The USTC-NERCSLIP Systems for The ICMC-ASR Challenge

This report describes the submitted system to the In-Car Multi-Channel Automatic Speech Recognition (ICMC-ASR) challenge, which considers the ASR task with multi-speaker overlapping and Mandarin accent dynamics in the ICMC case. We implement the front-end speaker diarization using the self-supervised learning representation based multi-speaker embedding and beamforming using the speaker position, respectively. For ASR, we employ an iterative pseudo-label generation method based on fusion model to obtain text labels of unsupervised data. To mitigate the impact of accent, an Accent-ASR framework is proposed, which captures pronunciation-related accent features at a fine-grained level and linguistic information at a coarse-grained level. On the ICMC-ASR eval set, the proposed system achieves a CER of 13.16% on track 1 and a cpCER of 21.48% on track 2, which significantly outperforms the official baseline system and obtains the first rank on both tracks.

FedTrans: Efficient Federated Learning via Multi-Model Transformation

Federated learning (FL) aims to train machine learning (ML) models across potentially millions of edge client devices. Yet, training and customizing models for FL clients is notoriously challenging due to the heterogeneity of client data, device capabilities, and the massive scale of clients, making individualized model exploration prohibitively expensive. State-of-the-art FL solutions personalize a globally trained model or concurrently train multiple models, but they often incur suboptimal model accuracy and huge training costs. In this paper, we introduce FedTrans, a multi-model FL training framework that automatically produces and trains high-accuracy, hardware-compatible models for individual clients at scale. FedTrans begins with a basic global model, identifies accuracy bottlenecks in model architectures during training, and then employs model transformation to derive new models for heterogeneous clients on the fly. It judiciously assigns models to individual clients while performing soft aggregation on multi-model updates to minimize total training costs. Our evaluations using realistic settings show that FedTrans improves individual client model accuracy by 14% - 72% while slashing training costs by 1.6X - 20X over state-of-the-art solutions.

Andes: Defining and Enhancing Quality-of-Experience in LLM-Based Text Streaming Services

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has transformed text-based services, enabling capabilities ranging from real-time translation to AI-driven chatbots. However, existing serving systems primarily focus on optimizing server-side aggregate metrics like token generation throughput, ignoring individual user experience with streamed text. As a result, under high and/or bursty load, a significant number of users can receive unfavorable service quality or poor Quality-of-Experience (QoE). In this paper, we first formally define QoE of text streaming services, where text is delivered incrementally and interactively to users, by considering the end-to-end token delivery process throughout the entire interaction with the user. Thereafter, we propose Andes, a QoE-aware serving system that enhances user experience for LLM-enabled text streaming services. At its core, Andes strategically allocates contended GPU resources among multiple requests over time to optimize their QoE. Our evaluations demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art LLM serving systems like vLLM, Andes improves the average QoE by up to 3.2$\times$ under high request rate, or alternatively, it attains up to 1.6$\times$ higher request rate while preserving high QoE.

UNIMO-G: Unified Image Generation through Multimodal Conditional Diffusion

Existing text-to-image diffusion models primarily generate images from text prompts. However, the inherent conciseness of textual descriptions poses challenges in faithfully synthesizing images with intricate details, such as specific entities or scenes. This paper presents UNIMO-G, a simple multimodal conditional diffusion framework that operates on multimodal prompts with interleaved textual and visual inputs, which demonstrates a unified ability for both text-driven and subject-driven image generation. UNIMO-G comprises two core components: a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for encoding multimodal prompts, and a conditional denoising diffusion network for generating images based on the encoded multimodal input. We leverage a two-stage training strategy to effectively train the framework: firstly pre-training on large-scale text-image pairs to develop conditional image generation capabilities, and then instruction tuning with multimodal prompts to achieve unified image generation proficiency. A well-designed data processing pipeline involving language grounding and image segmentation is employed to construct multi-modal prompts. UNIMO-G excels in both text-to-image generation and zero-shot subject-driven synthesis, and is notably effective in generating high-fidelity images from complex multimodal prompts involving multiple image entities.

Efficient Large Language Models: A Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in important tasks such as natural language understanding, language generation, and complex reasoning and have the potential to make a substantial impact on our society. Such capabilities, however, come with the considerable resources they demand, highlighting the strong need to develop effective techniques for addressing their efficiency challenges. In this survey, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review of efficient LLMs research. We organize the literature in a taxonomy consisting of three main categories, covering distinct yet interconnected efficient LLMs topics from model-centric, data-centric, and framework-centric perspective, respectively. We have also created a GitHub repository where we compile the papers featured in this survey at https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/EfficientLLMs, and will actively maintain this repository and incorporate new research as it emerges. We hope our survey can serve as a valuable resource to help researchers and practitioners gain a systematic understanding of the research developments in efficient LLMs and inspire them to contribute to this important and exciting field.

Venn: Resource Management Across Federated Learning Jobs

In recent years, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach for machine learning (ML) and data science across distributed edge devices. With the increasing popularity of FL, resource contention between multiple FL jobs training on the same device population is increasing as well. Scheduling edge resources among multiple FL jobs is different from GPU scheduling for cloud ML because of the ephemeral nature and planetary scale of participating devices as well as the overlapping resource requirements of diverse FL jobs. Existing resource managers for FL jobs opt for random assignment of devices to FL jobs for simplicity and scalability, which leads to poor performance. In this paper, we present Venn, an FL resource manager, that efficiently schedules ephemeral, heterogeneous devices among many FL jobs, with the goal of reducing their average job completion time (JCT). Venn formulates the Intersection Resource Scheduling (IRS) problem to identify complex resource contention among multiple FL jobs. Then, Venn proposes a contention-aware scheduling heuristic to minimize the average scheduling delay. Furthermore, it proposes a resource-aware device-to-job matching heuristic that focuses on optimizing response collection time by mitigating stragglers. Our evaluation shows that, compared to the state-of-the-art FL resource managers, Venn improves the average JCT by up to 1.88X.

3D-Aware Talking-Head Video Motion Transfer

Motion transfer of talking-head videos involves generating a new video with the appearance of a subject video and the motion pattern of a driving video. Current methodologies primarily depend on a limited number of subject images and 2D representations, thereby neglecting to fully utilize the multi-view appearance features inherent in the subject video. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D-aware talking-head video motion transfer network, Head3D, which fully exploits the subject appearance information by generating a visually-interpretable 3D canonical head from the 2D subject frames with a recurrent network. A key component of our approach is a self-supervised 3D head geometry learning module, designed to predict head poses and depth maps from 2D subject video frames. This module facilitates the estimation of a 3D head in canonical space, which can then be transformed to align with driving video frames. Additionally, we employ an attention-based fusion network to combine the background and other details from subject frames with the 3D subject head to produce the synthetic target video. Our extensive experiments on two public talking-head video datasets demonstrate that Head3D outperforms both 2D and 3D prior arts in the practical cross-identity setting, with evidence showing it can be readily adapted to the pose-controllable novel view synthesis task.

CodeFuse-13B: A Pretrained Multi-lingual Code Large Language Model

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have gained significant attention in the industry due to their wide applications in the full lifecycle of software engineering. However, the effectiveness of existing models in understanding non-English inputs for multi-lingual code-related tasks is still far from well studied. This paper introduces CodeFuse-13B, an open-sourced pre-trained code LLM. It is specifically designed for code-related tasks with both English and Chinese prompts and supports over 40 programming languages. CodeFuse achieves its effectiveness by utilizing a high quality pre-training dataset that is carefully filtered by program analyzers and optimized during the training process. Extensive experiments are conducted using real-world usage scenarios, the industry-standard benchmark HumanEval-x, and the specially designed CodeFuseEval for Chinese prompts. To assess the effectiveness of CodeFuse, we actively collected valuable human feedback from the AntGroup's software development process where CodeFuse has been successfully deployed. The results demonstrate that CodeFuse-13B achieves a HumanEval pass@1 score of 37.10%, positioning it as one of the top multi-lingual code LLMs with similar parameter sizes. In practical scenarios, such as code generation, code translation, code comments, and testcase generation, CodeFuse performs better than other models when confronted with Chinese prompts.

NeRF-Enhanced Outpainting for Faithful Field-of-View Extrapolation

In various applications, such as robotic navigation and remote visual assistance, expanding the field of view (FOV) of the camera proves beneficial for enhancing environmental perception. Unlike image outpainting techniques aimed solely at generating aesthetically pleasing visuals, these applications demand an extended view that faithfully represents the scene. To achieve this, we formulate a new problem of faithful FOV extrapolation that utilizes a set of pre-captured images as prior knowledge of the scene. To address this problem, we present a simple yet effective solution called NeRF-Enhanced Outpainting (NEO) that uses extended-FOV images generated through NeRF to train a scene-specific image outpainting model. To assess the performance of NEO, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on three photorealistic datasets and one real-world dataset. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets showcase the robustness and potential of our method in addressing this challenge. We believe our work lays a strong foundation for future exploration within the research community.

WeCheck: Strong Factual Consistency Checker via Weakly Supervised Learning

A crucial issue of current text generation models is that they often uncontrollably generate factually inconsistent text with respective of their inputs. Limited by the lack of annotated data, existing works in evaluating factual consistency directly transfer the reasoning ability of models trained on other data-rich upstream tasks like question answering (QA) and natural language inference (NLI) without any further adaptation. As a result, they perform poorly on the real generated text and are biased heavily by their single-source upstream tasks. To alleviate this problem, we propose a weakly supervised framework that aggregates multiple resources to train a precise and efficient factual metric, namely WeCheck. WeCheck first utilizes a generative model to accurately label a real generated sample by aggregating its weak labels, which are inferred from multiple resources. Then, we train the target metric model with the weak supervision while taking noises into consideration. Comprehensive experiments on a variety of tasks demonstrate the strong performance of WeCheck, which achieves a 3.4\% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods on TRUE benchmark on average.