TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition

While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA have effectively addressed GPU memory constraints during fine-tuning, their performance often falls short, especially in multidimensional task scenarios. To address this issue, one straightforward solution is to introduce task-specific LoRA modules as domain experts, leveraging the modeling of multiple experts' capabilities and thus enhancing the general capability of multi-task learning. Despite promising, these additional components often add complexity to the training and inference process, contravening the efficient characterization of PEFT designed for. Considering this, we introduce an innovative PEFT method, TeamLoRA, consisting of a collaboration and competition module for experts, and thus achieving the right balance of effectiveness and efficiency: (i) For collaboration, a novel knowledge-sharing and -organizing mechanism is devised to appropriately reduce the scale of matrix operations, thereby boosting the training and inference speed. (ii) For competition, we propose leveraging a game-theoretic interaction mechanism for experts, encouraging experts to transfer their domain-specific knowledge while facing diverse downstream tasks, and thus enhancing the performance. By doing so, TeamLoRA elegantly connects the experts as a "Team" with internal collaboration and competition, enabling a faster and more accurate PEFT paradigm for multi-task learning. To validate the superiority of TeamLoRA, we curate a comprehensive multi-task evaluation(CME) benchmark to thoroughly assess the capability of multi-task learning. Experiments conducted on our CME and other benchmarks indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of TeamLoRA. Our project is available at https://github.com/Lin-Tianwei/TeamLoRA.

E-CGL: An Efficient Continual Graph Learner

Continual learning has emerged as a crucial paradigm for learning from sequential data while preserving previous knowledge. In the realm of continual graph learning, where graphs continuously evolve based on streaming graph data, continual graph learning presents unique challenges that require adaptive and efficient graph learning methods in addition to the problem of catastrophic forgetting. The first challenge arises from the interdependencies between different graph data, where previous graphs can influence new data distributions. The second challenge lies in the efficiency concern when dealing with large graphs. To addresses these two problems, we produce an Efficient Continual Graph Learner (E-CGL) in this paper. We tackle the interdependencies issue by demonstrating the effectiveness of replay strategies and introducing a combined sampling strategy that considers both node importance and diversity. To overcome the limitation of efficiency, E-CGL leverages a simple yet effective MLP model that shares weights with a GCN during training, achieving acceleration by circumventing the computationally expensive message passing process. Our method comprehensively surpasses nine baselines on four graph continual learning datasets under two settings, meanwhile E-CGL largely reduces the catastrophic forgetting problem down to an average of -1.1%. Additionally, E-CGL achieves an average of 15.83x training time acceleration and 4.89x inference time acceleration across the four datasets. These results indicate that E-CGL not only effectively manages the correlation between different graph data during continual training but also enhances the efficiency of continual learning on large graphs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/aubreygjh/E-CGL.

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey

Recently, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has achieved remarkable success in addressing the challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) without necessitating retraining. By referencing an external knowledge base, RAG refines LLM outputs, effectively mitigating issues such as ``hallucination'', lack of domain-specific knowledge, and outdated information. However, the complex structure of relationships among different entities in databases presents challenges for RAG systems. In response, GraphRAG leverages structural information across entities to enable more precise and comprehensive retrieval, capturing relational knowledge and facilitating more accurate, context-aware responses. Given the novelty and potential of GraphRAG, a systematic review of current technologies is imperative. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of GraphRAG methodologies. We formalize the GraphRAG workflow, encompassing Graph-Based Indexing, Graph-Guided Retrieval, and Graph-Enhanced Generation. We then outline the core technologies and training methods at each stage. Additionally, we examine downstream tasks, application domains, evaluation methodologies, and industrial use cases of GraphRAG. Finally, we explore future research directions to inspire further inquiries and advance progress in the field.

Logic Distillation: Learning from Code Function by Function for Planning and Decision-making

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention owing to their powerful logical reasoning capabilities. Generally, larger LLMs (L-LLMs) that require paid interfaces exhibit significantly superior performance compared to smaller LLMs (S-LLMs) that can be deployed on a variety of devices. Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to empower S-LLMs with the capabilities of L-LLMs, while S-LLMs merely mimic the outputs of L-LLMs, failing to get the powerful logical reasoning capabilities. Consequently, S-LLMs are helpless when it comes to planning and decision-making tasks that require logical reasoning capabilities. To tackle the identified challenges, we propose a novel framework called Logic Distillation (LD). Initially, LD employs L-LLMs to instantiate complex instructions into discrete functions and illustrates their usage to establish a function base. Subsequently, based on the function base, LD fine-tunes S-LLMs to learn the logic employed by L-LLMs in planning and decision-making. During testing, LD utilizes a retriever to identify the top-$K$ relevant functions based on instructions and current states, which will be selected and invoked by S-LLMs. Ultimately, S-LLMs yield planning and decision-making outcomes, function by function. Relevant experiments demonstrate that with the assistance of LD, S-LLMs can achieve outstanding results in planning and decision-making tasks, comparable to, or even surpassing, those of L-LLMs.

IDEAL: Leveraging Infinite and Dynamic Characterizations of Large Language Models for Query-focused Summarization

Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to produce summaries that answer particular questions of interest, enabling greater user control and personalization. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), shows their impressive capability of textual understanding through large-scale pretraining, which implies the great potential of extractive snippet generation. In this paper, we systematically investigated two indispensable characteristics that the LLMs-based QFS models should be harnessed, Lengthy Document Summarization and Efficiently Fine-grained Query-LLM Alignment, respectively. Correspondingly, we propose two modules called Query-aware HyperExpert and Query-focused Infini-attention to access the aforementioned characteristics. These innovations pave the way for broader application and accessibility in the field of QFS technology. Extensive experiments conducted on existing QFS benchmarks indicate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/IDEAL_Summary.

Ask Questions with Double Hints: Visual Question Generation with Answer-awareness and Region-reference

The visual question generation (VQG) task aims to generate human-like questions from an image and potentially other side information (e.g. answer type). Previous works on VQG fall in two aspects: i) They suffer from one image to many questions mapping problem, which leads to the failure of generating referential and meaningful questions from an image. ii) They fail to model complex implicit relations among the visual objects in an image and also overlook potential interactions between the side information and image. To address these limitations, we first propose a novel learning paradigm to generate visual questions with answer-awareness and region-reference. Concretely, we aim to ask the right visual questions with Double Hints - textual answers and visual regions of interests, which could effectively mitigate the existing one-to-many mapping issue. Particularly, we develop a simple methodology to self-learn the visual hints without introducing any additional human annotations. Furthermore, to capture these sophisticated relationships, we propose a new double-hints guided Graph-to-Sequence learning framework, which first models them as a dynamic graph and learns the implicit topology end-to-end, and then utilizes a graph-to-sequence model to generate the questions with double hints. Experimental results demonstrate the priority of our proposed method.

Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is vital for real-world applications, as they combine semantic textual and contextual structural information. Research in this field generally consist of two main perspectives: local-level encoding and global-level aggregating, respectively refer to textual node information unification (e.g., using Language Models) and structure-augmented modeling (e.g., using Graph Neural Networks). Most existing works focus on combining different information levels but overlook the interconnections, i.e., the contextual textual information among nodes, which provides semantic insights to bridge local and global levels. In this paper, we propose GraphBridge, a multi-granularity integration framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information, enhancing fine-grained understanding of TAGs. Besides, to tackle scalability and efficiency challenges, we introduce a graphaware token reduction module. Extensive experiments across various models and datasets show that our method achieves state-of-theart performance, while our graph-aware token reduction module significantly enhances efficiency and solves scalability issues.

Improving Large Models with Small models: Lower Costs and Better Performance

Pretrained large models (PLMs), such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks. However, the significant computational requirements of PLMs have discouraged most product teams from running or fine-tuning them. In such cases, to harness the exceptional performance of PLMs, one must rely on expensive APIs, thereby exacerbating the economic burden. Despite the overall inferior performance of small models, in specific distributions, they can achieve comparable or even superior results. Consequently, some input can be processed exclusively by small models. On the other hand, certain tasks can be broken down into multiple subtasks, some of which can be completed without powerful capabilities. Under these circumstances, small models can handle the simple subtasks, allowing large models to focus on challenging subtasks, thus improving the performance. We propose Data Shunt$^+$ (DS$^+$), a general paradigm for collaboration of small and large models. DS$^+$ not only substantially reduces the cost associated with querying large models but also effectively improves large models' performance. For instance, ChatGPT achieves an accuracy of $94.43\%$ on Amazon Product sentiment analysis, and DS$^+$ achieves an accuracy of $95.64\%$, while the cost has been reduced to only $31.18\%$. Besides, experiments also prove that the proposed collaborative-based paradigm can better inject specific task knowledge into PLMs compared to fine-tuning.

T2S-GPT: Dynamic Vector Quantization for Autoregressive Sign Language Production from Text

In this work, we propose a two-stage sign language production (SLP) paradigm that first encodes sign language sequences into discrete codes and then autoregressively generates sign language from text based on the learned codebook. However, existing vector quantization (VQ) methods are fixed-length encodings, overlooking the uneven information density in sign language, which leads to under-encoding of important regions and over-encoding of unimportant regions. To address this issue, we propose a novel dynamic vector quantization (DVA-VAE) model that can dynamically adjust the encoding length based on the information density in sign language to achieve accurate and compact encoding. Then, a GPT-like model learns to generate code sequences and their corresponding durations from spoken language text. Extensive experiments conducted on the PHOENIX14T dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. To promote sign language research, we propose a new large German sign language dataset, PHOENIX-News, which contains 486 hours of sign language videos, audio, and transcription texts.Experimental analysis on PHOENIX-News shows that the performance of our model can be further improved by increasing the size of the training data. Our project homepage is https://t2sgpt-demo.yinaoxiong.cn.

Auto-Encoding Morph-Tokens for Multimodal LLM

For multimodal LLMs, the synergy of visual comprehension (textual output) and generation (visual output) presents an ongoing challenge. This is due to a conflicting objective: for comprehension, an MLLM needs to abstract the visuals; for generation, it needs to preserve the visuals as much as possible. Thus, the objective is a dilemma for visual-tokens. To resolve the conflict, we propose encoding images into morph-tokens to serve a dual purpose: for comprehension, they act as visual prompts instructing MLLM to generate texts; for generation, they take on a different, non-conflicting role as complete visual-tokens for image reconstruction, where the missing visual cues are recovered by the MLLM. Extensive experiments show that morph-tokens can achieve a new SOTA for multimodal comprehension and generation simultaneously. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/MorphTokens.