Federated learning (FL) is increasingly recognized for its efficacy in training models using locally distributed data. However, the proper valuation of shared data in this collaborative process remains insufficiently addressed. In this work, we frame FL as a marketplace of models, where clients act as both buyers and sellers, engaging in model trading. This FL market allows clients to gain monetary reward by selling their own models and improve local model performance through the purchase of others' models. We propose an auction-based solution to ensure proper pricing based on performance gain. Incentive mechanisms are designed to encourage clients to truthfully reveal their model valuations. Furthermore, we introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for marketing operations, aiming to achieve maximum trading volumes under the dynamic and evolving market status. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed FL market can achieve high trading revenue and fair downstream task accuracy.

While recent works have shown preliminary evidence for the efficacy of early exiting in accelerating LLM inference, EE-LLM makes a foundational step towards scaling up early-exit LLMs by supporting their training and inference with massive 3D parallelism. Built upon Megatron-LM, EE-LLM implements a variety of algorithmic innovations and performance optimizations tailored to early exiting, including a lightweight method that facilitates backpropagation for the early-exit training objective with pipeline parallelism, techniques of leveraging idle resources in the original pipeline schedule for computation related to early-exit layers, and two approaches of early-exit inference that are compatible with KV caching for autoregressive generation. Our analytical and empirical study shows that EE-LLM achieves great training efficiency with negligible computational overhead compared to standard LLM training, as well as outstanding inference speedup without compromising output quality. To facilitate further research and adoption, we release EE-LLM at https://github.com/pan-x-c/EE-LLM.

This work introduces EE-Tuning, a lightweight and economical solution to training/tuning early-exit large language models (LLMs). In contrast to the common approach of full-parameter pre-training, EE-Tuning augments any pre-trained (and possibly fine-tuned) standard LLM with additional early-exit layers that are tuned in a parameter-efficient manner, which requires significantly less computational resources and training data. Our implementation of EE-Tuning achieves outstanding training efficiency via extensive performance optimizations, as well as scalability due to its full compatibility with 3D parallelism. Results of systematic experiments validate the efficacy of EE-Tuning, confirming that effective early-exit LLM inference can be achieved with a limited training budget. In hope of making early-exit LLMs accessible to the community, we release the source code of our implementation of EE-Tuning at https://github.com/pan-x-c/EE-LLM.

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) need fine-tuning to improve their responsiveness to natural language instructions. Federated learning offers a way to fine-tune LLMs using the abundant data on end devices without compromising data privacy. Most existing federated fine-tuning methods for LLMs rely on parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, which may not reach the performance height possible with full-parameter tuning. However, federated full-parameter tuning of LLMs is a non-trivial problem due to the immense communication cost. This work introduces FedKSeed that employs zeroth-order optimization with a finite set of random seeds. It significantly reduces transmission requirements between the server and clients to just a few random seeds and scalar gradients, amounting to only a few thousand bytes, making federated full-parameter tuning of billion-sized LLMs possible on devices. Building on it, we develop a strategy enabling probability-differentiated seed sampling, prioritizing perturbations with greater impact on model accuracy. Experiments across six scenarios with various LLMs, datasets and data partitions demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing federated LLM fine-tuning methods in both communication efficiency and new task generalization.

Despite the impressive capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in integrating text and image modalities, challenges remain in accurately interpreting detailed visual elements. This paper presents an empirical study on enhancing MLLMs with state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection and Optical Character Recognition models to improve fine-grained image understanding and reduce hallucination in responses. Our research investigates the embedding-based infusion of detection information, the impact of such infusion on the MLLMs' original abilities, and the interchangeability of detection models. We conduct systematic experiments with models such as LLaVA-1.5, DINO, and PaddleOCRv2, revealing that our approach not only refines MLLMs' performance in specific visual tasks but also maintains their original strengths. The resulting enhanced MLLMs outperform SOTA models on 9 out of 10 benchmarks, achieving an improvement of up to 12.99% on the normalized average score, marking a notable advancement in multimodal understanding. We release our codes to facilitate further exploration into the fine-grained multimodal dialogue capabilities of MLLMs.

Recently, multi-task instruction tuning has been applied into sentence representation learning, which endows the capability of generating specific representations with the guidance of task instruction, exhibiting strong generalization ability on new tasks. However, these methods mostly neglect the potential interference problems across different tasks and instances, which may affect the training and convergence of the model. To address it, we propose a data curriculum method, namely Data-CUBE, that arranges the orders of all the multi-task data for training, to minimize the interference risks from the two views. In the task level, we aim to find the optimal task order to minimize the total cross-task interference risk, which is exactly the traveling salesman problem, hence we utilize a simulated annealing algorithm to find its solution. In the instance level, we measure the difficulty of all instances per task, then divide them into the easy-to-difficult mini-batches for training. Experiments on MTEB sentence representation evaluation tasks show that our approach can boost the performance of state-of-the-art methods. Our code and data are publicly available at the link: \url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Data-CUBE}.

Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (KGQA) aims to seek answer entities for the natural language question from a large-scale Knowledge Graph~(KG). To better perform reasoning on KG, recent work typically adopts a pre-trained language model~(PLM) to model the question, and a graph neural network~(GNN) based module to perform multi-hop reasoning on the KG. Despite the effectiveness, due to the divergence in model architecture, the PLM and GNN are not closely integrated, limiting the knowledge sharing and fine-grained feature interactions. To solve it, we aim to simplify the above two-module approach, and develop a more capable PLM that can directly support subgraph reasoning for KGQA, namely ReasoningLM. In our approach, we propose a subgraph-aware self-attention mechanism to imitate the GNN for performing structured reasoning, and also adopt an adaptation tuning strategy to adapt the model parameters with 20,000 subgraphs with synthesized questions. After adaptation, the PLM can be parameter-efficient fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Experiments show that ReasoningLM surpasses state-of-the-art models by a large margin, even with fewer updated parameters and less training data. Our codes and data are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ReasoningLM}.

The immense evolution in Large Language Models (LLMs) has underscored the importance of massive, heterogeneous, and high-quality data. A data recipe is a mixture of data from different sources for training LLMs, which plays a vital role in LLMs' performance. Existing open-source tools for LLM data processing are mostly tailored for specific data recipes. To continuously uncover the potential of LLMs, incorporate data from new sources, and improve LLMs' performance, we build a new system named Data-Juicer, with which we can efficiently generate diverse data recipes, explore different possibilities in forming data mixtures, and evaluate their effects on model performance. Different from traditional data-analytics pipelines, Data-Juicer faces some unique challenges. Firstly, the possible data sources for forming data recipes are truly heterogeneous and massive with various qualities. Secondly, it is extremely expensive to precisely evaluate data recipes' impact on LLMs' performance. Thirdly, the end users of Data-Juicer, model developers, need sufficient flexibility to configure and evaluate different data recipes. Data-Juicer features a fine-grained abstraction of pipelines for constructing data recipes, with over 50 built-in operators for easy composition and extension. By incorporating visualization and auto-evaluation capabilities, Data-Juicer enables a timely feedback loop for both LLM pre-training and fine-tuning. Further, Data-Juicer is optimized and integrated with ecosystems for LLM training, evaluation, and distributed computing. The data recipes derived with Data-Juicer gain notable improvements on state-of-the-art LLMs, by up to 7.45% increase in averaged score across 16 LLM benchmarks and 17.5% higher win rate in pair-wise GPT-4 evaluations. Our system, data recipes, and tutorials are released, calling for broader data-centric research on training and understanding LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm for Text-to-SQL task. However, the absence of a systematical benchmark inhibits the development of designing effective, efficient and economic LLM-based Text-to-SQL solutions. To address this challenge, in this paper, we first conduct a systematical and extensive comparison over existing prompt engineering methods, including question representation, example selection and example organization, and with these experimental results, we elaborate their pros and cons. Based on these findings, we propose a new integrated solution, named DAIL-SQL, which refreshes the Spider leaderboard with 86.6% execution accuracy and sets a new bar. To explore the potential of open-source LLM, we investigate them in various scenarios, and further enhance their performance with supervised fine-tuning. Our explorations highlight open-source LLMs' potential in Text-to-SQL, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the supervised fine-tuning. Additionally, towards an efficient and economic LLM-based Text-to-SQL solution, we emphasize the token efficiency in prompt engineering and compare the prior studies under this metric. We hope that our work provides a deeper understanding of Text-to-SQL with LLMs, and inspires further investigations and broad applications.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple participants to collaboratively train machine learning models using decentralized data sources, alleviating privacy concerns that arise from directly sharing local data. However, the lack of model privacy protection in FL becomes an unneglectable challenge, especially when people want to federally finetune models based on a proprietary large language model. In this study, we propose a novel FL training approach that accomplishes information exchange among participants via tunable soft prompts. These soft prompts, updated and transmitted between the server and clients, assume the role of the global model parameters and serve as messengers to deliver useful knowledge from the local data and global model. As the global model itself is not required to be shared and the local training is conducted based on an auxiliary model with fewer parameters than the global model, the proposed approach provides protection for the global model while reducing communication and computation costs in FL. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to several baselines. We have released the source code at \url{https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/fedsp/federatedscope/nlp/fedsp}.