Qi He

Ruibo Chen, Yihan Wu, Lichang Chen et al.

Data selection in instruction tuning emerges as a pivotal process for acquiring high-quality data and training instruction-following large language models (LLMs), but it is still a new and unexplored research area for vision-language models (VLMs). Existing data selection approaches on LLMs either rely on single unreliable scores, or use downstream tasks for selection, which is time-consuming and can lead to potential over-fitting on the chosen evaluation datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel dataset selection method, Self-Filter, that utilizes the VLM itself as a filter. This approach is inspired by the observation that VLMs benefit from training with the most challenging instructions. Self-Filter operates in two stages. In the first stage, we devise a scoring network to evaluate the difficulty of training instructions, which is co-trained with the VLM. In the second stage, we use the trained score net to measure the difficulty of each instruction, select the most challenging samples, and penalize similar samples to encourage diversity. Comprehensive experiments on LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 show that Self-Filter can reach better results compared to full data settings with merely about 15% samples, and can achieve superior performance against competitive baselines.

Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which breaks down complex tasks into intermediate reasoning steps, has significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging tasks. However, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs, partly due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. To address this, we propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance: a step is deemed critical if its removal causes a significant increase in perplexity. Our method enables models to focus solely on generating these critical steps. This can be achieved through two approaches: refining demonstration examples in few-shot CoT or fine-tuning the model using selected examples that include only critical steps. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves a better balance between the reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT.

Yunwei Mao, Qi He, Ju Li

Networked computing power is a critical utility in the era of artificial intelligence. This paper presents a novel Physical Infrastructure Finance (PinFi) protocol designed to facilitate the distribution of computing power within networks in a decentralized manner. Addressing the core challenges of coordination, pricing, and liquidity in decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), the PinFi protocol introduces a distinctive dynamic pricing mechanism. It enables providers to allocate excess computing resources to a "dissipative" PinFi liquidity pool, distinct from traditional DeFi liquidity pools, ensuring seamless access for clients at equitable, market-based prices. This approach significantly reduces the costs of accessing computing power, potentially to as low as 1% compared to existing services, while simultaneously enhancing security and dependability. The PinFi protocol is poised to transform the dynamics of supply and demand in computing power networks, setting a new standard for efficiency and accessibility.