Pangu Ultra MoE: How to Train Your Big MoE on Ascend NPUs

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.

Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs

We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.

See Further When Clear: Curriculum Consistency Model

Significant advances have been made in the sampling efficiency of diffusion models and flow matching models, driven by Consistency Distillation (CD), which trains a student model to mimic the output of a teacher model at a later timestep. However, we found that the learning complexity of the student model varies significantly across different timesteps, leading to suboptimal performance in CD.To address this issue, we propose the Curriculum Consistency Model (CCM), which stabilizes and balances the learning complexity across timesteps. Specifically, we regard the distillation process at each timestep as a curriculum and introduce a metric based on Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) to quantify the learning complexity of this curriculum, then ensure that the curriculum maintains consistent learning complexity across different timesteps by having the teacher model iterate more steps when the noise intensity is low. Our method achieves competitive single-step sampling Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) scores of 1.64 on CIFAR-10 and 2.18 on ImageNet 64x64.Moreover, we have extended our method to large-scale text-to-image models and confirmed that it generalizes well to both diffusion models (Stable Diffusion XL) and flow matching models (Stable Diffusion 3). The generated samples demonstrate improved image-text alignment and semantic structure, since CCM enlarges the distillation step at large timesteps and reduces the accumulated error.

MM-Instruct: Generated Visual Instructions for Large Multimodal Model Alignment

This paper introduces MM-Instruct, a large-scale dataset of diverse and high-quality visual instruction data designed to enhance the instruction-following capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). While existing visual instruction datasets often focus on question-answering, they struggle to generalize to broader application scenarios such as creative writing, summarization, or image analysis. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach to constructing MM-Instruct that leverages the strong instruction-following capabilities of existing LLMs to generate novel visual instruction data from large-scale but conventional image captioning datasets. MM-Instruct first leverages ChatGPT to automatically generate diverse instructions from a small set of seed instructions through augmenting and summarization. It then matches these instructions with images and uses an open-sourced large language model (LLM) to generate coherent answers to the instruction-image pairs. The LLM is grounded by the detailed text descriptions of images in the whole answer generation process to guarantee the alignment of the instruction data. Moreover, we introduce a benchmark based on the generated instruction data to evaluate the instruction-following capabilities of existing LMMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-Instruct by training a LLaVA-1.5 model on the generated data, denoted as LLaVA-Instruct, which exhibits significant improvements in instruction-following capabilities compared to LLaVA-1.5 models. The MM-Instruct dataset, benchmark, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jihaonew/MM-Instruct.

Enhancing Vision-Language Model with Unmasked Token Alignment

Contrastive pre-training on image-text pairs, exemplified by CLIP, becomes a standard technique for learning multi-modal visual-language representations. Although CLIP has demonstrated remarkable performance, training it from scratch on noisy web-scale datasets is computationally demanding. On the other hand, mask-then-predict pre-training approaches, like Masked Image Modeling (MIM), offer efficient self-supervised learning for single-modal representations. This paper introduces Unmasked Token Alignment (UTA), a method that leverages existing CLIP models to further enhance its vision-language representations. UTA trains a Vision Transformer (ViT) by aligning unmasked visual tokens to the corresponding image tokens from a frozen CLIP vision encoder, which automatically aligns the ViT model with the CLIP text encoder. The pre-trained ViT can be directly applied for zero-shot evaluation even without training on image-text pairs. Compared to MIM approaches, UTA does not suffer from training-finetuning inconsistency and is much more training-efficient by avoiding using the extra [MASK] tokens. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that UTA can enhance CLIP models and outperform existing MIM methods on various uni- and multi-modal benchmarks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/jihaonew/UTA.

RAPHAEL: Text-to-Image Generation via Large Mixture of Diffusion Paths

Text-to-image generation has recently witnessed remarkable achievements. We introduce a text-conditional image diffusion model, termed RAPHAEL, to generate highly artistic images, which accurately portray the text prompts, encompassing multiple nouns, adjectives, and verbs. This is achieved by stacking tens of mixture-of-experts (MoEs) layers, i.e., space-MoE and time-MoE layers, enabling billions of diffusion paths (routes) from the network input to the output. Each path intuitively functions as a "painter" for depicting a particular textual concept onto a specified image region at a diffusion timestep. Comprehensive experiments reveal that RAPHAEL outperforms recent cutting-edge models, such as Stable Diffusion, ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, DeepFloyd, and DALL-E 2, in terms of both image quality and aesthetic appeal. Firstly, RAPHAEL exhibits superior performance in switching images across diverse styles, such as Japanese comics, realism, cyberpunk, and ink illustration. Secondly, a single model with three billion parameters, trained on 1,000 A100 GPUs for two months, achieves a state-of-the-art zero-shot FID score of 6.61 on the COCO dataset. Furthermore, RAPHAEL significantly surpasses its counterparts in human evaluation on the ViLG-300 benchmark. We believe that RAPHAEL holds the potential to propel the frontiers of image generation research in both academia and industry, paving the way for future breakthroughs in this rapidly evolving field. More details can be found on a project webpage: https://raphael-painter.github.io/.

Towards Better 3D Knowledge Transfer via Masked Image Modeling for Multi-view 3D Understanding

Multi-view camera-based 3D detection is a challenging problem in computer vision. Recent works leverage a pretrained LiDAR detection model to transfer knowledge to a camera-based student network. However, we argue that there is a major domain gap between the LiDAR BEV features and the camera-based BEV features, as they have different characteristics and are derived from different sources. In this paper, we propose Geometry Enhanced Masked Image Modeling (GeoMIM) to transfer the knowledge of the LiDAR model in a pretrain-finetune paradigm for improving the multi-view camera-based 3D detection. GeoMIM is a multi-camera vision transformer with Cross-View Attention (CVA) blocks that uses LiDAR BEV features encoded by the pretrained BEV model as learning targets. During pretraining, GeoMIM's decoder has a semantic branch completing dense perspective-view features and the other geometry branch reconstructing dense perspective-view depth maps. The depth branch is designed to be camera-aware by inputting the camera's parameters for better transfer capability. Extensive results demonstrate that GeoMIM outperforms existing methods on nuScenes benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art performance for camera-based 3D object detection and 3D segmentation.

Rethinking Robust Representation Learning Under Fine-grained Noisy Faces

Learning robust feature representation from large-scale noisy faces stands out as one of the key challenges in high-performance face recognition. Recent attempts have been made to cope with this challenge by alleviating the intra-class conflict and inter-class conflict. However, the unconstrained noise type in each conflict still makes it difficult for these algorithms to perform well. To better understand this, we reformulate the noise type of each class in a more fine-grained manner as N-identities|K^C-clusters. Different types of noisy faces can be generated by adjusting the values of \nkc. Based on this unified formulation, we found that the main barrier behind the noise-robust representation learning is the flexibility of the algorithm under different N, K, and C. For this potential problem, we propose a new method, named Evolving Sub-centers Learning~(ESL), to find optimal hyperplanes to accurately describe the latent space of massive noisy faces. More specifically, we initialize M sub-centers for each class and ESL encourages it to be automatically aligned to N-identities|K^C-clusters faces via producing, merging, and dropping operations. Images belonging to the same identity in noisy faces can effectively converge to the same sub-center and samples with different identities will be pushed away. We inspect its effectiveness with an elaborate ablation study on the synthetic noisy dataset with different N, K, and C. Without any bells and whistles, ESL can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods on large-scale noisy faces

TokenMix: Rethinking Image Mixing for Data Augmentation in Vision Transformers

CutMix is a popular augmentation technique commonly used for training modern convolutional and transformer vision networks. It was originally designed to encourage Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) to focus more on an image's global context instead of local information, which greatly improves the performance of CNNs. However, we found it to have limited benefits for transformer-based architectures that naturally have a global receptive field. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation technique TokenMix to improve the performance of vision transformers. TokenMix mixes two images at token level via partitioning the mixing region into multiple separated parts. Besides, we show that the mixed learning target in CutMix, a linear combination of a pair of the ground truth labels, might be inaccurate and sometimes counter-intuitive. To obtain a more suitable target, we propose to assign the target score according to the content-based neural activation maps of the two images from a pre-trained teacher model, which does not need to have high performance. With plenty of experiments on various vision transformer architectures, we show that our proposed TokenMix helps vision transformers focus on the foreground area to infer the classes and enhances their robustness to occlusion, with consistent performance gains. Notably, we improve DeiT-T/S/B with +1% ImageNet top-1 accuracy. Besides, TokenMix enjoys longer training, which achieves 81.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with DeiT-S trained for 400 epochs. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/TokenMix.

Meta Knowledge Distillation

Recent studies pointed out that knowledge distillation (KD) suffers from two degradation problems, the teacher-student gap and the incompatibility with strong data augmentations, making it not applicable to training state-of-the-art models, which are trained with advanced augmentations. However, we observe that a key factor, i.e., the temperatures in the softmax functions for generating probabilities of both the teacher and student models, was mostly overlooked in previous methods. With properly tuned temperatures, such degradation problems of KD can be much mitigated. However, instead of relying on a naive grid search, which shows poor transferability, we propose Meta Knowledge Distillation (MKD) to meta-learn the distillation with learnable meta temperature parameters. The meta parameters are adaptively adjusted during training according to the gradients of the learning objective. We validate that MKD is robust to different dataset scales, different teacher/student architectures, and different types of data augmentation. With MKD, we achieve the best performance with popular ViT architectures among compared methods that use only ImageNet-1K as training data, ranging from tiny to large models. With ViT-L, we achieve 86.5% with 600 epochs of training, 0.6% better than MAE that trains for 1,650 epochs.