Chao Ma

Wenbo Gong, Meyer Scetbon, Chao Ma et al.

Designing efficient optimizers for large language models (LLMs) with low-memory requirements and fast convergence is an important and challenging problem. This paper makes a step towards the systematic design of such optimizers through the lens of structured Fisher information matrix (FIM) approximation. We show that many state-of-the-art efficient optimizers can be viewed as solutions to FIM approximation (under the Frobenius norm) with specific structural assumptions. Building on these insights, we propose two design recommendations of practical efficient optimizers for LLMs, involving the careful selection of structural assumptions to balance generality and efficiency, and enhancing memory efficiency of optimizers with general structures through a novel low-rank extension framework. We demonstrate how to use each design approach by deriving new memory-efficient optimizers: Row and Column Scaled SGD (RACS) and Adaptive low-dimensional subspace estimation (Alice). Experiments on LLaMA pre-training (up to 1B parameters) validate the effectiveness, showing faster and better convergence than existing memory-efficient baselines and Adam with little memory overhead. Notably, Alice achieves better than 2x faster convergence over Adam, while RACS delivers strong performance on the 1B model with SGD-like memory.

Zeyu Yan, Fei Wen, Rendong Ying et al.

Lossy compression algorithms are typically designed to achieve the lowest possible distortion at a given bit rate. However, recent studies show that pursuing high perceptual quality would lead to increase of the lowest achievable distortion (e.g., MSE). This paper provides nontrivial results theoretically revealing that, \textit{1}) the cost of achieving perfect perception quality is exactly a doubling of the lowest achievable MSE distortion, \textit{2}) an optimal encoder for the "classic" rate-distortion problem is also optimal for the perceptual compression problem, \textit{3}) distortion loss is unnecessary for training a perceptual decoder. Further, we propose a novel training framework to achieve the lowest MSE distortion under perfect perception constraint at a given bit rate. This framework uses a GAN with discriminator conditioned on an MSE-optimized encoder, which is superior over the traditional framework using distortion plus adversarial loss. Experiments are provided to verify the theoretical finding and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed training framework.

Chao Ma, Chih-Yuan Yang, Xiaokang Yang et al.

Numerous single-image super-resolution algorithms have been proposed in the literature, but few studies address the problem of performance evaluation based on visual perception. While most super-resolution images are evaluated by fullreference metrics, the effectiveness is not clear and the required ground-truth images are not always available in practice. To address these problems, we conduct human subject studies using a large set of super-resolution images and propose a no-reference metric learned from visual perceptual scores. Specifically, we design three types of low-level statistical features in both spatial and frequency domains to quantify super-resolved artifacts, and learn a two-stage regression model to predict the quality scores of super-resolution images without referring to ground-truth images. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed metric is effective and efficient to assess the quality of super-resolution images based on human perception.