Chao Li

01. AI, Alex Young, Bei Chen et al.

We introduce the Yi model family, a series of language and multimodal models that demonstrate strong multi-dimensional capabilities. The Yi model family is based on 6B and 34B pretrained language models, then we extend them to chat models, 200K long context models, depth-upscaled models, and vision-language models. Our base models achieve strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks like MMLU, and our finetuned chat models deliver strong human preference rate on major evaluation platforms like AlpacaEval and Chatbot Arena. Building upon our scalable super-computing infrastructure and the classical transformer architecture, we attribute the performance of Yi models primarily to its data quality resulting from our data-engineering efforts. For pretraining, we construct 3.1 trillion tokens of English and Chinese corpora using a cascaded data deduplication and quality filtering pipeline. For finetuning, we polish a small scale (less than 10K) instruction dataset over multiple iterations such that every single instance has been verified directly by our machine learning engineers. For vision-language, we combine the chat language model with a vision transformer encoder and train the model to align visual representations to the semantic space of the language model. We further extend the context length to 200K through lightweight continual pretraining and demonstrate strong needle-in-a-haystack retrieval performance. We show that extending the depth of the pretrained checkpoint through continual pretraining further improves performance. We believe that given our current results, continuing to scale up model parameters using thoroughly optimized data will lead to even stronger frontier models.

Riling Wei, Kelu Yao, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation has demonstrated promising performance on paired modalities with strong semantic connections, referred to as Symmetric Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (SCKD). However, implementing SCKD becomes exceedingly constrained in real-world scenarios due to the limited availability of paired modalities. To this end, we investigate a general and effective knowledge learning concept under weak semantic consistency, dubbed Asymmetric Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (ACKD), aiming to bridge modalities with limited semantic overlap. Nevertheless, the shift from strong to weak semantic consistency improves flexibility but exacerbates challenges in knowledge transmission costs, which we rigorously verified based on optimal transport theory. To mitigate the issue, we further propose a framework, namely SemBridge, integrating a Student-Friendly Matching module and a Semantic-aware Knowledge Alignment module. The former leverages self-supervised learning to acquire semantic-based knowledge and provide personalized instruction for each student sample by dynamically selecting the relevant teacher samples. The latter seeks the optimal transport path by employing Lagrangian optimization. To facilitate the research, we curate a benchmark dataset derived from two modalities, namely Multi-Spectral (MS) and asymmetric RGB images, tailored for remote sensing scene classification. Comprehensive experiments exhibit that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with 7 existing approaches on 6 different model architectures across various datasets.

Yaswitha Gujju, Romain Harang, Chao Li et al.

The quest for effective quantum feature maps for data encoding presents significant challenges, particularly due to the flat training landscapes and lengthy training processes associated with parameterised quantum circuits. To address these issues, we propose an evolutionary training-free quantum architecture search (QAS) framework that employs circuit-based heuristics focused on trainability, hardware robustness, generalisation ability, expressivity, complexity, and kernel-target alignment. By ranking circuit architectures with various proxies, we reduce evaluation costs and incorporate hardware-aware circuits to enhance robustness against noise. We evaluate our approach on classification tasks (using quantum support vector machine) across diverse datasets using both artificial and quantum-generated datasets. Our approach demonstrates competitive accuracy on both simulators and real quantum hardware, surpassing state-of-the-art QAS methods in terms of sampling efficiency and achieving up to a 2x speedup in architecture search runtime.

Xiaoyang Li, Yixuan Jiang, Junze Zhu et al.

In the field of sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR), deep neural networks provide advanced technical support. Many studies have proven that recognition accuracy can be improved by increasing the depth or width of the network. However, for wearable devices, the balance between network performance and resource consumption is crucial. With minimum resource consumption as the basic principle, we propose a universal attention feature purification mechanism, called MSAP, which is suitable for multi-scale networks. The mechanism effectively solves the feature redundancy caused by the superposition of multi-scale features by means of inter-scale attention screening and connection method. In addition, we have designed a network correction module that integrates seamlessly between layers of individual network modules to mitigate inherent problems in deep networks. We also built an embedded deployment system that is in line with the current level of wearable technology to test the practical feasibility of the HAR model, and further prove the efficiency of the method. Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that the proposed method model effectively reduces redundant features in filtered data and provides excellent performance with little resource consumption.