Distributed Clustering based on Distributional Kernel

This paper introduces a new framework for clustering in a distributed network called Distributed Clustering based on Distributional Kernel (K) or KDC that produces the final clusters based on the similarity with respect to the distributions of initial clusters, as measured by K. It is the only framework that satisfies all three of the following properties. First, KDC guarantees that the combined clustering outcome from all sites is equivalent to the clustering outcome of its centralized counterpart from the combined dataset from all sites. Second, the maximum runtime cost of any site in distributed mode is smaller than the runtime cost in centralized mode. Third, it is designed to discover clusters of arbitrary shapes, sizes and densities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first distributed clustering framework that employs a distributional kernel. The distribution-based clustering leads directly to significantly better clustering outcomes than existing methods of distributed clustering. In addition, we introduce a new clustering algorithm called Kernel Bounded Cluster Cores, which is the best clustering algorithm applied to KDC among existing clustering algorithms. We also show that KDC is a generic framework that enables a quadratic time clustering algorithm to deal with large datasets that would otherwise be impossible.

Layerwise Change of Knowledge in Neural Networks

This paper aims to explain how a deep neural network (DNN) gradually extracts new knowledge and forgets noisy features through layers in forward propagation. Up to now, although the definition of knowledge encoded by the DNN has not reached a consensus, Previous studies have derived a series of mathematical evidence to take interactions as symbolic primitive inference patterns encoded by a DNN. We extend the definition of interactions and, for the first time, extract interactions encoded by intermediate layers. We quantify and track the newly emerged interactions and the forgotten interactions in each layer during the forward propagation, which shed new light on the learning behavior of DNNs. The layer-wise change of interactions also reveals the change of the generalization capacity and instability of feature representations of a DNN.

NASH: Neural Architecture and Accelerator Search for Multiplication-Reduced Hybrid Models

The significant computational cost of multiplications hinders the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices. While multiplication-free models offer enhanced hardware efficiency, they typically sacrifice accuracy. As a solution, multiplication-reduced hybrid models have emerged to combine the benefits of both approaches. Particularly, prior works, i.e., NASA and NASA-F, leverage Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to construct such hybrid models, enhancing hardware efficiency while maintaining accuracy. However, they either entail costly retraining or encounter gradient conflicts, limiting both search efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, they overlook the acceleration opportunity introduced by accelerator search, yielding sub-optimal hardware performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose NASH, a Neural architecture and Accelerator Search framework for multiplication-reduced Hybrid models. Specifically, as for NAS, we propose a tailored zero-shot metric to pre-identify promising hybrid models before training, enhancing search efficiency while alleviating gradient conflicts. Regarding accelerator search, we innovatively introduce coarse-to-fine search to streamline the search process. Furthermore, we seamlessly integrate these two levels of searches to unveil NASH, obtaining the optimal model and accelerator pairing. Experiments validate our effectiveness, e.g., when compared with the state-of-the-art multiplication-based system, we can achieve $\uparrow$$2.14\times$ throughput and $\uparrow$$2.01\times$ FPS with $\uparrow$$0.25\%$ accuracy on CIFAR-100, and $\uparrow$$1.40\times$ throughput and $\uparrow$$1.19\times$ FPS with $\uparrow$$0.56\%$ accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/xuyang527/NASH.}

Multi-Task Combinatorial Bandits for Budget Allocation

Today's top advertisers typically manage hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and consistently launch new ones throughout the year. A crucial challenge for marketing managers is determining the optimal allocation of limited budgets across various ad lines in each campaign to maximize cumulative returns, especially given the huge uncertainty in return outcomes. In this paper, we propose to formulate budget allocation as a multi-task combinatorial bandit problem and introduce a novel online budget allocation system. The proposed system: i) integrates a Bayesian hierarchical model to intelligently utilize the metadata of campaigns and ad lines and budget size, ensuring efficient information sharing; ii) provides the flexibility to incorporate diverse modeling techniques such as Linear Regression, Gaussian Processes, and Neural Networks, catering to diverse environmental complexities; and iii) employs the Thompson sampling (TS) technique to strike a balance between exploration and exploitation. Through offline evaluation and online experiments, our system demonstrates robustness and adaptability, effectively maximizing the overall cumulative returns. A Python implementation of the proposed procedure is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCMAB.

SAB:A Stealing and Robust Backdoor Attack based on Steganographic Algorithm against Federated Learning

Federated learning, an innovative network architecture designed to safeguard user privacy, is gaining widespread adoption in the realm of technology. However, given the existence of backdoor attacks in federated learning, exploring the security of federated learning is significance. Nevertheless, the backdoors investigated in current federated learning research can be readily detected by human inspection or resisted by detection algorithms. Accordingly, a new goal has been set to develop stealing and robust federated learning backdoor attacks. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, SAB, tailored specifically for backdoor attacks in federated learning, presenting an alternative gradient updating mechanism. SAB attack based on steganographic algorithm, using image steganographic algorithm to build a full-size trigger to improve the accuracy of backdoors and use multiple loss joint computation to produce triggers. SAB exhibits smaller distances to benign samples and greater imperceptibility to the human eye. As such, our triggers are capable of mitigating or evading specific backdoor defense methods. In SAB, the bottom-95\% method is applied to extend the lifespan of backdoor attacks. It updates the gradient on minor value points to reduce the probability of being cleaned. Finally, the generalization of backdoors is enhanced with Sparse-update to improve the backdoor accuracy.

OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research

The rapid growth of scientific literature imposes significant challenges for researchers endeavoring to stay updated with the latest advancements in their fields and delve into new areas. We introduce OpenResearcher, an innovative platform that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to accelerate the research process by answering diverse questions from researchers. OpenResearcher is built based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. Moreover, we develop various tools for OpenResearcher to understand researchers' queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine these answers. OpenResearcher can flexibly use these tools to balance efficiency and effectiveness. As a result, OpenResearcher enables researchers to save time and increase their potential to discover new insights and drive scientific breakthroughs. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/OpenResearcher.

Rina: Enhancing Ring-AllReduce with In-network Aggregation in Distributed Model Training

Parameter Server (PS) and Ring-AllReduce (RAR) are two widely utilized synchronization architectures in multi-worker Deep Learning (DL), also referred to as Distributed Deep Learning (DDL). However, PS encounters challenges with the ``incast'' issue, while RAR struggles with problems caused by the long dependency chain. The emerging In-network Aggregation (INA) has been proposed to integrate with PS to mitigate its incast issue. However, such PS-based INA has poor incremental deployment abilities as it requires replacing all the switches to show significant performance improvement, which is not cost-effective. In this study, we present the incorporation of INA capabilities into RAR, called RAR with In-Network Aggregation (Rina), to tackle both the problems above. Rina features its agent-worker mechanism. When an INA-capable ToR switch is deployed, all workers in this rack run as one abstracted worker with the help of the agent, resulting in both excellent incremental deployment capabilities and better throughput. We conducted extensive testbed and simulation evaluations to substantiate the throughput advantages of Rina over existing DDL training synchronization structures. Compared with the state-of-the-art PS-based INA methods ATP, Rina can achieve more than 50\% throughput with the same hardware cost.

Towards the Dynamics of a DNN Learning Symbolic Interactions

This study proves the two-phase dynamics of a deep neural network (DNN) learning interactions. Despite the long disappointing view of the faithfulness of post-hoc explanation of a DNN, in recent years, a series of theorems have been proven to show that given an input sample, a small number of interactions between input variables can be considered as primitive inference patterns, which can faithfully represent every detailed inference logic of the DNN on this sample. Particularly, it has been observed that various DNNs all learn interactions of different complexities with two-phase dynamics, and this well explains how a DNN's generalization power changes from under-fitting to over-fitting. Therefore, in this study, we prove the dynamics of a DNN gradually encoding interactions of different complexities, which provides a theoretically grounded mechanism for the over-fitting of a DNN. Experiments show that our theory well predicts the real learning dynamics of various DNNs on different tasks.

Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models

Through reading the documentation in the context, tool-using language models can dynamically extend their capability using external tools. The cost is that we have to input lengthy documentation every time the model needs to use the tool, occupying the input window as well as slowing down the decoding process. Given the progress in general-purpose compression, soft context compression is a suitable approach to alleviate the problem. However, when compressing tool documentation, existing methods suffer from the weaknesses of key information loss (specifically, tool/parameter name errors) and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths. To address these problems, we propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. 1) Selective compression strategy mitigates key information loss by deliberately retaining key information as raw text tokens. 2) Block compression strategy involves dividing tool documentation into short chunks and then employing a fixed-length compression model to achieve variable-length compression. This strategy facilitates the flexible adjustment of the compression ratio. Results on API-Bank and APIBench show that our approach reaches a performance comparable to the upper-bound baseline under up to 16x compression ratio.

Paraphrase Types Elicit Prompt Engineering Capabilities

Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study systematically and empirically evaluates which linguistic features influence models through paraphrase types, i.e., different linguistic changes at particular positions. We measure behavioral changes for five models across 120 tasks and six families of paraphrases (i.e., morphology, syntax, lexicon, lexico-syntax, discourse, and others). We also control for other prompt engineering factors (e.g., prompt length, lexical diversity, and proximity to training data). Our results show a potential for language models to improve tasks when their prompts are adapted in specific paraphrase types (e.g., 6.7% median gain in Mixtral 8x7B; 5.5% in LLaMA 3 8B). In particular, changes in morphology and lexicon, i.e., the vocabulary used, showed promise in improving prompts. These findings contribute to developing more robust language models capable of handling variability in linguistic expression.