Large language models (LLM) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their substantial parameter sizes pose significant challenges for deployment on edge devices with limited computational and memory resources. Low-rank compression is a promising approach to address this issue, as it reduces both computational and memory costs, making LLM more suitable for resource-constrained environments. Nonetheless, naïve low-rank compression methods require a significant reduction in the retained rank to achieve meaningful memory and computation savings. For a low-rank model, the ranks need to be reduced by more than half to yield efficiency gains. Such aggressive truncation, however, typically results in substantial performance degradation. To address this trade-off, we propose SkipCat, a novel low-rank compression framework that enables the use of higher ranks while achieving the same compression rates. First, we introduce an intra-layer shared low-rank projection method, where multiple matrices that share the same input use a common projection. This reduces redundancy and improves compression efficiency. Second, we propose a block skipping technique that omits computations and memory transfers for selected sub-blocks within the low-rank decomposition. These two techniques jointly enable our compressed model to retain more effective ranks under the same compression budget. Experimental results show that, without any additional fine-tuning, our method outperforms previous low-rank compression approaches by 7% accuracy improvement on zero-shot tasks under the same compression rate. These results highlight the effectiveness of our rank-maximized compression strategy in preserving model performance under tight resource constraints.

Although larger datasets are crucial for training large deep models, the rapid growth of dataset size has brought a significant challenge in terms of considerable training costs, which even results in prohibitive computational expenses. Dataset Distillation becomes a popular technique recently to reduce the dataset size via learning a highly compact set of representative exemplars, where the model trained with these exemplars ideally should have comparable performance with respect to the one trained with the full dataset. While most of existing works upon dataset distillation focus on supervised datasets, \todo{we instead aim to distill images and their self-supervisedly trained representations into a distilled set. This procedure, named as Self-Supervised Dataset Distillation, effectively extracts rich information from real datasets, yielding the distilled sets with enhanced cross-architecture generalizability.} Particularly, in order to preserve the key characteristics of original dataset more faithfully and compactly, several novel techniques are proposed: 1) we introduce an innovative parameterization upon images and representations via distinct low-dimensional bases, where the base selection for parameterization is experimentally shown to play a crucial role; 2) we tackle the instability induced by the randomness of data augmentation -- a key component in self-supervised learning but being underestimated in the prior work of self-supervised dataset distillation -- by utilizing predetermined augmentations; 3) we further leverage a lightweight network to model the connections among the representations of augmented views from the same image, leading to more compact pairs of distillation. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets validate the superiority of our approach in terms of distillation efficiency, cross-architecture generalization, and transfer learning performance.

Online continual learning (OCL) aims to enable model learning from a non-stationary data stream to continuously acquire new knowledge as well as retain the learnt one. Under the constraints of having limited system size and computational cost, in which the main challenge comes from the “catastrophic forgetting” issue - the inability to well remember the learnt knowledge while learning the new ones. With the specific focus on the class-incremental OCL scenario, i.e. OCL for classification, the recent advance incorporates the contrastive learning technologies for learning more generalised feature representation to achieve the state-of-the-art performance but is still unable to fully resolve the catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we follow the strategy of adopting contrastive learning but further introduce the semantically distinct augmentation technique, in which it leverages strong augmentation to generate more data samples, and we show that considering these samples semantically different from their original classes (thus being related to the out-of-distribution samples) in the contrastive learning mechanisms contributes to alleviate forgetting and facilitate model stability. Moreover, in addition to contrastive learning, the typical classification mechanism and objective (i.e. softmax classifier and cross-entropy loss) are included in our model design for utilising the label information, but particularly equipped with a sampling strategy to tackle the tendency of favouring the new classes (i.e. model bias towards the recently learnt classes). Upon conducting extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Mini-Imagenet datasets, our proposed method is shown to achieve superior performance against various baselines.