Binbin Chen

Binbin Chen, Weijie Chen, Shicai Yang et al.

Semi-supervised object detection has made significant progress with the development of mean teacher driven self-training. Despite the promising results, the label mismatch problem is not yet fully explored in the previous works, leading to severe confirmation bias during self-training. In this paper, we delve into this problem and propose a simple yet effective LabelMatch framework from two different yet complementary perspectives, i.e., distribution-level and instance-level. For the former one, it is reasonable to approximate the class distribution of the unlabeled data from that of the labeled data according to Monte Carlo Sampling. Guided by this weakly supervision cue, we introduce a re-distribution mean teacher, which leverages adaptive label-distribution-aware confidence thresholds to generate unbiased pseudo labels to drive student learning. For the latter one, there exists an overlooked label assignment ambiguity problem across teacher-student models. To remedy this issue, we present a novel label assignment mechanism for self-training framework, namely proposal self-assignment, which injects the proposals from student into teacher and generates accurate pseudo labels to match each proposal in the student model accordingly. Experiments on both MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC datasets demonstrate the considerable superiority of our proposed framework to other state-of-the-arts. Code will be available at https://github.com/hikvision-research/SSOD.

Wei Zhao, Binbin Chen, Weijie Chen et al.

OOD-CV challenge is an out-of-distribution generalization task. To solve this problem in object detection track, we propose a simple yet effective Generalize-then-Adapt (G&A) framework, which is composed of a two-stage domain generalization part and a one-stage domain adaptation part. The domain generalization part is implemented by a Supervised Model Pretraining stage using source data for model warm-up and a Weakly Semi-Supervised Model Pretraining stage using both source data with box-level label and auxiliary data (ImageNet-1K) with image-level label for performance boosting. The domain adaptation part is implemented as a Source-Free Domain Adaptation paradigm, which only uses the pre-trained model and the unlabeled target data to further optimize in a self-supervised training manner. The proposed G&A framework help us achieve the first place on the object detection leaderboard of the OOD-CV challenge. Code will be released in https://github.com/hikvision-research/OOD-CV.

Xiumei Deng, Zehui Xiong, Binbin Chen et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are proliferating rapidly at the edge, delivering intelligent capabilities across diverse application scenarios. However, their practical deployment in collaborative scenarios confronts fundamental challenges: privacy vulnerabilities, communication overhead, and computational bottlenecks. To address these, we propose Federated Attention (FedAttn), which integrates the federated paradigm into the self-attention mechanism, creating a new distributed LLM inference framework that simultaneously achieves privacy protection, communication efficiency, and computational efficiency. FedAttn enables participants to perform local self-attention over their own token representations while periodically exchanging and aggregating Key-Value (KV) matrices across multiple Transformer blocks, collaboratively generating LLM responses without exposing private prompts. Further, we identify a structural duality between contextual representation refinement in FedAttn and parameter optimization in FL across private data, local computation, and global aggregation. This key insight provides a principled foundation for systematically porting federated optimization techniques to collaborative LLM inference. Building on this framework, we theoretically analyze how local self-attention computation within participants and heterogeneous token relevance among participants shape error propagation dynamics across Transformer blocks. Moreover, we characterize the fundamental trade-off between response quality and communication/computation efficiency, which is governed by the synchronization interval and the number of participants. Experimental results validate our theoretical analysis, and reveal significant optimization opportunities through sparse attention and adaptive KV aggregation, highlighting FedAttn's potential to deliver scalability and efficiency in real-world edge deployments.

Bin Ren, Yawei Li, Nancy Mehta et al.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Tuan V. Ngo, Mao V. Ngo, Binbin Chen et al.

Modern 5G/6G radio access networks are increasingly programmable through O-RAN, yet their operational complexity has grown with disaggregation, open interfaces, and fine-grained control parameters. While RAN-side analytics and telemetry mechanisms, such as KPI-based monitoring and mobility event reporting, provide visibility into network behavior, operators still face challenges in correlating heterogeneous events and safely translating observations into actionable configuration changes. This paper presents an LLM-based Net Analyzer rApp for the O-RAN Non-RT RIC that enables explainable and safe, human-in-the-loop automation for RAN operations. The proposed rApp adopts an event-informed, batch-triggered reasoning framework in which mobility events are first interpreted, anomalies are confirmed through targeted log inspection, configurations are inspected via tool-gated access, and minimal configuration changes are proposed only after explicit operator approval. The architecture enforces a strict separation between reasoning and actuation, ensuring auditability and operational safety. The system is implemented and demonstrated on a real O-RAN testbed using a reproducible ping-pong handover scenario, illustrating how large language models can function as reasoning co-pilots that transform raw RAN telemetry into structured explanations and controlled remediation workflows, complementing existing analytics-only approaches in the NonRT RIC.

Xianzhong Ding, Yunkai Zhang, Binbin Chen et al.

Modern industry-scale data centers need to manage a large number of virtual machines (VMs). Due to the continual creation and release of VMs, many small resource fragments are scattered across physical machines (PMs). To handle these fragments, data centers periodically reschedule some VMs to alternative PMs, a practice commonly referred to as VM rescheduling. Despite the increasing importance of VM rescheduling as data centers grow in size, the problem remains understudied. We first show that, unlike most combinatorial optimization tasks, the inference time of VM rescheduling algorithms significantly influences their performance, due to dynamic VM state changes during this period. This causes existing methods to scale poorly. Therefore, we develop a reinforcement learning system for VM rescheduling, VM2RL, which incorporates a set of customized techniques, such as a two-stage framework that accommodates diverse constraints and workload conditions, a feature extraction module that captures relational information specific to rescheduling, as well as a risk-seeking evaluation enabling users to optimize the trade-off between latency and accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments with data from an industry-scale data center. Our results show that VM2RL can achieve a performance comparable to the optimal solution but with a running time of seconds. Code and datasets are open-sourced: https://github.com/zhykoties/VMR2L_eurosys, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PfRo1cVwuhH30XhsE2Np3xqJn2GpX5qy.

The AIBrix Team, Jiaxin Shan, Varun Gupta et al.

We introduce AIBrix, a cloud-native, open-source framework designed to optimize and simplify large-scale LLM deployment in cloud environments. Unlike traditional cloud-native stacks, AIBrix follows a co-design philosophy, ensuring every layer of the infrastructure is purpose-built for seamless integration with inference engines like vLLM. AIBrix introduces several key innovations to reduce inference costs and enhance performance including high-density LoRA management for dynamic adapter scheduling, LLM-specific autoscalers, and prefix-aware, load-aware routing. To further improve efficiency, AIBrix incorporates a distributed KV cache, boosting token reuse across nodes, leading to a 50% increase in throughput and a 70% reduction in inference latency. AIBrix also supports unified AI runtime which streamlines model management while maintaining vendor-agnostic engine compatibility. For large-scale multi-node inference, AIBrix employs hybrid orchestration -- leveraging Kubernetes for coarse-grained scheduling and Ray for fine-grained execution -- to balance efficiency and flexibility. Additionally, an SLO-driven GPU optimizer dynamically adjusts resource allocations, optimizing heterogeneous serving to maximize cost efficiency while maintaining service guarantees. Finally, AIBrix enhances system reliability with AI accelerator diagnostic tools, enabling automated failure detection and mock-up testing to improve fault resilience. AIBrix is available at https://github.com/vllm-project/aibrix.

Hao Zhou, Suman Sourav, Binbin Chen et al.

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are critical components in Industrial Control Systems (ICSs). Their potential exposure to external world makes them susceptible to cyber-attacks. Existing detection methods against controller logic attacks use either specification-based or learnt models. However, specification-based models require experts' manual efforts or access to PLC's source code, while machine learning-based models often fall short of providing explanation for their decisions. We design SRLR -- a it Symbolic Regression based Logic Recovery} solution to identify the logic of a PLC based only on its inputs and outputs. The recovered logic is used to generate explainable rules for detecting controller logic attacks. SRLR enhances the latest deep symbolic regression methods using the following ICS-specific properties: (1) some important ICS control logic is best represented in frequency domain rather than time domain; (2) an ICS controller can operate in multiple modes, each using different logic, where mode switches usually do not happen frequently; (3) a robust controller usually filters out outlier inputs as ICS sensor data can be noisy; and (4) with the above factors captured, the degree of complexity of the formulas is reduced, making effective search possible. Thanks to these enhancements, SRLR consistently outperforms all existing methods in a variety of ICS settings that we evaluate. In terms of the recovery accuracy, SRLR's gain can be as high as 39% in some challenging environment. We also evaluate SRLR on a distribution grid containing hundreds of voltage regulators, demonstrating its stability in handling large-scale, complex systems with varied configurations.

Tam Thanh Nguyen, Yong Hao Pua, Tuan Van Ngo et al.

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of transformer-based split inference for real-time video object detection over dynamic 5G AI-RAN networks. We extend throughput-aware adaptive splitting from CNNs to a Swin Transformer backbone and show that practical split execution is achievable for transformer-based vision models without retraining. To address the large intermediate activations inherent to transformers, we introduce an efficient, accuracy-preserving activation compression pipeline that substantially reduces uplink payload. The complete system -- including adaptive split selection, transformer inference, and compression -- is implemented and validated end-to-end on a real-time detection workload, with distributed UPF (dUPF) integration further reducing user-plane latency and improving runtime stability. Extensive measurements on an NVIDIA Aerial-based AI-RAN testbed jointly account for inference and 5G communication energy, quantifying the latency-energy-privacy trade-offs in realistic deployments.

Gaowei Chang, Eidan Lin, Chengxuan Yuan et al.

With the development of large models and autonomous decision-making AI, agents are rapidly becoming the new entities of the internet, following mobile apps. However, existing internet infrastructure is primarily designed for human interaction, creating data silos, unfriendly interfaces, and high collaboration costs among agents, making it difficult to support the needs for large-scale agent interconnection and collaboration. The internet is undergoing a profound transformation, showing four core trends: agents replacing traditional software, universal agent interconnection, native protocol-based connections, and autonomous agent organization and collaboration. To align with these trends, Agent Network Protocol (ANP) proposes a new generation of communication protocols for the Agentic Web. ANP adheres to AI-native design, maintains compatibility with existing internet protocols, adopts a modular composable architecture, follows minimalist yet extensible principles, and enables rapid deployment based on existing infrastructure. Through a three-layer protocol system--identity and encrypted communication layer, meta-protocol negotiation layer, and application protocol layer--ANP. systematically solves the problems of agent identity authentication, dynamic negotiation, and capability discovery interoperability.

Han Wang, Binbin Chen, Tieying Zhang et al.

Effective communication is an essential component in collaborative multi-agent systems. Situations where explicit messaging is not feasible have been common in human society throughout history, which motivate the study of implicit communication. Previous works on learning implicit communication mostly rely on theory of mind (ToM), where agents infer the mental states and intentions of others by interpreting their actions. However, ToM-based methods become less effective in making accurate inferences in complex tasks. In this work, we propose the Implicit Channel Protocol (ICP) framework, which allows agents to communicate through implicit communication channels similar to the explicit ones. ICP leverages a subset of actions, denoted as the scouting actions, and a mapping between information and these scouting actions that encodes and decodes the messages. We propose training algorithms for agents to message and act, including learning with a randomly initialized information map and with a delayed information map. The efficacy of ICP has been tested on the tasks of Guessing Numbers, Revealing Goals, and Hanabi, where ICP significantly outperforms baseline methods through more efficient information transmission.

Xin-Cheng Wen, Binbin Chen, Haoxuan Lan et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the software engineering landscape. Recently, numerous LLM-based agents have been developed to address real-world software issue fixing tasks. Despite their state-of-the-art performance, Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance, these agents face a significant challenge: \textbf{Insufficient high-quality issue descriptions.} Real-world datasets often exhibit misalignments between issue descriptions and their corresponding solutions, introducing noise and ambiguity that mislead automated agents and limit their problem-solving effectiveness. We propose \textbf{\textit{SWE-Fuse}}, an issue-description-aware training framework that fuses issue-description-guided and issue-free samples for training SWE agents. It consists of two key modules: (1) An issue-free-driven trajectory learning module for mitigating potentially misleading issue descriptions while enabling the model to learn step-by-step debugging processes; and (2) An entropy-aware RLVR training module, which adaptively adjusts training dynamics through entropy-driven clipping. It applies relaxed clipping under high entropy to encourage exploration, and stricter clipping under low entropy to ensure training stability. We evaluate SWE-Fuse on the widely studied SWE-bench Verified benchmark shows to demonstrate its effectiveness in solving real-world software problems. Specifically, SWE-Fuse outperforms the best 8B and 32B baselines by 43.0\% and 60.2\% in solve rate, respectively. Furthermore, integrating SWE-Fuse with test-time scaling (TTS) enables further performance improvements, achieving solve rates of 49.8\% and 65.2\% under TTS@8 for the 8B and 32B models, respectively.

Yu Li, Mingyang Yi, Xiuyu Li et al.

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (ARL) focuses on training large language models (LLMs) to interleave reasoning with external tool execution to solve complex tasks. Most existing ARL methods train a single shared model parameters to support both reasoning and tool use behaviors, implicitly assuming that joint training leads to improved overall agent performance. Despite its widespread adoption, this assumption has rarely been examined empirically. In this paper, we systematically investigate this assumption by introducing a Linear Effect Attribution System(LEAS), which provides quantitative evidence of interference between reasoning and tool-use behaviors. Through an in-depth analysis, we show that these two capabilities often induce misaligned gradient directions, leading to training interference that undermines the effectiveness of joint optimization and challenges the prevailing ARL paradigm. To address this issue, we propose Disentangled Action Reasoning Tuning(DART), a simple and efficient framework that explicitly decouples parameter updates for reasoning and tool-use via separate low-rank adaptation modules. Experimental results show that DART consistently outperforms baseline methods with averaged 6.35 percent improvements and achieves performance comparable to multi-agent systems that explicitly separate tool-use and reasoning using a single model.

Binquan Guo, Junteng Cao, Marie Siew et al.

Large-scale low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite systems are increasingly valued for their ability to enable rapid and wide-area data exchange, thereby facilitating the collaborative training of artificial intelligence (AI) models across geographically distributed regions. Due to privacy concerns and regulatory constraints, raw data collected at remote clients cannot be centrally aggregated, posing a major obstacle to traditional AI training methods. Federated learning offers a privacy-preserving alternative by training local models on distributed devices and exchanging only model parameters. However, the dynamic topology and limited bandwidth of satellite systems will hinder timely parameter aggregation and distribution, resulting in prolonged training times. To address this challenge, we investigate the problem of scheduling federated learning over satellite networks and identify key bottlenecks that impact the overall duration of each training round. We propose a discrete temporal graph-based on-demand scheduling framework that dynamically allocates communication resources to accelerate federated learning. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves significant performance gains over traditional statistical multiplexing-based model exchange strategies, reducing overall round times by 14.20% to 41.48%. Moreover, the acceleration effect becomes more pronounced for larger models and higher numbers of clients, highlighting the scalability of the proposed approach.

Nan Li, Wanting Yang, Marie Siew et al.

Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as powerful tools for high-quality content generation, yet their intensive computational requirements for inference pose challenges for resource-constrained edge devices. Cloud-based solutions aid in computation but often fall short in addressing privacy risks, personalization efficiency, and communication costs in multi-user edge-AIGC scenarios. To bridge this gap, we first analyze existing edge-AIGC applications in personalized content synthesis, revealing their limitations in efficiency and scalability. We then propose a novel cluster-aware hierarchical federated aggregation framework. Based on parameter-efficient local fine-tuning via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the framework first clusters clients based on the similarity of their uploaded task requirements, followed by an intra-cluster aggregation for enhanced personalization at the server-side. Subsequently, an inter-cluster knowledge interaction paradigm is implemented to enable hybrid-style content generation across diverse clusters.Building upon federated learning (FL) collaboration, our framework simultaneously trains personalized models for individual users at the devices and a shared global model enhanced with multiple LoRA adapters on the server,enabling efficient edge inference; meanwhile, all prompts for clustering and inference are encoded prior to transmission, thereby further mitigating the risk of plaintext leakage. Our evaluations demonstrate that the framework achieves accelerated convergence while maintaining practical viability for scalable multi-user personalized AIGC services under edge constraints.

Tongjun Shi, Shuhao Zhang, Binbin Chen et al.

Stream Learning (SL) requires models that can quickly adapt to continuously evolving data, posing significant challenges in both computational efficiency and learning accuracy. Effective data selection is critical in SL to ensure a balance between information retention and training efficiency. Traditional rule-based data selection methods struggle to accommodate the dynamic nature of streaming data, highlighting the necessity for innovative solutions that effectively address these challenges. Recent approaches to handling changing data distributions face challenges that limit their effectiveness in fast-paced environments. In response, we propose StreamFP, a novel approach that uniquely employs dynamic, learnable parameters called fingerprints to enhance data selection efficiency and adaptability in stream learning. StreamFP optimizes coreset selection through its unique fingerprint-guided mechanism for efficient training while ensuring robust buffer updates that adaptively respond to data dynamics, setting it apart from existing methods in stream learning. Experimental results demonstrate that StreamFP outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving accuracy improvements of 15.99%, 29.65%, and 51.24% compared to baseline models across varying data arrival rates, alongside a training throughput increase of 4.6x.

Xinmeng Xu, Yang Wang, Dongxiang Xu et al.

Speech enhancement is an essential task of improving speech quality in noise scenario. Several state-of-the-art approaches have introduced visual information for speech enhancement,since the visual aspect of speech is essentially unaffected by acoustic environment. This paper proposes a novel frameworkthat involves visual information for speech enhancement, by in-corporating a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). In par-ticular, the proposed visual speech enhancement GAN consistof two networks trained in adversarial manner, i) a generator that adopts multi-layer feature fusion convolution network to enhance input noisy speech, and ii) a discriminator that attemptsto minimize the discrepancy between the distributions of the clean speech signal and enhanced speech signal. Experiment re-sults demonstrated superior performance of the proposed modelagainst several state-of-the-art

Weijie Chen, Yilu Guo, Shicai Yang et al.

False positive is one of the most serious problems brought by agnostic domain shift in domain adaptive pedestrian detection. However, it is impossible to label each box in countless target domains. Therefore, it yields our attention to suppress false positive in each target domain in an unsupervised way. In this paper, we model an object detection task into a ranking task among positive and negative boxes innovatively, and thus transform a false positive suppression problem into a box re-ranking problem elegantly, which makes it feasible to solve without manual annotation. An attached problem during box re-ranking appears that no labeled validation data is available for cherrypicking. Considering we aim to keep the detection of true positive unchanged, we propose box number alignment, a self-supervised evaluation metric, to prevent the optimized model from capacity degeneration. Extensive experiments conducted on cross-domain pedestrian detection datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Furthermore, the extension to two general unsupervised domain adaptive object detection benchmarks also supports our superiority to other state-of-the-arts.

Hoon Wei Lim, William G. Temple, Bao Anh N. Tran et al.

Modern trains rely on balises (communication beacons) located on the track to provide location information as they traverse a rail network. Balises, such as those conforming to the Eurobalise standard, were not designed with security in mind and are thus vulnerable to cyber attacks targeting data availability, integrity, or authenticity. In this work, we discuss data integrity threats to balise transmission modules and use high-fidelity simulation to study the risks posed by data integrity attacks. To mitigate such risk, we propose a practical two-layer solution: at the device level, we design a lightweight and low-cost cryptographic solution to protect the integrity of the location information; at the system layer, we devise a secure hybrid train speed controller to mitigate the impact under various attacks. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.

Ethan Fast, Binbin Chen, Julia Mendelsohn et al.

Today's conversational agents are restricted to simple standalone commands. In this paper, we present Iris, an agent that draws on human conversational strategies to combine commands, allowing it to perform more complex tasks that it has not been explicitly designed to support: for example, composing one command to "plot a histogram" with another to first "log-transform the data". To enable this complexity, we introduce a domain specific language that transforms commands into automata that Iris can compose, sequence, and execute dynamically by interacting with a user through natural language, as well as a conversational type system that manages what kinds of commands can be combined. We have designed Iris to help users with data science tasks, a domain that requires support for command combination. In evaluation, we find that data scientists complete a predictive modeling task significantly faster (2.6 times speedup) with Iris than a modern non-conversational programming environment. Iris supports the same kinds of commands as today's agents, but empowers users to weave together these commands to accomplish complex goals.

Ethan Fast, Binbin Chen, Michael Bernstein

Human language is colored by a broad range of topics, but existing text analysis tools only focus on a small number of them. We present Empath, a tool that can generate and validate new lexical categories on demand from a small set of seed terms (like "bleed" and "punch" to generate the category violence). Empath draws connotations between words and phrases by deep learning a neural embedding across more than 1.8 billion words of modern fiction. Given a small set of seed words that characterize a category, Empath uses its neural embedding to discover new related terms, then validates the category with a crowd-powered filter. Empath also analyzes text across 200 built-in, pre-validated categories we have generated from common topics in our web dataset, like neglect, government, and social media. We show that Empath's data-driven, human validated categories are highly correlated (r=0.906) with similar categories in LIWC.

Nils Ole Tippenhauer, William G. Temple, An Hoa Vu et al.

Graph-based assessment formalisms have proven to be useful in the safety, dependability, and security communities to help stakeholders manage risk and maintain appropriate documentation throughout the system lifecycle. In this paper, we propose a set of methods to automatically construct security argument graphs, a graphical formalism that integrates various security-related information to argue about the security level of a system. Our approach is to generate the graph in a progressive manner by exploiting logical relationships among pieces of diverse input information. Using those emergent argument patterns as a starting point, we define a set of extension templates that can be applied iteratively to grow a security argument graph. Using a scenario from the electric power sector, we demonstrate the graph generation process and highlight its application for system security evaluation in our prototype software tool, CyberSAGE.