Minghui Song

Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. Recent research on advancing open-source smaller LMs by distilling knowledge from black-box LLMs has obtained promising results in the instruction-following ability. However, the reasoning ability which is more challenging to foster, is relatively rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a tailored learning approach to distill such reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability. In contrast to merely employing LLM as a data annotator, we exploit the potential of LLM as a reasoning teacher by building an interactive multi-round learning paradigm. This paradigm enables the student to expose its deficiencies to the black-box teacher who then can provide customized training data in return. Further, to exploit the reasoning potential of the smaller LM, we propose self-reflection learning to motivate the student to learn from self-made mistakes. The learning from self-reflection and LLM are all tailored to the student's learning status, thanks to the seamless integration with the multi-round learning paradigm. Comprehensive experiments and analysis on mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code will be available at https://github.com/Raibows/Learn-to-Reason.

Ting Jiang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising advancements in general visual and language understanding. However, the representation of multimodal information using MLLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a new framework, E5-V, designed to adapt MLLMs for achieving universal multimodal embeddings. Our findings highlight the significant potential of MLLMs in representing multimodal inputs compared to previous approaches. By leveraging MLLMs with prompts, E5-V effectively bridges the modality gap between different types of inputs, demonstrating strong performance in multimodal embeddings even without fine-tuning. We propose a single modality training approach for E5-V, where the model is trained exclusively on text pairs. This method demonstrates significant improvements over traditional multimodal training on image-text pairs, while reducing training costs by approximately 95%. Additionally, this approach eliminates the need for costly multimodal training data collection. Extensive experiments across four types of tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of E5-V. As a universal multimodal model, E5-V not only achieves but often surpasses state-of-the-art performance in each task, despite being trained on a single modality.

Shuhua Shi, Shaohan Huang, Minghui Song et al.

As one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is commonly applied to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). However, updating the weights of LoRA blocks effectively and expeditiously is challenging due to the long calculation path in the original model. To address this, we propose ResLoRA, an improved framework of LoRA. By adding residual paths during training and using merging approaches to eliminate these extra paths during inference, our method can achieve better results in fewer training steps without any extra trainable parameters or inference cost compared to LoRA. The experiments on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To the best of our knowledge, ResLoRA is the first work that combines the residual path with LoRA. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps/tree/main/reslora .

M. H. Song, Y. L. Lu, M. Z. Liu

Recently, Martin Hutzenthaler pointed out that the explicit Euler method fails to converge strongly to the exact solution of a stochastic differential equation (SDE) with superlinearly growing and globally one sided Lipschitz drift coefficient. Afterwards, he proposed an explicit and easily implementable Euler method, i.e tamed Euler method, for such an SDE and showed that this method converges strongly with order of one half. In this paper, we use the tamed Euler method to solve the stochastic differential equations with piecewise continuous arguments (SEPCAs) with superlinearly growing coefficients and prove that this method is convergent with strong order one half.

M. H. Song, Y. L. Lu, M. Z. Liu

In this paper, we study the polynomial stability of analytical solution and convergence of the semi-implicit Euler method for non-linear stochastic pantograph differential equations. Firstly, the sufficient conditions for solutions to grow at a polynomial rate in the sense of mean-square and almost surely are obtained. Secondly, the consistence and convergence of this method are proved. Furthermore, the orders of consistence (in the sense of average and mean-square) and convergence are given, respectively.