Wei Quan

Quan Wei, Chung-Yiu Yau, Hoi-To Wai et al.

Supervised fine-tuning is a standard method for adapting pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. Quantization has been recently studied as a post-training technique for efficient LLM deployment. To obtain quantized fine-tuned LLMs, conventional pipelines would first fine-tune the pre-trained models, followed by post-training quantization. This often yields suboptimal performance as it fails to leverage the synergy between fine-tuning and quantization. To effectively realize low-bit quantization of weights, activations and KV caches in LLMs, we propose an algorithm named Rotated Straight-Through-Estimator (RoSTE), which combines quantization-aware supervised fine-tuning (QA-SFT) with an adaptive rotation strategy that identifies an effective rotation configuration to reduce activation outliers. We provide theoretical insights on RoSTE by analyzing its prediction error when applied to an overparameterized least square quantized training problem. Our findings reveal that the prediction error is directly proportional to the quantization error of the converged weights, which can be effectively managed through an optimized rotation configuration. Experiments on Pythia, Qwen and Llama models of different sizes demonstrate the effectiveness of RoSTE. Compared to existing post-SFT quantization baselines, our method consistently achieves superior performances across various tasks and different LLM architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/OptimAI-Lab/RoSTE.

Zheng Chen, Xinli Yu, Yuan Ling et al.

Correlated anomaly detection (CAD) from streaming data is a type of group anomaly detection and an essential task in useful real-time data mining applications like botnet detection, financial event detection, industrial process monitor, etc. The primary approach for this type of detection in previous researches is based on principal score (PS) of divided batches or sliding windows by computing top eigenvalues of the correlation matrix, e.g. the Lanczos algorithm. However, this paper brings up the phenomenon of principal score degeneration for large data set, and then mathematically and practically prove current PS-based methods are likely to fail for CAD on large-scale streaming data even if the number of correlated anomalies grows with the data size at a reasonable rate; in reality, anomalies tend to be the minority of the data, and this issue can be more serious. We propose a framework with two novel randomized algorithms rPS and gPS for better detection of correlated anomalies from large streaming data of various correlation strength. The experiment shows high and balanced recall and estimated accuracy of our framework for anomaly detection from a large server log data set and a U.S. stock daily price data set in comparison to direct principal score evaluation and some other recent group anomaly detection algorithms. Moreover, our techniques significantly improve the computation efficiency and scalability for principal score calculation.

Wei Quan, Andy D. Pimentel

Exploration of task mappings plays a crucial role in achieving high performance in heterogeneous multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) platforms. The problem of optimally mapping a set of tasks onto a set of given heterogeneous processors for maximal throughput has been known, in general, to be NP-complete. The problem is further exacerbated when multiple applications (i.e., bigger task sets) and the communication between tasks are also considered. Previous research has shown that Genetic Algorithms (GA) typically are a good choice to solve this problem when the solution space is relatively small. However, when the size of the problem space increases, classic genetic algorithms still suffer from the problem of long evolution times. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel bias-elitist genetic algorithm that is guided by domain-specific heuristics to speed up the evolution process. Experimental results reveal that our proposed algorithm is able to handle large scale task mapping problems and produces high-quality mapping solutions in only a short time period.