Scaling the effective context length is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, the quadratic increase in computational complexity inherent in traditional attention mechanisms presents a prohibitive overhead. Existing approaches either impose strongly biased structures, such as sink or window attention which are task-specific, or radically modify the attention mechanism into linear approximations, whose performance in complex reasoning tasks remains inadequately explored. In this work, we propose a solution that adheres to the ``less structure'' principle, allowing the model to determine where to attend autonomously, rather than introducing predefined biases. We introduce Mixture of Block Attention (MoBA), an innovative approach that applies the principles of Mixture of Experts (MoE) to the attention mechanism. This novel architecture demonstrates superior performance on long-context tasks while offering a key advantage: the ability to seamlessly transition between full and sparse attention, enhancing efficiency without the risk of compromising performance. MoBA has already been deployed to handle actual production workloads with long-context requirements, demonstrating significant advancements in efficient attention computation for LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/MoonshotAI/MoBA.

Recently, the self-supervised pre-training paradigm has shown great potential in leveraging large-scale unlabeled data to improve downstream task performance. However, increasing the scale of unlabeled pre-training data in real-world scenarios requires prohibitive computational costs and faces the challenge of uncurated samples. To address these issues, we build a task-specific self-supervised pre-training framework from a data selection perspective based on a simple hypothesis that pre-training on the unlabeled samples with similar distribution to the target task can bring substantial performance gains. Buttressed by the hypothesis, we propose the first yet novel framework for Scalable and Efficient visual Pre-Training (SEPT) by introducing a retrieval pipeline for data selection. SEPT first leverage a self-supervised pre-trained model to extract the features of the entire unlabeled dataset for retrieval pipeline initialization. Then, for a specific target task, SEPT retrievals the most similar samples from the unlabeled dataset based on feature similarity for each target instance for pre-training. Finally, SEPT pre-trains the target model with the selected unlabeled samples in a self-supervised manner for target data finetuning. By decoupling the scale of pre-training and available upstream data for a target task, SEPT achieves high scalability of the upstream dataset and high efficiency of pre-training, resulting in high model architecture flexibility. Results on various downstream tasks demonstrate that SEPT can achieve competitive or even better performance compared with ImageNet pre-training while reducing the size of training samples by one magnitude without resorting to any extra annotations.

Current out-of-distribution (OOD) detection benchmarks are commonly built by defining one dataset as in-distribution (ID) and all others as OOD. However, these benchmarks unfortunately introduce some unwanted and impractical goals, e.g., to perfectly distinguish CIFAR dogs from ImageNet dogs, even though they have the same semantics and negligible covariate shifts. These unrealistic goals will result in an extremely narrow range of model capabilities, greatly limiting their use in real applications. To overcome these drawbacks, we re-design the benchmarks and propose the semantically coherent out-of-distribution detection (SC-OOD). On the SC-OOD benchmarks, existing methods suffer from large performance degradation, suggesting that they are extremely sensitive to low-level discrepancy between data sources while ignoring their inherent semantics. To develop an effective SC-OOD detection approach, we leverage an external unlabeled set and design a concise framework featured by unsupervised dual grouping (UDG) for the joint modeling of ID and OOD data. The proposed UDG can not only enrich the semantic knowledge of the model by exploiting unlabeled data in an unsupervised manner, but also distinguish ID/OOD samples to enhance ID classification and OOD detection tasks simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on SC-OOD benchmarks. Code and benchmarks are provided on our project page: https://jingkang50.github.io/projects/scood.

Webly supervised learning becomes attractive recently for its efficiency in data expansion without expensive human labeling. However, adopting search queries or hashtags as web labels of images for training brings massive noise that degrades the performance of DNNs. Especially, due to the semantic confusion of query words, the images retrieved by one query may contain tremendous images belonging to other concepts. For example, searching 'tiger cat' on Flickr will return a dominating number of tiger images rather than the cat images. These realistic noisy samples usually have clear visual semantic clusters in the visual space that mislead DNNs from learning accurate semantic labels. To correct real-world noisy labels, expensive human annotations seem indispensable. Fortunately, we find that metadata can provide extra knowledge to discover clean web labels in a labor-free fashion, making it feasible to automatically provide correct semantic guidance among the massive label-noisy web data. In this paper, we propose an automatic label corrector VSGraph-LC based on the visual-semantic graph. VSGraph-LC starts from anchor selection referring to the semantic similarity between metadata and correct label concepts, and then propagates correct labels from anchors on a visual graph using graph neural network (GNN). Experiments on realistic webly supervised learning datasets Webvision-1000 and NUS-81-Web show the effectiveness and robustness of VSGraph-LC. Moreover, VSGraph-LC reveals its advantage on the open-set validation set.