Xiao Zheng

Jun Huang, Yang Yang, Hang Yu et al.

Microservice architecture has sprung up over recent years for managing enterprise applications, due to its ability to independently deploy and scale services. Despite its benefits, ensuring the reliability and safety of a microservice system remains highly challenging. Existing anomaly detection algorithms based on a single data modality (i.e., metrics, logs, or traces) fail to fully account for the complex correlations and interactions between different modalities, leading to false negatives and false alarms, whereas incorporating more data modalities can offer opportunities for further performance gain. As a fresh attempt, we propose in this paper a semi-supervised graph-based anomaly detection method, MSTGAD, which seamlessly integrates all available data modalities via attentive multi-modal learning. First, we extract and normalize features from the three modalities, and further integrate them using a graph, namely MST (microservice system twin) graph, where each node represents a service instance and the edge indicates the scheduling relationship between different service instances. The MST graph provides a virtual representation of the status and scheduling relationships among service instances of a real-world microservice system. Second, we construct a transformer-based neural network with both spatial and temporal attention mechanisms to model the inter-correlations between different modalities and temporal dependencies between the data points. This enables us to detect anomalies automatically and accurately in real-time. The source code of MSTGAD is publicly available at https://github.com/alipay/microservice_system_twin_graph_based_anomaly_detection.

Xiao Zheng, Xiaoshui Huang, Guofeng Mei et al.

Pre-training a model and then fine-tuning it on downstream tasks has demonstrated significant success in the 2D image and NLP domains. However, due to the unordered and non-uniform density characteristics of point clouds, it is non-trivial to explore the prior knowledge of point clouds and pre-train a point cloud backbone. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method called Point cloud Diffusion pre-training (PointDif). We consider the point cloud pre-training task as a conditional point-to-point generation problem and introduce a conditional point generator. This generator aggregates the features extracted by the backbone and employs them as the condition to guide the point-to-point recovery from the noisy point cloud, thereby assisting the backbone in capturing both local and global geometric priors as well as the global point density distribution of the object. We also present a recurrent uniform sampling optimization strategy, which enables the model to uniformly recover from various noise levels and learn from balanced supervision. Our PointDif achieves substantial improvement across various real-world datasets for diverse downstream tasks such as classification, segmentation and detection. Specifically, PointDif attains 70.0% mIoU on S3DIS Area 5 for the segmentation task and achieves an average improvement of 2.4% on ScanObjectNN for the classification task compared to TAP. Furthermore, our pre-training framework can be flexibly applied to diverse point cloud backbones and bring considerable gains.

Xuwen Zhou, Fangxin Liu, Chao Wang et al.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting draft tokens bypass full verification, but conventional frameworks suffer from frequent false rejections, particularly when draft models produce semantically correct but lexically divergent outputs. In this paper, we present Calibrated Speculative Decoding (CSD), a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification. Guided by the principle of "Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection and Probability-Guarded Acceptance," CSD incorporates two lightweight modules: Online Correction Memory, which aggregates historical rejections to propose recurring divergence patterns as rescue candidates, and Semantic Consistency Gating, which verifies candidate admissibility using probability ratios instead of exact token matching. Our evaluation across diverse large language models demonstrates that CSD outperforms existing methods, achieving a peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. CSD preserves model accuracy across all tasks while further boosting performance on complex reasoning datasets. These results establish CSD as a highly effective, lightweight solution for practical LLM deployments.

Long Cao, Liwei Ge, Daochi Zhang et al.

Reducing computational scaling for simulating non-Markovian dissipative dynamics using artificial neural networks is both a major focus and formidable challenge in open quantum systems. To enable neural quantum states (NQSs), we encode environmental memory in dissipatons (quasiparticles with characteristic lifetimes), yielding the dissipaton-embedded quantum master equation (DQME). The resulting NQS-DQME framework achieves compact representation of many-body correlations and non-Markovian memory. Benchmarking against numerically exact hierarchical equations of motion confirms NQS-DQME maintains comparable accuracy while enhancing scalability and interpretability. This methodology opens new paths to explore non-Markovian open quantum dynamics in previously intractable systems.

Yanhao Dong, Yubo Miao, Weinan Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit pronounced memory-bound characteristics during inference due to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we propose an L2 Cache-oriented asynchronous KV Cache prefetching method to break through the memory bandwidth bottleneck in LLM inference through computation-load overlap. By strategically scheduling idle memory bandwidth during active computation windows, our method proactively prefetches required KV Cache into GPU L2 cache, enabling high-speed L2 cache hits for subsequent accesses and effectively hiding HBM access latency within computational cycles. Extensive experiments on NVIDIA H20 GPUs demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 2.15x improvement in attention kernel efficiency and up to 1.97x end-to-end throughput enhancement, surpassing state-of-the-art baseline FlashAttention-3. Notably, our solution maintains orthogonality to existing optimization techniques and can be integrated with current inference frameworks, providing a scalable latency-hiding solution for next-generation LLM inference engines.

Xiao Zheng

Large Language Model (LLM) hallucination is a significant barrier to their reliable deployment. Current methods like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are often reactive. We introduce **Dynamic Self-reinforcing Calibration for Hallucination Suppression (DSCC-HS)**, a novel, proactive framework that intervenes during autoregressive decoding. Inspired by dual-process cognitive theory, DSCC-HS uses a compact proxy model, trained in adversarial roles as a Factual Alignment Proxy (FAP) and a Hallucination Detection Proxy (HDP). During inference, these proxies dynamically steer a large target model by injecting a real-time steering vector, which is the difference between FAP and HDP logits, at each decoding step. This plug-and-play approach requires no modification to the target model. Our experiments on TruthfulQA and BioGEN show DSCC-HS achieves state-of-the-art performance. On TruthfulQA, it reached a 99.2% Factual Consistency Rate (FCR). On the long-form BioGEN benchmark, it attained the highest FActScore of 46.50. These results validate DSCC-HS as a principled and efficient solution for enhancing LLM factuality.

Xiao Zheng, Saeed Asadi Bagloee, Majid Sarvi

Traffic forecasting is vital for Intelligent Transportation Systems, for which Machine Learning (ML) methods have been extensively explored to develop data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. Recent research focuses on modelling spatial-temporal correlations for short-term traffic prediction, leaving the favourable long-term forecasting a challenging and open issue. This paper presents a comparative study on large-scale real-world signalized arterials and freeway traffic flow datasets, aiming to evaluate promising ML methods in the context of large forecasting horizons up to 30 days. Focusing on modelling capacity for temporal dynamics, we develop one ensemble ML method, eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and a range of Deep Learning (DL) methods, including Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based methods and the state-of-the-art Transformer-based method. Time embedding is leveraged to enhance their understanding of seasonality and event factors. Experimental results highlight that while the attention mechanism/Transformer framework is effective for capturing long-range dependencies in sequential data, as the forecasting horizon extends, the key to effective traffic forecasting gradually shifts from temporal dependency capturing to periodicity modelling. Time embedding is particularly effective in this context, helping naive RNN outperform Informer by 31.1% for 30-day-ahead forecasting. Meanwhile, as an efficient and robust model, XGBoost, while learning solely from time features, performs competitively with DL methods. Moreover, we investigate the impacts of various factors like input sequence length, holiday traffic, data granularity, and training data size. The findings offer valuable insights and serve as a reference for future long-term traffic forecasting research and the improvement of AI's corresponding learning capabilities.

Xiwen Qu, Hao Che, Jun Huang et al.

Multi-label image classification (MLIC) is a fundamental and practical task, which aims to assign multiple possible labels to an image. In recent years, many deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches have been proposed which model label correlations to discover semantics of labels and learn semantic representations of images. This paper advances this research direction by improving both the modeling of label correlations and the learning of semantic representations. On the one hand, besides the local semantics of each label, we propose to further explore global semantics shared by multiple labels. On the other hand, existing approaches mainly learn the semantic representations at the last convolutional layer of a CNN. But it has been noted that the image representations of different layers of CNN capture different levels or scales of features and have different discriminative abilities. We thus propose to learn semantic representations at multiple convolutional layers. To this end, this paper designs a Multi-layered Semantic Representation Network (MSRN) which discovers both local and global semantics of labels through modeling label correlations and utilizes the label semantics to guide the semantic representations learning at multiple layers through an attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets including VOC 2007, COCO, NUS-WIDE, and Apparel show a competitive performance of the proposed MSRN against state-of-the-art models.