Chain-of-Rank: Enhancing Large Language Models for Domain-Specific RAG in Edge Device

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with large language models (LLMs) is especially valuable in specialized domains, where precision is critical. To more specialize the LLMs into a target domain, domain-specific RAG has recently been developed by allowing the LLM to access the target domain early via finetuning. The domain-specific RAG makes more sense in resource-constrained environments like edge devices, as they should perform a specific task (e.g. personalization) reliably using only small-scale LLMs. While the domain-specific RAG is well-aligned with edge devices in this respect, it often relies on widely-used reasoning techniques like chain-of-thought (CoT). The reasoning step is useful to understand the given external knowledge, and yet it is computationally expensive and difficult for small-scale LLMs to learn it. Tackling this, we propose the Chain of Rank (CoR) which shifts the focus from intricate lengthy reasoning to simple ranking of the reliability of input external documents. Then, CoR reduces computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy, making it particularly suited for resource-constrained environments. We attain the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in benchmarks, and analyze its efficacy.

Learning Primitive Relations for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to identify unseen state-object compositions by leveraging knowledge learned from seen compositions. Existing approaches often independently predict states and objects, overlooking their relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, learning primitive relations (LPR), designed to probabilistically capture the relationships between states and objects. By employing the cross-attention mechanism, LPR considers the dependencies between states and objects, enabling the model to infer the likelihood of unseen compositions. Experimental results demonstrate that LPR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all three CZSL benchmark datasets in both closed-world and open-world settings. Through qualitative analysis, we show that LPR leverages state-object relationships for unseen composition prediction.

Unlocking Transfer Learning for Open-World Few-Shot Recognition

Few-Shot Open-Set Recognition (FSOSR) targets a critical real-world challenge, aiming to categorize inputs into known categories, termed closed-set classes, while identifying open-set inputs that fall outside these classes. Although transfer learning where a model is tuned to a given few-shot task has become a prominent paradigm in closed-world, we observe that it fails to expand to open-world. To unlock this challenge, we propose a two-stage method which consists of open-set aware meta-learning with open-set free transfer learning. In the open-set aware meta-learning stage, a model is trained to establish a metric space that serves as a beneficial starting point for the subsequent stage. During the open-set free transfer learning stage, the model is further adapted to a specific target task through transfer learning. Additionally, we introduce a strategy to simulate open-set examples by modifying the training dataset or generating pseudo open-set examples. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely recognized benchmarks, miniImageNet and tieredImageNet, with only a 1.5\% increase in training effort. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of transfer learning in FSOSR.

Preserving Pre-trained Representation Space: On Effectiveness of Prefix-tuning for Large Multi-modal Models

Recently, we have observed that Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) are revolutionizing the way machines interact with the world, unlocking new possibilities across various multi-modal applications. To adapt LMMs for downstream tasks, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) which only trains additional prefix tokens or modules, has gained popularity. Nevertheless, there has been little analysis of how PEFT works in LMMs. In this paper, we delve into the strengths and weaknesses of each tuning strategy, shifting the focus from the efficiency typically associated with these approaches. We first discover that model parameter tuning methods such as LoRA and Adapters distort the feature representation space learned during pre-training and limit the full utilization of pre-trained knowledge. We also demonstrate that prefix-tuning excels at preserving the representation space, despite its lower performance on downstream tasks. These findings suggest a simple two-step PEFT strategy called Prefix-Tuned PEFT (PT-PEFT), which successively performs prefix-tuning and then PEFT (i.e., Adapter, LoRA), combines the benefits of both. Experimental results show that PT-PEFT not only improves performance in image captioning and visual question answering compared to vanilla PEFT methods but also helps preserve the representation space of the four pre-trained models.

Semantic Token Reweighting for Interpretable and Controllable Text Embeddings in CLIP

A text encoder within Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP plays a crucial role in translating textual input into an embedding space shared with images, thereby facilitating the interpretative analysis of vision tasks through natural language. Despite the varying significance of different textual elements within a sentence depending on the context, efforts to account for variation of importance in constructing text embeddings have been lacking. We propose a framework of Semantic Token Reweighting to build Interpretable text embeddings (SToRI), which incorporates controllability as well. SToRI refines the text encoding process in CLIP by differentially weighting semantic elements based on contextual importance, enabling finer control over emphasis responsive to data-driven insights and user preferences. The efficacy of SToRI is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on few-shot image classification and image retrieval tailored to user preferences.

InfiniPot: Infinite Context Processing on Memory-Constrained LLMs

Handling long input contexts remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices. Our work aims to address this limitation by introducing InfiniPot, a novel KV cache control framework designed to enable pre-trained LLMs to manage extensive sequences within fixed memory constraints efficiently, without requiring additional training. InfiniPot leverages Continual Context Distillation (CCD), an iterative process that compresses and retains essential information through novel importance metrics, effectively maintaining critical data even without access to future context. Our comprehensive evaluations indicate that InfiniPot significantly outperforms models trained for long contexts in various NLP tasks, establishing its efficacy and versatility. This work represents a substantial advancement toward making LLMs applicable to a broader range of real-world scenarios.

Crayon: Customized On-Device LLM via Instant Adapter Blending and Edge-Server Hybrid Inference

The customization of large language models (LLMs) for user-specified tasks gets important. However, maintaining all the customized LLMs on cloud servers incurs substantial memory and computational overheads, and uploading user data can also lead to privacy concerns. On-device LLMs can offer a promising solution by mitigating these issues. Yet, the performance of on-device LLMs is inherently constrained by the limitations of small-scaled models. To overcome these restrictions, we first propose Crayon, a novel approach for on-device LLM customization. Crayon begins by constructing a pool of diverse base adapters, and then we instantly blend them into a customized adapter without extra training. In addition, we develop a device-server hybrid inference strategy, which deftly allocates more demanding queries or non-customized tasks to a larger, more capable LLM on a server. This ensures optimal performance without sacrificing the benefits of on-device customization. We carefully craft a novel benchmark from multiple question-answer datasets, and show the efficacy of our method in the LLM customization.

Role of Sensing and Computer Vision in 6G Wireless Communications

Recently, we are witnessing the remarkable progress and widespread adoption of sensing technologies in autonomous driving, robotics, and metaverse. Considering the rapid advancement of computer vision (CV) technology to analyze the sensing information, we anticipate a proliferation of wireless applications exploiting the sensing and CV technologies in 6G. In this article, we provide a holistic overview of the sensing and CV-aided wireless communications (SVWC) framework for 6G. By analyzing the high-resolution sensing information through the powerful CV techniques, SVWC can quickly and accurately understand the wireless environments and then perform the wireless tasks. To demonstrate the efficacy of SVWC, we design the whole process of SVWC including the sensing dataset collection, DL model training, and execution of realistic wireless tasks. From the numerical evaluations on 6G communication scenarios, we show that SVWC achieves considerable performance gains over the conventional 5G systems in terms of positioning accuracy, data rate, and access latency.

Expand-and-Quantize: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Using High-Dimensional Space and Product Quantization

Unsupervised semantic segmentation (USS) aims to discover and recognize meaningful categories without any labels. For a successful USS, two key abilities are required: 1) information compression and 2) clustering capability. Previous methods have relied on feature dimension reduction for information compression, however, this approach may hinder the process of clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel USS framework called Expand-and-Quantize Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation (EQUSS), which combines the benefits of high-dimensional spaces for better clustering and product quantization for effective information compression. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that EQUSS achieves state-of-the-art results on three standard benchmarks. In addition, we analyze the entropy of USS features, which is the first step towards understanding USS from the perspective of information theory.

Knowledge Distillation from Non-streaming to Streaming ASR Encoder using Auxiliary Non-streaming Layer

Streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are restricted from accessing future context, which results in worse performance compared to the non-streaming models. To improve the performance of streaming ASR, knowledge distillation (KD) from the non-streaming to streaming model has been studied, mainly focusing on aligning the output token probabilities. In this paper, we propose a layer-to-layer KD from the teacher encoder to the student encoder. To ensure that features are extracted using the same context, we insert auxiliary non-streaming branches to the student and perform KD from the non-streaming teacher layer to the non-streaming auxiliary layer. We design a special KD loss that leverages the autoregressive predictive coding (APC) mechanism to encourage the streaming model to predict unseen future contexts. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce the word error rate compared to previous token probability distillation methods.