Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture proposed by DeepSeek, designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. Compared to MLA, standard LLMs employing Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and its variants such as Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) exhibit significant cost disadvantages. Enabling well-trained LLMs (e.g., Llama) to rapidly adapt to MLA without pre-training from scratch is both meaningful and challenging. This paper proposes the first data-efficient fine-tuning method for transitioning from MHA to MLA (**MHA2MLA**), which includes two key components: for *partial-RoPE*, we remove RoPE from dimensions of queries and keys that contribute less to the attention scores, for *low-rank approximation*, we introduce joint SVD approximations based on the pre-trained parameters of keys and values. These carefully designed strategies enable MHA2MLA to recover performance using only a small fraction (0.6% to 1%) of the data, significantly reducing inference costs while seamlessly integrating with compression techniques such as KV cache quantization. For example, the KV cache size of Llama2-7B is reduced by 92.19%, with only a 1% drop in LongBench performance. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/JT-Ushio/MHA2MLA.

Causal Language Modeling (CLM) and Masked Language Modeling (MLM) are two mainstream learning paradigms based on Transformer networks, specifically the Decoder-only and Encoder-only architectures. The strengths of each paradigm in downstream tasks have shown a mix of advantages and disadvantages. In the past BabyLM Challenge 2023, although the MLM paradigm achieved the best average performance, the CLM paradigm demonstrated significantly faster convergence rates. For the BabyLM Challenge 2024, we propose a novel language modeling paradigm named AntLM, which integrates both CLM and MLM to leverage the advantages of these two classic paradigms. We chose the strict-small track and conducted experiments on two foundation models: BabyLlama, representing CLM, and LTG-BERT, representing MLM. During the training process for specific foundation models, we alternate between applying CLM or MLM training objectives and causal or bidirectional attention masks. Experimental results show that combining the two pretraining objectives leverages their strengths, enhancing overall training performance. Under the same epochs, AntLM_BabyLlama improves Macro-average by 1%, and AntLM_LTG-BERT achieves a 2.2% increase over the baselines.

To evaluate the performance of a multi-domain goal-oriented Dialogue System (DS), it is important to understand what the users’ goals are for the conversations and whether those goals are successfully achieved. The success rate of goals directly correlates with user satisfaction and perceived usefulness of the DS. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic dialogue evaluation framework that jointly performs two tasks: goal segmentation and goal success prediction. We extend the RoBERTa-IQ model (Gupta et al., 2021) by adding multi-task learning heads for goal segmentation and success prediction. Using an annotated dataset from a commercial DS, we demonstrate that our proposed model reaches an accuracy that is on-par with single-pass human annotation comparing to a three-pass gold annotation benchmark.