Large Language Model
SpeCache: Speculative Key-Value Caching for Efficient Generation of LLMs
Jie, Shibo, Tang, Yehui, Han, Kai, Deng, Zhi-Hong, Han, Jing
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have already achieved remarkable results on long-text tasks, but the limited GPU memory (VRAM) resources struggle to accommodate the linearly growing demand for key-value (KV) cache as the sequence length increases, which has become a bottleneck for the application of LLMs on long sequences. Existing KV cache compression methods include eviction, merging, or quantization of the KV cache to reduce its size. However, compression results in irreversible information forgetting, potentially affecting the accuracy of subsequent decoding. In this paper, we propose SpeCache, which takes full advantage of the large and easily expandable CPU memory to offload the complete KV cache, and dynamically fetches KV pairs back in each decoding step based on their importance measured by low-bit KV cache copy in VRAM. To avoid inference latency caused by CPU-GPU communication, SpeCache speculatively predicts the KV pairs that the next token might attend to, allowing us to prefetch them before the next decoding step which enables parallelization of prefetching and computation. Experiments on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack benchmarks verify that SpeCache effectively reduces VRAM usage while avoiding information forgetting for long sequences without re-training, even with a 10x high KV cache compression ratio.
Accelerating Transformer Inference and Training with 2:4 Activation Sparsity
Haziza, Daniel, Chou, Timothy, Choudhary, Dhruv, Wehrstedt, Luca, Massa, Francisco, Yu, Jiecao, Jeong, Geonhwa, Rao, Supriya, Labatut, Patrick, Cai, Jesse
In this paper, we demonstrate how to leverage 2:4 sparsity, a popular hardwareaccelerated GPU sparsity pattern, to activations to accelerate large language model training and inference. Crucially we exploit the intrinsic sparsity found in Squared-ReLU activations to provide this acceleration with no accuracy loss. Our approach achieves up to 1.3x faster Feed Forward Network (FFNs) in both the forwards and backwards pass. This work highlights the potential for sparsity to play a key role in accelerating large language model training and inference. The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years has been driven by a corresponding surge in GPU FLOPs.
From Structured Prompts to Open Narratives: Measuring Gender Bias in LLMs Through Open-Ended Storytelling
Chen, Evan, Zhan, Run-Jun, Lin, Yan-Bai, Chen, Hung-Hsuan
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet concerns persist regarding their tendency to reflect or amplify social biases present in their training data. This study introduces a novel evaluation framework to uncover gender biases in LLMs, focusing on their occupational narratives. Unlike previous methods relying on structured scenarios or carefully crafted prompts, our approach leverages free-form storytelling to reveal biases embedded in the models. Systematic analyses show an overrepresentation of female characters across occupations in six widely used LLMs. Additionally, our findings reveal that LLM-generated occupational gender rankings align more closely with human stereotypes than actual labor statistics. These insights underscore the need for balanced mitigation strategies to ensure fairness while avoiding the reinforcement of new stereotypes.
CodeReviewQA: The Code Review Comprehension Assessment for Large Language Models
Lin, Hong Yi, Liu, Chunhua, Gao, Haoyu, Thongtanunam, Patanamon, Treude, Christoph
State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive code generation capabilities but struggle with real-world software engineering tasks, such as revising source code to address code reviews, hindering their practical use. Code review comments are often implicit, ambiguous, and colloquial, requiring models to grasp both code and human intent. This challenge calls for evaluating large language models' ability to bridge both technical and conversational contexts. While existing work has employed the automated code refinement (ACR) task to resolve these comments, current evaluation methods fall short, relying on text matching metrics that provide limited insight into model failures and remain susceptible to training data contamination. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel evaluation benchmark, $\textbf{CodeReviewQA}$ that enables us to conduct fine-grained assessment of model capabilities and mitigate data contamination risks. In CodeReviewQA, we decompose the generation task of code refinement into $\textbf{three essential reasoning steps}$: $\textit{change type recognition}$ (CTR), $\textit{change localisation}$ (CL), and $\textit{solution identification}$ (SI). Each step is reformulated as multiple-choice questions with varied difficulty levels, enabling precise assessment of model capabilities, while mitigating data contamination risks. Our comprehensive evaluation spans 72 recently released large language models on $\textbf{900 manually curated, high-quality examples}$ across nine programming languages. Our results show that CodeReviewQA is able to expose specific model weaknesses in code review comprehension, disentangled from their generative automated code refinement results.
Chain-of-Tools: Utilizing Massive Unseen Tools in the CoT Reasoning of Frozen Language Models
Wu, Mengsong, Zhu, Tong, Han, Han, Zhang, Xiang, Shao, Wenbiao, Chen, Wenliang
Tool learning can further broaden the usage scenarios of large language models (LLMs). However most of the existing methods either need to finetune that the model can only use tools seen in the training data, or add tool demonstrations into the prompt with lower efficiency. In this paper, we present a new Tool Learning method Chain-of-Tools. It makes full use of the powerful semantic representation capability of frozen LLMs to finish tool calling in CoT reasoning with a huge and flexible tool pool which may contain unseen tools. Especially, to validate the effectiveness of our approach in the massive unseen tool scenario, we construct a new dataset SimpleToolQuestions. We conduct experiments on two numerical reasoning benchmarks (GSM8K-XL and FuncQA) and two knowledge-based question answering benchmarks (KAMEL and SimpleToolQuestions). Experimental results show that our approach performs better than the baseline. We also identify dimensions of the model output that are critical in tool selection, enhancing the model interpretability. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/fairyshine/Chain-of-Tools .
Re-Imagining Multimodal Instruction Tuning: A Representation View
Liu, Yiyang, Liang, James Chenhao, Tang, Ruixiang, Lee, Yugyung, Rabbani, Majid, Dianat, Sohail, Rao, Raghuveer, Huang, Lifu, Liu, Dongfang, Wang, Qifan, Han, Cheng
Multimodal instruction tuning has proven to be an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by fine-tuning pre-trained Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with instruction-following data. However, as the scale of LMMs continues to grow, fully fine-tuning these models has become highly parameter-intensive. Although Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have been introduced to reduce the number of tunable parameters, a significant performance gap remains compared to full fine-tuning. Furthermore, existing PEFT approaches are often highly parameterized, making them difficult to interpret and control. In light of this, we introduce Multimodal Representation Tuning (MRT), a novel approach that focuses on directly editing semantically rich multimodal representations to achieve strong performance and provide intuitive control over LMMs. Empirical results show that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art baselines with significant performance gains (e.g., 1580.40 MME score) while requiring substantially fewer tunable parameters (e.g., 0.03% parameters). Additionally, we conduct experiments on editing instrumental tokens within multimodal representations, demonstrating that direct manipulation of these representations enables simple yet effective control over network behavior.
Deceptive Humor: A Synthetic Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Bridging Fabricated Claims with Humorous Content
Kasu, Sai Kartheek Reddy, Biradar, Shankar, Saumya, Sunil
This paper presents the Deceptive Humor Dataset (DHD), a novel resource for studying humor derived from fabricated claims and misinformation. In an era of rampant misinformation, understanding how humor intertwines with deception is essential. DHD consists of humor-infused comments generated from false narratives, incorporating fabricated claims and manipulated information using the ChatGPT-4o model. Each instance is labeled with a Satire Level, ranging from 1 for subtle satire to 3 for high-level satire and classified into five distinct Humor Categories: Dark Humor, Irony, Social Commentary, Wordplay, and Absurdity. The dataset spans multiple languages including English, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and their code-mixed variants (Te-En, Hi-En, Ka-En, Ta-En), making it a valuable multilingual benchmark. By introducing DHD, we establish a structured foundation for analyzing humor in deceptive contexts, paving the way for a new research direction that explores how humor not only interacts with misinformation but also influences its perception and spread. We establish strong baselines for the proposed dataset, providing a foundation for future research to benchmark and advance deceptive humor detection models.
Who Relies More on World Knowledge and Bias for Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: Humans or LLMs?
Lee, So Young, Scheinberg, Russell, Shore, Amber, Agrawal, Ameeta
This study explores how recent large language models (LLMs) navigate relative clause attachment {ambiguity} and use world knowledge biases for disambiguation in six typologically diverse languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. We describe the process of creating a novel dataset -- MultiWho -- for fine-grained evaluation of relative clause attachment preferences in ambiguous and unambiguous contexts. Our experiments with three LLMs indicate that, contrary to humans, LLMs consistently exhibit a preference for local attachment, displaying limited responsiveness to syntactic variations or language-specific attachment patterns. Although LLMs performed well in unambiguous cases, they rigidly prioritized world knowledge biases, lacking the flexibility of human language processing. These findings highlight the need for more diverse, pragmatically nuanced multilingual training to improve LLMs' handling of complex structures and human-like comprehension.
MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidance
Li, Quanhao, Xing, Zhen, Wang, Rui, Zhang, Hui, Dai, Qi, Wu, Zuxuan
Recent advances in video generation have led to remarkable improvements in visual quality and temporal coherence. Upon this, trajectory-controllable video generation has emerged to enable precise object motion control through explicitly defined spatial paths. However, existing methods struggle with complex object movements and multi-object motion control, resulting in imprecise trajectory adherence, poor object consistency, and compromised visual quality. Furthermore, these methods only support trajectory control in a single format, limiting their applicability in diverse scenarios. Additionally, there is no publicly available dataset or benchmark specifically tailored for trajectory-controllable video generation, hindering robust training and systematic evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce MagicMotion, a novel image-to-video generation framework that enables trajectory control through three levels of conditions from dense to sparse: masks, bounding boxes, and sparse boxes. Given an input image and trajectories, MagicMotion seamlessly animates objects along defined trajectories while maintaining object consistency and visual quality. Furthermore, we present MagicData, a large-scale trajectory-controlled video dataset, along with an automated pipeline for annotation and filtering. We also introduce MagicBench, a comprehensive benchmark that assesses both video quality and trajectory control accuracy across different numbers of objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicMotion outperforms previous methods across various metrics. Our project page are publicly available at https://quanhaol.github.io/magicmotion-site.
Investigating Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Quranic Studies: A Study of 13 Open-Source Large Language Models
Khalila, Zahra, Nasution, Arbi Haza, Monika, Winda, Onan, Aytug, Murakami, Yohei, Radi, Yasir Bin Ismail, Osmani, Noor Mohammad
Accurate and contextually faithful responses are critical when applying large language models (LLMs) to sensitive and domain-specific tasks, such as answering queries related to quranic studies. General-purpose LLMs often struggle with hallucinations, where generated responses deviate from authoritative sources, raising concerns about their reliability in religious contexts. This challenge highlights the need for systems that can integrate domain-specific knowledge while maintaining response accuracy, relevance, and faithfulness. In this study, we investigate 13 open-source LLMs categorized into large (e.g., Llama3:70b, Gemma2:27b, QwQ:32b), medium (e.g., Gemma2:9b, Llama3:8b), and small (e.g., Llama3.2:3b, Phi3:3.8b). A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is used to make up for the problems that come with using separate models. This research utilizes a descriptive dataset of Quranic surahs including the meanings, historical context, and qualities of the 114 surahs, allowing the model to gather relevant knowledge before responding. The models are evaluated using three key metrics set by human evaluators: context relevance, answer faithfulness, and answer relevance. The findings reveal that large models consistently outperform smaller models in capturing query semantics and producing accurate, contextually grounded responses. The Llama3.2:3b model, even though it is considered small, does very well on faithfulness (4.619) and relevance (4.857), showing the promise of smaller architectures that have been well optimized. This article examines the trade-offs between model size, computational efficiency, and response quality while using LLMs in domain-specific applications.