Tianqi Zhang

Tiancheng Zhao, Tianqi Zhang, Mingwei Zhu et al. · cmu

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models have recently successfully facilitated many cross-modal downstream tasks. Most existing works evaluated their systems by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance. However, only average downstream task accuracy provides little information about the pros and cons of each VLP method, let alone provides insights on how the community can improve the systems in the future. Inspired by the CheckList for testing natural language processing, we exploit VL-CheckList, a novel framework to understand the capabilities of VLP models. The proposed method divides the image-texting ability of a VLP model into three categories: objects, attributes, and relations, and uses a novel taxonomy to further break down these three aspects. We conduct comprehensive studies to analyze seven recently popular VLP models via the proposed framework. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by revealing fine-grained differences among the compared models that were not visible from downstream task-only evaluation. Further results show promising research direction in building better VLP models. Our data and code are available at: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VL-CheckList.

ByteDance Seed, Jiaze Chen, Tiantian Fan et al. · bytedance

We introduce Seed1.5-Thinking, capable of reasoning through thinking before responding, resulting in improved performance on a wide range of benchmarks. Seed1.5-Thinking achieves 86.7 on AIME 2024, 55.0 on Codeforces and 77.3 on GPQA, demonstrating excellent reasoning abilities in STEM and coding. Beyond reasoning tasks, the method demonstrates notable generalization across diverse domains. For instance, it surpasses DeepSeek R1 by 8% in win rate on non-reasoning tasks, indicating its broader applicability. Compared to other state-of-the-art reasoning models, Seed1.5-Thinking is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with a relatively small size, featuring 20B activated and 200B total parameters. As part of our effort to assess generalized reasoning, we develop two internal benchmarks, BeyondAIME and Codeforces, both of which will be publicly released to support future research. Model trial link: https://www.volcengine.com/experience/ark.

Dong Jing, Jingchen Nie, Tianqi Zhang et al.

Robot manipulation alternates between low-risk transit phases that call for fast execution and high-risk contact stages that demand slow, precise motion. Yet existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) only inherit a single fixed speed from training demonstrations. Prior efforts to accelerate VLAs through model compression, KV-cache reuse, or reinforcement learning only shift the policy from one fixed speed to another, and leave deceleration almost unexplored. We observe that the magnitude of each predicted action already governs how fast the robot moves, opening a direct route to controllable execution speed. We turn this observation into TempoVLA, a single VLA whose execution speed is controlled by an explicit condition. TempoVLA combines two coupled components. (1) A data-side Variable-Speed Trajectory Augmentation (VSTA) that re-times demonstration to any target speed by merging or splitting actions while preserving its motion semantics. (2) A model-side conditioning mechanism that feeds the speed to the policy. Statistics show that VSTA reaches the requested speed with negligible motion error. Experiments in simulation and on real-world tasks demonstrate that TempoVLA achieves flexible speed control in both directions, while VSTA additionally boosts the default $1\times$ performance via better data utilization. Furthermore, by cooperating with a large multimodal model, TempoVLA realizes dynamic speed control, accelerating through low-risk phases and decelerating for high-risk ones.

Lai-Man Po, Yuyang Liu, Haoxuan Wu et al.

This paper introduces Standard Basis LoRA (SBoRA), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach for Large Language Models that builds upon the pioneering works of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Orthogonal Adaptation. SBoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters by half or doubles the rank with the similar number of trainable parameters as LoRA, while improving learning performance. By utilizing orthogonal standard basis vectors to initialize one of the low-rank matrices (either $\mathbf{A}$ or $\mathbf{B}$), SBoRA facilitates regional weight updates and memory-efficient fine-tuning. This results in two variants, SBoRA-FA and SBoRA-FB, where only one of the matrices is updated, leading to a sparse update matrix $\mathrmΔ \mathbf{W}$ with predominantly zero rows or columns. Consequently, most of the fine-tuned model's weights $(\mathbf{W}_0+\mathrmΔ \mathbf{W})$ remain unchanged from the pre-trained weights, akin to the modular organization of the human brain, which efficiently adapts to new tasks. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of SBoRA-FA over LoRA in various fine-tuning tasks, including commonsense reasoning and arithmetic reasoning. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of QSBoRA on quantized LLaMA models of varying scales, highlighting its potential for efficient adaptation to new tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/cityuhkai/SBoRA

Haojie Yin, Chengcheng Feng, Tianyi Liu et al.

Mean Deviation (MD) is a critical metric for assessing visual field loss in ophthalmology. While previous work has focused solely on predicting MD from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), it is intuitive to assume that combining OCT with another imaging of fundus photography (FP) could improve performance, as two ophthalmic medical imaging provide complementary information. This is particularly expected when sophisticated multi-objective optimization is applied, as documented in common multimodal classification. Surprisingly, our investigations reveal that multimodal fusion in this medical imaging scenario performs worse than unimodal model. Through detailed analysis, we identify the root cause as a coupled imbalance between data distribution and modality learning conflict. This imbalance distorts the optimization landscape, leading to unstable training. To address this challenge, we propose the method of Rebalanced MultiModal Mean Deviation Regression (Re-M3Dr), a novel multimodal regression framework. We enhance unimodal representation through adaptive margin based supervised contrastive learning. Then, our framework stabilizes the joint optimization with the sharpness-aware gradient modulation. Experimental results on both public and private clinical datasets show average 29\% reduction in MSE compared to SOTA multimodal learning methods, demonstrating the superiority of Re-M3Dr. The code is available in the supplementary materials.

Md Mizanur Rahaman Nayan, Tianqi Zhang, Flavio Ponzina et al.

Vector database search with frequent updates is increasingly critical in applications such as retrieval augmented generation, recommendation systems, and large-scale embedding retrieval. Existing solutions, such as graph-based and partition-based approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS), suffer from frequent index rebuilding due to data distribution-dependent indexing that impacts continuous deployment and causes long rebuilding latency. This paper proposes an algorithm-hardware co-designed platform, ACRONYM, that addresses key problems with state of the art database search. Algorithmically, it leverages efficient encoding independent of data distribution and Hamming-distance based search for efficient hardware acceleration. Architecturally, we propose CAM-based in-memory parallel distance computation followed by time multiplexed approximated top-k selection to enable the exhaustive search. We propose two-stage search that includes coarse search followed by binary refinement to achieve high recall in CAM based search which is heavily limited to small vector dimension due to capacity and wordline parasitic. ACRONYM supports continuous update without stalling and integrates novel XOR-and-Accumulate (XAC) based systolic-array encoder for efficient on chip encoding during search. Across million-scale datasets, while serving dynamic database ACRONYM achieves >90% recall at a throughput of 8e6 queries per second, with a memory footprint of only 32MB and an average energy consumption of 2.56uJ per query, speedup over HNSW (CPU) of about 400x and FAISS-IVF (GPU) of about 80x.

Sumukh Pinge, Weihong Xu, Jaeyoung Kang et al.

Mass spectrometry-based proteomics is a key enabler for personalized healthcare, providing a deep dive into the complex protein compositions of biological systems. This technology has vast applications in biotechnology and biomedicine but faces significant computational bottlenecks. Current methodologies often require multiple hours or even days to process extensive datasets, particularly in the domain of spectral clustering. To tackle these inefficiencies, we introduce SpecHD, a hyperdimensional computing (HDC) framework supplemented by an FPGA-accelerated architecture with integrated near-storage preprocessing. Utilizing streamlined binary operations in an HDC environment, SpecHD capitalizes on the low-latency and parallel capabilities of FPGAs. This approach markedly improves clustering speed and efficiency, serving as a catalyst for real-time, high-throughput data analysis in future healthcare applications. Our evaluations demonstrate that SpecHD not only maintains but often surpasses existing clustering quality metrics while drastically cutting computational time. Specifically, it can cluster a large-scale human proteome dataset-comprising 25 million MS/MS spectra and 131 GB of MS data-in just 5 minutes. With energy efficiency exceeding 31x and a speedup factor that spans a range of 6x to 54x over existing state of-the-art solutions, SpecHD emerges as a promising solution for the rapid analysis of mass spectrometry data with great implications for personalized healthcare.

Jianzhe Xue, Dongcheng Yuan, Yu Sun et al.

The growing number of connected vehicles offers an opportunity to leverage internet of vehicles (IoV) data for traffic state estimation (TSE) which plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). By utilizing only a portion of IoV data instead of the entire dataset, the significant overheads associated with collecting and processing large amounts of data can be avoided. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that utilizes sparse IoV data to achieve cost-effective TSE. Particularly, we propose a novel spatial-temporal attention model called the convolutional retentive network (CRNet) to improve the TSE accuracy by mining spatial-temporal traffic state correlations. The model employs the convolutional neural network (CNN) for spatial correlation aggregation and the retentive network (RetNet) based on the attention mechanism to extract temporal correlations. Extensive simulations on a real-world IoV dataset validate the advantage of the proposed TSE approach in achieving accurate TSE using sparse IoV data, demonstrating its cost effectiveness and practicality for real-world applications.

Bing Zhao, Chenfei Wu, Deqing Li et al.

We present Qwen-Image-2.0, an omni-capable image generation foundation model that unifies high-fidelity generation and precise image editing within a single framework. Despite recent progress, existing models still struggle with ultra-long text rendering, multilingual typography, high-resolution photorealism, robust instruction following, and efficient deployment, especially in text-rich and compositionally complex scenarios. Qwen-Image-2.0 addresses these challenges by coupling Qwen3-VL as the condition encoder with a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for joint condition-target modeling, supported by large-scale data curation and a customized multi-stage training pipeline. This enables strong multimodal understanding while preserving flexible generation and editing capabilities. The model supports instructions of up to 1K tokens for generating text-rich content such as slides, posters, infographics, and comics, while significantly improving multilingual text fidelity and typography. It also enhances photorealistic generation with richer details, more realistic textures, and coherent lighting, and follows complex prompts more reliably across diverse styles. Extensive human evaluations show that Qwen-Image-2.0 substantially outperforms previous Qwen-Image models in both generation and editing, marking a step toward more general, reliable, and practical image generation foundation models.

Wenxing Zhu, Simeng Qi, Junkui Chen et al.

We present ACE-Bench (Azure SDK Coding Evaluation Benchmark), an execution-free benchmark that provides fast, reproducible pass or fail signals for whether large language model (LLM)-based coding agents use Azure SDKs correctly-without provisioning cloud resources or maintaining fragile end-to-end test environments. ACE-Bench turns official Azure SDK documentation examples into self-contained coding tasks and validates solutions with task-specific atomic criteria: deterministic regex checks that enforce required API usage patterns and reference-based LLM-judge checks that capture semantic workflow constraints. This design makes SDK-centric evaluation practical in day-to-day development and CI: it reduces evaluation cost, improves repeatability, and scales to new SDKs and languages as documentation evolves. Using a lightweight coding agent, we benchmark multiple state-of-the-art LLMs and quantify the benefit of retrieval in an MCP-enabled augmented setting, showing consistent gains from documentation access while highlighting substantial cross-model differences.

Rongwu Xu, Brian S. Lin, Shujian Yang et al. · uw

Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate vast amounts of knowledge but still remain vulnerable to external misinformation. Existing research mainly studied this susceptibility behavior in a single-turn setting. However, belief can change during a multi-turn conversation, especially a persuasive one. Therefore, in this study, we delve into LLMs' susceptibility to persuasive conversations, particularly on factual questions that they can answer correctly. We first curate the Farm (i.e., Fact to Misinform) dataset, which contains factual questions paired with systematically generated persuasive misinformation. Then, we develop a testing framework to track LLMs' belief changes in a persuasive dialogue. Through extensive experiments, we find that LLMs' correct beliefs on factual knowledge can be easily manipulated by various persuasive strategies.

Tianqi Zhang, Flavio Ponzina, Tajana Rosing

Approximate Nearest-Neighbor Search (ANNS) is a key technique in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enabling rapid identification of the most relevant high-dimensional embeddings from massive vector databases. Modern ANNS engines accelerate this process using prebuilt indexes and store compressed vector-quantized representations in fast memory. However, they still rely on a costly second-pass refinement stage that reads full-precision vectors from slower storage like SSDs. For modern text and multimodal embeddings, these reads now dominate the latency of the entire query. We propose FaTRQ, a far-memory-aware refinement system using tiered memory that eliminates the need to fetch full vectors from storage. It introduces a progressive distance estimator that refines coarse scores using compact residuals streamed from far memory. Refinement stops early once a candidate is provably outside the top-k. To support this, we propose tiered residual quantization, which encodes residuals as ternary values stored efficiently in far memory. A custom accelerator is deployed in a CXL Type-2 device to perform low-latency refinement locally. Together, FaTRQ improves the storage efficiency by 2.4$\times$ and improves the throughput by up to 9$ \times$ than SOTA GPU ANNS system.

Tianqi Zhang, Puzhen Yuan, Guojian Zhan et al.

Constrained optimization is popularly seen in reinforcement learning for addressing complex control tasks. From the perspective of dynamic system, iteratively solving a constrained optimization problem can be framed as the temporal evolution of a feedback control system. Classical constrained optimization methods, such as penalty and Lagrangian approaches, inherently use proportional and integral feedback controllers. In this paper, we propose a more generic equivalence framework to build the connection between constrained optimization and feedback control system, for the purpose of developing more effective constrained RL algorithms. Firstly, we define that each step of the system evolution determines the Lagrange multiplier by solving a multiplier feedback optimal control problem (MFOCP). In this problem, the control input is multiplier, the state is policy parameters, the dynamics is described by policy gradient descent, and the objective is to minimize constraint violations. Then, we introduce a multiplier guided policy learning (MGPL) module to perform policy parameters updating. And we prove that the resulting optimal policy, achieved through alternating MFOCP and MGPL, aligns with the solution of the primal constrained RL problem, thereby establishing our equivalence framework. Furthermore, we point out that the existing PID Lagrangian is merely one special case within our framework that utilizes a PID controller. We also accommodate the integration of other various feedback controllers, thereby facilitating the development of new algorithms. As a representative, we employ model predictive control (MPC) as the feedback controller and consequently propose a new algorithm called predictive Lagrangian optimization (PLO). Numerical experiments demonstrate its superiority over the PID Lagrangian method, achieving a larger feasible region up to 7.2% and a comparable average reward.

Bohong Wu, Mengzhao Chen, Xiang Luo et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but often too slow and costly for real-world use during inference. Looped transformers save on parameters by reusing the same weights for multiple computational steps, or "loops." However, this approach has a major flaw: the loops run one after another, causing inference latency and memory requirements to increase with each added loop. This makes them impractical for fast applications. To solve this problem, we introduce the Parallel Loop Transformer (PLT). PLT is a new architecture that delivers the performance benefits of a deep, looped model but with the low latency of a standard, non-looped model. PLT works using two key techniques. First, Cross-Loop Parallelism (CLP) breaks the sequential dependency by computing different loops for different tokens at the same time, all within a single pass. Second, to prevent memory costs from growing, we use an Efficient Representation Enhancement strategy. This method shares the memory (KV cache) from the first loop with all other loops. It then uses a Gated Sliding-Window Attention (G-SWA) to combine this shared global information with local information, maintaining high accuracy. Our experiments show that PLT achieves the high accuracy of a traditional looped model but with almost no extra latency or memory cost compared to a standard transformer.

Tianqi Zhang, Ziyi Wang, Wenzhao Zheng et al.

Video diffusion models, trained on large-scale datasets, naturally capture correspondences of shared features across frames. Recent works have exploited this property for tasks such as optical flow prediction and tracking in a zero-shot setting. Motivated by these findings, we investigate whether supervised training can more fully harness the tracking capability of video diffusion models. To this end, we propose Moaw, a framework that unleashes motion awareness for video diffusion models and leverages it to facilitate motion transfer. Specifically, we train a diffusion model for motion perception, shifting its modality from image-to-video generation to video-to-dense-tracking. We then construct a motion-labeled dataset to identify features that encode the strongest motion information, and inject them into a structurally identical video generation model. Owing to the homogeneity between the two networks, these features can be naturally adapted in a zero-shot manner, enabling motion transfer without additional adapters. Our work provides a new paradigm for bridging generative modeling and motion understanding, paving the way for more unified and controllable video learning frameworks.

Shengheng Liu, Tianqi Zhang, Ningning Fu et al.

AI becomes increasingly vital for telecom industry, as the burgeoning complexity of upcoming mobile communication networks places immense pressure on network operators. While there is a growing consensus that intelligent network self-driving holds the key, it heavily relies on expert experience and knowledge extracted from network data. In an effort to facilitate convenient analytics and utilization of wireless big data, we introduce the concept of knowledge graphs into the field of mobile networks, giving rise to what we term as wireless data knowledge graphs (WDKGs). However, the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of communication networks renders manual WDKG construction both prohibitively costly and error-prone, presenting a fundamental challenge. In this context, we propose an unsupervised data-and-model driven graph structure learning (DMGSL) framework, aimed at automating WDKG refinement and updating. Tackling WDKG heterogeneity involves stratifying the network into homogeneous layers and refining it at a finer granularity. Furthermore, to capture WDKG dynamics effectively, we segment the network into static snapshots based on the coherence time and harness the power of recurrent neural networks to incorporate historical information. Extensive experiments conducted on the established WDKG demonstrate the superiority of the DMGSL over the baselines, particularly in terms of node classification accuracy.

Runzhong Wang, Tianqi Zhang, Tianshu Yu et al.

Graph Edit Distance (GED) is a popular similarity measurement for pairwise graphs and it also refers to the recovery of the edit path from the source graph to the target graph. Traditional A* algorithm suffers scalability issues due to its exhaustive nature, whose search heuristics heavily rely on human prior knowledge. This paper presents a hybrid approach by combing the interpretability of traditional search-based techniques for producing the edit path, as well as the efficiency and adaptivity of deep embedding models to achieve a cost-effective GED solver. Inspired by dynamic programming, node-level embedding is designated in a dynamic reuse fashion and suboptimal branches are encouraged to be pruned. To this end, our method can be readily integrated into A* procedure in a dynamic fashion, as well as significantly reduce the computational burden with a learned heuristic. Experimental results on different graph datasets show that our approach can remarkably ease the search process of A* without sacrificing much accuracy. To our best knowledge, this work is also the first deep learning-based GED method for recovering the edit path.

Yizhu Jiao, Yun Xiong, Jiawei Zhang et al.

Graph representation learning has attracted lots of attention recently. Existing graph neural networks fed with the complete graph data are not scalable due to limited computation and memory costs. Thus, it remains a great challenge to capture rich information in large-scale graph data. Besides, these methods mainly focus on supervised learning and highly depend on node label information, which is expensive to obtain in the real world. As to unsupervised network embedding approaches, they overemphasize node proximity instead, whose learned representations can hardly be used in downstream application tasks directly. In recent years, emerging self-supervised learning provides a potential solution to address the aforementioned problems. However, existing self-supervised works also operate on the complete graph data and are biased to fit either global or very local (1-hop neighborhood) graph structures in defining the mutual information based loss terms. In this paper, a novel self-supervised representation learning method via Subgraph Contrast, namely \textsc{Subg-Con}, is proposed by utilizing the strong correlation between central nodes and their sampled subgraphs to capture regional structure information. Instead of learning on the complete input graph data, with a novel data augmentation strategy, \textsc{Subg-Con} learns node representations through a contrastive loss defined based on subgraphs sampled from the original graph instead. Compared with existing graph representation learning approaches, \textsc{Subg-Con} has prominent performance advantages in weaker supervision requirements, model learning scalability, and parallelization. Extensive experiments verify both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our work compared with both classic and state-of-the-art graph representation learning approaches on multiple real-world large-scale benchmark datasets from different domains.