Yang Zhou

Xinyi Hou, Yanjie Zhao, Yue Liu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted numerous domains, including Software Engineering (SE). Many recent publications have explored LLMs applied to various SE tasks. Nevertheless, a comprehensive understanding of the application, effects, and possible limitations of LLMs on SE is still in its early stages. To bridge this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) on LLM4SE, with a particular focus on understanding how LLMs can be exploited to optimize processes and outcomes. We select and analyze 395 research papers from January 2017 to January 2024 to answer four key research questions (RQs). In RQ1, we categorize different LLMs that have been employed in SE tasks, characterizing their distinctive features and uses. In RQ2, we analyze the methods used in data collection, preprocessing, and application, highlighting the role of well-curated datasets for successful LLM for SE implementation. RQ3 investigates the strategies employed to optimize and evaluate the performance of LLMs in SE. Finally, RQ4 examines the specific SE tasks where LLMs have shown success to date, illustrating their practical contributions to the field. From the answers to these RQs, we discuss the current state-of-the-art and trends, identifying gaps in existing research, and flagging promising areas for future study. Our artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/xinyi-hou/LLM4SE_SLR.

Ji Liu, Juncheng Jia, Hong Zhang et al.

Despite achieving remarkable performance, Federated Learning (FL) encounters two important problems, i.e., low training efficiency and limited computational resources. In this paper, we propose a new FL framework, i.e., FedDUMAP, with three original contributions, to leverage the shared insensitive data on the server in addition to the distributed data in edge devices so as to efficiently train a global model. First, we propose a simple dynamic server update algorithm, which takes advantage of the shared insensitive data on the server while dynamically adjusting the update steps on the server in order to speed up the convergence and improve the accuracy. Second, we propose an adaptive optimization method with the dynamic server update algorithm to exploit the global momentum on the server and each local device for superior accuracy. Third, we develop a layer-adaptive model pruning method to carry out specific pruning operations, which is adapted to the diverse features of each layer so as to attain an excellent trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. Our proposed FL model, FedDUMAP, combines the three original techniques and has a significantly better performance compared with baseline approaches in terms of efficiency (up to 16.9 times faster), accuracy (up to 20.4% higher), and computational cost (up to 62.6% smaller).

Zhihang Yuan, Yuzhang Shang, Yang Zhou et al.

The field of efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference is rapidly evolving, presenting a unique blend of opportunities and challenges. Although the field has expanded and is vibrant, there hasn't been a concise framework that analyzes the various methods of LLM Inference to provide a clear understanding of this domain. Our survey stands out from traditional literature reviews by not only summarizing the current state of research but also by introducing a framework based on roofline model for systematic analysis of LLM inference techniques. This framework identifies the bottlenecks when deploying LLMs on hardware devices and provides a clear understanding of practical problems, such as why LLMs are memory-bound, how much memory and computation they need, and how to choose the right hardware. We systematically collate the latest advancements in efficient LLM inference, covering crucial areas such as model compression (e.g., Knowledge Distillation and Quantization), algorithm improvements (e.g., Early Exit and Mixture-of-Expert), and both hardware and system-level enhancements. Our survey stands out by analyzing these methods with roofline model, helping us understand their impact on memory access and computation. This distinctive approach not only showcases the current research landscape but also delivers valuable insights for practical implementation, positioning our work as an indispensable resource for researchers new to the field as well as for those seeking to deepen their understanding of efficient LLM deployment. The analyze tool, LLM-Viewer, is open-sourced.

Weiliang Chen, Li Jia, Yang Zhou et al.

Federated learning combined with blockchain empowers secure data sharing in autonomous driving applications. Nevertheless, with the increasing granularity and complexity of vehicle-generated data, the lack of data quality audits raises concerns about multi-party mistrust in trajectory prediction tasks. In response, this paper proposes an asynchronous federated learning data sharing method based on an interpretable reputation quantization mechanism utilizing graph neural network tools. Data providers share data structures under differential privacy constraints to ensure security while reducing redundant data. We implement deep reinforcement learning to categorize vehicles by reputation level, which optimizes the aggregation efficiency of federated learning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed data sharing scheme not only reinforces the security of the trajectory prediction task but also enhances prediction accuracy.

Yang Zhou, Xiaoning Ren

In dynamic graphs, preserving temporal continuity is critical. However, Memory-based Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (MDGNNs) trained with large batches often disrupt event sequences, leading to temporal information loss. This discontinuity not only deteriorates temporal modeling but also hinders optimization by increasing the difficulty of parameter convergence. Our theoretical study quantifies this through a Lipschitz upper bound, showing that large batch sizes enlarge the parameter search space. In response, we propose BADGNN, a novel batch-agnostic framework consisting of two core components: (1) Temporal Lipschitz Regularization (TLR) to control parameter search space expansion, and (2) Adaptive Attention Adjustment (A3) to alleviate attention distortion induced by both regularization and batching. Empirical results on three benchmark datasets show that BADGNN maintains strong performance while enabling significantly larger batch sizes and faster training compared to TGN. Our code is available at Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TGN_Lipichitz-C033/.

Xuanlin Jiang, Yang Zhou, Shiyi Cao et al.

Online LLM inference powers many exciting applications such as intelligent chatbots and autonomous agents. Modern LLM inference engines widely rely on request batching to improve inference throughput, aiming to make it cost-efficient when running on expensive GPU accelerators. However, the limited GPU memory has largely limited the batch size achieved in practice, leaving significant GPU compute resources wasted. We present NEO, an online LLM inference system that offloads part of attention compute and KV cache states from the GPU to the local host CPU, effectively increasing the GPU batch size and thus inference throughput. To this end, NEO proposes asymmetric GPU-CPU pipelining and load-aware scheduling to balance GPU and CPU loads and fully utilize their compute and memory resources. We evaluate NEO on a wide range of workloads (i.e., code generation, text summarization), GPUs (i.e., T4, A10G, H100), and LLM models (i.e., 7B, 8B, 70B). NEO achieves up to 7.5$\times$, 26%, and 14% higher throughput compared to GPU-only approach on T4, A10G, and H100 GPUs, respectively, while maintaining the same latency; with more powerful CPUs, NEO achieves up to 79.3% throughput gain on A10G GPU.

Yilong Zhao, Shuo Yang, Kan Zhu et al.

Offline batch inference, which leverages the flexibility of request batching to achieve higher throughput and lower costs, is becoming more popular for latency-insensitive applications. Meanwhile, recent progress in model capability and modality makes requests more diverse in compute and memory demands, creating unique opportunities for throughput improvement by resource overlapping. However, a request schedule that maximizes resource overlapping can conflict with the schedule that maximizes prefix sharing, a widely-used performance optimization, causing sub-optimal inference throughput. We present BlendServe, a system that maximizes resource utilization of offline batch inference by combining the benefits of resource overlapping and prefix sharing using a resource-aware prefix tree. BlendServe exploits the relaxed latency requirements in offline batch inference to reorder and overlap requests with varied resource demands while ensuring high prefix sharing. We evaluate BlendServe on a variety of synthetic multi-modal workloads and show that it provides up to $1.44\times$ throughput boost compared to widely-used industry standards, vLLM and SGLang.

Juncheng Jia, Ji Liu, Chao Huo et al.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a compelling methodology for the management of distributed data, marked by significant advancements in recent years. In this paper, we propose an efficient FL approach that capitalizes on additional downlink bandwidth resources to ensure timely update dissemination. Initially, we implement this strategy within an asynchronous framework, introducing the Asynchronous Staleness-aware Model Update (FedASMU), which integrates both server-side and device-side methodologies. On the server side, we present an asynchronous FL system model that employs a dynamic model aggregation technique, which harmonizes local model updates with the global model to enhance both accuracy and efficiency. Concurrently, on the device side, we propose an adaptive model adjustment mechanism that integrates the latest global model with local models during training to further elevate accuracy. Subsequently, we extend this approach to a synchronous context, referred to as FedSSMU. Theoretical analyses substantiate the convergence of our proposed methodologies. Extensive experiments, encompassing six models and five public datasets, demonstrate that FedASMU and FedSSMU significantly surpass baseline methods in terms of both accuracy (up to 145.87%) and efficiency (up to 97.59%).

Fa-Ting Hong, Zhan Xu, Haiyang Liu et al.

Diffusion-based human animation aims to animate a human character based on a source human image as well as driving signals such as a sequence of poses. Leveraging the generative capacity of diffusion model, existing approaches are able to generate high-fidelity poses, but struggle with significant viewpoint changes, especially in zoom-in/zoom-out scenarios where camera-character distance varies. This limits the applications such as cinematic shot type plan or camera control. We propose a pose-correlated reference selection diffusion network, supporting substantial viewpoint variations in human animation. Our key idea is to enable the network to utilize multiple reference images as input, since significant viewpoint changes often lead to missing appearance details on the human body. To eliminate the computational cost, we first introduce a novel pose correlation module to compute similarities between non-aligned target and source poses, and then propose an adaptive reference selection strategy, utilizing the attention map to identify key regions for animation generation. To train our model, we curated a large dataset from public TED talks featuring varied shots of the same character, helping the model learn synthesis for different perspectives. Our experimental results show that with the same number of reference images, our model performs favorably compared to the current SOTA methods under large viewpoint change. We further show that the adaptive reference selection is able to choose the most relevant reference regions to generate humans under free viewpoints.

Zhou Yang, Yucai Pang, Hongbo Yin et al.

This paper introduces a new Transformer, called MS$^2$Dformer, that can be used as a generalized backbone for multi-modal sequence spammer detection. Spammer detection is a complex multi-modal task, thus the challenges of applying Transformer are two-fold. Firstly, complex multi-modal noisy information about users can interfere with feature mining. Secondly, the long sequence of users' historical behaviors also puts a huge GPU memory pressure on the attention computation. To solve these problems, we first design a user behavior Tokenization algorithm based on the multi-modal variational autoencoder (MVAE). Subsequently, a hierarchical split-window multi-head attention (SW/W-MHA) mechanism is proposed. The split-window strategy transforms the ultra-long sequences hierarchically into a combination of intra-window short-term and inter-window overall attention. Pre-trained on the public datasets, MS$^2$Dformer's performance far exceeds the previous state of the art. The experiments demonstrate MS$^2$Dformer's ability to act as a backbone.

Ji Liu, Jizhou Huang, Yang Zhou et al.

In recent years, data and computing resources are typically distributed in the devices of end users, various regions or organizations. Because of laws or regulations, the distributed data and computing resources cannot be directly shared among different regions or organizations for machine learning tasks. Federated learning emerges as an efficient approach to exploit distributed data and computing resources, so as to collaboratively train machine learning models, while obeying the laws and regulations and ensuring data security and data privacy. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of existing works for federated learning. We propose a functional architecture of federated learning systems and a taxonomy of related techniques. Furthermore, we present the distributed training, data communication, and security of FL systems. Finally, we analyze their limitations and propose future research directions.