Jing Li

Yifan Wang, Wei Fan, Keke Yang et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel framework of decentralized machine learning. Due to the decentralized feature of FL, it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the training procedure, e.g. , backdoor attacks. A backdoor attack aims to inject a backdoor into the machine learning model such that the model will make arbitrarily incorrect behavior on the test sample with some specific backdoor trigger. Even though a range of backdoor attack methods of FL has been introduced, there are also methods defending against them. Many of the defending methods utilize the abnormal characteristics of the models with backdoor or the difference between the models with backdoor and the regular models. To bypass these defenses, we need to reduce the difference and the abnormal characteristics. We find a source of such abnormality is that backdoor attack would directly flip the label of data when poisoning the data. However, current studies of the backdoor attack in FL are not mainly focus on reducing the difference between the models with backdoor and the regular models. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Knowledge Distillation(ADVKD), a method combine knowledge distillation with backdoor attack in FL. With knowledge distillation, we can reduce the abnormal characteristics in model result from the label flipping, thus the model can bypass the defenses. Compared to current methods, we show that ADVKD can not only reach a higher attack success rate, but also successfully bypass the defenses when other methods fails. To further explore the performance of ADVKD, we test how the parameters affect the performance of ADVKD under different scenarios. According to the experiment result, we summarize how to adjust the parameter for better performance under different scenarios. We also use several methods to visualize the effect of different attack and explain the effectiveness of ADVKD.

Mingcong Song, Xinru Tang, Fengfan Hou et al.

Meeting growing demands for low latency and cost efficiency in production-grade large language model (LLM) serving systems requires integrating advanced optimization techniques. However, dynamic and unpredictable input-output lengths of LLM, compounded by these optimizations, exacerbate the issues of workload variability, making it difficult to maintain high efficiency on AI accelerators, especially DSAs with tile-based programming models. To address this challenge, we introduce XY-Serve, a versatile, Ascend native, end-to-end production LLM-serving system. The core idea is an abstraction mechanism that smooths out the workload variability by decomposing computations into unified, hardware-friendly, fine-grained meta primitives. For attention, we propose a meta-kernel that computes the basic pattern of matmul-softmax-matmul with architectural-aware tile sizes. For GEMM, we introduce a virtual padding scheme that adapts to dynamic shape changes while using highly efficient GEMM primitives with assorted fixed tile sizes. XY-Serve sits harmoniously with vLLM. Experimental results show up to 89% end-to-end throughput improvement compared with current publicly available baselines on Ascend NPUs. Additionally, our approach outperforms existing GEMM (average 14.6% faster) and attention (average 21.5% faster) kernels relative to existing libraries. While the work is Ascend native, we believe the approach can be readily applicable to SIMT architectures as well.

Yunqi Zhou, Chengjie Jiang, Chun Yuan et al.

With advances in satellite constellations, sensor technologies, and imaging pipelines, ultra-high-resolution (Ultra-HR) remote sensing imagery is becoming increasingly widespread. However, current remote sensing foundation models are ill-suited to such inputs: full-image encoding exhausts token and memory budgets, while resize-based preprocessing loses fine-grained and answer-critical details. In this context, guiding the model look where it matters before prediction becomes crucial. Therefore, we present ZoomSearch, a training-free, plug-and-play pipeline that decouples 'where to look' from 'how to answer' for Ultra-HR Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RS-VQA). ZoomSearch combines Adaptive Multi-Branch Zoom Search, which performs a hierarchical search over image patches to localize query-relevant regions, with Layout-Aware Patch Reassembly, which reorganizes the selected patches into a compact, layout-faithful canvas. We conduct comprehensive experiments on Ultra-HR RS-VQA benchmarks MME-RealWorld-RS and LRS-VQA, comparing against (i) strong general foundation models, (ii) remote sensing foundation models, (iii) Ultra-HR RS-VQA methods, and (iv) plug-and-play search-based VQA methods. When integrated with LLaVA-ov, ZoomSearch attains state-of-the-art accuracy across diverse tasks, improving the LLaVA-ov baseline by 26.3% on LRS-VQA and 114.8% on MME-RealWorld-RS. Meanwhile, it achieves much higher inference efficiency, outperforming prior search-based methods by 20%~44% in speed.

Xiang Ni, Jing Li, Mo Yu et al.

This paper considers the problem of resource allocation in stream processing, where continuous data flows must be processed in real time in a large distributed system. To maximize system throughput, the resource allocation strategy that partitions the computation tasks of a stream processing graph onto computing devices must simultaneously balance workload distribution and minimize communication. Since this problem of graph partitioning is known to be NP-complete yet crucial to practical streaming systems, many heuristic-based algorithms have been developed to find reasonably good solutions. In this paper, we present a graph-aware encoder-decoder framework to learn a generalizable resource allocation strategy that can properly distribute computation tasks of stream processing graphs unobserved from training data. We, for the first time, propose to leverage graph embedding to learn the structural information of the stream processing graphs. Jointly trained with the graph-aware decoder using deep reinforcement learning, our approach can effectively find optimized solutions for unseen graphs. Our experiments show that the proposed model outperforms both METIS, a state-of-the-art graph partitioning algorithm, and an LSTM-based encoder-decoder model, in about 70% of the test cases.