Lin Zhang

Jiaxing Zhang, Ruyi Gan, Junjie Wang et al.

Nowadays, foundation models become one of fundamental infrastructures in artificial intelligence, paving ways to the general intelligence. However, the reality presents two urgent challenges: existing foundation models are dominated by the English-language community; users are often given limited resources and thus cannot always use foundation models. To support the development of the Chinese-language community, we introduce an open-source project, called Fengshenbang, which leads by the research center for Cognitive Computing and Natural Language (CCNL). Our project has comprehensive capabilities, including large pre-trained models, user-friendly APIs, benchmarks, datasets, and others. We wrap all these in three sub-projects: the Fengshenbang Model, the Fengshen Framework, and the Fengshen Benchmark. An open-source roadmap, Fengshenbang, aims to re-evaluate the open-source community of Chinese pre-trained large-scale models, prompting the development of the entire Chinese large-scale model community. We also want to build a user-centered open-source ecosystem to allow individuals to access the desired models to match their computing resources. Furthermore, we invite companies, colleges, and research institutions to collaborate with us to build the large-scale open-source model-based ecosystem. We hope that this project will be the foundation of Chinese cognitive intelligence.

Ren Yang, Radu Timofte, Xin Li et al.

This paper reviews the Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video at AIM 2022. This challenge includes two tracks. Track 1 aims at the super-resolution of compressed image, and Track~2 targets the super-resolution of compressed video. In Track 1, we use the popular dataset DIV2K as the training, validation and test sets. In Track 2, we propose the LDV 3.0 dataset, which contains 365 videos, including the LDV 2.0 dataset (335 videos) and 30 additional videos. In this challenge, there are 12 teams and 2 teams that submitted the final results to Track 1 and Track 2, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of super-resolution on compressed image and video. The proposed LDV 3.0 dataset is available at https://github.com/RenYang-home/LDV_dataset. The homepage of this challenge is at https://github.com/RenYang-home/AIM22_CompressSR.

Xinyu Zhu, Junjie Wang, Lin Zhang et al.

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) bring new opportunities to challenging problems, especially those that need high-level intelligence, such as the math word problem (MWPs). However, directly applying existing PLMs to MWPs can fail as the generation process lacks sufficient supervision and thus lacks fast adaptivity as humans. We notice that human reasoning has a dual reasoning framework that consists of an immediate reaction system (system 1) and a delicate reasoning system (system 2), where the entire reasoning is determined by their interaction. This inspires us to develop a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving MWPs, called Cooperative Reasoning (CoRe), resulting in a human-like reasoning architecture with system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier. In our approach, the generator is responsible for generating reasoning paths, and the verifiers are used to supervise the evaluation in order to obtain reliable feedback for the generator. We evaluate our CoRe framework on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieve decent improvement over state-of-the-art methods, up to 9.6% increase over best baselines. Our codes are available at https://github.com/TianHongZXY/CoRe

Qi Hu, Yifeng Tang, Qinghua Wang et al.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as coding agents, shifting safety from individual responses to action sequences. Existing benchmarks, however, primarily assess whether models refuse unsafe prompts, leaving impacts on stateful workspaces largely unexamined. We present SABER, a benchmark for environment-aware operational safety that places models in realistic agent-style projects and evaluates safety from the final environment state after a sequence of actions. Beyond binary safety-violation reports, SABER categorizes violations by cause, enabling analysis of model-specific safety profiles. Our evaluations show that even the best-performing model has more than a 54% harmful safety-violation rate (HSR), suggesting that current alignment remains insufficient for realistic project environments. SABER further reveals distinct safety profiles across models. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/sssr-lab/saber.

Zhouhong Gu, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Haoning Ye et al.

New Natural Langauge Process~(NLP) benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present Xiezhi, the most comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess holistic domain knowledge. Xiezhi comprises multiple-choice questions across 516 diverse disciplines ranging from 13 different subjects with 249,587 questions and accompanied by Xiezhi-Specialty and Xiezhi-Interdiscipline, both with 15k questions. We conduct evaluation of the 47 cutting-edge LLMs on Xiezhi. Results indicate that LLMs exceed average performance of humans in science, engineering, agronomy, medicine, and art, but fall short in economics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, literature, history, and management. We anticipate Xiezhi will help analyze important strengths and shortcomings of LLMs, and the benchmark is released in~\url{https://github.com/MikeGu721/XiezhiBenchmark}.

Xinhang Li, Yiying Yang, Zheng Yuan et al.

Multi-vehicle pursuit (MVP) such as autonomous police vehicles pursuing suspects is important but very challenging due to its mission and safety critical nature. While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have been proposed for MVP problem in structured grid-pattern roads, the existing algorithms use randomly training samples in centralized learning, which leads to homogeneous agents showing low collaboration performance. For the more challenging problem of pursuing multiple evading vehicles, these algorithms typically select a fixed target evading vehicle for pursuing vehicles without considering dynamic traffic situation, which significantly reduces pursuing success rate. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a Progression Cognition Reinforcement Learning with Prioritized Experience for MVP (PEPCRL-MVP) in urban multi-intersection dynamic traffic scenes. PEPCRL-MVP uses a prioritization network to assess the transitions in the global experience replay buffer according to the parameters of each MARL agent. With the personalized and prioritized experience set selected via the prioritization network, diversity is introduced to the learning process of MARL, which can improve collaboration and task related performance. Furthermore, PEPCRL-MVP employs an attention module to extract critical features from complex urban traffic environments. These features are used to develop progression cognition method to adaptively group pursuing vehicles. Each group efficiently target one evading vehicle in dynamic driving environments. Extensive experiments conducted with a simulator over unstructured roads of an urban area show that PEPCRL-MVP is superior to other state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, PEPCRL-MVP improves pursuing efficiency by 3.95% over TD3-DMAP and its success rate is 34.78% higher than that of MADDPG. Codes are open sourced.

Yajie Bao, Yang Li, Shao-Lun Huang et al.

Task transfer learning is a popular technique in image processing applications that uses pre-trained models to reduce the supervision cost of related tasks. An important question is to determine task transferability, i.e. given a common input domain, estimating to what extent representations learned from a source task can help in learning a target task. Typically, transferability is either measured experimentally or inferred through task relatedness, which is often defined without a clear operational meaning. In this paper, we present a novel metric, H-score, an easily-computable evaluation function that estimates the performance of transferred representations from one task to another in classification problems using statistical and information theoretic principles. Experiments on real image data show that our metric is not only consistent with the empirical transferability measurement, but also useful to practitioners in applications such as source model selection and task transfer curriculum learning.

Zhuoming Liu, Jinhong Lin, Kwan Man Cheng et al.

Many modern vision-language models (VLMs) build on autoregressive decoding of discrete tokens. While text-based output interfaces enable scalable pretraining and strong zero-shot generalization across diverse tasks, they are poorly suited for problems that require precise continuous outputs, such as localizing temporal boundaries of events or generating robotic control actions. To address this challenge, we propose DRIFT, a general framework for adapting pretrained VLMs to continuous decoding tasks. DRIFT combines a base predictor, which provides a coarse estimate of the target output, with a generative refinement module based on flow matching that iteratively improves the prediction. This residual formulation transforms the generative modeling problem from learning a global output distribution to modeling a localized residual distribution around a strong prior, substantially simplifying optimization. We evaluate DRIFT on both perception and planning tasks, including visual grounding and robotic control. Across multiple tasks and architectures spanning MLLMs, VLAs, and WAMs, DRIFT consistently outperforms a strong set of regression- and generative-based solutions.

Longteng Zhang, Lin Zhang, Shaohuai Shi et al.

The low-rank adaptation (LoRA) method can largely reduce the amount of trainable parameters for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), however, it still requires expensive activation memory to update low-rank weights. Reducing the number of LoRA layers or using activation recomputation could harm the fine-tuning performance or increase the computational overhead. In this work, we present LoRA-FA, a memory-efficient fine-tuning method that reduces the activation memory without performance degradation and expensive recomputation. LoRA-FA chooses to freeze the projection-down weight of $A$ and update the projection-up weight of $B$ in each LoRA layer. It ensures the change of model weight reside in a low-rank space during LLMs fine-tuning, while eliminating the requirement to store full-rank input activations. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple model types (RoBERTa, T5, LLaMA) and model scales. Our results show that LoRA-FA can always achieve close fine-tuning accuracy across different tasks compared to full parameter fine-tuning and LoRA. Furthermore, LoRA-FA can reduce the overall memory cost by up to 1.4$\times$ compared to LoRA.

Shenhong Li, Sheng He, San Jiang et al.

Stereo matching of high-resolution satellite images (HRSI) is still a fundamental but challenging task in the field of photogrammetry and remote sensing. Recently, deep learning (DL) methods, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have demonstrated tremendous potential for stereo matching on public benchmark datasets. However, datasets for stereo matching of satellite images are scarce. To facilitate further research, this paper creates and publishes a challenging dataset, termed WHU-Stereo, for stereo matching DL network training and testing. This dataset is created by using airborne LiDAR point clouds and high-resolution stereo imageries taken from the Chinese GaoFen-7 satellite (GF-7). The WHU-Stereo dataset contains more than 1700 epipolar rectified image pairs, which cover six areas in China and includes various kinds of landscapes. We have assessed the accuracy of ground-truth disparity maps, and it is proved that our dataset achieves comparable precision compared with existing state-of-the-art stereo matching datasets. To verify its feasibility, in experiments, the hand-crafted SGM stereo matching algorithm and recent deep learning networks have been tested on the WHU-Stereo dataset. Experimental results show that deep learning networks can be well trained and achieves higher performance than hand-crafted SGM algorithm, and the dataset has great potential in remote sensing application. The WHU-Stereo dataset can serve as a challenging benchmark for stereo matching of high-resolution satellite images, and performance evaluation of deep learning models. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/Sheng029/WHU-Stereo

Si Shen, Jiangfeng Liu, Litao Lin et al.

The academic literature of social sciences records human civilization and studies human social problems. With its large-scale growth, the ways to quickly find existing research on relevant issues have become an urgent demand for researchers. Previous studies, such as SciBERT, have shown that pre-training using domain-specific texts can improve the performance of natural language processing tasks. However, the pre-trained language model for social sciences is not available so far. In light of this, the present research proposes a pre-trained model based on the abstracts published in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals. The models, which are available on GitHub (https://github.com/S-T-Full-Text-Knowledge-Mining/SSCI-BERT), show excellent performance on discipline classification, abstract structure-function recognition, and named entity recognition tasks with the social sciences literature.

Jiongjiong Gu, Jianfeng Wang, Zidong Han et al.

Modern AI serving increasingly relies on NPUs for conventional inference and large language model serving. However, current NPU deployments commonly expose physical devices directly to applications, which limits runtime control over scheduling and makes it difficult to adapt execution to phase-level workload behavior. This limitation is particularly evident in LLM serving, where the prefill phase is compute-intensive while the decode phase is often constrained by memory bandwidth and KV-cache accesses. Static prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation reduces phase interference, but can introduce resource imbalance and unnecessary data movement. We present FlexNPU, a transparent user-space virtualization layer for Ascend NPUs. FlexNPU interposes on AscendCL APIs and routes NPU operations through per-device daemons, decoupling unmodified from physical NPU devices without modifying model code, AI frameworks, or NPU drivers. This runtime boundary allows FlexNPU to virtualize NPU objects, control operator dispatch, and support phase-aware scheduling for LLM serving. In particular, FlexNPU enables dynamic PD co-location, which adapts scheduling between prefill and decode according to their complementary resource characteristics. We implement FlexNPU on Huawei Ascend NPUs and evaluate it with typical LLM workloads. Compared with direct NPU passthrough, FlexNPU introduces no measurable inference overhead and slightly improves throughput in some scenarios. On a 384-card Ascend 910C deployment of DeepSeek-R1, FlexNPU improves throughput over static PD disaggregation by 5.15% and 26.33%. On Qwen2.5-7B, compared with static PD co-location, FlexNPU maintains comparable throughput while reducing TTFT by over 92% across tested workloads with nearly unchanged TPOT. These results show that transparent NPU virtualization is a practical substrate for efficient and responsive LLM serving.

Lin Zhang, Li Shen, Liang Ding et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging distributed learning paradigm under privacy constraint. Data heterogeneity is one of the main challenges in FL, which results in slow convergence and degraded performance. Most existing approaches only tackle the heterogeneity challenge by restricting the local model update in client, ignoring the performance drop caused by direct global model aggregation. Instead, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation method to fine-tune the global model in the server (FedFTG), which relieves the issue of direct model aggregation. Concretely, FedFTG explores the input space of local models through a generator, and uses it to transfer the knowledge from local models to the global model. Besides, we propose a hard sample mining scheme to achieve effective knowledge distillation throughout the training. In addition, we develop customized label sampling and class-level ensemble to derive maximum utilization of knowledge, which implicitly mitigates the distribution discrepancy across clients. Extensive experiments show that our FedFTG significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) FL algorithms and can serve as a strong plugin for enhancing FedAvg, FedProx, FedDyn, and SCAFFOLD.

Yiyao Yu, Junjie Wang, Yuxiang Zhang et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies should adhere to human norms to better serve our society and avoid disseminating harmful or misleading information, particularly in Conversational Information Retrieval (CIR). Previous work, including approaches and datasets, has not always been successful or sufficiently robust in taking human norms into consideration. To this end, we introduce a workflow that integrates ethical alignment, with an initial ethical judgment stage for efficient data screening. To address the need for ethical judgment in CIR, we present the QA-ETHICS dataset, adapted from the ETHICS benchmark, which serves as an evaluation tool by unifying scenarios and label meanings. However, each scenario only considers one ethical concept. Therefore, we introduce the MP-ETHICS dataset to evaluate a scenario under multiple ethical concepts, such as justice and Deontology. In addition, we suggest a new approach that achieves top performance in both binary and multi-label ethical judgment tasks. Our research provides a practical method for introducing ethical alignment into the CIR workflow. The data and code are available at https://github.com/wanng-ide/ealm .

Ping Yang, Junjie Wang, Ruyi Gan et al.

We propose a new paradigm for zero-shot learners that is format agnostic, i.e., it is compatible with any format and applicable to a list of language tasks, such as text classification, commonsense reasoning, coreference resolution, and sentiment analysis. Zero-shot learning aims to train a model on a given task such that it can address new learning tasks without any additional training. Our approach converts zero-shot learning into multiple-choice tasks, avoiding problems in commonly used large-scale generative models such as FLAN. It not only adds generalization ability to models but also significantly reduces the number of parameters. Our method shares the merits of efficient training and deployment. Our approach shows state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and produces satisfactory results on tasks such as natural language inference and text classification. Our model achieves this success with only 235M parameters, which is substantially smaller than state-of-the-art models with billions of parameters. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-CCNL/Fengshenbang-LM .

Linfei Li, Lin Zhang, Zhong Wang et al.

Recently, the multi-modal fusion of RGB, depth, and semantics has shown great potential in dense Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). However, a prerequisite for generating consistent semantic maps is the availability of dense, efficient, and scalable scene representations. Existing semantic SLAM systems based on explicit representations are often limited by resolution and an inability to predict unknown areas. Conversely, implicit representations typically rely on time-consuming ray tracing, failing to meet real-time requirements. Fortunately, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising representation that combines the efficiency of point-based methods with the continuity of geometric structures. To this end, we propose GS3LAM, a Gaussian Semantic Splatting SLAM framework that processes multimodal data to render consistent, dense semantic maps in real-time. GS3LAM models the scene as a Semantic Gaussian Field (SG-Field) and jointly optimizes camera poses and the field via multimodal error constraints. Furthermore, a Depth-adaptive Scale Regularization (DSR) scheme is introduced to resolve misalignments between scale-invariant Gaussians and geometric surfaces. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting, we propose a Random Sampling-based Keyframe Mapping (RSKM) strategy, which demonstrates superior performance over common local covisibility optimization methods. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that GS3LAM achieves increased tracking robustness, superior rendering quality, and enhanced semantic precision compared to state-of-the-art methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/lif314/GS3LAM.

Zheng Yuan, Tianhao Wu, Qinwen Wang et al.

Smart Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) will contribute to vehicle decision-making in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Multi-Vehicle Pursuit games (MVP), a multi-vehicle cooperative ability to capture mobile targets, is becoming a hot research topic gradually. Although there are some achievements in the field of MVP in the open space environment, the urban area brings complicated road structures and restricted moving spaces as challenges to the resolution of MVP games. We define an Observation-constrained MVP (OMVP) problem in this paper and propose a Transformer-based Time and Team Reinforcement Learning scheme ($ \text{T}^3 $OMVP) to address the problem. First, a new multi-vehicle pursuit model is constructed based on decentralized partially observed Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDP) to instantiate this problem. Second, by introducing and modifying the transformer-based observation sequence, QMIX is redefined to adapt to the complicated road structure, restricted moving spaces and constrained observations, so as to control vehicles to pursue the target combining the vehicle's observations. Third, a multi-intersection urban environment is built to verify the proposed scheme. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed $ \text{T}^3 $OMVP scheme achieves significant improvements relative to state-of-the-art QMIX approaches by 9.66%~106.25%. Code is available at https://github.com/pipihaiziguai/T3OMVP.

Xinhang Li, Zihao Li, Nan Yang et al.

The expansion of renewable energy could help realizing the goals of peaking carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutralization. Some existing grid dispatching methods integrating short-term renewable energy prediction and reinforcement learning (RL) have been proved to alleviate the adverse impact of energy fluctuations risk. However, these methods omit the long-term output prediction, which leads to stability and security problems on the optimal power flow. This paper proposes a confidence estimation Transformer for long-term renewable energy forecasting in reinforcement learning-based power grid dispatching (Conformer-RLpatching). Conformer-RLpatching predicts long-term active output of each renewable energy generator with an enhanced Transformer to boost the performance of hybrid energy grid dispatching. Furthermore, a confidence estimation method is proposed to reduce the prediction error of renewable energy. Meanwhile, a dispatching necessity evaluation mechanism is put forward to decide whether the active output of a generator needs to be adjusted. Experiments carried out on the SG-126 power grid simulator show that Conformer-RLpatching achieves great improvement over the second best algorithm DDPG in security score by 25.8% and achieves a better total reward compared with the golden medal team in the power grid dispatching competition sponsored by State Grid Corporation of China under the same simulation environment. Codes are outsourced in https://github.com/buptlxh/Conformer-RLpatching.

Lin Zhang, Shaohuai Shi, Xiaowen Chu et al.

Communication scheduling has been shown to be effective in accelerating distributed training, which enables all-reduce communications to be overlapped with backpropagation computations. This has been commonly adopted in popular distributed deep learning frameworks. However, there exist two fundamental problems: (1) excessive startup latency proportional to the number of workers for each all-reduce operation; (2) it only achieves sub-optimal training performance due to the dependency and synchronization requirement of the feed-forward computation in the next iteration. We propose a novel scheduling algorithm, DeAR, that decouples the all-reduce primitive into two continuous operations, which overlaps with both backpropagation and feed-forward computations without extra communications. We further design a practical tensor fusion algorithm to improve the training performance. Experimental results with five popular models show that DeAR achieves up to 83% and 15% training speedup over the state-of-the-art solutions on a 64-GPU cluster with 10Gb/s Ethernet and 100Gb/s InfiniBand interconnects, respectively.

Ruotian Ma, Xuanting Chen, Lin Zhang et al.

As the categories of named entities rapidly increase, the deployed NER models are required to keep updating toward recognizing more entity types, creating a demand for class-incremental learning for NER. Considering the privacy concerns and storage constraints, the standard paradigm for class-incremental NER updates the models with training data only annotated with the new classes, yet the entities from other entity classes are unlabeled, regarded as "Non-entity" (or "O"). In this work, we conduct an empirical study on the "Unlabeled Entity Problem" and find that it leads to severe confusion between "O" and entities, decreasing class discrimination of old classes and declining the model's ability to learn new classes. To solve the Unlabeled Entity Problem, we propose a novel representation learning method to learn discriminative representations for the entity classes and "O". Specifically, we propose an entity-aware contrastive learning method that adaptively detects entity clusters in "O". Furthermore, we propose two effective distance-based relabeling strategies for better learning the old classes. We introduce a more realistic and challenging benchmark for class-incremental NER, and the proposed method achieves up to 10.62\% improvement over the baseline methods.

Lin Zhang, Xin Li, Dongliang He et al.

It is widely agreed that reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) achieves superior results by referring to similar high quality images, compared to single image super-resolution (SISR). Intuitively, the more references, the better performance. However, previous RefSR methods have all focused on single-reference image training, while multiple reference images are often available in testing or practical applications. The root cause of such training-testing mismatch is the absence of publicly available multi-reference SR training datasets, which greatly hinders research efforts on multi-reference super-resolution. To this end, we construct a large-scale, multi-reference super-resolution dataset, named LMR. It contains 112,142 groups of 300x300 training images, which is 10x of the existing largest RefSR dataset. The image size is also much larger. More importantly, each group is equipped with 5 reference images with different similarity levels. Furthermore, we propose a new baseline method for multi-reference super-resolution: MRefSR, including a Multi-Reference Attention Module (MAM) for feature fusion of an arbitrary number of reference images, and a Spatial Aware Filtering Module (SAFM) for the fused feature selection. The proposed MRefSR achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our code and data would be made available soon.

Lin Zhang, Longteng Zhang, Shaohuai Shi et al.

To accelerate distributed training, many gradient compression methods have been proposed to alleviate the communication bottleneck in synchronous stochastic gradient descent (S-SGD), but their efficacy in real-world applications still remains unclear. In this work, we first evaluate the efficiency of three representative compression methods (quantization with Sign-SGD, sparsification with Top-k SGD, and low-rank with Power-SGD) on a 32-GPU cluster. The results show that they cannot always outperform well-optimized S-SGD or even worse due to their incompatibility with three key system optimization techniques (all-reduce, pipelining, and tensor fusion) in S-SGD. To this end, we propose a novel gradient compression method, called alternate compressed Power-SGD (ACP-SGD), which alternately compresses and communicates low-rank matrices. ACP-SGD not only significantly reduces the communication volume, but also enjoys the three system optimizations like S-SGD. Compared with Power-SGD, the optimized ACP-SGD can largely reduce the compression and communication overheads, while achieving similar model accuracy. In our experiments, ACP-SGD achieves an average of 4.06x and 1.43x speedups over S-SGD and Power-SGD, respectively, and it consistently outperforms other baselines across different setups (from 8 GPUs to 64 GPUs and from 1Gb/s Ethernet to 100Gb/s InfiniBand).

Yatai Ji, Junjie Wang, Yuan Gong et al.

Multimodal semantic understanding often has to deal with uncertainty, which means the obtained messages tend to refer to multiple targets. Such uncertainty is problematic for our interpretation, including inter- and intra-modal uncertainty. Little effort has studied the modeling of this uncertainty, particularly in pre-training on unlabeled datasets and fine-tuning in task-specific downstream datasets. In this paper, we project the representations of all modalities as probabilistic distributions via a Probability Distribution Encoder (PDE) by utilizing sequence-level interactions. Compared to the existing deterministic methods, such uncertainty modeling can convey richer multimodal semantic information and more complex relationships. Furthermore, we integrate uncertainty modeling with popular pre-training frameworks and propose suitable pre-training tasks: Distribution-based Vision-Language Contrastive learning (D-VLC), Distribution-based Masked Language Modeling (D-MLM), and Distribution-based Image-Text Matching (D-ITM). The fine-tuned models are applied to challenging downstream tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment, and achieve state-of-the-art results.

Linfei Li, Lin Zhang, Zhong Wang et al.

Recent advances in generative AI have accelerated the production of ultra-high-resolution visual content, posing significant challenges for efficient compression and real-time decoding on end-user devices. Inspired by 3D Gaussian Splatting, recent 2D Gaussian image models improve representation efficiency, yet existing methods struggle to balance compression ratio and reconstruction fidelity in ultra-high-resolution scenarios. To address this issue, we propose SmartSplat, a highly adaptive and feature-aware GS-based image compression framework that supports arbitrary image resolutions and compression ratios. SmartSplat leverages image-aware features such as gradients and color variances, introducing a Gradient-Color Guided Variational Sampling strategy together with an Exclusion-based Uniform Sampling scheme to improve the non-overlapping coverage of Gaussian primitives in pixel space. In addition, we propose a Scale-Adaptive Gaussian Color Sampling method to enhance color initialization across scales. Through joint optimization of spatial layout, scale, and color initialization, SmartSplat efficiently captures both local structures and global textures using a limited number of Gaussians, achieving high reconstruction quality under strong compression. Extensive experiments on DIV8K and a newly constructed 16K dataset demonstrate that SmartSplat consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods at comparable compression ratios and exceeds their compression limits, showing strong scalability and practical applicability. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lif314/SmartSplat.

Yiying Yang, Xinhang Li, Zheng Yuan et al.

The multi-vehicle pursuit (MVP), as a problem abstracted from various real-world scenarios, is becoming a hot research topic in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and connected vehicles has greatly promoted the research development of MVP. However, existing works on MVP pay little attention to the importance of information exchange and cooperation among pursuing vehicles under the complex urban traffic environment. This paper proposed a graded-Q reinforcement learning with information-enhanced state encoder (GQRL-IESE) framework to address this hierarchical collaborative multi-vehicle pursuit (HCMVP) problem. In the GQRL-IESE, a cooperative graded Q scheme is proposed to facilitate the decision-making of pursuing vehicles to improve pursuing efficiency. Each pursuing vehicle further uses a deep Q network (DQN) to make decisions based on its encoded state. A coordinated Q optimizing network adjusts the individual decisions based on the current environment traffic information to obtain the global optimal action set. In addition, an information-enhanced state encoder is designed to extract critical information from multiple perspectives and uses the attention mechanism to assist each pursuing vehicle in effectively determining the target. Extensive experimental results based on SUMO indicate that the total timestep of the proposed GQRL-IESE is less than other methods on average by 47.64%, which demonstrates the excellent pursuing efficiency of the GQRL-IESE. Codes are outsourced in https://github.com/ANT-ITS/GQRL-IESE.

Lin Zhang, Xin Li, Dongliang He et al.

Reference-based image super-resolution (RefSR) is a promising SR branch and has shown great potential in overcoming the limitations of single image super-resolution. While previous state-of-the-art RefSR methods mainly focus on improving the efficacy and robustness of reference feature transfer, it is generally overlooked that a well reconstructed SR image should enable better SR reconstruction for its similar LR images when it is referred to as. Therefore, in this work, we propose a reciprocal learning framework that can appropriately leverage such a fact to reinforce the learning of a RefSR network. Besides, we deliberately design a progressive feature alignment and selection module for further improving the RefSR task. The newly proposed module aligns reference-input images at multi-scale feature spaces and performs reference-aware feature selection in a progressive manner, thus more precise reference features can be transferred into the input features and the network capability is enhanced. Our reciprocal learning paradigm is model-agnostic and it can be applied to arbitrary RefSR models. We empirically show that multiple recent state-of-the-art RefSR models can be consistently improved with our reciprocal learning paradigm. Furthermore, our proposed model together with the reciprocal learning strategy sets new state-of-the-art performances on multiple benchmarks.

Xuanzhou Liu, Lin Zhang, Jiaqi Sun et al.

Subgraph matching is a fundamental building block for graph-based applications and is challenging due to its high-order combinatorial nature. Existing studies usually tackle it by combinatorial optimization or learning-based methods. However, they suffer from exponential computational costs or searching the matching without theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we develop D2Match by leveraging the efficiency of Deep learning and Degeneracy for subgraph matching. More specifically, we first prove that subgraph matching can degenerate to subtree matching, and subsequently is equivalent to finding a perfect matching on a bipartite graph. We can then yield an implementation of linear time complexity by the built-in tree-structured aggregation mechanism on graph neural networks. Moreover, circle structures and node attributes can be easily incorporated in D2Match to boost the matching performance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the superior performance of our D2Match and confirm that our D2Match indeed exploits the subtrees and differs from existing GNNs-based subgraph matching methods that depend on memorizing the data distribution divergence

Jiaqi Sun, Lin Zhang, Shenglin Zhao et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) hold the promise of learning efficient representations of graph-structured data, and one of its most important applications is semi-supervised node classification. However, in this application, GNN frameworks tend to fail due to the following issues: over-smoothing and heterophily. The most popular GNNs are known to be focused on the message-passing framework, and recent research shows that these GNNs are often bounded by low-pass filters from a signal processing perspective. We thus incorporate high-frequency information into GNNs to alleviate this genetic problem. In this paper, we argue that the complement of the original graph incorporates a high-pass filter and propose Complement Laplacian Regularization (CLAR) for an efficient enhancement of high-frequency components. The experimental results demonstrate that CLAR helps GNNs tackle over-smoothing, improving the expressiveness of heterophilic graphs, which adds up to 3.6% improvement over popular baselines and ensures topological robustness.

Xiaohui Liu, Meng Liu, Lin Zhang et al.

The Audio Deep Synthesis Detection (ADD) Challenge has been held to detect generated human-like speech. With our submitted system, this paper provides an overall assessment of track 1 (Low-quality Fake Audio Detection) and track 2 (Partially Fake Audio Detection). In this paper, spectro-temporal artifacts were detected using raw temporal signals, spectral features, as well as deep embedding features. To address track 1, low-quality data augmentation, domain adaptation via finetuning, and various complementary feature information fusion were aggregated in our system. Furthermore, we analyzed the clustering characteristics of subsystems with different features by visualization method and explained the effectiveness of our proposed greedy fusion strategy. As for track 2, frame transition and smoothing were detected using self-supervised learning structure to capture the manipulation of PF attacks in the time domain. We ranked 4th and 5th in track 1 and track 2, respectively.

Zihao Lin, Wanrong Zhu, Jiuxiang Gu et al.

Real-world design documents (e.g., posters) are inherently multi-layered, combining decoration, text, and images. Editing them from natural-language instructions requires fine-grained, layer-aware reasoning to identify relevant layers and coordinate modifications. Prior work largely overlooks multi-layer design document editing, focusing instead on single-layer image editing or multi-layer generation, which assume a flat canvas and lack the reasoning needed to determine what and where to modify. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-Layer Document Editing Agent (MiLDEAgent), a reasoning-based framework that combines an RL-trained multimodal reasoner for layer-wise understanding with an image editor for targeted modifications. To systematically benchmark this setting, we introduce the MiLDEBench, a human-in-the-loop corpus of over 20K design documents paired with diverse editing instructions. The benchmark is complemented by a task-specific evaluation protocol, MiLDEEval, which spans four dimensions including instruction following, layout consistency, aesthetics, and text rendering. Extensive experiments on 14 open-source and 2 closed-source models reveal that existing approaches fail to generalize: open-source models often cannot complete multi-layer document editing tasks, while closed-source models suffer from format violations. In contrast, MiLDEAgent achieves strong layer-aware reasoning and precise editing, significantly outperforming all open-source baselines and attaining performance comparable to closed-source models, thereby establishing the first strong baseline for multi-layer document editing.

Lin Zhang, Thomas Thebaud, Zexin Cai et al.

Large language models (LLMs), trained on large-scale text, have recently attracted significant attention for their strong performance across many tasks. Motivated by this, we investigate whether a text-trained LLM can help localize fake words in partially fake speech, where only specific words within a speech are edited. We build a speech LLM to perform fake word localization via next token prediction. Experiments and analyses on AV-Deepfake1M and PartialEdit indicates that the model frequently leverages editing-style pattern learned from the training data, particularly word-level polarity substitutions for those two databases we discussed, as cues for localizing fake words. Although such particular patterns provide useful information in an in-domain scenario, how to avoid over-reliance on such particular pattern and improve generalization to unseen editing styles remains an open question.

Tianjun Zhang, Fengyi Zhang, Tianchen Deng et al.

Visual Geometry Foundation Models (VGFMs) demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in local reconstruction. However, deploying them for kilometer-level Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains challenging. In such scenarios, current approaches mainly rely on linear transforms (e.g., Sim3 and SL4) for sub-map alignment, while we argue that a single linear transform is fundamentally insufficient to model the complex, non-linear geometric distortions inherent in VGFM outputs. Forcing such rigid alignment leads to the rapid accumulation of uncorrected residuals, eventually resulting in significant trajectory drift and map divergence. To address these limitations, we present CAL2M (Calibration-free Assistant-eye based Large-scale Localization and Mapping), a plug-and-play framework compatible with arbitrary VGFMs. Distinct from traditional systems, CAL2M introduces an "assistant eye" solely to leverage the prior of constant physical spacing, effectively eliminating scale ambiguity without any temporal or spatial pre-calibration. Furthermore, leveraging the assumption of accurate feature matching, we propose an epipolar-guided intrinsic and pose correction model. Supported by an online intrinsic search module, it can effectively rectify rotation and translation errors caused by inaccurate intrinsics through fundamental matrix decomposition. Finally, to ensure accurate mapping, we introduce a globally consistent mapping strategy based on anchor propagation. By constructing and fusing anchors across the trajectory, we establish a direct local-to-global mapping relationship. This enables the application of nonlinear transformations to elastically align sub-maps, effectively eliminating geometric misalignments and ensuring a globally consistent reconstruction. The source code of CAL2M will be publicly available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/CALM.

Lin Zhang, Shaohuai Shi, Wei Wang et al.

The second-order optimization methods, notably the D-KFAC (Distributed Kronecker Factored Approximate Curvature) algorithms, have gained traction on accelerating deep neural network (DNN) training on GPU clusters. However, existing D-KFAC algorithms require to compute and communicate a large volume of second-order information, i.e., Kronecker factors (KFs), before preconditioning gradients, resulting in large computation and communication overheads as well as a high memory footprint. In this paper, we propose DP-KFAC, a novel distributed preconditioning scheme that distributes the KF constructing tasks at different DNN layers to different workers. DP-KFAC not only retains the convergence property of the existing D-KFAC algorithms but also enables three benefits: reduced computation overhead in constructing KFs, no communication of KFs, and low memory footprint. Extensive experiments on a 64-GPU cluster show that DP-KFAC reduces the computation overhead by 1.55x-1.65x, the communication cost by 2.79x-3.15x, and the memory footprint by 1.14x-1.47x in each second-order update compared to the state-of-the-art D-KFAC methods.

Kai Tan, Lin Zhang, Ruiteng Zhang et al.

Spoofing-robust automatic speaker verification (SASV) aims to integrate automatic speaker verification (ASV) and countermeasure (CM). A popular solution is fusion of independent ASV and CM scores. To better modeling SASV, some frameworks integrate ASV and CM within a single network. However, these solutions are typically bi-encoder based, offer limited interpretability, and cannot be readily adapted to new evaluation parameters without retraining. Based on this, we propose a unified end-to-end framework via a three-class formulation that enables log-likelihood ratio (LLR) inference from class logits for a more interpretable decision pipeline. Experiments show comparable performance to existing methods on ASVSpoof5 and better results on SpoofCeleb. The visualization and analysis also prove that the three-class reformulation provides more interpretability.

Muhammad Umar Farooq Qaisar, Weijie Yuan, Onur Günlü et al.

The commencement of the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks represents a fundamental shift in the integration of communication and sensing technologies to support next-generation applications. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a key concept in this evolution, enabling end-to-end support for both communication and sensing within a unified framework. It enhances spectrum efficiency, reduces latency, and supports diverse use cases, including smart cities, autonomous systems, and perceptive environments. This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of ISAC's role in 6G networks, beginning with its evolution since 5G and the technical drivers behind its adoption. Core principles and system variations of ISAC are introduced, followed by an in-depth discussion of the enabling technologies that facilitate its practical deployment. The paper further analyzes current research directions to highlight key challenges, open issues, and emerging trends. Design insights and recommendations are also presented to support future development and implementation. This work ultimately tries to address three central questions: Why is ISAC essential for 6G? What innovations does it bring? How will it shape the future of wireless communication?

Yifan Wang, Lin Zhang, Ran Song et al.

Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer the knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without any assumptions of the label sets, which requires distinguishing the unknown samples from the known ones in the target domain. A main challenge of UniDA is that the nonidentical label sets cause the misalignment between the two domains. Moreover, the domain discrepancy and the supervised objectives in the source domain easily lead the whole model to be biased towards the common classes and produce overconfident predictions for unknown samples. To address the above challenging problems, we propose a new uncertainty-guided UniDA framework. Firstly, we introduce an empirical estimation of the probability of a target sample belonging to the unknown class which fully exploits the distribution of the target samples in the latent space. Then, based on the estimation, we propose a novel neighbors searching scheme in a linear subspace with a $δ$-filter to estimate the uncertainty score of a target sample and discover unknown samples. It fully utilizes the relationship between a target sample and its neighbors in the source domain to avoid the influence of domain misalignment. Secondly, this paper well balances the confidences of predictions for both known and unknown samples through an uncertainty-guided margin loss based on the confidences of discovered unknown samples, which can reduce the gap between the intra-class variances of known classes with respect to the unknown class. Finally, experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Ruiteng Zhang, Jianguo Wei, Xugang Lu et al.

Speaker embedding is an important front-end module to explore discriminative speaker features for many speech applications where speaker information is needed. Current SOTA backbone networks for speaker embedding are designed to aggregate multi-scale features from an utterance with multi-branch network architectures for speaker representation. However, naively adding many branches of multi-scale features with the simple fully convolutional operation could not efficiently improve the performance due to the rapid increase of model parameters and computational complexity. Therefore, in the most current state-of-the-art network architectures, only a few branches corresponding to a limited number of temporal scales could be designed for speaker embeddings. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an effective temporal multi-scale (TMS) model where multi-scale branches could be efficiently designed in a speaker embedding network almost without increasing computational costs. The new model is based on the conventional TDNN, where the network architecture is smartly separated into two modeling operators: a channel-modeling operator and a temporal multi-branch modeling operator. Adding temporal multi-scale in the temporal multi-branch operator needs only a little bit increase of the number of parameters, and thus save more computational budget for adding more branches with large temporal scales. Moreover, in the inference stage, we further developed a systemic re-parameterization method to convert the TMS-based model into a single-path-based topology in order to increase inference speed. We investigated the performance of the new TMS method for automatic speaker verification (ASV) on in-domain and out-of-domain conditions. Results show that the TMS-based model obtained a significant increase in the performance over the SOTA ASV models, meanwhile, had a faster inference speed.

Dayuan Fu, Shenyu Wu, Yunze Wu et al.

Training capable software engineering (SWE) agents demands large-scale, executable, and verifiable environments that provide dynamic feedback loops for iterative code editing, test execution, and solution refinement. However, existing open-source datasets remain limited in scale and repository diversity, while industrial solutions are opaque with unreleased infrastructure, creating a prohibitive barrier for most academic research groups. We present OpenSWE, the largest fully transparent framework for SWE agent training in Python, comprising 45,320 executable Docker environments spanning over 12.8k repositories, with all Dockerfiles, evaluation scripts, and infrastructure fully open-sourced for reproducibility. OpenSWE is built through a multi-agent synthesis pipeline deployed across a 64-node distributed cluster, automating repository exploration, Dockerfile construction, evaluation script generation, and iterative test analysis. Beyond scale, we propose a quality-centric filtering pipeline that characterizes the inherent difficulty of each environment, filtering out instances that are either unsolvable or insufficiently challenging and retaining only those that maximize learning efficiency. With $891K spent on environment construction and an additional $576K on trajectory sampling and difficulty-aware curation, the entire project represents a total investment of approximately $1.47 million, yielding about 13,000 curated trajectories from roughly 9,000 quality guaranteed environments. Extensive experiments validate OpenSWE's effectiveness: OpenSWE-32B and OpenSWE-72B achieve 62.4% and 66.0% on SWE-bench Verified, establishing SOTA among Qwen2.5 series. Moreover, SWE-focused training yields substantial out-of-domain improvements, including up to 12 points on mathematical reasoning and 5 points on science benchmarks, without degrading factual recall.

Qijie Bai, Jiawen Guo, Haiwei Zhang et al.

Temporal heterogeneous information network (temporal HIN) embedding, aiming to represent various types of nodes of different timestamps into low dimensional spaces while preserving structural and semantic information, is of vital importance in diverse real-life tasks. Researchers have made great efforts on temporal HIN embedding in Euclidean spaces and got some considerable achievements. However, there is always a fundamental conflict that many real-world networks show hierarchical property and power-law distribution, and are not isometric of Euclidean spaces. Recently, representation learning in hyperbolic spaces has been proved to be valid for data with hierarchical and power-law structure. Inspired by this character, we propose a hyperbolic heterogeneous temporal network embedding ($\text{H}^2\text{TNE}$) model for temporal HINs. Specifically, we leverage a temporally and heterogeneously double-constrained random walk strategy to capture the structural and semantic information, and then calculate the embedding by exploiting hyperbolic distance in proximity measurement. Experimental results show that our method has superior performance on temporal link prediction and node classification compared with SOTA models.

Yifan Wang, Lin Zhang, Ran Song et al.

Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer the knowledge of common classes from the source domain to the target domain without any prior knowledge on the label set, which requires distinguishing in the target domain the unknown samples from the known ones. Recent methods usually focused on categorizing a target sample into one of the source classes rather than distinguishing known and unknown samples, which ignores the inter-sample affinity between known and unknown samples and may lead to suboptimal performance. Aiming at this issue, we propose a novel UDA framework where such inter-sample affinity is exploited. Specifically, we introduce a knowability-based labeling scheme which can be divided into two steps: 1) Knowability-guided detection of known and unknown samples based on the intrinsic structure of the neighborhoods of samples, where we leverage the first singular vectors of the affinity matrices to obtain the knowability of every target sample. 2) Label refinement based on neighborhood consistency to relabel the target samples, where we refine the labels of each target sample based on its neighborhood consistency of predictions. Then, auxiliary losses based on the two steps are used to reduce the inter-sample affinity between the unknown and the known target samples. Finally, experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Qing Guo, Xinhang Li, Junyu Chen et al.

Leveraging large language models (LLMs) in traffic signal control (TSC) improves optimization efficiency and interpretability compared to traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods. However, existing LLM-based approaches are limited by fixed time signal durations and are prone to hallucination errors, while RL methods lack robustness in signal timing decisions and suffer from poor generalization. To address these challenges, this paper proposes HeraldLight, a dual LLMs architecture enhanced by Herald guided prompts. The Herald Module extracts contextual information and forecasts queue lengths for each traffic phase based on real-time conditions. The first LLM, LLM-Agent, uses these forecasts to make fine grained traffic signal control, while the second LLM, LLM-Critic, refines LLM-Agent's outputs, correcting errors and hallucinations. These refined outputs are used for score-based fine-tuning to improve accuracy and robustness. Simulation experiments using CityFlow on real world datasets covering 224 intersections in Jinan (12), Hangzhou (16), and New York (196) demonstrate that HeraldLight outperforms state of the art baselines, achieving a 20.03% reduction in average travel time across all scenarios and a 10.74% reduction in average queue length on the Jinan and Hangzhou scenarios. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/BUPT-ANTlab/HeraldLight.

Lin Zhang, Tiziano Portenier, Orcun Goksel

Photorealistic image generation from simulated label maps are necessitated in several contexts, such as for medical training in virtual reality. With conventional deep learning methods, this task requires images that are paired with semantic annotations, which typically are unavailable. We introduce a contrastive learning framework for generating photorealistic images from simulated label maps, by learning from unpaired sets of both. Due to potentially large scene differences between real images and label maps, existing unpaired image translation methods lead to artifacts of scene modification in synthesized images. We utilize simulated images as surrogate targets for a contrastive loss, while ensuring consistency by utilizing features from a reverse translation network. Our method enables bidirectional label-image translations, which is demonstrated in a variety of scenarios and datasets, including laparoscopy, ultrasound, and driving scenes. By comparing with state-of-the-art unpaired translation methods, our proposed method is shown to generate realistic and scene-accurate translations.

Suwen Shi, Ziwei Huang, Xingxin Gu et al.

In recent years, conventional chemistry techniques have faced significant challenges due to their inherent limitations, struggling to cope with the increasing complexity and volume of data generated in contemporary research endeavors. Computational methodologies represent robust tools in the field of chemistry, offering the capacity to harness potent machine-learning models to yield insightful analytical outcomes. This review delves into the spectrum of computational strategies available for natural product analysis and constructs a research framework for investigating both qualitative and quantitative chemistry problems. Our objective is to present a novel perspective on the symbiosis of machine learning and chemistry, with the potential to catalyze a transformation in the field of natural product analysis.

Yu Zhang, Lin Zhang

Fracture is one of the main failure modes of engineering structures such as buildings and roads. Effective detection of surface cracks is significant for damage evaluation and structure maintenance. In recent years, the emergence and development of deep learning techniques have shown great potential to facilitate surface crack detection. Currently, most reported tasks were performed by a convolutional neural network (CNN), while the limitation of CNN may be improved by the transformer architecture introduced recently. In this study, we investigated nine promising models to evaluate their performance in pavement surface crack detection by model accuracy, computational complexity, and model stability. We created 711 images of 224 by 224 pixels with crack labels, selected an optimal loss function, compared the evaluation metrics of the validation dataset and test dataset, analyzed the data details, and checked the segmentation outcomes of each model. We find that transformer-based models generally are easier to converge during the training process and have higher accuracy, but usually exhibit more memory consumption and low processing efficiency. Among nine models, SwinUNet outperforms the other two transformers and shows the highest accuracy among nine models. The results should shed light on surface crack detection by various deep-learning models and provide a guideline for future applications in this field.

Ruiqi Xu, Yongfeng Huang, Xin Chen et al.

In this work, we introduce the concept of complex text style transfer tasks, and constructed complex text datasets based on two widely applicable scenarios. Our dataset is the first large-scale data set of its kind, with 700 rephrased sentences and 1,000 sentences from the game Genshin Impact. While large language models (LLM) have shown promise in complex text style transfer, they have drawbacks such as data privacy concerns, network instability, and high deployment costs. To address these issues, we explore the effectiveness of small models (less than T5-3B) with implicit style pre-training through contrastive learning. We also propose a method for automated evaluation of text generation quality based on alignment with human evaluations using ChatGPT. Finally, we compare our approach with existing methods and show that our model achieves state-of-art performances of few-shot text style transfer models.

Zhouhong Gu, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Haoning Ye et al.

Domain knowledge refers to the in-depth understanding, expertise, and familiarity with a specific subject, industry, field, or area of special interest. The existing benchmarks are all lack of an overall design for domain knowledge evaluation. Holding the belief that the real ability of domain language understanding can only be fairly evaluated by an comprehensive and in-depth benchmark, we introduces the Domma, a Domain Mastery Benchmark. DomMa targets at testing Large Language Models (LLMs) on their domain knowledge understanding, it features extensive domain coverage, large data volume, and a continually updated data set based on Chinese 112 first-level subject classifications. DomMa consist of 100,000 questions in both Chinese and English sourced from graduate entrance examinations and undergraduate exams in Chinese college. We have also propose designs to make benchmark and evaluation process more suitable to LLMs.

Lin Zhang, Shaohuai Shi, Bo Li

Second-order optimization algorithms exhibit excellent convergence properties for training deep learning models, but often incur significant computation and memory overheads. This can result in lower training efficiency than the first-order counterparts such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In this work, we present a memory- and time-efficient second-order algorithm named Eva with two novel techniques: 1) we construct the second-order information with the Kronecker factorization of small stochastic vectors over a mini-batch of training data to reduce memory consumption, and 2) we derive an efficient update formula without explicitly computing the inverse of matrices using the Sherman-Morrison formula. We further extend Eva to a general vectorized approximation framework to improve the compute and memory efficiency of two existing second-order algorithms (FOOF and Shampoo) without affecting their convergence performance. Extensive experimental results on different models and datasets show that Eva reduces the end-to-end training time up to 2.05x and 2.42x compared to first-order SGD and second-order algorithms (K-FAC and Shampoo), respectively.

Lin Zhang, Nicholas Moskwa, Melinda Larsen et al.

Unlike tabular data, features in network data are interconnected within a domain-specific graph. Examples of this setting include gene expression overlaid on a protein interaction network (PPI) and user opinions in a social network. Network data is typically high-dimensional (large number of nodes) and often contains outlier snapshot instances and noise. In addition, it is often non-trivial and time-consuming to annotate instances with global labels (e.g., disease or normal). How can we jointly select discriminative subnetworks and representative instances for network data without supervision? We address these challenges within an unsupervised framework for joint subnetwork and instance selection in network data, called UISS, via a convex self-representation objective. Given an unlabeled network dataset, UISS identifies representative instances while ignoring outliers. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both discriminative subnetwork selection and representative instance selection, achieving up to 10% accuracy improvement on all real-world data sets we use for evaluation. When employed for exploratory analysis in RNA-seq network samples from multiple studies it produces interpretable and informative summaries.

Haoyu Zhang, Jingyi Zhou, Peng Ye et al.

With the development of deep learning, ViT-based stereo matching methods have made significant progress due to their remarkable robustness and zero-shot ability. However, due to the limitations of ViTs in handling resolution sensitivity and their relative neglect of local information, the ability of ViT-based methods to predict details and handle arbitrary-resolution images is still weaker than that of CNN-based methods. To address these shortcomings, we propose MLG-Stereo, a systematic pipeline-level design that extends global modeling beyond the encoder stage. First, we propose a Multi-Granularity Feature Network to effectively balance global context and local geometric information, enabling comprehensive feature extraction from images of arbitrary resolution and bridging the gap between training and inference scales. Then, a Local-Global Cost Volume is constructed to capture both locally-correlated and global-aware matching information. Finally, a Local-Global Guided Recurrent Unit is introduced to iteratively optimize the disparity locally under the guidance of global information. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our MLG-Stereo exhibits highly competitive performance on the Middlebury and KITTI-2015 benchmarks compared to contemporaneous leading methods, and achieves outstanding results in the KITTI-2012 dataset.

Zheng Li, Xiaoyan Zhou, Zongze Li et al.

Optical packet header recognition is an important signal processing task of optical communication networks. In this work, we propose an all-optical reservoir, consisting of integrated double-ring resonators (DRRs) as nodes, for fast and accurate optical packet header recognition. As the delay-bandwidth product (DBP) of the node is a key figure-of-merit in the reservoir, we adopt a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to maximize the DBPs for various types of DRRs, which has the advantage of full parameter space optimization and fast convergence speed. Intriguingly, the optimized DBPs of the DRRs in cascaded, parallel, and embedded configurations reach the same maximum value, which is believed to be the global maximum. Finally, 3-bit and 6-bit packet header recognition tasks are performed with the all-optical reservoir consisting of the optimized cascaded rings, which have greatly reduced chip size and the desired "flat-top" delay spectra. Using this optical computing scheme, word-error rates as low as 5*10-4 and 9*10-4 are achieved for 3-bit and 6-bit packet header recognition tasks, respectively, which are one order of magnitude better than the previously reported values.