Zhijie Huang

Zhijie Huang, Stephen McIntosh, Daisuke Saito et al.

A good language model starts with a good tokenizer. Tokenization is especially important for speech modeling, which must handle continuous signals that mix linguistic and non-linguistic information. A speech tokenizer should extract phonetics and prosody, suppress linguistically irrelevant information like speaker identity, and enable high-quality synthesis. We present Kanade, a single-layer disentangled speech tokenizer that realizes this ideal. Kanade separates out acoustic constants to create a single stream of tokens that captures rich phonetics and prosody. It does so without the need for auxiliary methods that existing disentangled codecs often rely on. Experiments show that Kanade achieves state-of-the-art speaker disentanglement and lexical availability, while maintaining excellent reconstruction quality.

Kejun Zhang, Xinda Wu, Tieyao Zhang et al.

Although deep learning has revolutionized music generation, existing methods for structured melody generation follow an end-to-end left-to-right note-by-note generative paradigm and treat each note equally. Here, we present WuYun, a knowledge-enhanced deep learning architecture for improving the structure of generated melodies, which first generates the most structurally important notes to construct a melodic skeleton and subsequently infills it with dynamically decorative notes into a full-fledged melody. Specifically, we use music domain knowledge to extract melodic skeletons and employ sequence learning to reconstruct them, which serve as additional knowledge to provide auxiliary guidance for the melody generation process. We demonstrate that WuYun can generate melodies with better long-term structure and musicality and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by 0.51 on average on all subjective evaluation metrics. Our study provides a multidisciplinary lens to design melodic hierarchical structures and bridge the gap between data-driven and knowledge-based approaches for numerous music generation tasks.

Xinda Wu, Zhijie Huang, Kejun Zhang et al.

Pre-trained language models have achieved impressive results in various music understanding and generation tasks. However, existing pre-training methods for symbolic melody generation struggle to capture multi-scale, multi-dimensional structural information in note sequences, due to the domain knowledge discrepancy between text and music. Moreover, the lack of available large-scale symbolic melody datasets limits the pre-training improvement. In this paper, we propose MelodyGLM, a multi-task pre-training framework for generating melodies with long-term structure. We design the melodic n-gram and long span sampling strategies to create local and global blank infilling tasks for modeling the local and global structures in melodies. Specifically, we incorporate pitch n-grams, rhythm n-grams, and their combined n-grams into the melodic n-gram blank infilling tasks for modeling the multi-dimensional structures in melodies. To this end, we have constructed a large-scale symbolic melody dataset, MelodyNet, containing more than 0.4 million melody pieces. MelodyNet is utilized for large-scale pre-training and domain-specific n-gram lexicon construction. Both subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that MelodyGLM surpasses the standard and previous pre-training methods. In particular, subjective evaluations show that, on the melody continuation task, MelodyGLM gains average improvements of 0.82, 0.87, 0.78, and 0.94 in consistency, rhythmicity, structure, and overall quality, respectively. Notably, MelodyGLM nearly matches the quality of human-composed melodies on the melody inpainting task.

Shujie Han, Feng Jiang, Patrick P. C. Lee et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) training is frequently interrupted by a heterogeneous spectrum of failures, from common GPU crashes to catastrophic cluster-wide outages. Existing checkpointing systems rely on monolithic, single-tier storage backend, forcing a trade-off between state-saving overhead and recovery speed. We propose TierCheck, a cluster-aware tiered checkpointing system that aligns storage placement with failure heterogeneity. TierCheck adopts a three-tier design that maintains lightweight differential checkpoints in local and peer memory for fast localized recovery, while asynchronously migrating heavyweight base checkpoints to remote persistent storage. It also ensures strict global consistency across tiers without stalling training, and achieves fast cluster-aware checkpoint restoration during recovery. Evaluations on models up to 40 billion parameters show that TierCheck achieves low training overhead, reduces end-to-end checkpointing time to under 10s, and supports high-frequency checkpointing, ultimately striking an optimal balance between low-overhead persistence and fast recovery.

Zui Chen, Yezeng Chen, Jiaqi Han et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are displaying emergent abilities for math reasoning tasks,and there is a growing attention on enhancing the ability of open-source LLMs through supervised fine-tuning (SFT).In this paper, we aim to explore a general data strategy for supervised data to help optimize and expand math reasoning ability.Firstly, we determine the ability boundary of reasoning paths augmentation by identifying these paths' minimal optimal set.Secondly, we validate that different abilities of the model can be cumulatively enhanced by Mix of Minimal Optimal Sets of corresponding types of data, while our models MMOS achieve SOTA performance on series base models under much lower construction costs.Besides, we point out GSM-HARD is not really hard and today's LLMs no longer lack numerical robustness.Also, we provide an Auto Problem Generator for robustness testing and educational applications.Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/cyzhh/MMOS.

Sihan Xu, Zelong Jiang, Ruisi Liu et al.

Image-to-image translation is a fundamental task in computer vision. It transforms images from one domain to images in another domain so that they have particular domain-specific characteristics. Most prior works train a generative model to learn the mapping from a source domain to a target domain. However, learning such mapping between domains is challenging because data from different domains can be highly unbalanced in terms of both quality and quantity. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to extract image features by learning the similarities and differences of samples within the same data distribution via a novel contrastive learning framework, which we call Auto-Contrastive-Encoder (ACE). ACE learns the content code as the similarity between samples with the same content information and different style perturbations. The design of ACE enables us to achieve zero-shot image-to-image translation with no training on image translation tasks for the first time. Moreover, our learning method can learn the style features of images on different domains effectively. Consequently, our model achieves competitive results on multimodal image translation tasks with zero-shot learning as well. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential of our method in transfer learning. With fine-tuning, the quality of translated images improves in unseen domains. Even though we use contrastive learning, all of our training can be performed on a single GPU with the batch size of 8.

Weichen Dai, Yezeng Chen, Zijie Dai et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for enabling domain-specific intelligence. In this work, we present our vision for building an AI-powered chemical brain, which frames chemical intelligence around four core capabilities: information extraction, semantic parsing, knowledge-based QA, and reasoning & planning. We argue that domain knowledge and logic are essential pillars for enabling such a system to assist and accelerate scientific discovery. To initiate this effort, we introduce our first generation of large language models for chemistry: KALE-LM-Chem and KALE-LM-Chem-1.5, which have achieved outstanding performance in tasks related to the field of chemistry. We hope that our work serves as a strong starting point, helping to realize more intelligent AI and promoting the advancement of human science and technology, as well as societal development.

Xiaopeng Guo, Zhijie Huang, Jie Gao et al.

We study the problem of knowledge tracing (KT) where the goal is to trace the students' knowledge mastery over time so as to make predictions on their future performance. Owing to the good representation capacity of deep neural networks (DNNs), recent advances on KT have increasingly concentrated on exploring DNNs to improve the performance of KT. However, we empirically reveal that the DNNs based KT models may run the risk of overfitting, especially on small datasets, leading to limited generalization. In this paper, by leveraging the current advances in adversarial training (AT), we propose an efficient AT based KT method (ATKT) to enhance KT model's generalization and thus push the limit of KT. Specifically, we first construct adversarial perturbations and add them on the original interaction embeddings as adversarial examples. The original and adversarial examples are further used to jointly train the KT model, forcing it is not only to be robust to the adversarial examples, but also to enhance the generalization over the original ones. To better implement AT, we then present an efficient attentive-LSTM model as KT backbone, where the key is a proposed knowledge hidden state attention module that adaptively aggregates information from previous knowledge hidden states while simultaneously highlighting the importance of current knowledge hidden state to make a more accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our ATKT achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: \color{blue} {\url{https://github.com/xiaopengguo/ATKT}}.

Yukai Zhou, Jian Lou, Zhijie Huang et al.

Ensuring the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for generating responses consistent with human values. However, LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, where carefully crafted prompts manipulate them into producing toxic content. One category of such attacks reformulates the task as an optimization problem, aiming to elicit affirmative responses from the LLM. However, these methods heavily rely on predefined objectionable behaviors, limiting their effectiveness and adaptability to diverse harmful queries. In this study, we first identify why the vanilla target loss is suboptimal and then propose enhancements to the loss objective. We introduce DSN (Don't Say No) attack, which combines a cosine decay schedule method with refusal suppression to achieve higher success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSN outperforms baseline attacks and achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates (ASR). DSN also shows strong universality and transferability to unseen datasets and black-box models.

Cheng Ge, Han-Shen Tae, Zhenqiang Zhang et al.

Target-specific peptides, such as conotoxins, exhibit exceptional binding affinity and selectivity toward ion channels and receptors. However, their therapeutic potential remains underutilized due to the limited diversity of natural variants and the labor-intensive nature of traditional optimization strategies. Here, we present CreoPep, a deep learning-based conditional generative framework that integrates masked language modeling with a progressive masking scheme to design high-affinity peptide mutants while uncovering novel structural motifs. CreoPep employs an integrative augmentation pipeline, combining FoldX-based energy screening with temperature-controlled multinomial sampling, to generate structurally and functionally diverse peptides that retain key pharmacological properties. We validate this approach by designing conotoxin inhibitors targeting the $α$7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, achieving submicromolar potency in electrophysiological assays. Structural analysis reveals that CreoPep-generated variants engage in both conserved and novel binding modes, including disulfide-deficient forms, thus expanding beyond conventional design paradigms. Overall, CreoPep offers a robust and generalizable platform that bridges computational peptide design with experimental validation, accelerating the discovery of next-generation peptide therapeutics.

Weichen Dai, Zijie Dai, Zhijie Huang et al.

While current large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable linguistic capabilities through training on massive unstructured text corpora, they remain inadequate in leveraging structured scientific data (e.g., chemical molecular properties in databases) that encapsulate centuries of accumulated scientific expertise. These structured datasets hold strategic significance for advancing AI for Science yet current approaches merely treat them as auxiliary supplements to unstructured text. This study pioneers a systematic investigation into enhancing LLMs with structured scientific data, using chemical molecular science as a testbed. We investigate the impact of incorporating molecular property data on LLM across distinct training phases, including continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Notably, to address the inherent limitation of numerical insensitivity in large models, we propose an innovative methodology termed "Reinforcement Learning with Database Feedback" (RLDBF). Experimental evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, with the model exhibiting remarkable generalization capabilities on previously unseen data and other chemical tasks. The results substantiate the potential of our method in advancing the field of structured scientific data processing within LLMs.

Daliang Ouyang, Su He, Guozhong Zhang et al.

Remarkable effectiveness of the channel or spatial attention mechanisms for producing more discernible feature representation are illustrated in various computer vision tasks. However, modeling the cross-channel relationships with channel dimensionality reduction may bring side effect in extracting deep visual representations. In this paper, a novel efficient multi-scale attention (EMA) module is proposed. Focusing on retaining the information on per channel and decreasing the computational overhead, we reshape the partly channels into the batch dimensions and group the channel dimensions into multiple sub-features which make the spatial semantic features well-distributed inside each feature group. Specifically, apart from encoding the global information to re-calibrate the channel-wise weight in each parallel branch, the output features of the two parallel branches are further aggregated by a cross-dimension interaction for capturing pixel-level pairwise relationship. We conduct extensive ablation studies and experiments on image classification and object detection tasks with popular benchmarks (e.g., CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k, MS COCO and VisDrone2019) for evaluating its performance.

Zhijie Huang, Xiaopeng Guo, Mingyu Shang et al.

In this paper, a novel QP variable convolutional neural network based in-loop filter is proposed for VVC intra coding. To avoid training and deploying multiple networks, we develop an efficient QP attention module (QPAM) which can capture compression noise levels for different QPs and emphasize meaningful features along channel dimension. Then we embed QPAM into the residual block, and based on it, we design a network architecture that is equipped with controllability for different QPs. To make the proposed model focus more on examples that have more compression artifacts or is hard to restore, a focal mean square error (MSE) loss function is employed to fine tune the network. Experimental results show that our approach achieves 4.03\% BD-Rate saving on average for all intra configuration, which is even better than QP-separate CNN models while having less model parameters.