Zhiming Li

Tianlin Li, Qing Guo, Aishan Liu et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant progress, but often suffer from fairness issues, as deep models typically show distinct accuracy differences among certain subgroups (e.g., males and females). Existing research addresses this critical issue by employing fairness-aware loss functions to constrain the last-layer outputs and directly regularize DNNs. Although the fairness of DNNs is improved, it is unclear how the trained network makes a fair prediction, which limits future fairness improvements. In this paper, we investigate fairness from the perspective of decision rationale and define the parameter parity score to characterize the fair decision process of networks by analyzing neuron influence in various subgroups. Extensive empirical studies show that the unfair issue could arise from the unaligned decision rationales of subgroups. Existing fairness regularization terms fail to achieve decision rationale alignment because they only constrain last-layer outputs while ignoring intermediate neuron alignment. To address the issue, we formulate the fairness as a new task, i.e., decision rationale alignment that requires DNNs' neurons to have consistent responses on subgroups at both intermediate processes and the final prediction. To make this idea practical during optimization, we relax the naive objective function and propose gradient-guided parity alignment, which encourages gradient-weighted consistency of neurons across subgroups. Extensive experiments on a variety of datasets show that our method can significantly enhance fairness while sustaining a high level of accuracy and outperforming other approaches by a wide margin.

Yushi Cao, Zhiming Li, Tianpei Yang et al.

Despite achieving superior performance in human-level control problems, unlike humans, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) lacks high-order intelligence (e.g., logic deduction and reuse), thus it behaves ineffectively than humans regarding learning and generalization in complex problems. Previous works attempt to directly synthesize a white-box logic program as the DRL policy, manifesting logic-driven behaviors. However, most synthesis methods are built on imperative or declarative programming, and each has a distinct limitation, respectively. The former ignores the cause-effect logic during synthesis, resulting in low generalizability across tasks. The latter is strictly proof-based, thus failing to synthesize programs with complex hierarchical logic. In this paper, we combine the above two paradigms together and propose a novel Generalizable Logic Synthesis (GALOIS) framework to synthesize hierarchical and strict cause-effect logic programs. GALOIS leverages the program sketch and defines a new sketch-based hybrid program language for guiding the synthesis. Based on that, GALOIS proposes a sketch-based program synthesis method to automatically generate white-box programs with generalizable and interpretable cause-effect logic. Extensive evaluations on various decision-making tasks with complex logic demonstrate the superiority of GALOIS over mainstream baselines regarding the asymptotic performance, generalizability, and great knowledge reusability across different environments.

ZhiMing Li, JiaHe Feng

We study eigendecomposition on $SO(n)$ under streaming observations $C_k = C_{\mathrm{sig}} + σ_k^2 I + E_k$, where the isotropic background $σ_k^2 I$ may be time-varying and arbitrarily large. Standard algorithms couple their stability to $\lVert C_k \rVert_2 \approx σ^2$, forcing step sizes, contraction rates, and iteration counts to degrade with the noise floor. We observe that $σ^2 I$ lies in the center of the matrix algebra and therefore *should never enter* the eigenspace dynamics. We construct a discrete double-bracket flow whose skew-symmetric generator $Ω= [A, \operatorname{diag}(A)]$ operates in the tangent Lie algebra $\mathfrak{so}(n)$, where scalar multiples of the identity vanish by antisymmetry. The resulting trajectory, Lyapunov function, and maximal stable step size $η_{\max} = 1/L_C$ depend exclusively on the trace-free signal $C_e$ -- achieving pointwise, pathwise $σ^2$-invariance. We establish input-to-state stability with a noise ball governed solely by trace-free perturbations, prove global convergence via strict-saddle geometry and a discrete Łojasiewicz argument, and extend the framework to top-$k$ eigentracking on the Stiefel manifold $\operatorname{St}(k,n)$ at cost $k$ matrix-vector products per step.

Le Liu, Zhiming Li, Jianzhi Yan et al.

Despite its success, existing in-context learning (ICL) relies on in-domain expert demonstrations, limiting its applicability when expert annotations are scarce. We posit that different domains may share underlying reasoning structures, enabling source-domain demonstrations to improve target-domain inference despite semantic mismatch. To test this hypothesis, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study of different retrieval methods to validate the feasibility of achieving cross-domain knowledge transfer under the in-context learning setting. Our results demonstrate conditional positive transfer in cross-domain ICL. We identify a clear example absorption threshold: beyond it, positive transfer becomes more likely, and additional demonstrations yield larger gains. Further analysis suggests that these gains stem from reasoning structure repair by retrieved cross-domain examples, rather than semantic cues. Overall, our study validates the feasibility of leveraging cross-domain knowledge transfer to improve cross-domain ICL performance, motivating the community to explore designing more effective retrieval approaches for this novel direction.\footnote{Our implementation is available at https://github.com/littlelaska/ICL-TF4LR}

Jianzhi Yan, Zhiming Li, Le Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have made notable progress in logical reasoning, yet still fall short of human-level performance. Current boosting strategies rely on expert-crafted in-domain demonstrations, limiting their applicability in expertise-scarce domains, such as specialized mathematical reasoning, formal logic, or legal analysis. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of leveraging cross-domain demonstrating examples to boost the LLMs' reasoning performance. Despite substantial domain differences, many reusable implicit logical structures are shared across domains. In order to effectively retrieve cross-domain examples for unseen domains under investigation, in this work, we further propose an effective retrieval method, called domain-invariant neurons-based retrieval (\textbf{DIN-Retrieval}). Concisely, DIN-Retrieval first summarizes a hidden representation that is universal across different domains. Then, during the inference stage, we use the DIN vector to retrieve structurally compatible cross-domain demonstrations for the in-context learning. Experimental results in multiple settings for the transfer of mathematical and logical reasoning demonstrate that our method achieves an average improvement of 1.8 over the state-of-the-art methods \footnote{Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Leon221220/DIN-Retrieval}.

Zhiming Li, Junzhe Jiang, Yushi Cao et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has revolutionized quantitative trading (Q-trading) by achieving decent performance without significant human expert knowledge. Despite its achievements, we observe that the current state-of-the-art DRL models are still ineffective in identifying the market trends, causing them to miss good trading opportunities or suffer from large drawdowns when encountering market crashes. To address this limitation, a natural approach is to incorporate human expert knowledge in identifying market trends. Whereas, such knowledge is abstract and hard to be quantified. In order to effectively leverage abstract human expert knowledge, in this paper, we propose a universal logic-guided deep reinforcement learning framework for Q-trading, called Logic-Q. In particular, Logic-Q adopts the program synthesis by sketching paradigm and introduces a logic-guided model design that leverages a lightweight, plug-and-play market trend-aware program sketch to determine the market trend and correspondingly adjusts the DRL policy in a post-hoc manner. Extensive evaluations of two popular quantitative trading tasks demonstrate that Logic-Q can significantly improve the performance of previous state-of-the-art DRL trading strategies.

ZhiMing Li, Yue Song

We study online estimation in latent-variable models by recasting the problem as tracking a moving empirical equilibrium. Standard online EM and stochastic approximation analyses primarily study convergence toward the population parameter and typically do not isolate the empirical batch optimum from the online tracking error at finite horizon. Our framework decomposes the online estimate into the frozen batch equilibrium at the current running statistic and a tracking lag that captures the algorithm's delay behind this moving target. We prove a batch-to-online transfer theorem: provided $\lVert e_T \rVert_{L^{2}} = o(T^{-1/2})$, the online estimator inherits the batch central limit theorem and the sharp first-order risk constant. Our key observation is that the empirical optimum evolves on a smooth equilibrium manifold indexed by the running statistic. An $m$-th order equilibrium-jet predictor combined with an order-$ν$ frozen corrector yields localized tracking rates $O(T^{-ν(m+1)})$. We formalize EM-compressibility and EM-jet$^R$-compressibility as the structural conditions that make the equilibrium response and the Newton corrector evaluable from a retained streaming statistic. The theory is instantiated in latent linear Gaussian covariance estimation, where the first-order scheme operates on a compressed $d \times d$ statistic with explicit finite-sample risk envelopes and a certified restart rule.

Dejun Hu, Zhiming Li, Jia-Rui Shen et al.

Machine learning is profoundly reshaping molecular and materials modeling; however, given the vast scale of chemical space (10^30-10^60), it remains an open scientific question whether models can achieve convergent learning across this space. We introduce a Dual-Axis Representation-Complete Convergent Learning (RCCL) strategy, enabled by a molecular representation that integrates graph convolutional network (GCN) encoding of local valence environments, grounded in modern valence bond theory, together with no-bridge graph (NBG) encoding of ring/cage topologies, providing a quantitative measure of chemical-space coverage. This framework formalizes representation completeness, establishing a principled basis for constructing datasets that support convergent learning for large models. Guided by this RCCL framework, we develop the FD25 dataset, systematically covering 13,302 local valence units and 165,726 ring/cage topologies, achieving near-complete combinatorial coverage of organic molecules with H/C/N/O/F elements. Graph neural networks trained on FD25 exhibit representation-complete convergent learning and strong out-of-distribution generalization, with an overall prediction error of approximately 1.0 kcal/mol MAE across external benchmarks. Our results establish a quantitative link between molecular representation, structural completeness, and model generalization, providing a foundation for interpretable, transferable, and data-efficient molecular intelligence.

Zhiming Li, Yushi Cao, Xiufeng Xu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized many areas (e.g. natural language processing, software engineering, etc.) by achieving state-of-the-art performance on extensive downstream tasks. Aiming to achieve robust and general artificial intelligence, there has been a surge of interest in investigating the reasoning ability of the LLMs. Whereas the textual and numerical reasoning benchmarks adopted by previous works are rather shallow and simple, it is hard to conclude that the LLMs possess strong reasoning ability by merely achieving positive results on these benchmarks. Recent efforts have demonstrated that the LLMs are poor at solving sequential decision-making problems that require common-sense planning by evaluating their performance on the reinforcement learning benchmarks. In this work, we conduct an in-depth assessment of several state-of-the-art LLMs' reasoning ability based on the inductive logic programming (ILP) benchmark, which is broadly recognized as a representative and challenging measurement for evaluating logic program induction/synthesis systems as it requires inducing strict cause-effect logic to achieve robust deduction on independent and identically distributed (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) test samples. Our evaluations illustrate that compared with the neural program induction systems which are much smaller in model size, the state-of-the-art LLMs are much poorer in terms of reasoning ability by achieving much lower performance and generalization using either natural language prompting or truth-value matrix prompting.

Jianzhi Yan, Le Liu, Buzhou Tang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved substantial advances in logical reasoning, yet they continue to lag behind human-level performance. In-context learning provides a viable solution that boosts the model's performance via prompting its input with expert-curated, in-domain exemplars. However, in many real-world, expertise-scarce domains, such as low-resource scientific disciplines, emerging biomedical subfields, or niche legal jurisdictions, such high-quality in-domain demonstrations are inherently limited or entirely unavailable, thereby constraining the general applicability of these approaches. To mitigate this limitation, recent efforts have explored the retrieval of cross-domain samples as surrogate in-context demonstrations. Nevertheless, the resulting gains remain modest. This is largely attributable to the pronounced domain shift between source and target distributions, which impedes the model's ability to effectively identify and exploit underlying shared structures or latent reasoning patterns. Consequently, when relying solely on raw textual prompting, LLMs struggle to abstract and transfer such cross-domain knowledge in a robust and systematic manner. To address these issues, we propose CoDA, which employs a lightweight adapter to directly intervene in the intermediate hidden states. By combining feature-based distillation of CoT-enriched reference representations with Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) for kernelized distribution matching, our method aligns the latent reasoning representation of the source and target domains. Extensive experimental results on multiple logical reasoning tasks across various model families validate the efficacy of CoDA by significantly outperforming the previous state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin.

Ruichen Zhang, Yuguang Yao, Zhen Tan et al.

Image generation is a prevailing technique for clinical data augmentation for advancing diagnostic accuracy and reducing healthcare disparities. Diffusion Model (DM) has become a leading method in generating synthetic medical images, but it suffers from a critical twofold bias: (1) The quality of images generated for Caucasian individuals is significantly higher, as measured by the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). (2) The ability of the downstream-task learner to learn critical features from disease images varies across different skin tones. These biases pose significant risks, particularly in skin disease detection, where underrepresentation of certain skin tones can lead to misdiagnosis or neglect of specific conditions. To address these challenges, we propose FairSkin, a novel DM framework that mitigates these biases through a three-level resampling mechanism, ensuring fairer representation across racial and disease categories. Our approach significantly improves the diversity and quality of generated images, contributing to more equitable skin disease detection in clinical settings.

ZhiMing Li

Tracking non-stationary covariance matrices is fundamental to vision yet hindered by existing estimators that either neglect manifold constraints or rely on first-order updates, incurring inevitable phase lag during rapid evolution. We propose K-GMRF, an online, training-free framework for covariance tracking that reformulates the problem as forced rigid-body motion on Lie groups. Derived from the Euler-Poincaré equations, our method interprets observations as torques driving a latent angular velocity, propagated via a structure-preserving symplectic integrator. We theoretically prove that this second-order dynamics achieves zero steady-state error under constant rotation, strictly superior to the proportional lag of first-order baselines. Validation across three domains demonstrates robust tracking fidelity: (i) on synthetic ellipses, K-GMRF reduces angular error by 30x compared to Riemannian EMA while maintaining stability at high speeds; (ii) on SO(3) stabilization with 20% dropout, it decreases geodesic error from 29.4° to 9.9°; and (iii) on OTB motion-blur sequences, it improves loU from 0.55 to 0.74 on BlurCar2 with a 96% success rate. As a fully differentiable symplectic module, K-GMRF provides a plug-and-play geometric prior for data-constrained scenarios and an interpretable layer within modern deep architectures.

Tianlin Li, Yunxiang Wei, Zhiming Li et al.

Recent advances in code large language models (CodeLLMs) have made them indispensable tools in modern software engineering. However, these models occasionally produce outputs that contain proprietary or sensitive code snippets, raising concerns about potential non-compliant use of training data, and posing risks to privacy and intellectual property. To ensure responsible and compliant deployment of CodeLLMs, training data detection (TDD) has become a critical task. While recent TDD methods have shown promise in natural language settings, their effectiveness on code data remains largely underexplored. This gap is particularly important given code's structured syntax and distinct similarity criteria compared to natural language. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study of seven state-of-the-art TDD methods on source code data, evaluating their performance across eight CodeLLMs. To support this evaluation, we introduce CodeSnitch, a function-level benchmark dataset comprising 9,000 code samples in three programming languages, each explicitly labeled as either included or excluded from CodeLLM training. Beyond evaluation on the original CodeSnitch, we design targeted mutation strategies to test the robustness of TDD methods under three distinct settings. These mutation strategies are grounded in the well-established Type-1 to Type-4 code clone detection taxonomy. Our study provides a systematic assessment of current TDD techniques for code and offers insights to guide the development of more effective and robust detection methods in the future.

Sarthak Ketanbhai Modi, Zi Pong Lim, Shourya Kuchhal et al.

The rapid growth in complexity and size of modern deep neural networks (DNNs) has increased challenges related to computational costs and memory usage, spurring a growing interest in efficient model compression techniques. Previous state-of-the-art approach proposes using a Torque-inspired regularization which forces the weights of neural modules around a selected pivot point. Whereas, we observe that the pruning effect of this approach is far from perfect, as the post-trained network is still dense and also suffers from high accuracy drop. In this work, we attribute such ineffectiveness to the default linear force application scheme, which imposes inappropriate force on neural module of different distances. To efficiently prune the redundant and distant modules while retaining those that are close and necessary for effective inference, in this work, we propose Exponential Torque Pruning (ETP), which adopts an exponential force application scheme for regularization. Experimental results on a broad range of domains demonstrate that, though being extremely simple, ETP manages to achieve significantly higher compression rate than the previous state-of-the-art pruning strategies with negligible accuracy drop.

Junzhe Jiang, Chang Yang, Xinrun Wang et al.

The latency of the exchanges in Market Making (MM) is inevitable due to hardware limitations, system processing times, delays in receiving data from exchanges, the time required for order transmission to reach the market, etc. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods for Market Making (MM) overlook the impact of these latency, which can lead to unintended order cancellations due to price discrepancies between decision and execution times and result in undesired inventory accumulation, exposing MM traders to increased market risk. Therefore, these methods cannot be applied in real MM scenarios. To address these issues, we first build a realistic MM environment with random delays of 30-100 milliseconds for order placement and market information reception, and implement a batch matching mechanism that collects orders within every 500 milliseconds before matching them all at once, simulating the batch auction mechanisms adopted by some exchanges. Then, we propose Relaver, an RL-based method for MM to tackle the latency and inventory risk issues. The three main contributions of Relaver are: i) we introduce an augmented state-action space that incorporates order hold time alongside price and volume, enabling Relaver to optimize execution strategies under latency constraints and time-priority matching mechanisms, ii) we leverage dynamic programming (DP) to guide the exploration of RL training for better policies, iii) we train a market trend predictor, which can guide the agent to intelligently adjust the inventory to reduce the risk. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on four real-world datasets demonstrate that \textsc{Relaver} significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art RL-based MM strategies across multiple metrics.

Zhiming Li, Yanzhou Li, Tianlin Li et al.

Deep learning has introduced significant improvements in many software analysis tasks. Although the Large Language Models (LLMs) based neural code models demonstrate commendable performance when trained and tested within the intra-project independent and identically distributed (IID) setting, they often struggle to generalize effectively to real-world inter-project out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this work, we show that this phenomenon is caused by the heavy reliance on project-specific shortcuts for prediction instead of ground-truth evidence. We propose a Cond-Idf measurement to interpret this behavior, which quantifies the relatedness of a token with a label and its project-specificness. The strong correlation between model behavior and the proposed measurement indicates that without proper regularization, models tend to leverage spurious statistical cues for prediction. Equipped with these observations, we propose a novel bias mitigation mechanism that regularizes the model's learning behavior by leveraging latent logic relations among samples. Experimental results on two representative program analysis tasks indicate that our mitigation framework can improve both inter-project OOD generalization and adversarial robustness, while not sacrificing accuracy on intra-project IID data.

Zhiming Li, Xiaofei Xie, Haoliang Li et al.

Hitherto statistical type inference systems rely thoroughly on supervised learning approaches, which require laborious manual effort to collect and label large amounts of data. Most Turing-complete imperative languages share similar control- and data-flow structures, which make it possible to transfer knowledge learned from one language to another. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual transfer learning framework, PLATO, for statistical type inference, which allows us to leverage prior knowledge learned from the labeled dataset of one language and transfer it to the others, e.g., Python to JavaScript, Java to JavaScript, etc. PLATO is powered by a novel kernelized attention mechanism to constrain the attention scope of the backbone Transformer model such that the model is forced to base its prediction on commonly shared features among languages. In addition, we propose the syntax enhancement that augments the learning on the feature overlap among language domains. Furthermore, PLATO can also be used to improve the performance of the conventional supervised learning-based type inference by introducing cross-lingual augmentation, which enables the model to learn more general features across multiple languages. We evaluated PLATO under two settings: 1) under the cross-domain scenario that the target language data is not labeled or labeled partially, the results show that PLATO outperforms the state-of-the-art domain transfer techniques by a large margin, e.g., it improves the Python to TypeScript baseline by +5.40%@EM, +5.40%@weighted-F1, and 2) under the conventional monolingual supervised learning based scenario, PLATO improves the Python baseline by +4.40%@EM, +3.20%@EM (parametric).

Wenqian Fang, Lihua Fu, Meng Zhang et al.

Missing traces in acquired seismic data is a common occurrence during the collection of seismic data. Deep neural network (DNN) has shown considerable promise in restoring incomplete seismic data. However, several DNN-based approaches ignore the specific characteristics of seismic data itself, and only focus on reducing the difference between the recovered and the original signals. In this study, a novel Seismic U-net InterpolaTor (SUIT) is proposed to preserve the seismic texture information while reconstructing the missing traces. Aside from minimizing the reconstruction error, SUIT enhances the texture consistency between the recovery and the original completely seismic data, by designing a pre-trained U-Net to extract the texture information. The experiments show that our method outperforms the classic state-of-art methods in terms of robustness.

Zhiming Li, Qing Wu, Kun Qian

Reverse Engineering(RE) has been a fundamental task in software engineering. However, most of the traditional Java reverse engineering tools are strictly rule defined, thus are not fault-tolerant, which pose serious problem when noise and interference were introduced into the system. In this paper, we view reverse engineering as a statistical machine translation task instead of rule-based task, and propose a fault-tolerant Java decompiler based on machine translation models. Our model is based on attention-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Transformer architectures. First, we measure the translation quality on both the redundant and purified datasets. Next, we evaluate the fault-tolerance(anti-noise ability) of our framework on test sets with different unit error probability (UEP). In addition, we compare the suitability of different word segmentation algorithms for decompilation task. Experimental results demonstrate that our model is more robust and fault-tolerant compared to traditional Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) based decompilers. Specifically, in terms of BLEU-4 and Word Error Rate (WER), our performance has reached 94.50% and 2.65% on the redundant test set; 92.30% and 3.48% on the purified test set.