Yujuan Tan

Lang Xiong, Ning Liu, Ao Ren et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face significant deployment challenges due to their massive computational demands. % While pruning offers a promising compression solution, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) They neglect activation distribution shifts between calibration data and test data, resulting in inaccurate error estimations; (2) They overlook the long-tail distribution characteristics of activations in the attention module. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel pruning method, $D^2Prune$. First, we propose a dual Taylor expansion-based method that jointly models weight and activation perturbations for precise error estimation, leading to precise pruning mask selection and weight updating and facilitating error minimization during pruning. % Second, we propose an attention-aware dynamic update strategy that preserves the long-tail attention pattern by jointly minimizing the KL divergence of attention distributions and the reconstruction error. Extensive experiments show that $D^2Prune$ consistently outperforms SOTA methods across various LLMs (e.g., OPT-125M, LLaMA2/3, and Qwen3). Moreover, the dynamic attention update mechanism also generalizes well to ViT-based vision models like DeiT, achieving superior accuracy on ImageNet-1K.

Lin Huang, Yujuan Tan, Weisheng Li et al.

This paper addresses the inherent limitations of conventional bottleneck structures (diminished instance discriminability due to overemphasis on batch statistics) and decoupled heads (computational redundancy) in object detection frameworks by proposing two novel modules: the Instance-Specific Bottleneck with full-channel global self-attention (ISB) and the Instance-Specific Asymmetric Decoupled Head (ISADH). The ISB module innovatively reconstructs feature maps to establish an efficient full-channel global attention mechanism through synergistic fusion of batch-statistical and instance-specific features. Complementing this, the ISADH module pioneers an asymmetric decoupled architecture enabling hierarchical multi-dimensional feature integration via dual-stream batch-instance representation fusion. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO benchmark demonstrate that the coordinated deployment of ISB and ISADH in the YOLO-PRO framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across all computational scales. Specifically, YOLO-PRO surpasses YOLOv8 by 1.0-1.6% AP (N/S/M/L/X scales) and outperforms YOLO11 by 0.1-0.5% AP in critical N/M/L/X groups, while maintaining competitive computational efficiency. This work provides practical insights for developing high-precision detectors deployable on edge devices.

Moming Duan, Duo Liu, Xinyuan Ji et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables the multiple participating devices to collaboratively contribute to a global neural network model while keeping the training data locally. Unlike the centralized training setting, the non-IID, imbalanced (statistical heterogeneity) and distribution shifted training data of FL is distributed in the federated network, which will increase the divergences between the local models and the global model, further degrading performance. In this paper, we propose a flexible clustered federated learning (CFL) framework named FlexCFL, in which we 1) group the training of clients based on the similarities between the clients' optimization directions for lower training divergence; 2) implement an efficient newcomer device cold start mechanism for framework scalability and practicality; 3) flexibly migrate clients to meet the challenge of client-level data distribution shift. FlexCFL can achieve improvements by dividing joint optimization into groups of sub-optimization and can strike a balance between accuracy and communication efficiency in the distribution shift environment. The convergence and complexity are analyzed to demonstrate the efficiency of FlexCFL. We also evaluate FlexCFL on several open datasets and made comparisons with related CFL frameworks. The results show that FlexCFL can significantly improve absolute test accuracy by +10.6% on FEMNIST compared to FedAvg, +3.5% on FashionMNIST compared to FedProx, +8.4% on MNIST compared to FeSEM. The experiment results show that FlexCFL is also communication efficient in the distribution shift environment.

Yu Zhang, Moming Duan, Duo Liu et al.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that protects privacy and tackles the problem of isolated data islands. At present, there are two main communication strategies of FL: synchronous FL and asynchronous FL. The advantages of synchronous FL are that the model has high precision and fast convergence speed. However, this synchronous communication strategy has the risk that the central server waits too long for the devices, namely, the straggler effect which has a negative impact on some time-critical applications. Asynchronous FL has a natural advantage in mitigating the straggler effect, but there are threats of model quality degradation and server crash. Therefore, we combine the advantages of these two strategies to propose a clustered semi-asynchronous federated learning (CSAFL) framework. We evaluate CSAFL based on four imbalanced federated datasets in a non-IID setting and compare CSAFL to the baseline methods. The experimental results show that CSAFL significantly improves test accuracy by more than +5% on the four datasets compared to TA-FedAvg. In particular, CSAFL improves absolute test accuracy by +34.4% on non-IID FEMNIST compared to TA-FedAvg.

Li Li, Moming Duan, Duo Liu et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel distributed machine learning which allows thousands of edge devices to train model locally without uploading data concentrically to the server. But since real federated settings are resource-constrained, FL is encountered with systems heterogeneity which causes a lot of stragglers directly and then leads to significantly accuracy reduction indirectly. To solve the problems caused by systems heterogeneity, we introduce a novel self-adaptive federated framework FedSAE which adjusts the training task of devices automatically and selects participants actively to alleviate the performance degradation. In this work, we 1) propose FedSAE which leverages the complete information of devices' historical training tasks to predict the affordable training workloads for each device. In this way, FedSAE can estimate the reliability of each device and self-adaptively adjust the amount of training load per client in each round. 2) combine our framework with Active Learning to self-adaptively select participants. Then the framework accelerates the convergence of the global model. In our framework, the server evaluates devices' value of training based on their training loss. Then the server selects those clients with bigger value for the global model to reduce communication overhead. The experimental result indicates that in a highly heterogeneous system, FedSAE converges faster than FedAvg, the vanilla FL framework. Furthermore, FedSAE outperforms than FedAvg on several federated datasets - FedSAE improves test accuracy by 26.7% and reduces stragglers by 90.3% on average.

Moming Duan, Duo Liu, Xinyuan Ji et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables the multiple participating devices to collaboratively contribute to a global neural network model while keeping the training data locally. Unlike the centralized training setting, the non-IID and imbalanced (statistical heterogeneity) training data of FL is distributed in the federated network, which will increase the divergences between the local models and global model, further degrading performance. In this paper, we propose a novel clustered federated learning (CFL) framework FedGroup, in which we 1) group the training of clients based on the similarities between the clients' optimization directions for high training performance; 2) construct a new data-driven distance measure to improve the efficiency of the client clustering procedure. 3) implement a newcomer device cold start mechanism based on the auxiliary global model for framework scalability and practicality. FedGroup can achieve improvements by dividing joint optimization into groups of sub-optimization and can be combined with FL optimizer FedProx. The convergence and complexity are analyzed to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed framework. We also evaluate FedGroup and FedGrouProx (combined with FedProx) on several open datasets and made comparisons with related CFL frameworks. The results show that FedGroup can significantly improve absolute test accuracy by +14.1% on FEMNIST compared to FedAvg. +3.4% on Sentiment140 compared to FedProx, +6.9% on MNIST compared to FeSEM.