DMin: Scalable Training Data Influence Estimation for Diffusion Models

Identifying the training data samples that most influence a generated image is a critical task in understanding diffusion models, yet existing influence estimation methods are constrained to small-scale or LoRA-tuned models due to computational limitations. As diffusion models scale up, these methods become impractical. To address this challenge, we propose DMin (Diffusion Model influence), a scalable framework for estimating the influence of each training data sample on a given generated image. By leveraging efficient gradient compression and retrieval techniques, DMin reduces storage requirements from 339.39 TB to only 726 MB and retrieves the top-k most influential training samples in under 1 second, all while maintaining performance. Our empirical results demonstrate DMin is both effective in identifying influential training samples and efficient in terms of computational and storage requirements.

Measuring Copyright Risks of Large Language Model via Partial Information Probing

Exploring the data sources used to train Large Language Models (LLMs) is a crucial direction in investigating potential copyright infringement by these models. While this approach can identify the possible use of copyrighted materials in training data, it does not directly measure infringing risks. Recent research has shifted towards testing whether LLMs can directly output copyrighted content. Addressing this direction, we investigate and assess LLMs' capacity to generate infringing content by providing them with partial information from copyrighted materials, and try to use iterative prompting to get LLMs to generate more infringing content. Specifically, we input a portion of a copyrighted text into LLMs, prompt them to complete it, and then analyze the overlap between the generated content and the original copyrighted material. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can indeed generate content highly overlapping with copyrighted materials based on these partial inputs.

Less is More: Sparse Watermarking in LLMs with Enhanced Text Quality

With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), concerns about potential misuse have emerged. To this end, watermarking has been adapted to LLM, enabling a simple and effective way to detect and monitor generated text. However, while the existing methods can differentiate between watermarked and unwatermarked text with high accuracy, they often face a trade-off between the quality of the generated text and the effectiveness of the watermarking process. In this work, we present a novel type of LLM watermark, Sparse Watermark, which aims to mitigate this trade-off by applying watermarks to a small subset of generated tokens distributed across the text. The key strategy involves anchoring watermarked tokens to words that have specific Part-of-Speech (POS) tags. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme achieves high detectability while generating text that outperforms previous LLM watermarking methods in quality across various tasks

Token-wise Influential Training Data Retrieval for Large Language Models

Given a Large Language Model (LLM) generation, how can we identify which training data led to this generation? In this paper, we proposed RapidIn, a scalable framework adapting to LLMs for estimating the influence of each training data. The proposed framework consists of two stages: caching and retrieval. First, we compress the gradient vectors by over 200,000x, allowing them to be cached on disk or in GPU/CPU memory. Then, given a generation, RapidIn efficiently traverses the cached gradients to estimate the influence within minutes, achieving over a 6,326x speedup. Moreover, RapidIn supports multi-GPU parallelization to substantially accelerate caching and retrieval. Our empirical result confirms the efficiency and effectiveness of RapidIn.

GUITAR: Gradient Pruning toward Fast Neural Ranking

With the continuous popularity of deep learning and representation learning, fast vector search becomes a vital task in various ranking/retrieval based applications, say recommendation, ads ranking and question answering. Neural network based ranking is widely adopted due to its powerful capacity in modeling complex relationships, such as between users and items, questions and answers. However, it is usually exploited in offline or re-ranking manners for it is time-consuming in computations. Online neural network ranking--so called fast neural ranking--is considered challenging because neural network measures are usually non-convex and asymmetric. Traditional Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search which usually focuses on metric ranking measures, is not applicable to these advanced measures. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph searching framework to accelerate the searching in the fast neural ranking problem. The proposed graph searching algorithm is bi-level: we first construct a probable candidate set; then we only evaluate the neural network measure over the probable candidate set instead of evaluating the neural network over all neighbors. Specifically, we propose a gradient-based algorithm that approximates the rank of the neural network matching score to construct the probable candidate set; and we present an angle-based heuristic procedure to adaptively identify the proper size of the probable candidate set. Empirical results on public data confirm the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

Blockwise Feature Interaction in Recommendation Systems

Feature interactions can play a crucial role in recommendation systems as they capture complex relationships between user preferences and item characteristics. Existing methods such as Deep & Cross Network (DCNv2) may suffer from high computational requirements due to their cross-layer operations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called blockwise feature interaction (BFI) to help alleviate this issue. By partitioning the feature interaction process into smaller blocks, we can significantly reduce both the memory footprint and the computational burden. Four variants (denoted by P, Q, T, S, respectively) of BFI have been developed and empirically compared. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieves close accuracy compared to the standard DCNv2, while greatly reducing the computational overhead and the number of parameters. This paper contributes to the development of efficient recommendation systems by providing a practical solution for improving feature interaction efficiency.

Pb-Hash: Partitioned b-bit Hashing

Many hashing algorithms including minwise hashing (MinHash), one permutation hashing (OPH), and consistent weighted sampling (CWS) generate integers of $B$ bits. With $k$ hashes for each data vector, the storage would be $B\times k$ bits; and when used for large-scale learning, the model size would be $2^B\times k$, which can be expensive. A standard strategy is to use only the lowest $b$ bits out of the $B$ bits and somewhat increase $k$, the number of hashes. In this study, we propose to re-use the hashes by partitioning the $B$ bits into $m$ chunks, e.g., $b\times m =B$. Correspondingly, the model size becomes $m\times 2^b \times k$, which can be substantially smaller than the original $2^B\times k$. Our theoretical analysis reveals that by partitioning the hash values into $m$ chunks, the accuracy would drop. In other words, using $m$ chunks of $B/m$ bits would not be as accurate as directly using $B$ bits. This is due to the correlation from re-using the same hash. On the other hand, our analysis also shows that the accuracy would not drop much for (e.g.,) $m=2\sim 4$. In some regions, Pb-Hash still works well even for $m$ much larger than 4. We expect Pb-Hash would be a good addition to the family of hashing methods/applications and benefit industrial practitioners. We verify the effectiveness of Pb-Hash in machine learning tasks, for linear SVM models as well as deep learning models. Since the hashed data are essentially categorical (ID) features, we follow the standard practice of using embedding tables for each hash. With Pb-Hash, we need to design an effective strategy to combine $m$ embeddings. Our study provides an empirical evaluation on four pooling schemes: concatenation, max pooling, mean pooling, and product pooling. There is no definite answer which pooling would be always better and we leave that for future study.

Practice with Graph-based ANN Algorithms on Sparse Data: Chi-square Two-tower model, HNSW, Sign Cauchy Projections

Sparse data are common. The traditional ``handcrafted'' features are often sparse. Embedding vectors from trained models can also be very sparse, for example, embeddings trained via the ``ReLu'' activation function. In this paper, we report our exploration of efficient search in sparse data with graph-based ANN algorithms (e.g., HNSW, or SONG which is the GPU version of HNSW), which are popular in industrial practice, e.g., search and ads (advertising). We experiment with the proprietary ads targeting application, as well as benchmark public datasets. For ads targeting, we train embeddings with the standard ``cosine two-tower'' model and we also develop the ``chi-square two-tower'' model. Both models produce (highly) sparse embeddings when they are integrated with the ``ReLu'' activation function. In EBR (embedding-based retrieval) applications, after we the embeddings are trained, the next crucial task is the approximate near neighbor (ANN) search for serving. While there are many ANN algorithms we can choose from, in this study, we focus on the graph-based ANN algorithm (e.g., HNSW-type). Sparse embeddings should help improve the efficiency of EBR. One benefit is the reduced memory cost for the embeddings. The other obvious benefit is the reduced computational time for evaluating similarities, because, for graph-based ANN algorithms such as HNSW, computing similarities is often the dominating cost. In addition to the effort on leveraging data sparsity for storage and computation, we also integrate ``sign cauchy random projections'' (SignCRP) to hash vectors to bits, to further reduce the memory cost and speed up the ANN search. In NIPS'13, SignCRP was proposed to hash the chi-square similarity, which is a well-adopted nonlinear kernel in NLP and computer vision. Therefore, the chi-square two-tower model, SignCRP, and HNSW are now tightly integrated.

Building K-Anonymous User Cohorts with\\ Consecutive Consistent Weighted Sampling (CCWS)

To retrieve personalized campaigns and creatives while protecting user privacy, digital advertising is shifting from member-based identity to cohort-based identity. Under such identity regime, an accurate and efficient cohort building algorithm is desired to group users with similar characteristics. In this paper, we propose a scalable $K$-anonymous cohort building algorithm called {\em consecutive consistent weighted sampling} (CCWS). The proposed method combines the spirit of the ($p$-powered) consistent weighted sampling and hierarchical clustering, so that the $K$-anonymity is ensured by enforcing a lower bound on the size of cohorts. Evaluations on a LinkedIn dataset consisting of $>70$M users and ads campaigns demonstrate that CCWS achieves substantial improvements over several hashing-based methods including sign random projections (SignRP), minwise hashing (MinHash), as well as the vanilla CWS.

Constrained Approximate Similarity Search on Proximity Graph

Search engines and recommendation systems are built to efficiently display relevant information from those massive amounts of candidates. Typically a three-stage mechanism is employed in those systems: (i) a small collection of items are first retrieved by (e.g.,) approximate near neighbor search algorithms; (ii) then a collection of constraints are applied on the retrieved items; (iii) a fine-grained ranking neural network is employed to determine the final recommendation. We observe a major defect of the original three-stage pipeline: Although we only target to retrieve $k$ vectors in the final recommendation, we have to preset a sufficiently large $s$ ($s > k$) for each query, and ``hope'' the number of survived vectors after the filtering is not smaller than $k$. That is, at least $k$ vectors in the $s$ similar candidates satisfy the query constraints. In this paper, we investigate this constrained similarity search problem and attempt to merge the similarity search stage and the filtering stage into one single search operation. We introduce AIRSHIP, a system that integrates a user-defined function filtering into the similarity search framework. The proposed system does not need to build extra indices nor require prior knowledge of the query constraints. We propose three optimization strategies: (1) starting point selection, (2) multi-direction search, and (3) biased priority queue selection. Experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real data confirm the effectiveness of the proposed AIRSHIP algorithm. We focus on constrained graph-based approximate near neighbor (ANN) search in this study, in part because graph-based ANN is known to achieve excellent performance. We believe it is also possible to develop constrained hashing-based ANN or constrained quantization-based ANN.