Unlocking Data-free Low-bit Quantization with Matrix Decomposition for KV Cache Compression

Key-value~(KV) caching is an important technique to accelerate the inference of large language models~(LLMs), but incurs significant memory overhead. To compress the size of KV cache, existing methods often compromise precision or require extra data for calibration, limiting their practicality in LLM deployment. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{DecoQuant}, a novel data-free low-bit quantization technique based on tensor decomposition methods, to effectively compress KV cache. Our core idea is to adjust the outlier distribution of the original matrix by performing tensor decomposition, so that the quantization difficulties are migrated from the matrix to decomposed local tensors. Specially, we find that outliers mainly concentrate on small local tensors, while large tensors tend to have a narrower value range. Based on this finding, we propose to apply low-bit quantization to the large tensor, while maintaining high-precision representation for the small tensor. Furthermore, we utilize the proposed quantization method to compress the KV cache of LLMs to accelerate the inference and develop an efficient dequantization kernel tailored specifically for DecoQuant. Through extensive experiments, DecoQuant demonstrates remarkable efficiency gains, showcasing up to a $\sim$75\% reduction in memory footprint while maintaining comparable generation quality.

How ChatGPT is Solving Vulnerability Management Problem

Recently, ChatGPT has attracted great attention from the code analysis domain. Prior works show that ChatGPT has the capabilities of processing foundational code analysis tasks, such as abstract syntax tree generation, which indicates the potential of using ChatGPT to comprehend code syntax and static behaviors. However, it is unclear whether ChatGPT can complete more complicated real-world vulnerability management tasks, such as the prediction of security relevance and patch correctness, which require an all-encompassing understanding of various aspects, including code syntax, program semantics, and related manual comments. In this paper, we explore ChatGPT's capabilities on 6 tasks involving the complete vulnerability management process with a large-scale dataset containing 78,445 samples. For each task, we compare ChatGPT against SOTA approaches, investigate the impact of different prompts, and explore the difficulties. The results suggest promising potential in leveraging ChatGPT to assist vulnerability management. One notable example is ChatGPT's proficiency in tasks like generating titles for software bug reports. Furthermore, our findings reveal the difficulties encountered by ChatGPT and shed light on promising future directions. For instance, directly providing random demonstration examples in the prompt cannot consistently guarantee good performance in vulnerability management. By contrast, leveraging ChatGPT in a self-heuristic way -- extracting expertise from demonstration examples itself and integrating the extracted expertise in the prompt is a promising research direction. Besides, ChatGPT may misunderstand and misuse the information in the prompt. Consequently, effectively guiding ChatGPT to focus on helpful information rather than the irrelevant content is still an open problem.

Relation Extraction Model Based on Semantic Enhancement Mechanism

Relational extraction is one of the basic tasks related to information extraction in the field of natural language processing, and is an important link and core task in the fields of information extraction, natural language understanding, and information retrieval. None of the existing relation extraction methods can effectively solve the problem of triple overlap. The CasAug model proposed in this paper based on the CasRel framework combined with the semantic enhancement mechanism can solve this problem to a certain extent. The CasAug model enhances the semantics of the identified possible subjects by adding a semantic enhancement mechanism, First, based on the semantic coding of possible subjects, pre-classify the possible subjects, and then combine the subject lexicon to calculate the semantic similarity to obtain the similar vocabulary of possible subjects. According to the similar vocabulary obtained, each word in different relations is calculated through the attention mechanism. For the contribution of the possible subject, finally combine the relationship pre-classification results to weight the enhanced semantics of each relationship to find the enhanced semantics of the possible subject, and send the enhanced semantics combined with the possible subject to the object and relationship extraction module. Complete the final relation triplet extraction. The experimental results show that, compared with the baseline model, the CasAug model proposed in this paper has improved the effect of relation extraction, and CasAug's ability to deal with overlapping problems and extract multiple relations is also better than the baseline model, indicating that the semantic enhancement mechanism proposed in this paper It can further reduce the judgment of redundant relations and alleviate the problem of triple overlap.

CP-BCS: Binary Code Summarization Guided by Control Flow Graph and Pseudo Code

Automatically generating function summaries for binaries is an extremely valuable but challenging task, since it involves translating the execution behavior and semantics of the low-level language (assembly code) into human-readable natural language. However, most current works on understanding assembly code are oriented towards generating function names, which involve numerous abbreviations that make them still confusing. To bridge this gap, we focus on generating complete summaries for binary functions, especially for stripped binary (no symbol table and debug information in reality). To fully exploit the semantics of assembly code, we present a control flow graph and pseudo code guided binary code summarization framework called CP-BCS. CP-BCS utilizes a bidirectional instruction-level control flow graph and pseudo code that incorporates expert knowledge to learn the comprehensive binary function execution behavior and logic semantics. We evaluate CP-BCS on 3 different binary optimization levels (O1, O2, and O3) for 3 different computer architectures (X86, X64, and ARM). The evaluation results demonstrate CP-BCS is superior and significantly improves the efficiency of reverse engineering.

Do Emergent Abilities Exist in Quantized Large Language Models: An Empirical Study

Despite the superior performance, Large Language Models~(LLMs) require significant computational resources for deployment and use. To overcome this issue, quantization methods have been widely applied to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs as well as increasing the inference rate. However, a major challenge is that low-bit quantization methods often lead to performance degradation. It is important to understand how quantization impacts the capacity of LLMs. Different from previous studies focused on overall performance, this work aims to investigate the impact of quantization on \emph{emergent abilities}, which are important characteristics that distinguish LLMs from small language models. Specially, we examine the abilities of in-context learning, chain-of-thought reasoning, and instruction-following in quantized LLMs. Our empirical experiments show that these emergent abilities still exist in 4-bit quantization models, while 2-bit models encounter severe performance degradation on the test of these abilities. To improve the performance of low-bit models, we conduct two special experiments: (1) fine-gained impact analysis that studies which components (or substructures) are more sensitive to quantization, and (2) performance compensation through model fine-tuning. Our work derives a series of important findings to understand the impact of quantization on emergent abilities, and sheds lights on the possibilities of extremely low-bit quantization for LLMs.

A semantically enhanced dual encoder for aspect sentiment triplet extraction

Aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) is a crucial subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) that aims to comprehensively identify sentiment triplets. Previous research has focused on enhancing ASTE through innovative table-filling strategies. However, these approaches often overlook the multi-perspective nature of language expressions, resulting in a loss of valuable interaction information between aspects and opinions. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that leverages both a basic encoder, primarily based on BERT, and a particular encoder comprising a Bi-LSTM network and graph convolutional network (GCN ). The basic encoder captures the surface-level semantics of linguistic expressions, while the particular encoder extracts deeper semantics, including syntactic and lexical information. By modeling the dependency tree of comments and considering the part-of-speech and positional information of words, we aim to capture semantics that are more relevant to the underlying intentions of the sentences. An interaction strategy combines the semantics learned by the two encoders, enabling the fusion of multiple perspectives and facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of aspect--opinion relationships. Experiments conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed framework.

Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization

Automatically generating human-readable text describing the functionality of a program is the intent of source code summarization. Although Neural Language Models achieve significant performance in this field, an emerging trend is combining neural models with external knowledge. Most previous approaches rely on the sentence-level retrieval and combination paradigm (retrieval of similar code snippets and use of the corresponding code and summary pairs) on the encoder side. However, this paradigm is coarse-grained and cannot directly take advantage of the high-quality retrieved summary tokens on the decoder side. In this paper, we explore a fine-grained token-level retrieval-augmented mechanism on the decoder side to help the vanilla neural model generate a better code summary. Furthermore, to mitigate the limitation of token-level retrieval on capturing contextual code semantics, we propose to integrate code semantics into summary tokens. Extensive experiments and human evaluation reveal that our token-level retrieval-augmented approach significantly improves performance and is more interpretive.

A Survey of Large Language Models

Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach, language modeling has been widely studied for language understanding and generation in the past two decades, evolving from statistical language models to neural language models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks. Since researchers have found that model scaling can lead to performance improvement, they further study the scaling effect by increasing the model size to an even larger size. Interestingly, when the parameter scale exceeds a certain level, these enlarged language models not only achieve a significant performance improvement but also show some special abilities that are not present in small-scale language models. To discriminate the difference in parameter scale, the research community has coined the term large language models (LLM) for the PLMs of significant size. Recently, the research on LLMs has been largely advanced by both academia and industry, and a remarkable progress is the launch of ChatGPT, which has attracted widespread attention from society. The technical evolution of LLMs has been making an important impact on the entire AI community, which would revolutionize the way how we develop and use AI algorithms. In this survey, we review the recent advances of LLMs by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques. In particular, we focus on four major aspects of LLMs, namely pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization, and capacity evaluation. Besides, we also summarize the available resources for developing LLMs and discuss the remaining issues for future directions.

Scaling Pre-trained Language Models to Deeper via Parameter-efficient Architecture

In this paper, we propose a highly parameter-efficient approach to scaling pre-trained language models (PLMs) to a deeper model depth. Unlike prior work that shares all parameters or uses extra blocks, we design a more capable parameter-sharing architecture based on matrix product operator (MPO). MPO decomposition can reorganize and factorize the information of a parameter matrix into two parts: the major part that contains the major information (central tensor) and the supplementary part that only has a small proportion of parameters (auxiliary tensors). Based on such a decomposition, our architecture shares the central tensor across all layers for reducing the model size and meanwhile keeps layer-specific auxiliary tensors (also using adapters) for enhancing the adaptation flexibility. To improve the model training, we further propose a stable initialization algorithm tailored for the MPO-based architecture. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed model in reducing the model size and achieving highly competitive performance.

TikTalk: A Multi-Modal Dialogue Dataset for Real-World Chitchat

We present a novel multi-modal chitchat dialogue dataset-TikTalk aimed at facilitating the research of intelligent chatbots. It consists of the videos and corresponding dialogues users generate on video social applications. In contrast to existing multi-modal dialogue datasets, we construct dialogue corpora based on video comment-reply pairs, which is more similar to chitchat in real-world dialogue scenarios. Our dialogue context includes three modalities: text, vision, and audio. Compared with previous image-based dialogue datasets, the richer sources of context in TikTalk lead to a greater diversity of conversations. TikTalk contains over 38K videos and 367K dialogues. Data analysis shows that responses in TikTalk are in correlation with various contexts and external knowledge. It poses a great challenge for the deep understanding of multi-modal information and the generation of responses. We evaluate several baselines on three types of automatic metrics and conduct case studies. Experimental results demonstrate that there is still a large room for future improvement on TikTalk. Our dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/RUC-AIMind/TikTalk}.