Tao Ge

Tao Ge, Jing Hu, Lei Wang et al. · microsoft-research

We propose the In-context Autoencoder (ICAE), leveraging the power of a large language model (LLM) to compress a long context into short compact memory slots that can be directly conditioned on by the LLM for various purposes. ICAE is first pretrained using both autoencoding and language modeling objectives on massive text data, enabling it to generate memory slots that accurately and comprehensively represent the original context. Then, it is fine-tuned on instruction data for producing desirable responses to various prompts. Experiments demonstrate that our lightweight ICAE, introducing about 1% additional parameters, effectively achieves $4\times$ context compression based on Llama, offering advantages in both improved latency and GPU memory cost during inference, and showing an interesting insight in memorization as well as potential for scalability. These promising results imply a novel perspective on the connection between working memory in cognitive science and representation learning in LLMs, revealing ICAE's significant implications in addressing the long context problem and suggesting further research in LLM context management. Our data, code and models are available at https://github.com/getao/icae.

Nan Yang, Tao Ge, Liang Wang et al. · microsoft-research

We propose LLMA, an LLM accelerator to losslessly speed up Large Language Model (LLM) inference with references. LLMA is motivated by the observation that there are abundant identical text spans between the decoding result by an LLM and the reference that is available in many real world scenarios (e.g., retrieved documents). LLMA first selects a text span from the reference and copies its tokens to the decoder and then efficiently checks the tokens' appropriateness as the decoding result in parallel within one decoding step. The improved computational parallelism allows LLMA to achieve over 2x speed-up for LLMs with identical generation results as greedy decoding in many practical generation scenarios where significant overlap between in-context reference and outputs exists (e.g., search engines and multi-turn conversations).

Tao Ge, Heming Xia, Xin Sun et al. · microsoft-research, pku

We study lossless acceleration for seq2seq generation with a novel decoding algorithm -- Aggressive Decoding. Unlike the previous efforts (e.g., non-autoregressive decoding) speeding up seq2seq generation at the cost of quality loss, our approach aims to yield the identical (or better) generation compared with autoregressive decoding but in a significant speedup, achieved by innovative cooperation of aggressive decoding and verification that are both efficient due to parallel computing. We propose two Aggressive Decoding paradigms for 2 kinds of seq2seq tasks: 1) For the seq2seq tasks whose inputs and outputs are highly similar (e.g., Grammatical Error Correction), we propose Input-guided Aggressive Decoding (IAD) that aggressively copies from the input sentence as drafted decoded tokens to verify in parallel; 2) For other general seq2seq tasks (e.g., Machine Translation), we propose Generalized Aggressive Decoding (GAD) that first employs an additional non-autoregressive decoding model for aggressive decoding and then verifies in parallel in the autoregressive manner. We test Aggressive Decoding on the most popular 6-layer Transformer model on GPU in multiple seq2seq tasks: 1) For IAD, we show that it can introduce a 7x-9x speedup for the Transformer in Grammatical Error Correction and Text Simplification tasks with the identical results as greedy decoding; 2) For GAD, we observe a 3x-5x speedup with the identical or even better quality in two important seq2seq tasks: Machine Translation and Abstractive Summarization. Moreover, Aggressive Decoding can benefit even more from stronger computing devices that are better at parallel computing. Given the lossless quality as well as significant and promising speedup, we believe Aggressive Decoding may potentially evolve into a de facto standard for efficient and lossless seq2seq generation in the near future.

Guangyue Peng, Tao Ge, Si-Qing Chen et al. · microsoft-research

Semiparametric language models (LMs) have shown promise in continuously learning from new text data by combining a parameterized neural LM with a growable non-parametric memory for memorizing new content. However, conventional semiparametric LMs will finally become prohibitive for computing and storing if they are applied to continual learning over streaming data, because the non-parametric memory grows linearly with the amount of data they learn from over time. To address the issue of scalability, we present a simple and intuitive approach called Selective Memorization (SeMem), which only memorizes difficult samples that the model is likely to struggle with. We demonstrate that SeMem improves the scalability of semiparametric LMs for continual learning over streaming data in two ways: (1) data-wise scalability: as the model becomes stronger through continual learning, it will encounter fewer difficult cases that need to be memorized, causing the growth of the non-parametric memory to slow down over time rather than growing at a linear rate with the size of training data; (2) model-wise scalability: SeMem allows a larger model to memorize fewer samples than its smaller counterpart because it is rarer for a larger model to encounter incomprehensible cases, resulting in a non-parametric memory that does not scale linearly with model size. We conduct extensive experiments in language modeling and downstream tasks to test SeMem's results, showing SeMem enables a semiparametric LM to be a scalable continual learner with little forgetting.

Jingjing Li, Zichao Li, Tao Ge et al.

Text revision refers to a family of natural language generation tasks, where the source and target sequences share moderate resemblance in surface form but differentiate in attributes, such as text formality and simplicity. Current state-of-the-art methods formulate these tasks as sequence-to-sequence learning problems, which rely on large-scale parallel training corpus. In this paper, we present an iterative in-place editing approach for text revision, which requires no parallel data. In this approach, we simply fine-tune a pre-trained Transformer with masked language modeling and attribute classification. During inference, the editing at each iteration is realized by two-step span replacement. At the first step, the distributed representation of the text optimizes on the fly towards an attribute function. At the second step, a text span is masked and another new one is proposed conditioned on the optimized representation. The empirical experiments on two typical and important text revision tasks, text formalization and text simplification, show the effectiveness of our approach. It achieves competitive and even better performance than state-of-the-art supervised methods on text simplification, and gains better performance than strong unsupervised methods on text formalization \footnote{Code and model are available at \url{https://github.com/jingjingli01/OREO}}.

Tao Ge, Jing Hu, Li Dong et al. · microsoft-research

We propose eXtensible Prompt (X-Prompt) for prompting a large language model (LLM) beyond natural language (NL). X-Prompt instructs an LLM with not only NL but also an extensible vocabulary of imaginary words. Registering new imaginary words allows us to instruct the LLM to comprehend concepts that are difficult to describe with NL words, thereby making a prompt more descriptive. Also, these imaginary words are designed to be out-of-distribution (OOD) robust so that they can be (re)used like NL words in various prompts, distinguishing X-Prompt from soft prompt that is for fitting in-distribution data. We propose context-augmented learning (CAL) to learn imaginary words for general usability, enabling them to work properly in OOD (unseen) prompts. We experiment X-Prompt for zero-shot language style customization as a case study. The promising results of X-Prompt demonstrate its potential to facilitate advanced interaction beyond the natural language interface, bridging the communication gap between humans and LLMs.

Xun Wang, Tao Ge, Allen Mao et al. · microsoft-research

We introduce \textsc{PoliteRewrite} -- a dataset for polite language rewrite which is a novel sentence rewrite task. Compared with previous text style transfer tasks that can be mostly addressed by slight token- or phrase-level edits, polite language rewrite requires deep understanding and extensive sentence-level edits over an offensive and impolite sentence to deliver the same message euphemistically and politely, which is more challenging -- not only for NLP models but also for human annotators to rewrite with effort. To alleviate the human effort for efficient annotation, we first propose a novel annotation paradigm by a collaboration of human annotators and GPT-3.5 to annotate \textsc{PoliteRewrite}. The released dataset has 10K polite sentence rewrites annotated collaboratively by GPT-3.5 and human, which can be used as gold standard for training, validation and test; and 100K high-quality polite sentence rewrites by GPT-3.5 without human review. We wish this work (The dataset (10K+100K) will be released soon) could contribute to the research on more challenging sentence rewrite, and provoke more thought in future on resource annotation paradigm with the help of the large-scaled pretrained models.

Yuzhe Cai, Shaoguang Mao, Wenshan Wu et al.

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It incorporates six types of simple low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. Through visual interaction with a graphical user interface, users can incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. The proposed Low-code LLM framework consists of a Planning LLM that designs a structured planning workflow for complex tasks, which can be correspondingly edited and confirmed by users through low-code visual programming operations, and an Executing LLM that generates responses following the user-confirmed workflow. We highlight three advantages of the low-code LLM: user-friendly interaction, controllable generation, and wide applicability. We demonstrate its benefits using four typical applications. By introducing this framework, we aim to bridge the gap between humans and LLMs, enabling more effective and efficient utilization of LLMs for complex tasks. The code, prompts, and experimental details are available at https://github.com/moymix/TaskMatrix/tree/main/LowCodeLLM. A system demonstration video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb2C1vaeO3E.

Shaoguang Mao, Yuzhe Cai, Yan Xia et al.

This paper introduces Alympics (Olympics for Agents), a systematic simulation framework utilizing Large Language Model (LLM) agents for game theory research. Alympics creates a versatile platform for studying complex game theory problems, bridging the gap between theoretical game theory and empirical investigations by providing a controlled environment for simulating human-like strategic interactions with LLM agents. In our pilot case study, the "Water Allocation Challenge," we explore Alympics through a challenging strategic game focused on the multi-round auction on scarce survival resources. This study demonstrates the framework's ability to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze game determinants, strategies, and outcomes. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive human assessment and an in-depth evaluation of LLM agents in strategic decision-making scenarios. Our findings not only expand the understanding of LLM agents' proficiency in emulating human strategic behavior but also highlight their potential in advancing game theory knowledge, thereby enriching our understanding of both game theory and empowering further research into strategic decision-making domains with LLM agents. Codes, prompts, and all related resources are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Alympics.

Tao Ge, Maria Medrano, Rui Liao et al.

Numerous dual-energy CT (DECT) techniques have been developed in the past few decades. Dual-energy CT (DECT) statistical iterative reconstruction (SIR) has demonstrated its potential for reducing noise and increasing accuracy. Our lab proposed a joint statistical DECT algorithm for stopping power estimation and showed that it outperforms competing image-based material-decomposition methods. However, due to its slow convergence and the high computational cost of projections, the elapsed time of 3D DECT SIR is often not clinically acceptable. Therefore, to improve its convergence, we have embedded DECT SIR into a deep learning model-based unrolled network for 3D DECT reconstruction (MB-DECTNet) that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. This deep learning-based method is trained to learn the shortcuts between the initial conditions and the stationary points of iterative algorithms while preserving the unbiased estimation property of model-based algorithms. MB-DECTNet is formed by stacking multiple update blocks, each of which consists of a data consistency layer (DC) and a spatial mixer layer, where the spatial mixer layer is the shrunken U-Net, and the DC layer is a one-step update of an arbitrary traditional iterative method. Although the proposed network can be combined with numerous iterative DECT algorithms, we demonstrate its performance with the dual-energy alternating minimization (DEAM). The qualitative result shows that MB-DECTNet with DEAM significantly reduces noise while increasing the resolution of the test image. The quantitative result shows that MB-DECTNet has the potential to estimate attenuation coefficients accurately as traditional statistical algorithms but with a much lower computational cost.

Tao Ge, Jaideep Pathak, Akshay Subramaniam et al.

Data-driven models, such as FourCastNet (FCN), have shown exemplary performance in high-resolution global weather forecasting. This performance, however, is based on supervision on mesh-gridded weather data without the utilization of raw climate observational data, the gold standard ground truth. In this work we develop a methodology to correct, remap, and fine-tune gridded uniform forecasts of FCN so it can be directly compared against observational ground truth, which is sparse and non-uniform in space and time. This is akin to bias correction and post-processing of numerical weather prediction (NWP), a routine operation at meteorological and weather forecasting centers across the globe. The Adaptive Fourier Neural Operator (AFNO) architecture is used as the backbone to learn continuous representations of the atmosphere. The spatially and temporally non-uniform output is evaluated by the non-uniform discrete inverse Fourier transform (NUIDFT) given the output query locations. We call this network the Deep-Learning-Corrector-Remapper (DLCR). The improvement in DLCR's performance against the gold standard ground truth over the baseline's performance shows its potential to correct, remap, and fine-tune the mesh-gridded forecasts under the supervision of observations.

Dingyao Yu, Yang An, Wei Ye et al.

Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) commonly lacks large-scale high-quality corpora, due to the labor-intensive labeling of spelling errors in real-life human writing or typing scenarios. Two data augmentation methods are widely adopted: (1) \textit{Random Replacement} with the guidance of confusion sets and (2) \textit{OCR/ASR-based Generation} that simulates character misusing. However, both methods inevitably introduce noisy data (e.g., false spelling errors), potentially leading to over-correction. By carefully analyzing the two types of corpora, we find that though the latter achieves more robust generalization performance, the former yields better-calibrated CSC models. We then provide a theoretical analysis of this empirical observation, based on which a corpus refining strategy is proposed. Specifically, OCR/ASR-based data samples are fed into a well-calibrated CSC model trained on random replacement-based corpora and then filtered based on prediction confidence. By learning a simple BERT-based model on the refined OCR/ASR-based corpus, we set up impressive state-of-the-art performance on three widely-used benchmarks, while significantly alleviating over-correction (e.g., lowering false positive predictions).

Heming Xia, Tao Ge, Peiyi Wang et al.

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an independent model specially optimized for efficient and accurate drafting -- and Spec-Verification -- a reliable method for verifying the drafted tokens efficiently in the decoding paradigm. Experimental results on various seq2seq tasks including machine translation and abstractive summarization show our approach can achieve around $5\times$ speedup for the popular Transformer architectures with comparable generation quality to beam search decoding, refreshing the impression that the draft-then-verify paradigm introduces only $1.4\times$$\sim$$2\times$ speedup. In addition to the remarkable speedup, we also demonstrate 3 additional advantages of SpecDec, revealing its practical value for accelerating generative models in real-world applications. Our models and codes are available at https://github.com/hemingkx/SpecDec.

Yadong Zhang, Shaoguang Mao, Tao Ge et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the current status and opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs) in strategic reasoning, a sophisticated form of reasoning that necessitates understanding and predicting adversary actions in multi-agent settings while adjusting strategies accordingly. Strategic reasoning is distinguished by its focus on the dynamic and uncertain nature of interactions among multi-agents, where comprehending the environment and anticipating the behavior of others is crucial. We explore the scopes, applications, methodologies, and evaluation metrics related to strategic reasoning with LLMs, highlighting the burgeoning development in this area and the interdisciplinary approaches enhancing their decision-making performance. It aims to systematize and clarify the scattered literature on this subject, providing a systematic review that underscores the importance of strategic reasoning as a critical cognitive capability and offers insights into future research directions and potential improvements.

Zeyuan Hu, Akshay Subramaniam, Noel Keen et al.

Kilometer-scale convection shapes precipitation extremes, tropical organization, and cloud feedbacks, but most global atmospheric models approximate these processes at 25-100 km resolution. Global storm-resolving physics models resolve convective systems explicitly, but at a cost -- roughly one MWh per simulated day on exascale supercomputers -- that limits long-duration simulation. We introduce STRATA (Storm-resolving Tile-based autoRegressive Atmosphere Transformer Architecture), the first autoregressive AI emulator for global storm-resolving atmospheric dynamics. STRATA is trained on the highest-resolution atmospheric dataset yet used for global AI emulation: 17 days of SCREAM physics-model output at 4.9-km resolution (~25 million grid cells) sampled every 10 minutes. Our central premise is that on 10-minute timescales atmospheric dynamics are predominantly local, so training on small spatial tiles trades scarce global temporal samples for abundant local spatial samples and enables global rollout via overlapping-tile blending. STRATA combines 3D patch embedding and local 3D neighborhood attention, a novel Stereographic Rotary Position Embedding (StereoRoPE) for grid-invariant encoding, and a pixel-space de-aliasing decoder that suppresses patch-scale rollout artifacts. An iso-FLOP scaling study reveals that km-scale emulation requires ~10x more FLOPs per grid point than coarse-resolution AI weather models, consistent with the higher information density of convective-scale dynamics. Trained on only 17 days of data, STRATA produces stable 24-hour global rollouts with realistic km-scale dynamics across diverse regimes, though large-scale biases develop with lead time. It achieves 48 simulation days per megawatt-hour -- about 50 times better energy efficiency than the SCREAM physics model -- and 741 simulated days per wall-clock day at 512 H100 GPUs. Code and dataset are publicly available.

Tao Ge, Si-Qing Chen, Furu Wei

We introduce EdgeFormer -- a parameter-efficient Transformer for on-device seq2seq generation under the strict computation and memory constraints. Compared with the previous parameter-efficient Transformers, EdgeFormer applies two novel principles for cost-effective parameterization, allowing it to perform better given the same parameter budget; moreover, EdgeFormer is further enhanced by layer adaptation innovation that is proposed for improving the network with shared layers. Extensive experiments show EdgeFormer can effectively outperform previous parameter-efficient Transformer baselines and achieve competitive results under both the computation and memory constraints. Given the promising results, we release EdgeLM -- the pretrained version of EdgeFormer, which is the first publicly available pretrained on-device seq2seq model that can be easily fine-tuned for seq2seq tasks with strong results, facilitating on-device seq2seq generation in practice.

Xin Sun, Tao Ge, Shuming Ma et al.

Synthetic data construction of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) for non-English languages relies heavily on human-designed and language-specific rules, which produce limited error-corrected patterns. In this paper, we propose a generic and language-independent strategy for multilingual GEC, which can train a GEC system effectively for a new non-English language with only two easy-to-access resources: 1) a pretrained cross-lingual language model (PXLM) and 2) parallel translation data between English and the language. Our approach creates diverse parallel GEC data without any language-specific operations by taking the non-autoregressive translation generated by PXLM and the gold translation as error-corrected sentence pairs. Then, we reuse PXLM to initialize the GEC model and pretrain it with the synthetic data generated by itself, which yields further improvement. We evaluate our approach on three public benchmarks of GEC in different languages. It achieves the state-of-the-art results on the NLPCC 2018 Task 2 dataset (Chinese) and obtains competitive performance on Falko-Merlin (German) and RULEC-GEC (Russian). Further analysis demonstrates that our data construction method is complementary to rule-based approaches.