Xiangda Yan

Ziye Chen, Hongbin Lin, Chenyu Zhang et al.

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables large-language-model fine-tuning without storing backpropagation activations, while LoRA supplies compact trainable adapters. Combining them creates a rank paradox: increasing LoRA rank improves adapter capacity, but standard two-point ZO either perturbs a rank-dependent number of coordinates or, under atomwise updates, can make the finite-difference signal unobservable. This paper shows that the bottleneck is a measurement-topology problem rather than a need for an external subspace. LoRA already decomposes into matched rank-$1$ atoms, each a complete factor-coordinate block of dimension $d_\text{out}+d_\text{in}$. Querying one atom per step keeps the stored adapter rank $r$ while removing $r$ from the single-query perturbation dimension. The naive atomwise query is still miscalibrated: if it inherits canonical LoRA scaling $α/r$, the active finite-difference signal shrinks as $1/r$ and the active finite-difference signal-to-noise ratio (FD-SNR) as $1/r^2$, producing directional collapse under a fixed residual evaluation-noise floor. AR1-ZO pairs alternating rank-$1$ atom queries with topology-aware scaling $γ=αr$, restoring rank-invariant active signal without auxiliary bases, activation hooks, curvature estimates, or extra forward queries. Theory proves atom minimality, rank-independent active query dimension, directional collapse and restoration, and the remaining rank dependence as an amortized coverage cost. Experiments on OPT and Qwen3 models validate the signal mechanism and show that AR1-ZO makes high-rank LoRA effective among matched-budget ZO methods under the standard two-forward-pass query budget.

Zuwang He, Shihao Shu, Yuli Qu et al.

Personalized incentive allocation is vital for e-commerce, where uplift modeling is the standard for estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE). However, traditional models often fail in complex multi-seller environments with violations of the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA). We identify two critical challenges: Seller-level Cannibalization, where incentives shift expenditure between shops without growing the platform, and Incentive-level Cannibalization, where organic conversions or alternative rewards introduce significant noise into incrementality estimation. In this paper, we propose CanniUplift, a unified framework to mitigate these dual-source cannibalization effects. Specifically, we design Platform-level Global Alignment (PGA) to capture cross-shop substitution through global GMV consistency constraints. To tackle incentive-driven noise, we introduce Redemption-based Decomposition Denoising (RDD), which uses redemption behavior to decompose treated outcomes and reduce attribution noise within an entire-space framework. Furthermore, a Treat-Attention mechanism is designed to model intricate interactions between users' historical behaviors and current treatment options. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate that CanniUplift significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation studies confirm that the integration of PGA and RDD consistently improves wAUUC and wQINI. Successfully deployed online, our framework achieved a 4.08% relative increase in platform-wide incremental GMV (Delta GMV) over the production baseline and improved ROI in online A/B tests, proving effective in driving global platform growth.