The quadratic computational complexity in the self-attention mechanism of popular transformer architectures poses significant challenges for training and inference, particularly in terms of efficiency and memory requirements. Towards addressing these challenges, this paper introduces a novel fast computation method for gradient calculation in multi-layer transformer models. Our approach enables the computation of gradients for the entire multi-layer transformer model in almost linear time $n^{1+o(1)}$, where $n$ is the input sequence length. This breakthrough significantly reduces the computational bottleneck associated with the traditional quadratic time complexity. Our theory holds for any loss function and maintains a bounded approximation error across the entire model. Furthermore, our analysis can hold when the multi-layer transformer model contains many practical sub-modules, such as residual connection, casual mask, and multi-head attention. By improving the efficiency of gradient computation in large language models, we hope that our work will facilitate the more effective training and deployment of long-context language models based on our theoretical results.

Large Language Models have undoubtedly revolutionized the Natural Language Processing field, the current trend being to promote one-model-for-all tasks (sentiment analysis, translation, etc.). However, the statistical mechanisms at work in the larger language models struggle to exploit the relevant information when it is very sparse, when it is a weak signal. This is the case, for example, for the classification of long domain-specific documents, when the relevance relies on a single relevant word or on very few relevant words from technical jargon. In the medical domain, it is essential to determine whether a given report contains critical information about a patient's condition. This critical information is often based on one or few specific isolated terms. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical model which exploits a short list of potential target terms to retrieve candidate sentences and represent them into the contextualized embedding of the target term(s) they contain. A pooling of the term(s) embedding(s) entails the document representation to be classified. We evaluate our model on one public medical document benchmark in English and on one private French medical dataset. We show that our narrower hierarchical model is better than larger language models for retrieving relevant long documents in a domain-specific context.

The emergence of text-to-image synthesis (TIS) models has significantly influenced digital image creation by producing high-quality visuals from written descriptions. Yet these models heavily rely on the quality and specificity of textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users who may not be familiar with TIS-model-preferred prompt writing. Existing solutions relieve this via automatic model-preferred prompt generation from user queries. However, this single-turn manner suffers from limited user-centricity in terms of result interpretability and user interactivity. To address these issues, we propose DialPrompt, a multi-turn dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasises user-centricity. DialPrompt is designed to follow a multi-turn guidance workflow, where in each round of dialogue the model queries user with their preferences on possible optimization dimensions before generating the final TIS prompt. To achieve this, we mined 15 essential dimensions for high-quality prompts from advanced users and curated a multi-turn dataset. Through training on this dataset, DialPrompt can improve interpretability by allowing users to understand the correlation between specific phrases and image attributes. Additionally, it enables greater user control and engagement in the prompt generation process, leading to more personalized and visually satisfying outputs. Experiments indicate that DialPrompt achieves a competitive result in the quality of synthesized images, outperforming existing prompt engineering approaches by 5.7%. Furthermore, in our user evaluation, DialPrompt outperforms existing approaches by 46.5% in user-centricity score and is rated 7.9/10 by 19 human reviewers.

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) usage has highlighted the importance of gradient-free in-context learning (ICL). However, interpreting their inner workings remains challenging. This paper introduces a novel multimodal contrastive in-context learning framework to enhance our understanding of ICL in LLMs. First, we present a contrastive learning-based interpretation of ICL in real-world settings, marking the distance of the key-value representation as the differentiator in ICL. Second, we develop an analytical framework to address biases in multimodal input formatting for real-world datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ICL examples where baseline performance is poor, even when they are represented in unseen formats. Lastly, we propose an on-the-fly approach for ICL (Anchored-by-Text ICL) that demonstrates effectiveness in detecting hateful memes, a task where typical ICL struggles due to resource limitations. Extensive experiments on multimodal datasets reveal that our approach significantly improves ICL performance across various scenarios, such as challenging tasks and resource-constrained environments. Moreover, it provides valuable insights into the mechanisms of in-context learning in LLMs. Our findings have important implications for developing more interpretable, efficient, and robust multimodal AI systems, especially in challenging tasks and resource-constrained environments.

Existing vehicle detectors are usually obtained by training a typical detector (e.g., YOLO, RCNN, DETR series) on vehicle images based on a pre-trained backbone (e.g., ResNet, ViT). Some researchers also exploit and enhance the detection performance using pre-trained large foundation models. However, we think these detectors may only get sub-optimal results because the large models they use are not specifically designed for vehicles. In addition, their results heavily rely on visual features, and seldom of they consider the alignment between the vehicle's semantic information and visual representations. In this work, we propose a new vehicle detection paradigm based on a pre-trained foundation vehicle model (VehicleMAE) and a large language model (T5), termed VFM-Det. It follows the region proposal-based detection framework and the features of each proposal can be enhanced using VehicleMAE. More importantly, we propose a new VAtt2Vec module that predicts the vehicle semantic attributes of these proposals and transforms them into feature vectors to enhance the vision features via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on three vehicle detection benchmark datasets thoroughly proved the effectiveness of our vehicle detector. Specifically, our model improves the baseline approach by $+5.1\%$, $+6.2\%$ on the $AP_{0.5}$, $AP_{0.75}$ metrics, respectively, on the Cityscapes dataset.The source code of this work will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/VFM-Det.

Code benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), providing insights into their strengths and weaknesses. However, current benchmarks primarily exercise LLMs' capability on common coding tasks (e.g., bubble sort, greatest common divisor), leaving domain-specific coding tasks (e.g., computation, system, cryptography) unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a multi-domain code benchmark, DOMAINEVAL, designed to evaluate LLMs' coding capabilities thoroughly. Our pipeline works in a fully automated manner, enabling a push-bottom construction from code repositories into formatted subjects under study. Interesting findings are observed by evaluating 12 representative LLMs against DOMAINEVAL. We notice that LLMs are generally good at computation tasks while falling short on cryptography and system coding tasks. The performance gap can be as much as 68.94% (80.94% - 12.0%) in some LLMs. We also observe that generating more samples can increase the overall performance of LLMs, while the domain bias may even increase. The contributions of this study include a code generation benchmark dataset DOMAINEVAL, encompassing six popular domains, a fully automated pipeline for constructing code benchmarks, and an identification of the limitations of LLMs in code generation tasks based on their performance on DOMAINEVAL, providing directions for future research improvements. The leaderboard is available at https://domaineval.github.io/.

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention in the community where LLMs make predictions only based on instructions augmented with a few examples. Existing example selection methods for ICL utilize sparse or dense retrievers and derive effective performance. However, these methods do not utilize direct feedback of LLM to train the retriever and the examples selected can not necessarily improve the analogy ability of LLM. To tackle this, we propose our policy-based reinforcement learning framework for example selection (RLS), which consists of a language model (LM) selector and an LLM generator. The LM selector encodes the candidate examples into dense representations and selects the top-k examples into the demonstration for LLM. The outputs of LLM are adopted to compute the reward and policy gradient to optimize the LM selector. We conduct experiments on different datasets and significantly outperform existing example selection methods. Moreover, our approach shows advantages over supervised finetuning (SFT) models in few shot setting. Further experiments show the balance of abundance and the similarity with the test case of examples is important for ICL performance of LLM.

Medical decisions directly impact individuals' health and well-being. Extracting decision spans from clinical notes plays a crucial role in understanding medical decision-making processes. In this paper, we develop a new dataset called "MedDec", which contains clinical notes of eleven different phenotypes (diseases) annotated by ten types of medical decisions. We introduce the task of medical decision extraction, aiming to jointly extract and classify different types of medical decisions within clinical notes. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the dataset, develop a span detection model as a baseline for this task, evaluate recent span detection approaches, and employ a few metrics to measure the complexity of data samples. Our findings shed light on the complexities inherent in clinical decision extraction and enable future work in this area of research. The dataset and code are available through https://github.com/CLU-UML/MedDec.

LLMs have revolutionized the landscape of information retrieval and knowledge dissemination. However, their application in specialized areas is often hindered by factual inaccuracies and hallucinations, especially in long-tail knowledge distributions. We explore the potential of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models for long-form question answering (LFQA) in a specialized knowledge domain. We present VedantaNY-10M, a dataset curated from extensive public discourses on the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. We develop and benchmark a RAG model against a standard, non-RAG LLM, focusing on transcription, retrieval, and generation performance. Human evaluations by computational linguists and domain experts show that the RAG model significantly outperforms the standard model in producing factual and comprehensive responses having fewer hallucinations. In addition, a keyword-based hybrid retriever that emphasizes unique low-frequency terms further improves results. Our study provides insights into effectively integrating modern large language models with ancient knowledge systems. Project page with dataset and code: https://sites.google.com/view/vedantany-10m

Recently, a wide range of memory-efficient LLM training algorithms have gained substantial popularity. These methods leverage the low-rank structure of gradients to project optimizer states into a subspace using projection matrix found by singular value decomposition (SVD). However, convergence of these algorithms is highly dependent on the update rules of their projection matrix. In this work, we provide the \emph{first} convergence guarantee for arbitrary update rules of projection matrix. This guarantee is generally applicable to optimizers that can be analyzed with Hamiltonian Descent, including most common ones, such as LION, Adam. Inspired by our theoretical understanding, we propose Online Subspace Descent, a new family of subspace descent optimizer without SVD. Instead of updating the projection matrix with eigenvectors, Online Subspace Descent updates the projection matrix with online PCA. Online Subspace Descent is flexible and introduces only minimum overhead to training. We show that for the task of pretraining LLaMA models ranging from 60M to 7B parameters on the C4 dataset, Online Subspace Descent achieves lower perplexity and better downstream tasks performance than state-of-the-art low-rank training methods across different settings and narrows the gap with full-rank baselines.