14.5DCApr 21
ReaLB: Real-Time Load Balancing for Multimodal MoE InferenceYingping Wang, Yi Wu, Xiangyu Wu et al.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are widely used in modern large language models and multimodal models. However, inference efficiency is often limited by highly dynamic and skewed expert workloads across different modalities. During the prefill stage with large batch sizes, vision tokens frequently dominate the input sequences. Under expert parallelism (EP), this leads to severe load imbalance, where a subset of devices becomes overloaded, reducing overall system throughput. We propose ReaLB, a real-time load balancing method for multimodal MoE (MMoE) inference that introduces zero scheduling overhead. ReaLB dynamically adjusts the computation precision of MoE experts at runtime on a per-EP-rank basis. For ranks dominated by vision-heavy experts, ReaLB assigns lower-precision computation to improve execution efficiency by exploiting FP4 Tensor Cores. ReaLB does not require redundant experts or additional memory allocation. Instead, it performs layer-wise expert precision transformation on the fly and hides the associated overhead within the dispatch phase before MoE computation. Experiments on representative MMoE models show that ReaLB achieves 1.29x layer-level speedup while limiting accuracy loss to within 1.2%.
12.2RODec 16, 2024Code
What Matters in Learning A Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real RL Policy for Quadrotor Control? A Comprehensive StudyJiayu Chen, Chao Yu, Yuqing Xie et al. · tsinghua
Executing precise and agile flight maneuvers is critical for quadrotors in various applications. Traditional quadrotor control approaches are limited by their reliance on flat trajectories or time-consuming optimization, which restricts their flexibility. Recently, RL-based policy has emerged as a promising alternative due to its ability to directly map observations to actions, reducing the need for detailed system knowledge and actuation constraints. However, a significant challenge remains in bridging the sim-to-real gap, where RL-based policies often experience instability when deployed in real world. In this paper, we investigate key factors for learning robust RL-based control policies that are capable of zero-shot deployment in real-world quadrotors. We identify five critical factors and we develop a PPO-based training framework named SimpleFlight, which integrates these five techniques. We validate the efficacy of SimpleFlight on Crazyflie quadrotor, demonstrating that it achieves more than a 50% reduction in trajectory tracking error compared to state-of-the-art RL baselines. The policy derived by SimpleFlight consistently excels across both smooth polynominal trajectories and challenging infeasible zigzag trajectories on small thrust-to-weight quadrotors. In contrast, baseline methods struggle with high-speed or infeasible trajectories. To support further research and reproducibility, we integrate SimpleFlight into a GPU-based simulator Omnidrones and provide open-source access to the code and model checkpoints. We hope SimpleFlight will offer valuable insights for advancing RL-based quadrotor control. For more details, visit our project website at https://sites.google.com/view/simpleflight/.
16.5IRJan 27, 2025
360Brew: A Decoder-only Foundation Model for Personalized Ranking and RecommendationHamed Firooz, Maziar Sanjabi, Adrian Englhardt et al.
Ranking and recommendation systems are the foundation for numerous online experiences, ranging from search results to personalized content delivery. These systems have evolved into complex, multilayered architectures that leverage vast datasets and often incorporate thousands of predictive models. The maintenance and enhancement of these models is a labor intensive process that requires extensive feature engineering. This approach not only exacerbates technical debt but also hampers innovation in extending these systems to emerging problem domains. In this report, we present our research to address these challenges by utilizing a large foundation model with a textual interface for ranking and recommendation tasks. We illustrate several key advantages of our approach: (1) a single model can manage multiple predictive tasks involved in ranking and recommendation, (2) decoder models with textual interface due to their comprehension of reasoning capabilities, can generalize to new recommendation surfaces and out-of-domain problems, and (3) by employing natural language interfaces for task definitions and verbalizing member behaviors and their social connections, we eliminate the need for feature engineering and the maintenance of complex directed acyclic graphs of model dependencies. We introduce our research pre-production model, 360Brew V1.0, a 150B parameter, decoder-only model that has been trained and fine-tuned on LinkedIn's data and tasks. This model is capable of solving over 30 predictive tasks across various segments of the LinkedIn platform, achieving performance levels comparable to or exceeding those of current production systems based on offline metrics, without task-specific fine-tuning. Notably, each of these tasks is conventionally addressed by dedicated models that have been developed and maintained over multiple years by teams of a similar or larger size than our own.
Evaluating Cell AI Foundation Models in Kidney Pathology with Human-in-the-Loop EnrichmentJunlin Guo, Siqi Lu, Can Cui et al.
Training AI foundation models has emerged as a promising large-scale learning approach for addressing real-world healthcare challenges, including digital pathology. While many of these models have been developed for tasks like disease diagnosis and tissue quantification using extensive and diverse training datasets, their readiness for deployment on some arguably simplest tasks, such as nuclei segmentation within a single organ (e.g., the kidney), remains uncertain. This paper seeks to answer this key question, "How good are we?", by thoroughly evaluating the performance of recent cell foundation models on a curated multi-center, multi-disease, and multi-species external testing dataset. Additionally, we tackle a more challenging question, "How can we improve?", by developing and assessing human-in-the-loop data enrichment strategies aimed at enhancing model performance while minimizing the reliance on pixel-level human annotation. To address the first question, we curated a multicenter, multidisease, and multispecies dataset consisting of 2,542 kidney whole slide images (WSIs). Three state-of-the-art (SOTA) cell foundation models-Cellpose, StarDist, and CellViT-were selected for evaluation. To tackle the second question, we explored data enrichment algorithms by distilling predictions from the different foundation models with a human-in-the-loop framework, aiming to further enhance foundation model performance with minimal human efforts. Our experimental results showed that all three foundation models improved over their baselines with model fine-tuning with enriched data. Interestingly, the baseline model with the highest F1 score does not yield the best segmentation outcomes after fine-tuning. This study establishes a benchmark for the development and deployment of cell vision foundation models tailored for real-world data applications.