Rethinking the Instruction Quality: LIFT is What You Need

Instruction tuning, a specialized technique to enhance large language model (LLM) performance via instruction datasets, relies heavily on the quality of employed data. Existing quality improvement methods alter instruction data through dataset expansion or curation. However, the expansion method risks data redundancy, potentially compromising LLM performance, while the curation approach confines the LLM's potential to the original dataset. Our aim is to surpass the original data quality without encountering these shortcomings. To achieve this, we propose LIFT (LLM Instruction Fusion Transfer), a novel and versatile paradigm designed to elevate the instruction quality to new heights. LIFT strategically broadens data distribution to encompass more high-quality subspaces and eliminates redundancy, concentrating on high-quality segments across overall data subspaces. Experimental results demonstrate that, even with a limited quantity of high-quality instruction data selected by our paradigm, LLMs not only consistently uphold robust performance across various tasks but also surpass some state-of-the-art results, highlighting the significant improvement in instruction quality achieved by our paradigm.

Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

Accelerated Gradient Algorithms with Adaptive Subspace Search for Instance-Faster Optimization

Gradient-based minimax optimal algorithms have greatly promoted the development of continuous optimization and machine learning. One seminal work due to Yurii Nesterov [Nes83a] established $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{L/\mu})$ gradient complexity for minimizing an $L$-smooth $\mu$-strongly convex objective. However, an ideal algorithm would adapt to the explicit complexity of a particular objective function and incur faster rates for simpler problems, triggering our reconsideration of two defeats of existing optimization modeling and analysis. (i) The worst-case optimality is neither the instance optimality nor such one in reality. (ii) Traditional $L$-smoothness condition may not be the primary abstraction/characterization for modern practical problems. In this paper, we open up a new way to design and analyze gradient-based algorithms with direct applications in machine learning, including linear regression and beyond. We introduce two factors $(\alpha, \tau_{\alpha})$ to refine the description of the degenerated condition of the optimization problems based on the observation that the singular values of Hessian often drop sharply. We design adaptive algorithms that solve simpler problems without pre-known knowledge with reduced gradient or analogous oracle accesses. The algorithms also improve the state-of-art complexities for several problems in machine learning, thereby solving the open problem of how to design faster algorithms in light of the known complexity lower bounds. Specially, with the $\mathcal{O}(1)$-nuclear norm bounded, we achieve an optimal $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\mu^{-1/3})$ (v.s. $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\mu^{-1/2})$) gradient complexity for linear regression. We hope this work could invoke the rethinking for understanding the difficulty of modern problems in optimization.

MergeSFL: Split Federated Learning with Feature Merging and Batch Size Regulation

Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a popular technique for edge AI to mine valuable knowledge in edge computing (EC) systems. To mitigate the computing/communication burden on resource-constrained workers and protect model privacy, split federated learning (SFL) has been released by integrating both data and model parallelism. Despite resource limitations, SFL still faces two other critical challenges in EC, i.e., statistical heterogeneity and system heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel SFL framework, termed MergeSFL, by incorporating feature merging and batch size regulation in SFL. Concretely, feature merging aims to merge the features from workers into a mixed feature sequence, which is approximately equivalent to the features derived from IID data and is employed to promote model accuracy. While batch size regulation aims to assign diverse and suitable batch sizes for heterogeneous workers to improve training efficiency. Moreover, MergeSFL explores to jointly optimize these two strategies upon their coupled relationship to better enhance the performance of SFL. Extensive experiments are conducted on a physical platform with 80 NVIDIA Jetson edge devices, and the experimental results show that MergeSFL can improve the final model accuracy by 5.82% to 26.22%, with a speedup by about 1.74x to 4.14x, compared to the baselines.

RLLTE: Long-Term Evolution Project of Reinforcement Learning

We present RLLTE: a long-term evolution, extremely modular, and open-source framework for reinforcement learning (RL) research and application. Beyond delivering top-notch algorithm implementations, RLLTE also serves as a toolkit for developing algorithms. More specifically, RLLTE decouples the RL algorithms completely from the exploitation-exploration perspective, providing a large number of components to accelerate algorithm development and evolution. In particular, RLLTE is the first RL framework to build a complete and luxuriant ecosystem, which includes model training, evaluation, deployment, benchmark hub, and large language model (LLM)-empowered copilot. RLLTE is expected to set standards for RL engineering practice and be highly stimulative for industry and academia.

CARE: Confidence-rich Autonomous Robot Exploration using Bayesian Kernel Inference and Optimization

In this paper, we consider improving the efficiency of information-based autonomous robot exploration in unknown and complex environments. We first utilize Gaussian process (GP) regression to learn a surrogate model to infer the confidence-rich mutual information (CRMI) of querying control actions, then adopt an objective function consisting of predicted CRMI values and prediction uncertainties to conduct Bayesian optimization (BO), i.e., GP-based BO (GPBO). The trade-off between the best action with the highest CRMI value (exploitation) and the action with high prediction variance (exploration) can be realized. To further improve the efficiency of GPBO, we propose a novel lightweight information gain inference method based on Bayesian kernel inference and optimization (BKIO), achieving an approximate logarithmic complexity without the need for training. BKIO can also infer the CRMI and generate the best action using BO with bounded cumulative regret, which ensures its comparable accuracy to GPBO with much higher efficiency. Extensive numerical and real-world experiments show the desired efficiency of our proposed methods without losing exploration performance in different unstructured, cluttered environments. We also provide our open-source implementation code at https://github.com/Shepherd-Gregory/BKIO-Exploration.

Efficient Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Participants

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged to allow multiple clients to collaboratively train machine learning models on their private data. However, training and deploying large models for broader applications is challenging in resource-constrained environments. Fortunately, Split Federated Learning (SFL) offers an excellent solution by alleviating the computation and communication burden on the clients SFL often assumes labeled data for local training on clients, however, it is not the case in practice.Prior works have adopted semi-supervised techniques for leveraging unlabeled data in FL, but data non-IIDness poses another challenge to ensure training efficiency. Herein, we propose Pseudo-Clustering Semi-SFL, a novel system for training models in scenarios where labeled data reside on the server. By introducing Clustering Regularization, model performance under data non-IIDness can be improved. Besides, our theoretical and experimental investigations into model convergence reveal that the inconsistent training processes on labeled and unlabeled data impact the effectiveness of clustering regularization. Upon this, we develop a control algorithm for global updating frequency adaptation, which dynamically adjusts the number of supervised training iterations to mitigate the training inconsistency. Extensive experiments on benchmark models and datasets show that our system provides a 3.3x speed-up in training time and reduces the communication cost by about 80.1% while reaching the target accuracy, and achieves up to 6.9% improvement in accuracy under non-IID scenarios compared to the state-of-the-art.

OSP: Boosting Distributed Model Training with 2-stage Synchronization

Distributed deep learning (DDL) is a promising research area, which aims to increase the efficiency of training deep learning tasks with large size of datasets and models. As the computation capability of DDL nodes continues to increase, the network connection between nodes is becoming a major bottleneck. Various methods of gradient compression and improved model synchronization have been proposed to address this bottleneck in Parameter-Server-based DDL. However, these two types of methods can result in accuracy loss due to discarded gradients and have limited enhancement on the throughput of model synchronization, respectively. To address these challenges, we propose a new model synchronization method named Overlapped Synchronization Parallel (OSP), which achieves efficient communication with a 2-stage synchronization approach and uses Local-Gradient-based Parameter correction (LGP) to avoid accuracy loss caused by stale parameters. The prototype of OSP has been implemented using PyTorch and evaluated on commonly used deep learning models and datasets with a 9-node testbed. Evaluation results show that OSP can achieve up to 50\% improvement in throughput without accuracy loss compared to popular synchronization models.

Collaborative Optimization of Multi-microgrids System with Shared Energy Storage Based on Multi-agent Stochastic Game and Reinforcement Learning

Achieving the economical and stable operation of Multi-microgrids (MMG) systems is vital. However, there are still some challenging problems to be solved. Firstly, from the perspective of stable operation, it is necessary to minimize the energy fluctuation of the main grid. Secondly, the characteristics of energy conversion equipment need to be considered. Finally, privacy protection while reducing the operating cost of an MMG system is crucial. To address these challenges, a Data-driven strategy for MMG systems with Shared Energy Storage (SES) is proposed. The Mixed-Attention is applied to fit the conditions of the equipment, additionally, Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic(MA-SAC) and (Multi-Agent Win or Learn Fast Policy Hill-Climbing)MA-WoLF-PHC are proposed to solve the partially observable dynamic stochastic game problem. By testing the operation data of the MMG system in Northwest China, following conclusions are drawn: the R-Square (R2) values of results reach 0.999, indicating the neural network effectively models the nonlinear conditions. The proposed MMG system framework can reduce energy fluctuations in the main grid by 1746.5kW in 24 hours and achieve a cost reduction of 16.21% in the test. Finally, the superiority of the proposed algorithms is verified through their fast convergence speed and excellent optimization performance.

Scale-Rotation-Equivariant Lie Group Convolution Neural Networks (Lie Group-CNNs)

The weight-sharing mechanism of convolutional kernels ensures translation-equivariance of convolution neural networks (CNNs). Recently, rotation-equivariance has been investigated. However, research on scale-equivariance or simultaneous scale-rotation-equivariance is insufficient. This study proposes a Lie group-CNN, which can keep scale-rotation-equivariance for image classification tasks. The Lie group-CNN includes a lifting module, a series of group convolution modules, a global pooling layer, and a classification layer. The lifting module transfers the input image from Euclidean space to Lie group space, and the group convolution is parameterized through a fully connected network using Lie-algebra of Lie-group elements as inputs to achieve scale-rotation-equivariance. The Lie group SIM(2) is utilized to establish the Lie group-CNN with scale-rotation-equivariance. Scale-rotation-equivariance of Lie group-CNN is verified and achieves the best recognition accuracy on the blood cell dataset (97.50%) and the HAM10000 dataset (77.90%) superior to Lie algebra convolution network, dilation convolution, spatial transformer network, and scale-equivariant steerable network. In addition, the generalization ability of the Lie group-CNN on SIM(2) on rotation-equivariance is verified on rotated-MNIST and rotated-CIFAR10, and the robustness of the network is verified on SO(2) and SE(2). Therefore, the Lie group-CNN can successfully extract geometric features and performs equivariant recognition on images with rotation and scale transformations.