Jinyang Li

Lujie Ban, Jiasheng Shi, Jinyang Li et al.

Text-to-SQL systems are typically evaluated by query-level execution correctness, but this terminal signal provides little guidance about which intermediate SQL decision caused success or failure. Token-level dense supervision is also ill-suited: SQL tokens do not align with complete semantic decisions, can penalize execution-equivalent queries, and are difficult to label reliably at scale. We therefore propose CAPER, which automatically derives clause-level supervision via counterfactual intervention on the SQL abstract syntax tree, enabling root-cause error localization for reward modeling; the resulting data is used to train CAPER-9B, a lightweight Clause-PRM that provides clause-boundary feedback for policy optimization and candidate verification. Experiments on BIRD and Spider show that clause-aligned supervision not only improves execution accuracy, achieving up to a 15.3% relative EX improvement over GPT-5.4, but also strengthens failure-localization capability, reaching 84.53% accuracy and 90.60% MRR on held-out failures. Our project page is at https://github.com/banrichard/RL-NL2SQL.

Wei Zheng, Yang Yan, Yiyang Shao et al.

The era of the Internet of Agents (IoA) is taking shape: LLM agents are expected to fulfill user goals by orchestrating fast-growing populations of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) endpoints, reusable skills, and other LLM-callable services. Yet LLMs face a structural mismatch with this regime: effective context is a scarce resource that does not scale with the number of services. Concatenating thousands of service descriptions into a prompt overflows the context window, and even when the window is large enough, models systematically under-attend to information in the middle of long inputs, the well-documented Lost-in-the-Middle phenomenon. This is fundamentally a question of context management for service discovery. To address this, we propose an LLM-native progressive-disclosure scheme and its concrete instantiation, A2X (Agent-to-Anything service discovery): an LLM-driven pipeline that automatically organizes the registered services into a hierarchical taxonomy and walks it layer by layer at query time, so that every LLM call sees only a small candidate set highly relevant to the user query. This decouples effective-context scarcity from registry size and significantly reduces token consumption while improving retrieval accuracy. Compared to full-context dumping, A2X achieves a 6.2-point Hit Rate gain at one-ninth the prompt-token cost; compared to the state-of-the-art open-source embedding-based baseline, A2X improves Hit Rate by more than 20 points.

Shengzhong Liu, Tomoyoshi Kimura, Dongxin Liu et al.

This paper proposes a novel contrastive learning framework, called FOCAL, for extracting comprehensive features from multimodal time-series sensing signals through self-supervised training. Existing multimodal contrastive frameworks mostly rely on the shared information between sensory modalities, but do not explicitly consider the exclusive modality information that could be critical to understanding the underlying sensing physics. Besides, contrastive frameworks for time series have not handled the temporal information locality appropriately. FOCAL solves these challenges by making the following contributions: First, given multimodal time series, it encodes each modality into a factorized latent space consisting of shared features and private features that are orthogonal to each other. The shared space emphasizes feature patterns consistent across sensory modalities through a modal-matching objective. In contrast, the private space extracts modality-exclusive information through a transformation-invariant objective. Second, we propose a temporal structural constraint for modality features, such that the average distance between temporally neighboring samples is no larger than that of temporally distant samples. Extensive evaluations are performed on four multimodal sensing datasets with two backbone encoders and two classifiers to demonstrate the superiority of FOCAL. It consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in downstream tasks with a clear margin, under different ratios of available labels. The code and self-collected dataset are available at https://github.com/tomoyoshki/focal.

Huajian Ruan, Jinyang Li, Xingyu Guo et al.

We propose a statistical-field framework for text generated by large language models (LLMs), treating token embeddings as continuous spin variables on a one-dimensional chain. Defining a susceptibility from the connected two-point correlator and an order parameter from the ensemble-averaged embedding field, we vary the \texttt{softmax} temperature $T$ and observe a sharp susceptibility peak near a characteristic $T_c$ with power-law-like scaling, a concurrent rapid change in the order parameter, and a collapse onto a single semantic direction below $T_c$. The intrinsic dimension estimated by the two nearest neighbor (TwoNN) method independently corroborates these findings, reaching a minimum near $T_c$. Results are robust across model scales (Qwen3: 0.6B--32B) and prompt categories. While the phenomenology closely resembles a continuous phase transition, the non-equilibrium nature of autoregressive generation warrants further investigation. Our framework provides quantitative tools for probing the collective statistical structure of LLM outputs and suggests connections between decoding strategies and critical phenomena.

Yifan Du, Zikang Liu, Jinbiao Peng et al.

Multimodal deep search agents have shown great potential in solving complex tasks by iteratively collecting textual and visual evidence. However, managing the heterogeneous information and high token costs associated with multimodal inputs over long horizons remains a critical challenge, as existing methods often suffer from context explosion or the loss of crucial visual signals. To address this, we propose a novel Long-horizon MultiModal deep search framework, named LMM-Searcher, centered on a file-based visual representation mechanism. By offloading visual assets to an external file system and mapping them to lightweight textual identifiers (UIDs), our approach mitigates context overhead while preserving multimodal information for future access. We equip the agent with a tailored fetch-image tool, enabling a progressive, on-demand visual loading strategy for active perception. Furthermore, we introduce a data synthesis pipeline designed to generate queries requiring complex cross-modal multi-hop reasoning. Using this pipeline, we distill 12K high-quality trajectories to fine-tune Qwen3-VL-Thinking-30A3B into a specialized multimodal deep search agent. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that our method successfully scales to 100-turn search horizons, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on challenging long-horizon benchmarks like MM-BrowseComp and MMSearch-Plus, while also exhibiting strong generalizability across different base models. Our code will be released in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LMM-Searcher.

Jiawei Liu, Jinkun Lin, Fabian Ruffy et al.

Deep-learning (DL) compilers such as TVM and TensorRT are increasingly being used to optimize deep neural network (DNN) models to meet performance, resource utilization and other requirements. Bugs in these compilers can result in models whose semantics differ from the original ones, producing incorrect results that corrupt the correctness of downstream applications. However, finding bugs in these compilers is challenging due to their complexity. In this work, we propose a new fuzz testing approach for finding bugs in deep-learning compilers. Our core approach consists of (i) generating diverse yet valid DNN test models that can exercise a large part of the compiler's transformation logic using light-weight operator specifications; (ii) performing gradient-based search to find model inputs that avoid any floating-point exceptional values during model execution, reducing the chance of missed bugs or false alarms; and (iii) using differential testing to identify bugs. We implemented this approach in NNSmith which has found 72 new bugs for TVM, TensorRT, ONNXRuntime, and PyTorch to date. Of these 58 have been confirmed and 51 have been fixed by their respective project maintainers.

Jinyang Li, Yuval Moskovitch, H. V. Jagadish

Real-life tools for decision-making in many critical domains are based on ranking results. With the increasing awareness of algorithmic fairness, recent works have presented measures for fairness in ranking. Many of those definitions consider the representation of different ``protected groups'', in the top-$k$ ranked items, for any reasonable $k$. Given the protected groups, confirming algorithmic fairness is a simple task. However, the groups' definitions may be unknown in advance. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting groups with biased representation in the top-$k$ ranked items, eliminating the need to pre-define protected groups. The number of such groups possible can be exponential, making the problem hard. We propose efficient search algorithms for two different fairness measures: global representation bounds, and proportional representation. Then we propose a method to explain the bias in the representations of groups utilizing the notion of Shapley values. We conclude with an experimental study, showing the scalability of our approach and demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed algorithms.

Jinyang Li, Binyuan Hui, Reynold Cheng et al.

The task of text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language questions into executable SQL queries, has garnered increasing attention in recent years, as it can assist end users in efficiently extracting vital information from databases without the need for technical background. One of the major challenges in text-to-SQL parsing is domain generalization, i.e., how to generalize well to unseen databases. Recently, the pre-trained text-to-text transformer model, namely T5, though not specialized for text-to-SQL parsing, has achieved state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks targeting domain generalization. In this work, we explore ways to further augment the pre-trained T5 model with specialized components for text-to-SQL parsing. Such components are expected to introduce structural inductive bias into text-to-SQL parsers thus improving model's capacity on (potentially multi-hop) reasoning, which is critical for generating structure-rich SQLs. To this end, we propose a new architecture GRAPHIX-T5, a mixed model with the standard pre-trained transformer model augmented by some specially-designed graph-aware layers. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of GRAPHIX-T5 across four text-to-SQL benchmarks: SPIDER, SYN, REALISTIC and DK. GRAPHIX-T5 surpass all other T5-based parsers with a significant margin, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Notably, GRAPHIX-T5-large reach performance superior to the original T5-large by 5.7% on exact match (EM) accuracy and 6.6% on execution accuracy (EX). This even outperforms the T5-3B by 1.2% on EM and 1.5% on EX.

Jinkun Lin, Anqi Zhang, Mathias Lecuyer et al.

We develop a new, principled algorithm for estimating the contribution of training data points to the behavior of a deep learning model, such as a specific prediction it makes. Our algorithm estimates the AME, a quantity that measures the expected (average) marginal effect of adding a data point to a subset of the training data, sampled from a given distribution. When subsets are sampled from the uniform distribution, the AME reduces to the well-known Shapley value. Our approach is inspired by causal inference and randomized experiments: we sample different subsets of the training data to train multiple submodels, and evaluate each submodel's behavior. We then use a LASSO regression to jointly estimate the AME of each data point, based on the subset compositions. Under sparsity assumptions ($k \ll N$ datapoints have large AME), our estimator requires only $O(k\log N)$ randomized submodel trainings, improving upon the best prior Shapley value estimators.

Bowen Qin, Binyuan Hui, Lihan Wang et al.

Text-to-SQL parsing is an essential and challenging task. The goal of text-to-SQL parsing is to convert a natural language (NL) question to its corresponding structured query language (SQL) based on the evidences provided by relational databases. Early text-to-SQL parsing systems from the database community achieved a noticeable progress with the cost of heavy human engineering and user interactions with the systems. In recent years, deep neural networks have significantly advanced this task by neural generation models, which automatically learn a mapping function from an input NL question to an output SQL query. Subsequently, the large pre-trained language models have taken the state-of-the-art of the text-to-SQL parsing task to a new level. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review on deep learning approaches for text-to-SQL parsing. First, we introduce the text-to-SQL parsing corpora which can be categorized as single-turn and multi-turn. Second, we provide a systematical overview of pre-trained language models and existing methods for text-to-SQL parsing. Third, we present readers with the challenges faced by text-to-SQL parsing and explore some potential future directions in this field.

Yanying Li, Jinyang Li, Shengfeng He et al.

We present NimbusGS, a unified framework for reconstructing high-quality 3D scenes from degraded multi-view inputs captured under diverse and mixed adverse weather conditions. Unlike existing methods that target specific weather types, NimbusGS addresses the broader challenge of generalization by modeling the dual nature of weather: a continuous, view-consistent medium that attenuates light, and dynamic, view-dependent particles that cause scattering and occlusion. To capture this structure, we decompose degradations into a global transmission field and per-view particulate residuals. The transmission field represents static atmospheric effects shared across views, while the residuals model transient disturbances unique to each input. To enable stable geometry learning under severe visibility degradation, we introduce a geometry-guided gradient scaling mechanism that mitigates gradient imbalance during the self-supervised optimization of 3D Gaussian representations. This physically grounded formulation allows NimbusGS to disentangle complex degradations while preserving scene structure, yielding superior geometry reconstruction and outperforming task-specific methods across diverse and challenging weather conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/lyy-ovo/NimbusGS.

Jinyang Li, Zhepeng Wang, Zhirui Hu et al.

Quantum computing presents a promising approach for machine learning with its capability for extremely parallel computation in high-dimension through superposition and entanglement. Despite its potential, existing quantum learning algorithms, such as Variational Quantum Circuits(VQCs), face challenges in handling more complex datasets, particularly those that are not linearly separable. What's more, it encounters the deployability issue, making the learning models suffer a drastic accuracy drop after deploying them to the actual quantum devices. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel spatial-temporal design, namely ST-VQC, to integrate non-linearity in quantum learning and improve the robustness of the learning model to noise. Specifically, ST-VQC can extract spatial features via a novel block-based encoding quantum sub-circuit coupled with a layer-wise computation quantum sub-circuit to enable temporal-wise deep learning. Additionally, a SWAP-Free physical circuit design is devised to improve robustness. These designs bring a number of hyperparameters. After a systematic analysis of the design space for each design component, an automated optimization framework is proposed to generate the ST-VQC quantum circuit. The proposed ST-VQC has been evaluated on two IBM quantum processors, ibm_cairo with 27 qubits and ibmq_lima with 7 qubits to assess its effectiveness. The results of the evaluation on the standard dataset for binary classification show that ST-VQC can achieve over 30% accuracy improvement compared with existing VQCs on actual quantum computers. Moreover, on a non-linear synthetic dataset, the ST-VQC outperforms a linear classifier by 27.9%, while the linear classifier using classical computing outperforms the existing VQC by 15.58%.

Xiaohan Xu, Ming Li, Chongyang Tao et al.

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), Knowledge Distillation (KD) emerges as a pivotal methodology for transferring advanced capabilities from leading proprietary LLMs, such as GPT-4, to their open-source counterparts like LLaMA and Mistral. Additionally, as open-source LLMs flourish, KD plays a crucial role in both compressing these models, and facilitating their self-improvement by employing themselves as teachers. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of KD's role within the realm of LLM, highlighting its critical function in imparting advanced knowledge to smaller models and its utility in model compression and self-improvement. Our survey is meticulously structured around three foundational pillars: \textit{algorithm}, \textit{skill}, and \textit{verticalization} -- providing a comprehensive examination of KD mechanisms, the enhancement of specific cognitive abilities, and their practical implications across diverse fields. Crucially, the survey navigates the intricate interplay between data augmentation (DA) and KD, illustrating how DA emerges as a powerful paradigm within the KD framework to bolster LLMs' performance. By leveraging DA to generate context-rich, skill-specific training data, KD transcends traditional boundaries, enabling open-source models to approximate the contextual adeptness, ethical alignment, and deep semantic insights characteristic of their proprietary counterparts. This work aims to provide an insightful guide for researchers and practitioners, offering a detailed overview of current methodologies in KD and proposing future research directions. Importantly, we firmly advocate for compliance with the legal terms that regulate the use of LLMs, ensuring ethical and lawful application of KD of LLMs. An associated Github repository is available at https://github.com/Tebmer/Awesome-Knowledge-Distillation-of-LLMs.

Zhepeng Wang, Jinyang Li, Zhirui Hu et al.

Security has always been a critical issue in machine learning (ML) applications. Due to the high cost of model training -- such as collecting relevant samples, labeling data, and consuming computing power -- model-stealing attack is one of the most fundamental but vitally important issues. When it comes to quantum computing, such a quantum machine learning (QML) model-stealing attack also exists and is even more severe because the traditional encryption method, such as homomorphic encryption can hardly be directly applied to quantum computation. On the other hand, due to the limited quantum computing resources, the monetary cost of training QML model can be even higher than classical ones in the near term. Therefore, a well-tuned QML model developed by a third-party company can be delegated to a quantum cloud provider as a service to be used by ordinary users. In this case, the QML model will likely be leaked if the cloud provider is under attack. To address such a problem, we propose a novel framework, namely QuMoS, to preserve model security. We propose to divide the complete QML model into multiple parts and distribute them to multiple physically isolated quantum cloud providers for execution. As such, even if the adversary in a single provider can obtain a partial model, it does not have sufficient information to retrieve the complete model. Although promising, we observed that an arbitrary model design under distributed settings cannot provide model security. We further developed a reinforcement learning-based security engine, which can automatically optimize the model design under the distributed setting, such that a good trade-off between model performance and security can be made. Experimental results on four datasets show that the model design proposed by QuMoS can achieve competitive performance while providing the highest security than the baselines.

Hexu Zhao, Xiwen Min, Xiaoteng Liu et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is an increasingly popular novel view synthesis approach due to its fast rendering time, and high-quality output. However, scaling 3DGS to large (or intricate) scenes is challenging due to its large memory requirement, which exceed most GPU's memory capacity. In this paper, we describe CLM, a system that allows 3DGS to render large scenes using a single consumer-grade GPU, e.g., RTX4090. It does so by offloading Gaussians to CPU memory, and loading them into GPU memory only when necessary. To reduce performance and communication overheads, CLM uses a novel offloading strategy that exploits observations about 3DGS's memory access pattern for pipelining, and thus overlap GPU-to-CPU communication, GPU computation and CPU computation. Furthermore, we also exploit observation about the access pattern to reduce communication volume. Our evaluation shows that the resulting implementation can render a large scene that requires 100 million Gaussians on a single RTX4090 and achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction quality.

Xingyu Wu, Jinyang Li

An autonomous Artificial Internet of Things (AIoT) system for elderly dementia patients monitoring in a smart home is presented. The system mainly implements two functions based on the activity inference of the sensor data, which are real time abnormal activity monitoring and trend prediction of disease related activities. Specifically, CASAS dataset is employed to train a Random Forest (RF) model for activity inference. Then, another RF model trained by the output data of activity inference is used for abnormal activity monitoring. Particularly, RF is chosen for these tasks because of its balanced trade offs between accuracy, time efficiency, flexibility, and interpretability. Moreover, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is utilised to forecast the disease related activity trend of a patient. Consequently, the accuracy of two RF classifiers designed for activity inference and abnormal activity detection is greater than 99 percent and 94 percent, respectively. Furthermore, using the duration of sleep as an example, the LSTM model achieves accurate and evident future trends prediction.

Chengwen Qi, Bowen Li, Binyuan Hui et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many formal language oriented tasks, such as structural data-to-text and semantic parsing. However current benchmarks mostly follow the data distribution of the pre-training data of LLMs. Therefore, a natural question rises that do LLMs really understand the structured semantics of formal languages. In this paper, we investigate this problem on a special case, converse binary relation. We introduce a new benchmark ConvRe focusing on converse relations, which contains 17 relations and 1240 triples extracted from popular knowledge graph completion datasets. Our ConvRE features two tasks, Re2Text and Text2Re, which are formulated as multi-choice question answering to evaluate LLMs' ability to determine the matching between relations and associated text. For the evaluation protocol, apart from different prompting methods, we further introduce variants to the test text and few-shot example text. We conduct experiments on three popular LLM families and have observed various scaling trends. The results suggest that LLMs often resort to shortcut learning and still face challenges on our proposed benchmark.

Sijia Chen, En Yu, Jinyang Li et al.

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is a critical area within computer vision, with a broad spectrum of practical implementations. Current research has primarily focused on the development of tracking algorithms and enhancement of post-processing techniques. Yet, there has been a lack of thorough examination concerning the nature of tracking data it self. In this study, we pioneer an exploration into the distribution patterns of tracking data and identify a pronounced long-tail distribution issue within existing MOT datasets. We note a significant imbalance in the distribution of trajectory lengths across different pedestrians, a phenomenon we refer to as ``pedestrians trajectory long-tail distribution''. Addressing this challenge, we introduce a bespoke strategy designed to mitigate the effects of this skewed distribution. Specifically, we propose two data augmentation strategies, including Stationary Camera View Data Augmentation (SVA) and Dynamic Camera View Data Augmentation (DVA) , designed for viewpoint states and the Group Softmax (GS) module for Re-ID. SVA is to backtrack and predict the pedestrian trajectory of tail classes, and DVA is to use diffusion model to change the background of the scene. GS divides the pedestrians into unrelated groups and performs softmax operation on each group individually. Our proposed strategies can be integrated into numerous existing tracking systems, and extensive experimentation validates the efficacy of our method in reducing the influence of long-tail distribution on multi-object tracking performance. The code is available at https://github.com/chen-si-jia/Trajectory-Long-tail-Distribution-for-MOT.

Yi Sheng, Junhuan Yang, Jinyang Li et al.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly integrates into our daily lives, fairness has emerged as a critical concern, particularly in medical AI, where datasets often reflect inherent biases due to social factors like the underrepresentation of marginalized communities and socioeconomic barriers to data collection. Traditional approaches to mitigating these biases have focused on data augmentation and the development of fairness-aware training algorithms. However, this paper argues that the architecture of neural networks, a core component of Machine Learning (ML), plays a crucial role in ensuring fairness. We demonstrate that addressing fairness effectively requires a holistic approach that simultaneously considers data, algorithms, and architecture. Utilizing Automated ML (AutoML) technology, specifically Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we introduce a novel framework, BiaslessNAS, designed to achieve fair outcomes in analyzing skin lesion datasets. BiaslessNAS incorporates fairness considerations at every stage of the NAS process, leading to the identification of neural networks that are not only more accurate but also significantly fairer. Our experiments show that BiaslessNAS achieves a 2.55% increase in accuracy and a 65.50% improvement in fairness compared to traditional NAS methods, underscoring the importance of integrating fairness into neural network architecture for better outcomes in medical AI applications.

Jinyang Li

In this research paper, we investigate into a paper named "A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for the Financial Portfolio Management Problem" [arXiv:1706.10059]. It is a portfolio management problem which is solved by deep learning techniques. The original paper proposes a financial-model-free reinforcement learning framework, which consists of the Ensemble of Identical Independent Evaluators (EIIE) topology, a Portfolio-Vector Memory (PVM), an Online Stochastic Batch Learning (OSBL) scheme, and a fully exploiting and explicit reward function. Three different instants are used to realize this framework, namely a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a basic Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The performance is then examined by comparing to a number of recently reviewed or published portfolio-selection strategies. We have successfully replicated their implementations and evaluations. Besides, we further apply this framework in the stock market, instead of the cryptocurrency market that the original paper uses. The experiment in the cryptocurrency market is consistent with the original paper, which achieve superior returns. But it doesn't perform as well when applied in the stock market.

Jinyang Li, En Yu, Sijia Chen et al.

Open-vocabulary multiple object tracking aims to generalize trackers to unseen categories during training, enabling their application across a variety of real-world scenarios. However, the existing open-vocabulary tracker is constrained by its framework structure, isolated frame-level perception, and insufficient modal interactions, which hinder its performance in open-vocabulary classification and tracking. In this paper, we propose OVTR (End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Multiple Object Tracking with TRansformer), the first end-to-end open-vocabulary tracker that models motion, appearance, and category simultaneously. To achieve stable classification and continuous tracking, we design the CIP (Category Information Propagation) strategy, which establishes multiple high-level category information priors for subsequent frames. Additionally, we introduce a dual-branch structure for generalization capability and deep multimodal interaction, and incorporate protective strategies in the decoder to enhance performance. Experimental results show that our method surpasses previous trackers on the open-vocabulary MOT benchmark while also achieving faster inference speeds and significantly reducing preprocessing requirements. Moreover, the experiment transferring the model to another dataset demonstrates its strong adaptability. Models and code are released at https://github.com/jinyanglii/OVTR.

Jinyang Li, Xiaolong Li, Ge Qu et al.

Resolution of complex SQL issues persists as a significant bottleneck in real-world database applications. Current Large Language Models (LLMs), while adept at text-to-SQL translation, have not been rigorously evaluated on the more challenging task of debugging SQL issues. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-CRITIC, a new SQL issue debugging benchmark comprising 530 PostgreSQL tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-PG) and 570 multi-dialect tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-Multi), distilled from authentic user issues and replayed within new environments to facilitate rigorous evaluation. Baseline evaluations underscore the task's complexity, with the leading reasoning model O3-Mini achieving only 38.87% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 33.33% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi. Meanwhile, advancing open-source models for database tasks is crucial for empowering local development while safeguarding data privacy. Therefore, we present Six-Gym (Sql-fIX-Gym), a training environment for elevating open-source model capabilities for SQL issue debugging. This environment leverages SQL-Rewind strategy, which automatically generates executable issue-solution datasets by reverse-engineering issues from verified SQLs. However, popular trajectory-based fine-tuning methods do not explore substantial supervisory signals. We further propose f-Plan Boosting, which extracts high-level debugging plans from SQL solutions, enabling teacher LLMs to produce 73.7% more successful trajectories for training. We integrate these components into an open-source agent, Bird-Fixer. Based on Qwen-2.5-Coder-14B, Bird-Fixer achieves 38.11% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 29.65% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi, surpassing leading proprietary models such as Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4.1, marking a significant step toward democratizing sophisticated SQL-debugging capabilities. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-critic.github.io/

Renjie Liu, Haitian Jiang, Xiao Yan et al.

GraphRAG enhances large language models (LLMs) to generate quality answers for user questions by retrieving related facts from external knowledge graphs. However, current GraphRAG methods are primarily evaluated on and overly tailored for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) benchmarks, which are biased towards a few specific question patterns and do not reflect the diversity of real-world questions. To better evaluate GraphRAG methods, we propose a complete four-class taxonomy to categorize the basic patterns of knowledge graph questions and use it to create PolyBench, a new GraphRAG benchmark encompassing a comprehensive set of graph questions. With the new benchmark, we find that existing GraphRAG methods fall short in effectiveness (i.e., quality of the generated answers) and/or efficiency (i.e., response time or token usage) because they adopt either a fixed graph traversal strategy or free-form exploration by LLMs for fact retrieval. However, different question patterns require distinct graph traversal strategies and context formation. To facilitate better retrieval, we propose PolyG, an adaptive GraphRAG approach by decomposing and categorizing the questions according to our proposed question taxonomy. Built on top of a unified interface and execution engine, PolyG dynamically prompts an LLM to generate a graph database query to retrieve the context for each decomposed basic question. Compared with SOTA GraphRAG methods, PolyG achieves a higher win rate in generation quality and has a low response latency and token cost. Our code and benchmark are open-source at https://github.com/Liu-rj/PolyG.

Weifu Fu, Jinyang Li, Bin-Bin Gao et al.

Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) enables recognition of novel categories beyond fixed classes but faces challenges in aligning text representations with complex visual concepts and the scarcity of image-text pairs for rare categories. This results in suboptimal performance in specialized domains or with complex objects. Recent visual-prompted methods partially address these issues but often involve complex multi-modal designs and multi-stage optimizations, prolonging the development cycle. Additionally, effective training strategies for data-driven OSOD models remain largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose PET-DINO, a universal detector supporting both text and visual prompts. Our Alignment-Friendly Visual Prompt Generation (AFVPG) module builds upon an advanced text-prompted detector, addressing the limitations of text representation guidance and reducing the development cycle. We introduce two prompt-enriched training strategies: Intra-Batch Parallel Prompting (IBP) at the iteration level and Dynamic Memory-Driven Prompting (DMD) at the overall training level. These strategies enable simultaneous modeling of multiple prompt routes, facilitating parallel alignment with diverse real-world usage scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that PET-DINO exhibits competitive zero-shot object detection capabilities across various prompt-based detection protocols. These strengths can be attributed to inheritance-based philosophy and prompt-enriched training strategies, which play a critical role in building an effective generic object detector. Project page: https://fuweifuvtoo.github.io/pet-dino.

Tomoyoshi Kimura, Denizhan Kara, Jinyang Li et al.

Internet of Things (IoT) systems continuously collect heterogeneous sensing signals from ubiquitous sensors to support intelligent applications such as human activity analysis, emotion monitoring, and environmental perception. These signals are inherently non-stationary and multi-scale, posing unique challenges for standard tokenization techniques. This paper proposes Dywave, a dynamic tokenization framework for IoT sensing signals that constructs compact input representations aligned with intrinsic temporal structures and underlying physical events. Dywave leverages wavelet-based hierarchical decomposition, identifies meaningful temporal boundaries corresponding to underlying semantic events, and adaptively compresses redundant intervals while preserving temporal coherence. Extensive evaluations on five real-world IoT sensing datasets across activity recognition, stress assessment, and nearby object detection demonstrate that Dywave outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 12% in accuracy, while improving computational efficiency by reducing input token lengths by up to 75% across mainstream sequence models. Moreover, Dywave exhibits improved robustness to domain shifts and varying sequence lengths.

Hexu Zhao, Haoyang Weng, Daohan Lu et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is increasingly popular for 3D reconstruction due to its superior visual quality and rendering speed. However, 3DGS training currently occurs on a single GPU, limiting its ability to handle high-resolution and large-scale 3D reconstruction tasks due to memory constraints. We introduce Grendel, a distributed system designed to partition 3DGS parameters and parallelize computation across multiple GPUs. As each Gaussian affects a small, dynamic subset of rendered pixels, Grendel employs sparse all-to-all communication to transfer the necessary Gaussians to pixel partitions and performs dynamic load balancing. Unlike existing 3DGS systems that train using one camera view image at a time, Grendel supports batched training with multiple views. We explore various optimization hyperparameter scaling strategies and find that a simple sqrt(batch size) scaling rule is highly effective. Evaluations using large-scale, high-resolution scenes show that Grendel enhances rendering quality by scaling up 3DGS parameters across multiple GPUs. On the Rubble dataset, we achieve a test PSNR of 27.28 by distributing 40.4 million Gaussians across 16 GPUs, compared to a PSNR of 26.28 using 11.2 million Gaussians on a single GPU. Grendel is an open-source project available at: https://github.com/nyu-systems/Grendel-GS

Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Haishu Tan et al.

Existing multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) methods often fail to preserve the uncertain transition region and detect small focus areas within large defocused regions accurately. To address this issue, this study proposes a new small-area-aware MFIF algorithm for enhancing object detection capability. First, we enhance the pixel attributes within the small focus and boundary regions, which are subsequently combined with visual saliency detection to obtain the pre-fusion results used to discriminate the distribution of focused pixels. To accurately ensure pixel focus, we consider the source image as a combination of focused, defocused, and uncertain regions and propose a three-region segmentation strategy. Finally, we design an effective pixel selection rule to generate segmentation decision maps and obtain the final fusion results. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method can accurately detect small and smooth focus areas while improving object detection performance, outperforming existing methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. The source code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/SAMF.

Jinyang Li, Shuhao Mei, Xiaoyu Xiao et al.

For time series arising from latent dynamical systems, existing cross-domain generalization methods commonly assume that samples are comparably meaningful within a shared representation space. In real-world settings, however, different datasets often originate from structurally heterogeneous families of dynamical systems, leading to fundamentally distinct feature distributions. Under such circumstances, performing global alignment while neglecting structural differences is highly prone to establishing spurious correspondences and inducing negative transfer. From the new perspective of cross-domain structural correspondence failure, we revisit this problem and propose a structurally stratified calibration framework. This approach explicitly distinguishes structurally consistent samples and performs amplitude calibration exclusively within structurally compatible sample clusters, thereby effectively alleviating generalization failures caused by structural incompatibility. Notably, the proposed framework achieves substantial performance improvements through a concise and computationally efficient calibration strategy. Evaluations on 19 public datasets (100.3k samples) demonstrate that SSCF significantly outperforms strong baselines under the zero-shot setting. These results confirm that establishing structural consistency prior to alignment constitutes a more reliable and effective pathway for improving cross-domain generalization of time series governed by latent dynamical systems.

Ge Qu, Jinyang Li, Bowen Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL. Previous methods generally employ a two-stage reasoning framework, namely 1) schema linking and 2) logical synthesis, making the framework not only effective but also interpretable. Despite these advancements, the inherent bad nature of the generalization of LLMs often results in hallucinations, which limits the full potential of LLMs. In this work, we first identify and categorize the common types of hallucinations at each stage in text-to-SQL. We then introduce a novel strategy, Task Alignment (TA), designed to mitigate hallucinations at each stage. TA encourages LLMs to take advantage of experiences from similar tasks rather than starting the tasks from scratch. This can help LLMs reduce the burden of generalization, thereby mitigating hallucinations effectively. We further propose TA-SQL, a text-to-SQL framework based on this strategy. The experimental results and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. Specifically, it enhances the performance of the GPT-4 baseline by 21.23% relatively on BIRD dev and it yields significant improvements across six models and four mainstream, complex text-to-SQL benchmarks.

Anqi Zhang, Yulin Chen, Jane Pan et al.

Reasoning models have achieved remarkable performance on tasks like math and logical reasoning thanks to their ability to search during reasoning. However, they still suffer from overthinking, often performing unnecessary reasoning steps even after reaching the correct answer. This raises the question: can models evaluate the correctness of their intermediate answers during reasoning? In this work, we study whether reasoning models encode information about answer correctness through probing the model's hidden states. The resulting probe can verify intermediate answers with high accuracy and produces highly calibrated scores. Additionally, we find models' hidden states encode correctness of future answers, enabling early prediction of the correctness before the intermediate answer is fully formulated. We then use the probe as a verifier to decide whether to exit reasoning at intermediate answers during inference, reducing the number of inference tokens by 24\% without compromising performance. These findings confirm that reasoning models do encode a notion of correctness yet fail to exploit it, revealing substantial untapped potential to enhance their efficiency.

Lingfan Yu, Jinkun Lin, Jinyang Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are wildly popular today and it is important to serve them efficiently. Existing LLM serving systems are stateless across requests. Consequently, when LLMs are used in the common setting of multi-turn conversations, a growing log of the conversation history must be processed alongside any request by the serving system at each turn, resulting in repeated processing. In this paper, we design $Pensieve$, a system optimized for multi-turn conversation LLM serving. $Pensieve$ maintains the conversation state across requests by caching previously processed history to avoid duplicate processing. $Pensieve$'s multi-tier caching strategy can utilize both GPU and CPU memory to efficiently store and retrieve cached data. $Pensieve$ also generalizes the recent PagedAttention kernel to support attention between multiple input tokens with a GPU cache spread over non-contiguous memory. Our evaluation shows that $Pensieve$ can achieve $1.14$-$3.0\times$ the throughput of vLLM and TensorRT-LLM and significantly reduce latency.

Zirui Tang, Xuanhe Zhou, Yumou Liu et al.

Workspace learning requires AI agents to identify, reason over, exploit, and update explicit and implicit dependencies among heterogeneous files in a worker's workspace, enabling them to complete both routine and advanced tasks effectively. Despite its importance, existing relevant benchmarks largely evaluate agents on pre-specified or synthesized files with limited real-world dependencies, leaving workspace-level evaluation underexplored. To this end, we introduce Workspace-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on Workspace Learning invOlving Large-Scale File Dependencies. We construct realistic workspaces with 5 worker profiles, 74 file types, 20,476 files (up to 20GB) and curate 388 tasks, each with its own file dependency graph, evaluated across 7,399 total rubrics that require cross-file retrieval, contextual reasoning, and adaptive decision-making. We further provide Workspace-Bench-Lite, a 100-task subset that preserves the benchmark distribution while reducing evaluation costs by about 70%. We evaluate 4 popular agent harnesses and 7 foundation models. Experimental results show that current agents remain far from reliable workspace learning, where the best reaches only 68.7%, substantially below the human result of 80.7%, and the average performance across agents is only 47.4%.

Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their coding capabilities. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, such as single-file code generation or repository issue debugging, falling short of measuring the full spectrum of challenges raised by real-world programming activities. In this case study, we explore the performance of LLMs across the entire software development lifecycle with DevEval, encompassing stages including software design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. DevEval features four programming languages, multiple domains, high-quality data collection, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. Empirical studies show that current LLMs, including GPT-4, fail to solve the challenges presented within DevEval. Our findings offer actionable insights for the future development of LLMs toward real-world programming applications.

Jinyang Li, Nan Huo, Yan Gao et al.

Interactive Data Analysis, the collaboration between humans and LLM agents, enables real-time data exploration for informed decision-making. The challenges and costs of collecting realistic interactive logs for data analysis hinder the quantitative evaluation of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in this task. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Tapilot-Crossing, a new benchmark to evaluate LLM agents on interactive data analysis. Tapilot-Crossing contains 1024 interactions, covering 4 practical scenarios: Normal, Action, Private, and Private Action. Notably, Tapilot-Crossing is constructed by an economical multi-agent environment, Decision Company, with few human efforts. We evaluate popular and advanced LLM agents in Tapilot-Crossing, which underscores the challenges of interactive data analysis. Furthermore, we propose Adaptive Interaction Reflection (AIR), a self-generated reflection strategy that guides LLM agents to learn from successful history. Experiments demonstrate that Air can evolve LLMs into effective interactive data analysis agents, achieving a relative performance improvement of up to 44.5%.

Jinkun Lin, Ziheng Jiang, Zuquan Song et al.

Large language model (LLM) training is one of the most demanding distributed computations today, often requiring thousands of GPUs with frequent synchronization across machines. Such a workload pattern makes it susceptible to stragglers, where the training can be stalled by few slow workers. At ByteDance we find stragglers are not trivially always caused by hardware failures, but can arise from multiple complex factors. This work aims to present a comprehensive study on the straggler issues in LLM training, using a five-month trace collected from our ByteDance LLM training cluster. The core methodology is what-if analysis that simulates the scenario without any stragglers and contrasts with the actual case. We use this method to study the following questions: (1) how often do stragglers affect training jobs, and what effect do they have on job performance; (2) do stragglers exhibit temporal or spatial patterns; and (3) what are the potential root causes for stragglers?

Tianshi Wang, Jinyang Li, Ruijie Wang et al.

This paper introduces SudokuSens, a generative framework for automated generation of training data in machine-learning-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, such that the generated synthetic data mimic experimental configurations not encountered during actual sensor data collection. The framework improves the robustness of resulting deep learning models, and is intended for IoT applications where data collection is expensive. The work is motivated by the fact that IoT time-series data entangle the signatures of observed objects with the confounding intrinsic properties of the surrounding environment and the dynamic environmental disturbances experienced. To incorporate sufficient diversity into the IoT training data, one therefore needs to consider a combinatorial explosion of training cases that are multiplicative in the number of objects considered and the possible environmental conditions in which such objects may be encountered. Our framework substantially reduces these multiplicative training needs. To decouple object signatures from environmental conditions, we employ a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) that allows us to reduce data collection needs from multiplicative to (nearly) linear, while synthetically generating (data for) the missing conditions. To obtain robustness with respect to dynamic disturbances, a session-aware temporal contrastive learning approach is taken. Integrating the aforementioned two approaches, SudokuSens significantly improves the robustness of deep learning for IoT applications. We explore the degree to which SudokuSens benefits downstream inference tasks in different data sets and discuss conditions under which the approach is particularly effective.

Tomoyoshi Kimura, Jinyang Li, Tianshi Wang et al.

This paper demonstrates the potential of vibration-based Foundation Models (FMs), pre-trained with unlabeled sensing data, to improve the robustness of run-time inference in (a class of) IoT applications. A case study is presented featuring a vehicle classification application using acoustic and seismic sensing. The work is motivated by the success of foundation models in the areas of natural language processing and computer vision, leading to generalizations of the FM concept to other domains as well, where significant amounts of unlabeled data exist that can be used for self-supervised pre-training. One such domain is IoT applications. Foundation models for selected sensing modalities in the IoT domain can be pre-trained in an environment-agnostic fashion using available unlabeled sensor data and then fine-tuned to the deployment at hand using a small amount of labeled data. The paper shows that the pre-training/fine-tuning approach improves the robustness of downstream inference and facilitates adaptation to different environmental conditions. More specifically, we present a case study in a real-world setting to evaluate a simple (vibration-based) FM-like model, called FOCAL, demonstrating its superior robustness and adaptation, compared to conventional supervised deep neural networks (DNNs). We also demonstrate its superior convergence over supervised solutions. Our findings highlight the advantages of vibration-based FMs (and FM-inspired selfsupervised models in general) in terms of inference robustness, runtime efficiency, and model adaptation (via fine-tuning) in resource-limited IoT settings.

Ge Qu, Jinyang Li, Bowen Qin et al.

Current self-correction approaches in text-to-SQL face two critical limitations: 1) Conventional self-correction methods rely on recursive self-calls of LLMs, resulting in multiplicative computational overhead, and 2) LLMs struggle to implement effective error detection and correction for declarative SQL queries, as they fail to demonstrate the underlying reasoning path. In this work, we propose SHARE, an SLM-based Hierarchical Action corREction assistant that enables LLMs to perform more precise error localization and efficient correction. SHARE orchestrates three specialized Small Language Models (SLMs) in a sequential pipeline, where it first transforms declarative SQL queries into stepwise action trajectories that reveal underlying reasoning, followed by a two-phase granular refinement. We further propose a novel hierarchical self-evolution strategy for data-efficient training. Experimental results demonstrate that SHARE effectively enhances self-correction capabilities while proving robust across various LLMs. Furthermore, our comprehensive analysis shows that SHARE maintains strong performance even in low-resource training settings, which is particularly valuable for text-to-SQL applications with data privacy constraints.

Renjie Liu, Yichuan Wang, Xiao Yan et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are machine learning models specialized for graph data and widely used in many applications. To train GNNs on large graphs that exceed CPU memory, several systems store data on disk and conduct out-of-core processing. However, these systems suffer from either read amplification when reading node features that are usually smaller than a disk page or degraded model accuracy by treating the graph as disconnected partitions. To close this gap, we build a system called DiskGNN, which achieves high I/O efficiency and thus fast training without hurting model accuracy. The key technique used by DiskGNN is offline sampling, which helps decouple graph sampling from model computation. In particular, by conducting graph sampling beforehand, DiskGNN acquires the node features that will be accessed by model computation, and such information is utilized to pack the target node features contiguously on disk to avoid read amplification. Besides, \name{} also adopts designs including four-level feature store to fully utilize the memory hierarchy to cache node features and reduce disk access, batched packing to accelerate the feature packing process, and pipelined training to overlap disk access with other operations. We compare DiskGNN with Ginex and MariusGNN, which are state-of-the-art systems for out-of-core GNN training. The results show that DiskGNN can speed up the baselines by over 8x while matching their best model accuracy.

Tomoyoshi Kimura, Xinlin Li, Osama Hanna et al.

Standard multimodal self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms regard cross-modal synchronization as implicit supervisory labels during pretraining, thus posing high requirements on the scale and quality of multimodal samples. These constraints significantly limit the performance of sensing intelligence in IoT applications, as the heterogeneity and the non-interpretability of time-series signals result in abundant unimodal data but scarce high-quality multimodal pairs. This paper proposes InfoMAE, a cross-modal alignment framework that tackles the challenge of multimodal pair efficiency under the SSL setting by facilitating efficient cross-modal alignment of pretrained unimodal representations. InfoMAE achieves \textit{efficient cross-modal alignment} with \textit{limited data pairs} through a novel information theory-inspired formulation that simultaneously addresses distribution-level and instance-level alignment. Extensive experiments on two real-world IoT applications are performed to evaluate InfoMAE's pairing efficiency to bridge pretrained unimodal models into a cohesive joint multimodal model. InfoMAE enhances downstream multimodal tasks by over 60% with significantly improved multimodal pairing efficiency. It also improves unimodal task accuracy by an average of 22%.

Nan Huo, Xiaohan Xu, Jinyang Li et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on single-turn text-to-SQL tasks, but real-world database applications predominantly require multi-turn interactions to handle ambiguous queries, execution errors, and evolving user requirements. Existing multi-turn benchmarks fall short by treating conversation histories as static context or limiting evaluation to read-only operations, failing to reflect production-grade database assistant challenges. We introduce BIRD-INTERACT, a benchmark that restores this realism through: (1) a comprehensive interaction environment coupling each database with a hierarchical knowledge base, metadata files, and a function-driven user simulator, enabling models to solicit clarifications, retrieve knowledge, and recover from errors without human supervision; (2) two evaluation settings consisting of a pre-defined conversational protocol (c-Interact) and an open-ended agentic setting (a-Interact) where models autonomously decide when to query the user simulator or explore the environment; (3) a challenging task suite covering the full CRUD spectrum for business-intelligence and operational use cases, guarded by executable test cases. Each task features ambiguous and follow-up sub-tasks requiring dynamic interaction. The suite comprises BIRD-INTERACT-FULL (600 tasks, up to 11,796 interactions) for comprehensive performance assessment, and BIRD-INTERACT-LITE (300 tasks with simplified databases) for detailed behavioral analysis and rapid method development. Our empirical results highlight BIRD-INTERACT's difficulty: GPT-5 completes only 8.67% of tasks in c-Interact and 17.00% in a-Interact. Analysis via memory grafting and Interaction Test-time Scaling validates the importance of effective interaction for complex, dynamic text-to-SQL tasks.

Haitian Jiang, Shaowei Zhu, Zhen Zhang et al.

Distributed training is essential for scaling the training of large neural network models, such as large language models (LLMs), across thousands of GPUs. However, the complexity of distributed training programs makes them particularly prone to silent bugs, which do not produce explicit error signal but lead to incorrect training outcome. Effectively detecting and localizing such silent bugs in distributed training is challenging. Common debugging practice using metrics like training loss or gradient norm curves can be inefficient and ineffective. Additionally, obtaining intermediate tensor values and determining whether they are correct during silent bug localization is difficult, particularly in the context of low-precision training. To address those challenges, we design and implement TTrace, the first system capable of detecting and localizing silent bugs in distributed training. TTrace collects intermediate tensors from distributing training in a fine-grained manner and compares them against those from a trusted single-device reference implementation. To properly compare the floating-point values in the tensors, we propose novel mathematical analysis that provides a guideline for setting thresholds, enabling TTrace to distinguish bug-induced errors from floating-point round-off errors. Experimental results demonstrate that TTrace effectively detects 11 existing bugs and 3 new bugs in the widely used Megatron-LM framework, while requiring fewer than 10 lines of code change. TTrace is effective in various training recipes, including low-precision recipes involving BF16 and FP8.

Nan Huo, Jinyang Li, Bowen Qin et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems commonly suffer from Knowledge Conflicts, where retrieved external knowledge contradicts the inherent, parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). It adversely affects performance on downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). Existing approaches often attempt to mitigate conflicts by directly comparing two knowledge sources in a side-by-side manner, but this can overwhelm LLMs with extraneous or lengthy contexts, ultimately hindering their ability to identify and mitigate inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose Micro-Act a framework with a hierarchical action space that automatically perceives context complexity and adaptively decomposes each knowledge source into a sequence of fine-grained comparisons. These comparisons are represented as actionable steps, enabling reasoning beyond the superficial context. Through extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, Micro-Act consistently achieves significant increase in QA accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines across all 5 datasets and 3 conflict types, especially in temporal and semantic types where all baselines fail significantly. More importantly, Micro-Act exhibits robust performance on non-conflict questions simultaneously, highlighting its practical value in real-world RAG applications.

Jinyang Li, Sangwon Hyun, M. Ali Babar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, the quality of the generated code is heavily dependent on the structure and composition of the prompts used. Crafting high-quality prompts is a challenging task that requires significant knowledge and skills of prompt engineering. To advance the automation support for the prompt engineering for LLM-based code generation, we propose a novel solution Diffusion-Driven Prompt Tuning (DDPT) that learns how to generate optimal prompt embedding from Gaussian Noise to automate the prompt engineering for code generation. We evaluate the feasibility of diffusion-based optimization and abstract the optimal prompt embedding as a directional vector toward the optimal embedding. We use the code generation loss given by the LLMs to help the diffusion model capture the distribution of optimal prompt embedding during training. The trained diffusion model can build a path from the noise distribution to the optimal distribution at the sampling phrase, the evaluation result demonstrates that DDPT helps improve the prompt optimization for code generation.

Weiyao Zhang, Jinyang Li, Qi Song et al.

Federated Learning (FL) remains highly vulnerable to poisoning attacks, especially under real-world hyper-heterogeneity, where clients differ significantly in data distributions, communication capabilities, and model architectures. Such heterogeneity not only undermines the effectiveness of aggregation strategies but also makes attacks more difficult to detect. Furthermore, high-dimensional models expand the attack surface. To address these challenges, we propose Horus, a heterogeneity-oblivious robust FL framework centered on low-rank adaptations (LoRAs). Rather than aggregating full model parameters, Horus inserts LoRAs into empirically stable layers and aggregates only LoRAs to reduce the attack uncover a key empirical observation that the input projection (LoRA-A) is markedly more stable than the output projection (LoRA-B) under heterogeneity and poisoning. Leveraging this, we design a Heterogeneity-Oblivious Poisoning Score using the features from LoRA-A to filter poisoned clients. For the remaining benign clients, we propose projection-aware aggregation mechanism to preserve collaborative signals while suppressing drifts, which reweights client updates by consistency with the global directions. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, model architectures, and attacks demonstrate that Horus consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both robustness and accuracy.

Jinyang Li, Samudra Dasgupta, Yuhong Song et al.

Quantum computing has significantly advanced in recent years, boasting devices with hundreds of quantum bits (qubits), hinting at its potential quantum advantage over classical computing. Yet, noise in quantum devices poses significant barriers to realizing this supremacy. Understanding noise's impact is crucial for reproducibility and application reuse; moreover, the next-generation quantum-centric supercomputing essentially requires efficient and accurate noise characterization to support system management (e.g., job scheduling), where ensuring correct functional performance (i.e., fidelity) of jobs on available quantum devices can even be higher-priority than traditional objectives. However, noise fluctuates over time, even on the same quantum device, which makes predicting the computational bounds for on-the-fly noise is vital. Noisy quantum simulation can offer insights but faces efficiency and scalability issues. In this work, we propose a data-driven workflow, namely QuBound, to predict computational performance bounds. It decomposes historical performance traces to isolate noise sources and devises a novel encoder to embed circuit and noise information processed by a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. For evaluation, we compare QuBound with a state-of-the-art learning-based predictor, which only generates a single performance value instead of a bound. Experimental results show that the result of the existing approach falls outside of performance bounds, while all predictions from our QuBound with the assistance of performance decomposition better fit the bounds. Moreover, QuBound can efficiently produce practical bounds for various circuits with over 106 speedup over simulation; in addition, the range from QuBound is over 10x narrower than the state-of-the-art analytical approach.

Yizhuo Chen, Tianchen Wang, You Lyu et al.

We present SPAR, a framework for self-supervised placement-aware representation learning in distributed sensing. Distributed sensing spans applications where multiple spatially distributed and multimodal sensors jointly observe an environment, from vehicle monitoring to human activity recognition and earthquake localization. A central challenge shared by this wide spectrum of applications, is that observed signals are inseparably shaped by sensor placements, including their spatial locations and structural roles. However, existing pretraining methods remain largely placement-agnostic. SPAR addresses this gap through a unifying principle: the duality between signals and positions. Guided by this principle, SPAR introduces spatial and structural positional embeddings together with dual reconstruction objectives, explicitly modeling how observing positions and observed signals shape each other. Placement is thus treated not as auxiliary metadata but as intrinsic to representation learning. SPAR is theoretically supported by analyses from information theory and occlusion-invariant learning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that SPAR achieves superior robustness and generalization across various modalities, placements, and downstream tasks.

Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Haiyang Yu et al.

The goal of document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) is to generate a response by grounding the evidence in a supporting document in accordance with the dialogue context. This process involves four variables that are causally connected. Recently, task-specific pre-training has greatly boosted performances on many downstream tasks. Existing DocGD methods, however, continue to rely on general pre-trained language models without a specifically tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures the causal relationships. To tackle this issue, we are the first to present a causally-complete dataset construction strategy for building million-level DocGD pre-training corpora. To better capture causality, we further propose a causally-perturbed pre-training strategy, which introduces causal perturbations on the variables and optimizes the overall causal effect. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our causal pre-training achieves considerable and consistent improvements under fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings.

Jinyang Li, Binyuan Hui, Ge Qu et al.

Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, Codex and ChatGPT have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present Bird, a big benchmark for large-scale database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. ChatGPT, only achieves 40.08% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. Besides, we also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.

Jinning Li, Huajie Shao, Dachun Sun et al.

This paper develops a novel unsupervised algorithm for belief representation learning in polarized networks that (i) uncovers the latent dimensions of the underlying belief space and (ii) jointly embeds users and content items (that they interact with) into that space in a manner that facilitates a number of downstream tasks, such as stance detection, stance prediction, and ideology mapping. Inspired by total correlation in information theory, we propose the Information-Theoretic Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (InfoVGAE) that learns to project both users and content items (e.g., posts that represent user views) into an appropriate disentangled latent space. To better disentangle latent variables in that space, we develop a total correlation regularization module, a Proportional-Integral (PI) control module, and adopt rectified Gaussian distribution to ensure the orthogonality. The latent representation of users and content can then be used to quantify their ideological leaning and detect/predict their stances on issues. We evaluate the performance of the proposed InfoVGAE on three real-world datasets, of which two are collected from Twitter and one from U.S. Congress voting records. The evaluation results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised models by reducing 10.5% user clustering errors and achieving 12.1% higher F1 scores for stance separation of content items. In addition, InfoVGAE produces a comparable result with supervised models. We also discuss its performance on stance prediction and user ranking within ideological groups.