Education
EMLoC: Emulator-based Memory-efficient Fine-tuning with LoRA Correction
Open-source foundation models have seen rapid adoption and development, enabling powerful general-purpose capabilities across diverse domains. However, fine-tuning large foundation models for domain-specific or personalized tasks remains prohibitively expensive for most users due to the significant memory overhead beyond that of inference. We introduce EMLoC, an Emulator-based Memory-efficient fine-tuning framework with LoRACorrection, which enables model fine-tuning within the same memory budget required for inference. EMLoC constructs a task-specific light-weight emulator using activation-aware singular value decomposition (SVD) on a small downstream calibration set. Fine-tuning then is performed on this lightweight emulator via LoRA. To tackle the misalignment between the original model and the compressed emulator, we propose a novel compensation algorithm to correct the fine-tuned LoRA module, which thus can be merged into the original model for inference. EMLoC supports flexible compression ratios and standard training pipelines, making it adaptable to a wide range of applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMLoC outperforms other baselines across multiple datasets and modalities. Moreover, without quantization, EMLoC enables fine-tuning of a 38B model, which originally required 95GB of memory, on a single 24GB consumer GPU--bringing efficient and practical model adaptation to individual users.
Atomic Thinking of LLMs: Decoupling and Exploring Mathematical Reasoning Abilities
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in mathematical reasoning capabilities. However, we argue that current largescale reasoning models primarily rely on scaling up training datasets with diverse mathematical problems and long thinking chains, which raises questions about whether LLMs genuinely acquire mathematical concepts and reasoning principles or merely remember the training data. In contrast, humans tend to break down complex problems into multiple fundamental atomic capabilities. Inspired by this, we propose a new paradigm for evaluating mathematical atomic capabilities.
Open Language Models for Flexible Data Use
We introduce FLEXOLMO, a new class of language models (LMs) that supports (1) distributed training without data sharing, where different model parameters are independently trained on closed datasets, and (2) data-flexible inference, where these parameters along with their associated data can be flexibly included or excluded from model inferences with no further training. FLEXOLMO employs a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture where each expert is trained independently on closed datasets and later integrated through a new domain-informed routing without any joint training. FLEXOLMO is trained on FLEXMIX, a corpus we curate comprising publicly available datasets alongside seven domain-specific sets, representing realistic approximations of closed sets. We evaluate models with up to 37 billion parameters (20 billion active) on 31 diverse downstream tasks. We show that a general expert trained on public data can be effectively combined with independently trained experts from other data owners, leading to an average 41% relative improvement while allowing users to opt out of certain data based on data licensing or permission requirements. Our approach also outperforms prior model merging methods by 10.1% on average and surpasses the standard MoE trained without data restrictions using the same training FLOPs. Altogether, this research presents a solution for both data owners and researchers in regulated industries with sensitive or protected data. FLEXOLMO enables benefiting from closed data while respecting data owners' preferences by keeping their data local and supporting fine-grained control of data access during inference.
GVPO: Group Variance Policy Optimization for Large Language Model Post-Training
Post-training plays a crucial role in refining and aligning large language models to meet specific tasks and human preferences. While recent advancements in posttraining techniques, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), leverage increased sampling with relative reward scoring to achieve superior performance, these methods often suffer from training instability that limits their practical adoption.
Figure synthesis
Reward modeling, crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, is often bottlenecked by the high cost of preference data. Existing textual data synthesis methods are computationally expensive. We propose a novel framework LENS for synthesizing preference data directly in the LLM's latent embedding space. Our method employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn a structured latent representation of response embeddings. By performing controlled perturbations in this latent space and decoding back to the embedding space, we efficiently generate diverse, semantically consistent synthetic preference pairs, bypassing costly text generation and annotation. We provide theoretical guarantees that our synthesized pairs approximately preserve original preference ordering and improve reward model generalization. Empirically, our latent-space synthesis significantly outperforms text-based augmentation on standard benchmarks, achieving superior results while being 18 faster in generation and using a 16,000 smaller model. Our work offers a scalable and effective alternative for enhancing reward modeling through efficient data augmentation.
Self-Refining Language Model Anonymizers via Adversarial Distillation
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in sensitive domains, where their ability to infer personal data from seemingly benign text introduces emerging privacy risks. While recent LLM-based anonymization methods help mitigate such risks, they often rely on proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4), raising concerns about cost and the potential exposure of sensitive data to untrusted external systems. To address this, we introduce SElf-refining Anonymization with Language model (SEAL), a novel distillation framework for training small language models (SLMs) to perform effective anonymization without relying on external models at inference time. SEAL leverages adversarial interactions between an LLM anonymizer and an inference model to collect trajectories of anonymized texts and inferred attributes, which are then used to distill anonymization and critique capabilities into SLMs through supervised fine-tuning and preference learning. The resulting models learn both to anonymize text and to evaluate their outputs, enabling iterative improvement of anonymization quality via self-refinement. Experiments on SynthPAI, a dataset of synthetic personal profiles and text comments, demonstrate that SLMs trained with SEAL achieve substantial improvements in anonymization capabilities. Notably, 8B models attain a privacy-utility trade-off comparable to that of the GPT-4 anonymizer and, with self-refinement, even surpass it in terms of privacy protection.
Private Online Learning against an Adaptive Adversary: Realizable and Agnostic Settings
We revisit the problem of private online learning, in which a learner receives a sequence of T data points and has to respond at each time-step a hypothesis. It is required that the entire stream of output hypotheses should satisfy differential privacy. Prior work of Golowich and Livni [2021] established that every concept class H with finite Littlestone dimension d is privately online learnable in the realizable setting. In particular, they proposed an algorithm that achieves an Od(logT) mistake bound against an oblivious adversary. However, their approach yields a suboptimal Od( T) bound against an adaptive adversary. In this work, we present a new algorithm with a mistake bound of Od(logT)against an adaptive adversary, closing this gap. We further investigate the problem in the agnostic setting, which is more general than the realizable setting as it does not impose any assumptions on the data. We give an algorithm that obtains a sublinear regret of Od( T) for generic Littlestone classes, demonstrating that they are also privately online learnable in the agnostic setting.
Alleviating Hallucinations in Large Language Models through Multi-Model Contrastive Decoding and Dynamic Hallucination Detection
Despite their outstanding performance in numerous applications, large language models (LLMs) remain prone to hallucinations, generating content inconsistent with their pretraining corpora. Currently, almost all contrastive decoding approaches alleviate hallucinations by introducing a model susceptible to hallucinations and appropriately widening the contrastive logits gap between hallucinatory tokens and target tokens. However, although existing contrastive decoding methods mitigate hallucinations, they lack enough confidence in the factual accuracy of the generated content. In this work, we propose Multi-Model Contrastive Decoding (MCD), which integrates a pretrained language model with an evil model and a truthful model for contrastive decoding. Intuitively, a token is assigned a high probability only when deemed potentially hallucinatory by the evil model while being considered factual by the truthful model. This decoding strategy significantly enhances the model's confidence in its generated responses and reduces potential hallucinations. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic hallucination detection mechanism that facilitates token-by-token identification of hallucinations during generation and a tree-based revision mechanism to diminish hallucinations further. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our MCD strategy effectively reduces hallucinations in LLMs and outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various benchmarks.
Bridging Equivariant GNNs and Spherical CNNs for Structured Physical Domains
Many modeling tasks from disparate domains can be framed in the same way, computing spherical signals from geometric inputs, for example, computing the radar response of different objects or navigating through an environment. This paper introduces G2Sphere, a general method for mapping object geometries to spherical signals. G2Sphere operates entirely in Fourier space, encoding geometric structure into latent Fourier features using equivariant neural networks and outputting the Fourier coefficients of the continuous target signal, which can be evaluated at any resolution. By utilizing a hybrid GNN-spherical CNN architecture, our method achieves a much higher frequency output signal than comparable equivariant GNNs and avoids hand-engineered geometry features used previously by purely spherical methods. We perform experiments on various challenging domains, including radar response modeling, aerodynamic drag prediction, and policy learning for manipulation and navigation. We find that G2Sphere outperforms competitive baselines in terms of accuracy and inference time, and we demonstrate that equivariance and Fourier features lead to improved sample efficiency and generalization.
Data Efficient Adaptation in Large Language Models via Continuous Low-Rank Fine-Tuning
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have emphasized the critical role of fine-tuning (FT) techniques in adapting LLMs to specific tasks, especially when retraining from scratch is computationally infeasible. Fine-tuning enables LLMs to leverage task-or domain-specific data, producing models that more effectively meet the requirements of targeted applications. However, conventional FT approaches often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal data efficiency, limiting their real-world applicability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes DEAL, a novel framework that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with a continuous fine-tuning strategy.