LLaVA-Zip: Adaptive Visual Token Compression with Intrinsic Image Information

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) utilizing instruction-following data, such as LLaVA, have achieved great progress in the industry. A major limitation in these models is that visual tokens consume a substantial portion of the maximum token limit in large language models (LLMs), leading to increased computational demands and decreased performance when prompts include multiple images or videos. Industry solutions often mitigate this issue by increasing computational power, but this approach is less feasible in academic environments with limited resources. In this study, we propose Dynamic Feature Map Reduction (DFMR) based on LLaVA-1.5 to address the challenge of visual token overload. DFMR dynamically compresses the visual tokens, freeing up token capacity. Our experimental results demonstrate that integrating DFMR into LLaVA-1.5 significantly improves the performance of LLaVA in varied visual token lengths, offering a promising solution for extending LLaVA to handle multi-image and video scenarios in resource-constrained academic environments and it can also be applied in industry settings for data augmentation to help mitigate the scarcity of open-domain image-text pair datasets in the continued pretraining stage.

Wireless Resource Allocation with Collaborative Distributed and Centralized DRL under Control Channel Attacks

In this paper, we consider a wireless resource allocation problem in a cyber-physical system (CPS) where the control channel, carrying resource allocation commands, is subjected to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We propose a novel concept of collaborative distributed and centralized (CDC) resource allocation to effectively mitigate the impact of these attacks. To optimize the CDC resource allocation policy, we develop a new CDC-deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, whereas existing DRL frameworks only formulate either centralized or distributed decision-making problems. Simulation results demonstrate that the CDC-DRL algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art DRL benchmarks, showcasing its ability to address resource allocation problems in large-scale CPSs under control channel attacks.

SAM Decoding: Speculative Decoding via Suffix Automaton

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by unifying tasks into text generation, yet their large parameter sizes and autoregressive nature limit inference speed. SAM-Decoding addresses this by introducing a novel retrieval-based speculative decoding method that uses a suffix automaton for efficient and accurate draft generation. Unlike n-gram matching used by the existing method, SAM-Decoding finds the longest suffix match in generating text and text corpuss, achieving an average time complexity of $O(1)$ per generation step. SAM-Decoding constructs static and dynamic suffix automatons for the text corpus and input prompts, respectively, enabling fast and precise draft generation. Meanwhile, it is designed as an approach that can be combined with existing methods, allowing SAM-Decoding to adaptively select a draft generation strategy based on the matching length, thus increasing the inference speed of the LLM. When combined with Token Recycling, evaluations show SAM-Decoding outperforms existing model-free methods, achieving a speedup of $2.27\times$ over autoregressive decoding on Spec-Bench. When combined with EAGLE2, it reaches a speedup of $2.49\times$, surpassing all current approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyx1999/SAM-Decoding.

LiNeS: Post-training Layer Scaling Prevents Forgetting and Enhances Model Merging

Large pre-trained models exhibit impressive zero-shot performance across diverse tasks, but fine-tuning often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where improvements on a target domain degrade generalization on other tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce LiNeS, Layer-increasing Network Scaling, a post-training editing technique designed to preserve pre-trained generalization while enhancing fine-tuned task performance. LiNeS scales parameter updates linearly based on their layer depth within the network, maintaining shallow layers close to their pre-trained values to preserve general features while allowing deeper layers to retain task-specific representations. We further extend this approach to multi-task model merging scenarios, where layer-wise scaling of merged parameters reduces negative task interference. LiNeS demonstrates significant improvements in both single-task and multi-task settings across various benchmarks in vision and natural language processing. It mitigates forgetting, enhances out-of-distribution generalization, integrates seamlessly with existing multi-task model merging baselines improving their performance across benchmarks and model sizes, and can boost generalization when merging LLM policies aligned with different rewards via RLHF. Importantly, our method is simple to implement and complementary to many existing techniques.

Improving Parallel Program Performance Through DSL-Driven Code Generation with LLM Optimizers

Mapping computations to processors and assigning data to memory are critical for maximizing performance in parallel programming. These mapping decisions are managed through the development of specialized low-level system code, called mappers, crafted by performance engineers. Each mapper is tailored to a specific application and optimized for the underlying machine architecture, a process that requires days of refinement and tuning from an expert. Despite advances in system research, automating mapper generation remains a challenge due to the complexity of making millions of decisions to find the optimal solution and generate the solution as code. We introduce an approach that leverages recent advances in LLM-based optimizers for mapper design. In under ten minutes, our method automatically discovers mappers that surpass human expert designs in scientific applications by up to 1.34X speedup. For parallel matrix multiplication algorithms, our mapper achieves up to 1.31X of the expert-designed solution. To achieve this, we simplify the complexity of low-level code generation by introducing a domain-specific language (DSL) that abstracts the low-level system programming details and defines a structured search space for LLMs to explore. To maximize the application performance, we use an LLM optimizer to improve an agentic system that generates the mapper code. As a result, this approach significantly reduces the workload for performance engineers while achieving substantial performance gains across diverse applications. Finally, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-based optimization in system design and suggest its potential for addressing other complex system challenges.

An Electoral Approach to Diversify LLM-based Multi-Agent Collective Decision-Making

Modern large language models (LLMs) have exhibited cooperative synergy on complex task-solving, and collective decision-making (CDM) is a pivotal component in LLM-based multi-agent collaboration frameworks. Our survey on 52 recent such systems uncovers a severe lack of diversity, with a heavy reliance on dictatorial and plurality voting for CDM. Through the lens of social choice theory, we scrutinize widely-adopted CDM methods and identify their limitations. To enrich current landscape of LLM-based CDM, we present GEDI, an electoral CDM module that incorporates various ordinal preferential voting mechanisms. Our empirical case study across three benchmarks shows that the integration of certain CDM methods can markedly improve the reasoning capabilities and robustness of some leading LLMs, all without requiring intricate system designs. Additionally, we find that some CDM mechanisms generate positive synergies even with as few as three agents. The voting-based methods also demonstrate robustness against single points of failure, as well as diversity in terms of hit-rate@k and subject-wise impacts.

ORCHID: A Chinese Debate Corpus for Target-Independent Stance Detection and Argumentative Dialogue Summarization

Dialogue agents have been receiving increasing attention for years, and this trend has been further boosted by the recent progress of large language models (LLMs). Stance detection and dialogue summarization are two core tasks of dialogue agents in application scenarios that involve argumentative dialogues. However, research on these tasks is limited by the insufficiency of public datasets, especially for non-English languages. To address this language resource gap in Chinese, we present ORCHID (Oral Chinese Debate), the first Chinese dataset for benchmarking target-independent stance detection and debate summarization. Our dataset consists of 1,218 real-world debates that were conducted in Chinese on 476 unique topics, containing 2,436 stance-specific summaries and 14,133 fully annotated utterances. Besides providing a versatile testbed for future research, we also conduct an empirical study on the dataset and propose an integrated task. The results show the challenging nature of the dataset and suggest a potential of incorporating stance detection in summarization for argumentative dialogue.

A Survey on Data Synthesis and Augmentation for Large Language Models

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently linked to the availability of vast, diverse, and high-quality data for training and evaluation. However, the growth rate of high-quality data is significantly outpaced by the expansion of training datasets, leading to a looming data exhaustion crisis. This underscores the urgent need to enhance data efficiency and explore new data sources. In this context, synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution. Currently, data generation primarily consists of two major approaches: data augmentation and synthesis. This paper comprehensively reviews and summarizes data generation techniques throughout the lifecycle of LLMs, including data preparation, pre-training, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning, preference alignment, and applications. Furthermore, We discuss the current constraints faced by these methods and investigate potential pathways for future development and research. Our aspiration is to equip researchers with a clear understanding of these methodologies, enabling them to swiftly identify appropriate data generation strategies in the construction of LLMs, while providing valuable insights for future exploration.

Adaptive Power Allocation in Spaceborne Assisted NOMA Systems for Integrated Terrestrial Communications

This study introduces an innovative approach for adaptive power allocation in Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) systems, enhanced by the integration of spaceborne and terrestrial signals through a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS). We develop an adaptive mechanism to adjust the power distribution between spaceborne and terrestrial signals according to variations in environmental conditions and elevation angles. This mechanism employs a sophisticated transition model that combines Gaussian Mixture Models with Log-Normal distributions to adaptively counteract the detrimental impacts of atmospheric attenuation and urban shadowing. These adaptive power adjustments significantly enhance system capacity, particularly improving the Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio under diverse operational scenarios. Simulation studies confirm the efficacy of our method within an RIS-enhanced framework, showing an approximate 20\% increase in system capacity through optimized power management between spaceborne and terrestrial signals.

Measuring the Inconsistency of Large Language Models in Preferential Ranking

Despite large language models' (LLMs) recent advancements, their bias and hallucination issues persist, and their ability to offer consistent preferential rankings remains underexplored. This study investigates the capacity of LLMs to provide consistent ordinal preferences, a crucial aspect in scenarios with dense decision space or lacking absolute answers. We introduce a formalization of consistency based on order theory, outlining criteria such as transitivity, asymmetry, reversibility, and independence from irrelevant alternatives. Our diagnostic experiments on selected state-of-the-art LLMs reveal their inability to meet these criteria, indicating a strong positional bias and poor transitivity, with preferences easily swayed by irrelevant alternatives. These findings highlight a significant inconsistency in LLM-generated preferential rankings, underscoring the need for further research to address these limitations.