South America
Efficiently Democratizing Medical LLMs for 50 Languages via a Mixture of Language Family Experts
Zheng, Guorui, Wang, Xidong, Liang, Juhao, Chen, Nuo, Zheng, Yuping, Wang, Benyou
Adapting medical Large Language Models to local languages can reduce barriers to accessing healthcare services, but data scarcity remains a significant challenge, particularly for low-resource languages. To address this, we first construct a highquality medical dataset and conduct analysis to ensure its quality. In order to leverage the generalization capability of multilingual LLMs to efficiently scale to more resource-constrained languages, we explore the internal information flow of LLMs from a multilingual perspective using Mixture of Experts (MoE) modularity. Technically, we propose a novel MoE routing method that employs languagespecific experts and cross-lingual routing. Inspired by circuit theory, our routing analysis revealed a "Spread Out in the End" information flow mechanism: while earlier layers concentrate cross-lingual information flow, the later layers exhibit language-specific divergence. This insight directly led to the development of the Post-MoE architecture, which applies sparse routing only in the later layers while maintaining dense others. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach enhances the generalization of multilingual models to other languages while preserving interpretability. Finally, to efficiently scale the model to 50 languages, we introduce the concept of language family experts, drawing on linguistic priors, which enables scaling the number of languages without adding additional parameters.
Cultural Fidelity in Large-Language Models: An Evaluation of Online Language Resources as a Driver of Model Performance in Value Representation
Kazemi, Sharif, Gerhardt, Gloria, Katz, Jonty, Kuria, Caroline Ida, Pan, Estelle, Prabhakar, Umang
The training data for LLMs embeds societal values, increasing their familiarity with the language's culture. Our analysis found that 44% of the variance in the ability of GPT-4o to reflect the societal values of a country, as measured by the World Values Survey, correlates with the availability of digital resources in that language. Notably, the error rate was more than five times higher for the languages of the lowest resource compared to the languages of the highest resource. For GPT-4-turbo, this correlation rose to 72%, suggesting efforts to improve the familiarity with the non-English language beyond the web-scraped data. Our study developed one of the largest and most robust datasets in this topic area with 21 country-language pairs, each of which contain 94 survey questions verified by native speakers. Our results highlight the link between LLM performance and digital data availability in target languages. Weaker performance in low-resource languages, especially prominent in the Global South, may worsen digital divides. We discuss strategies proposed to address this, including developing multilingual LLMs from the ground up and enhancing fine-tuning on diverse linguistic datasets, as seen in African language initiatives.
Towards Better Multi-head Attention via Channel-wise Sample Permutation
Transformer [48] has been widely adopted in the deep learning domain. Recent large language models like GPT [4, 36] and LLaMA [45, 46] series are built based on the Transformer and its variants, which demonstrate their remarkable abilities in natural language processing. In the field of computer vision, Vision Transformers (ViTs) [14], such as EfficientViT [5, 26] and SHViT [53], exhibit exceptional performance and consistently push their limits. In addition, the Transformer-based models have been designed for the complex structured data in various applications, including the Informer [57] for time series broadcasting, the Transformer Hawkes process [58] for continuous-time event sequence prediction, the Graphormer [51] for molecular representation, the Mesh Transformer [24] for 3D mesh representation, the Set-Transformer [22] and Point-Transformer [56] for point cloud modeling, and so on. Although some new alternatives like Mamba [15] and RWKV [33] have been proposed and shown their competitiveness in some aspects, Transformer still maintains a dominant position when developing deep learning models because of its strong performance and outstanding universality. The effectiveness of Transformer is mainly attributed to its multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism [48]. However, MHA's quadratic complexity concerning sequence length leads to a heavy, even Hongteng Xu is the corresponding author of this work.
Do we need more complex representations for structure? A comparison of note duration representation for Music Transformers
Souza, Gabriel, Figueiredo, Flavio, Machado, Alexei, Guimarães, Deborah
In recent years, deep learning has achieved formidable results in creative computing. When it comes to music, one viable model for music generation are Transformer based models. However, while transformers models are popular for music generation, they often rely on annotated structural information. In this work, we inquire if the off-the-shelf Music Transformer models perform just as well on structural similarity metrics using only unannotated MIDI information. We show that a slight tweak to the most common representation yields small but significant improvements. We also advocate that searching for better unannotated musical representations is more cost-effective than producing large amounts of curated and annotated data.
Archilles' Heel in Semi-open LLMs: Hiding Bottom against Recovery Attacks
Huang, Hanbo, Li, Yihan, Jiang, Bowen, Liu, Lin, Sun, Ruoyu, Liu, Zhuotao, Liang, Shiyu
Closed-source large language models deliver strong performance but have limited downstream customizability. Semi-open models, combining both closed-source and public layers, were introduced to improve customizability. However, parameters in the closed-source layers are found vulnerable to recovery attacks. In this paper, we explore the design of semi-open models with fewer closed-source layers, aiming to increase customizability while ensuring resilience to recovery attacks. We analyze the contribution of closed-source layer to the overall resilience and theoretically prove that in a deep transformer-based model, there exists a transition layer such that even small recovery errors in layers before this layer can lead to recovery failure. SCARA employs a fine-tuning-free metric to estimate the maximum number of layers that can be publicly accessible for customization. We apply it to five models (1.3B to 70B parameters) to construct semi-open models, validating their customizability on six downstream tasks and assessing their resilience against various recovery attacks on sixteen benchmarks. We compare SCARA to baselines and observe that it generally improves downstream customization performance and offers similar resilience with over 10 times fewer closed-source parameters. We empirically investigate the existence of transition layers, analyze the effectiveness of our scheme and finally discuss its limitations. Open-sourcing more parameters and structure details apparently enhances downstream customizability. However, Zanella-Beguelin et al. (2021) showed that semi-open LLMs with only a few closed-source parameters are vulnerable to model recovery attacks. Recovery attackers query the closed-source module and then train a new module that imitates its functionality. This can lead to the full replication and theft of closed-source modules (Solaiman, 2023). Recovery attackers targeting fully closed-source models seek to fine-tune a new model that precisely replicates the closed-source model (Tamber et al., 2024; Dubiński et al., 2024). In contrast, attackers in semi-open settings are not required to exactly replicate the closed-source module. Instead, they can fine-tune the closed-source module alongside the public module to reconstruct the overall functionality. While open-sourcing more layers enhances downstream flexibility, it also facilitates easier replication.
Cultural Heritage 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Networks
Jaramillo, Pablo, Sipiran, Ivan
This article explores the use of recent generative AI algorithms for repairing cultural heritage objects, leveraging a conditional diffusion model designed to reconstruct 3D point clouds effectively. Our study evaluates the model's performance across general and cultural heritage-specific settings. Results indicate that, with considerations for object variability, the diffusion model can accurately reproduce cultural heritage geometries. Despite encountering challenges like data diversity and outlier sensitivity, the model demonstrates significant potential in artifact restoration research. This work lays groundwork for advancing restoration methodologies for ancient artifacts using AI technologies.
DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and Streaming Heads
Xiao, Guangxuan, Tang, Jiaming, Zuo, Jingwei, Guo, Junxian, Yang, Shang, Tang, Haotian, Fu, Yao, Han, Song
Deploying long-context large language models (LLMs) is essential but poses significant computational and memory challenges. Caching all Key and Value (KV) states across all attention heads consumes substantial memory. Existing KV cache pruning methods either damage the long-context capabilities of LLMs or offer only limited efficiency improvements. In this paper, we identify that only a fraction of attention heads, a.k.a, Retrieval Heads, are critical for processing long contexts and require full attention across all tokens. In contrast, all other heads, which primarily focus on recent tokens and attention sinks--referred to as Streaming Heads--do not require full attention. Based on this insight, we introduce DuoAttention, a framework that only applies a full KV cache to retrieval heads while using a light-weight, constant-length KV cache for streaming heads, which reduces both LLM's decoding and pre-filling memory and latency without compromising its long-context abilities. DuoAttention uses a lightweight, optimization-based algorithm with synthetic data to identify retrieval heads accurately. Our method significantly reduces long-context inference memory by up to 2.55x for MHA and 1.67x for GQA models while speeding up decoding by up to 2.18x and 1.50x and accelerating pre-filling by up to 1.73x and 1.63x for MHA and GQA models, respectively, with minimal accuracy loss compared to full attention. Notably, combined with quantization, DuoAttention enables Llama-3-8B decoding with 3.3 million context length on a single A100 GPU. Code is provided in https://github.com/mit-han-lab/duo-attention.
LVD-2M: A Long-take Video Dataset with Temporally Dense Captions
Xiong, Tianwei, Wang, Yuqing, Zhou, Daquan, Lin, Zhijie, Feng, Jiashi, Liu, Xihui
The efficacy of video generation models heavily depends on the quality of their training datasets. Most previous video generation models are trained on short video clips, while recently there has been increasing interest in training long video generation models directly on longer videos. However, the lack of such high-quality long videos impedes the advancement of long video generation. To promote research in long video generation, we desire a new dataset with four key features essential for training long video generation models: (1) long videos covering at least 10 seconds, (2) long-take videos without cuts, (3) large motion and diverse contents, and (4) temporally dense captions. To achieve this, we introduce a new pipeline for selecting high-quality long-take videos and generating temporally dense captions. Specifically, we define a set of metrics to quantitatively assess video quality including scene cuts, dynamic degrees, and semantic-level quality, enabling us to filter high-quality long-take videos from a large amount of source videos. Subsequently, we develop a hierarchical video captioning pipeline to annotate long videos with temporally-dense captions. With this pipeline, we curate the first long-take video dataset, LVD-2M, comprising 2 million long-take videos, each covering more than 10 seconds and annotated with temporally dense captions. We further validate the effectiveness of LVD-2M by fine-tuning video generation models to generate long videos with dynamic motions. We believe our work will significantly contribute to future research in long video generation.
Real-Time Localization and Bimodal Point Pattern Analysis of Palms Using UAV Imagery
Cui, Kangning, Tang, Wei, Zhu, Rongkun, Wang, Manqi, Larsen, Gregory D., Pauca, Victor P., Alqahtani, Sarra, Yang, Fan, Segurado, David, Fine, Paul, Karubian, Jordan, Chan, Raymond H., Plemmons, Robert J., Morel, Jean-Michel, Silman, Miles R.
Understanding the spatial distribution of palms within tropical forests is essential for effective ecological monitoring, conservation strategies, and the sustainable integration of natural forest products into local and global supply chains. However, the analysis of remotely sensed data in these environments faces significant challenges, such as overlapping palm and tree crowns, uneven shading across the canopy surface, and the heterogeneous nature of the forest landscapes, which often affect the performance of palm detection and segmentation algorithms. To overcome these issues, we introduce PalmDSNet, a deep learning framework for real-time detection, segmentation, and counting of canopy palms. Additionally, we employ a bimodal reproduction algorithm that simulates palm spatial propagation to further enhance the understanding of these point patterns using PalmDSNet's results. We used UAV-captured imagery to create orthomosaics from 21 sites across western Ecuadorian tropical forests, covering a gradient from the everwet Choc\'o forests near Colombia to the drier forests of southwestern Ecuador. Expert annotations were used to create a comprehensive dataset, including 7,356 bounding boxes on image patches and 7,603 palm centers across five orthomosaics, encompassing a total area of 449 hectares. By combining PalmDSNet with the bimodal reproduction algorithm, which optimizes parameters for both local and global spatial variability, we effectively simulate the spatial distribution of palms in diverse and dense tropical environments, validating its utility for advanced applications in tropical forest monitoring and remote sensing analysis.
Mix Data or Merge Models? Optimizing for Diverse Multi-Task Learning
Aakanksha, null, Ahmadian, Arash, Goldfarb-Tarrant, Seraphina, Ermis, Beyza, Fadaee, Marzieh, Hooker, Sara
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted and deployed worldwide for a broad variety of applications. However, ensuring their safe use remains a significant challenge. Preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms prevalent in Western-centric datasets, and safety protocols frequently fail to extend to multilingual settings. In this work, we explore model merging in a diverse multi-task setting, combining safety and general-purpose tasks within a multilingual context. Each language introduces unique and varied learning challenges across tasks. We find that objective-based merging is more effective than mixing data, with improvements of up to 8% and 10% in general performance and safety respectively. We also find that language-based merging is highly effective -- by merging monolingually fine-tuned models, we achieve a 4% increase in general performance and 7% reduction in harm across all languages on top of the data mixtures method using the same available data. Overall, our comprehensive study of merging approaches provides a useful framework for building strong and safe multilingual models.