ICLR 2025 论文列表

International Conference on Learning Representations

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3,703篇论文

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    38010.3%
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    3,11084.0%

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Pursuing Better Decision Boundaries for Long-Tailed Object Detection via Category Information Amount

Yanbiao Ma, Wei Dai, Jiayi Chen

展开摘要

In object detection, the number of instances is commonly used to determine whether a dataset follows a long-tailed distribution, implicitly assuming that the model will perform poorly on categories with fewer instances. This assumption has led to extensive research on category bias in datasets with imbalanced instance distributions. However, even in datasets with relatively balanced instance counts, models still exhibit bias toward certain categories, indicating that instance count alone cannot explain this phenomenon. In this work, we first introduce the concept and measurement of category informativeness. We observe a significant negative correlation between a category’s informativeness and its accuracy, suggesting that informativeness more accurately reflects the learning difficulty of a category. Based on this observation, we propose the Informativeness-Guided Angular Margin Loss (IGAM Loss), which dynamically adjusts the decision space of categories according to their informativeness, thereby mitigating category bias in long-tailed datasets. IGAM Loss not only achieves superior performance on long-tailed benchmark datasets such as LVIS v1.0 and COCO-LT but also demonstrates significant improvements for underrepresented categories in non-long-tailed datasets like Pascal VOC. Extensive experiments confirm the potential of category informativeness as a tool and the generalizability of our proposed method.

Poster
Bringing NeRFs to the Latent Space: Inverse Graphics Autoencoder

Antoine Schnepf, Karim Kassab, Jean-Yves Franceschi, Laurent Caraffa, Flavian Vasile, Jeremie Mary, Andrew I. Comport, Valerie Gouet-Brunet

展开摘要

While pre-trained image autoencoders are increasingly utilized in computer vision, the application of inverse graphics in 2D latent spaces has been under-explored. Yet, besides reducing the training and rendering complexity, applying inverse graphics in the latent space enables a valuable interoperability with other latent-based 2D methods. The major challenge is that inverse graphics cannot be directly applied to such image latent spaces because they lack an underlying 3D geometry. In this paper, we propose an Inverse Graphics Autoencoder (IG-AE) that specifically addresses this issue. To this end, we regularize an image autoencoder with 3D-geometry by aligning its latent space with jointly trained latent 3D scenes. We utilize the trained IG-AE to bring NeRFs to the latent space with a latent NeRF training pipeline, which we implement in an open-source extension of the Nerfstudio framework, thereby unlocking latent scene learning for its supported methods. We experimentally confirm that Latent NeRFs trained with IG-AE present an improved quality compared to a standard autoencoder, all while exhibiting training and rendering accelerations with respect to NeRFs trained in the image space. Our project page can be found at https://ig-ae.github.io .

Poster
Cross-Domain Offline Policy Adaptation with Optimal Transport and Dataset Constraint

Jiafei Lyu, Mengbei Yan, Zhongjian Qiao, Runze Liu, Xiaoteng Ma, Deheng Ye, Jing-Wen Yang, Zongqing Lu, Xiu Li

展开摘要

We explore cross-domain offline reinforcement learning (RL) where offline datasets from another domain can be accessed to facilitate policy learning. However, the underlying environments of the two datasets may have dynamics mismatches, incurring inferior performance when simply merging the data of two domains. Existing methods mitigate this issue by training domain classifiers, using contrastive learning methods, etc. Nevertheless, they still rely on a large amount of target domain data to function well. Instead, we address this problem by establishing a concrete performance bound of a policy given datasets from two domains. Motivated by the theoretical insights, we propose to align transitions in the two datasets using optimal transport and selectively share source domain samples, without training any neural networks. This enables reliable data filtering even given a few target domain data. Additionally, we introduce a dataset regularization term that ensures the learned policy remains within the scope of the target domain dataset, preventing it from being biased towards the source domain data. Consequently, we propose the Optimal Transport Data Filtering (dubbed OTDF) method and examine its effectiveness by conducting extensive experiments across various dynamics shift conditions (e.g., gravity shift), given limited target domain data. It turns out that OTDF exhibits superior performance on many tasks and dataset qualities, often surpassing prior strong baselines by a large margin.

Poster
CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer

Zhuoyi Yang, Jiayan Teng, Wendi Zheng, Ming Ding, Shiyu Huang, Jiazheng Xu, Yuanming Yang, Wenyi Hong, Xiaohan Zhang, Guanyu Feng, Da Yin, Yuxuan.Zhang, Weihan Wang, Yean Cheng, Bin Xu, Xiaotao Gu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang

展开摘要

We present CogVideoX, a large-scale text-to-video generation model based on diffusion transformer, which can generate 10-second continuous videos that align seamlessly with text prompts, with a frame rate of 16 fps and resolution of 768 x 1360 pixels. Previous video generation models often struggled with limited motion and short durations. It is especially difficult to generate videos with coherent narratives based on text. We propose several designs to address these issues. First, we introduce a 3D Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to compress videos across spatial and temporal dimensions, enhancing both the compression rate and video fidelity. Second, to improve text-video alignment, we propose an expert transformer with expert adaptive LayerNorm to facilitate the deep fusion between the two modalities. Third, by employing progressive training and multi-resolution frame packing, CogVideoX excels at generating coherent, long-duration videos with diverse shapes and dynamic movements. In addition, we develop an effective pipeline that includes various pre-processing strategies for text and video data. Our innovative video captioning model significantly improves generation quality and semantic alignment. Results show that CogVideoX achieves state-of-the-art performance in both automated benchmarks and human evaluation. We publish the code and model checkpoints of CogVideoX along with our VAE model and video captioning model at https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo.

Poster
Complementary Label Learning with Positive Label Guessing and Negative Label Enhancement

Yuhang Li, Zhuying Li, Yuheng Jia

展开摘要

Complementary label learning (CLL) is a weakly supervised learning paradigm that constructs a multi-class classifier only with complementary labels, specifying classes that the instance does not belong to. We reformulate CLL as an inverse problem that infers the full label information from the output space information. To be specific, we propose to split the inverse problem into two subtasks: positive label guessing (PLG) and negative label enhancement (NLE), collectively called PLNL. Specifically, we use well-designed criteria for evaluating the confidence of the model output, accordingly divide the training instances into three categories: highly-confident, moderately-confident and under-confident. For highly-confident instances, we perform PLG to assign them pseudo labels for supervised training. For moderately-confident and under-confident instances, we perform NLE by enhancing their complementary label set at different levels and train them with the augmented complementary labels iteratively. In addition, we unify PLG and NLE into a consistent framework, in which we can view all the pseudo-labeling-based methods from the perspective of negative label recovery. We prove that the error rates of both PLG and NLE are upper bounded, and based on that we can construct a classifier consistent with that learned by clean full labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of PLNL over the state-of-the-art CLL methods, e.g., on STL-10, we increase the classification accuracy from 34.96\% to 55.25\%. The source code is available at https://github.com/yhli-ml/PLNL.

Poster
DistRL: An Asynchronous Distributed Reinforcement Learning Framework for On-Device Control Agent

Taiyi Wang, Zhihao Wu, Jianheng Liu, Jianye Hao, Jun Wang, Kun Shao

展开摘要

On-device control agents, especially on mobile devices, are responsible for operating mobile devices to fulfill users' requests, enabling seamless and intuitive interactions. Integrating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into these agents enhances their ability to understand and execute complex commands, thereby improving user experience. However, fine-tuning MLLMs for on-device control presents significant challenges due to limited data availability and inefficient online training processes. This paper introduces DistRL, a novel framework designed to enhance the efficiency of online RL fine-tuning for mobile device control agents. DistRL employs centralized training and decentralized data acquisition to ensure efficient fine-tuning in the context of dynamic online interactions. Additionally, the framework is backed by our tailor-made RL algorithm, which effectively balances exploration with the prioritized utilization of collected data to ensure stable and robust training. Our experiments show that, on average, DistRL delivers a 3$\times$ improvement in training efficiency and enables training data collection 2.4$\times$ faster than the leading synchronous multi-machine methods. Notably, after training, DistRL achieves a 20\% relative improvement in success rate compared to state-of-the-art methods on general Android tasks from an open benchmark, significantly outperforming existing approaches while maintaining the same training time. These results validate DistRL as a scalable and efficient solution, offering substantial improvements in both training efficiency and agent performance for real-world, in-the-wild device control tasks.

Poster
Does Safety Training of LLMs Generalize to Semantically Related Natural Prompts?

Sravanti Addepalli, Yerram Varun, Arun Suggala, Karthikeyan Shanmugam, Prateek Jain

展开摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to be susceptible to crafted adversarial attacks or jailbreaks that lead to the generation of objectionable content despite being aligned to human preferences using safety fine-tuning methods. While the large dimensionality of input token space makes it inevitable to find *adversarial* prompts that can jailbreak these models, we aim to evaluate whether safety fine-tuned LLMs are safe against *natural* prompts which are semantically related to toxic seed prompts that elicit safe responses after alignment. We surprisingly find that popular aligned LLMs such as GPT-4 can be compromised using naive prompts that are NOT even crafted with an objective of jailbreaking the model. Furthermore, we empirically show that given a seed prompt that elicits a toxic response from an unaligned model, one can systematically generate several semantically related *natural* prompts that can jailbreak aligned LLMs. Towards this, we propose a method of *Response Guided Question Augmentation (ReG-QA)* to evaluate the generalization of safety aligned LLMs to natural prompts, that first generates several toxic answers given a seed question using an unaligned LLM (Q to A), and further leverages an LLM to generate questions that are likely to produce these answers (A to Q). We interestingly find that safety fine-tuned LLMs such as GPT-4o are vulnerable to producing natural jailbreak *questions* from unsafe content (without denial) and can thus be used for the latter (A to Q) step. We obtain attack success rates that are comparable to/ better than leading adversarial attack methods on the JailbreakBench leaderboard, while being significantly more stable against defenses such as Smooth-LLM and Synonym Substitution, which are effective against existing all attacks on the leaderboard.

Poster
Towards Domain Adaptive Neural Contextual Bandits

Ziyan Wang, Xiaoming Huo, Hao Wang

展开摘要

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from mice (as a source domain) and humans (as a target domain). Unfortunately, adapting a contextual bandit algorithm from a source domain to a target domain with distribution shift still remains a major challenge and largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce the first general domain adaptation method for contextual bandits. Our approach learns a bandit model for the target domain by collecting feedback from the source domain. Our theoretical analysis shows that our algorithm maintains a sub-linear regret bound even adapting across domains. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art contextual bandit algorithms on real-world datasets. Code will soon be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/DABand.

Poster
SVD-LLM: Truncation-aware Singular Value Decomposition for Large Language Model Compression

Xin Wang, Yu Zheng, Zhongwei Wan, Mi Zhang

展开摘要

The advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been hindered by their substantial sizes, which necessitates LLM compression methods for practical deployment. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) offers a promising solution for LLM compression. However, state-of-the-art SVD-based LLM compression meth- ods have two key limitations: truncating smaller singular values may lead to higher compression loss, and the lack of update on the compressed weights after SVD truncation. In this work, we propose SVD-LLM, a SVD-based post-training LLM compression method that addresses the limitations of existing methods. SVD-LLM incorporates a truncation-aware data whitening technique to ensure a direct map- ping between singular values and compression loss. Moreover, SVD-LLM adopts a parameter update with sequential low-rank approximation to compensate for the accuracy degradation after SVD compression. We evaluate SVD-LLM on 10 datasets and seven models from three different LLM families at three different scales. Our results demonstrate the superiority of SVD-LLM over state-of-the-arts, especially at high model compression ratios.

Poster
Frame-Voyager: Learning to Query Frames for Video Large Language Models

Sicheng Yu, CHENGKAI JIN, Huanyu Wang, Zhenghao Chen, Sheng Jin, ZHONGRONG ZUO, XU XIAOLEI, Zhenbang Sun, Bingni Zhang, Jiawei Wu, Hao Zhang, Qianru Sun

展开摘要

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have made remarkable progress in video understanding tasks. However, they are constrained by the maximum length of input tokens, making it impractical to input entire videos. Existing frame selection approaches, such as uniform frame sampling and text-frame retrieval, fail to account for the information density variations in the videos or the complex instructions in the tasks, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose Frame-Voyager that learns to query informative frame combinations, based on the given textual queries in the task. To train Frame-Voyager, we introduce a new data collection and labeling pipeline, by ranking frame combinations using a pre-trained Video-LLM. Given a video of M frames, we traverse its T-frame combinations, feed them into a Video-LLM, and rank them based on Video-LLM's prediction losses. Using this ranking as supervision, we train Frame-Voyager to query the frame combinations with lower losses. In experiments, we evaluate Frame-Voyager on four Video Question Answering benchmarks by plugging it into two different Video-LLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that Frame-Voyager achieves impressive results in all settings, highlighting its potential as a plug-and-play solution for Video-LLMs.

Poster
One Hundred Neural Networks and Brains Watching Videos: Lessons from Alignment

Christina Sartzetaki, Gemma Roig, Cees G. M. Snoek, Iris Groen

展开摘要

What can we learn from comparing video models to human brains, arguably the most efficient and effective video processing systems in existence? Our work takes a step towards answering this question by performing the first large-scale benchmarking of deep video models on representational alignment to the human brain, using publicly available models and a recently released video brain imaging (fMRI) dataset. We disentangle four factors of variation in the models (temporal modeling, classification task, architecture, and training dataset) that affect alignment to the brain, which we measure by conducting Representational Similarity Analysis across multiple brain regions and model layers. We show that temporal modeling is key for alignment to brain regions involved in early visual processing, while a relevant classification task is key for alignment to higher-level regions. Moreover, we identify clear differences between the brain scoring patterns across layers of CNNs and Transformers, and reveal how training dataset biases transfer to alignment with functionally selective brain areas. Additionally, we uncover a negative correlation of computational complexity to brain alignment. Measuring a total of 99 neural networks and 10 human brains watching videos, we aim to forge a path that widens our understanding of temporal and semantic video representations in brains and machines, ideally leading towards more efficient video models and more mechanistic explanations of processing in the human brain.

Poster
Leveraging Driver Field-of-View for Multimodal Ego-Trajectory Prediction

M. Eren Akbiyik, Nedko Savov, Danda Pani Paudel, Nikola Popovic, Christian Vater, Otmar Hilliges, Luc Van Gool, Xi Wang

展开摘要

Understanding drivers’ decision-making is crucial for road safety. Although predicting the ego-vehicle’s path is valuable for driver-assistance systems, existing methods mainly focus on external factors like other vehicles’ motions, often neglecting the driver’s attention and intent. To address this gap, we infer the ego-trajectory by integrating the driver’s gaze and the surrounding scene. We introduce RouteFormer, a novel multimodal ego-trajectory prediction network combining GPS data, environmental context, and the driver's field-of-view—comprising first-person video and gaze fixations. We also present the Path Complexity Index (PCI), a new metric for trajectory complexity that enables a more nuanced evaluation of challenging scenarios. To tackle data scarcity and enhance diversity, we introduce GEM, a comprehensive dataset of urban driving scenarios enriched with synchronized driver field-of-view and gaze data. Extensive evaluations on GEM and DR(eye)VE demonstrate that RouteFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in prediction accuracy across diverse conditions. Ablation studies reveal that incorporating driver field-of-view data yields significantly better average displacement error, especially in challenging scenarios with high PCI scores, underscoring the importance of modeling driver attention. All data and code are available at meakbiyik.github.io/routeformer.

Poster
CPSample: Classifier Protected Sampling for Guarding Training Data During Diffusion

Joshua Kazdan, Hao Sun, Jiaqi Han, Felix Petersen, Frederick Vu, Stefano Ermon

展开摘要

Diffusion models have a tendency to exactly replicate their training data, especially when trained on small datasets. Most prior work has sought to mitigate this problem by imposing differential privacy constraints or masking parts of the training data, resulting in a notable substantial decrease in image quality. We present CPSample, a method that modifies the sampling process to prevent training data replication while preserving image quality. CPSample utilizes a classifier that is trained to overfit on random binary labels attached to the training data. CPSample then uses classifier guidance to steer the generation process away from the set of points that can be classified with high certainty, a set that includes the training data. CPSample achieves FID scores of 4.97 and 2.97 on CIFAR-10 and CelebA-64, respectively, without producing exact replicates of the training data. Unlike prior methods intended to guard the training images, CPSample only requires training a classifier rather than retraining a diffusion model, which is computationally cheaper. Moreover, our technique provides diffusion models with greater robustness against membership inference attacks, wherein an adversary attempts to discern which images were in the model's training dataset. We show that CPSample behaves like a built-in rejection sampler, and we demonstrate its capabilities to prevent mode collapse in Stable Diffusion.

Poster
Can LLMs Understand Time Series Anomalies?

Zihao Zhou, Rose Yu

展开摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity in time series forecasting, but their potential for anomaly detection remains largely unexplored. Our study investigates whether LLMs can understand and detect anomalies in time series data, focusing on zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Inspired by conjectures about LLMs' behavior from time series forecasting research, we formulate key hypotheses about LLMs' capabilities in time series anomaly detection. We design and conduct principled experiments to test each of these hypotheses. Our investigation reveals several surprising findings about LLMs for time series: (1) LLMs understand time series better as *images* rather than as text, (2) LLMs do not demonstrate enhanced performance when prompted to engage in *explicit reasoning* about time series analysis. (3) Contrary to common beliefs, LLMs' understanding of time series *do not* stem from their repetition biases or arithmetic abilities. (4) LLMs' behaviors and performance in time series analysis *vary significantly* across different models. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of contemporary LLM capabilities in time series anomaly detection. Our results suggest that while LLMs can understand trivial time series anomalies (we have no evidence that they can understand more subtle real-world anomalies), many common conjectures based on their reasoning capabilities do not hold. All synthetic dataset generators, final prompts, and evaluation scripts have been made available in https://github.com/rose-stl-lab/anomllm.

Poster
IDInit: A Universal and Stable Initialization Method for Neural Network Training

Yu Pan, Chaozheng Wang, Zekai Wu, Qifan Wang, Min Zhang, Zenglin Xu

展开摘要

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable accomplishments in practice. The success of these networks hinges on effective initialization methods, which are vital for ensuring stable and rapid convergence during training. Recently, initialization methods that maintain identity transition within layers have shown good efficiency in network training. These techniques (e.g., Fixup) set specific weights to zero to achieve identity control. However, settings of remaining weight (e.g., Fixup uses random values to initialize non-zero weights) will affect the inductive bias that is achieved only by a zero weight, which may be harmful to training. Addressing this concern, we introduce fully identical initialization (IDInit), a novel method that preserves identity in both the main and sub-stem layers of residual networks. IDInit employs a padded identity-like matrix to overcome rank constraints in non-square weight matrices. Furthermore, we show the convergence problem of an identity matrix can be solved by stochastic gradient descent. Additionally, we enhance the universality of IDInit by processing higher-order weights and addressing dead neuron problems. IDInit is a straightforward yet effective initialization method, with improved convergence, stability, and performance across various settings, including large-scale datasets and deep models.

Poster
VEDIT: Latent Prediction Architecture For Procedural Video Representation Learning

Han Lin, Tushar Nagarajan, Nicolas Ballas, Mido Assran, Mojtaba Komeili, Mohit Bansal, Koustuv Sinha

展开摘要

Procedural video representation learning is an active research area where the objective is to learn an agent which can anticipate and forecast the future given the present video input, typically in conjunction with textual annotations. Prior works often rely on large-scale pretraining of visual encoders and prediction models with language supervision. However, the necessity and effectiveness of extending compute intensive pretraining to learn video clip sequences with noisy text supervision have not yet been fully validated by previous works. In this work, we show that a strong off-the-shelf frozen pretrained visual encoder, along with a well designed prediction model, can achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in forecasting and procedural planning without the need for pretraining the prediction model, nor requiring additional supervision from language or ASR. Instead of learning representations from pixel space, our method utilizes the latent embedding space of publicly available vision encoders. By conditioning on frozen clip-level embeddings from observed steps to predict the actions of unseen steps, our prediction model is able to learn robust representations for forecasting through iterative denoising —leveraging the recent advances in diffusion transformers (Peebles & Xie, 2023). Empirical studies over a total of five procedural learning tasks across four datasets (NIV, CrossTask, COIN and Ego4D-v2) show that our model advances the strong baselines in long-horizon action anticipation (+2.6% in Verb ED@20, +3.1% in Noun ED@20), and significantly improves the SoTA in step forecasting (+5.0%), task classification (+3.8%), and procedure planning tasks (up to +2.28% in success rate, +3.39% in mAcc, and +0.90% in mIoU).

Poster
For Better or For Worse? Learning Minimum Variance Features With Label Augmentation

Muthu Chidambaram, Rong Ge

展开摘要

Data augmentation has been pivotal in successfully training deep learning models on classification tasks over the past decade. An important subclass of data augmentation techniques - which includes both label smoothing and Mixup - involves modifying not only the input data but also the input label during model training. In this work, we analyze the role played by the label augmentation aspect of such methods. We first prove that linear models on binary classification data trained with label augmentation learn only the minimum variance features in the data, while standard training (which includes weight decay) can learn higher variance features. We then use our techniques to show that even for nonlinear models and general data distributions, the label smoothing and Mixup losses are lower bounded by a function of the model output variance. Lastly, we demonstrate empirically that this aspect of label smoothing and Mixup can be a positive and a negative. On the one hand, we show that the strong performance of label smoothing and Mixup on image classification benchmarks is correlated with learning low variance hidden representations. On the other hand, we show that Mixup and label smoothing can be more susceptible to low variance spurious correlations in the training data.

Poster
Accessing Vision Foundation Models via ImageNet-1K

Yitian Zhang, Xu Ma, Yue Bai, Huan Wang, Yun Fu

展开摘要

Vision foundation models are renowned for the generalization ability due to massive training data. Nevertheless, they demand tremendous training resources, and the training data is often inaccessible, e.g., CLIP, DINOv2, posing great challenges to developing derivatives that could facilitate the research. In this work, we offer a very simple and general solution, named Proteus, to distill foundation models into smaller equivalents on ImageNet-1K without access to the original training data. Specifically, we remove the designs from conventional knowledge distillation settings that result in dataset bias and present three levels of training objectives, i.e., token, patch, and feature, to maximize the efficacy of knowledge transfer. In this manner, Proteus is trained at ImageNet-level costs with surprising ability, facilitating the accessibility of training foundation models for the broader research community. When leveraging DINOv2-g/14 as the teacher, Proteus-L/14 matches the performance of the Oracle method DINOv2-L/14 (142M training data) across 19 benchmarks and outperforms other vision foundation models including CLIP-L/14 (400M), OpenCLIP-L/14 (400M/2B) and SynCLR-L/14 (600M) with a significantly smaller training set of 1.2M images.

Poster
QERA: an Analytical Framework for Quantization Error Reconstruction

Cheng Zhang, Jeffrey T. H. Wong, Can Xiao, George Anthony Constantinides, Yiren Zhao

展开摘要

The growing number of parameters and computational demands of large language models (LLMs) present significant challenges for their efficient deployment. Recently, there is an increasing interest in quantizing weights to extremely low precision while offsetting the resulting error with low-rank, high-precision error reconstruction terms. The combination of quantization and low-rank approximation is now popular in both adapter-based, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoftQ and low-precision inference techniques including ZeroQuant-V2. Usually, the low-rank terms are calculated via the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the weight quantization error, minimizing the Frobenius and spectral norms of the weight approximation error. Recent methods like LQ-LoRA and LQER introduced hand-crafted heuristics to minimize errors in layer outputs (activations) rather than weights, resulting improved quantization results. However, these heuristic methods lack an analytical solution to guide the design of quantization error reconstruction terms. In this paper, we revisit this problem and formulate an analytical framework, named Quantization Error Reconstruction Analysis (QERA), and offer a closed-form solution to the problem. We show QERA benefits both existing low-precision fine-tuning and inference methods -- QERA achieves a fine-tuned accuracy gain of $\Delta_{\text{acc}}$ = 6.05\% of 2-bit RoBERTa-base on GLUE compared to LoftQ; and obtains $\Delta_{\text{acc}}$ = 2.97\% higher post-training quantization accuracy of 4-bit Llama-3.1-70B on average than ZeroQuant-V2 and $\Delta_{\text{ppl}}$ = $-$ 0.28 lower perplexity on WikiText2 than LQER.

Poster
SPAM: Spike-Aware Adam with Momentum Reset for Stable LLM Training

Tianjin Huang, Ziquan Zhu, Gaojie Jin, Lu Liu, Zhangyang Wang, Shiwei Liu

展开摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse tasks, yet their training remains highly resource intensive and susceptible to critical challenges such as training instability. A predominant source of this instability stems from gradient and loss spikes, which disrupt the learning process, often leading to costly interventions like checkpoint recovery and experiment restarts, further amplifying inefficiencies. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation into gradient spikes observed during LLM training, revealing their prevalence across multiple architectures and datasets. Our analysis shows that these spikes can be up to 1000× larger than typical gradients, substantially deteriorating model performance. To address this issue, we propose Spike-Aware Adam with Momentum Reset (SPAM), a novel optimizer designed to counteract gradient spikes through momentum reset and spike-aware gradient clipping. Extensive experiments, including both pre-training and fine-tuning, demonstrate that SPAM consistently surpasses Adam and its variants across a range of model scales. Additionally, SPAM facilitates memory-efficient training by enabling sparse momentum, where only a subset of momentum terms are maintained and updated. When operating under memory constraints, SPAM outperforms state-of-the-art memory-efficient optimizers such as GaLore and Adam-Mini. Our work underscores the importance of mitigating gradient spikes in LLM training and introduces an effective optimization strategy that enhances both training stability and resource efficiency at scale. Code is submitted.

Poster