Ye Lu

Chaoqian Yuan, Chinnapat Panwisawas, Ye Lu

Phase field simulations play a key role in the understanding of microstructure evolution in additive manufacturing. However, they have been found extremely computationally expensive. One of the reasons is the small time step requirement to resolve the complex microstructure evolution during the rapid solidification process. This paper investigates the possibility of using a class of stabilized time integration algorithms to accelerate such phase field simulations by increasing the time steps, based on a phase field model dedicated to simulating the solidification of 316L stainless steel during additive manufacturing, particularly in a regime where the solid-liquid interface is moving fast and there is absolute interfacial stability with negligible composition variations. The specific computational framework, incorporating the finite element method and the stabilized time integration algorithms, was developed. A theoretical analysis on energy stability was conducted, based on a revisited energy law derived for the phase field model. The numerical results confirmed that the proposed framework can effectively enforce the numerical stability and a decreasing energy requirement for the phase field simulations with at least two orders-of-magnitude larger time steps over conventional explicit methods. 2D and 3D phase field simulations have been conducted with relevant physical and kinetic parameters for 316L stainless steel. This computational framework can be easily adapted for different phase field models and open numerous opportunities for efficient phase field simulations.

Cheng Gong, Yao Chen, Qiuyang Luo et al.

Multi-exit network is a promising architecture for efficient model inference by sharing backbone networks and weights among multiple exits. However, the gradient conflict of the shared weights results in sub-optimal accuracy. This paper introduces Deep Feature Surgery (\methodname), which consists of feature partitioning and feature referencing approaches to resolve gradient conflict issues during the training of multi-exit networks. The feature partitioning separates shared features along the depth axis among all exits to alleviate gradient conflict while simultaneously promoting joint optimization for each exit. Subsequently, feature referencing enhances multi-scale features for distinct exits across varying depths to improve the model accuracy. Furthermore, \methodname~reduces the training operations with the reduced complexity of backpropagation. Experimental results on Cifar100 and ImageNet datasets exhibit that \methodname~provides up to a \textbf{50.00\%} reduction in training time and attains up to a \textbf{6.94\%} enhancement in accuracy when contrasted with baseline methods across diverse models and tasks. Budgeted batch classification evaluation on MSDNet demonstrates that DFS uses about $\mathbf{2}\boldsymbol{\times}$ fewer average FLOPs per image to achieve the same classification accuracy as baseline methods on Cifar100. The code is available at https://github.com/GongCheng1919/dfs.

Yangfan Li, Satyajit Mojumder, Ye Lu et al.

A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of physical process, products and/or systems that requires a high-fidelity computational model for continuous update through the integration of sensor data and user input. In the context of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing, a digital twin of the manufacturing process can offer predictions for the produced parts, diagnostics for manufacturing defects, as well as control capabilities. This paper introduces a parameterized physics-based digital twin (PPB-DT) for the statistical predictions of LPBF metal additive manufacturing process. We accomplish this by creating a high-fidelity computational model that accurately represents the melt pool phenomena and subsequently calibrating and validating it through controlled experiments. In PPB-DT, a mechanistic reduced-order method-driven stochastic calibration process is introduced, which enables the statistical predictions of the melt pool geometries and the identification of defects such as lack-of-fusion porosity and surface roughness, specifically for diagnostic applications. Leveraging data derived from this physics-based model and experiments, we have trained a machine learning-based digital twin (PPB-ML-DT) model for predicting, monitoring, and controlling melt pool geometries. These proposed digital twin models can be employed for predictions, control, optimization, and quality assurance within the LPBF process, ultimately expediting product development and certification in LPBF-based metal additive manufacturing.

Junjie Yu, Pengrui Lu, Weiye Si et al.

Benchmarks within the OpenClaw ecosystem have thus far evaluated exclusively assistant-level tasks, leaving the academic-level capabilities of OpenClaw largely unexamined. We introduce AcademiClaw, a bilingual benchmark of 80 complex, long-horizon tasks sourced directly from university students' real academic workflows -- homework, research projects, competitions, and personal projects -- that they found current AI agents unable to solve effectively. Curated from 230 student-submitted candidates through rigorous expert review, the final task set spans 25+ professional domains, ranging from olympiad-level mathematics and linguistics problems to GPU-intensive reinforcement learning and full-stack system debugging, with 16 tasks requiring CUDA GPU execution. Each task executes in an isolated Docker sandbox and is scored on task completion by multi-dimensional rubrics combining six complementary techniques, with an independent five-category safety audit providing additional behavioral analysis. Experiments on six frontier models show that even the best achieves only a 55\% pass rate. Further analysis uncovers sharp capability boundaries across task domains, divergent behavioral strategies among models, and a disconnect between token consumption and output quality, providing fine-grained diagnostic signals beyond what aggregate metrics reveal. We hope that AcademiClaw and its open-sourced data and code can serve as a useful resource for the OpenClaw community, driving progress toward agents that are more capable and versatile across the full breadth of real-world academic demands. All data and code are available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AcademiClaw.

Ye Lu, Bingdong Li, Aimin Zhou et al.

Expensive optimization problems (EOPs) are black-box tasks with costly objective evaluations and no gradient access, making the evaluation budget the key bottleneck. Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) reduce evaluations via surrogate predictions, but conventional surrogates often require frequent retraining as populations evolve, incurring overhead. This paper proposes R2SAEA, a reinforcement-trained relation-based large language model (LLM) surrogate assisted evolutionary algorithm. We cast relation-based surrogate modeling as an in-context pairwise reasoning task. To enable efficient inference in evolutionary loops, we develop an anchor-based iterative context construction strategy that reduces prompt complexity from quadratic to linear in population size, and a voting-based aggregation scheme that converts predicted relations into scores for offspring selection. We further build an RL pipeline from evolutionary trajectories and fine-tune Qwen2.5 with GRPO. Experiments on single- and multi-objective benchmarks show improved relation prediction and state-of-the-art optimization performance over strong SAEA baselines and general LLMs. Quantization also enables efficient edge deployment, supporting a zero-shot surrogate paradigm without per-generation retraining. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Septend9/R2SAEA.

Tianyi Liu, Ye Lu, Linfeng Zhang et al.

Diffusion-based video editing has emerged as an important paradigm for high-quality and flexible content generation. However, despite their generality and strong modeling capacity, Diffusion Transformers (DiT) remain computationally expensive due to the iterative denoising process, posing challenges for practical deployment. Existing video diffusion acceleration methods primarily exploit denoising timestep-level feature reuse, which mitigates the redundancy in denoising process, but overlooks the architectural redundancy within the DiT that many attention operations over spatio-temporal tokens are redundantly executed, offering little to no incremental contribution to the model output. This work introduces HetCache, a training-free diffusion acceleration framework designed to exploit the inherent heterogeneity in diffusion-based masked video-to-video (MV2V) generation and editing. Instead of uniformly reuse or randomly sampling tokens, HetCache assesses the contextual relevance and interaction strength among various types of tokens in designated computing steps. Guided by spatial priors, it divides the spatial-temporal tokens in DiT model into context and generative tokens, and selectively caches the context tokens that exhibit the strongest correlation and most representative semantics with generative ones. This strategy reduces redundant attention operations while maintaining editing consistency and fidelity. Experiments show that HetCache achieves a noticeable acceleration, including a 2.67$\times$ latency speedup and FLOPs reduction over commonly used foundation models, with negligible degradation in editing quality.

Boran Wen, Ye Lu, Keyan Wan et al.

Generalized robots must learn from diverse, large-scale human-object interactions (HOI) to operate robustly in the real world. Monocular internet videos offer a nearly limitless and readily available source of data, capturing an unparalleled diversity of human activities, objects, and environments. However, accurately and scalably extracting 4D interaction data from these in-the-wild videos remains a significant and unsolved challenge. Thus, in this work, we introduce 4DHOISolver, a novel and efficient optimization framework that constrains the ill-posed 4D HOI reconstruction problem by leveraging sparse, human-in-the-loop contact point annotations, while maintaining high spatio-temporal coherence and physical plausibility. Leveraging this framework, we introduce Open4DHOI, a new large-scale 4D HOI dataset featuring a diverse catalog of 144 object types and 103 actions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our reconstructions by enabling an RL-based agent to imitate the recovered motions. However, a comprehensive benchmark of existing 3D foundation models indicates that automatically predicting precise human-object contact correspondences remains an unsolved problem, underscoring the immediate necessity of our human-in-the-loop strategy while posing an open challenge to the community. Data and code will be publicly available at https://wenboran2002.github.io/open4dhoi/

Cheng Gong, Ye Lu, Surong Dai et al.

Exploring the expected quantizing scheme with suitable mixed-precision policy is the key point to compress deep neural networks (DNNs) in high efficiency and accuracy. This exploration implies heavy workloads for domain experts, and an automatic compression method is needed. However, the huge search space of the automatic method introduces plenty of computing budgets that make the automatic process challenging to be applied in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework named AutoQNN, for automatically quantizing different layers utilizing different schemes and bitwidths without any human labor. AutoQNN can seek desirable quantizing schemes and mixed-precision policies for mainstream DNN models efficiently by involving three techniques: quantizing scheme search (QSS), quantizing precision learning (QPL), and quantized architecture generation (QAG). QSS introduces five quantizing schemes and defines three new schemes as a candidate set for scheme search, and then uses the differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) algorithm to seek the layer- or model-desired scheme from the set. QPL is the first method to learn mixed-precision policies by reparameterizing the bitwidths of quantizing schemes, to the best of our knowledge. QPL optimizes both classification loss and precision loss of DNNs efficiently and obtains the relatively optimal mixed-precision model within limited model size and memory footprint. QAG is designed to convert arbitrary architectures into corresponding quantized ones without manual intervention, to facilitate end-to-end neural network quantization. We have implemented AutoQNN and integrated it into Keras. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoQNN can consistently outperform state-of-the-art quantization.

Linxin Hua, Jianghua Deng, Ye Lu

Point cloud reconstruction of damage offers an effective solution to image-based methods vulnerable to background noise, yet its application is constrained by the high volume of 3D data. This study proposes a new feature, relative angle, computed as the angle between the normal vector of a point and the average normal vector of its parent point cloud. This single-dimensional feature provides directionality information equivalent to normal vectors for concrete surface defect characteristics. Through entropy-based feature evaluation, this study demonstrates the ability of relative angle to filter out redundant information in undamaged sections while retaining effective information in damaged sections. By training and testing with PointNet++, models based on the relative angles achieved similar performance to that of models based on normal vectors while delivering 27.6% storage reduction and 83% input channel compression. This novel feature has the potential to enable larger-batch execution on resource-constrained hardware without the necessity of architectural modifications to models.

Siyu Song, Wentao Liu, Ye Lu et al.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into education presents unprecedented opportunities for scalable personalized learning. However, standard LLMs often function as generic information providers, lacking alignment with fundamental pedagogical principles such as helpfulness, student-centered personalization, and creativity cultivation. To bridge this gap, we propose EduAlign, a novel framework designed to guide LLMs toward becoming more effective and responsible educational assistants. EduAlign consists of two main stages. In the first stage, we curate a dataset of 8k educational interactions and annotate them-both manually and automatically-along three key educational dimensions: Helpfulness, Personalization, and Creativity (HPC). These annotations are used to train HPC-RM, a multi-dimensional reward model capable of accurately scoring LLM outputs according to these educational principles. We further evaluate the consistency and reliability of this reward model. In the second stage, we leverage HPC-RM as a reward signal to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on a set of 2k diverse prompts. We then assess the pre- and post-finetuning models on both educational and general-domain benchmarks across the three HPC dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned model exhibits significantly improved alignment with pedagogical helpfulness, personalization, and creativity stimulation. This study presents a scalable and effective approach to aligning LLMs with nuanced and desirable educational traits, paving the way for the development of more engaging, pedagogically aligned AI tutors.

Ye Lu, Jie Wang, Jianjun Gao et al.

Recent Mamba-based methods for the pose-lifting task tend to model joint dependencies by 2D-to-1D mapping with diverse scanning strategies. Though effective, they struggle to model intricate joint connections and uniformly process all joint motion trajectories while neglecting the intrinsic differences across motion characteristics. In this work, we propose a structure-aware and motion-adaptive framework to capture spatial joint topology along with diverse motion dynamics independently, named as SAMA. Specifically, SAMA consists of a Structure-aware State Integrator (SSI) and a Motion-adaptive State Modulator (MSM). The Structure-aware State Integrator is tasked with leveraging dynamic joint relationships to fuse information at both the joint feature and state levels in the state space, based on pose topology rather than sequential state transitions. The Motion-adaptive State Modulator is responsible for joint-specific motion characteristics recognition, thus applying tailored adjustments to diverse motion patterns across different joints. Through the above key modules, our algorithm enables structure-aware and motion-adaptive pose lifting. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our algorithm achieves advanced results with fewer computational costs.

Keyu Li, Ye Lu, Max Q. -H. Meng

In recent years, the growing demand for more intelligent service robots is pushing the development of mobile robot navigation algorithms to allow safe and efficient operation in a dense crowd. Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown superior ability in solving sequential decision making problems, and recent work has explored its potential to learn navigation polices in a socially compliant manner. However, the expert demonstration data used in existing methods is usually expensive and difficult to obtain. In this work, we consider the task of training an RL agent without employing the demonstration data, to achieve efficient and collision-free navigation in a crowded environment. To address the sparse reward navigation problem, we propose to incorporate the hindsight experience replay (HER) and curriculum learning (CL) techniques with RL to efficiently learn the optimal navigation policy in the dense crowd. The effectiveness of our method is validated in a simulated crowd-robot coexisting environment. The results demonstrate that our method can effectively learn human-aware navigation without requiring additional demonstration data.

Cheng Gong, Ye Lu, Kunpeng Xie et al.

Quantization has been proven to be a vital method for improving the inference efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, it is still challenging to strike a good balance between accuracy and efficiency while quantizing DNN weights or activation values from high-precision formats to their quantized counterparts. We propose a new method called elastic significant bit quantization (ESB) that controls the number of significant bits of quantized values to obtain better inference accuracy with fewer resources. We design a unified mathematical formula to constrain the quantized values of the ESB with a flexible number of significant bits. We also introduce a distribution difference aligner (DDA) to quantitatively align the distributions between the full-precision weight or activation values and quantized values. Consequently, ESB is suitable for various bell-shaped distributions of weights and activation of DNNs, thus maintaining a high inference accuracy. Benefitting from fewer significant bits of quantized values, ESB can reduce the multiplication complexity. We implement ESB as an accelerator and quantitatively evaluate its efficiency on FPGAs. Extensive experimental results illustrate that ESB quantization consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves average accuracy improvements of 4.78%, 1.92%, and 3.56% over AlexNet, ResNet18, and MobileNetV2, respectively. Furthermore, ESB as an accelerator can achieve 10.95 GOPS peak performance of 1k LUTs without DSPs on the Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA platform. Compared with CPU, GPU, and state-of-the-art accelerators on FPGAs, the ESB accelerator can improve the energy efficiency by up to 65x, 11x, and 26x, respectively.

Lei Zhang, Ye Lu, Shaoqiang Tang et al.

This paper presents a proper generalized decomposition (PGD) based reduced-order model of hierarchical deep-learning neural networks (HiDeNN). The proposed HiDeNN-PGD method keeps both advantages of HiDeNN and PGD methods. The automatic mesh adaptivity makes the HiDeNN-PGD more accurate than the finite element method (FEM) and conventional PGD, using a fraction of the FEM degrees of freedom. The accuracy and convergence of the method have been studied theoretically and numerically, with a comparison to different methods, including FEM, PGD, HiDeNN and Deep Neural Networks. In addition, we theoretically showed that the PGD converges to FEM at increasing modes, and the PGD error is a direct sum of the FEM error and the mode reduction error. The proposed HiDeNN-PGD performs high accuracy with orders of magnitude fewer degrees of freedom, which shows a high potential to achieve fast computations with a high level of accuracy for large-size engineering problems.

Qihang Yang, Tao Chen, Jiayuan Fan et al.

Due to real-time image semantic segmentation needs on power constrained edge devices, there has been an increasing desire to design lightweight semantic segmentation neural network, to simultaneously reduce computational cost and increase inference speed. In this paper, we propose an efficient asymmetric dilated semantic segmentation network, named EADNet, which consists of multiple developed asymmetric convolution branches with different dilation rates to capture the variable shapes and scales information of an image. Specially, a multi-scale multi-shape receptive field convolution (MMRFC) block with only a few parameters is designed to capture such information. Experimental results on the Cityscapes dataset demonstrate that our proposed EADNet achieves segmentation mIoU of 67.1 with smallest number of parameters (only 0.35M) among mainstream lightweight semantic segmentation networks.

Cheng Gong, Yao Chen, Ye Lu et al.

Quantization has been proven to be an effective method for reducing the computing and/or storage cost of DNNs. However, the trade-off between the quantization bitwidth and final accuracy is complex and non-convex, which makes it difficult to be optimized directly. Minimizing direct quantization loss (DQL) of the coefficient data is an effective local optimization method, but previous works often neglect the accurate control of the DQL, resulting in a higher loss of the final DNN model accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel metric called Vector Loss. Based on this new metric, we develop a new quantization solution called VecQ, which can guarantee minimal direct quantization loss and better model accuracy. In addition, in order to speed up the proposed quantization process during model training, we accelerate the quantization process with a parameterized probability estimation method and template-based derivation calculation. We evaluate our proposed algorithm on MNIST, CIFAR, ImageNet, IMDB movie review and THUCNews text data sets with numerical DNN models. The results demonstrate that our proposed quantization solution is more accurate and effective than the state-of-the-art approaches yet with more flexible bitwidth support. Moreover, the evaluation of our quantized models on Saliency Object Detection (SOD) tasks maintains comparable feature extraction quality with up to 16$\times$ weight size reduction.