MergeQuant: Accurate 4-bit Static Quantization of Large Language Models by Channel-wise Calibration

Quantization has been widely used to compress and accelerate inference of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods focus on exploring the per-token dynamic calibration to ensure both inference acceleration and model accuracy under 4-bit quantization. However, in autoregressive generation inference of long sequences, the overhead of repeated dynamic quantization and dequantization steps becomes considerably expensive. In this work, we propose MergeQuant, an accurate and efficient per-channel static quantization framework. MergeQuant integrates the per-channel quantization steps with the corresponding scalings and linear mappings through a Quantization Step Migration (QSM) method, thereby eliminating the quantization overheads before and after matrix multiplication. Furthermore, in view of the significant differences between the different channel ranges, we propose dimensional reconstruction and adaptive clipping to address the non-uniformity of quantization scale factors and redistribute the channel variations to the subsequent modules to balance the parameter distribution under QSM. Within the static quantization setting of W4A4, MergeQuant reduces the accuracy gap on zero-shot tasks compared to FP16 baseline to 1.3 points on Llama-2-70B model. On Llama-2-7B model, MergeQuant achieves up to 1.77x speedup in decoding, and up to 2.06x speedup in end-to-end compared to FP16 baseline.

OIPR: Evaluation for Time-series Anomaly Detection Inspired by Operator Interest

With the growing adoption of time-series anomaly detection (TAD) technology, numerous studies have employed deep learning-based detectors for analyzing time-series data in the fields of Internet services, industrial systems, and sensors. The selection and optimization of anomaly detectors strongly rely on the availability of an effective performance evaluation method for TAD. Since anomalies in time-series data often manifest as a sequence of points, conventional metrics that solely consider the detection of individual point are inadequate. Existing evaluation methods for TAD typically employ point-based or event-based metrics to capture the temporal context. However, point-based metrics tend to overestimate detectors that excel only in detecting long anomalies, while event-based metrics are susceptible to being misled by fragmented detection results. To address these limitations, we propose OIPR, a novel set of TAD evaluation metrics. It models the process of operators receiving detector alarms and handling faults, utilizing area under the operator interest curve to evaluate the performance of TAD algorithms. Furthermore, we build a special scenario dataset to compare the characteristics of different evaluation methods. Through experiments conducted on the special scenario dataset and five real-world datasets, we demonstrate the remarkable performance of OIPR in extreme and complex scenarios. It achieves a balance between point and event perspectives, overcoming their primary limitations and offering applicability to broader situations.

Erasing Without Remembering: Safeguarding Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models

In this paper, we explore machine unlearning from a novel dimension, by studying how to safeguard model unlearning in large language models (LLMs). Our goal is to prevent unlearned models from recalling any related memory of the targeted knowledge.We begin by uncovering a surprisingly simple yet overlooked fact: existing methods typically erase only the exact expressions of the targeted knowledge, leaving paraphrased or related information intact. To rigorously measure such oversights, we introduce UGBench, the first benchmark tailored for evaluating the generalisation performance across 13 state-of-the-art methods.UGBench reveals that unlearned models can still recall paraphrased answers and retain target facts in intermediate layers. To address this, we propose PERMU, a perturbation-based method that significantly enhances the generalisation capabilities for safeguarding LLM unlearning.Experiments demonstrate that PERMU delivers up to a 50.13% improvement in unlearning while maintaining a 43.53% boost in robust generalisation. Our code can be found in https://github.com/MaybeLizzy/UGBench.

NTP-INT: Network Traffic Prediction-Driven In-band Network Telemetry for High-load Switches

In-band network telemetry (INT) is essential to network management due to its real-time visibility. However, because of the rapid increase in network devices and services, it has become crucial to have targeted access to detailed network information in a dynamic network environment. This paper proposes an intelligent network telemetry system called NTP-INT to obtain more fine-grained network information on high-load switches. Specifically, NTP-INT consists of three modules: network traffic prediction module, network pruning module, and probe path planning module. Firstly, the network traffic prediction module adopts a Multi-Temporal Graph Neural Network (MTGNN) to predict future network traffic and identify high-load switches. Then, we design the network pruning algorithm to generate a subnetwork covering all high-load switches to reduce the complexity of probe path planning. Finally, the probe path planning module uses an attention-mechanism-based deep reinforcement learning (DEL) model to plan efficient probe paths in the network slice. The experimental results demonstrate that NTP-INT can acquire more precise network information on high-load switches while decreasing the control overhead by 50\%.

ChatTime: A Unified Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model Bridging Numerical and Textual Data

Human experts typically integrate numerical and textual multimodal information to analyze time series. However, most traditional deep learning predictors rely solely on unimodal numerical data, using a fixed-length window for training and prediction on a single dataset, and cannot adapt to different scenarios. The powered pre-trained large language model has introduced new opportunities for time series analysis. Yet, existing methods are either inefficient in training, incapable of handling textual information, or lack zero-shot forecasting capability. In this paper, we innovatively model time series as a foreign language and construct ChatTime, a unified framework for time series and text processing. As an out-of-the-box multimodal time series foundation model, ChatTime provides zero-shot forecasting capability and supports bimodal input/output for both time series and text. We design a series of experiments to verify the superior performance of ChatTime across multiple tasks and scenarios, and create four multimodal datasets to address data gaps. The experimental results demonstrate the potential and utility of ChatTime.

Interdependency Matters: Graph Alignment for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series (MTS) is crucial for various applications in data mining and industry. Current industrial methods typically approach anomaly detection as an unsupervised learning task, aiming to identify deviations by estimating the normal distribution in noisy, label-free datasets. These methods increasingly incorporate interdependencies between channels through graph structures to enhance accuracy. However, the role of interdependencies is more critical than previously understood, as shifts in interdependencies between MTS channels from normal to anomalous data are significant. This observation suggests that \textit{anomalies could be detected by changes in these interdependency graph series}. To capitalize on this insight, we introduce MADGA (MTS Anomaly Detection via Graph Alignment), which redefines anomaly detection as a graph alignment (GA) problem that explicitly utilizes interdependencies for anomaly detection. MADGA dynamically transforms subsequences into graphs to capture the evolving interdependencies, and Graph alignment is performed between these graphs, optimizing an alignment plan that minimizes cost, effectively minimizing the distance for normal data and maximizing it for anomalous data. Uniquely, our GA approach involves explicit alignment of both nodes and edges, employing Wasserstein distance for nodes and Gromov-Wasserstein distance for edges. To our knowledge, this is the first application of GA to MTS anomaly detection that explicitly leverages interdependency for this purpose. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of MADGA, demonstrating its capability to detect anomalies and differentiate interdependencies, consistently achieving state-of-the-art across various scenarios.

Rethinking the Power of Timestamps for Robust Time Series Forecasting: A Global-Local Fusion Perspective

Time series forecasting has played a pivotal role across various industries, including finance, transportation, energy, healthcare, and climate. Due to the abundant seasonal information they contain, timestamps possess the potential to offer robust global guidance for forecasting techniques. However, existing works primarily focus on local observations, with timestamps being treated merely as an optional supplement that remains underutilized. When data gathered from the real world is polluted, the absence of global information will damage the robust prediction capability of these algorithms. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework named GLAFF. Within this framework, the timestamps are modeled individually to capture the global dependencies. Working as a plugin, GLAFF adaptively adjusts the combined weights for global and local information, enabling seamless collaboration with any time series forecasting backbone. Extensive experiments conducted on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that GLAFF significantly enhances the average performance of widely used mainstream forecasting models by 12.5%, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art method by 5.5%.

OutlierTune: Efficient Channel-Wise Quantization for Large Language Models

Quantizing the activations of large language models (LLMs) has been a significant challenge due to the presence of structured outliers. Most existing methods focus on the per-token or per-tensor quantization of activations, making it difficult to achieve both accuracy and hardware efficiency. To address this problem, we propose OutlierTune, an efficient per-channel post-training quantization (PTQ) method for the activations of LLMs. OutlierTune consists of two components: pre-execution of dequantization and symmetrization. The pre-execution of dequantization updates the model weights by the activation scaling factors, avoiding the internal scaling and costly additional computational overheads brought by the per-channel activation quantization. The symmetrization further reduces the quantization differences arising from the weight updates by ensuring the balanced numerical ranges across different activation channels. OutlierTune is easy to implement and hardware-efficient, introducing almost no additional computational overheads during the inference. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods across multiple different tasks. Demonstrating better generalization, this framework improves the Int6 quantization of the instruction-tuning LLMs, such as OPT-IML, to the same level as half-precision (FP16). Moreover, we have shown that the proposed framework is 1.48x faster than the FP16 implementation while reducing approximately 2x memory usage.

Understanding and Guiding Weakly Supervised Entity Alignment with Potential Isomorphism Propagation

Weakly Supervised Entity Alignment (EA) is the task of identifying equivalent entities across diverse knowledge graphs (KGs) using only a limited number of seed alignments. Despite substantial advances in aggregation-based weakly supervised EA, the underlying mechanisms in this setting remain unexplored. In this paper, we present a propagation perspective to analyze weakly supervised EA and explain the existing aggregation-based EA models. Our theoretical analysis reveals that these models essentially seek propagation operators for pairwise entity similarities. We further prove that, despite the structural heterogeneity of different KGs, the potentially aligned entities within aggregation-based EA models have isomorphic subgraphs, which is the core premise of EA but has not been investigated. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a potential isomorphism propagation operator to enhance the propagation of neighborhood information across KGs. We develop a general EA framework, PipEA, incorporating this operator to improve the accuracy of every type of aggregation-based model without altering the learning process. Extensive experiments substantiate our theoretical findings and demonstrate PipEA's significant performance gains over state-of-the-art weakly supervised EA methods. Our work not only advances the field but also enhances our comprehension of aggregation-based weakly supervised EA.

Towards Semantic Consistency: Dirichlet Energy Driven Robust Multi-Modal Entity Alignment

In Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs), Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (MMEA) is crucial for identifying identical entities across diverse modal attributes. However, semantic inconsistency, mainly due to missing modal attributes, poses a significant challenge. Traditional approaches rely on attribute interpolation, but this often introduces modality noise, distorting the original semantics. Moreover, the lack of a universal theoretical framework limits advancements in achieving semantic consistency. This study introduces a novel approach, DESAlign, which addresses these issues by applying a theoretical framework based on Dirichlet energy to ensure semantic consistency. We discover that semantic inconsistency leads to model overfitting to modality noise, causing performance fluctuations, particularly when modalities are missing. DESAlign innovatively combats over-smoothing and interpolates absent semantics using existing modalities. Our approach includes a multi-modal knowledge graph learning strategy and a propagation technique that employs existing semantic features to compensate for missing ones, providing explicit Euler solutions. Comprehensive evaluations across 18 benchmarks, including monolingual and bilingual scenarios, demonstrate that DESAlign surpasses existing methods, setting a new standard in performance. Further testing on 42 benchmarks with high rates of missing modalities confirms its robustness, offering an effective solution to semantic inconsistency in real-world MMKGs.