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Hyper-Modality Enhancement for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modalities

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to infer human emotions by integrating complementary signals from diverse modalities. However, in real-world scenarios, missing modalities are common due to data corruption, sensor failure, or privacy concerns, which can significantly degrade model performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose Hyper-Modality Enhancement (HME), a novel framework that avoids explicit modality reconstruction by enriching each observed modality with semantically relevant cues retrieved from other samples. This cross-sample enhancement reduces reliance on fully observed data during training, making the method better suited to scenarios with inherently incomplete inputs. In addition, we introduce an uncertainty-aware fusion mechanism that adaptively balances original and enriched representations to improve robustness. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks show that HME consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under various missing modality conditions, demonstrating its practicality in real-world MSA applications.


Buffer layers for Test-Time Adaptation

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent advancements in Test Time Adaptation (TTA), most existing methodologies focus on updating normalization layers to adapt to the test domain. However, the reliance on normalization-based adaptation presents key challenges. First, normalization layers such as Batch Normalization (BN) are highly sensitive to small batch sizes, leading to unstable and inaccurate statistics. Moreover, normalizationbased adaptation is inherently constrained by the structure of the pre-trained model, as it relies on training-time statistics that may not generalize well to unseen domains. These issues limit the effectiveness of normalization-based TTA approaches, especially under significant domain shift.


Ditch the Denoiser: Emergence of Noise Robustness in Self-Supervised Learning from Data Curriculum

Neural Information Processing Systems

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has become a powerful solution to extract rich representations from unlabeled data. Yet, SSL research is mostly focused on clean, curated and high-quality datasets. As a result, applying SSL on noisy data remains a challenge, despite being crucial to applications such as astrophysics, medical imaging, geophysics or finance. In this work, we present a fully selfsupervised framework that enables noise-robust representation learning without requiring a denoiser at inference or downstream fine-tuning. Our method first trains an SSL denoiser on noisy data, then uses it to construct a denoised-tonoisy data curriculum (i.e., training first on denoised, then noisy samples) for pretraining a SSL backbone (e.g., DINOv2), combined with a teacher-guided regularization that anchors noisy embeddings to their denoised counterparts. This process encourages the model to internalize noise robustness. Notably, the denoiser can be discarded after pretraining, simplifying deployment. On ImageNet-1k with ViT-B under extreme Gaussian noise (ฯƒ = 255, SNR = 0.72 dB), our method improves linear probing accuracy by 4.8% over DINOv2, demonstrating that denoiser-free robustness can emerge from noise-aware pretraining.


Hyperparameter Transfer Enables Consistent Gains of Matrix-Preconditioned Optimizers Across Scales

Neural Information Processing Systems

Several recently introduced deep learning optimizers utilizing matrix-level preconditioning have shown promising speedups relative to the current dominant optimizer AdamW, particularly in relatively small-scale experiments. However, efforts to validate and replicate their successes have reported mixed results. To better understand the effectiveness of these optimizers at scale, in this work we investigate how to scale preconditioned optimizers via hyperparameter transfer, building on prior works such as ยตP. We study how the optimal learning rate and weight decay should scale with model width and depth for a wide range of optimizers, including Shampoo, SOAP, and Muon, accounting for the impact of commonly used techniques such as blocking and grafting. We find that scaling the learning rate according to ยตP improves transfer, but can still suffer from significant finite-width deviations that cause drifting optimal learning rates, which we show can be mitigated by blocking and explicit spectral normalization. For compute-optimal scaling, we find scaling independent weight decay as 1/width is nearly optimal across optimizers. Applying these scaling rules, we show Muon, SOAP and Shampoo consistently achieve near 1.4 speedup over AdamW for training Llama-architecture language models of sizes ranging from 190M to 1.4B, whereas the speedup vanishes rapidly with scale under incorrect scaling. Based on these results and further ablations, we argue that studying optimal hyperparameter transfer is essential for reliably comparing optimizers at scale given a realistic tuning budget.



MoESD: Unveil Speculative Decoding's Potential for Accelerating Sparse MoE

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, with Mixture of Experts (MoE) models demonstrating great potential. Compared to traditional dense models, MoEs achieve better performance with less computation. Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely used technique to accelerate LLM inference without accuracy loss, but it has been considered efficient only for dense models. In this work, we first demonstrate that, under medium batch sizes, MoE surprisingly benefits more from SD than dense models. Furthermore, as MoE becomes sparser - the prevailing trend in MoE designs - the batch size range where SD acceleration is expected to be effective becomes broader. To quantitatively understand tradeoffs involved in SD, we develop a reliable modeling based on theoretical analyses. While current SD research primarily focuses on improving acceptance rates of algorithms, changes in workload and model architecture can still lead to degraded SD acceleration even with high acceptance rates. To address this limitation, we introduce a new metric target efficiency that characterizes these effects, thus helping researchers identify system bottlenecks and understand SD acceleration more comprehensively. For scenarios like private serving, this work unveils a new perspective to speed up MoE inference, where existing solutions struggle.


Power Lines: Scaling Laws for Weight Decay and Batch Size in LLMPre-training

Neural Information Processing Systems

Efficient LLM pre-training requires well-tuned hyperparameters (HPs), including learning rate ฮท and weight decay ฮป. We study scaling laws for HPs: formulas for how to scale HPs as we scale model size N, dataset size D, and batch size B. Recent work [1] suggests the AdamW timescale, ฯ„ = B/(ฮทฮปD), should remain constant across training settings, and we verify the implication that optimal ฮปscales linearly with B, for a fixed N and D. However, as N and Dscale, we show optimal ฯ„ obeys a precise power law in the tokens-per-parameter ratio, D/N. This law thus provides a method to accurately predict ฮปopt in advance of large-scale training. We also study scaling laws for optimal batch size Bopt (the B enabling lowest loss at a given N,D) and critical batch size Bcrit (the B beyond which further data parallelism becomes ineffective). In contrast to prior work, we find both Bopt and Bcrit scale as power laws in D, independent of model size, N. Finally, we analyze how these findings inform the real-world selection of Pareto-optimal N and D under dual training time and compute objectives.



Parallel Scaling Law for Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

It is commonly believed that scaling language models should commit a significant space or time cost, by increasing the parameters (parameter scaling) or output tokens (inference-time scaling). We introduce another and more inference-efficient scaling paradigm: increasing the model's parallel computation during both training and inference time. We apply P diverse and learnable transformations to the input, execute forward passes of the model in parallel, and dynamically aggregate the P outputs. This method, namely parallel scaling (PARSCALE), scales parallel computation by reusing existing parameters and can be applied to any model structure, optimization procedure, data, or task. We theoretically propose a new scaling law and validate it through large-scale pre-training, which shows that a model with P parallel streams is similar to scaling the parameters by O(logP) while showing superior inference efficiency. For example, PARSCALE can use up to 22 less memory increase and 6 less latency increase compared to parameter scaling that achieves the same performance improvement. It can also recycle an off-the-shelf pre-trained model into a parallelly scaled one by post-training on a small amount of tokens, further reducing the training budget. The new scaling law we discovered potentially facilitates the deployment of more powerful models in low-resource scenarios, and provides an alternative perspective for the role of computation in machine learning. Our code and 67 trained model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/QwenLM/ParScale


SuperCLIP: CLIP with Simple Classification Supervision

Neural Information Processing Systems

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) achieves strong generalization in vision-language tasks by aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space. However, recent findings show that CLIP-like models still underutilize fine-grained semantic signals in text, and this issue becomes even more pronounced when dealing with long and detailed captions. This stems from CLIP's training objective, which optimizes only global image-text similarity and overlooks tokenlevel supervision--limiting its ability to achieve fine-grained visual-text alignment. To address this, we propose SuperCLIP, a simple yet effective framework that augments contrastive learning with classification-based supervision. By adding only a lightweight linear layer to the vision encoder, SuperCLIP leverages tokenlevel cues to enhance visual-textual alignment -- with just a 0.077% increase in total FLOPs, and no need for additional annotated data. Experiments show that SuperCLIP consistently improves zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and purely visual tasks. These gains hold regardless of whether the model is trained on original web data or rich re-captioned data, demonstrating SuperCLIP's ability to recover textual supervision in both cases. Furthermore, SuperCLIP alleviates CLIP's small-batch performance drop through classification-based supervision that avoids reliance on large batch sizes.