Zili Zhang

Yinmin Zhong, Zili Zhang, Bingyang Wu et al.

We present RLHFuse, an efficient training system with stage fusion for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Due to the intrinsic nature of RLHF training, i.e., the data skewness in the generation stage and the pipeline bubbles in the training stage, existing RLHF systems suffer from low GPU utilization. RLHFuse breaks the traditional view of RLHF workflow as a composition of individual tasks, splitting each task into finer-grained subtasks, and performing stage fusion to improve GPU utilization. RLHFuse contains two key ideas. First, for generation and inference tasks, RLHFuse splits them into sample-level subtasks, enabling efficient inter-stage fusion to overlap the execution of generation and inference stages, thus mitigating the original generation bottleneck dominated by long-tailed samples. Second, for training tasks, RLHFuse breaks them into subtasks of micro-batches and performs intra-stage fusion to concurrently execute these subtasks in the training stage with a fused pipeline schedule, effectively mitigating the pipeline bubbles. The experiments show that RLHFuse increases the training throughput by up to $3.7\times$, compared to existing systems.

Ailin Huang, Bingxin Li, Bruce Wang et al.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have significantly advanced intelligent human-computer interaction, yet their reliance on text-based outputs limits their ability to generate natural speech responses directly, hindering seamless audio interactions. To address this, we introduce Step-Audio-AQAA, a fully end-to-end LALM designed for Audio Query-Audio Answer (AQAA) tasks. The model integrates a dual-codebook audio tokenizer for linguistic and semantic feature extraction, a 130-billion-parameter backbone LLM and a neural vocoder for high-fidelity speech synthesis. Our post-training approach employs interleaved token-output of text and audio to enhance semantic coherence and combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with model merge to improve performance. Evaluations on the StepEval-Audio-360 benchmark demonstrate that Step-Audio-AQAA excels especially in speech control, outperforming the state-of-art LALMs in key areas. This work contributes a promising solution for end-to-end LALMs and highlights the critical role of token-based vocoder in enhancing overall performance for AQAA tasks.