Xin Liang

Jinyang Liu, Sheng Di, Sian Jin et al.

The fast growth of computational power and scales of modern super-computing systems have raised great challenges for the management of exascale scientific data. To maintain the usability of scientific data, error-bound lossy compression is proposed and developed as an essential technique for the size reduction of scientific data with constrained data distortion. Among the diverse datasets generated by various scientific simulations, certain datasets cannot be effectively compressed by existing error-bounded lossy compressors with traditional techniques. The recent success of Artificial Intelligence has inspired several researchers to integrate neural networks into error-bounded lossy compressors. However, those works still suffer from limited compression ratios and/or extremely low efficiencies. To address those issues and improve the compression on the hard-to-compress datasets, in this paper, we propose SRN-SZ, which is a deep learning-based scientific error-bounded lossy compressor leveraging the hierarchical data grid expansion paradigm implemented by super-resolution neural networks. SRN-SZ applies the most advanced super-resolution network HAT for its compression, which is free of time-costing per-data training. In experiments compared with various state-of-the-art compressors, SRN-SZ achieves up to 75% compression ratio improvements under the same error bound and up to 80% compression ratio improvements under the same PSNR than the second-best compressor.

Xuan Wu, Sheng Di, Tripti Agarwal et al.

Error-controlled lossy compressors have been widely used in scientific applications to reduce the unprecedented size of scientific data while keeping data distortion within a user-specified threshold. While they significantly mitigate the pressure for data storage and transmission, they prolong the time to access the data because decompression is required to transform the binary compressed data into meaningful floating-point numbers. This incurs noticeable overhead for common analytical operations on scientific data that extract or derive useful information, because the time cost of the operations could be much lower than that of decompression. In this work, we design an error-controlled lossy compression and analytical framework that features multi-stage decompression and homomorphic analytical operation algorithms on intermediate decompressed data for reduced data access latency. Our contributions are threefold. (1) We abstract a generic compression pipeline with partial decompression to multiple intermediate data representations and implement four instances based on state-of-the-art high-throughput scientific data compressors. (2) We carefully design homomorphic algorithms to enable direct operations on intermediate decompressed data for three types of analytical operations on scientific data. (3) We evaluate our approach using five real-world scientific datasets. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves significant speedups when performing analytical operations on compressed scientific data across all three targeted analytical operation types.

Huaming Ling, Chenglong Bao, Xin Liang et al.

Most existing semi-supervised graph-based clustering methods exploit the supervisory information by either refining the affinity matrix or directly constraining the low-dimensional representations of data points. The affinity matrix represents the graph structure and is vital to the performance of semi-supervised graph-based clustering. However, existing methods adopt a static affinity matrix to learn the low-dimensional representations of data points and do not optimize the affinity matrix during the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic graph structure learning method for semi-supervised clustering. In this method, we simultaneously optimize the affinity matrix and the low-dimensional representations of data points by leveraging the given pairwise constraints. Moreover, we propose an alternating minimization approach with proven convergence to solve the proposed nonconvex model. During the iteration process, our method cyclically updates the low-dimensional representations of data points and refines the affinity matrix, leading to a dynamic affinity matrix (graph structure). Specifically, for the update of the affinity matrix, we enforce the data points with remarkably different low-dimensional representations to have an affinity value of 0. Furthermore, we construct the initial affinity matrix by integrating the local distance and global self-representation among data points. Experimental results on eight benchmark datasets under different settings show the advantages of the proposed approach.

Kejiang Qian, Lingjun Mao, Xin Liang et al.

In urban planning, land use readjustment plays a pivotal role in aligning land use configurations with the current demands for sustainable urban development. However, present-day urban planning practices face two main issues. Firstly, land use decisions are predominantly dependent on human experts. Besides, while resident engagement in urban planning can promote urban sustainability and livability, it is challenging to reconcile the diverse interests of stakeholders. To address these challenges, we introduce a Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework for real-world land use readjustment. This framework serves participatory urban planning, allowing diverse intelligent agents as stakeholder representatives to vote for preferred land use types. Within this framework, we propose a novel consensus mechanism in reward design to optimize land utilization through collective decision making. To abstract the structure of the complex urban system, the geographic information of cities is transformed into a spatial graph structure and then processed by graph neural networks. Comprehensive experiments on both traditional top-down planning and participatory planning methods from real-world communities indicate that our computational framework enhances global benefits and accommodates diverse interests, leading to improved satisfaction across different demographic groups. By integrating Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, our framework ensures that participatory urban planning decisions are more dynamic and adaptive to evolving community needs and provides a robust platform for automating complex real-world urban planning processes.

Boyuan Zhang, Haozhen Li, Xin Liang et al.

Deep learning has been widely applied for the channel state information (CSI) feedback in frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. For the typical supervised training of the feedback model, the requirements of large amounts of task-specific labeled data can hardly be satisfied, and the huge training costs and storage usage of the model in multiple scenarios are hindrance for model application. In this letter, a multi-task learning-based approach is proposed to improve the feasibility of the feedback network. An encoder-shared feedback architecture and the corresponding training scheme are further proposed to facilitate the implementation of the multi-task learning approach. The experimental results indicate that the proposed multi-task learning approach can achieve comprehensive feedback performance with considerable reduction of training cost and storage usage of the feedback model.

Xin Liang, Xiang Zhang, Yiwei Xu et al.

Generating academic slides from scientific papers is a challenging multimodal reasoning task that requires both long context understanding and deliberate visual planning. Existing approaches largely reduce it to text only summarization, overlooking the visual component and design intensive nature of slide creation. In this paper we introduce SlideGen, an agentic, modular, and visual in the loop framework for scientific paper to slide generation. SlideGen orchestrates a group of vision language agents that reason collaboratively over the document structure and semantics, producing editable PPTX slides with logical flow and compelling visual presentation. By integrating coordinated outlining, mapping, arrangement, note synthesis, and iterative refinement, our system consistently delivers slides of expert level quality. Across diverse benchmarks and strong baselines, SlideGen outperforms existing methods in visual quality, content faithfulness, and readability, positioning it as the new state of the art in automated slide generation. Our work establishes a foundation for design aware multimodal slide generation, demonstrating how agentic collaboration can bridge understanding and presentation in complex multimodal reasoning tasks.

Long Bai, Guankun Wang, Jie Wang et al.

In the realm of automated robotic surgery and computer-assisted interventions, understanding robotic surgical activities stands paramount. Existing algorithms dedicated to surgical activity recognition predominantly cater to pre-defined closed-set paradigms, ignoring the challenges of real-world open-set scenarios. Such algorithms often falter in the presence of test samples originating from classes unseen during training phases. To tackle this problem, we introduce an innovative Open-Set Surgical Activity Recognition (OSSAR) framework. Our solution leverages the hyperspherical reciprocal point strategy to enhance the distinction between known and unknown classes in the feature space. Additionally, we address the issue of over-confidence in the closed set by refining model calibration, avoiding misclassification of unknown classes as known ones. To support our assertions, we establish an open-set surgical activity benchmark utilizing the public JIGSAWS dataset. Besides, we also collect a novel dataset on endoscopic submucosal dissection for surgical activity tasks. Extensive comparisons and ablation experiments on these datasets demonstrate the significant outperformance of our method over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our proposed solution can effectively address the challenges of real-world surgical scenarios. Our code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/longbai1006/OSSAR.

Xin Liang, Yogesh S Rawat

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals under different clothing scenarios. Current CC-ReID approaches either concentrate on modeling body shape using additional modalities including silhouette, pose, and body mesh, potentially causing the model to overlook other critical biometric traits such as gender, age, and style, or they incorporate supervision through additional labels that the model tries to disregard or emphasize, such as clothing or personal attributes. However, these annotations are discrete in nature and do not capture comprehensive descriptions. In this work, we propose DIFFER: Disentangle Identity Features From Entangled Representations, a novel adversarial learning method that leverages textual descriptions to disentangle identity features. Recognizing that image features inherently mix inseparable information, DIFFER introduces NBDetach, a mechanism designed for feature disentanglement by leveraging the separable nature of text descriptions as supervision. It partitions the feature space into distinct subspaces and, through gradient reversal layers, effectively separates identity-related features from non-biometric features. We evaluate DIFFER on 4 different benchmark datasets (LTCC, PRCC, CelebreID-Light, and CCVID) to demonstrate its effectiveness and provide state-of-the-art performance across all the benchmarks. DIFFER consistently outperforms the baseline method, with improvements in top-1 accuracy of 3.6% on LTCC, 3.4% on PRCC, 2.5% on CelebReID-Light, and 1% on CCVID. Our code can be found here.

Yuxiao Li, Mingze Xia, Xin Liang et al.

Scientific applications are generating unprecedented volumes of data that overwhelm storage and transmission systems, posing significant challenges for the design of data management tools and scientific databases. Lossy compression has emerged as a promising strategy to address this problem, but most existing compressors fail to preserve the topology of scientific data, leading to inaccuracies in downstream analyses and potentially erroneous scientific conclusions. In this work, we present a methodology for fully preserving the topology, specifically, Morse-Smale complexes (MSCs), in lossy-compressed 2D and 3D scalar field data from scientific simulations. We generalize the edit-based strategy introduced in MSz (a previous method that preserves only segmentations and cannot preserve saddles or separatrices) by extending the framework to the full MSCs, including all critical points and separatrices. Our approach corrects the MSCs in the decompressed output of any error-bounded lossy compressor (e.g., SZ3 or ZFP), referred to as the base compressor, using an iterative editing strategy that preserves all critical points and their connectivity via separatrices. During compression, we generate a sequence of quantized edits that are applied to the decompressed output, ensuring accurate preservation of topological features while maintaining the error within prescribed bounds. The strategy iteratively fixes critical points and separatrices in alternating steps until convergence is achieved in a finite number of iterations. To meet diverse application needs, our method offers flexible options that balance compression efficiency with feature preservation. To reduce computation time, we leverage GPU parallelism to accelerate each component of the workflow. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves 100% preservation of Morse-Smale complexes.

Mingze Xia, Yuxiao Li, Pu Jiao et al.

Scientific simulations and observations are producing vast amounts of time-varying vector field data, making it hard to store them for archival purposes and transmit them for analysis. Lossy compression is considered a promising approach to reducing these data because lossless compression yields low compression ratios that barely mitigate the problem. However, directly applying existing lossy compression methods to timevarying vector fields may introduce undesired distortions in critical-point trajectories, a crucial feature that encodes key properties of the vector field. In this work, we propose an efficient lossy compression framework that exactly preserves all critical-point trajectories in time-varying vector fields. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extend the theory for preserving critical points in space to preserving critical-point trajectories in space-time, and develop a compression framework to realize the functionality. Second, we propose a semi-Lagrange predictor to exploit the spatiotemporal correlations in advectiondominated regions, and combine it with the traditional Lorenzo predictor for improved compression efficiency. Third, we evaluate our method against state-of-the-art lossy and lossless compressors using four real-world scientific datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method delivers up to 124.48X compression ratios while effectively preserving all critical-point trajectories. This compression ratio is up to 56.07X higher than that of the best lossless compressors, and none of the existing lossy compressors can preserve all critical-point trajectories at similar compression ratios.

Lingjun Mao, Rodolfo Corona, Xin Liang et al.

Most existing vision encoders map images into a fixed-length sequence of tokens, overlooking the fact that different images contain varying amounts of information. For example, a visually complex image (e.g., a cluttered room) inherently carries more information and thus deserves more tokens than a simple image (e.g., a blank wall). To address this inefficiency, we propose DOVE, a dynamic vision encoder that produces a variable number of visual tokens (i.e., continuous representation vectors) to reconstruct each image. Our results show that DOVE significantly reduces the average number of tokens while maintaining high reconstruction quality. In several linear probing and downstream multimodal tasks, it outperforms existing autoencoder-based tokenization methods when using far fewer tokens, capturing more expressive semantic features compared to fixed-length encoding. We further extend DOVE with query-conditioned tokenization. By guiding the model to focus on query-relevant regions, it achieves more efficient and targeted semantic extraction. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://dove-encoder.github.io/dove-encoder.

Qian Lou, Xin Liang, Jiaqi Xue et al.

It is imperative to ensure the stability of every prediction made by a language model; that is, a language's prediction should remain consistent despite minor input variations, like word substitutions. In this paper, we investigate the problem of certifying a language model's robustness against Universal Text Perturbations (UTPs), which have been widely used in universal adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks. Existing certified robustness based on random smoothing has shown considerable promise in certifying the input-specific text perturbations (ISTPs), operating under the assumption that any random alteration of a sample's clean or adversarial words would negate the impact of sample-wise perturbations. However, with UTPs, masking only the adversarial words can eliminate the attack. A naive method is to simply increase the masking ratio and the likelihood of masking attack tokens, but it leads to a significant reduction in both certified accuracy and the certified radius due to input corruption by extensive masking. To solve this challenge, we introduce a novel approach, the superior prompt search method, designed to identify a superior prompt that maintains higher certified accuracy under extensive masking. Additionally, we theoretically motivate why ensembles are a particularly suitable choice as base prompts for random smoothing. The method is denoted by superior prompt ensembling technique. We also empirically confirm this technique, obtaining state-of-the-art results in multiple settings. These methodologies, for the first time, enable high certified accuracy against both UTPs and ISTPs. The source code of CR-UTP is available at \url {https://github.com/UCFML-Research/CR-UTP}.

Yuxiao Li, Mingze Xia, Xin Liang et al.

This paper introduces EXaCTz, a parallel algorithm that concurrently preserves extremum graphs and contour trees in lossy-compressed scalar field data. While error-bounded lossy compression is essential for large-scale scientific simulations and workflows, existing topology-preserving methods suffer from (1) a significant throughput disparity, where topology correction speeds are on the order of MB/s, lagging orders of magnitude behind compression speeds on the order of GB/s, (2) limited support for diverse topological descriptors, and (3) a lack of theoretical convergence bounds. To address these challenges, EXaCTz introduces a high-performance, bounded-iteration algorithm that enforces topological consistency by deriving targeted edits for decompressed data. Unlike prior methods that rely on explicit topology reconstruction, EXaCTz enforces consistent min/max neighbors of all vertices, along with global ordering among critical points. As such, the algorithm enforces consistent critical-point classification, saddle extremum connectivity, and the preservation of merge/split events. We theoretically prove the convergence of our algorithm, bounded by the longest path in a vulnerability graph that characterizes potential cascading effects during correction. Experiments on real-world datasets show that EXaCTz achieves a single-GPU throughput of up to 4.52 GB/s, outperforming the state-of-the-art contour-tree-preserving method (Gorski et al.) by up to 213x (with a single-core CPU implementation for fair comparison) and 3,285x (with a single-GPU version). In distributed environments, EXaCTz scales to 128 GPUs with 55.6\% efficiency (compared with 6.4\% for a naive parallelization), processing datasets of up to 512 GB in under 48 seconds and achieving an aggregate correction throughput of up to 32.69 GB/s.

Qian Gong, Jieyang Chen, Ben Whitney et al.

We describe MGARD, a software providing MultiGrid Adaptive Reduction for floating-point scientific data on structured and unstructured grids. With exceptional data compression capability and precise error control, MGARD addresses a wide range of requirements, including storage reduction, high-performance I/O, and in-situ data analysis. It features a unified application programming interface (API) that seamlessly operates across diverse computing architectures. MGARD has been optimized with highly-tuned GPU kernels and efficient memory and device management mechanisms, ensuring scalable and rapid operations.

Xin Liang, Qing Yang, Wenru Qiu et al.

Large-scale search engines face a fundamental tension: the index must be updated frequently to maintain freshness, yet updates create resource contention that inflates query latency. In the dominant Lucene-based architecture, segment merges triggered by writes compete with concurrent queries for CPU cycles, disk I/O bandwidth, and operating-system page cache -- a problem we term \emph{write-read contention}. This survey systematically examines the architectural solutions that industry and academia have developed to decouple write pressure from read latency. We identify five principal patterns: (i)~node-level read-write separation; (ii)~compute-storage separation; (iii)~full in-memory indexing; (iv)~log-structured write paths; and (v)~in-place partial updates. We survey representative systems including Elasticsearch, LinkedIn Galene, Uber Sia, Quickwit, Alibaba Havenask, Algolia, Milvus, and Vespa, and discuss an emerging synthesis -- the ScaleSearch architecture -- that combines compute-storage separation with full in-memory indexing and dedicated write nodes. A key contribution of ScaleSearch is \emph{per-field update routing}: each field is assigned its own Kafka topic and update path, allowing scalar fields (price, stock, tags) to be updated in-place in $O(1)$ RAM with immediate visibility while full-text fields follow the segment-based compute-storage path. We conclude with open challenges in hybrid vector-and-full-text retrieval, serverless deployments, and AI-integrated search.

Zhechen Shen, Xin Liang

This paper provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the local convergence behavior of an extended variation of the locally optimal preconditioned conjugate gradient method (LOBPCG) for computing the extreme eigenvalue of a Hermitian matrix. The convergence rates derived in this work are either obtained for the first time or sharper than those previously established, including those in Ovtchinnikov's work ({\em SIAM J. Numer. Anal.}, 46(5):2567--2592, 2008). The study also extends to generalized problems, including Hermitian matrix polynomials that admit an extended form of the Rayleigh quotient. The new approach used to obtain these rates may also serve as a valuable tool for the convergence analysis of other gradient-type optimization methods.

Qian Gong, Chengzhu Zhang, Xin Liang et al.

Scientific discoveries are increasingly constrained by limited storage space and I/O capacities. For time-series simulations and experiments, their data often need to be decimated over timesteps to accommodate storage and I/O limitations. In this paper, we propose a technique that addresses storage costs while improving post-analysis accuracy through spatiotemporal adaptive, error-controlled lossy compression. We investigate the trade-off between data precision and temporal output rates, revealing that reducing data precision and increasing timestep frequency lead to more accurate analysis outcomes. Additionally, we integrate spatiotemporal feature detection with data compression and demonstrate that performing adaptive error-bounded compression in higher dimensional space enables greater compression ratios, leveraging the error propagation theory of a transformation-based compressor. To evaluate our approach, we conduct experiments using the well-known E3SM climate simulation code and apply our method to compress variables used for cyclone tracking. Our results show a significant reduction in storage size while enhancing the quality of cyclone tracking analysis, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in comparison to the prevalent timestep decimation approach. Compared to three state-of-the-art lossy compressors lacking feature preservation capabilities, our adaptive compression framework improves perfectly matched cases in TC tracking by 26.4-51.3% at medium compression ratios and by 77.3-571.1% at large compression ratios, with a merely 5-11% computational overhead.

Yikai Wang, Guangce Liu, Xinzhou Wang et al.

The advancement of 4D (i.e., sequential 3D) generation opens up new possibilities for lifelike experiences in various applications, where users can explore dynamic objects or characters from any viewpoint. Meanwhile, video generative models are receiving particular attention given their ability to produce realistic and imaginative frames. These models are also observed to exhibit strong 3D consistency, indicating the potential to act as world simulators. In this work, we present Video4DGen, a novel framework that excels in generating 4D representations from single or multiple generated videos as well as generating 4D-guided videos. This framework is pivotal for creating high-fidelity virtual contents that maintain both spatial and temporal coherence. The 4D outputs generated by Video4DGen are represented using our proposed Dynamic Gaussian Surfels (DGS), which optimizes time-varying warping functions to transform Gaussian surfels (surface elements) from a static state to a dynamically warped state. We design warped-state geometric regularization and refinements on Gaussian surfels, to preserve the structural integrity and fine-grained appearance details. To perform 4D generation from multiple videos and capture representation across spatial, temporal, and pose dimensions, we design multi-video alignment, root pose optimization, and pose-guided frame sampling strategies. The leveraging of continuous warping fields also enables a precise depiction of pose, motion, and deformation over per-video frames. Further, to improve the overall fidelity from the observation of all camera poses, Video4DGen performs novel-view video generation guided by the 4D content, with the proposed confidence-filtered DGS to enhance the quality of generated sequences. With the ability of 4D and video generation, Video4DGen offers a powerful tool for applications in virtual reality, animation, and beyond.

Zeliang Zhang, Xin Liang, Mingqian Feng et al.

As the demand for high-quality training data escalates, researchers have increasingly turned to generative models to create synthetic data, addressing data scarcity and enabling continuous model improvement. However, reliance on self-generated data introduces a critical question: Will this practice amplify bias in future models? While most research has focused on overall performance, the impact on model bias, particularly subgroup bias, remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate the effects of the generated data on image classification tasks, with a specific focus on bias. We develop a practical simulation environment that integrates a self-consuming loop, where the generative model and classification model are trained synergistically. Hundreds of experiments are conducted on Colorized MNIST, CIFAR-20/100, and Hard ImageNet datasets to reveal changes in fairness metrics across generations. In addition, we provide a conjecture to explain the bias dynamics when training models on continuously augmented datasets across generations. Our findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the implications of synthetic data for fairness in real-world applications.

Haolong Yan, Jia Wang, Xin Huang et al.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models unlock unprecedented opportunities for GUI automation. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how to efficiently acquire high-quality training data while maintaining annotation reliability? We introduce a self-evolving training pipeline powered by the Calibrated Step Reward System, which converts model-generated trajectories into reliable training signals through trajectory-level calibration, achieving >90% annotation accuracy with 10-100x lower cost. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce Step-GUI, a family of models (4B/8B) that achieves state-of-the-art GUI performance (8B: 80.2% AndroidWorld, 48.5% OSWorld, 62.6% ScreenShot-Pro) while maintaining robust general capabilities. As GUI agent capabilities improve, practical deployment demands standardized interfaces across heterogeneous devices while protecting user privacy. To this end, we propose GUI-MCP, the first Model Context Protocol for GUI automation with hierarchical architecture that combines low-level atomic operations and high-level task delegation to local specialist models, enabling high-privacy execution where sensitive data stays on-device. Finally, to assess whether agents can handle authentic everyday usage, we introduce AndroidDaily, a benchmark grounded in real-world mobile usage patterns with 3146 static actions and 235 end-to-end tasks across high-frequency daily scenarios (8B: static 89.91%, end-to-end 52.50%). Our work advances the development of practical GUI agents and demonstrates strong potential for real-world deployment in everyday digital interactions.

Hejie Cui, Lingjun Mao, Xin Liang et al.

Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models have showcased impressive capabilities in understanding and reasoning with visual and textual information. Adapting these foundation models trained for general usage to specialized domains like biomedicine requires large-scale domain-specific instruction datasets. While existing works have explored curating such datasets automatically, the resultant datasets are not explicitly aligned with domain expertise. In this work, we propose a data-centric framework, Biomedical Visual Instruction Tuning with Clinician Preference Alignment (BioMed-VITAL), that incorporates clinician preferences into both stages of generating and selecting instruction data for tuning biomedical multimodal foundation models. First, during the generation stage, we prompt the GPT-4V generator with a diverse set of clinician-selected demonstrations for preference-aligned data candidate generation. Then, during the selection phase, we train a separate selection model, which explicitly distills clinician and policy-guided model preferences into a rating function to select high-quality data for medical instruction tuning. Results show that the model tuned with the instruction-following data from our method demonstrates a significant improvement in open visual chat (18.5% relatively) and medical VQA (win rate up to 81.73%). Our instruction-following data and models are available at BioMed-VITAL.github.io.

Hanfang Lyu, Yuanchen Bai, Xin Liang et al.

Preference-based learning aims to align robot task objectives with human values. One of the most common methods to infer human preferences is by pairwise comparisons of robot task trajectories. Traditional comparison-based preference labeling systems seldom support labelers to digest and identify critical differences between complex trajectories recorded in videos. Our formative study (N = 12) suggests that individuals may overlook non-salient task features and establish biased preference criteria during their preference elicitation process because of partial observations. In addition, they may experience mental fatigue when given many pairs to compare, causing their label quality to deteriorate. To mitigate these issues, we propose FARPLS, a Feature-Augmented Robot trajectory Preference Labeling System. FARPLS highlights potential outliers in a wide variety of task features that matter to humans and extracts the corresponding video keyframes for easy review and comparison. It also dynamically adjusts the labeling order according to users' familiarities, difficulties of the trajectory pair, and level of disagreements. At the same time, the system monitors labelers' consistency and provides feedback on labeling progress to keep labelers engaged. A between-subjects study (N = 42, 105 pairs of robot pick-and-place trajectories per person) shows that FARPLS can help users establish preference criteria more easily and notice more relevant details in the presented trajectories than the conventional interface. FARPLS also improves labeling consistency and engagement, mitigating challenges in preference elicitation without raising cognitive loads significantly

Jinyang Liu, Sheng Di, Kai Zhao et al.

Error-bounded lossy compression is becoming an indispensable technique for the success of today's scientific projects with vast volumes of data produced during simulations or instrument data acquisitions. Not only can it significantly reduce data size, but it also can control the compression errors based on user-specified error bounds. Autoencoder (AE) models have been widely used in image compression, but few AE-based compression approaches support error-bounding features, which are highly required by scientific applications. To address this issue, we explore using convolutional autoencoders to improve error-bounded lossy compression for scientific data, with the following three key contributions. (1) We provide an in-depth investigation of the characteristics of various autoencoder models and develop an error-bounded autoencoder-based framework in terms of the SZ model. (2) We optimize the compression quality for the main stages in our designed AE-based error-bounded compression framework, fine-tuning the block sizes and latent sizes and also optimizing the compression efficiency of latent vectors. (3) We evaluate our proposed solution using five real-world scientific datasets and compare them with six other related works. Experiments show that our solution exhibits a very competitive compression quality among all the compressors in our tests. In absolute terms, it can obtain a much better compression quality (100% ~ 800% improvement in compression ratio with the same data distortion) compared with SZ2.1 and ZFP in cases with a high compression ratio.

Xin Liang

In this paper we analyze the behavior of the Oja's algorithm for online/streaming principal component subspace estimation. It is proved that with high probability it performs an efficient, gap-free, global convergence rate to approximate an principal component subspace for any sub-Gaussian distribution. Moreover, it is the first time to show that the convergence rate, namely the upper bound of the approximation, exactly matches the lower bound of an approximation obtained by the offline/classical PCA up to a constant factor.

Kai Zhao, Sheng Di, Sihuan Li et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are becoming more and more important for solving challenging and critical problems in many fields. CNN inference applications have been deployed in safety-critical systems, which may suffer from soft errors caused by high-energy particles, high temperature, or abnormal voltage. Of critical importance is ensuring the stability of the CNN inference process against soft errors. Traditional fault tolerance methods are not suitable for CNN inference because error-correcting code is unable to protect computational components, instruction duplication techniques incur high overhead, and existing algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) techniques cannot protect all convolution implementations. In this paper, we focus on how to protect the CNN inference process against soft errors as efficiently as possible, with the following three contributions. (1) We propose several systematic ABFT schemes based on checksum techniques and analyze their fault protection ability and runtime thoroughly.Unlike traditional ABFT based on matrix-matrix multiplication, our schemes support any convolution implementations. (2) We design a novel workflow integrating all the proposed schemes to obtain a high detection/correction ability with limited total runtime overhead. (3) We perform our evaluation using ImageNet with well-known CNN models including AlexNet, VGG-19, ResNet-18, and YOLOv2. Experimental results demonstrate that our implementation can handle soft errors with very limited runtime overhead (4%~8% in both error-free and error-injected situations).

Sian Jin, Sheng Di, Xin Liang et al.

DNNs have been quickly and broadly exploited to improve the data analysis quality in many complex science and engineering applications. Today's DNNs are becoming deeper and wider because of increasing demand on the analysis quality and more and more complex applications to resolve. The wide and deep DNNs, however, require large amounts of resources, significantly restricting their utilization on resource-constrained systems. Although some network simplification methods have been proposed to address this issue, they suffer from either low compression ratios or high compression errors, which may introduce a costly retraining process for the target accuracy. In this paper, we propose DeepSZ: an accuracy-loss bounded neural network compression framework, which involves four key steps: network pruning, error bound assessment, optimization for error bound configuration, and compressed model generation, featuring a high compression ratio and low encoding time. The contribution is three-fold. (1) We develop an adaptive approach to select the feasible error bounds for each layer. (2) We build a model to estimate the overall loss of accuracy based on the accuracy degradation caused by individual decompressed layers. (3) We develop an efficient optimization algorithm to determine the best-fit configuration of error bounds in order to maximize the compression ratio under the user-set accuracy constraint. Experiments show that DeepSZ can compress AlexNet and VGG-16 on the ImageNet by a compression ratio of 46X and 116X, respectively, and compress LeNet-300-100 and LeNet-5 on the MNIST by a compression ratio of 57X and 56X, respectively, with only up to 0.3% loss of accuracy. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, DeepSZ can improve the compression ratio by up to 1.43X, the DNN encoding performance by up to 4.0X (with four Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs), and the decoding performance by up to 6.2X.