Deep Learning
Shifting AI Efficiency From Model-Centric to Data-Centric Compression
Liu, Xuyang, Wen, Zichen, Wang, Shaobo, Chen, Junjie, Tao, Zhishan, Wang, Yubo, Chen, Tailai, Jin, Xiangqi, Zou, Chang, Wang, Yiyu, Liao, Chenfei, Zheng, Xu, Chen, Honggang, Li, Weijia, Hu, Xuming, He, Conghui, Zhang, Linfeng
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) has historically relied on scaling model parameters. However, as hardware limits constrain further model growth, the primary computational bottleneck has shifted to the quadratic cost of self-attention over increasingly long sequences by ultra-long text contexts, high-resolution images, and extended videos. In this position paper, \textbf{we argue that the focus of research for efficient artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting from model-centric compression to data-centric compression}. We position data-centric compression as the emerging paradigm, which improves AI efficiency by directly compressing the volume of data processed during model training or inference. To formalize this shift, we establish a unified framework for existing efficiency strategies and demonstrate why it constitutes a crucial paradigm change for long-context AI. We then systematically review the landscape of data-centric compression methods, analyzing their benefits across diverse scenarios. Finally, we outline key challenges and promising future research directions. Our work aims to provide a novel perspective on AI efficiency, synthesize existing efforts, and catalyze innovation to address the challenges posed by ever-increasing context lengths.
CrosGrpsABS: Cross-Attention over Syntactic and Semantic Graphs for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in a Low-Resource Language
Hossain, Md. Mithun, Hossain, Md. Shakil, Chaki, Sudipto, Hossain, Md. Rajib
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, offering fine-grained insights into opinions expressed in text. While existing research has largely focused on resource-rich languages like English which leveraging large annotated datasets, pre-trained models, and language-specific tools. These resources are often unavailable for low-resource languages such as Bengali. The ABSA task in Bengali remains poorly explored and is further complicated by its unique linguistic characteristics and a lack of annotated data, pre-trained models, and optimized hyperparameters. To address these challenges, this research propose CrosGrpsABS, a novel hybrid framework that leverages bidirectional cross-attention between syntactic and semantic graphs to enhance aspect-level sentiment classification. The CrosGrpsABS combines transformerbased contextual embeddings with graph convolutional networks, built upon rule-based syntactic dependency parsing and semantic similarity computations. By employing bidirectional crossattention, the model effectively fuses local syntactic structure with global semantic context, resulting in improved sentiment classification performance across both low- and high-resource settings. We evaluate CrosGrpsABS on four low-resource Bengali ABSA datasets and the high-resource English SemEval 2014 Task 4 dataset. The CrosGrpsABS consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving notable improvements, including a 0.93% F1-score increase for the Restaurant domain and a 1.06% gain for the Laptop domain in the SemEval 2014 Task 4 benchmark.
DetailMaster: Can Your Text-to-Image Model Handle Long Prompts?
Jiao, Qirui, Chen, Daoyuan, Huang, Yilun, Lin, Xika, Shen, Ying, Li, Yaliang
While recent text-to-image (T2I) models show impressive capabilities in synthesizing images from brief descriptions, their performance significantly degrades when confronted with long, detail-intensive prompts required in professional applications. We present DetailMaster, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate T2I models' systematic abilities to handle extended textual inputs that contain complex compositional requirements. Our benchmark introduces four critical evaluation dimensions: Character Attributes, Structured Character Locations, Multi-Dimensional Scene Attributes, and Spatial/Interactive Relationships. The benchmark comprises long and detail-rich prompts averaging 284.89 tokens, with high quality validated by expert annotators. Evaluation on 7 general-purpose and 5 long-prompt-optimized T2I models reveals critical performance limitations: state-of-the-art models achieve merely $\sim$50\% accuracy in key dimensions like attribute binding and spatial reasoning, while all models showing progressive performance degradation as prompt length increases. Our analysis reveals fundamental limitations in compositional reasoning, demonstrating that current encoders flatten complex grammatical structures and that diffusion models suffer from attribute leakage under detail-intensive conditions. We open-source our dataset, data curation code, and evaluation tools to advance detail-rich T2I generation and enable applications previously hindered by the lack of a dedicated benchmark.
TRIM: Achieving Extreme Sparsity with Targeted Row-wise Iterative Metric-driven Pruning
Beck, Florentin, Rudman, William, Eickhoff, Carsten
Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant computational and memory challenges due to their extensive size, making pruning essential for their efficient deployment. Existing one-shot pruning methods often apply uniform sparsity constraints across layers or within each layer, resulting in suboptimal performance, especially at high sparsity ratios. This work introduces TRIM (Targeted Row-wise Iterative Metric-driven pruning), a novel approach that applies varying sparsity ratios to individual output dimensions (rows) within each layer. TRIM employs an iterative adjustment process guided by quality metrics to optimize dimension-wise sparsity allocation, focusing on reducing variance in quality retention across outputs to preserve critical information. TRIM can be seamlessly integrated with existing layer-wise pruning strategies. Our evaluations on perplexity and zero-shot tasks across diverse LLM families (Qwen2.5, LLaMA-2, and OPT) and sparsity levels demonstrate that TRIM achieves new state-of-the-art results and enhances stability. For instance, at 80% sparsity, TRIM reduces perplexity by 48% for Qwen2.5-14B and over 90% for OPT-13B compared to baseline methods. We conclude that fine-grained, dimension-wise sparsity adaptation is crucial for pushing the limits of extreme LLM compression. Code available at: https://github.com/flobk/TRIM
MCP-RADAR: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating Tool Use Capabilities in Large Language Models
Gao, Xuanqi, Xie, Siyi, Zhai, Juan, Ma, Shiqing, Shen, Chao
As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from passive text generators to active reasoning agents capable of interacting with external tools, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a key standardized framework for dynamic tool discovery and orchestration. Despite its widespread industry adoption, existing evaluation methods do not adequately assess tool utilization capabilities under this new paradigm. To address this gap, this paper introduces MCP-RADAR, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM performance within the MCP framework. MCP-RADAR features a challenging dataset of 507 tasks spanning six domains: mathematical reasoning, web search, email, calendar, file management, and terminal operations. It quantifies performance based on two primary criteria: answer correctness and operational accuracy. To closely emulate real-world usage, our evaluation employs both authentic MCP tools and high-fidelity simulations of official tools. Unlike traditional benchmarks that rely on subjective human evaluation or binary success metrics, MCP-RADAR adopts objective, quantifiable measurements across multiple task domains, including computational resource efficiency and the number of successful tool-invocation rounds. Our evaluation of leading closed-source and open-source LLMs reveals distinct capability profiles and highlights a significant trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Our findings provide actionable insights for both LLM developers and tool creators, establishing a standardized methodology applicable to the broader LLM agent ecosystem. All implementations, configurations, and datasets are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCPRadar-B143.
Explain Less, Understand More: Jargon Detection via Personalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning
Wu, Bohao, Wang, Qingyun, Guo, Yue
Personalizing jargon detection and explanation is essential for making technical documents accessible to readers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. However, tailoring models to individual users typically requires substantial annotation efforts and computational resources due to user-specific finetuning. To address this, we present a systematic study of personalized jargon detection, focusing on methods that are both efficient and scalable for real-world deployment. We explore two personalization strategies: (1) lightweight finetuning using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on open-source models, and (2) personalized prompting, which tailors model behavior at inference time without retaining. To reflect realistic constraints, we also investigate semi-supervised approaches that combine limited annotated data with self-supervised learning from users' publications. Our personalized LoRA model outperforms GPT-4 with contextual prompting by 21.4% in F1 score and exceeds the best performing oracle baseline by 8.3%. Remarkably, our method achieves comparable performance using only 10% of the annotated training data, demonstrating its practicality for resource-constrained settings. Our study offers the first work to systematically explore efficient, low-resource personalization of jargon detection using open-source language models, offering a practical path toward scalable, user-adaptive NLP system.
From Problem-Solving to Teaching Problem-Solving: Aligning LLMs with Pedagogy using Reinforcement Learning
Dinucu-Jianu, David, Macina, Jakub, Daheim, Nico, Hakimi, Ido, Gurevych, Iryna, Sachan, Mrinmaya
Large language models (LLMs) can transform education, but their optimization for direct question-answering often undermines effective pedagogy which requires strategically withholding answers. To mitigate this, we propose an online reinforcement learning (RL)-based alignment framework that can quickly adapt LLMs into effective tutors using simulated student-tutor interactions by emphasizing pedagogical quality and guided problem-solving over simply giving away answers. We use our method to train a 7B parameter tutor model without human annotations which reaches similar performance to larger proprietary models like LearnLM. We introduce a controllable reward weighting to balance pedagogical support and student solving accuracy, allowing us to trace the Pareto frontier between these two objectives. Our models better preserve reasoning capabilities than single-turn SFT baselines and can optionally enhance interpretability through thinking tags that expose the model's instructional planning.
Communication-Efficient Diffusion Denoising Parallelization via Reuse-then-Predict Mechanism
Wang, Kunyun, Li, Bohan, Yu, Kai, Guo, Minyi, Zhao, Jieru
Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models across various modalities, including image, video, and audio synthesis. However, their deployment is often limited by significant inference latency, primarily due to the inherently sequential nature of the denoising process. While existing parallelization strategies attempt to accelerate inference by distributing computation across multiple devices, they typically incur high communication overhead, hindering deployment on commercial hardware. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ParaStep}, a novel parallelization method based on a reuse-then-predict mechanism that parallelizes diffusion inference by exploiting similarity between adjacent denoising steps. Unlike prior approaches that rely on layer-wise or stage-wise communication, ParaStep employs lightweight, step-wise communication, substantially reducing overhead. ParaStep achieves end-to-end speedups of up to \textbf{3.88}$\times$ on SVD, \textbf{2.43}$\times$ on CogVideoX-2b, and \textbf{6.56}$\times$ on AudioLDM2-large, while maintaining generation quality. These results highlight ParaStep as a scalable and communication-efficient solution for accelerating diffusion inference, particularly in bandwidth-constrained environments.
"Haet Bhasha aur Diskrimineshun": Phonetic Perturbations in Code-Mixed Hinglish to Red-Team LLMs
Aswal, Darpan, Jaiswal, Siddharth D
Recently released LLMs have strong multilingual \& multimodal capabilities. Model vulnerabilities are exposed using audits and red-teaming efforts. Existing efforts have focused primarily on the English language; thus, models continue to be susceptible to multilingual jailbreaking strategies, especially for multimodal contexts. In this study, we introduce a novel strategy that leverages code-mixing and phonetic perturbations to jailbreak LLMs for both text and image generation tasks. We also present an extension to a current jailbreak-template-based strategy and propose a novel template, showing higher effectiveness than baselines. Our work presents a method to effectively bypass safety filters in LLMs while maintaining interpretability by applying phonetic misspellings to sensitive words in code-mixed prompts. We achieve a 99\% Attack Success Rate for text generation and 78\% for image generation, with Attack Relevance Rate of 100\% for text generation and 96\% for image generation for the phonetically perturbed code-mixed prompts. Our interpretability experiments reveal that phonetic perturbations impact word tokenization, leading to jailbreak success. Our study motivates increasing the focus towards more generalizable safety alignment for multilingual multimodal models, especially in real-world settings wherein prompts can have misspelt words. \textit{\textbf{Warning: This paper contains examples of potentially harmful and offensive content.}}
Noise Injection Systemically Degrades Large Language Model Safety Guardrails
Shahani, Prithviraj Singh, Miandoab, Kaveh Eskandari, Scheutz, Matthias
Safety guardrails in large language models (LLMs) are a critical component in preventing harmful outputs. Yet, their resilience under perturbation remains poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of safety fine-tuning in LLMs by systematically injecting Gaussian noise into model activations. We show across multiple open-weight models that (1) Gaussian noise raises harmful-output rates (p < 0.001) by up to 27%, (2) that deeper safety fine-tuning affords no extra protection, and (3) that chain-of-thought reasoning remains largely intact. The findings reveal critical vulnerabilities in current safety alignment techniques and highlight the potential of reasoning-based and reinforcement learning approaches as promising direction for developing more robust AI safety systems. These results have important implications for real-world deployment of LLMs in safety-critical applications as these results imply that widely-deployed safety tuning methods can fail even without adversarial prompts.