Yue Wu

Jun Li, Hongfu Liu, Yue Wu et al.

We consider three challenges in multi-block Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM): building convergence conditions for ADMM with any block (variable) sequence, finding available block sequences to be fit for ADMM, and designing useful parameter controllers for ADMM with unfixed parameters. To address these challenges, we develop a switched control framework for studying multi-block ADMM. First, since ADMM recursively and alternately updates the block-variables, it is converted into a discrete-time switched dynamical system. Second, we study exponential stability and stabilizability of the switched system for linear convergence analysis and design of ADMM by employing switched Lyapunov functions. Moreover, linear matrix inequalities conditions are proposed to ensure convergence of ADMM under arbitrary sequence, to find convergent sequences, and to design the fixed parameters. These conditions are checked and solved by employing semidefinite programming. Numerical experiments further verify the effectiveness of our proposed theories.

So Yeon Min, Yue Wu, Jimin Sun et al. · cmu

Human intelligence involves metacognitive abilities like self-regulation, recognizing limitations, and seeking assistance only when needed. While LLM Agents excel in many domains, they often lack this awareness. Overconfident agents risk catastrophic failures, while those that seek help excessively hinder efficiency. A key challenge is enabling agents with a limited intervention budget $C$ is to decide when to request assistance. In this paper, we propose an offline framework that trains a "helper" policy to request interventions, such as more powerful models or test-time compute, by combining LLM-based process reward models (PRMs) with tabular reinforcement learning. Using state transitions collected offline, we score optimal intervention timing with PRMs and train the helper model on these labeled trajectories. This offline approach significantly reduces costly intervention calls during training. Furthermore, the integration of PRMs with tabular RL enhances robustness to off-policy data while avoiding the inefficiencies of deep RL. We empirically find that our method delivers optimal helper behavior.

Tiantian Ji, Yue Wu, Chang Wang et al.

With the success of the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) sponsored by DARPA, the topic of Autonomous Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) has recently attracted extensive attention from both industry and academia. Utilizing automated system to detect, exploit and patch software vulnerabilities seems so attractive because of its scalability and cost-efficiency compared with the human expert based solution. In this paper, we give an extensive survey of former representative works related to the underlying technologies of a CRS, including vulnerability detection, exploitation and patching. As an important supplement, we then review several pioneer studies that explore the potential of machine learning technologies in this field, and point out that the future development of Autonomous CRS is inseparable from machine learning.

Jun Li, Hongfu Liu, Bineng Zhong et al.

Stochastic gradient methods are dominant in nonconvex optimization especially for deep models but have low asymptotical convergence due to the fixed smoothness. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method for improving stochastic gradient methods named predictive local smoothness (PLS). First, we create a convergence condition to build a learning rate which varies adaptively with local smoothness. Second, the local smoothness can be predicted by the latest gradients. Third, we use the adaptive learning rate to update the stochastic gradients for exploring linear convergence rates. By applying the PLS method, we implement new variants of three popular algorithms: PLS-stochastic gradient descent (PLS-SGD), PLS-accelerated SGD (PLS-AccSGD), and PLS-AMSGrad. Moreover, we provide much simpler proofs to ensure their linear convergence. Empirical results show that the variants have better performance gains than the popular algorithms, such as, faster convergence and alleviating explosion and vanish of gradients.