Hanyu Zhao

Sha Yuan, Hanyu Zhao, Shuai Zhao et al. · bytedance, pku

With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.

Yuezihan Jiang, Yu Cheng, Hanyu Zhao et al.

We introduce ZOOMER, a system deployed at Taobao, the largest e-commerce platform in China, for training and serving GNN-based recommendations over web-scale graphs. ZOOMER is designed for tackling two challenges presented by the massive user data at Taobao: low training/serving efficiency due to the huge scale of the graphs, and low recommendation quality due to the information overload which distracts the recommendation model from specific user intentions. ZOOMER achieves this by introducing a key concept, Region of Interests (ROI) in GNNs for recommendations, i.e., a neighborhood region in the graph with significant relevance to a strong user intention. ZOOMER narrows the focus from the whole graph and "zooms in" on the more relevant ROIs, thereby reducing the training/serving cost and mitigating the information overload at the same time. With carefully designed mechanisms, ZOOMER identifies the interest expressed by each recommendation request, constructs an ROI subgraph by sampling with respect to the interest, and guides the GNN to reweigh different parts of the ROI towards the interest by a multi-level attention module. Deployed as a large-scale distributed system, ZOOMER supports graphs with billions of nodes for training and thousands of requests per second for serving. ZOOMER achieves up to 14x speedup when downsizing sampling scales with comparable (even better) AUC performance than baseline methods. Besides, both the offline evaluation and online A/B test demonstrate the effectiveness of ZOOMER.

Yuezihan Jiang, Hao Yang, Junyang Lin et al.

Prompt Learning has recently gained great popularity in bridging the gap between pretraining tasks and various downstream tasks. It freezes Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and only tunes a few task-related parameters (prompts) for downstream tasks, greatly reducing the cost of tuning giant models. The key enabler of this is the idea of querying PLMs with task-specific knowledge implicated in prompts. This paper reveals a major limitation of existing methods that the indiscriminate prompts for all input data in a task ignore the intrinsic knowledge from input data, resulting in sub-optimal performance. We introduce Instance-wise Prompt Tuning (IPT), the first prompt learning paradigm that injects knowledge from the input data instances to the prompts, thereby providing PLMs with richer and more concrete context information. We devise a series of strategies to produce instance-wise prompts, addressing various concerns like model quality and cost-efficiency. Across multiple tasks and resource settings, IPT significantly outperforms task-based prompt learning methods, and achieves comparable performance to conventional finetuning with only 0.5% - 1.5% of tuned parameters.

Yinpeng Dong, Peng Chen, Senyou Deng et al.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

Jijie Li, Li Du, Hanyu Zhao et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance in real-world applications, yet existing open-source instruction datasets often concentrate on narrow domains, such as mathematics or coding, limiting generalization and widening the gap with proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we introduce Infinity-Instruct, a high-quality instruction dataset designed to enhance both foundational and chat capabilities of LLMs through a two-phase pipeline. In Phase 1, we curate 7.4M high-quality foundational instructions (InfInstruct-F-7.4M) from over 100M samples using hybrid data selection techniques. In Phase 2, we synthesize 1.5M high-quality chat instructions (InfInstruct-G-1.5M) through a two-stage process involving instruction selection, evolution, and diagnostic filtering. We empirically evaluate Infinity-Instruct by fine-tuning several open-source models, including Mistral, LLaMA, Qwen, and Yi, and observe substantial performance gains across both foundational and instruction following benchmarks, consistently surpassing official instruction-tuned counterparts. Notably, InfInstruct-LLaMA3.1-70B outperforms GPT-4-0314 by 8.6\% on instruction following tasks while achieving comparable foundational performance. These results underscore the synergy between foundational and chat training and offer new insights into holistic LLM development. Our dataset\footnote{https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/Infinity-Instruct} and codes\footnote{https://gitee.com/li-touch/infinity-instruct} have been publicly released.

Bo-Wen Zhang, Liangdong Wang, Ye Yuan et al.

In recent years, with the rapid application of large language models across various fields, the scale of these models has gradually increased, and the resources required for their pre-training have grown exponentially. Training an LLM from scratch will cost a lot of computation resources while scaling up from a smaller model is a more efficient approach and has thus attracted significant attention. In this paper, we present AquilaMoE, a cutting-edge bilingual 8*16B Mixture of Experts (MoE) language model that has 8 experts with 16 billion parameters each and is developed using an innovative training methodology called EfficientScale. This approach optimizes performance while minimizing data requirements through a two-stage process. The first stage, termed Scale-Up, initializes the larger model with weights from a pre-trained smaller model, enabling substantial knowledge transfer and continuous pretraining with significantly less data. The second stage, Scale-Out, uses a pre-trained dense model to initialize the MoE experts, further enhancing knowledge transfer and performance. Extensive validation experiments on 1.8B and 7B models compared various initialization schemes, achieving models that maintain and reduce loss during continuous pretraining. Utilizing the optimal scheme, we successfully trained a 16B model and subsequently the 8*16B AquilaMoE model, demonstrating significant improvements in performance and training efficiency.

Sha Yuan, Shuai Zhao, Jiahong Leng et al.

Compared with the domain-specific model, the vision-language pre-training models (VLPMs) have shown superior performance on downstream tasks with fast fine-tuning process. For example, ERNIE-ViL, Oscar and UNIMO trained VLPMs with a uniform transformers stack architecture and large amounts of image-text paired data, achieving remarkable results on downstream tasks such as image-text reference(IR and TR), vision question answering (VQA) and image captioning (IC) etc. During the training phase, VLPMs are always fed with a combination of multiple public datasets to meet the demand of large-scare training data. However, due to the unevenness of data distribution including size, task type and quality, using the mixture of multiple datasets for model training can be problematic. In this work, we introduce a large-scale multi-modal corpora named WuDaoMM, totally containing more than 650M image-text pairs. Specifically, about 600 million pairs of data are collected from multiple webpages in which image and caption present weak correlation, and the other 50 million strong-related image-text pairs are collected from some high-quality graphic websites. We also release a base version of WuDaoMM with 5 million strong-correlated image-text pairs, which is sufficient to support the common cross-modal model pre-training. Besides, we trained both an understanding and a generation vision-language (VL) model to test the dataset effectiveness. The results show that WuDaoMM can be applied as an efficient dataset for VLPMs, especially for the model in text-to-image generation task. The data is released at https://data.wudaoai.cn

Liangdong Wang, Bo-Wen Zhang, Chengwei Wu et al.

We present CCI3.0-HQ (https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-HQ), a high-quality 500GB subset of the Chinese Corpora Internet 3.0 (CCI3.0)(https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-Data), developed using a novel two-stage hybrid filtering pipeline that significantly enhances data quality. To evaluate its effectiveness, we trained a 0.5B parameter model from scratch on 100B tokens across various datasets, achieving superior performance on 10 benchmarks in a zero-shot setting compared to CCI3.0, SkyPile, and WanjuanV1. The high-quality filtering process effectively distills the capabilities of the Qwen2-72B-instruct model into a compact 0.5B model, attaining optimal F1 scores for Chinese web data classification. We believe this open-access dataset will facilitate broader access to high-quality language models.

Huiyao Shu, Ang Wang, Ziji Shi et al.

As deep learning models continue to increase in size, the memory requirements for training have surged. While high-level techniques like offloading, recomputation, and compression can alleviate memory pressure, they also introduce overheads. However, a memory-efficient execution plan that includes a reasonable operator execution order and tensor memory layout can significantly increase the models' memory efficiency and reduce overheads from high-level techniques. In this paper, we propose ROAM which operates on computation graph level to derive memory-efficient execution plan with optimized operator order and tensor memory layout for models. We first propose sophisticated theories that carefully consider model structure and training memory load to support optimization for large complex graphs that have not been well supported in the past. An efficient tree-based algorithm is further proposed to search task divisions automatically, along with delivering high performance and effectiveness to solve the problem. Experiments show that ROAM achieves a substantial memory reduction of 35.7%, 13.3%, and 27.2% compared to Pytorch and two state-of-the-art methods and offers a remarkable 53.7x speedup. The evaluation conducted on the expansive GPT2-XL further validates ROAM's scalability.

Hanyu Zhao, Li Du, Yiming Ju et al.

With the availability of various instruction datasets, a pivotal challenge is how to effectively select and integrate these instructions to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). Previous research mainly focuses on selecting individual high-quality instructions. However, these works overlooked the joint interactions and dependencies between different categories of instructions, leading to suboptimal selection strategies. Moreover, the nature of these interaction patterns remains largely unexplored, let alone optimize the instruction set with regard to them. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we: (1) systemically investigate interaction and dependency patterns between different categories of instructions, (2) manage to optimize the instruction set concerning the interaction patterns using a linear programming-based method, and optimize the learning schema of SFT using an instruction dependency taxonomy guided curriculum learning. Experimental results across different LLMs demonstrate improved performance over strong baselines on widely adopted benchmarks.

Yiming Ju, Jijin Hu, Zhengxiong Luo et al.

Text-to-video (T2V) generation has recently attracted considerable attention, resulting in the development of numerous high-quality datasets that have propelled progress in this area. However, existing public datasets are primarily composed of isolated text-video (T-V) pairs and thus fail to support the modeling of coherent multi-clip video sequences. To address this limitation, we introduce CI-VID, a dataset that moves beyond isolated text-to-video (T2V) generation toward text-and-video-to-video (TV2V) generation, enabling models to produce coherent, multi-scene video sequences. CI-VID contains over 340,000 samples, each featuring a coherent sequence of video clips with text captions that capture both the individual content of each clip and the transitions between them, enabling visually and textually grounded generation. To further validate the effectiveness of CI-VID, we design a comprehensive, multi-dimensional benchmark incorporating human evaluation, VLM-based assessment, and similarity-based metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on CI-VID exhibit significant improvements in both accuracy and content consistency when generating video sequences. This facilitates the creation of story-driven content with smooth visual transitions and strong temporal coherence, underscoring the quality and practical utility of the CI-VID dataset We release the CI-VID dataset and the accompanying code for data construction and evaluation at: https://github.com/ymju-BAAI/CI-VID

Biao Sun, Ziming Huang, Hanyu Zhao et al.

Inference serving for large language models (LLMs) is the key to unleashing their potential in people's daily lives. However, efficient LLM serving remains challenging today because the requests are inherently heterogeneous and unpredictable in terms of resource and latency requirements, as a result of the diverse applications and the dynamic execution nature of LLMs. Existing systems are fundamentally limited in handling these characteristics and cause problems such as severe queuing delays, poor tail latencies, and SLO violations. We introduce Llumnix, an LLM serving system that reacts to such heterogeneous and unpredictable requests by runtime rescheduling across multiple model instances. Similar to context switching across CPU cores in modern operating systems, Llumnix reschedules requests to improve load balancing and isolation, mitigate resource fragmentation, and differentiate request priorities and SLOs. Llumnix implements the rescheduling with an efficient and scalable live migration mechanism for requests and their in-memory states, and exploits it in a dynamic scheduling policy that unifies the multiple rescheduling scenarios elegantly. Our evaluations show that Llumnix improves tail latencies by an order of magnitude, accelerates high-priority requests by up to 1.5x, and delivers up to 36% cost savings while achieving similar tail latencies, compared against state-of-the-art LLM serving systems. Llumnix is publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaPAI/llumnix.

Yiming Ju, Hanyu Zhao, Quanyue Ma et al.

Large-scale video repositories are increasingly available for modern video understanding and generation tasks. However, transforming raw videos into high-quality, task-specific datasets remains costly and inefficient. We present DataCube, an intelligent platform for automatic video processing, multi-dimensional profiling, and query-driven retrieval. DataCube constructs structured semantic representations of video clips and supports hybrid retrieval with neural re-ranking and deep semantic matching. Through an interactive web interface, users can efficiently construct customized video subsets from massive repositories for training, analysis, and evaluation, and build searchable systems over their own private video collections. The system is publicly accessible at https://datacube.baai.ac.cn/. Demo Video: https://baai-data-cube.ks3-cn-beijing.ksyuncs.com/custom/Adobe%20Express%20-%202%E6%9C%8818%E6%97%A5%20%281%29%281%29%20%281%29.mp4

Fan Lyu, Kaile Du, Yuyang Li et al.

The prior drift is crucial in Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) methods that only use unlabeled test data, as it can cause significant error propagation. In this paper, we introduce VCoTTA, a variational Bayesian approach to measure uncertainties in CTTA. At the source stage, we transform a pre-trained deterministic model into a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) via a variational warm-up strategy, injecting uncertainties into the model. During the testing time, we employ a mean-teacher update strategy using variational inference for the student model and exponential moving average for the teacher model. Our novel approach updates the student model by combining priors from both the source and teacher models. The evidence lower bound is formulated as the cross-entropy between the student and teacher models, along with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of the prior mixture. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate the method's effectiveness in mitigating prior drift within the CTTA framework.

Fan Lyu, Hanyu Zhao, Ziqi Shi et al.

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt models to sequentially changing domains during testing, relying on pseudo-labels for self-adaptation. However, incorrect pseudo-labels can accumulate, leading to performance degradation. To address this, we propose a Conformal Uncertainty Indicator (CUI) for CTTA, leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP) to generate prediction sets that include the true label with a specified coverage probability. Since domain shifts can lower the coverage than expected, making CP unreliable, we dynamically compensate for the coverage by measuring both domain and data differences. Reliable pseudo-labels from CP are then selectively utilized to enhance adaptation. Experiments confirm that CUI effectively estimates uncertainty and improves adaptation performance across various existing CTTA methods.

Chengwei Wu, Li Du, Hanyu Zhao et al.

Scaling the amount of data used for supervied fine-tuning(SFT) does not guarantee the proportional gains in model performance, highlighting a critical need to understand what makes training samples effective. This work identifies two fundamental dataset properties that govern SFT scalability: \textbf{semantic coverage}, or the breadth of task domains, and \textbf{information depth}, or the richness of individual examples. We demonstrate that simple proxies for these properties explain the majority of validation loss variance in our experiments. In this work, we further propose the \textbf{Information Landscape Approximation (ILA)}, a model-agnostic data selection framework that jointly optimizes for these two factors. ILA constructs compact subsets that approximate the informational value of large datasets. Empirical results show that models tuned on ILA-selected data achieve faster and more sustained performance improvements across diverse tasks and model sizes compared to existing methods, a phenomenon we term \textbf{accelerated scaling}.

Li Du, Hanyu Zhao, Yiming Ju et al.

Instruction tuning has become a foundation for unlocking the capabilities of large-scale pretrained models and improving their performance on complex tasks. Thus, the construction of high-quality instruction datasets is crucial for enhancing model performance and generalizability. Although current instruction datasets have reached tens of millions of samples, models finetuned on them may still struggle with complex instruction following and tasks in rare domains. This is primarily due to limited expansion in both ``coverage'' (coverage of task types and knowledge areas) and ``depth'' (instruction complexity) of the instruction set. To address this issue, we propose a systematic instruction data construction framework, which integrates a hierarchical labeling system, an informative seed selection algorithm, an evolutionary data synthesis process, and a model deficiency diagnosis with targeted data generation. These components form an iterative closed-loop to continuously enhance the coverage and depth of instruction data. Based on this framework, we construct InfinityInstruct-Subject, a high-quality dataset containing ~1.5 million instructions. Experiments on multiple foundation models and benchmark tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in improving instruction-following capabilities. Further analyses suggest that InfinityInstruct-Subject shows enlarged coverage and depth compared to comparable synthesized instruction datasets. Our work lays a theoretical and practical foundation for the efficient, continuous evolution of instruction datasets, moving from data quantity expansion to qualitative improvement.

Yu Guan, Zhiyu Yin, Haoyu Chen et al.

Troubleshooting performance problems of large model training (LMT) is immensely challenging, due to unprecedented scales of modern GPU clusters, the complexity of software-hardware interactions, and the data intensity of the training process. Existing troubleshooting approaches designed for traditional distributed systems or datacenter networks fall short and can hardly apply to real-world training systems. In this paper, we present PerfTracker, the first online troubleshooting system utilizing fine-grained profiling, to diagnose performance issues of large-scale model training in production. PerfTracker can diagnose performance issues rooted in both hardware (e.g., GPUs and their interconnects) and software (e.g., Python functions and GPU operations). It scales to LMT on modern GPU clusters. PerfTracker effectively summarizes runtime behavior patterns of fine-grained LMT functions via online profiling, and leverages differential observability to localize the root cause with minimal production impact. PerfTracker has been deployed as a production service for large-scale GPU clusters of O(10, 000) GPUs (product homepage https://help.aliyun.com/zh/pai/user-guide/perftracker-online-performance-analysis-diagnostic-tool). It has been used to diagnose a variety of difficult performance issues.

Jianbo Dong, Bin Luo, Jun Zhang et al.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has necessitated the adoption of distributed training techniques, involving the deployment of thousands of GPUs to train a single model. Unfortunately, the efficiency of large-scale distributed training systems is often suboptimal due to the increased likelihood of hardware errors in high-end GPU products and the heightened risk of network traffic collisions. Moreover, any local hardware failure can disrupt training tasks, and the inability to swiftly identify faulty components leads to a significant waste of GPU resources. And, prolonged communication due to traffic collisions can substantially increase GPU waiting times. To address these challenges, we propose a communication-driven solution, namely the C4. The key insights of C4 are twofold. First, the load in distributed training exhibits homogeneous characteristics and is divided into iterations through periodic synchronization, therefore hardware anomalies would incur certain syndrome in collective communication. By leveraging this feature, C4 can rapidly identify the faulty components, swiftly isolate the anomaly, and restart the task, thereby avoiding resource wastage caused by delays in anomaly detection. Second, the predictable communication model of collective communication, involving a limited number of long-lived flows, allows C4 to efficiently execute traffic planning, substantially reducing bandwidth competition among these flows. The C4 has been extensively deployed across real-world production systems in a hyperscale cloud provider, yielding a significant improvement in system efficiency, from 30% to 45%. This enhancement is attributed to a 30% reduction in error-induced overhead and a 15% reduction in communication costs.

Hanyu Zhao, Sha Yuan, Jiahong Leng et al.

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions with the help of an external knowledge base. The core idea is to find the link between the internal knowledge behind questions and known triples of the knowledge base. Traditional KBQA task pipelines contain several steps, including entity recognition, entity linking, answering selection, etc. In this kind of pipeline methods, errors in any procedure will inevitably propagate to the final prediction. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a Corpus Generation - Retrieve Method (CGRM) with Pre-training Language Model (PLM) for the KBQA task. The major novelty lies in the design of the new method, wherein our approach, the knowledge enhanced T5 (kT5) model aims to generate natural language QA pairs based on Knowledge Graph triples and directly solve the QA by retrieving the synthetic dataset. The new method can extract more information about the entities from PLM to improve accuracy and simplify the processes. We test our method on NLPCC-ICCPOL 2016 KBQA dataset, and the results show that our method improves the performance of KBQA and the out straight-forward method is competitive with the state-of-the-art.

Yunteng Luan, Hanyu Zhao, Zhi Yang et al.

As the development of neural networks, more and more deep neural networks are adopted in various tasks, such as image classification. However, as the huge computational overhead, these networks could not be applied on mobile devices or other low latency scenes. To address this dilemma, multi-classifier convolutional network is proposed to allow faster inference via early classifiers with the corresponding classifiers. These networks utilize sophisticated designing to increase the early classifier accuracy. However, naively training the multi-classifier network could hurt the performance (accuracy) of deep neural networks as early classifiers throughout interfere with the feature generation process. In this paper, we propose a general training framework named multi-self-distillation learning (MSD), which mining knowledge of different classifiers within the same network and increase every classifier accuracy. Our approach can be applied not only to multi-classifier networks, but also modern CNNs (e.g., ResNet Series) augmented with additional side branch classifiers. We use sampling-based branch augmentation technique to transform a single-classifier network into a multi-classifier network. This reduces the gap of capacity between different classifiers, and improves the effectiveness of applying MSD. Our experiments show that MSD improves the accuracy of various networks: enhancing the accuracy of every classifier significantly for existing multi-classifier network (MSDNet), improving vanilla single-classifier networks with internal classifiers with high accuracy, while also improving the final accuracy.