arXiv subjects

Dacheng Tao

Publications and source records attributed to Dacheng Tao.

At least 325 records · Page 18Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

A Theoretical Survey on Foundation Models

Understanding the inner mechanisms of black-box foundation models (FMs) is essential yet challenging in artificial intelligence and its applications. Over the last decade, the long-running focus has been on their explainability, leading to the development of post-hoc explainable methods to rationalize the specific decisions already made by black-box FMs. However, these explainable methods have certain limitations in terms of faithfulness and resource requirement. Consequently, a new class of interpretable methods should be considered to unveil the underlying mechanisms of FMs in an accurate, comprehensive, heuristic, and resource-light way. This survey aims to review those interpretable methods that comply with the aforementioned principles and have been successfully applied to FMs. These methods are deeply rooted in machine learning theory, covering the analysis of generalization performance, expressive capability, and dynamic behavior. They provide a thorough interpretation of the entire workflow of FMs, ranging from the inference capability and training dynamics to their ethical implications. Ultimately, drawing upon these interpretations, this review identifies the next frontier research directions for FMs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

A Unified Analysis for Finite Weight Averaging

Averaging iterations of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) have achieved empirical success in training deep learning models, such as Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA), Exponential Moving Average (EMA), and LAtest Weight Averaging (LAWA). Especially, with a finite weight averaging method, LAWA can attain faster convergence and better generalization. However, its theoretical explanation is still less explored since there are fundamental differences between finite and infinite settings. In this work, we first generalize SGD and LAWA as Finite Weight Averaging (FWA) and explain their advantages compared to SGD from the perspective of optimization and generalization. A key challenge is the inapplicability of traditional methods in the sense of expectation or optimal values for infinite-dimensional settings in analyzing FWA's convergence. Second, the cumulative gradients introduced by FWA introduce additional confusion to the generalization analysis, especially making it more difficult to discuss them under different assumptions. Extending the final iteration convergence analysis to the FWA, this paper, under a convexity assumption, establishes a convergence bound $\mathcal{O}(\log\left(\frac{T}{k}\right)/\sqrt{T})$, where $k\in[1, T/2]$ is a constant representing the last $k$ iterations. Compared to SGD with $\mathcal{O}(\log(T)/\sqrt{T})$, we prove theoretically that FWA has a faster convergence rate and explain the effect of the number of average points. In the generalization analysis, we find a recursive representation for bounding the cumulative gradient using mathematical induction. We provide bounds for constant and decay learning rates and the convex and non-convex cases to show the good generalization performance of FWA. Finally, experimental results on several benchmarks verify our theoretical results.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Continual Task Learning through Adaptive Policy Self-Composition

Training a generalizable agent to continually learn a sequence of tasks from offline trajectories is a natural requirement for long-lived agents, yet remains a significant challenge for current offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Specifically, an agent must be able to rapidly adapt to new tasks using newly collected trajectories (plasticity), while retaining knowledge from previously learned tasks (stability). However, systematic analyses of this setting are scarce, and it remains unclear whether conventional continual learning (CL) methods are effective in continual offline RL (CORL) scenarios. In this study, we develop the Offline Continual World benchmark and demonstrate that traditional CL methods struggle with catastrophic forgetting, primarily due to the unique distribution shifts inherent to CORL scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce CompoFormer, a structure-based continual transformer model that adaptively composes previous policies via a meta-policy network. Upon encountering a new task, CompoFormer leverages semantic correlations to selectively integrate relevant prior policies alongside newly trained parameters, thereby enhancing knowledge sharing and accelerating the learning process. Our experiments reveal that CompoFormer outperforms conventional CL methods, particularly in longer task sequences, showcasing a promising balance between plasticity and stability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Learn from Downstream and Be Yourself in Multimodal Large Language Model Fine-Tuning

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse distributions and tasks, largely due to extensive pre-training datasets. Fine-tuning MLLM has become a common practice to improve performance on specific downstream tasks. However, during fine-tuning, MLLM often faces the risk of forgetting knowledge acquired during pre-training, which can result in a decline in generalization abilities. To balance the trade-off between generalization and specialization, we propose measuring the parameter importance for both pre-trained and fine-tuning distributions, based on frozen pre-trained weight magnitude and accumulated fine-tuning gradient values. We further apply an importance-aware weight allocation strategy, selectively updating relatively important parameters for downstream tasks. We conduct empirical evaluations on both image captioning and visual question-answering tasks using various MLLM architectures. The comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed solution, highlighting the efficiency of the crucial modules in enhancing downstream specialization performance while mitigating generalization degradation in MLLM Fine-Tuning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Stability and Generalization for Distributed SGDA

Minimax optimization is gaining increasing attention in modern machine learning applications. Driven by large-scale models and massive volumes of data collected from edge devices, as well as the concern to preserve client privacy, communication-efficient distributed minimax optimization algorithms become popular, such as Local Stochastic Gradient Descent Ascent (Local-SGDA), and Local Decentralized SGDA (Local-DSGDA). While most existing research on distributed minimax algorithms focuses on convergence rates, computation complexity, and communication efficiency, the generalization performance remains underdeveloped, whereas generalization ability is a pivotal indicator for evaluating the holistic performance of a model when fed with unknown data. In this paper, we propose the stability-based generalization analytical framework for Distributed-SGDA, which unifies two popular distributed minimax algorithms including Local-SGDA and Local-DSGDA, and conduct a comprehensive analysis of stability error, generalization gap, and population risk across different metrics under various settings, e.g., (S)C-(S)C, PL-SC, and NC-NC cases. Our theoretical results reveal the trade-off between the generalization gap and optimization error and suggest hyperparameters choice to obtain the optimal population risk. Numerical experiments for Local-SGDA and Local-DSGDA validate the theoretical results.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Hi-SAM: Marrying Segment Anything Model for Hierarchical Text Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a profound vision foundation model pretrained on a large-scale dataset, breaks the boundaries of general segmentation and sparks various downstream applications. This paper introduces Hi-SAM, a unified model leveraging SAM for hierarchical text segmentation. Hi-SAM excels in segmentation across four hierarchies, including pixel-level text, word, text-line, and paragraph, while realizing layout analysis as well. Specifically, we first turn SAM into a high-quality pixel-level text segmentation (TS) model through a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach. We use this TS model to iteratively generate the pixel-level text labels in a semi-automatical manner, unifying labels across the four text hierarchies in the HierText dataset. Subsequently, with these complete labels, we launch the end-to-end trainable Hi-SAM based on the TS architecture with a customized hierarchical mask decoder. During inference, Hi-SAM offers both automatic mask generation (AMG) mode and promptable segmentation (PS) mode. In the AMG mode, Hi-SAM segments pixel-level text foreground masks initially, then samples foreground points for hierarchical text mask generation and achieves layout analysis in passing. As for the PS mode, Hi-SAM provides word, text-line, and paragraph masks with a single point click. Experimental results show the state-of-the-art performance of our TS model: 84.86% fgIOU on Total-Text and 88.96% fgIOU on TextSeg for pixel-level text segmentation. Moreover, compared to the previous specialist for joint hierarchical detection and layout analysis on HierText, Hi-SAM achieves significant improvements: 4.73% PQ and 5.39% F1 on the text-line level, 5.49% PQ and 7.39% F1 on the paragraph level layout analysis, requiring $20\times$ fewer training epochs. The code is available at https://github.com/ymy-k/Hi-SAM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Task-Aware Harmony Multi-Task Decision Transformer for Offline Reinforcement Learning

The purpose of offline multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) is to develop a unified policy applicable to diverse tasks without the need for online environmental interaction. Recent advancements approach this through sequence modeling, leveraging the Transformer architecture's scalability and the benefits of parameter sharing to exploit task similarities. However, variations in task content and complexity pose significant challenges in policy formulation, necessitating judicious parameter sharing and management of conflicting gradients for optimal policy performance. Furthermore, identifying the optimal parameter subspace for each task often necessitates prior knowledge of the task identifier during inference, limiting applicability in real-world scenarios with variable task content and unknown current tasks. In this work, we introduce the Harmony Multi-Task Decision Transformer (HarmoDT), a novel solution designed to identify an optimal harmony subspace of parameters for each task. We formulate this as a bi-level optimization problem within a meta-learning framework, where the upper level learns masks to define the harmony subspace, while the inner level focuses on updating parameters to improve the overall performance of the unified policy. To eliminate the need for task identifiers, we further design a group-wise variant (G-HarmoDT) that clusters tasks into coherent groups based on gradient information, and utilizes a gating network to determine task identifiers during inference. Empirical evaluations across various benchmarks highlight the superiority of our approach, demonstrating its effectiveness in the multi-task context with specific improvements of 8% gain in task-provided settings, 5% in task-agnostic settings, and 10% in unseen settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Prompt Tuning with Diffusion for Few-Shot Pre-trained Policy Generalization

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods harness previous experiences to derive an optimal policy, forming the foundation for pre-trained large-scale models (PLMs). When encountering tasks not seen before, PLMs often utilize several expert trajectories as prompts to expedite their adaptation to new requirements. Though a range of prompt-tuning methods have been proposed to enhance the quality of prompts, these methods often face optimization restrictions due to prompt initialization, which can significantly constrain the exploration domain and potentially lead to suboptimal solutions. To eliminate the reliance on the initial prompt, we shift our perspective towards the generative model, framing the prompt-tuning process as a form of conditional generative modeling, where prompts are generated from random noise. Our innovation, the Prompt Diffuser, leverages a conditional diffusion model to produce prompts of exceptional quality. Central to our framework is the approach to trajectory reconstruction and the meticulous integration of downstream task guidance during the training phase. Further experimental results underscore the potency of the Prompt Diffuser as a robust and effective tool for the prompt-tuning process, demonstrating strong performance in the meta-RL tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

InfoRM: Mitigating Reward Hacking in RLHF via Information-Theoretic Reward Modeling

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge. This issue primarily arises from reward misgeneralization, where reward models (RMs) compute reward using spurious features that are irrelevant to human preferences. In this work, we tackle this problem from an information-theoretic perspective and propose a framework for reward modeling, namely InfoRM, by introducing a variational information bottleneck objective to filter out irrelevant information. Notably, we further identify a correlation between overoptimization and outliers in the IB latent space of InfoRM, establishing it as a promising tool for detecting reward overoptimization. Inspired by this finding, we propose the Cluster Separation Index (CSI), which quantifies deviations in the IB latent space, as an indicator of reward overoptimization to facilitate the development of online mitigation strategies. Extensive experiments on a wide range of settings and RM scales (70M, 440M, 1.4B, and 7B) demonstrate the effectiveness of InfoRM. Further analyses reveal that InfoRM's overoptimization detection mechanism is not only effective but also robust across a broad range of datasets, signifying a notable advancement in the field of RLHF. The code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Communication Learning in Multi-Agent Systems from Graph Modeling Perspective

In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Offline Behavior Distillation

Massive reinforcement learning (RL) data are typically collected to train policies offline without the need for interactions, but the large data volume can cause training inefficiencies. To tackle this issue, we formulate offline behavior distillation (OBD), which synthesizes limited expert behavioral data from sub-optimal RL data, enabling rapid policy learning. We propose two naive OBD objectives, DBC and PBC, which measure distillation performance via the decision difference between policies trained on distilled data and either offline data or a near-expert policy. Due to intractable bi-level optimization, the OBD objective is difficult to minimize to small values, which deteriorates PBC by its distillation performance guarantee with quadratic discount complexity $\mathcal{O}(1/(1-γ)^2)$. We theoretically establish the equivalence between the policy performance and action-value weighted decision difference, and introduce action-value weighted PBC (Av-PBC) as a more effective OBD objective. By optimizing the weighted decision difference, Av-PBC achieves a superior distillation guarantee with linear discount complexity $\mathcal{O}(1/(1-γ))$. Extensive experiments on multiple D4RL datasets reveal that Av-PBC offers significant improvements in OBD performance, fast distillation convergence speed, and robust cross-architecture/optimizer generalization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

NoVo: Norm Voting off Hallucinations with Attention Heads in Large Language Models

Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) remain a major obstacle, particularly in high-stakes applications where factual accuracy is critical. While representation editing and reading methods have made strides in reducing hallucinations, their heavy reliance on specialised tools and training on in-domain samples, makes them difficult to scale and prone to overfitting. This limits their accuracy gains and generalizability to diverse datasets. This paper presents a lightweight method, Norm Voting (NoVo), which harnesses the untapped potential of attention head norms to dramatically enhance factual accuracy in zero-shot multiple-choice questions (MCQs). NoVo begins by automatically selecting truth-correlated head norms with an efficient, inference-only algorithm using only 30 random samples, allowing NoVo to effortlessly scale to diverse datasets. Afterwards, selected head norms are employed in a simple voting algorithm, which yields significant gains in prediction accuracy. On TruthfulQA MC1, NoVo surpasses the current state-of-the-art and all previous methods by an astounding margin -- at least 19 accuracy points. NoVo demonstrates exceptional generalization to 20 diverse datasets, with significant gains in over 90\% of them, far exceeding all current representation editing and reading methods. NoVo also reveals promising gains to finetuning strategies and building textual adversarial defence. NoVo's effectiveness with head norms opens new frontiers in LLM interpretability, robustness and reliability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Efficient and Effective Weight-Ensembling Mixture of Experts for Multi-Task Model Merging

Multi-task learning (MTL) leverages a shared model to accomplish multiple tasks and facilitate knowledge transfer. Recent research on task arithmetic-based MTL demonstrates that merging the parameters of independently fine-tuned models can effectively achieve MTL. However, existing merging methods primarily seek a static optimal solution within the original model parameter space, which often results in performance degradation due to the inherent diversity among tasks and potential interferences. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Weight-Ensembling Mixture of Experts (WEMoE) method for multi-task model merging. Specifically, we first identify critical (or sensitive) modules by analyzing parameter variations in core modules of Transformer-based models before and after finetuning. Then, our WEMoE statically merges non-critical modules while transforming critical modules into a mixture-of-experts (MoE) structure. During inference, expert modules in the MoE are dynamically merged based on input samples, enabling a more flexible and adaptive merging approach. Building on WEMoE, we further introduce an efficient-and-effective WEMoE (E-WEMoE) method, whose core mechanism involves eliminating non-essential elements in the critical modules of WEMoE and implementing shared routing across multiple MoE modules, thereby significantly reducing both the trainable parameters, the overall parameter count, and computational overhead of the merged model by WEMoE. Experimental results across various architectures and tasks demonstrate that both WEMoE and E-WEMoE outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) model merging methods in terms of MTL performance, generalization, and robustness.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

SafeBench: A Safety Evaluation Framework for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are showing strong safety concerns (e.g., generating harmful outputs for users), which motivates the development of safety evaluation benchmarks. However, we observe that existing safety benchmarks for MLLMs show limitations in query quality and evaluation reliability limiting the detection of model safety implications as MLLMs continue to evolve. In this paper, we propose \toolns, a comprehensive framework designed for conducting safety evaluations of MLLMs. Our framework consists of a comprehensive harmful query dataset and an automated evaluation protocol that aims to address the above limitations, respectively. We first design an automatic safety dataset generation pipeline, where we employ a set of LLM judges to recognize and categorize the risk scenarios that are most harmful and diverse for MLLMs; based on the taxonomy, we further ask these judges to generate high-quality harmful queries accordingly resulting in 23 risk scenarios with 2,300 multi-modal harmful query pairs. During safety evaluation, we draw inspiration from the jury system in judicial proceedings and pioneer the jury deliberation evaluation protocol that adopts collaborative LLMs to evaluate whether target models exhibit specific harmful behaviors, providing a reliable and unbiased assessment of content security risks. In addition, our benchmark can also be extended to the audio modality showing high scalability and potential. Based on our framework, we conducted large-scale experiments on 15 widely-used open-source MLLMs and 6 commercial MLLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini), where we revealed widespread safety issues in existing MLLMs and instantiated several insights on MLLM safety performance such as image quality and parameter size.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Comprehensive Survey of Data Augmentation in Visual Reinforcement Learning

Visual reinforcement learning (RL), which makes decisions directly from high-dimensional visual inputs, has demonstrated significant potential in various domains. However, deploying visual RL techniques in the real world remains challenging due to their low sample efficiency and large generalization gaps. To tackle these obstacles, data augmentation (DA) has become a widely used technique in visual RL for acquiring sample-efficient and generalizable policies by diversifying the training data. This survey aims to provide a timely and essential review of DA techniques in visual RL in recognition of the thriving development in this field. In particular, we propose a unified framework for analyzing visual RL and understanding the role of DA in it. We then present a principled taxonomy of the existing augmentation techniques used in visual RL and conduct an in-depth discussion on how to better leverage augmented data in different scenarios. Moreover, we report a systematic empirical evaluation of DA-based techniques in visual RL and conclude by highlighting the directions for future research. As the first comprehensive survey of DA in visual RL, this work is expected to offer valuable guidance to this emerging field.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SLLEN: Semantic-aware Low-light Image Enhancement Network

How to effectively explore semantic feature is vital for low-light image enhancement (LLE). Existing methods usually utilize the semantic feature that is only drawn from the output produced by high-level semantic segmentation (SS) network. However, if the output is not accurately estimated, it would affect the high-level semantic feature (HSF) extraction, which accordingly interferes with LLE. To this end, we develop a simple and effective semantic-aware LLE network (SSLEN) composed of a LLE main-network (LLEmN) and a SS auxiliary-network (SSaN). In SLLEN, LLEmN integrates the random intermediate embedding feature (IEF), i.e., the information extracted from the intermediate layer of SSaN, together with the HSF into a unified framework for better LLE. SSaN is designed to act as a SS role to provide HSF and IEF. Moreover, thanks to a shared encoder between LLEmN and SSaN, we further propose an alternating training mechanism to facilitate the collaboration between them. Unlike currently available approaches, the proposed SLLEN is able to fully lever the semantic information, e.g., IEF, HSF, and SS dataset, to assist LLE, thereby leading to a more promising enhancement performance. Comparisons between the proposed SLLEN and other state-of-the-art techniques demonstrate the superiority of SLLEN with respect to LLE quality over all the comparable alternatives.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), Knowledge Distillation (KD) emerges as a pivotal methodology for transferring advanced capabilities from leading proprietary LLMs, such as GPT-4, to their open-source counterparts like LLaMA and Mistral. Additionally, as open-source LLMs flourish, KD plays a crucial role in both compressing these models, and facilitating their self-improvement by employing themselves as teachers. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of KD's role within the realm of LLM, highlighting its critical function in imparting advanced knowledge to smaller models and its utility in model compression and self-improvement. Our survey is meticulously structured around three foundational pillars: \textit{algorithm}, \textit{skill}, and \textit{verticalization} -- providing a comprehensive examination of KD mechanisms, the enhancement of specific cognitive abilities, and their practical implications across diverse fields. Crucially, the survey navigates the intricate interplay between data augmentation (DA) and KD, illustrating how DA emerges as a powerful paradigm within the KD framework to bolster LLMs' performance. By leveraging DA to generate context-rich, skill-specific training data, KD transcends traditional boundaries, enabling open-source models to approximate the contextual adeptness, ethical alignment, and deep semantic insights characteristic of their proprietary counterparts. This work aims to provide an insightful guide for researchers and practitioners, offering a detailed overview of current methodologies in KD and proposing future research directions. Importantly, we firmly advocate for compliance with the legal terms that regulate the use of LLMs, ensuring ethical and lawful application of KD of LLMs. An associated Github repository is available at https://github.com/Tebmer/Awesome-Knowledge-Distillation-of-LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Solving Continual Offline RL through Selective Weights Activation on Aligned Spaces

Continual offline reinforcement learning (CORL) has shown impressive ability in diffusion-based lifelong learning systems by modeling the joint distributions of trajectories. However, most research only focuses on limited continual task settings where the tasks have the same observation and action space, which deviates from the realistic demands of training agents in various environments. In view of this, we propose Vector-Quantized Continual Diffuser, named VQ-CD, to break the barrier of different spaces between various tasks. Specifically, our method contains two complementary sections, where the quantization spaces alignment provides a unified basis for the selective weights activation. In the quantized spaces alignment, we leverage vector quantization to align the different state and action spaces of various tasks, facilitating continual training in the same space. Then, we propose to leverage a unified diffusion model attached by the inverse dynamic model to master all tasks by selectively activating different weights according to the task-related sparse masks. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on 15 continual learning (CL) tasks, including conventional CL task settings (identical state and action spaces) and general CL task settings (various state and action spaces). Compared with 16 baselines, our method reaches the SOTA performance.

cs.LG↗