Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular task-specific parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods on pre-trained language models for its good performance and computational efficiency. LoRA injects a product of two trainable rank decomposition matrices over the top of each frozen pre-trained model module. However, when applied in the setting of privacy-preserving federated learning (FL), LoRA may become unstable due to the following facts: 1) the effects of data heterogeneity and multi-step local updates are non-negligible, 2) additive noise enforced on updating gradients to guarantee differential privacy (DP) can be amplified and 3) the final performance is susceptible to hyper-parameters. A key factor leading to these phenomena is the discordance between jointly optimizing the two low-rank matrices by local clients and separately aggregating them by the central server. Thus, this paper proposes an efficient and effective version of LoRA, Federated Freeze A LoRA (FFA-LoRA), to alleviate these challenges and further halve the communication cost of federated fine-tuning LLMs. The core idea of FFA-LoRA is to fix the randomly initialized non-zero matrices and only fine-tune the zero-initialized matrices. Compared to LoRA, FFA-LoRA is motivated by practical and theoretical benefits in privacy-preserved FL. Our experiments demonstrate that FFA-LoRA provides more consistent performance with better computational efficiency over vanilla LoRA in various FL tasks.
This paper focuses on training a robust RGB-D registration model without ground-truth pose supervision. Existing methods usually adopt a pairwise training strategy based on differentiable rendering, which enforces the photometric and the geometric consistency between the two registered frames as supervision. However, this frame-to-frame framework suffers from poor multi-view consistency due to factors such as lighting changes, geometry occlusion and reflective materials. In this paper, we present NeRF-UR, a novel frame-to-model optimization framework for unsupervised RGB-D registration. Instead of frame-to-frame consistency, we leverage the neural radiance field (NeRF) as a global model of the scene and use the consistency between the input and the NeRF-rerendered frames for pose optimization. This design can significantly improve the robustness in scenarios with poor multi-view consistency and provides better learning signal for the registration model. Furthermore, to bootstrap the NeRF optimization, we create a synthetic dataset, Sim-RGBD, through a photo-realistic simulator to warm up the registration model. By first training the registration model on Sim-RGBD and later unsupervisedly fine-tuning on real data, our framework enables distilling the capability of feature extraction and registration from simulation to reality. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts on two popular indoor RGB-D datasets, ScanNet and 3DMatch. Code and models will be released for paper reproduction.
The use of automatic short answer grading (ASAG) models may help alleviate the time burden of grading while encouraging educators to frequently incorporate open-ended items in their curriculum. However, current state-of-the-art ASAG models are large neural networks (NN) often described as "black box", providing no explanation for which characteristics of an input are important for the produced output. This inexplicable nature can be frustrating to teachers and students when trying to interpret, or learn from an automatically-generated grade. To create a powerful yet intelligible ASAG model, we experiment with a type of model called a Neural Additive Model that combines the performance of a NN with the explainability of an additive model. We use a Knowledge Integration (KI) framework from the learning sciences to guide feature engineering to create inputs that reflect whether a student includes certain ideas in their response. We hypothesize that indicating the inclusion (or exclusion) of predefined ideas as features will be sufficient for the NAM to have good predictive power and interpretability, as this may guide a human scorer using a KI rubric. We compare the performance of the NAM with another explainable model, logistic regression, using the same features, and to a non-explainable neural model, DeBERTa, that does not require feature engineering.
Massive multiple input multiple output (M-MIMO) technology plays a pivotal role in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond communication systems, offering a wide range of benefits, from increased spectral efficiency (SE) to enhanced energy efficiency and higher reliability. However, these advantages are contingent upon precise channel state information (CSI) availability at the base station (BS). Ensuring precise CSI is challenging due to the constrained size of the coherence interval and the resulting limitations on pilot sequence length. Therefore, reusing pilot sequences in adjacent cells introduces pilot contamination, hindering SE enhancement. This paper reviews recent advancements and addresses research challenges in mitigating pilot contamination and improving channel estimation, categorizing the existing research into three broader categories: pilot assignment schemes, advanced signal processing methods, and advanced channel estimation techniques. Salient representative pilot mitigation/assignment techniques are analyzed and compared in each category. Lastly, possible future research directions are discussed.
Backreferences and lookaheads are vital features to make classical regular expressions (REGEX) practical. Although these features have been widely used, understanding of the unrestricted combination of them has been limited. Practically, most likely no implementation fully supports them. Theoretically, while some studies have addressed these features separately, few have dared to combine them. In those few studies, it has been made clear that the amalgamation of these features renders REGEX significantly expressive. However, no acceptable expressivity bound for REWBLk$\unicode{x2014}$REGEX with backreferences and lookaheads$\unicode{x2014}$has been established. We elucidate this by establishing that REWBLk coincides with NLOG, the class of languages accepted by log-space nondeterministic Turing machines (NTMs). In translating REWBLk to log-space NTMs, negative lookaheads are the most challenging part since it essentially requires complementing log-space NTMs in nondeterministic log-space. To address this problem, we revisit Immerman$\unicode{x2013}$Szelepcs\'enyi theorem. In addition, we employ log-space nested-oracles NTMs to naturally handle nested lookaheads of REWBLk. Utilizing such oracle machines, we also present the new result that the membership problem of REWBLk is PSPACE-complete.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) that leverage self-attention mechanism have shown superior performance on many classical vision tasks compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and gain increasing popularity recently. Existing ViTs works mainly optimize performance and accuracy, but ViTs reliability issues induced by soft errors in large-scale VLSI designs have generally been overlooked. In this work, we mainly study the reliability of ViTs and investigate the vulnerability from different architecture granularities ranging from models, layers, modules, and patches for the first time. The investigation reveals that ViTs with the self-attention mechanism are generally more resilient on linear computing including general matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) and full connection (FC) and show a relatively even vulnerability distribution across the patches. ViTs involve more fragile non-linear computing such as softmax and GELU compared to typical CNNs. With the above observations, we propose a lightweight block-wise algorithm-based fault tolerance (LB-ABFT) approach to protect the linear computing implemented with distinct sizes of GEMM and apply a range-based protection scheme to mitigate soft errors in non-linear computing. According to our experiments, the proposed fault-tolerant approaches enhance ViTs accuracy significantly with minor computing overhead in presence of various soft errors.
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has recently gained attention for fine-tuning foundation models by incorporating trainable low-rank matrices, thereby reducing the number of trainable parameters. While LoRA offers numerous advantages, its applicability for real-time serving to a diverse and global user base is constrained by its incapability to handle multiple task-specific adapters efficiently. This imposes a performance bottleneck in scenarios requiring personalized, task-specific adaptations for each incoming request. To mitigate this constraint, we introduce Fast LoRA (FLoRA), a framework in which each input example in a minibatch can be associated with its unique low-rank adaptation weights, allowing for efficient batching of heterogeneous requests. We empirically demonstrate that FLoRA retains the performance merits of LoRA, showcasing competitive results on the MultiPL-E code generation benchmark spanning over 8 languages and a multilingual speech recognition task across 6 languages.
We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.
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.
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.
Effective multi-robot teams require the ability to move to goals in complex environments in order to address real-world applications such as search and rescue. Multi-robot teams should be able to operate in a completely decentralized manner, with individual robot team members being capable of acting without explicit communication between neighbors. In this paper, we propose a novel game theoretic model that enables decentralized and communication-free navigation to a goal position. Robots each play their own distributed game by estimating the behavior of their local teammates in order to identify behaviors that move them in the direction of the goal, while also avoiding obstacles and maintaining team cohesion without collisions. We prove theoretically that generated actions approach a Nash equilibrium, which also corresponds to an optimal strategy identified for each robot. We show through extensive simulations that our approach enables decentralized and communication-free navigation by a multi-robot system to a goal position, and is able to avoid obstacles and collisions, maintain connectivity, and respond robustly to sensor noise.