Chu Wang

Adit Krishnan, Chu Wang, Chris Kong

Semantic text classification requires the understanding of the contextual significance of specific tokens rather than surface-level patterns or keywords (as in rule-based or statistical text classification), making large language models (LLMs) well-suited for this task. However, semantic classification applications in industry, like customer intent detection or semantic role labeling, tend to be highly specialized. They require annotation by domain experts in contrast to general-purpose corpora for pretraining. Further, they typically require high inference throughputs which limits the model size from latency and cost perspectives. Thus, for a range of specialized classification tasks, the preferred solution is to develop customized classifiers by finetuning smaller language models (e.g., mini-encoders, small language models). In this work, we develop a token-driven sparse finetuning strategy to adapt small language models to specialized classification tasks. We identify and finetune a small sensitive subset of model parameters by leveraging task-specific token constructs in the finetuning dataset, while leaving most of the pretrained weights unchanged. Unlike adapter approaches such as low rank adaptation (LoRA), we do not introduce additional parameters to the model. Our approach identifies highly relevant semantic tokens (case study in the Appendix) and outperforms end-to-end finetuning, LoRA, layer selection, and prefix tuning on five diverse semantic classification tasks. We achieve greater stability and half the training costs vs. end-to-end finetuning.

Yanzhi Wang, Jinhong Wu, Chu Wang et al.

Fault diagnosis of mechanical equipment provides robust support for industrial production. It is worth noting that, the operation of mechanical equipment is accompanied by changes in factors such as speed and load, leading to significant differences in data distribution, which pose challenges for fault diagnosis. Additionally, in terms of application deployment, commonly used cloud-based fault diagnosis methods often encounter issues such as time delays and data security concerns, while common fault diagnosis methods cannot be directly applied to edge computing devices. Therefore, conducting fault diagnosis under cross-operating conditions based on edge computing holds significant research value. This paper proposes a domain-adaptation-based lightweight fault diagnosis framework tailored for edge computing scenarios. Incorporating the local maximum mean discrepancy into knowledge transfer aligns the feature distributions of different domains in a high-dimensional feature space, to discover a common feature space across domains. The acquired fault diagnosis expertise from the cloud-based deep neural network model is transferred to the lightweight edge-based model (edge model) using adaptation knowledge transfer methods. It aims to achieve accurate fault diagnosis under cross-working conditions while ensuring real-time diagnosis capabilities. We utilized the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX kit as the edge computing platform and conducted validation experiments on two devices. In terms of diagnostic performance, the proposed method significantly improved diagnostic accuracy, with average increases of 34.44% and 17.33% compared to existing methods, respectively.