11 accepted papers
This work identifies anisotropy in the singular value spectra of parameters, activations, and gradients as the fundamental barrier to low-bit training of large language models (LLMs). These spectra are dominated by a small fraction of large singular values, inducing wide numerical ranges that cause…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are often considered a natural fit for continual learning because sparse routing should localize updates and reduce interference, yet MoE Transformers still forget substantially even with sparse, well-balanced expert utilization. We attribute this gap to a pre-…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale Large Language Models via expert specialization induced by conditional computation. In practice, however, expert specialization often fails: some experts become functionally similar, while others functioning as de facto shared experts, limiting the effect…
Gradient signals in LLM training are highly anisotropic: recurrent linguistic structure concentrates energy into a small set of dominant spectral directions, while context-specific information resides in a long tail. We show that this spike–tail separation persists throughout training, with the spik…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is widely adopted to deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices with limited memory budgets. Although MoE is, in theory, an inborn memory-friendly architecture requiring only a few activated experts to reside in the memory for inference, current MoE architectures ca…
Language models (LMs) only pretrained on a general and massive corpus usually cannot attain satisfying performance on domain-specific downstream tasks, and hence, applying domain-specific pretraining to LMs is a common and indispensable practice. However, domain-specific pretraining can be costly an…
This work pursues the optimization of over-parameterized deep models for superior training efficiency and test performance. We first theoretically emphasize the importance of two properties of over-parameterized models, i.e., the convergence gap and the generalization gap. Subsequent analyses unveil…
Despite their prevalence in deep-learning communities, over-parameterized models convey high demands of computational costs for proper training. This work studies the fine-grained, modular-level learning dynamics of over-parameterized models to attain a more efficient and fruitful training strategy.…
Disentangled feature representation is essential for data-efficient learning. The feature space of deep models is inherently compositional. Existing $\beta$-VAE-based methods, which only apply disentanglement regularization to the resulting embedding space of deep models, cannot effectively regulari…
For real-time semantic video segmentation, most recent works utilised a dynamic framework with a key scheduler to make online key/non-key decisions. Some works used a fixed key scheduling policy, while others proposed adaptive key scheduling methods based on heuristic strategies, both of which may l…
Metric learning aims to learn a distance measure that can benefit distance-based methods such as the nearest neighbour (NN) classifier. While considerable efforts have been made to improve its empirical performance and analyze its generalization ability by focusing on the data structure and model co…