Tianyu Ding

Jinxin Zhou, Xiao Li, Tianyu Ding et al. · deepmind

When training deep neural networks for classification tasks, an intriguing empirical phenomenon has been widely observed in the last-layer classifiers and features, where (i) the class means and the last-layer classifiers all collapse to the vertices of a Simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) up to scaling, and (ii) cross-example within-class variability of last-layer activations collapses to zero. This phenomenon is called Neural Collapse (NC), which seems to take place regardless of the choice of loss functions. In this work, we justify NC under the mean squared error (MSE) loss, where recent empirical evidence shows that it performs comparably or even better than the de-facto cross-entropy loss. Under a simplified unconstrained feature model, we provide the first global landscape analysis for vanilla nonconvex MSE loss and show that the (only!) global minimizers are neural collapse solutions, while all other critical points are strict saddles whose Hessian exhibit negative curvature directions. Furthermore, we justify the usage of rescaled MSE loss by probing the optimization landscape around the NC solutions, showing that the landscape can be improved by tuning the rescaling hyperparameters. Finally, our theoretical findings are experimentally verified on practical network architectures.

Zhicheng Geng, Luming Liang, Tianyu Ding et al.

Space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) is the task of interpolating videos with both Low Frame Rate (LFR) and Low Resolution (LR) to produce High-Frame-Rate (HFR) and also High-Resolution (HR) counterparts. The existing methods based on Convolutional Neural Network~(CNN) succeed in achieving visually satisfied results while suffer from slow inference speed due to their heavy architectures. We propose to resolve this issue by using a spatial-temporal transformer that naturally incorporates the spatial and temporal super resolution modules into a single model. Unlike CNN-based methods, we do not explicitly use separated building blocks for temporal interpolations and spatial super-resolutions; instead, we only use a single end-to-end transformer architecture. Specifically, a reusable dictionary is built by encoders based on the input LFR and LR frames, which is then utilized in the decoder part to synthesize the HFR and HR frames. Compared with the state-of-the-art TMNet \cite{xu2021temporal}, our network is $60\%$ smaller (4.5M vs 12.3M parameters) and $80\%$ faster (26.2fps vs 14.3fps on $720\times576$ frames) without sacrificing much performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/llmpass/RSTT.

Tianyu Ding, Luming Liang, Zhihui Zhu et al.

DNN-based frame interpolation, which generates intermediate frames from two consecutive frames, is often dependent on model architectures with a large number of features, preventing their deployment on systems with limited resources, such as mobile devices. We present a compression-driven network design for frame interpolation that leverages model pruning through sparsity-inducing optimization to greatly reduce the model size while attaining higher performance. Concretely, we begin by compressing the recently proposed AdaCoF model and demonstrating that a 10 times compressed AdaCoF performs similarly to its original counterpart, where different strategies for using layerwise sparsity information as a guide are comprehensively investigated under a variety of hyperparameter settings. We then enhance this compressed model by introducing a multi-resolution warping module, which improves visual consistency with multi-level details. As a result, we achieve a considerable performance gain with a quarter of the size of the original AdaCoF. In addition, our model performs favorably against other state-of-the-art approaches on a wide variety of datasets. We note that the suggested compression-driven framework is generic and can be easily transferred to other DNN-based frame interpolation algorithms. The source code is available at https://github.com/tding1/CDFI.

Pratheba Selvaraju, Tianyu Ding, Tianyi Chen et al.

Diffusion transformers (DiT) have become the de facto choice for generating high-quality images and videos, largely due to their scalability, which enables the construction of larger models for enhanced performance. However, the increased size of these models leads to higher inference costs, making them less attractive for real-time applications. We present Fast-FORward CAching (FORA), a simple yet effective approach designed to accelerate DiT by exploiting the repetitive nature of the diffusion process. FORA implements a caching mechanism that stores and reuses intermediate outputs from the attention and MLP layers across denoising steps, thereby reducing computational overhead. This approach does not require model retraining and seamlessly integrates with existing transformer-based diffusion models. Experiments show that FORA can speed up diffusion transformers several times over while only minimally affecting performance metrics such as the IS Score and FID. By enabling faster processing with minimal trade-offs in quality, FORA represents a significant advancement in deploying diffusion transformers for real-time applications. Code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/prathebaselva/FORA.

Yanqi Bao, Yuxin Li, Jing Huo et al.

Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse input} (NeRF-S) have shown great potential in synthesizing novel views with a limited number of observed viewpoints. However, due to the inherent limitations of sparse inputs and the gap between non-adjacent views, rendering results often suffer from over-fitting and foggy surfaces, a phenomenon we refer to as "CONFUSION" during volume rendering. In this paper, we analyze the root cause of this confusion and attribute it to two fundamental questions: "WHERE" and "HOW". To this end, we present a novel learning framework, WaH-NeRF, which effectively mitigates confusion by tackling the following challenges: (i)"WHERE" to Sample? in NeRF-S -- we introduce a Deformable Sampling strategy and a Weight-based Mutual Information Loss to address sample-position confusion arising from the limited number of viewpoints; and (ii) "HOW" to Predict? in NeRF-S -- we propose a Semi-Supervised NeRF learning Paradigm based on pose perturbation and a Pixel-Patch Correspondence Loss to alleviate prediction confusion caused by the disparity between training and testing viewpoints. By integrating our proposed modules and loss functions, WaH-NeRF outperforms previous methods under the NeRF-S setting. Code is available https://github.com/bbbbby-99/WaH-NeRF.

Tianyi Chen, Luming Liang, Tianyu Ding et al.

The existing model compression methods via structured pruning typically require complicated multi-stage procedures. Each individual stage necessitates numerous engineering efforts and domain-knowledge from the end-users which prevent their wider applications onto broader scenarios. We propose the second generation of Only-Train-Once (OTOv2), which first automatically trains and compresses a general DNN only once from scratch to produce a more compact model with competitive performance without fine-tuning. OTOv2 is automatic and pluggable into various deep learning applications, and requires almost minimal engineering efforts from the users. Methodologically, OTOv2 proposes two major improvements: (i) Autonomy: automatically exploits the dependency of general DNNs, partitions the trainable variables into Zero-Invariant Groups (ZIGs), and constructs the compressed model; and (ii) Dual Half-Space Projected Gradient (DHSPG): a novel optimizer to more reliably solve structured-sparsity problems. Numerically, we demonstrate the generality and autonomy of OTOv2 on a variety of model architectures such as VGG, ResNet, CARN, ConvNeXt, DenseNet and StackedUnets, the majority of which cannot be handled by other methods without extensive handcrafting efforts. Together with benchmark datasets including CIFAR10/100, DIV2K, Fashion-MNIST, SVNH and ImageNet, its effectiveness is validated by performing competitively or even better than the state-of-the-arts. The source code is available at https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once.

Tianyi Chen, Tianyu Ding, Badal Yadav et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the landscape of artificial intelligence, while their enormous size presents significant challenges in terms of computational costs. We introduce LoRAShear, a novel efficient approach to structurally prune LLMs and recover knowledge. Given general LLMs, LoRAShear at first creates the dependency graphs over LoRA modules to discover minimally removal structures and analyze the knowledge distribution. It then proceeds progressive structured pruning on LoRA adaptors and enables inherent knowledge transfer to better preserve the information in the redundant structures. To recover the lost knowledge during pruning, LoRAShear meticulously studies and proposes a dynamic fine-tuning schemes with dynamic data adaptors to effectively narrow down the performance gap to the full models. Numerical results demonstrate that by only using one GPU within a couple of GPU days, LoRAShear effectively reduced footprint of LLMs by 20% with only 1.0% performance degradation and significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts. The source code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/lorashear.

Yanqi Bao, Tianyu Ding, Jing Huo et al.

Generalizing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to new scenes is a significant challenge that existing approaches struggle to address without extensive modifications to vanilla NeRF framework. We introduce InsertNeRF, a method for INStilling gEneRalizabiliTy into NeRF. By utilizing multiple plug-and-play HyperNet modules, InsertNeRF dynamically tailors NeRF's weights to specific reference scenes, transforming multi-scale sampling-aware features into scene-specific representations. This novel design allows for more accurate and efficient representations of complex appearances and geometries. Experiments show that this method not only achieves superior generalization performance but also provides a flexible pathway for integration with other NeRF-like systems, even in sparse input settings. Code will be available https://github.com/bbbbby-99/InsertNeRF.

Yanqi Bao, Tianyu Ding, Jing Huo et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a prominent technique with the potential to become a mainstream method for 3D representations. It can effectively transform multi-view images into explicit 3D Gaussian through efficient training, and achieve real-time rendering of novel views. This survey aims to analyze existing 3DGS-related works from multiple intersecting perspectives, including related tasks, technologies, challenges, and opportunities. The primary objective is to provide newcomers with a rapid understanding of the field and to assist researchers in methodically organizing existing technologies and challenges. Specifically, we delve into the optimization, application, and extension of 3DGS, categorizing them based on their focuses or motivations. Additionally, we summarize and classify nine types of technical modules and corresponding improvements identified in existing works. Based on these analyses, we further examine the common challenges and technologies across various tasks, proposing potential research opportunities.

Jinxin Zhou, Tianyu Ding, Tianyi Chen et al.

We present DREAM, a novel training framework representing Diffusion Rectification and Estimation Adaptive Models, requiring minimal code changes (just three lines) yet significantly enhancing the alignment of training with sampling in diffusion models. DREAM features two components: diffusion rectification, which adjusts training to reflect the sampling process, and estimation adaptation, which balances perception against distortion. When applied to image super-resolution (SR), DREAM adeptly navigates the tradeoff between minimizing distortion and preserving high image quality. Experiments demonstrate DREAM's superiority over standard diffusion-based SR methods, showing a $2$ to $3\times $ faster training convergence and a $10$ to $20\times$ reduction in sampling steps to achieve comparable results. We hope DREAM will inspire a rethinking of diffusion model training paradigms.

Haidong Zhu, Tianyu Ding, Tianyi Chen et al.

Generalizability and few-shot learning are key challenges in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), often due to the lack of a holistic understanding in pixel-level rendering. We introduce CaesarNeRF, an end-to-end approach that leverages scene-level CAlibratEd SemAntic Representation along with pixel-level representations to advance few-shot, generalizable neural rendering, facilitating a holistic understanding without compromising high-quality details. CaesarNeRF explicitly models pose differences of reference views to combine scene-level semantic representations, providing a calibrated holistic understanding. This calibration process aligns various viewpoints with precise location and is further enhanced by sequential refinement to capture varying details. Extensive experiments on public datasets, including LLFF, Shiny, mip-NeRF 360, and MVImgNet, show that CaesarNeRF delivers state-of-the-art performance across varying numbers of reference views, proving effective even with a single reference image.

Tianyi Chen, Xiaoyi Qu, David Aponte et al.

Structured pruning is one of the most popular approaches to effectively compress the heavy deep neural networks (DNNs) into compact sub-networks while retaining performance. The existing methods suffer from multi-stage procedures along with significant engineering efforts and human expertise. The Only-Train-Once (OTO) series has been recently proposed to resolve the many pain points by streamlining the workflow by automatically conducting (i) search space generation, (ii) structured sparse optimization, and (iii) sub-network construction. However, the built-in sparse optimizers in the OTO series, i.e., the Half-Space Projected Gradient (HSPG) family, have limitations that require hyper-parameter tuning and the implicit controls of the sparsity exploration, consequently requires intervening by human expertise. To address such limitations, we propose a Hybrid Efficient Structured Sparse Optimizer (HESSO). HESSO could automatically and efficiently train a DNN to produce a high-performing subnetwork. Meanwhile, it is almost tuning-free and enjoys user-friendly integration for generic training applications. To address another common issue of irreversible performance collapse observed in pruning DNNs, we further propose a Corrective Redundant Identification Cycle (CRIC) for reliably identifying indispensable structures. We numerically demonstrate the efficacy of HESSO and its enhanced version HESSO-CRIC on a variety of applications ranging from computer vision to natural language processing, including large language model. The numerical results showcase that HESSO can achieve competitive even superior performance to varying state-of-the-arts and support most DNN architectures. Meanwhile, CRIC can effectively prevent the irreversible performance collapse and further enhance the performance of HESSO on certain applications.

Wenxiao Deng, Wenbin Li, Tianyu Ding et al.

Dataset distillation has emerged as a promising approach in deep learning, enabling efficient training with small synthetic datasets derived from larger real ones. Particularly, distribution matching-based distillation methods attract attention thanks to its effectiveness and low computational cost. However, these methods face two primary limitations: the dispersed feature distribution within the same class in synthetic datasets, reducing class discrimination, and an exclusive focus on mean feature consistency, lacking precision and comprehensiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce two novel constraints: a class centralization constraint and a covariance matching constraint. The class centralization constraint aims to enhance class discrimination by more closely clustering samples within classes. The covariance matching constraint seeks to achieve more accurate feature distribution matching between real and synthetic datasets through local feature covariance matrices, particularly beneficial when sample sizes are much smaller than the number of features. Experiments demonstrate notable improvements with these constraints, yielding performance boosts of up to 6.6% on CIFAR10, 2.9% on SVHN, 2.5% on CIFAR100, and 2.5% on TinyImageNet, compared to the state-of-the-art relevant methods. In addition, our method maintains robust performance in cross-architecture settings, with a maximum performance drop of 1.7% on four architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/VincenDen/IID.

Jiwei Guan, Tianyu Ding, Longbing Cao et al.

Vision-language pretraining (VLP) with transformers has demonstrated exceptional performance across numerous multimodal tasks. However, the adversarial robustness of these models has not been thoroughly investigated. Existing multimodal attack methods have largely overlooked cross-modal interactions between visual and textual modalities, particularly in the context of cross-attention mechanisms. In this paper, we study the adversarial vulnerability of recent VLP transformers and design a novel Joint Multimodal Transformer Feature Attack (JMTFA) that concurrently introduces adversarial perturbations in both visual and textual modalities under white-box settings. JMTFA strategically targets attention relevance scores to disrupt important features within each modality, generating adversarial samples by fusing perturbations and leading to erroneous model predictions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach achieves high attack success rates on vision-language understanding and reasoning downstream tasks compared to existing baselines. Notably, our findings reveal that the textual modality significantly influences the complex fusion processes within VLP transformers. Moreover, we observe no apparent relationship between model size and adversarial robustness under our proposed attacks. These insights emphasize a new dimension of adversarial robustness and underscore potential risks in the reliable deployment of multimodal AI systems.

Tianyu Ding, Adi Banerjee, Laurent Mombaerts et al.

The increasing use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in various applications necessitates stringent protocols to ensure RAG systems accuracy, safety, and alignment with user intentions. In this paper, we introduce VERA (Validation and Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Systems), a framework designed to enhance the transparency and reliability of outputs from large language models (LLMs) that utilize retrieved information. VERA improves the way we evaluate RAG systems in two important ways: (1) it introduces a cross-encoder based mechanism that encompasses a set of multidimensional metrics into a single comprehensive ranking score, addressing the challenge of prioritizing individual metrics, and (2) it employs Bootstrap statistics on LLM-based metrics across the document repository to establish confidence bounds, ensuring the repositorys topical coverage and improving the overall reliability of retrieval systems. Through several use cases, we demonstrate how VERA can strengthen decision-making processes and trust in AI applications. Our findings not only contribute to the theoretical understanding of LLM-based RAG evaluation metric but also promote the practical implementation of responsible AI systems, marking a significant advancement in the development of reliable and transparent generative AI technologies.

Tianyi Chen, Tianyu Ding, Zhihui Zhu et al.

Compressing a predefined deep neural network (DNN) into a compact sub-network with competitive performance is crucial in the efficient machine learning realm. This topic spans various techniques, from structured pruning to neural architecture search, encompassing both pruning and erasing operators perspectives. Despite advancements, existing methods suffers from complex, multi-stage processes that demand substantial engineering and domain knowledge, limiting their broader applications. We introduce the third-generation Only-Train-Once (OTOv3), which first automatically trains and compresses a general DNN through pruning and erasing operations, creating a compact and competitive sub-network without the need of fine-tuning. OTOv3 simplifies and automates the training and compression process, minimizes the engineering efforts required from users. It offers key technological advancements: (i) automatic search space construction for general DNNs based on dependency graph analysis; (ii) Dual Half-Space Projected Gradient (DHSPG) and its enhanced version with hierarchical search (H2SPG) to reliably solve (hierarchical) structured sparsity problems and ensure sub-network validity; and (iii) automated sub-network construction using solutions from DHSPG/H2SPG and dependency graphs. Our empirical results demonstrate the efficacy of OTOv3 across various benchmarks in structured pruning and neural architecture search. OTOv3 produces sub-networks that match or exceed the state-of-the-arts. The source code will be available at https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once.

Linjian Meng, Youzhi Zhang, Zhenxing Ge et al.

To establish last-iterate convergence for Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) algorithms in learning a Nash equilibrium (NE) of extensive-form games (EFGs), recent studies reformulate learning an NE of the original EFG as learning the NEs of a sequence of (perturbed) regularized EFGs. Consequently, proving last-iterate convergence in solving the original EFG reduces to proving last-iterate convergence in solving (perturbed) regularized EFGs. However, the empirical convergence rates of the algorithms in these studies are suboptimal, since they do not utilize Regret Matching (RM)-based CFR algorithms to solve perturbed EFGs, which are known the exceptionally fast empirical convergence rates. Additionally, since solving multiple perturbed regularized EFGs is required, fine-tuning across all such games is infeasible, making parameter-free algorithms highly desirable. In this paper, we prove that CFR$^+$, a classical parameter-free RM-based CFR algorithm, achieves last-iterate convergence in learning an NE of perturbed regularized EFGs. Leveraging CFR$^+$ to solve perturbed regularized EFGs, we get Reward Transformation CFR$^+$ (RTCFR$^+$). Importantly, we extend prior work on the parameter-free property of CFR$^+$, enhancing its stability, which is crucial for the empirical convergence of RTCFR$^+$. Experiments show that RTCFR$^+$ significantly outperforms existing algorithms with theoretical last-iterate convergence guarantees.

Tianyu Ding, Jinxin Zhou, Tianyi Chen et al.

Existing angle-based contour descriptors suffer from lossy representation for non-starconvex shapes. By and large, this is the result of the shape being registered with a single global inner center and a set of radii corresponding to a polar coordinate parameterization. In this paper, we propose AdaContour, an adaptive contour descriptor that uses multiple local representations to desirably characterize complex shapes. After hierarchically encoding object shapes in a training set and constructing a contour matrix of all subdivided regions, we compute a robust low-rank robust subspace and approximate each local contour by linearly combining the shared basis vectors to represent an object. Experiments show that AdaContour is able to represent shapes more accurately and robustly than other descriptors while retaining effectiveness. We validate AdaContour by integrating it into off-the-shelf detectors to enable instance segmentation which demonstrates faithful performance. The code is available at https://github.com/tding1/AdaContour.

Tianyi Chen, Michael Solodko, Sen Wang et al.

Computer Using Agents (CUAs) are increasingly equipped with external tools, enabling them to perform complex and realistic tasks. For CUAs to operate effectively, application selection, which refers to deciding which application to use before invoking fine-grained tools such as APIs, is a fundamental capability. It determines whether the agent initializes the correct environment, avoids orchestration confusion, and efficiently focuses on relevant context. However, existing benchmarks primarily assess fine-grained API selection, offering limited insight into whether models can reason across and choose between different applications. To fill this gap, we introduce AppSelectBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating application selection in CUAs. AppSelectBench contains a novel user task generation pipeline that produces realistic, diverse, and semantically grounded user intents at scale, together with unified evaluation protocols covering random, heuristic, zero-shot, few-shot, and retrieval-augmented-settings. AppSelectBench covers one hundred widely used desktop applications and includes more than one hundred thousand realistic, diverse, and semantically grounded user tasks. Extensive experiments across both closed-source and open-source large language models reveal systematic strengths and weaknesses in inter-application reasoning, showing that even the most capable models still struggle to make consistent application choices. Together, these results establish AppSelectBench as a foundation for studying and advancing application level reasoning, an essential yet underexplored capability of intelligent CUAs. The source is available at https://microsoft.github.io/appselectbench/.

Tianyi Chen, Luming Liang, Tianyu Ding et al.

To search an optimal sub-network within a general deep neural network (DNN), existing neural architecture search (NAS) methods typically rely on handcrafting a search space beforehand. Such requirements make it challenging to extend them onto general scenarios without significant human expertise and manual intervention. To overcome the limitations, we propose Automated Search-Space Generation Neural Architecture Search (ASGNAS), perhaps the first automated system to train general DNNs that cover all candidate connections and operations and produce high-performing sub-networks in the one shot manner. Technologically, ASGNAS delivers three noticeable contributions to minimize human efforts: (i) automated search space generation for general DNNs; (ii) a Hierarchical Half-Space Projected Gradient (H2SPG) that leverages the hierarchy and dependency within generated search space to ensure the network validity during optimization, and reliably produces a solution with both high performance and hierarchical group sparsity; and (iii) automated sub-network construction upon the H2SPG solution. Numerically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ASGNAS on a variety of general DNNs, including RegNet, StackedUnets, SuperResNet, and DARTS, over benchmark datasets such as CIFAR10, Fashion-MNIST, ImageNet, STL-10 , and SVNH. The sub-networks computed by ASGNAS achieve competitive even superior performance compared to the starting full DNNs and other state-of-the-arts. The library will be released at https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once.

Tianyi Chen, Bo Ji, Tianyu Ding et al.

Structured pruning is a commonly used technique in deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) onto resource-constrained devices. However, the existing pruning methods are usually heuristic, task-specified, and require an extra fine-tuning procedure. To overcome these limitations, we propose a framework that compresses DNNs into slimmer architectures with competitive performances and significant FLOPs reductions by Only-Train-Once (OTO). OTO contains two keys: (i) we partition the parameters of DNNs into zero-invariant groups, enabling us to prune zero groups without affecting the output; and (ii) to promote zero groups, we then formulate a structured-sparsity optimization problem and propose a novel optimization algorithm, Half-Space Stochastic Projected Gradient (HSPG), to solve it, which outperforms the standard proximal methods on group sparsity exploration and maintains comparable convergence. To demonstrate the effectiveness of OTO, we train and compress full models simultaneously from scratch without fine-tuning for inference speedup and parameter reduction, and achieve state-of-the-art results on VGG16 for CIFAR10, ResNet50 for CIFAR10 and Bert for SQuAD and competitive result on ResNet50 for ImageNet. The source code is available at https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once.

Tianyu Ding, Luming Liang, Zhihui Zhu et al.

DNN-based frame interpolation--that generates the intermediate frames given two consecutive frames--typically relies on heavy model architectures with a huge number of features, preventing them from being deployed on systems with limited resources, e.g., mobile devices. We propose a compression-driven network design for frame interpolation (CDFI), that leverages model pruning through sparsity-inducing optimization to significantly reduce the model size while achieving superior performance. Concretely, we first compress the recently proposed AdaCoF model and show that a 10X compressed AdaCoF performs similarly as its original counterpart; then we further improve this compressed model by introducing a multi-resolution warping module, which boosts visual consistencies with multi-level details. As a consequence, we achieve a significant performance gain with only a quarter in size compared with the original AdaCoF. Moreover, our model performs favorably against other state-of-the-arts in a broad range of datasets. Finally, the proposed compression-driven framework is generic and can be easily transferred to other DNN-based frame interpolation algorithm. Our source code is available at https://github.com/tding1/CDFI.

Jongwoo Ko, Tianyi Chen, Sungnyun Kim et al.

Despite the success of distillation in large language models (LLMs), most prior work applies identical loss functions to both teacher- and student-generated data. These strategies overlook the synergy between loss formulations and data types, leading to a suboptimal performance boost in student models. To address this, we propose DistiLLM-2, a contrastive approach that simultaneously increases the likelihood of teacher responses and decreases that of student responses by harnessing this synergy. Our extensive experiments show that DistiLLM-2 not only builds high-performing student models across a wide range of tasks, including instruction-following and code generation, but also supports diverse applications, such as preference alignment and vision-language extensions. These findings highlight the potential of a contrastive approach to enhance the efficacy of LLM distillation by effectively aligning teacher and student models across varied data types.

Xiaoyi Qu, David Aponte, Colby Banbury et al.

Structured pruning and quantization are fundamental techniques used to reduce the size of deep neural networks (DNNs) and typically are applied independently. Applying these techniques jointly via co-optimization has the potential to produce smaller, high-quality models. However, existing joint schemes are not widely used because of (1) engineering difficulties (complicated multi-stage processes), (2) black-box optimization (extensive hyperparameter tuning to control the overall compression), and (3) insufficient architecture generalization. To address these limitations, we present the framework GETA, which automatically and efficiently performs joint structured pruning and quantization-aware training on any DNNs. GETA introduces three key innovations: (i) a quantization-aware dependency graph (QADG) that constructs a pruning search space for generic quantization-aware DNN, (ii) a partially projected stochastic gradient method that guarantees layerwise bit constraints are satisfied, and (iii) a new joint learning strategy that incorporates interpretable relationships between pruning and quantization. We present numerical experiments on both convolutional neural networks and transformer architectures that show that our approach achieves competitive (often superior) performance compared to existing joint pruning and quantization methods.

Dongdong Ren, Wenbin Li, Tianyu Ding et al.

Recent advancements in model pruning have focused on developing new algorithms and improving upon benchmarks. However, the practical application of these algorithms across various models and platforms remains a significant challenge. To address this challenge, we propose ONNXPruner, a versatile pruning adapter designed for the ONNX format models. ONNXPruner streamlines the adaptation process across diverse deep learning frameworks and hardware platforms. A novel aspect of ONNXPruner is its use of node association trees, which automatically adapt to various model architectures. These trees clarify the structural relationships between nodes, guiding the pruning process, particularly highlighting the impact on interconnected nodes. Furthermore, we introduce a tree-level evaluation method. By leveraging node association trees, this method allows for a comprehensive analysis beyond traditional single-node evaluations, enhancing pruning performance without the need for extra operations. Experiments across multiple models and datasets confirm ONNXPruner's strong adaptability and increased efficacy. Our work aims to advance the practical application of model pruning.

Huminhao Zhu, Fangyikang Wang, Tianyu Ding et al.

Training with synthetic data is becoming increasingly inevitable as synthetic content proliferates across the web, driven by the remarkable performance of recent deep generative models. This reliance on synthetic data can also be intentional, as seen in Rectified Flow models, whose Reflow method iteratively uses self-generated data to straighten the flow and improve sampling efficiency. However, recent studies have shown that repeatedly training on self-generated samples can lead to model collapse (MC), where performance degrades over time. Despite this, most recent work on MC either focuses on empirical observations or analyzes regression problems and maximum likelihood objectives, leaving a rigorous theoretical analysis of reflow methods unexplored. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by providing both theoretical analysis and practical solutions for addressing MC in diffusion/flow models. We begin by studying Denoising Autoencoders and prove performance degradation when DAEs are iteratively trained on their own outputs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to rigorously analyze model collapse in DAEs and, by extension, in diffusion models and Rectified Flow. Our analysis and experiments demonstrate that rectified flow also suffers from MC, leading to potential performance degradation in each reflow step. Additionally, we prove that incorporating real data can prevent MC during recursive DAE training, supporting the recent trend of using real data as an effective approach for mitigating MC. Building on these insights, we propose a novel Real-data Augmented Reflow and a series of improved variants, which seamlessly integrate real data into Reflow training by leveraging reverse flow. Empirical evaluations on standard image benchmarks confirm that RA Reflow effectively mitigates model collapse, preserving high-quality sample generation even with fewer sampling steps.

Jiachen Jiang, Tianyu Ding, Zhihui Zhu

LLM-driven evolutionary systems have shown promise for automated science discovery, yet existing approaches such as AlphaEvolve rely on full-code histories that are context-inefficient and potentially provide weak evolutionary guidance. In this work, we first formalize the evolutionary agents as a general Expectation-Maximization framework, where the language model samples candidate programs (E-step) and the system updates the control context based on evaluation feedback (M-step). Under this view, constructing context via full-code snapshots constitutes a suboptimal M-step, as redundant implement details dilutes core algorithmic ideas, making it difficult to provide clear inspirations for evolution. To address this, we propose DeltaEvolve, a momentum-driven evolutionary framework that replaces full-code history with structured semantic delta capturing how and why modifications between successive nodes affect performance. As programs are often decomposable, semantic delta usually contains many effective components which are transferable and more informative to drive improvement. By organizing semantic delta through multi-level database and progressive disclosure mechanism, input tokens are further reduced. Empirical evaluations on tasks across diverse scientific domains show that our framework can discover better solution with less token consumption over full-code-based evolutionary agents.

Jiachen Jiang, Tianyu Ding, Ke Zhang et al.

All-in-one image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from various types of degradation using a single model, without prior knowledge of the corruption source. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively and efficiently handle multiple degradation types. We present Cat-AIR, a novel \textbf{C}ontent \textbf{A}nd \textbf{T}ask-aware framework for \textbf{A}ll-in-one \textbf{I}mage \textbf{R}estoration. Cat-AIR incorporates an alternating spatial-channel attention mechanism that adaptively balances the local and global information for different tasks. Specifically, we introduce cross-layer channel attentions and cross-feature spatial attentions that allocate computations based on content and task complexity. Furthermore, we propose a smooth learning strategy that allows for seamless adaptation to new restoration tasks while maintaining performance on existing ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cat-AIR achieves state-of-the-art results across a wide range of restoration tasks, requiring fewer FLOPs than previous methods, establishing new benchmarks for efficient all-in-one image restoration.

Pratheba Selvaraju, Victoria Fernandez Abrevaya, Timo Bolkart et al.

Reconstructing 3D face models from a single image is an inherently ill-posed problem, which becomes even more challenging in the presence of occlusions. In addition to fewer available observations, occlusions introduce an extra source of ambiguity where multiple reconstructions can be equally valid. Despite the ubiquity of the problem, very few methods address its multi-hypothesis nature. In this paper we introduce OFER, a novel approach for single-image 3D face reconstruction that can generate plausible, diverse, and expressive 3D faces, even under strong occlusions. Specifically, we train two diffusion models to generate the shape and expression coefficients of a face parametric model, conditioned on the input image. This approach captures the multi-modal nature of the problem, generating a distribution of solutions as output. However, to maintain consistency across diverse expressions, the challenge is to select the best matching shape. To achieve this, we propose a novel ranking mechanism that sorts the outputs of the shape diffusion network based on predicted shape accuracy scores. We evaluate our method using standard benchmarks and introduce CO-545, a new protocol and dataset designed to assess the accuracy of expressive faces under occlusion. Our results show improved performance over occlusion-based methods, while also enabling the generation of diverse expressions for a given image.

Guangzhi Wang, Tianyi Chen, Kamran Ghasedi et al.

Face attribute editing plays a pivotal role in various applications. However, existing methods encounter challenges in achieving high-quality results while preserving identity, editing faithfulness, and temporal consistency. These challenges are rooted in issues related to the training pipeline, including limited supervision, architecture design, and optimization strategy. In this work, we introduce S3Editor, a Sparse Semantic-disentangled Self-training framework for face video editing. S3Editor is a generic solution that comprehensively addresses these challenges with three key contributions. Firstly, S3Editor adopts a self-training paradigm to enhance the training process through semi-supervision. Secondly, we propose a semantic disentangled architecture with a dynamic routing mechanism that accommodates diverse editing requirements. Thirdly, we present a structured sparse optimization schema that identifies and deactivates malicious neurons to further disentangle impacts from untarget attributes. S3Editor is model-agnostic and compatible with various editing approaches. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative results affirm that our approach significantly enhances identity preservation, editing fidelity, as well as temporal consistency.

Quanlin Chen, Yiyu Chen, Jing Huo et al.

Bayesian Optimization (BO) has been widely applied to optimize expensive black-box functions while retaining sample efficiency. However, scaling BO to high-dimensional spaces remains challenging. Existing literature proposes performing standard BO in multiple local trust regions (TuRBO) for heterogeneous modeling of the objective function and avoiding over-exploration. Despite its advantages, using local Gaussian Processes (GPs) reduces sampling efficiency compared to a global GP. To enhance sampling efficiency while preserving heterogeneous modeling, we propose to construct multiple local quadratic models using gradients and Hessians from a global GP, and select new sample points by solving the bound-constrained quadratic program. Additionally, we address the issue of vanishing gradients of GPs in high-dimensional spaces. We provide a convergence analysis and demonstrate through experimental results that our method enhances the efficacy of TuRBO and outperforms a wide range of high-dimensional BO techniques on synthetic functions and real-world applications.

Ke Zhang, Tianyu Ding, Jiachen Jiang et al.

Image cropping is crucial for enhancing the visual appeal and narrative impact of photographs, yet existing rule-based and data-driven approaches often lack diversity or require annotated training data. We introduce ProCrop, a retrieval-based method that leverages professional photography to guide cropping decisions. By fusing features from professional photographs with those of the query image, ProCrop learns from professional compositions, significantly boosting performance. Additionally, we present a large-scale dataset of 242K weakly-annotated images, generated by out-painting professional images and iteratively refining diverse crop proposals. This composition-aware dataset generation offers diverse high-quality crop proposals guided by aesthetic principles and becomes the largest publicly available dataset for image cropping. Extensive experiments show that ProCrop significantly outperforms existing methods in both supervised and weakly-supervised settings. Notably, when trained on the new dataset, our ProCrop surpasses previous weakly-supervised methods and even matches fully supervised approaches. Both the code and dataset will be made publicly available to advance research in image aesthetics and composition analysis.

Wei Lai, Tianyu Ding, ren dongdong et al.

Dataset distillation synthesizes compact datasets that enable models to achieve performance comparable to training on the original large-scale datasets. However, existing distillation methods overlook the robustness of the model, resulting in models that are vulnerable to adversarial attacks when trained on distilled data. To address this limitation, we introduce the task of ``robust dataset distillation", a novel paradigm that embeds adversarial robustness into the synthetic datasets during the distillation process. We propose Matching Adversarial Trajectories (MAT), a method that integrates adversarial training into trajectory-based dataset distillation. MAT incorporates adversarial samples during trajectory generation to obtain robust training trajectories, which are then used to guide the distillation process. As experimentally demonstrated, even through natural training on our distilled dataset, models can achieve enhanced adversarial robustness while maintaining competitive accuracy compared to existing distillation methods. Our work highlights robust dataset distillation as a new and important research direction and provides a strong baseline for future research to bridge the gap between efficient training and adversarial robustness.

Yachao Li, Dong Liang, Tianyu Ding et al.

Diffusion-based models have shown great promise in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR), but often generate content with structural errors and spurious texture details due to the empirical priors and illusions of these models. To address this issue, we introduce StructSR, a simple, effective, and plug-and-play method that enhances structural fidelity and suppresses spurious details for diffusion-based Real-ISR. StructSR operates without the need for additional fine-tuning, external model priors, or high-level semantic knowledge. At its core is the Structure-Aware Screening (SAS) mechanism, which identifies the image with the highest structural similarity to the low-resolution (LR) input in the early inference stage, allowing us to leverage it as a historical structure knowledge to suppress the generation of spurious details. By intervening in the diffusion inference process, StructSR seamlessly integrates with existing diffusion-based Real-ISR models. Our experimental results demonstrate that StructSR significantly improves the fidelity of structure and texture, improving the PSNR and SSIM metrics by an average of 5.27% and 9.36% on a synthetic dataset (DIV2K-Val) and 4.13% and 8.64% on two real-world datasets (RealSR and DRealSR) when integrated with four state-of-the-art diffusion-based Real-ISR methods.

Zhihui Zhu, Tianyu Ding, Jinxin Zhou et al.

We provide the first global optimization landscape analysis of $Neural\;Collapse$ -- an intriguing empirical phenomenon that arises in the last-layer classifiers and features of neural networks during the terminal phase of training. As recently reported by Papyan et al., this phenomenon implies that ($i$) the class means and the last-layer classifiers all collapse to the vertices of a Simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) up to scaling, and ($ii$) cross-example within-class variability of last-layer activations collapses to zero. We study the problem based on a simplified $unconstrained\;feature\;model$, which isolates the topmost layers from the classifier of the neural network. In this context, we show that the classical cross-entropy loss with weight decay has a benign global landscape, in the sense that the only global minimizers are the Simplex ETFs while all other critical points are strict saddles whose Hessian exhibit negative curvature directions. In contrast to existing landscape analysis for deep neural networks which is often disconnected from practice, our analysis of the simplified model not only does it explain what kind of features are learned in the last layer, but it also shows why they can be efficiently optimized in the simplified settings, matching the empirical observations in practical deep network architectures. These findings could have profound implications for optimization, generalization, and robustness of broad interests. For example, our experiments demonstrate that one may set the feature dimension equal to the number of classes and fix the last-layer classifier to be a Simplex ETF for network training, which reduces memory cost by over $20\%$ on ResNet18 without sacrificing the generalization performance.

Tianyi Chen, Bo Ji, Yixin Shi et al.

The compression of deep neural networks (DNNs) to reduce inference cost becomes increasingly important to meet realistic deployment requirements of various applications. There have been a significant amount of work regarding network compression, while most of them are heuristic rule-based or typically not friendly to be incorporated into varying scenarios. On the other hand, sparse optimization yielding sparse solutions naturally fits the compression requirement, but due to the limited study of sparse optimization in stochastic learning, its extension and application onto model compression is rarely well explored. In this work, we propose a model compression framework based on the recent progress on sparse stochastic optimization. Compared to existing model compression techniques, our method is effective and requires fewer extra engineering efforts to incorporate with varying applications, and has been numerically demonstrated on benchmark compression tasks. Particularly, we achieve up to 7.2 and 2.9 times FLOPs reduction with the same level of evaluation accuracy on VGG16 for CIFAR10 and ResNet50 for ImageNet compared to the baseline heavy models, respectively.

Shailesh Nirgudkar, Tianyu Ding

This paper describes a methodology to detect sepsis ahead of time by analyzing hourly patient records. The Physionet 2019 challenge consists of medical records of over 40,000 patients. Using imputation and weak ensembler technique to analyze these medical records and 3-fold validation, a model is created and validated internally. The model achieved an accuracy of 93.45% and a utility score of 0.271. The utility score as defined by the organizers takes into account true positives, negatives and false alarms.

Tianyi Chen, Tianyu Ding, Bo Ji et al.

Sparsity-inducing regularization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning applications, ranging from feature selection to model compression. In this paper, we present a novel stochastic method -- Orthant Based Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method (OBProx-SG) -- to solve perhaps the most popular instance, i.e., the l1-regularized problem. The OBProx-SG method contains two steps: (i) a proximal stochastic gradient step to predict a support cover of the solution; and (ii) an orthant step to aggressively enhance the sparsity level via orthant face projection. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., Prox-SG, RDA and Prox-SVRG, the OBProx-SG not only converges to the global optimal solutions (in convex scenario) or the stationary points (in non-convex scenario), but also promotes the sparsity of the solutions substantially. Particularly, on a large number of convex problems, OBProx-SG outperforms the existing methods comprehensively in the aspect of sparsity exploration and objective values. Moreover, the experiments on non-convex deep neural networks, e.g., MobileNetV1 and ResNet18, further demonstrate its superiority by achieving the solutions of much higher sparsity without sacrificing generalization accuracy.