Deploying machine learning (ML) on diverse computing platforms is crucial to accelerate and broaden their applications. However, it presents significant software engineering challenges due to the fast evolution of models, especially the recent Large Language Models (LLMs), and the emergence of new computing platforms. Current ML frameworks are primarily engineered for CPU and CUDA platforms, leaving a big gap in enabling emerging ones like Metal, Vulkan, and WebGPU. While a traditional bottom-up development pipeline fails to close the gap timely, we introduce TapML, a top-down approach and tooling designed to streamline the deployment of ML systems on diverse platforms, optimized for developer productivity. Unlike traditional bottom-up methods, which involve extensive manual testing and debugging, TapML automates unit testing through test carving and adopts a migration-based strategy for gradually offloading model computations from mature source platforms to emerging target platforms. By leveraging realistic inputs and remote connections for gradual target offloading, TapML accelerates the validation and minimizes debugging scopes, significantly optimizing development efforts. TapML was developed and applied through a year-long, real-world effort that successfully deployed significant emerging models and platforms. Through serious deployments of 82 emerging models in 17 distinct architectures across 5 emerging platforms, we showcase the effectiveness of TapML in enhancing developer productivity while ensuring model reliability and efficiency. Furthermore, we summarize comprehensive case studies from our real-world development, offering best practices for developing emerging ML systems.
Aligning text-to-image diffusion model (T2I) with preference has been gaining increasing research attention. While prior works exist on directly optimizing T2I by preference data, these methods are developed under the bandit assumption of a latent reward on the entire diffusion reverse chain, while ignoring the sequential nature of the generation process. From literature, this may harm the efficacy and efficiency of alignment. In this paper, we take on a finer dense reward perspective and derive a tractable alignment objective that emphasizes the initial steps of the T2I reverse chain. In particular, we introduce temporal discounting into the DPO-style explicit-reward-free loss, to break the temporal symmetry therein and suit the T2I generation hierarchy. In experiments on single and multiple prompt generation, our method is competitive with strong relevant baselines, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Further studies are conducted to illustrate the insight of our approach.
Low-dose PET offers a valuable means of minimizing radiation exposure in PET imaging. However, the prevalent practice of employing additional CT scans for generating attenuation maps (u-map) for PET attenuation correction significantly elevates radiation doses. To address this concern and further mitigate radiation exposure in low-dose PET exams, we propose POUR-Net - an innovative population-prior-aided over-under-representation network that aims for high-quality attenuation map generation from low-dose PET. First, POUR-Net incorporates an over-under-representation network (OUR-Net) to facilitate efficient feature extraction, encompassing both low-resolution abstracted and fine-detail features, for assisting deep generation on the full-resolution level. Second, complementing OUR-Net, a population prior generation machine (PPGM) utilizing a comprehensive CT-derived u-map dataset, provides additional prior information to aid OUR-Net generation. The integration of OUR-Net and PPGM within a cascade framework enables iterative refinement of $\mu$-map generation, resulting in the production of high-quality $\mu$-maps. Experimental results underscore the effectiveness of POUR-Net, showing it as a promising solution for accurate CT-free low-count PET attenuation correction, which also surpasses the performance of previous baseline methods.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), generative large language models (LLMs) stand at the forefront, revolutionizing how we interact with our data. However, the computational intensity and memory consumption of deploying these models present substantial challenges in terms of serving efficiency, particularly in scenarios demanding low latency and high throughput. This survey addresses the imperative need for efficient LLM serving methodologies from a machine learning system (MLSys) research perspective, standing at the crux of advanced AI innovations and practical system optimizations. We provide in-depth analysis, covering a spectrum of solutions, ranging from cutting-edge algorithmic modifications to groundbreaking changes in system designs. The survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state and future directions in efficient LLM serving, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in overcoming the barriers of effective LLM deployment, thereby reshaping the future of AI.
In light of the remarkable success of in-context learning in large language models, its potential extension to the vision domain, particularly with visual foundation models like Stable Diffusion, has sparked considerable interest. Existing approaches in visual in-context learning frequently face hurdles such as expensive pretraining, limiting frameworks, inadequate visual comprehension, and limited adaptability to new tasks. In response to these challenges, we introduce improved Prompt Diffusion (iPromptDiff) in this study. iPromptDiff integrates an end-to-end trained vision encoder that converts visual context into an embedding vector. This vector is subsequently used to modulate the token embeddings of text prompts. We show that a diffusion-based vision foundation model, when equipped with this visual context-modulated text guidance and a standard ControlNet structure, exhibits versatility and robustness across a variety of training tasks and excels in in-context learning for novel vision tasks, such as normal-to-image or image-to-line transformations. The effectiveness of these capabilities relies heavily on a deep visual understanding, which is achieved through relevant visual demonstrations processed by our proposed in-context learning architecture.
The growing demand for Large Language Models (LLMs) in applications such as content generation, intelligent chatbots, and sentiment analysis poses considerable challenges for LLM service providers. To efficiently use GPU resources and boost throughput, batching multiple requests has emerged as a popular paradigm; to further speed up batching, LLM quantization techniques reduce memory consumption and increase computing capacity. However, prevalent quantization schemes (e.g., 8-bit weight-activation quantization) cannot fully leverage the capabilities of modern GPUs, such as 4-bit integer operators, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To maximize LLMs' serving throughput, we introduce Atom, a low-bit quantization method that achieves high throughput improvements with negligible accuracy loss. Atom significantly boosts serving throughput by using low-bit operators and considerably reduces memory consumption via low-bit quantization. It attains high accuracy by applying a novel mixed-precision and fine-grained quantization process. We evaluate Atom on 4-bit weight-activation quantization setups in the serving context. Atom improves end-to-end throughput by up to $7.73\times$ compared to the FP16 and by $2.53\times$ compared to INT8 quantization, while maintaining the same latency target.
Dynamic shape computations have become critical in modern machine learning workloads, especially in emerging large language models. The success of these models has driven demand for deploying them to a diverse set of backend environments. In this paper, we present Relax, a compiler abstraction for optimizing end-to-end dynamic machine learning workloads. Relax introduces first-class symbolic shape annotations to track dynamic shape computations globally across the program. It also introduces a cross-level abstraction that encapsulates computational graphs, loop-level tensor programs, and library calls in a single representation to enable cross-level optimizations. We build an end-to-end compilation framework using the proposed approach to optimize dynamic shape models. Experimental results on large language models show that Relax delivers performance competitive with state-of-the-art hand-optimized systems across platforms and enables deployment of emerging dynamic models to a broader set of environments, including mobile phones, embedded devices, and web browsers.
We introduce beta diffusion, a novel generative modeling method that integrates demasking and denoising to generate data within bounded ranges. Using scaled and shifted beta distributions, beta diffusion utilizes multiplicative transitions over time to create both forward and reverse diffusion processes, maintaining beta distributions in both the forward marginals and the reverse conditionals, given the data at any point in time. Unlike traditional diffusion-based generative models relying on additive Gaussian noise and reweighted evidence lower bounds (ELBOs), beta diffusion is multiplicative and optimized with KL-divergence upper bounds (KLUBs) derived from the convexity of the KL divergence. We demonstrate that the proposed KLUBs are more effective for optimizing beta diffusion compared to negative ELBOs, which can also be derived as the KLUBs of the same KL divergence with its two arguments swapped. The loss function of beta diffusion, expressed in terms of Bregman divergence, further supports the efficacy of KLUBs for optimization. Experimental results on both synthetic data and natural images demonstrate the unique capabilities of beta diffusion in generative modeling of range-bounded data and validate the effectiveness of KLUBs in optimizing diffusion models, thereby making them valuable additions to the family of diffusion-based generative models and the optimization techniques used to train them.