arXiv subjects

Rui Men

Publications and source records attributed to Rui Men.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of gating. In this work, we conduct comprehensive experiments to systematically investigate gating-augmented softmax attention variants. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive comparison over 30 variants of 15B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and 1.7B dense models trained on a 3.5 trillion token dataset. Our central finding is that a simple modification-applying a head-specific sigmoid gate after the Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)-consistently improves performance. This modification also enhances training stability, tolerates larger learning rates, and improves scaling properties. By comparing various gating positions and computational variants, we attribute this effectiveness to two key factors: (1) introducing non-linearity upon the low-rank mapping in the softmax attention, and (2) applying query-dependent sparse gating scores to modulate the SDPA output. Notably, we find this sparse gating mechanism mitigates 'attention sink' and enhances long-context extrapolation performance, and we also release related $\href{https://github.com/qiuzh20/gated_attention}{codes}$ and $\href{https://huggingface.co/QwQZh/gated_attention}{models}$ to facilitate future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Demons in the Detail: On Implementing Load Balancing Loss for Training Specialized Mixture-of-Expert Models

This paper revisits the implementation of $\textbf{L}$oad-$\textbf{b}$alancing $\textbf{L}$oss (LBL) when training Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models. Specifically, LBL for MoEs is defined as $N_E \sum_{i=1}^{N_E} f_i p_i$, where $N_E$ is the total number of experts, $f_i$ represents the frequency of expert $i$ being selected, and $p_i$ denotes the average gating score of the expert $i$. Existing MoE training frameworks usually employ the parallel training strategy so that $f_i$ and the LBL are calculated within a $\textbf{micro-batch}$ and then averaged across parallel groups. In essence, a micro-batch for training billion-scale LLMs normally contains very few sequences. So, the micro-batch LBL is almost at the sequence level, and the router is pushed to distribute the token evenly within each sequence. Under this strict constraint, even tokens from a domain-specific sequence ($\textit{e.g.}$, code) are uniformly routed to all experts, thereby inhibiting expert specialization. In this work, we propose calculating LBL using a $\textbf{global-batch}$ to loose this constraint. Because a global-batch contains much more diverse sequences than a micro-batch, which will encourage load balance at the corpus level. Specifically, we introduce an extra communication step to synchronize $f_i$ across micro-batches and then use it to calculate the LBL. Through experiments on training MoEs-based LLMs (up to $\textbf{42.8B}$ total parameters and $\textbf{400B}$ tokens), we surprisingly find that the global-batch LBL strategy yields excellent performance gains in both pre-training perplexity and downstream tasks. Our analysis reveals that the global-batch LBL also greatly improves the domain specialization of MoE experts.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report

We introduce Qwen2.5-1M, a series of models that extend the context length to 1 million tokens. Compared to the previous 128K version, the Qwen2.5-1M series have significantly enhanced long-context capabilities through long-context pre-training and post-training. Key techniques such as long data synthesis, progressive pre-training, and multi-stage supervised fine-tuning are employed to effectively enhance long-context performance while reducing training costs. To promote the use of long-context models among a broader user base, we present and open-source our inference framework. This framework includes a length extrapolation method that can expand the model context lengths by at least four times, or even more, without additional training. To reduce inference costs, we implement a sparse attention method along with chunked prefill optimization for deployment scenarios and a sparsity refinement method to improve precision. Additionally, we detail our optimizations in the inference engine, including kernel optimization, pipeline parallelism, and scheduling optimization, which significantly enhance overall inference performance. By leveraging our inference framework, the Qwen2.5-1M models achieve a remarkable 3x to 7x prefill speedup in scenarios with 1 million tokens of context. This framework provides an efficient and powerful solution for developing applications that require long-context processing using open-source models. The Qwen2.5-1M series currently includes the open-source models Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M, as well as the API-accessed model Qwen2.5-Turbo. Evaluations show that Qwen2.5-1M models have been greatly improved in long-context tasks without compromising performance in short-context scenarios. Specifically, the Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M model significantly outperforms GPT-4o-mini in long-context tasks and supports contexts eight times longer.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Qwen2.5 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce Qwen2.5, a comprehensive series of large language models (LLMs) designed to meet diverse needs. Compared to previous iterations, Qwen 2.5 has been significantly improved during both the pre-training and post-training stages. In terms of pre-training, we have scaled the high-quality pre-training datasets from the previous 7 trillion tokens to 18 trillion tokens. This provides a strong foundation for common sense, expert knowledge, and reasoning capabilities. In terms of post-training, we implement intricate supervised finetuning with over 1 million samples, as well as multistage reinforcement learning. Post-training techniques enhance human preference, and notably improve long text generation, structural data analysis, and instruction following. To handle diverse and varied use cases effectively, we present Qwen2.5 LLM series in rich sizes. Open-weight offerings include base and instruction-tuned models, with quantized versions available. In addition, for hosted solutions, the proprietary models currently include two mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants: Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus, both available from Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. Qwen2.5 has demonstrated top-tier performance on a wide range of benchmarks evaluating language understanding, reasoning, mathematics, coding, human preference alignment, etc. Specifically, the open-weight flagship Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct outperforms a number of open and proprietary models and demonstrates competitive performance to the state-of-the-art open-weight model, Llama-3-405B-Instruct, which is around 5 times larger. Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus offer superior cost-effectiveness while performing competitively against GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o respectively. Additionally, as the foundation, Qwen2.5 models have been instrumental in training specialized models such as Qwen2.5-Math, Qwen2.5-Coder, QwQ, and multimodal models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report

In this report, we introduce the Qwen2.5-Coder series, a significant upgrade from its predecessor, CodeQwen1.5. This series includes six models: Qwen2.5-Coder-(0.5B/1.5B/3B/7B/14B/32B). As a code-specific model, Qwen2.5-Coder is built upon the Qwen2.5 architecture and continues pretrained on a vast corpus of over 5.5 trillion tokens. Through meticulous data cleaning, scalable synthetic data generation, and balanced data mixing, Qwen2.5-Coder demonstrates impressive code generation capabilities while retaining general and math skills. These models have been evaluated on a wide range of code-related tasks, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across more than 10 benchmarks, including code generation, completion, reasoning, and repair, consistently outperforming larger models of the same model size. We believe that the release of the Qwen2.5-Coder series will advance research in code intelligence and, with its permissive licensing, support wider adoption by developers in real-world applications.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution

We present the Qwen2-VL Series, an advanced upgrade of the previous Qwen-VL models that redefines the conventional predetermined-resolution approach in visual processing. Qwen2-VL introduces the Naive Dynamic Resolution mechanism, which enables the model to dynamically process images of varying resolutions into different numbers of visual tokens. This approach allows the model to generate more efficient and accurate visual representations, closely aligning with human perceptual processes. The model also integrates Multimodal Rotary Position Embedding (M-RoPE), facilitating the effective fusion of positional information across text, images, and videos. We employ a unified paradigm for processing both images and videos, enhancing the model's visual perception capabilities. To explore the potential of large multimodal models, Qwen2-VL investigates the scaling laws for large vision-language models (LVLMs). By scaling both the model size-with versions at 2B, 8B, and 72B parameters-and the amount of training data, the Qwen2-VL Series achieves highly competitive performance. Notably, the Qwen2-VL-72B model achieves results comparable to leading models such as GPT-4o and Claude3.5-Sonnet across various multimodal benchmarks, outperforming other generalist models. Code is available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen2-VL .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Qwen2 Technical Report

This report introduces the Qwen2 series, the latest addition to our large language models and large multimodal models. We release a comprehensive suite of foundational and instruction-tuned language models, encompassing a parameter range from 0.5 to 72 billion, featuring dense models and a Mixture-of-Experts model. Qwen2 surpasses most prior open-weight models, including its predecessor Qwen1.5, and exhibits competitive performance relative to proprietary models across diverse benchmarks on language understanding, generation, multilingual proficiency, coding, mathematics, and reasoning. The flagship model, Qwen2-72B, showcases remarkable performance: 84.2 on MMLU, 37.9 on GPQA, 64.6 on HumanEval, 89.5 on GSM8K, and 82.4 on BBH as a base language model. The instruction-tuned variant, Qwen2-72B-Instruct, attains 9.1 on MT-Bench, 48.1 on Arena-Hard, and 35.7 on LiveCodeBench. Moreover, Qwen2 demonstrates robust multilingual capabilities, proficient in approximately 30 languages, spanning English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and more, underscoring its versatility and global reach. To foster community innovation and accessibility, we have made the Qwen2 model weights openly available on Hugging Face and ModelScope, and the supplementary materials including example code on GitHub. These platforms also include resources for quantization, fine-tuning, and deployment, facilitating a wide range of applications and research endeavors.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Qwen Technical Report

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, enabling natural language processing tasks that were previously thought to be exclusive to humans. In this work, we introduce Qwen, the first installment of our large language model series. Qwen is a comprehensive language model series that encompasses distinct models with varying parameter counts. It includes Qwen, the base pretrained language models, and Qwen-Chat, the chat models finetuned with human alignment techniques. The base language models consistently demonstrate superior performance across a multitude of downstream tasks, and the chat models, particularly those trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are highly competitive. The chat models possess advanced tool-use and planning capabilities for creating agent applications, showcasing impressive performance even when compared to bigger models on complex tasks like utilizing a code interpreter. Furthermore, we have developed coding-specialized models, Code-Qwen and Code-Qwen-Chat, as well as mathematics-focused models, Math-Qwen-Chat, which are built upon base language models. These models demonstrate significantly improved performance in comparison with open-source models, and slightly fall behind the proprietary models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Chinese CLIP: Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining in Chinese

The tremendous success of CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) has promoted the research and application of contrastive learning for vision-language pretraining. In this work, we construct a large-scale dataset of image-text pairs in Chinese, where most data are retrieved from publicly available datasets, and we pretrain Chinese CLIP models on the new dataset. We develop 5 Chinese CLIP models of multiple sizes, spanning from 77 to 958 million parameters. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage pretraining method, where the model is first trained with the image encoder frozen and then trained with all parameters being optimized, to achieve enhanced model performance. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Chinese CLIP can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on MUGE, Flickr30K-CN, and COCO-CN in the setups of zero-shot learning and finetuning, and it is able to achieve competitive performance in zero-shot image classification based on the evaluation on the ELEVATER benchmark (Li et al., 2022). We have released our codes, models, and demos in https://github.com/OFA-Sys/Chinese-CLIP

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

OFASys: A Multi-Modal Multi-Task Learning System for Building Generalist Models

Generalist models, which are capable of performing diverse multi-modal tasks in a task-agnostic way within a single model, have been explored recently. Being, hopefully, an alternative to approaching general-purpose AI, existing generalist models are still at an early stage, where modality and task coverage is limited. To empower multi-modal task-scaling and speed up this line of research, we release a generalist model learning system, OFASys, built on top of a declarative task interface named multi-modal instruction. At the core of OFASys is the idea of decoupling multi-modal task representations from the underlying model implementations. In OFASys, a task involving multiple modalities can be defined declaratively even with just a single line of code. The system automatically generates task plans from such instructions for training and inference. It also facilitates multi-task training for diverse multi-modal workloads. As a starting point, we provide presets of 7 different modalities and 23 highly-diverse example tasks in OFASys, with which we also develop a first-in-kind, single model, OFA+, that can handle text, image, speech, video, and motion data. The single OFA+ model achieves 95% performance in average with only 16% parameters of 15 task-finetuned models, showcasing the performance reliability of multi-modal task-scaling provided by OFASys. Available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/OFASys

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework

In this work, we pursue a unified paradigm for multimodal pretraining to break the scaffolds of complex task/modality-specific customization. We propose OFA, a Task-Agnostic and Modality-Agnostic framework that supports Task Comprehensiveness. OFA unifies a diverse set of cross-modal and unimodal tasks, including image generation, visual grounding, image captioning, image classification, language modeling, etc., in a simple sequence-to-sequence learning framework. OFA follows the instruction-based learning in both pretraining and finetuning stages, requiring no extra task-specific layers for downstream tasks. In comparison with the recent state-of-the-art vision & language models that rely on extremely large cross-modal datasets, OFA is pretrained on only 20M publicly available image-text pairs. Despite its simplicity and relatively small-scale training data, OFA achieves new SOTAs in a series of cross-modal tasks while attaining highly competitive performances on uni-modal tasks. Our further analysis indicates that OFA can also effectively transfer to unseen tasks and unseen domains. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/OFA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

M6-UFC: Unifying Multi-Modal Controls for Conditional Image Synthesis via Non-Autoregressive Generative Transformers

Conditional image synthesis aims to create an image according to some multi-modal guidance in the forms of textual descriptions, reference images, and image blocks to preserve, as well as their combinations. In this paper, instead of investigating these control signals separately, we propose a new two-stage architecture, M6-UFC, to unify any number of multi-modal controls. In M6-UFC, both the diverse control signals and the synthesized image are uniformly represented as a sequence of discrete tokens to be processed by Transformer. Different from existing two-stage autoregressive approaches such as DALL-E and VQGAN, M6-UFC adopts non-autoregressive generation (NAR) at the second stage to enhance the holistic consistency of the synthesized image, to support preserving specified image blocks, and to improve the synthesis speed. Further, we design a progressive algorithm that iteratively improves the non-autoregressively generated image, with the help of two estimators developed for evaluating the compliance with the controls and evaluating the fidelity of the synthesized image, respectively. Extensive experiments on a newly collected large-scale clothing dataset M2C-Fashion and a facial dataset Multi-Modal CelebA-HQ verify that M6-UFC can synthesize high-fidelity images that comply with flexible multi-modal controls.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

M6-T: Exploring Sparse Expert Models and Beyond

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models can achieve promising results with outrageous large amount of parameters but constant computation cost, and thus it has become a trend in model scaling. Still it is a mystery how MoE layers bring quality gains by leveraging the parameters with sparse activation. In this work, we investigate several key factors in sparse expert models. We observe that load imbalance may not be a significant problem affecting model quality, contrary to the perspectives of recent studies, while the number of sparsely activated experts $k$ and expert capacity $C$ in top-$k$ routing can significantly make a difference in this context. Furthermore, we take a step forward to propose a simple method called expert prototyping that splits experts into different prototypes and applies $k$ top-$1$ routing. This strategy improves the model quality but maintains constant computational costs, and our further exploration on extremely large-scale models reflects that it is more effective in training larger models. We push the model scale to over $1$ trillion parameters and implement it on solely $480$ NVIDIA V100-32GB GPUs, in comparison with the recent SOTAs on $2048$ TPU cores. The proposed giant model achieves substantial speedup in convergence over the same-size baseline.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval

Despite the achievements of large-scale multimodal pre-training approaches, cross-modal retrieval, e.g., image-text retrieval, remains a challenging task. To bridge the semantic gap between the two modalities, previous studies mainly focus on word-region alignment at the object level, lacking the matching between the linguistic relation among the words and the visual relation among the regions. The neglect of such relation consistency impairs the contextualized representation of image-text pairs and hinders the model performance and the interpretability. In this paper, we first propose a novel metric, Intra-modal Self-attention Distance (ISD), to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. In response, we present Inter-modal Alignment on Intra-modal Self-attentions (IAIS), a regularized training method to optimize the ISD and calibrate intra-modal self-attentions from the two modalities mutually via inter-modal alignment. The IAIS regularizer boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin, which demonstrates the superiority of our approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

M6: A Chinese Multimodal Pretrainer

In this work, we construct the largest dataset for multimodal pretraining in Chinese, which consists of over 1.9TB images and 292GB texts that cover a wide range of domains. We propose a cross-modal pretraining method called M6, referring to Multi-Modality to Multi-Modality Multitask Mega-transformer, for unified pretraining on the data of single modality and multiple modalities. We scale the model size up to 10 billion and 100 billion parameters, and build the largest pretrained model in Chinese. We apply the model to a series of downstream applications, and demonstrate its outstanding performance in comparison with strong baselines. Furthermore, we specifically design a downstream task of text-guided image generation, and show that the finetuned M6 can create high-quality images with high resolution and abundant details.

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arXiv2016

Natural Language Inference by Tree-Based Convolution and Heuristic Matching

In this paper, we propose the TBCNN-pair model to recognize entailment and contradiction between two sentences. In our model, a tree-based convolutional neural network (TBCNN) captures sentence-level semantics; then heuristic matching layers like concatenation, element-wise product/difference combine the information in individual sentences. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing sentence encoding-based approaches by a large margin.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2015

On End-to-End Program Generation from User Intention by Deep Neural Networks

This paper envisions an end-to-end program generation scenario using recurrent neural networks (RNNs): Users can express their intention in natural language; an RNN then automatically generates corresponding code in a characterby-by-character fashion. We demonstrate its feasibility through a case study and empirical analysis. To fully make such technique useful in practice, we also point out several cross-disciplinary challenges, including modeling user intention, providing datasets, improving model architectures, etc. Although much long-term research shall be addressed in this new field, we believe end-to-end program generation would become a reality in future decades, and we are looking forward to its practice.

cs.SE↗