Efficient finetuning of pretrained language transformers is becoming increasingly prevalent for solving natural language processing tasks. While effective, it can still require a large number of tunable parameters. This can be a drawback for low-resource applications and training with differential-privacy constraints, where excessive noise may be introduced during finetuning. To this end, we propose a novel language transformer finetuning strategy that introduces task-specific parameters in multiple transformer layers. These parameters are derived from fixed random projections of a single trainable vector, enabling finetuning with significantly fewer parameters while maintaining performance. We achieve within 5% of full finetuning performance on GLUE tasks with as few as 4,100 parameters per task, outperforming other parameter-efficient finetuning approaches that use a similar number of per-task parameters. Besides, the random projections can be precomputed at inference, avoiding additional computational latency. All these make our method particularly appealing for low-resource applications. Finally, our method achieves the best or comparable utility compared to several recent finetuning methods when training with the same privacy constraints, underscoring its effectiveness and potential real-world impact.
Movement paths are used widely in intelligent transportation and smart city applications. To serve such applications, path representation learning aims to provide compact representations of paths that enable efficient and accurate operations when used for different downstream tasks such as path ranking and travel cost estimation. In many cases, it is attractive that the path representation learning is lightweight and scalable; in resource-limited environments and under green computing limitations, it is essential. Yet, existing path representation learning studies focus on accuracy and pay at most secondary attention to resource consumption and scalability. We propose a lightweight and scalable path representation learning framework, termed LightPath, that aims to reduce resource consumption and achieve scalability without affecting accuracy, thus enabling broader applicability. More specifically, we first propose a sparse auto-encoder that ensures that the framework achieves good scalability with respect to path length. Next, we propose a relational reasoning framework to enable faster training of more robust sparse path encoders. We also propose global-local knowledge distillation to further reduce the size and improve the performance of sparse path encoders. Finally, we report extensive experiments on two real-world datasets to offer insight into the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Fine-tuning pretrained self-supervised language models is widely adopted for transfer learning to downstream tasks. Fine-tuning can be achieved by freezing gradients of the pretrained network and only updating gradients of a newly added classification layer, or by performing gradient updates on all parameters. Gradual unfreezing makes a trade-off between the two by gradually unfreezing gradients of whole layers during training. This has been an effective strategy to trade-off between storage and training speed with generalization performance. However, it is not clear whether gradually unfreezing layers throughout training is optimal, compared to sparse variants of gradual unfreezing which may improve fine-tuning performance. In this paper, we propose to stochastically mask gradients to regularize pretrained language models for improving overall fine-tuned performance. We introduce GradDrop and variants thereof, a class of gradient sparsification methods that mask gradients during the backward pass, acting as gradient noise. GradDrop is sparse and stochastic unlike gradual freezing. Extensive experiments on the multilingual XGLUE benchmark with XLMR-Large show that GradDrop is competitive against methods that use additional translated data for intermediate pretraining and outperforms standard fine-tuning and gradual unfreezing. A post-analysis shows how GradDrop improves performance with languages it was not trained on, such as under-resourced languages.
Fine-tuning a pre-trained language model (PLM) emerges as the predominant strategy in many natural language processing applications. However, even fine-tuning the PLMs and doing inference are expensive, especially on edge devices with low computing power. Some general approaches (e.g. quantization and distillation) have been widely studied to reduce the compute/memory of PLM fine-tuning, while very few one-shot compression techniques are explored. In this paper, we investigate the neural tangent kernel (NTK)--which reveals the gradient descent dynamics of neural networks--of the multilayer perceptrons (MLP) modules in a PLM and propose to coin a lightweight PLM through NTK-approximating MLP fusion. To achieve this, we reconsider the MLP as a bundle of sub-MLPs, and cluster them into a given number of centroids, which can then be restored as a compressed MLP and surprisingly shown to well approximate the NTK of the original PLM. Extensive experiments of PLM fine-tuning on both natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method MLP fusion. Our code is available at //github.com/weitianxin/MLP_Fusion.
Transformer and its variants have been widely used for medical image segmentation. However, the large number of parameter and computational load of these models make them unsuitable for mobile health applications. To address this issue, we propose a more efficient approach, the Efficient Group Enhanced UNet (EGE-UNet). We incorporate a Group multi-axis Hadamard Product Attention module (GHPA) and a Group Aggregation Bridge module (GAB) in a lightweight manner. The GHPA groups input features and performs Hadamard Product Attention mechanism (HPA) on different axes to extract pathological information from diverse perspectives. The GAB effectively fuses multi-scale information by grouping low-level features, high-level features, and a mask generated by the decoder at each stage. Comprehensive experiments on the ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 datasets demonstrate that EGE-UNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. In short, compared to the TransFuse, our model achieves superior segmentation performance while reducing parameter and computation costs by 494x and 160x, respectively. Moreover, to our best knowledge, this is the first model with a parameter count limited to just 50KB. Our code is available at //github.com/JCruan519/EGE-UNet.
Numerical software is usually shipped with built-in hyperparameters. By carefully tuning those hyperparameters, significant performance enhancements can be achieved for specific applications. We developed MindOpt Tuner, a new automatic tuning tool that supports a wide range of numerical software, including optimization and other solvers. MindOpt Tuner uses elastic cloud resources, features a web-based task management panel and integration with ipython notebook with both command-line tools and Python APIs. Our experiments with COIN-OR Cbc, an open-source mixed-integer optimization solver, demonstrate remarkable improvements with the tuned parameters compared to the default ones on the MIPLIB2017 test set, resulting in over 100x acceleration on several problem instances. Additionally, the results demonstrate that Tuner has a higher tuning efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art automatic tuning tool SMAC3.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance has improved drastically in recent years, mainly enabled by self-supervised learning (SSL) based acoustic models such as wav2vec2 and large-scale multi-lingual training like Whisper. A huge challenge still exists for low-resource languages where the availability of both audio and text is limited. This is further complicated by the presence of multiple dialects like in Indian languages. However, many Indian languages can be grouped into the same families and share the same script and grammatical structure. This is where a lot of adaptation and fine-tuning techniques can be applied to overcome the low-resource nature of the data by utilising well-resourced similar languages. In such scenarios, it is important to understand the extent to which each modality, like acoustics and text, is important in building a reliable ASR. It could be the case that an abundance of acoustic data in a language reduces the need for large text-only corpora. Or, due to the availability of various pretrained acoustic models, the vice-versa could also be true. In this proposed special session, we encourage the community to explore these ideas with the data in two low-resource Indian languages of Bengali and Bhojpuri. These approaches are not limited to Indian languages, the solutions are potentially applicable to various languages spoken around the world.
Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) has been widely explored in recent years because it tunes much fewer parameters (PET modules) than full-parameter fine-tuning (FT) while still stimulating sufficient knowledge from large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks. Moreover, when PET is employed to serve multiple tasks, different task-specific PET modules can be built on a frozen LLM, avoiding redundant LLM deployments. Although PET significantly reduces the cost of tuning and deploying LLMs, its inference still suffers from the computational bottleneck of LLMs. To address the above issue, we propose an effective PET framework based on compressed LLMs, named "CPET". In CPET, we evaluate the impact of mainstream LLM compression techniques on PET performance and then introduce knowledge inheritance and recovery strategies to restore the knowledge loss caused by these compression techniques. Our experimental results demonstrate that, owing to the restoring strategies of CPET, collaborating task-specific PET modules with a compressed LLM can achieve comparable performance to collaborating PET modules with the original version of the compressed LLM and outperform directly applying vanilla PET methods to the compressed LLM.
Federated learning (FL) combined with differential privacy (DP) offers machine learning (ML) training with distributed devices and with a formal privacy guarantee. With a large population of devices, FL with DP produces a performant model in a timely manner. However, for applications with a smaller population, not only does the model utility degrade as the DP noise is inversely proportional to population, but also the training latency increases since waiting for enough clients to become available from a smaller pool is slower. In this work, we thus propose expanding the population based on domain adaptation techniques to speed up the training and improves the final model quality when training with small populations. We empirically demonstrate that our techniques can improve the utility by 13% to 30% on real-world language modeling datasets.
While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models have shown significant advances with the introduction of unsupervised or self-supervised training techniques, these improvements are still only limited to a subsection of languages and speakers. Transfer learning enables the adaptation of large-scale multilingual models to not only low-resource languages but also to more specific speaker groups. However, fine-tuning on data from new domains is usually accompanied by a decrease in performance on the original domain. Therefore, in our experiments, we examine how well the performance of large-scale ASR models can be approximated for smaller domains, with our own dataset of German Senior Voice Commands (SVC-de), and how much of the general speech recognition performance can be preserved by selectively freezing parts of the model during training. To further increase the robustness of the ASR model to vocabulary and speakers outside of the fine-tuned domain, we apply Experience Replay for continual learning. By adding only a fraction of data from the original domain, we are able to reach Word-Error-Rates (WERs) below 5\% on the new domain, while stabilizing performance for general speech recognition at acceptable WERs.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.