Li Shen

Guinan Su, Li Shen, Lu Yin et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, such impressive capability typically comes with a substantial model size, which presents significant challenges in deployment and inference. While structured pruning of model parameters offers a promising way to reduce computational costs at deployment time, current methods primarily focus on single model pruning. In this work, we develop a novel strategy to compress models by strategically combining or merging layers from finetuned model variants, which preserves the original model's abilities by aggregating capabilities accentuated in different finetunes. We pose the optimal tailoring of these LLMs as a zero-order optimization problem, adopting a search space that supports three different operations: (1) Layer removal, (2) Layer selection from different candidate models, and (3) Layer merging. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach leads to competitive model pruning, for example, for the Llama2-13B model families, our compressed models maintain approximately 97.3\% of the original performance while removing $\sim25\%$ of parameters, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Guinan-Su/auto-merge-llm.

Shen Li, Renfen Hu, Lijun Wang

General-purpose large language models demonstrate notable capabilities in language comprehension and generation, achieving results that are comparable to, or even surpass, human performance in many natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, when general models are applied to some specific domains, e.g., Classical Chinese texts, their effectiveness is often unsatisfactory, and fine-tuning open-source foundational models similarly struggles to adequately incorporate domain-specific knowledge. To address this challenge, this study developed a large language model, AI Taiyan, specifically designed for understanding and generating Classical Chinese. Experiments show that with a reasonable model design, data processing, foundational training, and fine-tuning, satisfactory results can be achieved with only 1.8 billion parameters. In key tasks related to language processing of Classical Chinese such as punctuation, identification of allusions, explanation of word meanings, and translation between ancient and modern Chinese, this model exhibits a clear advantage over both general-purpose large models and domain-specific traditional models, achieving levels close to or surpassing human baselines. This research provides a reference for the efficient construction of specialized domain-specific large language models. Furthermore, the paper discusses the application of this model in fields such as the collation of ancient texts, dictionary editing, and language research, combined with case studies.