Rui Ye

Rui Ye, Zhenyang Ni, Chenxin Xu et al.

One of the key challenges in federated learning (FL) is local data distribution heterogeneity across clients, which may cause inconsistent feature spaces across clients. To address this issue, we propose a novel method FedFM, which guides each client's features to match shared category-wise anchors (landmarks in feature space). This method attempts to mitigate the negative effects of data heterogeneity in FL by aligning each client's feature space. Besides, we tackle the challenge of varying objective function and provide convergence guarantee for FedFM. In FedFM, to mitigate the phenomenon of overlapping feature spaces across categories and enhance the effectiveness of feature matching, we further propose a more precise and effective feature matching loss called contrastive-guiding (CG), which guides each local feature to match with the corresponding anchor while keeping away from non-corresponding anchors. Additionally, to achieve higher efficiency and flexibility, we propose a FedFM variant, called FedFM-Lite, where clients communicate with server with fewer synchronization times and communication bandwidth costs. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FedFM with CG outperforms several works by quantitative and qualitative comparisons. FedFM-Lite can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods with five to ten times less communication costs.

Yuwen Du, Rui Ye, Shuo Tang et al.

Deep search capabilities have become an indispensable competency for frontier Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet the development of high-performance search agents remains dominated by industrial giants due to a lack of transparent, high-quality training data. This persistent data scarcity has fundamentally hindered the progress of the broader research community in developing and innovating within this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce OpenSeeker, the first fully open-source search agent (i.e., model and data) that achieves frontier-level performance through two core technical innovations: (1) Fact-grounded scalable controllable QA synthesis, which reverse-engineers the web graph via topological expansion and entity obfuscation to generate complex, multi-hop reasoning tasks with controllable coverage and complexity. (2) Denoised trajectory synthesis, which employs a retrospective summarization mechanism to denoise the trajectory, therefore promoting the teacher LLMs to generate high-quality actions. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenSeeker, trained (a single training run) on only 11.7k synthesized samples, achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, xbench-DeepSearch, and WideSearch. Notably, trained with simple SFT, OpenSeeker significantly outperforms the second-best fully open-source agent DeepDive (e.g., 29.5% v.s. 15.3% on BrowseComp), and even surpasses industrial competitors such as Tongyi DeepResearch (trained via extensive continual pre-training, SFT, and RL) on BrowseComp-ZH (48.4% v.s. 46.7%). We fully open-source the complete training dataset and the model weights to democratize frontier search agent research and foster a more transparent, collaborative ecosystem.

Xinyu Zhu, Yuzhu Cai, Zexi Liu et al.

The convergence of large language models and agents is catalyzing a new era of scientific discovery: Agentic Science. While the scientific method is inherently iterative, existing agent frameworks are predominantly static, narrowly scoped, and lack the capacity to learn from trial and error. To bridge this gap, we present EvoMaster, a foundational evolving agent framework engineered specifically for Agentic Science at Scale. Driven by the core principle of continuous self-evolution, EvoMaster empowers agents to iteratively refine hypotheses, self-critique, and progressively accumulate knowledge across experimental cycles, faithfully mirroring human scientific inquiry. Crucially, as a domain-agnostic base harness, EvoMaster is exceptionally easy to scale up -- enabling developers to build and deploy highly capable, self-evolving scientific agents for arbitrary disciplines in approximately 100 lines of code. Built upon EvoMaster, we incubated the SciMaster ecosystem across domains such as machine learning, physics, and general science. Evaluations on four authoritative benchmarks (Humanity's Last Exam, MLE-Bench Lite, BrowseComp, and FrontierScience) demonstrate that EvoMaster achieves state-of-the-art scores of 41.1%, 75.8%, 73.3%, and 53.3%, respectively. It comprehensively outperforms the general-purpose baseline OpenClaw with relative improvements ranging from +159% to +316%, robustly validating its efficacy and generality as the premier foundational framework for the next generation of autonomous scientific discovery. EvoMaster is available at https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/EvoMaster.

Ziyu Shan, Qi Yang, Rui Ye et al.

With the rapid development of 3D vision, point cloud has become an increasingly popular 3D visual media content. Due to the irregular structure, point cloud has posed novel challenges to the related research, such as compression, transmission, rendering and quality assessment. In these latest researches, point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) has attracted wide attention due to its significant role in guiding practical applications, especially in many cases where the reference point cloud is unavailable. However, current no-reference metrics which based on prevalent deep neural network have apparent disadvantages. For example, to adapt to the irregular structure of point cloud, they require preprocessing such as voxelization and projection that introduce extra distortions, and the applied grid-kernel networks, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, fail to extract effective distortion-related features. Besides, they rarely consider the various distortion patterns and the philosophy that PCQA should exhibit shifting, scaling, and rotational invariance. In this paper, we propose a novel no-reference PCQA metric named the Graph convolutional PCQA network (GPA-Net). To extract effective features for PCQA, we propose a new graph convolution kernel, i.e., GPAConv, which attentively captures the perturbation of structure and texture. Then, we propose the multi-task framework consisting of one main task (quality regression) and two auxiliary tasks (distortion type and degree predictions). Finally, we propose a coordinate normalization module to stabilize the results of GPAConv under shift, scale and rotation transformations. Experimental results on two independent databases show that GPA-Net achieves the best performance compared to the state-of-the-art no-reference PCQA metrics, even better than some full-reference metrics in some cases.

Baoquan Zhang, Hao Jiang, Xutao Li et al.

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is a challenging task, which aims to recognize novel classes with few examples. Recently, lots of methods have been proposed from the perspective of meta-learning and representation learning. However, few works focus on the interpretability of FSL decision process. In this paper, we take a step towards the interpretable FSL by proposing a novel meta-learning based decision tree framework, namely, MetaDT. In particular, the FSL interpretability is achieved from two aspects, i.e., a concept aspect and a visual aspect. On the concept aspect, we first introduce a tree-like concept hierarchy as FSL prior. Then, resorting to the prior, we split each few-shot task to a set of subtasks with different concept levels and then perform class prediction via a model of decision tree. The advantage of such design is that a sequence of high-level concept decisions that lead up to a final class prediction can be obtained, which clarifies the FSL decision process. On the visual aspect, a set of subtask-specific classifiers with visual attention mechanism is designed to perform decision at each node of the decision tree. As a result, a subtask-specific heatmap visualization can be obtained to achieve the decision interpretability of each tree node. At last, to alleviate the data scarcity issue of FSL, we regard the prior of concept hierarchy as an undirected graph, and then design a graph convolution-based decision tree inference network as our meta-learner to infer parameters of the decision tree. Extensive experiments on performance comparison and interpretability analysis show superiority of our MetaDT.

Rui Ye, Wenhao Wang, Jingyi Chai et al.

Trained on massive publicly available data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated tremendous success across various fields. While more data contributes to better performance, a disconcerting reality is that high-quality public data will be exhausted in a few years. In this paper, we offer a potential next step for contemporary LLMs: collaborative and privacy-preserving LLM training on the underutilized distributed private data via federated learning (FL), where multiple data owners collaboratively train a shared model without transmitting raw data. To achieve this, we build a concise, integrated, and research-friendly framework/codebase, named OpenFedLLM. It covers federated instruction tuning for enhancing instruction-following capability, federated value alignment for aligning with human values, and 7 representative FL algorithms. Besides, OpenFedLLM supports training on diverse domains, where we cover 8 training datasets; and provides comprehensive evaluations, where we cover 30+ evaluation metrics. Through extensive experiments, we observe that all FL algorithms outperform local training on training LLMs, demonstrating a clear performance improvement across a variety of settings. Notably, in a financial benchmark, Llama2-7B fine-tuned by applying any FL algorithm can outperform GPT-4 by a significant margin while the model obtained through individual training cannot, demonstrating strong motivation for clients to participate in FL. The code is available at https://github.com/rui-ye/OpenFedLLM.

Yuwen Du, Rui Ye, Shuo Tang et al.

Deep search capabilities have become an indispensable competency for frontier Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet their development remains dominated by industrial giants. The typical industry recipe involves a highly resource-intensive pipeline spanning pre-training, continual pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL). In this report, we show that when fueled with informative and high-difficulty trajectories, a simple SFT approach could be surprisingly powerful for training frontier search agents. By introducing three simple data synthesis modifications: scaling knowledge graph size for richer exploration, expanding the tool set size for broader functionality, and strict low-step filtering, we establish a stronger baseline. Trained on merely 10.6k data points, our OpenSeeker-v2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across 4 benchmarks (30B-sized agents with ReAct paradigm): 46.0% on BrowseComp, 58.1% on BrowseComp-ZH, 34.6% on Humanity's Last Exam, and 78.0% on xbench, surpassing even Tongyi DeepResearch trained with heavy CPT+SFT+RL pipeline, which achieves 43.4%, 46.7%, 32.9%, and 75.0%, respectively. Notably, OpenSeeker-v2 represents the first state-of-the-art search agent within its model scale and paradigm to be developed by a purely academic team using only SFT. We are excited to open-source the OpenSeeker-v2 model weights and share our simple yet effective findings to make frontier search agent research more accessible to the community.

Xinyu Zhu, Yuzhu Cai, Zexi Liu et al.

The advancement of artificial intelligence toward agentic science is currently bottlenecked by the challenge of ultra-long-horizon autonomy, the ability to sustain strategic coherence and iterative correction over experimental cycles spanning days or weeks. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated prowess in short-horizon reasoning, they are easily overwhelmed by execution details in the high-dimensional, delayed-feedback environments of real-world research, failing to consolidate sparse feedback into coherent long-term guidance. Here, we present ML-Master 2.0, an autonomous agent that masters ultra-long-horizon machine learning engineering (MLE) which is a representative microcosm of scientific discovery. By reframing context management as a process of cognitive accumulation, our approach introduces Hierarchical Cognitive Caching (HCC), a multi-tiered architecture inspired by computer systems that enables the structural differentiation of experience over time. By dynamically distilling transient execution traces into stable knowledge and cross-task wisdom, HCC allows agents to decouple immediate execution from long-term experimental strategy, effectively overcoming the scaling limits of static context windows. In evaluations on OpenAI's MLE-Bench under 24-hour budgets, ML-Master 2.0 achieves a state-of-the-art medal rate of 56.44%. Our findings demonstrate that ultra-long-horizon autonomy provides a scalable blueprint for AI capable of autonomous exploration beyond human-precedent complexities.

Rui Ye, Rui Ge, Yuchi Fengting et al.

Federated instruction tuning enables multiple clients to collaboratively fine-tune a shared large language model (LLM) that can follow humans' instructions without directly sharing raw data. However, existing literature impractically requires that all the clients readily hold instruction-tuning data (i.e., structured instruction-response pairs), which necessitates massive human annotations since clients' data is usually unstructured text instead. Addressing this, we propose a novel and flexible framework FedIT-U2S, which can automatically transform unstructured corpus into structured data for federated instruction tuning. FedIT-U2S consists two key steps: (1) few-shot instruction-tuning data generation, where each unstructured data piece together with several examples is combined to prompt an LLM in generating an instruction-response pair. To further enhance the flexibility, a retrieval-based example selection technique is proposed, where the examples are automatically selected based on the relatedness between the client's data piece and example pool, bypassing the need of determining examples in advance. (2) A typical federated instruction tuning process based on the generated data. Overall, FedIT-U2S can be applied to diverse scenarios as long as the client holds valuable text corpus, broadening the application scope of federated instruction tuning. We conduct a series of experiments on three domains (medicine, knowledge, and math), showing that our proposed FedIT-U2S can consistently and significantly brings improvement over the base LLM.

Zhaopeng Feng, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang et al.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents for long-horizon information-seeking, managing finite context capacity has become a critical bottleneck. Existing context management methods typically commit to a single fixed strategy throughout the entire trajectory. Such static designs may work well in some states, but they cannot adapt as the usefulness and reliability of the accumulated context evolve during long-horizon search. To formalize this challenge, we introduce a probabilistic framework that characterizes long-horizon success through two complementary dimensions: search efficiency and terminal precision. Building on this perspective, we propose AgentSwing, a state-aware adaptive parallel context management routing framework. At each trigger point, AgentSwing expands multiple context-managed branches in parallel and uses lookahead routing to select the most promising continuation. Experiments across diverse benchmarks and agent backbones show that AgentSwing consistently outperforms strong static context management methods, often matching or exceeding their performance with up to $3\times$ fewer interaction turns while also improving the ultimate performance ceiling of long-horizon web agents. Beyond the empirical gains, the proposed probabilistic framework provides a principled lens for analyzing and designing future context management strategies for long-horizon agents.

Xiaofang Yang, Lijun Li, Heng Zhou et al.

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in extending large language models into agentic systems. While the effectiveness of agents has continued to improve, efficiency, which is crucial for real-world deployment, has often been overlooked. This paper therefore investigates efficiency from three core components of agents: memory, tool learning, and planning, considering costs such as latency, tokens, steps, etc. Aimed at conducting comprehensive research addressing the efficiency of the agentic system itself, we review a broad range of recent approaches that differ in implementation yet frequently converge on shared high-level principles including but not limited to bounding context via compression and management, designing reinforcement learning rewards to minimize tool invocation, and employing controlled search mechanisms to enhance efficiency, which we discuss in detail. Accordingly, we characterize efficiency in two complementary ways: comparing effectiveness under a fixed cost budget, and comparing cost at a comparable level of effectiveness. This trade-off can also be viewed through the Pareto frontier between effectiveness and cost. From this perspective, we also examine efficiency oriented benchmarks by summarizing evaluation protocols for these components and consolidating commonly reported efficiency metrics from both benchmark and methodological studies. Moreover, we discuss the key challenges and future directions, with the goal of providing promising insights.

Jingyi Chai, Shuo Tang, Rui Ye et al.

The rapid advancements of AI agents have ignited the long-held ambition of leveraging them to accelerate scientific discovery. Achieving this goal requires a deep understanding of the frontiers of human knowledge. As such, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) provides an exceptionally challenging touchstone for evaluating scientific AI agents. In this work, we aim to construct the foundational architecture for general-purpose agents and validate the capabilities through leading performance on HLE. To achieve this, we introduce X-Master, a tool-augmented reasoning agent designed to emulate human researchers by interacting flexibly with external tools during its reasoning process. This agent, guided by the conceptualization of code as an interaction language, can flexibly leverage built-in Python libraries and our customized tools to augment the reasoning. We further scale its capabilities through X-Masters, a scattered-and-stacked agentic workflow that systematically enhances breadth and depth of reasoning. Our open-source solution, X-Masters, sets a new state-of-the-art record on HLE with a score of 32.1%, surpassing OpenAI's and Google's Deep Research (26.6% and 26.9%) and becoming the first to exceed the 30% threshold. This work allows us to gain a deeper understanding of complex task-solving and accumulates valuable experience that can inform future advancements, guiding subsequent model training.

Rui Ye, Shuo Tang, Rui Ge et al.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown significant potential in tackling diverse tasks. However, to design effective MAS, existing approaches heavily rely on manual configurations or multiple calls of advanced LLMs, resulting in inadaptability and high inference costs. In this paper, we simplify the process of building an MAS by reframing it as a generative language task, where the input is a user query and the output is a corresponding MAS. To address this novel task, we unify the representation of MAS as executable code and propose a consistency-oriented data construction pipeline to create a high-quality dataset comprising coherent and consistent query-MAS pairs. Using this dataset, we train MAS-GPT, an open-source medium-sized LLM that is capable of generating query-adaptive MAS within a single LLM inference. The generated MAS can be seamlessly applied to process user queries and deliver high-quality responses. Extensive experiments on 9 benchmarks and 5 LLMs show that the proposed MAS-GPT consistently outperforms 10+ baseline MAS methods on diverse settings, indicating MAS-GPT's high effectiveness, efficiency and strong generalization ability. Code will be available at https://github.com/rui-ye/MAS-GPT.

Linfeng Zhang, Siheng Chen, Yuzhu Cai et al.

AI agents are emerging as a practical way to run multi-step scientific workflows that interleave reasoning with tool use and verification, pointing to a shift from isolated AI-assisted steps toward \emph{agentic science at scale}. This shift is increasingly feasible, as scientific tools and models can be invoked through stable interfaces and verified with recorded execution traces, and increasingly necessary, as AI accelerates scientific output and stresses the peer-review and publication pipeline, raising the bar for traceability and credible evaluation. However, scaling agentic science remains difficult: workflows are hard to observe and reproduce; many tools and laboratory systems are not agent-ready; execution is hard to trace and govern; and prototype AI Scientist systems are often bespoke, limiting reuse and systematic improvement from real workflow signals. We argue that scaling agentic science requires an infrastructure-and-ecosystem approach, instantiated in Bohrium+SciMaster. Bohrium acts as a managed, traceable hub for AI4S assets -- akin to a HuggingFace of AI for Science -- that turns diverse scientific data, software, compute, and laboratory systems into agent-ready capabilities. SciMaster orchestrates these capabilities into long-horizon scientific workflows, on which scientific agents can be composed and executed. Between infrastructure and orchestration, a \emph{scientific intelligence substrate} organizes reusable models, knowledge, and components into executable building blocks for workflow reasoning and action, enabling composition, auditability, and improvement through use. We demonstrate this stack with eleven representative master agents in real workflows, achieving orders-of-magnitude reductions in end-to-end scientific cycle time and generating execution-grounded signals from real workloads at multi-million scale.

Kuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin et al.

Transcending human cognitive limitations represents a critical frontier in LLM training. Proprietary agentic systems like DeepResearch have demonstrated superhuman capabilities on extremely complex information-seeking benchmarks such as BrowseComp, a feat previously unattainable. We posit that their success hinges on a sophisticated reasoning pattern absent in open-source models: the ability to systematically reduce extreme uncertainty when navigating vast information landscapes. Based on this insight, we introduce WebSailor, a complete post-training methodology designed to instill this crucial capability. Our approach involves generating novel, high-uncertainty tasks through structured sampling and information obfuscation, RFT cold start, and an efficient agentic RL training algorithm, Duplicating Sampling Policy Optimization (DUPO). With this integrated pipeline, WebSailor significantly outperforms all open-source agents in complex information-seeking tasks, matching proprietary agents' performance and closing the capability gap.

Rui Ye, Keduan Huang, Qimin Wu et al.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing single LLMs to address complex and diverse tasks in practical applications. Despite considerable advancements, the field lacks a unified codebase that consolidates existing methods, resulting in redundant re-implementation efforts, unfair comparisons, and high entry barriers for researchers. To address these challenges, we introduce MASLab, a unified, comprehensive, and research-friendly codebase for LLM-based MAS. (1) MASLab integrates over 20 established methods across multiple domains, each rigorously validated by comparing step-by-step outputs with its official implementation. (2) MASLab provides a unified environment with various benchmarks for fair comparisons among methods, ensuring consistent inputs and standardized evaluation protocols. (3) MASLab implements methods within a shared streamlined structure, lowering the barriers for understanding and extension. Building on MASLab, we conduct extensive experiments covering 10+ benchmarks and 8 models, offering researchers a clear and comprehensive view of the current landscape of MAS methods. MASLab will continue to evolve, tracking the latest developments in the field, and invite contributions from the broader open-source community.

Xianghe Pang, Shuo Tang, Rui Ye et al.

Effective information seeking in the vast and ever-growing digital landscape requires balancing expansive search with strategic reasoning. Current large language model (LLM)-based agents struggle to achieve this balance due to limitations in search breadth and reasoning depth, where slow, serial querying restricts coverage of relevant sources and noisy raw inputs disrupt the continuity of multi-step reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose BrowseMaster, a scalable framework built around a programmatically augmented planner-executor agent pair. The planner formulates and adapts search strategies based on task constraints, while the executor conducts efficient, targeted retrieval to supply the planner with concise, relevant evidence. This division of labor preserves coherent, long-horizon reasoning while sustaining broad and systematic exploration, overcoming the trade-off that limits existing agents. Extensive experiments on challenging English and Chinese benchmarks show that BrowseMaster consistently outperforms open-source and proprietary baselines, achieving scores of 30.0 on BrowseComp-en and 46.5 on BrowseComp-zh, which demonstrates its strong capability in complex, reasoning-heavy information-seeking tasks at scale.

Peihua Mai, Youjia Yang, Ran Yan et al.

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are typically deployed as online services, requiring users to transmit detailed prompts to cloud servers. This raises significant privacy concerns. In response, we introduce ConfusionPrompt, a novel framework for private LLM inference that protects user privacy by: (i) decomposing the original prompt into smaller sub-prompts, and (ii) generating pseudo-prompts alongside the genuine sub-prompts, which are then sent to the LLM. The server responses are later recomposed by the user to reconstruct the final output. This approach offers key advantages over previous LLM privacy protection methods: (i) it integrates seamlessly with existing black-box LLMs, and (ii) it delivers a significantly improved privacy-utility trade-off compared to existing text perturbation methods. We also develop a $(λ, μ, ρ)$-privacy model to formulate the requirements for a privacy-preserving group of prompts and provide a complexity analysis to justify the role of prompt decomposition. Our empirical evaluation shows that ConfusionPrompt achieves significantly higher utility than local inference methods using open-source models and perturbation-based techniques, while also reducing memory consumption compared to open-source LLMs.

Tingjia Miao, Jiawen Dai, Jingkun Liu et al.

Advances in LLMs have produced agents with knowledge and operational capabilities comparable to human scientists, suggesting potential to assist, accelerate, and automate research. However, existing studies mainly evaluate such systems on well-defined benchmarks or general tasks like literature retrieval, limiting their end-to-end problem-solving ability in open scientific scenarios. This is particularly true in physics, which is abstract, mathematically intensive, and requires integrating analytical reasoning with code-based computation. To address this, we propose PhysMaster, an LLM-based agent functioning as an autonomous theoretical and computational physicist. PhysMaster couples absract reasoning with numerical computation and leverages LANDAU, the Layered Academic Data Universe, which preserves retrieved literature, curated prior knowledge, and validated methodological traces, enhancing decision reliability and stability. It also employs an adaptive exploration strategy balancing efficiency and open-ended exploration, enabling robust performance in ultra-long-horizon tasks. We evaluate PhysMaster on problems from high-energy theory, condensed matter theory to astrophysics, including: (i) acceleration, compressing labor-intensive research from months to hours; (ii) automation, autonomously executing hypothesis-driven loops ; and (iii) autonomous discovery, independently exploring open problems.

Wenhao Wang, Zijie Yu, Rui Ye et al.

Mobile agents have attracted tremendous research participation recently. Traditional approaches to mobile agent training rely on centralized data collection, leading to high cost and limited scalability. Distributed training utilizing federated learning offers an alternative by harnessing real-world user data, providing scalability and reducing costs. However, pivotal challenges, including the absence of standardized benchmarks, hinder progress in this field. To tackle the challenges, we introduce FedMABench, the first benchmark for federated training and evaluation of mobile agents, specifically designed for heterogeneous scenarios. FedMABench features 6 datasets with 30+ subsets, 8 federated algorithms, 10+ base models, and over 800 apps across 5 categories, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating mobile agents across diverse environments. Through extensive experiments, we uncover several key insights: federated algorithms consistently outperform local training; the distribution of specific apps plays a crucial role in heterogeneity; and, even apps from distinct categories can exhibit correlations during training. FedMABench is publicly available at: https://github.com/wwh0411/FedMABench with the datasets at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/wwh0411/FedMABench.

Kanglin Qu, Pan Gao, Qun Dai et al.

Due to the long-range modeling ability and linear complexity property, Mamba has attracted considerable attention in point cloud analysis. Despite some interesting progress, related work still suffers from imperfect point cloud serialization, insufficient high-level geometric perception, and overfitting of the selective state space model (S6) at the core of Mamba. To this end, we resort to an SSM-based point cloud network termed CloudMamba to address the above challenges. Specifically, we propose sequence expanding and sequence merging, where the former serializes points along each axis separately and the latter serves to fuse the corresponding higher-order features causally inferred from different sequences, enabling unordered point sets to adapt more stably to the causal nature of Mamba without parameters. Meanwhile, we design chainedMamba that chains the forward and backward processes in the parallel bidirectional Mamba, capturing high-level geometric information during scanning. In addition, we propose a grouped selective state space model (GS6) via parameter sharing on S6, alleviating the overfitting problem caused by the computational mode in S6. Experiments on various point cloud tasks validate CloudMamba's ability to achieve state-of-the-art results with significantly less complexity.

Shuo Tang, Rui Ye, Chenxin Xu et al.

Decentralized and lifelong-adaptive multi-agent collaborative learning aims to enhance collaboration among multiple agents without a central server, with each agent solving varied tasks over time. To achieve efficient collaboration, agents should: i) autonomously identify beneficial collaborative relationships in a decentralized manner; and ii) adapt to dynamically changing task observations. In this paper, we propose DeLAMA, a decentralized multi-agent lifelong collaborative learning algorithm with dynamic collaboration graphs. To promote autonomous collaboration relationship learning, we propose a decentralized graph structure learning algorithm, eliminating the need for external priors. To facilitate adaptation to dynamic tasks, we design a memory unit to capture the agents' accumulated learning history and knowledge, while preserving finite storage consumption. To further augment the system's expressive capabilities and computational efficiency, we apply algorithm unrolling, leveraging the advantages of both mathematical optimization and neural networks. This allows the agents to `learn to collaborate' through the supervision of training tasks. Our theoretical analysis verifies that inter-agent collaboration is communication efficient under a small number of communication rounds. The experimental results verify its ability to facilitate the discovery of collaboration strategies and adaptation to dynamic learning scenarios, achieving a 98.80% reduction in MSE and a 188.87% improvement in classification accuracy. We expect our work can serve as a foundational technique to facilitate future works towards an intelligent, decentralized, and dynamic multi-agent system. Code is available at https://github.com/ShuoTang123/DeLAMA.

Tongyi DeepResearch Team, Baixuan Li, Bo Zhang et al.

We present Tongyi DeepResearch, an agentic large language model, which is specifically designed for long-horizon, deep information-seeking research tasks. To incentivize autonomous deep research agency, Tongyi DeepResearch is developed through an end-to-end training framework that combines agentic mid-training and agentic post-training, enabling scalable reasoning and information seeking across complex tasks. We design a highly scalable data synthesis pipeline that is fully automatic, without relying on costly human annotation, and empowers all training stages. By constructing customized environments for each stage, our system enables stable and consistent interactions throughout. Tongyi DeepResearch, featuring 30.5 billion total parameters, with only 3.3 billion activated per token, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of agentic deep research benchmarks, including Humanity's Last Exam, BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, WebWalkerQA, xbench-DeepSearch, FRAMES and xbench-DeepSearch-2510. We open-source the model, framework, and complete solutions to empower the community.

Rui Ye, Zhongwang Zhang, Kuan Li et al.

LLM-based web agents show immense promise for information seeking, yet their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks is hindered by a fundamental trade-off in context management. Prevailing ReAct-based agents suffer from context saturation as they accumulate noisy, raw histories, while methods that fixedly summarize the full history at each step risk the irreversible loss of critical details. Addressing these, we introduce AgentFold, a novel agent paradigm centered on proactive context management, inspired by the human cognitive process of retrospective consolidation. AgentFold treats its context as a dynamic cognitive workspace to be actively sculpted, rather than a passive log to be filled. At each step, it learns to execute a `folding' operation, which manages its historical trajectory at multiple scales: it can perform granular condensations to preserve vital, fine-grained details, or deep consolidations to abstract away entire multi-step sub-tasks. The results on prominent benchmarks are striking: with simple supervised fine-tuning (without continual pre-training or RL), our AgentFold-30B-A3B agent achieves 36.2% on BrowseComp and 47.3% on BrowseComp-ZH. Notably, this performance not only surpasses or matches open-source models of a dramatically larger scale, such as the DeepSeek-V3.1-671B-A37B, but also surpasses leading proprietary agents like OpenAI's o4-mini.

Litu Ou, Kuan Li, Huifeng Yin et al.

Confidence in LLMs is a useful indicator of model uncertainty and answer reliability. Existing work mainly focused on single-turn scenarios, while research on confidence in complex multi-turn interactions is limited. In this paper, we investigate whether LLM-based search agents have the ability to communicate their own confidence through verbalized confidence scores after long sequences of actions, a significantly more challenging task compared to outputting confidence in a single interaction. Experimenting on open-source agentic models, we first find that models exhibit much higher task accuracy at high confidence while having near-zero accuracy when confidence is low. Based on this observation, we propose Test-Time Scaling (TTS) methods that use confidence scores to determine answer quality, encourage the model to try again until reaching a satisfactory confidence level. Results show that our proposed methods significantly reduce token consumption while demonstrating competitive performance compared to baseline fixed budget TTS methods.

Rui Ye, Rui Ge, Xinyu Zhu et al.

Federated learning has enabled multiple parties to collaboratively train large language models without directly sharing their data (FedLLM). Following this training paradigm, the community has put massive efforts from diverse aspects including framework, performance, and privacy. However, an unpleasant fact is that there are currently no realistic datasets and benchmarks for FedLLM and previous works all rely on artificially constructed datasets, failing to capture properties in real-world scenarios. Addressing this, we propose FedLLM-Bench, which involves 8 training methods, 4 training datasets, and 6 evaluation metrics, to offer a comprehensive testbed for the FedLLM community. FedLLM-Bench encompasses three datasets (e.g., user-annotated multilingual dataset) for federated instruction tuning and one dataset (e.g., user-annotated preference dataset) for federated preference alignment, whose scale of client number ranges from 38 to 747. Our datasets incorporate several representative diversities: language, quality, quantity, instruction, length, embedding, and preference, capturing properties in real-world scenarios. Based on FedLLM-Bench, we conduct experiments on all datasets to benchmark existing FL methods and provide empirical insights (e.g., multilingual collaboration). We believe that our FedLLM-Bench can benefit the FedLLM community by reducing required efforts, providing a practical testbed, and promoting fair comparisons. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/rui-ye/FedLLM-Bench.

Rui Ye, Mingkai Xu, Jianyu Wang et al.

This work considers the category distribution heterogeneity in federated learning. This issue is due to biased labeling preferences at multiple clients and is a typical setting of data heterogeneity. To alleviate this issue, most previous works consider either regularizing local models or fine-tuning the global model, while they ignore the adjustment of aggregation weights and simply assign weights based on the dataset size. However, based on our empirical observations and theoretical analysis, we find that the dataset size is not optimal and the discrepancy between local and global category distributions could be a beneficial and complementary indicator for determining aggregation weights. We thus propose a novel aggregation method, Federated Learning with Discrepancy-aware Collaboration (FedDisco), whose aggregation weights not only involve both the dataset size and the discrepancy value, but also contribute to a tighter theoretical upper bound of the optimization error. FedDisco also promotes privacy-preservation, communication and computation efficiency, as well as modularity. Extensive experiments show that our FedDisco outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and can be easily incorporated with many existing methods to further enhance the performance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/FedDisco.

Yijun Lu, Rui Ye, Yuwen Du et al.

Long-horizon search agents must manage a rapidly growing working context as they reason, call tools, and observe information. Naively accumulating all intermediate content can overwhelm the agent, increasing costs and the risk of errors. We propose that effective context management should be adaptive: parts of the agent's trajectory are maintained at different levels of detail depending on their current relevance to the task. To operationalize this principle, we introduce Context-ReAct, a general agentic paradigm for elastic context orchestration that integrates reasoning, context management, and tool use in a unified loop. Context-ReAct provides five atomic operations: Skip, Compress, Rollback, Snippet and Delete, which allow the agent to dynamically reshape its working context, preserving important evidence, summarizing resolved information, discarding unhelpful branches, and controlling context size. We prove that the Compress operator is expressively complete, while the other specialized operators provide efficiency and fidelity guarantees that reduce generation cost and hallucination risk. Building on this paradigm, we develop LongSeeker, a long-horizon search agent fine-tuned from Qwen3-30B-A3B on 10k synthesized trajectories. Across four representative search benchmarks, LongSeeker achieves 61.5% on BrowseComp and 62.5% on BrowseComp-ZH, substantially outperforming Tongyi DeepResearch (43.2% and 46.7%) and AgentFold (36.2% and 47.3%). These results highlight the potential of adaptive context management, showing that agents can achieve more reliable and efficient long-horizon reasoning by actively shaping their working memory.

Xianghe Pang, Shuo Tang, Rui Ye et al.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is imperative to mitigate potential adverse effects resulting from their misuse. Drawing from the sociological insight that acknowledging all parties' concerns is a key factor in shaping human values, this paper proposes a novel direction to align LLMs by themselves: social scene simulation. To achieve this, we present MATRIX, a novel social scene simulator that emulates realistic scenes around a user's input query, enabling the LLM to take social consequences into account before responding. MATRIX serves as a virtual rehearsal space, akin to a Monopolylogue, where the LLM performs diverse roles related to the query and practice by itself. To inject this alignment, we fine-tune the LLM with MATRIX-simulated data, ensuring adherence to human values without compromising inference speed. We theoretically show that the LLM with MATRIX outperforms Constitutional AI under mild assumptions. Finally, extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms over 10 baselines across 4 benchmarks. As evidenced by 875 user ratings, our tuned 13B-size LLM exceeds GPT-4 in aligning with human values. See our project page at https://shuotang123.github.io/MATRIX.

Rui Ye, Xianghe Pang, Jingyi Chai et al.

Scholarly peer review is a cornerstone of scientific advancement, but the system is under strain due to increasing manuscript submissions and the labor-intensive nature of the process. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to their integration into peer review, with promising results such as substantial overlaps between LLM- and human-generated reviews. However, the unchecked adoption of LLMs poses significant risks to the integrity of the peer review system. In this study, we comprehensively analyze the vulnerabilities of LLM-generated reviews by focusing on manipulation and inherent flaws. Our experiments show that injecting covert deliberate content into manuscripts allows authors to explicitly manipulate LLM reviews, leading to inflated ratings and reduced alignment with human reviews. In a simulation, we find that manipulating 5% of the reviews could potentially cause 12% of the papers to lose their position in the top 30% rankings. Implicit manipulation, where authors strategically highlight minor limitations in their papers, further demonstrates LLMs' susceptibility compared to human reviewers, with a 4.5 times higher consistency with disclosed limitations. Additionally, LLMs exhibit inherent flaws, such as potentially assigning higher ratings to incomplete papers compared to full papers and favoring well-known authors in single-blind review process. These findings highlight the risks of over-reliance on LLMs in peer review, underscoring that we are not yet ready for widespread adoption and emphasizing the need for robust safeguards.

Zhuofu Tao, Yichen Shi, Yiru Huo et al.

Today's analog/mixed-signal (AMS) integrated circuit (IC) designs demand substantial manual intervention. The advent of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has unveiled significant potential across various fields, suggesting their applicability in streamlining large-scale AMS IC design as well. A bottleneck in employing MLLMs for automatic AMS circuit generation is the absence of a comprehensive dataset delineating the schematic-netlist relationship. We therefore design an automatic technique for converting schematics into netlists, and create dataset AMSNet, encompassing transistor-level schematics and corresponding SPICE format netlists. With a growing size, AMSNet can significantly facilitate exploration of MLLM applications in AMS circuit design. We have made an initial set of netlists public, and will make both our netlist generation tool and the full dataset available upon publishing of this paper.

Shuo Tang, Xianghe Pang, Zexi Liu et al.

Post-training is essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions. However, its effectiveness depends on high-quality instruction data, which is challenging to obtain in the real world due to privacy concerns, data scarcity, and high annotation costs. To fill this gap, inspired by the recent success of using LLMs to simulate human society, we propose MATRIX, a multi-agent simulator that automatically generates diverse text-based scenarios, capturing a wide range of real-world human needs in a realistic and scalable manner. Leveraging these outputs, we introduce a novel scenario-driven instruction generator MATRIX-Gen for controllable and highly realistic data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively generates both general and domain-specific data. On AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks, Llama-3-8B-Base, post-trained on datasets synthesized by MATRIX-Gen with just 20K instruction-response pairs, outperforms Meta's Llama-3-8B-Instruct model, which was trained on over 10M pairs.

Rui Ye, Xiangrui Liu, Qimin Wu et al.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) extend the capabilities of single LLMs by enabling cooperation among multiple specialized agents. However, most existing MAS frameworks rely on a single LLM to drive all agents, constraining the system's intelligence to the limit of that model. This paper explores the paradigm of heterogeneous LLM-driven MAS (X-MAS), where agents are powered by diverse LLMs, elevating the system's potential to the collective intelligence of diverse LLMs. We introduce X-MAS-Bench, a comprehensive testbed designed to evaluate the performance of various LLMs across different domains and MAS-related functions. As an extensive empirical study, we assess 27 LLMs across 5 domains (encompassing 21 test sets) and 5 functions, conducting over 1.7 million evaluations to identify optimal model selections for each domain-function combination. Building on these findings, we demonstrate that transitioning from homogeneous to heterogeneous LLM-driven MAS can significantly enhance system performance without requiring structural redesign. Specifically, in a chatbot-only MAS scenario, the heterogeneous configuration yields up to 8.4\% performance improvement on the MATH dataset. In a mixed chatbot-reasoner scenario, the heterogeneous MAS could achieve a remarkable 47\% performance boost on the AIME dataset. Our results underscore the transformative potential of heterogeneous LLMs in MAS, highlighting a promising avenue for advancing scalable, collaborative AI systems.

Zexi Liu, Jingyi Chai, Xinyu Zhu et al.

The emergence of large language model (LLM)-based agents has significantly advanced the development of autonomous machine learning (ML) engineering. However, most existing approaches rely heavily on manual prompt engineering, failing to adapt and optimize based on diverse experimental experiences. Focusing on this, for the first time, we explore the paradigm of learning-based agentic ML, where an LLM agent learns through interactive experimentation on ML tasks using online reinforcement learning (RL). To realize this, we propose a novel agentic ML training framework with three key components: (1) exploration-enriched fine-tuning, which enables LLM agents to generate diverse actions for enhanced RL exploration; (2) step-wise RL, which enables training on a single action step, accelerating experience collection and improving training efficiency; (3) an agentic ML-specific reward module, which unifies varied ML feedback signals into consistent rewards for RL optimization. Leveraging this framework, we train ML-Agent, driven by a 7B-sized Qwen-2.5 LLM for autonomous ML. Remarkably, despite being trained on merely 9 ML tasks, our 7B-sized ML-Agent outperforms the 671B-sized DeepSeek-R1 agent. Furthermore, it achieves continuous performance improvements and demonstrates exceptional cross-task generalization capabilities.

Wenhao Wang, Mengying Yuan, Zijie Yu et al.

The advancement of mobile GUI agents has opened new opportunities for automating tasks on mobile devices. Training these agents requires large-scale high-quality data, which is prohibitively expensive when relying on human labor. Given the vast population of global mobile phone users, if automated data collection from them becomes feasible, the resulting data volume and the subsequently trained mobile agents could reach unprecedented levels. Nevertheless, two major challenges arise: (1) extracting user instructions without human intervention and (2) utilizing distributed user data while preserving privacy. To tackle these challenges, we propose MobileA3gent, a collaborative framework that trains mobile GUI Agents using decentralized self-sourced data from diverse users. The framework comprises two components, each targeting a specific challenge: (1) Auto-Annotation, which enables the automatic collection of high-quality datasets during users' routine phone usage with minimal cost. (2) FedVLM-A, which enhances federated VLM training under non-IID distributions by incorporating adapted global aggregation based on both episode-level and step-level variability. Extensive experiments prove that MobileA3gent achieves superior performance over traditional approaches at only 1% of the cost, highlighting its potential for real-world applications

Yaxin Du, Rui Ye, Fengting Yuchi et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative instruction tuning of large language models (LLMs) by leveraging massively distributed data. However, the decentralized nature of FL exacerbates data quality challenges, as local clients lack global visibility to filter noisy or low-quality samples before training. To resolve this issue, we propose FedDQC, a novel federated instruction tuning framework with dynamic data quality control. Our approach introduces two key innovations. First, we propose instruction-response alignment (IRA), an efficient client-side metric for quality evaluation requiring only low-cost inference. We validate that higher-IRA data corresponds to more relevant and easier-to-learn question-answer pairs. Second, mirroring the human easy-to-hard knowledge acquisition process, we design a quality-aware hierarchical FL training framework, where the LLM is progressively fine-tuned from high- to low-IRA data in a collaborative manner. The framework also supports adaptive data quality assessment at each hierarchy, enabling dynamic adjustments throughout the training process. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method significantly improves LLM performance on mixed-quality data in FL.

Shaoheng Fang, Rui Ye, Wenhao Wang et al.

Roadside unit (RSU) can significantly improve the safety and robustness of autonomous vehicles through Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. Currently, the usage of a single RSU mainly focuses on real-time inference and V2X collaboration, while neglecting the potential value of the high-quality data collected by RSU sensors. Integrating the vast amounts of data from numerous RSUs can provide a rich source of data for model training. However, the absence of ground truth annotations and the difficulty of transmitting enormous volumes of data are two inevitable barriers to fully exploiting this hidden value. In this paper, we introduce FedRSU, an innovative federated learning framework for self-supervised scene flow estimation. In FedRSU, we present a recurrent self-supervision training paradigm, where for each RSU, the scene flow prediction of points at every timestamp can be supervised by its subsequent future multi-modality observation. Another key component of FedRSU is federated learning, where multiple devices collaboratively train an ML model while keeping the training data local and private. With the power of the recurrent self-supervised learning paradigm, FL is able to leverage innumerable underutilized data from RSU. To verify the FedRSU framework, we construct a large-scale multi-modality dataset RSU-SF. The dataset consists of 17 RSU clients, covering various scenarios, modalities, and sensor settings. Based on RSU-SF, we show that FedRSU can greatly improve model performance in ITS and provide a comprehensive benchmark under diverse FL scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first real-world LiDAR-camera multi-modal dataset and benchmark for the FL community.

Enpei Zhang, Jingyi Chai, Rui Ye et al.

While data plays a crucial role in training contemporary AI models, it is acknowledged that valuable public data will be exhausted in a few years, directing the world's attention towards the massive decentralized private data. However, the privacy-sensitive nature of raw data and lack of incentive mechanism prevent these valuable data from being fully exploited. Addressing these challenges, this paper proposes inclusive and incentivized personalized federated learning (iPFL), which incentivizes data holders with diverse purposes to collaboratively train personalized models without revealing raw data. iPFL constructs a model-sharing market by solving a graph-based training optimization and incorporates an incentive mechanism based on game theory principles. Theoretical analysis shows that iPFL adheres to two key incentive properties: individual rationality and truthfulness. Empirical studies on eleven AI tasks (e.g., large language models' instruction-following tasks) demonstrate that iPFL consistently achieves the highest economic utility, and better or comparable model performance compared to baseline methods. We anticipate that our iPFL can serve as a valuable technique for boosting future AI models on decentralized private data while making everyone satisfied.

Zhengwei Tao, Haiyang Shen, Baixuan Li et al.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as a transformative approach for open-ended problem solving, with information seeking (IS) being a core capability that enables autonomous reasoning and decision-making. While prior research has largely focused on improving retrieval depth, we observe that current IS agents often suffer from low search efficiency, which in turn constrains overall performance. A key factor underlying this inefficiency is the sparsity of target entities in training tasks, which limits opportunities for agents to learn and generalize efficient search behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose WebLeaper, a framework for constructing high-coverage IS tasks and generating efficient solution trajectories. We formulate IS as a tree-structured reasoning problem, enabling a substantially larger set of target entities to be embedded within a constrained context. Leveraging curated Wikipedia tables, we propose three variants for synthesizing IS tasks, Basic, Union, and Reverse-Union, to systematically increase both IS efficiency and efficacy. Finally, we curate training trajectories by retaining only those that are simultaneously accurate and efficient, ensuring that the model is optimized for both correctness and search performance. Extensive experiments on both basic and comprehensive settings, conducted on five IS benchmarks, BrowserComp, GAIA, xbench-DeepSearch, WideSearch, and Seal-0, demonstrate that our method consistently achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency over strong baselines.

Tingrui Zhang, Honglin Wu, Zekun Jiang et al.

Aimed to develop and validate a CT radiomics-based explainable machine learning model for precise diagnosing malignancy and benignity specifically in endometrial cancer (EC) patients. A total of 83 EC patients from two centers, including 46 with malignant and 37 with benign conditions, were included, with data split into a training set (n=59) and a testing set (n=24). The regions of interest (ROIs) were manually segmented from pre-surgical CT scans, and 1132 radiomic features were extracted from the pre-surgical CT scans using Pyradiomics. Six explainable machine learning (ML) modeling algorithms were implemented respectively, for determining the optimal radiomics pipeline. The diagnostic performance of the radiomic model was evaluated by using sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, precision, F1 score, AUROC, and AUPRC. To enhance clinical understanding and usability, we separately implemented SHAP analysis and feature mapping visualization, and evaluated the calibration curve and decision curve. By comparing six modeling strategies, the Random Forest model emerged as the optimal choice for diagnosing EC, with a training AUROC of 1.00 and a testing AUROC of 0.96. SHAP identified the most important radiomic features, revealing that all selected features were significantly associated with EC (P < 0.05). Radiomics feature maps also provide a feasible assessment tool for clinical applications. Decision Curve Analysis (DCA) indicated a higher net benefit for our model compared to the "All" and "None" strategies, suggesting its clinical utility in identifying high-risk cases and reducing unnecessary interventions. In conclusion, the CT radiomics-based explainable ML model achieved high diagnostic performance, which could be used as an intelligent auxiliary tool for the diagnosis of endometrial cancer.

Dengfeng Liu, Jucai Zhai, Xiaoguang Jiang et al.

Code completion technology based on large language model has significantly improved the development efficiency of programmers. However, in practical applications, there remains a gap between current commonly used code completion evaluation metrics and users' actual perception. To address this issue, we propose two evaluation metrics for code completion tasks--LCP and ROUGE-LCP, from the perspective of probabilistic modeling. Furthermore, to tackle the lack of effective structural semantic modeling and cross-module dependency information in LLMs for repository-level code completion scenarios, we propose a data processing method based on a Structure-Preserving and Semantically-Reordered Code Graph (SPSR-Graph). Through theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed evaluation metrics in terms of user perception consistency, as well as the effectiveness of the data processing method in enhancing model performance.

Rui Ye, Jingyi Chai, Xiangrui Liu et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple parties to collaboratively fine-tune an large language model (LLM) without the need of direct data sharing. Ideally, by training on decentralized data that is aligned with human preferences and safety principles, federated instruction tuning can result in an LLM that could behave in a helpful and safe manner. In this paper, we for the first time reveal the vulnerability of safety alignment in FedIT by proposing a simple, stealthy, yet effective safety attack method. Specifically, the malicious clients could automatically generate attack data without involving manual efforts and attack the FedIT system by training their local LLMs on such attack data. Unfortunately, this proposed safety attack not only can compromise the safety alignment of LLM trained via FedIT, but also can not be effectively defended against by many existing FL defense methods. Targeting this, we further propose a post-hoc defense method, which could rely on a fully automated pipeline: generation of defense data and further fine-tuning of the LLM. Extensive experiments show that our safety attack method can significantly compromise the LLM's safety alignment (e.g., reduce safety rate by 70\%), which can not be effectively defended by existing defense methods (at most 4\% absolute improvement), while our safety defense method can significantly enhance the attacked LLM's safety alignment (at most 69\% absolute improvement).

Kexin Lv, Rui Ye, Xiaolin Huang et al.

Personalized federated learning aims to address data heterogeneity across local clients in federated learning. However, current methods blindly incorporate either full model parameters or predefined partial parameters in personalized federated learning. They fail to customize the collaboration manner according to each local client's data characteristics, causing unpleasant aggregation results. To address this essential issue, we propose $\textit{Learn2pFed}$, a novel algorithm-unrolling-based personalized federated learning framework, enabling each client to adaptively select which part of its local model parameters should participate in collaborative training. The key novelty of the proposed $\textit{Learn2pFed}$ is to optimize each local model parameter's degree of participant in collaboration as learnable parameters via algorithm unrolling methods. This approach brings two benefits: 1) mathmatically determining the participation degree of local model parameters in the federated collaboration, and 2) obtaining more stable and improved solutions. Extensive experiments on various tasks, including regression, forecasting, and image classification, demonstrate that $\textit{Learn2pFed}$ significantly outperforms previous personalized federated learning methods.

Rui Ye, Yaxin Du, Zhenyang Ni et al.

In federated learning (FL), data heterogeneity is one key bottleneck that causes model divergence and limits performance. Addressing this, existing methods often regard data heterogeneity as an inherent property and propose to mitigate its adverse effects by correcting models. In this paper, we seek to break this inherent property by generating data to complement the original dataset to fundamentally mitigate heterogeneity level. As a novel attempt from the perspective of data, we propose federated learning with consensus-oriented generation (FedCOG). FedCOG consists of two key components at the client side: complementary data generation, which generates data extracted from the shared global model to complement the original dataset, and knowledge-distillation-based model training, which distills knowledge from global model to local model based on the generated data to mitigate over-fitting the original heterogeneous dataset. FedCOG has two critical advantages: 1) it can be a plug-and-play module to further improve the performance of most existing FL methods, and 2) it is naturally compatible with standard FL protocols such as Secure Aggregation since it makes no modification in communication process. Extensive experiments on classical and real-world FL datasets show that FedCOG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Rui Ye, Xinyu Zhu, Jingyi Chai et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables leveraging distributed private data for model training in a privacy-preserving way. However, data heterogeneity significantly limits the performance of current FL methods. In this paper, we propose a novel FL framework termed FedGC, designed to mitigate data heterogeneity issues by diversifying private data with generative content. FedGC is a simple-to-implement framework as it only introduces a one-shot step of data generation. In data generation, we summarize three crucial and worth-exploring aspects (budget allocation, prompt design, and generation guidance) and propose three solution candidates for each aspect. Specifically, to achieve a better trade-off between data diversity and fidelity for generation guidance, we propose to generate data based on the guidance of prompts and real data simultaneously. The generated data is then merged with private data to facilitate local model training. Such generative data increases the diversity of private data to prevent each client from fitting the potentially biased private data, alleviating the issue of data heterogeneity. We conduct a systematic empirical study on FedGC, covering diverse baselines, datasets, scenarios, and modalities. Interesting findings include (1) FedGC consistently and significantly enhances the performance of FL methods, even when notable disparities exist between generative and private data; (2) FedGC achieves both better performance and privacy-preservation. We wish this work can inspire future works to further explore the potential of enhancing FL with generative content.

Baoquan Zhang, Shanshan Feng, Xutao Li et al.

Few-Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification (FSRSSC) is an important task, which aims to recognize novel scene classes with few examples. Recently, several studies attempt to address the FSRSSC problem by following few-shot natural image classification methods. These existing methods have made promising progress and achieved superior performance. However, they all overlook two unique characteristics of remote sensing images: (i) object co-occurrence that multiple objects tend to appear together in a scene image and (ii) object spatial correlation that these co-occurrence objects are distributed in the scene image following some spatial structure patterns. Such unique characteristics are very beneficial for FSRSSC, which can effectively alleviate the scarcity issue of labeled remote sensing images since they can provide more refined descriptions for each scene class. To fully exploit these characteristics, we propose a novel scene graph matching-based meta-learning framework for FSRSSC, called SGMNet. In this framework, a scene graph construction module is carefully designed to represent each test remote sensing image or each scene class as a scene graph, where the nodes reflect these co-occurrence objects meanwhile the edges capture the spatial correlations between these co-occurrence objects. Then, a scene graph matching module is further developed to evaluate the similarity score between each test remote sensing image and each scene class. Finally, based on the similarity scores, we perform the scene class prediction via a nearest neighbor classifier. We conduct extensive experiments on UCMerced LandUse, WHU19, AID, and NWPU-RESISC45 datasets. The experimental results show that our method obtains superior performance over the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Chuyao Luo, ZhengZhang, Rui Ye et al.

Natural disasters caused by heavy rainfall often cost huge loss of life and property. To avoid it, the task of precipitation nowcasting is imminent. To solve the problem, increasingly deep learning methods are proposed to forecast future radar echo images and then the predicted maps have converted the distribution of rainfall. The prevailing spatiotemporal sequence prediction methods apply ConvRNN structure which combines the Convolution and Recurrent neural network. Although improvements based on ConvRNN achieve remarkable success, these methods ignore capturing both local and global spatial features simultaneously, which degrades the nowcasting in the region of heavy rainfall. To address this issue, we proposed the Region Attention Block (RAB) and embed it into ConvRNN to enhance the forecast in the area with strong rainfall. Besides, the ConvRNN models are hard to memory longer history representations with limited parameters. Considering it, we propose Recall Attention Mechanism (RAM) to improve the prediction. By preserving longer temporal information, RAM contributes to the forecasting, especially in the middle rainfall intensity. The experiments show that the proposed model Region Attention Predictive Network (RAP-Net) has outperformed the state-of-art method.

Baoquan Zhang, Xutao Li, Shanshan Feng et al.

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is a challenging task, \emph{i.e.}, how to recognize novel classes with few examples? Pre-training based methods effectively tackle the problem by pre-training a feature extractor and then predicting novel classes via a cosine nearest neighbor classifier with mean-based prototypes. Nevertheless, due to the data scarcity, the mean-based prototypes are usually biased. In this paper, we attempt to diminish the prototype bias by regarding it as a prototype optimization problem. To this end, we propose a novel meta-learning based prototype optimization framework to rectify prototypes, \emph{i.e.}, introducing a meta-optimizer to optimize prototypes. Although the existing meta-optimizers can also be adapted to our framework, they all overlook a crucial gradient bias issue, \emph{i.e.}, the mean-based gradient estimation is also biased on sparse data. To address the issue, we regard the gradient and its flow as meta-knowledge and then propose a novel Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE)-based meta-optimizer to polish prototypes, called MetaNODE. In this meta-optimizer, we first view the mean-based prototypes as initial prototypes, and then model the process of prototype optimization as continuous-time dynamics specified by a Neural ODE. A gradient flow inference network is carefully designed to learn to estimate the continuous gradient flow for prototype dynamics. Finally, the optimal prototypes can be obtained by solving the Neural ODE. Extensive experiments on miniImagenet, tieredImagenet, and CUB-200-2011 show the effectiveness of our method.