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Mar 12

SlimPajama-DC: Understanding Data Combinations for LLM Training

This paper aims to understand the impacts of various data combinations (e.g., web text, wikipedia, github, books) on the training of large language models using SlimPajama. SlimPajama is a rigorously deduplicated, multi-source dataset, which has been refined and further deduplicated to 627B tokens from the extensive 1.2T tokens RedPajama dataset contributed by Together. We've termed our research as SlimPajama-DC, an empirical analysis designed to uncover fundamental characteristics and best practices associated with employing SlimPajama in the training of large language models. During our research with SlimPajama, two pivotal observations emerged: (1) Global deduplication vs. local deduplication. We analyze and discuss how global (across different sources of datasets) and local (within the single source of dataset) deduplications affect the performance of trained models. (2) Proportions of high-quality/highly-deduplicated multi-source datasets in the combination. To study this, we construct six configurations of SlimPajama dataset and train individual ones using 1.3B Cerebras-GPT model with Alibi and SwiGLU. Our best configuration outperforms the 1.3B model trained on RedPajama using the same number of training tokens by a significant margin. All our 1.3B models are trained on Cerebras 16times CS-2 cluster with a total of 80 PFLOP/s in bf16 mixed precision. We further extend our discoveries (such as increasing data diversity is crucial after global deduplication) on a 7B model with large batch-size training. Our models and the separate SlimPajama-DC datasets are available at: https://huggingface.co/MBZUAI-LLM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/cerebras/SlimPajama-627B.

Towards Scalable Exact Machine Unlearning Using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Machine unlearning is the process of efficiently removing the influence of a training data instance from a trained machine learning model without retraining it from scratch. A popular subclass of unlearning approaches is exact machine unlearning, which focuses on techniques that explicitly guarantee the removal of the influence of a data instance from a model. Exact unlearning approaches use a machine learning model in which individual components are trained on disjoint subsets of the data. During deletion, exact unlearning approaches only retrain the affected components rather than the entire model. While existing approaches reduce retraining costs, it can still be expensive for an organization to retrain a model component as it requires halting a system in production, which leads to service failure and adversely impacts customers. To address these challenges, we introduce an exact unlearning framework -- Sequence-aware Sharded Sliced Training (S3T), designed to enhance the deletion capabilities of an exact unlearning system while minimizing the impact on model's performance. At the core of S3T, we utilize a lightweight parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach that enables parameter isolation by sequentially training layers with disjoint data slices. This enables efficient unlearning by simply deactivating the layers affected by data deletion. Furthermore, to reduce the retraining cost and improve model performance, we train the model on multiple data sequences, which allows S3T to handle an increased number of deletion requests. Both theoretically and empirically, we demonstrate that S3T attains superior deletion capabilities and enhanced performance compared to baselines across a wide range of settings.

Out of Length Text Recognition with Sub-String Matching

Scene Text Recognition (STR) methods have demonstrated robust performance in word-level text recognition. However, in real applications the text image is sometimes long due to detected with multiple horizontal words. It triggers the requirement to build long text recognition models from readily available short (i.e., word-level) text datasets, which has been less studied previously. In this paper, we term this task Out of Length (OOL) text recognition. We establish the first Long Text Benchmark (LTB) to facilitate the assessment of different methods in long text recognition. Meanwhile, we propose a novel method called OOL Text Recognition with sub-String Matching (SMTR). SMTR comprises two cross-attention-based modules: one encodes a sub-string containing multiple characters into next and previous queries, and the other employs the queries to attend to the image features, matching the sub-string and simultaneously recognizing its next and previous character. SMTR can recognize text of arbitrary length by iterating the process above. To avoid being trapped in recognizing highly similar sub-strings, we introduce a regularization training to compel SMTR to effectively discover subtle differences between similar sub-strings for precise matching. In addition, we propose an inference augmentation strategy to alleviate confusion caused by identical sub-strings in the same text and improve the overall recognition efficiency. Extensive experimental results reveal that SMTR, even when trained exclusively on short text, outperforms existing methods in public short text benchmarks and exhibits a clear advantage on LTB. Code: https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.

MoS: Unleashing Parameter Efficiency of Low-Rank Adaptation with Mixture of Shards

The rapid scaling of large language models necessitates more lightweight finetuning methods to reduce the explosive GPU memory overhead when numerous customized models are served simultaneously. Targeting more parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA), parameter sharing presents a promising solution. Empirically, our research into high-level sharing principles highlights the indispensable role of differentiation in reversing the detrimental effects of pure sharing. Guided by this finding, we propose Mixture of Shards (MoS), incorporating both inter-layer and intra-layer sharing schemes, and integrating four nearly cost-free differentiation strategies, namely subset selection, pair dissociation, vector sharding, and shard privatization. Briefly, it selects a designated number of shards from global pools with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-like routing mechanism before sequentially concatenating them to low-rank matrices. Hence, it retains all the advantages of LoRA while offering enhanced parameter efficiency, and effectively circumvents the drawbacks of peer parameter-sharing methods. Our empirical experiments demonstrate approximately 8x parameter savings in a standard LoRA setting. The ablation study confirms the significance of each component. Our insights into parameter sharing and MoS method may illuminate future developments of more parameter-efficient finetuning methods.

Faster Algorithms for Text-to-Pattern Hamming Distances

We study the classic Text-to-Pattern Hamming Distances problem: given a pattern P of length m and a text T of length n, both over a polynomial-size alphabet, compute the Hamming distance between P and T[i, ., . , i+m-1] for every shift i, under the standard Word-RAM model with Theta(log n)-bit words. - We provide an O(nm) time Las Vegas randomized algorithm for this problem, beating the decades-old O(n m log m) running time [Abrahamson, SICOMP 1987]. We also obtain a deterministic algorithm, with a slightly higher O(nm(log mloglog m)^{1/4}) running time. Our randomized algorithm extends to the k-bounded setting, with running time Obig(n+nk{m}big), removing all the extra logarithmic factors from earlier algorithms [Gawrychowski and Uzna\'{n}ski, ICALP 2018; Chan, Golan, Kociumaka, Kopelowitz and Porat, STOC 2020]. - For the (1+epsilon)-approximate version of Text-to-Pattern Hamming Distances, we give an O(epsilon^{-0.93}n) time Monte Carlo randomized algorithm, beating the previous O(epsilon^{-1}n) running time [Kopelowitz and Porat, FOCS 2015; Kopelowitz and Porat, SOSA 2018]. Our approximation algorithm exploits a connection with 3SUM, and uses a combination of Fredman's trick, equality matrix product, and random sampling; in particular, we obtain new results on approximate counting versions of 3SUM and Exact Triangle, which may be of independent interest. Our exact algorithms use a novel combination of hashing, bit-packed FFT, and recursion; in particular, we obtain a faster algorithm for computing the sumset of two integer sets, in the regime when the universe size is close to quadratic in the number of elements. We also prove a fine-grained equivalence between the exact Text-to-Pattern Hamming Distances problem and a range-restricted, counting version of 3SUM.

Neural Locality Sensitive Hashing for Entity Blocking

Locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is a fundamental algorithmic technique widely employed in large-scale data processing applications, such as nearest-neighbor search, entity resolution, and clustering. However, its applicability in some real-world scenarios is limited due to the need for careful design of hashing functions that align with specific metrics. Existing LSH-based Entity Blocking solutions primarily rely on generic similarity metrics such as Jaccard similarity, whereas practical use cases often demand complex and customized similarity rules surpassing the capabilities of generic similarity metrics. Consequently, designing LSH functions for these customized similarity rules presents considerable challenges. In this research, we propose a neuralization approach to enhance locality-sensitive hashing by training deep neural networks to serve as hashing functions for complex metrics. We assess the effectiveness of this approach within the context of the entity resolution problem, which frequently involves the use of task-specific metrics in real-world applications. Specifically, we introduce NLSHBlock (Neural-LSH Block), a novel blocking methodology that leverages pre-trained language models, fine-tuned with a novel LSH-based loss function. Through extensive evaluations conducted on a diverse range of real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of NLSHBlock over existing methods, exhibiting significant performance improvements. Furthermore, we showcase the efficacy of NLSHBlock in enhancing the performance of the entity matching phase, particularly within the semi-supervised setting.

Deep Lifelong Cross-modal Hashing

Hashing methods have made significant progress in cross-modal retrieval tasks with fast query speed and low storage cost. Among them, deep learning-based hashing achieves better performance on large-scale data due to its excellent extraction and representation ability for nonlinear heterogeneous features. However, there are still two main challenges in catastrophic forgetting when data with new categories arrive continuously, and time-consuming for non-continuous hashing retrieval to retrain for updating. To this end, we, in this paper, propose a novel deep lifelong cross-modal hashing to achieve lifelong hashing retrieval instead of re-training hash function repeatedly when new data arrive. Specifically, we design lifelong learning strategy to update hash functions by directly training the incremental data instead of retraining new hash functions using all the accumulated data, which significantly reduce training time. Then, we propose lifelong hashing loss to enable original hash codes participate in lifelong learning but remain invariant, and further preserve the similarity and dis-similarity among original and incremental hash codes to maintain performance. Additionally, considering distribution heterogeneity when new data arriving continuously, we introduce multi-label semantic similarity to supervise hash learning, and it has been proven that the similarity improves performance with detailed analysis. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed methods achieves comparative performance comparing with recent state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods, and it yields substantial average increments over 20\% in retrieval accuracy and almost reduces over 80\% training time when new data arrives continuously.

Hecate: Unlocking Efficient Sparse Model Training via Fully Sharded Sparse Data Parallelism

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a promising sparse paradigm for scaling up pre-trained models (PTMs) with remarkable cost-effectiveness. However, the dynamic nature of MoE leads to rapid fluctuations and imbalances in expert loads during training, resulting in significant straggler effects that hinder training performance when using expert parallelism (EP). Existing MoE training systems attempt to mitigate these effects through expert rearrangement strategies, but they face challenges in terms of memory efficiency and timeliness of rearrangement. This paper proposes Fully Sharded Sparse Data Parallelism (FSSDP), an innovative approach that tackles the parallelization of MoE layers and potential straggler effects caused by imbalanced expert loads from a new perspective. FSSDP fully shards the parameters and optimizer states of MoE layers across devices and sparsely materializes MoE parameters from scratch in each iteration with two sparse collectives SparseAllGather and SparseReduceScatter. We build Hecate, a high-performance MoE training system that incorporates FSSDP to fully unlock its potential. Hecate introduces heterogeneous sharding, sparse materialization, and re-materialization techniques to construct flexible and efficient expert placements with low memory and communication overhead. Our evaluation reveals that Hecate achieves up to 3.54x speedup compared over state-of-the-art MoE training systems and consistently demonstrates improvements across model architectures and hardware environments.

Rethinking Benchmark and Contamination for Language Models with Rephrased Samples

Large language models are increasingly trained on all the data ever produced by humans. Many have raised concerns about the trustworthiness of public benchmarks due to potential contamination in pre-training or fine-tuning datasets. While most data decontamination efforts apply string matching (e.g., n-gram overlap) to remove benchmark data, we show that these methods are insufficient, and simple variations of test data (e.g., paraphrasing, translation) can easily bypass these decontamination measures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that if such variation of test data is not eliminated, a 13B model can easily overfit a test benchmark and achieve drastically high performance, on par with GPT-4. We validate such observations in widely used benchmarks such as MMLU, GSK8k, and HumanEval. To address this growing risk, we propose a stronger LLM-based decontamination method and apply it to widely used pre-training and fine-tuning datasets, revealing significant previously unknown test overlap. For example, in pre-training sets such as RedPajama-Data-1T and StarCoder-Data, we identified that 8-18\% of the HumanEval benchmark overlaps. Interestingly, we also find such contamination in synthetic dataset generated by GPT-3.5/4, suggesting a potential risk of unintentional contamination. We urge the community to adopt stronger decontamination approaches when using public benchmarks. Moreover, we call for the community to actively develop fresh one-time exams to evaluate models accurately. Our decontamination tool is publicly available at https://github.com/lm-sys/llm-decontaminator.

Duplicate Question Retrieval and Confirmation Time Prediction in Software Communities

Community Question Answering (CQA) in different domains is growing at a large scale because of the availability of several platforms and huge shareable information among users. With the rapid growth of such online platforms, a massive amount of archived data makes it difficult for moderators to retrieve possible duplicates for a new question and identify and confirm existing question pairs as duplicates at the right time. This problem is even more critical in CQAs corresponding to large software systems like askubuntu where moderators need to be experts to comprehend something as a duplicate. Note that the prime challenge in such CQA platforms is that the moderators are themselves experts and are therefore usually extremely busy with their time being extraordinarily expensive. To facilitate the task of the moderators, in this work, we have tackled two significant issues for the askubuntu CQA platform: (1) retrieval of duplicate questions given a new question and (2) duplicate question confirmation time prediction. In the first task, we focus on retrieving duplicate questions from a question pool for a particular newly posted question. In the second task, we solve a regression problem to rank a pair of questions that could potentially take a long time to get confirmed as duplicates. For duplicate question retrieval, we propose a Siamese neural network based approach by exploiting both text and network-based features, which outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline techniques. Our method outperforms DupPredictor and DUPE by 5% and 7% respectively. For duplicate confirmation time prediction, we have used both the standard machine learning models and neural network along with the text and graph-based features. We obtain Spearman's rank correlation of 0.20 and 0.213 (statistically significant) for text and graph based features respectively.

A Benchmark and Asymmetrical-Similarity Learning for Practical Image Copy Detection

Image copy detection (ICD) aims to determine whether a query image is an edited copy of any image from a reference set. Currently, there are very limited public benchmarks for ICD, while all overlook a critical challenge in real-world applications, i.e., the distraction from hard negative queries. Specifically, some queries are not edited copies but are inherently similar to some reference images. These hard negative queries are easily false recognized as edited copies, significantly compromising the ICD accuracy. This observation motivates us to build the first ICD benchmark featuring this characteristic. Based on existing ICD datasets, this paper constructs a new dataset by additionally adding 100, 000 and 24, 252 hard negative pairs into the training and test set, respectively. Moreover, this paper further reveals a unique difficulty for solving the hard negative problem in ICD, i.e., there is a fundamental conflict between current metric learning and ICD. This conflict is: the metric learning adopts symmetric distance while the edited copy is an asymmetric (unidirectional) process, e.g., a partial crop is close to its holistic reference image and is an edited copy, while the latter cannot be the edited copy of the former (in spite the distance is equally small). This insight results in an Asymmetrical-Similarity Learning (ASL) method, which allows the similarity in two directions (the query <-> the reference image) to be different from each other. Experimental results show that ASL outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin, confirming that solving the symmetric-asymmetric conflict is critical for ICD. The NDEC dataset and code are available at https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/ASL.

Evaluation of Contrastive Learning with Various Code Representations for Code Clone Detection

Code clones are pairs of code snippets that implement similar functionality. Clone detection is a fundamental branch of automatic source code comprehension, having many applications in refactoring recommendation, plagiarism detection, and code summarization. A particularly interesting case of clone detection is the detection of semantic clones, i.e., code snippets that have the same functionality but significantly differ in implementation. A promising approach to detecting semantic clones is contrastive learning (CL), a machine learning paradigm popular in computer vision but not yet commonly adopted for code processing. Our work aims to evaluate the most popular CL algorithms combined with three source code representations on two tasks. The first task is code clone detection, which we evaluate on the POJ-104 dataset containing implementations of 104 algorithms. The second task is plagiarism detection. To evaluate the models on this task, we introduce CodeTransformator, a tool for transforming source code. We use it to create a dataset that mimics plagiarised code based on competitive programming solutions. We trained nine models for both tasks and compared them with six existing approaches, including traditional tools and modern pre-trained neural models. The results of our evaluation show that proposed models perform diversely in each task, however the performance of the graph-based models is generally above the others. Among CL algorithms, SimCLR and SwAV lead to better results, while Moco is the most robust approach. Our code and trained models are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6360627, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5596345.

Cache-Craft: Managing Chunk-Caches for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is often used with Large Language Models (LLMs) to infuse domain knowledge or user-specific information. In RAG, given a user query, a retriever extracts chunks of relevant text from a knowledge base. These chunks are sent to an LLM as part of the input prompt. Typically, any given chunk is repeatedly retrieved across user questions. However, currently, for every question, attention-layers in LLMs fully compute the key values (KVs) repeatedly for the input chunks, as state-of-the-art methods cannot reuse KV-caches when chunks appear at arbitrary locations with arbitrary contexts. Naive reuse leads to output quality degradation. This leads to potentially redundant computations on expensive GPUs and increases latency. In this work, we propose Cache-Craft, a system for managing and reusing precomputed KVs corresponding to the text chunks (we call chunk-caches) in RAG-based systems. We present how to identify chunk-caches that are reusable, how to efficiently perform a small fraction of recomputation to fix the cache to maintain output quality, and how to efficiently store and evict chunk-caches in the hardware for maximizing reuse while masking any overheads. With real production workloads as well as synthetic datasets, we show that Cache-Craft reduces redundant computation by 51% over SOTA prefix-caching and 75% over full recomputation. Additionally, with continuous batching on a real production workload, we get a 1.6X speed up in throughput and a 2X reduction in end-to-end response latency over prefix-caching while maintaining quality, for both the LLaMA-3-8B and LLaMA-3-70B models.

Let the Code LLM Edit Itself When You Edit the Code

In this work, we investigate a typical scenario in code generation where a developer edits existing code in real time and requests a code assistant, e.g., a large language model, to re-predict the next token or next line on the fly. Naively, the LLM needs to re-encode the entire KV cache to provide an accurate prediction. However, this process is computationally expensive, especially when the sequence length is long. Simply encoding the edited subsequence and integrating it to the original KV cache meets the temporal confusion problem, leading to significantly worse performance. We address this efficiency and accuracy trade-off by introducing \textbf{Positional \textbf{Integrity Encoding} (PIE). Building upon the rotary positional encoding, PIE first removes the rotary matrices in the Key cache that introduce temporal confusion and then reapplies the correct rotary matrices. This process ensures that positional relationships between tokens are correct and requires only a single round of matrix multiplication. We validate the effectiveness of PIE through extensive experiments on the RepoBench-C-8k dataset, utilizing DeepSeek-Coder models with 1.3B, 6.7B, and 33B parameters. Our evaluation includes three real-world coding tasks: code insertion, code deletion, and multi-place code editing. Results demonstrate that PIE reduces computational overhead by over 85% compared to the standard full recomputation approach across all model sizes and tasks while well approximating the model performance.

Unified Functional Hashing in Automatic Machine Learning

The field of Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) has recently attained impressive results, including the discovery of state-of-the-art machine learning solutions, such as neural image classifiers. This is often done by applying an evolutionary search method, which samples multiple candidate solutions from a large space and evaluates the quality of each candidate through a long training process. As a result, the search tends to be slow. In this paper, we show that large efficiency gains can be obtained by employing a fast unified functional hash, especially through the functional equivalence caching technique, which we also present. The central idea is to detect by hashing when the search method produces equivalent candidates, which occurs very frequently, and this way avoid their costly re-evaluation. Our hash is "functional" in that it identifies equivalent candidates even if they were represented or coded differently, and it is "unified" in that the same algorithm can hash arbitrary representations; e.g. compute graphs, imperative code, or lambda functions. As evidence, we show dramatic improvements on multiple AutoML domains, including neural architecture search and algorithm discovery. Finally, we consider the effect of hash collisions, evaluation noise, and search distribution through empirical analysis. Altogether, we hope this paper may serve as a guide to hashing techniques in AutoML.

Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image models encounter safety issues, including concerns related to copyright and Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. Despite several methods have been proposed for erasing inappropriate concepts from diffusion models, they often exhibit incomplete erasure, consume a lot of computing resources, and inadvertently damage generation ability. In this work, we introduce Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure (RECE), a novel approach that modifies the model in 3 seconds without necessitating additional fine-tuning. Specifically, RECE efficiently leverages a closed-form solution to derive new target embeddings, which are capable of regenerating erased concepts within the unlearned model. To mitigate inappropriate content potentially represented by derived embeddings, RECE further aligns them with harmless concepts in cross-attention layers. The derivation and erasure of new representation embeddings are conducted iteratively to achieve a thorough erasure of inappropriate concepts. Besides, to preserve the model's generation ability, RECE introduces an additional regularization term during the derivation process, resulting in minimizing the impact on unrelated concepts during the erasure process. All the processes above are in closed-form, guaranteeing extremely efficient erasure in only 3 seconds. Benchmarking against previous approaches, our method achieves more efficient and thorough erasure with minor damage to original generation ability and demonstrates enhanced robustness against red-teaming tools. Code is available at https://github.com/CharlesGong12/RECE.

Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse, many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and "Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach identifies relationships between organization names using network representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software ("LinkOrgs").

Fast and Memory-Efficient Video Diffusion Using Streamlined Inference

The rapid progress in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC), especially with diffusion models, has significantly advanced development of high-quality video generation. However, current video diffusion models exhibit demanding computational requirements and high peak memory usage, especially for generating longer and higher-resolution videos. These limitations greatly hinder the practical application of video diffusion models on standard hardware platforms. To tackle this issue, we present a novel, training-free framework named Streamlined Inference, which leverages the temporal and spatial properties of video diffusion models. Our approach integrates three core components: Feature Slicer, Operator Grouping, and Step Rehash. Specifically, Feature Slicer effectively partitions input features into sub-features and Operator Grouping processes each sub-feature with a group of consecutive operators, resulting in significant memory reduction without sacrificing the quality or speed. Step Rehash further exploits the similarity between adjacent steps in diffusion, and accelerates inference through skipping unnecessary steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces peak memory and computational overhead, making it feasible to generate high-quality videos on a single consumer GPU (e.g., reducing peak memory of AnimateDiff from 42GB to 11GB, featuring faster inference on 2080Ti).

SkCoder: A Sketch-based Approach for Automatic Code Generation

Recently, deep learning techniques have shown great success in automatic code generation. Inspired by the code reuse, some researchers propose copy-based approaches that can copy the content from similar code snippets to obtain better performance. Practically, human developers recognize the content in the similar code that is relevant to their needs, which can be viewed as a code sketch. The sketch is further edited to the desired code. However, existing copy-based approaches ignore the code sketches and tend to repeat the similar code without necessary modifications, which leads to generating wrong results. In this paper, we propose a sketch-based code generation approach named SkCoder to mimic developers' code reuse behavior. Given a natural language requirement, SkCoder retrieves a similar code snippet, extracts relevant parts as a code sketch, and edits the sketch into the desired code. Our motivations are that the extracted sketch provides a well-formed pattern for telling models "how to write". The post-editing further adds requirement-specific details to the sketch and outputs the complete code. We conduct experiments on two public datasets and a new dataset collected by this work. We compare our approach to 20 baselines using 5 widely used metrics. Experimental results show that (1) SkCoder can generate more correct programs, and outperforms the state-of-the-art - CodeT5-base by 30.30%, 35.39%, and 29.62% on three datasets. (2) Our approach is effective to multiple code generation models and improves them by up to 120.1% in Pass@1. (3) We investigate three plausible code sketches and discuss the importance of sketches. (4) We manually evaluate the generated code and prove the superiority of our SkCoder in three aspects.

Stacking Brick by Brick: Aligned Feature Isolation for Incremental Face Forgery Detection

The rapid advancement of face forgery techniques has introduced a growing variety of forgeries. Incremental Face Forgery Detection (IFFD), involving gradually adding new forgery data to fine-tune the previously trained model, has been introduced as a promising strategy to deal with evolving forgery methods. However, a naively trained IFFD model is prone to catastrophic forgetting when new forgeries are integrated, as treating all forgeries as a single ''Fake" class in the Real/Fake classification can cause different forgery types overriding one another, thereby resulting in the forgetting of unique characteristics from earlier tasks and limiting the model's effectiveness in learning forgery specificity and generality. In this paper, we propose to stack the latent feature distributions of previous and new tasks brick by brick, i.e., achieving aligned feature isolation. In this manner, we aim to preserve learned forgery information and accumulate new knowledge by minimizing distribution overriding, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. To achieve this, we first introduce Sparse Uniform Replay (SUR) to obtain the representative subsets that could be treated as the uniformly sparse versions of the previous global distributions. We then propose a Latent-space Incremental Detector (LID) that leverages SUR data to isolate and align distributions. For evaluation, we construct a more advanced and comprehensive benchmark tailored for IFFD. The leading experimental results validate the superiority of our method.

eDKM: An Efficient and Accurate Train-time Weight Clustering for Large Language Models

Since Large Language Models or LLMs have demonstrated high-quality performance on many complex language tasks, there is a great interest in bringing these LLMs to mobile devices for faster responses and better privacy protection. However, the size of LLMs (i.e., billions of parameters) requires highly effective compression to fit into storage-limited devices. Among many compression techniques, weight-clustering, a form of non-linear quantization, is one of the leading candidates for LLM compression, and supported by modern smartphones. Yet, its training overhead is prohibitively significant for LLM fine-tuning. Especially, Differentiable KMeans Clustering, or DKM, has shown the state-of-the-art trade-off between compression ratio and accuracy regression, but its large memory complexity makes it nearly impossible to apply to train-time LLM compression. In this paper, we propose a memory-efficient DKM implementation, eDKM powered by novel techniques to reduce the memory footprint of DKM by orders of magnitudes. For a given tensor to be saved on CPU for the backward pass of DKM, we compressed the tensor by applying uniquification and sharding after checking if there is no duplicated tensor previously copied to CPU. Our experimental results demonstrate that \prjname can fine-tune and compress a pretrained LLaMA 7B model from 12.6 GB to 2.5 GB (3bit/weight) with the Alpaca dataset by reducing the train-time memory footprint of a decoder layer by 130times, while delivering good accuracy on broader LLM benchmarks (i.e., 77.7% for PIQA, 66.1% for Winograde, and so on).

Solving Data Quality Problems with Desbordante: a Demo

Data profiling is an essential process in modern data-driven industries. One of its critical components is the discovery and validation of complex statistics, including functional dependencies, data constraints, association rules, and others. However, most existing data profiling systems that focus on complex statistics do not provide proper integration with the tools used by contemporary data scientists. This creates a significant barrier to the adoption of these tools in the industry. Moreover, existing systems were not created with industrial-grade workloads in mind. Finally, they do not aim to provide descriptive explanations, i.e. why a given pattern is not found. It is a significant issue as it is essential to understand the underlying reasons for a specific pattern's absence to make informed decisions based on the data. Because of that, these patterns are effectively rest in thin air: their application scope is rather limited, they are rarely used by the broader public. At the same time, as we are going to demonstrate in this presentation, complex statistics can be efficiently used to solve many classic data quality problems. Desbordante is an open-source data profiler that aims to close this gap. It is built with emphasis on industrial application: it is efficient, scalable, resilient to crashes, and provides explanations. Furthermore, it provides seamless Python integration by offloading various costly operations to the C++ core, not only mining. In this demonstration, we show several scenarios that allow end users to solve different data quality problems. Namely, we showcase typo detection, data deduplication, and data anomaly detection scenarios.

All You Need Is Hashing: Defending Against Data Reconstruction Attack in Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning is a trending solution for multi-party collaboration in training machine learning models. Industrial frameworks adopt secure multi-party computation methods such as homomorphic encryption to guarantee data security and privacy. However, a line of work has revealed that there are still leakage risks in VFL. The leakage is caused by the correlation between the intermediate representations and the raw data. Due to the powerful approximation ability of deep neural networks, an adversary can capture the correlation precisely and reconstruct the data. To deal with the threat of the data reconstruction attack, we propose a hashing-based VFL framework, called HashVFL, to cut off the reversibility directly. The one-way nature of hashing allows our framework to block all attempts to recover data from hash codes. However, integrating hashing also brings some challenges, e.g., the loss of information. This paper proposes and addresses three challenges to integrating hashing: learnability, bit balance, and consistency. Experimental results demonstrate HashVFL's efficiency in keeping the main task's performance and defending against data reconstruction attacks. Furthermore, we also analyze its potential value in detecting abnormal inputs. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments to prove HashVFL's generalization in various settings. In summary, HashVFL provides a new perspective on protecting multi-party's data security and privacy in VFL. We hope our study can attract more researchers to expand the application domains of HashVFL.

Training Language Models on Synthetic Edit Sequences Improves Code Synthesis

Software engineers mainly write code by editing existing programs. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) autoregressively synthesize programs in a single pass. One explanation for this is the scarcity of open-sourced edit data. While high-quality instruction data for code synthesis is already scarce, high-quality edit data is even scarcer. To fill this gap, we develop a synthetic data generation algorithm called LintSeq. This algorithm refactors existing code into a sequence of code edits by using a linter to procedurally sample across the error-free insertions that can be used to sequentially write programs. It outputs edit sequences as text strings consisting of consecutive program diffs. To test LintSeq, we use it to refactor a dataset of instruction + program pairs into instruction + program-diff-sequence tuples. Then, we instruction finetune a series of smaller LLMs ranging from 2.6B to 14B parameters on both the re-factored and original versions of this dataset, comparing zero-shot performance on code synthesis benchmarks. We show that during repeated sampling, edit sequence finetuned models produce more diverse programs than baselines. This results in better inference-time scaling for benchmark coverage as a function of samples, i.e. the fraction of problems "pass@k" solved by any attempt given "k" tries. For example, on HumanEval pass@50, small LLMs finetuned on synthetic edit sequences are competitive with GPT-4 and outperform models finetuned on the baseline dataset by +20% (+/-3%) in absolute score. Finally, we also pretrain our own tiny LMs for code understanding. We show that finetuning tiny models on synthetic code edits results in state-of-the-art code synthesis for the on-device model class. Our 150M parameter edit sequence LM matches or outperforms code models with twice as many parameters, both with and without repeated sampling, including Codex and AlphaCode.

Scaling Laws for Data Filtering -- Data Curation cannot be Compute Agnostic

Vision-language models (VLMs) are trained for thousands of GPU hours on carefully curated web datasets. In recent times, data curation has gained prominence with several works developing strategies to retain 'high-quality' subsets of 'raw' scraped data. For instance, the LAION public dataset retained only 10% of the total crawled data. However, these strategies are typically developed agnostic of the available compute for training. In this paper, we first demonstrate that making filtering decisions independent of training compute is often suboptimal: the limited high-quality data rapidly loses its utility when repeated, eventually requiring the inclusion of 'unseen' but 'lower-quality' data. To address this quality-quantity tradeoff (QQT), we introduce neural scaling laws that account for the non-homogeneous nature of web data, an angle ignored in existing literature. Our scaling laws (i) characterize the differing 'utility' of various quality subsets of web data; (ii) account for how utility diminishes for a data point at its 'nth' repetition; and (iii) formulate the mutual interaction of various data pools when combined, enabling the estimation of model performance on a combination of multiple data pools without ever jointly training on them. Our key message is that data curation cannot be agnostic of the total compute that a model will be trained for. Our scaling laws allow us to curate the best possible pool for achieving top performance on Datacomp at various compute budgets, carving out a pareto-frontier for data curation. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/scaling_laws_data_filtering.