AuG-KD: Anchor-Based Mixup Generation for Out-of-Domain Knowledge Distillation

Due to privacy or patent concerns, a growing number of large models are released without granting access to their training data, making transferring their knowledge inefficient and problematic. In response, Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) methods have emerged as direct solutions. However, simply adopting models derived from DFKD for real-world applications suffers significant performance degradation, due to the discrepancy between teachers' training data and real-world scenarios (student domain). The degradation stems from the portions of teachers' knowledge that are not applicable to the student domain. They are specific to the teacher domain and would undermine students' performance. Hence, selectively transferring teachers' appropriate knowledge becomes the primary challenge in DFKD. In this work, we propose a simple but effective method AuG-KD. It utilizes an uncertainty-guided and sample-specific anchor to align student-domain data with the teacher domain and leverages a generative method to progressively trade off the learning process between OOD knowledge distillation and domain-specific information learning via mixup learning. Extensive experiments in 3 datasets and 8 settings demonstrate the stability and superiority of our approach. Code available at https://github.com/IshiKura-a/AuG-KD .

ModelGPT: Unleashing LLM's Capabilities for Tailored Model Generation

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized various sectors by automating routine tasks, marking a step toward the realization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, they still struggle to accommodate the diverse and specific needs of users and simplify the utilization of AI models for the average user. In response, we propose ModelGPT, a novel framework designed to determine and generate AI models specifically tailored to the data or task descriptions provided by the user, leveraging the capabilities of LLMs. Given user requirements, ModelGPT is able to provide tailored models at most 270x faster than the previous paradigms (e.g. all-parameter or LoRA finetuning). Comprehensive experiments on NLP, CV, and Tabular datasets attest to the effectiveness of our framework in making AI models more accessible and user-friendly. Our code is available at https://github.com/IshiKura-a/ModelGPT.

Sim-GPT: Text Similarity via GPT Annotated Data

Due to the lack of a large collection of high-quality labeled sentence pairs with textual similarity scores, existing approaches for Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) mostly rely on unsupervised techniques or training signals that are only partially correlated with textual similarity, e.g., NLI-based datasets. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose the strategy of measuring text similarity via GPT annotated data (Sim-GPT for short). The core idea of Sim-GPT is to generate data with STS labels using GPT-4, based on which an STS model is trained. Sim-GPT framework utilizes LLMs to provide a substantial amount of reliable annotated data filling the gap of the lack of training signals for STS. Sim-GPT is trained on a one-time generated dataset using BERT or RoBERTa as the backbone, which offers long-term savings in cost and speed compared to repeatedly invoking LLMs for each sentence pair. Trained on the examples from GPT-4 (371K), Sim-GPT yields SOTA performances on the widely-used seven STS benchmarks: +0.99 over supervised-SimCSE, and +0.42 over the current SOTA PromCSE model. To encourage further advancements of the field, we release both models and the 371K annotated examples from GPT-4. Code, models and annotated data are available at: https://github.com/ShuheWang1998/Sim-GPT.

Music-PAW: Learning Music Representations via Hierarchical Part-whole Interaction and Contrast

The excellent performance of recent self-supervised learning methods on various downstream tasks has attracted great attention from academia and industry. Some recent research efforts have been devoted to self-supervised music representation learning. Nevertheless, most of them learn to represent equally-sized music clips in the waveform or a spectrogram. Despite being effective in some tasks, learning music representations in such a manner largely neglect the inherent part-whole hierarchies of music. Due to the hierarchical nature of the auditory cortex [24], understanding the bottom-up structure of music, i.e., how different parts constitute the whole at different levels, is essential for music understanding and representation learning. This work pursues hierarchical music representation learning and introduces the Music-PAW framework, which enables feature interactions of cropped music clips with part-whole hierarchies. From a technical perspective, we propose a transformer-based part-whole interaction module to progressively reason the structural relationships between part-whole music clips at adjacent levels. Besides, to create a multi-hierarchy representation space, we devise a hierarchical contrastive learning objective to align part-whole music representations in adjacent hierarchies. The merits of audio representation learning from part-whole hierarchies have been validated on various downstream tasks, including music classification (single-label and multi-label), cover song identification and acoustic scene classification.

Sentiment Analysis through LLM Negotiations

A standard paradigm for sentiment analysis is to rely on a singular LLM and makes the decision in a single round under the framework of in-context learning. This framework suffers the key disadvantage that the single-turn output generated by a single LLM might not deliver the perfect decision, just as humans sometimes need multiple attempts to get things right. This is especially true for the task of sentiment analysis where deep reasoning is required to address the complex linguistic phenomenon (e.g., clause composition, irony, etc) in the input. To address this issue, this paper introduces a multi-LLM negotiation framework for sentiment analysis. The framework consists of a reasoning-infused generator to provide decision along with rationale, a explanation-deriving discriminator to evaluate the credibility of the generator. The generator and the discriminator iterate until a consensus is reached. The proposed framework naturally addressed the aforementioned challenge, as we are able to take the complementary abilities of two LLMs, have them use rationale to persuade each other for correction. Experiments on a wide range of sentiment analysis benchmarks (SST-2, Movie Review, Twitter, yelp, amazon, IMDB) demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach: it consistently yields better performances than the ICL baseline across all benchmarks, and even superior performances to supervised baselines on the Twitter and movie review datasets.

Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities and controllability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction tuning refers to the process of further training LLMs on a dataset consisting of \textsc{(instruction, output)} pairs in a supervised fashion, which bridges the gap between the next-word prediction objective of LLMs and the users' objective of having LLMs adhere to human instructions. In this work, we make a systematic review of the literature, including the general methodology of IT, the construction of IT datasets, the training of IT models, and applications to different modalities, domains and applications, along with an analysis on aspects that influence the outcome of IT (e.g., generation of instruction outputs, size of the instruction dataset, etc). We also review the potential pitfalls of IT along with criticism against it, along with efforts pointing out current deficiencies of existing strategies and suggest some avenues for fruitful research.

DisCover: Disentangled Music Representation Learning for Cover Song Identification

In the field of music information retrieval (MIR), cover song identification (CSI) is a challenging task that aims to identify cover versions of a query song from a massive collection. Existing works still suffer from high intra-song variances and inter-song correlations, due to the entangled nature of version-specific and version-invariant factors in their modeling. In this work, we set the goal of disentangling version-specific and version-invariant factors, which could make it easier for the model to learn invariant music representations for unseen query songs. We analyze the CSI task in a disentanglement view with the causal graph technique, and identify the intra-version and inter-version effects biasing the invariant learning. To block these effects, we propose the disentangled music representation learning framework (DisCover) for CSI. DisCover consists of two critical components: (1) Knowledge-guided Disentanglement Module (KDM) and (2) Gradient-based Adversarial Disentanglement Module (GADM), which block intra-version and inter-version biased effects, respectively. KDM minimizes the mutual information between the learned representations and version-variant factors that are identified with prior domain knowledge. GADM identifies version-variant factors by simulating the representation transitions between intra-song versions, and exploits adversarial distillation for effect blocking. Extensive comparisons with best-performing methods and in-depth analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of DisCover and the and necessity of disentanglement for CSI.

Multi-task Bioassay Pre-training for Protein-ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLBA) prediction is the fundamental task in drug discovery. Recently, various deep learning-based models predict binding affinity by incorporating the three-dimensional structure of protein-ligand complexes as input and achieving astounding progress. However, due to the scarcity of high-quality training data, the generalization ability of current models is still limited. In addition, different bioassays use varying affinity measurement labels (i.e., IC50, Ki, Kd), and different experimental conditions inevitably introduce systematic noise, which poses a significant challenge to constructing high-precision affinity prediction models. To address these issues, we (1) propose Multi-task Bioassay Pre-training (MBP), a pre-training framework for structure-based PLBA prediction; (2) construct a pre-training dataset called ChEMBL-Dock with more than 300k experimentally measured affinity labels and about 2.8M docked three-dimensional structures. By introducing multi-task pre-training to treat the prediction of different affinity labels as different tasks and classifying relative rankings between samples from the same bioassay, MBP learns robust and transferrable structural knowledge from our new ChEMBL-Dock dataset with varied and noisy labels. Experiments substantiate the capability of MBP as a general framework that can improve and be tailored to mainstream structure-based PLBA prediction tasks. To the best of our knowledge, MBP is the first affinity pre-training model and shows great potential for future development.

Denoising Multi-modal Sequential Recommenders with Contrastive Learning

There is a rapidly-growing research interest in engaging users with multi-modal data for accurate user modeling on recommender systems. Existing multimedia recommenders have achieved substantial improvements by incorporating various modalities and devising delicate modules. However, when users decide to interact with items, most of them do not fully read the content of all modalities. We refer to modalities that directly cause users' behaviors as point-of-interests, which are important aspects to capture users' interests. In contrast, modalities that do not cause users' behaviors are potential noises and might mislead the learning of a recommendation model. Not surprisingly, little research in the literature has been devoted to denoising such potential noises due to the inaccessibility of users' explicit feedback on their point-of-interests. To bridge the gap, we propose a weakly-supervised framework based on contrastive learning for denoising multi-modal recommenders (dubbed Demure). In a weakly-supervised manner, Demure circumvents the requirement of users' explicit feedback and identifies the noises by analyzing the modalities of all interacted items from a given user.