Shuo Chen

Jialiang Tang, Shuo Chen, Chen Gong

Data-free knowledge distillation aims to learn a compact student network from a pre-trained large teacher network without using the original training data of the teacher network. Existing collection-based and generation-based methods train student networks by collecting massive real examples and generating synthetic examples, respectively. However, they inevitably become weak in practical scenarios due to the difficulties in gathering or emulating sufficient real-world data. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method called \textbf{H}ybr\textbf{i}d \textbf{D}ata-\textbf{F}ree \textbf{D}istillation (HiDFD), which leverages only a small amount of collected data as well as generates sufficient examples for training student networks. Our HiDFD comprises two primary modules, \textit{i.e.}, the teacher-guided generation and student distillation. The teacher-guided generation module guides a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) by the teacher network to produce high-quality synthetic examples from very few real-world collected examples. Specifically, we design a feature integration mechanism to prevent the GAN from overfitting and facilitate the reliable representation learning from the teacher network. Meanwhile, we drive a category frequency smoothing technique via the teacher network to balance the generative training of each category. In the student distillation module, we explore a data inflation strategy to properly utilize a blend of real and synthetic data to train the student network via a classifier-sharing-based feature alignment technique. Intensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our HiDFD can achieve state-of-the-art performance using 120 times less collected data than existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/tangjialiang97/HiDFD.

Zhiqiang Kou, Si Qin, Hailin Wang et al.

Multi-label learning (MLL) has gained attention for its ability to represent real-world data. Label Distribution Learning (LDL), an extension of MLL to learning from label distributions, faces challenges in collecting accurate label distributions. To address the issue of biased annotations, based on the low-rank assumption, existing works recover true distributions from biased observations by exploring the label correlations. However, recent evidence shows that the label distribution tends to be full-rank, and naive apply of low-rank approximation on biased observation leads to inaccurate recovery and performance degradation. In this paper, we address the LDL with biased annotations problem from a novel perspective, where we first degenerate the soft label distribution into a hard multi-hot label and then recover the true label information for each instance. This idea stems from an insight that assigning hard multi-hot labels is often easier than assigning a soft label distribution, and it shows stronger immunity to noise disturbances, leading to smaller label bias. Moreover, assuming that the multi-label space for predicting label distributions is low-rank offers a more reasonable approach to capturing label correlations. Theoretical analysis and experiments confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our method on real-world datasets.

Juewen Hu, Yexin Li, Jiulin Li et al.

Emotion recognition plays a vital role in enhancing human-computer interaction. In this study, we tackle the MER-SEMI challenge of the MER2025 competition by proposing a novel multimodal emotion recognition framework. To address the issue of data scarcity, we leverage large-scale pre-trained models to extract informative features from visual, audio, and textual modalities. Specifically, for the visual modality, we design a dual-branch visual encoder that captures both global frame-level features and localized facial representations. For the textual modality, we introduce a context-enriched method that employs large language models to enrich emotional cues within the input text. To effectively integrate these multimodal features, we propose a fusion strategy comprising two key components, i.e., self-attention mechanisms for dynamic modality weighting, and residual connections to preserve original representations. Beyond architectural design, we further refine noisy labels in the training set by a multi-source labeling strategy. Our approach achieves a substantial performance improvement over the official baseline on the MER2025-SEMI dataset, attaining a weighted F-score of 87.49% compared to 78.63%, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Yilun Liu, Yunpu Ma, Yuetian Lu et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) benefits from a dynamic routing mechanism among their specialized experts, which existing Parameter- Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies fail to leverage. This motivates us to investigate whether adaptation modules themselves should incorporate routing mechanisms to align with MoE's multi-expert architecture. We analyze dynamics of core components when applying PEFT to MoE language models and examine how different routing strategies affect adaptation effectiveness. Extensive experiments adapting OLMoE-1B-7B and Mixtral-8x7B on various commonsense and math reasoning tasks validate the performance and efficiency of our routed approach. We identify the optimal configurations for different scenarios and provide empirical analyses with practical insights to facilitate better PEFT and MoE applications.