IVQA 651-700

651. Tradeoffs of embedded vs. cloud LLMs:

  • Embedded: Lower latency, greater privacy, offline availability, but limited by compute, memory, and power.

  • Cloud: Access to larger models, better scalability, but dependent on internet, higher latency, and potential privacy concerns.

652. Deploying quantized LLM on mobile:

  • Use quantized formats (e.g., 4-bit GGUF), convert model using tools like transformers, ggml, or onnxruntime, and run via mobile-optimized inference engines (e.g., MLC, llama.cpp, or Core ML).

653. Role of 4-bit/8-bit quantization:

  • Reduces model size and memory bandwidth needs. Allows edge inference on CPUs/NPUs but may slightly reduce precision. Crucial for running LLMs in RAM-constrained devices.

654. Minimizing memory footprint:

  • Apply quantization, use smaller architectures (e.g., Phi-2, TinyLLaMA), load model in chunks (streaming), and minimize context length.

655. ONNX vs. GGUF:

  • ONNX: General-purpose, supports many hardware backends, standard across ML ecosystem.

  • GGUF: Optimized for LLMs, supports quantized formats and fast inference with llama.cpp or MLC.

656. Offline caching:

  • Use local storage (SQLite, file cache) with hashed keys (prompt+params). Cache embeddings or full outputs. Use TTL (time-to-live) and LRU (least-recently-used) eviction.

657. Phi-2/TinyLLaMA vs GPT-3.5:

  • Smaller, more efficient, ideal for constrained environments. Tradeoff in reasoning depth and fluency but useful for simple tasks, classification, or embedded apps.

658. On-device RAG:

Use lightweight vector DBs (e.g., Chroma, Qdrant-lite). Store embeddings locally, use cosine similarity, and fetch context from device storage for grounding.

659. Edge-cloud sync architecture:

Use federated learning or periodic cloud sync. Maintain local inference and updates, then sync user data/feedback to central server.

660. Fallback for low-power clients:

  • Use prompt simplification, compression, or switch to rule-based systems. Optionally offload to cloud with reconnect/retry logic.


661. Meta-prompting:

  • Prompting the model to reason about its own output or goals (e.g., "Before answering, plan the steps"). Helps improve coherence and performance.

662. LLM quality assessment:

  • Self-reflection, likelihood scoring, comparison against known good outputs, or user feedback analysis.

663.Self-refinement:

  • Model re-evaluates and rewrites its own output iteratively to improve quality, often using a feedback loop or critique-prompt.

664. Evaluating critique loops:

Measure improvements in BLEU, ROUGE, accuracy, or human evaluation between initial and refined responses.

665. Prompt rewriting by model:

Use examples, metadata, or chain-of-thought to let the model modify the prompt for clarity, domain focus, or user intent alignment.

666. Learning without labeled data:

Use user interaction signals (clicks, edits, time spent), weak supervision, or reward models for preference alignment.

667. Prompt evolution:

Maintain a prompt history with feedback. Fine-tune prompt templates over time or auto-generate variants with higher success scores.

668. Policy-gradient updates:

Reinforcement learning approach where the model updates policy (output behavior) based on reward feedback rather than ground truth.

669. Identifying need for help:

Detect ambiguity, uncertainty (low confidence), repeated failures, or user dissatisfaction and escalate to human or higher-capacity model.

670. Safety concerns:

Risks include reward hacking, model drift, harmful output reinforcement, lack of oversight, and unintended behavior from unsupervised learning.

671. Financial advice tuning:

Use supervised fine-tuning on compliant data, reinforce conservative outputs, and enforce disclaimers or approval checks.

Insert citation demands, enforce source grounding, limit hallucination via retrieval, and add legal term constraints.

673. Medical LLM validation:

Clinical review, benchmark against known diagnosis sets, use specialist human-in-the-loop, and evaluate using precision/recall.

674. Prompting for code:

Embedded: Constrained APIs, memory limits, safety-focused. Full-stack: Larger context, architectural reasoning, multi-language support.

Evaluate with legal experts, cross-check citations, and use summarization quality metrics like ROUGE and factual consistency.

676. Pharma research support:

Extract structured entities, auto-generate trial summaries, validate with SME feedback, integrate with document repositories.

677. Academic LLM evaluation:

Use rubric-based human review, citation accuracy, novelty, coherence, and clarity as metrics.

678. Taxonomy incorporation:

Use structured prompts, knowledge graphs, or embedding-based reranking with domain taxonomies.

679.Scientific writing risks:

Hallucination, outdated references, false precision, and over-simplification. Needs fact-checking and SME review.

680. Patent/IP support:

  • Use structured prompts, keyword guidance, include claims/examples, and validate via overlap with prior art.


681.Whisper vs. traditional STT:

  1. Whisper vs. traditional STT:

    • Whisper uses transformers with multilingual, zero-shot capability; better accuracy across accents/languages but heavier.

  2. Transcription + summarization:

    • Pipeline: Audio → STT (e.g., Whisper) → Chunking → LLM summarization (e.g., GPT). Enables podcast notes or meeting digests.

  3. TTS integration:

    • Consider latency, tone consistency, speaker variation, and model size. Use Edge TTS or Coqui.

  4. Aligning visuals with scripts:

    • Use scene segmentation, object recognition, and LLM-generated scene descriptions to guide visuals.

  5. Real-time captioning:

    • Combine STT (Whisper or DeepSpeech) with lightweight summarizers or text formatters. Add latency buffers.

  6. Multimodal input workflows:

    • Use gesture/image classifiers, ASR, and natural language inputs as multi-source events. Requires unified model or orchestration.

  7. Role of VLMs:

    • Vision-Language Models like GPT-4V can jointly reason over images and text, enabling OCR, image Q&A, diagram understanding.

  8. Prompting image generators:

    • Use structured prompt templates, style references, and consistent descriptors. Validate with test outputs.

  9. Video editing use cases:

    • Auto-captioning, clip trimming, scene reordering, style transformation, background substitution, and highlight reels.

  10. Narrated video from documents:

  • Chunk doc → summarize → script generation → TTS → visuals → video stitching (using tools like Runway, Descript).


Section 70: Future Architectures & Emerging Ideas

  1. Mixture of experts (MoE):

    • Activates only relevant subnetworks during inference, allowing scalability without full compute cost. Used in models like GShard and Switch Transformer.

  2. Recurrent Memory Transformer:

    • Adds memory units to standard Transformers for longer context and state retention. Improves long-sequence reasoning.

  3. State-space models (SSMs):

    • Process sequences with linear recurrence and memory, enabling efficient long-context handling (e.g., Mamba, S4).

  4. Mamba, RWKV vs Transformers:

    • Mamba and RWKV use state-space or RNN-like mechanisms for better scalability and inference efficiency on long texts, outperforming Transformers in memory use.

  5. FlashAttention:

    • A fast, memory-efficient attention mechanism that improves training/inference speed by optimizing memory access patterns.

  6. Sparsity techniques:

    • Skip irrelevant computations via sparse activations or weights. Maintains performance while reducing cost (used in MoE, pruning).

  7. Retrieval as first-class citizen:

    • Emphasizes hybrid systems (RAG, Toolformer) where retrieval augments model context. Improves grounding and performance.

  8. Modularity:

    • Decouples components (retrieval, generation, memory, tools). Enables faster iteration, debugging, and reuse.

  9. Agent-based modeling:

    • Uses LLMs as reasoning agents with autonomy, memory, and tools. Advances autonomy via looped planning-execution-reflection.

  10. Convergence with cognitive architectures:

  • Trends toward combining symbolic reasoning, memory modules, learning loops, and agent-like behavior for human-like AI systems.

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