Training and Serving System of Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Foundation models (e.g., ChatGPT, DALL-E, PengCheng Mind, PanGu-$\Sigma$) have demonstrated extraordinary performance in key technological areas, such as natural language processing and visual recognition, and have become the mainstream trend of artificial general intelligence. This has led more and more major technology giants to dedicate significant human and financial resources to actively develop their foundation model systems, which drives continuous growth of these models' parameters. As a result, the training and serving of these models have posed significant challenges, including substantial computing power, memory consumption, bandwidth demands, etc. Therefore, employing efficient training and serving strategies becomes particularly crucial. Many researchers have actively explored and proposed effective methods. So, a comprehensive survey of them is essential for system developers and researchers. This paper extensively explores the methods employed in training and serving foundation models from various perspectives. It provides a detailed categorization of these state-of-the-art methods, including finer aspects such as network, computing, and storage. Additionally, the paper summarizes the challenges and presents a perspective on the future development direction of foundation model systems. Through comprehensive discussion and analysis, it hopes to provide a solid theoretical basis and practical guidance for future research and applications, promoting continuous innovation and development in foundation model systems.

Decoupling Representation and Knowledge for Few-Shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling

Few-shot intent classification and slot filling are important but challenging tasks due to the scarcity of finely labeled data. Therefore, current works first train a model on source domains with sufficiently labeled data, and then transfer the model to target domains where only rarely labeled data is available. However, experience transferring as a whole usually suffers from gaps that exist among source domains and target domains. For instance, transferring domain-specific-knowledge-related experience is difficult. To tackle this problem, we propose a new method that explicitly decouples the transferring of general-semantic-representation-related experience and the domain-specific-knowledge-related experience. Specifically, for domain-specific-knowledge-related experience, we design two modules to capture intent-slot relation and slot-slot relation respectively. Extensive experiments on Snips and FewJoint datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The method improves the joint accuracy metric from 27.72% to 42.20% in the 1-shot setting, and from 46.54% to 60.79% in the 5-shot setting.

DVIS++: Improved Decoupled Framework for Universal Video Segmentation

We present the \textbf{D}ecoupled \textbf{VI}deo \textbf{S}egmentation (DVIS) framework, a novel approach for the challenging task of universal video segmentation, including video instance segmentation (VIS), video semantic segmentation (VSS), and video panoptic segmentation (VPS). Unlike previous methods that model video segmentation in an end-to-end manner, our approach decouples video segmentation into three cascaded sub-tasks: segmentation, tracking, and refinement. This decoupling design allows for simpler and more effective modeling of the spatio-temporal representations of objects, especially in complex scenes and long videos. Accordingly, we introduce two novel components: the referring tracker and the temporal refiner. These components track objects frame by frame and model spatio-temporal representations based on pre-aligned features. To improve the tracking capability of DVIS, we propose a denoising training strategy and introduce contrastive learning, resulting in a more robust framework named DVIS++. Furthermore, we evaluate DVIS++ in various settings, including open vocabulary and using a frozen pre-trained backbone. By integrating CLIP with DVIS++, we present OV-DVIS++, the first open-vocabulary universal video segmentation framework. We conduct extensive experiments on six mainstream benchmarks, including the VIS, VSS, and VPS datasets. Using a unified architecture, DVIS++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art specialized methods on these benchmarks in both close- and open-vocabulary settings. Code:~\url{https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS_Plus}.

PAD: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Patchwise-Scale Adapter for Infrared Images

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for RGB images has achieved significant success, yet there is still limited research on SSL for infrared images, primarily due to three prominent challenges: 1) the lack of a suitable large-scale infrared pre-training dataset, 2) the distinctiveness of non-iconic infrared images rendering common pre-training tasks like masked image modeling (MIM) less effective, and 3) the scarcity of fine-grained textures making it particularly challenging to learn general image features. To address these issues, we construct a Multi-Scene Infrared Pre-training (MSIP) dataset comprising 178,756 images, and introduce object-sensitive random RoI cropping, an image preprocessing method, to tackle the challenge posed by non-iconic images. To alleviate the impact of weak textures on feature learning, we propose a pre-training paradigm called Pre-training with ADapter (PAD), which uses adapters to learn domain-specific features while freezing parameters pre-trained on ImageNet to retain the general feature extraction capability. This new paradigm is applicable to any transformer-based SSL method. Furthermore, to achieve more flexible coordination between pre-trained and newly-learned features in different layers and patches, a patchwise-scale adapter with dynamically learnable scale factors is introduced. Extensive experiments on three downstream tasks show that PAD, with only 1.23M pre-trainable parameters, outperforms other baseline paradigms including continual full pre-training on MSIP. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/casiatao/PAD.

Technical Report for Argoverse Challenges on Unified Sensor-based Detection, Tracking, and Forecasting

This report presents our Le3DE2E solution for unified sensor-based detection, tracking, and forecasting in Argoverse Challenges at CVPR 2023 Workshop on Autonomous Driving (WAD). We propose a unified network that incorporates three tasks, including detection, tracking, and forecasting. This solution adopts a strong Bird's Eye View (BEV) encoder with spatial and temporal fusion and generates unified representations for multi-tasks. The solution was tested in the Argoverse 2 sensor dataset to evaluate the detection, tracking, and forecasting of 26 object categories. We achieved 1st place in Detection, Tracking, and Forecasting on the E2E Forecasting track in Argoverse Challenges at CVPR 2023 WAD.

Aspect-based Meeting Transcript Summarization: A Two-Stage Approach with Weak Supervision on Sentence Classification

Aspect-based meeting transcript summarization aims to produce multiple summaries, each focusing on one aspect of content in a meeting transcript. It is challenging as sentences related to different aspects can mingle together, and those relevant to a specific aspect can be scattered throughout the long transcript of a meeting. The traditional summarization methods produce one summary mixing information of all aspects, which cannot deal with the above challenges of aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. To select the input content related to specific aspects, we train a sentence classifier on a dataset constructed from the AMI corpus with pseudo-labeling. Then we merge the sentences selected for a specific aspect as the input for the summarizer to produce the aspect-based summary. Experimental results on the AMI corpus outperform many strong baselines, which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.

JPAVE: A Generation and Classification-based Model for Joint Product Attribute Prediction and Value Extraction

Product attribute value extraction is an important task in e-Commerce which can help several downstream applications such as product search and recommendation. Most previous models handle this task using sequence labeling or question answering method which rely on the sequential position information of values in the product text and are vulnerable to data discrepancy between training and testing. This limits their generalization ability to real-world scenario in which each product can have multiple descriptions across various shopping platforms with different composition of text and style. They also have limited zero-shot ability to new values. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning model with value generation/classification and attribute prediction called JPAVE to predict values without the necessity of position information of values in the text. Furthermore, the copy mechanism in value generator and the value attention module in value classifier help our model address the data discrepancy issue by only focusing on the relevant part of input text and ignoring other information which causes the discrepancy issue such as sentence structure in the text. Besides, two variants of our model are designed for open-world and closed-world scenarios. In addition, copy mechanism introduced in the first variant based on value generation can improve its zero-shot ability for identifying unseen values. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with strong baselines and its generalization ability of predicting new values.

CoF-CoT: Enhancing Large Language Models with Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multi-domain NLU Tasks

While Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored. Motivated by multi-step reasoning of LLMs, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought (CoF-CoT) approach that breaks down NLU tasks into multiple reasoning steps where LLMs can learn to acquire and leverage essential concepts to solve tasks from different granularities. Moreover, we propose leveraging semantic-based Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) structured knowledge as an intermediate step to capture the nuances and diverse structures of utterances, and to understand connections between their varying levels of granularity. Our proposed approach is demonstrated effective in assisting the LLMs adapt to the multi-grained NLU tasks under both zero-shot and few-shot multi-domain settings.

DexCatch: Learning to Catch Arbitrary Objects with Dexterous Hands

Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a crucial area of research in robotics. Current research focuses on improving the success rate of pick-and-place tasks. Compared with pick-and-place, throw-catching behavior has the potential to increase picking speed without transporting objects to their destination. However, dynamic dexterous manipulation poses a major challenge for stable control due to a large number of dynamic contacts. In this paper, we propose a Stability-Constrained Reinforcement Learning (SCRL) algorithm to learn to catch diverse objects with dexterous hands. The SCRL algorithm outperforms baselines by a large margin, and the learned policies show strong zero-shot transfer performance on unseen objects. Remarkably, even though the object in a hand facing sideward is extremely unstable due to the lack of support from the palm, our method can still achieve a high level of success in the most challenging task. Video demonstrations of learned behaviors and the code can be found on the supplementary website.

Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on a variety of natural language tasks based on just a few examples of natural language instructions, reducing the need for extensive feature engineering. However, most powerful LLMs are closed-source or limited in their capability for languages other than English. In this technical report, we present Baichuan 2, a series of large-scale multilingual language models containing 7 billion and 13 billion parameters, trained from scratch, on 2.6 trillion tokens. Baichuan 2 matches or outperforms other open-source models of similar size on public benchmarks like MMLU, CMMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Furthermore, Baichuan 2 excels in vertical domains such as medicine and law. We will release all pre-training model checkpoints to benefit the research community in better understanding the training dynamics of Baichuan 2.