Liming Yang

Daliang Xu, Hao Zhang, Liming Yang et al.

On-device inference for Large Language Models (LLMs), driven by increasing privacy concerns and advancements of mobile-sized models, has gained significant interest. However, even mobile-sized LLMs (e.g., Gemma-2B) encounter unacceptably high inference latency, often bottlenecked by the prefill stage in tasks like screen UI understanding. We present llm.npu, the first LLM inference system utilizing on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offloading to reduce prefill latency. llm.npu enhances NPU offloading efficiency by re-constructing the prompt and model in three levels: (1) At prompt level, it divides variable-length prompts into multiple fixed-sized chunks while maintaining data dependencies; (2) At tensor level, it identifies and extracts significant outliers to run on the CPU/GPU in parallel with minimal overhead; (3) At block level, it schedules Transformer blocks in an out-of-order manner to the CPU/GPU and NPU based on their hardware affinity and sensitivity to accuracy. Compared to competitive baselines, llm.npu achieves 22.4x faster prefill speed and 30.7$\times$ energy savings on average, and up to 32.8x speedup in an end-to-end real-world application. For the first time, llm.npu achieves more than 1,000 tokens/sec prefilling for a billion-sized model.

Junyu Luo, Zhizhuo Kou, Liming Yang et al. · pku

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced rapid development in recent years. However, in the financial domain, there is a notable lack of effective and specialized multimodal evaluation datasets. To advance the development of MLLMs in the finance domain, we introduce FinMME, encompassing more than 11,000 high-quality financial research samples across 18 financial domains and 6 asset classes, featuring 10 major chart types and 21 subtypes. We ensure data quality through 20 annotators and carefully designed validation mechanisms. Additionally, we develop FinScore, an evaluation system incorporating hallucination penalties and multi-dimensional capability assessment to provide an unbiased evaluation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o exhibit unsatisfactory performance on FinMME, highlighting its challenging nature. The benchmark exhibits high robustness with prediction variations under different prompts remaining below 1%, demonstrating superior reliability compared to existing datasets. Our dataset and evaluation protocol are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/luojunyu/FinMME and https://github.com/luo-junyu/FinMME.

Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Liming Yang et al.

Current unlearning methods for large language models usually rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. However, this paradigm disrupts the subsequent tokens prediction, degrading model performance and linguistic coherence. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics overemphasize contextual forgetting while inadequately assessing response fluency and relevance. To address these challenges, we propose ReLearn, a data augmentation and fine-tuning pipeline for effective unlearning, along with a comprehensive evaluation framework. This framework introduces Knowledge Forgetting Rate (KFR) and Knowledge Retention Rate (KRR) to measure knowledge-level preservation, and Linguistic Score (LS) to evaluate generation quality. Our experiments show that ReLearn successfully achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality output. Through mechanistic analysis, we further demonstrate how reverse optimization disrupts coherent text generation, while ReLearn preserves this essential capability. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/unlearn.

Liming Yang, Junyu Luo, Xuanzhe Liu et al.

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have emerged as a powerful paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. As these systems scale in complexity, cost becomes an important consideration for practical deployment. However, existing work rarely addresses how to structure multi-agent systems under explicit budget constraints. In this paper, we propose BAMAS, a novel approach for building multi-agent systems with budget awareness. BAMAS first selects an optimal set of LLMs by formulating and solving an Integer Linear Programming problem that balances performance and cost. It then determines how these LLMs should collaborate by leveraging a reinforcement learning-based method to select the interaction topology. Finally, the system is instantiated and executed based on the selected agents and their collaboration topology. We evaluate BAMAS on three representative tasks and compare it with state-of-the-art agent construction methods. Results show that BAMAS achieves comparable performance while reducing cost by up to 86%.

Shitou Zhang, Zuchao Li, Xingshen Liu et al.

In light of the rapidly evolving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), it becomes imperative to develop rigorous domain-specific evaluation benchmarks to accurately assess their capabilities. In response to this need, this paper introduces ArcMMLU, a specialized benchmark tailored for the Library & Information Science (LIS) domain in Chinese. This benchmark aims to measure the knowledge and reasoning capability of LLMs within four key sub-domains: Archival Science, Data Science, Library Science, and Information Science. Following the format of MMLU/CMMLU, we collected over 6,000 high-quality questions for the compilation of ArcMMLU. This extensive compilation can reflect the diverse nature of the LIS domain and offer a robust foundation for LLM evaluation. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that while most mainstream LLMs achieve an average accuracy rate above 50% on ArcMMLU, there remains a notable performance gap, suggesting substantial headroom for refinement in LLM capabilities within the LIS domain. Further analysis explores the effectiveness of few-shot examples on model performance and highlights challenging questions where models consistently underperform, providing valuable insights for targeted improvements. ArcMMLU fills a critical gap in LLM evaluations within the Chinese LIS domain and paves the way for future development of LLMs tailored to this specialized area.

Xunjian Yin, Jin Jiang, Liming Yang et al.

The imperative task of revising or updating the knowledge stored within large language models arises from two distinct sources: intrinsic errors inherent in the model which should be corrected and outdated knowledge due to external shifts in the real world which should be updated. Prevailing efforts in model editing conflate these two distinct categories of edits arising from distinct reasons and directly modify the original knowledge in models into new knowledge. However, we argue that preserving the model's original knowledge remains pertinent. Specifically, if a model's knowledge becomes outdated due to evolving worldly dynamics, it should retain recollection of the historical knowledge while integrating the newfound knowledge. In this work, we introduce the task of Temporal Knowledge Editing (TKE) and establish a benchmark AToKe (Assessment of TempOral Knowledge Editing) to evaluate current model editing methods. We find that while existing model editing methods are effective at making models remember new knowledge, the edited model catastrophically forgets historical knowledge. To address this gap, we propose a simple and general framework termed Multi-Editing with Time Objective (METO) for enhancing existing editing models, which edits both historical and new knowledge concurrently and optimizes the model's prediction for the time of each fact. Our assessments demonstrate that while AToKe is still difficult, METO maintains the effectiveness of learning new knowledge and meanwhile substantially improves the performance of edited models on utilizing historical knowledge.

Hongwei Dong, Liming Yang

Least squares kernel based methods have been widely used in regression problems due to the simple implementation and good generalization performance. Among them, least squares support vector regression (LS-SVR) and extreme learning machine (ELM) are popular techniques. However, the noise sensitivity is a major bottleneck. To address this issue, a generalized loss function, called $\ell_s$-loss, is proposed in this paper. With the support of novel loss function, two kernel based regressors are constructed by replacing the $\ell_2$-loss in LS-SVR and ELM with the proposed $\ell_s$-loss for better noise robustness. Important properties of $\ell_s$-loss, including robustness, asymmetry and asymptotic approximation behaviors, are verified theoretically. Moreover, iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) is utilized to optimize and interpret the proposed methods from a weighted viewpoint. The convergence of the proposal are proved, and detailed analyses of robustness are given. Experiments on both artificial and benchmark datasets confirm the validity of the proposed methods.