arXiv subjects

Bolin Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Bolin Ding.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

BiMix: A Bivariate Data Mixing Law for Language Model Pretraining

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, primarily attributed to the utilization of diversely sourced data. However, the impact of pretraining data composition on model performance remains poorly understood. This paper introduces $\textbf{BiMix}$, a novel bivariate data mixing law that models the joint scaling behavior of domain proportions and data volume in LLM pretraining. $\textbf{BiMix}$ provides a systematic framework for understanding and optimizing data mixtures across diverse domains. Through extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, we demonstrate $\textbf{BiMix}$'s high accuracy in loss extrapolation (mean relative error < 0.2%) and its generalization to unseen mixtures (R${}^{2}$ > 0.97). Optimization of domain proportions yields superior model performance compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we establish entropy-based measures as efficient proxies for data mixing, offering a computationally lightweight strategy. Our work contributes both theoretical insights into data mixing dynamics and practical tools for enhancing LLM training efficiency, paving the way for more effective scaling strategies in language model development.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems are Scalable Graph Generative Models

The structural properties of naturally arising social graphs are extensively studied to understand their evolution. Prior approaches for modeling network dynamics typically rely on rule-based models, which lack realism and generalizability, or deep learning-based models, which require large-scale training datasets. Social graphs, as abstract graph representations of entity-wise interactions, present an opportunity to explore network evolution mechanisms through realistic simulations of human-item interactions. Leveraging the pre-trained social consensus knowledge embedded in large language models (LLMs), we present GraphAgent-Generator (GAG), a novel simulation-based framework for dynamic, text-attributed social graph generation. GAG simulates the temporal node and edge generation processes for zero-shot social graph generation. The resulting graphs exhibit adherence to seven key macroscopic network properties, achieving an 11% improvement in microscopic graph structure metrics. Through the node classification benchmarking task, we validate GAG effectively captures the intricate text-structure correlations in graph generation. Furthermore, GAG supports generating graphs with up to nearly 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges through large-scale LLM-based agent simulation with parallel acceleration, achieving a minimum speed-up of 90.4%. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ji-Cather/GraphAgent.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Img-Diff: Contrastive Data Synthesis for Multimodal Large Language Models

High-performance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are heavily dependent on data quality. To advance fine-grained image recognition within MLLMs, we introduce a novel data synthesis method inspired by contrastive learning and image difference captioning. Our key idea involves challenging the model to discern both matching and distinct elements by scrutinizing object differences in detailed regions across similar images. We begin by generating pairs of similar images that emphasize object variations. Following this, we employ a Difference Area Generator to pinpoint object differences, and subsequently, a Difference Captions Generator to articulate these differences. This process results in a high-quality dataset of "object replacement" samples, termed Img-Diff, which can be scaled as needed due to its automated nature. We leverage this generated dataset to fine-tune state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLMs, such as InternVL2, achieving substantial improvements across various image difference and Visual Question Answering tasks. Notably, the trained models significantly outperform existing SOTA models like GPT-4V and Gemini on the MMVP benchmark. Additionally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations to validate the dataset's diversity, quality, and robustness, offering several insights into the synthesis of such contrastive datasets. We release our codes and dataset to encourage further research on multimodal data synthesis and MLLMs' fundamental capabilities for image understanding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SMARTFEAT: Efficient Feature Construction through Feature-Level Foundation Model Interactions

Before applying data analytics or machine learning to a data set, a vital step is usually the construction of an informative set of features from the data. In this paper, we present SMARTFEAT, an efficient automated feature engineering tool to assist data users, even non-experts, in constructing useful features. Leveraging the power of Foundation Models (FMs), our approach enables the creation of new features from the data, based on contextual information and open-world knowledge. Our method incorporates an intelligent operator selector that discerns a subset of operators, effectively avoiding exhaustive combinations of original features, as is typically observed in traditional automated feature engineering tools. Moreover, we address the limitations of performing data tasks through row-level interactions with FMs, which could lead to significant delays and costs due to excessive API calls. We introduce a function generator that facilitates the acquisition of efficient data transformations, such as dataframe built-in methods or lambda functions, ensuring the applicability of SMARTFEAT to generate new features for large datasets. Code repo with prompt details and datasets: (https://github.com/niceIrene/SMARTFEAT).

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Exploring Selective Layer Fine-Tuning in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for fine-tuning foundation models using distributed data in a privacy-preserving manner. Under limited computational resources, clients often find it more practical to fine-tune a selected subset of layers, rather than the entire model, based on their task-specific data. In this study, we provide a thorough theoretical exploration of selective layer fine-tuning in FL, emphasizing a flexible approach that allows the clients to adjust their selected layers according to their local data and resources. We theoretically demonstrate that the layer selection strategy has a significant impact on model convergence in two critical aspects: the importance of selected layers and the heterogeneous choices across clients. Drawing from these insights, we further propose a strategic layer selection method that utilizes local gradients and regulates layer selections across clients. The extensive experiments on both image and text datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy compared with several baselines, highlighting its advances in identifying critical layers that adapt to the client heterogeneity and training dynamics in FL.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Very Large-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation in AgentScope

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for applying multi-agent systems in very large-scale simulations. However, there remain several challenges when conducting multi-agent simulations with existing platforms, such as limited scalability and low efficiency, unsatisfied agent diversity, and effort-intensive management processes. To address these challenges, we develop several new features and components for AgentScope, a user-friendly multi-agent platform, enhancing its convenience and flexibility for supporting very large-scale multi-agent simulations. Specifically, we propose an actor-based distributed mechanism as the underlying technological infrastructure towards great scalability and high efficiency, and provide flexible environment support for simulating various real-world scenarios, which enables parallel execution of multiple agents, automatic workflow conversion for distributed deployment, and both inter-agent and agent-environment interactions. Moreover, we integrate an easy-to-use configurable tool and an automatic background generation pipeline in AgentScope, simplifying the process of creating agents with diverse yet detailed background settings. Last but not least, we provide a web-based interface for conveniently monitoring and managing a large number of agents that might deploy across multiple devices. We conduct a comprehensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of these proposed enhancements in AgentScope, and provide detailed observations and insightful discussions to highlight the great potential of applying multi-agent systems in large-scale simulations. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope/tree/main/examples/paper_large_scale_simulation to inspire further research and development in large-scale multi-agent simulations.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2024

Make LLMs better zero-shot reasoners: Structure-orientated autonomous reasoning

Zero-shot reasoning methods with Large Language Models (LLMs) offer significant advantages including great generalization to novel tasks and reduced dependency on human-crafted examples. However, the current zero-shot methods still have limitations in complex tasks, e.g., answering questions that require multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing a novel structure-oriented analysis method to help LLMs better understand the question and guide the problem-solving process of LLMs. We first demonstrate how the existing reasoning strategies, Chain-of-Thought and ReAct, can benefit from our structure-oriented analysis. In addition to empirical investigations, we leverage the probabilistic graphical model to theoretically explain why our structure-oriented analysis can improve the LLM reasoning process. To further improve the reliability in complex question-answering tasks, we propose a multi-agent reasoning system, Structure-oriented Autonomous Reasoning Agents (SARA), that can better enforce the reasoning process following our structure-oriented analysis by refinement techniques and is equipped with external knowledge retrieval capability to reduce factual errors. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed reasoning system. Surprisingly, in some cases, the system even surpasses few-shot methods. Finally, the system not only improves reasoning accuracy in complex tasks but also demonstrates robustness against potential attacks that corrupt the reasoning process.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

$β$-DPO: Direct Preference Optimization with Dynamic $β$

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a compelling approach for training Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human preferences. However, the performance of DPO is sensitive to the fine-tuning of its trade-off parameter $β$, as well as to the quality of the preference data. We analyze the impact of $β$ and data quality on DPO, uncovering that optimal $β$ values vary with the informativeness of pairwise data. Addressing the limitations of static $β$ values, we introduce a novel framework that dynamically calibrates $β$ at the batch level, informed by data quality considerations. Additionally, our method incorporates $β$-guided data filtering to safeguard against the influence of outliers. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our dynamic $β$ adjustment technique significantly improves DPO's performance across a range of models and datasets, offering a more robust and adaptable training paradigm for aligning LLMs with human feedback. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/junkangwu/beta-DPO}.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

When to Trust LLMs: Aligning Confidence with Response Quality

Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language generation, much evidence shows that LLMs may produce incorrect or nonsensical text. This limitation highlights the importance of discerning when to trust LLMs, especially in safety-critical domains. Existing methods often express reliability by confidence level, however, their effectiveness is limited by the lack of objective guidance. To address this, we propose CONfidence-Quality-ORDer-preserving alignment approach (CONQORD), which leverages reinforcement learning guided by a tailored dual-component reward function. This function integrates quality reward and order-preserving alignment reward functions. Specifically, the order-preserving reward incentivizes the model to verbalize greater confidence for responses of higher quality to align the order of confidence and quality. Experiments demonstrate that CONQORD significantly improves the alignment performance between confidence and response accuracy, without causing over-cautious. Furthermore, the aligned confidence provided by CONQORD informs when to trust LLMs, and acts as a determinant for initiating the retrieval process of external knowledge. Aligning confidence with response quality ensures more transparent and reliable responses, providing better trustworthiness.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Understanding Byzantine Robustness in Federated Learning with A Black-box Server

Federated learning (FL) becomes vulnerable to Byzantine attacks where some of participators tend to damage the utility or discourage the convergence of the learned model via sending their malicious model updates. Previous works propose to apply robust rules to aggregate updates from participators against different types of Byzantine attacks, while at the same time, attackers can further design advanced Byzantine attack algorithms targeting specific aggregation rule when it is known. In practice, FL systems can involve a black-box server that makes the adopted aggregation rule inaccessible to participants, which can naturally defend or weaken some Byzantine attacks. In this paper, we provide an in-depth understanding on the Byzantine robustness of the FL system with a black-box server. Our investigation demonstrates the improved Byzantine robustness of a black-box server employing a dynamic defense strategy. We provide both empirical evidence and theoretical analysis to reveal that the black-box server can mitigate the worst-case attack impact from a maximum level to an expectation level, which is attributed to the inherent inaccessibility and randomness offered by a black-box server.The source code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/Byzantine_attack_defense to promote further research in the community.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

The Synergy between Data and Multi-Modal Large Language Models: A Survey from Co-Development Perspective

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has been witnessed in recent years. Based on the powerful LLMs, multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) extend the modality from text to a broader spectrum of domains, attracting widespread attention due to the broader range of application scenarios. As LLMs and MLLMs rely on vast amounts of model parameters and data to achieve emergent capabilities, the importance of data is receiving increasingly widespread attention and recognition. Tracing and analyzing recent data-oriented works for MLLMs, we find that the development of models and data is not two separate paths but rather interconnected. On the one hand, vaster and higher-quality data contribute to better performance of MLLMs; on the other hand, MLLMs can facilitate the development of data. The co-development of multi-modal data and MLLMs requires a clear view of 1) at which development stages of MLLMs specific data-centric approaches can be employed to enhance certain MLLM capabilities, and 2) how MLLMs, utilizing those capabilities, can contribute to multi-modal data in specific roles. To promote the data-model co-development for MLLM community, we systematically review existing works related to MLLMs from the data-model co-development perspective. A regularly maintained project associated with this survey is accessible at https://github.com/modelscope/data-juicer/blob/main/docs/awesome_llm_data.md.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

VertiMRF: Differentially Private Vertical Federated Data Synthesis

Data synthesis is a promising solution to share data for various downstream analytic tasks without exposing raw data. However, without a theoretical privacy guarantee, a synthetic dataset would still leak some sensitive information. Differential privacy is thus widely adopted to safeguard data synthesis by strictly limiting the released information. This technique is advantageous yet presents significant challenges in the vertical federated setting, where data attributes are distributed among different data parties. The main challenge lies in maintaining privacy while efficiently and precisely reconstructing the correlation among cross-party attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called VertiMRF, designed explicitly for generating synthetic data in the vertical setting and providing differential privacy protection for all information shared from data parties. We introduce techniques based on the Flajolet-Martin sketch (or frequency oracle) for encoding local data satisfying differential privacy and estimating cross-party marginals. We provide theoretical privacy and utility proof for encoding in this multi-attribute data. Collecting the locally generated private Markov Random Field (MRF) and the sketches, a central server can reconstruct a global MRF, maintaining the most useful information. Additionally, we introduce two techniques tailored for datasets with large attribute domain sizes, namely dimension reduction and consistency enforcement. These two techniques allow flexible and inconsistent binning strategies of local private MRF and the data sketching module, which can preserve information to the greatest extent. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of VertiMRF. End-to-end comparisons demonstrate the superiority of VertiMRF, and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2024

FedBiOT: LLM Local Fine-tuning in Federated Learning without Full Model

Large language models (LLMs) show amazing performance on many domain-specific tasks after fine-tuning with some appropriate data. However, many domain-specific data are privately distributed across multiple owners. Thus, this dilemma raises the interest in how to perform LLM fine-tuning in federated learning (FL). However, confronted with limited computation and communication capacities, FL clients struggle to fine-tune an LLM effectively. To this end, we introduce FedBiOT, a resource-efficient LLM fine-tuning approach to FL. Specifically, our method involves the server generating a compressed LLM and aligning its performance with the full model. Subsequently, the clients fine-tune a lightweight yet important part of the compressed model, referred to as an adapter. Notice that as the server has no access to the private data owned by the clients, the data used for alignment by the server has a different distribution from the one used for fine-tuning by clients. We formulate the problem into a bi-level optimization problem to minimize the negative effect of data discrepancy and derive the updating rules for the server and clients. We conduct extensive experiments on LLaMA-2, empirically showing that the adapter has exceptional performance when reintegrated into the global LLM. The results also indicate that the proposed FedBiOT significantly reduces resource consumption compared to existing benchmarks, all while achieving comparable performance levels.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

EE-LLM: Large-Scale Training and Inference of Early-Exit Large Language Models with 3D Parallelism

We present EE-LLM, a framework for large-scale training and inference of early-exit large language models (LLMs). While recent works have shown preliminary evidence for the efficacy of early exiting in accelerating LLM inference, EE-LLM makes a foundational step towards scaling up early-exit LLMs by supporting their training and inference with massive 3D parallelism. Built upon Megatron-LM, EE-LLM implements a variety of algorithmic innovations and performance optimizations tailored to early exiting, including a lightweight method that facilitates backpropagation for the early-exit training objective with pipeline parallelism, techniques of leveraging idle resources in the original pipeline schedule for computation related to early-exit layers, and two approaches of early-exit inference that are compatible with KV caching for autoregressive generation. Our analytical and empirical study shows that EE-LLM achieves great training efficiency with negligible computational overhead compared to standard LLM training, as well as outstanding inference speedup without compromising output quality. To facilitate further research and adoption, we release EE-LLM at https://github.com/pan-x-c/EE-LLM.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

PRICE: A Pretrained Model for Cross-Database Cardinality Estimation

Cardinality estimation (CardEst) is essential for optimizing query execution plans. Recent ML-based CardEst methods achieve high accuracy but face deployment challenges due to high preparation costs and lack of transferability across databases. In this paper, we propose PRICE, a PRetrained multI-table CardEst model, which addresses these limitations. PRICE takes low-level but transferable features w.r.t. data distributions and query information and elegantly applies self-attention models to learn meta-knowledge to compute cardinality in any database. It is generally applicable to any unseen new database to attain high estimation accuracy, while its preparation cost is as little as the basic one-dimensional histogram-based CardEst methods. Moreover, PRICE can be finetuned to further enhance its performance on any specific database. We pretrained PRICE using 30 diverse datasets, completing the process in about 5 hours with a resulting model size of only about 40MB. Evaluations show that PRICE consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest estimation accuracy on several unseen databases and generating faster execution plans with lower overhead. After finetuning with a small volume of databasespecific queries, PRICE could even find plans very close to the optimal ones. Meanwhile, PRICE is generally applicable to different settings such as data updates, data scaling, and query workload shifts. We have made all of our data and codes publicly available at https://github.com/StCarmen/PRICE.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Federated Full-Parameter Tuning of Billion-Sized Language Models with Communication Cost under 18 Kilobytes

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) need fine-tuning to improve their responsiveness to natural language instructions. Federated learning offers a way to fine-tune LLMs using the abundant data on end devices without compromising data privacy. Most existing federated fine-tuning methods for LLMs rely on parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, which may not reach the performance height possible with full-parameter tuning. However, federated full-parameter tuning of LLMs is a non-trivial problem due to the immense communication cost. This work introduces FedKSeed that employs zeroth-order optimization with a finite set of random seeds. It significantly reduces transmission requirements between the server and clients to just a few random seeds and scalar gradients, amounting to only a few thousand bytes, making federated full-parameter tuning of billion-sized LLMs possible on devices. Building on it, we develop a strategy enabling probability-differentiated seed sampling, prioritizing perturbations with greater impact on model accuracy. Experiments across six scenarios with various LLMs, datasets and data partitions demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing federated LLM fine-tuning methods in both communication efficiency and new task generalization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

AgentScope: A Flexible yet Robust Multi-Agent Platform

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), significant progress has been made in multi-agent applications. However, the complexities in coordinating agents' cooperation and LLMs' erratic performance pose notable challenges in developing robust and efficient multi-agent applications. To tackle these challenges, we propose AgentScope, a developer-centric multi-agent platform with message exchange as its core communication mechanism. The abundant syntactic tools, built-in agents and service functions, user-friendly interfaces for application demonstration and utility monitor, zero-code programming workstation, and automatic prompt tuning mechanism significantly lower the barriers to both development and deployment. Towards robust and flexible multi-agent application, AgentScope provides both built-in and customizable fault tolerance mechanisms. At the same time, it is also armed with system-level support for managing and utilizing multi-modal data, tools, and external knowledge. Additionally, we design an actor-based distribution framework, enabling easy conversion between local and distributed deployments and automatic parallel optimization without extra effort. With these features, AgentScope empowers developers to build applications that fully realize the potential of intelligent agents. We have released AgentScope at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope, and hope AgentScope invites wider participation and innovation in this fast-moving field.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2024

UniDM: A Unified Framework for Data Manipulation with Large Language Models

Designing effective data manipulation methods is a long standing problem in data lakes. Traditional methods, which rely on rules or machine learning models, require extensive human efforts on training data collection and tuning models. Recent methods apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to resolve multiple data manipulation tasks. They exhibit bright benefits in terms of performance but still require customized designs to fit each specific task. This is very costly and can not catch up with the requirements of big data lake platforms. In this paper, inspired by the cross-task generality of LLMs on NLP tasks, we pave the first step to design an automatic and general solution to tackle with data manipulation tasks. We propose UniDM, a unified framework which establishes a new paradigm to process data manipulation tasks using LLMs. UniDM formalizes a number of data manipulation tasks in a unified form and abstracts three main general steps to solve each task. We develop an automatic context retrieval to allow the LLMs to retrieve data from data lakes, potentially containing evidence and factual information. For each step, we design effective prompts to guide LLMs to produce high quality results. By our comprehensive evaluation on a variety of benchmarks, our UniDM exhibits great generality and state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of data manipulation tasks.

cs.AI↗