Task arithmetic has recently emerged as a cost-effective and scalable approach to edit pre-trained models directly in weight space: By adding the fine-tuned weights of different tasks, the model's performance can be improved on these tasks, while negating them leads to task forgetting. Yet, our understanding of the effectiveness of task arithmetic and its underlying principles remains limited. We present a comprehensive study of task arithmetic in vision-language models and show that weight disentanglement is the crucial factor that makes it effective. This property arises during pre-training and manifests when distinct directions in weight space govern separate, localized regions in function space associated with the tasks. Notably, we show that fine-tuning models in their tangent space by linearizing them amplifies weight disentanglement. This leads to substantial performance improvements across multiple task arithmetic benchmarks and diverse models. Building on these findings, we provide theoretical and empirical analyses of the neural tangent kernel (NTK) of these models and establish a compelling link between task arithmetic and the spatial localization of the NTK eigenfunctions. Overall, our work uncovers novel insights into the fundamental mechanisms of task arithmetic and offers a more reliable and effective approach to edit pre-trained models through the NTK linearization.
The existing internet-scale image and video datasets cover a wide range of everyday objects and tasks, bringing the potential of learning policies that have broad generalization. Prior works have explored visual pre-training with different self-supervised objectives, but the generalization capabilities of the learned policies remain relatively unknown. In this work, we take the first step towards this challenge, focusing on how pre-trained representations can help the generalization of the learned policies. We first identify the key bottleneck in using a frozen pre-trained visual backbone for policy learning. We then propose SpawnNet, a novel two-stream architecture that learns to fuse pre-trained multi-layer representations into a separate network to learn a robust policy. Through extensive simulated and real experiments, we demonstrate significantly better categorical generalization compared to prior approaches in imitation learning settings.
Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token prediction objective. This study investigates how small transformers, trained from random initialization, can efficiently learn arithmetic operations such as addition, multiplication, and elementary functions like square root, using the next-token prediction objective. We first demonstrate that conventional training data is not the most effective for arithmetic learning, and simple formatting changes can significantly improve accuracy. This leads to sharp phase transitions as a function of training data scale, which, in some cases, can be explained through connections to low-rank matrix completion. Building on prior work, we then train on chain-of-thought style data that includes intermediate step results. Even in the complete absence of pretraining, this approach significantly and simultaneously improves accuracy, sample complexity, and convergence speed. We also study the interplay between arithmetic and text data during training and examine the effects of few-shot prompting, pretraining, and model scale. Additionally, we discuss length generalization challenges. Our work highlights the importance of high-quality, instructive data that considers the particular characteristics of the next-word prediction objective for rapidly eliciting arithmetic capabilities.
Fine-tuning large models is highly effective, however, inference can be expensive and produces carbon emissions. Knowledge distillation has been shown to be a practical solution to reduce inference costs, but the distillation process itself requires significant computational resources. Rather than buying or renting GPUs to fine-tune, then distill a large model, an NLP practitioner might instead choose to allocate the available budget to hire annotators and manually label additional fine-tuning data. In this paper, we investigate how to most efficiently use a fixed budget to build a compact model. Through extensive experiments on six diverse tasks, we show that distilling from T5-XXL (11B) to T5-Small (60M) is almost always a cost-efficient strategy compared to annotating more data to directly train a compact model (T5-Small). We further investigate how the optimal budget allocated towards computation varies across scenarios. We will make our code, datasets, annotation cost estimates, and baseline models available as a benchmark to support further work on cost-efficient training of compact models.
We study the measure of order-competitive ratio introduced by Ezra et al. [2023] for online algorithms in Bayesian combinatorial settings. In our setting, a decision-maker observes a sequence of elements that are associated with stochastic rewards that are drawn from known priors, but revealed one by one in an online fashion. The decision-maker needs to decide upon the arrival of each element whether to select it or discard it (according to some feasibility constraint), and receives the associated rewards of the selected elements. The order-competitive ratio is defined as the worst-case ratio (over all distribution sequences) between the performance of the best order-unaware and order-aware algorithms, and quantifies the loss incurred due to the lack of knowledge of the arrival order. Ezra et al. [2023] showed how to design algorithms that achieve better approximations with respect to the new benchmark (order-competitive ratio) in the single-choice setting, which raises the natural question of whether the same can be achieved in combinatorial settings. In particular, whether it is possible to achieve a constant approximation with respect to the best online algorithm for downward-closed feasibility constraints, whether $\omega(1/n)$-approximation is achievable for general (non-downward-closed) feasibility constraints, or whether a convergence rate to $1$ of $o(1/\sqrt{k})$ is achievable for the multi-unit setting. We show, by devising novel constructions that may be of independent interest, that for all three scenarios, the asymptotic lower bounds with respect to the old benchmark, also hold with respect to the new benchmark.
With the urgent demand for generalized deep models, many pre-trained big models are proposed, such as BERT, ViT, GPT, etc. Inspired by the success of these models in single domains (like computer vision and natural language processing), the multi-modal pre-trained big models have also drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this work, we give a comprehensive survey of these models and hope this paper could provide new insights and helps fresh researchers to track the most cutting-edge works. Specifically, we firstly introduce the background of multi-modal pre-training by reviewing the conventional deep learning, pre-training works in natural language process, computer vision, and speech. Then, we introduce the task definition, key challenges, and advantages of multi-modal pre-training models (MM-PTMs), and discuss the MM-PTMs with a focus on data, objectives, network architectures, and knowledge enhanced pre-training. After that, we introduce the downstream tasks used for the validation of large-scale MM-PTMs, including generative, classification, and regression tasks. We also give visualization and analysis of the model parameters and results on representative downstream tasks. Finally, we point out possible research directions for this topic that may benefit future works. In addition, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for large-scale pre-trained multi-modal big models: //github.com/wangxiao5791509/MultiModal_BigModels_Survey
Diffusion models have shown incredible capabilities as generative models; indeed, they power the current state-of-the-art models on text-conditioned image generation such as Imagen and DALL-E 2. In this work we review, demystify, and unify the understanding of diffusion models across both variational and score-based perspectives. We first derive Variational Diffusion Models (VDM) as a special case of a Markovian Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder, where three key assumptions enable tractable computation and scalable optimization of the ELBO. We then prove that optimizing a VDM boils down to learning a neural network to predict one of three potential objectives: the original source input from any arbitrary noisification of it, the original source noise from any arbitrarily noisified input, or the score function of a noisified input at any arbitrary noise level. We then dive deeper into what it means to learn the score function, and connect the variational perspective of a diffusion model explicitly with the Score-based Generative Modeling perspective through Tweedie's Formula. Lastly, we cover how to learn a conditional distribution using diffusion models via guidance.
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.
Pre-trained models learn contextualized word representations on large-scale text corpus through a self-supervised learning method, which has achieved promising performance after fine-tuning. These models, however, suffer from poor robustness and lack of interpretability. Pre-trained models with knowledge injection, which we call knowledge enhanced pre-trained models (KEPTMs), possess deep understanding and logical reasoning and introduce interpretability to some extent. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of KEPTMs for natural language processing. We first introduce the progress of pre-trained models and knowledge representation learning. Then we systematically categorize existing KEPTMs from three different perspectives. Finally, we outline some potential directions of KEPTMs for future research.
Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success and become a milestone in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model parameters, large-scale PTMs can effectively capture knowledge from massive labeled and unlabeled data. By storing knowledge into huge parameters and fine-tuning on specific tasks, the rich knowledge implicitly encoded in huge parameters can benefit a variety of downstream tasks, which has been extensively demonstrated via experimental verification and empirical analysis. It is now the consensus of the AI community to adopt PTMs as backbone for downstream tasks rather than learning models from scratch. In this paper, we take a deep look into the history of pre-training, especially its special relation with transfer learning and self-supervised learning, to reveal the crucial position of PTMs in the AI development spectrum. Further, we comprehensively review the latest breakthroughs of PTMs. These breakthroughs are driven by the surge of computational power and the increasing availability of data, towards four important directions: designing effective architectures, utilizing rich contexts, improving computational efficiency, and conducting interpretation and theoretical analysis. Finally, we discuss a series of open problems and research directions of PTMs, and hope our view can inspire and advance the future study of PTMs.
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.