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Jul 21

The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing

These names do not exist. Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen have appeared as volcano experts, astronauts, thriller protagonists, podcast hosts, and academic co-authors across hundreds of independently produced AI-generated documents, never having lived. We show that large language models do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations. These priors are model-family-specific (Claude: Elena Vasquez + Marcus Chen + Amara Okafor; Gemini: Aris Thorne + Lena Petrova; GPT: Elara Voss with no fixed partner), version-specific, and actively suppressed at model release boundaries, leaving dateable behavioral fingerprints in the content they produced. We document a downstream consequence at scale. On Zenodo, a CERN-operated repository that mints real DataCite DOIs, we identify 1,655 ghost-authored records claiming nonexistent journals with fabricated publication dates: server-side DataCite timestamps prove deliberate backdating, and 991 records were registered in a single month; these carry real DOIs registered in DataCite, making them harvestable by any scholarly aggregator that ingests DOI metadata. Ghost names additionally appear on ResearchGate forming synthetic research groups with collaborators drawn from multiple model families; publication dates on these records provide a reliable temporal proxy for model deployment windows.

  • 2 authors
·
May 31

MUSE: A Run-Centric Platform for Multimodal Unified Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models

Safety evaluation and red-teaming of large language models remain predominantly text-centric, and existing frameworks lack the infrastructure to systematically test whether alignment generalizes to audio, image, and video inputs. We present MUSE (Multimodal Unified Safety Evaluation), an open-source, run-centric platform that integrates automatic cross-modal payload generation, three multi-turn attack algorithms (Crescendo, PAIR, Violent Durian), provider-agnostic model routing, and an LLM judge with a five-level safety taxonomy into a single browser-based system. A dual-metric framework distinguishes hard Attack Success Rate (Compliance only) from soft ASR (including Partial Compliance), capturing partial information leakage that binary metrics miss. To probe whether alignment generalizes across modality boundaries, we introduce Inter-Turn Modality Switching (ITMS), which augments multi-turn attacks with per-turn modality rotation. Experiments across six multimodal LLMs from four providers show that multi-turn strategies can achieve up to 90-100% ASR against models with near-perfect single-turn refusal. ITMS does not uniformly raise final ASR on already-saturated baselines, but accelerates convergence by destabilizing early-turn defenses, and ablation reveals that the direction of modality effects is model-family-specific rather than universal, underscoring the need for provider-aware cross-modal safety testing.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 2 2

ClimateGPT: Towards AI Synthesizing Interdisciplinary Research on Climate Change

This paper introduces ClimateGPT, a model family of domain-specific large language models that synthesize interdisciplinary research on climate change. We trained two 7B models from scratch on a science-oriented dataset of 300B tokens. For the first model, the 4.2B domain-specific tokens were included during pre-training and the second was adapted to the climate domain after pre-training. Additionally, ClimateGPT-7B, 13B and 70B are continuously pre-trained from Llama~2 on a domain-specific dataset of 4.2B tokens. Each model is instruction fine-tuned on a high-quality and human-generated domain-specific dataset that has been created in close cooperation with climate scientists. To reduce the number of hallucinations, we optimize the model for retrieval augmentation and propose a hierarchical retrieval strategy. To increase the accessibility of our model to non-English speakers, we propose to make use of cascaded machine translation and show that this approach can perform comparably to natively multilingual models while being easier to scale to a large number of languages. Further, to address the intrinsic interdisciplinary aspect of climate change we consider different research perspectives. Therefore, the model can produce in-depth answers focusing on different perspectives in addition to an overall answer. We propose a suite of automatic climate-specific benchmarks to evaluate LLMs. On these benchmarks, ClimateGPT-7B performs on par with the ten times larger Llama-2-70B Chat model while not degrading results on general domain benchmarks. Our human evaluation confirms the trends we saw in our benchmarks. All models were trained and evaluated using renewable energy and are released publicly.

  • 26 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024 4

COVID-19-related Nepali Tweets Classification in a Low Resource Setting

Billions of people across the globe have been using social media platforms in their local languages to voice their opinions about the various topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several organizations, including the World Health Organization, have developed automated social media analysis tools that classify COVID-19-related tweets into various topics. However, these tools that help combat the pandemic are limited to very few languages, making several countries unable to take their benefit. While multi-lingual or low-resource language-specific tools are being developed, they still need to expand their coverage, such as for the Nepali language. In this paper, we identify the eight most common COVID-19 discussion topics among the Twitter community using the Nepali language, set up an online platform to automatically gather Nepali tweets containing the COVID-19-related keywords, classify the tweets into the eight topics, and visualize the results across the period in a web-based dashboard. We compare the performance of two state-of-the-art multi-lingual language models for Nepali tweet classification, one generic (mBERT) and the other Nepali language family-specific model (MuRIL). Our results show that the models' relative performance depends on the data size, with MuRIL doing better for a larger dataset. The annotated data, models, and the web-based dashboard are open-sourced at https://github.com/naamiinepal/covid-tweet-classification.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 11, 2022

Does RoPE Prevent or Degrade Retrieval Heads? A Mechanistic Analysis Across Model Families

Retrieval heads, attention heads that copy information from earlier context to the current position, have been proposed as the mechanistic substrate for long-context recall. Rotary position embeddings (RoPE) rotate queries and keys by frequencies decaying with a base hyperparameter theta, and a natural hypothesis is that this rotation either prevents retrieval heads from forming or degrades their function. We test both across four open-weight 7-8B models spanning multi-head and grouped-query attention and a 100x range of theta, using paired-seed needle-in-a-haystack tests, layer-clustered permutation, and causal head-masking. (i) Retrieval heads are causally necessary: masking the 87 detected heads in OLMo-2 collapses recall from 1.00 to 0.00, while masking matched random heads has no effect; this replicates in Qwen. (ii) Higher theta does not reduce retrieval-head count (LLaMA-3.1 at theta=500K has 47 heads vs LLaMA-2 at theta=10K with 42), refuting the prevention hypothesis. (iii) The norm-utility relation is family-specific and significant in opposite directions (Qwen d=-0.49, OLMo d=+0.50, both significant; LLaMA null); since OLMo and LLaMA-3.1 share theta=500K yet differ, the effect is not theta-driven. (iv) Building on Chiang and Yogatama (2025), a controlled patch shows that zeroing the lowest-frequency RoPE dimensions of retrieval heads degrades recall dose-dependently (1.00 to 0.18 when 32 of 128 dimensions are zeroed, vs 0.98 for random dimensions); the effect is head-specific and task-specific. The causal variable is RoPE frequency, not norm-utility. The direction holds in all five models patched (OLMo-2, Qwen2.5-7B/14B, Gemma-2, Mistral) across four lineages and two scales. We do not claim cross-model magnitude. Code and a paired-seed harness are released.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 18

Chain-of-Models Pre-Training: Rethinking Training Acceleration of Vision Foundation Models

In this paper, we present Chain-of-Models Pre-Training (CoM-PT), a novel performance-lossless training acceleration method for vision foundation models (VFMs). This approach fundamentally differs from existing acceleration methods in its core motivation: rather than optimizing each model individually, CoM-PT is designed to accelerate the training pipeline at the model family level, scaling efficiently as the model family expands. Specifically, CoM-PT establishes a pre-training sequence for the model family, arranged in ascending order of model size, called model chain. In this chain, only the smallest model undergoes standard individual pre-training, while the other models are efficiently trained through sequential inverse knowledge transfer from their smaller predecessors by jointly reusing the knowledge in the parameter space and the feature space. As a result, CoM-PT enables all models to achieve performance that is mostly superior to standard individual training while significantly reducing training cost, and this is extensively validated across 45 datasets spanning zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. Notably, its efficient scaling property yields a remarkable phenomenon: training more models even results in higher efficiency. For instance, when pre-training on CC3M: i) given ViT-L as the largest model, progressively prepending smaller models to the model chain reduces computational complexity by up to 72%; ii) within a fixed model size range, as the VFM family scales across 3, 4, and 7 models, the acceleration ratio of CoM-PT exhibits a striking leap: from 4.13X to 5.68X and 7.09X. Since CoM-PT is naturally agnostic to specific pre-training paradigms, we open-source the code to spur further extensions in more computationally intensive scenarios, such as large language model pre-training.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13

Delulu: A Verified Multi-Lingual Benchmark for Code Hallucination Detection in Fill-in-the-Middle Tasks

Large Language Models for code generation frequently produce hallucinations in Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) tasks -- plausible but incorrect completions such as invented API methods, invalid parameters, undefined variables, or non-existent imports. These failures pass superficial review yet introduce runtime errors. We introduce Delulu, a verified multi-lingual benchmark of 1,951 FIM samples across 7 languages and 4 hallucination types. Samples are curated through an adversarial pipeline: a frontier LLM generates plausible hallucinations, four diverse judge models evaluate them, embedding-based clustering mines progressively harder examples, self-contained Docker containers verify that golden completions compile while hallucinated variants produce the expected runtime error, and a final human-expert review removes any remaining biased or trivially decidable samples. We evaluate 11 open-weight FIM models from five families spanning 0.5B-32B parameters: a six-point Qwen2.5-Coder scaling slate, plus a cross-family slate (CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder-V2, StarCoder2). The strongest model reaches only 84.5% pass@1, no family exceeds 0.77 Edit Similarity, and every family produces hallucination-aligned completions on a non-trivial share of samples, confirming that the difficulty exposed by Delulu is task-intrinsic rather than family-specific. We release the benchmark, containers, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/microsoft/delulu.

  • 7 authors
·
May 6

Do LLMs Align Human Values Regarding Social Biases? Judging and Explaining Social Biases with LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) can lead to undesired consequences when misaligned with human values, especially in scenarios involving complex and sensitive social biases. Previous studies have revealed the misalignment of LLMs with human values using expert-designed or agent-based emulated bias scenarios. However, it remains unclear whether the alignment of LLMs with human values differs across different types of scenarios (e.g., scenarios containing negative vs. non-negative questions). In this study, we investigate the alignment of LLMs with human values regarding social biases (HVSB) in different types of bias scenarios. Through extensive analysis of 12 LLMs from four model families and four datasets, we demonstrate that LLMs with large model parameter scales do not necessarily have lower misalignment rate and attack success rate. Moreover, LLMs show a certain degree of alignment preference for specific types of scenarios and the LLMs from the same model family tend to have higher judgment consistency. In addition, we study the understanding capacity of LLMs with their explanations of HVSB. We find no significant differences in the understanding of HVSB across LLMs. We also find LLMs prefer their own generated explanations. Additionally, we endow smaller language models (LMs) with the ability to explain HVSB. The generation results show that the explanations generated by the fine-tuned smaller LMs are more readable, but have a relatively lower model agreeability.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 16, 2025

Florenz: Scaling Laws for Systematic Generalization in Vision-Language Models

Cross-lingual transfer enables vision-language models (VLMs) to perform vision tasks in various languages with training data only in one language. Current approaches rely on large pre-trained multilingual language models. However, they face the curse of multilinguality, sacrificing downstream task performance for multilingual capabilities, struggling with lexical ambiguities, and falling behind recent advances. In this work, we study the scaling laws of systematic generalization with monolingual VLMs for multilingual tasks, focusing on the impact of model size and seen training samples. We propose Florenz, a monolingual encoder-decoder VLM with 0.4B to 11.2B parameters combining the pre-trained VLM Florence-2 and the large language model Gemma-2. Florenz is trained with varying compute budgets on a synthetic dataset that features intentionally incomplete language coverage for image captioning, thus, testing generalization from the fully covered translation task. We show that not only does indirectly learning unseen task-language pairs adhere to a scaling law, but also that with our data generation pipeline and the proposed Florenz model family, image captioning abilities can emerge in a specific language even when only data for the translation task is available. Fine-tuning on a mix of downstream datasets yields competitive performance and demonstrates promising scaling trends in multimodal machine translation (Multi30K, CoMMuTE), lexical disambiguation (CoMMuTE), and image captioning (Multi30K, XM3600, COCO Karpathy).

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 12, 2025 2

UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report

GUI agents have emerged as a powerful paradigm for automating interactions in digital environments, yet achieving both broad generality and consistently strong task performance remains challenging.In this report, we present UI-Venus-1.5, a unified, end-to-end GUI Agent designed for robust real-world applications.The proposed model family comprises two dense variants (2B and 8B) and one mixture-of-experts variant (30B-A3B) to meet various downstream application scenarios.Compared to our previous version, UI-Venus-1.5 introduces three key technical advances: (1) a comprehensive Mid-Training stage leveraging 10 billion tokens across 30+ datasets to establish foundational GUI semantics; (2) Online Reinforcement Learning with full-trajectory rollouts, aligning training objectives with long-horizon, dynamic navigation in large-scale environments; and (3) a single unified GUI Agent constructed via Model Merging, which synthesizes domain-specific models (grounding, web, and mobile) into one cohesive checkpoint. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UI-Venus-1.5 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as ScreenSpot-Pro (69.6%), VenusBench-GD (75.0%), and AndroidWorld (77.6%), significantly outperforming previous strong baselines. In addition, UI-Venus-1.5 demonstrates robust navigation capabilities across a variety of Chinese mobile apps, effectively executing user instructions in real-world scenarios. Code: https://github.com/inclusionAI/UI-Venus; Model: https://huggingface.co/collections/inclusionAI/ui-venus

inclusionAI inclusionAI
·
Feb 9 4

PoET: A generative model of protein families as sequences-of-sequences

Generative protein language models are a natural way to design new proteins with desired functions. However, current models are either difficult to direct to produce a protein from a specific family of interest, or must be trained on a large multiple sequence alignment (MSA) from the specific family of interest, making them unable to benefit from transfer learning across families. To address this, we propose Protein Evolutionary Transformer (PoET), an autoregressive generative model of whole protein families that learns to generate sets of related proteins as sequences-of-sequences across tens of millions of natural protein sequence clusters. PoET can be used as a retrieval-augmented language model to generate and score arbitrary modifications conditioned on any protein family of interest, and can extrapolate from short context lengths to generalize well even for small families. This is enabled by a unique Transformer layer; we model tokens sequentially within sequences while attending between sequences order invariantly, allowing PoET to scale to context lengths beyond those used during training. In extensive experiments on deep mutational scanning datasets, we show that PoET outperforms existing protein language models and evolutionary sequence models for variant function prediction across proteins of all MSA depths. We also demonstrate PoET's ability to controllably generate new protein sequences.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 9, 2023

Möbius Transform for Mitigating Perspective Distortions in Representation Learning

Perspective distortion (PD) causes unprecedented changes in shape, size, orientation, angles, and other spatial relationships of visual concepts in images. Precisely estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters is a challenging task that prevents synthesizing perspective distortion. Non-availability of dedicated training data poses a critical barrier to developing robust computer vision methods. Additionally, distortion correction methods make other computer vision tasks a multi-step approach and lack performance. In this work, we propose mitigating perspective distortion (MPD) by employing a fine-grained parameter control on a specific family of M\"obius transform to model real-world distortion without estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and without the need for actual distorted data. Also, we present a dedicated perspectively distorted benchmark dataset, ImageNet-PD, to benchmark the robustness of deep learning models against this new dataset. The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks, ImageNet-E and ImageNet-X. Additionally, it significantly improves performance on ImageNet-PD while consistently performing on standard data distribution. Notably, our method shows improved performance on three PD-affected real-world applications crowd counting, fisheye image recognition, and person re-identification and one PD-affected challenging CV task: object detection. The source code, dataset, and models are available on the project webpage at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/mpd.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 7, 2024

An adapted large language model facilitates multiple medical tasks in diabetes care

Diabetes is a chronic disease that poses a significant global health burden, and optimizing diabetes management requires multi-stakeholder collaboration. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in various healthcare scenarios, but their effectiveness across a diverse range of diabetes tasks remains unproven. In this study, we introduced a framework to train and validate diabetes-specific LLMs. We first developed a comprehensive data processing pipeline that includes data collection, filtering, augmentation and refinement. This approach contributes to creating a high-quality, diabetes-specific dataset, and several evaluation benchmarks entirely from scratch. Utilizing the collected training dataset, we fine-tuned a diabetes-specific LLM family that demonstrated state-of-the-art proficiency in understanding and processing various diabetes tasks compared to other LLMs. Furthermore, clinical studies showed the potential applications of our models in diabetes care, including providing personalized healthcare, assisting medical education, and streamlining clinical tasks. In conclusion, our study introduced a framework to develop and evaluate a diabetes-specific LLM family, and highlighted its potential to enhance clinical practice and provide personalized, data-driven support for diabetes support when facing different end users. The code is provided via GitHub at https://github.com/waltonfuture/Diabetica.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 19, 2024 2

Gradient-Based Model Fingerprinting for LLM Similarity Detection and Family Classification

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become integral software components in modern applications, unauthorized model derivations through fine-tuning, merging, and redistribution have emerged as critical software engineering challenges. Unlike traditional software where clone detection and license compliance are well-established, the LLM ecosystem lacks effective mechanisms to detect model lineage and enforce licensing agreements. This gap is particularly problematic when open-source model creators, such as Meta's LLaMA, require derivative works to maintain naming conventions for attribution, yet no technical means exist to verify compliance. To fill this gap, treating LLMs as software artifacts requiring provenance tracking, we present TensorGuard, a gradient-based fingerprinting framework for LLM similarity detection and family classification. Our approach extracts model-intrinsic behavioral signatures by analyzing gradient responses to random input perturbations across tensor layers, operating independently of training data, watermarks, or specific model formats. TensorGuard supports the widely-adopted safetensors format and constructs high-dimensional fingerprints through statistical analysis of gradient features. These fingerprints enable two complementary capabilities: direct pairwise similarity assessment between arbitrary models through distance computation, and systematic family classification of unknown models via the K-Means clustering algorithm with domain-informed centroid initialization using known base models. Experimental evaluation on 58 models comprising 8 base models and 50 derivatives across five model families (Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Phi, Mistral) demonstrates 94% classification accuracy under our centroid-initialized K-Means clustering.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025

FAQ: Mitigating Quantization Error via Regenerating Calibration Data with Family-Aware Quantization

Although post-training quantization (PTQ) provides an efficient numerical compression scheme for deploying large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained devices, the representativeness and universality of calibration data remain a core bottleneck in determining the accuracy of quantization parameters. Traditional PTQ methods typically rely on limited samples, making it difficult to capture the activation distribution during the inference phase, leading to biases in quantization parameters. To address this, we propose FAQ (Family-Aware Quantization), a calibration data regeneration framework that leverages prior knowledge from LLMs of the same family to generate high-fidelity calibration samples. Specifically, FAQ first inputs the original calibration samples into a larger LLM from the same family as the target model, regenerating a series of high-fidelity calibration data using a highly consistent knowledge system. Subsequently, this data, carrying Chain-of-Thought reasoning and conforming to the expected activation distribution, undergoes group competition under expert guidance to select the best samples, which are then re-normalized to enhance the effectiveness of standard PTQ. Experiments on multiple model series, including Qwen3-8B, show that FAQ reduces accuracy loss by up to 28.5\% compared to the baseline with original calibration data, demonstrating its powerful potential and contribution.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 15

Self-Evolving Recommendation System: End-To-End Autonomous Model Optimization With LLM Agents

Optimizing large-scale machine learning systems, such as recommendation models for global video platforms, requires navigating a massive hyperparameter search space and, more critically, designing sophisticated optimizers, architectures, and reward functions to capture nuanced user behaviors. Achieving substantial improvements in these areas is a non-trivial task, traditionally relying on extensive manual iterations to test new hypotheses. We propose a self-evolving system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically those from Google's Gemini family, to autonomously generate, train, and deploy high-performing, complex model changes within an end-to-end automated workflow. The self-evolving system is comprised of an Offline Agent (Inner Loop) that performs high-throughput hypothesis generation using proxy metrics, and an Online Agent (Outer Loop) that validates candidates against delayed north star business metrics in live production. Our agents act as specialized Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs): they exhibit deep reasoning capabilities, discovering novel improvements in optimization algorithms and model architecture, and formulating innovative reward functions that target long-term user engagement. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through several successful production launches at YouTube, confirming that autonomous, LLM-driven evolution can surpass traditional engineering workflows in both development velocity and model performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 10

The Topology and Geometry of Neural Representations

A central question for neuroscience is how to characterize brain representations of perceptual and cognitive content. An ideal characterization should distinguish different functional regions with robustness to noise and idiosyncrasies of individual brains that do not correspond to computational differences. Previous studies have characterized brain representations by their representational geometry, which is defined by the representational dissimilarity matrix (RDM), a summary statistic that abstracts from the roles of individual neurons (or responses channels) and characterizes the discriminability of stimuli. Here we explore a further step of abstraction: from the geometry to the topology of brain representations. We propose topological representational similarity analysis (tRSA), an extension of representational similarity analysis (RSA) that uses a family of geo-topological summary statistics that generalizes the RDM to characterize the topology while de-emphasizing the geometry. We evaluate this new family of statistics in terms of the sensitivity and specificity for model selection using both simulations and functional MRI (fMRI) data. In the simulations, the ground truth is a data-generating layer representation in a neural network model and the models are the same and other layers in different model instances (trained from different random seeds). In fMRI, the ground truth is a visual area and the models are the same and other areas measured in different subjects. Results show that topology-sensitive characterizations of population codes are robust to noise and interindividual variability and maintain excellent sensitivity to the unique representational signatures of different neural network layers and brain regions.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 19, 2023

LeMON: Learning to Learn Multi-Operator Networks

Single-operator learning involves training a deep neural network to learn a specific operator, whereas recent work in multi-operator learning uses an operator embedding structure to train a single neural network on data from multiple operators. Thus, multi-operator learning is capable of predicting a range of operators within one model. In this work, we propose pretraining and fine-tuning strategies for solving PDEs using multi-operator learning. One key aspect is that by increasing the number of families of operators used in pretraining, a PDE foundation model can be fine-tuned to downstream tasks involving new PDEs with a limited number of samples, thus outperforming single operator neural networks. Specifically, a multi-operator learning model pre-trained with data from diverse PDE families can predict unseen operators after fine-tuning with only a limited number of operators from the new family, enabling them to serve as a data-free PDE solver. We also show that the proposed training and fine-tuning method is able to predict new operators in zero-shot prediction without samples. Additionally, we introduce a PDE-agnostic meta-learning algorithm to improve the adaptability of the model to various PDEs by providing a better parameter initialization process. To address the needs of applications with limited computing resources, we explore low-rank adaptation methods that reduce computational costs while enhancing solver accuracy. Lastly, by examining the scaling law with respect to the number of operator families, we establish and highlight its potential for broad adaptation in PDE-solving tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024

In-Context Learning Strategies Emerge Rationally

Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate strategies in the first place. Specifically, we start with the observation that when trained to learn a mixture of tasks, as is popular in the literature, the strategies learned by a model for performing ICL can be captured by a family of Bayesian predictors: a memorizing predictor, which assumes a discrete prior on the set of seen tasks, and a generalizing predictor, where the prior matches the underlying task distribution. Adopting the normative lens of rational analysis, where a learner's behavior is explained as an optimal adaptation to data given computational constraints, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian framework that almost perfectly predicts Transformer next-token predictions throughout training -- without assuming access to its weights. Under this framework, pretraining is viewed as a process of updating the posterior probability of different strategies, and inference-time behavior as a posterior-weighted average over these strategies' predictions. Our framework draws on common assumptions about neural network learning dynamics, which make explicit a tradeoff between loss and complexity among candidate strategies: beyond how well it explains the data, a model's preference towards implementing a strategy is dictated by its complexity. This helps explain well-known ICL phenomena, while offering novel predictions: e.g., we show a superlinear trend in the timescale for transitioning from generalization to memorization as task diversity increases. Overall, our work advances an explanatory and predictive account of ICL grounded in tradeoffs between strategy loss and complexity.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 21, 2025 1

Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses

Harnesses are now central to coding-agent performance, mediating how models interact with tools and execution environments. Yet harness engineering remains a manual craft, because automating it faces a heterogeneous action space across editable components, voluminous trajectories that bury actionable signal, and edits whose effect is hard to attribute. We introduce Agentic Harness Engineering (AHE), a closed loop that addresses these challenges through three matched observability pillars: (1) component observability gives every editable harness component a file-level representation so the action space is explicit and revertible; (2) experience observability distills millions of raw trajectory tokens into a layered, drill-down evidence corpus that an evolving agent can actually consume; and (3) decision observability pairs every edit with a self-declared prediction, later verified against the next round's task-level outcomes. Together, these pillars turn every edit into a falsifiable contract, so harness evolution proceeds autonomously without collapsing into trial-and-error. Empirically, ten AHE iterations lift pass@1 on Terminal-Bench 2 from 69.7% to 77.0%, surpassing the human-designed harness Codex-CLI (71.9%) and the self-evolving baselines ACE and TF-GRPO. The frozen harness transfers without re-evolution: on SWE-bench-verified it tops aggregate success at 12% fewer tokens than the seed, and on Terminal-Bench 2 it yields +5.1 to +10.1pp cross-family gains across three alternate model families, indicating the evolved components encode general engineering experience rather than benchmark-specific tuning. Ablations localize the gain to tools, middleware, and long-term memory rather than the system prompt, suggesting factual harness structure transfers while prose-level strategy does not.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 29

Measuring Maximum Activations in Open Large Language Models

The dynamic range of activations is a first-order constraint for low-bit quantization, activation scaling, and stable LLM inference. Prior work characterized outlier features and massive activations on pre-2024 LLaMA-style models, and the downstream activation-quantization stack inherits that picture without revisiting it for the post-LLaMA open-model boom. We ask the deployment-oriented question: how large can activations get in modern open LLMs, and how does this magnitude vary across families, generations, and training stages? Under a unified pipeline (5,000-sample multi-domain corpus, family-specific tokenization, identical hooks across embeddings, hidden states, attention, MLP/MoE, SwiGLU gates, and final norm), we measure global and layerwise maxima on 27 checkpoints from 8 open families spanning dense, MoE, vision-language, intermediate-training, and instruction-tuned variants. We find that (i) global maxima span over nearly four orders of magnitude at comparable parameter counts, with Qwen3.5 and MoE checkpoints in the 10^2 to 10^3 range and Gemma3-27B-it reaching ~7 x 10^5; (ii) cross-family and cross-generation comparisons break simple monotonic scaling; and (iii) MoE checkpoints exhibit 14.0-23.4x lower peaks than matched-scale dense counterparts, while the residual stream carries the global maximum in 22/24 checkpoints. A lightweight INT-8 sanity check shows that measured maxima co-vary with low-bit reconstruction error via activation-scale selection. We conclude that maximum activation magnitude is a model property tied to family, architecture, and training stage - not a simple byproduct of size - and should be measured and reported alongside any open-weight release before low-bit deployment. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/clx1415926/Max_act_llm.

baidu BAIDU
·
May 14 2

ContextEcho: A Benchmark for Persona Drift in Long Agentic-Coding Sessions

A frontier language model's acknowledged "helpful programming assistant" persona does not survive long agentic-coding sessions in the deployment regime that production products actually run. After hours of tool-using debugging, a model that initially hedges preferences ("I don't have preferences") may begin asserting them ("Python - the feedback loop is instant..."), revealing user-visible drift that deployer evaluations may miss. Existing persona-stability studies focus on short dialogues and report little shift, leaving real-world code-generation regimes - thousands of tool-using turns, compaction, and hours-long sessions - largely uncharacterized. We introduce ContextEcho, a benchmark and reusable harness for measuring persona drift at deployment scale. It combines a 25-probe identity suite, a snapshot-then-probe protocol that forks conversation state without perturbing the main session, complementary judged and judge-free measurement surfaces, and three anonymized Claude Code sessions spanning 3,746-9,716 turns. Across 23 frontier models, ContextEcho shows that persona drift is general across organizations rather than family-specific, that in-session compaction does not reliably reset it, and that a single-shot anchor restores the trained register across measured targets. It also reveals mode-dependent downstream effects: while drift can facilitate tool-using continuation, in tool-free chat it breaks formatting contracts and inflates output length. Overall, ContextEcho provides researchers and deployers an open-source framework to audit whether the persona a model ships with is the persona users encounter at session end, across chat-completions API targets and without retraining.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21

Euclid: Supercharging Multimodal LLMs with Synthetic High-Fidelity Visual Descriptions

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in recent years, yet continue to struggle with low-level visual perception (LLVP) -- particularly the ability to accurately describe the geometric details of an image. This capability is crucial for applications in areas such as robotics, medical image analysis, and manufacturing. In this paper, we first introduce Geoperception, a benchmark designed to evaluate an MLLM's ability to accurately transcribe 2D geometric information from an image. Using this benchmark, we demonstrate the limitations of leading MLLMs, and then conduct a comprehensive empirical study to explore strategies for improving their performance on geometric tasks. Our findings highlight the benefits of certain model architectures, training techniques, and data strategies, including the use of high-fidelity synthetic data and multi-stage training with a data curriculum. Notably, we find that a data curriculum enables models to learn challenging geometry understanding tasks which they fail to learn from scratch. Leveraging these insights, we develop Euclid, a family of models specifically optimized for strong low-level geometric perception. Although purely trained on synthetic multimodal data, Euclid shows strong generalization ability to novel geometry shapes. For instance, Euclid outperforms the best closed-source model, Gemini-1.5-Pro, by up to 58.56% on certain Geoperception benchmark tasks and 10.65% on average across all tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024 2

On Relation-Specific Neurons in Large Language Models

In large language models (LLMs), certain neurons can store distinct pieces of knowledge learned during pretraining. While knowledge typically appears as a combination of relations and entities, it remains unclear whether some neurons focus on a relation itself -- independent of any entity. We hypothesize such neurons detect a relation in the input text and guide generation involving such a relation. To investigate this, we study the Llama-2 family on a chosen set of relations with a statistics-based method. Our experiments demonstrate the existence of relation-specific neurons. We measure the effect of selectively deactivating candidate neurons specific to relation r on the LLM's ability to handle (1) facts whose relation is r and (2) facts whose relation is a different relation r' neq r. With respect to their capacity for encoding relation information, we give evidence for the following three properties of relation-specific neurons. (i) Neuron cumulativity. The neurons for r present a cumulative effect so that deactivating a larger portion of them results in the degradation of more facts in r. (ii) Neuron versatility. Neurons can be shared across multiple closely related as well as less related relations. Some relation neurons transfer across languages. (iii) Neuron interference. Deactivating neurons specific to one relation can improve LLM generation performance for facts of other relations. We will make our code publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/relation-specific-neurons.

cis-lmu CIS, LMU Munich
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Feb 24, 2025 2

KL3M Tokenizers: A Family of Domain-Specific and Character-Level Tokenizers for Legal, Financial, and Preprocessing Applications

We present the KL3M tokenizers, a family of specialized tokenizers for legal, financial, and governmental text. Despite established work on tokenization, specialized tokenizers for professional domains remain understudied. Our paper offers two main contributions to this area. First, we introduce domain-specific BPE tokenizers for legal, financial, and governmental text. Our kl3m-004-128k-cased tokenizer uses 9-17% fewer tokens than GPT-4o and Llama3 for domain-specific documents, despite having a smaller vocabulary. For specialized terminology, our cased tokenizer is even more efficient, using up to 83% fewer tokens for legal terms and 39% fewer tokens for financial terms. Second, we develop character-level BPE tokenizers (4K, 8K, and 16K vocabulary sizes) for text correction tasks like OCR post-processing. These tokenizers keep consistent token boundaries between error-containing and correct text, making it easier for models to learn correction patterns. These tokenizers help professional applications by fitting more text in context windows, reducing computational needs, and preserving the meaning of domain-specific terms. Our analysis shows these efficiency gains directly benefit the processing of long legal and financial documents. We release all tokenizers and code through GitHub and Hugging Face to support further research in specialized tokenization.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 21, 2025 2

EvalYaks: Instruction Tuning Datasets and LoRA Fine-tuned Models for Automated Scoring of CEFR B2 Speaking Assessment Transcripts

Relying on human experts to evaluate CEFR speaking assessments in an e-learning environment creates scalability challenges, as it limits how quickly and widely assessments can be conducted. We aim to automate the evaluation of CEFR B2 English speaking assessments in e-learning environments from conversation transcripts. First, we evaluate the capability of leading open source and commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) to score a candidate's performance across various criteria in the CEFR B2 speaking exam in both global and India-specific contexts. Next, we create a new expert-validated, CEFR-aligned synthetic conversational dataset with transcripts that are rated at different assessment scores. In addition, new instruction-tuned datasets are developed from the English Vocabulary Profile (up to CEFR B2 level) and the CEFR-SP WikiAuto datasets. Finally, using these new datasets, we perform parameter efficient instruction tuning of Mistral Instruct 7B v0.2 to develop a family of models called EvalYaks. Four models in this family are for assessing the four sections of the CEFR B2 speaking exam, one for identifying the CEFR level of vocabulary and generating level-specific vocabulary, and another for detecting the CEFR level of text and generating level-specific text. EvalYaks achieved an average acceptable accuracy of 96%, a degree of variation of 0.35 levels, and performed 3 times better than the next best model. This demonstrates that a 7B parameter LLM instruction tuned with high-quality CEFR-aligned assessment data can effectively evaluate and score CEFR B2 English speaking assessments, offering a promising solution for scalable, automated language proficiency evaluation.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 22, 2024 1

PerfCoder: Large Language Models for Interpretable Code Performance Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in automatic code generation, yet their ability to produce high-performance code remains limited--a critical requirement in real-world software systems. We argue that current LLMs struggle not only due to data scarcity but, more importantly, because they lack supervision that guides interpretable and effective performance improvements. In this work, we introduce PerfCoder, a family of LLMs specifically designed to generate performance-enhanced code from source code via interpretable, customized optimizations. PerfCoder is fine-tuned on a curated collection of real-world optimization trajectories with human-readable annotations, and preference-aligned by reinforcement fine-tuning using runtime measurements, enabling it to propose input-specific improvement strategies and apply them directly without relying on iterative refinement. On the PIE code performance benchmark, PerfCoder surpasses all existing models in both runtime speedup and effective optimization rate, demonstrating that performance optimization cannot be achieved by scale alone but requires optimization stratetgy awareness. In addition, PerfCoder can generate interpretable feedback about the source code, which, when provided as input to a larger LLM in a planner-and-optimizer cooperative workflow, can further improve outcomes. Specifically, we elevate the performance of 32B models and GPT-5 to new levels on code optimization, substantially surpassing their original performance.

  • 7 authors
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Dec 15, 2025

Building a Family of Data Augmentation Models for Low-cost LLM Fine-tuning on the Cloud

Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 6, 2024

TEDDY: A Family Of Foundation Models For Understanding Single Cell Biology

Understanding the biological mechanism of disease is critical for medicine, and in particular drug discovery. AI-powered analysis of genome-scale biological data hold great potential in this regard. The increasing availability of single-cell RNA sequencing data has enabled the development of large foundation models for disease biology. However, existing foundation models either do not improve or only modestly improve over task-specific models in downstream applications. Here, we explored two avenues for improving the state-of-the-art. First, we scaled the pre-training dataset to 116 million cells, which is larger than those used by previous models. Second, we leveraged the availability of large-scale biological annotations as a form of supervision during pre-training. We trained the TEDDY family of models comprising six transformer-based state-of-the-art single-cell foundation models with 70 million, 160 million, and 400 million parameters. We vetted our models on two downstream evaluation tasks -- identifying the underlying disease state of held-out donors not seen during training and distinguishing healthy cells from diseased ones for disease conditions and donors not seen during training. Scaling experiments showed that performance improved predictably with both data volume and parameter count. Our models showed substantial improvement over existing work on the first task and more muted improvements on the second.

  • 16 authors
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Mar 5, 2025

LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-3 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by fine-tuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLM-Adapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and can execute these adapter-based PEFT methods of LLMs for different tasks. The framework includes state-of-the-art open-access LLMs such as LLaMA, BLOOM, OPT, and GPT-J, as well as widely used adapters such as Series adapter, Parallel adapter, and LoRA. The framework is designed to be research-friendly, efficient, modular, and extendable, allowing the integration of new adapters and the evaluation of them with new and larger-scale LLMs. Furthermore, to evaluate the effectiveness of adapters in LLMs-Adapters, we conduct experiments on six math reasoning datasets. The results demonstrate that using adapter-based PEFT in smaller-scale LLMs (7B) with few extra trainable parameters yields comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to that of powerful LLMs (175B) in zero-shot inference on simple math reasoning datasets. Overall, we provide a promising framework for fine-tuning large LLMs on downstream tasks. We believe the proposed LLMs-Adapters will advance adapter-based PEFT research, facilitate the deployment of research pipelines, and enable practical applications to real-world systems.

  • 9 authors
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Apr 4, 2023

A Survey of GPT-3 Family Large Language Models Including ChatGPT and GPT-4

Large language models (LLMs) are a special class of pretrained language models obtained by scaling model size, pretraining corpus and computation. LLMs, because of their large size and pretraining on large volumes of text data, exhibit special abilities which allow them to achieve remarkable performances without any task-specific training in many of the natural language processing tasks. The era of LLMs started with OpenAI GPT-3 model, and the popularity of LLMs is increasing exponentially after the introduction of models like ChatGPT and GPT4. We refer to GPT-3 and its successor OpenAI models, including ChatGPT and GPT4, as GPT-3 family large language models (GLLMs). With the ever-rising popularity of GLLMs, especially in the research community, there is a strong need for a comprehensive survey which summarizes the recent research progress in multiple dimensions and can guide the research community with insightful future research directions. We start the survey paper with foundation concepts like transformers, transfer learning, self-supervised learning, pretrained language models and large language models. We then present a brief overview of GLLMs and discuss the performances of GLLMs in various downstream tasks, specific domains and multiple languages. We also discuss the data labelling and data augmentation abilities of GLLMs, the robustness of GLLMs, the effectiveness of GLLMs as evaluators, and finally, conclude with multiple insightful future research directions. To summarize, this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good resource for both academic and industry people to stay updated with the latest research related to GPT-3 family large language models.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 4, 2023

MLE convergence speed to information projection of exponential family: Criterion for model dimension and sample size -- complete proof version--

For a parametric model of distributions, the closest distribution in the model to the true distribution located outside the model is considered. Measuring the closeness between two distributions with the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence, the closest distribution is called the "information projection." The estimation risk of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is defined as the expectation of K-L divergence between the information projection and the predictive distribution with plugged-in MLE. Here, the asymptotic expansion of the risk is derived up to n^{-2}-order, and the sufficient condition on the risk for the Bayes error rate between the true distribution and the information projection to be lower than a specified value is investigated. Combining these results, the "p-n criterion" is proposed, which determines whether the MLE is sufficiently close to the information projection for the given model and sample. In particular, the criterion for an exponential family model is relatively simple and can be used for a complex model with no explicit form of normalizing constant. This criterion can constitute a solution to the sample size or model acceptance problem. Use of the p-n criteria is demonstrated for two practical datasets. The relationship between the results and information criteria is also studied.

  • 1 authors
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May 19, 2021

The Specification as Quality Gate: Three Hypotheses on AI-Assisted Code Review

The dominant industry response to AI-generated code quality problems is to deploy AI reviewers. This paper argues that this response is structurally circular when executable specifications are absent: without an external reference, both the generating agent and the reviewing agent reason from the same artefact, share the same training distribution, and exhibit correlated failures. The review checks code against itself, not against intent. Three hypotheses are developed. First, that correlated errors in homogeneous LLM pipelines echo rather than cancel, a claim supported by convergent empirical evidence from multiple 2025-2026 studies and by three small contrived experiments reported here. The first two experiments are same-family (Claude reviewing Claude-generated code); the third extends to a cross-family panel of four models from three families. All use a planted bug corpus rather than a natural defect sample; they are directional evidence, not a controlled demonstration. Second, that executable specifications perform a domain transition in the Cynefin sense, converting enabling constraints into governing constraints and moving the problem from the complex domain to the complicated domain, a transition that AI makes economically viable at scale. Third, that the defect classes lying outside the reach of executable specifications form a well-defined residual, which is the legitimate and bounded target for AI review. The combined argument implies an architecture: specifications first, deterministic verification pipeline second, AI review only for the structural and architectural residual. This is not a claim that AI review is valueless. It is a claim about what it is actually for, and about what happens when it is deployed without the foundation that makes it non-circular.

  • 1 authors
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Mar 25

VidEmo: Affective-Tree Reasoning for Emotion-Centric Video Foundation Models

Understanding and predicting emotion from videos has gathered significant attention in recent studies, driven by advancements in video large language models (VideoLLMs). While advanced methods have made progress in video emotion analysis, the intrinsic nature of emotions poses significant challenges. Emotions are characterized by dynamic and cues-dependent properties, making it difficult to understand complex and evolving emotional states with reasonable rationale. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel affective cues-guided reasoning framework that unifies fundamental attribute perception, expression analysis, and high-level emotional understanding in a stage-wise manner. At the core of our approach is a family of video emotion foundation models (VidEmo), specifically designed for emotion reasoning and instruction-following. These models undergo a two-stage tuning process: first, curriculum emotion learning for injecting emotion knowledge, followed by affective-tree reinforcement learning for emotion reasoning. Moreover, we establish a foundational data infrastructure and introduce a emotion-centric fine-grained dataset (Emo-CFG) consisting of 2.1M diverse instruction-based samples. Emo-CFG includes explainable emotional question-answering, fine-grained captions, and associated rationales, providing essential resources for advancing emotion understanding tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance, setting a new milestone across 15 face perception tasks.

  • 7 authors
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Nov 4, 2025 1

Foundational Large Language Models for Materials Research

Materials discovery and development are critical for addressing global challenges. Yet, the exponential growth in materials science literature comprising vast amounts of textual data has created significant bottlenecks in knowledge extraction, synthesis, and scientific reasoning. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportunities to accelerate materials research through automated analysis and prediction. Still, their effective deployment requires domain-specific adaptation for understanding and solving domain-relevant tasks. Here, we present LLaMat, a family of foundational models for materials science developed through continued pretraining of LLaMA models on an extensive corpus of materials literature and crystallographic data. Through systematic evaluation, we demonstrate that LLaMat excels in materials-specific NLP and structured information extraction while maintaining general linguistic capabilities. The specialized LLaMat-CIF variant demonstrates unprecedented capabilities in crystal structure generation, predicting stable crystals with high coverage across the periodic table. Intriguingly, despite LLaMA-3's superior performance in comparison to LLaMA-2, we observe that LLaMat-2 demonstrates unexpectedly enhanced domain-specific performance across diverse materials science tasks, including structured information extraction from text and tables, more particularly in crystal structure generation, a potential adaptation rigidity in overtrained LLMs. Altogether, the present work demonstrates the effectiveness of domain adaptation towards developing practically deployable LLM copilots for materials research. Beyond materials science, our findings reveal important considerations for domain adaptation of LLMs, such as model selection, training methodology, and domain-specific performance, which may influence the development of specialized scientific AI systems.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024

Simulated Ensemble Attack: Transferring Jailbreaks Across Fine-tuned Vision-Language Models

Fine-tuning open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) creates a critical yet underexplored attack surface: vulnerabilities in the base VLM could be retained in fine-tuned variants, rendering them susceptible to transferable jailbreak attacks. To demonstrate this risk, we introduce the Simulated Ensemble Attack (SEA), a novel grey-box jailbreak method in which the adversary has full access to the base VLM but no knowledge of the fine-tuned target's weights or training configuration. To improve jailbreak transferability across fine-tuned VLMs, SEA combines two key techniques: Fine-tuning Trajectory Simulation (FTS) and Targeted Prompt Guidance (TPG). FTS generates transferable adversarial images by simulating the vision encoder's parameter shifts, while TPG is a textual strategy that steers the language decoder toward adversarially optimized outputs. Experiments on the Qwen2-VL family (2B and 7B) demonstrate that SEA achieves high transfer attack success rates exceeding 86.5% and toxicity rates near 49.5% across diverse fine-tuned variants, even those specifically fine-tuned to improve safety behaviors. Notably, while direct PGD-based image jailbreaks rarely transfer across fine-tuned VLMs, SEA reliably exploits inherited vulnerabilities from the base model, significantly enhancing transferability. These findings highlight an urgent need to safeguard fine-tuned proprietary VLMs against transferable vulnerabilities inherited from open-source foundations, motivating the development of holistic defenses across the entire model lifecycle.

  • 5 authors
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Aug 3, 2025

AniMer+: Unified Pose and Shape Estimation Across Mammalia and Aves via Family-Aware Transformer

In the era of foundation models, achieving a unified understanding of different dynamic objects through a single network has the potential to empower stronger spatial intelligence. Moreover, accurate estimation of animal pose and shape across diverse species is essential for quantitative analysis in biological research. However, this topic remains underexplored due to the limited network capacity of previous methods and the scarcity of comprehensive multi-species datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce AniMer+, an extended version of our scalable AniMer framework. In this paper, we focus on a unified approach for reconstructing mammals (mammalia) and birds (aves). A key innovation of AniMer+ is its high-capacity, family-aware Vision Transformer (ViT) incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. Its architecture partitions network layers into taxa-specific components (for mammalia and aves) and taxa-shared components, enabling efficient learning of both distinct and common anatomical features within a single model. To overcome the critical shortage of 3D training data, especially for birds, we introduce a diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. This pipeline produces two large-scale synthetic datasets: CtrlAni3D for quadrupeds and CtrlAVES3D for birds. To note, CtrlAVES3D is the first large-scale, 3D-annotated dataset for birds, which is crucial for resolving single-view depth ambiguities. Trained on an aggregated collection of 41.3k mammalian and 12.4k avian images (combining real and synthetic data), our method demonstrates superior performance over existing approaches across a wide range of benchmarks, including the challenging out-of-domain Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both our novel network architecture and the generated synthetic datasets in enhancing real-world application performance.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 31, 2025

HY-Embodied-0.5: Embodied Foundation Models for Real-World Agents

We introduce HY-Embodied-0.5, a family of foundation models specifically designed for real-world embodied agents. To bridge the gap between general Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the demands of embodied agents, our models are developed to enhance the core capabilities required by embodied intelligence: spatial and temporal visual perception, alongside advanced embodied reasoning for prediction, interaction, and planning. The HY-Embodied-0.5 suite comprises two primary variants: an efficient model with 2B activated parameters designed for edge deployment, and a powerful model with 32B activated parameters targeted for complex reasoning. To support the fine-grained visual perception essential for embodied tasks, we adopt a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to enable modality-specific computing. By incorporating latent tokens, this design effectively enhances the perceptual representation of the models. To improve reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative, self-evolving post-training paradigm. Furthermore, we employ on-policy distillation to transfer the advanced capabilities of the large model to the smaller variant, thereby maximizing the performance potential of the compact model. Extensive evaluations across 22 benchmarks, spanning visual perception, spatial reasoning, and embodied understanding, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our MoT-2B model outperforms similarly sized state-of-the-art models on 16 benchmarks, while the 32B variant achieves performance comparable to frontier models such as Gemini 3.0 Pro. In downstream robot control experiments, we leverage our robust VLM foundation to train an effective Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, achieving compelling results in real-world physical evaluations. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-Embodied.

MOAT: Alternating Mobile Convolution and Attention Brings Strong Vision Models

This paper presents MOAT, a family of neural networks that build on top of MObile convolution (i.e., inverted residual blocks) and ATtention. Unlike the current works that stack separate mobile convolution and transformer blocks, we effectively merge them into a MOAT block. Starting with a standard Transformer block, we replace its multi-layer perceptron with a mobile convolution block, and further reorder it before the self-attention operation. The mobile convolution block not only enhances the network representation capacity, but also produces better downsampled features. Our conceptually simple MOAT networks are surprisingly effective, achieving 89.1% / 81.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K / ImageNet-1K-V2 with ImageNet22K pretraining. Additionally, MOAT can be seamlessly applied to downstream tasks that require large resolution inputs by simply converting the global attention to window attention. Thanks to the mobile convolution that effectively exchanges local information between pixels (and thus cross-windows), MOAT does not need the extra window-shifting mechanism. As a result, on COCO object detection, MOAT achieves 59.2% box AP with 227M model parameters (single-scale inference, and hard NMS), and on ADE20K semantic segmentation, MOAT attains 57.6% mIoU with 496M model parameters (single-scale inference). Finally, the tiny-MOAT family, obtained by simply reducing the channel sizes, also surprisingly outperforms several mobile-specific transformer-based models on ImageNet. The tiny-MOAT family is also benchmarked on downstream tasks, serving as a baseline for the community. We hope our simple yet effective MOAT will inspire more seamless integration of convolution and self-attention. Code is publicly available.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 4, 2022

MambaQuant: Quantizing the Mamba Family with Variance Aligned Rotation Methods

Mamba is an efficient sequence model that rivals Transformers and demonstrates significant potential as a foundational architecture for various tasks. Quantization is commonly used in neural networks to reduce model size and computational latency. However, applying quantization to Mamba remains underexplored, and existing quantization methods, which have been effective for CNN and Transformer models, appear inadequate for Mamba models (e.g., Quarot suffers a 21% accuracy drop on Vim-T^dagger even under W8A8). We have pioneered the exploration of this issue and identified several key challenges. First, significant outliers are present in gate projections, output projections, and matrix multiplications. Second, Mamba's unique parallel scan further amplifies these outliers, leading to uneven and heavy-tailed data distributions. Third, even with the application of the Hadamard transform, the variance across channels in weights and activations still remains inconsistent. To these ends, we propose MambaQuant, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework consisting of: 1) Karhunen-Loeve Transformation (KLT) enhanced rotation, rendering the rotation matrix adaptable to diverse channel distributions. 2) Smooth-Fused rotation, which equalizes channel variances and can merge additional parameters into model weights. Experiments show that MambaQuant can quantize both weights and activations into 8-bit with less than 1% accuracy loss for Mamba-based vision and language tasks. To the best of our knowledge, MambaQuant is the first comprehensive PTQ design for the Mamba family, paving the way for further advancements in its application.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 23, 2025

AdaReasoner: Dynamic Tool Orchestration for Iterative Visual Reasoning

When humans face problems beyond their immediate capabilities, they rely on tools, providing a promising paradigm for improving visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Effective reasoning, therefore, hinges on knowing which tools to use, when to invoke them, and how to compose them over multiple steps, even when faced with new tools or new tasks. We introduce AdaReasoner, a family of multimodal models that learn tool use as a general reasoning skill rather than as tool-specific or explicitly supervised behavior. AdaReasoner is enabled by (i) a scalable data curation pipeline exposing models to long-horizon, multi-step tool interactions; (ii) Tool-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that optimizes tool selection and sequencing based on end-task success; and (iii) an adaptive learning mechanism that dynamically regulates tool usage. Together, these components allow models to infer tool utility from task context and intermediate outcomes, enabling coordination of multiple tools and generalization to unseen tools. Empirically, AdaReasoner exhibits strong tool-adaptive and generalization behaviors: it autonomously adopts beneficial tools, suppresses irrelevant ones, and adjusts tool usage frequency based on task demands, despite never being explicitly trained to do so. These capabilities translate into state-of-the-art performance across challenging benchmarks, improving the 7B base model by +24.9\% on average and surpassing strong proprietary systems such as GPT-5 on multiple tasks, including VSP and Jigsaw.

OpenELM: An Efficient Language Model Family with Open-source Training and Inference Framework

The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results, and enabling investigations into data and model biases, as well as potential risks. To this end, we release OpenELM, a state-of-the-art open language model. OpenELM uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, leading to enhanced accuracy. For example, with a parameter budget of approximately one billion parameters, OpenELM exhibits a 2.36% improvement in accuracy compared to OLMo while requiring 2times fewer pre-training tokens. Diverging from prior practices that only provide model weights and inference code, and pre-train on private datasets, our release includes the complete framework for training and evaluation of the language model on publicly available datasets, including training logs, multiple checkpoints, and pre-training configurations. We also release code to convert models to MLX library for inference and fine-tuning on Apple devices. This comprehensive release aims to empower and strengthen the open research community, paving the way for future open research endeavors. Our source code along with pre-trained model weights and training recipes is available at https://github.com/apple/corenet. Additionally, \model models can be found on HuggingFace at: https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM.

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 22, 2024 14

The SAM2-to-SAM3 Gap in the Segment Anything Model Family: Why Prompt-Based Expertise Fails in Concept-Driven Image Segmentation

This paper investigates the fundamental discontinuity between the latest two Segment Anything Models: SAM2 and SAM3. We explain why the expertise in prompt-based segmentation of SAM2 does not transfer to the multimodal concept-driven paradigm of SAM3. SAM2 operates through spatial prompts points, boxes, and masks yielding purely geometric and temporal segmentation. In contrast, SAM3 introduces a unified vision-language architecture capable of open-vocabulary reasoning, semantic grounding, contrastive alignment, and exemplar-based concept understanding. We structure this analysis through five core components: (1) a Conceptual Break Between Prompt-Based and Concept-Based Segmentation, contrasting spatial prompt semantics of SAM2 with multimodal fusion and text-conditioned mask generation of SAM3; (2) Architectural Divergence, detailing pure vision-temporal design of SAM2 versus integration of vision-language encoders, geometry and exemplar encoders, fusion modules, DETR-style decoders, object queries, and ambiguity-handling via Mixture-of-Experts in SAM3; (3) Dataset and Annotation Differences, contrasting SA-V video masks with multimodal concept-annotated corpora of SAM3; (4) Training and Hyperparameter Distinctions, showing why SAM2 optimization knowledge does not apply to SAM3; and (5) Evaluation, Metrics, and Failure Modes, outlining the transition from geometric IoU metrics to semantic, open-vocabulary evaluation. Together, these analyses establish SAM3 as a new class of segmentation foundation model and chart future directions for the emerging concept-driven segmentation era.

cornell Cornell University
·
Dec 4, 2025 2

Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on code are revolutionizing the software development process. Increasingly, code LLMs are being integrated into software development environments to improve the productivity of human programmers, and LLM-based agents are beginning to show promise for handling complex tasks autonomously. Realizing the full potential of code LLMs requires a wide range of capabilities, including code generation, fixing bugs, explaining and documenting code, maintaining repositories, and more. In this work, we introduce the Granite series of decoder-only code models for code generative tasks, trained with code written in 116 programming languages. The Granite Code models family consists of models ranging in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters, suitable for applications ranging from complex application modernization tasks to on-device memory-constrained use cases. Evaluation on a comprehensive set of tasks demonstrates that Granite Code models consistently reaches state-of-the-art performance among available open-source code LLMs. The Granite Code model family was optimized for enterprise software development workflows and performs well across a range of coding tasks (e.g. code generation, fixing and explanation), making it a versatile all around code model. We release all our Granite Code models under an Apache 2.0 license for both research and commercial use.

  • 46 authors
·
May 7, 2024 1

YuFeng-XGuard: A Reasoning-Centric, Interpretable, and Flexible Guardrail Model for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, safety guardrails are required to go beyond coarse-grained filtering and support fine-grained, interpretable, and adaptable risk assessment. However, existing solutions often rely on rapid classification schemes or post-hoc rules, resulting in limited transparency, inflexible policies, or prohibitive inference costs. To this end, we present YuFeng-XGuard, a reasoning-centric guardrail model family designed to perform multi-dimensional risk perception for LLM interactions. Instead of producing opaque binary judgments, YuFeng-XGuard generates structured risk predictions, including explicit risk categories and configurable confidence scores, accompanied by natural language explanations that expose the underlying reasoning process. This formulation enables safety decisions that are both actionable and interpretable. To balance decision latency and explanatory depth, we adopt a tiered inference paradigm that performs an initial risk decision based on the first decoded token, while preserving ondemand explanatory reasoning when required. In addition, we introduce a dynamic policy mechanism that decouples risk perception from policy enforcement, allowing safety policies to be adjusted without model retraining. Extensive experiments on a diverse set of public safety benchmarks demonstrate that YuFeng-XGuard achieves stateof-the-art performance while maintaining strong efficiency-efficacy trade-offs. We release YuFeng-XGuard as an open model family, including both a full-capacity variant and a lightweight version, to support a wide range of deployment scenarios.

  • 15 authors
·
Jan 21

Reverse Distillation: Consistently Scaling Protein Language Model Representations

Unlike the predictable scaling laws in natural language processing and computer vision, protein language models (PLMs) scale poorly: for many tasks, models within the same family plateau or even decrease in performance, with mid-sized models often outperforming the largest in the family. We introduce Reverse Distillation, a principled framework that decomposes large PLM representations into orthogonal subspaces guided by smaller models of the same family. The resulting embeddings have a nested, Matryoshka-style structure: the first k dimensions of a larger model's embedding are exactly the representation from the smaller model. This ensures that larger reverse-distilled models consistently outperform smaller ones. A motivating intuition is that smaller models, constrained by capacity, preferentially encode broadly-shared protein features. Reverse distillation isolates these shared features and orthogonally extracts additional contributions from larger models, preventing interference between the two. On ProteinGym benchmarks, reverse-distilled ESM-2 variants outperform their respective baselines at the same embedding dimensionality, with the reverse-distilled 15 billion parameter model achieving the strongest performance. Our framework is generalizable to any model family where scaling challenges persist. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/rohitsinghlab/plm_reverse_distillation.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 8

PulseMind: A Multi-Modal Medical Model for Real-World Clinical Diagnosis

Recent advances in medical multi-modal models focus on specialized image analysis like dermatology, pathology, or radiology. However, they do not fully capture the complexity of real-world clinical diagnostics, which involve heterogeneous inputs and require ongoing contextual understanding during patient-physician interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce PulseMind, a new family of multi-modal diagnostic models that integrates a systematically curated dataset, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, and a tailored training framework. Specifically, we first construct a diagnostic dataset, MediScope, which comprises 98,000 real-world multi-turn consultations and 601,500 medical images, spanning over 10 major clinical departments and more than 200 sub-specialties. Then, to better reflect the requirements of real-world clinical diagnosis, we develop the PulseMind Benchmark, a multi-turn diagnostic consultation benchmark with a four-dimensional evaluation protocol comprising proactiveness, accuracy, usefulness, and language quality. Finally, we design a training framework tailored for multi-modal clinical diagnostics, centered around a core component named Comparison-based Reinforcement Policy Optimization (CRPO). Compared to absolute score rewards, CRPO uses relative preference signals from multi-dimensional com-parisons to provide stable and human-aligned training guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PulseMind achieves competitive performance on both the diagnostic consultation benchmark and public medical benchmarks.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 12

Nudging: Inference-time Alignment via Model Collaboration

Large language models (LLMs) require alignment, such as instruction-tuning or reinforcement learning from human feedback, to effectively and safely follow user instructions. This process necessitates training aligned versions for every model size in each model family, resulting in significant computational overhead. In this work, we propose nudging, a simple, plug-and-play, and training-free algorithm that aligns any base model at inference time using a small aligned model. Nudging is motivated by recent findings that alignment primarily alters the model's behavior on a small subset of stylistic tokens, such as "Sure" or "Thank". We find that base models are significantly more uncertain when generating these tokens. Leveraging this observation, nudging employs a small aligned model to generate nudging tokens to steer the large base model's output toward desired directions when the base model's uncertainty is high. We evaluate the effectiveness of nudging across 3 model families and 13 tasks, covering reasoning, general knowledge, instruction following, and safety benchmarks. Without any additional training, nudging a large base model with a 7x - 14x smaller aligned model achieves zero-shot performance comparable to, and sometimes surpassing, that of large aligned models. For example, nudging OLMo-7b with OLMo-1b-instruct, affecting less than 9% of tokens, achieves a 10% absolute improvement on GSM8K over OLMo-7b-instruct. Unlike prior inference-time tuning methods, nudging enables off-the-shelf collaboration between model families. For instance, nudging Gemma-2-27b with Llama-2-7b-chat outperforms Llama-2-70b-chat on various tasks. Overall, this work introduces a simple yet powerful approach to token-level model collaboration, offering a modular solution to LLM alignment. Our project website: https://fywalter.github.io/nudging/ .

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

An Experience Report on Machine Learning Reproducibility: Guidance for Practitioners and TensorFlow Model Garden Contributors

Machine learning techniques are becoming a fundamental tool for scientific and engineering progress. These techniques are applied in contexts as diverse as astronomy and spam filtering. However, correctly applying these techniques requires careful engineering. Much attention has been paid to the technical potential; relatively little attention has been paid to the software engineering process required to bring research-based machine learning techniques into practical utility. Technology companies have supported the engineering community through machine learning frameworks such as TensorFLow and PyTorch, but the details of how to engineer complex machine learning models in these frameworks have remained hidden. To promote best practices within the engineering community, academic institutions and Google have partnered to launch a Special Interest Group on Machine Learning Models (SIGMODELS) whose goal is to develop exemplary implementations of prominent machine learning models in community locations such as the TensorFlow Model Garden (TFMG). The purpose of this report is to define a process for reproducing a state-of-the-art machine learning model at a level of quality suitable for inclusion in the TFMG. We define the engineering process and elaborate on each step, from paper analysis to model release. We report on our experiences implementing the YOLO model family with a team of 26 student researchers, share the tools we developed, and describe the lessons we learned along the way.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 2, 2021

From Text to Source: Results in Detecting Large Language Model-Generated Content

The widespread use of Large Language Models (LLMs), celebrated for their ability to generate human-like text, has raised concerns about misinformation and ethical implications. Addressing these concerns necessitates the development of robust methods to detect and attribute text generated by LLMs. This paper investigates "Cross-Model Detection," evaluating whether a classifier trained to distinguish between source LLM-generated and human-written text can also detect text from a target LLM without further training. The study comprehensively explores various LLM sizes and families, and assesses the impact of conversational fine-tuning techniques on classifier generalization. The research also delves into Model Attribution, encompassing source model identification, model family classification, and model size classification. Our results reveal several key findings: a clear inverse relationship between classifier effectiveness and model size, with larger LLMs being more challenging to detect, especially when the classifier is trained on data from smaller models. Training on data from similarly sized LLMs can improve detection performance from larger models but may lead to decreased performance when dealing with smaller models. Additionally, model attribution experiments show promising results in identifying source models and model families, highlighting detectable signatures in LLM-generated text. Overall, our study contributes valuable insights into the interplay of model size, family, and training data in LLM detection and attribution.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 23, 2023

Qwen3-VL Technical Report

We introduce Qwen3-VL, the most capable vision-language model in the Qwen series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. It natively supports interleaved contexts of up to 256K tokens, seamlessly integrating text, images, and video. The model family includes both dense (2B/4B/8B/32B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B/235B-A22B) variants to accommodate diverse latency-quality trade-offs. Qwen3-VL delivers three core pillars: (i) markedly stronger pure-text understanding, surpassing comparable text-only backbones in several cases; (ii) robust long-context comprehension with a native 256K-token window for both text and interleaved multimodal inputs, enabling faithful retention, retrieval, and cross-referencing across long documents and videos; and (iii) advanced multimodal reasoning across single-image, multi-image, and video tasks, demonstrating leading performance on comprehensive evaluations such as MMMU and visual-math benchmarks (e.g., MathVista and MathVision). Architecturally, we introduce three key upgrades: (i) an enhanced interleaved-MRoPE for stronger spatial-temporal modeling across images and video; (ii) DeepStack integration, which effectively leverages multi-level ViT features to tighten vision-language alignment; and (iii) text-based time alignment for video, evolving from T-RoPE to explicit textual timestamp alignment for more precise temporal grounding. Under comparable token budgets and latency constraints, Qwen3-VL achieves superior performance in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. We envision Qwen3-VL serving as a foundational engine for image-grounded reasoning, agentic decision-making, and multimodal code intelligence in real-world workflows.

Qwen Qwen
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Nov 26, 2025 4

Steerable but Not Decodable: Function Vectors Operate Beyond the Logit Lens

Activation steering presupposes that task-relevant behaviors correspond to linear directions in activation space -- directions that should both steer the model and be readable along the unembedding. Function vectors (FVs), extracted as mean differences across ICL demonstrations, are the canonical test case; the prediction: steering and decoding succeed or fail together. Across 12 tasks, 6 models from 3 families, and 4,032 directed cross-template pairs, we find the opposite. FV steering routinely succeeds where the logit lens cannot decode the correct answer at any intermediate layer, while the converse -- decodable without steerable -- is nearly empty (3 of 72). The gap is not representational dialect. A diagonal tuned lens closes 1 of 14 steerable-not-decodable cases; a 2-layer MLP probe with a Hewitt \& Liang control closes 5 of 10 via nonlinearly encoded structure but leaves 5 invisible to every decoder tested. Even at > 0.90 steering accuracy, projecting the FV through the unembedding yields incoherent token distributions: FVs encode computational instructions, not answer directions. A model-family asymmetry sharpens the picture. Mistral FVs rewrite intermediate representations, while Llama and Gemma FVs steer the final output without leaving a logit-lens-visible trace, corroborated by three signals (post-steering deltas, activation-patching recovery, FV norm-transfer correlations). A previously reported negative cosine-transfer correlation dissolves at scale, adding at most ΔR^2 = 0.011 beyond task identity. These results decompose the linear representation hypothesis into linear decodability and linear steerability and show they come apart opposite to intuition, with implications for safety monitoring: vocabulary-projection tools are blind to FV-style interventions on widely deployed model families.

  • 1 authors
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May 7

Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI

We introduce the Yi model family, a series of language and multimodal models that demonstrate strong multi-dimensional capabilities. The Yi model family is based on 6B and 34B pretrained language models, then we extend them to chat models, 200K long context models, depth-upscaled models, and vision-language models. Our base models achieve strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks like MMLU, and our finetuned chat models deliver strong human preference rate on major evaluation platforms like AlpacaEval and Chatbot Arena. Building upon our scalable super-computing infrastructure and the classical transformer architecture, we attribute the performance of Yi models primarily to its data quality resulting from our data-engineering efforts. For pretraining, we construct 3.1 trillion tokens of English and Chinese corpora using a cascaded data deduplication and quality filtering pipeline. For finetuning, we polish a small scale (less than 10K) instruction dataset over multiple iterations such that every single instance has been verified directly by our machine learning engineers. For vision-language, we combine the chat language model with a vision transformer encoder and train the model to align visual representations to the semantic space of the language model. We further extend the context length to 200K through lightweight continual pretraining and demonstrate strong needle-in-a-haystack retrieval performance. We show that extending the depth of the pretrained checkpoint through continual pretraining further improves performance. We believe that given our current results, continuing to scale up model parameters using thoroughly optimized data will lead to even stronger frontier models.

  • 31 authors
·
Mar 7, 2024 3

QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs

We present QLoRA, an efficient finetuning approach that reduces memory usage enough to finetune a 65B parameter model on a single 48GB GPU while preserving full 16-bit finetuning task performance. QLoRA backpropagates gradients through a frozen, 4-bit quantized pretrained language model into Low Rank Adapters~(LoRA). Our best model family, which we name Guanaco, outperforms all previous openly released models on the Vicuna benchmark, reaching 99.3% of the performance level of ChatGPT while only requiring 24 hours of finetuning on a single GPU. QLoRA introduces a number of innovations to save memory without sacrificing performance: (a) 4-bit NormalFloat (NF4), a new data type that is information theoretically optimal for normally distributed weights (b) double quantization to reduce the average memory footprint by quantizing the quantization constants, and (c) paged optimziers to manage memory spikes. We use QLoRA to finetune more than 1,000 models, providing a detailed analysis of instruction following and chatbot performance across 8 instruction datasets, multiple model types (LLaMA, T5), and model scales that would be infeasible to run with regular finetuning (e.g. 33B and 65B parameter models). Our results show that QLoRA finetuning on a small high-quality dataset leads to state-of-the-art results, even when using smaller models than the previous SoTA. We provide a detailed analysis of chatbot performance based on both human and GPT-4 evaluations showing that GPT-4 evaluations are a cheap and reasonable alternative to human evaluation. Furthermore, we find that current chatbot benchmarks are not trustworthy to accurately evaluate the performance levels of chatbots. A lemon-picked analysis demonstrates where Guanaco fails compared to ChatGPT. We release all of our models and code, including CUDA kernels for 4-bit training.

  • 4 authors
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May 23, 2023 10

BigNAS: Scaling Up Neural Architecture Search with Big Single-Stage Models

Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown promising results discovering models that are both accurate and fast. For NAS, training a one-shot model has become a popular strategy to rank the relative quality of different architectures (child models) using a single set of shared weights. However, while one-shot model weights can effectively rank different network architectures, the absolute accuracies from these shared weights are typically far below those obtained from stand-alone training. To compensate, existing methods assume that the weights must be retrained, finetuned, or otherwise post-processed after the search is completed. These steps significantly increase the compute requirements and complexity of the architecture search and model deployment. In this work, we propose BigNAS, an approach that challenges the conventional wisdom that post-processing of the weights is necessary to get good prediction accuracies. Without extra retraining or post-processing steps, we are able to train a single set of shared weights on ImageNet and use these weights to obtain child models whose sizes range from 200 to 1000 MFLOPs. Our discovered model family, BigNASModels, achieve top-1 accuracies ranging from 76.5% to 80.9%, surpassing state-of-the-art models in this range including EfficientNets and Once-for-All networks without extra retraining or post-processing. We present ablative study and analysis to further understand the proposed BigNASModels.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 24, 2020

Stitchable Neural Networks

The public model zoo containing enormous powerful pretrained model families (e.g., ResNet/DeiT) has reached an unprecedented scope than ever, which significantly contributes to the success of deep learning. As each model family consists of pretrained models with diverse scales (e.g., DeiT-Ti/S/B), it naturally arises a fundamental question of how to efficiently assemble these readily available models in a family for dynamic accuracy-efficiency trade-offs at runtime. To this end, we present Stitchable Neural Networks (SN-Net), a novel scalable and efficient framework for model deployment. It cheaply produces numerous networks with different complexity and performance trade-offs given a family of pretrained neural networks, which we call anchors. Specifically, SN-Net splits the anchors across the blocks/layers and then stitches them together with simple stitching layers to map the activations from one anchor to another. With only a few epochs of training, SN-Net effectively interpolates between the performance of anchors with varying scales. At runtime, SN-Net can instantly adapt to dynamic resource constraints by switching the stitching positions. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification demonstrate that SN-Net can obtain on-par or even better performance than many individually trained networks while supporting diverse deployment scenarios. For example, by stitching Swin Transformers, we challenge hundreds of models in Timm model zoo with a single network. We believe this new elastic model framework can serve as a strong baseline for further research in wider communities.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 13, 2023

LeYOLO, New Scalable and Efficient CNN Architecture for Object Detection

Computational efficiency in deep neural networks is critical for object detection, especially as newer models prioritize speed over efficient computation (FLOP). This evolution has somewhat left behind embedded and mobile-oriented AI object detection applications. In this paper, we focus on design choices of neural network architectures for efficient object detection computation based on FLOP and propose several optimizations to enhance the efficiency of YOLO-based models. Firstly, we introduce an efficient backbone scaling inspired by inverted bottlenecks and theoretical insights from the Information Bottleneck principle. Secondly, we present the Fast Pyramidal Architecture Network (FPAN), designed to facilitate fast multiscale feature sharing while reducing computational resources. Lastly, we propose a Decoupled Network-in-Network (DNiN) detection head engineered to deliver rapid yet lightweight computations for classification and regression tasks. Building upon these optimizations and leveraging more efficient backbones, this paper contributes to a new scaling paradigm for object detection and YOLO-centric models called LeYOLO. Our contribution consistently outperforms existing models in various resource constraints, achieving unprecedented accuracy and flop ratio. Notably, LeYOLO-Small achieves a competitive mAP score of 38.2% on the COCOval with just 4.5 FLOP(G), representing a 42% reduction in computational load compared to the latest state-of-the-art YOLOv9-Tiny model while achieving similar accuracy. Our novel model family achieves a FLOP-to-accuracy ratio previously unattained, offering scalability that spans from ultra-low neural network configurations (< 1 GFLOP) to efficient yet demanding object detection setups (> 4 GFLOPs) with 25.2, 31.3, 35.2, 38.2, 39.3 and 41 mAP for 0.66, 1.47, 2.53, 4.51, 5.8 and 8.4 FLOP(G).

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 20, 2024