LoRS: Efficient Low-Rank Adaptation for Sparse Large Language Model

Existing low-rank adaptation (LoRA) methods face challenges on sparse large language models (LLMs) due to the inability to maintain sparsity. Recent works introduced methods that maintain sparsity by augmenting LoRA techniques with additional masking mechanisms. Despite these successes, such approaches suffer from an increased memory and computation overhead, which affects efficiency of LoRA methods. In response to this limitation, we introduce LoRS, an innovative method designed to achieve both memory and computation efficiency when fine-tuning sparse LLMs. To mitigate the substantial memory and computation demands associated with preserving sparsity, our approach incorporates strategies of weight recompute and computational graph rearrangement. In addition, we also improve the effectiveness of LoRS through better adapter initialization. These innovations lead to a notable reduction in memory and computation consumption during the fine-tuning phase, all while achieving performance levels that outperform existing LoRA approaches.

Interleaved Speech-Text Language Models are Simple Streaming Text to Speech Synthesizers

This paper introduces Interleaved Speech-Text Language Model (IST-LM) for streaming zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS). Unlike many previous approaches, IST-LM is directly trained on interleaved sequences of text and speech tokens with a fixed ratio, eliminating the need for additional efforts in duration prediction and grapheme-to-phoneme alignment. The ratio of text chunk size to speech chunk size is crucial for the performance of IST-LM. To explore this, we conducted a comprehensive series of statistical analyses on the training data and performed correlation analysis with the final performance, uncovering several key factors: 1) the distance between speech tokens and their corresponding text tokens, 2) the number of future text tokens accessible to each speech token, and 3) the frequency of speech tokens precedes their corresponding text tokens. Experimental results demonstrate how to achieve an optimal streaming TTS system without complicated engineering optimization, which has a limited gap with the non-streaming system. IST-LM is conceptually simple and empirically powerful, paving the way for streaming TTS with minimal overhead while largely maintaining performance, showcasing broad prospects coupled with real-time text stream from LLMs.

SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training

Recent advancements highlight the potential of end-to-end real-time spoken dialogue systems, showcasing their low latency and high quality. In this paper, we introduce SLAM-Omni, a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training. SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens and decoupling speaker information to a vocoder. By predicting grouped speech semantic tokens at each step, our method significantly reduces the sequence length of audio tokens, accelerating both training and inference. Additionally, we propose historical text prompting to compress dialogue history, facilitating efficient multi-round interactions. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that SLAM-Omni outperforms prior models of similar scale, requiring only 15 hours of training on 4 GPUs with limited data. Notably, it is the first spoken dialogue system to achieve competitive performance with a single-stage training approach, eliminating the need for pre-training on TTS or ASR tasks. Further experiments validate its multilingual and multi-turn dialogue capabilities on larger datasets.

AlignFormer: Modality Matching Can Achieve Better Zero-shot Instruction-Following Speech-LLM

Integrating speech into LLM (speech-LLM) has gaining increased attention recently. The mainstream solution is to connect a well-trained speech encoder and LLM with a neural adapter. However, the length mismatch between the speech and text sequences are not well handled, leading to imperfect modality matching between the speech and text. In this work, we propose a novel neural adapter, AlignFormer, to reduce the length gap between the two modalities. AlignFormer consists of CTC and dynamic-window QFormer layers, where the CTC alignment provides the dynamic window information for qformer layers. The LLM backbone is frozen in training to preserve its text capability, especially the instruction following capability. When training with only the ASR data, the proposed AlignFormer unlocks the instruction following capability for speech-LLM and the model can perform zero-shot speech translation (ST) and speech question answering (SQA) tasks. In fact, speech-LLM with AlignFormer can theoretically perform any tasks that the LLM backbone can deal with in the speech version. To evaluate the effectiveness of the instruction-following speech-LLM, we propose to use instruction following rate (IFR) and offer a systematic perspective for the IFR evaluation. In addition, we find that the audio position in training would affect the instruction following capability of speech-LLM and conduct an in-depth study on it. Our findings show that audio-first training achieves higher IFR than instruction-first training. The AlignFormer can achieve a near 100% IFR with audio-first training and game-changing improvements from zero to non-zero IFR on some evaluation data with instruction-first training. We believe that this study is a big step towards the perfect speech and text modality matching in the LLM embedding space.

SAM Decoding: Speculative Decoding via Suffix Automaton

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by unifying tasks into text generation, yet their large parameter sizes and autoregressive nature limit inference speed. SAM-Decoding addresses this by introducing a novel retrieval-based speculative decoding method that uses a suffix automaton for efficient and accurate draft generation. Unlike n-gram matching used by the existing method, SAM-Decoding finds the longest suffix match in generating text and text corpuss, achieving an average time complexity of $O(1)$ per generation step. SAM-Decoding constructs static and dynamic suffix automatons for the text corpus and input prompts, respectively, enabling fast and precise draft generation. Meanwhile, it is designed as an approach that can be combined with existing methods, allowing SAM-Decoding to adaptively select a draft generation strategy based on the matching length, thus increasing the inference speed of the LLM. When combined with Token Recycling, evaluations show SAM-Decoding outperforms existing model-free methods, achieving a speedup of $2.27\times$ over autoregressive decoding on Spec-Bench. When combined with EAGLE2, it reaches a speedup of $2.49\times$, surpassing all current approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyx1999/SAM-Decoding.

Scaling Law for Post-training after Model Pruning

Large language models (LLMs) based on the Transformer architecture are widely employed across various domains and tasks. However, their increasing size imposes significant hardware demands, limiting practical deployment. To mitigate this, model pruning techniques have been developed to create more efficient models while maintaining high performance. Despite this, post-training after pruning is crucial for performance recovery and can be resource-intensive. This paper investigates the post-training requirements of pruned LLMs and introduces a scaling law to determine the optimal amount of post-training data. Post-training experiments with the Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5 series models, pruned using depth pruning, width pruning, and 2:4 semi-structured pruning, show that higher pruning ratios necessitate more post-training data for performance recovery, whereas larger LLMs require less. The proposed scaling law predicts a model's loss based on its parameter counts before and after pruning, as well as the post-training token counts. Furthermore, we find that the scaling law established from smaller LLMs can be reliably extrapolated to larger LLMs. This work provides valuable insights into the post-training of pruned LLMs and offers a practical scaling law for optimizing post-training data usage.

APTNESS: Incorporating Appraisal Theory and Emotion Support Strategies for Empathetic Response Generation

Empathetic response generation is designed to comprehend the emotions of others and select the most appropriate strategies to assist them in resolving emotional challenges. Empathy can be categorized into cognitive empathy and affective empathy. The former pertains to the ability to understand and discern the emotional issues and situations of others, while the latter involves the capacity to provide comfort. To enhance one's empathetic abilities, it is essential to develop both these aspects. Therefore, we develop an innovative framework that combines retrieval augmentation and emotional support strategy integration. Our framework starts with the introduction of a comprehensive emotional palette for empathy. We then apply appraisal theory to decompose this palette and create a database of empathetic responses. This database serves as an external resource and enhances the LLM's empathy by integrating semantic retrieval mechanisms. Moreover, our framework places a strong emphasis on the proper articulation of response strategies. By incorporating emotional support strategies, we aim to enrich the model's capabilities in both cognitive and affective empathy, leading to a more nuanced and comprehensive empathetic response. Finally, we extract datasets ED and ET from the empathetic dialogue dataset \textsc{EmpatheticDialogues} and ExTES based on dialogue length. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can enhance the empathy ability of LLMs from both cognitive and affective empathy perspectives. Our code is released at https://github.com/CAS-SIAT-XinHai/APTNESS.

Balancing Information Perception with Yin-Yang: Agent-Based Information Neutrality Model for Recommendation Systems

While preference-based recommendation algorithms effectively enhance user engagement by recommending personalized content, they often result in the creation of ``filter bubbles''. These bubbles restrict the range of information users interact with, inadvertently reinforcing their existing viewpoints. Previous research has focused on modifying these underlying algorithms to tackle this issue. Yet, approaches that maintain the integrity of the original algorithms remain largely unexplored. This paper introduces an Agent-based Information Neutrality model grounded in the Yin-Yang theory, namely, AbIN. This innovative approach targets the imbalance in information perception within existing recommendation systems. It is designed to integrate with these preference-based systems, ensuring the delivery of recommendations with neutral information. Our empirical evaluation of this model proved its efficacy, showcasing its capacity to expand information diversity while respecting user preferences. Consequently, AbIN emerges as an instrumental tool in mitigating the negative impact of filter bubbles on information consumption.

Compressing Large Language Models by Streamlining the Unimportant Layer

Large language models (LLM) have been extensively applied in various natural language tasks and domains, but their applicability is constrained by the large number of parameters of the models. Consequently, there is an increasing emphasis on compact models that exhibit high performance. In this study, we observe that different layers in LLM have varying degrees of perturbation on the hidden states, which allows us to identify less important layers. Based on this phenomenon, we propose LLM-Streamline, which consists of two parts: layer pruning, where we remove a set of consecutive layers with the lowest importance in the model according to the target sparsity; and layer replacement, where we train a lightweight model to substitute the pruned layers, thereby mitigating the performance degradation caused by pruning. In our experiments, we utilize structures such as a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and a transformer layer as lightweight models and ultimately demonstrate that a single MLP can effectively fit the pruned layers. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed method, LLM-Streamline, outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) model pruning methods.

LMDrive: Closed-Loop End-to-End Driving with Large Language Models

Despite significant recent progress in the field of autonomous driving, modern methods still struggle and can incur serious accidents when encountering long-tail unforeseen events and challenging urban scenarios. On the one hand, large language models (LLM) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities that approach "Artificial General Intelligence". On the other hand, previous autonomous driving methods tend to rely on limited-format inputs (e.g. sensor data and navigation waypoints), restricting the vehicle's ability to understand language information and interact with humans. To this end, this paper introduces LMDrive, a novel language-guided, end-to-end, closed-loop autonomous driving framework. LMDrive uniquely processes and integrates multi-modal sensor data with natural language instructions, enabling interaction with humans and navigation software in realistic instructional settings. To facilitate further research in language-based closed-loop autonomous driving, we also publicly release the corresponding dataset which includes approximately 64K instruction-following data clips, and the LangAuto benchmark that tests the system's ability to handle complex instructions and challenging driving scenarios. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted to demonstrate LMDrive's effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, we're the very first work to leverage LLMs for closed-loop end-to-end autonomous driving. Codes, models, and datasets can be found at https://github.com/opendilab/LMDrive