United States

The tremendous success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various complex tasks relies heavily on their substantial scale, which raises challenges during model deployment due to their large memory consumption. Recently, numerous studies have attempted to compress LLMs using one-shot pruning methods. However, these methods often experience considerable performance degradation on complex language understanding tasks, calling into question the feasibility of pruning in LLMs. To address this issue, we propose a pruning pipeline for semi-structured sparse models via retraining, termed Adaptive Sparse Trainer (AST). Unlike previous one-shot pruning methods, AST incrementally transforms dense models into sparse ones by applying decay to masked weights while allowing the model to adaptively select masks throughout the training process. Furthermore, we observe that using distillation with a dense model as the teacher can prevent the sparse model from falling into local optima and accelerate convergence. In addition, we incorporate extra well-initialized parameters to further enhance model performance with minimal increase in memory footprint. AST can significantly enhance model performance, approaching the level of dense models. When applied to the LLaMA2-7B model, AST reduces the zero-shot accuracy gap between dense and semi-structured sparse models to 1.12\% across multiple zero-shot tasks, utilizing less than 0.4\% of the pretraining tokens. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of deploying semi-structured sparse large language models and introduces a novel method for achieving highly compressed models when combined with existing quantization techniques.

AAAI 2025

Pruning Large Language Models with Semi-Structural Adaptive Sparse Training

snlp

language models

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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NAACL 2021

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)<br><br><br>

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)<br><br> 

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



In recent Open-set Recognition (OSR) community, a prevailing belief is that enhancing the discriminative boundaries of closed-set classes can improve the robustness of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) against open data during testing. Typical studies validate this *implicitly* by empirical evidence, without a formalized understanding of *how DNNs help the closed-set features obtain more discriminative boundaries?* For this, we provide an answer from the Neural Collapse (NC) perspective: DNNs align the closed-set with a *Simplex Equiangular Tight Frame* (ETF) structure that has geometric and mathematical interpretability. Regrettably, although NC naturally occurs in DNNs, we discover that typical studies cannot guarantee the features being learned to strictly align with the ETF. Thus, we introduce a novel concept, Fixed ETF Template (FiT), which holds an ideal structure associated with closed-set classes. To force class means and classifier vectors to align with FiT, we further design a Dual ETF (DEF) loss involving two components. Specifically, *F*-DEF loss is designed to align class means with FiT strictly, yielding optimal inter-class separability. Meanwhile, we extend a dual form to classifier vectors, termed *C*-DEF loss, which guides class means and classifier vectors to satisfy self-duality. Our theoretical analysis proves the validity of the proposed approach, and extensive experiments demonstrate that DEF achieves comparable or superior results with reduced computational resources on standard OSR benchmarks.

Unlocking Better Closed-Set Alignment Based on Neural Collapse for Open-Set Recognition

In-the-wild Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) encounters a significant challenge in recognizing emotion-related expressions, which are often temporally and spatially diluted by emotion-irrelevant expressions and global context respectively.
Most of the prior DFER methods model tightly coupled spatiotemporal representations for direct classification, which may incorporate weakly relevant features such as facial contours and identity-specific characteristics, leading to information redundancy and emotion-irrelevant context bias.
Several DFER methods have highlighted the significance of dynamic information for DFER, but utilize explicit manners to extract dynamic features with overly strong prior knowledge.
In this paper, we propose a novel Implicit Facial Dynamics Disentanglement framework (IFDD).
Through expanding wavelet lifting scheme to fully learnable framework, IFDD disentangles emotion-related dynamic information from emotion-irrelevant global context in an implicit manner, i.e., without exploit operations and external guidance.
The disentanglement process of IFDD contains two stages, i.e., Inter-frame Static-dynamic Splitting Module (ISSM) for rough disentanglement estimation and Lifting-based Aggregation-Disentanglement Module (LADM) for further refinement.
Specifically, ISSM explores inter-frame correlation to generate content-aware splitting indexes on-the-fly.
We preliminarily utilize these indexes to split frame features into two groups, one with greater global similarity, and the other with more unique dynamic features.
Subsequently, LADM first aggregates these two groups of features to obtain fine-grained global context features by an updater, and then disentangles emotion-related facial dynamic features from the  global context by a predictor.
Extensive experiments on in-the-wild datasets have demonstrated that IFDD outperforms prior supervised DFER methods with higher recognition accuracy and comparable efficiency.

Lifting Scheme-Based Implicit Disentanglement of Emotion-Related Facial Dynamics in the Wild

Prototype-based classification learning methods are known to be inherently interpretable. However, this paradigm suffers from major limitations when compared with deep models, such as lower performance. This led to the development of the so-called deep Prototype-Based Networks (PBNs), also known as prototypical parts models. In this work, we analyze these models with respect to different properties, including interpretability. In particular, we focus on the Classification-by-Components (CBC) approach, which uses a probabilistic model to ensure interpretability and can be used as a shallow and deep model. We show that this model has several shortcomings, like creating contradicting explanations. Based on these findings, we propose an extension of CBC that solves these issues. Moreover, we prove that this extension has robustness guarantees and derive a loss that optimizes robustness. Additionally, our analysis shows that most deep PBNs are related to (deep) RBF classifiers, which implies that our robustness guarantees generalizes to shallow RBF classifiers. The empirical evaluation demonstrates that our deep PBN yields state-of-the-art classification accuracy on different benchmarks while resolving the interpretability shortcomings of other approaches. Further, our shallow PBN variant outperforms other shallow PBNs while being inherently interpretable and achieving provable robustness guarantees.

A Robust Prototype-Based Network with Interpretable RBF Classifier Foundations

Tongue diagnosis is a vital tool in both Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine, providing key insights into a patient's health by analyzing tongue attributes. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the need for accurate remote medical assessments, emphasizing the importance of precise tongue attribute recognition via telehealth. To address this, we propose a Sign-Oriented multi-label Attributes Detection Framework. Our approach begins with an adaptive tongue feature extraction module that standardizes tongue images and mitigates environmental factors. This is followed by a Sign-oriented Network (SignNet) that identifies specific tongue attributes, emulating the diagnostic process of experienced practitioners and enabling comprehensive health evaluations.
To validate our methodology, we developed an extensive tongue image dataset specifically designed for telemedicine. Unlike existing datasets, ours is tailored for remote diagnosis, with a comprehensive set of attribute labels. This dataset will be openly available, providing a valuable resource for research. Initial tests have shown improved accuracy in detecting various tongue attributes, highlighting our framework's potential as an essential tool for remote medical assessments. The code for this project is available at https://github.com/anonymous8161/anonymous8161 .

Dr. Tongue: Sign-Oriented Multi-label Detection for Remote Tongue Diagnosis

Large models for text-to-music generation have achieved significant progress, facilitating the creation of high-quality and varied musical compositions from provided text prompts. However, input text prompts may not precisely capture user requirements, particularly when the objective is to generate music that embodies a specific concept derived from a designated reference collection. In this paper, we propose a novel method for customized text-to-music generation, which can capture the concept from a two-minute reference music and generate a new piece of music conforming to the concept. We achieve this by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-music model using the reference music. However, directly fine-tuning all parameters leads to overfitting issues. To address this problem, we propose a Pivotal Parameters Tuning method that enables the model to assimilate the new concept while preserving its original generative capabilities. Additionally, we identify a potential concept conflict when introducing multiple concepts into the pretrained model. We present a concept enhancement strategy to distinguish multiple concepts, enabling the fine-tuned model to generate music incorporating either individual or multiple concepts simultaneously. Since we are the first to work on the customized music generation task, we also introduce a new dataset and evaluation protocol for the new task. Our proposed Jen1-DreamStyler outperforms several baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Demos are available in the supplementary materials for further exploration and understanding.

JEN-1 DreamStyler: Customized Musical Concept Learning via Pivotal Parameters Tuning

We present a novel, training-free approach to scene change detection. Our method leverages tracking models, which inherently perform change detection between consecutive frames of video by identifying common objects and detecting new or missing objects. Specifically, our method takes advantage of the change detection effect of the tracking model by inputting reference and query images instead of consecutive frames. Furthermore, we focus on the content gap and style gap between two input images in change detection, and address both issues by proposing adaptive content threshold and style bridging layers, respectively. Finally, we extend our approach to video to exploit rich temporal information, enhancing scene change detection performance. We compare our approach and baseline through various experiments. While existing train-based baseline tend to specialize only in the trained domain, our method shows consistent performance across various domains, proving the competitiveness of our approach.

Zero-Shot Scene Change Detection

The multi-instance multi-label (MIML) problem is a new supervised learning paradigm that has emerged to efficiently represent complex data. Therefore, various similarity-based algorithms have been proposed, but existing algorithms commonly measure similarity by considering only the structural relationships in the feature space without utilizing information from the label space. As these approaches do not adequately reflect the complex properties of MIML data, it is essential to improve the accuracy of MIML classification by utilizing information from both feature and label spaces. Thus, we propose a new algorithm, T-MDML: triplet-based multiple distance metric learning for MIML. T-MDML defines a distance metric by learning a global property shared by the entire label space and a label-specific property for each label. In addition, we simultaneously consider the structural characteristics of features and label space to extract label correlation and incorporate it into the optimization process. In experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of our label correlation estimation method and verify its performance by applying it to MIML$k$NN. We also demonstrate T-MDML’s relative superiority over existing MIML algorithms, as well as its scalability when applied to similarity-based MIML methods.

T-MDML: Triplet-based Multiple Distance Metric Learning for Multi-Instance Multi-Label Classification with Label Correlation

In this paper, we propose Neural-Symbolic Collaborative Distillation (NesyCD), a novel knowledge distillation method for learning the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., \textgreater 13B). We argue that complex reasoning tasks are difficult for Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., $\leq$ 7B), as these tasks demand not only general cognitive abilities but also specialized knowledge, which is often sparse and difficult for these neural-based SLMs to effectively capture. Therefore, NesyCD distills the general capabilities and specialized knowledge in LLMs using different manners.On the one hand, we distill only general abilities from teacher LLMs into the student SLMs of parameterized neural networks. On the other hand, for the specialized abilities and uncommon knowledge of a complex reasoning task, we employ a symbolic knowledge distillation approach to obtain and store the specialized knowledge within a symbolic knowledge base (KB).By decoupling general and specialized capabilities, the proposed NesyCD can achieve superior performance cost-effectively, utilizing smaller models and blending parameterized neural networks with symbolic KB. Moreover, the specialized KB generalizes well and is comprehended and manipulated by humans.Our experiments show that NesyCD significantly boosts SLMs' complex reasoning performance on in-domain (BBH, GSM8K) and out-of-domain (AGIEval, ARC) datasets. Notably, our approach enabled the LLaMA3-8B and Qwen2-7B to surpass GPT-3.5-turbo in performance and come close to matching LLaMA3-70B, despite the latter having nine times more parameters. Our code will be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NesyCD-F492.

Neural-Symbolic CollaborativeDistillation: Advancing Small Language Models for Complex Reasoning Tasks

Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection (S-DGOD) aims to train on a single source domain for robust performance across a variety of unseen target domains by taking advantage of an object detector. Existing S-DGOD approaches often rely on data augmentation strategies, including a composition of visual transformations, to enhance the detector's generalization ability. However, the absence of real-world prior knowledge hinders data augmentation from contributing to the diversity of training data distributions. To address this issue, we propose PhysAug, a novel physical model-based non-ideal imaging condition data augmentation method, to enhance the adaptability of the S-DGOD tasks. Drawing upon the principles of atmospheric optics, we develop a universal perturbation model that serves as the foundation for our proposed PhysAug. Given that visual perturbations typically arise from the interaction of light with atmospheric particles, the image frequency spectrum is harnessed to simulate real-world variations during training. This approach fosters the detector to learn domain-invariant representations, thereby enhancing its ability to generalize across various settings. Without altering the network architecture or loss function, our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art across various S-DGOD datasets. In particular, it achieves a substantial improvement of 7.3% and 7.2% over the baseline on DWD and Cityscape-C, highlighting its enhanced generalizability in real-world settings.

PhysAug: A Physical-guided and Frequency-based Data Augmentation for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection

In 3D human action recognition, limited supervised data makes it challenging to fully tap into the modeling potential of powerful networks such as transformers. As a result, researchers have been actively investigating effective self-supervised pre-training strategies. For example, MAMP shows that instead of following the prevalent masked joint reconstruction, explicit masked motion reconstruction is key to the success of learning effective feature representation for 3D action recognition. However, we find that if we make a simple and effective change to the reconstructed target of masked joint reconstruction, masked joint reconstruction can achieve the same results as masked motion reconstruction. The devil is in the special characteristic of 3D skeleton data and the normalization process of training targets. We need to dig for all effective information of targets during normalization. Besides, considering that mask data reconstruction focuses more on learning local relations in input data for fulfilling the reconstruction task, instead of modeling the relation among samples, we further employ contrastive learning to learn more discriminative 3D action representations. We show that contrastive learning can consistently boost the performance of model pre-trained by masked joint prediction under various settings, especially in the semi-supervised setting that has a very limited number of labeled samples. Extensive experiments on NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD datasets show that the proposed pre-training strategy achieves state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles. Codes will be open-sourced after being accepted.

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Unlocking Better Closed-Set Alignment Based on Neural Collapse for Open-Set Recognition

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Rethinking Network Pruning -- under the Pre-train and Fine-tune Paradigm

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