We address the challenge of utilizing large language models (LLMs) for complex embodied tasks, in the environment where decision-making systems operate timely on capacity-limited, off-the-shelf devices. We present DeDer, a framework for decomposing and distilling the embodied reasoning capabilities from LLMs to efficient, small language model (sLM)-based policies. In DeDer, the decision-making process of LLM-based strategies is restructured into a hierarchy with a reasoning-policy and planning-policy. The reasoning-policy is distilled from the data that is generated through the embodied in-context learning and self-verification of an LLM, so it can produce effective rationales. The planning-policy, guided by the rationales, can render optimized plans efficiently. In turn, DeDer allows for adopting sLMs for both policies, deployed on off-the-shelf devices. Furthermore, to enhance the quality of intermediate rationales, specific to embodied tasks, we devise the embodied knowledge graph, and to generate multiple rationales timely through a single inference, we also use the contrastively prompted attention model. Our experiments with the ALFRED benchmark demonstrate that DeDer surpasses leading language planning and distillation approaches, indicating the applicability and efficiency of sLM-based embodied policies derived through DeDer.
The quality of instruction data directly affects the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs). Previously, \cite{li2023one} proposed \texttt{NUGGETS}, which identifies and selects high-quality quality data from a large dataset by identifying those individual instruction examples that can significantly improve the performance of different tasks after being learnt as one-shot instances. In this work, we propose \texttt{SuperNUGGETS}, an improved variant of \texttt{NUGGETS} optimised for efficiency and performance. Our \texttt{SuperNUGGETS} uses a small language model (SLM) instead of a large language model (LLM) to filter the data for outstanding one-shot instances and refines the predefined set of tests. The experimental results show that the performance of \texttt{SuperNUGGETS} only decreases by 1-2% compared to \texttt{NUGGETS}, but the efficiency can be increased by a factor of 58. Compared to the original \texttt{NUGGETS}, our \texttt{SuperNUGGETS} has a higher utility value due to the significantly lower resource consumption.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, leading to their increasing deployment in wireless networks for a wide variety of user services. However, the growing longer prompt setting highlights the crucial issue of computational resource demands and huge communication load. To address this challenge, we propose Joint Power and Prompt Optimization (JPPO), a framework that combines Small Language Model (SLM)-based prompt compression with wireless power allocation optimization. By deploying SLM at user devices for prompt compression and employing Deep Reinforcement Learning for joint optimization of compression ratio and transmission power, JPPO effectively balances service quality with resource efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves high service fidelity and low bit error rates while optimizing power usage in wireless LLM services. The system reduces response time by about 17%, with the improvement varying based on the length of the original prompt.
This study investigates the relative impact of training data quality versus quantity on the performance of small language models (SLMs), utilizing the TinyStories dataset for empirical analysis. Analysis of dataset variations with respect to size (25% and 50% of the original size) and duplication (controlled rates of 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) were performed. Model performance was evaluated based on the validation loss, accuracy, and perplexity metrics. Results indicate training data quality plays a more significant role in the overall performance of SLMs, especially given scale of this experiment. Minimal duplication positively impacted model accuracy (+0.87% increase in accuracy at 25% duplication) without significantly increasing perplexity (+0.52% increase going from 0% to 25% duplication) but excessive duplication led to pronounced performance degradation (-40% drop in accuracy at 100% duplication). The implications of this exploration extend beyond just model performance; training large-scale models imposes significant financial and computational burdens, which can be prohibitive for organizations, individuals, and the public at large, especially in developing countries. Additionally, the energy consumption associated with large-scale training raises environmental concerns. Understanding the relative importance of data quality versus quantity could democratize AI technology, making advanced models more accessible and sustainable for all.
Machine Learning (ML) for software engineering (SE) has gained prominence due to its ability to significantly enhance the performance of various SE applications. This progress is largely attributed to the development of generalizable source code representations that effectively capture the syntactic and semantic characteristics of code. In recent years, pre-trained transformer-based models, inspired by natural language processing (NLP), have shown remarkable success in SE tasks. However, source code contains structural and semantic properties embedded within its grammar, which can be extracted from structured code-views like the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), Data-Flow Graph (DFG), and Control-Flow Graph (CFG). These code-views can complement NLP techniques, further improving SE tasks. Unfortunately, there are no flexible frameworks to infuse arbitrary code-views into existing transformer-based models effectively. Therefore, in this work, we propose CodeSAM, a novel scalable framework to infuse multiple code-views into transformer-based models by creating self-attention masks. We use CodeSAM to fine-tune a small language model (SLM) like CodeBERT on the downstream SE tasks of semantic code search, code clone detection, and program classification. Experimental results show that by using this technique, we improve downstream performance when compared to SLMs like GraphCodeBERT and CodeBERT on all three tasks by utilizing individual code-views or a combination of code-views during fine-tuning. We believe that these results are indicative that techniques like CodeSAM can help create compact yet performant code SLMs that fit in resource constrained settings.
LLM based copilot assistants are useful in everyday tasks. There is a proliferation in the exploration of AI assistant use cases to support radiology workflows in a reliable manner. In this work, we present RadPhi-3, a Small Language Model instruction tuned from Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct with 3.8B parameters to assist with various tasks in radiology workflows. While impression summary generation has been the primary task which has been explored in prior works w.r.t radiology reports of Chest X-rays, we also explore other useful tasks like change summary generation comparing the current radiology report and its prior report, section extraction from radiology reports, tagging the reports with various pathologies and tubes, lines or devices present in them etc. In-addition, instruction tuning RadPhi-3 involved learning from a credible knowledge source used by radiologists, Radiopaedia.org. RadPhi-3 can be used both to give reliable answers for radiology related queries as well as perform useful tasks related to radiology reports. RadPhi-3 achieves SOTA results on the RaLEs radiology report generation benchmark.
Interactions with online Large Language Models raise privacy issues where providers can gather sensitive information about users and their companies from the prompts. While textual prompts can be sanitized using Differential Privacy, we show that it is difficult to anticipate the performance of an LLM on such sanitized prompt. Poor performance has clear monetary consequences for LLM services charging on a pay-per-use model as well as great amount of computing resources wasted. To this end, we propose a middleware architecture leveraging a Small Language Model to predict the utility of a given sanitized prompt before it is sent to the LLM. We experimented on a summarization task and a translation task to show that our architecture helps prevent such resource waste for up to 20% of the prompts. During our study, we also reproduced experiments from one of the most cited paper on text sanitization using DP and show that a potential performance-driven implementation choice dramatically changes the output while not being explicitly acknowledged in the paper.
While small language models (SLMs) show promises for mobile deployment, their real-world performance and applications on smartphones remains underexplored. We present SlimLM, a series of SLMs optimized for document assistance tasks on mobile devices. Through extensive experiments on a Samsung Galaxy S24, we identify the optimal trade-offs between model size (ranging from 125M to 7B parameters), context length, and inference time for efficient on-device processing. SlimLM is pre-trained on SlimPajama-627B and fine-tuned on DocAssist, our constructed dataset for summarization, question answering and suggestion tasks. Our smallest model demonstrates efficient performance on S24, while larger variants offer enhanced capabilities within mobile constraints. We evaluate SlimLM against existing SLMs, showing comparable or superior performance and offering a benchmark for future research in on-device language models. We also provide an Android application, offering practical insights into SLM deployment. Our findings provide valuable insights and illuminate the capabilities of running advanced language models on high-end smartphones, potentially reducing server costs and enhancing privacy through on-device processing.
Large and Small Language Models (LMs) are typically pretrained using extensive volumes of text, which are sourced from publicly accessible platforms such as Wikipedia, Book Corpus, or through web scraping. These models, due to their exposure to a wide range of language data, exhibit impressive generalization capabilities and can perform a multitude of tasks simultaneously. However, they often fall short when it comes to domain-specific tasks due to their broad training data. This paper introduces SecEncoder, a specialized small language model that is pretrained using security logs. SecEncoder is designed to address the domain-specific limitations of general LMs by focusing on the unique language and patterns found in security logs. Experimental results indicate that SecEncoder outperforms other LMs, such as BERTlarge, DeBERTa-v3-large and OpenAI's Embedding (textembedding-ada-002) models, which are pretrained mainly on natural language, across various tasks. Furthermore, although SecEncoder is primarily pretrained on log data, it outperforms models pretrained on natural language for a range of tasks beyond log analysis, such as incident prioritization and threat intelligence document retrieval. This suggests that domain specific pretraining with logs can significantly enhance the performance of LMs in security. These findings pave the way for future research into security-specific LMs and their potential applications.
We present a novel 4.5B parameter small language model that can handle multiple input and output modalities, including text, images, videos, and audio. Despite its small size, the model achieves near state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks, demonstrating the potential of multi-modal models to tackle complex real-world problems. Our approach leverages recent advancements in language modeling and multi-task learning to create a versatile and high-performing model that can even be deployed for edge inference. Experimental results show the model's strong performance across multiple benchmarks, paving the way for further progress in multi-modal artificial intelligence.
The interest in developing small language models (SLM) for on-device deployment is fast growing. However, the existing SLM design hardly considers the device hardware characteristics. Instead, this work presents a simple yet effective principle for SLM design: architecture searching for (near-)optimal runtime efficiency before pre-training. Guided by this principle, we develop PhoneLM SLM family (currently with 0.5B and 1.5B versions), that acheive the state-of-the-art capability-efficiency tradeoff among those with similar parameter size. We fully open-source the code, weights, and training datasets of PhoneLM for reproducibility and transparency, including both base and instructed versions. We also release a finetuned version of PhoneLM capable of accurate Android Intent invocation, and an end-to-end Android demo. All materials are available at https://github.com/UbiquitousLearning/PhoneLM.
The telecommunications industry's rapid evolution demands intelligent systems capable of managing complex networks and adapting to emerging technologies. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in addressing these challenges, their deployment in telecom environments faces significant constraints due to edge device limitations and inconsistent documentation. To bridge this gap, we present TeleOracle, a telecom-specialized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system built on the Phi-2 small language model (SLM). To improve context retrieval, TeleOracle employs a two-stage retriever that incorporates semantic chunking and hybrid keyword and semantic search. Additionally, we expand the context window during inference to enhance the model's performance on open-ended queries. We also employ low-rank adaption for efficient fine-tuning. A thorough analysis of the model's performance indicates that our RAG framework is effective in aligning Phi-2 to the telecom domain in a downstream question and answer (QnA) task, achieving a 30% improvement in accuracy over the base Phi-2 model, reaching an overall accuracy of 81.20%. Notably, we show that our model not only performs on par with the much larger LLMs but also achieves a higher faithfulness score, indicating higher adherence to the retrieved context.
We propose an innovative token representation and update method in a new ultra-small language model: the Wave network. Specifically, we use a complex vector to represent each token, encoding both global and local semantics of the input text. A complex vector consists of two components: a magnitude vector representing the global semantics of the input text, and a phase vector capturing the relationships between individual tokens and global semantics. Experiments on the AG News text classification task demonstrate that, when generating complex vectors from randomly initialized token embeddings, our single-layer Wave Network achieves 90.91% accuracy with wave interference and 91.66% with wave modulation - outperforming a single Transformer layer using BERT pre-trained embeddings by 19.23% and 19.98%, respectively, and approaching the accuracy of the pre-trained and fine-tuned BERT base model (94.64%). Additionally, compared to BERT base, the Wave Network reduces video memory usage and training time by 77.34% and 85.62% during wave modulation. In summary, we used a 2.4-million-parameter small language model to achieve accuracy comparable to a 100-million-parameter BERT model in text classification.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance on domain-specific tasks remains limited. While methods like retrieval augmented generation and fine-tuning can help to address this, they require significant resources. In-context learning (ICL) is a cheap and efficient alternative but cannot match the accuracies of advanced methods. We present Ensemble SuperICL, a novel approach that enhances ICL by leveraging the expertise of multiple fine-tuned small language models (SLMs). Ensemble SuperICL achieves state of the art (SoTA) results on several natural language understanding benchmarks. Additionally, we test it on a medical-domain labelling task and showcase its practicality by using off-the-shelf SLMs fine-tuned on a general language task, achieving superior accuracy in large-scale data labelling compared to all baselines. Finally, we conduct an ablation study and sensitivity analyses to elucidate the underlying mechanism of Ensemble SuperICL. Our research contributes to the growing demand for efficient domain specialisation methods in LLMs, offering a cheap and effective method for practitioners.
This paper describes experiments on fine-tuning a small language model to generate forecasts of long-horizon stock price movements. Inputs to the model are narrative text from 10-K reports of large market capitalization companies in the S&P 500 index; the output is a forward-looking buy or sell decision. Price direction is predicted at discrete horizons up to 12 months after the report filing date. The results reported here demonstrate good out-of-sample statistical performance (F1-macro= 0.62) at medium to long investment horizons. In particular, the buy signals generated from 10-K text are found most precise at 6 and 9 months in the future. As measured by the F1 score, the buy signal provides between 4.8 and 9 percent improvement against a random stock selection model. In contrast, sell signals generated by the models do not perform well. This may be attributed to the highly imbalanced out-of-sample data, or perhaps due to management drafting annual reports with a bias toward positive language. Cross-sectional analysis of performance by economic sector suggests that idiosyncratic reporting styles within industries are correlated with varying degrees and time scales of price movement predictability.
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of text generation, producing outputs that closely mimic human-like writing. Although academic and industrial institutions have developed detectors to prevent the malicious usage of LLM-generated texts, other research has doubt about the robustness of these systems. To stress test these detectors, we introduce a proxy-attack strategy that effortlessly compromises LLMs, causing them to produce outputs that align with human-written text and mislead detection systems. Our method attacks the source model by leveraging a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuned humanized small language model (SLM) in the decoding phase. Through an in-depth analysis, we demonstrate that our attack strategy is capable of generating responses that are indistinguishable to detectors, preventing them from differentiating between machine-generated and human-written text. We conduct systematic evaluations on extensive datasets using proxy-attacked open-source models, including Llama2-13B, Llama3-70B, and Mixtral-8*7B in both white- and black-box settings. Our findings show that the proxy-attack strategy effectively deceives the leading detectors, resulting in an average AUROC drop of 70.4% across multiple datasets, with a maximum drop of 90.3% on a single dataset. Furthermore, in cross-discipline scenarios, our strategy also bypasses these detectors, leading to a significant relative decrease of up to 90.9%, while in cross-language scenario, the drop reaches 91.3%. Despite our proxy-attack strategy successfully bypassing the detectors with such significant relative drops, we find that the generation quality of the attacked models remains preserved, even within a modest utility budget, when compared to the text produced by the original, unattacked source model.
A primary challenge in large language model (LLM) development is their onerous pre-training cost. Typically, such pre-training involves optimizing a self-supervised objective (such as next-token prediction) over a large corpus. This paper explores a promising paradigm to improve LLM pre-training efficiency and quality by suitably leveraging a small language model (SLM). In particular, this paradigm relies on an SLM to both (1) provide soft labels as additional training supervision, and (2) select a small subset of valuable ("informative" and "hard") training examples. Put together, this enables an effective transfer of the SLM's predictive distribution to the LLM, while prioritizing specific regions of the training data distribution. Empirically, this leads to reduced LLM training time compared to standard training, while improving the overall quality. Theoretically, we develop a statistical framework to systematically study the utility of SLMs in enabling efficient training of high-quality LLMs. In particular, our framework characterizes how the SLM's seemingly low-quality supervision can enhance the training of a much more capable LLM. Furthermore, it also highlights the need for an adaptive utilization of such supervision, by striking a balance between the bias and variance introduced by the SLM-provided soft labels. We corroborate our theoretical framework by improving the pre-training of an LLM with 2.8B parameters by utilizing a smaller LM with 1.5B parameters on the Pile dataset.
Training stability of large language models(LLMs) is an important research topic. Reproducing training instabilities can be costly, so we use a small language model with 830M parameters and experiment with higher learning rates to force models to diverge. One of the sources of training instability is the growth of logits in attention layers. We extend the focus of the previous work and look not only at the magnitude of the logits but at all outputs of linear layers in the Transformer block. We observe that with a high learning rate the L2 norm of all linear layer outputs can grow with each training step and the model diverges. Specifically we observe that QKV, Proj and FC2 layers have the largest growth of the output magnitude. This prompts us to explore several options: 1) apply layer normalization not only after QK layers but also after Proj and FC2 layers too; 2) apply layer normalization after the QKV layer (and remove pre normalization). 3) apply QK layer normalization together with softmax capping. We show that with the last two methods we can increase learning rate by 1.5x (without model divergence) in comparison to an approach based on QK layer normalization only. Also we observe significant perplexity improvements for all three methods in comparison to the baseline model.
Graph representation learning, involving both node features and graph structures, is crucial for real-world applications but often encounters pervasive noise. State-of-the-art methods typically address noise by focusing separately on node features with large language models (LLMs) and on graph structures with graph structure learning models (GSLMs). In this paper, we introduce LangGSL, a robust framework that integrates the complementary strengths of pre-trained language models and GSLMs to jointly enhance both node feature and graph structure learning. In LangGSL, we first leverage LLMs to filter noise in the raw data and extract valuable cleaned information as features, enhancing the synergy of downstream models. During the mutual learning phase in LangGSL, the core idea is to leverage the relatively small language model (LM) to process local attributes and generate reliable pseudo-labels and informative node embeddings, which are then integrated into the GSLM's prediction phase. This approach enriches the global context and enhances overall performance. Meanwhile, GSLM refines the evolving graph structure constructed from the LM's output, offering updated labels back to the LM as additional guidance, thus facilitating a more effective mutual learning process. The LM and GSLM work synergistically, complementing each other's strengths and offsetting weaknesses within a variational information-maximizing framework, resulting in enhanced node features and a more robust graph structure. Extensive experiments on diverse graph datasets of varying scales and across different task scenarios demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
We introduce Shakti, a 2.5 billion parameter language model specifically optimized for resource-constrained environments such as edge devices, including smartphones, wearables, and IoT systems. Shakti combines high-performance NLP with optimized efficiency and precision, making it ideal for real-time AI applications where computational resources and memory are limited. With support for vernacular languages and domain-specific tasks, Shakti excels in industries such as healthcare, finance, and customer service. Benchmark evaluations demonstrate that Shakti performs competitively against larger models while maintaining low latency and on-device efficiency, positioning it as a leading solution for edge AI.