LoRA-FA: Memory-efficient Low-rank Adaptation for Large Language Models Fine-tuning

The low-rank adaptation (LoRA) method can largely reduce the amount of trainable parameters for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), however, it still requires expensive activation memory to update low-rank weights. Reducing the number of LoRA layers or using activation recomputation could harm the fine-tuning performance or increase the computational overhead. In this work, we present LoRA-FA, a memory-efficient fine-tuning method that reduces the activation memory without performance degradation and expensive recomputation. LoRA-FA chooses to freeze the projection-down weight of $A$ and update the projection-up weight of $B$ in each LoRA layer. It ensures the change of model weight reside in a low-rank space during LLMs fine-tuning, while eliminating the requirement to store full-rank input activations. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple model types (RoBERTa, T5, LLaMA) and model scales. Our results show that LoRA-FA can always achieve close fine-tuning accuracy across different tasks compared to full parameter fine-tuning and LoRA. Furthermore, LoRA-FA can reduce the overall memory cost by up to 1.4$\times$ compared to LoRA.

Eva: A General Vectorized Approximation Framework for Second-order Optimization

Second-order optimization algorithms exhibit excellent convergence properties for training deep learning models, but often incur significant computation and memory overheads. This can result in lower training efficiency than the first-order counterparts such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In this work, we present a memory- and time-efficient second-order algorithm named Eva with two novel techniques: 1) we construct the second-order information with the Kronecker factorization of small stochastic vectors over a mini-batch of training data to reduce memory consumption, and 2) we derive an efficient update formula without explicitly computing the inverse of matrices using the Sherman-Morrison formula. We further extend Eva to a general vectorized approximation framework to improve the compute and memory efficiency of two existing second-order algorithms (FOOF and Shampoo) without affecting their convergence performance. Extensive experimental results on different models and datasets show that Eva reduces the end-to-end training time up to 2.05x and 2.42x compared to first-order SGD and second-order algorithms (K-FAC and Shampoo), respectively.

Beyond the Obvious: Evaluating the Reasoning Ability In Real-life Scenarios of Language Models on Life Scapes Reasoning Benchmark~(LSR-Benchmark)

This paper introduces the Life Scapes Reasoning Benchmark (LSR-Benchmark), a novel dataset targeting real-life scenario reasoning, aiming to close the gap in artificial neural networks' ability to reason in everyday contexts. In contrast to domain knowledge reasoning datasets, LSR-Benchmark comprises free-text formatted questions with rich information on real-life scenarios, human behaviors, and character roles. The dataset consists of 2,162 questions collected from open-source online sources and is manually annotated to improve its quality. Experiments are conducted using state-of-the-art language models, such as gpt3.5-turbo and instruction fine-tuned llama models, to test the performance in LSR-Benchmark. The results reveal that humans outperform these models significantly, indicating a persisting challenge for machine learning models in comprehending daily human life.

Xiezhi: An Ever-Updating Benchmark for Holistic Domain Knowledge Evaluation

New Natural Langauge Process~(NLP) benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present Xiezhi, the most comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess holistic domain knowledge. Xiezhi comprises multiple-choice questions across 516 diverse disciplines ranging from 13 different subjects with 249,587 questions and accompanied by Xiezhi-Specialty and Xiezhi-Interdiscipline, both with 15k questions. We conduct evaluation of the 47 cutting-edge LLMs on Xiezhi. Results indicate that LLMs exceed average performance of humans in science, engineering, agronomy, medicine, and art, but fall short in economics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, literature, history, and management. We anticipate Xiezhi will help analyze important strengths and shortcomings of LLMs, and the benchmark is released in~\url{https://github.com/MikeGu721/XiezhiBenchmark}.

Evaluation and Optimization of Gradient Compression for Distributed Deep Learning

To accelerate distributed training, many gradient compression methods have been proposed to alleviate the communication bottleneck in synchronous stochastic gradient descent (S-SGD), but their efficacy in real-world applications still remains unclear. In this work, we first evaluate the efficiency of three representative compression methods (quantization with Sign-SGD, sparsification with Top-k SGD, and low-rank with Power-SGD) on a 32-GPU cluster. The results show that they cannot always outperform well-optimized S-SGD or even worse due to their incompatibility with three key system optimization techniques (all-reduce, pipelining, and tensor fusion) in S-SGD. To this end, we propose a novel gradient compression method, called alternate compressed Power-SGD (ACP-SGD), which alternately compresses and communicates low-rank matrices. ACP-SGD not only significantly reduces the communication volume, but also enjoys the three system optimizations like S-SGD. Compared with Power-SGD, the optimized ACP-SGD can largely reduce the compression and communication overheads, while achieving similar model accuracy. In our experiments, ACP-SGD achieves an average of 4.06x and 1.43x speedups over S-SGD and Power-SGD, respectively, and it consistently outperforms other baselines across different setups (from 8 GPUs to 64 GPUs and from 1Gb/s Ethernet to 100Gb/s InfiniBand).

D2Match: Leveraging Deep Learning and Degeneracy for Subgraph Matching

Subgraph matching is a fundamental building block for graph-based applications and is challenging due to its high-order combinatorial nature. Existing studies usually tackle it by combinatorial optimization or learning-based methods. However, they suffer from exponential computational costs or searching the matching without theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we develop D2Match by leveraging the efficiency of Deep learning and Degeneracy for subgraph matching. More specifically, we first prove that subgraph matching can degenerate to subtree matching, and subsequently is equivalent to finding a perfect matching on a bipartite graph. We can then yield an implementation of linear time complexity by the built-in tree-structured aggregation mechanism on graph neural networks. Moreover, circle structures and node attributes can be easily incorporated in D2Match to boost the matching performance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the superior performance of our D2Match and confirm that our D2Match indeed exploits the subtrees and differs from existing GNNs-based subgraph matching methods that depend on memorizing the data distribution divergence

Progression Cognition Reinforcement Learning with Prioritized Experience for Multi-Vehicle Pursuit

Multi-vehicle pursuit (MVP) such as autonomous police vehicles pursuing suspects is important but very challenging due to its mission and safety critical nature. While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have been proposed for MVP problem in structured grid-pattern roads, the existing algorithms use randomly training samples in centralized learning, which leads to homogeneous agents showing low collaboration performance. For the more challenging problem of pursuing multiple evading vehicles, these algorithms typically select a fixed target evading vehicle for pursuing vehicles without considering dynamic traffic situation, which significantly reduces pursuing success rate. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a Progression Cognition Reinforcement Learning with Prioritized Experience for MVP (PEPCRL-MVP) in urban multi-intersection dynamic traffic scenes. PEPCRL-MVP uses a prioritization network to assess the transitions in the global experience replay buffer according to the parameters of each MARL agent. With the personalized and prioritized experience set selected via the prioritization network, diversity is introduced to the learning process of MARL, which can improve collaboration and task related performance. Furthermore, PEPCRL-MVP employs an attention module to extract critical features from complex urban traffic environments. These features are used to develop progression cognition method to adaptively group pursuing vehicles. Each group efficiently target one evading vehicle in dynamic driving environments. Extensive experiments conducted with a simulator over unstructured roads of an urban area show that PEPCRL-MVP is superior to other state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, PEPCRL-MVP improves pursuing efficiency by 3.95% over TD3-DMAP and its success rate is 34.78% higher than that of MADDPG. Codes are open sourced.

Range-Based Equal Error Rate for Spoof Localization

Spoof localization, also called segment-level detection, is a crucial task that aims to locate spoofs in partially spoofed audio. The equal error rate (EER) is widely used to measure performance for such biometric scenarios. Although EER is the only threshold-free metric, it is usually calculated in a point-based way that uses scores and references with a pre-defined temporal resolution and counts the number of misclassified segments. Such point-based measurement overly relies on this resolution and may not accurately measure misclassified ranges. To properly measure misclassified ranges and better evaluate spoof localization performance, we upgrade point-based EER to range-based EER. Then, we adapt the binary search algorithm for calculating range-based EER and compare it with the classical point-based EER. Our analyses suggest utilizing either range-based EER, or point-based EER with a proper temporal resolution can fairly and properly evaluate the performance of spoof localization.

A Diffusion Model for Event Skeleton Generation

Event skeleton generation, aiming to induce an event schema skeleton graph with abstracted event nodes and their temporal relations from a set of event instance graphs, is a critical step in the temporal complex event schema induction task. Existing methods effectively address this task from a graph generation perspective but suffer from noise-sensitive and error accumulation, e.g., the inability to correct errors while generating schema. We, therefore, propose a novel Diffusion Event Graph Model~(DEGM) to address these issues. Our DEGM is the first workable diffusion model for event skeleton generation, where the embedding and rounding techniques with a custom edge-based loss are introduced to transform a discrete event graph into learnable latent representation. Furthermore, we propose a denoising training process to maintain the model's robustness. Consequently, DEGM derives the final schema, where error correction is guaranteed by iteratively refining the latent representation during the schema generation process. Experimental results on three IED bombing datasets demonstrate that our DEGM achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhufq00/EventSkeletonGeneration.