Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success with their billion-level parameters, yet they incur high inference overheads. The emergence of activation sparsity in LLMs provides a natural approach to reduce this cost by involving only parts of the parameters for inference. Existing methods only focus on utilizing this naturally formed activation sparsity, overlooking the potential for further amplifying this inherent sparsity. In this paper, we hypothesize that LLMs can learn to be efficient by achieving more structured activation sparsity.To achieve this, we introduce a novel algorithm, Learn-To-be-Efficient (LTE), designed to train efficiency-aware LLMs to learn to activate fewer neurons and achieve a better trade-off between sparsity and performance. Furthermore, unlike SOTA MoEfication methods, which mainly focus on ReLU-based models, LTE can also be applied to LLMs like GPT and LLaMA with soft activation functions. We evaluate LTE on four models and eleven datasets. The experiments show that LTE achieves a better trade-off between sparsity and task performance. For instance, LTE with LLaMA provides a 1.83x-2.59x FLOPs speed-up on language generation tasks, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.
Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of following long and complex instructions that enable a diverse amount of user tasks. However, despite Information Retrieval (IR) models using LLMs as the backbone of their architectures, nearly all of them still only take queries as input, with no instructions. For the handful of recent models that do take instructions, it's unclear how they use them. We introduce our dataset FollowIR, which contains a rigorous instruction evaluation benchmark as well as a training set for helping IR models learn to better follow real-world instructions. FollowIR builds off the long history of the TREC conferences: as TREC provides human annotators with instructions (also known as narratives) to determine document relevance, so should IR models be able to understand and decide relevance based on these detailed instructions. Our evaluation benchmark starts with three deeply judged TREC collections and alters the annotator instructions, re-annotating relevant documents. Through this process, we can measure how well IR models follow instructions, through a new pairwise evaluation framework. Our results indicate that existing retrieval models fail to correctly use instructions, using them for basic keywords and struggling to understand long-form information. However, we show that it is possible for IR models to learn to follow complex instructions: our new FollowIR-7B model has significant improvements (over 13%) after fine-tuning on our training set.
Advanced diffusion-based Text-to-Image (T2I) models, such as the Stable Diffusion Model, have made significant progress in generating diverse and high-quality images using text prompts alone. However, when non-famous users require personalized image generation for their identities (IDs), the T2I models fail to accurately generate their ID-related images. The main problem is that pre-trained T2I models do not learn the mapping between the new ID prompts and their corresponding visual content. The previous methods either failed to accurately fit the face region or lost the interactive generative ability with other existing concepts in T2I models. In other words, they are unable to generate T2I-aligned and semantic-fidelity images for the given prompts with other concepts such as scenes (``Eiffel Tower''), actions (``holding a basketball''), and facial attributes (``eyes closed''). In this paper, we focus on inserting accurate and interactive ID embedding into the Stable Diffusion Model for semantic-fidelity personalized generation. We address this challenge from two perspectives: face-wise region fitting and semantic-fidelity token optimization. Specifically, we first visualize the attention overfit problem and propose a face-wise attention loss to fit the face region instead of entangling ID-unrelated information, such as face layout and background. This key trick significantly enhances the ID accuracy and interactive generative ability with other existing concepts. Then, we optimize one ID representation as multiple per-stage tokens where each token contains two disentangled features. This expansion of the textual conditioning space improves semantic-fidelity control. Extensive experiments validate that our results exhibit superior ID accuracy, text-based manipulation ability, and generalization compared to previous methods.
Collaborative Mobile Crowdsourcing (CMCS) allows platforms to recruit worker teams to collaboratively execute complex sensing tasks. The efficiency of such collaborations could be influenced by trust relationships among workers. To obtain the asymmetric trust values among all workers in the social network, the Trust Reinforcement Evaluation Framework (TREF) based on Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) is proposed in this paper. The task completion effect is comprehensively calculated by considering the workers' ability benefits, distance benefits, and trust benefits in this paper. The worker recruitment problem is modeled as an Undirected Complete Recruitment Graph (UCRG), for which a specific Tabu Search Recruitment (TSR) algorithm solution is proposed. An optimal execution team is recruited for each task by the TSR algorithm, and the collaboration team for the task is obtained under the constraint of privacy loss. To enhance the efficiency of the recruitment algorithm on a large scale and scope, the Mini-Batch K-Means clustering algorithm and edge computing technology are introduced, enabling distributed worker recruitment. Lastly, extensive experiments conducted on five real datasets validate that the recruitment algorithm proposed in this paper outperforms other baselines. Additionally, TREF proposed herein surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art trust evaluation methods in the literature.
Face presentation attacks (FPA), also known as face spoofing, have brought increasing concerns to the public through various malicious applications, such as financial fraud and privacy leakage. Therefore, safeguarding face recognition systems against FPA is of utmost importance. Although existing learning-based face anti-spoofing (FAS) models can achieve outstanding detection performance, they lack generalization capability and suffer significant performance drops in unforeseen environments. Many methodologies seek to use auxiliary modality data (e.g., depth and infrared maps) during the presentation attack detection (PAD) to address this limitation. However, these methods can be limited since (1) they require specific sensors such as depth and infrared cameras for data capture, which are rarely available on commodity mobile devices, and (2) they cannot work properly in practical scenarios when either modality is missing or of poor quality. In this paper, we devise an accurate and robust MultiModal Mobile Face Anti-Spoofing system named M3FAS to overcome the issues above. The primary innovation of this work lies in the following aspects: (1) To achieve robust PAD, our system combines visual and auditory modalities using three commonly available sensors: camera, speaker, and microphone; (2) We design a novel two-branch neural network with three hierarchical feature aggregation modules to perform cross-modal feature fusion; (3). We propose a multi-head training strategy, allowing the model to output predictions from the vision, acoustic, and fusion heads, resulting in a more flexible PAD. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the accuracy, robustness, and flexibility of M3FAS under various challenging experimental settings. The source code and dataset are available at: //github.com/ChenqiKONG/M3FAS/
Existence constraints were defined in the Relational Data Model, but, unfortunately, are not provided by any Relational Database Management System, except for their NOT NULL particular case. Our (Elementary) Mathematical Data Model extended them to function products and introduced their dual non-existence constraints. MatBase, an intelligent data and knowledge base management system prototype based on both these data models, not only provides existence and non-existence constraints, but also automatically generates code for their enforcement. This paper presents and discusses the algorithms used by MatBase to enforce these types of constraints.
Tools for fighting cyber-criminal activities using new technologies are promoted and deployed every day. However, too often, they are unnecessarily complex and hard to use, requiring deep domain and technical knowledge. These characteristics often limit the engagement of law enforcement and end-users in these technologies that, despite their potential, remain misunderstood. For this reason, in this study, we describe our experience in combining learning and training methods and the potential benefits of gamification to enhance technology transfer and increase adult learning. In fact, in this case, participants are experienced practitioners in professions/industries that are exposed to terrorism financing (such as Law Enforcement Officers, Financial Investigation Officers, private investigators, etc.) We define training activities on different levels for increasing the exchange of information about new trends and criminal modus operandi among and within law enforcement agencies, intensifying cross-border cooperation and supporting efforts to combat and prevent terrorism funding activities. On the other hand, a game (hackathon) is designed to address realistic challenges related to the dark net, crypto assets, new payment systems and dark web marketplaces that could be used for terrorist activities. The entire methodology was evaluated using quizzes, contest results, and engagement metrics. In particular, training events show about 60% of participants complete the 11-week training course, while the Hackathon results, gathered in two pilot studies (Madrid and The Hague), show increasing expertise among the participants (progression in the achieved points on average). At the same time, more than 70% of participants positively evaluate the use of the gamification approach, and more than 85% of them consider the implemented Use Cases suitable for their investigations.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities and versatility in NLP tasks, however they sometimes fail to maintain crucial invariances for specific tasks. One example is permutation sensitivity, where LLMs' outputs may significantly vary depending on the order of the input options. While debiasing techniques can mitigate these issues, and yield better performance and reliability, they often come with a high computational cost at inference. This paper addresses this inefficiency at inference time. The aim is to distill the capabilities of a computationally intensive, debiased, teacher model into a more compact student model. We explore two variants of student models: one based on pure distillation, and the other on an error-correction approach for more complex tasks, where the student corrects a single biased decision from the teacher to achieve a debiased output. Our approach is general and can be applied to both black-box and white-box LLMs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our compact, encoder-only student models can outperform their larger, biased teacher counterparts, achieving better results with significantly fewer parameters.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising performance in various graph learning tasks, but at the cost of resource-intensive computations. The primary overhead of GNN update stems from graph propagation and weight transformation, both involving operations on graph-scale matrices. Previous studies attempt to reduce the computational budget by leveraging graph-level or network-level sparsification techniques, resulting in downsized graph or weights. In this work, we propose Unifews, which unifies the two operations in an entry-wise manner considering individual matrix elements, and conducts joint edge-weight sparsification to enhance learning efficiency. The entry-wise design of Unifews enables adaptive compression across GNN layers with progressively increased sparsity, and is applicable to a variety of architectural designs with on-the-fly operation simplification. Theoretically, we establish a novel framework to characterize sparsified GNN learning in view of a graph optimization process, and prove that Unifews effectively approximates the learning objective with bounded error and reduced computational load. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our method in diverse settings. Unifews is advantageous in jointly removing more than 90% of edges and weight entries with comparable or better accuracy than baseline models. The sparsification offers remarkable efficiency improvements including 10-20x matrix operation reduction and up to 100x acceleration in graph propagation time for the largest graph at the billion-edge scale.
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods. For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.