25.1CLFeb 18, 2025Code
Baichuan-M1: Pushing the Medical Capability of Large Language ModelsBingning Wang, Haizhou Zhao, Huozhi Zhou et al.
The current generation of large language models (LLMs) is typically designed for broad, general-purpose applications, while domain-specific LLMs, especially in vertical fields like medicine, remain relatively scarce. In particular, the development of highly efficient and practical LLMs for the medical domain is challenging due to the complexity of medical knowledge and the limited availability of high-quality data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Baichuan-M1, a series of large language models specifically optimized for medical applications. Unlike traditional approaches that simply continue pretraining on existing models or apply post-training to a general base model, Baichuan-M1 is trained from scratch with a dedicated focus on enhancing medical capabilities. Our model is trained on 20 trillion tokens and incorporates a range of effective training methods that strike a balance between general capabilities and medical expertise. As a result, Baichuan-M1 not only performs strongly across general domains such as mathematics and coding but also excels in specialized medical fields. We have open-sourced Baichuan-M1-14B, a mini version of our model, which can be accessed through the following links.
15.7LGApr 28, 2025
Attention Mechanism, Max-Affine Partition, and Universal ApproximationHude Liu, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Zhao Song et al.
We establish the universal approximation capability of single-layer, single-head self- and cross-attention mechanisms with minimal attached structures. Our key insight is to interpret single-head attention as an input domain-partition mechanism that assigns distinct values to subregions. This allows us to engineer the attention weights such that this assignment imitates the target function. Building on this, we prove that a single self-attention layer, preceded by sum-of-linear transformations, is capable of approximating any continuous function on a compact domain under the $L_\infty$-norm. Furthermore, we extend this construction to approximate any Lebesgue integrable function under $L_p$-norm for $1\leq p <\infty$. Lastly, we also extend our techniques and show that, for the first time, single-head cross-attention achieves the same universal approximation guarantees.
2.7LGJul 14, 2019
More Supervision, Less Computation: Statistical-Computational Tradeoffs in Weakly Supervised LearningXinyang Yi, Zhaoran Wang, Zhuoran Yang et al.
We consider the weakly supervised binary classification problem where the labels are randomly flipped with probability $1- α$. Although there exist numerous algorithms for this problem, it remains theoretically unexplored how the statistical accuracies and computational efficiency of these algorithms depend on the degree of supervision, which is quantified by $α$. In this paper, we characterize the effect of $α$ by establishing the information-theoretic and computational boundaries, namely, the minimax-optimal statistical accuracy that can be achieved by all algorithms, and polynomial-time algorithms under an oracle computational model. For small $α$, our result shows a gap between these two boundaries, which represents the computational price of achieving the information-theoretic boundary due to the lack of supervision. Interestingly, we also show that this gap narrows as $α$ increases. In other words, having more supervision, i.e., more correct labels, not only improves the optimal statistical accuracy as expected, but also enhances the computational efficiency for achieving such accuracy.