Xin Zhang

Zhaojian Yu, Xin Zhang, Ning Shang et al.

Recent work demonstrates that, after instruction tuning, Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) can obtain impressive capabilities to address a wide range of code-related tasks. However, current instruction tuning methods for Code LLMs mainly focus on the traditional code generation task, resulting in poor performance in complex multi-task scenarios. In this paper, we concentrate on multiple code-related tasks and present WaveCoder, a series of Code LLMs trained with Widespread And Versatile Enhanced instruction data. To enable the models to tackle complex code-related tasks, we propose a method to stably generate diverse, high-quality instruction data from open source code dataset in multi-task scenarios and obtain CodeSeaXDataset, a dataset comprising 19,915 instruction instances across 4 code-related tasks, which is aimed at improving the generalization ability of Code LLM. Our experiments demonstrate that WaveCoder models significantly outperform other open-source models in terms of the generalization ability across different code-related tasks. Moreover, WaveCoder-Ultra-6.7B presents the state-of-the-art generalization abilities on a wide range of code-related tasks.

Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Xin Zhang et al.

Preference learning extends the performance of Code LLMs beyond traditional supervised fine-tuning by leveraging relative quality comparisons. In existing approaches, a set of n candidate solutions is evaluated based on test case success rates, with the candidate demonstrating a higher pass rate being labeled as positive and its counterpart with a lower pass rate as negative. However, because this approach aligns entire failing code blocks rather than pinpointing specific errors, it lacks the granularity necessary to capture meaningful error-correction relationships. As a result, the model is unable to learn more informative error-correction patterns. To address these issues, we propose Target-DPO, a new preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs. Target-DPO explicitly locates error regions and aligns the corresponding tokens via a tailored DPO algorithm. To facilitate it, we introduce the CodeFlow dataset, where samples are iteratively refined until passing tests, with modifications capturing error corrections. Extensive experiments show that a diverse suite of Code LLMs equipped with Target-DPO achieves significant performance gains in code generation and improves on challenging tasks like BigCodeBench. In-depth analysis reveals that Target-DPO yields fewer errors. Code, model and datasets are in: https://github.com/JieWu02/Target-DPO.

Hua Zheng, Kuang-Hung Liu, Igor Fedorov et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become a widely used tool for automating neural network design. While one-shot NAS methods have successfully reduced computational requirements, they often require extensive training. On the other hand, zero-shot NAS utilizes training-free proxies to evaluate a candidate architecture's test performance but has two limitations: (1) inability to use the information gained as a network improves with training and (2) unreliable performance, particularly in complex domains like RecSys, due to the multi-modal data inputs and complex architecture configurations. To synthesize the benefits of both methods, we introduce a "sub-one-shot" paradigm that serves as a bridge between zero-shot and one-shot NAS. In sub-one-shot NAS, the supernet is trained using only a small subset of the training data, a phase we refer to as "warm-up." Within this framework, we present SiGeo, a proxy founded on a novel theoretical framework that connects the supernet warm-up with the efficacy of the proxy. Extensive experiments have shown that SiGeo, with the benefit of warm-up, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art NAS proxies on various established NAS benchmarks. When a supernet is warmed up, it can achieve comparable performance to weight-sharing one-shot NAS methods, but with a significant reduction ($\sim 60$\%) in computational costs.

Sean Fletcher, Gabby Scott, Douglas Currie et al.

Monitoring the effects of the chemotherapeutic agent Taxol at the cellular level is critical for both clinical evaluation and biomedical research. However, existing detection methods require specialized equipment, skilled personnel, and extensive sample preparation, making them expensive, labor-intensive, and unsuitable for high-throughput or real-time analysis. Deep learning approaches have shown great promise in medical and biological image analysis, enabling automated, high-throughput assessment of cellular morphology. Yet, no publicly available dataset currently exists for automated morphological analysis of cellular responses to Taxol exposure. To address this gap, we introduce a new microscopy image dataset capturing C6 glioma cells treated with varying concentrations of Taxol. To provide an effective solution for Taxol concentration classification and establish a benchmark for future studies on this dataset, we propose a baseline model named ResAttention-KNN, which combines a ResNet-50 with Convolutional Block Attention Modules and uses a k-Nearest Neighbors classifier in the learned embedding space. This model integrates attention-based refinement and non-parametric classification to enhance robustness and interpretability. Both the dataset and implementation are publicly released to support reproducibility and facilitate future research in vision-based biomedical analysis.

Sen Bai, Chunqi Yang, Xin Bai et al.

Binary (0-1) integer programming (BIP) is pivotal in scientific domains requiring discrete decision-making. As the advance of AI computing, recent works explore neural network-based solvers for integer linear programming (ILP) problems. Yet, they lack scalability for tackling nonlinear challenges. To handle nonlinearities, state-of-the-art Branch-and-Cut solvers employ linear relaxations, leading to exponential growth in auxiliary variables and severe computation limitations. To overcome these limitations, we propose BIPNN (Binary Integer Programming Neural Network), an unsupervised learning framework to solve nonlinear BIP problems via hypergraph neural networks (HyperGNN). Specifically, BIPNN reformulates BIPs-constrained, discrete, and nonlinear (sin, log, exp) optimization problems-into unconstrained, differentiable, and polynomial loss functions. The reformulation stems from the observation of a precise one-to-one mapping between polynomial BIP objectives and hypergraph structures, enabling the unsupervised training of HyperGNN to optimize BIP problems in an end-to-end manner. On this basis, we propose a GPU-accelerated and continuous-annealing-enhanced training pipeline for BIPNN. The pipeline enables BIPNN to optimize large-scale nonlinear terms in BIPs fully in parallel via straightforward gradient descent, thus significantly reducing the training cost while ensuring the generation of discrete, high-quality solutions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets highlight the superiority of our approach.

Sen Bai, Chunqi Yang, Xin Bai et al.

Along with AI computing shining in scientific discovery, its potential in the combinatorial optimization (CO) domain has also emerged in recent years. Yet, existing unsupervised neural network solvers struggle to solve $k$-grouping problems (e.g., coloring, partitioning) on large-scale graphs and hypergraphs, due to limited computational frameworks. In this work, we propose Deep $k$-grouping, an unsupervised learning-based CO framework. Specifically, we contribute: Novel one-hot encoded polynomial unconstrained binary optimization (OH-PUBO), a formulation for modeling k-grouping problems on graphs and hypergraphs (e.g., graph/hypergraph coloring and partitioning); GPU-accelerated algorithms for large-scale k-grouping CO problems. Deep $k$-grouping employs the relaxation of large-scale OH-PUBO objectives as differentiable loss functions and trains to optimize them in an unsupervised manner. To ensure scalability, it leverages GPU-accelerated algorithms to unify the training pipeline; A Gini coefficient-based continuous relaxation annealing strategy to enforce discreteness of solutions while preventing convergence to local optima. Experimental results demonstrate that Deep $k$-grouping outperforms existing neural network solvers and classical heuristics such as SCIP and Tabu.

Xin Zhang, Victor S. Sheng

Neuro-symbolic AI is an effective method for improving the overall performance of AI models by combining the advantages of neural networks and symbolic learning. However, there are differences between the two in terms of how they process data, primarily because they often use different data representation methods, which is often an important factor limiting the overall performance of the two. From this perspective, we analyzed 191 studies from 2013 by constructing a four-level classification framework. The first level defines five types of representation spaces, and the second level focuses on five types of information modalities that the representation space can represent. Then, the third level describes four symbolic logic methods. Finally, the fourth-level categories propose three collaboration strategies between neural networks and symbolic learning. Furthermore, we conducted a detailed analysis of 46 research based on their representation space.

Sen Pei, Xin Zhang, Bin Fan et al.

There is an increasing need to determine whether inputs are out-of-distribution (\emph{OOD}) for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world scenario. Typical neural classifiers are based on the closed world assumption, where the training data and the test data are drawn \emph{i.i.d.} from the same distribution, and as a result, give over-confident predictions even faced with \emph{OOD} inputs. For tackling this problem, previous studies either use real outliers for training or generate synthetic \emph{OOD} data under strong assumptions, which are either costly or intractable to generalize. In this paper, we propose boundary aware learning (\textbf{BAL}), a novel framework that can learn the distribution of \emph{OOD} features adaptively. The key idea of BAL is to generate \emph{OOD} features from trivial to hard progressively with a generator, meanwhile, a discriminator is trained for distinguishing these synthetic \emph{OOD} features and in-distribution (\emph{ID}) features. Benefiting from the adversarial training scheme, the discriminator can well separate \emph{ID} and \emph{OOD} features, allowing more robust \emph{OOD} detection. The proposed BAL achieves \emph{state-of-the-art} performance on classification benchmarks, reducing up to 13.9\% FPR95 compared with previous methods.

Kelei He, Chunfeng Lian, Bing Zhang et al.

Accurate segmentation of the prostate is a key step in external beam radiation therapy treatments. In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of prostate segmentation in CT images by a two-stage network with 1) the first stage to fast localize, and 2) the second stage to accurately segment the prostate. To precisely segment the prostate in the second stage, we formulate prostate segmentation into a multi-task learning framework, which includes a main task to segment the prostate, and an auxiliary task to delineate the prostate boundary. Here, the second task is applied to provide additional guidance of unclear prostate boundary in CT images. Besides, the conventional multi-task deep networks typically share most of the parameters (i.e., feature representations) across all tasks, which may limit their data fitting ability, as the specificities of different tasks are inevitably ignored. By contrast, we solve them by a hierarchically-fused U-Net structure, namely HF-UNet. The HF-UNet has two complementary branches for two tasks, with the novel proposed attention-based task consistency learning block to communicate at each level between the two decoding branches. Therefore, HF-UNet endows the ability to learn hierarchically the shared representations for different tasks, and preserve the specificities of learned representations for different tasks simultaneously. We did extensive evaluations of the proposed method on a large planning CT image dataset, including images acquired from 339 patients. The experimental results show HF-UNet outperforms the conventional multi-task network architectures and the state-of-the-art methods.