Ao Shen

Ao Shen, Rui Zhang, Junping Zhao

As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale, multi-node deployment has become a necessity. Consequently, communication has become a critical performance bottleneck. Current intra-node communication libraries, like NCCL, typically make use of a single interconnect such as NVLink. This approach creates performance ceilings, especially on hardware like the H800 GPU where the primary interconnect's bandwidth can become a bottleneck, and leaves other hardware resources like PCIe and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)-capable Network Interface Cards (NICs) largely idle during intensive workloads. We propose FlexLink, the first collective communication framework to the best of our knowledge designed to systematically address this by aggregating these heterogeneous links-NVLink, PCIe, and RDMA NICs-into a single, high-performance communication fabric. FlexLink employs an effective two-stage adaptive load balancing strategy that dynamically partitions communication traffic across all available links, ensuring that faster interconnects are not throttled by slower ones. On an 8-GPU H800 server, our design improves the bandwidth of collective operators such as AllReduce and AllGather by up to 26% and 27% over the NCCL baseline, respectively. This gain is achieved by offloading 2-22% of the total communication traffic to the previously underutilized PCIe and RDMA NICs. FlexLink provides these improvements as a lossless, drop-in replacement compatible with the NCCL API, ensuring easy adoption.

Qiang Wang, Dawei Feng, Xu Zhang et al.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a paramount method for tailoring the behaviors of LLMs. Recent work has unveiled the potential for LLMs to achieve high performance through fine-tuning with a limited quantity of high-quality instruction data. Building upon this approach, we further explore the impact of prompt's robustness on the selection of high-quality instruction data. This paper proposes a pioneering framework of high-quality online instruction data mining for instruction tuning, focusing on the impact of prompt's robustness on the data mining process. Our notable innovation, is to generate the adversarial instruction data by conducting the attack for the prompt of online instruction data. Then, we introduce an Adversarial Instruction-Following Difficulty metric to measure how much help the adversarial instruction data can provide to the generation of the corresponding response. Apart from it, we propose a novel Adversarial Instruction Output Embedding Consistency approach to select high-quality online instruction data. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets to assess the performance. The experimental results serve to underscore the effectiveness of our proposed two methods. Moreover, the results underscore the critical practical significance of considering prompt's robustness.