Ernie Chang

Aarohi Srivastava, Abhinav Rastogi, Abhishek Rao et al. · allen-ai, amazon-science

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 450 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Angela Fan et al. · deepmind, mila

Recent advances in the pre-training of language models leverage large-scale datasets to create multilingual models. However, low-resource languages are mostly left out in these datasets. This is primarily because many widely spoken languages are not well represented on the web and therefore excluded from the large-scale crawls used to create datasets. Furthermore, downstream users of these models are restricted to the selection of languages originally chosen for pre-training. This work investigates how to optimally leverage existing pre-trained models to create low-resource translation systems for 16 African languages. We focus on two questions: 1) How can pre-trained models be used for languages not included in the initial pre-training? and 2) How can the resulting translation models effectively transfer to new domains? To answer these questions, we create a new African news corpus covering 16 languages, of which eight languages are not part of any existing evaluation dataset. We demonstrate that the most effective strategy for transferring both to additional languages and to additional domains is to fine-tune large pre-trained models on small quantities of high-quality translation data.

Yanbei Chen, Hanxian Huang, Ernie Chang et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become the de facto architecture for hundred-billion-parameter language models, yet its advantages at sub-billion scales for on-device deployment remain largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present MobileMoE, a family of on-device MoE language models with sub-billion active parameters (0.3-0.9B active and 1.3-5.3B total) that establish a new Pareto frontier for on-device LLMs. We first formulate an on-device MoE scaling law that jointly optimizes MoE architecture under mobile memory and compute constraints, identifying an on-device sweet spot - moderate sparsity with fine-grained and shared experts - that is simultaneously memory and compute-optimal. Building on the derived architectures, we train MobileMoE with a four-stage recipe covering pre-training, mid-training, instruction fine-tuning, and quantization-aware training, all on open-source datasets. Across 14 benchmarks, MobileMoE matches or exceeds leading on-device dense LLMs with 2-4$\times$ fewer inference FLOPs, and matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art MoE OLMoE-1B-7B with up to 60% fewer parameters. To bridge the last mile to mobile deployment, we provide the first efficient MoE inference on commodity smartphones with comprehensive on-device profiling. At comparable INT4 weight memory, MobileMoE-S delivers $1.8$-$3.8\times$ faster prefill and $2.2$-$3.4\times$ faster decode than the dense baseline MobileLLM-Pro.

Qingyu Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen, Ernie Chang et al.

Owing to the lack of corpora for low-resource languages, current works on dialogue generation have mainly focused on English. In this paper, we present mDIA, the first large-scale multilingual benchmark for dialogue generation across low- to high-resource languages. It covers real-life conversations in 46 languages across 19 language families. We present baseline results obtained by fine-tuning the multilingual, non-dialogue-focused pre-trained model mT5 as well as English-centric, dialogue-focused pre-trained chatbot DialoGPT. The results show that mT5-based models perform better on sacreBLEU and BertScore but worse on diversity. Even though promising results are found in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, there is a large gap between the generation quality in English and other languages. We hope that the release of mDIA could encourage more works on multilingual dialogue generation to promote language diversity.

Yang Li, Liangzhen Lai, Yuan Shangguan et al.

Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition models usually process a limited number of tokens each time, making attention score calculation less of a bottleneck. Instead, the bottleneck lies in the linear projection layers of multi-head attention and feedforward networks, constituting a substantial portion of the model size and contributing significantly to computation, memory, and power usage. To address this bottleneck, we propose folding attention, a technique targeting these linear layers, significantly reducing model size and improving memory and power efficiency. Experiments on on-device Transformer-based streaming speech recognition models show that folding attention reduces model size (and corresponding memory consumption) by up to 24% and power consumption by up to 23%, all without compromising model accuracy or computation overhead.

Yangyang Shi, Gael Le Lan, Varun Nagaraja et al.

This paper presents an innovative approach to enhance control over audio generation by emphasizing the alignment between audio and text representations during model training. In the context of language model-based audio generation, the model leverages input from both textual and audio token representations to predict subsequent audio tokens. However, the current configuration lacks explicit regularization to ensure the alignment between the chosen text representation and the language model's predictions. Our proposal involves the incorporation of audio and text representation regularization, particularly during the classifier-free guidance (CFG) phase, where the text condition is excluded from cross attention during language model training. The aim of this proposed representation regularization is to minimize discrepancies in audio and text similarity compared to other samples within the same training batch. Experimental results on both music and audio generation tasks demonstrate that our proposed methods lead to improvements in objective metrics for both audio and music generation, as well as an enhancement in the human perception for audio generation.

Ernie Chang, Muhammad Hassan Rashid, Pin-Jie Lin et al.

Knowing exactly how many data points need to be labeled to achieve a certain model performance is a hugely beneficial step towards reducing the overall budgets for annotation. It pertains to both active learning and traditional data annotation, and is particularly beneficial for low resource scenarios. Nevertheless, it remains a largely under-explored area of research in NLP. We therefore explored various techniques for estimating the training sample size necessary to achieve a targeted performance value. We derived a simple yet effective approach to predict the maximum achievable model performance based on small amount of training samples - which serves as an early indicator during data annotation for data quality and sample size determination. We performed ablation studies on four language understanding tasks, and showed that the proposed approach allows us to forecast model performance within a small margin of mean absolute error (~ 0.9%) with only 10% data.

Pin-Jie Lin, Muhammed Saeed, Ernie Chang et al.

Developing effective spoken language processing systems for low-resource languages poses several challenges due to the lack of parallel data and limited resources for fine-tuning models. In this work, we target on improving upon both text classification and translation of Nigerian Pidgin (Naija) by collecting a large-scale parallel English-Pidgin corpus and further propose a framework of cross-lingual adaptive training that includes both continual and task adaptive training so as to adapt a base pre-trained model to low-resource languages. Our studies show that English pre-trained language models serve as a stronger prior than multilingual language models on English-Pidgin tasks with up to 2.38 BLEU improvements; and demonstrate that augmenting orthographic data and using task adaptive training with back-translation can have a significant impact on model performance.

Ernie Chang, Sidd Srinivasan, Mahi Luthra et al.

Text-to-audio generation (TTA) produces audio from a text description, learning from pairs of audio samples and hand-annotated text. However, commercializing audio generation is challenging as user-input prompts are often under-specified when compared to text descriptions used to train TTA models. In this work, we treat TTA models as a ``blackbox'' and address the user prompt challenge with two key insights: (1) User prompts are generally under-specified, leading to a large alignment gap between user prompts and training prompts. (2) There is a distribution of audio descriptions for which TTA models are better at generating higher quality audio, which we refer to as ``audionese''. To this end, we rewrite prompts with instruction-tuned models and propose utilizing text-audio alignment as feedback signals via margin ranking learning for audio improvements. On both objective and subjective human evaluations, we observed marked improvements in both text-audio alignment and music audio quality.

Ernie Chang, Pin-Jie Lin, Yang Li et al.

Language model pretraining generally targets a broad range of use cases and incorporates data from diverse sources. However, there are instances where we desire a model that excels in specific areas without markedly compromising performance in other areas. A cost-effective and straightforward approach is sampling with low-dimensional data features, which allows to select large-scale pretraining data for domain-specific use cases. In this work, we revisit importance sampling with n-gram features consisting of multi-granular tokens, which strikes a good balance between sentence compression and representation capabilities. We observed the sampled data to have a high correlation with the target downstream task performance while preserving its effectiveness on other tasks. This leads to the proposed data sampling paradigm where language models can be pretrained more efficiently on selected documents. On eight benchmarks we demonstrate with $\sim$1% of the data, pretrained models perform on par with the full RefinedWeb data and outperform randomly selected samples for model sizes ranging from 125M to 1.5B.

Ernie Chang, Pin-Jie Lin, Yang Li et al.

Distributional shift is a central challenge in the deployment of machine learning models as they can be ill-equipped for real-world data. This is particularly evident in text-to-audio generation where the encoded representations are easily undermined by unseen prompts, which leads to the degradation of generated audio -- the limited set of the text-audio pairs remains inadequate for conditional audio generation in the wild as user prompts are under-specified. In particular, we observe a consistent audio quality degradation in generated audio samples with user prompts, as opposed to training set prompts. To this end, we present a retrieval-based in-context prompt editing framework that leverages the training captions as demonstrative exemplars to revisit the user prompts. We show that the framework enhanced the audio quality across the set of collected user prompts, which were edited with reference to the training captions as exemplars.

Dylan R. Ashley, Gaël Le Lan, Changsheng Zhao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency (e.g., number of parameters) and output quality, especially when deployed on computationally limited devices such as phones or laptops. One way to address this challenge is by following the example of humans and have models ask for help when they believe they are incapable of solving a problem on their own; we can overcome this trade-off by allowing smaller models to respond to queries when they believe they can provide good responses, and deferring to larger models when they do not believe they can. To this end, in this paper, we investigate the viability of Predict-Answer/Act (PA) and Reason-Predict-Reason-Answer/Act (RPRA) paradigms where models predict -- prior to responding -- how an LLM judge would score their output. We evaluate three approaches: zero-shot prediction, prediction using an in-context report card, and supervised fine-tuning. Our results show that larger models (particularly reasoning models) perform well when predicting generic LLM judges zero-shot, while smaller models can reliably predict such judges well after being fine-tuned or provided with an in-context report card. Altogether, both approaches can substantially improve the prediction accuracy of smaller models, with report cards and fine-tuning achieving mean improvements of up to 55% and 52% across datasets, respectively. These findings suggest that models can learn to predict their own performance limitations, paving the way for more efficient and self-aware AI systems.

Wenxuan Zhang, Lemeng Wu, Changsheng Zhao et al.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation, which in turn presents new challenges for aligning them with human preferences. In this work, we aim to improve the policy optimization for dLLMs by reducing the cost of the trajectory probability calculation, thereby enabling scaled-up offline policy training. We prove that: (i) under reference policy regularization, the probability ratio of the newly unmasked tokens is an unbiased estimate of that of intermediate diffusion states, and (ii) the probability of the full trajectory can be effectively estimated with a single forward pass of a re-masked final state. By integrating these two trajectory reduction strategies into a policy optimization objective, we propose Trajectory Reduction Policy Optimization (dTRPO). We evaluate dTRPO on 7B dLLMs across instruction-following and reasoning benchmarks. Results show that it substantially improves the core performance of state-of-the-art dLLMs, achieving gains of up to 9.6% on STEM tasks, up to 4.3% on coding tasks, and up to 3.0% on instruction-following tasks. Moreover, dTRPO exhibits strong training efficiency due to its offline, single-forward nature, and achieves improved generation efficiency through high-quality outputs.

Mingchen Zhuge, Changsheng Zhao, Haozhe Liu et al.

We propose a new frontier: Neural Computers (NCs) -- an emerging machine form that unifies computation, memory, and I/O in a learned runtime state. Unlike conventional computers, which execute explicit programs, agents, which act over external execution environments, and world models, which learn environment dynamics, NCs aim to make the model itself the running computer. Our long-term goal is the Completely Neural Computer (CNC): the mature, general-purpose realization of this emerging machine form, with stable execution, explicit reprogramming, and durable capability reuse. As an initial step, we study whether early NC primitives can be learned solely from collected I/O traces, without instrumented program state. Concretely, we instantiate NCs as video models that roll out screen frames from instructions, pixels, and user actions (when available) in CLI and GUI settings. These implementations show that learned runtimes can acquire early interface primitives, especially I/O alignment and short-horizon control, while routine reuse, controlled updates, and symbolic stability remain open. We outline a roadmap toward CNCs around these challenges. If overcome, CNCs could establish a new computing paradigm beyond today's agents, world models, and conventional computers.

Shuming Liu, Mingchen Zhuge, Changsheng Zhao et al.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for multimodal large language models on video understanding tasks. However, its necessity and advantages over direct answering remain underexplored. In this paper, we first demonstrate that for RL-trained video models, direct answering often matches or even surpasses CoT performance, despite CoT producing step-by-step analyses at a higher computational cost. Motivated by this, we propose VideoAuto-R1, a video understanding framework that adopts a reason-when-necessary strategy. During training, our approach follows a Thinking Once, Answering Twice paradigm: the model first generates an initial answer, then performs reasoning, and finally outputs a reviewed answer. Both answers are supervised via verifiable rewards. During inference, the model uses the confidence score of the initial answer to determine whether to proceed with reasoning. Across video QA and grounding benchmarks, VideoAuto-R1 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly improved efficiency, reducing the average response length by ~3.3x, e.g., from 149 to just 44 tokens. Moreover, we observe a low rate of thinking-mode activation on perception-oriented tasks, but a higher rate on reasoning-intensive tasks. This suggests that explicit language-based reasoning is generally beneficial but not always necessary.

Patrick Huber, Ernie Chang, Wei Wen et al.

Efficient on-device language models around 1 billion parameters are essential for powering low-latency AI applications on mobile and wearable devices. However, achieving strong performance in this model class, while supporting long context windows and practical deployment remains a significant challenge. We introduce MobileLLM-Pro, a 1-billion-parameter language model optimized for on-device deployment. MobileLLM-Pro achieves state-of-the-art results across 11 standard benchmarks, significantly outperforming both Gemma 3-1B and Llama 3.2-1B, while supporting context windows of up to 128,000 tokens and showing only minor performance regressions at 4-bit quantization. These improvements are enabled by four core innovations: (1) implicit positional distillation, a novel technique that effectively instills long-context capabilities through knowledge distillation; (2) a specialist model merging framework that fuses multiple domain experts into a compact model without parameter growth; (3) simulation-driven data mixing using utility estimation; and (4) 4-bit quantization-aware training with self-distillation. We release our model weights and code to support future research in efficient on-device language models.

Ashish Seth, Xinhao Mei, Changsheng Zhao et al.

Understanding egocentric videos plays a vital role for embodied intelligence. Recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) can accept both visual and audio inputs. However, due to the challenge of obtaining text labels with coherent joint-modality information, whether MLLMs can jointly understand both modalities in egocentric videos remains under-explored. To address this problem, we introduce EgoAVU, a scalable data engine to automatically generate egocentric audio-visual narrations, questions, and answers. EgoAVU enriches human narrations with multimodal context and generates audio-visual narrations through cross-modal correlation modeling. Token-based video filtering and modular, graph-based curation ensure both data diversity and quality. Leveraging EgoAVU, we construct EgoAVU-Instruct, a large-scale training dataset of 3M samples, and EgoAVU-Bench, a manually verified evaluation split covering diverse tasks. EgoAVU-Bench clearly reveals the limitations of existing MLLMs: they bias heavily toward visual signals, often neglecting audio cues or failing to correspond audio with the visual source. Finetuning MLLMs on EgoAVU-Instruct effectively addresses this issue, enabling up to 113% performance improvement on EgoAVU-Bench. Such benefits also transfer to other benchmarks such as EgoTempo and EgoIllusion, achieving up to 28% relative performance gain. Code will be released to the community.

Changsheng Zhao, Ernie Chang, Zechun Liu et al.

The paradigm shift in large language models (LLMs) from instinctive responses to chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has fueled two prevailing assumptions: (1) reasoning capabilities only emerge in sufficiently large models, and (2) such capabilities require training on massive datasets. While the first assumption has already been challenged by recent sub-billion-parameter reasoning models such as Qwen3-0.6B and DeepSeek distilled variants, the second remains largely unquestioned. In this work, we revisit the necessity of scaling to extremely large corpora (>10T tokens) for reasoning emergence. By carefully curating and resampling open-source datasets that we identify as beneficial under our designed metrics, we demonstrate that strong reasoning abilities can emerge with far less data. Specifically, we show that only ~2T tokens of high-quality data are sufficient, and pre-training with 4.2T tokens on the dataset resampled from these ~2T tokens, followed by a established post-training procedure, enables the development of MobileLLM-R1, a series of sub-billion-parameter reasoning models that substantially outperform prior models trained on fully open-sourced data. For example, MobileLLM-R1-950M achieves an AIME score of 15.5, compared to just 0.6 for OLMo-2-1.48B and 0.3 for SmolLM-2-1.7B. Remarkably, despite being trained on only 11.7% of the tokens compared to Qwen3's proprietary 36T-token corpus for pretraining, MobileLLM-R1-950M matches or surpasses Qwen3-0.6B across multiple reasoning benchmarks. To facilitate further research in this direction, we have released the complete training recipe, data sources, data mixing ratio, and model checkpoints, together with the key insights obtained throughout this study.

Zechun Liu, Changsheng Zhao, Forrest Iandola et al.

This paper addresses the growing need for efficient large language models (LLMs) on mobile devices, driven by increasing cloud costs and latency concerns. We focus on designing top-quality LLMs with fewer than a billion parameters, a practical choice for mobile deployment. Contrary to prevailing belief emphasizing the pivotal role of data and parameter quantity in determining model quality, our investigation underscores the significance of model architecture for sub-billion scale LLMs. Leveraging deep and thin architectures, coupled with embedding sharing and grouped-query attention mechanisms, we establish a strong baseline network denoted as MobileLLM, which attains a remarkable 2.7%/4.3% accuracy boost over preceding 125M/350M state-of-the-art models. Additionally, we propose an immediate block-wise weight-sharing approach with no increase in model size and only marginal latency overhead. The resultant models, denoted as MobileLLM-LS, demonstrate a further accuracy enhancement of 0.7%/0.8% than MobileLLM 125M/350M. Moreover, MobileLLM model family shows significant improvements compared to previous sub-billion models on chat benchmarks, and demonstrates close correctness to LLaMA-v2 7B in API calling tasks, highlighting the capability of small models for common on-device use cases.

Ernie Chang, Yow-Ting Shiue, Hui-Syuan Yeh et al.

In this paper, we aim to address the challenges surrounding the translation of ancient Chinese text: (1) The linguistic gap due to the difference in eras results in translations that are poor in quality, and (2) most translations are missing the contextual information that is often very crucial to understanding the text. To this end, we improve upon past translation techniques by proposing the following: We reframe the task as a multi-label prediction task where the model predicts both the translation and its particular era. We observe that this helps to bridge the linguistic gap as chronological context is also used as auxiliary information. % As a natural step of generalization, we pivot on the modern Chinese translations to generate multilingual outputs. %We show experimentally the efficacy of our framework in producing quality translation outputs and also validate our framework on a collected task-specific parallel corpus. We validate our framework on a parallel corpus annotated with chronology information and show experimentally its efficacy in producing quality translation outputs. We release both the code and the data https://github.com/orina1123/time-aware-ancient-text-translation for future research.

Mingchen Zhuge, Changsheng Zhao, Dylan Ashley et al.

Contemporary evaluation techniques are inadequate for agentic systems. These approaches either focus exclusively on final outcomes -- ignoring the step-by-step nature of agentic systems, or require excessive manual labour. To address this, we introduce the Agent-as-a-Judge framework, wherein agentic systems are used to evaluate agentic systems. This is an organic extension of the LLM-as-a-Judge framework, incorporating agentic features that enable intermediate feedback for the entire task-solving process. We apply the Agent-as-a-Judge to the task of code generation. To overcome issues with existing benchmarks and provide a proof-of-concept testbed for Agent-as-a-Judge, we present DevAI, a new benchmark of 55 realistic automated AI development tasks. It includes rich manual annotations, like a total of 365 hierarchical user requirements. We benchmark three of the popular agentic systems using Agent-as-a-Judge and find it dramatically outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge and is as reliable as our human evaluation baseline. Altogether, we believe that Agent-as-a-Judge marks a concrete step forward for modern agentic systems -- by providing rich and reliable reward signals necessary for dynamic and scalable self-improvement.

Daniel Agyei Asante, Ernie Chang, Yang Li

Low-rank decomposition is a compelling approach for compressing large language models, but its effectiveness hinges on selecting which singular-vector bases to retain for a target task. Existing methods such as Basel adapt singular-value coefficients on downstream data and prune bases with small re-learned magnitudes, a heuristic that can be misaligned with task performance because it ignores the local geometry of the loss landscape. We present Basis Selection with Importance (BSI), a principled low-rank compression framework that ranks and prunes bases by directly estimating the expected loss increase incurred when each basis is removed. BSI derives a derivative-based importance score from a second-order Taylor expansion of the task loss with respect to singular values, combining first-order sensitivity and second-order curvature to quantify pruning impact. To make this criterion practical for LLMs, we develop an efficient Hessian-diagonal estimator by adapting the Hutchinson randomized-probing method to loss curvature with symmetric parameter perturbations. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis, including loss-increase bounds under basis pruning, explicit propagation of Hessian-diagonal estimation error into these bounds, variance characterization tied to the Hessian spectrum, high-probability sample-complexity guarantees for achieving a target estimation accuracy, and guidance on perturbation intensity. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that BSI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art low-rank decomposition baselines, with especially strong improvements under deep compression.

Ashish Seth, Xinhao Mei, Changsheng Zhao et al.

Egocentric videos provide a distinctive setting in which sound serves as crucial cues to understand user activities and surroundings, particularly when visual information is unstable or occluded due to continuous camera movement. State-of-the-art large audio-visual language models (AV-LLMs) can generate multimodal descriptions. However, we show in this work that they are prone to audio hallucinations, often inferring sounds from visual cues that are visible but not heard. We present a systematic and automatic evaluation framework for analyzing audio hallucinations in egocentric video through a targeted question-answering (Q/A) protocol. We curate a dataset of 300 egocentric videos and design 1,000 sound-focused questions to probe model outputs. To characterize hallucinations, we propose a grounded taxonomy that distinguishes between foreground action sounds from the user activities and background ambient sounds. Our evaluation shows that advanced AV-LLMs, such as Qwen2.5 Omni, exhibit high hallucination rates, achieving only 27.3% and 39.5% accuracy on Q/As related to foreground and background sounds, respectively. With this work, we highlight the need to measure the reliability of multimodal responses, emphasizing that robust evaluation of hallucinations is essential to develop reliable AV-LLMs.

Ernie Chang, Yang Li, Patrick Huber et al.

In language model training, it is desirable to equip models with capabilities from various tasks. However, it is not clear how to directly obtain the right data mixtures for these capabilities as the relationship between data and tasks is difficult to be modeled. In this work, we observe that checkpoint models exhibit emerging capabilities at different points in the training trajectory. Often, the training process saves checkpoints as artifacts that are under-utilized as a source of in-training data signals. We identify these artifact models based on their respective capabilities on the benchmarks and leverage them as data mixers by using their aggregated first-order influence approximation over source data. We demonstrated on eight reasoning benchmarks that the proposed framework shows significant improvements in the pretraining setting, with performance improvements of up to 1.93%. Overall, this shows the potential of checkpoint models to enhance data quality and optimize data mixtures.

Yang Li, Yuan Shangguan, Yuhao Wang et al.

Power consumption plays a crucial role in on-device streaming speech recognition, significantly influencing the user experience. This study explores how the configuration of weight parameters in speech recognition models affects their overall energy efficiency. We found that the influence of these parameters on power consumption varies depending on factors such as invocation frequency and memory allocation. Leveraging these insights, we propose design principles that enhance on-device speech recognition models by reducing power consumption with minimal impact on accuracy. Our approach, which adjusts model components based on their specific energy sensitivities, achieves up to 47% lower energy usage while preserving comparable model accuracy and improving real-time performance compared to leading methods.

Patrick Huber, Ernie Chang, Chinnadhurai Sankar et al.

Extending the context window of language models typically requires expensive long-context pre-training, posing significant challenges for both training efficiency and data collection. In this paper, we present evidence that long-context retrieval capabilities can be transferred to student models through logit-based knowledge distillation, even when training exclusively on packed short-context samples within a long-context window. We provide comprehensive insights through the lens of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) and establish three key findings. First, consistent with prior work, we show that phase-wise RoPE scaling, which maximizes rotational spectrum utilization at each training stage, also achieves the best long-context performance in knowledge distillation setups. Second, we demonstrate that logit-based knowledge distillation can directly enable positional information transfer. Using an experimental setup with packed repeated token sequences, we trace the propagation of positional perturbations from query and key vectors through successive transformer layers to output logits, revealing that positional information systematically influences the teacher's output distribution and, in turn, the distillation signal received by the student model. Third, our analysis uncovers structured update patterns in the query state during long-context extension, with distinct parameter spans exhibiting strong sensitivity to long-context training.

Yang Li, Daniel Agyei Asante, Changsheng Zhao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) significantly enhance the performance of various applications, but they are computationally intensive and energy-demanding. This makes it challenging to deploy them on devices with limited resources, such as personal computers and mobile/wearable devices, and results in substantial inference costs in resource-rich environments like cloud servers. To extend the use of LLMs, we introduce a low-rank decomposition approach to effectively compress these models, tailored to the requirements of specific applications. We observe that LLMs pretrained on general datasets contain many redundant components not needed for particular applications. Our method focuses on identifying and removing these redundant parts, retaining only the necessary elements for the target applications. Specifically, we represent the weight matrices of LLMs as a linear combination of base components. We then prune the irrelevant bases and enhance the model with new bases beneficial for specific applications. Deep compression results on the Llama 2-7b and -13B models, conducted on target applications including mathematical reasoning and code generation, show that our method significantly reduces model size while maintaining comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art low-rank compression techniques.

Md Mokarram Chowdhury, Daniel Agyei Asante, Ernie Chang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many domains but are difficult to deploy in resource-constrained settings due to their size. Low-rank weight matrix compression is a popular strategy for reducing model size, typically by minimizing weight reconstruction error under the assumption that weights are low-rank. However, this assumption often does not hold in LLMs. Instead, LLM activations exhibit stronger low-rank structure-prompting a shift toward minimizing activation reconstruction error. We show that this shift alone is insufficient: activation dimensions contribute unequally to model performance, and uniform reconstruction can harm performance. We propose IMPACT, a principled framework for importance-aware activation reconstruction that links model compression decisions to their impact on model behavior. IMPACT formulates an optimization problem that considers both activation structure and gradient sensitivity, and derives a closed-form solution where the optimal reconstruction bases are the eigenvectors of an importance-weighted activation covariance matrix. This enables low-rank approximations explicitly optimized to preserve accuracy. Experiments across diverse models and tasks show that IMPACT achieves up to 48.6% greater model size reduction with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art baselines.

Pin-Jie Lin, Ernie Chang, Yangyang Shi et al.

Past vocabulary learning techniques identify relevant vocabulary before training, relying on statistical and entropy-based assumptions that largely neglect the role of model training. Empirically, we observe that trained translation models are induced to use a byte-pair encoding (BPE) vocabulary subset distinct from the original BPE vocabulary, leading to performance improvements when retrained with the induced vocabulary. In this paper, we analyze this discrepancy in neural machine translation by examining vocabulary and entropy shifts during self-training--where each iteration generates a labeled dataset by pairing source sentences with the model's predictions to define a new vocabulary. Building on these insights, we propose self-vocabularizing training, an iterative method that self-selects a smaller, more optimal vocabulary, yielding up to a 1.49 BLEU improvement. Moreover, we find that deeper model architectures lead to both an increase in unique token usage and a 6-8% reduction in vocabulary size.

Patrick Huber, Akshat Shrivastava, Ernie Chang et al. · meta-ai, mila

Sparse Mixture of Expert (MoE) models are popular foundational architectures at large scale, however, under-explored at smaller sizes. Here, we show how to enable Compact Sparse Mixture of Experts (CoSMoEs) for on-device inference. Specifically, we tackle the three main on-device dimensions: Quality, Memory and Latency. Along the quality axis, we show that in a fair evaluation (removing confounding factors) MoE architectures outperform FLOP-aligned dense models at on-device scale. We introduce weight-decomposed experts, further improving the MoE model performance. Regarding model memory and latency, we significantly improve model offloading efficiency and, in turn, reduce model inference latency.

Rastislav Rabatin, Frank Seide, Ernie Chang

We adapt the well-known beam-search algorithm for machine translation to operate in a cascaded real-time speech translation system. This proved to be more complex than initially anticipated, due to four key challenges: (1) real-time processing of intermediate and final transcriptions with incomplete words from ASR, (2) emitting intermediate and final translations with minimal user perceived latency, (3) handling beam search hypotheses that have unequal length and different model state, and (4) handling sentence boundaries. Previous work in the field of simultaneous machine translation only implemented greedy decoding. We present a beam-search realization that handles all of the above, providing guidance through the minefield of challenges. Our approach increases the BLEU score by 1 point compared to greedy search, reduces the CPU time by up to 40% and character flicker rate by 20+% compared to a baseline heuristic that just retranslates input repeatedly.

Zechun Liu, Barlas Oguz, Changsheng Zhao et al.

Several post-training quantization methods have been applied to large language models (LLMs), and have been shown to perform well down to 8-bits. We find that these methods break down at lower bit precision, and investigate quantization aware training for LLMs (LLM-QAT) to push quantization levels even further. We propose a data-free distillation method that leverages generations produced by the pre-trained model, which better preserves the original output distribution and allows quantizing any generative model independent of its training data, similar to post-training quantization methods. In addition to quantizing weights and activations, we also quantize the KV cache, which is critical for increasing throughput and support long sequence dependencies at current model sizes. We experiment with LLaMA models of sizes 7B, 13B, and 30B, at quantization levels down to 4-bits. We observe large improvements over training-free methods, especially in the low-bit settings.

Ernie Chang, Xiaoyu Shen, Alex Marin et al.

We propose a shared task on training instance selection for few-shot neural text generation. Large-scale pretrained language models have led to dramatic improvements in few-shot text generation. Nonetheless, almost all previous work simply applies random sampling to select the few-shot training instances. Little to no attention has been paid to the selection strategies and how they would affect model performance. The study of the selection strategy can help us to (1) make the most use of our annotation budget in downstream tasks and (2) better benchmark few-shot text generative models. We welcome submissions that present their selection strategies and the effects on the generation quality.

Ernie Chang, Xiaoyu Shen, Hui-Syuan Yeh et al.

Large-scale pretrained language models have led to dramatic improvements in text generation. Impressive performance can be achieved by finetuning only on a small number of instances (few-shot setting). Nonetheless, almost all previous work simply applies random sampling to select the few-shot training instances. Little to no attention has been paid to the selection strategies and how they would affect model performance. In this work, we present a study on training instance selection in few-shot neural text generation. The selection decision is made based only on the unlabeled data so as to identify the most worthwhile data points that should be annotated under some budget of labeling cost. Based on the intuition that the few-shot training instances should be diverse and representative of the entire data distribution, we propose a simple selection strategy with K-means clustering. We show that even with the naive clustering-based approach, the generation models consistently outperform random sampling on three text generation tasks: data-to-text generation, document summarization and question generation. We hope that this work will call for more attention on this largely unexplored area.

Ernie Chang, Xiaoyu Shen, Dawei Zhu et al.

For many new application domains for data-to-text generation, the main obstacle in training neural models consists of a lack of training data. While usually large numbers of instances are available on the data side, often only very few text samples are available. To address this problem, we here propose a novel few-shot approach for this setting. Our approach automatically augments the data available for training by (i) generating new text samples based on replacing specific values by alternative ones from the same category, (ii) generating new text samples based on GPT-2, and (iii) proposing an automatic method for pairing the new text samples with data samples. As the text augmentation can introduce noise to the training data, we use cycle consistency as an objective, in order to make sure that a given data sample can be correctly reconstructed after having been formulated as text (and that text samples can be reconstructed from data). On both the E2E and WebNLG benchmarks, we show that this weakly supervised training paradigm is able to outperform fully supervised seq2seq models with less than 10% annotations. By utilizing all annotated data, our model can boost the performance of a standard seq2seq model by over 5 BLEU points, establishing a new state-of-the-art on both datasets.

Ernie Chang, Hui-Syuan Yeh, Vera Demberg

Recent advancements in data-to-text generation largely take on the form of neural end-to-end systems. Efforts have been dedicated to improving text generation systems by changing the order of training samples in a process known as curriculum learning. Past research on sequence-to-sequence learning showed that curriculum learning helps to improve both the performance and convergence speed. In this work, we delve into the same idea surrounding the training samples consisting of structured data and text pairs, where at each update, the curriculum framework selects training samples based on the model's competence. Specifically, we experiment with various difficulty metrics and put forward a soft edit distance metric for ranking training samples. Our benchmarks show faster convergence speed where training time is reduced by 38.7% and performance is boosted by 4.84 BLEU.

Ernie Chang, Vera Demberg, Alex Marin

Neural natural language generation (NLG) and understanding (NLU) models are data-hungry and require massive amounts of annotated data to be competitive. Recent frameworks address this bottleneck with generative models that synthesize weak labels at scale, where a small amount of training labels are expert-curated and the rest of the data is automatically annotated. We follow that approach, by automatically constructing a large-scale weakly-labeled data with a fine-tuned GPT-2, and employ a semi-supervised framework to jointly train the NLG and NLU models. The proposed framework adapts the parameter updates to the models according to the estimated label-quality. On both the E2E and Weather benchmarks, we show that this weakly supervised training paradigm is an effective approach under low resource scenarios and outperforming benchmark systems on both datasets when 100% of training data is used.

Frederik Wiehr, Anke Hirsch, Florian Daiber et al.

For mixed-initiative control between cyber-physical systems (CPS) and its users, it is still an open question how machines can safely hand over control to humans. In this work, we propose a concept to provide technological support that uses formal methods from AI -- description logic (DL) and automated planning -- to predict more reliably when a hand-over is necessary, and to increase the advance notice for handovers by planning ahead of runtime. We combine this with methods from human-computer interaction (HCI) and natural language generation (NLG) to develop solutions for safe and smooth handovers and provide an example autonomous driving scenario. A study design is proposed with the assessment of qualitative feedback, cognitive load and trust in automation.

Ernie Chang, Jeriah Caplinger, Alex Marin et al.

We present a lightweight annotation tool, the Data AnnotatoR Tool (DART), for the general task of labeling structured data with textual descriptions. The tool is implemented as an interactive application that reduces human efforts in annotating large quantities of structured data, e.g. in the format of a table or tree structure. By using a backend sequence-to-sequence model, our system iteratively analyzes the annotated labels in order to better sample unlabeled data. In a simulation experiment performed on annotating large quantities of structured data, DART has been shown to reduce the total number of annotations needed with active learning and automatically suggesting relevant labels.

Xiaoyu Shen, Ernie Chang, Hui Su et al.

The neural attention model has achieved great success in data-to-text generation tasks. Though usually excelling at producing fluent text, it suffers from the problem of information missing, repetition and "hallucination". Due to the black-box nature of the neural attention architecture, avoiding these problems in a systematic way is non-trivial. To address this concern, we propose to explicitly segment target text into fragment units and align them with their data correspondences. The segmentation and correspondence are jointly learned as latent variables without any human annotations. We further impose a soft statistical constraint to regularize the segmental granularity. The resulting architecture maintains the same expressive power as neural attention models, while being able to generate fully interpretable outputs with several times less computational cost. On both E2E and WebNLG benchmarks, we show the proposed model consistently outperforms its neural attention counterparts.

Ernie Chang, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Xiaoyu Shen et al.

West African Pidgin English is a language that is significantly spoken in West Africa, consisting of at least 75 million speakers. Nevertheless, proper machine translation systems and relevant NLP datasets for pidgin English are virtually absent. In this work, we develop techniques targeted at bridging the gap between Pidgin English and English in the context of natural language generation. %As a proof of concept, we explore the proposed techniques in the area of data-to-text generation. By building upon the previously released monolingual Pidgin English text and parallel English data-to-text corpus, we hope to build a system that can automatically generate Pidgin English descriptions from structured data. We first train a data-to-English text generation system, before employing techniques in unsupervised neural machine translation and self-training to establish the Pidgin-to-English cross-lingual alignment. The human evaluation performed on the generated Pidgin texts shows that, though still far from being practically usable, the pivoting + self-training technique improves both Pidgin text fluency and relevance.

Wenli Zhuang, Ernie Chang

This paper describes a neural-network model which performed competitively (top 6) at the SemEval 2017 cross-lingual Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task. Our system employs an attention-based recurrent neural network model that optimizes the sentence similarity. In this paper, we describe our participation in the multilingual STS task which measures similarity across English, Spanish, and Arabic.