Jiacheng Liu

Jiacheng Liu, Peng Tang, Wenfeng Wang et al.

The emergence of large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, offering enhanced model capacity and computational efficiency through conditional computation. However, deploying and running inference on these models presents significant challenges in computational resources, latency, and energy efficiency. This comprehensive survey analyzes optimization techniques for MoE models across the entire system stack. We first establish a taxonomical framework that categorizes optimization approaches into model-level, system-level, and hardware-level optimizations. At the model level, we examine architectural innovations including efficient expert design, attention mechanisms, various compression techniques such as pruning, quantization, and knowledge distillation, as well as algorithm improvement including dynamic routing strategies and expert merging methods. At the system level, we investigate distributed computing approaches, load balancing mechanisms, and efficient scheduling algorithms that enable scalable deployment. Furthermore, we delve into hardware-specific optimizations and co-design strategies that maximize throughput and energy efficiency. This survey provides both a structured overview of existing solutions and identifies key challenges and promising research directions in MoE inference optimization. To facilitate ongoing updates and the sharing of cutting-edge advances in MoE inference optimization research, we have established a repository accessible at https://github.com/MoE-Inf/awesome-moe-inference/.

Jiacheng Liu, Yuanchun Li, Liangyan Li et al. · tsinghua

Many applications demand context sensing to offer personalized and timely services. Yet, developing sensing programs can be challenging for developers and using them is privacy-concerning for end-users. In this paper, we propose to use natural language as the unified interface to process personal data and sense user context, which can effectively ease app development and make the data pipeline more transparent. Our work is inspired by large language models (LLMs) and other generative models, while directly applying them does not solve the problem - letting the model directly process the data cannot handle complex sensing requests and letting the model write the data processing program suffers error-prone code generation. We address the problem with 1) a unified data processing framework that makes context-sensing programs simpler and 2) a feedback-guided query optimizer that makes data query more informative. To evaluate the performance of natural language-based context sensing, we create a benchmark that contains 133 context sensing tasks. Extensive evaluation has shown that our approach is able to automatically solve the context-sensing tasks efficiently and precisely. The code is opensourced at https://github.com/MobileLLM/ChainStream.

Ian Magnusson, Nguyen Tai, Ben Bogin et al. · allen-ai, uw

Because large language models are expensive to pretrain on different datasets, using smaller-scale experiments to decide on data is crucial for reducing costs. Which benchmarks and methods of making decisions from observed performance at small scale most accurately predict the datasets that yield the best large models? To empower open exploration of this question, we release models, data, and evaluations in DataDecide -- the most extensive open suite of models over differences in data and scale. We conduct controlled pretraining experiments across 25 corpora with differing sources, deduplication, and filtering up to 100B tokens, model sizes up to 1B parameters, and 3 random seeds. We find that the ranking of models at a single, small size (e.g., 150M parameters) is a strong baseline for predicting best models at our larger target scale (1B) (~80% of com parisons correct). No scaling law methods among 8 baselines exceed the compute-decision frontier of single-scale predictions, but DataDecide can measure improvement in future scaling laws. We also identify that using continuous likelihood metrics as proxies in small experiments makes benchmarks including MMLU, ARC, HellaSwag, MBPP, and HumanEval >80% predictable at the target 1B scale with just 0.01% of the compute.

Jiacheng Liu, Lisa Kirkland, Jaideep Srivastava

Unlike in a clinical trial, where researchers get to determine the least number of positive and negative samples required, or in a machine learning study where the size and the class distribution of the validation set is static and known, in a real-world scenario, there is little control over the size and distribution of incoming patients. As a result, when measured during different time periods, evaluation metrics like Area under the Receiver Operating Curve (AUCROC) and Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve(AUCPR) may not be directly comparable. Therefore, in this study, for binary classifiers running in a long time period, we proposed to adjust these performance metrics for sample size and class distribution, so that a fair comparison can be made between two time periods. Note that the number of samples and the class distribution, namely the ratio of positive samples, are two robustness factors which affect the variance of AUCROC. To better estimate the mean of performance metrics and understand the change of performance over time, we propose a Kalman filter based framework with extrapolated variance adjusted for the total number of samples and the number of positive samples during different time periods. The efficacy of this method is demonstrated first on a synthetic dataset and then retrospectively applied to a 2-days ahead in-hospital mortality prediction model for COVID-19 patients during 2021 and 2022. Further, we conclude that our prediction model is not significantly affected by the evolution of the disease, improved treatments and changes in hospital operational plans.