Random walks on expanders play a crucial role in Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms, derandomization, graph theory, and distributed computing. A desirable property is that they are rapidly mixing, which is equivalent to having a spectral gap $\gamma$ (asymptotically) bounded away from $0$. Our work has two main strands. First, we establish a dichotomy for the robustness of mixing times on edge-weighted $d$-regular graphs (i.e., reversible Markov chains) subject to a Lipschitz condition, which bounds the ratio of adjacent weights by $\beta \geq 1$. If $\beta \ge 1$ is sufficiently small, then $\gamma \asymp 1$ and the mixing time is logarithmic in $n$. On the other hand, if $\beta \geq 2d$, there is an edge-weighting such that $\gamma$ is polynomially small in $1/n$. Second, we apply our robustness result to a time-dependent version of the so-called $\varepsilon$-biased random walk, as introduced in Azar et al. [Combinatorica 1996]. We show that, for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a bias strategy can be chosen adaptively so that the $\varepsilon$-biased random walk covers any bounded-degree regular expander in $\Theta(n)$ expected time, improving the previous-best bound of $O(n \log \log n)$. We prove the first non-trivial lower bound on the cover time of the $\varepsilon$-biased random walk, showing that, on bounded-degree regular expanders, it is $\omega(n)$ whenever $\varepsilon = o(1)$. We establish this by controlling how much the probability of arbitrary events can be ``boosted'' by using a time-dependent bias strategy.
This survey presents an in-depth exploration of knowledge distillation (KD) techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), spotlighting the pivotal role of KD in transferring sophisticated capabilities from proprietary giants such as GPT-4 to accessible, open-source models like LLaMA and Mistral. Amidst the evolving AI landscape, this work elucidates the critical disparities between proprietary and open-source LLMs, demonstrating how KD serves as an essential conduit for imbuing the latter with the former's advanced functionalities and nuanced understandings. Our survey is meticulously structured around three foundational pillars: algorithm, skill, and verticalization -- providing a comprehensive examination of KD mechanisms, the enhancement of specific cognitive abilities, and their practical implications across diverse fields. Crucially, the survey navigates the intricate interplay between data augmentation (DA) and KD, illustrating how DA emerges as a powerful paradigm within the KD framework to bolster LLMs' performance. By leveraging DA to generate context-rich, skill-specific training data, KD transcends traditional boundaries, enabling open-source models to approximate the contextual adeptness, ethical alignment, and deep semantic insights characteristic of their proprietary counterparts. This work aims to provide an insightful guide for researchers and practitioners, offering a detailed overview of current methodologies in knowledge distillation and proposing future research directions. By bridging the gap between proprietary and open-source LLMs, this survey underscores the potential for more accessible, efficient, and sustainable AI solutions, fostering a more inclusive and equitable landscape in AI advancements. An associated Github repository is available at //github.com/Tebmer/Awesome-Knowledge-Distillation-of-LLMs.
Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
We consider the problem of discovering $K$ related Gaussian directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where the involved graph structures share a consistent causal order and sparse unions of supports. Under the multi-task learning setting, we propose a $l_1/l_2$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for learning $K$ linear structural equation models. We theoretically show that the joint estimator, by leveraging data across related tasks, can achieve a better sample complexity for recovering the causal order (or topological order) than separate estimations. Moreover, the joint estimator is able to recover non-identifiable DAGs, by estimating them together with some identifiable DAGs. Lastly, our analysis also shows the consistency of union support recovery of the structures. To allow practical implementation, we design a continuous optimization problem whose optimizer is the same as the joint estimator and can be approximated efficiently by an iterative algorithm. We validate the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the joint estimator in experiments.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.
Within the rapidly developing Internet of Things (IoT), numerous and diverse physical devices, Edge devices, Cloud infrastructure, and their quality of service requirements (QoS), need to be represented within a unified specification in order to enable rapid IoT application development, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration. But heterogeneities among different configuration knowledge representation models pose limitations for acquisition, discovery and curation of configuration knowledge for coordinated IoT applications. This paper proposes a unified data model to represent IoT resource configuration knowledge artifacts. It also proposes IoT-CANE (Context-Aware recommendatioN systEm) to facilitate incremental knowledge acquisition and declarative context driven knowledge recommendation.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.