Shuai Ning

2papers

2 Papers

LGFeb 6
Refining the Information Bottleneck via Adversarial Information Separation

Shuai Ning, Zhenpeng Wang, Lin Wang et al.

Generalizing from limited data is particularly critical for models in domains such as material science, where task-relevant features in experimental datasets are often heavily confounded by measurement noise and experimental artifacts. Standard regularization techniques fail to precisely separate meaningful features from noise, while existing adversarial adaptation methods are limited by their reliance on explicit separation labels. To address this challenge, we propose the Adversarial Information Separation Framework (AdverISF), which isolates task-relevant features from noise without requiring explicit supervision. AdverISF introduces a self-supervised adversarial mechanism to enforce statistical independence between task-relevant features and noise representations. It further employs a multi-layer separation architecture that progressively recycles noise information across feature hierarchies to recover features inadvertently discarded as noise, thereby enabling finer-grained feature extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdverISF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in data-scarce scenarios. In addition, evaluations on real-world material design tasks show that it achieves superior generalization performance.

LGFeb 7, 2021
OPT-GAN: A Broad-Spectrum Global Optimizer for Black-box Problems by Learning Distribution

Minfang Lu, Shuai Ning, Shuangrong Liu et al.

Black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms are concerned with finding the best solutions for problems with missing analytical details. Most classical methods for such problems are based on strong and fixed a priori assumptions, such as Gaussianity. However, the complex real-world problems, especially when the global optimum is desired, could be very far from the a priori assumptions because of their diversities, causing unexpected obstacles. In this study, we propose a generative adversarial net-based broad-spectrum global optimizer (OPT-GAN) which estimates the distribution of optimum gradually, with strategies to balance exploration-exploitation trade-off. It has potential to better adapt to the regularity and structure of diversified landscapes than other methods with fixed prior, e.g., Gaussian assumption or separability. Experiments on diverse BBO benchmarks and high dimensional real world applications exhibit that OPT-GAN outperforms other traditional and neural net-based BBO algorithms.