Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across numerous domains. However, the high time complexity of existing pruning and quantization methods significantly hinders their effective deployment on resource-constrained consumer or edge devices. In this study, we propose a novel Hessian-free Weight Pruning-Quantization (HWPQ) method. HWPQ eliminates the need for computationally intensive Hessian matrix calculations by introducing a contribution-based weight metric, which evaluates the importance of weights without relying on second-order derivatives. Additionally, we employ the Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) technique to bypass weight sorting, enabling the selection of weights that contribute most to LLM accuracy and further reducing time complexity. Our approach is extended to support 2:4 structured sparsity pruning, facilitating efficient execution on modern hardware accelerators. Experimental results demonstrate that HWPQ significantly enhances the compression performance of LLaMA2. Compared to state-of-the-art quantization and pruning frameworks, HWPQ achieves average speedups of 5.97x (up to 20.75x) in quantization time and 12.29x (up to 56.02x) in pruning time, while largely preserving model accuracy. Furthermore, we observe a 1.50x inference speedup compared to the baseline.

Video anomaly understanding (VAU) aims to automatically comprehend unusual occurrences in videos, thereby enabling various applications such as traffic surveillance and industrial manufacturing. While existing VAU benchmarks primarily concentrate on anomaly detection and localization, our focus is on more practicality, prompting us to raise the following crucial questions: "what anomaly occurred?", "why did it happen?", and "how severe is this abnormal event?". In pursuit of these answers, we present a comprehensive benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly (CUVA). Specifically, each instance of the proposed benchmark involves three sets of human annotations to indicate the "what", "why" and "how" of an anomaly, including 1) anomaly type, start and end times, and event descriptions, 2) natural language explanations for the cause of an anomaly, and 3) free text reflecting the effect of the abnormality. In addition, we also introduce MMEval, a novel evaluation metric designed to better align with human preferences for CUVA, facilitating the measurement of existing LLMs in comprehending the underlying cause and corresponding effect of video anomalies. Finally, we propose a novel prompt-based method that can serve as a baseline approach for the challenging CUVA. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of our evaluation metric and the prompt-based approach. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/fesvhtr/CUVA.

AI-aided drug discovery (AIDD) is gaining increasing popularity due to its promise of making the search for new pharmaceuticals quicker, cheaper and more efficient. In spite of its extensive use in many fields, such as ADMET prediction, virtual screening, protein folding and generative chemistry, little has been explored in terms of the out-of-distribution (OOD) learning problem with \emph{noise}, which is inevitable in real world AIDD applications. In this work, we present DrugOOD, a systematic OOD dataset curator and benchmark for AI-aided drug discovery, which comes with an open-source Python package that fully automates the data curation and OOD benchmarking processes. We focus on one of the most crucial problems in AIDD: drug target binding affinity prediction, which involves both macromolecule (protein target) and small-molecule (drug compound). In contrast to only providing fixed datasets, DrugOOD offers automated dataset curator with user-friendly customization scripts, rich domain annotations aligned with biochemistry knowledge, realistic noise annotations and rigorous benchmarking of state-of-the-art OOD algorithms. Since the molecular data is often modeled as irregular graphs using graph neural network (GNN) backbones, DrugOOD also serves as a valuable testbed for \emph{graph OOD learning} problems. Extensive empirical studies have shown a significant performance gap between in-distribution and out-of-distribution experiments, which highlights the need to develop better schemes that can allow for OOD generalization under noise for AIDD.