Yurun Song

Yurun Song, Zhuoyi Yang, Ian G. Harris et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are scaling rapidly, creating significant challenges for collaborative server client distributed training, particularly in terms of communication efficiency and computational overheads. To address these challenges, we implement Parameter-efficient Split Learning, which effectively balances efficiency and performance for collaborative training on low-resource devices. To reduce communication overhead in collaborative training, we introduce Adaptive Mixed bit Activation Quantization (AMAQ), a strategy that progressively compresses activations and gradients from high precision (6 to 8 bits) to low precision (3 to 4 bits). AMAQ achieves this by effectively allocating bit budgets across channels based on feature wise and layer wise importance using bit regularization. Under the same bit budgets, AMAQ outperforms fixed-precision approaches, delivering about 2.5% higher generation accuracy and about 1.3% better classification accuracy for models like LLaMA3 8B and Qwen2.5 7B. In addition, it significantly enhances training stability and reducing ultra-low bit representation collapse during the training. Experiments demonstrate that AMAQ integrates effectively into practical multi-machine collaborative training setups, offering superior inference accuracy with only a modest communication overhead for bits adaptation during training. This trade off makes AMAQ a practical and effective solution for collaborative training with minimal communication cost.

Yurun Song, Junchen Zhao, Ian G. Harris et al.

In this paper, we introduce \textbf{Share}d \textbf{Lo}w \textbf{R}ank \textbf{A}daptation (ShareLoRA), a Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning technique that balances parameter efficiency, adaptability, and robustness without compromising performance. By strategically sharing the low-rank weight matrices across different layers, ShareLoRA achieves 44\% to 96\% reduction in trainable parameters compared to standard LoRA, alongside a substantial decrease in memory overhead. This efficiency gain scales with model size, making ShareLoRA particularly advantageous for resource-constrained environments. Importantly, ShareLoRA not only maintains model performance but also exhibits robustness in both classification and generation tasks across diverse models, including RoBERTa, GPT-2, and LLaMA series (1, 2, and 3). It consistently outperforms LoRA in zero-shot, few-shot, and continual fine-tuning scenarios, achieving up to 1.2\% average accuracy improvement, and enhanced generalization across domains. In continual learning settings, ShareLoRA achieves 1.2\% higher accuracy on GSM8K, 0.6\% on HumanEval, and 0.5\% on both MMLU and MMLU-Pro. Our results demonstrate that ShareLoRA supports high-quality fine-tuning while offering strong generalization and continual adaptation across various model scales and diverse tasks.

Junchen Zhao, Yurun Song, Junlin Wang et al.

Automatic code generation from natural language descriptions can be highly beneficial during the process of software development. In this work, we propose GAP-Gen, a Guided Automatic Python Code Generation method based on Python syntactic constraints and semantic constraints. We first introduce Python syntactic constraints in the form of Syntax-Flow, which is a simplified version of Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) reducing the size and high complexity of Abstract Syntax Tree but maintaining crucial syntactic information of Python code. In addition to Syntax-Flow, we introduce Variable-Flow which abstracts variable and function names consistently through out the code. In our work, rather than pretraining, we focus on modifying the finetuning process which reduces computational requirements but retains high generation performance on automatic Python code generation task. GAP-Gen fine-tunes the transformer based language models T5 and CodeT5 using the Code-to-Docstring datasets CodeSearchNet, CodeSearchNet AdvTest and Code-Docstring Corpus from EdinburghNLP. Our experiments show that GAP-Gen achieves better results on automatic Python code generation task than previous works.