Lining Zhang

Lining Zhang, Simon Mille, Yufang Hou et al. · deepmind, uw

To prevent the costly and inefficient use of resources on low-quality annotations, we want a method for creating a pool of dependable annotators who can effectively complete difficult tasks, such as evaluating automatic summarization. Thus, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality Amazon Mechanical Turk workers via a two-step pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out subpar workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-agreement annotations with similar constraints on resources. Although our workers demonstrate a strong consensus among themselves and CloudResearch workers, their alignment with expert judgments on a subset of the data is not as expected and needs further training in correctness. This paper still serves as a best practice for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.

Zonglin Yang, J. -H. Xie, Lining Zhang et al.

Deploying high-fidelity AI tutors in schools is often blocked by the Resource Curse -- the need for expensive cloud GPUs and massive data engineering. In this practitioner report, we present a replicable Standard Operating Procedure that breaks this barrier. Using a Vision-Language Model data cleaning strategy and a novel Shadow-RAG architecture, we localized a graduate-level Applied Mathematics tutor using only 3 person-days of non-expert labor and open-weights 32B models deployable on a single consumer-grade GPU. Our pilot study on a full graduate-level final exam reveals a striking emergence phenomenon: while both zero-shot baselines and standard retrieval stagnate around 50-60% accuracy across model generations, the Shadow Agent, which provides structured reasoning guidance, triggers a massive capability surge in newer 32B models, boosting performance from 74% (Naive RAG) to mastery level (90%). In contrast, older models see only modest gains (~10%). This suggests that such guidance is the key to unlocking the latent power of modern small language models. This work offers a cost-effective, scientifically grounded blueprint for ubiquitous AI education.

Lile Cai, Xun Xu, Lining Zhang et al.

State-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation are based on deep neural networks trained on large-scale labeled datasets. Acquiring such datasets would incur large annotation costs, especially for dense pixel-level prediction tasks like semantic segmentation. We consider region-based active learning as a strategy to reduce annotation costs while maintaining high performance. In this setting, batches of informative image regions instead of entire images are selected for labeling. Importantly, we propose that enforcing local spatial diversity is beneficial for active learning in this case, and to incorporate spatial diversity along with the traditional active selection criterion, e.g., data sample uncertainty, in a unified optimization framework for region-based active learning. We apply this framework to the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC datasets and demonstrate that the inclusion of spatial diversity effectively improves the performance of uncertainty-based and feature diversity-based active learning methods. Our framework achieves $95\%$ performance of fully supervised methods with only $5-9\%$ of the labeled pixels, outperforming all state-of-the-art region-based active learning methods for semantic segmentation.

Lile Cai, Ramanpreet Singh Pahwa, Xun Xu et al.

The development of X-Ray microscopy (XRM) technology has enabled non-destructive inspection of semiconductor structures for defect identification. Deep learning is widely used as the state-of-the-art approach to perform visual analysis tasks. However, deep learning based models require large amount of annotated data to train. This can be time-consuming and expensive to obtain especially for dense prediction tasks like semantic segmentation. In this work, we explore active learning (AL) as a potential solution to alleviate the annotation burden. We identify two unique challenges when applying AL on semiconductor XRM scans: large domain shift and severe class-imbalance. To address these challenges, we propose to perform contrastive pretraining on the unlabelled data to obtain the initialization weights for each AL cycle, and a rareness-aware acquisition function that favors the selection of samples containing rare classes. We evaluate our method on a semiconductor dataset that is compiled from XRM scans of high bandwidth memory structures composed of logic and memory dies, and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Marcel Nawrath, Agnieszka Nowak, Tristan Ratz et al. · amazon-science

At the heart of the Pyramid evaluation method for text summarization lie human written summary content units (SCUs). These SCUs are concise sentences that decompose a summary into small facts. Such SCUs can be used to judge the quality of a candidate summary, possibly partially automated via natural language inference (NLI) systems. Interestingly, with the aim to fully automate the Pyramid evaluation, Zhang and Bansal (2021) show that SCUs can be approximated by automatically generated semantic role triplets (STUs). However, several questions currently lack answers, in particular: i) Are there other ways of approximating SCUs that can offer advantages? ii) Under which conditions are SCUs (or their approximations) offering the most value? In this work, we examine two novel strategies to approximate SCUs: generating SCU approximations from AMR meaning representations (SMUs) and from large language models (SGUs), respectively. We find that while STUs and SMUs are competitive, the best approximation quality is achieved by SGUs. We also show through a simple sentence-decomposition baseline (SSUs) that SCUs (and their approximations) offer the most value when ranking short summaries, but may not help as much when ranking systems or longer summaries.

John Mendonça, Lining Zhang, Rahul Mallidi et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for robust dialogue system evaluation, yet comprehensive assessment remains challenging. Traditional metrics often prove insufficient, and safety considerations are frequently narrowly defined or culturally biased. The DSTC12 Track 1, "Dialog System Evaluation: Dimensionality, Language, Culture and Safety," is part of the ongoing effort to address these critical gaps. The track comprised two subtasks: (1) Dialogue-level, Multi-dimensional Automatic Evaluation Metrics, and (2) Multilingual and Multicultural Safety Detection. For Task 1, focused on 10 dialogue dimensions, a Llama-3-8B baseline achieved the highest average Spearman's correlation (0.1681), indicating substantial room for improvement. In Task 2, while participating teams significantly outperformed a Llama-Guard-3-1B baseline on the multilingual safety subset (top ROC-AUC 0.9648), the baseline proved superior on the cultural subset (0.5126 ROC-AUC), highlighting critical needs in culturally-aware safety. This paper describes the datasets and baselines provided to participants, as well as submission evaluation results for each of the two proposed subtasks.

Chenhao Xue, Yi Ren, Jinwei Zhou et al.

Multipliers and multiply-accumulators (MACs) are fundamental building blocks for compute-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence. With the diminishing returns of Moore's Law, optimizing multiplier performance now necessitates process-aware architectural innovations rather than relying solely on technology scaling. In this paper, we introduce DOMAC, a novel approach that employs differentiable optimization for designing multipliers and MACs at specific technology nodes. DOMAC establishes an analogy between optimizing multi-staged parallel compressor trees and training deep neural networks. Building on this insight, DOMAC reformulates the discrete optimization challenge into a continuous problem by incorporating differentiable timing and area objectives. This formulation enables us to utilize existing deep learning toolkit for highly efficient implementation of the differentiable solver. Experimental results demonstrate that DOMAC achieves significant enhancements in both performance and area efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines and commercial IPs in multiplier and MAC designs.

Yi Ren, Yukun Wang, Xiang Meng et al.

Automated standard cell library extension is crucial for maximizing Quality of Results (QoR) in modern VLSI design. We introduce CellE, a novel framework that leverages formal methods to achieve exhaustive discovery of functionally equivalent subcircuits. CellE applies equality saturation to the post-mapping netlist, generating an e-graph to cluster all functionally equivalent implementations. This canonical representation enables an efficient pattern mining algorithm to select the most area-optimal standard cells. Experimental results show a 15.41% average area reduction (up to 23.64% over prior work). Furthermore, characterization in a commercial flow demonstrates an 8.00% average delay reduction, confirming CellE's superior QoR optimization capabilities.

Chenhao Xue, Kezhi Li, Jiaxing Zhang et al.

Arithmetic circuits, such as adders and multipliers, are fundamental components of digital systems, directly impacting the performance, power efficiency, and area footprint. However, optimizing these circuits remains challenging due to the vast design space and complex physical constraints. While recent deep learning-based approaches have shown promise, they struggle to consistently explore high-potential design variants, limiting their optimization efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose AC-Refiner, a novel arithmetic circuit optimization framework leveraging conditional diffusion models. Our key insight is to reframe arithmetic circuit synthesis as a conditional image generation task. By carefully conditioning the denoising diffusion process on target quality-of-results (QoRs), AC-Refiner consistently produces high-quality circuit designs. Furthermore, the explored designs are used to fine-tune the diffusion model, which focuses the exploration near the Pareto frontier. Experimental results demonstrate that AC-Refiner generates designs with superior Pareto optimality, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. The performance gain is further validated by integrating AC-Refiner into practical applications.