ByteScale: Efficient Scaling of LLM Training with a 2048K Context Length on More Than 12,000 GPUs

Scaling long-context ability is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs). To amortize the memory consumption across multiple devices in long-context training, inter-data partitioning (a.k.a. Data Parallelism) and intra-data partitioning (a.k.a. Context Parallelism) are commonly used. Current training frameworks predominantly treat the two techniques as orthogonal, and establish static communication groups to organize the devices as a static mesh (e.g., a 2D mesh). However, the sequences for LLM training typically vary in lengths, no matter for texts, multi-modalities or reinforcement learning. The mismatch between data heterogeneity and static mesh causes redundant communication and imbalanced computation, degrading the training efficiency. In this work, we introduce ByteScale, an efficient, flexible, and scalable LLM training framework for large-scale mixed training of long and short sequences. The core of ByteScale is a novel parallelism strategy, namely Hybrid Data Parallelism (HDP), which unifies the inter- and intra-data partitioning with a dynamic mesh design. In particular, we build a communication optimizer, which eliminates the redundant communication for short sequences by data-aware sharding and dynamic communication, and further compresses the communication cost for long sequences by selective offloading. Besides, we also develop a balance scheduler to mitigate the imbalanced computation by parallelism-aware data assignment. We evaluate ByteScale with the model sizes ranging from 7B to 141B, context lengths from 256K to 2048K, on a production cluster with more than 12,000 GPUs. Experiment results show that ByteScale outperforms the state-of-the-art training system by up to 7.89x.

Diffusion Models for Tabular Data: Challenges, Current Progress, and Future Directions

In recent years, generative models have achieved remarkable performance across diverse applications, including image generation, text synthesis, audio creation, video generation, and data augmentation. Diffusion models have emerged as superior alternatives to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) by addressing their limitations, such as training instability, mode collapse, and poor representation of multimodal distributions. This success has spurred widespread research interest. In the domain of tabular data, diffusion models have begun to showcase similar advantages over GANs and VAEs, achieving significant performance breakthroughs and demonstrating their potential for addressing unique challenges in tabular data modeling. However, while domains like images and time series have numerous surveys summarizing advancements in diffusion models, there remains a notable gap in the literature for tabular data. Despite the increasing interest in diffusion models for tabular data, there has been little effort to systematically review and summarize these developments. This lack of a dedicated survey limits a clear understanding of the challenges, progress, and future directions in this critical area. This survey addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive review of diffusion models for tabular data. Covering works from June 2015, when diffusion models emerged, to December 2024, we analyze nearly all relevant studies, with updates maintained in a \href{https://github.com/Diffusion-Model-Leiden/awesome-diffusion-models-for-tabular-data}{GitHub repository}. Assuming readers possess foundational knowledge of statistics and diffusion models, we employ mathematical formulations to deliver a rigorous and detailed review, aiming to promote developments in this emerging and exciting area.

P2DFlow: A Protein Ensemble Generative Model with SE(3) Flow Matching

Biological processes, functions, and properties are intricately linked to the ensemble of protein conformations, rather than being solely determined by a single stable conformation. In this study, we have developed P2DFlow, a generative model based on SE(3) flow matching, to predict the structural ensembles of proteins. We specifically designed a valuable prior for the flow process and enhanced the model's ability to distinguish each intermediate state by incorporating an additional dimension to describe the ensemble data, which can reflect the physical laws governing the distribution of ensembles, so that the prior knowledge can effectively guide the generation process. When trained and evaluated on the MD datasets of ATLAS, P2DFlow outperforms other baseline models on extensive experiments, successfully capturing the observable dynamic fluctuations as evidenced in crystal structure and MD simulations. As a potential proxy agent for protein molecular simulation, the high-quality ensembles generated by P2DFlow could significantly aid in understanding protein functions across various scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/BLEACH366/P2DFlow.

Body-Resonance Human Body Communication

Seamless interaction between Humans and AI-empowered battery-operated miniaturized electronic devices, exponentially transforming the wearable technology industry while forming an anthropomorphic artificial nervous system for distributed computing around the human body, demands high-speed low-power connectivity. If interconnected via radio frequency (RF) based wireless communication techniques, that being radiative, incur substantial absorption losses from the body during non-line-of-sight scenarios and consume higher power (more than 10s of mW). Although as a promising alternative with its non-radiative nature that resulted in 100X improvement in energy efficiency (sub-10 pJ/bit) and better signal confinement, Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication (EQS HBC) incurs moderate path loss (60-70 dB), limited data rate (less than 20 Mbps), making it less suitable for applications demanding fast connectivity like HD audio-video streaming, AR-VR-based products, distributed computing with wearable AI devices. Hence, to meet the requirement of energy-efficient connectivity at 100s of Mbps between wearables, we propose Body-Resonance (BR) HBC, which operates in the near-intermediate field and utilizes the transmission-line-like behavior of the body channel to offer 30X improvement in channel capacity. Our work sheds new light on the wireless communication system for wearables with potential to increase the channel gain by 20 dB with a 10X improvement in bandwidth compared to the EQS HBC for communication over on-body channels (whole-body coverage area). Experimentally demonstrating BR HBC, we presented low-loss (40-50 dB) and wide-band (hundreds of MHz) body channels that are 10X less leaky than radiative wireless communication, hence, can revolutionize the design of wireless communication system for several applications with wearables from healthcare, defense, to consumer electronics.

TX-Gen: Multi-Objective Optimization for Sparse Counterfactual Explanations for Time-Series Classification

In time-series classification, understanding model decisions is crucial for their application in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance. Counterfactual explanations, which provide insights by presenting alternative inputs that change model predictions, offer a promising solution. However, existing methods for generating counterfactual explanations for time-series data often struggle with balancing key objectives like proximity, sparsity, and validity. In this paper, we introduce TX-Gen, a novel algorithm for generating counterfactual explanations based on the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). TX-Gen leverages evolutionary multi-objective optimization to find a diverse set of counterfactuals that are both sparse and valid, while maintaining minimal dissimilarity to the original time series. By incorporating a flexible reference-guided mechanism, our method improves the plausibility and interpretability of the counterfactuals without relying on predefined assumptions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TX-Gen outperforms existing methods in generating high-quality counterfactuals, making time-series models more transparent and interpretable.

Beyond the Veil of Similarity: Quantifying Semantic Continuity in Explainable AI

We introduce a novel metric for measuring semantic continuity in Explainable AI methods and machine learning models. We posit that for models to be truly interpretable and trustworthy, similar inputs should yield similar explanations, reflecting a consistent semantic understanding. By leveraging XAI techniques, we assess semantic continuity in the task of image recognition. We conduct experiments to observe how incremental changes in input affect the explanations provided by different XAI methods. Through this approach, we aim to evaluate the models' capability to generalize and abstract semantic concepts accurately and to evaluate different XAI methods in correctly capturing the model behaviour. This paper contributes to the broader discourse on AI interpretability by proposing a quantitative measure for semantic continuity for XAI methods, offering insights into the models' and explainers' internal reasoning processes, and promoting more reliable and transparent AI systems.

Latent Conditional Diffusion-based Data Augmentation for Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph Mode

Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph (CTDG) precisely models evolving real-world relationships, drawing heightened interest in dynamic graph learning across academia and industry. However, existing CTDG models encounter challenges stemming from noise and limited historical data. Graph Data Augmentation (GDA) emerges as a critical solution, yet current approaches primarily focus on static graphs and struggle to effectively address the dynamics inherent in CTDGs. Moreover, these methods often demand substantial domain expertise for parameter tuning and lack theoretical guarantees for augmentation efficacy. To address these issues, we propose Conda, a novel latent diffusion-based GDA method tailored for CTDGs. Conda features a sandwich-like architecture, incorporating a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) and a conditional diffusion model, aimed at generating enhanced historical neighbor embeddings for target nodes. Unlike conventional diffusion models trained on entire graphs via pre-training, Conda requires historical neighbor sequence embeddings of target nodes for training, thus facilitating more targeted augmentation. We integrate Conda into the CTDG model and adopt an alternating training strategy to optimize performance. Extensive experimentation across six widely used real-world datasets showcases the consistent performance improvement of our approach, particularly in scenarios with limited historical data.

MegaScale: Scaling Large Language Model Training to More Than 10,000 GPUs

We present the design, implementation and engineering experience in building and deploying MegaScale, a production system for training large language models (LLMs) at the scale of more than 10,000 GPUs. Training LLMs at this scale brings unprecedented challenges to training efficiency and stability. We take a full-stack approach that co-designs the algorithmic and system components across model block and optimizer design, computation and communication overlapping, operator optimization, data pipeline, and network performance tuning. Maintaining high efficiency throughout the training process (i.e., stability) is an important consideration in production given the long extent of LLM training jobs. Many hard stability issues only emerge at large scale, and in-depth observability is the key to address them. We develop a set of diagnosis tools to monitor system components and events deep in the stack, identify root causes, and derive effective techniques to achieve fault tolerance and mitigate stragglers. MegaScale achieves 55.2% Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) when training a 175B LLM model on 12,288 GPUs, improving the MFU by 1.34x compared to Megatron-LM. We share our operational experience in identifying and fixing failures and stragglers. We hope by articulating the problems and sharing our experience from a systems perspective, this work can inspire future LLM systems research.

Shapelet-based Model-agnostic Counterfactual Local Explanations for Time Series Classification

In this work, we propose a model-agnostic instance-based post-hoc explainability method for time series classification. The proposed algorithm, namely Time-CF, leverages shapelets and TimeGAN to provide counterfactual explanations for arbitrary time series classifiers. We validate the proposed method on several real-world univariate time series classification tasks from the UCR Time Series Archive. The results indicate that the counterfactual instances generated by Time-CF when compared to state-of-the-art methods, demonstrate better performance in terms of four explainability metrics: closeness, sensibility, plausibility, and sparsity.

KS-Net: Multi-band joint speech restoration and enhancement network for 2024 ICASSP SSI Challenge

This paper presents the speech restoration and enhancement system created by the 1024K team for the ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement (SSI) Challenge. Our system consists of a generative adversarial network (GAN) in complex-domain for speech restoration and a fine-grained multi-band fusion module for speech enhancement. In the blind test set of SSI, the proposed system achieves an overall mean opinion score (MOS) of 3.49 based on ITU-T P.804 and a Word Accuracy Rate (WAcc) of 0.78 for the real-time track, as well as an overall P.804 MOS of 3.43 and a WAcc of 0.78 for the non-real-time track, ranking 1st in both tracks.