Jian Cao

Tao Huang, Yuan Zhang, Shan You et al.

Distilling from the feature maps can be fairly effective for dense prediction tasks since both the feature discriminability and localization priors can be well transferred. However, not every pixel contributes equally to the performance, and a good student should learn from what really matters to the teacher. In this paper, we introduce a learnable embedding dubbed receptive token to localize those pixels of interests (PoIs) in the feature map, with a distillation mask generated via pixel-wise attention. Then the distillation will be performed on the mask via pixel-wise reconstruction. In this way, a distillation mask actually indicates a pattern of pixel dependencies within feature maps of teacher. We thus adopt multiple receptive tokens to investigate more sophisticated and informative pixel dependencies to further enhance the distillation. To obtain a group of masks, the receptive tokens are learned via the regular task loss but with teacher fixed, and we also leverage a Dice loss to enrich the diversity of learned masks. Our method dubbed MasKD is simple and practical, and needs no priors of tasks in application. Experiments show that our MasKD can achieve state-of-the-art performance consistently on object detection and semantic segmentation benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/hunto/MasKD .

Jianqing Zhang, Yang Hua, Jian Cao et al.

Recently, federated learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning abilities. However, under statistically heterogeneous scenarios, we observe that biased data domains on clients cause a representation bias phenomenon and further degenerate generic representations during local training, i.e., the representation degeneration phenomenon. To address these issues, we propose a general framework Domain Bias Eliminator (DBE) for FL. Our theoretical analysis reveals that DBE can promote bi-directional knowledge transfer between server and client, as it reduces the domain discrepancy between server and client in representation space. Besides, extensive experiments on four datasets show that DBE can greatly improve existing FL methods in both generalization and personalization abilities. The DBE-equipped FL method can outperform ten state-of-the-art personalized FL methods by a large margin. Our code is public at https://github.com/TsingZ0/DBE.

Yunfeng Li, Bo Wang, Ye Li et al.

A visual single-object tracker is an indispensable component of underwater vehicles (UVs) in marine organism grasping tasks. Its accuracy and stability are imperative to guide the UVs to perform grasping behavior. Although single-object trackers show competitive performance in the challenge of underwater image degradation, there are still issues with sample imbalance and exclusion of similar objects that need to be addressed for application in marine organism grasping. This paper proposes Underwater OSTrack (UOSTrack), which consists of underwater image and open-air sequence hybrid training (UOHT), and motion-based post-processing (MBPP). The UOHT training paradigm is designed to train the sample-imbalanced underwater tracker so that the tracker is exposed to a great number of underwater domain training samples and learns the feature expressions. The MBPP paradigm is proposed to exclude similar objects. It uses the estimation box predicted with a Kalman filter and the candidate boxes in the response map to relocate the lost tracked object in the candidate area. UOSTrack achieves an average performance improvement of 4.41% and 7.98% maximum compared to state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks, respectively. Field experiments have verified the accuracy and stability of our proposed UOSTrack for UVs in marine organism grasping tasks. More details can be found at https://github.com/LiYunfengLYF/UOSTrack.

Boxuan Zhao, Jun Zhang, Deheng Ye et al.

Whole-slide images (WSI) in computational pathology have high resolution with gigapixel size, but are generally with sparse regions of interest, which leads to weak diagnostic relevance and data inefficiency for each area in the slide. Most of the existing methods rely on a multiple instance learning framework that requires densely sampling local patches at high magnification. The limitation is evident in the application stage as the heavy computation for extracting patch-level features is inevitable. In this paper, we develop RLogist, a benchmarking deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for fast observation strategy on WSIs. Imitating the diagnostic logic of human pathologists, our RL agent learns how to find regions of observation value and obtain representative features across multiple resolution levels, without having to analyze each part of the WSI at the high magnification. We benchmark our method on two whole-slide level classification tasks, including detection of metastases in WSIs of lymph node sections, and subtyping of lung cancer. Experimental results demonstrate that RLogist achieves competitive classification performance compared to typical multiple instance learning algorithms, while having a significantly short observation path. In addition, the observation path given by RLogist provides good decision-making interpretability, and its ability of reading path navigation can potentially be used by pathologists for educational/assistive purposes. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/tencent-ailab/RLogist}.

Shuheng Liao, Tianju Xue, Jihoon Jeong et al.

Understanding the thermal behavior of additive manufacturing (AM) processes is crucial for enhancing the quality control and enabling customized process design. Most purely physics-based computational models suffer from intensive computational costs and the need of calibrating unknown parameters, thus not suitable for online control and iterative design application. Data-driven models taking advantage of the latest developed computational tools can serve as a more efficient surrogate, but they are usually trained over a large amount of simulation data and often fail to effectively use small but high-quality experimental data. In this work, we developed a hybrid physics-based data-driven thermal modeling approach of AM processes using physics-informed neural networks. Specifically, partially observed temperature data measured from an infrared camera is combined with the physics laws to predict full-field temperature history and to discover unknown material and process parameters. In the numerical and experimental examples, the effectiveness of adding auxiliary training data and using the pretrained model on training efficiency and prediction accuracy, as well as the ability to identify unknown parameters with partially observed data, are demonstrated. The results show that the hybrid thermal model can effectively identify unknown parameters and capture the full-field temperature accurately, and thus it has the potential to be used in iterative process design and real-time process control of AM.

Jianqing Zhang, Yang Hua, Hao Wang et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning capabilities. Recently, personalized FL (pFL) has received attention for its ability to address statistical heterogeneity and achieve personalization in FL. However, from the perspective of feature extraction, most existing pFL methods only focus on extracting global or personalized feature information during local training, which fails to meet the collaborative learning and personalization goals of pFL. To address this, we propose a new pFL method, named GPFL, to simultaneously learn global and personalized feature information on each client. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets in three statistically heterogeneous settings and show the superiority of GPFL over ten state-of-the-art methods regarding effectiveness, scalability, fairness, stability, and privacy. Besides, GPFL mitigates overfitting and outperforms the baselines by up to 8.99% in accuracy.

Kaixuan Zhang, Yunfan Cui, Shuhao Zhang et al.

The rapid expansion of Transformer-based large language models has dramatically increased the need for high-performance GPUs. As a result, there is growing demand for fast, accurate, and widely generalizable GPU performance models to support next-generation hardware selection and system-level exploration. However, current data-driven methods are limited, exhibiting poor generalization across hardware and inadequate modeling of complex production-level kernels common in modern inference stacks. To address these issues, we present PipeWeave, a unified GPU modeling framework. This approach first employs an analytical model to quantify a given kernel's demands on the GPU's heterogeneous instruction pipelines. These analytical features are then fed into a machine learning (ML) model to capture complex cross-pipeline interactions and resource dependencies, enabling high-fidelity performance prediction. Our evaluation across 11 GPU types from four generations of major architectures on two widely-used serving systems demonstrates that PipeWeave delivers high fidelity and strong generalizability. It achieves accurate predictions, with only 6.1% average error at the kernel level and 8.5% for end-to-end inference -- reducing the error of state-of-the-art methods by 6.7x and 4.4x, respectively. We also demonstrate PipeWeave's value "beyond simulation" by utilizing its performance ceiling to diagnose implementation shortcomings and guide the optimization of a production fused MoE Triton kernel, achieving up to 1.7x speedup. Code is available https://github.com/zksainx/pipeweave.

Yu Qian, Jian Cao, Xiaoshuang Li et al.

Structured pruning compresses neural networks by reducing channels (filters) for fast inference and low footprint at run-time. To restore accuracy after pruning, fine-tuning is usually applied to pruned networks. However, too few remaining parameters in pruned networks inevitably bring a great challenge to fine-tuning to restore accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that first linearly over-parameterizes the compact layers in pruned networks to enlarge the number of fine-tuning parameters and then re-parameterizes them to the original layers after fine-tuning. Specifically, we equivalently expand the convolution/linear layer with several consecutive convolution/linear layers that do not alter the current output feature maps. Furthermore, we utilize similarity-preserving knowledge distillation that encourages the over-parameterized block to learn the immediate data-to-data similarities of the corresponding dense layer to maintain its feature learning ability. The proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet which significantly outperforms the vanilla fine-tuning strategy, especially for large pruning ratio.

Yuan Zhang, Jian Cao, Ling Zhang et al.

The event streams generated by dynamic vision sensors (DVS) are sparse and non-uniform in the spatial domain, while still dense and redundant in the temporal domain. Although spiking neural network (SNN), the event-driven neuromorphic model, has the potential to extract spatio-temporal features from the event streams, it is not effective and efficient. Based on the above, we propose an events sparsification spiking framework dubbed as Razor SNN, pruning pointless event frames progressively. Concretely, we extend the dynamic mechanism based on the global temporal embeddings, reconstruct the features, and emphasize the events effect adaptively at the training stage. During the inference stage, eliminate fruitless frames hierarchically according to a binary mask generated by the trained temporal embeddings. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our Razor SNN achieves competitive performance consistently on four events-based benchmarks: DVS 128 Gesture, N-Caltech 101, CIFAR10-DVS and SHD.

Jian Cao, Myeongjong Kang, Felix Jimenez et al.

To achieve scalable and accurate inference for latent Gaussian processes, we propose a variational approximation based on a family of Gaussian distributions whose covariance matrices have sparse inverse Cholesky (SIC) factors. We combine this variational approximation of the posterior with a similar and efficient SIC-restricted Kullback-Leibler-optimal approximation of the prior. We then focus on a particular SIC ordering and nearest-neighbor-based sparsity pattern resulting in highly accurate prior and posterior approximations. For this setting, our variational approximation can be computed via stochastic gradient descent in polylogarithmic time per iteration. We provide numerical comparisons showing that the proposed double-Kullback-Leibler-optimal Gaussian-process approximation (DKLGP) can sometimes be vastly more accurate for stationary kernels than alternative approaches such as inducing-point and mean-field approximations at similar computational complexity.

Chunyan Xiong, Mengli Lu, Xiaotong Yu et al.

Soft-thresholding has been widely used in neural networks. Its basic network structure is a two-layer convolution neural network with soft-thresholding. Due to the network's nature of nonlinearity and nonconvexity, the training process heavily depends on an appropriate initialization of network parameters, resulting in the difficulty of obtaining a globally optimal solution. To address this issue, a convex dual network is designed here. We theoretically analyze the network convexity and numerically confirm that the strong duality holds. This conclusion is further verified in the linear fitting and denoising experiments. This work provides a new way to convexify soft-thresholding neural networks.

Jian Cao, Chen Qian, Yihui Huang et al.

Implicit regularization is an important way to interpret neural networks. Recent theory starts to explain implicit regularization with the model of deep matrix factorization (DMF) and analyze the trajectory of discrete gradient dynamics in the optimization process. These discrete gradient dynamics are relatively small but not infinitesimal, thus fitting well with the practical implementation of neural networks. Currently, discrete gradient dynamics analysis has been successfully applied to shallow networks but encounters the difficulty of complex computation for deep networks. In this work, we introduce another discrete gradient dynamics approach to explain implicit regularization, i.e. landscape analysis. It mainly focuses on gradient regions, such as saddle points and local minima. We theoretically establish the connection between saddle point escaping (SPE) stages and the matrix rank in DMF. We prove that, for a rank-R matrix reconstruction, DMF will converge to a second-order critical point after R stages of SPE. This conclusion is further experimentally verified on a low-rank matrix reconstruction problem. This work provides a new theory to analyze implicit regularization in deep learning.

Hongyi Yao, Pu Li, Jian Cao et al.

We introduce a Power-of-Two low-bit post-training quantization(PTQ) method for deep neural network that meets hardware requirements and does not call for long-time retraining. Power-of-Two quantization can convert the multiplication introduced by quantization and dequantization to bit-shift that is adopted by many efficient accelerators. However, the Power-of-Two scale factors have fewer candidate values, which leads to more rounding or clipping errors. We propose a novel Power-of-Two PTQ framework, dubbed RAPQ, which dynamically adjusts the Power-of-Two scales of the whole network instead of statically determining them layer by layer. It can theoretically trade off the rounding error and clipping error of the whole network. Meanwhile, the reconstruction method in RAPQ is based on the BN information of every unit. Extensive experiments on ImageNet prove the excellent performance of our proposed method. Without bells and whistles, RAPQ can reach accuracy of 65% and 48% on ResNet-18 and MobileNetV2 respectively with weight INT2 activation INT4. We are the first to propose the more constrained but hardware-friendly Power-of-Two quantization scheme for low-bit PTQ specially and prove that it can achieve nearly the same accuracy as SOTA PTQ method. The code was released.

Jianqing Zhang, Yang Liu, Yang Hua et al.

Recently, Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) has attracted attention due to its ability to support heterogeneous models and data. To reduce the high communication cost of transmitting model parameters, a major challenge in HtFL, prototype-based HtFL methods are proposed to solely share class representatives, a.k.a, prototypes, among heterogeneous clients while maintaining the privacy of clients' models. However, these prototypes are naively aggregated into global prototypes on the server using weighted averaging, resulting in suboptimal global knowledge which negatively impacts the performance of clients. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel HtFL approach called FedTGP, which leverages our Adaptive-margin-enhanced Contrastive Learning (ACL) to learn Trainable Global Prototypes (TGP) on the server. By incorporating ACL, our approach enhances prototype separability while preserving semantic meaning. Extensive experiments with twelve heterogeneous models demonstrate that our FedTGP surpasses state-of-the-art methods by up to 9.08% in accuracy while maintaining the communication and privacy advantages of prototype-based HtFL. Our code is available at https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedTGP.

Ke Sun, Jian Cao, Qi Wang et al.

Virtual Try-On (VTON) has become a transformative technology, empowering users to experiment with fashion without ever having to physically try on clothing. However, existing methods often struggle with generating high-fidelity and detail-consistent results. While diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion series, have shown their capability in creating high-quality and photorealistic images, they encounter formidable challenges in conditional generation scenarios like VTON. Specifically, these models struggle to maintain a balance between control and consistency when generating images for virtual clothing trials. OutfitAnyone addresses these limitations by leveraging a two-stream conditional diffusion model, enabling it to adeptly handle garment deformation for more lifelike results. It distinguishes itself with scalability-modulating factors such as pose, body shape and broad applicability, extending from anime to in-the-wild images. OutfitAnyone's performance in diverse scenarios underscores its utility and readiness for real-world deployment. For more details and animated results, please see \url{https://humanaigc.github.io/outfit-anyone/}.

Yangfan Li, Satyajit Mojumder, Ye Lu et al.

A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of physical process, products and/or systems that requires a high-fidelity computational model for continuous update through the integration of sensor data and user input. In the context of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing, a digital twin of the manufacturing process can offer predictions for the produced parts, diagnostics for manufacturing defects, as well as control capabilities. This paper introduces a parameterized physics-based digital twin (PPB-DT) for the statistical predictions of LPBF metal additive manufacturing process. We accomplish this by creating a high-fidelity computational model that accurately represents the melt pool phenomena and subsequently calibrating and validating it through controlled experiments. In PPB-DT, a mechanistic reduced-order method-driven stochastic calibration process is introduced, which enables the statistical predictions of the melt pool geometries and the identification of defects such as lack-of-fusion porosity and surface roughness, specifically for diagnostic applications. Leveraging data derived from this physics-based model and experiments, we have trained a machine learning-based digital twin (PPB-ML-DT) model for predicting, monitoring, and controlling melt pool geometries. These proposed digital twin models can be employed for predictions, control, optimization, and quality assurance within the LPBF process, ultimately expediting product development and certification in LPBF-based metal additive manufacturing.

Xin Dong, Ruize Wu, Chao Xiong et al.

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims at solving multiple related tasks simultaneously and has experienced rapid growth in recent years. However, MTL models often suffer from performance degeneration with negative transfer due to learning several tasks simultaneously. Some related work attributed the source of the problem is the conflicting gradients. In this case, it is needed to select useful gradient updates for all tasks carefully. To this end, we propose a novel optimization approach for MTL, named GDOD, which manipulates gradients of each task using an orthogonal basis decomposed from the span of all task gradients. GDOD decomposes gradients into task-shared and task-conflict components explicitly and adopts a general update rule for avoiding interference across all task gradients. This allows guiding the update directions depending on the task-shared components. Moreover, we prove the convergence of GDOD theoretically under both convex and non-convex assumptions. Experiment results on several multi-task datasets not only demonstrate the significant improvement of GDOD performed to existing MTL models but also prove that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art optimization methods in terms of AUC and Logloss metrics.

Jianqing Zhang, Yang Liu, Yang Hua et al.

Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) enables task-specific knowledge sharing among clients with different model architectures while preserving privacy. Despite recent research progress, transferring knowledge in HtFL is still difficult due to data and model heterogeneity. To tackle this, we introduce a public pre-trained generator (e.g., StyleGAN or Stable Diffusion) as the bridge and propose a new upload-efficient knowledge transfer scheme called Federated Knowledge-Transfer-Loop (FedKTL). It can produce task-related prototypical image-vector pairs via the generator's inference on the server. With these pairs, each client can transfer common knowledge from the generator to its local model through an additional supervised local task. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets under two types of data heterogeneity with 14 heterogeneous models, including CNNs and ViTs. Results show that our FedKTL surpasses seven state-of-the-art methods by up to 7.31%. Moreover, our knowledge transfer scheme is applicable in cloud-edge scenarios with only one edge client. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedKTL

Kaixuan Zhang, Chutong Ding, Shiyou Qian et al.

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made GPU inference efficiency an increasingly critical system concern. The runtime of LLM workloads is largely dominated by tile-based kernels, particularly General Matrix Multiplications (GEMMs). Although these kernels are highly optimized, their performance remains sensitive to a large space of runtime parameters, such as tile sizes and pipeline stages. The interaction between these parameters and hardware resources leads to a non-convex optimization landscape. Existing approaches to parameter configuration -- including search-based auto-tuning, heuristic rules, and learned cost models -- face a fundamental trade-off between performance optimality and runtime efficiency. In this paper, we present WaveTune, a wave-aware framework for runtime kernel auto-tuning. First, we introduce a unified mapping method to handle input diversity and decompose the configuration space to manage high dimensionality. Second, we develop an analytical wave-aware bilinear model that accurately predicts kernel latency. Third, we design a sparse sampling scheme based on wave structures and a lightweight dual-table retrieval mechanism to minimize runtime overhead. As a result, WaveTune enables precise and efficient runtime configuration for GPU kernels. Across three representative kernels and five GPU architectures, WaveTune consistently achieves near-optimal kernel performance, delivering up to 1.83x kernel-level speedup and up to 1.33x end-to-end TTFT reduction, while reducing runtime decision overhead by five orders of magnitude compared to exhaustive search. These results demonstrate that WaveTune effectively eliminates the traditional trade-off between configuration latency and execution optimality, providing a practical and robust solution for high-performance LLM inference.

Yi-Ping Chen, Derick Suarez, Ying-Kuan Tsai et al.

Digital Twin (DT) technologies are transforming manufacturing by enabling real-time prediction, monitoring, and control of complex processes. Yet, applying DT to deformation-based metal forming remains challenging because of the strongly coupled spatial-temporal behavior and the nonlinear relationship between toolpath and material response. For instance, sheet-metal forming by the English wheel, a highly flexible but artisan-dependent process, still lacks digital counterparts that can autonomously plan and adapt forming strategies. This study presents an adaptive DT framework that integrates Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) for physics-aware dimensionality reduction with a Koopman operator for representing nonlinear system in a linear lifted space for the real-time decision-making via model predictive control (MPC). To accommodate evolving process conditions or material states, an online Recursive Least Squares (RLS) algorithm is introduced to update the operator coefficients in real time, enabling continuous adaptation of the DT model as new deformation data become available. The proposed framework is experimentally demonstrated on a robotic English Wheel sheet metal forming system, where deformation fields are measured and modeled under varying toolpaths. Results show that the adaptive DT is capable of controlling the forming process to achieve the given target shape by effectively capturing non-stationary process behaviors. Beyond this case study, the proposed framework establishes a generalizable approach for interpretable, adaptive, and computationally-efficient DT of nonlinear manufacturing systems, bridging reduced-order physics representations with data-driven adaptability to support autonomous process control and optimization.

Jianqing Zhang, Xinghao Wu, Yanbing Zhou et al.

As AI evolves, collaboration among heterogeneous models helps overcome data scarcity by enabling knowledge transfer across institutions and devices. Traditional Federated Learning (FL) only supports homogeneous models, limiting collaboration among clients with heterogeneous model architectures. To address this, Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) methods are developed to enable collaboration across diverse heterogeneous models while tackling the data heterogeneity issue at the same time. However, a comprehensive benchmark for standardized evaluation and analysis of the rapidly growing HtFL methods is lacking. Firstly, the highly varied datasets, model heterogeneity scenarios, and different method implementations become hurdles to making easy and fair comparisons among HtFL methods. Secondly, the effectiveness and robustness of HtFL methods are under-explored in various scenarios, such as the medical domain and sensor signal modality. To fill this gap, we introduce the first Heterogeneous Federated Learning Library (HtFLlib), an easy-to-use and extensible framework that integrates multiple datasets and model heterogeneity scenarios, offering a robust benchmark for research and practical applications. Specifically, HtFLlib integrates (1) 12 datasets spanning various domains, modalities, and data heterogeneity scenarios; (2) 40 model architectures, ranging from small to large, across three modalities; (3) a modularized and easy-to-extend HtFL codebase with implementations of 10 representative HtFL methods; and (4) systematic evaluations in terms of accuracy, convergence, computation costs, and communication costs. We emphasize the advantages and potential of state-of-the-art HtFL methods and hope that HtFLlib will catalyze advancing HtFL research and enable its broader applications. The code is released at https://github.com/TsingZ0/HtFLlib.

Yuan Zhang, Weihua Chen, Yichen Lu et al.

Knowledge distillation is an effective paradigm for boosting the performance of pocket-size model, especially when multiple teacher models are available, the student would break the upper limit again. However, it is not economical to train diverse teacher models for the disposable distillation. In this paper, we introduce a new concept dubbed Avatars for distillation, which are the inference ensemble models derived from the teacher. Concretely, (1) For each iteration of distillation training, various Avatars are generated by a perturbation transformation. We validate that Avatars own higher upper limit of working capacity and teaching ability, aiding the student model in learning diverse and receptive knowledge perspectives from the teacher model. (2) During the distillation, we propose an uncertainty-aware factor from the variance of statistical differences between the vanilla teacher and Avatars, to adjust Avatars' contribution on knowledge transfer adaptively. Avatar Knowledge Distillation AKD is fundamentally different from existing methods and refines with the innovative view of unequal training. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our Avatars mechanism, which polishes up the state-of-the-art distillation methods for dense prediction without more extra computational cost. The AKD brings at most 0.7 AP gains on COCO 2017 for Object Detection and 1.83 mIoU gains on Cityscapes for Semantic Segmentation, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Gumpest/AvatarKD.

Arindam Paul, Mojtaba Mozaffar, Zijiang Yang et al.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a manufacturing paradigm that builds three-dimensional objects from a computer-aided design model by successively adding material layer by layer. AM has become very popular in the past decade due to its utility for fast prototyping such as 3D printing as well as manufacturing functional parts with complex geometries using processes such as laser metal deposition that would be difficult to create using traditional machining. As the process for creating an intricate part for an expensive metal such as Titanium is prohibitive with respect to cost, computational models are used to simulate the behavior of AM processes before the experimental run. However, as the simulations are computationally costly and time-consuming for predicting multiscale multi-physics phenomena in AM, physics-informed data-driven machine-learning systems for predicting the behavior of AM processes are immensely beneficial. Such models accelerate not only multiscale simulation tools but also empower real-time control systems using in-situ data. In this paper, we design and develop essential components of a scientific framework for developing a data-driven model-based real-time control system. Finite element methods are employed for solving time-dependent heat equations and developing the database. The proposed framework uses extremely randomized trees - an ensemble of bagged decision trees as the regression algorithm iteratively using temperatures of prior voxels and laser information as inputs to predict temperatures of subsequent voxels. The models achieve mean absolute percentage errors below 1% for predicting temperature profiles for AM processes. The code is made available for the research community at https://github.com/paularindam/ml-iter-additive.

Vispi Karkaria, Anthony Goeckner, Rujing Zha et al.

Laser-directed-energy deposition (DED) offers advantages in additive manufacturing (AM) for creating intricate geometries and material grading. Yet, challenges like material inconsistency and part variability remain, mainly due to its layer-wise fabrication. A key issue is heat accumulation during DED, which affects the material microstructure and properties. While closed-loop control methods for heat management are common in DED research, few integrate real-time monitoring, physics-based modeling, and control in a unified framework. Our work presents a digital twin (DT) framework for real-time predictive control of DED process parameters to meet specific design objectives. We develop a surrogate model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based machine learning with Bayesian Inference to predict temperatures in DED parts. This model predicts future temperature states in real time. We also introduce Bayesian Optimization (BO) for Time Series Process Optimization (BOTSPO), based on traditional BO but featuring a unique time series process profile generator with reduced dimensions. BOTSPO dynamically optimizes processes, identifying optimal laser power profiles to attain desired mechanical properties. The established process trajectory guides online optimizations, aiming to enhance performance. This paper outlines the digital twin framework's components, promoting its integration into a comprehensive system for AM.

Jian Cao, Nian Liu, Ying Lin

We introduce a novel framework for constructing scalable and flexible covariance kernels for Gaussian processes (GPs) by directly learning the covariance structure under a regression-type parameterization induced by Vecchia approximations, using deep neural architectures. Specifically, we model kriging coefficients and conditional standard deviations, deterministic quantities that uniquely characterize the covariance, providing stable and informative learning targets. Exploiting the permutation-equivariant structure of conditioning sets in the Vecchia factorization, we derive a universal representation for permutation-preserving functions and design neural architectures that respect this symmetry, leading to improved training stability and data efficiency. The proposed approach enables expressive, non-stationary kernel learning while maintaining computational scalability, thereby bridging classical GP methodology with modern deep learning.

Qingao Yi, Jiaang Duan, Hanwen Hu et al.

Training large language models (LLMs) poses significant challenges regarding computational resources and memory capacity. Although distributed training techniques help mitigate these issues, they still suffer from considerable communication overhead. Existing approaches primarily rely on static gradient compression to enhance communication efficiency; however, these methods neglect the dynamic nature of evolving gradients during training, leading to performance degradation. Accelerating LLM training via compression without sacrificing performance remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose an entropy-driven dynamic gradient compression framework called EDGC. The core concept is to adjust the compression rate during LLM training based on the evolving trends of gradient entropy, taking into account both compression efficiency and error. EDGC consists of three key components.First, it employs a down-sampling method to efficiently estimate gradient entropy, reducing computation overhead. Second, it establishes a theoretical model linking compression rate with gradient entropy, enabling more informed compression decisions. Lastly, a window-based adjustment mechanism dynamically adapts the compression rate across pipeline stages, improving communication efficiency and maintaining model performance. We implemented EDGC on a 32-NVIDIA-V100 cluster and a 64-NVIDIA-H100 cluster to train GPT2-2.5B and GPT2-12.1B, respectively. The results show that EDGC significantly reduces communication latency and training time by up to 46.45% and 16.13% while preserving LLM accuracy.

Tianhao Fu, Xinxin Xu, Weichen Xu et al.

Market making (MM) through Reinforcement Learning (RL) has attracted significant attention in financial trading. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), more and more attempts are being made to apply LLMs to financial areas. A simple, direct application of LLM as an agent shows significant performance. Such methods are hindered by their slow inference speed, while most of the current research has not studied LLM distillation for this specific task. To address this, we first propose the normalized fluorescent probe to study the mechanism of the LLM's feature. Based on the observation found by our investigation, we propose Cooperative Market Making (CMM), a novel framework that decouples LLM features across three orthogonal dimensions: layer, task, and data. Various student models collaboratively learn simple LLM features along with different dimensions, with each model responsible for a distinct feature to achieve knowledge distillation. Furthermore, CMM introduces an Hájek-MoE to integrate the output of the student models by investigating the contribution of different models in a kernel function-generated common feature space. Extensive experimental results on four real-world market datasets demonstrate the superiority of CMM over the current distillation method and RL-based market-making strategies.

Yi-Ping Chen, Vispi Karkaria, Ying-Kuan Tsai et al.

Digital Twin -- a virtual replica of a physical system enabling real-time monitoring, model updating, prediction, and decision-making -- combined with recent advances in machine learning, offers new opportunities for proactive control strategies in autonomous manufacturing. However, achieving real-time decision-making with Digital Twins requires efficient optimization driven by accurate predictions of highly nonlinear manufacturing systems. This paper presents a simultaneous multi-step Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for real-time decision-making, using a multivariate deep neural network, named Time-Series Dense Encoder (TiDE), as the surrogate model. Unlike conventional MPC models which only provide one-step ahead prediction, TiDE is capable of predicting future states within the prediction horizon in one shot (multi-step), significantly accelerating the MPC. Using Directed Energy Deposition (DED) additive manufacturing as a case study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MPC in achieving melt pool temperature tracking to ensure part quality, while reducing porosity defects by regulating laser power to maintain melt pool depth constraints. In this work, we first show that TiDE is capable of accurately predicting melt pool temperature and depth. Second, we demonstrate that the proposed MPC achieves precise temperature tracking while satisfying melt pool depth constraints within a targeted dilution range (10\%-30\%), reducing potential porosity defects. Compared to PID controller, the MPC results in smoother and less fluctuating laser power profiles with competitive or superior melt pool temperature control performance. This demonstrates the MPC's proactive control capabilities, leveraging time-series prediction and real-time optimization, positioning it as a powerful tool for future Digital Twin applications and real-time process optimization in manufacturing.

Jianqing Zhang, Yang Liu, Yang Hua et al.

Amid the ongoing advancements in Federated Learning (FL), a machine learning paradigm that allows collaborative learning with data privacy protection, personalized FL (pFL)has gained significant prominence as a research direction within the FL domain. Whereas traditional FL (tFL) focuses on jointly learning a global model, pFL aims to balance each client's global and personalized goals in FL settings. To foster the pFL research community, we started and built PFLlib, a comprehensive pFL library with an integrated benchmark platform. In PFLlib, we implemented 37 state-of-the-art FL algorithms (8 tFL algorithms and 29 pFL algorithms) and provided various evaluation environments with three statistically heterogeneous scenarios and 24 datasets. At present, PFLlib has gained more than 1600 stars and 300 forks on GitHub.

Wei Guan, Jian Cao, Shiyou Qian et al.

Software systems often record important runtime information in logs to help with troubleshooting. Log-based anomaly detection has become a key research area that aims to identify system issues through log data, ultimately enhancing the reliability of software systems. Traditional deep learning methods often struggle to capture the semantic information embedded in log data, which is typically organized in natural language. In this paper, we propose LogLLM, a log-based anomaly detection framework that leverages large language models (LLMs). LogLLM employs BERT for extracting semantic vectors from log messages, while utilizing Llama, a transformer decoder-based model, for classifying log sequences. Additionally, we introduce a projector to align the vector representation spaces of BERT and Llama, ensuring a cohesive understanding of log semantics. Unlike conventional methods that require log parsers to extract templates, LogLLM preprocesses log messages with regular expressions, streamlining the entire process. Our framework is trained through a novel three-stage procedure designed to enhance performance and adaptability. Experimental results across four public datasets demonstrate that LogLLM outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Even when handling unstable logs, it effectively captures the semantic meaning of log messages and detects anomalies accurately.

Yang Gu, Hengyu You, Jian Cao et al.

Building effective machine learning (ML) workflows to address complex tasks is a primary focus of the Automatic ML (AutoML) community and a critical step toward achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Recently, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into ML workflows has shown great potential for automating and enhancing various stages of the ML pipeline. This survey provides a comprehensive and up-to-date review of recent advancements in using LLMs to construct and optimize ML workflows, focusing on key components encompassing data and feature engineering, model selection and hyperparameter optimization, and workflow evaluation. We discuss both the advantages and limitations of LLM-driven approaches, emphasizing their capacity to streamline and enhance ML workflow modeling process through language understanding, reasoning, interaction, and generation. Finally, we highlight open challenges and propose future research directions to advance the effective application of LLMs in ML workflows.

Chanwook Park, Sourav Saha, Jiachen Guo et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized software development, shifting from task-specific codes (Software 1.0) to neural network-based approaches (Software 2.0). However, applying this transition in engineering software presents challenges, including low surrogate model accuracy, the curse of dimensionality in inverse design, and rising complexity in physical simulations. We introduce an interpolating neural network (INN), grounded in interpolation theory and tensor decomposition, to realize Engineering Software 2.0 by advancing data training, partial differential equation solving, and parameter calibration. INN offers orders of magnitude fewer trainable/solvable parameters for comparable model accuracy than traditional multi-layer perceptron (MLP) or physics-informed neural networks (PINN). Demonstrated in metal additive manufacturing, INN rapidly constructs an accurate surrogate model of Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) heat transfer simulation, achieving sub-10-micrometer resolution for a 10 mm path in under 15 minutes on a single GPU. This makes a transformative step forward across all domains essential to engineering software.

Jiaqi Sun, Shiyou Qian, Zhangchi Han et al.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) structure real-world entities and their relationships into triples, enhancing machine reasoning for various tasks. While domain-specific KGs offer substantial benefits, their manual construction is often inefficient and requires specialized knowledge. Recent approaches for knowledge graph construction (KGC) based on large language models (LLMs), such as schema-guided KGC and reference knowledge integration, have proven efficient. However, these methods are constrained by their reliance on manually defined schema, single-document processing, and public-domain references, making them less effective for domain-specific corpora that exhibit complex knowledge dependencies and specificity, as well as limited reference knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose LKD-KGC, a novel framework for unsupervised domain-specific KG construction. LKD-KGC autonomously analyzes document repositories to infer knowledge dependencies, determines optimal processing sequences via LLM driven prioritization, and autoregressively generates entity schema by integrating hierarchical inter-document contexts. This schema guides the unsupervised extraction of entities and relationships, eliminating reliance on predefined structures or external knowledge. Extensive experiments show that compared with state-of-the-art baselines, LKD-KGC generally achieves improvements of 10% to 20% in both precision and recall rate, demonstrating its potential in constructing high-quality domain-specific KGs.

Xiangyu Shi, Junyang Ding, Xu Zhao et al.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is vital to modern manufacturing, yet model creation remains labor-intensive and expertise-heavy. To enable non-experts to translate intuitive design intent into manufacturable artifacts, recent large language models-based text-to-CAD efforts focus on command sequences or script-based formats like CadQuery. However, these formats are kernel-dependent and lack universality for manufacturing. In contrast, the Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP, ISO 10303) file is a widely adopted, neutral boundary representation (B-rep) format directly compatible with manufacturing, but its graph-structured, cross-referenced nature poses unique challenges for auto-regressive LLMs. To address this, we curate a dataset of ~40K STEP-caption pairs and introduce novel preprocessing tailored for the graph-structured format of STEP, including a depth-first search-based reserialization that linearizes cross-references while preserving locality and chain-of-thought(CoT)-style structural annotations that guide global coherence. We integrate retrieval-augmented generation to ground predictions in relevant examples for supervised fine-tuning, and refine generation quality through reinforcement learning with a specific Chamfer Distance-based geometric reward. Experiments demonstrate consistent gains of our STEP-LLM in geometric fidelity over the Text2CAD baseline, with improvements arising from multiple stages of our framework: the RAG module substantially enhances completeness and renderability, the DFS-based reserialization strengthens overall accuracy, and the RL further reduces geometric discrepancy. Both metrics and visual comparisons confirm that STEP-LLM generates shapes with higher fidelity than Text2CAD. These results show the feasibility of LLM-driven STEP model generation from natural language, showing its potential to democratize CAD design for manufacturing.

Wei Guan, Jian Cao, Jinyu Cai et al.

Agentic Workflows (AWs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks. However, the scalability of automating their generation is severely constrained by the high cost and latency of execution-based evaluation. Existing AW performance prediction methods act as surrogates but fail to simultaneously capture the intricate topological dependencies and the deep semantic logic embedded in AWs. To address this limitation, we propose GLOW, a unified framework for AW performance prediction that combines the graph-structure modeling capabilities of GNNs with the reasoning power of LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a graph-oriented LLM, instruction-tuned on graph tasks, to extract topologically aware semantic features, which are fused with GNN-encoded structural representations. A contrastive alignment strategy further refines the latent space to distinguish high-quality AWs. Extensive experiments on FLORA-Bench show that GLOW outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in prediction accuracy and ranking utility.

Hongshun Chen, Ryan Zhou, Rujing Zha et al.

Hihg-temperature creep characterization of structural alloys traditionally relies on serial uniaxial tests, which are highly inefficient for exploring the large search space of alloy compositions and for material discovery. Here, we introduce a machine-learning-assisted, high-throughput framework for creep law identification based on a dimple array bulge instrument (DABI) configuration, which enables parallel creep testing of 25 dimples, each fabricated from a different alloy, in a single experiment. Full-field surface displacements of dimples undergoing time-dependent creep-induced bulging under inert gas pressure are measured by 3D digital image correlation. We train a recurrent neural network (RNN) as a surrogate model, mapping creep parameters and loading conditions to the time-dependent deformation response of DABI. Coupling this surrogate with a particle swarm optimization scheme enables rapid and global inverse identification with sparsity regularization of creep parameters from experiment displacement-time histories. In addition, we propose a phenomenological creep law with a time-dependent stress exponent that captures the sigmoidal primary creep observed in wrought INCONEL 625 and extracts its temperature dependence from DABI test at multiple temperatures. Furthermore, we employ a general creep law combining several conventional forms together with regularized inversion to identify the creep laws for 47 additional Fe-, Ni-, and Co-rich alloys and to automatically select the dominant functional form for each alloy. This workflow combined with DABI experiment provides a quantitative, high-throughput creep characterization platform that is compatible with data mining, composition-property modeling, and nonlinear structural optimization with creep behavior across a large alloy design space.

Jianqing Zhang, Zhezheng Hao, Wei Xia et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods like GRPO are popular for their critic-free, normalized advantage estimation. However, in real-world code-editing scenarios, reward distributions are often skewed with unpredictable outliers, leading to distorted advantage computation and increased noise. To address this issue, we propose Group Adaptive Policy Optimization (GAPO), which adaptively finds an outlier-free highest-density interval (HDI) per prompt and then uses the median of that interval as an adaptive Q to replace the group mean in advantage calculation. This adaptive Q robustly handles skewed distributions while remaining plug-and-play and efficient. We validate GAPO on nine instruction-tuned LLMs (3B-14B) using a large internal dataset of 51,844 real-world, history-aware code-editing tasks across 10 languages, demonstrating consistent improvements in exact match accuracy over GRPO and its variant DAPO. Code is publicly available.

Yutong Feng, Linlin Zhang, Hengyuan Cao et al.

Virtual Try-ON (VTON) is a practical and widely-applied task, for which most of existing works focus on clothes. This paper presents OmniTry, a unified framework that extends VTON beyond garment to encompass any wearable objects, e.g., jewelries and accessories, with mask-free setting for more practical application. When extending to various types of objects, data curation is challenging for obtaining paired images, i.e., the object image and the corresponding try-on result. To tackle this problem, we propose a two-staged pipeline: For the first stage, we leverage large-scale unpaired images, i.e., portraits with any wearable items, to train the model for mask-free localization. Specifically, we repurpose the inpainting model to automatically draw objects in suitable positions given an empty mask. For the second stage, the model is further fine-tuned with paired images to transfer the consistency of object appearance. We observed that the model after the first stage shows quick convergence even with few paired samples. OmniTry is evaluated on a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 12 common classes of wearable objects, with both in-shop and in-the-wild images. Experimental results suggest that OmniTry shows better performance on both object localization and ID-preservation compared with existing methods. The code, model weights, and evaluation benchmark of OmniTry will be made publicly available at https://omnitry.github.io/.

Wei Guan, Jun Lan, Jian Cao et al.

Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) plays a crucial role in maintaining the safety and reliability of manufacturing systems. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show strong vision-language reasoning abilities, their effectiveness in IAD remains limited without domain-specific adaptation. In this work, we propose EMIT, a unified framework that enhances MLLMs for IAD via difficulty-aware group relative policy optimization (GRPO). EMIT constructs a multi-task IAD dataset and utilizes GPT-generated object text descriptions to compensate for missing defective images. For few-shot anomaly detection, it integrates a soft prompt and heatmap-guided contrastive embeddings derived from patch-level comparisons. To better handle difficult data samples, i.e., cases where the MLLM struggles to generate correct answers, we propose a difficulty-aware GRPO that extends the original GRPO by incorporating a response resampling strategy to ensure the inclusion of correct answers in the sampled responses, as well as an advantage reweighting mechanism to strengthen learning from such difficult data samples. Extensive experiments on the MMAD benchmark demonstrate that EMIT significantly enhances the IAD performance of MLLMs, achieving an average improvement of 7.77\% over the base model (InternVL3-8B) across seven tasks.

Zhihao Sui, Liang Hu, Jian Cao et al.

Machine Unlearning (MU) technology facilitates the removal of the influence of specific data instances from trained models on request. Despite rapid advancements in MU technology, its vulnerabilities are still underexplored, posing potential risks of privacy breaches through leaks of ostensibly unlearned information. Current limited research on MU attacks requires access to original models containing privacy data, which violates the critical privacy-preserving objective of MU. To address this gap, we initiate an innovative study on recalling the forgotten class memberships from unlearned models (ULMs) without requiring access to the original one. Specifically, we implement a Membership Recall Attack (MRA) framework with a teacher-student knowledge distillation architecture, where ULMs serve as noisy labelers to transfer knowledge to student models. Then, it is translated into a Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) problem for inferring the correct labels of the forgetting instances. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MU methods with multiple real datasets demonstrate that the proposed MRA strategy exhibits high efficacy in recovering class memberships of unlearned instances. As a result, our study and evaluation have established a benchmark for future research on MU vulnerabilities.

Zhihao Sui, Liang Hu, Jian Cao et al.

Large deep learning models have achieved significant success in various tasks. However, the performance of a model can significantly degrade if it is needed to train on datasets with noisy labels with misleading or ambiguous information. To date, there are limited investigations on how to restore performance when model degradation has been incurred by noisy label data. Inspired by the ``forgetting mechanism'' in neuroscience, which enables accelerating the relearning of correct knowledge by unlearning the wrong knowledge, we propose a robust model restoration and refinement (MRR) framework COLUR, namely Confidence-Oriented Learning, Unlearning and Relearning. Specifically, we implement COLUR with an efficient co-training architecture to unlearn the influence of label noise, and then refine model confidence on each label for relearning. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real datasets and all evaluation results show that COLUR consistently outperforms other SOTA methods after MRR.

Wei Guan, Jian Cao, Jianqi Gao et al.

Detecting anomalies in business processes is crucial for ensuring operational success. While many existing methods rely on statistical frequency to detect anomalies, it's important to note that infrequent behavior doesn't necessarily imply undesirability. To address this challenge, detecting anomalies from a semantic viewpoint proves to be a more effective approach. However, current semantic anomaly detection methods treat a trace (i.e., process instance) as multiple event pairs, disrupting long-distance dependencies. In this paper, we introduce DABL, a novel approach for detecting semantic anomalies in business processes using large language models (LLMs). We collect 143,137 real-world process models from various domains. By generating normal traces through the playout of these process models and simulating both ordering and exclusion anomalies, we fine-tune Llama 2 using the resulting log. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DABL surpasses existing state-of-the-art semantic anomaly detection methods in terms of both generalization ability and learning of given processes. Users can directly apply DABL to detect semantic anomalies in their own datasets without the need for additional training. Furthermore, DABL offers the capability to interpret the causes of anomalies in natural language, providing valuable insights into the detected anomalies.

Jian Cao, Joseph Guinness, Marc G. Genton et al.

Gaussian process (GP) regression is a flexible, nonparametric approach to regression that naturally quantifies uncertainty. In many applications, the number of responses and covariates are both large, and a goal is to select covariates that are related to the response. For this setting, we propose a novel, scalable algorithm, coined VGPR, which optimizes a penalized GP log-likelihood based on the Vecchia GP approximation, an ordered conditional approximation from spatial statistics that implies a sparse Cholesky factor of the precision matrix. We traverse the regularization path from strong to weak penalization, sequentially adding candidate covariates based on the gradient of the log-likelihood and deselecting irrelevant covariates via a new quadratic constrained coordinate descent algorithm. We propose Vecchia-based mini-batch subsampling, which provides unbiased gradient estimators. The resulting procedure is scalable to millions of responses and thousands of covariates. Theoretical analysis and numerical studies demonstrate the improved scalability and accuracy relative to existing methods.

Yuan Zhang, Jian Cao, Ling Zhang et al.

Learning subtle representation about object parts plays a vital role in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) field. The vision transformer (ViT) achieves promising results on computer vision due to its attention mechanism. Nonetheless, with the fixed size of patches in ViT, the class token in deep layer focuses on the global receptive field and cannot generate multi-granularity features for FGVR. To capture region attention without box annotations and compensate for ViT shortcomings in FGVR, we propose a novel method named Adaptive attention multi-scale Fusion Transformer (AFTrans). The Selective Attention Collection Module (SACM) in our approach leverages attention weights in ViT and filters them adaptively to correspond with the relative importance of input patches. The multiple scales (global and local) pipeline is supervised by our weights sharing encoder and can be easily trained end-to-end. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AFTrans can achieve SOTA performance on three published fine-grained benchmarks: CUB-200-2011, Stanford Dogs and iNat2017.

Xiangcheng Liu, Jian Cao, Hongyi Yao et al.

Channel pruning is one of the major compression approaches for deep neural networks. While previous pruning methods have mostly focused on identifying unimportant channels, channel pruning is considered as a special case of neural architecture search in recent years. However, existing methods are either complicated or prone to sub-optimal pruning. In this paper, we propose a pruning framework that adaptively determines the number of each layer's channels as well as the wights inheritance criteria for sub-network. Firstly, evaluate the importance of each block in the network based on the mean of the scaling parameters of the BN layers. Secondly, use the bisection method to quickly find the compact sub-network satisfying the budget. Finally, adaptively and efficiently choose the weight inheritance criterion that fits the current architecture and fine-tune the pruned network to recover performance. AdaPruner allows to obtain pruned network quickly, accurately and efficiently, taking into account both the structure and initialization weights. We prune the currently popular CNN models (VGG, ResNet, MobileNetV2) on different image classification datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. On ImageNet, we reduce 32.8% FLOPs of MobileNetV2 with only 0.62% decrease for top-1 accuracy, which exceeds all previous state-of-the-art channel pruning methods. The code will be released.

Ling Zhang, Jian Cao, Yuan Zhang et al.

Spiking neural network (SNN), compared with depth neural network (DNN), has faster processing speed, lower energy consumption and more biological interpretability, which is expected to approach Strong AI. Reinforcement learning is similar to learning in biology. It is of great significance to study the combination of SNN and RL. We propose the reinforcement learning method of spike distillation network (SDN) with STBP. This method uses distillation to effectively avoid the weakness of STBP, which can achieve SOTA performance in classification, and can obtain a smaller, faster convergence and lower power consumption SNN reinforcement learning model. Experiments show that our method can converge faster than traditional SNN reinforcement learning and DNN reinforcement learning methods, about 1000 epochs faster, and obtain SNN 200 times smaller than DNN. We also deploy SDN to the PKU nc64c chip, which proves that SDN has lower power consumption than DNN, and the power consumption of SDN is more than 600 times lower than DNN on large-scale devices. SDN provides a new way of SNN reinforcement learning, and can achieve SOTA performance, which proves the possibility of further development of SNN reinforcement learning.

Yao Wu, Jian Cao, Guandong Xu et al.

At present, most research on the fairness of recommender systems is conducted either from the perspective of customers or from the perspective of product (or service) providers. However, such a practice ignores the fact that when fairness is guaranteed to one side, the fairness and rights of the other side are likely to reduce. In this paper, we consider recommendation scenarios from the perspective of two sides (customers and providers). From the perspective of providers, we consider the fairness of the providers' exposure in recommender system. For customers, we consider the fairness of the reduced quality of recommendation results due to the introduction of fairness measures. We theoretically analyzed the relationship between recommendation quality, customers fairness, and provider fairness, and design a two-sided fairness-aware recommendation model (TFROM) for both customers and providers. Specifically, we design two versions of TFROM for offline and online recommendation. The effectiveness of the model is verified on three real-world data sets. The experimental results show that TFROM provides better two-sided fairness while still maintaining a higher level of personalization than the baseline algorithms.

Maya Srikanth, Anqi Liu, Nicholas Adams-Cohen et al.

Tracking and collecting fast-evolving online discussions provides vast data for studying social media usage and its role in people's public lives. However, collecting social media data using a static set of keywords fails to satisfy the growing need to monitor dynamic conversations and to study fast-changing topics. We propose a dynamic keyword search method to maximize the coverage of relevant information in fast-evolving online discussions. The method uses word embedding models to represent the semantic relations between keywords and predictive models to forecast the future time series. We also implement a visual user interface to aid in the decision-making process in each round of keyword updates. This allows for both human-assisted tracking and fully-automated data collection. In simulations using historical #MeToo data in 2017, our human-assisted tracking method outperforms the traditional static baseline method significantly, with 37.1% higher F-1 score than traditional static monitors in tracking the top trending keywords. We conduct a contemporary case study to cover dynamic conversations about the recent Presidential Inauguration and to test the dynamic data collection system. Our case studies reflect the effectiveness of our process and also points to the potential challenges in future deployment.

Yao Wu, Jian Cao, Guandong Xu

An excessive number of customers often leads to a degradation in service quality. However, the capacity constraints of services are ignored by recommender systems, which may lead to unsatisfactory recommendation. This problem can be solved by limiting the number of users who receive the recommendation for a service, but this may be viewed as unfair. In this paper, we propose a novel metric Top-N Fairness to measure the individual fairness of multi-round recommendations of services with capacity constraints. By considering the fact that users are often only affected by top-ranked items in a recommendation, Top-N Fairness only considers a sub-list consisting of top N services. Based on the metric, we design FAST, a Fairness Assured service recommendation STrategy. FAST adjusts the original recommendation list to provide users with recommendation results that guarantee the long-term fairness of multi-round recommendations. We prove the convergence property of the variance of Top-N Fairness of FAST theoretically. FAST is tested on the Yelp dataset and synthetic datasets. The experimental results show that FAST achieves better recommendation fairness while still maintaining high recommendation quality.

Wenyu Sun, Jian Cao, Pengtao Xu et al.

We propose an efficient once-for-all budgeted pruning framework (OFARPruning) to find many compact network structures close to winner tickets in the early training stage considering the effect of input resolution during the pruning process. In structure searching stage, we utilize cosine similarity to measure the similarity of the pruning mask to get high-quality network structures with low energy and time consumption. After structure searching stage, our proposed method randomly sample the compact structures with different pruning rates and input resolution to achieve joint optimization. Ultimately, we can obtain a cohort of compact networks adaptive to various resolution to meet dynamic FLOPs constraints on different edge devices with only once training. The experiments based on image classification and object detection show that OFARPruning has a higher accuracy than the once-for-all compression methods such as US-Net and MutualNet (1-2% better with less FLOPs), and achieve the same even higher accuracy as the conventional pruning methods (72.6% vs. 70.5% on MobileNetv2 under 170 MFLOPs) with much higher efficiency.