16 accepted papers
Traditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models lack explicit constraints to ensure the router’s decisions align well with the experts’ capabilities, which ultimately limits model performance. To address this, we propose expert-router coupling loss (ERC loss), a lightweight auxiliary loss that couples e…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models mostly use a router to assign tokens to specific expert modules, activating only partial parameters and often outperforming dense models. We argue that the separation between the router's decision-making and the experts' execution is a critical yet overlooked issue, l…
Symbolic music generation aims to create musical notes, which can help users compose music, such as generating target instrument tracks based on provided source tracks. In practical scenarios where there’s a predefined ensemble of tracks and various composition needs, an efficient and effective gene
Many positional encodings (PEs) are designed to exhibit long-term decay, based on an entrenched and long-standing inductive opinion: tokens farther away from the current position carry less relevant information. We argue that long-term decay is outdated in the era of LLMs, as LLMs are now applied to…
We examine the pre-training dynamics of language models, focusing on their ability to copy text from preceding context—a fundamental skill for various LLM applications, including in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We propose a novel perspective that Transformer-based…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) without requiring parameter updates. However, as ICL demonstrations increase from a few to many, performance tends to plateau and eventually decline. We identify two primary causes for this trend: the suboptimal negative log-li…
The increasing demand for long-context generation has made the KV cache in large language models a bottleneck in memory consumption. Quantizing the cache to lower bit widths is an effective way to reduce memory costs; however, previous methods struggle with key cache quantization due to outliers, re…
In this paper, by treating in-context learning (ICL) as a meta-optimization process, we explain why LLMs are sensitive to the order of ICL examples. This understanding leads us to the development of Batch-ICL, an effective, efficient, and order-agnostic inference algorithm for ICL. Differing from th…
In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing LLMs for tool-use. Specifically, the crucial information in the…
In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models insuch domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise supervisory signals from human labeling, larger models, or self-sam…
Many studies have revealed that large language models (LLMs) exhibit uneven awareness of different contextual positions. Their limited context awareness can lead to overlooking critical information and subsequent task failures. While several approaches have been proposed to enhance LLMs' context awa…
Is it always necessary to compute tokens from shallow to deep layers in Transformers? The continued success of vanilla Transformers and their variants suggests an undoubted “yes”. In this work, however, we attempt to break the depth-ordered convention by proposing a novel architecture dubbed mixture…
Current lyric-to-melody generation methods struggle with the lack of paired lyric-melody data to train, and the lack of adherence to composition guidelines, resulting in melodies that do not sound human-composed. To address these issues, we propose a novel paradigm called Re-creation of Creations (R…
In open-domain dialogue generation tasks, contexts and responses in most datasets are one-to-one mapped, violating an important many-to-many characteristic: a context leads to various responses, and a response answers multiple contexts. Without such patterns, models poorly generalize and prefer resp…
In this paper, we define a widely neglected property in dialogue text, duality, which is a hierarchical property that is reflected in human behaviours in daily conversations: Based on the logic in a conversation (or a sentence), people can infer follow-up utterances (or tokens) based on the previous…
Autoregressive sequence generation, a prevalent task in machine learning and natural language processing, generates every target token conditioned on both a source input and previously generated target tokens. Previous data augmentation methods, which have been shown to be effective for the task, ma…