馃憢 Hi, all!
I am Elliot Shichao Song, a PhD candidate. My current research focuses on foundation models. I blog about my research and life.
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Efficient Large-Scale Crawling with an AI Agent: 3 Days, $175, 3 Billion Original Images
Downloading the originals behind 2.98 billion image URLs in OmniCorpus-CW, I left almost all operations to an AI agent: patrols, rate tuning, creating and deleting machines, incident handling and billing. I only made the decisions. In 79 hours it saved 99.6% of the images, 744 TB, for about $175 in machines.
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CaptionExam: A Challenging QA Benchmark for Captioners
On CaptionExam, even GPT-6 Astra only just passes at describing images, with a score of 61.2%.
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A Billion-Scale Retrieval System for Text-to-Image Training Data
Training a text-to-image model from scratch means finding, inspecting and filtering samples across billions of image鈥搕ext pairs. Using a retrieval system over 1.4B samples as an example, this post covers data storage and management, distributed embedding extraction, building and querying an IVF-PQ index, and online retrieval and cluster browsing.
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Fully Annotated Guide to "A (Long) Peek into Reinforcement Learning"
This is a fully annotated guide to Lilian Weng鈥檚 post A (Long) Peek into Reinforcement Learning.
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Fully Annotated Guide to "The Multi-Armed Bandit Problem and Its Solutions"
The multi-armed bandit problem is a classic exploration鈥揺xploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning. Lilian Weng鈥檚 post is an excellent introduction, but some mathematical details and motivations can be cryptic. This article annotates it with step-by-step explanations and supplementary notes.