Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used for compressing a teacher model to a smaller student model, reducing its inference cost and memory footprint while preserving model capabilities. However, current KD methods for auto-regressive sequence models (e.g., large language models) suffer from missing a standardized objective function. Moreover, the recent use of student-generated outputs to address training-inference mismatches has significantly escalated computational costs. To tackle these issues, we introduce DistiLLM, a more effective and efficient KD framework for auto-regressive language models. DistiLLM comprises two components: (1) a novel skew Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where we unveil and leverage its theoretical properties, and (2) an adaptive off-policy approach designed to enhance the efficiency in utilizing student-generated outputs. Extensive experiments, including instruction-following tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of DistiLLM in building high-performing student models while achieving up to 4.3$\times$ speedup compared to recent KD methods.

Time-series analysis is an important field encompassing a wide range of applications ranging from forecasting weather patterns Schneider and Dickinson [1974] or detecting irregular heartbeats using Electrocardiograms Goswami et al. [2021], to identifying anomalous software deployments Xu et al. [2018]. Due to its significant practical value and the unique challenges that modeling time-series data poses, time-series analysis continues to receive substantial interest from academia and industry alike. However, modeling such data typically requires substantial domain expertise, time, and task-specific design. Large pre-trained language Touvron et al. [2023], Devlin et al. [2019], Chung et al. [2022], vision Li et al. [2023a], and video Day et al. [2023] models, typically perform well on a variety of tasks on data from diverse domains, with little or no supervision, and they can be specialized to perform well on specific tasks. We unlock these key capabilities for time-series data and release the first family of open-source large pre-trained time-series models, which we call MOMENT. The models in this family (1) serve as a building block for diverse time-series analysis tasks (e.g., forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, and imputation, etc.), (2) are effective out-of-the-box, i.e., with no (or few) particular task-specific exemplars (enabling e.g., zero-shot forecasting, few-shot classification, etc.), and (3) are tunable using in-distribution and task-specific data to improve performance. MOMENT is a family of high-capacity transformer models, pre-trained using a masked time-series prediction task on large amounts of time-series data drawn from diverse domains. Below we summarize our key contributions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate ever-increasing abilities in mathematical and algorithmic tasks, yet their geometric reasoning skills are underexplored. We investigate LLMs' abilities in constructive geometric problem-solving one of the most fundamental steps in the development of human mathematical reasoning. Our work reveals notable challenges that the state-of-the-art LLMs face in this domain despite many successes in similar areas. LLMs exhibit biases in target variable selection and struggle with 2D spatial relationships, often misrepresenting and hallucinating objects and their placements. To this end, we introduce a framework that formulates an LLMs-based multi-agents system that enhances their existing reasoning potential by conducting an internal dialogue. This work underscores LLMs' current limitations in geometric reasoning and improves geometric reasoning capabilities through self-correction, collaboration, and diverse role specializations.

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to understand AI models by reverse-engineering the exact algorithms neural networks learn. Most works in MI so far have studied behaviors and capabilities that are trivial and token-aligned. However, most capabilities are not that trivial, which advocates for the study of hidden representations inside these networks as the unit of analysis. We do a literature review, formalize representations for features and behaviors, highlight their importance and evaluation, and perform some basic exploration in the mechanistic interpretability of representations. With discussion and exploratory results, we justify our position that studying representations is an important and under-studied field, and that currently established methods in MI are not sufficient to understand representations, thus pushing for the research community to work toward new frameworks for studying representations.

Traditionally, discriminative models have been the predominant choice for tasks like document classification and information extraction. These models make predictions that fall into a limited number of predefined classes, facilitating a binary true or false evaluation and enabling the direct calculation of metrics such as the F1 score. However, recent advancements in generative large language models (GLLMs) have prompted a shift in the field due to their enhanced zero-shot capabilities, which eliminate the need for a downstream dataset and computationally expensive fine-tuning. However, evaluating GLLMs presents a challenge as the binary true or false evaluation used for discriminative models is not applicable to the predictions made by GLLMs. This paper introduces a new metric for generative models called ANLS* for evaluating a wide variety of tasks, including information extraction and classification tasks. The ANLS* metric extends existing ANLS metrics as a drop-in-replacement and is still compatible with previously reported ANLS scores. An evaluation of 7 different datasets and 3 different GLLMs using the ANLS* metric is also provided, demonstrating the importance of the proposed metric. We also benchmark a novel approach to generate prompts for documents, called SFT, against other prompting techniques such as LATIN. In 15 out of 21 cases, SFT outperforms other techniques and improves the state-of-the-art, sometimes by as much as $15$ percentage points. Sources are available at https://github.com/deepopinion/anls_star_metric

We propose Embodied AI as the next fundamental step in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence, juxtaposing it against current AI advancements, particularly Large Language Models. We traverse the evolution of the embodiment concept across diverse fields - philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics - to highlight how EAI distinguishes itself from the classical paradigm of static learning. By broadening the scope of Embodied AI, we introduce a theoretical framework based on cognitive architectures, emphasizing perception, action, memory, and learning as essential components of an embodied agent. This framework is aligned with Friston's active inference principle, offering a comprehensive approach to EAI development. Despite the progress made in the field of AI, substantial challenges, such as the formulation of a novel AI learning theory and the innovation of advanced hardware, persist. Our discussion lays down a foundational guideline for future Embodied AI research. Highlighting the importance of creating Embodied AI agents capable of seamless communication, collaboration, and coexistence with humans and other intelligent entities within real-world environments, we aim to steer the AI community towards addressing the multifaceted challenges and seizing the opportunities that lie ahead in the quest for AGI.

This paper presents RevOrder, a novel technique aimed at improving arithmetic operations in large language models (LLMs) by reversing the output digits in addition, subtraction, and n-digit by 1-digit (nD by 1D) multiplication tasks. Our method significantly reduces the Count of Sequential Intermediate Digits (CSID) to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, a new metric we introduce to assess equation complexity. Through comprehensive testing, RevOrder not only achieves perfect accuracy in basic arithmetic operations but also substantially boosts LLM performance in division tasks, particularly with large numbers where traditional models struggle. Implementation of RevOrder is cost-effective for both training and inference phases. Moreover, applying RevOrder to fine-tune the LLaMA2-7B model on the GSM8K math task results in a considerable improvement, reducing equation calculation errors by 46% and increasing overall scores from 41.6 to 44.4.

Sparse computation offers a compelling solution for the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource scenarios by dynamically skipping the computation of inactive neurons. While traditional approaches focus on ReLU-based LLMs, leveraging zeros in activation values, we broaden the scope of sparse LLMs beyond zero activation values. We introduce a general method that defines neuron activation through neuron output magnitudes and a tailored magnitude threshold, demonstrating that non-ReLU LLMs also exhibit sparse activation. To find the most efficient activation function for sparse computation, we propose a systematic framework to examine the sparsity of LLMs from three aspects: the trade-off between sparsity and performance, the predictivity of sparsity, and the hardware affinity. We conduct thorough experiments on LLMs utilizing different activation functions, including ReLU, SwiGLU, ReGLU, and ReLU$^2$. The results indicate that models employing ReLU$^2$ excel across all three evaluation aspects, highlighting its potential as an efficient activation function for sparse LLMs. We will release the code to facilitate future research.

We introduce MobileVLM V2, a family of significantly improved vision language models upon MobileVLM, which proves that a delicate orchestration of novel architectural design, an improved training scheme tailored for mobile VLMs, and rich high-quality dataset curation can substantially benefit VLMs' performance. Specifically, MobileVLM V2 1.7B achieves better or on-par performance on standard VLM benchmarks compared with much larger VLMs at the 3B scale. Notably, our 3B model outperforms a large variety of VLMs at the 7B+ scale. Our models will be released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/MobileVLM .

Large language models (LLMs) have recently experienced remarkable progress, where the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has endowed LLMs with visual capabilities, leading to impressive performances in various multi-modal tasks. However, those powerful MLLMs such as GPT-4V still fail spectacularly when presented with certain image and text inputs. In this paper, we identify a typical class of inputs that baffles MLLMs, which consist of images that are highly relevant but inconsistent with answers, causing MLLMs to suffer from hallucination. To quantify the effect, we propose CorrelationQA, the first benchmark that assesses the hallucination level given spurious images. This benchmark contains 7,308 text-image pairs across 13 categories. Based on the proposed CorrelationQA, we conduct a thorough analysis on 9 mainstream MLLMs, illustrating that they universally suffer from this instinctive bias to varying degrees. We hope that our curated benchmark and evaluation results aid in better assessments of the MLLMs' robustness in the presence of misleading images. The resource is available in https://github.com/MasaiahHan/CorrelationQA.