MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attention

We introduce MiniMax-01 series, including MiniMax-Text-01 and MiniMax-VL-01, which are comparable to top-tier models while offering superior capabilities in processing longer contexts. The core lies in lightning attention and its efficient scaling. To maximize computational capacity, we integrate it with Mixture of Experts (MoE), creating a model with 32 experts and 456 billion total parameters, of which 45.9 billion are activated for each token. We develop an optimized parallel strategy and highly efficient computation-communication overlap techniques for MoE and lightning attention. This approach enables us to conduct efficient training and inference on models with hundreds of billions of parameters across contexts spanning millions of tokens. The context window of MiniMax-Text-01 can reach up to 1 million tokens during training and extrapolate to 4 million tokens during inference at an affordable cost. Our vision-language model, MiniMax-VL-01 is built through continued training with 512 billion vision-language tokens. Experiments on both standard and in-house benchmarks show that our models match the performance of state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet while offering 20-32 times longer context window. We publicly release MiniMax-01 at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI.

Logic Meets Magic: LLMs Cracking Smart Contract Vulnerabilities

Smart contract vulnerabilities caused significant economic losses in blockchain applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide new possibilities for addressing this time-consuming task. However, state-of-the-art LLM-based detection solutions are often plagued by high false-positive rates. In this paper, we push the boundaries of existing research in two key ways. First, our evaluation is based on Solidity v0.8, offering the most up-to-date insights compared to prior studies that focus on older versions (v0.4). Second, we leverage the latest five LLM models (across companies), ensuring comprehensive coverage across the most advanced capabilities in the field. We conducted a series of rigorous evaluations. Our experiments demonstrate that a well-designed prompt can reduce the false-positive rate by over 60%. Surprisingly, we also discovered that the recall rate for detecting some specific vulnerabilities in Solidity v0.8 has dropped to just 13% compared to earlier versions (i.e., v0.4). Further analysis reveals the root cause of this decline: the reliance of LLMs on identifying changes in newly introduced libraries and frameworks during detection.

Equivariant Representation Learning for Augmentation-based Self-Supervised Learning via Image Reconstruction

Augmentation-based self-supervised learning methods have shown remarkable success in self-supervised visual representation learning, excelling in learning invariant features but often neglecting equivariant ones. This limitation reduces the generalizability of foundation models, particularly for downstream tasks requiring equivariance. We propose integrating an image reconstruction task as an auxiliary component in augmentation-based self-supervised learning algorithms to facilitate equivariant feature learning without additional parameters. Our method implements a cross-attention mechanism to blend features learned from two augmented views, subsequently reconstructing one of them. This approach is adaptable to various datasets and augmented-pair based learning methods. We evaluate its effectiveness on learning equivariant features through multiple linear regression tasks and downstream applications on both artificial (3DIEBench) and natural (ImageNet) datasets. Results consistently demonstrate significant improvements over standard augmentation-based self-supervised learning methods and state-of-the-art approaches, particularly excelling in scenarios involving combined augmentations. Our method enhances the learning of both invariant and equivariant features, leading to more robust and generalizable visual representations for computer vision tasks.

Integrating Hierarchical Semantic into Iterative Generation Model for Entailment Tree Explanation

Manifestly and logically displaying the line of reasoning from evidence to answer is significant to explainable question answering (QA). The entailment tree exhibits the lines structurally, which is different from the self-explanation principle in large-scale language models. Existing methods rarely consider the semantic association of sentences between and within hierarchies within the tree structure, which is prone to apparent mistakes in combinations. In this work, we propose an architecture of integrating the Hierarchical Semantics of sentences under the framework of Controller-Generator (HiSCG) to explain answers. The HiSCG designs a hierarchical mapping between hypotheses and facts, discriminates the facts involved in tree constructions, and optimizes single-step entailments. To the best of our knowledge, We are the first to notice hierarchical semantics of sentences between the same layer and adjacent layers to yield improvements. The proposed method achieves comparable performance on all three settings of the EntailmentBank dataset. The generalization results on two out-of-domain datasets also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Is Your AI Truly Yours? Leveraging Blockchain for Copyrights, Provenance, and Lineage

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrates into diverse areas, particularly in content generation, ensuring rightful ownership and ethical use becomes paramount. AI service providers are expected to prioritize responsibly sourcing training data and obtaining licenses from data owners. However, existing studies primarily center on safeguarding static copyrights, which simply treats metadata/datasets as non-fungible items with transferable/trading capabilities, neglecting the dynamic nature of training procedures that can shape an ongoing trajectory. In this paper, we present \textsc{IBis}, a blockchain-based framework tailored for AI model training workflows. \textsc{IBis} integrates on-chain registries for datasets, licenses and models, alongside off-chain signing services to facilitate collaboration among multiple participants. Our framework addresses concerns regarding data and model provenance and copyright compliance. \textsc{IBis} enables iterative model retraining and fine-tuning, and offers flexible license checks and renewals. Further, \textsc{IBis} provides APIs designed for seamless integration with existing contract management software, minimizing disruptions to established model training processes. We implement \textsc{IBis} using Daml on the Canton blockchain. Evaluation results showcase the feasibility and scalability of \textsc{IBis} across varying numbers of users, datasets, models, and licenses.

From Beginner to Expert: Modeling Medical Knowledge into General LLMs

Recently, large language model (LLM) based artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, these models face a significant challenge when it comes to sensitive applications, such as reasoning over medical knowledge and answering medical questions in a physician-like manner. Prior studies attempted to overcome this challenge by increasing the model size (>100B) to learn more general medical knowledge, while there is still room for improvement in LLMs with smaller-scale model sizes (<100B). In this work, we start from a pre-trained general LLM model (AntGLM-10B) and fine-tune it from a medical beginner towards a medical expert (called AntGLM-Med-10B), which leverages a 3-stage optimization procedure, \textit{i.e.}, general medical knowledge injection, medical domain instruction tuning, and specific medical task adaptation. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We specifically investigate how to adapt a pre-trained general LLM in medical domain, especially for a specific medical task. (2) We collect and construct large-scale medical datasets for each stage of the optimization process. These datasets encompass various data types and tasks, such as question-answering, medical reasoning, multi-choice questions, and medical conversations. (3) Specifically for multi-choice questions in the medical domain, we propose a novel Verification-of-Choice approach for prompting engineering, which significantly enhances the reasoning ability of LLMs. Remarkably, by combining the above approaches, our AntGLM-Med-10B model can outperform the most of LLMs on PubMedQA, including both general and medical LLMs, even when these LLMs have larger model size.

DARE-GRAM : Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Regression by Aligning Inverse Gram Matrices

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Regression (DAR) aims to bridge the domain gap between a labeled source dataset and an unlabelled target dataset for regression problems. Recent works mostly focus on learning a deep feature encoder by minimizing the discrepancy between source and target features. In this work, we present a different perspective for the DAR problem by analyzing the closed-form ordinary least square~(OLS) solution to the linear regressor in the deep domain adaptation context. Rather than aligning the original feature embedding space, we propose to align the inverse Gram matrix of the features, which is motivated by its presence in the OLS solution and the Gram matrix's ability to capture the feature correlations. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective DAR method which leverages the pseudo-inverse low-rank property to align the scale and angle in a selected subspace generated by the pseudo-inverse Gram matrix of the two domains. We evaluate our method on three domain adaptation regression benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/ismailnejjar/DARE-GRAM.

Blockchain-Empowered Trustworthy Data Sharing: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges

Various data-sharing platforms have emerged with the growing public demand for open data and legislation mandating certain data to remain open. Most of these platforms remain opaque, leading to many questions about data accuracy, provenance and lineage, privacy implications, consent management, and the lack of fair incentives for data providers. With their transparency, immutability, non-repudiation, and decentralization properties, blockchains could not be more apt to answer these questions and enhance trust in a data-sharing platform. However, blockchains are not good at handling the four Vs of big data (i.e., volume, variety, velocity, and veracity) due to their limited performance, scalability, and high cost. Given many related works proposes blockchain-based trustworthy data-sharing solutions, there is increasing confusion and difficulties in understanding and selecting these technologies and platforms in terms of their sharing mechanisms, sharing services, quality of services, and applications. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on blockchain-based data-sharing architectures and applications to fill the gap. First, we present the foundations of blockchains and discuss the challenges of current data-sharing techniques. Second, we focus on the convergence of blockchain and data sharing to give a clear picture of this landscape and propose a reference architecture for blockchain-based data sharing. Third, we discuss the industrial applications of blockchain-based data sharing, ranging from healthcare and smart grid to transportation and decarbonization. For each application, we provide lessons learned for the deployment of Blockchain-based data sharing. Finally, we discuss research challenges and open research directions.

IronForge: An Open, Secure, Fair, Decentralized Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) provides an effective machine learning (ML) architecture to protect data privacy in a distributed manner. However, the inevitable network asynchrony, the over-dependence on a central coordinator, and the lack of an open and fair incentive mechanism collectively hinder its further development. We propose \textsc{IronForge}, a new generation of FL framework, that features a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based data structure and eliminates the need for central coordinators to achieve fully decentralized operations. \textsc{IronForge} runs in a public and open network, and launches a fair incentive mechanism by enabling state consistency in the DAG, so that the system fits in networks where training resources are unevenly distributed. In addition, dedicated defense strategies against prevalent FL attacks on incentive fairness and data privacy are presented to ensure the security of \textsc{IronForge}. Experimental results based on a newly developed testbed FLSim highlight the superiority of \textsc{IronForge} to the existing prevalent FL frameworks under various specifications in performance, fairness, and security. To the best of our knowledge, \textsc{IronForge} is the first secure and fully decentralized FL framework that can be applied in open networks with realistic network and training settings.

One-Shot Domain Adaptive and Generalizable Semantic Segmentation with Class-Aware Cross-Domain Transformers

Unsupervised sim-to-real domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation aims to improve the real-world test performance of a model trained on simulated data. It can save the cost of manually labeling data in real-world applications such as robot vision and autonomous driving. Traditional UDA often assumes that there are abundant unlabeled real-world data samples available during training for the adaptation. However, such an assumption does not always hold in practice owing to the collection difficulty and the scarcity of the data. Thus, we aim to relieve this need on a large number of real data, and explore the one-shot unsupervised sim-to-real domain adaptation (OSUDA) and generalization (OSDG) problem, where only one real-world data sample is available. To remedy the limited real data knowledge, we first construct the pseudo-target domain by stylizing the simulated data with the one-shot real data. To mitigate the sim-to-real domain gap on both the style and spatial structure level and facilitate the sim-to-real adaptation, we further propose to use class-aware cross-domain transformers with an intermediate domain randomization strategy to extract the domain-invariant knowledge, from both the simulated and pseudo-target data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for OSUDA and OSDG on different benchmarks, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, 10.87, 9.59, 13.05 and 15.91 mIoU on GTA, SYNTHIA$\rightarrow$Cityscapes, Foggy Cityscapes, respectively.