IDEA Prune: An Integrated Enlarge-and-Prune Pipeline in Generative Language Model Pretraining

Recent advancements in large language models have intensified the need for efficient and deployable models within limited inference budgets. Structured pruning pipelines have shown promise in token efficiency compared to training target-size models from scratch. In this paper, we advocate incorporating enlarged model pretraining, which is often ignored in previous works, into pruning. We study the enlarge-and-prune pipeline as an integrated system to address two critical questions: whether it is worth pretraining an enlarged model even when the model is never deployed, and how to optimize the entire pipeline for better pruned models. We propose an integrated enlarge-and-prune pipeline, which combines enlarge model training, pruning, and recovery under a single cosine annealing learning rate schedule. This approach is further complemented by a novel iterative structured pruning method for gradual parameter removal. The proposed method helps to mitigate the knowledge loss caused by the rising learning rate in naive enlarge-and-prune pipelines and enable effective redistribution of model capacity among surviving neurons, facilitating smooth compression and enhanced performance. We conduct comprehensive experiments on compressing 2.8B models to 1.3B with up to 2T tokens in pretraining. It demonstrates the integrated approach not only provides insights into the token efficiency of enlarged model pretraining but also achieves superior performance of pruned models.

Reconciling Stochastic and Deterministic Strategies for Zero-shot Image Restoration using Diffusion Model in Dual

Plug-and-play (PnP) methods offer an iterative strategy for solving image restoration (IR) problems in a zero-shot manner, using a learned \textit{discriminative denoiser} as the implicit prior. More recently, a sampling-based variant of this approach, which utilizes a pre-trained \textit{generative diffusion model}, has gained great popularity for solving IR problems through stochastic sampling. The IR results using PnP with a pre-trained diffusion model demonstrate distinct advantages compared to those using discriminative denoisers, \ie improved perceptual quality while sacrificing the data fidelity. The unsatisfactory results are due to the lack of integration of these strategies in the IR tasks. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot IR scheme, dubbed Reconciling Diffusion Model in Dual (RDMD), which leverages only a \textbf{single} pre-trained diffusion model to construct \textbf{two} complementary regularizers. Specifically, the diffusion model in RDMD will iteratively perform deterministic denoising and stochastic sampling, aiming to achieve high-fidelity image restoration with appealing perceptual quality. RDMD also allows users to customize the distortion-perception tradeoff with a single hyperparameter, enhancing the adaptability of the restoration process in different practical scenarios. Extensive experiments on several IR tasks demonstrate that our proposed method could achieve superior results compared to existing approaches on both the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets.

Show Me Your Code! Kill Code Poisoning: A Lightweight Method Based on Code Naturalness

Neural code models (NCMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in code intelligence tasks. Meanwhile, the security of NCMs and NCMs-based systems has garnered increasing attention. In particular, NCMs are often trained on large-scale data from potentially untrustworthy sources, providing attackers with the opportunity to manipulate them by inserting crafted samples into the data. This type of attack is called a code poisoning attack (also known as a backdoor attack). It allows attackers to implant backdoors in NCMs and thus control model behavior, which poses a significant security threat. However, there is still a lack of effective techniques for detecting various complex code poisoning attacks. In this paper, we propose an innovative and lightweight technique for code poisoning detection named KillBadCode. KillBadCode is designed based on our insight that code poisoning disrupts the naturalness of code. Specifically, KillBadCode first builds a code language model (CodeLM) on a lightweight $n$-gram language model. Then, given poisoned data, KillBadCode utilizes CodeLM to identify those tokens in (poisoned) code snippets that will make the code snippets more natural after being deleted as trigger tokens. Considering that the removal of some normal tokens in a single sample might also enhance code naturalness, leading to a high false positive rate (FPR), we aggregate the cumulative improvement of each token across all samples. Finally, KillBadCode purifies the poisoned data by removing all poisoned samples containing the identified trigger tokens. The experimental results on two code poisoning attacks and four code intelligence tasks demonstrate that KillBadCode significantly outperforms four baselines. More importantly, KillBadCode is very efficient, with a minimum time consumption of only 5 minutes, and is 25 times faster than the best baseline on average.

Gaze-Assisted Human-Centric Domain Adaptation for Cardiac Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Domain adaptation (DA) for cardiac ultrasound image segmentation is clinically significant and valuable. However, previous domain adaptation methods are prone to be affected by the incomplete pseudo-label and low-quality target to source images. Human-centric domain adaptation has great advantages of human cognitive guidance to help model adapt to target domain and reduce reliance on labels. Doctor gaze trajectories contains a large amount of cross-domain human guidance. To leverage gaze information and human cognition for guiding domain adaptation, we propose gaze-assisted human-centric domain adaptation (GAHCDA), which reliably guides the domain adaptation of cardiac ultrasound images. GAHCDA includes following modules: (1) Gaze Augment Alignment (GAA): GAA enables the model to obtain human cognition general features to recognize segmentation target in different domain of cardiac ultrasound images like humans. (2) Gaze Balance Loss (GBL): GBL fused gaze heatmap with outputs which makes the segmentation result structurally closer to the target domain. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed framework is able to segment cardiac ultrasound images more effectively in the target domain than GAN-based methods and other self-train based methods, showing great potential in clinical application.

Temporal-Aware Spiking Transformer Hashing Based on 3D-DWT

With the rapid growth of dynamic vision sensor (DVS) data, constructing a low-energy, efficient data retrieval system has become an urgent task. Hash learning is one of the most important retrieval technologies which can keep the distance between hash codes consistent with the distance between DVS data. As spiking neural networks (SNNs) can encode information through spikes, they demonstrate great potential in promoting energy efficiency. Based on the binary characteristics of SNNs, we first propose a novel supervised hashing method named Spikinghash with a hierarchical lightweight structure. Spiking WaveMixer (SWM) is deployed in shallow layers, utilizing a multilevel 3D discrete wavelet transform (3D-DWT) to decouple spatiotemporal features into various low-frequency and high frequency components, and then employing efficient spectral feature fusion. SWM can effectively capture the temporal dependencies and local spatial features. Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) is deployed in deeper layers to further extract global spatiotemporal information. We also design a hash layer utilizing binary characteristic of SNNs, which integrates information over multiple time steps to generate final hash codes. Furthermore, we propose a new dynamic soft similarity loss for SNNs, which utilizes membrane potentials to construct a learnable similarity matrix as soft labels to fully capture the similarity differences between classes and compensate information loss in SNNs, thereby improving retrieval performance. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that Spikinghash can achieve state-of-the-art results with low energy consumption and fewer parameters.

Instruction-Following Pruning for Large Language Models

With the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs), structured pruning has become a widely used technique to learn efficient, smaller models from larger ones, delivering superior performance compared to training similarly sized models from scratch. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional static pruning approach of determining a fixed pruning mask for a model, and propose a dynamic approach to structured pruning. In our method, the pruning mask is input-dependent and adapts dynamically based on the information described in a user instruction. Our approach, termed "instruction-following pruning", introduces a sparse mask predictor that takes the user instruction as input and dynamically selects the most relevant model parameters for the given task. To identify and activate effective parameters, we jointly optimize the sparse mask predictor and the LLM, leveraging both instruction-following data and the pre-training corpus. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a wide range of evaluation benchmarks. For example, our 3B activated model improves over the 3B dense model by 5-8 points of absolute margin on domains such as math and coding, and rivals the performance of a 9B model.

LWFNet: Coherent Doppler Wind Lidar-Based Network for Wind Field Retrieval

Accurate detection of wind fields within the troposphere is essential for atmospheric dynamics research and plays a crucial role in extreme weather forecasting. Coherent Doppler wind lidar (CDWL) is widely regarded as the most suitable technique for high spatial and temporal resolution wind field detection. However, since coherent detection relies heavily on the concentration of aerosol particles, which cause Mie scattering, the received backscattering lidar signal exhibits significantly low intensity at high altitudes. As a result, conventional methods, such as spectral centroid estimation, often fail to produce credible and accurate wind retrieval results in these regions. To address this issue, we propose LWFNet, the first Lidar-based Wind Field (WF) retrieval neural Network, built upon Transformer and the Kolmogorov-Arnold network. Our model is trained solely on targets derived from the traditional wind retrieval algorithm and utilizes radiosonde measurements as the ground truth for test results evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that LWFNet not only extends the maximum wind field detection range but also produces more accurate results, exhibiting a level of precision that surpasses the labeled targets. This phenomenon, which we refer to as super-accuracy, is explored by investigating the potential underlying factors that contribute to this intriguing occurrence. In addition, we compare the performance of LWFNet with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, highlighting its superior effectiveness and capability in high-resolution wind retrieval. LWFNet demonstrates remarkable performance in lidar-based wind field retrieval, setting a benchmark for future research and advancing the development of deep learning models in this domain.

LangYa: Revolutionizing Cross-Spatiotemporal Ocean Forecasting

Ocean forecasting is crucial for both scientific research and societal benefits. Currently, the most accurate forecasting systems are global ocean forecasting systems (GOFSs), which represent the ocean state variables (OSVs) as discrete grids and solve partial differential equations (PDEs) governing the transitions of oceanic state variables using numerical methods. However, GOFSs processes are computationally expensive and prone to cumulative errors. Recently, large artificial intelligence (AI)-based models significantly boosted forecasting speed and accuracy. Unfortunately, building a large AI ocean forecasting system that can be considered cross-spatiotemporal and air-sea coupled forecasts remains a significant challenge. Here, we introduce LangYa, a cross-spatiotemporal and air-sea coupled ocean forecasting system. Results demonstrate that the time embedding module in LangYa enables a single model to make forecasts with lead times ranging from 1 to 7 days. The air-sea coupled module effectively simulates air-sea interactions. The ocean self-attention module improves network stability and accelerates convergence during training, and the adaptive thermocline loss function improves the accuracy of thermocline forecasting. Compared to existing numerical and AI-based ocean forecasting systems, LangYa uses 27 years of global ocean data from the Global Ocean Reanalysis and Simulation version 12 (GLORYS12) for training and achieves more reliable deterministic forecasting results for OSVs. LangYa forecasting system provides global ocean researchers with access to a powerful software tool for accurate ocean forecasting and opens a new paradigm for ocean science.

Unseen Horizons: Unveiling the Real Capability of LLM Code Generation Beyond the Familiar

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in code generation tasks. However, there are still gaps before they can be fully applied in actual software development processes. Accurately assessing the code generation capabilities of large language models has become an important basis for evaluating and improving the models. Some existing works have constructed datasets to evaluate the capabilities of these models. However, the current evaluation process may encounter the illusion of "Specialist in Familiarity", primarily due to three gaps: the exposure of target code, case timeliness, and dependency availability. The fundamental reason for these gaps is that the code in current datasets may have been extensively exposed and exercised during the training phase, and due to the continuous training and development of LLM, their timeliness has been severely compromised. The key to solve the problem is to, as much as possible, evaluate the LLMs using code that they have not encountered before. Thus, the fundamental idea in this paper is to draw on the concept of code obfuscation, changing code at different levels while ensuring the functionality and output. To this end, we build a code-obfuscation based benchmark OBFUSEVAL. We first collect 1,354 raw cases from five real-world projects, including function description and code. Then we use three-level strategy (symbol, structure and semantic) to obfuscate descriptions, code and context dependencies. We evaluate four LLMs on OBFU- SEVAL and compared the effectiveness of different obfuscation strategy. We use official test suites of these projects to evaluate the generated code. The results show that after obfuscation, the average decrease ratio of test pass rate can up to 62.5%.

Cross- and Intra-image Prototypical Learning for Multi-label Disease Diagnosis and Interpretation

Recent advances in prototypical learning have shown remarkable potential to provide useful decision interpretations associating activation maps and predictions with class-specific training prototypes. Such prototypical learning has been well-studied for various single-label diseases, but for quite relevant and more challenging multi-label diagnosis, where multiple diseases are often concurrent within an image, existing prototypical learning models struggle to obtain meaningful activation maps and effective class prototypes due to the entanglement of the multiple diseases. In this paper, we present a novel Cross- and Intra-image Prototypical Learning (CIPL) framework, for accurate multi-label disease diagnosis and interpretation from medical images. CIPL takes advantage of common cross-image semantics to disentangle the multiple diseases when learning the prototypes, allowing a comprehensive understanding of complicated pathological lesions. Furthermore, we propose a new two-level alignment-based regularisation strategy that effectively leverages consistent intra-image information to enhance interpretation robustness and predictive performance. Extensive experiments show that our CIPL attains the state-of-the-art (SOTA) classification accuracy in two public multi-label benchmarks of disease diagnosis: thoracic radiography and fundus images. Quantitative interpretability results show that CIPL also has superiority in weakly-supervised thoracic disease localisation over other leading saliency- and prototype-based explanation methods.