Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a neural architecture design that can be utilized to add learnable parameters to Large Language Models (LLMs) without increasing inference cost. Instruction tuning is a technique for training LLMs to follow instructions. We advocate combining these two approaches, as we find that MoE models benefit more from instruction tuning than dense models. In particular, we conduct empirical studies across three experimental setups: (i) Direct finetuning on individual downstream tasks devoid of instruction tuning; (ii) Instructiontuning followed by in-context few-shot or zero-shot generalization on downstream tasks; and (iii) Instruction tuning supplemented by further finetuning on individual downstream tasks. In the first scenario, MoE models overall underperform dense models of identical computational capacity. This narrative, however, dramatically changes with the introduction of instruction tuning (second and third scenario), used independently or in conjunction with task-specific finetuning. Our most powerful model, FLAN-MOE-32B, surpasses the performance of FLAN-PALM-62B on four benchmark tasks, while using only a third of the FLOPs. The advancements embodied byFLAN-MOE inspire a reevaluation of the design principles of large-scale, high-performance language models in the framework of task-agnostic learning.
Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand the neural mechanisms that enable specific behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging causality-based methods. While these approaches have identified neural circuits that copy spans of text, capture factual knowledge, and more, they remain unusable for multimodal models since adapting these tools to the vision-language domain requires considerable architectural changes. In this work, we adapt a unimodal causal tracing tool to BLIP to enable the study of the neural mechanisms underlying image-conditioned text generation. We demonstrate our approach on a visual question answering dataset, highlighting the causal relevance of later layer representations for all tokens. Furthermore, we release our BLIP causal tracing tool as open source to enable further experimentation in vision-language mechanistic interpretability by the community. Our code is available at //github.com/vedantpalit/Towards-Vision-Language-Mechanistic-Interpretability.
Temporal Interaction Graphs (TIGs) are widely employed to model intricate real-world systems such as financial systems and social networks. To capture the dynamism and interdependencies of nodes, existing TIG embedding models need to process edges sequentially and chronologically. However, this requirement prevents it from being processed in parallel and struggle to accommodate burgeoning data volumes to GPU. Consequently, many large-scale temporal interaction graphs are confined to CPU processing. Furthermore, a generalized GPU scaling and acceleration approach remains unavailable. To facilitate large-scale TIGs' implementation on GPUs for acceleration, we introduce a novel training approach namely Streaming Edge Partitioning and Parallel Acceleration for Temporal Interaction Graph Embedding (SPEED). The SPEED is comprised of a Streaming Edge Partitioning Component (SEP) which addresses space overhead issue by assigning fewer nodes to each GPU, and a Parallel Acceleration Component (PAC) which enables simultaneous training of different sub-graphs, addressing time overhead issue. Our method can achieve a good balance in computing resources, computing time, and downstream task performance. Empirical validation across 7 real-world datasets demonstrates the potential to expedite training speeds by a factor of up to 19.29x. Simultaneously, resource consumption of a single-GPU can be diminished by up to 69%, thus enabling the multiple GPU-based training and acceleration encompassing millions of nodes and billions of edges. Furthermore, our approach also maintains its competitiveness in downstream tasks.
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology that enables the customization of electromagnetic propagation environments in next-generation wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the optimal pilot power allocation during the channel estimation stage to improve the ergodic channel gain of RIS-assisted systems under practical imperfect channel state information (CSI). Specifically, we commence by deriving an explicit closed-form expression of the ergodic channel gain of a multi-RIS-aided communication system that takes into account channel estimation errors. Then, we formulate the pilot power allocation problem to maximize the ergodic channel gain under imperfect CSI, subject to the average pilot power constraint. Then, the method of Lagrange multipliers is invoked to obtain the optimal pilot power allocation solution, which indicates that allocating more power to the pilots for estimating the weak reflection channels is capable of effectively improving the ergodic channel gain under imperfect CSI. Finally, extensive simulation results corroborate our theoretical analysis.
Structural re-parameterization is a general training scheme for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which achieves performance improvement without increasing inference cost. As Vision Transformers (ViTs) are gradually surpassing CNNs in various visual tasks, one may question: if a training scheme specifically for ViTs exists that can also achieve performance improvement without increasing inference cost? Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has attracted increasing attention, as it can efficiently scale up the capacity of Transformers at a fixed cost through sparsely activated experts. Considering that MoE can also be viewed as a multi-branch structure, can we utilize MoE to implement a ViT training scheme similar to structural re-parameterization? In this paper, we affirmatively answer these questions, with a new general training strategy for ViTs. Specifically, we decouple the training and inference phases of ViTs. During training, we replace some Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) of the ViT with specially designed, more efficient MoEs that assign tokens to experts by random uniform partition, and perform Experts Weights Averaging (EWA) on these MoEs at the end of each iteration. After training, we convert each MoE into an FFN by averaging the experts, transforming the model back into original ViT for inference. We further provide a theoretical analysis to show why and how it works. Comprehensive experiments across various 2D and 3D visual tasks, ViT architectures, and datasets validate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed training scheme. Besides, our training scheme can also be applied to improve performance when fine-tuning ViTs. Lastly, but equally important, the proposed EWA technique can significantly improve the effectiveness of naive MoE in various 2D visual small datasets and 3D visual tasks.
Despite their simpler information fusion designs compared with Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks, Vision MLP architectures have demonstrated strong performance and high data efficiency in recent research. However, existing works such as CycleMLP and Vision Permutator typically model spatial information in equal-size spatial regions and do not consider cross-scale spatial interactions. Further, their token mixers only model 1- or 2-axis correlations, avoiding 3-axis spatial-channel mixing due to its computational demands. We therefore propose CS-Mixer, a hierarchical Vision MLP that learns dynamic low-rank transformations for spatial-channel mixing through cross-scale local and global aggregation. The proposed methodology achieves competitive results on popular image recognition benchmarks without incurring substantially more compute. Our largest model, CS-Mixer-L, reaches 83.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k with 13.7 GFLOPs and 94 M parameters.
Multivariate Time Series (MVTS) anomaly detection is a long-standing and challenging research topic that has attracted tremendous research effort from both industry and academia recently. However, a careful study of the literature makes us realize that 1) the community is active but not as organized as other sibling machine learning communities such as Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), and 2) most proposed solutions are evaluated using either inappropriate or highly flawed protocols, with an apparent lack of scientific foundation. So flawed is one very popular protocol, the so-called \pa protocol, that a random guess can be shown to systematically outperform \emph{all} algorithms developed so far. In this paper, we review and evaluate many recent algorithms using more robust protocols and discuss how a normally good protocol may have weaknesses in the context of MVTS anomaly detection and how to mitigate them. We also share our concerns about benchmark datasets, experiment design and evaluation methodology we observe in many works. Furthermore, we propose a simple, yet challenging, baseline algorithm based on Principal Components Analysis (PCA) that surprisingly outperforms many recent Deep Learning (DL) based approaches on popular benchmark datasets. The main objective of this work is to stimulate more effort towards important aspects of the research such as data, experiment design, evaluation methodology and result interpretability, instead of putting the highest weight on the design of increasingly more complex and "fancier" algorithms.
Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally designed for prediction problems, it is natural to inquire about their suitability for sequential decision-making and reinforcement learning problems, which are typically beset by long-standing issues involving sample efficiency, credit assignment, and partial observability. In recent years, sequence models, especially the Transformer, have attracted increasing interest in the RL communities, spawning numerous approaches with notable effectiveness and generalizability. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of recent works aimed at solving sequential decision-making tasks with sequence models such as the Transformer, by discussing the connection between sequential decision-making and sequence modeling, and categorizing them based on the way they utilize the Transformer. Moreover, this paper puts forth various potential avenues for future research intending to improve the effectiveness of large sequence models for sequential decision-making, encompassing theoretical foundations, network architectures, algorithms, and efficient training systems. As this article has been accepted by the Frontiers of Computer Science, here is an early version, and the most up-to-date version can be found at //journal.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-023-2689-5
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (\emph{e.g.,} social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (\emph{e.g.,} object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (\emph{e.g.,} relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, \emph{i.e.,} 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
Neural architecture-based recommender systems have achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, when dealing with highly sparse data, they still fall short of expectation. Self-supervised learning (SSL), as an emerging technique to learn with unlabeled data, recently has drawn considerable attention in many fields. There is also a growing body of research proceeding towards applying SSL to recommendation for mitigating the data sparsity issue. In this survey, a timely and systematical review of the research efforts on self-supervised recommendation (SSR) is presented. Specifically, we propose an exclusive definition of SSR, on top of which we build a comprehensive taxonomy to divide existing SSR methods into four categories: contrastive, generative, predictive, and hybrid. For each category, the narrative unfolds along its concept and formulation, the involved methods, and its pros and cons. Meanwhile, to facilitate the development and evaluation of SSR models, we release an open-source library SELFRec, which incorporates multiple benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, and has implemented a number of state-of-the-art SSR models for empirical comparison. Finally, we shed light on the limitations in the current research and outline the future research directions.
An effective and efficient architecture performance evaluation scheme is essential for the success of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To save computational cost, most of existing NAS algorithms often train and evaluate intermediate neural architectures on a small proxy dataset with limited training epochs. But it is difficult to expect an accurate performance estimation of an architecture in such a coarse evaluation way. This paper advocates a new neural architecture evaluation scheme, which aims to determine which architecture would perform better instead of accurately predict the absolute architecture performance. Therefore, we propose a \textbf{relativistic} architecture performance predictor in NAS (ReNAS). We encode neural architectures into feature tensors, and further refining the representations with the predictor. The proposed relativistic performance predictor can be deployed in discrete searching methods to search for the desired architectures without additional evaluation. Experimental results on NAS-Bench-101 dataset suggests that, sampling 424 ($0.1\%$ of the entire search space) neural architectures and their corresponding validation performance is already enough for learning an accurate architecture performance predictor. The accuracies of our searched neural architectures on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201 datasets are higher than that of the state-of-the-art methods and show the priority of the proposed method.