arXiv subjects

Chris Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Chris Liu.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Optimizing Distributed Protocols with Query Rewrites [Technical Report]

Distributed protocols such as 2PC and Paxos lie at the core of many systems in the cloud, but standard implementations do not scale. New scalable distributed protocols are developed through careful analysis and rewrites, but this process is ad hoc and error-prone. This paper presents an approach for scaling any distributed protocol by applying rule-driven rewrites, borrowing from query optimization. Distributed protocol rewrites entail a new burden: reasoning about spatiotemporal correctness. We leverage order-insensitivity and data dependency analysis to systematically identify correct coordination-free scaling opportunities. We apply this analysis to create preconditions and mechanisms for coordination-free decoupling and partitioning, two fundamental vertical and horizontal scaling techniques. Manual rule-driven applications of decoupling and partitioning improve the throughput of 2PC by $5\times$ and Paxos by $3\times$, and match state-of-the-art throughput in recent work. These results point the way toward automated optimizers for distributed protocols based on correct-by-construction rewrite rules.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

SPHINX: The Joint Mixing of Weights, Tasks, and Visual Embeddings for Multi-modal Large Language Models

We present SPHINX, a versatile multi-modal large language model (MLLM) with a joint mixing of model weights, tuning tasks, and visual embeddings. First, for stronger vision-language alignment, we unfreeze the large language model (LLM) during pre-training, and introduce a weight mix strategy between LLMs trained by real-world and synthetic data. By directly integrating the weights from two domains, the mixed LLM can efficiently incorporate diverse semantics with favorable robustness. Then, to enable multi-purpose capabilities, we mix a variety of tasks for joint visual instruction tuning, and design task-specific instructions to avoid inter-task conflict. In addition to the basic visual question answering, we include more challenging tasks such as region-level understanding, caption grounding, document layout detection, and human pose estimation, contributing to mutual enhancement over different scenarios. Additionally, we propose to extract comprehensive visual embeddings from various network architectures, pre-training paradigms, and information granularity, providing language models with more robust image representations. Based on our proposed joint mixing, SPHINX exhibits superior multi-modal understanding capabilities on a wide range of applications. On top of this, we further propose an efficient strategy aiming to better capture fine-grained appearances of high-resolution images. With a mixing of different scales and high-resolution sub-images, SPHINX attains exceptional visual parsing and reasoning performance on existing evaluation benchmarks. We hope our work may cast a light on the exploration of joint mixing in future MLLM research. Code is released at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

ImageBind-LLM: Multi-modality Instruction Tuning

We present ImageBind-LLM, a multi-modality instruction tuning method of large language models (LLMs) via ImageBind. Existing works mainly focus on language and image instruction tuning, different from which, our ImageBind-LLM can respond to multi-modality conditions, including audio, 3D point clouds, video, and their embedding-space arithmetic by only image-text alignment training. During training, we adopt a learnable bind network to align the embedding space between LLaMA and ImageBind's image encoder. Then, the image features transformed by the bind network are added to word tokens of all layers in LLaMA, which progressively injects visual instructions via an attention-free and zero-initialized gating mechanism. Aided by the joint embedding of ImageBind, the simple image-text training enables our model to exhibit superior multi-modality instruction-following capabilities. During inference, the multi-modality inputs are fed into the corresponding ImageBind encoders, and processed by a proposed visual cache model for further cross-modal embedding enhancement. The training-free cache model retrieves from three million image features extracted by ImageBind, which effectively mitigates the training-inference modality discrepancy. Notably, with our approach, ImageBind-LLM can respond to instructions of diverse modalities and demonstrate significant language generation quality. Code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/LLaMA-Adapter.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2023

LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention

We present LLaMA-Adapter, a lightweight adaption method to efficiently fine-tune LLaMA into an instruction-following model. Using 52K self-instruct demonstrations, LLaMA-Adapter only introduces 1.2M learnable parameters upon the frozen LLaMA 7B model, and costs less than one hour for fine-tuning on 8 A100 GPUs. Specifically, we adopt a set of learnable adaption prompts, and prepend them to the word tokens at higher transformer layers. Then, a zero-initialized attention mechanism with zero gating is proposed, which adaptively injects the new instructional cues into LLaMA, while effectively preserves its pre-trained knowledge. With our efficient training, LLaMA-Adapter can generate high-quality responses, comparable to Alpaca with fully fine-tuned 7B parameters. Besides language commands, our approach can be simply extended to multi-modal instructions for learning image-conditioned LLaMA model, which achieves superior reasoning performance on ScienceQA and COCO Caption benchmarks. Furthermore, we also evaluate the zero-initialized attention mechanism for fine-tuning other pre-trained models (ViT, RoBERTa) on traditional vision and language tasks, demonstrating the superior generalization capacity of our approach. Code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/LLaMA-Adapter.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

When Private Blockchain Meets Deterministic Database

Private blockchain as a replicated transactional system shares many commonalities with distributed database. However, the intimacy between private blockchain and deterministic database has never been studied. In essence, private blockchain and deterministic database both ensure replica consistency by determinism. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis to uncover the connections between private blockchain and deterministic database. While private blockchains have started to pursue deterministic transaction executions recently, deterministic databases have already studied deterministic concurrency control protocols for almost a decade. This motivates us to propose Harmony, a novel deterministic concurrency control protocol designed for blockchain use. We use Harmony to build a new relational blockchain, namely HarmonyBC, which features low abort rates, hotspot resiliency, and inter-block parallelism, all of which are especially important to disk-oriented blockchain. Empirical results on Smallbank, YCSB, and TPC-C show that HarmonyBC offers 2.0x to 3.5x throughput better than the state-of-the-art private blockchains.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

Are Updatable Learned Indexes Ready?

Recently, numerous promising results have shown that updatable learned indexes can perform better than traditional indexes with much lower memory space consumption. But it is unknown how these learned indexes compare against each other and against the traditional ones under realistic workloads with changing data distributions and concurrency levels. This makes practitioners still wary about how these new indexes would actually behave in practice. To fill this gap, this paper conducts the first comprehensive evaluation on updatable learned indexes. Our evaluation uses ten real datasets and various workloads to challenge learned indexes in three aspects: performance, memory space efficiency and robustness. Based on the results, we give a series of takeaways that can guide the future development and deployment of learned indexes.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

Top-K Deep Video Analytics: A Probabilistic Approach

The impressive accuracy of deep neural networks (DNNs) has created great demands on practical analytics over video data. Although efficient and accurate, the latest video analytic systems have not supported analytics beyond selection and aggregation queries. In data analytics, Top-K is a very important analytical operation that enables analysts to focus on the most important entities. In this paper, we present Everest, the first system that supports efficient and accurate Top-K video analytics. Everest ranks and identifies the most interesting frames/moments from videos with probabilistic guarantees. Everest is a system built with a careful synthesis of deep computer vision models, uncertain data management, and Top-K query processing. Evaluations on real-world videos and the latest Visual Road benchmark show that Everest achieves between 14.3x to 20.6x higher efficiency than baseline approaches with high result accuracy

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Towards Self-Tuning Parameter Servers

Recent years, many applications have been driven advances by the use of Machine Learning (ML). Nowadays, it is common to see industrial-strength machine learning jobs that involve millions of model parameters, terabytes of training data, and weeks of training. Good efficiency, i.e., fast completion time of running a specific ML job, therefore, is a key feature of a successful ML system. While the completion time of a long-running ML job is determined by the time required to reach model convergence, practically that is also largely influenced by the values of various system settings. In this paper, we contribute techniques towards building self-tuning parameter servers. Parameter Server (PS) is a popular system architecture for large-scale machine learning systems; and by self-tuning we mean while a long-running ML job is iteratively training the expert-suggested model, the system is also iteratively learning which system setting is more efficient for that job and applies it online. While our techniques are general enough to various PS-style ML systems, we have prototyped our techniques on top of TensorFlow. Experiments show that our techniques can reduce the completion times of a variety of long-running TensorFlow jobs from 1.4x to 18x.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2018

Decentralized Search on Decentralized Web

Decentralized Web, or DWeb, is envisioned as a promising future of the Web. Being decentralized, there are no dedicated web servers in DWeb; Devices that retrieve web contents also serve their cached data to peer devices with straight privacy-preserving mechanisms. The fact that contents in DWeb are distributed, replicated, and decentralized lead to a number of key advantages over the conventional web. These include better resiliency against network partitioning and distributed-denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), and better browsing experiences in terms of shorter latency and higher throughput. Moreover, DWeb provides tamper-proof contents because each content piece is uniquely identified by a cryptographic hash. DWeb also clicks well with future Internet architectures, such as Named Data Networking (NDN).Search engines have been an inseparable element of the Web. Contemporary ("Web 2.0") search engines, however, provide centralized services. They are thus subject to DDoS attacks, insider threat, and ethical issues like search bias and censorship. As the web moves from being centralized to being decentralized, search engines ought to follow. We propose QueenBee, a decentralized search engine for DWeb. QueenBee is so named because worker bees and honeycomb are a common metaphor for distributed architectures, with the queen being the one that holds the colony together. QueenBee aims to revolutionize the search engine business model by offering incentives to both content providers and peers that participate in QueenBee's page indexing and ranking operations.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2017

InferSpark: Statistical Inference at Scale

The Apache Spark stack has enabled fast large-scale data processing. Despite a rich library of statistical models and inference algorithms, it does not give domain users the ability to develop their own models. The emergence of probabilistic programming languages has showed the promise of developing sophisticated probabilistic models in a succinct and programmatic way. These frameworks have the potential of automatically generating inference algorithms for the user defined models and answering various statistical queries about the model. It is a perfect time to unite these two great directions to produce a programmable big data analysis framework. We thus propose, InferSpark, a probabilistic programming framework on top of Apache Spark. Efficient statistical inference can be easily implemented on this framework and inference process can leverage the distributed main memory processing power of Spark. This framework makes statistical inference on big data possible and speed up the penetration of probabilistic programming into the data engineering domain.

cs.DB↗