Jia Liu

Jia Liu, Wenjie Xuan, Yuhang Gan et al.

Existing deep learning-based change detection methods try to elaborately design complicated neural networks with powerful feature representations, but ignore the universal domain shift induced by time-varying land cover changes, including luminance fluctuations and season changes between pre-event and post-event images, thereby producing sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Supervised Domain Adaptation framework for cross-domain Change Detection, namely SDACD, to effectively alleviate the domain shift between bi-temporal images for better change predictions. Specifically, our SDACD presents collaborative adaptations from both image and feature perspectives with supervised learning. Image adaptation exploits generative adversarial learning with cycle-consistency constraints to perform cross-domain style transformation, effectively narrowing the domain gap in a two-side generation fashion. As to feature adaptation, we extract domain-invariant features to align different feature distributions in the feature space, which could further reduce the domain gap of cross-domain images. To further improve the performance, we combine three types of bi-temporal images for the final change prediction, including the initial input bi-temporal images and two generated bi-temporal images from the pre-event and post-event domains. Extensive experiments and analyses on two benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our proposed framework. Notably, our framework pushes several representative baseline models up to new State-Of-The-Art records, achieving 97.34% and 92.36% on the CDD and WHU building datasets, respectively. The source code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Perfect-You/SDACD.

Anbai Jiang, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Yufeng Deng et al.

Automatic detection of machine anomaly remains challenging for machine learning. We believe the capability of generative adversarial network (GAN) suits the need of machine audio anomaly detection, yet rarely has this been investigated by previous work. In this paper, we propose AEGAN-AD, a totally unsupervised approach in which the generator (also an autoencoder) is trained to reconstruct input spectrograms. It is pointed out that the denoising nature of reconstruction deprecates its capacity. Thus, the discriminator is redesigned to aid the generator during both training stage and detection stage. The performance of AEGAN-AD on the dataset of DCASE 2022 Challenge TASK 2 demonstrates the state-of-the-art result on five machine types. A novel anomaly localization method is also investigated. Source code available at: www.github.com/jianganbai/AEGAN-AD

Haisong Liu, Tao Lu, Yihui Xu et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of jointly estimating the optical flow and scene flow from synchronized 2D and 3D data. Previous methods either employ a complex pipeline that splits the joint task into independent stages, or fuse 2D and 3D information in an ``early-fusion'' or ``late-fusion'' manner. Such one-size-fits-all approaches suffer from a dilemma of failing to fully utilize the characteristic of each modality or to maximize the inter-modality complementarity. To address the problem, we propose a novel end-to-end framework, which consists of 2D and 3D branches with multiple bidirectional fusion connections between them in specific layers. Different from previous work, we apply a point-based 3D branch to extract the LiDAR features, as it preserves the geometric structure of point clouds. To fuse dense image features and sparse point features, we propose a learnable operator named bidirectional camera-LiDAR fusion module (Bi-CLFM). We instantiate two types of the bidirectional fusion pipeline, one based on the pyramidal coarse-to-fine architecture (dubbed CamLiPWC), and the other one based on the recurrent all-pairs field transforms (dubbed CamLiRAFT). On FlyingThings3D, both CamLiPWC and CamLiRAFT surpass all existing methods and achieve up to a 47.9\% reduction in 3D end-point-error from the best published result. Our best-performing model, CamLiRAFT, achieves an error of 4.26\% on the KITTI Scene Flow benchmark, ranking 1st among all submissions with much fewer parameters. Besides, our methods have strong generalization performance and the ability to handle non-rigid motion. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/CamLiFlow.

Yizhe Ding, Runze Li, Jia Liu et al.

This paper establishes a theoretical framework for the uniform convergence of smoothly activated deep neural network (DNN) estimators. While standard ReLU networks achieve minimax-optimal rates in the $L^2(P)$ norm for various nonparametric regression tasks, we establish a theoretical lower bound demonstrating that least-squares ReLU estimators can suffer from the curse of dimensionality in their uniform convergence behavior. Motivated by the need for reliable uniform guarantees in downstream tasks requiring worst-case reliability, we address this limitation by analyzing smoothly activated DNNs (smooth DNNs), encompassing both feedforward and residual structures. We establish novel pseudo-dimension bounds, non-asymptotic approximation guarantees, and Hölder-norm bounds for the approximators of these models. Leveraging these results, we derive non-asymptotic uniform convergence rates for smooth DNN estimators across multiple statistical contexts, including Huber, least-squares, quantile, and logistic regression. We prove that smooth DNNs can mitigate the {curse of dimensionality} in uniform convergence by adaptively exploiting the low-dimensional hierarchical composition structure of the target function. Supported by both simulation studies and a real-world application, our results position smooth DNNs as a theoretically grounded and practically viable alternative to ReLU networks for statistical learning tasks requiring uniform guarantees.

Jia Liu, Cathy H. Xia, Ness B. Shroff et al.

Due to the rapidly growing scale and heterogeneity of wireless networks, the design of distributed cross-layer optimization algorithms have received significant interest from the networking research community. So far, the standard distributed cross-layer approach in the literature is based on first-order Lagrangian dual decomposition and the subgradient method, which suffers a slow convergence rate. In this paper, we make the first known attempt to develop a distributed Newton's method, which is second-order and enjoys a quadratic convergence rate. However, due to interference in wireless networks, the Hessian matrix of the cross-layer problem has an non-separable structure. As a result, developing a distributed second-order algorithm is far more challenging than its counterpart for wireline networks. Our main results in this paper are two-fold: i) For a special network setting where all links mutually interfere, we derive decentralized closed-form expressions to compute the Hessian inverse; ii) For general wireless networks where the interference relationships are arbitrary, we propose a distributed iterative matrix splitting scheme for the Hessian inverse. These results successfully lead to a new theoretical framework for cross-layer optimization in wireless networks. More importantly, our work contributes to an exciting second-order paradigm shift in wireless networks optimization theory.

Minghong Fang, Jia Liu, Neil Zhenqiang Gong et al.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm, in which clients jointly learn a model with the help of a cloud server. A fundamental challenge of FL is that the clients are often heterogeneous, e.g., they have different computing powers, and thus the clients may send model updates to the server with substantially different delays. Asynchronous FL aims to address this challenge by enabling the server to update the model once any client's model update reaches it without waiting for other clients' model updates. However, like synchronous FL, asynchronous FL is also vulnerable to poisoning attacks, in which malicious clients manipulate the model via poisoning their local data and/or model updates sent to the server. Byzantine-robust FL aims to defend against poisoning attacks. In particular, Byzantine-robust FL can learn an accurate model even if some clients are malicious and have Byzantine behaviors. However, most existing studies on Byzantine-robust FL focused on synchronous FL, leaving asynchronous FL largely unexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing AFLGuard, a Byzantine-robust asynchronous FL method. We show that, both theoretically and empirically, AFLGuard is robust against various existing and adaptive poisoning attacks (both untargeted and targeted). Moreover, AFLGuard outperforms existing Byzantine-robust asynchronous FL methods.

Dalong Zheng, Zebin Wu, Jia Liu et al.

Among the current mainstream change detection networks, transformer is deficient in the ability to capture accurate low-level details, while convolutional neural network (CNN) is wanting in the capacity to understand global information and establish remote spatial relationships. Meanwhile, both of the widely used early fusion and late fusion frameworks are not able to well learn complete change features. Therefore, based on swin transformer V2 (Swin V2) and VGG16, we propose an end-to-end compounded dense network SwinV2DNet to inherit the advantages of both transformer and CNN and overcome the shortcomings of existing networks in feature learning. Firstly, it captures the change relationship features through the densely connected Swin V2 backbone, and provides the low-level pre-changed and post-changed features through a CNN branch. Based on these three change features, we accomplish accurate change detection results. Secondly, combined with transformer and CNN, we propose mixed feature pyramid (MFP) which provides inter-layer interaction information and intra-layer multi-scale information for complete feature learning. MFP is a plug and play module which is experimentally proven to be also effective in other change detection networks. Further more, we impose a self-supervision strategy to guide a new CNN branch, which solves the untrainable problem of the CNN branch and provides the semantic change information for the features of encoder. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) change detection scores and fine-grained change maps were obtained compared with other advanced methods on four commonly used public remote sensing datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/DalongZ/SwinV2DNet.

Jia Liu, Ran Cheng, Yaochu Jin

Deep neural networks have been found vulnerable to adversarial attacks, thus raising potentially concerns in security-sensitive contexts. To address this problem, recent research has investigated the adversarial robustness of deep neural networks from the architectural point of view. However, searching for architectures of deep neural networks is computationally expensive, particularly when coupled with adversarial training process. To meet the above challenge, this paper proposes a bi-fidelity multiobjective neural architecture search approach. First, we formulate the NAS problem for enhancing adversarial robustness of deep neural networks into a multiobjective optimization problem. Specifically, in addition to a low-fidelity performance predictor as the first objective, we leverage an auxiliary-objective -- the value of which is the output of a surrogate model trained with high-fidelity evaluations. Secondly, we reduce the computational cost by combining three performance estimation methods, i.e., parameter sharing, low-fidelity evaluation, and surrogate-based predictor. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed by extensive experiments conducted on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and SVHN datasets.

Dalong Zheng, Zebin Wu, Jia Liu et al.

Change detection has always been a concerned task in the interpretation of remote sensing images. It is essentially a unique binary classification task with two inputs, and there is a change relationship between these two inputs. At present, the mining of change relationship features is usually implicit in the network architectures that contain single-branch or two-branch encoders. However, due to the lack of artificial prior design for change relationship features, these networks cannot learn enough change semantic information and lose more accurate change detection performance. So we propose a network architecture NAME for the explicit mining of change relation features. In our opinion, the change features of change detection should be divided into pre-changed image features, post-changed image features and change relation features. In order to fully mine these three kinds of change features, we propose the triple branch network combining the transformer and convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract and fuse these change features from two perspectives of global information and local information, respectively. In addition, we design the continuous change relation (CCR) branch to further obtain the continuous and detail change relation features to improve the change discrimination capability of the model. The experimental results show that our network performs better, in terms of F1, IoU, and OA, than those of the existing advanced networks for change detection on four public very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing datasets. Our source code is available at https://github.com/DalongZ/NAME.

Haibo Yang, Peiwen Qiu, Jia Liu et al.

This paper considers over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL). OTA-FL exploits the superposition property of the wireless medium, and performs model aggregation over the air for free. Thus, it can greatly reduce the communication cost incurred in communicating model updates from the edge devices. In order to fully utilize this advantage while providing comparable learning performance to conventional federated learning that presumes model aggregation via noiseless channels, we consider the joint design of transmission scaling and the number of local iterations at each round, given the power constraint at each edge device. We first characterize the training error due to such channel noise in OTA-FL by establishing a fundamental lower bound for general functions with Lipschitz-continuous gradients. Then, by introducing an adaptive transceiver power scaling scheme, we propose an over-the-air federated learning algorithm with joint adaptive computation and power control (ACPC-OTA-FL). We provide the convergence analysis for ACPC-OTA-FL in training with non-convex objective functions and heterogeneous data. We show that the convergence rate of ACPC-OTA-FL matches that of FL with noise-free communications.

Xin Zhang, Jia Liu, Zhengyuan Zhu et al.

Network consensus optimization has received increasing attention in recent years and has found important applications in many scientific and engineering fields. To solve network consensus optimization problems, one of the most well-known approaches is the distributed gradient descent method (DGD). However, in networks with slow communication rates, DGD's performance is unsatisfactory for solving high-dimensional network consensus problems due to the communication bottleneck. This motivates us to design a communication-efficient DGD-type algorithm based on compressed information exchanges. Our contributions in this paper are three-fold: i) We develop a communication-efficient algorithm called amplified-differential compression DGD (ADC-DGD) and show that it converges under {\em any} unbiased compression operator; ii) We rigorously prove the convergence performances of ADC-DGD and show that they match with those of DGD without compression; iii) We reveal an interesting phase transition phenomenon in the convergence speed of ADC-DGD. Collectively, our findings advance the state-of-the-art of network consensus optimization theory.

Donghui Li, Jia Liu, Fang Liu et al.

Deep learning based semantic segmentation is one of the popular methods in remote sensing image segmentation. In this paper, a network based on the widely used encoderdecoder architecture is proposed to accomplish the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images segmentation. With the better representation capability of optical images, we propose to enrich SAR images with generated optical images via the generative adversative network (GAN) trained by numerous SAR and optical images. These optical images can be used as expansions of original SAR images, thus ensuring robust result of segmentation. Then the optical images generated by the GAN are stitched together with the corresponding real images. An attention module following the stitched data is used to strengthen the representation of the objects. Experiments indicate that our method is efficient compared to other commonly used methods

Jia Liu, Hanif D. Sherali

The fast growing scale and heterogeneity of current communication networks necessitate the design of distributed cross-layer optimization algorithms. So far, the standard approach of distributed cross-layer design is based on dual decomposition and the subgradient algorithm, which is a first-order method that has a slow convergence rate. In this paper, we focus on solving a joint multi-path routing and flow control (MRFC) problem by designing a new distributed Newton's method, which is a second-order method and enjoys a quadratic rate of convergence. The major challenges in developing a distributed Newton's method lie in decentralizing the computation of the Hessian matrix and its inverse for both the primal Newton direction and dual variable updates. By appropriately reformulating, rearranging, and exploiting the special problem structures, we show that it is possible to decompose such computations into source nodes and links in the network, thus eliminating the need for global information. Furthermore, we derive closed-form expressions for both the primal Newton direction and dual variable updates, thus significantly reducing the computational complexity. The most attractive feature of our proposed distributed Newton's method is that it requires almost the same scale of information exchange as in first-order methods, while achieving a quadratic rate of convergence as in centralized Newton methods. We provide extensive numerical results to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithm. Our work contributes to the advanced paradigm shift in cross-layer network design that is evolving from first-order to second-order methods.

Peiwen Qiu, Yining Li, Zhuqing Liu et al.

Decentralized bilevel optimization has received increasing attention recently due to its foundational role in many emerging multi-agent learning paradigms (e.g., multi-agent meta-learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning) over peer-to-peer edge networks. However, to work with the limited computation and communication capabilities of edge networks, a major challenge in developing decentralized bilevel optimization techniques is to lower sample and communication complexities. This motivates us to develop a new decentralized bilevel optimization called DIAMOND (decentralized single-timescale stochastic approximation with momentum and gradient-tracking). The contributions of this paper are as follows: i) our DIAMOND algorithm adopts a single-loop structure rather than following the natural double-loop structure of bilevel optimization, which offers low computation and implementation complexity; ii) compared to existing approaches, the DIAMOND algorithm does not require any full gradient evaluations, which further reduces both sample and computational complexities; iii) through a careful integration of momentum information and gradient tracking techniques, we show that the DIAMOND algorithm enjoys $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3/2})$ in sample and communication complexities for achieving an $ε$-stationary solution, both of which are independent of the dataset sizes and significantly outperform existing works. Extensive experiments also verify our theoretical findings.

Xin Zhang, Minghong Fang, Zhuqing Liu et al.

Federated learning (FL) has received a surge of interest in recent years thanks to its benefits in data privacy protection, efficient communication, and parallel data processing. Also, with appropriate algorithmic designs, one could achieve the desirable linear speedup for convergence effect in FL. However, most existing works on FL are limited to systems with i.i.d. data and centralized parameter servers and results on decentralized FL with heterogeneous datasets remains limited. Moreover, whether or not the linear speedup for convergence is achievable under fully decentralized FL with data heterogeneity remains an open question. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a new algorithm, called NET-FLEET, for fully decentralized FL systems with data heterogeneity. The key idea of our algorithm is to enhance the local update scheme in FL (originally intended for communication efficiency) by incorporating a recursive gradient correction technique to handle heterogeneous datasets. We show that, under appropriate parameter settings, the proposed NET-FLEET algorithm achieves a linear speedup for convergence. We further conduct extensive numerical experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed NET-FLEET algorithm and verify our theoretical findings.

Minghong Fang, Jia Liu, Michinari Momma et al.

Today, recommender systems have played an increasingly important role in shaping our experiences of digital environments and social interactions. However, as recommender systems become ubiquitous in our society, recent years have also witnessed significant fairness concerns for recommender systems. Specifically, studies have shown that recommender systems may inherit or even amplify biases from historical data, and as a result, provide unfair recommendations. To address fairness risks in recommender systems, most of the previous approaches to date are focused on modifying either the existing training data samples or the deployed recommender algorithms, but unfortunately with limited degrees of success. In this paper, we propose a new approach called fair recommendation with optimized antidote data (FairRoad), which aims to improve the fairness performances of recommender systems through the construction of a small and carefully crafted antidote dataset. Toward this end, we formulate our antidote data generation task as a mathematical optimization problem, which minimizes the unfairness of the targeted recommender systems while not disrupting the deployed recommendation algorithms. Extensive experiments show that our proposed antidote data generation algorithm significantly improve the fairness of recommender systems with a small amounts of antidote data.

Ziyuan Zhuang, Zhiyang Zhang, Sitao Cheng et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encounter difficulties when addressing complex questions like multi-hop queries. While iterative retrieval methods improve performance by gathering additional information, current approaches often rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce EfficientRAG, an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering. EfficientRAG iteratively generates new queries without the need for LLM calls at each iteration and filters out irrelevant information. Experimental results demonstrate that EfficientRAG surpasses existing RAG methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets.

Zhixing Zhang, Ziwei Zhao, Dong Wang et al.

Automatic labeling of coronary arteries is an essential task in the practical diagnosis process of cardiovascular diseases. For experienced radiologists, the anatomically predetermined connections are important for labeling the artery segments accurately, while this prior knowledge is barely explored in previous studies. In this paper, we present a new framework called TopoLab which incorporates the anatomical connections into the network design explicitly. Specifically, the strategies of intra-segment feature aggregation and inter-segment feature interaction are introduced for hierarchical segment feature extraction. Moreover, we propose the anatomy-aware connection classifier to enable classification for each connected segment pair, which effectively exploits the prior topology among the arteries with different categories. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we contribute high-quality annotations of artery labeling to the public orCaScore dataset. The experimental results on both the orCaScore dataset and an in-house dataset show that our TopoLab has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Xinrui Zhou, Yuhao Huang, Wufeng Xue et al.

Localization of the narrowest position of the vessel and corresponding vessel and remnant vessel delineation in carotid ultrasound (US) are essential for carotid stenosis grading (CSG) in clinical practice. However, the pipeline is time-consuming and tough due to the ambiguous boundaries of plaque and temporal variation. To automatize this procedure, a large number of manual delineations are usually required, which is not only laborious but also not reliable given the annotation difficulty. In this study, we present the first video classification framework for automatic CSG. Our contribution is three-fold. First, to avoid the requirement of laborious and unreliable annotation, we propose a novel and effective video classification network for weakly-supervised CSG. Second, to ease the model training, we adopt an inflation strategy for the network, where pre-trained 2D convolution weights can be adapted into the 3D counterpart in our network for an effective warm start. Third, to enhance the feature discrimination of the video, we propose a novel attention-guided multi-dimension fusion (AMDF) transformer encoder to model and integrate global dependencies within and across spatial and temporal dimensions, where two lightweight cross-dimensional attention mechanisms are designed. Our approach is extensively validated on a large clinically collected carotid US video dataset, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance compared with strong competitors.

Minghe Zhang, Chaosheng Dong, Jinmiao Fu et al.

In this paper, we introduce AdaSelection, an adaptive sub-sampling method to identify the most informative sub-samples within each minibatch to speed up the training of large-scale deep learning models without sacrificing model performance. Our method is able to flexibly combines an arbitrary number of baseline sub-sampling methods incorporating the method-level importance and intra-method sample-level importance at each iteration. The standard practice of ad-hoc sampling often leads to continuous training with vast amounts of data from production environments. To improve the selection of data instances during forward and backward passes, we propose recording a constant amount of information per instance from these passes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by testing it across various types of inputs and tasks, including the classification tasks on both image and language datasets, as well as regression tasks. Compared with industry-standard baselines, AdaSelection consistently displays superior performance.

Liujie Zhang, Benzhe Ning, Rui Yang et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has proven effective at unlocking reasoning, self-reflection, and tool-use capabilities in large language models. As models extend to omni-modal inputs and agentic multi-turn workflows, RL training systems face three interdependent challenges: heterogeneous data flows, operational robustness at scale, and the staleness -- throughput tradeoff. We present \textbf{Relax} (Reinforcement Engine Leveraging Agentic X-modality), an open-source RL training engine that addresses these challenges through three co-designed architectural layers. First, an \emph{omni-native architecture} builds multimodal support into the full stack -- from data preprocessing and modality-aware parallelism to inference generation -- rather than retrofitting it onto a text-centric pipeline. Second, each RL role runs as an independent, fault-isolated service that can be scaled, recovered, and upgraded without global coordination. Third, service-level decoupling enables asynchronous training via the TransferQueue data bus, where a single staleness parameter smoothly interpolates among on-policy, near-on-policy, and fully asynchronous execution. Relax achieves a 1.20$\times$ end-to-end speedup over veRL on Qwen3-4B on-policy training. Its fully async mode delivers a 1.76$\times$ speedup over colocate on Qwen3-4B and a 2.00$\times$ speedup on Qwen3-Omni-30B, while all modes converge to the same reward level. Relax supports R3 (Rollout Routing Replay)~\cite{ma2025r3} for MoE models with only 1.9\% overhead, compared to 32\% degradation in veRL under the same configuration. It further demonstrates stable omni-modal RL convergence on Qwen3-Omni across image, text, and audio, sustaining over 2{,}000 steps on video without degradation. Relax is available at https://github.com/rednote-ai/Relax.

Quanen Sun, Changxin Tian, Ke Shi et al.

Scaling laws guide large language model training by relating compute to cross-entropy loss, and recent work further extends them to predict downstream benchmark performance. However, prior approaches face generalization limitations from two aspects: focusing on benchmark-level performance introduces scenario-specific artifacts, while relying on IID validation loss fails to track capability improvements when training distributions vary. In this work, we argue that downstream scaling should be studied at the capability level, which captures shared skill factors across related tasks while abstracting away benchmark-specific noise. We propose SuperValid, a framework that synthesizes OOD (out-of-distribution), capability-aligned validation data by distilling core concepts from benchmarks within a capability domain and expanding them into diverse, knowledge-rich texts. Extensive experiments spanning 17 benchmarks grouped into 6 capability domains show that SuperValid loss exhibits strong and stable correlation with downstream performance across models of different architectures, scales, and training data distributions. As a training-free metric computable during training without benchmark evaluation, SuperValid enables effective model selection, early stopping, and scaling decisions.

Hongru Liang, Jia Liu, Weihong Du et al.

The machine reading comprehension (MRC) of user manuals has huge potential in customer service. However, current methods have trouble answering complex questions. Therefore, we introduce the Knowing-how & Knowing-that task that requires the model to answer factoid-style, procedure-style, and inconsistent questions about user manuals. We resolve this task by jointly representing the steps and facts in a graph TARA, which supports a unified inference of various questions. Towards a systematical benchmarking study, we design a heuristic method to automatically parse user manuals into TARAs and build an annotated dataset to test the model's ability in answering real-world questions. Empirical results demonstrate that representing user manuals as TARAs is a desired solution for the MRC of user manuals. An in-depth investigation of TARA further sheds light on the issues and broader impacts of future representations of user manuals. We hope our work can move the MRC of user manuals to a more complex and realistic stage.

Liang Jiang, Zhenyu Huang, Jia Liu et al.

Most domain adaptation methods for machine reading comprehension (MRC) use a pre-trained question-answer (QA) construction model to generate pseudo QA pairs for MRC transfer. Such a process will inevitably introduce mismatched pairs (i.e., noisy correspondence) due to i) the unavailable QA pairs in target documents, and ii) the domain shift during applying the QA construction model to the target domain. Undoubtedly, the noisy correspondence will degenerate the performance of MRC, which however is neglected by existing works. To solve such an untouched problem, we propose to construct QA pairs by additionally using the dialogue related to the documents, as well as a new domain adaptation method for MRC. Specifically, we propose Robust Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension (RMRC) method which consists of an answer extractor (AE), a question selector (QS), and an MRC model. Specifically, RMRC filters out the irrelevant answers by estimating the correlation to the document via the AE, and extracts the questions by fusing the candidate questions in multiple rounds of dialogue chats via the QS. With the extracted QA pairs, MRC is fine-tuned and provides the feedback to optimize the QS through a novel reinforced self-training method. Thanks to the optimization of the QS, our method will greatly alleviate the noisy correspondence problem caused by the domain shift. To the best of our knowledge, this could be the first study to reveal the influence of noisy correspondence in domain adaptation MRC models and show a feasible way to achieve robustness to mismatched pairs. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Peijie Jiang, Yuqi Feng, Cunyin Peng et al.

In contemporary large language models (LLMs), the swish-gated linear unit (SwiGLU) activation function is widely adopted to regulate the information flow and introduce non-linearity. For large positive inputs, SwiGLU approximates the quadratic function $x^2$, providing strong nonlinearity and expressive capacity. However, this property also causes numerical instability as the input or model scale increases, particularly in low-precision LLM training. The main reason is its approximate quadratic amplification, which enlarges the output range and exacerbates outliers. To address this issue, we propose a stable activation function, Power Linear Unit (PowLU), for large-scale LLM pre-training. Specifically, PowLU employs a rational power function to achieve adaptive nonlinearity, thereby improving representation ability and enabling stable training in spike regions. Moreover, we provide theoretical justification for several key properties of PowLU. Scaling law experiments confirm that the performance is consistent across model sizes, and further experimental results with the Ling architecture (7.9B and 124B total parameters) demonstrate that PowLU achieves competitive results against SwiGLU and SwiGLU-Clip in large-scale training of LLMs. In addition, the experimental results also show that PowLU effectively improves the scalability of the large-scale training of LLMs.

Zhuqing Liu, Xin Zhang, Prashant Khanduri et al.

In recent years, decentralized bilevel optimization problems have received increasing attention in the networking and machine learning communities thanks to their versatility in modeling decentralized learning problems over peer-to-peer networks (e.g., multi-agent meta-learning, multi-agent reinforcement learning, personalized training, and Byzantine-resilient learning). However, for decentralized bilevel optimization over peer-to-peer networks with limited computation and communication capabilities, how to achieve low sample and communication complexities are two fundamental challenges that remain under-explored so far. In this paper, we make the first attempt to investigate the class of decentralized bilevel optimization problems with nonconvex and strongly-convex structure corresponding to the outer and inner subproblems, respectively. Our main contributions in this paper are two-fold: i) We first propose a deterministic algorithm called INTERACT (inner-gradient-descent-outer-tracked-gradient) that requires the sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n ε^{-1})$ and communication complexity of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-1})$ to solve the bilevel optimization problem, where $n$ and $ε> 0$ are the number of samples at each agent and the desired stationarity gap, respectively. ii) To relax the need for full gradient evaluations in each iteration, we propose a stochastic variance-reduced version of INTERACT (SVR-INTERACT), which improves the sample complexity to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n} ε^{-1})$ while achieving the same communication complexity as the deterministic algorithm. To our knowledge, this work is the first that achieves both low sample and communication complexities for solving decentralized bilevel optimization problems over networks. Our numerical experiments also corroborate our theoretical findings.

Moyan Li, Jinmiao Fu, Shaoyuan Xu et al.

On shopping websites, product images of low quality negatively affect customer experience. Although there are plenty of work in detecting images with different defects, few efforts have been dedicated to correct those defects at scale. A major challenge is that there are thousands of product types and each has specific defects, therefore building defect specific models is unscalable. In this paper, we propose a unified Image-to-Image (I2I) translation model to correct multiple defects across different product types. Our model leverages an attention mechanism to hierarchically incorporate high-level defect groups and specific defect types to guide the network to focus on defect-related image regions. Evaluated on eight public datasets, our model reduces the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) by 24.6% in average compared with MoNCE, the state-of-the-art I2I method. Unlike public data, another practical challenge on shopping websites is that some paired images are of low quality. Therefore we design our model to be semi-paired by combining the L1 loss of paired data with the cycle loss of unpaired data. Tested on a shopping website dataset to correct three image defects, our model reduces (FID) by 63.2% in average compared with WS-I2I, the state-of-the art semi-paired I2I method.

Hao Xu, Jia Liu, Yang Shen et al.

Graph Pooling technology plays an important role in graph node classification tasks. Sorting pooling technologies maintain large-value units for pooling graphs of varying sizes. However, by analyzing the statistical characteristic of activated units after pooling, we found that a large number of units dropped by sorting pooling are negative-value units that contain useful information and can contribute considerably to the final decision. To maintain more useful information, a novel pooling technology, called Geometric Pooling (GP), was proposed to contain the unique node features with negative values by measuring the similarity of all node features. We reveal the effectiveness of GP from the entropy reduction view. The experiments were conducted on TUdatasets to show the effectiveness of GP. The results showed that the proposed GP outperforms the SOTA graph pooling technologies by 1%\sim5% with fewer parameters.

Zhuqing Liu, Xin Zhang, Songtao Lu et al.

Recently, min-max optimization problems have received increasing attention due to their wide range of applications in machine learning (ML). However, most existing min-max solution techniques are either single-machine or distributed algorithms coordinated by a central server. In this paper, we focus on the decentralized min-max optimization for learning with domain constraints, where multiple agents collectively solve a nonconvex-strongly-concave min-max saddle point problem without coordination from any server. Decentralized min-max optimization problems with domain constraints underpins many important ML applications, including multi-agent ML fairness assurance, and policy evaluations in multi-agent reinforcement learning. We propose an algorithm called PRECISION (proximal gradient-tracking and stochastic recursive variance reduction) that enjoys a convergence rate of $O(1/T)$, where $T$ is the maximum number of iterations. To further reduce sample complexity, we propose PRECISION$^+$ with an adaptive batch size technique. We show that the fast $O(1/T)$ convergence of PRECISION and PRECISION$^+$ to an $ε$-stationary point imply $O(ε^{-2})$ communication complexity and $O(m\sqrt{n}ε^{-2})$ sample complexity, where $m$ is the number of agents and $n$ is the size of dataset at each agent. To our knowledge, this is the first work that achieves $O(ε^{-2})$ in both sample and communication complexities in decentralized min-max learning with domain constraints. Our experiments also corroborate the theoretical results.

Haibo Yang, Zhuqing Liu, Jia Liu et al.

In recent years, multi-objective optimization (MOO) emerges as a foundational problem underpinning many multi-agent multi-task learning applications. However, existing algorithms in MOO literature remain limited to centralized learning settings, which do not satisfy the distributed nature and data privacy needs of such multi-agent multi-task learning applications. This motivates us to propose a new federated multi-objective learning (FMOL) framework with multiple clients distributively and collaboratively solving an MOO problem while keeping their training data private. Notably, our FMOL framework allows a different set of objective functions across different clients to support a wide range of applications, which advances and generalizes the MOO formulation to the federated learning paradigm for the first time. For this FMOL framework, we propose two new federated multi-objective optimization (FMOO) algorithms called federated multi-gradient descent averaging (FMGDA) and federated stochastic multi-gradient descent averaging (FSMGDA). Both algorithms allow local updates to significantly reduce communication costs, while achieving the {\em same} convergence rates as those of their algorithmic counterparts in the single-objective federated learning. Our extensive experiments also corroborate the efficacy of our proposed FMOO algorithms.

Haibo Yang, Peiwen Qiu, Jia Liu

A key assumption in most existing works on FL algorithms' convergence analysis is that the noise in stochastic first-order information has a finite variance. Although this assumption covers all light-tailed (i.e., sub-exponential) and some heavy-tailed noise distributions (e.g., log-normal, Weibull, and some Pareto distributions), it fails for many fat-tailed noise distributions (i.e., ``heavier-tailed'' with potentially infinite variance) that have been empirically observed in the FL literature. To date, it remains unclear whether one can design convergent algorithms for FL systems that experience fat-tailed noise. This motivates us to fill this gap in this paper by proposing an algorithmic framework called FAT-Clipping (\ul{f}ederated \ul{a}veraging with \ul{t}wo-sided learning rates and \ul{clipping}), which contains two variants: FAT-Clipping per-round (FAT-Clipping-PR) and FAT-Clipping per-iteration (FAT-Clipping-PI). Specifically, for the largest $α\in (1,2]$ such that the fat-tailed noise in FL still has a bounded $α$-moment, we show that both variants achieve $\mathcal{O}((mT)^{\frac{2-α}α})$ and $\mathcal{O}((mT)^{\frac{1-α}{3α-2}})$ convergence rates in the strongly-convex and general non-convex settings, respectively, where $m$ and $T$ are the numbers of clients and communication rounds. Moreover, at the expense of more clipping operations compared to FAT-Clipping-PR, FAT-Clipping-PI further enjoys a linear speedup effect with respect to the number of local updates at each client and being lower-bound-matching (i.e., order-optimal). Collectively, our results advance the understanding of designing efficient algorithms for FL systems that exhibit fat-tailed first-order oracle information.

Wenfang Yao, Kejing Yin, William K. Cheung et al.

The combination of electronic health records (EHR) and medical images is crucial for clinicians in making diagnoses and forecasting prognosis. Strategically fusing these two data modalities has great potential to improve the accuracy of machine learning models in clinical prediction tasks. However, the asynchronous and complementary nature of EHR and medical images presents unique challenges. Missing modalities due to clinical and administrative factors are inevitable in practice, and the significance of each data modality varies depending on the patient and the prediction target, resulting in inconsistent predictions and suboptimal model performance. To address these challenges, we propose DrFuse to achieve effective clinical multi-modal fusion. It tackles the missing modality issue by disentangling the features shared across modalities and those unique within each modality. Furthermore, we address the modal inconsistency issue via a disease-wise attention layer that produces the patient- and disease-wise weighting for each modality to make the final prediction. We validate the proposed method using real-world large-scale datasets, MIMIC-IV and MIMIC-CXR. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/dorothy-yao/drfuse.

Zi Yin, Fanhong Li, Shurui Zheng et al.

Developing robotic manipulation policies is iterative and hypothesis-driven: researchers test tactile sensing, gripper geometries, and sensor placements through real-world data collection and training. Yet even minor end-effector changes often require mechanical refitting and system re-integration, slowing iteration. We present RAPID, a full-stack reconfigurable platform designed to reduce this friction. RAPID is built around a tool-free, modular hardware architecture that unifies handheld data collection and robot deployment, and a matching software stack that maintains real-time awareness of the underlying hardware configuration through a driver-level Physical Mask derived from USB events. This modular hardware architecture reduces reconfiguration to seconds and makes systematic multi-modal ablation studies practical, allowing researchers to sweep diverse gripper and sensing configurations without repeated system bring-up. The Physical Mask exposes modality presence as an explicit runtime signal, enabling auto-configuration and graceful degradation under sensor hot-plug events, so policies can continue executing when sensors are physically added or removed. System-centric experiments show that RAPID reduces the setup time for multi-modal configurations by two orders of magnitude compared to traditional workflows and preserves policy execution under runtime sensor hot-unplug events. The hardware designs, drivers, and software stack are open-sourced at https://rapid-kit.github.io/ .

Yijie Lin, Jie Zhang, Zhenyu Huang et al.

Existing video-language studies mainly focus on learning short video clips, leaving long-term temporal dependencies rarely explored due to over-high computational cost of modeling long videos. To address this issue, one feasible solution is learning the correspondence between video clips and captions, which however inevitably encounters the multi-granularity noisy correspondence (MNC) problem. To be specific, MNC refers to the clip-caption misalignment (coarse-grained) and frame-word misalignment (fine-grained), hindering temporal learning and video understanding. In this paper, we propose NOise Robust Temporal Optimal traNsport (Norton) that addresses MNC in a unified optimal transport (OT) framework. In brief, Norton employs video-paragraph and clip-caption contrastive losses to capture long-term dependencies based on OT. To address coarse-grained misalignment in video-paragraph contrast, Norton filters out the irrelevant clips and captions through an alignable prompt bucket and realigns asynchronous clip-caption pairs based on transport distance. To address the fine-grained misalignment, Norton incorporates a soft-maximum operator to identify crucial words and key frames. Additionally, Norton exploits the potential faulty negative samples in clip-caption contrast by rectifying the alignment target with OT assignment to ensure precise temporal modeling. Extensive experiments on video retrieval, videoQA, and action segmentation verify the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://lin-yijie.github.io/projects/Norton.

Jia Liu, Changlin Li, Qirui Sun et al.

Fine-tuning advanced diffusion models for high-quality image stylization usually requires large training datasets and substantial computational resources, hindering their practical applicability. We propose Ada-Adapter, a novel framework for few-shot style personalization of diffusion models. Ada-Adapter leverages off-the-shelf diffusion models and pre-trained image feature encoders to learn a compact style representation from a limited set of source images. Our method enables efficient zero-shot style transfer utilizing a single reference image. Furthermore, with a small number of source images (three to five are sufficient) and a few minutes of fine-tuning, our method can capture intricate style details and conceptual characteristics, generating high-fidelity stylized images that align well with the provided text prompts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various artistic styles, including flat art, 3D rendering, and logo design. Our experimental results show that Ada-Adapter outperforms existing zero-shot and few-shot stylization methods in terms of output quality, diversity, and training efficiency.

Xinrui Zhou, Yuhao Huang, Haoran Dou et al.

In the medical field, the limited availability of large-scale datasets and labor-intensive annotation processes hinder the performance of deep models. Diffusion-based generative augmentation approaches present a promising solution to this issue, having been proven effective in advancing downstream medical recognition tasks. Nevertheless, existing works lack sufficient semantic and sequential steerability for challenging video/3D sequence generation, and neglect quality control of noisy synthesized samples, resulting in unreliable synthetic databases and severely limiting the performance of downstream tasks. In this work, we present Ctrl-GenAug, a novel and general generative augmentation framework that enables highly semantic- and sequential-customized sequence synthesis and suppresses incorrectly synthesized samples, to aid medical sequence classification. Specifically, we first design a multimodal conditions-guided sequence generator for controllably synthesizing diagnosis-promotive samples. A sequential augmentation module is integrated to enhance the temporal/stereoscopic coherence of generated samples. Then, we propose a noisy synthetic data filter to suppress unreliable cases at semantic and sequential levels. Extensive experiments on 3 medical datasets, using 11 networks trained on 3 paradigms, comprehensively analyze the effectiveness and generality of Ctrl-GenAug, particularly in underrepresented high-risk populations and out-domain conditions.

Peizhong Ju, Haibo Yang, Jia Liu et al.

Federated Learning (FL) has gained significant popularity due to its effectiveness in training machine learning models across diverse sites without requiring direct data sharing. While various algorithms along with their optimization analyses have shown that FL with local updates is a communication-efficient distributed learning framework, the generalization performance of FL with local updates has received comparatively less attention. This lack of investigation can be attributed to the complex interplay between data heterogeneity and infrequent communication due to the local updates within the FL framework. This motivates us to investigate a fundamental question in FL: Can we quantify the impact of data heterogeneity and local updates on the generalization performance for FL as the learning process evolves? To this end, we conduct a comprehensive theoretical study of FL's generalization performance using a linear model as the first step, where the data heterogeneity is considered for both the stationary and online/non-stationary cases. By providing closed-form expressions of the model error, we rigorously quantify the impact of the number of the local updates (denoted as $K$) under three settings ($K=1$, $K<\infty$, and $K=\infty$) and show how the generalization performance evolves with the number of rounds $t$. Our investigation also provides a comprehensive understanding of how different configurations (including the number of model parameters $p$ and the number of training samples $n$) contribute to the overall generalization performance, thus shedding new insights (such as benign overfitting) for implementing FL over networks.

Zhiyu Xu, Jia Liu, Yixin Wang et al.

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates valid evaluation methods to provide guidance for both downstream applications and actionable future improvements. The Item Response Theory (IRT) model with Computerized Adaptive Testing has recently emerged as a promising framework for evaluating LLMs via their response accuracy. Beyond simple response accuracy, LLMs' chain of thought (CoT) lengths serve as a vital indicator of their reasoning ability. To leverage the CoT length information to assist the evaluation of LLMs, we propose the Latency-Response Theory (LaRT) model, which jointly models both the response accuracy and CoT length by introducing a key correlation parameter between the latent ability and the latent speed. We derive an efficient stochastic approximation Expectation-Maximization algorithm for parameter estimation. We establish rigorous identifiability results for the latent ability and latent speed parameters to ensure the statistical validity of their estimation. Through both theoretical asymptotic analyses and simulation studies, we demonstrate LaRT's advantages over IRT in terms of superior estimation accuracy and shorter confidence intervals for latent trait estimation. To evaluate LaRT in real data, we collect responses from diverse LLMs on popular benchmark datasets. We find that LaRT yields different LLM rankings than IRT and outperforms IRT across multiple key evaluation metrics including predictive power, item efficiency, ranking validity, and LLM evaluation efficiency. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Toby-X/Latency-Response-Theory-Model.

Xiaoshuang Huang, Lingdong Shen, Jia Liu et al.

In recent years, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have achieved notable advancements, demonstrating the feasibility of developing an intelligent biomedical assistant. However, current biomedical MLLMs predominantly focus on image-level understanding and restrict interactions to textual commands, thus limiting their capability boundaries and the flexibility of usage. In this paper, we introduce a novel end-to-end multimodal large language model for the biomedical domain, named MedPLIB, which possesses pixel-level understanding. Excitingly, it supports visual question answering (VQA), arbitrary pixel-level prompts (points, bounding boxes, and free-form shapes), and pixel-level grounding. We propose a novel Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multi-stage training strategy, which divides MoE into separate training phases for a visual-language expert model and a pixel-grounding expert model, followed by fine-tuning using MoE. This strategy effectively coordinates multitask learning while maintaining the computational cost at inference equivalent to that of a single expert model. To advance the research of biomedical MLLMs, we introduce the Medical Complex Vision Question Answering Dataset (MeCoVQA), which comprises an array of 8 modalities for complex medical imaging question answering and image region understanding. Experimental results indicate that MedPLIB has achieved state-of-the-art outcomes across multiple medical visual language tasks. More importantly, in zero-shot evaluations for the pixel grounding task, MedPLIB leads the best small and large models by margins of 19.7 and 15.6 respectively on the mDice metric. The codes, data, and model checkpoints will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ShawnHuang497/MedPLIB.

Junkai Chen, Zhijie Deng, Kening Zheng et al.

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) develop, their potential security issues have become increasingly prominent. Machine Unlearning (MU), as an effective strategy for forgetting specific knowledge in training data, has been widely used in privacy protection. However, MU for safety in MLLM has yet to be fully explored. To address this issue, we propose SAFEERASER, a safety unlearning benchmark for MLLMs, consisting of 3,000 images and 28.8K VQA pairs. We comprehensively evaluate unlearning methods from two perspectives: forget quality and model utility. Our findings show that existing MU methods struggle to maintain model performance while implementing the forget operation and often suffer from over-forgetting. Hence, we introduce Prompt Decouple (PD) Loss to alleviate over-forgetting through decouple prompt during unlearning process. To quantitatively measure over-forgetting mitigated by PD Loss, we propose a new metric called Safe Answer Refusal Rate (SARR). Experimental results demonstrate that combining PD Loss with existing unlearning methods can effectively prevent over-forgetting and achieve a decrease of 79.5% in the SARR metric of LLaVA-7B and LLaVA-13B, while maintaining forget quality and model utility. Our code and dataset will be released upon acceptance. Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language and images, and reader discretion is recommended.

Tianchen Zhou, Jia Liu, Yang Jiao et al.

Online learning to rank (ONL2R) is a foundational problem for recommender systems and has received increasing attention in recent years. Among the existing approaches for ONL2R, a natural modeling architecture is the multi-armed bandit framework coupled with the position-based click model. However, developing efficient online learning policies for MAB-based ONL2R with position-based click models is highly challenging due to the combinatorial nature of the problem, and partial observability in the position-based click model. To date, results in MAB-based ONL2R with position-based click models remain rather limited, which motivates us to fill this gap in this work. Our main contributions in this work are threefold: i) We propose the first general MAB framework that captures all key ingredients of ONL2R with position-based click models. Our model considers personalized and equal treatments in ONL2R ranking recommendations, both of which are widely used in practice; ii) Based on the above analytical framework, we develop two unified greed- and UCB-based policies called GreedyRank and UCBRank, each of which can be applied to personalized and equal ranking treatments; and iii) We show that both GreedyRank and UCBRank enjoy $O(\sqrt{t}\ln t)$ and $O(\sqrt{t\ln t})$ anytime sublinear regret for personalized and equal treatment, respectively. For the fundamentally hard equal ranking treatment, we identify classes of collective utility functions and their associated sufficient conditions under which $O(\sqrt{t}\ln t)$ and $O(\sqrt{t\ln t})$ anytime sublinear regrets are still achievable for GreedyRank and UCBRank, respectively. Our numerical experiments also verify our theoretical results and demonstrate the efficiency of GreedyRank and UCBRank in seeking the optimal action under various problem settings.

Xinhu Zheng, Anbai Jiang, Bing Han et al.

Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) has gained significant interest through the application of various Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in industrial settings. Though possessing great potential, ASD systems can hardly be readily deployed in real production sites due to the generalization problem, which is primarily caused by the difficulty of data collection and the complexity of environmental factors. This paper introduces a robust ASD model that leverages audio pre-trained models. Specifically, we fine-tune these models using machine operation data, employing SpecAug as a data augmentation strategy. Additionally, we investigate the impact of utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) tuning instead of full fine-tuning to address the problem of limited data for fine-tuning. Our experiments on the DCASE2023 Task 2 dataset establish a new benchmark of 77.75% on the evaluation set, with a significant improvement of 6.48% compared with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including top-tier traditional convolutional networks and speech pre-trained models, which demonstrates the effectiveness of audio pre-trained models with LoRA tuning. Ablation studies are also conducted to showcase the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

Ling Team, Binwei Zeng, Chao Huang et al.

In this technical report, we tackle the challenges of training large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, focusing on overcoming cost inefficiency and resource limitations prevalent in such systems. To address these issues, we present two differently sized MoE large language models (LLMs), namely Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus (referred to as "Bailing" in Chinese, spelled Bǎilíng in Pinyin). Ling-Lite contains 16.8 billion parameters with 2.75 billion activated parameters, while Ling-Plus boasts 290 billion parameters with 28.8 billion activated parameters. Both models exhibit comparable performance to leading industry benchmarks. This report offers actionable insights to improve the efficiency and accessibility of AI development in resource-constrained settings, promoting more scalable and sustainable technologies. Specifically, to reduce training costs for large-scale MoE models, we propose innovative methods for (1) optimization of model architecture and training processes, (2) refinement of training anomaly handling, and (3) enhancement of model evaluation efficiency. Additionally, leveraging high-quality data generated from knowledge graphs, our models demonstrate superior capabilities in tool use compared to other models. Ultimately, our experimental findings demonstrate that a 300B MoE LLM can be effectively trained on lower-performance devices while achieving comparable performance to models of a similar scale, including dense and MoE models. Compared to high-performance devices, utilizing a lower-specification hardware system during the pre-training phase demonstrates significant cost savings, reducing computing costs by approximately 20%. The models can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI.

Shi Qiu, Junyi Deng, Yiwei Deng et al.

AI agents powered by large language models exhibit strong reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, enabling them to assist scientific research tasks such as formula derivation and code generation. However, whether these agents can reliably perform end-to-end reproduction from real scientific papers remains an open question. We introduce PRBench, a benchmark of 30 expert-curated tasks spanning 11 subfields of physics. Each task requires an agent to comprehend the methodology of a published paper, implement the corresponding algorithms from scratch, and produce quantitative results matching the original publication. Agents are provided only with the task instruction and paper content, and operate in a sandboxed execution environment. All tasks are contributed by domain experts from over 20 research groups at the School of Physics, Peking University, each grounded in a real published paper and validated through end-to-end reproduction with verified ground-truth results and detailed scoring rubrics. Using an agentified assessment pipeline, we evaluate a set of coding agents on PRBench and analyze their capabilities across key dimensions of scientific reasoning and execution. The best-performing agent, OpenAI Codex powered by GPT-5.3-Codex, achieves a mean overall score of 34%. All agents exhibit a zero end-to-end callback success rate, with particularly poor performance in data accuracy and code correctness. We further identify systematic failure modes, including errors in formula implementation, inability to debug numerical simulations, and fabrication of output data. Overall, PRBench provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating progress toward autonomous scientific research.

Ru Li, Jia Liu, Guanghui Liu et al.

In this paper, we propose SpectralNeRF, an end-to-end Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based architecture for high-quality physically based rendering from a novel spectral perspective. We modify the classical spectral rendering into two main steps, 1) the generation of a series of spectrum maps spanning different wavelengths, 2) the combination of these spectrum maps for the RGB output. Our SpectralNeRF follows these two steps through the proposed multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based architecture (SpectralMLP) and Spectrum Attention UNet (SAUNet). Given the ray origin and the ray direction, the SpectralMLP constructs the spectral radiance field to obtain spectrum maps of novel views, which are then sent to the SAUNet to produce RGB images of white-light illumination. Applying NeRF to build up the spectral rendering is a more physically-based way from the perspective of ray-tracing. Further, the spectral radiance fields decompose difficult scenes and improve the performance of NeRF-based methods. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the proposed SpectralNeRF is superior to recent NeRF-based methods when synthesizing new views on synthetic and real datasets. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/liru0126/SpectralNeRF.

Yunkai Dang, Mengxi Gao, Yibo Yan et al. · tsinghua

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on tasks ranging from visual question answering to video understanding. However, existing studies have concentrated mainly on visual-textual misalignment, leaving largely unexplored the MLLMs' ability to preserve an originally correct answer when confronted with misleading information. We reveal a response uncertainty phenomenon: across nine standard datasets, twelve state-of-the-art open-source MLLMs overturn a previously correct answer in 65% of cases after receiving a single deceptive cue. To systematically quantify this vulnerability, we propose a two-stage evaluation pipeline: (1) elicit each model's original response on unperturbed inputs; (2) inject explicit (false-answer hints) and implicit (contextual contradictions) misleading instructions, and compute the misleading rate - the fraction of correct-to-incorrect flips. Leveraging the most susceptible examples, we curate the Multimodal Uncertainty Benchmark (MUB), a collection of image-question pairs stratified into low, medium, and high difficulty based on how many of twelve state-of-the-art MLLMs they mislead. Extensive evaluation on twelve open-source and five closed-source models reveals a high uncertainty: average misleading rates exceed 86%, with explicit cues over 67.19% and implicit cues over 80.67%. To reduce the misleading rate, we then fine-tune all open-source MLLMs on a compact 2000-sample mixed-instruction dataset, reducing misleading rates to 6.97% (explicit) and 32.77% (implicit), boosting consistency by nearly 29.37% on highly deceptive inputs, and slightly improving accuracy on standard benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/uncertainty

Xinyi Lin, Yuyang Zhang, Yuanhang Gan et al.

Scientific experiment and manufacture rely on complex, multi-step procedures that demand continuous human expertise for precise execution and decision-making. Despite advances in machine learning and automation, conventional models remain confined to virtual domains, while real-world experiment and manufacture still rely on human supervision and expertise. This gap between machine intelligence and physical execution limits reproducibility, scalability, and accessibility across scientific and manufacture workflows. Here, we introduce human-AI co-embodied intelligence, a new form of physical AI that unites human users, agentic AI, and wearable hardware into an integrated system for real-world experiment and intelligent manufacture. In this paradigm, humans provide precise execution and control, while agentic AI contributes memory, contextual reasoning, adaptive planning, and real-time feedback. The wearable interface continuously captures the experimental and manufacture processes, facilitates seamless communication between humans and AI for corrective guidance and interpretable collaboration. As a demonstration, we present Agentic-Physical Experimentation (APEX) system, coupling agentic reasoning with physical execution through mixed-reality. APEX observes and interprets human actions, aligns them with standard operating procedures, provides 3D visual guidance, and analyzes every step. Implemented in a cleanroom for flexible electronics fabrication, APEX system achieves context-aware reasoning with accuracy exceeding general multimodal large language models, corrects errors in real time, and transfers expertise to beginners. These results establish a new class of agentic-physical-human intelligence that extends agentic reasoning beyond computation into the physical domain, transforming scientific research and manufacturing into autonomous, traceable, interpretable, and scalable processes.

Lejun Ai, Yulong Li, Haodong Yi et al.

Automatic sleep staging plays a vital role in assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. Most existing methods rely heavily on long and continuous EEG recordings, which poses significant challenges for data acquisition in resource-constrained systems, such as wearable or home-based monitoring systems. In this paper, we propose the task of resource-efficient sleep staging, which aims to reduce the amount of signal collected per sleep epoch while maintaining reliable classification performance. To solve this task, we adopt the masking and prompt learning strategy and propose a novel framework called Mask-Aware Sleep Staging (MASS). Specifically, we design a multi-level masking strategy to promote effective feature modeling under partial and irregular observations. To mitigate the loss of contextual information introduced by masking, we further propose a hierarchical prompt learning mechanism that aggregates unmasked data into a global prompt, serving as a semantic anchor for guiding both patch-level and epoch-level feature modeling. MASS is evaluated on four datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance, especially when the amount of data is very limited. This result highlights its potential for efficient and scalable deployment in real-world low-resource sleep monitoring environments.

Haibo Yang, Zhuqing Liu, Xin Zhang et al.

To lower the communication complexity of federated min-max learning, a natural approach is to utilize the idea of infrequent communications (through multiple local updates) same as in conventional federated learning. However, due to the more complicated inter-outer problem structure in federated min-max learning, theoretical understandings of communication complexity for federated min-max learning with infrequent communications remain very limited in the literature. This is particularly true for settings with non-i.i.d. datasets and partial client participation. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a new algorithmic framework called stochastic sampling averaging gradient descent ascent (SAGDA), which i) assembles stochastic gradient estimators from randomly sampled clients as control variates and ii) leverages two learning rates on both server and client sides. We show that SAGDA achieves a linear speedup in terms of both the number of clients and local update steps, which yields an $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2})$ communication complexity that is orders of magnitude lower than the state of the art. Interestingly, by noting that the standard federated stochastic gradient descent ascent (FSGDA) is in fact a control-variate-free special version of SAGDA, we immediately arrive at an $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2})$ communication complexity result for FSGDA. Therefore, through the lens of SAGDA, we also advance the current understanding on communication complexity of the standard FSGDA method for federated min-max learning.

Zhuqing Liu, Xin Zhang, Jia Liu

To increase the training speed of distributed learning, recent years have witnessed a significant amount of interest in developing both synchronous and asynchronous distributed stochastic variance-reduced optimization methods. However, all existing synchronous and asynchronous distributed training algorithms suffer from various limitations in either convergence speed or implementation complexity. This motivates us to propose an algorithm called STNTHESIS (semi-asynchronous path-integrated stochastic gradient search), which leverages the special structure of the variance-reduction framework to overcome the limitations of both synchronous and asynchronous distributed learning algorithms while retaining their salient features. We consider two implementations of STNTHESIS under distributed and shared memory architectures. We show that our STNTHESIS algorithms have $O(\sqrt{N}ε^{-2}(Δ+1)+N)$ and $O(\sqrt{N}ε^{-2}(Δ+1) d+N)$ computational complexities for achieving an $ε$-stationary point in non-convex learning under distributed and shared memory architectures, respectively, where N denotes the total number of training samples and $Δ$ represents the maximum delay of the workers. Moreover, we investigate the generalization performance of \algname by establishing algorithmic stability bounds for quadratic strongly convex and non-convex optimization. We further conduct extensive numerical experiments to verify our theoretical findings