Communication-Efficient Large-Scale Distributed Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

With the rapid growth in the volume of data sets, models, and devices in the domain of deep learning, there is increasing attention on large-scale distributed deep learning. In contrast to traditional distributed deep learning, the large-scale scenario poses new challenges that include fault tolerance, scalability of algorithms and infrastructures, and heterogeneity in data sets, models, and resources. Due to intensive synchronization of models and sharing of data across GPUs and computing nodes during distributed training and inference processes, communication efficiency becomes the bottleneck for achieving high performance at a large scale. This article surveys the literature over the period of 2018-2023 on algorithms and technologies aimed at achieving efficient communication in large-scale distributed deep learning at various levels, including algorithms, frameworks, and infrastructures. Specifically, we first introduce efficient algorithms for model synchronization and communication data compression in the context of large-scale distributed training. Next, we introduce efficient strategies related to resource allocation and task scheduling for use in distributed training and inference. After that, we present the latest technologies pertaining to modern communication infrastructures used in distributed deep learning with a focus on examining the impact of the communication overhead in a large-scale and heterogeneous setting. Finally, we conduct a case study on the distributed training of large language models at a large scale to illustrate how to apply these technologies in real cases. This article aims to offer researchers a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape of large-scale distributed deep learning and to reveal promising future research directions toward communication-efficient solutions in this scope.

CLHA: A Simple yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a crucial technique in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, ensuring these LLMs behave in beneficial and comprehensible ways to users. However, a longstanding challenge in human alignment techniques based on reinforcement learning lies in their inherent complexity and difficulty in training. To address this challenge, we present a simple yet effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (CLHA) to align LLMs with human preferences directly. CLHA employs a novel rescoring strategy to evaluate the noise within the data by considering its inherent quality and dynamically adjusting the training process. Simultaneously, CLHA utilizes pairwise contrastive loss and adaptive supervised fine-tuning loss to adaptively modify the likelihood of generating responses, ensuring enhanced alignment with human preferences. Using advanced methods, CLHA surpasses other algorithms, showcasing superior performance in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used ``Helpful and Harmless'' dataset.

MoZIP: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Large Language Models in Intellectual Property

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, there is limited understanding of how well LLMs perform in specific domains (e.g, the intellectual property (IP) domain). In this paper, we contribute a new benchmark, the first Multilingual-oriented quiZ on Intellectual Property (MoZIP), for the evaluation of LLMs in the IP domain. The MoZIP benchmark includes three challenging tasks: IP multiple-choice quiz (IPQuiz), IP question answering (IPQA), and patent matching (PatentMatch). In addition, we also develop a new IP-oriented multilingual large language model (called MoZi), which is a BLOOMZ-based model that has been supervised fine-tuned with multilingual IP-related text data. We evaluate our proposed MoZi model and four well-known LLMs (i.e., BLOOMZ, BELLE, ChatGLM and ChatGPT) on the MoZIP benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that MoZi outperforms BLOOMZ, BELLE and ChatGLM by a noticeable margin, while it had lower scores compared with ChatGPT. Notably, the performance of current LLMs on the MoZIP benchmark has much room for improvement, and even the most powerful ChatGPT does not reach the passing level. Our source code, data, and models are available at \url{https://github.com/AI-for-Science/MoZi}.

Layer-wise Regularized Dropout for Neural Language Models

Among the various pre-trained neural language models that are popular today, dropout is already an indispensable regularization technique. To solve the inconsistency between training and inference caused by the randomness of dropout, some studies use consistency training to regularize dropout at the output layer. In this paper, we propose a novel Layer-wise Regularized Dropout (LR-Drop), which is specially designed for Transformer-based Language models. Specifically, LR-Drop layer-wise regularizes each Transformer layer using the consistency training strategy. Each training sample passes through the two siamese sub-models sampled by dropout, and then LR-Drop forces the hidden states, multi-head attention matrices, and output distribution of the two siamese sub-models to be consistent. The proposed LR-Drop can be regarded as a "self-distillation" framework, in which each sub-model generated by dropout is the other's "teacher" model and "student" model. Through extensive experiments on 8 natural language understanding datasets, 6 neural machine translation datasets, and 1 abstractive summarization dataset (a total of 15 datasets), we show that LR-Drop achieves superior performances, including state-of-the-art results.

History, Development, and Principles of Large Language Models-An Introductory Survey

Language models serve as a cornerstone in natural language processing (NLP), utilizing mathematical methods to generalize language laws and knowledge for prediction and generation. Over extensive research spanning decades, language modeling has progressed from initial statistical language models (SLMs) to the contemporary landscape of large language models (LLMs). Notably, the swift evolution of LLMs has reached the ability to process, understand, and generate human-level text. Nevertheless, despite the significant advantages that LLMs offer in improving both work and personal lives, the limited understanding among general practitioners about the background and principles of these models hampers their full potential. Notably, most LLMs reviews focus on specific aspects and utilize specialized language, posing a challenge for practitioners lacking relevant background knowledge. In light of this, this survey aims to present a comprehensible overview of LLMs to assist a broader audience. It strives to facilitate a comprehensive understanding by exploring the historical background of language models and tracing their evolution over time. The survey further investigates the factors influencing the development of LLMs, emphasizing key contributions. Additionally, it concentrates on elucidating the underlying principles of LLMs, equipping audiences with essential theoretical knowledge. The survey also highlights the limitations of existing work and points out promising future directions.

E-EVAL: A Comprehensive Chinese K-12 Education Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

With the accelerating development of Large Language Models (LLMs), many LLMs are beginning to be used in the Chinese K-12 education domain. The integration of LLMs and education is getting closer and closer, however, there is currently no benchmark for evaluating LLMs that focuses on the Chinese K-12 education domain. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive natural language processing benchmark to accurately assess the capabilities of various LLMs in the Chinese K-12 education domain. To address this, we introduce the E-EVAL, the first comprehensive evaluation benchmark specifically designed for the Chinese K-12 education field. The E-EVAL consists of 4,351 multiple-choice questions at the primary, middle, and high school levels across a wide range of subjects, including Chinese, English, Politics, History, Ethics, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Geography. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of E-EVAL on advanced LLMs, including both English-dominant and Chinese-dominant models. Findings show that Chinese-dominant models perform well compared to English-dominant models, with many scoring even above the GPT 4.0. However, almost all models perform poorly in complex subjects such as mathematics. We also found that most Chinese-dominant LLMs did not achieve higher scores at the primary school level compared to the middle school level. We observe that the mastery of higher-order knowledge by the model does not necessarily imply the mastery of lower-order knowledge as well. Additionally, the experimental results indicate that the Chain of Thought (CoT) technique is effective only for the challenging science subjects, while Few-shot prompting is more beneficial for liberal arts subjects. With E-EVAL, we aim to analyze the strengths and limitations of LLMs in educational applications, and to contribute to the progress and development of Chinese K-12 education and LLMs.

Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models

Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their amazing text understanding and generation capabilities. However, even stronger LLMs may still learn incorrect knowledge from the training corpus, as well as some knowledge that is outdated over time. Direct secondary fine-tuning with data containing new knowledge may be ineffective in updating knowledge due to the conflict between old and new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning (Forgetting before Learning), which is based on parametric arithmetic to achieve forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed F-Learning can obviously improve the knowledge updating performance of both full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning. Moreover, we have also discovered that forgetting old knowledge by subtracting the parameters of LoRA can achieve a similar effect to subtracting the parameters of full fine-tuning, and sometimes even surpass it significantly.

Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck for Math Word Problems

Math Word Problems (MWP) aims to automatically solve mathematical questions given in texts. Previous studies tend to design complex models to capture additional information in the original text so as to enable the model to gain more comprehensive features. In this paper, we turn our attention in the opposite direction, and work on how to discard redundant features containing spurious correlations for MWP. To this end, we design an Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck method for MWP (called ESIB) based on variational information bottleneck, which extracts essential features of expression syntax tree while filtering latent-specific redundancy containing syntax-irrelevant features. The key idea of ESIB is to encourage multiple models to predict the same expression syntax tree for different problem representations of the same problem by mutual learning so as to capture consistent information of expression syntax tree and discard latent-specific redundancy. To improve the generalization ability of the model and generate more diverse expressions, we design a self-distillation loss to encourage the model to rely more on the expression syntax information in the latent space. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmarks show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also generates more diverse solutions. The code is available.

Accelerating Wireless Federated Learning via Nesterov's Momentum and Distributed Principle Component Analysis

A wireless federated learning system is investigated by allowing a server and workers to exchange uncoded information via orthogonal wireless channels. Since the workers frequently upload local gradients to the server via bandwidth-limited channels, the uplink transmission from the workers to the server becomes a communication bottleneck. Therefore, a one-shot distributed principle component analysis (PCA) is leveraged to reduce the dimension of uploaded gradients such that the communication bottleneck is relieved. A PCA-based wireless federated learning (PCA-WFL) algorithm and its accelerated version (i.e., PCA-AWFL) are proposed based on the low-dimensional gradients and the Nesterov's momentum. For the non-convex loss functions, a finite-time analysis is performed to quantify the impacts of system hyper-parameters on the convergence of the PCA-WFL and PCA-AWFL algorithms. The PCA-AWFL algorithm is theoretically certified to converge faster than the PCA-WFL algorithm. Besides, the convergence rates of PCA-WFL and PCA-AWFL algorithms quantitatively reveal the linear speedup with respect to the number of workers over the vanilla gradient descent algorithm. Numerical results are used to demonstrate the improved convergence rates of the proposed PCA-WFL and PCA-AWFL algorithms over the benchmarks.

Self-consistent Reasoning For Solving Math Word Problems

Math word problems (MWPs) is a task that automatically derives solution expression from a giving math problems in text. The previous studies suffer from spurious correlations between input text and output expression. To mitigate this issue, we propose a self-consistent reasoning framework called SCR, which attempts to adopt a pruning strategy to correct the output distribution shift so as to implicitly fix those spurious correlative samples. Specifically, we firstly obtain a sub-network by pruning a roberta2tree model, for the sake to use the gap on output distribution between the original roberta2tree model and the pruned sub-network to expose spurious correlative samples. Then, we calibrate the output distribution shift by applying symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence to alleviate spurious correlations. In addition, SCR generates equivalent expressions, thereby, capturing the original text's logic rather than relying on hints from original text. Extensive experiments on two large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that our model substantially outperforms the strong baseline methods.