Feiyu Zhu

Yupeng Zheng, Jichao Peng, Weize Li et al. · cmu, tsinghua

We introduce World In Your Hands (WIYH), a large-scale open-source ecosystem comprising over 1,000 hours of human manipulation data collected in-the-wild with millimeter-scale motion accuracy. Specifically, WIYH includes (1) the Oracle Suite, a wearable data collection kit with an auto-labeling pipeline for accurate motion capture; (2) the WIYH Dataset, featuring over 1,000 hours of multimodal manipulation data across hundreds of skills in diverse real-world scenarios; and (3) extensive annotations and benchmarks supporting tasks from perception to action. Furthermore, experiments based on the WIYH ecosystem show that integrating WIYH's human-centric data improves robotic manipulation success rates from 8% to 60% in cluttered scenes. World In Your Hands provides a foundation for advancing human-centric data collection and cross-embodiment policy learning. All data and hardware design will be open-source.

Junhao Su, Changpeng Cai, Feiyu Zhu et al.

Deep neural networks conventionally employ end-to-end backpropagation for their training process, which lacks biological credibility and triggers a locking dilemma during network parameter updates, leading to significant GPU memory use. Supervised local learning, which segments the network into multiple local blocks updated by independent auxiliary networks. However, these methods cannot replace end-to-end training due to lower accuracy, as gradients only propagate within their local block, creating a lack of information exchange between blocks. To address this issue and establish information transfer across blocks, we propose a Momentum Auxiliary Network (MAN) that establishes a dynamic interaction mechanism. The MAN leverages an exponential moving average (EMA) of the parameters from adjacent local blocks to enhance information flow. This auxiliary network, updated through EMA, helps bridge the informational gap between blocks. Nevertheless, we observe that directly applying EMA parameters has certain limitations due to feature discrepancies among local blocks. To overcome this, we introduce learnable biases, further boosting performance. We have validated our method on four image classification datasets (CIFAR-10, STL-10, SVHN, ImageNet), attaining superior performance and substantial memory savings. Notably, our method can reduce GPU memory usage by more than 45\% on the ImageNet dataset compared to end-to-end training, while achieving higher performance. The Momentum Auxiliary Network thus offers a new perspective for supervised local learning. Our code is available at: https://github.com/JunhaoSu0/MAN.

Junhao Su, Chenghao He, Feiyu Zhu et al.

Traditional deep learning relies on end-to-end backpropagation for training, but it suffers from drawbacks such as high memory consumption and not aligning with biological neural networks. Recent advancements have introduced locally supervised learning, which divides networks into modules with isolated gradients and trains them locally. However, this approach can lead to performance lag due to limited interaction between these modules, and the design of auxiliary networks occupies a certain amount of GPU memory. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel model called HPFF that performs hierarchical locally supervised learning and patch-level feature computation on the auxiliary networks. Hierarchical Locally Supervised Learning (HiLo) enables the network to learn features at different granularity levels along their respective local paths. Specifically, the network is divided into two-level local modules: independent local modules and cascade local modules. The cascade local modules combine two adjacent independent local modules, incorporating both updates within the modules themselves and information exchange between adjacent modules. Patch Feature Fusion (PFF) reduces GPU memory usage by splitting the input features of the auxiliary networks into patches for computation. By averaging these patch-level features, it enhances the network's ability to focus more on those patterns that are prevalent across multiple patches. Furthermore, our method exhibits strong generalization capabilities and can be seamlessly integrated with existing techniques. We conduct experiments on CIFAR-10, STL-10, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed HPFF significantly outperforms previous approaches, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance across different datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Zeudfish/HPFF.

Feiyu Zhu, Reid Simmons · cmu

Large language models contain noisy general knowledge of the world, yet are hard to train or fine-tune. On the other hand cognitive architectures have excellent interpretability and are flexible to update but require a lot of manual work to instantiate. In this work, we combine the best of both worlds: bootstrapping a cognitive-based model with the noisy knowledge encoded in large language models. Through an embodied agent doing kitchen tasks, we show that our proposed framework yields better efficiency compared to an agent based entirely on large language models. Our experiments indicate that large language models are a good source of information for cognitive architectures, and the cognitive architecture in turn can verify and update the knowledge of large language models to a specific domain.

Yaoze Zhang, Yuming Zhang, Yu Zhao et al.

Knowledge distillation is widely applied in various fundamental vision models to enhance the performance of compact models. Existing knowledge distillation methods focus on designing different distillation targets to acquire knowledge from teacher models. However, these methods often overlook the efficient utilization of distilled information, crudely coupling different types of information, making it difficult to explain how the knowledge from the teacher network aids the student network in learning. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework, Local Attention Knowledge Distillation (LAKD), which more efficiently utilizes the distilled information from teacher networks, achieving higher interpretability and competitive performance. The framework establishes an independent interactive training mechanism through a separation-decoupling mechanism and non-directional activation mapping. LAKD decouples the teacher's features and facilitates progressive interaction training from simple to complex. Specifically, the student network is divided into local modules with independent gradients to decouple the knowledge transferred from the teacher. The non-directional activation mapping helps the student network integrate knowledge from different local modules by learning coarse-grained feature knowledge. We conducted experiments on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, and the results show that our LAKD method significantly outperforms existing methods, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance across different datasets.

Xiuyuan Guo, Chengqi Xu, Guinan Guo et al.

Currently, training large-scale deep learning models is typically achieved through parallel training across multiple GPUs. However, due to the inherent communication overhead and synchronization delays in traditional model parallelism methods, seamless parallel training cannot be achieved, which, to some extent, affects overall training efficiency. To address this issue, we present PPLL (Pipeline Parallelism based on Local Learning), a novel framework that leverages local learning algorithms to enable effective parallel training across multiple GPUs. PPLL divides the model into several distinct blocks, each allocated to a separate GPU. By utilizing queues to manage data transfers between GPUs, PPLL ensures seamless cross-GPU communication, allowing multiple blocks to execute forward and backward passes in a pipelined manner. This design minimizes idle times and prevents bottlenecks typically caused by sequential gradient updates, thereby accelerating the overall training process. We validate PPLL through extensive experiments using ResNet and Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and STL-10 datasets. Our results demonstrate that PPLL significantly enhances the training speed of the local learning method while achieving comparable or even superior training speed to traditional pipeline parallelism (PP) without sacrificing model performance. In a 4-GPU training setup, PPLL accelerated local learning training on ViT and ResNet by 162% and 33%, respectively, achieving 1.25x and 0.85x the speed of traditional pipeline parallelism.

Junhao Su, Feiyu Zhu, Hengyu Shi et al.

Deep learning typically relies on end-to-end backpropagation for training, a method that inherently suffers from issues such as update locking during parameter optimization, high GPU memory consumption, and a lack of biological plausibility. In contrast, supervised local learning seeks to mitigate these challenges by partitioning the network into multiple local blocks and designing independent auxiliary networks to update each block separately. However, because gradients are propagated solely within individual local blocks, performance degradation occurs, preventing supervised local learning from supplanting end-to-end backpropagation. To address these limitations and facilitate inter-block information flow, we propose the Momentum Auxiliary Network++ (MAN++). MAN++ introduces a dynamic interaction mechanism by employing the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of parameters from adjacent blocks to enhance communication across the network. The auxiliary network, updated via EMA, effectively bridges the information gap between blocks. Notably, we observed that directly applying EMA parameters can be suboptimal due to feature discrepancies between local blocks. To resolve this issue, we introduce a learnable scaling bias that balances feature differences, thereby further improving performance. We validate MAN++ through extensive experiments on tasks that include image classification, object detection, and image segmentation, utilizing multiple network architectures. The experimental results demonstrate that MAN++ achieves performance comparable to end-to-end training while significantly reducing GPU memory usage. Consequently, MAN++ offers a novel perspective for supervised local learning and presents a viable alternative to conventional training methods.

Changpeng Cai, Guinan Guo, Jiao Li et al.

Most earlier researches on talking face generation have focused on the synchronization of lip motion and speech content. However, head pose and facial emotions are equally important characteristics of natural faces. While audio-driven talking face generation has seen notable advancements, existing methods either overlook facial emotions or are limited to specific individuals and cannot be applied to arbitrary subjects. In this paper, we propose a novel one-shot Talking Head Generation framework (SPEAK) that distinguishes itself from the general Talking Face Generation by enabling emotional and postural control. Specifically, we introduce Inter-Reconstructed Feature Disentanglement (IRFD) module to decouple facial features into three latent spaces. Then we design a face editing module that modifies speech content and facial latent codes into a single latent space. Subsequently, we present a novel generator that employs modified latent codes derived from the editing module to regulate emotional expression, head poses, and speech content in synthesizing facial animations. Extensive trials demonstrate that our method ensures lip synchronization with the audio while enabling decoupled control of facial features, it can generate realistic talking head with coordinated lip motions, authentic facial emotions, and smooth head movements. The demo video is available: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SPEAK-8A22

Ming Hu, Jianfu Yin, Mingyu Dou et al.

The automatic classification of medical time series signals, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG), plays a pivotal role in clinical decision support and early detection of diseases. Although Transformer based models have achieved notable performance by implicitly modeling temporal dependencies through self-attention mechanisms, their inherently complex architectures and opaque reasoning processes undermine their trustworthiness in high stakes clinical settings. In response to these limitations, this study shifts focus toward a modeling paradigm that emphasizes structural transparency, aligning more closely with the intrinsic characteristics of medical data. We propose a novel method, Channel Imposed Fusion (CIF), which enhances the signal-to-noise ratio through cross-channel information fusion, effectively reduces redundancy, and improves classification performance. Furthermore, we integrate CIF with the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), known for its structural simplicity and controllable receptive field, to construct an efficient and explicit classification framework. Experimental results on multiple publicly available EEG and ECG datasets demonstrate that the proposed method not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in terms of various classification metrics, but also significantly enhances the transparency of the classification process, offering a novel perspective for medical time series classification.

Ömer Faruk Akgül, Feiyu Zhu, Yuxin Yang et al.

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) represent dynamic facts as timestamped relations between entities. TKG completion involves forecasting missing or future links, requiring models to reason over time-evolving structure. While LLMs show promise for this task, existing approaches often overemphasize supervised fine-tuning and struggle particularly when historical evidence is limited or missing. We introduce RECIPE-TKG, a lightweight and data-efficient framework designed to improve accuracy and generalization in settings with sparse historical context. It combines (1) rule-based multi-hop retrieval for structurally diverse history, (2) contrastive fine-tuning of lightweight adapters to encode relational semantics, and (3) test-time semantic filtering to iteratively refine generations based on embedding similarity. Experiments on four TKG benchmarks show that RECIPE-TKG outperforms previous LLM-based approaches, achieving up to 30.6\% relative improvement in Hits@10. Moreover, our proposed framework produces more semantically coherent predictions, even for the samples with limited historical context.

Feiyu Zhu, Jean Oh, Reid Simmons · cmu

Behavior cloning has shown success in many sequential decision-making tasks by learning from expert demonstrations, yet they can be very sample inefficient and fail to generalize to unseen scenarios. One approach to these problems is to introduce general domain knowledge, such that the policy can focus on the essential features and may generalize to unseen states by applying that knowledge. Although this knowledge is easy to acquire from the experts, it is hard to be combined with learning from individual examples due to the lack of semantic structure in neural networks and the time-consuming nature of feature engineering. To enable learning from both general knowledge and specific demonstration trajectories, we use a large language model's coding capability to instantiate a policy structure based on expert domain knowledge expressed in natural language and tune the parameters in the policy with demonstrations. We name this approach the Knowledge Informed Model (KIM) as the structure reflects the semantics of expert knowledge. In our experiments with lunar lander and car racing tasks, our approach learns to solve the tasks with as few as 5 demonstrations and is robust to action noise, outperforming the baseline model without domain knowledge. This indicates that with the help of large language models, we can incorporate domain knowledge into the structure of the policy, increasing sample efficiency for behavior cloning.

Yuming Zhang, Shouxin Zhang, Peizhe Wang et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) typically employ an end-to-end (E2E) training paradigm which presents several challenges, including high GPU memory consumption, inefficiency, and difficulties in model parallelization during training. Recent research has sought to address these issues, with one promising approach being local learning. This method involves partitioning the backbone network into gradient-isolated modules and manually designing auxiliary networks to train these local modules. Existing methods often neglect the interaction of information between local modules, leading to myopic issues and a performance gap compared to E2E training. To address these limitations, we propose the Multilaminar Leap Augmented Auxiliary Network (MLAAN). Specifically, MLAAN comprises Multilaminar Local Modules (MLM) and Leap Augmented Modules (LAM). MLM captures both local and global features through independent and cascaded auxiliary networks, alleviating performance issues caused by insufficient global features. However, overly simplistic auxiliary networks can impede MLM's ability to capture global information. To address this, we further design LAM, an enhanced auxiliary network that uses the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) method to facilitate information exchange between local modules, thereby mitigating the shortsightedness resulting from inadequate interaction. The synergy between MLM and LAM has demonstrated excellent performance. Our experiments on the CIFAR-10, STL-10, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets show that MLAAN can be seamlessly integrated into existing local learning frameworks, significantly enhancing their performance and even surpassing end-to-end (E2E) training methods, while also reducing GPU memory consumption.

Feiyu Zhu, Yuming Zhang, Xiuyuan Guo et al.

Local learning offers an alternative to traditional end-to-end back-propagation in deep neural networks, significantly reducing GPU memory consumption. Although it has shown promise in image classification tasks, its extension to other visual tasks has been limited. This limitation arises primarily from two factors: 1) architectures designed specifically for classification are not readily adaptable to other tasks, which prevents the effective reuse of task-specific knowledge from architectures tailored to different problems; 2) these classification-focused architectures typically lack cross-scale feature communication, leading to degraded performance in tasks like object detection and super-resolution. To address these challenges, we propose the Feature Bank Augmented auxiliary network (FBA), which introduces a simplified design principle and incorporates a feature bank to enhance cross-task adaptability and communication. This work represents the first successful application of local learning methods beyond classification, demonstrating that FBA not only conserves GPU memory but also achieves performance on par with end-to-end approaches across multiple datasets for various visual tasks.

Mingbo Hong, Shuiwang Li, Yuchao Yang et al.

With the increasing demand for search and rescue, it is highly demanded to detect objects of interest in large-scale images captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which is quite challenging due to extremely small scales of objects. Most existing methods employed Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) to enrich shallow layers' features by combing deep layers' contextual features. However, under the limitation of the inconsistency in gradient computation across different layers, the shallow layers in FPN are not fully exploited to detect tiny objects. In this paper, we propose a Scale Selection Pyramid network (SSPNet) for tiny person detection, which consists of three components: Context Attention Module (CAM), Scale Enhancement Module (SEM), and Scale Selection Module (SSM). CAM takes account of context information to produce hierarchical attention heatmaps. SEM highlights features of specific scales at different layers, leading the detector to focus on objects of specific scales instead of vast backgrounds. SSM exploits adjacent layers' relationships to fulfill suitable feature sharing between deep layers and shallow layers, thereby avoiding the inconsistency in gradient computation across different layers. Besides, we propose a Weighted Negative Sampling (WNS) strategy to guide the detector to select more representative samples. Experiments on the TinyPerson benchmark show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) detectors.

Ruowei Wang, Chenguo Lin, Qijun Zhao et al.

Digital watermarking has been widely used to protect the copyright and integrity of multimedia data. Previous studies mainly focus on designing watermarking techniques that are robust to attacks of destroying the embedded watermarks. However, the emerging deep learning based image generation technology raises new open issues that whether it is possible to generate fake watermarked images for circumvention. In this paper, we make the first attempt to develop digital image watermark fakers by using generative adversarial learning. Suppose that a set of paired images of original and watermarked images generated by the targeted watermarker are available, we use them to train a watermark faker with U-Net as the backbone, whose input is an original image, and after a domain-specific preprocessing, it outputs a fake watermarked image. Our experiments show that the proposed watermark faker can effectively crack digital image watermarkers in both spatial and frequency domains, suggesting the risk of such forgery attacks.

Yanru Huang, Feiyu Zhu, Zheni Zeng et al.

We present a novel self quality evaluation metric SQE for parameters optimization in the challenging yet critical multi-object tracking task. Current evaluation metrics all require annotated ground truth, thus will fail in the test environment and realistic circumstances prohibiting further optimization after training. By contrast, our metric reflects the internal characteristics of trajectory hypotheses and measures tracking performance without ground truth. We demonstrate that trajectories with different qualities exhibit different single or multiple peaks over feature distance distribution, inspiring us to design a simple yet effective method to assess the quality of trajectories using a two-class Gaussian mixture model. Experiments mainly on MOT16 Challenge data sets verify the effectiveness of our method in both correlating with existing metrics and enabling parameters self-optimization to achieve better performance. We believe that our conclusions and method are inspiring for future multi-object tracking in practice.