As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in performance, their size has escalated significantly, with current LLMs containing billions or even trillions of parameters. However, in this study, we discovered that many layers of LLMs exhibit high similarity, and some layers play a negligible role in network functionality. Based on this observation, we define a metric called Block Influence (BI) to gauge the significance of each layer in LLMs. We then propose a straightforward pruning approach: layer removal, in which we directly delete the redundant layers in LLMs based on their BI scores. Experiments demonstrate that our method, which we call ShortGPT, significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in model pruning. Moreover, ShortGPT is orthogonal to quantization-like methods, enabling further reduction in parameters and computation. The ability to achieve better results through simple layer removal, as opposed to more complex pruning techniques, suggests a high degree of redundancy in the model architecture.
Video-based facial affect analysis has recently attracted increasing attention owing to its critical role in human-computer interaction. Previous studies mainly focus on developing various deep learning architectures and training them in a fully supervised manner. Although significant progress has been achieved by these supervised methods, the longstanding lack of large-scale high-quality labeled data severely hinders their further improvements. Motivated by the recent success of self-supervised learning in computer vision, this paper introduces a self-supervised approach, termed Self-supervised Video Facial Affect Perceiver (SVFAP), to address the dilemma faced by supervised methods. Specifically, SVFAP leverages masked facial video autoencoding to perform self-supervised pre-training on massive unlabeled facial videos. Considering that large spatiotemporal redundancy exists in facial videos, we propose a novel temporal pyramid and spatial bottleneck Transformer as the encoder of SVFAP, which not only enjoys low computational cost but also achieves excellent performance. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on nine datasets spanning three downstream tasks, including dynamic facial expression recognition, dimensional emotion recognition, and personality recognition. Comprehensive results demonstrate that SVFAP can learn powerful affect-related representations via large-scale self-supervised pre-training and it significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on all datasets. Codes will be available at https://github.com/sunlicai/SVFAP.
Partial-label learning (PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning where the single ground truth resides in a set of candidate labels, while the research rarely considers the label imbalance. A recent study for imbalanced partial-Label learning proposed that the combinatorial challenge of partial-label learning and long-tail learning lies in matching between a decent marginal prior distribution with drawing the pseudo labels. However, we believe that even if the pseudo label matches the prior distribution, the tail classes will still be difficult to learn because the total weight is too small. Therefore, we propose a pseudo-label regularization technique specially designed for PLL. By punishing the pseudo labels of head classes, our method implements state-of-art under the standardized benchmarks compared to the previous PLL methods.
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is critical to building reliable machine learning systems in the open world. Among the existing OOD detection methods, ReAct is famous for its simplicity and efficiency, and has good theoretical analysis. The gap between ID data and OOD data is enlarged by clipping the larger activation value. But the question is, is this operation optimal? Is there a better way to expand the spacing between ID samples and OOD samples in theory? Driven by these questions, we view the optimal activation function modification from the perspective of functional extremum and propose the Variational Recified Acitvations (VRA) method. In order to make our method easy to practice, we further propose several VRA variants. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on many benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Meanwhile, our method is easy to implement and does not require additional OOD data or fine-tuning process. We can realize OOD detection in only one forward pass.
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is critical to building reliable machine learning systems in the open world. The previous methods either need to use additional data or use the information of training data. The method of using only the parameter information of the model is relatively poor. We propose an efficient method for OOD detection using only model parameter information. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our RG outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by 4.57\% in average AUROC. Meanwhile, our method is easy to implement and does not require additional OOD data or fine-tuning process. We can realize OOD detection in only one forward pass of any pretrained model.
Noisy partial label learning (noisy PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning. Unlike PLL where the ground-truth label must reside in the candidate set, noisy PLL relaxes this constraint and allows the ground-truth label may not be in the candidate set. To address this problem, existing works attempt to detect noisy samples and estimate the ground-truth label for each noisy sample. However, detection errors are inevitable, and these errors will accumulate during training and continuously affect model optimization. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework for noisy PLL, called ``Dynamically Adjusted Label Importance (DALI)''. It aims to reduce the negative impact of detection errors by trading off the initial candidate set and model outputs with theoretical guarantees. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that our DALI succeeds over existing state-of-the-art approaches on noisy PLL. Our code will soon be publicly available.
Partial label learning (PLL) is a typical weakly supervised learning, where each sample is associated with a set of candidate labels. The basic assumption of PLL is that the ground-truth label must reside in the candidate set. However, this assumption may not be satisfied due to the unprofessional judgment of the annotators, thus limiting the practical application of PLL. In this paper, we relax this assumption and focus on a more general problem, noisy PLL, where the ground-truth label may not exist in the candidate set. To address this challenging problem, we further propose a novel framework called "Automatic Refinement Network (ARNet)". Our method consists of multiple rounds. In each round, we purify the noisy samples through two key modules, i.e., noisy sample detection and label correction. To guarantee the performance of these modules, we start with warm-up training and automatically select the appropriate correction epoch. Meanwhile, we exploit data augmentation to further reduce prediction errors in ARNet. Through theoretical analysis, we prove that our method is able to reduce the noise level of the dataset and eventually approximate the Bayes optimal classifier. To verify the effectiveness of ARNet, we conduct experiments on multiple benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our ARNet is superior to existing state-of-the-art approaches in noisy PLL. Our code will be made public soon.