ExpertFlow: Optimized Expert Activation and Token Allocation for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Inference

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, while outperforming dense Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of performance, face significant deployment challenges during inference due to their high memory demands. Existing offloading techniques, which involve swapping activated and idle experts between the GPU and CPU, often suffer from rigid expert caching mechanisms. These mechanisms fail to adapt to dynamic routing, leading to inefficient cache utilization, or incur prohibitive costs for prediction training. To tackle these inference-specific challenges, we introduce ExpertFlow, a comprehensive system specifically designed to enhance inference efficiency by accommodating flexible routing and enabling efficient expert scheduling between CPU and GPU. This reduces overhead and boosts system performance. Central to our approach is a predictive routing path-based offloading mechanism that utilizes a lightweight predictor to accurately forecast routing paths before computation begins. This proactive strategy allows for real-time error correction in expert caching, significantly increasing cache hit ratios and reducing the frequency of expert transfers, thereby minimizing I/O overhead. Additionally, we implement a dynamic token scheduling strategy that optimizes MoE inference by rearranging input tokens across different batches. This method not only reduces the number of activated experts per batch but also improves computational efficiency. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ExpertFlow achieves up to 93.72\% GPU memory savings and enhances inference speed by 2 to 10 times compared to baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness and utility as a robust solution for resource-constrained inference scenarios.

ViMoE: An Empirical Study of Designing Vision Mixture-of-Experts

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models embody the divide-and-conquer concept and are a promising approach for increasing model capacity, demonstrating excellent scalability across multiple domains. In this paper, we integrate the MoE structure into the classic Vision Transformer (ViT), naming it ViMoE, and explore the potential of applying MoE to vision through a comprehensive study on image classification. However, we observe that the performance is sensitive to the configuration of MoE layers, making it challenging to obtain optimal results without careful design. The underlying cause is that inappropriate MoE layers lead to unreliable routing and hinder experts from effectively acquiring helpful knowledge. To address this, we introduce a shared expert to learn and capture common information, serving as an effective way to construct stable ViMoE. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to analyze expert routing behavior, revealing which MoE layers are capable of specializing in handling specific information and which are not. This provides guidance for retaining the critical layers while removing redundancies, thereby advancing ViMoE to be more efficient without sacrificing accuracy. We aspire for this work to offer new insights into the design of vision MoE models and provide valuable empirical guidance for future research.

FusionLLM: A Decentralized LLM Training System on Geo-distributed GPUs with Adaptive Compression

To alleviate hardware scarcity in training large deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly large language models (LLMs), we present FusionLLM, a decentralized training system designed and implemented for training DNNs using geo-distributed GPUs across different computing clusters or individual devices. Decentralized training faces significant challenges regarding system design and efficiency, including: 1) the need for remote automatic differentiation (RAD), 2) support for flexible model definitions and heterogeneous software, 3) heterogeneous hardware leading to low resource utilization or the straggler problem, and 4) slow network communication. To address these challenges, in the system design, we represent the model as a directed acyclic graph of operators (OP-DAG). Each node in the DAG represents the operator in the DNNs, while the edge represents the data dependency between operators. Based on this design, 1) users are allowed to customize any DNN without caring low-level operator implementation; 2) we enable the task scheduling with the more fine-grained sub-tasks, offering more optimization space; 3) a DAG runtime executor can implement RAD withour requiring the consistent low-level ML framework versions. To enhance system efficiency, we implement a workload estimator and design an OP-Fence scheduler to cluster devices with similar bandwidths together and partition the DAG to increase throughput. Additionally, we propose an AdaTopK compressor to adaptively compress intermediate activations and gradients at the slowest communication links. To evaluate the convergence and efficiency of our system and algorithms, we train ResNet-101 and GPT-2 on three real-world testbeds using 48 GPUs connected with 8 Mbps~10 Gbps networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our system and method can achieve 1.45 - 9.39x speedup compared to baseline methods while ensuring convergence.

Unsupervised Text Representation Learning via Instruction-Tuning for Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval

Dense retrieval systems are commonly used for information retrieval (IR). They rely on learning text representations through an encoder and usually require supervised modeling via labelled data which can be costly to obtain or simply unavailable. In this study, we introduce a novel unsupervised text representation learning technique via instruction-tuning the pre-trained encoder-decoder large language models (LLM) under the dual-encoder retrieval framework. We demonstrate the corpus representation can be augmented by the representations of relevant synthetic queries generated by the instruct-tuned LLM founded on the Rao-Blackwell theorem. Furthermore, we effectively align the query and corpus text representation with self-instructed-tuning. Specifically, we first prompt an open-box pre-trained LLM to follow defined instructions (i.e. question generation and keyword summarization) to generate synthetic queries. Next, we fine-tune the pre-trained LLM with defined instructions and the generated queries that passed quality check. Finally, we generate synthetic queries with the instruction-tuned LLM for each corpora and represent each corpora by weighted averaging the synthetic queries and original corpora embeddings. We evaluate our proposed method under low-resource settings on three English and one German retrieval datasets measuring NDCG@10, MRR@100, Recall@100. We significantly improve the average zero-shot retrieval performance on all metrics, increasing open-box FLAN-T5 model variations by [3.34%, 3.50%] in absolute and exceeding three competitive dense retrievers (i.e. mDPR, T-Systems, mBART-Large), with model of size at least 38% smaller, by 1.96%, 4.62%, 9.52% absolute on NDCG@10.

DAF-Net: A Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition Fusion Network with Domain Adaptive for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to combine complementary information from both modalities to provide a more comprehensive scene understanding. However, due to the significant differences between the two modalities, preserving key features during the fusion process remains a challenge. To address this issue, we propose a dual-branch feature decomposition fusion network (DAF-Net) with domain adaptive, which introduces Multi-Kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MK-MMD) into the base encoder and designs a hybrid kernel function suitable for infrared and visible image fusion. The base encoder built on the Restormer network captures global structural information while the detail encoder based on Invertible Neural Networks (INN) focuses on extracting detail texture information. By incorporating MK-MMD, the DAF-Net effectively aligns the latent feature spaces of visible and infrared images, thereby improving the quality of the fused images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing techniques across multiple datasets, significantly enhancing both visual quality and fusion performance. The related Python code is available at https://github.com/xujian000/DAF-Net.

IMAGDressing-v1: Customizable Virtual Dressing

Latest advances have achieved realistic virtual try-on (VTON) through localized garment inpainting using latent diffusion models, significantly enhancing consumers' online shopping experience. However, existing VTON technologies neglect the need for merchants to showcase garments comprehensively, including flexible control over garments, optional faces, poses, and scenes. To address this issue, we define a virtual dressing (VD) task focused on generating freely editable human images with fixed garments and optional conditions. Meanwhile, we design a comprehensive affinity metric index (CAMI) to evaluate the consistency between generated images and reference garments. Then, we propose IMAGDressing-v1, which incorporates a garment UNet that captures semantic features from CLIP and texture features from VAE. We present a hybrid attention module, including a frozen self-attention and a trainable cross-attention, to integrate garment features from the garment UNet into a frozen denoising UNet, ensuring users can control different scenes through text. IMAGDressing-v1 can be combined with other extension plugins, such as ControlNet and IP-Adapter, to enhance the diversity and controllability of generated images. Furthermore, to address the lack of data, we release the interactive garment pairing (IGPair) dataset, containing over 300,000 pairs of clothing and dressed images, and establish a standard pipeline for data assembly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our IMAGDressing-v1 achieves state-of-the-art human image synthesis performance under various controlled conditions. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/IMAGDressing.

Balancing User Preferences by Social Networks: A Condition-Guided Social Recommendation Model for Mitigating Popularity Bias

Social recommendation models weave social interactions into their design to provide uniquely personalized recommendation results for users. However, social networks not only amplify the popularity bias in recommendation models, resulting in more frequent recommendation of hot items and fewer long-tail items, but also include a substantial amount of redundant information that is essentially meaningless for the model's performance. Existing social recommendation models fail to address the issues of popularity bias and the redundancy of social information, as they directly characterize social influence across the entire social network without making targeted adjustments. In this paper, we propose a Condition-Guided Social Recommendation Model (named CGSoRec) to mitigate the model's popularity bias by denoising the social network and adjusting the weights of user's social preferences. More specifically, CGSoRec first includes a Condition-Guided Social Denoising Model (CSD) to remove redundant social relations in the social network for capturing users' social preferences with items more precisely. Then, CGSoRec calculates users' social preferences based on denoised social network and adjusts the weights in users' social preferences to make them can counteract the popularity bias present in the recommendation model. At last, CGSoRec includes a Condition-Guided Diffusion Recommendation Model (CGD) to introduce the adjusted social preferences as conditions to control the recommendation results for a debiased direction. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is in: https://github.com/hexin5515/CGSoRec.

RSDehamba: Lightweight Vision Mamba for Remote Sensing Satellite Image Dehazing

Remote sensing image dehazing (RSID) aims to remove nonuniform and physically irregular haze factors for high-quality image restoration. The emergence of CNNs and Transformers has taken extraordinary strides in the RSID arena. However, these methods often struggle to demonstrate the balance of adequate long-range dependency modeling and maintaining computational efficiency. To this end, we propose the first lightweight network on the mamba-based model called RSDhamba in the field of RSID. Greatly inspired by the recent rise of Selective State Space Model (SSM) for its superior performance in modeling linear complexity and remote dependencies, our designed RSDehamba integrates the SSM framework into the U-Net architecture. Specifically, we propose the Vision Dehamba Block (VDB) as the core component of the overall network, which utilizes the linear complexity of SSM to achieve the capability of global context encoding. Simultaneously, the Direction-aware Scan Module (DSM) is designed to dynamically aggregate feature exchanges over different directional domains to effectively enhance the flexibility of sensing the spatially varying distribution of haze. In this way, our RSDhamba fully demonstrates the superiority of spatial distance capture dependencies and channel information exchange for better extraction of haze features. Extensive experimental results on widely used benchmarks validate the surpassing performance of our RSDehamba against existing state-of-the-art methods.

Towards the limits: Sensing Capability Measurement for ISAC Through Channel Encoder

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is gradually becoming a reality due to the significant increase in frequency and bandwidth of next-generation wireless communication technologies. Therefore it becomes crucial to evaluate the communication and sensing performance using appropriate channel models to address resource competition from each other. Existing work only models the sensing capability based on the mutual information between the channel response and the received signal, and its theoretical resolution is difficult to support the high-precision requirements of ISAC for sensing tasks, and may even affect its communication optimal. In this paper, we propose a sensing channel encoder model to measure the sensing capacity with higher resolution by discrete task mutual information. For the first time, derive upper and lower bounds on the sensing accuracy for a given channel. This model not only provides the possibility of optimizing the ISAC systems at a finer granularity and balancing communication and sensing resources, but also provides theoretical explanations for classical intuitive feelings (like more modalities more accuracy) in wireless sensing. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed channel model through real-case studies, including person identification, displacement detection, direction estimation, and device recognition. The evaluation results indicate a Pearson correlation coefficient exceeding 0.9 between our task mutual information and conventional experimental metrics (e.g., accuracy).

Spectral-Spatial Mamba for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Recently, deep learning models have achieved excellent performance in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Among the many deep models, Transformer has gradually attracted interest for its excellence in modeling the long-range dependencies of spatial-spectral features in HSI. However, Transformer has the problem of quadratic computational complexity due to the self-attention mechanism, which is heavier than other models and thus has limited adoption in HSI processing. Fortunately, the recently emerging state space model-based Mamba shows great computational efficiency while achieving the modeling power of Transformers. Therefore, in this paper, we make a preliminary attempt to apply the Mamba to HSI classification, leading to the proposed spectral-spatial Mamba (SS-Mamba). Specifically, the proposed SS-Mamba mainly consists of spectral-spatial token generation module and several stacked spectral-spatial Mamba blocks. Firstly, the token generation module converts any given HSI cube to spatial and spectral tokens as sequences. And then these tokens are sent to stacked spectral-spatial mamba blocks (SS-MB). Each SS-MB block consists of two basic mamba blocks and a spectral-spatial feature enhancement module. The spatial and spectral tokens are processed separately by the two basic mamba blocks, respectively. Besides, the feature enhancement module modulates spatial and spectral tokens using HSI sample's center region information. In this way, the spectral and spatial tokens cooperate with each other and achieve information fusion within each block. The experimental results conducted on widely used HSI datasets reveal that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The Mamba-based method opens a new window for HSI classification.