Cheng Wan

Yonggan Fu, Haichuan Yang, Jiayi Yuan et al.

Efficient deep neural network (DNN) models equipped with compact operators (e.g., depthwise convolutions) have shown great potential in reducing DNNs' theoretical complexity (e.g., the total number of weights/operations) while maintaining a decent model accuracy. However, existing efficient DNNs are still limited in fulfilling their promise in boosting real-hardware efficiency, due to their commonly adopted compact operators' low hardware utilization. In this work, we open up a new compression paradigm for developing real-hardware efficient DNNs, leading to boosted hardware efficiency while maintaining model accuracy. Interestingly, we observe that while some DNN layers' activation functions help DNNs' training optimization and achievable accuracy, they can be properly removed after training without compromising the model accuracy. Inspired by this observation, we propose a framework dubbed DepthShrinker, which develops hardware-friendly compact networks via shrinking the basic building blocks of existing efficient DNNs that feature irregular computation patterns into dense ones with much improved hardware utilization and thus real-hardware efficiency. Excitingly, our DepthShrinker framework delivers hardware-friendly compact networks that outperform both state-of-the-art efficient DNNs and compression techniques, e.g., a 3.06% higher accuracy and 1.53$\times$ throughput on Tesla V100 over SOTA channel-wise pruning method MetaPruning. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/DepthShrinker.

Cheng Wan, Youjie Li, Ang Li et al.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art method for graph-based learning tasks. However, training GCNs at scale is still challenging, hindering both the exploration of more sophisticated GCN architectures and their applications to real-world large graphs. While it might be natural to consider graph partition and distributed training for tackling this challenge, this direction has only been slightly scratched the surface in the previous works due to the limitations of existing designs. In this work, we first analyze why distributed GCN training is ineffective and identify the underlying cause to be the excessive number of boundary nodes of each partitioned subgraph, which easily explodes the memory and communication costs for GCN training. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective method dubbed BNS-GCN that adopts random Boundary-Node-Sampling to enable efficient and scalable distributed GCN training. Experiments and ablation studies consistently validate the effectiveness of BNS-GCN, e.g., boosting the throughput by up to 16.2x and reducing the memory usage by up to 58%, while maintaining a full-graph accuracy. Furthermore, both theoretical and empirical analysis show that BNS-GCN enjoys a better convergence than existing sampling-based methods. We believe that our BNS-GCN has opened up a new paradigm for enabling GCN training at scale. The code is available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/BNS-GCN.

Cheng Wan, Youjie Li, Cameron R. Wolfe et al.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) is the state-of-the-art method for learning graph-structured data, and training large-scale GCNs requires distributed training across multiple accelerators such that each accelerator is able to hold a partitioned subgraph. However, distributed GCN training incurs prohibitive overhead of communicating node features and feature gradients among partitions for every GCN layer during each training iteration, limiting the achievable training efficiency and model scalability. To this end, we propose PipeGCN, a simple yet effective scheme that hides the communication overhead by pipelining inter-partition communication with intra-partition computation. It is non-trivial to pipeline for efficient GCN training, as communicated node features/gradients will become stale and thus can harm the convergence, negating the pipeline benefit. Notably, little is known regarding the convergence rate of GCN training with both stale features and stale feature gradients. This work not only provides a theoretical convergence analysis but also finds the convergence rate of PipeGCN to be close to that of the vanilla distributed GCN training without any staleness. Furthermore, we develop a smoothing method to further improve PipeGCN's convergence. Extensive experiments show that PipeGCN can largely boost the training throughput (1.7x~28.5x) while achieving the same accuracy as its vanilla counterpart and existing full-graph training methods. The code is available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/PipeGCN.

Cheng Wan, Hongyuan Yu, Zhiqi Li et al.

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is a crucial task in low-level computer vision, aiming to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution counterparts. Conventional attention mechanisms have significantly improved SISR performance but often result in complex network structures and large number of parameters, leading to slow inference speed and large model size. To address this issue, we propose the Swift Parameter-free Attention Network (SPAN), a highly efficient SISR model that balances parameter count, inference speed, and image quality. SPAN employs a novel parameter-free attention mechanism, which leverages symmetric activation functions and residual connections to enhance high-contribution information and suppress redundant information. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of this design in achieving the attention mechanism's purpose. We evaluate SPAN on multiple benchmarks, showing that it outperforms existing efficient super-resolution models in terms of both image quality and inference speed, achieving a significant quality-speed trade-off. This makes SPAN highly suitable for real-world applications, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios. Notably, we won the first place both in the overall performance track and runtime track of the NTIRE 2024 efficient super-resolution challenge. Our code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/hongyuanyu/SPAN.

Yongan Zhang, Zhongzhi Yu, Yonggan Fu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in streamlining hardware design processes by encapsulating vast amounts of domain-specific data. In addition, they allow users to interact with the design processes through natural language instructions, thus making hardware design more accessible to developers. However, effectively leveraging LLMs in hardware design necessitates providing domain-specific data during inference (e.g., through in-context learning), fine-tuning, or pre-training. Unfortunately, existing publicly available hardware datasets are often limited in size, complexity, or detail, which hinders the effectiveness of LLMs in hardware design tasks. To address this issue, we first propose a set of criteria for creating high-quality hardware datasets that can effectively enhance LLM-assisted hardware design. Based on these criteria, we propose a Multi-Grained-Verilog (MG-Verilog) dataset, which encompasses descriptions at various levels of detail and corresponding code samples. To benefit the broader hardware design community, we have developed an open-source infrastructure that facilitates easy access, integration, and extension of the dataset to meet specific project needs. Furthermore, to fully exploit the potential of the MG-Verilog dataset, which varies in complexity and detail, we introduce a balanced fine-tuning scheme. This scheme serves as a unique use case to leverage the diverse levels of detail provided by the dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed dataset and fine-tuning scheme consistently improve the performance of LLMs in hardware design tasks.

Yonggan Fu, Yongan Zhang, Zhongzhi Yu et al.

The remarkable capabilities and intricate nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have dramatically escalated the imperative for specialized AI accelerators. Nonetheless, designing these accelerators for various AI workloads remains both labor- and time-intensive. While existing design exploration and automation tools can partially alleviate the need for extensive human involvement, they still demand substantial hardware expertise, posing a barrier to non-experts and stifling AI accelerator development. Motivated by the astonishing potential of large language models (LLMs) for generating high-quality content in response to human language instructions, we embark on this work to examine the possibility of harnessing LLMs to automate AI accelerator design. Through this endeavor, we develop GPT4AIGChip, a framework intended to democratize AI accelerator design by leveraging human natural languages instead of domain-specific languages. Specifically, we first perform an in-depth investigation into LLMs' limitations and capabilities for AI accelerator design, thus aiding our understanding of our current position and garnering insights into LLM-powered automated AI accelerator design. Furthermore, drawing inspiration from the above insights, we develop a framework called GPT4AIGChip, which features an automated demo-augmented prompt-generation pipeline utilizing in-context learning to guide LLMs towards creating high-quality AI accelerator design. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate an effective pipeline for LLM-powered automated AI accelerator generation. Accordingly, we anticipate that our insights and framework can serve as a catalyst for innovations in next-generation LLM-powered design automation tools.

Yonggan Fu, Shunyao Zhang, Shang Wu et al.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently set off a new wave in neural architecture design thanks to their record-breaking performance in various vision tasks. In parallel, to fulfill the goal of deploying ViTs into real-world vision applications, their robustness against potential malicious attacks has gained increasing attention. In particular, recent works show that ViTs are more robust against adversarial attacks as compared with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and conjecture that this is because ViTs focus more on capturing global interactions among different input/feature patches, leading to their improved robustness to local perturbations imposed by adversarial attacks. In this work, we ask an intriguing question: "Under what kinds of perturbations do ViTs become more vulnerable learners compared to CNNs?" Driven by this question, we first conduct a comprehensive experiment regarding the robustness of both ViTs and CNNs under various existing adversarial attacks to understand the underlying reason favoring their robustness. Based on the drawn insights, we then propose a dedicated attack framework, dubbed Patch-Fool, that fools the self-attention mechanism by attacking its basic component (i.e., a single patch) with a series of attention-aware optimization techniques. Interestingly, our Patch-Fool framework shows for the first time that ViTs are not necessarily more robust than CNNs against adversarial perturbations. In particular, we find that ViTs are more vulnerable learners compared with CNNs against our Patch-Fool attack which is consistent across extensive experiments, and the observations from Sparse/Mild Patch-Fool, two variants of Patch-Fool, indicate an intriguing insight that the perturbation density and strength on each patch seem to be the key factors that influence the robustness ranking between ViTs and CNNs.

Shichang Zhang, Atefeh Sohrabizadeh, Cheng Wan et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are emerging for machine learning research on graph-structured data. GNNs achieve state-of-the-art performance on many tasks, but they face scalability challenges when it comes to real-world applications that have numerous data and strict latency requirements. Many studies have been conducted on how to accelerate GNNs in an effort to address these challenges. These acceleration techniques touch on various aspects of the GNN pipeline, from smart training and inference algorithms to efficient systems and customized hardware. As the amount of research on GNN acceleration has grown rapidly, there lacks a systematic treatment to provide a unified view and address the complexity of relevant works. In this survey, we provide a taxonomy of GNN acceleration, review the existing approaches, and suggest future research directions. Our taxonomic treatment of GNN acceleration connects the existing works and sets the stage for further development in this area.

Marius Potfer, Cheng Wan, Pierre Gruet

Bidding in the European Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR) market is challenging for flexibility providers because competing offers are hidden and bidders observe only partial feedback form the market, such as, clearing price and awarded quantity. For a participant active in a single country, we show that the multi-country FCR clearing problem can be recast as a repeated multi-unit uniform-price auction against an endogenous vector of opposing bids. This reformulation yields an online learning problem and allows us to adapt a Best-of-Both-Worlds combinatorial semi-bandit algorithm implementable from this standard market feedback. The resulting bidder achieves logarithmic pseudo-regret in stochastic environments and $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret in adversarial ones. Synthetic experiments confirm the expected scaling, and backtests on historical European FCR data show competitive performance in practice: the method performs especially well on stable products, while EXP3-type baselines can be safer under stronger non-stationarity. Overall, the results show that learning-based bidding in FCR markets is theoretically grounded and practically useful when the learning rule matches product-level market stability.

Zishen Wan, Che-Kai Liu, Hanchen Yang et al.

The remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), primarily driven by deep neural networks, are facing challenges surrounding unsustainable computational trajectories, limited robustness, and a lack of explainability. To develop next-generation cognitive AI systems, neuro-symbolic AI emerges as a promising paradigm, fusing neural and symbolic approaches to enhance interpretability, robustness, and trustworthiness, while facilitating learning from much less data. Recent neuro-symbolic systems have demonstrated great potential in collaborative human-AI scenarios with reasoning and cognitive capabilities. In this paper, we aim to understand the workload characteristics and potential architectures for neuro-symbolic AI. We first systematically categorize neuro-symbolic AI algorithms, and then experimentally evaluate and analyze them in terms of runtime, memory, computational operators, sparsity, and system characteristics on CPUs, GPUs, and edge SoCs. Our studies reveal that neuro-symbolic models suffer from inefficiencies on off-the-shelf hardware, due to the memory-bound nature of vector-symbolic and logical operations, complex flow control, data dependencies, sparsity variations, and limited scalability. Based on profiling insights, we suggest cross-layer optimization solutions and present a hardware acceleration case study for vector-symbolic architecture to improve the performance, efficiency, and scalability of neuro-symbolic computing. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential future directions of neuro-symbolic AI from both system and architectural perspectives.

Bin Ren, Yawei Li, Nancy Mehta et al.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Chenjun Li, Cheng Wan, Johannes C. Paetzold

Large language models are now embedded in everyday writing workflows, making reliable AI-generated text detection important for academic integrity, content moderation, and provenance tracking. In practice, however, a detector must do more than achieve high aggregate AUROC on clean, in-distribution human and AI text: it should remain robust to attacks and adversarial rewrites, transfer to unseen generators and domains, and operate at low false-positive rates (FPR). Most existing detectors optimize a single AI/Human objective, giving the representation little incentive to learn generator, attack, or domain structure once the binary task saturates. We introduce MELD (Multi-Task Equilibrated Learning Detector), a deployable detector for AI-generated text that enriches binary detection with auxiliary supervision. MELD attaches generator-family, attack-type, and source-domain heads to a shared encoder, and balances the four losses with learned homoscedastic uncertainty weights. To improve robustness, an EMA teacher predicts on clean inputs while an attack-augmented student is distilled toward the teacher. MELD further uses a hard-negative pairwise ranking loss to enlarge the score margin between AI-generated texts and the most confusable human texts. At inference, all auxiliary heads are discarded, giving MELD the same interface and cost as a standard detector. On the public RAID leaderboard, MELD is the strongest open-source detector and is competitive with leading commercial models, especially under attack and at low FPR. Across standard held-out benchmarks, MELD matches or outperforms supervised baselines. We further introduce MELD-eval, a held-out evaluation pool built from recent chat models released by four major LLM providers. Without additional finetuning, MELD achieves 99.9% TPR at 1% FPR on MELD-eval, while many baselines degrade sharply.

Cheng Wan, Bahram Jafrasteh, Ehsan Adeli et al.

Accurately modeling longitudinal brain MRI progression is crucial for understanding neurodegenerative diseases and predicting individualized structural changes. Existing state-of-the-art approaches, such as Brain Latent Progression (BrLP), often use multi-stage training pipelines with auxiliary conditioning modules but suffer from architectural complexity, suboptimal use of conditional clinical covariates, and limited guarantees of anatomical consistency. We propose Anatomically Guided Latent Diffusion Model (AG-LDM), a segmentation-guided framework that enforces anatomically consistent progression while substantially simplifying the training pipeline. AG-LDM conditions latent diffusion by directly fusing baseline anatomy, noisy follow-up states, and clinical covariates at the input level, a strategy that avoids auxiliary control networks by learning a unified, end-to-end model that represents both anatomy and progression. A lightweight 3D tissue segmentation model (WarpSeg) provides explicit anatomical supervision during both autoencoder fine-tuning and diffusion model training, ensuring consistent brain tissue boundaries and morphometric fidelity. Experiments on 31,713 ADNI longitudinal pairs and zero-shot evaluation on OASIS-3 demonstrate that AG-LDM matches or surpasses more complex diffusion models, achieving state-of-the-art image quality and 15-20\% reduction in volumetric errors in generated images. AG-LDM also exhibits markedly stronger utilization of temporal and clinical covariates (up to 31.5x higher sensitivity than BrLP) and generates biologically plausible counterfactual trajectories, accurately capturing hallmarks of Alzheimer's progression such as limbic atrophy and ventricular expansion. These results highlight AG-LDM as an efficient, anatomically grounded framework for reliable brain MRI progression modeling.

Hongyuan Yu, Cheng Wan, Xiyang Dai et al.

Real-time image segmentation demands architectures that preserve fine spatial detail while capturing global context under tight latency and memory budgets. Image segmentation is one of the most fundamental problems in computer vision and has drawn a lot of attention due to its vast applications in image understanding and autonomous driving. However, designing effective and efficient segmentation neural architectures is a labor-intensive process that may require numerous trials by human experts. In this paper, we address the challenge of integrating multi-head self-attention into high-resolution representation CNNs efficiently by leveraging architecture search. Manually replacing convolution layers with multi-head self-attention is non-trivial due to the costly overhead in memory to maintain high resolution. By contrast, we develop a multi-target multi-branch supernet method, which not only fully utilizes the advantages of high-resolution features but also finds the proper location for placing the multi-head self-attention module. Our search algorithm is optimized towards multiple objectives (e.g., latency and mIoU) and is capable of finding architectures on the approximate Pareto front with an arbitrary number of branches in a single search. We further present a series of models via the Hybrid Convolutional-Transformer Architecture Search (HyCTAS) method that searches for the best hybrid combination of lightweight convolution layers and memory-efficient self-attention layers between branches from different resolutions and fuses them at high resolution for both efficiency and effectiveness. On Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO, HyCTAS discovers competitive real-time models without ImageNet pretraining, delivering strong accuracy and latency trade-offs. Code and models are available at https://github.com/MarvinYu1995/HyCTAS.

Xun Sun, Shaoyuan Chen, Pingchuan Ma et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) serving relies on wide expert parallelism (EP) to aggregate the memory capacity and bandwidth of many GPUs within one inference instance. This efficiency comes with a systems cost: every decoding step depends on token dispatch and combination across all active EP ranks, so even one rank failure can disrupt the entire service. Existing EP stacks handle such failures poorly because they treat membership as a fixed configuration established at initialization. The same rank set determines communicator state, expert placement, and the routing metadata baked into CUDA execution graphs, leaving the system with no way to shrink around a failure while keeping the instance valid. This paper argues that partial-failure tolerance should instead be formulated as a live EP validity problem. We present EEP, a communication and runtime substrate that represents membership as explicit, mutable runtime state. EEP repairs the specific state invalidated by a fault: it restores peer reachability without rebuilding the communication substrate, repairs lost expert coverage through a bandwidth-aware hierarchy, and reintegrates repaired ranks without forcing healthy ranks to recapture their CUDA graphs. We implement EEP in an EP serving stack integrated with SGLang and evaluate it under steady-state serving, failure recovery, and rank reintegration. The results show that explicit mutable membership preserves the steady-state fast path, staying within 4.4% of a fixed-membership DeepEP baseline under static serving, while turning a local rank fault from whole-instance downtime into two bounded interruptions. On a single-rank failure workload, EEP incurs an 11s recovery pause and an 8s reintegration pause, and restores throughput to within 95% of the pre-fault level within 52s, whereas a fixed-membership full-restart baseline remains unavailable until 348s.

Bahram Jafrasteh, Wei Peng, Cheng Wan et al.

Generative models enhance neuroimaging through data augmentation, quality improvement, and rare condition studies. Despite advances in realistic synthetic MRIs, evaluations focus on texture and perception, lacking sensitivity to crucial anatomical fidelity. This study proposes a new metric, called WASABI (Wasserstein-Based Anatomical Brain Index), to assess the anatomical realism of synthetic brain MRIs. WASABI leverages \textit{SynthSeg}, a deep learning-based brain parcellation tool, to derive volumetric measures of brain regions in each MRI and uses the multivariate Wasserstein distance to compare distributions between real and synthetic anatomies. Based on controlled experiments on two real datasets and synthetic MRIs from five generative models, WASABI demonstrates higher sensitivity in quantifying anatomical discrepancies compared to traditional image-level metrics, even when synthetic images achieve near-perfect visual quality. Our findings advocate for shifting the evaluation paradigm beyond visual inspection and conventional metrics, emphasizing anatomical fidelity as a crucial benchmark for clinically meaningful brain MRI synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/BahramJafrasteh/wasabi-mri.

Zhenghan Song, Yulong Liu, Cheng Wan et al.

Execution-based evaluation of LLM-generated code implicitly treats successful execution as a proxy for correctness. In scientific simulation, this proxy is insufficient: a generated input file can run, mesh, and converge while encoding governing equations that differ from the user's intent. We call this mismatch between intended physics and generated code the comprehension-generation gap. We instantiate this in MOOSE, where Kernel and BC objects map compositionally to weak-form residual terms, enabling deterministic reconstruction of the encoded PDE and comparison against an intended contract. We formalize this comparison as the Intent Fidelity Score (IFS), a structural metric covering governing terms, BCs, ICs, coefficients, and time scheme. Building on IFS, we develop a PDE-grounded refinement loop that uses deterministic violation reports to correct generated code iteratively. We evaluate on MooseBench, a 220-case multiphysics benchmark with PDE-level ground truth released with this work. On this benchmark, our method consistently improves mean IFS over direct generation, with gains concentrated on hard cases. On the subset where direct generation falls below IFS 0.7, refinement adds +0.22 to +0.41 absolute IFS. In the deployment audit, execution-only repair improves execution success while leaving 39-40% of all 220 cases runnable but still solving the wrong physics across the three main deployment-audit models, exposing executability and intent fidelity as separable failure modes. Static proof-of-concept experiments on four PDE-oriented DSLs (UFL/FEniCS, FreeFEM, FiPy, and Devito) suggest that the reconstruction-and-comparison pattern extends beyond MOOSE. These findings reinforce that executable simulation code should be verified against the mathematical structure it is intended to encode, not accepted on execution alone.

Zheng Chen, Zongwei Wu, Eduard Zamfir et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

Cheng Wan, Chenjie Xie, Longfei Liu et al.

Continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring is essential for timely diagnosis and intervention in critical care settings. However, BP varies significantly across individuals, this inter-patient variability motivates the development of personalized models tailored to each patient's physiology. In this work, we propose a personalized BP forecasting model mainly using electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals. This time-series model incorporates 2D representation learning to capture complex physiological relationships. Experiments are conducted on datasets collected from three diverse scenarios with BP measurements from 60 subjects total. Results demonstrate that the model achieves accurate and robust BP forecasts across scenarios within the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standard criteria. This reliable early detection of abnormal fluctuations in BP is crucial for at-risk patients undergoing surgery or intensive care. The proposed model provides a valuable addition for continuous BP tracking to reduce mortality and improve prognosis.

Zishen Wan, Che-Kai Liu, Hanchen Yang et al.

The remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), primarily driven by deep neural networks, have significantly impacted various aspects of our lives. However, the current challenges surrounding unsustainable computational trajectories, limited robustness, and a lack of explainability call for the development of next-generation AI systems. Neuro-symbolic AI (NSAI) emerges as a promising paradigm, fusing neural, symbolic, and probabilistic approaches to enhance interpretability, robustness, and trustworthiness while facilitating learning from much less data. Recent NSAI systems have demonstrated great potential in collaborative human-AI scenarios with reasoning and cognitive capabilities. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of recent progress in NSAI and analyze the performance characteristics and computational operators of NSAI models. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and potential future directions of NSAI from both system and architectural perspectives.

Bin Ren, Hang Guo, Lei Sun et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep models that optimize key computational metrics, i.e., runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while achieving a PSNR of at least 26.90 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_valid}$ dataset and 26.99 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_test}$ dataset. A robust participation saw \textbf{244} registered entrants, with \textbf{43} teams submitting valid entries. This report meticulously analyzes these methods and results, emphasizing groundbreaking advancements in state-of-the-art single-image ESR techniques. The analysis highlights innovative approaches and establishes benchmarks for future research in the field.

Marcos V. Conde, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Radu Timofte et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 RAW Image Super-Resolution Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. New methods for RAW Super-Resolution could be essential in modern Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipelines, however, this problem is not as explored as in the RGB domain. Th goal of this challenge is to upscale RAW Bayer images by 2x, considering unknown degradations such as noise and blur. In the challenge, a total of 230 participants registered, and 45 submitted results during thee challenge period. The performance of the top-5 submissions is reviewed and provided here as a gauge for the current state-of-the-art in RAW Image Super-Resolution.

Marcos V. Conde, Zhijun Lei, Wen Li et al.

This paper introduces a novel benchmark as part of the AIS 2024 Real-Time Image Super-Resolution (RTSR) Challenge, which aims to upscale compressed images from 540p to 4K resolution (4x factor) in real-time on commercial GPUs. For this, we use a diverse test set containing a variety of 4K images ranging from digital art to gaming and photography. The images are compressed using the modern AVIF codec, instead of JPEG. All the proposed methods improve PSNR fidelity over Lanczos interpolation, and process images under 10ms. Out of the 160 participants, 25 teams submitted their code and models. The solutions present novel designs tailored for memory-efficiency and runtime on edge devices. This survey describes the best solutions for real-time SR of compressed high-resolution images.

Yaqi Wu, Zhihao Fan, Xiaofeng Chu et al.

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/.

Marius Potfer, Dorian Baudry, Hugo Richard et al.

Motivated by the strategic participation of electricity producers in electricity day-ahead market, we study the problem of online learning in repeated multi-unit uniform price auctions focusing on the adversarial opposing bid setting. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a new modeling of the bid space. Indeed, we prove that a learning algorithm leveraging the structure of this problem achieves a regret of $\tilde{O}(K^{4/3}T^{2/3})$ under bandit feedback, improving over the bound of $\tilde{O}(K^{7/4}T^{3/4})$ previously obtained in the literature. This improved regret rate is tight up to logarithmic terms. Inspired by electricity reserve markets, we further introduce a different feedback model under which all winning bids are revealed. This feedback interpolates between the full-information and bandit scenarios depending on the auctions' results. We prove that, under this feedback, the algorithm that we propose achieves regret $\tilde{O}(K^{5/2}\sqrt{T})$.

Chaojian Li, Zhifan Ye, Massimiliano Lupo Pasini et al.

Atomistic materials modeling is a critical task with wide-ranging applications, from drug discovery to materials science, where accurate predictions of the target material property can lead to significant advancements in scientific discovery. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) represent the state-of-the-art approach for modeling atomistic material data thanks to their capacity to capture complex relational structures. While machine learning performance has historically improved with larger models and datasets, GNNs for atomistic materials modeling remain relatively small compared to large language models (LLMs), which leverage billions of parameters and terabyte-scale datasets to achieve remarkable performance in their respective domains. To address this gap, we explore the scaling limits of GNNs for atomistic materials modeling by developing a foundational model with billions of parameters, trained on extensive datasets in terabyte-scale. Our approach incorporates techniques from LLM libraries to efficiently manage large-scale data and models, enabling both effective training and deployment of these large-scale GNN models. This work addresses three fundamental questions in scaling GNNs: the potential for scaling GNN model architectures, the effect of dataset size on model accuracy, and the applicability of LLM-inspired techniques to GNN architectures. Specifically, the outcomes of this study include (1) insights into the scaling laws for GNNs, highlighting the relationship between model size, dataset volume, and accuracy, (2) a foundational GNN model optimized for atomistic materials modeling, and (3) a GNN codebase enhanced with advanced LLM-based training techniques. Our findings lay the groundwork for large-scale GNNs with billions of parameters and terabyte-scale datasets, establishing a scalable pathway for future advancements in atomistic materials modeling.

Chenjun Li, Cheng Wan, Laurin Lux et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising path toward interpretable medical diagnosis by allowing users to ask about clinical explanations alongside predictions and across different modalities. However, training VLMs for detailed reasoning requires large-scale image-text datasets. In many specialized domains, for example in reading Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) images, such precise text with grounded description of pathologies is scarce or even non-existent. To overcome this bottleneck, we introduce Synthetic Vasculature Reasoning (SVR), a framework that controllably synthesizes images and corresponding text, specifically: realistic retinal vasculature with Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) features: capillary dropout, microaneurysms, neovascularization, and tortuosity, while automatically generating granular reasoning texts. Based on this we curate OCTA-100K-SVR, an OCTA image-reasoning dataset with 100,000 pairs. Our experiments show that a general-purpose VLM (Qwen3-VL-8b) trained on the dataset achieves a zero-shot balanced classification accuracy of 89.67% on real OCTA images, outperforming supervised baselines. Through human expert evaluation we also demonstrate that it significantly enhances explanation quality and pathology localization on clinical data.

Micky C Nnamdi, Wenqi Shi, Cheng Wan et al.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder that affects nearly one billion people globally and significantly elevates cardiovascular risk. Traditional diagnosis through polysomnography is resource-intensive and limits widespread access, creating a critical need for accurate and efficient alternatives. In this paper, we introduce KindSleep, a deep learning framework that integrates clinical knowledge with single-channel patient-specific oximetry signals and clinical data for precise OSA diagnosis. KindSleep first learns to identify clinically interpretable concepts, such as desaturation indices and respiratory disturbance events, directly from raw oximetry signals. It then fuses these AI-derived concepts with multimodal clinical data to estimate the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI). We evaluate KindSleep on three large, independent datasets from the National Sleep Research Resource (SHHS, CFS, MrOS; total n = 9,815). KindSleep demonstrates excellent performance in estimating AHI scores (R2 = 0.917, ICC = 0.957) and consistently outperforms existing approaches in classifying OSA severity, achieving weighted F1-scores from 0.827 to 0.941 across diverse populations. By grounding its predictions in a layer of clinically meaningful concepts, KindSleep provides a more transparent and trustworthy diagnostic tool for sleep medicine practices.

Yusu Qian, Cheng Wan, Chao Jia et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on vision-language tasks, yet their reasoning processes remain sometimes unreliable. We introduce PRISM-Bench, a benchmark of puzzle-based visual challenges designed to evaluate not only whether models can solve problems, but how their reasoning unfolds. Unlike prior evaluations that measure only final-answer accuracy, PRISM-Bench introduces a diagnostic task: given a visual puzzle and a step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) containing exactly one error, models must identify the first incorrect step. This setting enables fine-grained assessment of logical consistency, error detection, and visual reasoning. The puzzles in PRISM-Bench require multi-step symbolic, geometric, and analogical reasoning, resisting shortcuts based on superficial pattern matching. Evaluations across state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal a persistent gap between fluent generation and faithful reasoning: models that produce plausible CoTs often fail to locate simple logical faults. By disentangling answer generation from reasoning verification, PRISM-Bench offers a sharper lens on multimodal reasoning competence and underscores the need for diagnostic evaluation protocols in the development of trustworthy MLLMs.

Zhichao Wang, Cheng Wan, Dong Nie

The performance gains of LLMs have historically been driven by scaling up model size and training data. However, the rapidly diminishing availability of high-quality training data is introducing a fundamental bottleneck, shifting the focus of research toward inference-time scaling. This paradigm uses additional computation at the time of deployment to substantially improve LLM performance on downstream tasks without costly model re-training. This review systematically surveys the diverse techniques contributing to this new era of inference-time scaling, organizing the rapidly evolving field into two comprehensive perspectives: Output-focused and Input-focused methods. Output-focused techniques encompass complex, multi-step generation strategies, including reasoning (e.g., CoT, ToT, ReAct), various search and decoding methods (e.g., MCTS, beam search), training for long CoT (e.g., RLVR, GRPO), and model ensemble methods. Input-focused techniques are primarily categorized by few-shot and RAG, with RAG as the central focus. The RAG section is further detailed through a structured examination of query expansion, data, retrieval and reranker, LLM generation methods, and multi-modal RAG.

Youjie Li, Cheng Wan, Zhiqi Lin et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have scaled rapidly in size and complexity, requiring increasingly intricate parallelism for distributed training, such as 3D parallelism. This sophistication motivates a shift toward simpler, more debuggable programming paradigm like Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD). However, SPMD in eager execution introduces two key challenges: ensuring consistency with single-device execution and achieving high performance at scale. In this paper, we introduce veScale, an eager-mode training system that fully embraces SPMD paradigm to democratize distributed tensor programming. veScale addresses the prevalent issue of inconsistent results in systems like PyTorch by introducing a novel algorithm of distributed Random Number Generation (RNG) compatible with arbitrary sharded operators. veScale also significantly boosts training performance by reducing PyTorch primitive's overhead and improving communication efficiency. Evaluations show that veScale delivers up to 2.2x speedup over the state-of-the-art training systems, like TorchTitan, and cuts code complexity by 78.4%, while preserving single-device-equivalent results.

Feng Zhou, Quyu Kong, Jie Qiao et al.

Temporal point processes (TPPs) are stochastic process models used to characterize event sequences occurring in continuous time. Traditional statistical TPPs have a long-standing history, with numerous models proposed and successfully applied across diverse domains. In recent years, advances in deep learning have spurred the development of neural TPPs, enabling greater flexibility and expressiveness in capturing complex temporal dynamics. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further sparked excitement, offering new possibilities for modeling and analyzing event sequences by leveraging their rich contextual understanding. This survey presents a comprehensive review of recent research on TPPs from three perspectives: Bayesian, deep learning, and LLM approaches. We begin with a review of the fundamental concepts of TPPs, followed by an in-depth discussion of model design and parameter estimation techniques in these three frameworks. We also revisit classic application areas of TPPs to highlight their practical relevance. Finally, we outline challenges and promising directions for future research.

Cheng Wan, Runkai Tao, Zheng Du et al.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have demonstrated superiority in graph-based learning tasks. However, training GCNs on full graphs is particularly challenging, due to the following two challenges: (1) the associated feature tensors can easily explode the memory and block the communication bandwidth of modern accelerators, and (2) the computation workflow in training GCNs alternates between sparse and dense matrix operations, complicating the efficient utilization of computational resources. Existing solutions for scalable distributed full-graph GCN training mostly adopt partition parallelism, which is unsatisfactory as they only partially address the first challenge while incurring scaled-out communication volume. To this end, we propose MixGCN aiming to simultaneously address both the aforementioned challenges towards GCN training. To tackle the first challenge, MixGCN integrates mixture of parallelism. Both theoretical and empirical analysis verify its constant communication volumes and enhanced balanced workload; For handling the second challenge, we consider mixture of accelerators (i.e., sparse and dense accelerators) with a dedicated accelerator for GCN training and a fine-grain pipeline. Extensive experiments show that MixGCN achieves boosted training efficiency and scalability.

Wuxinlin Cheng, Cheng Wan, Yupeng Cao et al.

RITA presents a high-quality real-time interactive framework built upon generative models, designed with practical applications in mind. Our framework enables the transformation of user-uploaded photos into digital avatars that can engage in real-time dialogue interactions. By leveraging the latest advancements in generative modeling, we have developed a versatile platform that not only enhances the user experience through dynamic conversational avatars but also opens new avenues for applications in virtual reality, online education, and interactive gaming. This work showcases the potential of integrating computer vision and natural language processing technologies to create immersive and interactive digital personas, pushing the boundaries of how we interact with digital content.

Cheng Wan, Andrew W. McHill, Elizabeth Klerman et al.

Circadian rhythms influence multiple essential biological activities including sleep, performance, and mood. The dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) is the gold standard for measuring human circadian phase (i.e., timing). The collection of DLMO is expensive and time-consuming since multiple saliva or blood samples are required overnight in special conditions, and the samples must then be assayed for melatonin. Recently, several computational approaches have been designed for estimating DLMO. These methods collect daily sampled data (e.g., sleep onset/offset times) or frequently sampled data (e.g., light exposure/skin temperature/physical activity collected every minute) to train learning models for estimating DLMO. One limitation of these studies is that they only leverage one time-scale data. We propose a two-step framework for estimating DLMO using data from both time scales. The first step summarizes data from before the current day, while the second step combines this summary with frequently sampled data of the current day. We evaluate three moving average models that input sleep timing data as the first step and use recurrent neural network models as the second step. The results using data from 207 undergraduates show that our two-step model with two time-scale features has statistically significantly lower root-mean-square errors than models that use either daily sampled data or frequently sampled data.