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Large language models (LLMs) based on the Transformer architecture are widely employed across various domains and tasks. However, their increasing size imposes significant hardware demands, limiting practical deployment. To mitigate this, model pruning techniques have been developed to create more efficient models while maintaining high performance. Despite this, post-training after pruning is crucial for performance recovery and can be resource-intensive. This paper investigates the post-training requirements of pruned LLMs and introduces a scaling law to determine the optimal amount of post-training data. Post-training experiments with the Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5 series models, pruned using depth pruning, width pruning, and 2:4 semi-structured pruning, show that higher pruning ratios necessitate more post-training data for performance recovery, whereas larger LLMs require less. The proposed scaling law predicts a model's loss based on its parameter counts before and after pruning, as well as the post-training token counts. Furthermore, we find that the scaling law established from smaller LLMs can be reliably extrapolated to larger LLMs. This work provides valuable insights into the post-training of pruned LLMs and offers a practical scaling law for optimizing post-training data usage.

Developing asynchronous neuromorphic hardware to meet the demands of diverse real-life edge scenarios remains significant challenges. These challenges include constraints on hardware resources and power budgets while satisfying the requirements for real-time responsiveness, reliable inference accuracy, and so on. Besides, the existing system-level simulators for asynchronous neuromorphic hardware suffer from runtime limitations. To address these challenges, we propose an Asynchronous Neuromorphic algorithm/hardware Co-Exploration Framework (ANCoEF) including multi-objective reinforcement learning (RL)-based hardware architecture optimization method, and a fully asynchronous simulator (TrueAsync) which achieves over 2 times runtime speedups than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) simulator. Our experimental results show that, the RL-based hardware architecture optimization approach of ANCoEF outperforms the SOTA method by reducing 1.81 times hardware energy-delay product (EDP) with 2.73 times less search time on N-MNIST dataset, and the co-exploration framework of ANCoEF improves SNN accuracy by 9.72% and reduces hardware EDP by 28.85 times compared to the SOTA work on DVS128Gesture dataset. Furthermore, ANCoEF framework is evaluated on external neuromorphic dataset CIFAR10-DVS, and static datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN, and Tiny-ImageNet. For instance, after 26.23 ThreadHour of co-exploration process, the result on CIFAR10-DVS dataset achieves an SNN accuracy of 98.48% while consuming hardware EDP of 0.54 s nJ per sample.

We investigate the construction of gradient-guided conditional diffusion models for reconstructing private images, focusing on the adversarial interplay between differential privacy noise and the denoising capabilities of diffusion models. While current gradient-based reconstruction methods struggle with high-resolution images due to computational complexity and prior knowledge requirements, we propose two novel methods that require minimal modifications to the diffusion model's generation process and eliminate the need for prior knowledge. Our approach leverages the strong image generation capabilities of diffusion models to reconstruct private images starting from randomly generated noise, even when a small amount of differentially private noise has been added to the gradients. We also conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the impact of differential privacy noise on the quality of reconstructed images, revealing the relationship among noise magnitude, the architecture of attacked models, and the attacker's reconstruction capability. Additionally, extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods and the accuracy of our theoretical findings, suggesting new directions for privacy risk auditing using conditional diffusion models.

Massive black hole binaries are one of the important sources for the TianQin project. Our research has revealed that, for TianQin, the signal-to-noise ratio squared during the inspiral phase of massive black hole binaries exhibits a direct proportionality to the ratio of the observation duration to the time remaining until coalescence. This finding is expected to greatly simplify the estimation of detection capabilities for massive black hole binaries. In this paper, we demonstrated this relationship under both all-sky average and non-average conditions. The latter introduces only an additional term, which we refer to as the response factor. Although this term is not easily calculated analytically, we provide a simple estimation method with an error margin of within 2%., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, comments welcome

Existing Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR) is limited to coarse-grained understanding, which hinders precise video moment localization when given fine-grained queries. In this paper, we propose a more challenging fine-grained VCMR benchmark requiring methods to localize the best-matched moment from the corpus with other partially matched candidates. To improve the dataset construction efficiency and guarantee high-quality data annotations, we propose VERIFIED, an automatic \underline{V}id\underline{E}o-text annotation pipeline to generate captions with \underline{R}el\underline{I}able \underline{FI}n\underline{E}-grained statics and \underline{D}ynamics. Specifically, we resort to large language models (LLM) and large multimodal models (LMM) with our proposed Statics and Dynamics Enhanced Captioning modules to generate diverse fine-grained captions for each video. To filter out the inaccurate annotations caused by the LLM hallucination, we propose a Fine-Granularity Aware Noise Evaluator where we fine-tune a video foundation model with disturbed hard-negatives augmented contrastive and matching losses. With VERIFIED, we construct a more challenging fine-grained VCMR benchmark containing Charades-FIG, DiDeMo-FIG, and ActivityNet-FIG which demonstrate a high level of annotation quality. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VCMR models on the proposed dataset, revealing that there is still significant scope for fine-grained video understanding in VCMR. Code and Datasets are in \href{https://github.com/hlchen23/VERIFIED}{https://github.com/hlchen23/VERIFIED}., Comment: Accepted by 38th NeurIPS Datasets & Benchmarks Track (NeurIPS 2024)

Generalized additive models (GAM) have been successfully applied to high dimensional data analysis. However, most existing methods cannot simultaneously estimate the link function, the component functions and the variable interaction. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new sparse additive model, named generalized sparse additive model with unknown link function (GSAMUL), in which the component functions are estimated by B-spline basis and the unknown link function is estimated by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network. Furthermore, $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularizer is used for variable selection. The proposed GSAMUL can realize both variable selection and hidden interaction. We integrate this estimation into a bilevel optimization problem, where the data is split into training set and validation set. In theory, we provide the guarantees about the convergence of the approximate procedure. In applications, experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real world data sets consistently validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been a celebrated method for training vision encoders to generate image/text representations facilitating various applications. Recently, CLIP has been widely adopted as the vision backbone of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to connect image inputs for language interactions. The success of CLIP as a vision-language foundation model relies on aligning web-crawled noisy text annotations at image levels. Nevertheless, such criteria may become insufficient for downstream tasks in need of fine-grained vision representations, especially when region-level understanding is demanding for MLLMs. In this paper, we improve the localization capability of CLIP with several advances. We propose a pre-training method called Contrastive Localized Language-Image Pre-training (CLOC) by complementing CLIP with region-text contrastive loss and modules. We formulate a new concept, promptable embeddings, of which the encoder produces image embeddings easy to transform into region representations given spatial hints. To support large-scale pre-training, we design a visually-enriched and spatially-localized captioning framework to effectively generate region-text pseudo-labels at scale. By scaling up to billions of annotated images, CLOC enables high-quality regional embeddings for image region recognition and retrieval tasks, and can be a drop-in replacement of CLIP to enhance MLLMs, especially on referring and grounding tasks., Comment: Preprint

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of synthetic captions and their interaction with original web-crawled AltTexts in pre-training is still not well understood. Moreover, different multimodal foundation models may have unique preferences for specific caption formats, but efforts to identify the optimal captions for each model remain limited. In this work, we propose a novel, controllable, and scalable captioning pipeline designed to generate diverse caption formats tailored to various multimodal models. By examining Short Synthetic Captions (SSC) towards Dense Synthetic Captions (DSC+) as case studies, we systematically explore their effects and interactions with AltTexts across models such as CLIP, multimodal LLMs, and diffusion models. Our findings reveal that a hybrid approach that keeps both synthetic captions and AltTexts can outperform the use of synthetic captions alone, improving both alignment and performance, with each model demonstrating preferences for particular caption formats. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into optimizing captioning strategies, thereby advancing the pre-training of multimodal foundation models., Comment: CV/ML

Conversational Question Generation (CQG) enhances the interactivity of conversational question-answering systems in fields such as education, customer service, and entertainment. However, traditional CQG, focusing primarily on the immediate context, lacks the conversational foresight necessary to guide conversations toward specified conclusions. This limitation significantly restricts their ability to achieve conclusion-oriented conversational outcomes. In this work, we redefine the CQG task as Conclusion-driven Conversational Question Generation (CCQG) by focusing on proactivity, not merely reacting to the unfolding conversation but actively steering it towards a conclusion-oriented question-answer pair. To address this, we propose a novel approach, called Proactive Conversational Question Planning with self-Refining (PCQPR). Concretely, by integrating a planning algorithm inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with the analytical capabilities of large language models (LLMs), PCQPR predicts future conversation turns and continuously refines its questioning strategies. This iterative self-refining mechanism ensures the generation of contextually relevant questions strategically devised to reach a specified outcome. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that PCQPR significantly surpasses existing CQG methods, marking a paradigm shift towards conclusion-oriented conversational question-answering systems., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2024 Main

We present MM1.5, a new family of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) designed to enhance capabilities in text-rich image understanding, visual referring and grounding, and multi-image reasoning. Building upon the MM1 architecture, MM1.5 adopts a data-centric approach to model training, systematically exploring the impact of diverse data mixtures across the entire model training lifecycle. This includes high-quality OCR data and synthetic captions for continual pre-training, as well as an optimized visual instruction-tuning data mixture for supervised fine-tuning. Our models range from 1B to 30B parameters, encompassing both dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants, and demonstrate that careful data curation and training strategies can yield strong performance even at small scales (1B and 3B). Additionally, we introduce two specialized variants: MM1.5-Video, designed for video understanding, and MM1.5-UI, tailored for mobile UI understanding. Through extensive empirical studies and ablations, we provide detailed insights into the training processes and decisions that inform our final designs, offering valuable guidance for future research in MLLM development.

The opening of the gravitational wave window has significantly enhanced our capacity to explore the universe's most extreme and dynamic sector. In the mHz frequency range, a diverse range of compact objects, from the most massive black holes at the farthest reaches of the Universe to the lightest white dwarfs in our cosmic backyard, generate a complex and dynamic symphony of gravitational wave signals. Once recorded by gravitational wave detectors, these unique fingerprints have the potential to decipher the birth and growth of cosmic structures over a wide range of scales, from stellar binaries and stellar clusters to galaxies and large-scale structures. The TianQin space-borne gravitational wave mission is scheduled for launch in the 2030s, with an operational lifespan of five years. It will facilitate pivotal insights into the history of our universe. This document presents a concise overview of the detectable sources of TianQin, outlining their characteristics, the challenges they present, and the expected impact of the TianQin observatory on our understanding of them., Comment: TianQin Gravitational Wave Whitepaper, 72 pages, 30 figures

Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has attracted significant attention lately, due to the increasing size of pre-trained models and the need to fine-tune (FT) them for superior downstream performance. This community-wide enthusiasm has sparked a plethora of approaches. Nevertheless, a systematic study to understand their performance and suitable application scenarios is lacking, leaving questions like when to apply PETL and which approach to use largely unanswered. In this paper, we conduct a unifying empirical study of representative PETL methods in the context of Vision Transformers. We systematically tune their hyper-parameters to fairly compare their accuracy on downstream tasks. Our study not only offers a valuable user guide but also unveils several new insights. First, if tuned carefully, different PETL methods can obtain similar accuracy in the low-shot benchmark VTAB-1K. This includes simple methods like FT the bias terms that were reported inferior. Second, though with similar accuracy, we find that PETL methods make different mistakes and high-confidence predictions, likely due to their different inductive biases. Such an inconsistency (or complementariness) opens up the opportunity for ensemble methods, and we make preliminary attempts at this. Third, going beyond the commonly used low-shot tasks, we find that PETL is also useful in many-shot regimes -- it achieves comparable and sometimes better accuracy than full FT, using much fewer learnable parameters. Last but not least, we investigate PETL's ability to preserve a pre-trained model's robustness to distribution shifts (e.g., a CLIP backbone). Perhaps not surprisingly, PETL methods outperform full FT alone. However, with weight-space ensembles, the fully fine-tuned model can better balance target (i.e., downstream) distribution and distribution shift performance, suggesting a future research direction for PETL., Comment: Code is available at https://github.com/OSU-MLB/PETL_Vision

Fine-tuning is arguably the most straightforward way to tailor a pre-trained model (e.g., a foundation model) to downstream applications, but it also comes with the risk of losing valuable knowledge the model had learned in pre-training. For example, fine-tuning a pre-trained classifier capable of recognizing a large number of classes to master a subset of classes at hand is shown to drastically degrade the model's accuracy in the other classes it had previously learned. As such, it is hard to further use the fine-tuned model when it encounters classes beyond the fine-tuning data. In this paper, we systematically dissect the issue, aiming to answer the fundamental question, "What has been damaged in the fine-tuned model?" To our surprise, we find that the fine-tuned model neither forgets the relationship among the other classes nor degrades the features to recognize these classes. Instead, the fine-tuned model often produces more discriminative features for these other classes, even if they were missing during fine-tuning! {What really hurts the accuracy is the discrepant logit scales between the fine-tuning classes and the other classes}, implying that a simple post-processing calibration would bring back the pre-trained model's capability and at the same time unveil the feature improvement over all classes. We conduct an extensive empirical study to demonstrate the robustness of our findings and provide preliminary explanations underlying them, suggesting new directions for future theoretical analysis. Our code is available at https://github.com/OSU-MLB/Fine-Tuning-Is-Fine-If-Calibrated., Comment: The paper has been accepted to NeurIPS 2024. The first three authors contribute equally

Multi-modal generative AI has received increasing attention in both academia and industry. Particularly, two dominant families of techniques are: i) The multi-modal large language model (MLLM) such as GPT-4V, which shows impressive ability for multi-modal understanding; ii) The diffusion model such as Sora, which exhibits remarkable multi-modal powers, especially with respect to visual generation. As such, one natural question arises: Is it possible to have a unified model for both understanding and generation? To answer this question, in this paper, we first provide a detailed review of both MLLM and diffusion models, including their probabilistic modeling procedure, multi-modal architecture design, and advanced applications to image/video large language models as well as text-to-image/video generation. Then, we discuss the two important questions on the unified model: i) whether the unified model should adopt the auto-regressive or diffusion probabilistic modeling, and ii) whether the model should utilize a dense architecture or the Mixture of Experts(MoE) architectures to better support generation and understanding, two objectives. We further provide several possible strategies for building a unified model and analyze their potential advantages and disadvantages. We also summarize existing large-scale multi-modal datasets for better model pretraining in the future. To conclude the paper, we present several challenging future directions, which we believe can contribute to the ongoing advancement of multi-modal generative AI.

Federated learning (FL) has rapidly evolved as a promising paradigm that enables collaborative model training across distributed participants without exchanging their local data. Despite its broad applications in fields such as computer vision, graph learning, and natural language processing, the development of a data projection model that can be effectively used to visualize data in the context of FL is crucial yet remains heavily under-explored. Neighbor embedding (NE) is an essential technique for visualizing complex high-dimensional data, but collaboratively learning a joint NE model is difficult. The key challenge lies in the objective function, as effective visualization algorithms like NE require computing loss functions among pairs of data. In this paper, we introduce \textsc{FedNE}, a novel approach that integrates the \textsc{FedAvg} framework with the contrastive NE technique, without any requirements of shareable data. To address the lack of inter-client repulsion which is crucial for the alignment in the global embedding space, we develop a surrogate loss function that each client learns and shares with each other. Additionally, we propose a data-mixing strategy to augment the local data, aiming to relax the problems of invisible neighbors and false neighbors constructed by the local $k$NN graphs. We conduct comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that our \textsc{FedNE} can effectively preserve the neighborhood data structures and enhance the alignment in the global embedding space compared to several baseline methods.

Adversarial scenario generation is crucial for autonomous driving testing because it can efficiently simulate various challenge and complex traffic conditions. However, it is difficult to control current existing methods to generate desired scenarios, such as the ones with different conflict levels. Therefore, this paper proposes a data-driven quantitative method to represent scenario difficulty. Compared with rule-based discrete scenario difficulty representation method, the proposed algorithm can achieve continuous difficulty representation. Specifically, the environment agent is introduced, and a reinforcement learning method combined with mechanism knowledge is constructed for policy search to obtain an agent with adversarial behavior. The model parameters of the environment agent at different stages in the training process are extracted to construct a policy group, and then the agents with different adversarial intensity are obtained, which are used to realize data generation in different difficulty scenarios through the simulation environment. Finally, a data-driven scenario difficulty quantitative representation model is constructed, which is used to output the environment agent policy under different difficulties. The result analysis shows that the proposed algorithm can generate reasonable and interpretable scenarios with high discrimination, and can provide quantifiable difficulty representation without any expert logic rule design. The video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GceGdqAm9Ys.

Autonomous driving vehicles with self-learning capabilities are expected to evolve in complex environments to improve their ability to cope with different scenarios. However, most self-learning algorithms suffer from low learning efficiency and lacking safety, which limits their applications. This paper proposes a safety-oriented self-learning algorithm for autonomous driving, which focuses on how to achieve evolution from a basic model. Specifically, a basic model based on the transformer encoder is designed to extract and output policy features from a small number of demonstration trajectories. To improve the learning efficiency, a policy mixed approach is developed. The basic model provides initial values to improve exploration efficiency, and the self-learning algorithm enhances the adaptability and generalization of the model, enabling continuous improvement without external intervention. Finally, an actor approximator based on receding horizon optimization is designed considering the constraints of the environmental input to ensure safety. The proposed method is verified in a challenging mixed traffic environment with pedestrians and vehicles. Simulation and real-vehicle test results show that the proposed method can safely and efficiently learn appropriate autonomous driving behaviors. Compared reinforcement learning and behavior cloning methods, it can achieve comprehensive improvement in learning efficiency and performance under the premise of ensuring safety.

Autonomous vehicles with a self-evolving ability are expected to cope with unknown scenarios in the real-world environment. Take advantage of trial and error mechanism, reinforcement learning is able to self evolve by learning the optimal policy, and it is particularly well suitable for solving decision-making problems. However, reinforcement learning suffers from safety issues and low learning efficiency, especially in the continuous action space. Therefore, the motivation of this paper is to address the above problem by proposing a hybrid Mechanism-Experience-Learning augmented approach. Specifically, to realize the efficient self-evolution, the driving tendency by analogy with human driving experience is proposed to reduce the search space of the autonomous driving problem, while the constrained optimization problem based on a mechanistic model is designed to ensure safety during the self-evolving process. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of generating safe and reasonable actions in various complex scenarios, improving the performance of the autonomous driving system. Compared to conventional reinforcement learning, the safety and efficiency of the proposed algorithm are greatly improved. The training process is collision-free, and the training time is equivalent to less than 10 minutes in the real world.

Autonomous driving systems with self-evolution capabilities have the potential to independently evolve in complex and open environments, allowing to handle more unknown scenarios. However, as a result of the safety-performance trade-off mechanism of evolutionary algorithms, it is difficult to ensure safe exploration without sacrificing the improvement ability. This problem is especially prominent in dynamic traffic scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a safe self-evolution algorithm for autonomous driving based on data-driven risk quantification model. Specifically, a risk quantification model based on the attention mechanism is proposed by modeling the way humans perceive risks during driving, with the idea of achieving safety situation estimation of the surrounding environment through a data-driven approach. To prevent the impact of over-conservative safety guarding policies on the self-evolution capability of the algorithm, a safety-evolutionary decision-control integration algorithm with adjustable safety limits is proposed, and the proposed risk quantization model is integrated into it. Simulation and real-vehicle experiments results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed algorithm can generate safe and reasonable actions in a variety of complex scenarios and guarantee safety without losing the evolutionary potential of learning-based autonomous driving systems.

Instruct LLM provide a paradigm used in large scale language model to align LLM to human preference. The paradigm contains supervised fine tuning and reinforce learning from human feedback. This paradigm is also used in downstream scenarios to adapt LLM to specific corpora and applications. Comparing to SFT, there are many efforts focused on RLHF and several algorithms being proposed, such as PPO, DPO, IPO, KTO, MinorDPO and etc. Meanwhile most efforts for SFT are focused on how to collect, filter and mix high quality data. In this article with insight from DPO and MinorDPO, we propose a training metric for SFT to measure the discrepancy between the optimized model and the original model, and a loss function MinorSFT that can increase the training effectiveness, and reduce the discrepancy between the optimized LLM and original LLM., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Learning from human preference is a paradigm used in large-scale language model (LLM) fine-tuning step to better align pretrained LLM to human preference for downstream task. In the past it uses reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to optimize the LLM policy to align with these preferences and not to draft too far from the original model. Recently, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed to solve the alignment problem with a simplified RL-free method. Using preference pairs of chosen and reject data, DPO models the relative log probability as implicit reward function and optimize LLM policy using a simple binary cross entropy objective directly. DPO is quite straight forward and easy to be understood. It perform efficiently and well in most cases. In this article, we analyze the working mechanism of $\beta$ in DPO, disclose its syntax difference between RL algorithm and DPO, and understand the potential shortage brought by the DPO simplification. With these insights, we propose MinorDPO, which is better aligned to the original RL algorithm, and increase the stability of preference optimization process., Comment: 8 pages, 19 figures

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, can support rich functions and have developed into indispensable tools in daily life. With the rise of generative AI services, smartphones can potentially transform into personalized assistants, anticipating user needs and scheduling services accordingly. Predicting user intents on smartphones, and reflecting anticipated activities based on past interactions and context, remains a pivotal step towards this vision. Existing research predominantly focuses on specific domains, neglecting the challenge of modeling diverse event sequences across dynamic contexts. Leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) offers a promising avenue, yet adapting PLMs to on-device user intent prediction presents significant challenges. To address these challenges, we propose PITuning, a Population-to-Individual Tuning framework. PITuning enhances common pattern extraction through dynamic event-to-intent transition modeling and addresses long-tailed preferences via adaptive unlearning strategies. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate PITuning's superior intent prediction performance, highlighting its ability to capture long-tailed preferences and its practicality for on-device prediction scenarios., Comment: accepted by KDD 2024

Knob tuning plays a crucial role in optimizing databases by adjusting knobs to enhance database performance. However, traditional tuning methods often follow a Try-Collect-Adjust approach, proving inefficient and database-specific. Moreover, these methods are often opaque, making it challenging for DBAs to grasp the underlying decision-making process. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Claude-3 has excelled in complex natural language tasks, yet their potential in database knob tuning remains largely unexplored. This study harnesses LLMs as experienced DBAs for knob-tuning tasks with carefully designed prompts. We identify three key subtasks in the tuning system: knob pruning, model initialization, and knob recommendation, proposing LLM-driven solutions to replace conventional methods for each subtask. We conduct extensive experiments to compare LLM-driven approaches against traditional methods across the subtasks to evaluate LLMs' efficacy in the knob tuning domain. Furthermore, we explore the adaptability of LLM-based solutions in diverse evaluation settings, encompassing new benchmarks, database engines, and hardware environments. Our findings reveal that LLMs not only match or surpass traditional methods but also exhibit notable interpretability by generating responses in a coherent ``chain-of-thought'' manner. We further observe that LLMs exhibit remarkable generalizability through simple adjustments in prompts, eliminating the necessity for additional training or extensive code modifications. Drawing insights from our experimental findings, we identify several opportunities for future research aimed at advancing the utilization of LLMs in the realm of database management.

The Sparse Vector Technique (SVT) is one of the most fundamental tools in differential privacy (DP). It works as a backbone for adaptive data analysis by answering a sequence of queries on a given dataset, and gleaning useful information in a privacy-preserving manner. Unlike the typical private query releases that directly publicize the noisy query results, SVT is less informative -- it keeps the noisy query results to itself and only reveals a binary bit for each query, indicating whether the query result surpasses a predefined threshold. To provide a rigorous DP guarantee for SVT, prior works in the literature adopt a conservative privacy analysis by assuming the direct disclosure of noisy query results as in typical private query releases. This approach, however, hinders SVT from achieving higher query accuracy due to an overestimation of the privacy risks, which further leads to an excessive noise injection using the Laplacian or Gaussian noise for perturbation. Motivated by this, we provide a new privacy analysis for SVT by considering its less informative nature. Our analysis results not only broaden the range of applicable noise types for perturbation in SVT, but also identify the exponential noise as optimal among all evaluated noises (which, however, is usually deemed non-applicable in prior works). The main challenge in applying exponential noise to SVT is mitigating the sub-optimal performance due to the bias introduced by noise distributions. To address this, we develop a utility-oriented optimal threshold correction method and an appending strategy, which enhances the performance of SVT by increasing the precision and recall, respectively. The effectiveness of our proposed methods is substantiated both theoretically and empirically, demonstrating significant improvements up to $50\%$ across evaluated metrics.

The shuffle model of Differential Privacy (DP) is an enhanced privacy protocol which introduces an intermediate trusted server between local users and a central data curator. It significantly amplifies the central DP guarantee by anonymizing and shuffling the local randomized data. Yet, deriving a tight privacy bound is challenging due to its complicated randomization protocol. While most existing work are focused on unified local privacy settings, this work focuses on deriving the central privacy bound for a more practical setting where personalized local privacy is required by each user. To bound the privacy after shuffling, we first need to capture the probability of each user generating clones of the neighboring data points. Second, we need to quantify the indistinguishability between two distributions of the number of clones on neighboring datasets. Existing works either inaccurately capture the probability, or underestimate the indistinguishability between neighboring datasets. Motivated by this, we develop a more precise analysis, which yields a general and tighter bound for arbitrary DP mechanisms. Firstly, we derive the clone-generating probability by hypothesis testing %from a randomizer-specific perspective, which leads to a more accurate characterization of the probability. Secondly, we analyze the indistinguishability in the context of $f$-DP, where the convexity of the distributions is leveraged to achieve a tighter privacy bound. Theoretical and numerical results demonstrate that our bound remarkably outperforms the existing results in the literature.

We propose SlowFast-LLaVA (or SF-LLaVA for short), a training-free video large language model (LLM) that can jointly capture detailed spatial semantics and long-range temporal context without exceeding the token budget of commonly used LLMs. This is realized by using a two-stream SlowFast design of inputs for Video LLMs to aggregate features from sampled frames in an effective way. Specifically, the Slow pathway extracts features at a low frame rate while keeping as much spatial detail as possible (e.g., with 12x24 tokens), and the Fast pathway operates on a high frame rate but uses a larger spatial pooling stride (e.g., downsampling 6x) to focus on the motion cues. As a result, this design allows us to adequately capture both spatial and temporal features that are beneficial for detailed video understanding. Experimental results show that SF-LLaVA outperforms existing training-free methods on a wide range of video tasks. On some benchmarks, it achieves comparable or even better performance compared to state-of-the-art Video LLMs that are fine-tuned on video datasets. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/apple/ml-slowfast-llava., Comment: Technical report

Video generation has witnessed great success recently, but their application in generating long videos still remains challenging due to the difficulty in maintaining the temporal consistency of generated videos and the high memory cost during generation. To tackle the problems, in this paper, we propose a brave and new idea of Multi-sentence Video Grounding for Long Video Generation, connecting the massive video moment retrieval to the video generation task for the first time, providing a new paradigm for long video generation. The method of our work can be summarized as three steps: (i) We design sequential scene text prompts as the queries for video grounding, utilizing the massive video moment retrieval to search for video moment segments that meet the text requirements in the video database. (ii) Based on the source frames of retrieved video moment segments, we adopt video editing methods to create new video content while preserving the temporal consistency of the retrieved video. Since the editing can be conducted segment by segment, and even frame by frame, it largely reduces the memory cost. (iii) We also attempt video morphing and personalized generation methods to improve the subject consistency of long video generation, providing ablation experimental results for the subtasks of long video generation. Our approach seamlessly extends the development in image/video editing, video morphing and personalized generation, and video grounding to the long video generation, offering effective solutions for generating long videos at low memory cost.

Federated learning has recently garnered significant attention, especially within the domain of supervised learning. However, despite the abundance of unlabeled data on end-users, unsupervised learning problems such as clustering in the federated setting remain underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the federated clustering problem, with a focus on federated k-means. We outline the challenge posed by its non-convex objective and data heterogeneity in the federated framework. To tackle these challenges, we adopt a new perspective by studying the structures of local solutions in k-means and propose a one-shot algorithm called FeCA (Federated Centroid Aggregation). FeCA adaptively refines local solutions on clients, then aggregates these refined solutions to recover the global solution of the entire dataset in a single round. We empirically demonstrate the robustness of FeCA under various federated scenarios on both synthetic and real-world data. Additionally, we extend FeCA to representation learning and present DeepFeCA, which combines DeepCluster and FeCA for unsupervised feature learning in the federated setting., Comment: Accepted to TMLR

Recently, video diffusion models (VDMs) have garnered significant attention due to their notable advancements in generating coherent and realistic video content. However, processing multiple frame features concurrently, coupled with the considerable model size, results in high latency and extensive memory consumption, hindering their broader application. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is an effective technique to reduce memory footprint and improve computational efficiency. Unlike image diffusion, we observe that the temporal features, which are integrated into all frame features, exhibit pronounced skewness. Furthermore, we investigate significant inter-channel disparities and asymmetries in the activation of video diffusion models, resulting in low coverage of quantization levels by individual channels and increasing the challenge of quantization. To address these issues, we introduce the first PTQ strategy tailored for video diffusion models, dubbed QVD. Specifically, we propose the High Temporal Discriminability Quantization (HTDQ) method, designed for temporal features, which retains the high discriminability of quantized features, providing precise temporal guidance for all video frames. In addition, we present the Scattered Channel Range Integration (SCRI) method which aims to improve the coverage of quantization levels across individual channels. Experimental validations across various models, datasets, and bit-width settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our QVD in terms of diverse metrics. In particular, we achieve near-lossless performance degradation on W8A8, outperforming the current methods by 205.12 in FVD., Comment: accepted by ACMMM2024

In domain-specific applications, GPT-4, augmented with precise prompts or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), shows notable potential but faces the critical tri-lemma of performance, cost, and data privacy. High performance requires sophisticated processing techniques, yet managing multiple agents within a complex workflow often proves costly and challenging. To address this, we introduce the PEER (Plan, Execute, Express, Review) multi-agent framework. This systematizes domain-specific tasks by integrating precise question decomposition, advanced information retrieval, comprehensive summarization, and rigorous self-assessment. Given the concerns of cost and data privacy, enterprises are shifting from proprietary models like GPT-4 to custom models, striking a balance between cost, security, and performance. We developed industrial practices leveraging online data and user feedback for efficient model tuning. This study provides best practice guidelines for applying multi-agent systems in domain-specific problem-solving and implementing effective agent tuning strategies. Our empirical studies, particularly in the financial question-answering domain, demonstrate that our approach achieves 95.0% of GPT-4's performance, while effectively managing costs and ensuring data privacy.

Nanobubbles wield significant influence over the electronic properties of 2D materials, showing diverse applications ranging from flexible devices to strain sensors. Here, we reveal that a strongly-correlated phenomenon, i.e., Kondo resonance, naturally takes place as an intrinsic property of graphene nanobubbles. The localized strain within the nanobubbles engenders pseudo magnetic fields, driving Landau quantization with degenerate Landau orbits. Under the Coulomb repulsion, the Landau orbits form an effective $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ pseudospin intricately coupled to the bath via exchange interaction. This leads to novel Kondo behaviors with a new flavor screening mechanism. The resonance here exhibits an unparalleled tunability via strain engineering, establishing a versatile platform for exploring novel correlated phenomena beyond the scope of conventional Kondo systems., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures

Large-scale knowledge bases (KBs) like Freebase and Wikidata house millions of structured knowledge. Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) provides a user-friendly way to access these valuable KBs via asking natural language questions. In order to improve the generalization capabilities of KBQA models, extensive research has embraced a retrieve-then-reason framework to retrieve relevant evidence for logical expression generation. These multi-stage efforts prioritize acquiring external sources but overlook the incorporation of new knowledge into their model parameters. In effect, even advanced language models and retrievers have knowledge boundaries, thereby limiting the generalization capabilities of previous KBQA models. Therefore, this paper develops KBLLaMA, which follows a learn-then-reason framework to inject new KB knowledge into a large language model for flexible end-to-end KBQA. At the core of KBLLaMA, we study (1) how to organize new knowledge about KBQA and (2) how to facilitate the learning of the organized knowledge. Extensive experiments on various KBQA generalization tasks showcase the state-of-the-art performance of KBLLaMA. Especially on the general benchmark GrailQA and domain-specific benchmark Bio-chemical, KBLLaMA respectively derives a performance gain of up to 3.8% and 9.8% compared to the baselines.

Domain generalization aims to learn invariance across multiple training domains, thereby enhancing generalization against out-of-distribution data. While gradient or representation matching algorithms have achieved remarkable success, these methods generally lack generalization guarantees or depend on strong assumptions, leaving a gap in understanding the underlying mechanism of distribution matching. In this work, we formulate domain generalization from a novel probabilistic perspective, ensuring robustness while avoiding overly conservative solutions. Through comprehensive information-theoretic analysis, we provide key insights into the roles of gradient and representation matching in promoting generalization. Our results reveal the complementary relationship between these two components, indicating that existing works focusing solely on either gradient or representation alignment are insufficient to solve the domain generalization problem. In light of these theoretical findings, we introduce IDM to simultaneously align the inter-domain gradients and representations. Integrated with the proposed PDM method for complex distribution matching, IDM achieves superior performance over various baseline methods.

Gradient leakage has been identified as a potential source of privacy breaches in modern image processing systems, where the adversary can completely reconstruct the training images from leaked gradients. However, existing methods are restricted to reconstructing low-resolution images where data leakage risks of image processing systems are not sufficiently explored. In this paper, by exploiting diffusion models, we propose an innovative gradient-guided fine-tuning method and introduce a new reconstruction attack that is capable of stealing private, high-resolution images from image processing systems through leaked gradients where severe data leakage encounters. Our attack method is easy to implement and requires little prior knowledge. The experimental results indicate that current reconstruction attacks can steal images only up to a resolution of $128 \times 128$ pixels, while our attack method can successfully recover and steal images with resolutions up to $512 \times 512$ pixels. Our attack method significantly outperforms the SOTA attack baselines in terms of both pixel-wise accuracy and time efficiency of image reconstruction. Furthermore, our attack can render differential privacy ineffective to some extent.

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradients Descent (DP-SGD) is a prominent paradigm for preserving privacy in deep learning. It ensures privacy by perturbing gradients with random noise calibrated to their entire norm at each training step. However, this perturbation suffers from a sub-optimal performance: it repeatedly wastes privacy budget on the general converging direction shared among gradients from different batches, which we refer as common knowledge, yet yields little information gain. Motivated by this, we propose a differentially private training framework with early gradient decomposition and reconstruction (DPDR), which enables more efficient use of the privacy budget. In essence, it boosts model utility by focusing on incremental information protection and recycling the privatized common knowledge learned from previous gradients at early training steps. Concretely, DPDR incorporates three steps. First, it disentangles common knowledge and incremental information in current gradients by decomposing them based on previous noisy gradients. Second, most privacy budget is spent on protecting incremental information for higher information gain. Third, the model is updated with the gradient reconstructed from recycled common knowledge and noisy incremental information. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments show that DPDR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both convergence rate and accuracy., Comment: 14 pages

GWnext 2024 was a meeting held in the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in March $4^\text{th} - 8^\text{th}$, 2024. In the meeting researchers at different career stages -- with a particular focus on early career scientists -- working on the different aspects of gravitational wave (GW) astronomy gathered to discuss the current status as well as prospects of the field. The meeting was divided into three core sessions: Astrophysics, GW Theory, and Detection. Each session consisted of introductory talks and extended discussion sessions. Moreover, there was a poster session where students could present their results. In this paper, we summarize the results presented during the meeting and present the most important outcomes.

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely utilized to preserve training data privacy in deep learning, which first clips the gradients to a predefined norm and then injects calibrated noise into the training procedure. Existing DPSGD works typically assume the gradients follow sub-Gaussian distributions and design various clipping mechanisms to optimize training performance. However, recent studies have shown that the gradients in deep learning exhibit a heavy-tail phenomenon, that is, the tails of the gradient have infinite variance, which may lead to excessive clipping loss to the gradients with existing DPSGD mechanisms. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach, Discriminative Clipping~(DC)-DPSGD, with two key designs. First, we introduce a subspace identification technique to distinguish between body and tail gradients. Second, we present a discriminative clipping mechanism that applies different clipping thresholds for body and tail gradients to reduce the clipping loss. Under the non-convex condition, \ourtech{} reduces the empirical gradient norm from {${\mathbb{O}\left(\log^{\max(0,\theta-1)}(T/\delta)\log^{2\theta}(\sqrt{T})\right)}$} to {${\mathbb{O}\left(\log(\sqrt{T})\right)}$} with heavy-tailed index $\theta\geq 1/2$, iterations $T$, and arbitrary probability $\delta$. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms three baselines by up to 9.72\% in terms of accuracy.

We introduce GreenCOD, a green method for detecting camouflaged objects, distinct in its avoidance of backpropagation techniques. GreenCOD leverages gradient boosting and deep features extracted from pre-trained Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Traditional camouflaged object detection (COD) approaches often rely on complex deep neural network architectures, seeking performance improvements through backpropagation-based fine-tuning. However, such methods are typically computationally demanding and exhibit only marginal performance variations across different models. This raises the question of whether effective training can be achieved without backpropagation. Addressing this, our work proposes a new paradigm that utilizes gradient boosting for COD. This approach significantly simplifies the model design, resulting in a system that requires fewer parameters and operations and maintains high performance compared to state-of-the-art deep learning models. Remarkably, our models are trained without backpropagation and achieve the best performance with fewer than 20G Multiply-Accumulate Operations (MACs). This new, more efficient paradigm opens avenues for further exploration in green, backpropagation-free model training.

Space-borne gravitational wave detectors like TianQin might encounter data gaps due to factors like micro-meteoroid collisions or hardware failures. Such glitches will cause discontinuity in the data and have been observed in the LISA Pathfinder. The existence of such data gaps presents challenges to the data analysis for TianQin, especially for massive black hole binary mergers, since its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) accumulates in a non-linear way, a gap near the merger could lead to significant loss of SNR. It could introduce bias in the estimate of noise properties, and furthermore the results of the parameter estimation. In this work, using simulated TianQin data with injected a massive black hole binary merger, we study the window function method, and for the first time, the inpainting method to cope with the data gap, and an iterative estimate scheme is designed to properly estimate the noise spectrum. We find that both methods can properly estimate noise and signal parameters. The easy-to-implement window function method can already perform well, except that it will sacrifice some SNR due to the adoption of the window. The inpainting method is slower, but it can minimize the impact of the data gap., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, comments welcome

Generating customized content in videos has received increasing attention recently. However, existing works primarily focus on customized text-to-video generation for single subject, suffering from subject-missing and attribute-binding problems when the video is expected to contain multiple subjects. Furthermore, existing models struggle to assign the desired actions to the corresponding subjects (action-binding problem), failing to achieve satisfactory multi-subject generation performance. To tackle the problems, in this paper, we propose DisenStudio, a novel framework that can generate text-guided videos for customized multiple subjects, given few images for each subject. Specifically, DisenStudio enhances a pretrained diffusion-based text-to-video model with our proposed spatial-disentangled cross-attention mechanism to associate each subject with the desired action. Then the model is customized for the multiple subjects with the proposed motion-preserved disentangled finetuning, which involves three tuning strategies: multi-subject co-occurrence tuning, masked single-subject tuning, and multi-subject motion-preserved tuning. The first two strategies guarantee the subject occurrence and preserve their visual attributes, and the third strategy helps the model maintain the temporal motion-generation ability when finetuning on static images. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate our proposed DisenStudio significantly outperforms existing methods in various metrics. Additionally, we show that DisenStudio can be used as a powerful tool for various controllable generation applications.

Excitons, the bosonic quasiparticle emerging from Coulomb interaction between electrons and holes, will undergo a Bose-Einstein condensation(BEC) and transition into a superfluid state with global phase coherence at low temperatures. An important platform to study such excitonic physics is built on double-layer quantum wells or recent two-dimensional material heterostructures, where two parallel planes of electrons and holes are separated by a thin insulating layer. Lowering this separation distance ($d$) enhances the interlayer Coulomb interaction thereby strengthens the exciton binding energy. However, an exceedingly small $d$ will lead to the undesired interlayer tunneling, which results the annihilation of excitons. Here, we report the observation of a sequences of robust exciton condensates(ECs) in double bilayer graphenes twisted to $\sim 10^\circ$ with no insulating mid-layer. The large momentum mismatch between the two graphene layers well suppress the interlayer tunneling, allowing us to reach the separation lower limit $\sim$ 0.334 nm and investigate ECs in the extreme coupling regime. Carrying out transport measurements on the bulk and edge of the devices, we find incompressible states corresponding to ECs when both layers are half-filled in the $N=0$ and $N=1$ Landau levels (LLs). The comparison between these ECs and theoretical calculations suggest that the low-energy charged excitation of ECs can be meron-antimeron or particle-hole pair, which relies on both LL index and carrier type. Our results establish large-angle twisted bilayers as an experimental platform with extreme coupling strength for studying quantum bosonic phase and its low-energy excitations.

Quantum confinement is recognized to be an inherent property in low-dimensional structures. Traditionally it is believed that the carriers trapped within the well cannot escape due to the discrete energy levels. However, our previous research has revealed efficient carrier escape in low-dimensional structures, contradicting this conventional understanding. In this study, we review the energy band structure of quantum wells considering it as a superposition of the bulk material dispersion and quantization energy dispersion resulting from the quantum confinement across the whole Brillouin zone. By accounting for all wave vectors, we obtain a certain distribution of carrier energy at each quantization energy level, giving rise to the energy subbands. These results enable carriers to escape from the well under the influence of an electric field. Additionally, we have compiled a comprehensive summary of various energy band scenarios in quantum well structures, relevant to carrier transport. Such a new interpretation holds significant value in deepening our comprehension of low-dimensional energy bands, discovering new physical phenomena, and designing novel devices with superior performance., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures and 1 table

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has achieved impressive performance in many computer vision tasks. However, as a large-scale model, the immense memory and computation costs hinder its practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework for Segment Anything Model, namely PTQ4SAM. First, we investigate the inherent bottleneck of SAM quantization attributed to the bimodal distribution in post-Key-Linear activations. We analyze its characteristics from both per-tensor and per-channel perspectives, and propose a Bimodal Integration strategy, which utilizes a mathematically equivalent sign operation to transform the bimodal distribution into a relatively easy-quantized normal distribution offline. Second, SAM encompasses diverse attention mechanisms (i.e., self-attention and two-way cross-attention), resulting in substantial variations in the post-Softmax distributions. Therefore, we introduce an Adaptive Granularity Quantization for Softmax through searching the optimal power-of-two base, which is hardware-friendly. Extensive experimental results across various vision tasks (instance segmentation, semantic segmentation and object detection), datasets and model variants show the superiority of PTQ4SAM. For example, when quantizing SAM-L to 6-bit, we achieve lossless accuracy for instance segmentation, about 0.5\% drop with theoretical 3.9$\times$ acceleration. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/PTQ4SAM}., Comment: CVPR 2024

Let $U$ be a connected open subset of $\mathbb{R}^n$, and let $X=(X_1,X_{2},\ldots,X_m)$ be a system of H\"{o}rmander vector fields defined on $U$. This paper addresses sharp embedding results and geometric inequalities in the generalized Sobolev space $\mathcal{W}_{X,0}^{k,p}(\Omega)$, where $\Omega\subset\subset U$ is a general open bounded subset of $U$. By employing Rothschild-Stein's lifting technique and saturation method, we prove the representation formula for smooth functions with compact support in $\Omega$. Combining this representation formula with weighted weak-$L^p$ estimates, we derive sharp Sobolev inequalities on $\mathcal{W}_{X,0}^{k,p}(\Omega)$, where the critical Sobolev exponent depends on the generalized M\'{e}tivier index. As applications of these sharp Sobolev inequalities, we establish the isoperimetric inequality, logarithmic Sobolev inequalities, Rellich-Kondrachov compact embedding theorem, Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality, Nash inequality, and Moser-Trudinger inequality in the context of general H\"{o}rmander vector fields., Comment: 43 pages

The LLaMA family has become one of the most powerful open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and the popular LLM backbones of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), widely applied in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. Notably, LLaMA3 models have recently been released and achieve impressive performance across various with super-large scale pre-training on over 15T tokens of data. Given the wide application of low-bit quantization for LLMs in resource-limited scenarios, we explore LLaMA3's capabilities when quantized to low bit-width. This exploration can potentially unveil new insights and challenges for low-bit quantization of LLaMA3 and other forthcoming LLMs, especially in addressing performance degradation problems that suffer in LLM compression. Specifically, we comprehensively evaluate the 10 existing post-training quantization and LoRA-finetuning methods of LLaMA3 on 1-8 bits and diverse datasets to reveal LLaMA3's low-bit quantization performance. To uncover the capabilities of low-bit quantized MLLM, we assessed the performance of the LLaMA3-based LLaVA-Next-8B model under 2-4 ultra-low bits with post-training quantization methods. Our experimental results indicate that LLaMA3 still suffers non-negligent degradation in linguistic and visual contexts, particularly under ultra-low bit widths. This highlights the significant performance gap under low bit-width that needs to be bridged in future developments. We expect that this empirical study will prove valuable in advancing future models, driving LLMs and MLLMs to achieve higher accuracy at lower bit to enhance practicality.

In the burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and LLaMA, Prompt Engineering (PE) is renowned for boosting zero-shot or in-context learning (ICL) through prompt modifications. Yet, the realm of the sample design for downstream fine-tuning, crucial for task-specific LLM adaptation, is largely unexplored. This paper introduces Sample Design Engineering (SDE), a methodical approach to enhancing LLMs' post-tuning performance by refining input, output, and reasoning designs. We conduct a series of in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) experiments to assess the impact of various design options on LLMs' downstream performance, revealing several intriguing patterns that hold consistently across different LLMs. Based on these insights, we propose an integrated SDE strategy, combining the most effective options, and validate its consistent superiority over heuristic sample designs in complex downstream tasks like multi-aspect sentiment analysis, event extraction, and nested entity recognition. Additionally, analyses of LLMs' inherent prompt/output perplexity, zero-shot, and ICL abilities illustrate that good PE strategies may not always translate to good SDE strategies. Code available at https://github.com/beyondguo/LLM-Tuning., Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 14 tables

Database knob tuning is a critical challenge in the database community, aiming to optimize knob values to enhance database performance for specific workloads. DBMS often feature hundreds of tunable knobs, posing a significant challenge for DBAs to recommend optimal configurations. Consequently, many machine learning-based tuning methods have been developed to automate this process. Despite the introduction of various optimizers, practical applications have unveiled a new problem: they typically require numerous workload runs to achieve satisfactory performance, a process that is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. This inefficiency largely stems from the optimal configuration often being substantially different from the default setting, necessitating multiple iterations during tuning. Recognizing this, we argue that an effective starting point could significantly reduce redundant exploration in less efficient areas, thereby potentially speeding up the tuning process for the optimizers. Based on this assumption, we introduce LLMTune, a large language model-based configuration generator designed to produce an initial, high-quality configuration for new workloads. These generated configurations can then serve as starting points for various base optimizers, accelerating their tuning processes. To obtain training data for LLMTune's supervised fine-tuning, we have devised a new automatic data generation framework capable of efficiently creating a large number of pairs. We have conducted thorough experiments to evaluate LLMTune's effectiveness with different workloads, such as TPC-H and JOB. In comparison to leading methods, LLMTune demonstrates a quicker ability to identify superior configurations. For instance, with the challenging TPC-H workload, our LLMTune achieves a significant 15.6x speed-up ratio in finding the best-performing configurations.

If entanglement builds spacetime, then conversely, disentanglement ought to destroy spacetime. From the quantum null energy condition and quantum focusing conjecture, we obtain disentanglement criteria which necessitate infinite energies and strong spacetime singularities. We apply our results to the strong cosmic censorship proposal, where strong singularities at the Cauchy horizons in black holes are desirable. Using our disentanglement criteria and without resorting to any detailed calculations, we provide an exceedingly general and physically transparent discussion of strong cosmic censorship in semiclassical black holes. We argue that strong cosmic censorship is enforced in asymptotically flat and de Sitter black holes by disentanglement and describe how similar disentanglement might be avoided in some anti-de Sitter cases., Comment: Gravity Research Foundation essay, details added as footnotes and appendix, 27 pages, 5 figures