Zishan Shao

Yixiao Wang, Ting Jiang, Zishan Shao et al.

Denoising generative models deliver high-fidelity generation but remain bottlenecked by inference latency due to the many iterative denoiser calls required during sampling. Training-free acceleration methods reduce latency by either sparsifying the model architecture or shortening the sampling trajectory. Current training-free acceleration methods are more complex than necessary: higher-order predictors amplify error under aggressive speedups, and architectural modifications hinder deployment. Beyond 2x acceleration, step skipping creates structural scarcity -- at most one fresh evaluation per local window -- leaving the computed output and its backward difference as the only causally grounded information. Based on this, we propose ZEUS, an acceleration method that predicts reduced denoiser evaluations using a second-order predictor, and stabilizes aggressive consecutive skipping with an interleaved scheme that avoids back-to-back extrapolations. ZEUS adds essentially zero overhead, no feature caches, and no architectural modifications, and it is compatible with different backbones, prediction objectives, and solver choices. Across image and video generation, ZEUS consistently improves the speed-fidelity performance over recent training-free baselines, achieving up to 3.2x end-to-end speedup while maintaining perceptual quality. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ting-Justin-Jiang/ZEUS.

Wenhao Wu, Zishan Shao, Kangning Cui et al.

SVD-based Low-rank compression reduces transformer parameters and nominal FLOPs, but these savings often translate poorly into real LLM serving speedups. We show that this gap is largely a runtime problem: factorized checkpoints fragment execution paths, and the resulting overhead differs substantially between prefill and autoregressive decode. We present FlashSVD v1.5, a unified inference runtime for serving SVD-compressed transformers. FlashSVD v1.5 maps diverse public SVD compression families to a common factorized representation and combines phase-specific kernels with dense-KV decode, packed MLP execution, and per-layer CUDA-graph replay to reorganize the low-rank serving path into a thin runtime. Across representative decoder-serving settings, FlashSVD v1.5 achieves up to 2.55x decode and 2.39x end-to-end speedup, and it attains 1.48x average decode and 1.44x average end-to-end speedup across multiple popular SVD compression families. These results suggest that practical low-rank acceleration requires runtime co-design, not compression algorithms alone. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Zishan-Shao/FlashSVD.

Kangning Cui, Surendra Bohara, Suraj Prasai et al.

Illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest causes deforestation, water contamination, and long-term ecosystem disruption, yet remains difficult to monitor at fine spatial scales. Satellite imagery supports large-scale observation, but often misses small mining-related structures and subtle land-cover transitions, especially under frequent cloud cover. We introduce ELDOR, a large-scale UAV benchmark for monitoring environmental and landscape disturbance from illegal gold mining in the rainforest. ELDOR contains manually annotated orthomosaic imagery covering over 2,500 hectares, with pixel-level semantic labels for both mining-related activities and surrounding ecological structures. With this unified annotation source, we establish four benchmark tasks: semantic segmentation, segmentation-derived recognition, direct multi-label classification, and class-presence recognition with vision-language models. Across these tasks, we compare generic and remote-sensing-specific segmentation models, vision foundation model-related segmentation methods, direct multi-label classification methods, and vision-language models under a controlled closed-set protocol. Results show that current methods still struggle with rare small-scale mining structures and fine-grained recovery classes, suggesting the need for context-aware and multimodal modeling. To support domain analysis and practical use, we further build an interactive explorer for domain experts that provides a unified interface for data exploration and model inference.

Qinsi Wang, Hancheng Ye, Jinhee Kim et al.

Think about how human handles complex reading tasks: marking key points, inferring their relationships, and structuring information to guide understanding and responses. Likewise, can a large language model benefit from text structure to enhance text-processing performance? To explore it, in this work, we first introduce Structure of Thought (SoT), a prompting technique that explicitly guides models to construct intermediate text structures, consistently boosting performance across eight tasks and three model families. Building upon this insight, we present T2S-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate and improve text-to-structure capabilities of models. T2S-Bench includes 1.8K samples across 6 scientific domains and 32 structural types, rigorously constructed to ensure accuracy, fairness, and quality. Evaluation on 45 mainstream models reveals substantial improvement potential: the average accuracy on the multi-hop reasoning task is only 52.1%, and even the most advanced model achieves 58.1% node accuracy in end-to-end extraction. Furthermore, on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, SoT alone yields an average +5.7% improvement across eight diverse text-processing tasks, and fine-tuning on T2S-Bench further increases this gain to +8.6%. These results highlight the value of explicit text structuring and the complementary contributions of SoT and T2S-Bench. Dataset and eval code have been released at https://t2s-bench.github.io/T2S-Bench-Page/.

Yixiao Wang, Zishan Shao, Ting Jiang et al.

We present a novel enhanced cyclic coordinate descent (ECCD) framework for solving generalized linear models with elastic net constraints that reduces training time in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods. We redesign the CD method by performing a Taylor expansion around the current iterate to avoid nonlinear operations arising in the gradient computation. By introducing this approximation, we are able to unroll the vector recurrences occurring in the CD method and reformulate the resulting computations into more efficient batched computations. We show empirically that the recurrence can be unrolled by a tunable integer parameter, $s$, such that $s > 1$ yields performance improvements without affecting convergence, whereas $s = 1$ yields the original CD method. A key advantage of ECCD is that it avoids the convergence delay and numerical instability exhibited by block coordinate descent. Finally, we implement our proposed method in C++ using Eigen to accelerate linear algebra computations. Comparison of our method against existing state-of-the-art solvers shows consistent performance improvements of $3\times$ in average for regularization path variant on diverse benchmark datasets. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Yixiao-Wang-Stats/ECCD.

Kangning Cui, Zishan Shao, Gregory Larsen et al.

Palms play an outsized role in tropical forests and are important resources for humans and wildlife. A central question in tropical ecosystems is understanding palm distribution and abundance. However, accurately identifying and localizing palms in geospatial imagery presents significant challenges due to dense vegetation, overlapping canopies, and variable lighting conditions in mixed-forest landscapes. Addressing this, we introduce PalmProbNet, a probabilistic approach utilizing transfer learning to analyze high-resolution UAV-derived orthomosaic imagery, enabling the detection of palm trees within the dense canopy of the Ecuadorian Rainforest. This approach represents a substantial advancement in automated palm detection, effectively pinpointing palm presence and locality in mixed tropical rainforests. Our process begins by generating an orthomosaic image from UAV images, from which we extract and label palm and non-palm image patches in two distinct sizes. These patches are then used to train models with an identical architecture, consisting of an unaltered pre-trained ResNet-18 and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with specifically trained parameters. Subsequently, PalmProbNet employs a sliding window technique on the landscape orthomosaic, using both small and large window sizes to generate a probability heatmap. This heatmap effectively visualizes the distribution of palms, showcasing the scalability and adaptability of our approach in various forest densities. Despite the challenging terrain, our method demonstrated remarkable performance, achieving an accuracy of 97.32% and a Cohen's kappa of 94.59% in testing.

Ting Jiang, Yixiao Wang, Hancheng Ye et al.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative tasks but suffer from high computational costs due to their iterative sampling process and quadratic attention costs. Existing training-free acceleration strategies that reduce per-step computation cost, while effectively reducing sampling time, demonstrate low faithfulness compared to the original baseline. We hypothesize that this fidelity gap arises because (a) different prompts correspond to varying denoising trajectory, and (b) such methods do not consider the underlying ODE formulation and its numerical solution. In this paper, we propose Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration (SADA), a novel paradigm that unifies step-wise and token-wise sparsity decisions via a single stability criterion to accelerate sampling of ODE-based generative models (Diffusion and Flow-matching). For (a), SADA adaptively allocates sparsity based on the sampling trajectory. For (b), SADA introduces principled approximation schemes that leverage the precise gradient information from the numerical ODE solver. Comprehensive evaluations on SD-2, SDXL, and Flux using both EDM and DPM++ solvers reveal consistent $\ge 1.8\times$ speedups with minimal fidelity degradation (LPIPS $\leq 0.10$ and FID $\leq 4.5$) compared to unmodified baselines, significantly outperforming prior methods. Moreover, SADA adapts seamlessly to other pipelines and modalities: It accelerates ControlNet without any modifications and speeds up MusicLDM by $1.8\times$ with $\sim 0.01$ spectrogram LPIPS.

Zishan Shao, Yixiao Wang, Qinsi Wang et al.

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has recently seen a surge of interest as a simple yet powerful tool for large language models (LLMs) compression, with a growing number of works demonstrating 20-80% parameter reductions at minimal accuracy loss. Previous SVD-based approaches have focused primarily on reducing the memory footprint of model weights, largely overlooking the additional activation memory overhead incurred during inference when applying truncated factors via standard dense CUDA kernels. Our experiments demonstrate that this activation overhead, scaling with sequence length and hidden dimension, prevents current SVD compression techniques from achieving any reduction in peak inference memory, thereby limiting their viability for real-world, on-device deployments. We introduce FlashSVD, a novel, end-to-end rank-aware streaming inference framework specifically designed for SVD-compressed large language models. FlashSVD can be seamlessly integrated with any model that employs SVD-based methods for parameter reduction. By fusing low-rank projection kernels directly into both the self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN) pipelines, FlashSVD avoid materializing full-size activation buffers. Instead, small tiles of the truncated factors are loaded into on-chip SRAM, multiplied and reduced on the fly, and immediately evicted, preserving high GPU occupancy and adding no extra latency. On standard encoder benchmarks (e.g., BERT-Base), FlashSVD cuts peak activation memory by up to 70.2% and intermediate transient memory by 75%, all while incur no accuracy loss with upstreaming compression methods, offering a practical path toward memory-constrained deployment of low-rank LLMs.