In this technical report, we introduce the training methodologies implemented in the development of Skywork-MoE, a high-performance mixture-of-experts (MoE) large language model (LLM) with 146 billion parameters and 16 experts. It is initialized from the pre-existing dense checkpoints of our Skywork-13B model. We explore the comparative effectiveness of upcycling versus training from scratch initializations. Our findings suggest that the choice between these two approaches should consider both the performance of the existing dense checkpoints and the MoE training budget. We highlight two innovative techniques: gating logit normalization, which improves expert diversification, and adaptive auxiliary loss coefficients, allowing for layer-specific adjustment of auxiliary loss coefficients. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of these methods. Leveraging these techniques and insights, we trained our upcycled Skywork-MoE on a condensed subset of our SkyPile corpus. The evaluation results demonstrate that our model delivers strong performance across a wide range of benchmarks.

Language model (LM) watermarking techniques inject a statistical signal into LM-generated content by substituting the random sampling process with pseudo-random sampling, using watermark keys as the random seed. Among these statistical watermarking approaches, distortion-free watermarks are particularly crucial because they embed watermarks into LM-generated content without compromising generation quality. However, one notable limitation of pseudo-random sampling compared to true-random sampling is that, under the same watermark keys (i.e., key collision), the results of pseudo-random sampling exhibit correlations. This limitation could potentially undermine the distortion-free property. Our studies reveal that key collisions are inevitable due to the limited availability of watermark keys, and existing distortion-free watermarks exhibit a significant distribution bias toward the original LM distribution in the presence of key collisions. Moreover, achieving a perfect distortion-free watermark is impossible as no statistical signal can be embedded under key collisions. To reduce the distribution bias caused by key collisions, we introduce a new family of distortion-free watermarks--beta-watermark. Experimental results support that the beta-watermark can effectively reduce the distribution bias under key collisions.

Feedback data plays an important role in fine-tuning and evaluating state-of-the-art AI models. Often pairwise text preferences are used: given two texts, human (or AI) annotators select the "better" one. Such feedback data is widely used to align models to human preferences (e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback), or to rank models according to human preferences (e.g., Chatbot Arena). Despite its wide-spread use, prior work has demonstrated that human-annotated pairwise text preference data often exhibits unintended biases. For example, human annotators have been shown to prefer assertive over truthful texts in certain contexts. Models trained or evaluated on this data may implicitly encode these biases in a manner hard to identify. In this paper, we formulate the interpretation of existing pairwise text preference data as a compression task: the Inverse Constitutional AI (ICAI) problem. In constitutional AI, a set of principles (or constitution) is used to provide feedback and fine-tune AI models. The ICAI problem inverts this process: given a dataset of feedback, we aim to extract a constitution that best enables a large language model (LLM) to reconstruct the original annotations. We propose a corresponding initial ICAI algorithm and validate its generated constitutions quantitatively based on reconstructed annotations. Generated constitutions have many potential use-cases -- they may help identify undesirable biases, scale feedback to unseen data or assist with adapting LLMs to individual user preferences. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of datasets: (a) synthetic feedback datasets with known underlying principles; (b) the AlpacaEval dataset of cross-annotated human feedback; and (c) the crowdsourced Chatbot Arena data set. We release the code for our algorithm and experiments at https://github.com/rdnfn/icai .

This paper introduces Fortune Analytics Language Model (FALM). FALM empowers users with direct access to comprehensive business analysis, including market trends, company performance metrics, and expert insights. Unlike generic LLMs, FALM leverages a curated knowledge base built from professional journalism, enabling it to deliver precise and in-depth answers to intricate business questions. Users can further leverage natural language queries to directly visualize financial data, generating insightful charts and graphs to understand trends across diverse business sectors clearly. FALM fosters user trust and ensures output accuracy through three novel methods: 1) Time-aware reasoning guarantees accurate event registration and prioritizes recent updates. 2) Thematic trend analysis explicitly examines topic evolution over time, providing insights into emerging business landscapes. 3) Content referencing and task decomposition enhance answer fidelity and data visualization accuracy. We conduct both automated and human evaluations, demonstrating FALM's significant performance improvements over baseline methods while prioritizing responsible AI practices. These benchmarks establish FALM as a cutting-edge LLM in the business and media domains, with exceptional accuracy and trustworthiness.

This paper presents a novel method for utilizing fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to minimize data requirements in load profile analysis, demonstrated through the restoration of missing data in power system load profiles. A two-stage fine-tuning strategy is proposed to adapt a pre-trained LLMs, i.e., GPT-3.5, for missing data restoration tasks. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the fine-tuned model in accurately restoring missing data, achieving comparable performance to state-of-the-art specifically designed models such as BERT-PIN. Key findings include the importance of prompt engineering and the optimal utilization of fine-tuning samples, highlighting the efficiency of few-shot learning in transferring knowledge from general user cases to specific target users. Furthermore, the proposed approach demonstrates notable cost-effectiveness and time efficiency compared to training models from scratch, making it a practical solution for scenarios with limited data availability and computing resources. This research has significant potential for application to other power system load profile analysis tasks. Consequently, it advances the use of LLMs in power system analytics, offering promising implications for enhancing the resilience and efficiency of power distribution systems.

In recent years, as machine learning, particularly for vision and language understanding, has been improved, research in embedded AI has also evolved. VOYAGER is a well-known LLM-based embodied AI that enables autonomous exploration in the Minecraft world, but it has issues such as underutilization of visual data and insufficient functionality as a world model. In this research, the possibility of utilizing visual data and the function of LLM as a world model were investigated with the aim of improving the performance of embodied AI. The experimental results revealed that LLM can extract necessary information from visual data, and the utilization of the information improves its performance as a world model. It was also suggested that devised prompts could bring out the LLM's function as a world model.

Recent developments in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have spurred significant interest in their potential applications across various medical imaging domains. On the one hand, there is a temptation to use these generative models to synthesize realistic-looking medical image data, while on the other hand, the ability to identify synthetic image data in a pool of data is also significantly important. In this study, we explore the potential of the Gemini (\textit{gemini-1.0-pro-vision-latest}) and GPT-4V (gpt-4-vision-preview) models for medical image analysis using two modalities of medical image data. Utilizing synthetic and real imaging data, both Gemini AI and GPT-4V are first used to classify real versus synthetic images, followed by an interpretation and analysis of the input images. Experimental results demonstrate that both Gemini and GPT-4 could perform some interpretation of the input images. In this specific experiment, Gemini was able to perform slightly better than the GPT-4V on the classification task. In contrast, responses associated with GPT-4V were mostly generic in nature. Our early investigation presented in this work provides insights into the potential of MLLMs to assist with the classification and interpretation of retinal fundoscopy and lung X-ray images. We also identify key limitations associated with the early investigation study on MLLMs for specialized tasks in medical image analysis.

Sparse activation, which selectively activates only an input-dependent set of neurons in inference, is a useful technique to reduce the computing cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining or adaptation efforts. However, whether it can be applied to the recently emerging Small Language Models (SLMs) remains questionable, because SLMs are generally less over-parameterized than LLMs. In this paper, we aim to achieve sparse activation in SLMs. We first show that the existing sparse activation schemes in LLMs that build on neurons' output magnitudes cannot be applied to SLMs, and activating neurons based on their attribution scores is a better alternative. Further, we demonstrated and quantified the large errors of existing attribution metrics when being used for sparse activation, due to the interdependency among attribution scores of neurons across different layers. Based on these observations, we proposed a new attribution metric that can provably correct such errors and achieve precise sparse activation. Experiments over multiple popular SLMs and datasets show that our approach can achieve 80% sparsification ratio with <5% model accuracy loss, comparable to the sparse activation achieved in LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated amazing capabilities in language generation, text comprehension, and knowledge reasoning. While a single powerful model can already handle multiple tasks, relying on a single perspective can lead to biased and unstable results. Recent studies have further improved the model's reasoning ability on a wide range of tasks by introducing multi-model collaboration. However, models with different capabilities may produce conflicting answers on the same problem, and how to reasonably obtain the correct answer from multiple candidate models has become a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose the multi-model brainstorming based on prompt. It incorporates different models into a group for brainstorming, and after multiple rounds of reasoning elaboration and re-inference, a consensus answer is reached within the group. We conducted experiments on three different types of datasets, and demonstrate that the brainstorming can significantly improve the effectiveness in logical reasoning and fact extraction. Furthermore, we find that two small-parameter models can achieve accuracy approximating that of larger-parameter models through brainstorming, which provides a new solution for distributed deployment of LLMs.

In recent years, text-to-speech (TTS) technology has witnessed impressive advancements, particularly with large-scale training datasets, showcasing human-level speech quality and impressive zero-shot capabilities on unseen speakers. However, despite human subjective evaluations, such as the mean opinion score (MOS), remaining the gold standard for assessing the quality of synthetic speech, even state-of-the-art TTS approaches have kept human feedback isolated from training that resulted in mismatched training objectives and evaluation metrics. In this work, we investigate a novel topic of integrating subjective human evaluation into the TTS training loop. Inspired by the recent success of reinforcement learning from human feedback, we propose a comprehensive sampling-annotating-learning framework tailored to TTS optimization, namely uncertainty-aware optimization (UNO). Specifically, UNO eliminates the need for a reward model or preference data by directly maximizing the utility of speech generations while considering the uncertainty that lies in the inherent variability in subjective human speech perception and evaluations. Experimental results of both subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that UNO considerably improves the zero-shot performance of TTS models in terms of MOS, word error rate, and speaker similarity. Additionally, we present a remarkable ability of UNO that it can adapt to the desired speaking style in emotional TTS seamlessly and flexibly.