Chao Yin

Aiyuan Yang, Bin Xiao, Bingning Wang et al. · pku

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on a variety of natural language tasks based on just a few examples of natural language instructions, reducing the need for extensive feature engineering. However, most powerful LLMs are closed-source or limited in their capability for languages other than English. In this technical report, we present Baichuan 2, a series of large-scale multilingual language models containing 7 billion and 13 billion parameters, trained from scratch, on 2.6 trillion tokens. Baichuan 2 matches or outperforms other open-source models of similar size on public benchmarks like MMLU, CMMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Furthermore, Baichuan 2 excels in vertical domains such as medicine and law. We will release all pre-training model checkpoints to benefit the research community in better understanding the training dynamics of Baichuan 2.

Chao Yin, Youran Dong, Shiqian Ma et al.

Networked AI systems increasingly rely on multiple agents that collaboratively learn and adapt models over communication networks. In such systems, bilevel formulations naturally arise in hyperparameter optimization, data cleaning, and meta-learning, but the repeated evaluation of gradients, Jacobians, and Hessians can impose a substantial computational burden on individual agents. To address this challenge, we propose Snapshot-SLDBO (S$^3$LDBO), an efficient single-loop decentralized bilevel optimization algorithm that enables agents to intermittently skip expensive derivative evaluations through a snapshot mechanism. This mechanism can be interpreted as an autonomous computation-adaptation strategy for networked AI, where agents selectively perform costly local updates while maintaining global collaborative learning. We establish the ergodic iteration complexity and the high probability nonergodic iteration complexity of the proposed algorithm within a deterministic setting. Experimental results on hyperparameter optimization with synthetic and MNIST datasets, data hyper-cleaning on Fashion-MNIST, and decentralized meta-learning on miniImageNet demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves computational efficiency while maintaining competitive learning performance.

Chao Yin, Hongzhe Yue, Qing Han et al.

Automated semantic understanding of dense point clouds is a prerequisite for Scan-to-BIM pipelines, digital twin construction, and as-built verification--core tasks in the digital transformation of the construction industry. Yet for industrial mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) facilities, this challenge remains largely unsolved: TLS acquisitions of water treatment plants, chiller halls, and pumping stations exhibit extreme geometric ambiguity, severe occlusion, and extreme class imbalance that architectural benchmarks (e.g., S3DIS or ScanNet) cannot adequately represent. We present Industrial3D, a terrestrial LiDAR dataset comprising 612 million expertly labelled points at 6 mm resolution from 13 water treatment facilities. At 6.6x the scale of the closest comparable MEP dataset, Industrial3D provides the largest and most demanding testbed for industrial 3D scene understanding to date. We further establish the first industrial cross-paradigm benchmark, evaluating nine representative methods across fully supervised, weakly supervised, unsupervised, and foundation model settings under a unified benchmark protocol. The best supervised method achieves 55.74% mIoU, whereas zero-shot Point-SAM reaches only 15.79%--a 39.95 percentage-point gap that quantifies the unresolved domain-transfer challenge for industrial TLS data. Systematic analysis reveals that this gap originates from a dual crisis: statistical rarity (215:1 imbalance, 3.5x more severe than S3DIS) and geometric ambiguity (tail-class points share cylindrical primitives with head-class pipes) that frequency-based re-weighting alone cannot resolve. Industrial3D, along with benchmark code and pre-trained models, will be publicly available at https://github.com/pointcloudyc/Industrial3D.

Chao Yin, Qing Han, Zhiwei Hou et al.

Industrial point cloud segmentation for Digital Twin construction faces a persistent challenge: safety-critical components such as reducers and valves are systematically misclassified. These failures stem from two compounding factors: such components are rare in training data, yet they share identical local geometry with dominant structures like pipes. This work identifies a dual crisis unique to industrial 3D data extreme class imbalance 215:1 ratio compounded by geometric ambiguity where most tail classes share cylindrical primitives with head classes. Existing frequency-based re-weighting methods address statistical imbalance but cannot resolve geometric ambiguity. We propose spatial context constraints that leverage neighborhood prediction consistency to disambiguate locally similar structures. Our approach extends the Class-Balanced (CB) Loss framework with two architecture-agnostic mechanisms: (1) Boundary-CB, an entropy-based constraint that emphasizes ambiguous boundaries, and (2) Density-CB, a density-based constraint that compensates for scan-dependent variations. Both integrate as plug-and-play modules without network modifications, requiring only loss function replacement. On the Industrial3D dataset (610M points from water treatment facilities), our method achieves 55.74% mIoU with 21.7% relative improvement on tail-class performance (29.59% vs. 24.32% baseline) while preserving head-class accuracy (88.14%). Components with primitive-sharing ambiguity show dramatic gains: reducer improves from 0% to 21.12% IoU; valve improves by 24.3% relative. This resolves geometric ambiguity without the typical head-tail trade-off, enabling reliable identification of safety-critical components for automated knowledge extraction in Digital Twin applications.

Chao Yin, Zunchen Huang, Chenglu Jin et al.

Semi-Private Function Evaluation (SPFE) enables joint computation while protecting both input data and the function itself. A practical instantiation is gate-hiding garbled circuits, which conceal gate functionalities while revealing circuit topology. Existing security definitions intentionally exclude leakage through topology, leaving its concrete impact on function privacy largely unexplored. We present a SAT-based function-recovery attack that reconstructs hidden gate operations from a circuit's public topology under two attacker knowledge models. Our approach combines topology-preserving simplification theorems with a decomposition of the recovery task into smaller SAT queries, thereby reducing the candidate gate-type assignment space and improving recovery performance. We evaluate the attack on ISCAS benchmarks, representative secure computation circuits, and fault-tolerant sensor fusion circuits under a 24-hour recovery budget. Compared to a baseline attack, the optimized version substantially reduces recovery time and, in some cases, completes recovery within the evaluation budget where the baseline does not. Our results show that revealing circuit topology can materially assist recovery of hidden gate functionality, identifying topology as a security-relevant leakage channel in gate-hiding garbled circuits.

Ishna Satyarth, Chao Yin, Devin A. Matthews et al.

The factorization of skew-symmetric matrices is a critically understudied area of dense linear algebra, particularly in comparison to that of general and symmetric matrices. While some algorithms can be adapted from the symmetric case, the cost of algorithms can be reduced by exploiting skew-symmetry. This work examines the factorization of a skew-symmetric matrix $X$ into its $LTL^T$ decomposition, where $L$ is unit lower triangular and $T$ is tridiagonal. This is also known as a triangular tridiagonalization. This operation is a means for computing the determinant of $X$ as the square of the (cheaply-computed) Pfaffian of the skew-symmetric tridiagonal matrix $T$ as well as for solving systems of equations, across fields such as quantum electronic structure and machine learning. Its application also often requires pivoting in order to improve numerical stability. We compare and contrast previously-published algorithms with those systematically derived using the FLAME methodology. Performant parallel CPU implementations are achieved by fusing operations at multiple levels in order to reduce memory traffic overhead. A key factor is the employment of new capabilities of the BLAS-like Library Instantion Software (BLIS) framework, which now supports casting level-2 and level-3 BLAS-like operations by leveraging its gemm and other kernels, hierarchical parallelism, and cache blocking. A prototype, concise C++ API facilitates the translation of correct-by-construction algorithms into correct code. Experiments verify that the resulting implementations greatly exceed the performance of previous work.

Youran Dong, Shiqian Ma, Junfeng Yang et al.

Bilevel optimization has gained significant attention in recent years due to its broad applications in machine learning. This paper focuses on bilevel optimization in decentralized networks and proposes a novel single-loop algorithm for solving decentralized bilevel optimization with a strongly convex lower-level problem. Our approach is a fully single-loop method that approximates the hypergradient using only two matrix-vector multiplications per iteration. Importantly, our algorithm does not require any gradient heterogeneity assumption, distinguishing it from existing methods for decentralized bilevel optimization and federated bilevel optimization. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed algorithm achieves the best-known convergence rate for bilevel optimization algorithms. We also present experimental results on hyperparameter optimization problems using both synthetic and MNIST datasets, which demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

Chao Yin, Jide Li, Hang Yao et al.

Training-free Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS) seeks to segment camouflaged objects without task-specific training, by automatically generating visual prompts to guide the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, existing pipelines mostly yield semantic-level prompts, which drive SAM to coarse semantic masks and struggle to handle multiple discrete camouflaged instances effectively. To address this critical limitation, we propose an \textbf{I}nstance-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{P}rompting \textbf{F}ramework (IAPF) tailored for the first training-free COS that upgrades prompt granularity from semantic to instance-level while keeping all components frozen. The centerpiece is an Instance Mask Generator that (i) leverages a detector-agnostic enumerator to produce precise instance-level box prompts for the foreground tag, and (ii) introduces the Single-Foreground Multi-Background Prompting (SFMBP) strategy to sample region-constrained point prompts within each box prompt, enabling SAM to output instance masks. The pipeline is supported by a simple text prompt generator that produces image-specific tags and a self-consistency vote across synonymous task-generic prompts to stabilize inference. Extensive evaluations on three COS benchmarks, two CIS benchmarks, and two downstream datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods. Code will be released upon acceptance.