Tingwei Lu

Yangning Li, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li et al.

The Entity Set Expansion (ESE) task aims to expand a handful of seed entities with new entities belonging to the same semantic class. Conventional ESE methods are based on mono-modality (i.e., literal modality), which struggle to deal with complex entities in the real world such as: (1) Negative entities with fine-grained semantic differences. (2) Synonymous entities. (3) Polysemous entities. (4) Long-tailed entities. These challenges prompt us to propose Multi-modal Entity Set Expansion (MESE), where models integrate information from multiple modalities to represent entities. Intuitively, the benefits of multi-modal information for ESE are threefold: (1) Different modalities can provide complementary information. (2) Multi-modal information provides a unified signal via common visual properties for the same semantic class or entity. (3) Multi-modal information offers robust alignment signal for synonymous entities. To assess the performance of model in MESE and facilitate further research, we constructed the MESED dataset which is the first multi-modal dataset for ESE with large-scale and elaborate manual calibration. A powerful multi-modal model MultiExpan is proposed which is pre-trained on four multimodal pre-training tasks. The extensive experiments and analyses on MESED demonstrate the high quality of the dataset and the effectiveness of our MultiExpan, as well as pointing the direction for future research.

Jiwei Tang, Shilei Liu, Zhicheng Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capability across diverse tasks. However, their deployment in long-context scenarios is hindered by two challenges: computational inefficiency and redundant information. We propose RAM (Read As HuMan), a context compression framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy, to address these challenges. Inspired by human reading behavior (i.e., close reading important content while skimming less relevant content), RAM partitions the context into segments and encodes them with the input query in parallel. High-relevance segments are fully retained (close reading), while low-relevance ones are query-guided compressed into compact summary vectors (skimming). Both explicit textual segments and implicit summary vectors are concatenated and fed into decoder to achieve both superior performance and natural language format interpretability. To refine the decision boundary between close reading and skimming, we further introduce a contrastive learning objective based on positive and negative query-segment pairs. Experiments demonstrate that RAM outperforms existing baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks across two backbones, while delivering up to a 12x end-to-end speedup on long inputs (average length 16K; maximum length 32K).

Jiwei Tang, Jin Xu, Tingwei Lu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in various scenarios. However, they suffer from much redundant information and are sensitive to the position of key information in long context scenarios. To address these challenges, we present Perception Compressor, a training-free prompt compression framework. It includes a perception retriever that leverages guiding questions and instruction to retrieve the most relevant demonstrations, a dual-slope ratio allocator to dynamically allocate compression ratios and open-book ratios, and a semi-guided iterative compression that retains key information at the token level while removing tokens that distract the LLM. We conduct extensive experiments on long context benchmarks, i.e., NaturalQuestions, LongBench, and MuSiQue. Experiment results show that Perception Compressor outperforms existing methods by a large margin, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Shunlong Wu, Hai Lin, Shaoshen Chen et al.

Existing KV cache compression methods generally operate on discrete tokens or non-semantic chunks. However, such approaches often lead to semantic fragmentation, where linguistically coherent units are disrupted, causing irreversible information loss and degradation in model performance. To address this, we introduce SemantiCache, a novel compression framework that preserves semantic integrity by aligning the compression process with the semantic hierarchical nature of language. Specifically, we first partition the cache into semantically coherent chunks by delimiters, which are natural semantic boundaries. Within each chunk, we introduce a computationally efficient Greedy Seed-Based Clustering (GSC) algorithm to group tokens into semantic clusters. These clusters are further merged into semantic cores, enhanced by a Proportional Attention mechanism that rebalances the reduced attention contributions of the merged tokens. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and models demonstrate that SemantiCache accelerates the decoding stage of inference by up to 2.61 times and substantially reduces memory footprint, while maintaining performance comparable to the original model.

Jiwei Tang, Zhicheng Zhang, Shunlong Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, when applied to long-context scenarios, they face two challenges, i.e., low computational efficiency and much redundant information. This paper introduces GMSA, a context compression framework based on the encoder-decoder architecture, which addresses these challenges by reducing input sequence length and redundant information. Structurally, GMSA has two key components: Group Merging and Layer Semantic Alignment (LSA). Group merging is used to effectively and efficiently extract summary vectors from the original context. Layer semantic alignment, on the other hand, aligns the high-level summary vectors with the low-level primary input semantics, thus bridging the semantic gap between different layers. In the training process, GMSA first learns soft tokens that contain complete semantics through autoencoder training. To furtherly adapt GMSA to downstream tasks, we propose Knowledge Extraction Fine-tuning (KEFT) to extract knowledge from the soft tokens for downstream tasks. We train GMSA by randomly sampling the compression rate for each sample in the dataset. Under this condition, GMSA not only significantly outperforms the traditional compression paradigm in context restoration but also achieves stable and significantly faster convergence with only a few encoder layers. In downstream question-answering (QA) tasks, GMSA can achieve approximately a 2x speedup in end-to-end inference while outperforming both the original input prompts and various state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by a large margin.

Tingwei Lu, Yangning Li, Liyuan Wang et al.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly promoted the development of code generation task, sparking a surge in pertinent literature. Current research is hindered by redundant generation results and a tendency to overfit local patterns in the short term. Although existing studies attempt to alleviate the issue by adopting a multi-token prediction strategy, there remains limited focus on choosing the appropriate processing length for generations. By analyzing the attention between tokens during the generation process of LLMs, it can be observed that the high spikes of the attention scores typically appear at the end of lines. This insight suggests that it is reasonable to treat each line of code as a fundamental processing unit and generate them sequentially. Inspired by this, we propose the \textbf{LSR-MCTS} algorithm, which leverages MCTS to determine the code line-by-line and select the optimal path. Further, we integrate a self-refine mechanism at each node to enhance diversity and generate higher-quality programs through error correction. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analyses on three public coding benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance approaches.

Qingsong Lv, Yangning Li, Zihua Lan et al.

In the instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), it is widely recognized that a few high-quality instructions are superior to a large number of low-quality instructions. At present, many instruction selection methods have been proposed, but most of these methods select instruction based on heuristic quality metrics, and only consider data selection before training. These designs lead to insufficient optimization of instruction fine-tuning, and fixed heuristic indicators are often difficult to optimize for specific tasks. Therefore, we design a dynamic, task-objective-driven instruction selection framework RAISE(Reinforced Adaptive Instruction SElection), which incorporates the entire instruction fine-tuning process into optimization, selecting instructions at each step based on the expected impact of each instruction on model performance improvement. Our approach is well interpretable and has strong task-specific optimization capabilities. By modeling dynamic instruction selection as a sequential decision-making process, we use RL to train our selection strategy. Extensive experiments and result analysis prove the superiority of our method compared with other instruction selection methods. Notably, RAISE achieves superior performance by updating only 1% of the training steps compared to full-data training, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.

Yangning Li, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li et al.

Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models (LLMs) trained on a given instruction dataset. Curriculum learning as a typical data organization strategy has shown preliminary effectiveness in instruction tuning. However, current curriculum tuning methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, since they rely solely on static heuristic difficulty metrics. These methods fail to adapt to the evolving capabilities of models during training, resulting in a fixed and potentially sub-optimal learning trajectory. To address the issue, Competence-Aware Multi-Perspective cUrriculum inStruction tuning framework termed CAMPUS is proposed. CAMPUS offers several advantages: (1) Dynamic selection for sub-curriculum. (2) Competency-aware adjustment to the curriculum schedule. (3) Multiple difficulty-based scheduling. Extensive experiments prove the superior performance of CAMPUS, compared to other state-of-the-art baselines for efficient instruction tuning.