Zeman Li

Andrew Lowy, Zeman Li, Tianjian Huang et al.

Differential privacy (DP) ensures that training a machine learning model does not leak private data. In practice, we may have access to auxiliary public data that is free of privacy concerns. In this work, we assume access to a given amount of public data and settle the following fundamental open questions: 1. What is the optimal (worst-case) error of a DP model trained over a private data set while having access to side public data? 2. How can we harness public data to improve DP model training in practice? We consider these questions in both the local and central models of pure and approximate DP. To answer the first question, we prove tight (up to log factors) lower and upper bounds that characterize the optimal error rates of three fundamental problems: mean estimation, empirical risk minimization, and stochastic convex optimization. We show that the optimal error rates can be attained (up to log factors) by either discarding private data and training a public model, or treating public data like it is private and using an optimal DP algorithm. To address the second question, we develop novel algorithms that are "even more optimal" (i.e. better constants) than the asymptotically optimal approaches described above. For local DP mean estimation, our algorithm is optimal including constants. Empirically, our algorithms show benefits over the state-of-the-art.

Zeman Li, Ali Behrouz, Yuan Deng et al.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with deep test-time memorization modules, such as Titans and TTT, represent a promising, linearly-scaling paradigm distinct from Transformers. While these expressive models do not yet match the peak performance of state-of-the-art Transformers, their potential has been largely untapped due to prohibitively slow training and low hardware utilization. Existing parallelization methods force a fundamental conflict governed by the chunksize hyperparameter: large chunks boost speed but degrade performance, necessitating a fixed, suboptimal compromise. To solve this challenge, we introduce TNT, a novel training paradigm that decouples training efficiency from inference performance through a two-stage process. Stage one is an efficiency-focused pre-training phase utilizing a hierarchical memory. A global module processes large, hardware-friendly chunks for long-range context, while multiple parallel local modules handle fine-grained details. Crucially, by periodically resetting local memory states, we break sequential dependencies to enable massive context parallelization. Stage two is a brief fine-tuning phase where only the local memory modules are adapted to a smaller, high-resolution chunksize, maximizing accuracy with minimal overhead. Evaluated on Titans and TTT models, TNT achieves a substantial acceleration in training speed-up to 17 times faster than the most accurate baseline configuration - while simultaneously improving model accuracy. This improvement removes a critical scalability barrier, establishing a practical foundation for developing expressive RNNs and facilitating future work to close the performance gap with Transformers.

Dang Nguyen, Zeman Li, Mohammadhossein Bateni et al.

Synthetic data has the potential to improve the performance, training efficiency, and privacy of real training examples. Nevertheless, existing approaches for synthetic text generation are mostly heuristics and cannot generate human-readable text without compromising the privacy of real data, or provide performance guarantees for training Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose the first theoretically rigorous approach for generating synthetic human-readable text that provides convergence, performance, and privacy guarantees for fine-tuning LLMs on a target task. To do so, we leverage Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) that iteratively optimizes the embeddings of synthetic examples to match the noisy gradient of the target training or validation data, and maps them to a sequence of text tokens with low perplexity. In doing so, the generated synthetic text guarantees convergence of the model to a close neighborhood of the solution obtained by fine-tuning on real data and preserves their privacy. Experiments on various classification tasks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/BigML-CS-UCLA/GRADMM.

Ali Behrouz, Zeman Li, Praneeth Kacham et al.

Transformers have been established as the most popular backbones in sequence modeling, mainly due to their effectiveness in in-context retrieval tasks and the ability to learn at scale. Their quadratic memory and time complexity, however, bound their applicability in longer sequences and so has motivated researchers to explore effective alternative architectures such as modern recurrent neural networks (a.k.a long-term recurrent memory module). Despite their recent success in diverse downstream tasks, they struggle in tasks that requires long context understanding and extrapolation to longer sequences. We observe that these shortcomings come from three disjoint aspects in their design: (1) limited memory capacity that is bounded by the architecture of memory and feature mapping of the input; (2) online nature of update, i.e., optimizing the memory only with respect to the last input; and (3) less expressive management of their fixed-size memory. To enhance all these three aspects, we present ATLAS, a long-term memory module with high capacity that learns to memorize the context by optimizing the memory based on the current and past tokens, overcoming the online nature of long-term memory models. Building on this insight, we present a new family of Transformer-like architectures, called DeepTransformers, that are strict generalizations of the original Transformer architecture. Our experimental results on language modeling, common-sense reasoning, recall-intensive, and long-context understanding tasks show that ATLAS surpasses the performance of Transformers and recent linear recurrent models. ATLAS further improves the long context performance of Titans, achieving +80\% accuracy in 10M context length of BABILong benchmark.

Changkun Liu, Jiezhi Yang, Zeman Li et al.

Streaming 3D perception is well suited to robotics and augmented reality, where long visual streams must be processed efficiently and consistently. Recent recurrent models offer a promising solution by maintaining fixed-size states and enabling linear-time inference, but they often suffer from drift accumulation and temporal forgetting over long sequences due to the limited capacity of compressed latent memories. We propose Mem3R, a streaming 3D reconstruction model with a hybrid memory design that decouples camera tracking from geometric mapping to improve temporal consistency over long sequences. For camera tracking, Mem3R employs an implicit fast-weight memory implemented as a lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptron updated via Test-Time Training. For geometric mapping, Mem3R maintains an explicit token-based fixed-size state. Compared with CUT3R, this design not only significantly improves long-sequence performance but also reduces the model size from 793M to 644M parameters. Mem3R supports existing improved plug-and-play state update strategies developed for CUT3R. Specifically, integrating it with TTT3R decreases Absolute Trajectory Error by up to 39% over the base implementation on 500 to 1000 frame sequences. The resulting improvements also extend to other downstream tasks, including video depth estimation and 3D reconstruction, while preserving constant GPU memory usage and comparable inference throughput. Project page: https://lck666666.github.io/Mem3R/

Zeman Li, Yuan Deng, Peilin Zhong et al.

Modern foundation models are trained on diverse datasets to enhance generalization across tasks and domains A central challenge in this process is determining how to effectively mix and sample data from multiple sources This naturally leads to a multitask learning (MTL) perspective While prior work in MTL has emphasized mitigating gradient conflicts we observe that largescale pretraining scenariossuch as multilingual or multidomain trainingoften exhibit little to no gradient conflict Motivated by this observation we propose PiKE (Positive gradient interaction-based K-task weights Estimator) an adaptive data mixing algorithm that dynamically adjusts sampling weights during training PiKE exploits nonconflicting gradient interactions to minimize a neartight upper bound on the average loss decrease at each step while incurring negligible computational overhead We provide theoretical convergence guarantees and show that PiKE outperforms static and nonadaptive mixing baselines Furthermore we extend PiKE to promote balanced learning across tasks Extensive experiments on largescale language model pretraining confirm that PiKE achieves faster convergence and improved downstream performance compared to existing approaches