Optimizing distributed training strategies for large-scale deep learning models remains a critical challenge in both industry and academia, demanding extensive domain expertise and manual tuning. Existing automated distributed training frameworks are plagued by over-reliance on prior profiling, poor generalization across models/hardware, and scalability constraints stemming from vast search spaces, impeding real-world applicability. To address these challenges, we propose OptiCo, a model-driven multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable automatic and explainable distributed training strategy configuration. OptiCo orchestrates a team of reasoning-driven agents, through a shared Global Message Pool facilitating persistent memory and coordination. By employing inception prompting and Chain-Of-Thought (COT) reasoning, agents iteratively refine configurations, detect bottlenecks, analyze failures, and optimize resource utilization. Evaluated across 25+ configurations spanning diverse model architectures, GPU types and scales, OptiCo outperforms expert-designed strategies within 20 iterations, achieving an average performance improvement of 1.84%, with gains ranging from 0.08% to 8.65%. The source codes are avaiable at https://github.com/TangZhe96/OptiCo-public.

While the massive scale of modern LLMs enables remarkable performance, their static, input-agnostic computational graph incurs substantial resource wastage and high latency during inference. Existing dynamic schemes, such as early-exit and layer-drop reduce FLOPs but break batch processing or introduce KV-cache inconsistency. We propose Deputy, a dynamic low-rank substitution framework that employs a lightweight decision module at each layer to dynamically determine the execution branch for different tokens: Attention layers choose between full and low-rank computation to mitigate the KV cache issue, while FFN layers additionally support skipping to further reduce computation. We fine-tune the LLM with LoRA and then derive an additional low-rank matrix C via a least-squares fit BC ≈ W_pre, where B is the shared LoRA matrix, so that only one extra low-rank matrix is introduced, effectively reducing memory overhead. Moreover, a hybrid KV cache strategy stores KV values generated by the low-rank branch, achieving a 38% reduction in cache storage. Experiments on Llama models demonstrate that Deputy reduces computation by approximately 40% compared to the original dense model while outperforming existing baseline methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracies across various tasks. However, the latency of inference and the large GPU memory consumption of LLMs restrict their deployment performance. Recently, there have been some efficient attempts to quantize LLMs, yet inference with large batch size or long sequence still has the issue of being compute-bound. Fine-grained quantization methods have showcased their proficiency in achieving low-bit quantization for LLMs, while requiring FP16 data type for linear layer computations, which is time-consuming when dealing with large batch size or long sequence. In this paper, we introduce a method called FlattenQuant, which significantly reduces the maximum value of the tensor by flattening the larger channels in the tensor, to achieve low bit per-tensor quantization with minimal accuracy loss. Our experiments show that FlattenQuant can directly use 4 bits to achieve 48.29% of the linear layer calculation in LLMs, with the remaining layer using 8 bits. The 4-bit matrix multiplication introduced in the FlattenQuant method can effectively address the compute-bound caused by large matrix calculation. Our work achieves up to 2× speedup and 2.3× memory reduction for LLMs with negligible loss in accuracy.

Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted the performance of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on few-shot text classification by employing task-specific prompts. Yet, PLMs are unfamiliar with prompt-style expressions during pre-training, which limits the few-shot learning performance on downstream tasks.It would be desirable if the models can acquire some prompting knowledge before adapting to specific NLP tasks. We present the Unified Prompt Tuning (UPT) framework, leading to better few-shot text classification for BERT-style models by explicitly capturing prompting semantics from non-target NLP datasets. In UPT, a novel paradigm Prompt-Options-Verbalizer is proposed for joint prompt learning across different NLP tasks, forcing PLMs to capture task-invariant prompting knowledge. We further design a self-supervised task named Knowledge-enhanced Selective Masked Language Modeling to improve the PLM’s generalization abilities for accurate adaptation to previously unseen tasks. After multi-task learning across multiple tasks, the PLM can be better prompt-tuned towards any dissimilar target tasks in low-resourced settings. Experiments over a variety of NLP tasks show that UPT consistently outperforms state-of-the-arts for prompt-based fine-tuning.

With the wide availability of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), multi-task fine-tuning across domains has been extensively applied. For tasks related to distant domains with different class label sets, PLMs may memorize non-transferable knowledge for the target domain and suffer from negative transfer. Inspired by meta-learning, we propose the Meta Distant Transfer Learning (Meta-DTL) framework to learn the cross-task knowledge for PLM-based methods. Meta-DTL first employs task representation learning to mine implicit relations among multiple tasks and classes. Based on the results, it trains a PLM-based meta-learner to capture the transferable knowledge across tasks. The weighted maximum entropy regularizers are proposed to make meta-learner more task-agnostic and unbiased. Finally, the meta-learner can be fine-tuned to fit each task with better parameter initialization. We evaluate Meta-DTL using both BERT and ALBERT on seven public datasets. Experiment results confirm the superiority of Meta-DTL as it consistently outperforms strong baselines. We find that Meta-DTL is highly effective when very few data is available for the target task.

This paper addresses the problem of automatically recognizing linguistically significant nonmanual expressions in American Sign Language from video. We develop a fully automatic system that is able to track facial expressions and head movements, and detect and recognize facial events continuously from video. The main contributions of the proposed framework are the following: (1) We have built a stochastic and adaptive ensemble of face trackers to address factors resulting in lost face track; (2) We combine 2D and 3D deformable face models to warp input frames, thus correcting for any variation in facial appearance resulting from changes in 3D head pose; (3) We use a combination of geometric features and texture features extracted from a canonical frontal representation. The proposed new framework makes it possible to detect grammatically significant nonmanual expressions from continuous signing and to differentiate successfully among linguistically significant expressions that involve subtle differences in appearance. We present results that are based on the use of a dataset containing 330 sentences from videos that were collected and linguistically annotated at Boston University.