Meng Hu

Yiwen Shi, Jing Wang, Ping Ren et al.

Product-specific guidances (PSGs) recommended by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are instrumental to promote and guide generic drug product development. To assess a PSG, the FDA assessor needs to take extensive time and effort to manually retrieve supportive drug information of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) from the reference listed drug labeling. In this work, we leveraged the state-of-the-art pre-trained language models to automatically label the ADME paragraphs in the pharmacokinetics section from the FDA-approved drug labeling to facilitate PSG assessment. We applied a transfer learning approach by fine-tuning the pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model to develop a novel application of ADME semantic labeling, which can automatically retrieve ADME paragraphs from drug labeling instead of manual work. We demonstrated that fine-tuning the pre-trained BERT model can outperform the conventional machine learning techniques, achieving up to 11.6% absolute F1 improvement. To our knowledge, we were the first to successfully apply BERT to solve the ADME semantic labeling task. We further assessed the relative contribution of pre-training and fine-tuning to the overall performance of the BERT model in the ADME semantic labeling task using a series of analysis methods such as attention similarity and layer-based ablations. Our analysis revealed that the information learned via fine-tuning is focused on task-specific knowledge in the top layers of the BERT, whereas the benefit from the pre-trained BERT model is from the bottom layers.

Taha ValizadehAslani, Yiwen Shi, Jing Wang et al.

Classification on long-tailed distributed data is a challenging problem, which suffers from serious class-imbalance and hence poor performance on tail classes with only a few samples. Owing to this paucity of samples, learning on the tail classes is especially challenging for the fine-tuning when transferring a pretrained model to a downstream task. In this work, we present a simple modification of standard fine-tuning to cope with these challenges. Specifically, we propose a two-stage fine-tuning: we first fine-tune the final layer of the pretrained model with class-balanced reweighting loss, and then we perform the standard fine-tuning. Our modification has several benefits: (1) it leverages pretrained representations by only fine-tuning a small portion of the model parameters while keeping the rest untouched; (2) it allows the model to learn an initial representation of the specific task; and importantly (3) it protects the learning of tail classes from being at a disadvantage during the model updating. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic datasets of both two-class and multi-class tasks of text classification as well as a real-world application to ADME (i.e., absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion) semantic labeling. The experimental results show that the proposed two-stage fine-tuning outperforms both fine-tuning with conventional loss and fine-tuning with a reweighting loss on the above datasets.

Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao et al.

The emergence of fine-grained numerical formats like NVFP4 presents new opportunities for efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference. However, it is difficult to adapt existing Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) strategies to these formats: rotation-based methods compromise fine-grained block isolation; smoothing techniques struggle with significant 4-bit quantization errors; and mixed-precision approaches often conflict with hardware constraints on unified-precision computation. To address these challenges, we propose ARCQuant, a framework that boosts NVFP4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels. Distinct from methods that compromise block isolation or hardware uniformity, ARCQuant maintains a strictly unified NVFP4 format by augmenting the activation matrix with quantized residual channels. This design integrates the error compensation process directly into the matrix reduction dimension, enabling the use of standard, highly optimized GEMM kernels with minimal overhead. Theoretical analysis confirms that the worst-case error bound of our dual-stage NVFP4 quantization is comparable to that of standard 8-bit formats such as MXFP8. Extensive experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that ARCQuant achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, comparable to full-precision baselines in perplexity and downstream tasks. Furthermore, deployment on RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000 GPUs confirms practical benefits, achieving up to 3x speedup over FP16. Our code is available at https://github.com/actypedef/ARCQuant .

Zilong Bai, Ruiji Zhang, Linqing Chen et al.

In recent years, large language models(LLMs) have attracted significant attention due to their exceptional performance across a multitude of natural language process tasks, and have been widely applied in various fields. However, the application of large language models in the Intellectual Property (IP) domain is challenging due to the strong need for specialized knowledge, privacy protection, processing of extremely long text in this field. In this technical report, we present for the first time a low-cost, standardized procedure for training IP-oriented LLMs, meeting the unique requirements of the IP domain. Using this standard process, we have trained the PatentGPT series models based on open-source pretrained models. By evaluating them on the open-source IP-oriented benchmark MOZIP, our domain-specific LLMs outperforms GPT-4, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed training procedure and the expertise of the PatentGPT models in the IP domain. Remarkably, our model surpassed GPT-4 on the 2019 China Patent Agent Qualification Examination, scoring 65 and matching human expert levels. Additionally, the PatentGPT model, which utilizes the SMoE architecture, achieves performance comparable to that of GPT-4 in the IP domain and demonstrates a better cost-performance ratio on long-text tasks, potentially serving as an alternative to GPT-4 within the IP domain.

Wenyuan Liu, Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo et al.

Quantization significantly accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by replacing original high-precision matrices with low-precision counterparts. Recent advances in weight-activation quantization have primarily focused on mapping both weights and activations to the INT4 format. Although the new FP4 Tensor Cores in NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture offer up to 4x speedup over FP16, existing INT4-based kernels fail to fully exploit this capability due to mismatched data formats. To bridge this gap, we propose MicroMix, a co-designed mixed-precision quantization algorithm and matrix multiplication kernel based on Microscaling (MX) data formats. Tailored for the Blackwell architecture, the MicroMix kernel supports arbitrary combinations of MXFP4, MXFP6, and MXFP8 channels, and produces BFloat16 outputs. To achieve a favorable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for each linear layer, we introduce quantization thresholds that identify activation elements where lower-precision formats (MXFP4 or MXFP6) incur excessive quantization error. Our algorithm selectively allocates higher-precision channels to preserve accuracy while maintaining compute efficiency. MicroMix achieves competitive or superior performance across diverse downstream tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot learning, language modeling, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. On both consumer-grade (RTX 5070Ti laptop) and server-grade (RTX 5090) GPUs, our kernel delivers at least 20% faster execution than TensorRT-FP8. Furthermore, when applied to various Llama and Qwen models, MicroMix consistently improves prefill latency and memory efficiency across a range of batch sizes compared to TensorRT baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/lwy2020/MicroMix.

Yilun Luo, Huaqing Zheng, Haoqian Meng et al.

Huawei's openPangu-Embedded-1B and openPangu-Embedded-7B are variants of the openPangu large language model, designed for efficient deployment on Ascend NPUs. The 7B variant supports three distinct Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning paradigms, namely slow_think, auto_think, and no_think, while the 1B variant operates exclusively in the no_think mode, which employs condensed reasoning for higher efficiency. Although CoT reasoning enhances capability, the generation of extended reasoning traces introduces substantial memory and latency overheads, posing challenges for practical deployment on Ascend NPUs. This paper addresses these computational constraints by leveraging low-bit quantization, which transforms FP16 computations into more efficient integer arithmetic. We introduce a unified low-bit inference framework, supporting INT8 (W8A8) and W4A8 quantization, specifically optimized for openPangu-Embedded models on the Atlas A2. Our comprehensive evaluation on code generation benchmarks (HumanEval and MBPP) demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. INT8 quantization consistently preserves over 90\% of the FP16 baseline accuracy and achieves a 1.5x prefill speedup on the Atlas A2. Furthermore, W4A8 quantization significantly reduces memory consumption, albeit with a moderate trade-off in accuracy. These findings collectively indicate that low-bit quantization effectively facilitates efficient CoT reasoning on Ascend NPUs, maintaining high model fidelity.

Linqing Chen, Weilei Wang, Yubin Xia et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel system that integrates state-of-the-art, domain-specific large language models with advanced information retrieval techniques to deliver comprehensive and context-aware responses. Our approach facilitates seamless interaction among diverse components, enabling cross-validation of outputs to produce accurate, high-quality responses enriched with relevant data, images, tables, and other modalities. We demonstrate the system's capability to enhance response precision by leveraging a robust question-answering model, significantly improving the quality of dialogue generation. The system provides an accessible platform for real-time, high-fidelity interactions, allowing users to benefit from efficient human-computer interaction, precise retrieval, and simultaneous access to a wide range of literature and data. This dramatically improves the research efficiency of professionals in the biomedical and pharmaceutical domains and facilitates faster, more informed decision-making throughout the R\&D process. Furthermore, the system proposed in this paper is available at https://synapse-chat.patsnap.com.

Linqing Chen, Weilei Wang, Zilong Bai et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) by minimizing the need for complex feature engineering. However, the application of LLMs in specialized domains like biopharmaceuticals and chemistry remains largely unexplored. These fields are characterized by intricate terminologies, specialized knowledge, and a high demand for precision areas where general purpose LLMs often fall short. In this study, we introduce PharmaGPT, a suite of domain specilized LLMs with 13 billion and 70 billion parameters, specifically trained on a comprehensive corpus tailored to the Bio-Pharmaceutical and Chemical domains. Our evaluation shows that PharmaGPT surpasses existing general models on specific-domain benchmarks such as NAPLEX, demonstrating its exceptional capability in domain-specific tasks. Remarkably, this performance is achieved with a model that has only a fraction, sometimes just one-tenth-of the parameters of general-purpose large models. This advancement establishes a new benchmark for LLMs in the bio-pharmaceutical and chemical fields, addressing the existing gap in specialized language modeling. It also suggests a promising path for enhanced research and development, paving the way for more precise and effective NLP applications in these areas.