Guanhua Wang

Marah Abdin, Jyoti Aneja, Hany Awadalla et al. · microsoft-research, stanford

We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. Our training dataset is a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered publicly available web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide parameter-scaling results with a 7B, 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small, phi-3-medium, both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75%, 78% on MMLU, and 8.7, 8.9 on MT-bench). To enhance multilingual, multimodal, and long-context capabilities, we introduce three models in the phi-3.5 series: phi-3.5-mini, phi-3.5-MoE, and phi-3.5-Vision. The phi-3.5-MoE, a 16 x 3.8B MoE model with 6.6 billion active parameters, achieves superior performance in language reasoning, math, and code tasks compared to other open-source models of similar scale, such as Llama 3.1 and the Mixtral series, and on par with Gemini-1.5-Flash and GPT-4o-mini. Meanwhile, phi-3.5-Vision, a 4.2 billion parameter model derived from phi-3.5-mini, excels in reasoning tasks and is adept at handling both single-image and text prompts, as well as multi-image and text prompts.

Guanhua Wang, Chengming Zhang, Zheyu Shen et al.

Given the popularity of generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) often consume hundreds or thousands of GPUs for parallelizing and accelerating the training process. Communication overhead becomes more pronounced when training LLMs at scale. To eliminate communication overhead in distributed LLM training, we propose Domino, which provides a generic scheme to hide communication behind computation. By breaking data dependency of a single batch training into smaller independent pieces, Domino pipelines these independent pieces training and provides generic strategy of fine-grained communication and computation overlapping. Extensive results show that, comparing with Megatron-LM, Domino achieves up to 1.3x speedup for LLM training on Nvidia DGX-H100 GPUs.

Guanhua Wang, Olatunji Ruwase, Bing Xie et al.

Model checkpoints are critical Deep Learning (DL) artifacts that enable fault tolerance for training and downstream applications, such as inference. However, writing checkpoints to persistent storage, and other I/O aspects of DL training, are mostly ignored by compute-focused optimization efforts for faster training of rapidly growing models and datasets. Towards addressing this imbalance, we propose FastPersist to accelerate checkpoint creation in DL training. FastPersist combines three novel techniques: (i) NVMe optimizations for faster checkpoint writes to SSDs, (ii) efficient write parallelism using the available SSDs in training environments, and (iii) overlapping checkpointing with independent training computations. Our evaluation using real world dense and sparse DL models shows that FastPersist creates checkpoints in persistent storage up to 116x faster than baseline, and enables per-iteration checkpointing with negligible overhead.

Hongjia Yang, Guanhua Wang, Ziyu Li et al.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has significantly benefited from the resurgence of artificial intelligence (AI). By leveraging AI's capabilities in large-scale optimization and pattern recognition, innovative methods are transforming the MRI acquisition workflow, including planning, sequence design, and correction of acquisition artifacts. These emerging algorithms demonstrate substantial potential in enhancing the efficiency and throughput of acquisition steps. This review discusses several pivotal AI-based methods in neuro MRI acquisition, focusing on their technological advances, impact on clinical practice, and potential risks.

Ashkan Yousefpour, Brian Q. Nguyen, Siddartha Devic et al.

Federated Learning aims to train distributed deep models without sharing the raw data with the centralized server. Similarly, in distributed inference of neural networks, by partitioning the network and distributing it across several physical nodes, activations and gradients are exchanged between physical nodes, rather than raw data. Nevertheless, when a neural network is partitioned and distributed among physical nodes, failure of physical nodes causes the failure of the neural units that are placed on those nodes, which results in a significant performance drop. Current approaches focus on resiliency of training in distributed neural networks. However, resiliency of inference in distributed neural networks is less explored. We introduce ResiliNet, a scheme for making inference in distributed neural networks resilient to physical node failures. ResiliNet combines two concepts to provide resiliency: skip hyperconnection, a concept for skipping nodes in distributed neural networks similar to skip connection in resnets, and a novel technique called failout, which is introduced in this paper. Failout simulates physical node failure conditions during training using dropout, and is specifically designed to improve the resiliency of distributed neural networks. The results of the experiments and ablation studies using three datasets confirm the ability of ResiliNet to provide inference resiliency for distributed neural networks.

Ba Dung Le, Guanhua Wang, Mehwish Nasim et al.

Preventing organizations from Cyber exploits needs timely intelligence about Cyber vulnerabilities and attacks, referred as threats. Cyber threat intelligence can be extracted from various sources including social media platforms where users publish the threat information in real time. Gathering Cyber threat intelligence from social media sites is a time consuming task for security analysts that can delay timely response to emerging Cyber threats. We propose a framework for automatically gathering Cyber threat intelligence from Twitter by using a novelty detection model. Our model learns the features of Cyber threat intelligence from the threat descriptions published in public repositories such as Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) and classifies a new unseen tweet as either normal or anomalous to Cyber threat intelligence. We evaluate our framework using a purpose-built data set of tweets from 50 influential Cyber security related accounts over twelve months (in 2018). Our classifier achieves the F1-score of 0.643 for classifying Cyber threat tweets and outperforms several baselines including binary classification models. Our analysis of the classification results suggests that Cyber threat relevant tweets on Twitter do not often include the CVE identifier of the related threats. Hence, it would be valuable to collect these tweets and associate them with the related CVE identifier for cyber security applications.