This paper explores the growing impact of AI and NLP in bank marketing, highlighting their evolving roles in enhancing marketing strategies, improving customer engagement, and creating value within this sector. While AI and NLP have been widely studied in general marketing, there is a notable gap in understanding their specific applications and potential within the banking sector. This research addresses this specific gap by providing a systematic review and strategic analysis of AI and NLP applications in bank marketing, focusing on their integration across the customer journey and operational excellence. Employing the PRISMA methodology, this study systematically reviews existing literature to assess the current landscape of AI and NLP in bank marketing. Additionally, it incorporates semantic mapping using Sentence Transformers and UMAP for strategic gap analysis to identify underexplored areas and opportunities for future research. The systematic review reveals limited research specifically focused on NLP applications in bank marketing. The strategic gap analysis identifies key areas where NLP can further enhance marketing strategies, including customer-centric applications like acquisition, retention, and personalized engagement, offering valuable insights for both academic research and practical implementation. This research contributes to the field of bank marketing by mapping the current state of AI and NLP applications and identifying strategic gaps. The findings provide actionable insights for developing NLP-driven growth and innovation frameworks and highlight the role of NLP in improving operational efficiency and regulatory compliance. This work has broader implications for enhancing customer experience, profitability, and innovation in the banking industry.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has driven significant progress in medical applications, including traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). However, current medical LLMs struggle with TCM diagnosis and syndrome differentiation due to substantial differences between TCM and modern medical theory, and the scarcity of specialized, high-quality corpora. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing BianCang, a TCM-specific LLM, using a two-stage training process that first injects domain-specific knowledge and then aligns it through targeted stimulation. To enhance diagnostic and differentiation capabilities, we constructed pre-training corpora, instruction-aligned datasets based on real hospital records, and the ChP-TCM dataset derived from the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China. We compiled extensive TCM and medical corpora for continuous pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, building a comprehensive dataset to refine the model's understanding of TCM. Evaluations across 11 test sets involving 29 models and 4 tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of BianCang, offering valuable insights for future research. Code, datasets, and models are available at https://github.com/QLU-NLP/BianCang.

We present Fox-1, a series of small language models (SLMs) consisting of Fox-1-1.6B and Fox-1-1.6B-Instruct-v0.1. These models are pre-trained on 3 trillion tokens of web-scraped document data and fine-tuned with 5 billion tokens of instruction-following and multi-turn conversation data. Aiming to improve the pre-training efficiency, Fox-1-1.6B model introduces a novel 3-stage data curriculum across all the training data with 2K-8K sequence length. In architecture design, Fox-1 features a deeper layer structure, an expanded vocabulary, and utilizes Grouped Query Attention (GQA), offering a performant and efficient architecture compared to other SLMs. Fox-1 achieves better or on-par performance in various benchmarks compared to StableLM-2-1.6B, Gemma-2B, Qwen1.5-1.8B, and OpenELM1.1B, with competitive inference speed and throughput. The model weights have been released under the Apache 2.0 license, where we aim to promote the democratization of LLMs and make them fully accessible to the whole open-source community.

Efficient deployment of large language models, particularly Mixture of Experts (MoE), on resource-constrained platforms presents significant challenges, especially in terms of computational efficiency and memory utilization. The MoE architecture, renowned for its ability to increase model capacity without a proportional increase in inference cost, greatly reduces the token generation latency compared with dense models. However, the large model size makes MoE models inaccessible to individuals without high-end GPUs. In this paper, we propose a high-throughput MoE batch inference system, that significantly outperforms past work. MoE-Lightning introduces a novel CPU-GPU-I/O pipelining schedule, CGOPipe, with paged weights to achieve high resource utilization, and a performance model, HRM, based on a Hierarchical Roofline Model we introduce to help find policies with higher throughput than existing systems. MoE-Lightning can achieve up to 10.3x higher throughput than state-of-the-art offloading-enabled LLM inference systems for Mixtral 8x7B on a single T4 GPU (16GB). When the theoretical system throughput is bounded by the GPU memory, MoE-Lightning can reach the throughput upper bound with 2-3x less CPU memory, significantly increasing resource utilization. MoE-Lightning also supports efficient batch inference for much larger MoEs (e.g., Mixtral 8x22B and DBRX) on multiple low-cost GPUs (e.g., 2-4 T4).

Quantization-aware training (QAT) schemes have been shown to achieve near-full precision accuracy. They accomplish this by training a quantized model for multiple epochs. This is computationally expensive, mainly because of the full precision backward pass. On the other hand, post-training quantization (PTQ) schemes do not involve training and are therefore computationally cheap, but they usually result in a significant accuracy drop. We address these challenges by proposing EfQAT, which generalizes both schemes by optimizing only a subset of the parameters of a quantized model. EfQAT starts by applying a PTQ scheme to a pre-trained model and only updates the most critical network parameters while freezing the rest, accelerating the backward pass. We demonstrate the effectiveness of EfQAT on various CNNs and Transformer-based models using different GPUs. Specifically, we show that EfQAT is significantly more accurate than PTQ with little extra compute. Furthermore, EfQAT can accelerate the QAT backward pass between 1.44-1.64x while retaining most accuracy.

In this paper, we propose ZeFaV - a zero-shot based fact-checking verification framework to enhance the performance on fact verification task of large language models by leveraging the in-context learning ability of large language models to extract the relations among the entities within a claim, re-organized the information from the evidence in a relationally logical form, and combine the above information with the original evidence to generate the context from which our fact-checking model provide verdicts for the input claims. We conducted empirical experiments to evaluate our approach on two multi-hop fact-checking datasets including HoVer and FEVEROUS, and achieved potential results results comparable to other state-of-the-art fact verification task methods.

Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as an effective technique for accelerating the auto-regressive inference process of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, Speculative Decoding entirely relies on the availability of efficient draft models, which are often lacking for many existing language models due to a stringent constraint of vocabulary incompatibility. In this work we introduce FastDraft, a novel and efficient approach for pre-training and aligning a draft model to any large language model by incorporating efficient pre-training, followed by fine-tuning over synthetic datasets generated by the target model. We demonstrate FastDraft by training two highly parameter efficient drafts for the popular Phi-3-mini and Llama-3.1-8B models. Using FastDraft, we were able to produce a draft with approximately 10 billion tokens on a single server with 8 Intel$^\circledR$ Gaudi$^\circledR$ 2 accelerators in under 24 hours. Our results show that the draft model achieves impressive results in key metrics of acceptance rate, block efficiency and up to 3x memory bound speed up when evaluated on code completion and up to 2x in summarization, text completion and instruction tasks. We validate our theoretical findings through benchmarking on the latest Intel$^\circledR$ Core$^{\tiny \text{TM}}$ Ultra, achieving a wall-clock time speedup of up to 2x, indicating a significant reduction in runtime. Due to its high quality, FastDraft unlocks large language models inference on AI-PC and other edge-devices.

The LayerNorm (LN) layer in GPT-style transformer models has long been a hindrance to mechanistic interpretability. LN is a crucial component required to stabilize the training of large language models, and LN or the similar RMSNorm have been used in practically all large language models based on the transformer architecture. The non-linear nature of the LN layers is a hindrance for mechanistic interpretability as it hinders interpretation of the residual stream, and makes it difficult to decompose the model into circuits. Some researchers have gone so far as to name "reasons interpretability researchers hate layer norm." In this paper we show that it is possible to remove the LN layers from a pre-trained GPT2-small model by fine-tuning on a fraction (500M tokens) of the training data. We demonstrate that this LN-free model achieves similar performance to the original model on the OpenWebText and ThePile datasets (-0.05 cross-entropy loss), and the Hellaswag benchmark (-0.5% accuracy). We provide our implementation at https://github.com/ApolloResearch/gpt2_noLN, and fine-tuned GPT2-small models at https://huggingface.co/apollo-research/gpt2_noLN. Our work not only provides a simplified model for mechanistic interpretability research, but also provides evidence that the LN layers, at inference time, do not play a crucial role in transformer models.

Information-Seeking Dialogue (ISD) agents aim to provide accurate responses to user queries. While proficient in directly addressing user queries, these agents, as well as LLMs in general, predominantly exhibit reactive behavior, lacking the ability to generate proactive responses that actively engage users in sustained conversations. However, existing definitions of proactive dialogue in this context do not focus on how each response actively engages the user and sustains the conversation. Hence, we present a new definition of proactivity that focuses on enhancing the `proactiveness' of each generated response via the introduction of new information related to the initial query. To this end, we construct a proactive dialogue dataset comprising 2,000 single-turn conversations, and introduce several automatic metrics to evaluate response `proactiveness' which achieved high correlation with human annotation. Additionally, we introduce two innovative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts, the 3-step CoT and the 3-in-1 CoT prompts, which consistently outperform standard prompts by up to 90% in the zero-shot setting.

This article presents an experiment in fine-tuning a pretrained causal language model (Meta's Llama 3.1 8B Instruct) to assist with restoring missing or illegible characters in ancient Greek inscriptions and documentary papyri. Utilizing a straightforward instruction-based approach and a 95%/5% train/test split, the papyrus restoration model achieved a character error rate (CER) of 14.9%, a top-1 accuracy of 73.5%, and a top-20 accuracy of 86.0% for sequences up to 10 characters. A model was also fine-tuned for geographic attribution, reaching a top-1 accuracy of 66.4% and a top-3 accuracy of 79.9%. In chronological attribution, it demonstrated an average deviation of 21.7 years from the actual terminus post/ante quem, with a median deviation of 0 years. For inscriptions, the restoration model achieved a CER of 20.5%, a top-1 accuracy of 63.7%, and a top-20 accuracy of 83.0% for sequences up to 10 characters. In geographic attribution, it attained a top-1 accuracy of 75.0% and a top-3 accuracy of 83.7%, while in dating, it had an average deviation of 37.1 years and a median deviation of 3 years from the actual date range. Benchmarked against the state-of-the-art model (Ithaca) on a shared test set and on recently edited inscriptions, the instruction-tuned models excelled in text restoration, while also offering the practical advantage of ignoring spaces during reconstruction, which aligns with the scriptio continua of ancient textual artifacts. However, their performance in geographic and chronological attribution was lower than Ithaca's. To evaluate the approach in a more even setup, the instruction model was retrained with an 80%/10%/10% train-validation-test split, and still outperformed Ithaca in text restoration. The results suggest that fine-tuning larger pretrained causal language models using instruction templates for emendations and conjectures to ancient texts holds promise.