This work introduces $\rm CALDERA$ -- a new post-training LLM compression algorithm that harnesses the inherent low-rank structure of a weight matrix $\mathbf{W}$ by approximating it via a low-rank, low-precision decomposition as $\mathbf{W} \approx \mathbf{Q} + \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R}$. Here, $\mathbf{L}$ and $\mathbf{R}$ are low rank factors, and the entries of $\mathbf{Q}$, $\mathbf{L}$ and $\mathbf{R}$ are quantized. The model is compressed by substituting each layer with its $\mathbf{Q} + \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R}$ decomposition, and the zero-shot performance of the compressed model is evaluated. Additionally, $\mathbf{L}$ and $\mathbf{R}$ are readily amenable to low-rank adaptation, consequently enhancing the zero-shot performance.

Language models (LMs) only pretrained on a general and massive corpus usually cannot attain satisfying performance on domain-specific downstream tasks, and hence, applying domain-specific pretraining to LMs is a common and indispensable practice.However, domain-specific pretraining can be costly and time-consuming, hindering LMs' deployment in real-world applications.In this work, we consider the incapability to memorize domain-specific knowledge embedded in the general corpus with rare occurrences and long-tail distributions as the leading cause for pretrained LMs' inferior downstream performance. Analysis of Neural Tangent Kernels (NTKs) reveals that those long-tail data are commonly overlooked in the model's gradient updates and, consequently, are not effectively memorized, leading to poor domain-specific downstream performance.Based on the intuition that data with similar semantic meaning are closer in the embedding space, we devise a Cluster-guided Sparse Expert (CSE) layer to actively learn long-tail domain knowledge typically neglected in previous pretrained LMs.During pretraining, a CSE layer efficiently clusters domain knowledge together and assigns long-tail knowledge to designate extra experts. CSE is also a lightweight structure that only needs to be incorporated in several deep layers.With our training strategy, we found that during pretraining, data of long-tail knowledge gradually formulate isolated, outlier clusters in an LM's representation spaces, especially in deeper layers.

The standard paradigm of modeling marked point processes is by parameterizing the intensity function using an attention-based (Transformer-style) architecture. Despite the flexibility of these methods, their inference is based on the computationally intensive thinning algorithm. In this work, we propose a framework where the advantages of the attention-based architecture are maintained and the limitation of the thinning algorithm is circumvented. The framework depends on modeling the conditional distribution of inter-event times with a mixture of log-normals satisfying a Markov property and the conditional probability mass function for the marks with a Transformer-based architecture. The proposed method attains state-of-the-art performance in predicting the next event of a sequence given its history. The experiments also reveal the efficacy of the methods that do not rely on the thinning algorithm during inference over the ones they do. Finally, we test our method on the challenging long-horizon prediction task and find that it outperforms a baseline developed specifically for tackling this task; importantly, inference requires just a fraction of time compared to the thinning-based baseline.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for knowledge-seeking purposes yet suffer from hallucinations. The knowledge boundary of an LLM limits its factual understanding, beyond which it may begin to hallucinate. Investigating the perception of LLMs' knowledge boundary is crucial for detecting hallucinations and LLMs' reliable generation. Current studies perceive LLMs' knowledge boundary on questions with concrete answers (close-ended questions) while paying limited attention to semi-open-ended questions that correspond to many potential answers. Some researchers achieve it by judging whether the question is answerable or not.

Low-rank approximation and column subset selection are two fundamental and related problems that are applied across a wealth of machine learning applications. In this paper, we study the question of socially fair low-rank approximation and socially fair column subset selection, where the goal is to minimize the loss over all sub-populations of the data. We show that surprisingly, even constant-factor approximation to fair low-rank approximation requires exponential time under certain standard complexity hypotheses. On the positive side, we give an algorithm for fair low-rank approximation that, for a constant number of groups and constant-factor accuracy, runs in $2^{\text{poly}(k)}$ rather than the naive $n^{\text{poly}(k)}$, which is a substantial improvement when the dataset has a large number $n$ of observations. We then show that there exist bicriteria approximation algorithms for fair low-rank approximation and fair column subset selection that runs in polynomial time.

Scientific modeling applications often require estimating a distribution of parameters consistent with a dataset of observations - an inference task also known as source distribution estimation. This problem can be ill-posed, however, since many different source distributions might produce the same distribution of data-consistent simulations. To make a principled choice among many equally valid sources, we propose an approach which targets the maximum entropy distribution, i.e., prioritizes retaining as much uncertainty as possible. Our method is purely sample-based - leveraging the Sliced-Wasserstein distance to measure the discrepancy between the dataset and simulations - and thus suitable for simulators with intractable likelihoods. We benchmark our method on several tasks, and show that it can recover source distributions with substantially higher entropy than recent source estimation methods, without sacrificing the fidelity of the simulations. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of our approach, we infer source distributions for parameters of the Hodgkin-Huxley model from experimental datasets with hundreds of single-neuron measurements. In summary, we propose a principled method for inferring source distributions of scientific simulator parameters while retaining as much uncertainty as possible.

Deep learning models are now trained on increasingly larger datasets, making it crucial to reduce computational costs and improve data quality. Dataset distillation aims to distill a large dataset into a small synthesized dataset such that models trained on it can achieve similar performance to those trained on the original dataset. While there have been many empirical efforts to improve dataset distillation algorithms, a thorough theoretical analysis and provable, efficient algorithms are still lacking. In this paper, by focusing on dataset distillation for kernel ridge regression (KRR), we show that one data point per class is already necessary and sufficient to recover the original model's performance in many settings. For linear ridge regression and KRR with surjective feature mappings, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the distilled dataset to recover the original model's parameters. For KRR with injective feature mappings of deep neural networks, we show that while one data point per class is not sufficient in general, $k+1$ data points can be sufficient for deep linear neural networks, where $k$ is the number of classes. Our theoretical results enable directly constructing analytical solutions for distilled datasets, resulting in a provable and efficient dataset distillation algorithm for KRR. We verify our theory experimentally and show that our algorithm outperforms previous work such as KIP while being significantly more efficient, e.g.

Neural implicit functions have demonstrated significant importance in various areas such as computer vision, graphics. Their advantages include the ability to represent complex shapes and scenes with high fidelity, smooth interpolation capabilities, and continuous representations. Despite these benefits, the development and analysis of implicit functions have been limited by the lack of comprehensive datasets and the substantial computational resources required for their implementation and evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce Implicit-Zoo: a large-scale dataset requiring thousands of GPU training days designed to facilitate research and development in this field. Our dataset includes diverse 2D and 3D scenes, such as CIFAR-10, ImageNet-1K, and Cityscapes for 2D image tasks, and the OmniObject3D dataset for 3D vision tasks. We ensure high quality through strict checks, refining or filtering out low-quality data. Using Implicit-Zoo, we showcase two immediate benefits as it enables to: (1) learn token locations for transformer models; (2) Directly regress 3D cameras poses of 2D images with respect to NeRF models. This in turn leads to an \emph{improved performance} in all three task of image classification, semantic segmentation, and 3D pose regression -- thereby unlocking new avenues for research.

Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) is an influential sequential decision-making algorithm notably employed in AlphaZero. Despite its success, the primary challenge in AlphaZero training lies in its prolonged time-to-solution due to the high latency imposed by the sequential MCTS process. To address this challenge, this paper proposes and evaluates an inter-decision parallelization strategy called speculative MCTS, a new type of parallelism in AlphaZero which implements speculative execution. This approach allows for the parallel execution of future moves before the current MCTS computations are completed, thus reducing the latency. Additionally, we analyze factors contributing to the overall speedup by studying the synergistic effects of speculation and neural network caching in MCTS. We also provide an analytical model that can be used to evaluate the potential of different speculation strategies before they are implemented and deployed. Our empirical findings indicate that the proposed speculative MCTS can reduce training latency by 5.81$\times$ in 9x9 Go games. Moreover, our study shows that speculative execution can enhance the NN cache hit rate by 26\% during midgame. Overall, our end-to-end evaluation indicates 1.91$\times$ speedup in 19x19 Go training time, compared to the state-of-the-art KataGo program.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are stored in various database systems with different database models on heterogeneous storage architectures, such as relational databases, document stores, or graph databases. These different database models have a big impact on query complexity and performance. While this has been a known fact in database research, its implications for the growing number of Text-to-Query systems have surprisingly not been investigated so far.In this paper, we present SM3-Text-to-Query, the first multi-model medical Text-to-Query benchmark based on synthetic patient data from Synthea, following the SNOMED-CT taxonomy---a widely used knowledge graph ontology covering medical terminology. SM3-Text-to-Query provides data representations for relational databases (PostgreSQL), document stores (MongoDB), and graph databases (Neo4j and GraphDB (RDF)), allowing the evaluation across four popular query languages, namely SQL, MQL, Cypher, and SPARQL.We systematically and manually develop 408 template questions, which we augment to construct a benchmark of 10K diverse natural language question/query pairs for these four query languages (40K pairs overall). On our dataset, we evaluate several common in-context-learning (ICL) approaches for a set of representative closed and open-source LLMs.Our evaluation sheds light on the trade-offs between database models and query languages for different ICL strategies and LLMs. Last,SM3-Text-to-Query is easily extendable to additional query languages or real, standard-based patient databases.