Large Language Models' knowledge of how to perform cyber-security attacks, create bioweapons, and manipulate humans poses risks of misuse. Previous work has proposed methods to unlearn this knowledge. Historically, it has been unclear whether unlearning techniques are removing information from the model weights or just making it harder to access. To disentangle these two objectives, we propose an adversarial evaluation method to test for the removal of information from model weights: we give an attacker access to some facts that were supposed to be removed, and using those, the attacker tries to recover other facts from the same distribution that cannot be guessed from the accessible facts. We show that using fine-tuning on the accessible facts can recover 88% of the pre-unlearning accuracy when applied to current unlearning methods, revealing the limitations of these methods in removing information from the model weights.
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) models represent a significant advancement in large language model (LLM) development through their efficient parameter utilization. These models achieve substantial performance improvements at reduced inference costs. However, the deployment of SMoE models faces constraints from extensive memory requirements of expert components in resource-limited environments. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Hierarchical Clustering for Sparsely activated Mixture of Experts (HC-SMoE), a task-agnostic expert merging framework for parameter reduction without retraining. HC-SMoE introduces a novel hierarchical clustering approach based on expert outputs to ensure merging robustness independent of routing decisions. The proposed output-based clustering method enables effective capture of functional relationships between experts for large-scale architectures. We provide theoretical analysis and comprehensive evaluations across multiple zero-shot language tasks to demonstrate HC-SMoE's effectiveness in state-of-the-art models including Qwen and Mixtral. The experimental results validate HC-SMoE's superior performance and practical applicability for real-world deployments.
Machine learning (ML) models trained using Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) often exhibit systematic errors on specific subpopulations of tabular data, known as error slices. Learning robust representation in presence of error slices is challenging, especially in self-supervised settings during the feature reconstruction phase, due to high cardinality features and the complexity of constructing error sets. Traditional robust representation learning methods are largely focused on improving worst group performance in supervised setting in computer vision, leaving a gap in approaches tailored for tabular data. We address this gap by developing a framework to learn robust representation in tabular data during self-supervised pre-training. Our approach utilizes an encoder-decoder model trained with Masked Language Modeling (MLM) loss to learn robust latent representations. This paper applies the Just Train Twice (JTT) and Deep Feature Reweighting (DFR) methods during the pre-training phase for tabular data. These methods fine-tune the ERM pre-trained model by up-weighting error-prone samples or creating balanced datasets for specific categorical features. This results in specialized models for each feature, which are then used in an ensemble approach to enhance downstream classification performance. This methodology improves robustness across slices, thus enhancing overall generalization performance. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. The code is available: \url{https://github.com/amazon-science/distributionally-robust-self-supervised-learning-for-tabular-data}.
A mechanistic understanding of how MLPs do computation in deep neural networks remains elusive. Current interpretability work can extract features from hidden activations over an input dataset but generally cannot explain how MLP weights construct features. One challenge is that element-wise nonlinearities introduce higher-order interactions and make it difficult to trace computations through the MLP layer. In this paper, we analyze bilinear MLPs, a type of Gated Linear Unit (GLU) without any element-wise nonlinearity that nevertheless achieves competitive performance. Bilinear MLPs can be fully expressed in terms of linear operations using a third-order tensor, allowing flexible analysis of the weights. Analyzing the spectra of bilinear MLP weights using eigendecomposition reveals interpretable low-rank structure across toy tasks, image classification, and language modeling. We use this understanding to craft adversarial examples, uncover overfitting, and identify small language model circuits directly from the weights alone. Our results demonstrate that bilinear layers serve as an interpretable drop-in replacement for current activation functions and that weight-based interpretability is viable for understanding deep-learning models.
The salient multimodal capabilities and interactive experience of GPT-4o highlight its critical role in practical applications, yet it lacks a high-performing open-source counterpart. In this paper, we introduce Baichuan-omni, the first open-source 7B Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adept at concurrently processing and analyzing modalities of image, video, audio, and text, while delivering an advanced multimodal interactive experience and strong performance. We propose an effective multimodal training schema starting with 7B model and proceeding through two stages of multimodal alignment and multitask fine-tuning across audio, image, video, and text modal. This approach equips the language model with the ability to handle visual and audio data effectively. Demonstrating strong performance across various omni-modal and multimodal benchmarks, we aim for this contribution to serve as a competitive baseline for the open-source community in advancing multimodal understanding and real-time interaction.
Significant progress has been made in advancing large multimodal conversational models (LMMs), capitalizing on vast repositories of image-text data available online. Despite this progress, these models often encounter substantial domain gaps, hindering their ability to engage in complex conversations across new domains. Recent efforts have aimed to mitigate this issue, albeit relying on domain-specific image-text data to curate instruction-tuning data. However, many domains, such as agriculture, lack such vision-language data. In this work, we propose an approach to construct instruction-tuning data that harnesses vision-only data for the agriculture domain. We utilize diverse agricultural datasets spanning multiple domains, curate class-specific information, and employ large language models (LLMs) to construct an expert-tuning set, resulting in a 70k expert-tuning dataset called AgroInstruct. Subsequently, we expert-tuned and created AgroGPT, an efficient LMM that can hold complex agriculture-related conversations and provide useful insights. We also develop AgroEvals for evaluation and compare {AgroGPT's} performance with large open and closed-source models. {AgroGPT} excels at identifying fine-grained agricultural concepts, can act as an agriculture expert, and provides helpful information for multimodal agriculture questions. The code, datasets, and models are available at https://github.com/awaisrauf/agroGPT.
Ptychography is an advanced computational imaging technique in X-ray and electron microscopy. It has been widely adopted across scientific research fields, including physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science, as well as in industrial applications such as semiconductor characterization. In practice, obtaining high-quality ptychographic images requires simultaneous optimization of numerous experimental and algorithmic parameters. Traditionally, parameter selection often relies on trial and error, leading to low-throughput workflows and potential human bias. In this work, we develop the "Ptychographic Experiment and Analysis Robot" (PEAR), a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate data analysis in ptychography. To ensure high robustness and accuracy, PEAR employs multiple LLM agents for tasks including knowledge retrieval, code generation, parameter recommendation, and image reasoning. Our study demonstrates that PEAR's multi-agent design significantly improves the workflow success rate, even with smaller open-weight models such as LLaMA 3.1 8B. PEAR also supports various automation levels and is designed to work with customized local knowledge bases, ensuring flexibility and adaptability across different research environments.
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for a variety of downstream tasks. However, as LLMs grow in size, the memory demands for backpropagation become increasingly prohibitive. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods offer a memory-efficient alternative by using forward passes to estimate gradients, but the variance of gradient estimates typically scales linearly with the model's parameter dimension$\unicode{x2013}$a significant issue for LLMs. In this paper, we propose the random Subspace Zeroth-order (SubZero) optimization to address the challenges posed by LLMs' high dimensionality. We introduce a low-rank perturbation tailored for LLMs that significantly reduces memory consumption while improving training performance. Additionally, we prove that our gradient estimation closely approximates the backpropagation gradient, exhibits lower variance than traditional ZO methods, and ensures convergence when combined with SGD. Experimental results show that SubZero enhances fine-tuning performance and achieves faster convergence compared to standard ZO approaches like MeZO across various language modeling tasks.
Preference learning is a central component for aligning current LLMs, but this process can be vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. To address this concern, we introduce PoisonBench, a benchmark for evaluating large language models' susceptibility to data poisoning during preference learning. Data poisoning attacks can manipulate large language model responses to include hidden malicious content or biases, potentially causing the model to generate harmful or unintended outputs while appearing to function normally. We deploy two distinct attack types across eight realistic scenarios, assessing 21 widely-used models. Our findings reveal concerning trends: (1) Scaling up parameter size does not inherently enhance resilience against poisoning attacks; (2) There exists a log-linear relationship between the effects of the attack and the data poison ratio; (3) The effect of data poisoning can generalize to extrapolated triggers that are not included in the poisoned data. These results expose weaknesses in current preference learning techniques, highlighting the urgent need for more robust defenses against malicious models and data manipulation.
The increasing number of dispersed EEG dataset publications and the advancement of large-scale Electroencephalogram (EEG) models have increased the demand for practical tools to manage diverse EEG datasets. However, the inherent complexity of EEG data, characterized by variability in content data, metadata, and data formats, poses challenges for integrating multiple datasets and conducting large-scale EEG model research. To tackle the challenges, this paper introduces EEGUnity, an open-source tool that incorporates modules of 'EEG Parser', 'Correction', 'Batch Processing', and 'Large Language Model Boost'. Leveraging the functionality of such modules, EEGUnity facilitates the efficient management of multiple EEG datasets, such as intelligent data structure inference, data cleaning, and data unification. In addition, the capabilities of EEGUnity ensure high data quality and consistency, providing a reliable foundation for large-scale EEG data research. EEGUnity is evaluated across 25 EEG datasets from different sources, offering several typical batch processing workflows. The results demonstrate the high performance and flexibility of EEGUnity in parsing and data processing. The project code is publicly available at github.com/Baizhige/EEGUnity.
Efficient data selection is crucial to accelerate the pretraining of large language models (LLMs). While various methods have been proposed to enhance data efficiency, limited research has addressed the inherent conflicts between these approaches to achieve optimal data selection for LLM pretraining. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel multi-agent collaborative data selection mechanism. In this framework, each data selection method serves as an independent agent, and an agent console is designed to dynamically integrate the information from all agents throughout the LLM training process. We conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate our multi-agent framework. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves data efficiency, accelerates convergence in LLM training, and achieves an average performance gain up to 10.5% across multiple language model benchmarks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
The evolution of biological neural systems has led to both modularity and sparse coding, which enables energy efficiency and robustness across the diversity of tasks in the lifespan. In contrast, standard neural networks rely on dense, non-specialized architectures, where all model parameters are simultaneously updated to learn multiple tasks, leading to interference. Current sparse neural network approaches aim to alleviate this issue but are hindered by limitations such as 1) trainable gating functions that cause representation collapse, 2) disjoint experts that result in redundant computation and slow learning, and 3) reliance on explicit input or task IDs that limit flexibility and scalability. In this paper we propose Conditionally Overlapping Mixture of ExperTs (COMET), a general deep learning method that addresses these challenges by inducing a modular, sparse architecture with an exponential number of overlapping experts. COMET replaces the trainable gating function used in Sparse Mixture of Experts with a fixed, biologically inspired random projection applied to individual input representations. This design causes the degree of expert overlap to depend on input similarity, so that similar inputs tend to share more parameters. This results in faster learning \rev{per update step} and improved \rev{out-of-sample} generalization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of COMET on a range of tasks, including image classification, language modeling, and regression, using several popular deep learning architectures.
Large Language Model (LLM) services exhibit impressive capability on unlearned tasks leveraging only a few examples by in-context learning (ICL). However, the success of ICL varies depending on the task and context, leading to heterogeneous service quality. Directly estimating the performance of LLM services at each invocation can be laborious, especially requiring abundant labeled data or internal information within the LLM. This paper introduces a novel method to estimate the performance of LLM services across different tasks and contexts, which can be "plug-and-play" utilizing only a few unlabeled samples like ICL. Our findings suggest that the negative log-likelihood and perplexity derived from LLM service invocation can function as effective and significant features. Based on these features, we utilize four distinct meta-models to estimate the performance of LLM services. Our proposed method is compared against unlabeled estimation baselines across multiple LLM services and tasks. And it is experimentally applied to two scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in the selection and further optimization of LLM services.
Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems concatenate and process numerous retrieved document chunks for prefill which requires a large volume of computation, therefore leading to significant latency in time-to-first-token (TTFT). To reduce the computation overhead as well as TTFT, we introduce TurboRAG, a novel RAG system that redesigns the inference paradigm of the current RAG system by first pre-computing and storing the key-value (KV) caches of documents offline, and then directly retrieving the saved KV cache for prefill. Hence, online computation of KV caches is eliminated during inference. In addition, we provide a number of insights into the mask matrix and positional embedding mechanisms, plus fine-tune a pretrained language model to maintain model accuracy of TurboRAG. Our approach is applicable to most existing large language models and their applications without any requirement in modification of models and inference systems. Experimental results across a suite of RAG benchmarks demonstrate that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by up to 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG systems (on an average of 8.6x), but reserving comparable performance to the standard RAG systems.
In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization framework of large vision-language models (LVLMs) for efficient multi-modal inference. Conventional quantization methods sequentially search the layer-wise rounding functions by minimizing activation discretization errors, which fails to acquire optimal quantization strategy without considering cross-layer dependency. On the contrary, we mine the cross-layer dependency that significantly influences discretization errors of the entire vision-language model, and embed this dependency into optimal quantization strategy searching with low search cost. Specifically, we observe the strong correlation between the activation entropy and the cross-layer dependency concerning output discretization errors. Therefore, we employ the entropy as the proxy to partition blocks optimally, which aims to achieve satisfying trade-offs between discretization errors and the search cost. Moreover, we optimize the visual encoder to disentangle the cross-layer dependency for fine-grained decomposition of search space, so that the search cost is further reduced without harming the quantization accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method compresses the memory by 2.78x and increase generate speed by 1.44x about 13B LLaVA model without performance degradation on diverse multi-modal reasoning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/ChangyuanWang17/QVLM.
Constrained by the separate encoding of vision and language, existing grounding and referring segmentation works heavily rely on bulky Transformer-based fusion en-/decoders and a variety of early-stage interaction technologies. Simultaneously, the current mask visual language modeling (MVLM) fails to capture the nuanced referential relationship between image-text in referring tasks. In this paper, we propose OneRef, a minimalist referring framework built on the modality-shared one-tower transformer that unifies the visual and linguistic feature spaces. To modeling the referential relationship, we introduce a novel MVLM paradigm called Mask Referring Modeling (MRefM), which encompasses both referring-aware mask image modeling and referring-aware mask language modeling. Both modules not only reconstruct modality-related content but also cross-modal referring content. Within MRefM, we propose a referring-aware dynamic image masking strategy that is aware of the referred region rather than relying on fixed ratios or generic random masking schemes. By leveraging the unified visual language feature space and incorporating MRefM's ability to model the referential relations, our approach enables direct regression of the referring results without resorting to various complex techniques. Our method consistently surpasses existing approaches and achieves SoTA performance on both grounding and segmentation tasks, providing valuable insights for future research. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/linhuixiao/OneRef.
Recent efforts in fine-tuning language models often rely on automatic data selection, commonly using Nearest Neighbors retrieval from large datasets. However, we theoretically show that this approach tends to select redundant data, limiting its effectiveness or even hurting performance. To address this, we introduce SIFT, a data selection algorithm designed to reduce uncertainty about the model's response given a prompt, which unifies ideas from retrieval and active learning. Whereas Nearest Neighbor retrieval typically fails in the presence of information duplication, SIFT accounts for information duplication and optimizes the overall information gain of the selected examples. We focus our evaluations on fine-tuning at test-time for prompt-specific language modeling on the Pile dataset, and show that SIFT consistently outperforms Nearest Neighbor retrieval, with minimal computational overhead. Moreover, we show that our uncertainty estimates can predict the performance gain of test-time fine-tuning, and use this to develop an adaptive algorithm that invests test-time compute proportional to realized performance gains. We provide the $\texttt{activeft}$ (Active Fine-Tuning) library which can be used as a drop-in replacement for Nearest Neighbor retrieval.
Entity Linking (EL) is the process of associating ambiguous textual mentions to specific entities in a knowledge base. Traditional EL methods heavily rely on large datasets to enhance their performance, a dependency that becomes problematic in the context of few-shot entity linking, where only a limited number of examples are available for training. To address this challenge, we present OneNet, an innovative framework that utilizes the few-shot learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for fine-tuning. To the best of our knowledge, this marks a pioneering approach to applying LLMs to few-shot entity linking tasks. OneNet is structured around three key components prompted by LLMs: (1) an entity reduction processor that simplifies inputs by summarizing and filtering out irrelevant entities, (2) a dual-perspective entity linker that combines contextual cues and prior knowledge for precise entity linking, and (3) an entity consensus judger that employs a unique consistency algorithm to alleviate the hallucination in the entity linking reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets reveal that OneNet outperforms current state-of-the-art entity linking methods.
Providing feedback is widely recognized as crucial for refining students' writing skills. Recent advances in language models (LMs) have made it possible to automatically generate feedback that is actionable and well-aligned with human-specified attributes. However, it remains unclear whether the feedback generated by these models is truly effective in enhancing the quality of student revisions. Moreover, prompting LMs with a precise set of instructions to generate feedback is nontrivial due to the lack of consensus regarding the specific attributes that can lead to improved revising performance. To address these challenges, we propose PROF that PROduces Feedback via learning from LM simulated student revisions. PROF aims to iteratively optimize the feedback generator by directly maximizing the effectiveness of students' overall revising performance as simulated by LMs. Focusing on an economic essay assignment, we empirically test the efficacy of PROF and observe that our approach not only surpasses a variety of baseline methods in effectiveness of improving students' writing but also demonstrates enhanced pedagogical values, even though it was not explicitly trained for this aspect.
Reliability in cell type annotation is challenging in single-cell RNA-sequencing data analysis because both expert-driven and automated methods can be biased or constrained by their training data, especially for novel or rare cell types. Although large language models (LLMs) are useful, our evaluation found that only a few matched expert annotations due to biased data sources and inflexible training inputs. To overcome these limitations, we developed the LICT (Large language model-based Identifier for Cell Types) software package using a multi-model fusion and "talk-to-machine" strategy. Tested across various single-cell RNA sequencing datasets, our approach significantly improved annotation reliability, especially in datasets with low cellular heterogeneity. Notably, we established objective criteria to assess annotation reliability using the "talk-to-machine" approach, which addresses discrepancies between our annotations and expert ones, enabling reliable evaluation even without reference data. This strategy enhances annotation credibility and sets the stage for advancing future LLM-based cell type annotation methods.