Underlying data distributions of natural language, programming code, and mathematical symbols vary vastly, presenting a complex challenge for large language models (LLMs) that strive to achieve high performance across all three domains simultaneously. Achieving a very high level of proficiency for an LLM within a specific domain often requires extensive training with relevant corpora, which is typically accompanied by a sacrifice in performance in other domains. In this paper, we propose to fuse models that are already highly-specialized directly. The proposed fusing framework, UltraFuser, consists of three distinct specialists that are already sufficiently trained on language, coding, and mathematics. A token-level gating mechanism is introduced to blend the specialists' outputs. A two-stage training strategy accompanied by balanced sampling is designed to ensure stability. To effectively train the fused model, we further construct a high-quality supervised instruction tuning dataset, UltraChat 2, which includes text, code, and mathematical content. This dataset comprises approximately 300,000 instructions and covers a wide range of topics in each domain. Experiments show that our model could simultaneously achieve mastery of the three crucial domains.
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) has gained considerable attention in recent years for its pivotal role in addressing continuously arriving classes. However, it encounters additional challenges. The scarcity of samples in new sessions intensifies overfitting, causing incompatibility between the output features of new and old classes, thereby escalating catastrophic forgetting. A prevalent strategy involves mitigating catastrophic forgetting through the Explicit Memory (EM), which comprise of class prototypes. However, current EM-based methods retrieves memory globally by performing Vector-to-Vector (V2V) interaction between features corresponding to the input and prototypes stored in EM, neglecting the geometric structure of local features. This hinders the accurate modeling of their positional relationships. To incorporate information of local geometric structure, we extend the V2V interaction to Graph-to-Graph (G2G) interaction. For enhancing local structures for better G2G alignment and the prevention of local feature collapse, we propose the Local Graph Preservation (LGP) mechanism. Additionally, to address sample scarcity in classes from new sessions, the Contrast-Augmented G2G (CAG2G) is introduced to promote the aggregation of same class features thus helps few-shot learning. Extensive comparisons on CIFAR100, CUB200, and the challenging ImageNet-R dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing methods.
With the advancement of language models (LMs), their exposure to private data is increasingly inevitable, and their deployment (especially for smaller ones) on personal devices, such as PCs and smartphones, has become a prevailing trend. In contexts laden with user information, enabling models to both safeguard user privacy and execute commands efficiently emerges as an essential research imperative. In this paper, we propose CoGenesis, a collaborative generation framework integrating large (hosted on cloud infrastructure) and small models (deployed on local devices) to address privacy concerns logically. Initially, we design a pipeline to create personalized writing instruction datasets enriched with extensive context details as the testbed of this research issue. Subsequently, we introduce two variants of CoGenesis based on sketch and logits respectively. Our experimental findings, based on our synthesized dataset and two additional open-source datasets, indicate that: 1) Large-scale models perform well when provided with user context but struggle in the absence of such context. 2) While specialized smaller models fine-tuned on the synthetic dataset show promise, they still lag behind their larger counterparts. 3) Our CoGenesis framework, utilizing mixed-scale models, showcases competitive performance, providing a feasible solution to privacy issues.
Advanced life forms, sustained by the synergistic interaction of neural cognitive mechanisms, continually acquire and transfer knowledge throughout their lifespan. In contrast, contemporary machine learning paradigms exhibit limitations in emulating the facets of continual learning (CL). Nonetheless, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) presents promising avenues for realizing CL via interactions with these models. Drawing on Complementary Learning System theory, this paper presents a novel Interactive Continual Learning (ICL) framework, enabled by collaborative interactions among models of various sizes. Specifically, we assign the ViT model as System1 and multimodal LLM as System2. To enable the memory module to deduce tasks from class information and enhance Set2Set retrieval, we propose the Class-Knowledge-Task Multi-Head Attention (CKT-MHA). Additionally, to improve memory retrieval in System1 through enhanced geometric representation, we introduce the CL-vMF mechanism, based on the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution. Meanwhile, we introduce the von Mises-Fisher Outlier Detection and Interaction (vMF-ODI) strategy to identify hard examples, thus enhancing collaboration between System1 and System2 for complex reasoning realization. Comprehensive evaluation of our proposed ICL demonstrates significant resistance to forgetting and superior performance relative to existing methods.
The rise of generative neural networks has triggered an increased demand for intellectual property (IP) protection in generated content. Deep watermarking techniques, recognized for their flexibility in IP protection, have garnered significant attention. However, the surge in adversarial transferable attacks poses unprecedented challenges to the security of deep watermarking techniques-an area currently lacking systematic investigation. This study fills this gap by introducing two effective transferable attackers to assess the vulnerability of deep watermarks against erasure and tampering risks. Specifically, we initially define the concept of local sample density, utilizing it to deduce theorems on the consistency of model outputs. Upon discovering that perturbing samples towards high sample density regions (HSDR) of the target class enhances targeted adversarial transferability, we propose the Easy Sample Selection (ESS) mechanism and the Easy Sample Matching Attack (ESMA) method. Additionally, we propose the Bottleneck Enhanced Mixup (BEM) that integrates information bottleneck theory to reduce the generator's dependence on irrelevant noise. Experiments show a significant enhancement in the success rate of targeted transfer attacks for both ESMA and BEM-ESMA methods. We further conduct a comprehensive evaluation using ESMA and BEM-ESMA as measurements, considering model architecture and watermark encoding length, and achieve some impressive findings.
We explore the critical data size in language models, a threshold that marks a fundamental shift from quick memorization to slow generalization. We formalize the phase transition under the grokking configuration into the Data Efficiency Hypothesis and identify data insufficiency, sufficiency, and surplus regimes in language models training dynamics. We develop a grokking configuration to reproduce grokking on simplistic language models stably by rescaling initialization and weight decay. We show that generalization occurs only when language models reach a critical size. We analyze grokking across sample-wise and model-wise, verifying the proposed data efficiency hypothesis. Our experiments reveal smoother phase transitions occurring at the critical dataset size for language datasets. As the model size increases, this critical point also becomes larger, indicating that larger models require more data. Our results deepen the understanding of language model training, offering a novel perspective on the role of data in the learning mechanism of language models.
Knowledge retrieval with multi-modal queries plays a crucial role in supporting knowledge-intensive multi-modal applications. However, existing methods face challenges in terms of their effectiveness and training efficiency, especially when it comes to training and integrating multiple retrievers to handle multi-modal queries. In this paper, we propose an innovative end-to-end generative framework for multi-modal knowledge retrieval. Our framework takes advantage of the fact that large language models (LLMs) can effectively serve as virtual knowledge bases, even when trained with limited data. We retrieve knowledge via a two-step process: 1) generating knowledge clues related to the queries, and 2) obtaining the relevant document by searching databases using the knowledge clue. In particular, we first introduce an object-aware prefix-tuning technique to guide multi-grained visual learning. Then, we align multi-grained visual features into the textual feature space of the LLM, employing the LLM to capture cross-modal interactions. Subsequently, we construct instruction data with a unified format for model training. Finally, we propose the knowledge-guided generation strategy to impose prior constraints in the decoding steps, thereby promoting the generation of distinctive knowledge clues. Through experiments conducted on three benchmarks, we demonstrate significant improvements ranging from 3.0% to 14.6% across all evaluation metrics when compared to strong baselines.
With the great success of text-conditioned diffusion models in creative text-to-image generation, various text-driven image editing approaches have attracted the attentions of many researchers. However, previous works mainly focus on discreteness-sensitive instructions such as adding, removing or replacing specific objects, background elements or global styles (i.e., hard editing), while generally ignoring subject-binding but semantically fine-changing continuity-sensitive instructions such as actions, poses or adjectives, and so on (i.e., soft editing), which hampers generative AI from generating user-customized visual contents. To mitigate this predicament, we propose a spatio-temporal guided adaptive editing algorithm AdapEdit, which realizes adaptive image editing by introducing a soft-attention strategy to dynamically vary the guiding degree from the editing conditions to visual pixels from both temporal and spatial perspectives. Note our approach has a significant advantage in preserving model priors and does not require model training, fine-tuning, extra data, or optimization. We present our results over a wide variety of raw images and editing instructions, demonstrating competitive performance and showing it significantly outperforms the previous approaches.