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Xiaodong Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaodong Liu.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

StreamAdapter: Efficient Test Time Adaptation from Contextual Streams

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks directly from the given demonstrations without requiring gradient updates. While recent advances have expanded context windows to accommodate more demonstrations, this approach increases inference costs without necessarily improving performance. To mitigate these issues, We propose StreamAdapter, a novel approach that directly updates model parameters from context at test time, eliminating the need for explicit in-context demonstrations. StreamAdapter employs context mapping and weight absorption mechanisms to dynamically transform ICL demonstrations into parameter updates with minimal additional parameters. By reducing reliance on numerous in-context examples, StreamAdapter significantly reduce inference costs and allows for efficient inference with constant time complexity, regardless of demonstration count. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and model architectures demonstrate that StreamAdapter achieves comparable or superior adaptation capability to ICL while requiring significantly fewer demonstrations. The superior task adaptation and context encoding capabilities of StreamAdapter on both language understanding and generation tasks provides a new perspective for adapting LLMs at test time using context, allowing for more efficient adaptation across scenarios and more cost-effective inference

cs.CL↗

Generative Adapter: Contextualizing Language Models in Parameters with A Single Forward Pass

Large language models (LMs) are typically adapted to improve performance on new contexts (\eg text prompts that define new tasks or domains) through fine-tuning or prompting. However, there is an accuracy compute tradeoff -- fine-tuning incurs significant training cost and prompting increases inference overhead. We introduce $GenerativeAdapter$, an effective and efficient adaptation method that directly maps new contexts to low-rank LM adapters, thereby significantly reducing inference overhead with no need for finetuning. The adapter generator is trained via self-supervised learning, and can be used to adapt a single frozen LM for any new task simply by mapping the associated task or domain context to a new adapter. We apply $GenerativeAdapter$ to two pretrained LMs (Mistral-7B-Instruct and Llama2-7B-Chat) and evaluate the adapted models in three adaption scenarios: knowledge acquisition from documents, learning from demonstrations, and personalization for users. In StreamingQA, our approach is effective in injecting knowledge into the LM's parameters, achieving a 63.5% improvement in F1 score over the model with supervised fine-tuning (from $19.5$ to $31.5$) for contexts as long as 32K tokens. In the MetaICL in-context learning evaluation, our method achieves an average accuracy of $44.9$ across 26 tasks, outperforming the base model. On MSC, our method proves to be highly competitive in memorizing user information from conversations with a 4x reduction in computation and memory costs compared to prompting with full conversation history. Together, these results suggest that $GenerativeAdapter$ should allow for general adaption to a wide range of different contexts.

cs.LG↗

Tell Your Model Where to Attend: Post-hoc Attention Steering for LLMs

In human-written articles, we often leverage the subtleties of text style, such as bold and italics, to guide the attention of readers. These textual emphases are vital for the readers to grasp the conveyed information. When interacting with large language models (LLMs), we have a similar need -- steering the model to pay closer attention to user-specified information, e.g., an instruction. Existing methods, however, are constrained to process plain text and do not support such a mechanism. This motivates us to introduce PASTA -- Post-hoc Attention STeering Approach, a method that allows LLMs to read text with user-specified emphasis marks. To this end, PASTA identifies a small subset of attention heads and applies precise attention reweighting on them, directing the model attention to user-specified parts. Like prompting, PASTA is applied at inference time and does not require changing any model parameters. Experiments demonstrate that PASTA can substantially enhance an LLM's ability to follow user instructions or integrate new knowledge from user inputs, leading to a significant performance improvement on a variety of tasks, e.g., an average accuracy improvement of 22% for LLAMA-7B. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QingruZhang/PASTA .

cs.CL↗

DefSent+: Improving sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries

This paper presents a significant improvement on the previous conference paper known as DefSent. The prior study seeks to improve sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into the vector space of dictionary entries. We discover that this approach is not fully explored due to the methodological limitation of using word embeddings of language models to represent dictionary entries. This leads to two hindrances. First, dictionary entries are constrained by the single-word vocabulary, and thus cannot be fully exploited. Second, semantic representations of language models are known to be anisotropic, but pre-processing word embeddings for DefSent is not allowed because its weight is frozen during training and tied to the prediction layer. In this paper, we propose a novel method to progressively build entry embeddings not subject to the limitations. As a result, definition sentences can be projected into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries, so that sentence embeddings of noticeably better quality are attainable. We abbreviate our approach as DefSent+ (a plus version of DefSent), involving the following strengths: 1) the task performance on measuring sentence similarities is significantly improved compared to DefSent; 2) when DefSent+ is used to further train data-augmented models like SIMCSE, SNCSE, and SynCSE, state-of-the-art performance on measuring sentence similarities can be achieved among the approaches without using manually labeled datasets; 3) DefSent+ is also competitive in feature-based transfer for NLP downstream tasks.

cs.CL↗

GRIN: GRadient-INformed MoE

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale more effectively than dense models due to sparse computation through expert routing, selectively activating only a small subset of expert modules. However, sparse computation challenges traditional training practices, as discrete expert routing hinders standard backpropagation and thus gradient-based optimization, which are the cornerstone of deep learning. To better pursue the scaling power of MoE, we introduce GRIN (GRadient-INformed MoE training), which incorporates sparse gradient estimation for expert routing and configures model parallelism to avoid token dropping. Applying GRIN to autoregressive language modeling, we develop a top-2 16$\times$3.8B MoE model. Our model, with only 6.6B activated parameters, outperforms a 7B dense model and matches the performance of a 14B dense model trained on the same data. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate the potential of GRIN to significantly enhance MoE efficacy, achieving 79.4 on MMLU, 83.7 on HellaSwag, 74.4 on HumanEval, and 58.9 on MATH.

cs.CL↗

Model Tells Itself Where to Attend: Faithfulness Meets Automatic Attention Steering

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various real-world tasks. However, they often struggle to fully comprehend and effectively utilize their input contexts, resulting in responses that are unfaithful or hallucinated. This difficulty increases for contexts that are long or contain distracting information, which can divert LLMs from fully capturing essential evidence. To address this issue, many works use prompting to help LLMs utilize contextual information more faithfully. For instance, iterative prompting highlights key information in two steps that first ask the LLM to identify important pieces of context and then derive answers accordingly. However, prompting methods are constrained to highlighting key information implicitly in token space, which is often insufficient to fully steer the model's attention. To improve model faithfulness more reliably, we propose AutoPASTA, a method that automatically identifies key contextual information and explicitly highlights it by steering an LLM's attention scores. Like prompting, AutoPASTA is applied at inference time and does not require changing any model parameters. Our experiments on open-book QA demonstrate that AutoPASTA effectively enables models to grasp essential contextual information, leading to substantially improved model faithfulness and performance, e.g., an average improvement of 7.95% for LLAMA3-70B-Instruct. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/QingruZhang/AutoPASTA .

cs.CL↗

Fire-Flyer AI-HPC: A Cost-Effective Software-Hardware Co-Design for Deep Learning

The rapid progress in Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has exponentially increased demands of computational power and bandwidth. This, combined with the high costs of faster computing chips and interconnects, has significantly inflated High Performance Computing (HPC) construction costs. To address these challenges, we introduce the Fire-Flyer AI-HPC architecture, a synergistic hardware-software co-design framework and its best practices. For DL training, we deployed the Fire-Flyer 2 with 10,000 PCIe A100 GPUs, achieved performance approximating the DGX-A100 while reducing costs by half and energy consumption by 40%. We specifically engineered HFReduce to accelerate allreduce communication and implemented numerous measures to keep our Computation-Storage Integrated Network congestion-free. Through our software stack, including HaiScale, 3FS, and HAI-Platform, we achieved substantial scalability by overlapping computation and communication. Our system-oriented experience from DL training provides valuable insights to drive future advancements in AI-HPC.

cs.DC↗

Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone

We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. Our training dataset is a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered publicly available web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide parameter-scaling results with a 7B, 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small, phi-3-medium, both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75%, 78% on MMLU, and 8.7, 8.9 on MT-bench). To enhance multilingual, multimodal, and long-context capabilities, we introduce three models in the phi-3.5 series: phi-3.5-mini, phi-3.5-MoE, and phi-3.5-Vision. The phi-3.5-MoE, a 16 x 3.8B MoE model with 6.6 billion active parameters, achieves superior performance in language reasoning, math, and code tasks compared to other open-source models of similar scale, such as Llama 3.1 and the Mixtral series, and on par with Gemini-1.5-Flash and GPT-4o-mini. Meanwhile, phi-3.5-Vision, a 4.2 billion parameter model derived from phi-3.5-mini, excels in reasoning tasks and is adept at handling both single-image and text prompts, as well as multi-image and text prompts.

cs.CL↗

DIM: Dynamic Integration of Multimodal Entity Linking with Large Language Model

Our study delves into Multimodal Entity Linking, aligning the mention in multimodal information with entities in knowledge base. Existing methods are still facing challenges like ambiguous entity representations and limited image information utilization. Thus, we propose dynamic entity extraction using ChatGPT, which dynamically extracts entities and enhances datasets. We also propose a method: Dynamically Integrate Multimodal information with knowledge base (DIM), employing the capability of the Large Language Model (LLM) for visual understanding. The LLM, such as BLIP-2, extracts information relevant to entities in the image, which can facilitate improved extraction of entity features and linking them with the dynamic entity representations provided by ChatGPT. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed DIM method outperforms the majority of existing methods on the three original datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the dynamically enhanced datasets (Wiki+, Rich+, Diverse+). For reproducibility, our code and collected datasets are released on \url{https://github.com/season1blue/DIM}.

cs.CL↗

Uniqueness and modified Newton method for cracks from the far field patterns with a fixed incident direction

We consider the inverse cracks scattering problems from the far field patterns with a fixed incident direction. We firstly show that the sound-soft cracks can be uniquely determined by the multi-frequency far field patterns with a fixed incident direction. The proof is based on a low frequency asymptotic analysis of the scattered field. One important feature of the uniqueness result is that the background can even be an unknown inhomogeneous medium. A modified Newton method is then proposed for the numerical reconstruction of the shapes and locations of the cracks. Compared to the classical Newton method, the modified Newton method relaxes the dependence of a good initial guess and can be applied for multiple cracks. Numerical examples in two dimensions are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the modified Newton method. In particular, the quality of the reconstructions can be greatly improved if we use the measurements properly with two frequencies or two incident directions.

math.AP↗

DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model

We present DeepSeek-V2, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model characterized by economical training and efficient inference. It comprises 236B total parameters, of which 21B are activated for each token, and supports a context length of 128K tokens. DeepSeek-V2 adopts innovative architectures including Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE. MLA guarantees efficient inference through significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector, while DeepSeekMoE enables training strong models at an economical cost through sparse computation. Compared with DeepSeek 67B, DeepSeek-V2 achieves significantly stronger performance, and meanwhile saves 42.5% of training costs, reduces the KV cache by 93.3%, and boosts the maximum generation throughput to 5.76 times. We pretrain DeepSeek-V2 on a high-quality and multi-source corpus consisting of 8.1T tokens, and further perform Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to fully unlock its potential. Evaluation results show that, even with only 21B activated parameters, DeepSeek-V2 and its chat versions still achieve top-tier performance among open-source models.

cs.CL↗

ReEval: Automatic Hallucination Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Transferable Adversarial Attacks

Despite remarkable advancements in mitigating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) by retrieval augmentation, it remains challenging to measure the reliability of LLMs using static question-answering (QA) data. Specifically, given the potential of data contamination (e.g., leading to memorization), good static benchmark performance does not ensure that model can reliably use the provided evidence for responding, which is essential to avoid hallucination when the required knowledge is new or private. Inspired by adversarial machine learning, we investigate the feasibility of automatically perturbing existing static one for dynamic evaluation. Specifically, this paper presents ReEval, an LLM-based framework using prompt chaining to perturb the original evidence for generating new test cases for evaluating the LLMs' reliability in using new evidence for answering. We implement ReEval using ChatGPT and evaluate the resulting variants of two popular open-domain QA datasets on a collection of LLMs under various prompting settings. Our generated data is human-readable and useful to trigger hallucination in LLM. Accurate models on static data are observed to produce unsupported answers from the perturbed evidence, with pronounced accuracy drops across LLMs including GPT-4. We find that our adversarial examples are transferable across all considered LLMs. The examples generated by a small model can be used to evaluate a much larger model, making our approach cost-effective.

cs.CL↗

Unraveling the dust activity of naked-eye comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

A morphological and photometric analysis of the naked-eye long-period comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) before perihelion is presented in this study. The observation images taken by the Zwicky Transient Facility survey telescope from July 2022 to October 2022 show a gradually brightening dust coma and a tail with a clear structure. The morphology of the dust coma reveals nonsteady-state emission with an ejection velocity lower than 14 m s$^{-1}$ for particles larger than 100 um. According to the syndyne-synchrone analysis, dust particles larger than about 10 um contribute significantly to the observed tail. The model simulations of the 10 October 2022 image suggest that the radii of large particles lingering near the nucleus range from 0.1 mm to 1 mm. Assuming that the nucleus of comet E3 is a homogeneous sphere with an albedo of 0.1, the photometry analysis sets the lower and upper limits of the nucleus radius to be $0.81\pm0.07$ km and $2.79\pm0.01$ km, respectively. The dust production rates increased continuously from $241\pm3$ kg s$^{-1}$ in July to $476\pm9$ kg s$^{-1}$ in October. The dependence of the ejection velocity $v_{\perp}$ perpendicular to the orbital plane of comet E3 on the particle size $a$ can be simplified as $v_{\perp}\propto a^{-1/2}$, which indicates that the dust emission is likely driven by gas. The water-production rate is inferred as $\sim 368\pm72$ kg s$^{-1}$ in October 2022, which is sustained by an equilibrium-sublimating area of $8.2\times10^6$ m$^2$ at least. The comparative analysis of the characteristics of comet E3 with those of comets belonging to different types shows that the activity profile of long-period comet E3 surprisingly aligns more closely with those of short-period comets within a heliocentric distance range of about [1.7, 3.4] AU, where the images of comet E3 that we used in this study were taken.

astro-ph.EP↗

Energy Efficiency Optimization Method of WDM Visible Light Communication System for Indoor Broadcasting Networks

This paper introduces a novel approach to optimize energy efficiency in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) Visible Light Communication (VLC) systems designed for indoor broadcasting networks. A physics-based LED model is integrated into system energy efficiency optimization, enabling quantitative analysis of the critical issue of VLC energy efficiency: the nonlinear interplay between illumination and communication performance. The optimization jointly incorporates constraints on communication quality of each channel, and illumination performance, standardized by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE). The formulated nonlinear optimization problem is solved by the Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) algorithm in an experiment-based simulation. An integrated Red-Green-Blue-Yellow Light Emitting Diode (RGBY-LED) is measured for model calibration and three different scenarios are simulated to evaluate the generality of the proposed method. Results demonstrate a double enhancement in performance and a high versatility in accommodating various scenarios. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of balancing communication and illumination imperatives in VLC systems, challenging conventional perceptions focused solely on minimizing power consumption.

eess.SY↗

"Life" of dust originating from the irregular satellites of Jupiter

The irregular satellites of Jupiter produce dust particles through the impact of interplanetary micrometeoroids. In this paper, the dynamics of these particles is studied by both high-accuracy numerical simulation and analytical theory, in order to learn their transport, final fate, and spatial distribution. The perturbation forces that are considered in our dynamical model include the solar radiation pressure, solar gravity, Poynting-Robertson drag, Jovian oblateness, and the Galilean satellites' gravity. The trajectories of different size particles are simulated until they hit Jupiter, the Galilean satellites, or escape from the Jovian system. The average dynamical lifetimes of dust with different grain sizes are calculated, and the final fate of dust particles is reported and analysed. The steady-state spatial number density of particles is estimated by integrating the trajectories of dust particles over their initial size distribution, and compared to the previous work. The impact sites of dust on Callisto's surface are recorded and provide an important clue for the study of the hemisphere asymmetry of Callisto. Besides, the mass accretion rate, cross-sectional area influx, and mass influx density of dust on Callisto are calculated. A ring outside the orbit of Callisto dominated by dust between 2 and 25 $μ$m from Jupiter's irregular satellites is suggested, with the average normal geometric optical depth of the order of $10^{-8}$ and the configuration of the ring ansae similar to Jupiter's gossamer rings.

astro-ph.EP↗

Language Models as Inductive Reasoners

Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. In the past research of inductive reasoning within computer science, formal language is used as representations of knowledge (facts and rules, more specifically). However, formal language can cause systematic problems for inductive reasoning such as disability of handling raw input such as natural language, sensitiveness to mislabeled data, and incapacity to handle ambiguous input. To this end, we propose a new paradigm (task) for inductive reasoning, which is to induce natural language rules from natural language facts, and create a dataset termed DEER containing 1.2k rule-fact pairs for the task, where rules and facts are written in natural language. New automatic metrics are also proposed and analysed for the evaluation of this task. With DEER, we investigate a modern approach for inductive reasoning where we use natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language and use pretrained language models as ''reasoners''. Moreover, we provide the first and comprehensive analysis of how well pretrained language models can induce natural language rules from natural language facts. We also propose a new framework drawing insights from philosophy literature for this task, which we show in the experiment section that surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. We discuss about our future perspectives for inductive reasoning in Section 7. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ZonglinY/Inductive_Reasoning.

cs.CL↗

Towards Consistent Natural-Language Explanations via Explanation-Consistency Finetuning

Large language models (LLMs) often generate convincing, fluent explanations. However, different from humans, they often generate inconsistent explanations on different inputs. For example, an LLM may generate the explanation "all birds can fly" when answering the question "Can sparrows fly?" but meanwhile answer "no" to the related question "Can penguins fly?". Explanations should be consistent across related examples so that they allow a human to simulate the LLM's decision process on multiple examples. We propose explanation-consistency finetuning (EC-finetuning), a method that adapts LLMs to generate more consistent natural-language explanations on related examples. EC-finetuning involves finetuning LLMs on synthetic data that is carefully constructed to contain consistent explanations. Across a variety of question-answering datasets in various domains, EC-finetuning yields a 10.0% relative explanation consistency improvement on four finetuning datasets, and generalizes to seven out-of-distribution datasets not seen during finetuning (+4.5% relative). Code is available at https://github.com/yandachen/explanation-consistency-finetuning .

cs.CL↗

DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism

The rapid development of open-source large language models (LLMs) has been truly remarkable. However, the scaling law described in previous literature presents varying conclusions, which casts a dark cloud over scaling LLMs. We delve into the study of scaling laws and present our distinctive findings that facilitate scaling of large scale models in two commonly used open-source configurations, 7B and 67B. Guided by the scaling laws, we introduce DeepSeek LLM, a project dedicated to advancing open-source language models with a long-term perspective. To support the pre-training phase, we have developed a dataset that currently consists of 2 trillion tokens and is continuously expanding. We further conduct supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on DeepSeek LLM Base models, resulting in the creation of DeepSeek Chat models. Our evaluation results demonstrate that DeepSeek LLM 67B surpasses LLaMA-2 70B on various benchmarks, particularly in the domains of code, mathematics, and reasoning. Furthermore, open-ended evaluations reveal that DeepSeek LLM 67B Chat exhibits superior performance compared to GPT-3.5.

cs.CL↗