Zeyu Huang

CL
h-index32
30papers
1,283citations
Novelty47%
AI Score59

30 Papers

CLJan 24, 2023Code
Transformer-Patcher: One Mistake worth One Neuron

Zeyu Huang, Yikang Shen, Xiaofeng Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Large Transformer-based Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) dominate almost all Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Nevertheless, they still make mistakes from time to time. For a model deployed in an industrial environment, fixing these mistakes quickly and robustly is vital to improve user experiences. Previous works formalize such problems as Model Editing (ME) and mostly focus on fixing one mistake. However, the one-mistake-fixing scenario is not an accurate abstraction of the real-world challenge. In the deployment of AI services, there are ever-emerging mistakes, and the same mistake may recur if not corrected in time. Thus a preferable solution is to rectify the mistakes as soon as they appear nonstop. Therefore, we extend the existing ME into Sequential Model Editing (SME) to help develop more practical editing methods. Our study shows that most current ME methods could yield unsatisfying results in this scenario. We then introduce Transformer-Patcher, a novel model editor that can shift the behavior of transformer-based models by simply adding and training a few neurons in the last Feed-Forward Network layer. Experimental results on both classification and generation tasks show that Transformer-Patcher can successively correct up to thousands of errors (Reliability) and generalize to their equivalent inputs (Generality) while retaining the model's accuracy on irrelevant inputs (Locality). Our method outperforms previous fine-tuning and HyperNetwork-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance for Sequential Model Editing (SME). The code is available at https://github.com/ZeroYuHuang/Transformer-Patcher.

CLOct 11, 2022
Mixture of Attention Heads: Selecting Attention Heads Per Token

Xiaofeng Zhang, Yikang Shen, Zeyu Huang et al. · tencent-ai

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been proposed as an efficient way to scale up model capacity and implement conditional computing. However, the study of MoE components mostly focused on the feedforward layer in Transformer architecture. This paper proposes the Mixture of Attention Heads (MoA), a new architecture that combines multi-head attention with the MoE mechanism. MoA includes a set of attention heads that each has its own set of parameters. Given an input, a router dynamically selects a subset of $k$ attention heads per token. This conditional computation schema allows MoA to achieve stronger performance than the standard multi-head attention layer. Furthermore, the sparsely gated MoA can easily scale up the number of attention heads and the number of parameters while preserving computational efficiency. In addition to the performance improvements, MoA also automatically differentiates heads' utilities, providing a new perspective to discuss the model's interpretability. We conducted experiments on several important tasks, including Machine Translation and Masked Language Modeling. Experiments have shown promising results on several tasks against strong baselines that involve large and very deep models.

AISep 25, 2024Code
Post-hoc Reward Calibration: A Case Study on Length Bias

Zeyu Huang, Zihan Qiu, Zili Wang et al.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback aligns the outputs of Large Language Models with human values and preferences. Central to this process is the reward model (RM), which translates human feedback into training signals for optimising LLM behaviour. However, RMs can develop biases by exploiting spurious correlations in their training data, such as favouring outputs based on length or style rather than true quality. These biases can lead to incorrect output rankings, sub-optimal model evaluations, and the amplification of undesirable behaviours in LLMs alignment. This paper addresses the challenge of correcting such biases without additional data and training, introducing the concept of Post-hoc Reward Calibration. We first propose an intuitive approach to estimate the bias term and, thus, remove it to approximate the underlying true reward. We then extend the approach to a more general and robust form with the Locally Weighted Regression. Focusing on the prevalent length bias, we validate our proposed approaches across three experimental settings, demonstrating consistent improvements: (1) a 3.11 average performance gain across 33 reward models on the RewardBench dataset; (2) enhanced alignment of RM rankings with GPT-4 evaluations and human preferences based on the AlpacaEval benchmark; and (3) improved Length-Controlled win rate of the RLHF process in multiple LLM--RM combinations. Our method is computationally efficient and generalisable to other types of bias and RMs, offering a scalable and robust solution for mitigating biases in LLM alignment. Our code and results are available at https://github.com/ZeroYuHuang/Reward-Calibration.

LGOct 17, 2023Code
Unlocking Emergent Modularity in Large Language Models

Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Jie Fu

Modular Neural Networks (MNNs) demonstrate various advantages over monolithic models. Existing MNNs are generally $\textit{explicit}$: their modular architectures are pre-defined, with individual modules expected to implement distinct functions. Recent works reveal that there exists $\textit{implicit}$ modularity in standard pre-trained transformers, namely $\textit{Emergent Modularity}$. They indicate that such modular structures spontaneously exhibit during the early pre-training phase. Despite the benefits of modularity, most Language Models (LMs) are still treated as monolithic models in the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, with their emergent modularity locked and underutilized. In this work, focusing on unlocking the emergent modularity in LMs, we showcase that standard LMs could be fine-tuned as their Mixture-of-Expert (MoEs) counterparts without introducing any extra parameters. Such MoEs are derived from emergent modularity and are referred to as Emergent MoEs (EMoE). Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning EMoE effectively improves downstream in-domain and out-of-domain generalization compared with vanilla fine-tuning. Our analysis and ablation studies further illustrate that it is robust to various configurations and can scale up to Large Language Models (i.e., Llama2-7B and Llama-30B). Code is available at https://github.com/qiuzh20/EMoE.

CLAug 13, 2024Code
Layerwise Recurrent Router for Mixture-of-Experts

Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Shuang Cheng et al.

The scaling of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized their capabilities in various tasks, yet this growth must be matched with efficient computational strategies. The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture stands out for its ability to scale model size without significantly increasing training costs. Despite their advantages, current MoE models often display parameter inefficiency. For instance, a pre-trained MoE-based LLM with 52 billion parameters might perform comparably to a standard model with 6.7 billion parameters. Being a crucial part of MoE, current routers in different layers independently assign tokens without leveraging historical routing information, potentially leading to suboptimal token-expert combinations and the parameter inefficiency problem. To alleviate this issue, we introduce the Layerwise Recurrent Router for Mixture-of-Experts (RMoE). RMoE leverages a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to establish dependencies between routing decisions across consecutive layers. Such layerwise recurrence can be efficiently parallelly computed for input tokens and introduces negotiable costs. Our extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that RMoE-based language models consistently outperform a spectrum of baseline models. Furthermore, RMoE integrates a novel computation stage orthogonal to existing methods, allowing seamless compatibility with other MoE architectures. Our analyses attribute RMoE's gains to its effective cross-layer information sharing, which also improves expert selection and diversity. Our code is at https://github.com/qiuzh20/RMoE .

CVDec 19, 2022
ARO-Net: Learning Implicit Fields from Anchored Radial Observations

Yizhi Wang, Zeyu Huang, Ariel Shamir et al.

We introduce anchored radial observations (ARO), a novel shape encoding for learning implicit field representation of 3D shapes that is category-agnostic and generalizable amid significant shape variations. The main idea behind our work is to reason about shapes through partial observations from a set of viewpoints, called anchors. We develop a general and unified shape representation by employing a fixed set of anchors, via Fibonacci sampling, and designing a coordinate-based deep neural network to predict the occupancy value of a query point in space. Differently from prior neural implicit models that use global shape feature, our shape encoder operates on contextual, query-specific features. To predict point occupancy, locally observed shape information from the perspective of the anchors surrounding the input query point are encoded and aggregated through an attention module, before implicit decoding is performed. We demonstrate the quality and generality of our network, coined ARO-Net, on surface reconstruction from sparse point clouds, with tests on novel and unseen object categories, "one-shape" training, and comparisons to state-of-the-art neural and classical methods for reconstruction and tessellation.

ROOct 20, 2022
NIFT: Neural Interaction Field and Template for Object Manipulation

Zeyu Huang, Juzhan Xu, Sisi Dai et al.

We introduce NIFT, Neural Interaction Field and Template, a descriptive and robust interaction representation of object manipulations to facilitate imitation learning. Given a few object manipulation demos, NIFT guides the generation of the interaction imitation for a new object instance by matching the Neural Interaction Template (NIT) extracted from the demos in the target Neural Interaction Field (NIF) defined for the new object. Specifically, the NIF is a neural field that encodes the relationship between each spatial point and a given object, where the relative position is defined by a spherical distance function rather than occupancies or signed distances, which are commonly adopted by conventional neural fields but less informative. For a given demo interaction, the corresponding NIT is defined by a set of spatial points sampled in the demo NIF with associated neural features. To better capture the interaction, the points are sampled on the Interaction Bisector Surface (IBS), which consists of points that are equidistant to the two interacting objects and has been used extensively for interaction representation. With both point selection and pointwise features defined for better interaction encoding, NIT effectively guides the feature matching in the NIFs of the new object instances such that the relative poses are optimized to realize the manipulation while imitating the demo interactions. Experiments show that our NIFT solution outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods for object manipulation and generalizes better to objects from new categories.

CLJan 30
A Unified View of Attention and Residual Sinks: Outlier-Driven Rescaling is Essential for Transformer Training

Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Kaiyue Wen et al.

We investigate the functional role of emergent outliers in large language models, specifically attention sinks (a few tokens that consistently receive large attention logits) and residual sinks (a few fixed dimensions with persistently large activations across most tokens). We hypothesize that these outliers, in conjunction with the corresponding normalizations (\textit{e.g.}, softmax attention and RMSNorm), effectively rescale other non-outlier components. We term this phenomenon \textit{outlier-driven rescaling} and validate this hypothesis across different model architectures and training token counts. This view unifies the origin and mitigation of both sink types. Our main conclusions and observations include: (1) Outliers function jointly with normalization: removing normalization eliminates the corresponding outliers but degrades training stability and performance; directly clipping outliers while retaining normalization leads to degradation, indicating that outlier-driven rescaling contributes to training stability. (2) Outliers serve more as rescale factors rather than contributors, as the final contributions of attention and residual sinks are significantly smaller than those of non-outliers. (3) Outliers can be absorbed into learnable parameters or mitigated via explicit gated rescaling, leading to improved training performance (average gain of 2 points) and enhanced quantization robustness (1.2 points degradation under W4A4 quantization).

HCAug 1, 2024
DiscipLink: Unfolding Interdisciplinary Information Seeking Process via Human-AI Co-Exploration

Chengbo Zheng, Yuanhao Zhang, Zeyu Huang et al.

Interdisciplinary studies often require researchers to explore literature in diverse branches of knowledge. Yet, navigating through the highly scattered knowledge from unfamiliar disciplines poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce DiscipLink, a novel interactive system that facilitates collaboration between researchers and large language models (LLMs) in interdisciplinary information seeking (IIS). Based on users' topics of interest, DiscipLink initiates exploratory questions from the perspectives of possible relevant fields of study, and users can further tailor these questions. DiscipLink then supports users in searching and screening papers under selected questions by automatically expanding queries with disciplinary-specific terminologies, extracting themes from retrieved papers, and highlighting the connections between papers and questions. Our evaluation, comprising a within-subject comparative experiment and an open-ended exploratory study, reveals that DiscipLink can effectively support researchers in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and integrating scattered knowledge in diverse fields. The findings underscore the potential of LLM-powered tools in fostering information-seeking practices and bolstering interdisciplinary research.

HCApr 13
HeartSway: Exploring Biodata as Poetic Traces in Public Space

Zeyu Huang, Zhifan Guo, Xingyu Li et al.

Human traces scattered across urban landscapes can signify our everyday lives and societal vibrancy in subtle and poetic forms. In this paper, we explore how designed technology can engage biodata as evocative traces. To this end, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of HeartSway, an interactive hammock that captures a user's heart rate and micro-movements as traces and replays them as an embodied experience for the next visitor. Through a qualitative field study (N=10), we find that HeartSway evokes feelings of connection, curiosity about prior users, and appreciation for shared human vitality. Our work contributes to understanding anonymous archival biodata as a design material for experiential urban traces. We offer design considerations for intimate asynchronous encounters between strangers in public spaces and for reimagining public amenities.

CVJul 15, 2024
FRI-Net: Floorplan Reconstruction via Room-wise Implicit Representation

Honghao Xu, Juzhan Xu, Zeyu Huang et al.

In this paper, we introduce a novel method called FRI-Net for 2D floorplan reconstruction from 3D point cloud. Existing methods typically rely on corner regression or box regression, which lack consideration for the global shapes of rooms. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach using a room-wise implicit representation with structural regularization to characterize the shapes of rooms in floorplans. By incorporating geometric priors of room layouts in floorplans into our training strategy, the generated room polygons are more geometrically regular. We have conducted experiments on two challenging datasets, Structured3D and SceneCAD. Our method demonstrates improved performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our proposed representation for floorplan reconstruction.

LGJul 2, 2025Code
Blending Supervised and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Prefix Sampling

Zeyu Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Zihan Qiu et al.

Existing post-training techniques for large language models are broadly categorized into Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data but can lead to problematic generalization as a form of behavior cloning. Conversely, RFT can significantly enhance a model's performance but is prone to learn unexpected behaviors, and its performance is highly sensitive to the initial policy. In this paper, we propose a unified view of these methods and introduce Prefix-RFT, a hybrid approach that synergizes learning from both demonstration and exploration. Using mathematical reasoning problems as a testbed, we empirically demonstrate that Prefix-RFT is both simple and effective. It not only surpasses the performance of standalone SFT and RFT but also outperforms parallel mixed-policy RFT methods. A key advantage is its seamless integration into existing open-source frameworks, requiring only minimal modifications to the standard RFT pipeline. Our analysis highlights the complementary nature of SFT and RFT, and validates that Prefix-RFT effectively harmonizes these two learning paradigms. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the method's robustness to variations in the quality and quantity of demonstration data. We hope this work offers a new perspective on LLM post-training, suggesting that a unified paradigm that judiciously integrates demonstration and exploration could be a promising direction for future research.

CLMay 10, 2025Code
Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free

Zihan Qiu, Zekun Wang, Bo Zheng et al.

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of gating. In this work, we conduct comprehensive experiments to systematically investigate gating-augmented softmax attention variants. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive comparison over 30 variants of 15B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and 1.7B dense models trained on a 3.5 trillion token dataset. Our central finding is that a simple modification-applying a head-specific sigmoid gate after the Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)-consistently improves performance. This modification also enhances training stability, tolerates larger learning rates, and improves scaling properties. By comparing various gating positions and computational variants, we attribute this effectiveness to two key factors: (1) introducing non-linearity upon the low-rank mapping in the softmax attention, and (2) applying query-dependent sparse gating scores to modulate the SDPA output. Notably, we find this sparse gating mechanism mitigates 'attention sink' and enhances long-context extrapolation performance, and we also release related $\href{https://github.com/qiuzh20/gated_attention}{codes}$ and $\href{https://huggingface.co/QwQZh/gated_attention}{models}$ to facilitate future research.

CLFeb 19, 2024Code
Empirical Study on Updating Key-Value Memories in Transformer Feed-forward Layers

Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Youcheng Huang et al.

The feed-forward networks (FFNs) in transformers are recognized as a group of key-value neural memories to restore abstract high-level knowledge. In this work, we conduct an empirical ablation study on updating keys (the 1st layer in the FFNs layer) or values (the 2nd layer in the FFNs layer). We compare those two methods in various knowledge editing and fine-tuning tasks of large language models to draw insights to understand FFNs further. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/qiuzh20/Tuning-keys-v.s.-values}{this\,repo}$.

CLMay 13
Context Training with Active Information Seeking

Zeyu Huang, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Qixuan Feng et al.

Most existing large language models (LLMs) are expensive to adapt after deployment, especially when a task requires newly produced information or niche domain knowledge. Recent work has shown that, by manipulating and optimizing their context, LLMs can be tailored to downstream tasks without updating their weights. However, most existing methods remain closed-loop, relying solely on the model's intrinsic knowledge. In this paper, we equip these context optimizers with Wikipedia search and browser tools for active information seeking. We show that naively adding these tools to a standard sequential context optimization pipeline can actually degrade performance compared to baselines. However, when paired with a search-based training procedure that maintains and prunes multiple candidate contexts, active information seeking delivers consistent and substantial gains. We demonstrate these improvements across diverse domains, including low-resource translation (Flores+), health scenarios (HealthBench), and reasoning-heavy tasks (LiveCodeBench and Humanity's Last Exam). Furthermore, our method proves to be data-efficient, robust across different hyperparameters, and capable of generating effective textual contexts that generalize well across different models.

HCApr 13
Exploring the Grassroots Understanding and Practices of Collective Memory Co-Contribution in a University Community

Zeyu Huang, Xinyi Cao, Yue Deng et al.

Collective memory -- community members' interconnected memories and impressions of the group -- is essential to the community's culture and identity. Its development requires members' continuous participatory contribution and sensemaking. However, existing works mainly adopt a holistic sociological perspective to analyze well-developed collective memory, less focusing on member-level conceptualization of this possession or what the co-contribution practices can be. Therefore, this work alternatively adopts the latter perspective and probes such interpretative and interactional patterns with two mobile systems. With one being a locative narrative and exploration system condensed from existing literature's design frameworks, and the other being a conventional online forum representing current practices, they served as the anchors of observation for our two-week, mixed-methods field study (n=38) on a university campus. A core debate we have identified was to retrospectively contemplate or document the presence as a history for the future. This also subsequently impacted the narrative focuses, expectations of collective memory constituents, and the ways participants seek inspiration from the group. We further extracted design considerations that could better embrace the diverse conceptualizations of collective memory and bond different community members together. Lastly, revisiting and reflecting on our design, we provided extra insights on designing devoted locative narrative experiences for community-driven UGC platforms.

LGMay 9
The Cancellation Hypothesis in Critic-Free RL: From Outcome Rewards to Token Credits

Tianhao Cheng, Zeyu Huang, Zihan Qiu et al.

A commonly accepted explanation of critic-free RL for LLMs, based on sequence-level rewards, is that it reinforces successful rollouts with a positive advantage while penalizing failed ones. In contrast, we study critic-free RL from a token-level perspective, revealing the token-flipping phenomenon: positive and negative rollouts exhibit remarkably similar proportions of tokens whose probabilities are boosted or suppressed during RL training. To explain this phenomenon, we further show that a token's change in probability is not fully determined by its own advantage; coupled gradient interactions with other tokens also play a non-negligible role. Specifically, these token coupling effects occur primarily between identical tokens that are both predicted with low confidence. Building upon this analysis, we propose the cancellation hypothesis: as a result of coupling, opposing signals cancel out for tokens shared by positive and negative rollouts, while tokens more specific to successful rollouts receive stronger reinforcement, thereby inducing hidden token-level credit assignment from rollout-level rewards. We support this hypothesis with complementary empirical evidence. (1) Compared with training on only positive rollouts, critic-free RL shifts updates from template and formatting tokens toward reasoning tokens; (2) Tokens boosted by critic-free RL consistently demonstrate higher value than suppressed tokens, regardless of whether they originate from positive or negative rollouts. Guided by this view, we implement two batching interventions to encourage or preserve cancellation in critic-free RL training: query-preserved mini-batching and reward-balanced batching. Despite their simplicity, these interventions improve RLVR training across multiple model scales, supporting cancellation as both an explanatory principle and a practical design criterion for critic-free RL training.

NEJul 28, 2025Code
AR-LIF: Adaptive reset leaky integrate-and-fire neuron for spiking neural networks

Zeyu Huang, Wei Meng, Quan Liu et al.

Spiking neural networks offer low energy consumption due to their event-driven nature. Beyond binary spike outputs, their intrinsic floating-point dynamics merit greater attention. Neuronal threshold levels and reset modes critically determine spike count and timing. Hard reset cause information loss, while soft reset apply uniform treatment to neurons. To address these issues, we design an adaptive reset neuron that establishes relationships between inputs, outputs, and reset, while integrating a simple yet effective threshold adjustment strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance while maintaining lower energy consumption. In particular, it attains state-of-the-art accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet and CIFAR10-DVS. Codes are available at https://github.com/2ephyrus/AR-LIF.

CLJun 26, 2024Code
A Closer Look into Mixture-of-Experts in Large Language Models

Ka Man Lo, Zeyu Huang, Zihan Qiu et al.

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) is gaining increasing attention due to its unique properties and remarkable performance, especially for language tasks. By sparsely activating a subset of parameters for each token, MoE architecture could increase the model size without sacrificing computational efficiency, achieving a better trade-off between performance and training costs. However, the underlying mechanism of MoE still lacks further exploration, and its modularization degree remains questionable. In this paper, we make an initial attempt to understand the inner workings of MoE-based large language models. Concretely, we comprehensively study the parametric and behavioral features of three popular MoE-based models and reveal some intriguing observations, including 1) Neurons act like fine-grained experts; 2) The router of MoE usually selects experts with larger output norms; 3) The expert diversity increases as the layer increases, while the last layer is an outlier, which is further validated by an initial experiment. Based on the observations, we also provide suggestions for a broad spectrum of MoE practitioners, such as router design and expert allocation. We hope this work could shed light on future research on the MoE framework and other modular architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/kamanphoebe/Look-into-MoEs.

LGJun 25, 2024Code
Unlocking Continual Learning Abilities in Language Models

Wenyu Du, Shuang Cheng, Tongxu Luo et al.

Language models (LMs) exhibit impressive performance and generalization capabilities. However, LMs struggle with the persistent challenge of catastrophic forgetting, which undermines their long-term sustainability in continual learning (CL). Existing approaches usually address the issue by incorporating old task data or task-wise inductive bias into LMs. However, old data and accurate task information are often unavailable or costly to collect, hindering the availability of current CL approaches for LMs. To address this limitation, we introduce $\textbf{MIGU}$ ($\textbf{M}$agn$\textbf{I}$tude-based $\textbf{G}$radient $\textbf{U}$pdating for continual learning), a rehearsal-free and task-label-free method that only updates the model parameters with large magnitudes of output in LMs' linear layers. MIGU is based on our observation that the L1-normalized magnitude distribution of the output in LMs' linear layers is different when the LM models deal with different task data. By imposing this simple constraint on the gradient update process, we can leverage the inherent behaviors of LMs, thereby unlocking their innate CL abilities. Our experiments demonstrate that MIGU is universally applicable to all three LM architectures (T5, RoBERTa, and Llama2), delivering state-of-the-art or on-par performance across continual finetuning and continual pre-training settings on four CL benchmarks. For example, MIGU brings a 15.2% average accuracy improvement over conventional parameter-efficient finetuning baselines in a 15-task CL benchmark. MIGU can also seamlessly integrate with all three existing CL types to further enhance performance. Code is available at https://github.com/wenyudu/MIGU.

HCMar 11
Moving Phones, Active Peers: Exploring the Effect of Animated Phones as Facilitators in In-Person Group Discussion

Ziqi Pan, Ziqi Liu, Jinhan Zhang et al.

In today's in-person group discussions, smartphones are integrated as intelligent workstations; yet given their co-presence in such face-to-face interactions, whether and how they may enhance people's behavioral engagement with others remains underexplored. This work investigates how animating personal smartphones to move expressively, without compromising regular functions, can transform them into active embodied facilitators for co-located group interaction. In the four-stranger small-group discussion setting, guided by Tuckman's group-development theory, we conducted a design workshop (n=12) to identify problematic group-work circumstances and design expressive, attention-efficient animated phone facilitations. Subsequently, we developed AnimaStand, a movement-enabled phone stand that animates phones to deliver group facilitation cues according to conversation dynamics. In a between-subjects Wizard-of-Oz study (n=56) with four-stranger group discussions, where everyone's phone was on an AnimaStand, the facilitations re-engaged inactive members, enhancing group dynamics, task operation performance, and relationships. We finally discuss prospects for more adaptive and generalizable animated device personal facilitation.

LGJul 4, 2024
Purification Of Contaminated Convolutional Neural Networks Via Robust Recovery: An Approach with Theoretical Guarantee in One-Hidden-Layer Case

Hanxiao Lu, Zeyu Huang, Ren Wang

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), one of the key architectures of deep learning models, have achieved superior performance on many machine learning tasks such as image classification, video recognition, and power systems. Despite their success, CNNs can be easily contaminated by natural noises and artificially injected noises such as backdoor attacks. In this paper, we propose a robust recovery method to remove the noise from the potentially contaminated CNNs and provide an exact recovery guarantee on one-hidden-layer non-overlapping CNNs with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function. Our theoretical results show that both CNNs' weights and biases can be exactly recovered under the overparameterization setting with some mild assumptions. The experimental results demonstrate the correctness of the proofs and the effectiveness of the method in both the synthetic environment and the practical neural network setting. Our results also indicate that the proposed method can be extended to multiple-layer CNNs and potentially serve as a defense strategy against backdoor attacks.

CLMay 24, 2024
Stacking Your Transformers: A Closer Look at Model Growth for Efficient LLM Pre-Training

Wenyu Du, Tongxu Luo, Zihan Qiu et al.

LLMs are computationally expensive to pre-train due to their large scale. Model growth emerges as a promising approach by leveraging smaller models to accelerate the training of larger ones. However, the viability of these model growth methods in efficient LLM pre-training remains underexplored. This work identifies three critical $\underline{\textit{O}}$bstacles: ($\textit{O}$1) lack of comprehensive evaluation, ($\textit{O}$2) untested viability for scaling, and ($\textit{O}$3) lack of empirical guidelines. To tackle $\textit{O}$1, we summarize existing approaches into four atomic growth operators and systematically evaluate them in a standardized LLM pre-training setting. Our findings reveal that a depthwise stacking operator, called $G_{\text{stack}}$, exhibits remarkable acceleration in training, leading to decreased loss and improved overall performance on eight standard NLP benchmarks compared to strong baselines. Motivated by these promising results, we conduct extensive experiments to delve deeper into $G_{\text{stack}}$ to address $\textit{O}$2 and $\textit{O}$3. For $\textit{O}$2 (untested scalability), our study shows that $G_{\text{stack}}$ is scalable and consistently performs well, with experiments up to 7B LLMs after growth and pre-training LLMs with 750B tokens. For example, compared to a conventionally trained 7B model using 300B tokens, our $G_{\text{stack}}$ model converges to the same loss with 194B tokens, resulting in a 54.6\% speedup. We further address $\textit{O}$3 (lack of empirical guidelines) by formalizing guidelines to determine growth timing and growth factor for $G_{\text{stack}}$, making it practical in general LLM pre-training. We also provide in-depth discussions and comprehensive ablation studies of $G_{\text{stack}}$. Our code and pre-trained model are available at https://llm-stacking.github.io.

LGJan 21, 2025
Demons in the Detail: On Implementing Load Balancing Loss for Training Specialized Mixture-of-Expert Models

Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Bo Zheng et al.

This paper revisits the implementation of $\textbf{L}$oad-$\textbf{b}$alancing $\textbf{L}$oss (LBL) when training Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models. Specifically, LBL for MoEs is defined as $N_E \sum_{i=1}^{N_E} f_i p_i$, where $N_E$ is the total number of experts, $f_i$ represents the frequency of expert $i$ being selected, and $p_i$ denotes the average gating score of the expert $i$. Existing MoE training frameworks usually employ the parallel training strategy so that $f_i$ and the LBL are calculated within a $\textbf{micro-batch}$ and then averaged across parallel groups. In essence, a micro-batch for training billion-scale LLMs normally contains very few sequences. So, the micro-batch LBL is almost at the sequence level, and the router is pushed to distribute the token evenly within each sequence. Under this strict constraint, even tokens from a domain-specific sequence ($\textit{e.g.}$, code) are uniformly routed to all experts, thereby inhibiting expert specialization. In this work, we propose calculating LBL using a $\textbf{global-batch}$ to loose this constraint. Because a global-batch contains much more diverse sequences than a micro-batch, which will encourage load balance at the corpus level. Specifically, we introduce an extra communication step to synchronize $f_i$ across micro-batches and then use it to calculate the LBL. Through experiments on training MoEs-based LLMs (up to $\textbf{42.8B}$ total parameters and $\textbf{400B}$ tokens), we surprisingly find that the global-batch LBL strategy yields excellent performance gains in both pre-training perplexity and downstream tasks. Our analysis reveals that the global-batch LBL also greatly improves the domain specialization of MoE experts.

CLAug 12, 2025
MVISU-Bench: Benchmarking Mobile Agents for Real-World Tasks by Multi-App, Vague, Interactive, Single-App and Unethical Instructions

Zeyu Huang, Juyuan Wang, Longfeng Chen et al.

Given the significant advances in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in reasoning and visual understanding, mobile agents are rapidly emerging to meet users' automation needs. However, existing evaluation benchmarks are disconnected from the real world and fail to adequately address the diverse and complex requirements of users. From our extensive collection of user questionnaire, we identified five tasks: Multi-App, Vague, Interactive, Single-App, and Unethical Instructions. Around these tasks, we present \textbf{MVISU-Bench}, a bilingual benchmark that includes 404 tasks across 137 mobile applications. Furthermore, we propose Aider, a plug-and-play module that acts as a dynamic prompt prompter to mitigate risks and clarify user intent for mobile agents. Our Aider is easy to integrate into several frameworks and has successfully improved overall success rates by 19.55\% compared to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on MVISU-Bench. Specifically, it achieves success rate improvements of 53.52\% and 29.41\% for unethical and interactive instructions, respectively. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we highlight the gap between existing mobile agents and real-world user expectations.

CLJun 3, 2025
A Controllable Examination for Long-Context Language Models

Yijun Yang, Zeyu Huang, Wenhao Zhu et al.

Existing frameworks for evaluating long-context language models (LCLM) can be broadly categorized into real-world applications (e.g, document summarization) and synthetic tasks (e.g, needle-in-a-haystack). Despite their utility, both approaches are accompanied by certain intrinsic limitations. Real-world tasks often involve complexity that makes interpretation challenging and suffer from data contamination, whereas synthetic tasks frequently lack meaningful coherence between the target information (needle) and its surrounding context (haystack), undermining their validity as proxies for realistic applications. In response to these challenges, we posit that an ideal long-context evaluation framework should be characterized by three essential features: 1) seamless context 2) controllable setting and 3) sound evaluation. This study introduces $\textbf{LongBioBench}$, a benchmark that utilizes artificially generated biographies as a controlled environment for assessing LCLMs across dimensions of understanding, reasoning, and trustworthiness. Our experimental evaluation, which includes 18 LCLMs in total, demonstrates that most models still exhibit deficiencies in semantic understanding and elementary reasoning over retrieved results and are less trustworthy as context length increases. Our further analysis indicates some design choices employed by existing synthetic benchmarks, such as contextual non-coherence, numerical needles, and the absence of distractors, rendering them vulnerable to test the model's long-context capabilities. To sum up, compared to previous synthetic benchmarks, LongBioBench achieves a better trade-off between mirroring authentic language tasks and maintaining controllability, and is highly interpretable and configurable.

CLJun 29, 2024
PFME: A Modular Approach for Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing of Large Language Models

Kunquan Deng, Zeyu Huang, Chen Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in fluency but risk producing inaccurate content, called "hallucinations." This paper outlines a standardized process for categorizing fine-grained hallucination types and proposes an innovative framework--the Progressive Fine-grained Model Editor (PFME)--specifically designed to detect and correct fine-grained hallucinations in LLMs. PFME consists of two collaborative modules: the Real-time Fact Retrieval Module and the Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing Module. The former identifies key entities in the document and retrieves the latest factual evidence from credible sources. The latter further segments the document into sentence-level text and, based on relevant evidence and previously edited context, identifies, locates, and edits each sentence's hallucination type. Experimental results on FavaBench and FActScore demonstrate that PFME outperforms existing methods in fine-grained hallucination detection tasks. Particularly, when using the Llama3-8B-Instruct model, PFME's performance in fine-grained hallucination detection with external knowledge assistance improves by 8.7 percentage points (pp) compared to ChatGPT. In editing tasks, PFME further enhances the FActScore of FActScore-Alpaca13B and FActScore-ChatGPT datasets, increasing by 16.2pp and 4.6pp, respectively.

CVMay 6, 2024
Spatial and Surface Correspondence Field for Interaction Transfer

Zeyu Huang, Honghao Xu, Haibin Huang et al.

In this paper, we introduce a new method for the task of interaction transfer. Given an example interaction between a source object and an agent, our method can automatically infer both surface and spatial relationships for the agent and target objects within the same category, yielding more accurate and valid transfers. Specifically, our method characterizes the example interaction using a combined spatial and surface representation. We correspond the agent points and object points related to the representation to the target object space using a learned spatial and surface correspondence field, which represents objects as deformed and rotated signed distance fields. With the corresponded points, an optimization is performed under the constraints of our spatial and surface interaction representation and additional regularization. Experiments conducted on human-chair and hand-mug interaction transfer tasks show that our approach can handle larger geometry and topology variations between source and target shapes, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

CVApr 27, 2020
Graph2Plan: Learning Floorplan Generation from Layout Graphs

Ruizhen Hu, Zeyu Huang, Yuhan Tang et al.

We introduce a learning framework for automated floorplan generation which combines generative modeling using deep neural networks and user-in-the-loop designs to enable human users to provide sparse design constraints. Such constraints are represented by a layout graph. The core component of our learning framework is a deep neural network, Graph2Plan, which converts a layout graph, along with a building boundary, into a floorplan that fulfills both the layout and boundary constraints. Given an input building boundary, we allow a user to specify room counts and other layout constraints, which are used to retrieve a set of floorplans, with their associated layout graphs, from a database. For each retrieved layout graph, along with the input boundary, Graph2Plan first generates a corresponding raster floorplan image, and then a refined set of boxes representing the rooms. Graph2Plan is trained on RPLAN, a large-scale dataset consisting of 80K annotated floorplans. The network is mainly based on convolutional processing over both the layout graph, via a graph neural network (GNN), and the input building boundary, as well as the raster floorplan images, via conventional image convolution.

CLNov 21, 2019
Entity Extraction with Knowledge from Web Scale Corpora

Zeyi Wen, Zeyu Huang, Rui Zhang

Entity extraction is an important task in text mining and natural language processing. A popular method for entity extraction is by comparing substrings from free text against a dictionary of entities. In this paper, we present several techniques as a post-processing step for improving the effectiveness of the existing entity extraction technique. These techniques utilise models trained with the web-scale corpora which makes our techniques robust and versatile. Experiments show that our techniques bring a notable improvement on efficiency and effectiveness.