Artem Babenko

The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has led to a race towards performant quantization techniques which can enable their execution on end-user devices. In this paper, we revisit the problem of “extreme” LLM compression—defined as targeting extremely low bit counts, such as 2 to 3 bits per parameter—from the point of view of classic methods in Multi-Codebook Quantization (MCQ). Our algorithm, called AQLM, generalizes the classic Additive Quantization (AQ) approach for information retrieval to advance the state-of-the-art in LLM compression, via two innovations: 1) learned additive quantization of weight matrices in input-adaptive fashion, and 2) joint optimization of codebook parameters across each transformer blocks. Broadly, AQLM is the first scheme that is Pareto optimal in terms of accuracy-vs-model-size when compressing to less than 3 bits per parameter, and significantly improves upon all known schemes in the extreme compression (2bit) regime. In addition, AQLM is practical: we provide fast GPU and CPU implementations of AQLM for token generation, which enable us to match or outperform optimized FP16 implementations for speed, while executing in a much smaller memory footprint.

Knowledge distillation methods have recently shown to be a promising direction to speedup the synthesis of large-scale diffusion models by requiring only a few inference steps. While several powerful distillation methods were recently proposed, the overall quality of student samples is typically lower compared to the teacher ones, which hinders their practical usage. In this work, we investigate the relative quality of samples produced by the teacher text-to-image diffusion model and its distilled student version. As our main empirical finding, we discover that a noticeable portion of student samples exhibit superior fidelity compared to the teacher ones, despite the "approximate" nature of the student. Based on this finding, we propose an adaptive collaboration between student and teacher diffusion models for effective text-to-image synthesis. Specifically, the distilled model produces the initial sample, and then an oracle decides whether it needs further improvements with a slow teacher model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the designed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art text-to-image alternatives for various inference budgets in terms of human preference. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be naturally used in popular applications such as text-guided image editing and controllable generation.

Deep learning (DL) models for tabular data problems (e.g. classification, regression) are currently receiving increasingly more attention from researchers. However, despite the recent efforts, the non-DL algorithms based on gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) remain a strong go-to solution for these problems. One of the research directions aimed at improving the position of tabular DL involves designing so-called retrieval-augmented models. For a target object, such models retrieve other objects (e.g. the nearest neighbors) from the available training data and use their features and labels to make a better prediction.

In this work, we present TabR — essentially, a feed-forward network with a custom k-Nearest-Neighbors-like component in the middle. On a set of public benchmarks with datasets up to several million objects, TabR marks a big step forward for tabular DL: it demonstrates the best average performance among tabular DL models, becomes the new state-of-the-art on several datasets, and even outperforms GBDT models on the recently proposed “GBDT-friendly” benchmark. Among the important findings and technical details powering TabR, the main ones lie in the attention-like mechanism that is responsible for retrieving the nearest neighbors and extracting valuable signal from them. In addition to the higher performance, TabR is simple and significantly more efficient compared to prior retrieval-based tabular DL models.