Yunchen Pu

Shaoang Li, Yanhang Shi, Yufei Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can reason well, yet often miss decisive evidence when it is buried in long, noisy contexts. We introduce HiLight, an Evidence Emphasis framework that decouples evidence selection from reasoning for frozen LLM solvers. HiLight avoids compressing or rewriting the input, which can discard or distort evidence, by training a lightweight Emphasis Actor to insert minimal highlight tags around pivotal spans in the unaltered context. A frozen Solver then performs downstream reasoning on the emphasized input. We cast highlighting as a weakly supervised decision-making problem and optimize the Actor with reinforcement learning using only the Solver's task reward, requiring no evidence labels and no access to or modification of the Solver. Across sequential recommendation and long-context question answering, HiLight consistently improves performance over strong prompt-based and automated prompt-optimization baselines. The learned emphasis policy transfers zero-shot to both smaller and larger unseen Solver families, including an API-based Solver, suggesting that the Actor captures genuine, reusable evidence structure rather than overfitting to a single backbone.

Dongqi Fu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Haiyu Lu et al.

The increase in data volume, computational resources, and model parameters during training has led to the development of numerous large-scale industrial retrieval models for recommendation tasks. However, effectively and efficiently deploying these large-scale foundational retrieval models remains a critical challenge that has not been fully addressed. Common quick-win solutions for deploying these massive models include relying on offline computations (such as cached user dictionaries) or distilling large models into smaller ones. Yet, both approaches fall short of fully leveraging the representational and inference capabilities of foundational models. In this paper, we explore whether it is possible to learn a hierarchical organization over the memory of foundational retrieval models. Such a hierarchical structure would enable more efficient search by reducing retrieval costs while preserving exactness. To achieve this, we propose jointly learning a hierarchical index using cross-attention and residual quantization for large-scale retrieval models. We also present its real-world deployment at Meta, supporting daily advertisement recommendations for billions of Facebook and Instagram users. Interestingly, we discovered that the intermediate nodes in the learned index correspond to a small set of high-quality data. Fine-tuning the model on this set further improves inference performance, and concretize the concept of "test-time training" within the recommendation system domain. We demonstrate these findings using both internal and public datasets with strong baseline comparisons and hope they contribute to the community's efforts in developing the next generation of foundational retrieval models.

Zikun Liu, Liang Luo, Qianru Li et al.

Recent advances in recommendation scaling laws have led to foundation models of unprecedented complexity. While these models offer superior performance, their computational demands make real-time serving impractical, often forcing practitioners to rely on knowledge distillation-compromising serving quality for efficiency. To address this challenge, we present SOLARIS (Speculative Offloading of Latent-bAsed Representation for Inference Scaling), a novel framework inspired by speculative decoding. SOLARIS proactively precomputes user-item interaction embeddings by predicting which user-item pairs are likely to appear in future requests, and asynchronously generating their foundation model representations ahead of time. This approach decouples the costly foundation model inference from the latency-critical serving path, enabling real-time knowledge transfer from models previously considered too expensive for online use. Deployed across Meta's advertising system serving billions of daily requests, SOLARIS achieves 0.67% revenue-driving top-line metrics gain, demonstrating its effectiveness at scale.

Kaushik Rangadurai, Siyang Yuan, Minhui Huang et al.

Retrieval, the initial stage of a recommendation system, is tasked with down-selecting items from a pool of tens of millions of candidates to a few thousands. Embedding Based Retrieval (EBR) has been a typical choice for this problem, addressing the computational demands of deep neural networks across vast item corpora. EBR utilizes Two Tower or Siamese Networks to learn representations for users and items, and employ Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search to efficiently retrieve relevant items. Despite its popularity in industry, EBR faces limitations. The Two Tower architecture, relying on a single dot product interaction, struggles to capture complex data distributions due to limited capability in learning expressive interactions between users and items. Additionally, ANN index building and representation learning for user and item are often separate, leading to inconsistencies exacerbated by representation (e.g. continuous online training) and item drift (e.g. items expired and new items added). In this paper, we introduce the Hierarchical Structured Neural Network (HSNN), an efficient deep neural network model to learn intricate user and item interactions beyond the commonly used dot product in retrieval tasks, achieving sublinear computational costs relative to corpus size. A Modular Neural Network (MoNN) is designed to maintain high expressiveness for interaction learning while ensuring efficiency. A mixture of MoNNs operate on a hierarchical item index to achieve extensive computation sharing, enabling it to scale up to large corpus size. MoNN and the hierarchical index are jointly learnt to continuously adapt to distribution shifts in both user interests and item distributions. HSNN achieves substantial improvement in offline evaluation compared to prevailing methods.

Yunchen Pu, Shuyang Dai, Zhe Gan et al.

A new generative adversarial network is developed for joint distribution matching. Distinct from most existing approaches, that only learn conditional distributions, the proposed model aims to learn a joint distribution of multiple random variables (domains). This is achieved by learning to sample from conditional distributions between the domains, while simultaneously learning to sample from the marginals of each individual domain. The proposed framework consists of multiple generators and a single softmax-based critic, all jointly trained via adversarial learning. From a simple noise source, the proposed framework allows synthesis of draws from the marginals, conditional draws given observations from a subset of random variables, or complete draws from the full joint distribution. Most examples considered are for joint analysis of two domains, with examples for three domains also presented.

Wenlin Wang, Yunchen Pu, Vinay Kumar Verma et al.

We present a deep generative model for learning to predict classes not seen at training time. Unlike most existing methods for this problem, that represent each class as a point (via a semantic embedding), we represent each seen/unseen class using a class-specific latent-space distribution, conditioned on class attributes. We use these latent-space distributions as a prior for a supervised variational autoencoder (VAE), which also facilitates learning highly discriminative feature representations for the inputs. The entire framework is learned end-to-end using only the seen-class training data. The model infers corresponding attributes of a test image by maximizing the VAE lower bound; the inferred attributes may be linked to labels not seen when training. We further extend our model to a (1) semi-supervised/transductive setting by leveraging unlabeled unseen-class data via an unsupervised learning module, and (2) few-shot learning where we also have a small number of labeled inputs from the unseen classes. We compare our model with several state-of-the-art methods through a comprehensive set of experiments on a variety of benchmark data sets.

Yunchen Pu, Weiyao Wang, Ricardo Henao et al.

A new form of variational autoencoder (VAE) is developed, in which the joint distribution of data and codes is considered in two (symmetric) forms: ($i$) from observed data fed through the encoder to yield codes, and ($ii$) from latent codes drawn from a simple prior and propagated through the decoder to manifest data. Lower bounds are learned for marginal log-likelihood fits observed data and latent codes. When learning with the variational bound, one seeks to minimize the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence of joint density functions from ($i$) and ($ii$), while simultaneously seeking to maximize the two marginal log-likelihoods. To facilitate learning, a new form of adversarial training is developed. An extensive set of experiments is performed, in which we demonstrate state-of-the-art data reconstruction and generation on several image benchmark datasets.

Zhe Gan, Liqun Chen, Weiyao Wang et al.

A Triangle Generative Adversarial Network ($Δ$-GAN) is developed for semi-supervised cross-domain joint distribution matching, where the training data consists of samples from each domain, and supervision of domain correspondence is provided by only a few paired samples. $Δ$-GAN consists of four neural networks, two generators and two discriminators. The generators are designed to learn the two-way conditional distributions between the two domains, while the discriminators implicitly define a ternary discriminative function, which is trained to distinguish real data pairs and two kinds of fake data pairs. The generators and discriminators are trained together using adversarial learning. Under mild assumptions, in theory the joint distributions characterized by the two generators concentrate to the data distribution. In experiments, three different kinds of domain pairs are considered, image-label, image-image and image-attribute pairs. Experiments on semi-supervised image classification, image-to-image translation and attribute-based image generation demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.

Liqun Chen, Shuyang Dai, Yunchen Pu et al.

A new form of the variational autoencoder (VAE) is proposed, based on the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence. It is demonstrated that learning of the resulting symmetric VAE (sVAE) has close connections to previously developed adversarial-learning methods. This relationship helps unify the previously distinct techniques of VAE and adversarially learning, and provides insights that allow us to ameliorate shortcomings with some previously developed adversarial methods. In addition to an analysis that motivates and explains the sVAE, an extensive set of experiments validate the utility of the approach.

Chunyuan Li, Hao Liu, Changyou Chen et al.

We investigate the non-identifiability issues associated with bidirectional adversarial training for joint distribution matching. Within a framework of conditional entropy, we propose both adversarial and non-adversarial approaches to learn desirable matched joint distributions for unsupervised and supervised tasks. We unify a broad family of adversarial models as joint distribution matching problems. Our approach stabilizes learning of unsupervised bidirectional adversarial learning methods. Further, we introduce an extension for semi-supervised learning tasks. Theoretical results are validated in synthetic data and real-world applications.

Changyou Chen, Chunyuan Li, Liqun Chen et al.

Two fundamental problems in unsupervised learning are efficient inference for latent-variable models and robust density estimation based on large amounts of unlabeled data. Algorithms for the two tasks, such as normalizing flows and generative adversarial networks (GANs), are often developed independently. In this paper, we propose the concept of {\em continuous-time flows} (CTFs), a family of diffusion-based methods that are able to asymptotically approach a target distribution. Distinct from normalizing flows and GANs, CTFs can be adopted to achieve the above two goals in one framework, with theoretical guarantees. Our framework includes distilling knowledge from a CTF for efficient inference, and learning an explicit energy-based distribution with CTFs for density estimation. Both tasks rely on a new technique for distribution matching within amortized learning. Experiments on various tasks demonstrate promising performance of the proposed CTF framework, compared to related techniques.

Yunchen Pu, Zhe Gan, Ricardo Henao et al.

A new method for learning variational autoencoders (VAEs) is developed, based on Stein variational gradient descent. A key advantage of this approach is that one need not make parametric assumptions about the form of the encoder distribution. Performance is further enhanced by integrating the proposed encoder with importance sampling. Excellent performance is demonstrated across multiple unsupervised and semi-supervised problems, including semi-supervised analysis of the ImageNet data, demonstrating the scalability of the model to large datasets.

Xin Yuan, Yunchen Pu, Lawrence Carin

We solve the compressive sensing problem via convolutional factor analysis, where the convolutional dictionaries are learned {\em in situ} from the compressed measurements. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) paradigm for compressive sensing inversion based on convolutional factor analysis is developed. The proposed algorithm provides reconstructed images as well as features, which can be directly used for recognition ($e.g.$, classification) tasks. When a deep (multilayer) model is constructed, a stochastic unpooling process is employed to build a generative model. During reconstruction and testing, we project the upper layer dictionary to the data level and only a single layer deconvolution is required. We demonstrate that using $\sim30\%$ (relative to pixel numbers) compressed measurements, the proposed model achieves the classification accuracy comparable to the original data on MNIST. We also observe that when the compressed measurements are very limited ($e.g.$, $<10\%$), the upper layer dictionary can provide better reconstruction results than the bottom layer.

Yin Xian, Yunchen Pu, Zhe Gan et al.

In this paper, we investigate DCTNet for audio signal classification. Its output feature is related to Cohen's class of time-frequency distributions. We introduce the use of adaptive DCTNet (A-DCTNet) for audio signals feature extraction. The A-DCTNet applies the idea of constant-Q transform, with its center frequencies of filterbanks geometrically spaced. The A-DCTNet is adaptive to different acoustic scales, and it can better capture low frequency acoustic information that is sensitive to human audio perception than features such as Mel-frequency spectral coefficients (MFSC). We use features extracted by the A-DCTNet as input for classifiers. Experimental results show that the A-DCTNet and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) achieve state-of-the-art performance in bird song classification rate, and improve artist identification accuracy in music data. They demonstrate A-DCTNet's applicability to signal processing problems.

Andrew Stevens, Yunchen Pu, Yannan Sun et al.

A multi-way factor analysis model is introduced for tensor-variate data of any order. Each data item is represented as a (sparse) sum of Kruskal decompositions, a Kruskal-factor analysis (KFA). KFA is nonparametric and can infer both the tensor-rank of each dictionary atom and the number of dictionary atoms. The model is adapted for online learning, which allows dictionary learning on large data sets. After KFA is introduced, the model is extended to a deep convolutional tensor-factor analysis, supervised by a Bayesian SVM. The experiments section demonstrates the improvement of KFA over vectorized approaches (e.g., BPFA), tensor decompositions, and convolutional neural networks (CNN) in multi-way denoising, blind inpainting, and image classification. The improvement in PSNR for the inpainting results over other methods exceeds 1dB in several cases and we achieve state of the art results on Caltech101 image classification.

Zhe Gan, Chunyuan Li, Changyou Chen et al.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown promising performance for language modeling. However, traditional training of RNNs using back-propagation through time often suffers from overfitting. One reason for this is that stochastic optimization (used for large training sets) does not provide good estimates of model uncertainty. This paper leverages recent advances in stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (also appropriate for large training sets) to learn weight uncertainty in RNNs. It yields a principled Bayesian learning algorithm, adding gradient noise during training (enhancing exploration of the model-parameter space) and model averaging when testing. Extensive experiments on various RNN models and across a broad range of applications demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over stochastic optimization.

Zhe Gan, Chuang Gan, Xiaodong He et al.

A Semantic Compositional Network (SCN) is developed for image captioning, in which semantic concepts (i.e., tags) are detected from the image, and the probability of each tag is used to compose the parameters in a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The SCN extends each weight matrix of the LSTM to an ensemble of tag-dependent weight matrices. The degree to which each member of the ensemble is used to generate an image caption is tied to the image-dependent probability of the corresponding tag. In addition to captioning images, we also extend the SCN to generate captions for video clips. We qualitatively analyze semantic composition in SCNs, and quantitatively evaluate the algorithm on three benchmark datasets: COCO, Flickr30k, and Youtube2Text. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, across multiple evaluation metrics.

Zhe Gan, Yunchen Pu, Ricardo Henao et al.

We propose a new encoder-decoder approach to learn distributed sentence representations that are applicable to multiple purposes. The model is learned by using a convolutional neural network as an encoder to map an input sentence into a continuous vector, and using a long short-term memory recurrent neural network as a decoder. Several tasks are considered, including sentence reconstruction and future sentence prediction. Further, a hierarchical encoder-decoder model is proposed to encode a sentence to predict multiple future sentences. By training our models on a large collection of novels, we obtain a highly generic convolutional sentence encoder that performs well in practice. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets, and across a broad range of applications, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over competing methods.

Yunchen Pu, Martin Renqiang Min, Zhe Gan et al.

Previous models for video captioning often use the output from a specific layer of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as video features. However, the variable context-dependent semantics in the video may make it more appropriate to adaptively select features from the multiple CNN layers. We propose a new approach for generating adaptive spatiotemporal representations of videos for the captioning task. A novel attention mechanism is developed, that adaptively and sequentially focuses on different layers of CNN features (levels of feature "abstraction"), as well as local spatiotemporal regions of the feature maps at each layer. The proposed approach is evaluated on three benchmark datasets: YouTube2Text, M-VAD and MSR-VTT. Along with visualizing the results and how the model works, these experiments quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive spatiotemporal feature abstraction for translating videos to sentences with rich semantics.

Yunchen Pu, Zhe Gan, Ricardo Henao et al.

A novel variational autoencoder is developed to model images, as well as associated labels or captions. The Deep Generative Deconvolutional Network (DGDN) is used as a decoder of the latent image features, and a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used as an image encoder; the CNN is used to approximate a distribution for the latent DGDN features/code. The latent code is also linked to generative models for labels (Bayesian support vector machine) or captions (recurrent neural network). When predicting a label/caption for a new image at test, averaging is performed across the distribution of latent codes; this is computationally efficient as a consequence of the learned CNN-based encoder. Since the framework is capable of modeling the image in the presence/absence of associated labels/captions, a new semi-supervised setting is manifested for CNN learning with images; the framework even allows unsupervised CNN learning, based on images alone.

Yunchen Pu, Xin Yuan, Andrew Stevens et al.

A deep generative model is developed for representation and analysis of images, based on a hierarchical convolutional dictionary-learning framework. Stochastic {\em unpooling} is employed to link consecutive layers in the model, yielding top-down image generation. A Bayesian support vector machine is linked to the top-layer features, yielding max-margin discrimination. Deep deconvolutional inference is employed when testing, to infer the latent features, and the top-layer features are connected with the max-margin classifier for discrimination tasks. The model is efficiently trained using a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization (MCEM) algorithm, with implementation on graphical processor units (GPUs) for efficient large-scale learning, and fast testing. Excellent results are obtained on several benchmark datasets, including ImageNet, demonstrating that the proposed model achieves results that are highly competitive with similarly sized convolutional neural networks.

Yunchen Pu, Xin Yuan, Lawrence Carin

A generative model is developed for deep (multi-layered) convolutional dictionary learning. A novel probabilistic pooling operation is integrated into the deep model, yielding efficient bottom-up (pretraining) and top-down (refinement) probabilistic learning. Experimental results demonstrate powerful capabilities of the model to learn multi-layer features from images, and excellent classification results are obtained on the MNIST and Caltech 101 datasets.

Yunchen Pu, Xin Yuan, Lawrence Carin

A generative Bayesian model is developed for deep (multi-layer) convolutional dictionary learning. A novel probabilistic pooling operation is integrated into the deep model, yielding efficient bottom-up and top-down probabilistic learning. After learning the deep convolutional dictionary, testing is implemented via deconvolutional inference. To speed up this inference, a new statistical approach is proposed to project the top-layer dictionary elements to the data level. Following this, only one layer of deconvolution is required during testing. Experimental results demonstrate powerful capabilities of the model to learn multi-layer features from images. Excellent classification results are obtained on both the MNIST and Caltech 101 datasets.