing on vision models. $\mu$MoE layers enable scalable expert specialization by performing an implicit computation on prohibitively large weight tensors entirely in factorized form. Consequently, $\mu$MoEs (1) avoid the restrictively high inference-time costs of 'soft' MoEs, yet (2) do not inherit the training issues of the popular 'sparse' MoEs' discrete (non-differentiable) expert routing. We present both qualitative and quantitative evidence that scaling $\mu$MoE layers when fine-tuning foundation models for vision tasks leads to more specialized experts at the class-level, further enabling manual bias correction in CelebA attribute classification. Finally, we show qualitative results demonstrating the expert specialism achieved when pre-training large GPT2 and MLP-Mixer models with parameter-matched $\mu$MoE blocks at every layer, maintaining comparable accuracy. Our code is available at: //github.com/james-oldfield/muMoE.
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has been witnessed in recent years. Based on the powerful LLMs, multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) extend the modality from text to a broader spectrum of domains, attracting widespread attention due to the broader range of application scenarios. As LLMs and MLLMs rely on vast amounts of model parameters and data to achieve emergent capabilities, the importance of data is receiving increasingly widespread attention and recognition. Tracing and analyzing recent data-oriented works for MLLMs, we find that the development of models and data is not two separate paths but rather interconnected. On the one hand, vaster and higher-quality data contribute to better performance of MLLMs, on the other hand, MLLMs can facilitate the development of data. The co-development of multi-modal data and MLLMs requires a clear view of 1) at which development stage of MLLMs can specific data-centric approaches be employed to enhance which capabilities, and 2) by utilizing which capabilities and acting as which roles can models contribute to multi-modal data. To promote the data-model co-development for MLLM community, we systematically review existing works related to MLLMs from the data-model co-development perspective. A regularly maintained project associated with this survey is accessible at //github.com/modelscope/data-juicer/blob/main/docs/awesome_llm_data.md.
How to efficiently serve Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a pressing issue because of their huge computational cost in their autoregressive generation process. To mitigate computational costs, LLMs often employ the KV Cache technique to improve the generation speed. While improving the computational efficiency, the storage requirements of the KV cache are substantial, particularly in long-context scenarios, leading to significant memory consumption. Existing KV cache eviction methods often degrade the performance of LLMs in long-context scenarios due to the information loss introduced by eviction. In this paper, we propose a novel KV cache merging approach, called KVMerger, to achieve adaptive KV cache compression for long-context tasks without significant performance degradation under constrained memory budgets. Our approach is inspired by the intriguing observation that key states exhibit high similarity at the token level within a single sequence. To facilitate merging, we develop an effective yet straightforward merging set identification algorithm to identify suitable KV states for merging. Our merging set identification algorithm stimulates the second observation that KV cache sparsity, from similarity perspective, is independent of the dataset and remains persistent at the model level. Subsequently, we propose a Gaussian kernel weighted merging algorithm to selectively merge all states within each merging set. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of KVMerger for long-context tasks under constrained memory budgets, applying it to models including Llama2-7B-chat and Llama2-13B-chat. Using the LongBench and ZeroScroll benchmarks, we compare our method with other KV cache compression techniques, including H2O and CaM, showing that our method achieves superior performance across tasks with both 50% and 35% KV cache budgets.
We propose a new topological tool for computer vision - Scalar Function Topology Divergence (SFTD), which measures the dissimilarity of multi-scale topology between sublevel sets of two functions having a common domain. Functions can be defined on an undirected graph or Euclidean space of any dimensionality. Most of the existing methods for comparing topology are based on Wasserstein distance between persistence barcodes and they don't take into account the localization of topological features. On the other hand, the minimization of SFTD ensures that the corresponding topological features of scalar functions are located in the same places. The proposed tool provides useful visualizations depicting areas where functions have topological dissimilarities. We provide applications of the proposed method to 3D computer vision. In particular, experiments demonstrate that SFTD improves the reconstruction of cellular 3D shapes from 2D fluorescence microscopy images, and helps to identify topological errors in 3D segmentation.
Purpose:Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) models, such as ChatGPT, may inherit or amplify societal biases due to their training on extensive datasets. With the increasing usage of GAI by students, faculty, and staff in higher education institutions (HEIs), it is urgent to examine the ethical issues and potential biases associated with these technologies. Design/Approach/Methods:This scoping review aims to elucidate how biases related to GAI in HEIs have been researched and discussed in recent academic publications. We categorized the potential societal biases that GAI might cause in the field of higher education. Our review includes articles written in English, Chinese, and Japanese across four main databases, focusing on GAI usage in higher education and bias. Findings:Our findings reveal that while there is meaningful scholarly discussion around bias and discrimination concerning LLMs in the AI field, most articles addressing higher education approach the issue superficially. Few articles identify specific types of bias under different circumstances, and there is a notable lack of empirical research. Most papers in our review focus primarily on educational and research fields related to medicine and engineering, with some addressing English education. However, there is almost no discussion regarding the humanities and social sciences. Additionally, a significant portion of the current discourse is in English and primarily addresses English-speaking contexts. Originality/Value:To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to summarize the potential societal biases in higher education. This review highlights the need for more in-depth studies and empirical work to understand the specific biases that GAI might introduce or amplify in educational settings, guiding the development of more ethical AI applications in higher education.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) hold great potential for aiding individuals with speech impairments. Utilizing electroencephalography (EEG) to decode speech is particularly promising due to its non-invasive nature. However, recordings are typically short, and the high variability in EEG data has led researchers to focus on classification tasks with a few dozen classes. To assess its practical applicability for speech neuroprostheses, we investigate the relationship between the size of EEG data and decoding accuracy in the open vocabulary setting. We collected extensive EEG data from a single participant (175 hours) and conducted zero-shot speech segment classification using self-supervised representation learning. The model trained on the entire dataset achieved a top-1 accuracy of 48\% and a top-10 accuracy of 76\%, while mitigating the effects of myopotential artifacts. Conversely, when the data was limited to the typical amount used in practice ($\sim$10 hours), the top-1 accuracy dropped to 2.5\%, revealing a significant scaling effect. Additionally, as the amount of training data increased, the EEG latent representation progressively exhibited clearer temporal structures of spoken phrases. This indicates that the decoder can recognize speech segments in a data-driven manner without explicit measurements of word recognition. This research marks a significant step towards the practical realization of EEG-based speech BCIs.
With the emergence of large language models, such as LLaMA and OpenAI GPT-3, In-Context Learning (ICL) gained significant attention due to its effectiveness and efficiency. However, ICL is very sensitive to the choice, order, and verbaliser used to encode the demonstrations in the prompt. Retrieval-Augmented ICL methods try to address this problem by leveraging retrievers to extract semantically related examples as demonstrations. While this approach yields more accurate results, its robustness against various types of adversarial attacks, including perturbations on test samples, demonstrations, and retrieved data, remains under-explored. Our study reveals that retrieval-augmented models can enhance robustness against test sample attacks, outperforming vanilla ICL with a 4.87% reduction in Attack Success Rate (ASR); however, they exhibit overconfidence in the demonstrations, leading to a 2% increase in ASR for demonstration attacks. Adversarial training can help improve the robustness of ICL methods to adversarial attacks; however, such a training scheme can be too costly in the context of LLMs. As an alternative, we introduce an effective training-free adversarial defence method, DARD, which enriches the example pool with those attacked samples. We show that DARD yields improvements in performance and robustness, achieving a 15% reduction in ASR over the baselines. Code and data are released to encourage further research: //github.com/simonucl/adv-retreival-icl
In distributed computing by mobile robots, robots are deployed over a region, continuous or discrete, operating through a sequence of \textit{look-compute-move} cycles. An extensive study has been carried out to understand the computational powers of different robot models. The models vary on the ability to 1)~remember constant size information and 2)~communicate constant size message. Depending on the abilities the different models are 1)~$\mathcal{OBLOT}$ (robots are oblivious and silent), 2)~$\mathcal{FSTA}$ (robots have finite states but silent), 3)~$\mathcal{FCOM}$ (robots are oblivious but can communicate constant size information) and, 4)~$\mathcal{LUMI}$ (robots have finite states and can communicate constant size information). Another factor that affects computational ability is the scheduler that decides the activation time of the robots. The main three schedulers are \textit{fully-synchronous}, \textit{semi-synchronous} and \textit{asynchronous}. Combining the models ($M$) with schedulers ($K$), we have twelve combinations $M^K$. In the euclidean domain, the comparisons between these twelve variants have been done in different works for transparent robots, opaque robots, and robots with limited visibility. There is a vacant space for similar works when robots are operating on discrete regions like networks. It demands separate research attention because there have been a series of works where robots operate on different networks, and there is a fundamental difference when robots are operating on a continuous domain versus a discrete domain in terms of robots' movement. This work contributes to filling the space by giving a full comparison table for all models with two synchronous schedulers: fully-synchronous and semi-synchronous.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows for the execution of computations on encrypted data without the need to decrypt it first, offering significant potential for privacy-preserving computational operations. Emerging arithmetic-based FHE schemes (ar-FHE), like BGV, demonstrate even better performance in word-wise comparison operations over non-arithmetic FHE (na-FHE) schemes, such as TFHE, especially for basic tasks like comparing values, finding maximums, and minimums. This shows the universality of ar-FHE in effectively handling both arithmetic and non-arithmetic operations without the expensive conversion between arithmetic and non-arithmetic FHEs. We refer to universal arithmetic Fully Homomorphic Encryption as uFHE. The arithmetic operations in uFHE remain consistent with those in the original arithmetic FHE, which have seen significant acceleration. However, its non-arithmetic comparison operations differ, are slow, and have not been as thoroughly studied or accelerated. In this paper, we introduce BoostCom, a scheme designed to speed up word-wise comparison operations, enhancing the efficiency of uFHE systems. BoostCom involves a multi-prong optimizations including infrastructure acceleration (Multi-level heterogeneous parallelization and GPU-related improvements), and algorithm-aware optimizations (slot compaction, non-blocking comparison semantic). Together, BoostCom achieves an end-to-end performance improvement of more than an order of magnitude (11.1x faster) compared to the state-of-the-art CPU-based uFHE systems, across various FHE parameters and tasks.
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating pre-trained LLMs into dynamic data distributions, task structures, and user preferences. Pre-trained LLMs, when tailored for specific needs, often experience significant performance degradation in previous knowledge domains -- a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". While extensively studied in the continual learning (CL) community, it presents new manifestations in the realm of LLMs. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current research progress on LLMs within the context of CL. This survey is structured into four main sections: we first describe an overview of continually learning LLMs, consisting of two directions of continuity: vertical continuity (or vertical continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation from general to specific capabilities, and horizontal continuity (or horizontal continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation across time and domains (Section 3). We then summarize three stages of learning LLMs in the context of modern CL: Continual Pre-Training (CPT), Domain-Adaptive Pre-training (DAP), and Continual Fine-Tuning (CFT) (Section 4). Then we provide an overview of evaluation protocols for continual learning with LLMs, along with the current available data sources (Section 5). Finally, we discuss intriguing questions pertaining to continual learning for LLMs (Section 6). The full list of papers examined in this survey is available at //github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/llm-continual-learning-survey.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.