Xinyu Zhang

Raphael Tang, Xinyu Zhang, Jimmy Lin et al.

Do large language models (LLMs) exhibit sociodemographic biases, even when they decline to respond? To bypass their refusal to "speak," we study this research question by probing contextualized embeddings and exploring whether this bias is encoded in its latent representations. We propose a logistic Bradley-Terry probe which predicts word pair preferences of LLMs from the words' hidden vectors. We first validate our probe on three pair preference tasks and thirteen LLMs, where we outperform the word embedding association test (WEAT), a standard approach in testing for implicit association, by a relative 27% in error rate. We also find that word pair preferences are best represented in the middle layers. Next, we transfer probes trained on harmless tasks (e.g., pick the larger number) to controversial ones (compare ethnicities) to examine biases in nationality, politics, religion, and gender. We observe substantial bias for all target classes: for instance, the Mistral model implicitly prefers Europe to Africa, Christianity to Judaism, and left-wing to right-wing politics, despite declining to answer. This suggests that instruction fine-tuning does not necessarily debias contextualized embeddings. Our codebase is at https://github.com/castorini/biasprobe.

Minghan Li, Xinyu Zhang, Ji Xin et al.

In information retrieval (IR), candidate set pruning has been commonly used to speed up two-stage relevance ranking. However, such an approach lacks accurate error control and often trades accuracy off against computational efficiency in an empirical fashion, lacking theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose the concept of certified error control of candidate set pruning for relevance ranking, which means that the test error after pruning is guaranteed to be controlled under a user-specified threshold with high probability. Both in-domain and out-of-domain experiments show that our method successfully prunes the first-stage retrieved candidate sets to improve the second-stage reranking speed while satisfying the pre-specified accuracy constraints in both settings. For example, on MS MARCO Passage v1, our method yields an average candidate set size of 27 out of 1,000 which increases the reranking speed by about 37 times, while the MRR@10 is greater than a pre-specified value of 0.38 with about 90% empirical coverage and the empirical baselines fail to provide such guarantee. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/alexlimh/CEC-Ranking.

Jung-Woo Chang, Ke Sun, Nasimeh Heydaribeni et al.

Machine Learning (ML) has been instrumental in enabling joint transceiver optimization by merging all physical layer blocks of the end-to-end wireless communication systems. Although there have been a number of adversarial attacks on ML-based wireless systems, the existing methods do not provide a comprehensive view including multi-modality of the source data, common physical layer protocols, and wireless domain constraints. This paper proposes Magmaw, a novel wireless attack methodology capable of generating universal adversarial perturbations for any multimodal signal transmitted over a wireless channel. We further introduce new objectives for adversarial attacks on downstream applications. We adopt the widely-used defenses to verify the resilience of Magmaw. For proof-of-concept evaluation, we build a real-time wireless attack platform using a software-defined radio system. Experimental results demonstrate that Magmaw causes significant performance degradation even in the presence of strong defense mechanisms. Furthermore, we validate the performance of Magmaw in two case studies: encrypted communication channel and channel modality-based ML model.

Songlin Xu, Xinyu Zhang

Using deep neural networks as computational models to simulate cognitive process can provide key insights into human behavioral dynamics. Challenges arise when environments are highly dynamic, obscuring stimulus-behavior relationships. However, the majority of current research focuses on simulating human cognitive behaviors under ideal conditions, neglecting the influence of environmental disturbances. We propose CogReact, integrating drift-diffusion with deep reinforcement learning to simulate granular effects of dynamic environmental stimuli on human cognitive process. Quantitatively, it improves cognition modelling by considering temporal effect of environmental stimuli on cognitive process and captures both subject-specific and stimuli-specific behavioural differences. Qualitatively, it captures general trends in human cognitive process under stimuli, better than baselines. Our approach is examined in diverse environmental influences on various cognitive tasks. Overall, it demonstrates a powerful, data-driven methodology to simulate, align with, and understand the vagaries of human cognitive response in dynamic contexts.

Xingyu Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Qiyue Xia et al.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) sensing is an emerging technology with applications in 3D object characterization and environment mapping. However, realizing precise 3D reconstruction from sparse mmWave signals remains challenging. Existing methods rely on data-driven learning, constrained by dataset availability and difficulty in generalization. We propose DiffSBR, a differentiable framework for mmWave-based 3D reconstruction. DiffSBR incorporates a differentiable ray tracing engine to simulate radar point clouds from virtual 3D models. A gradient-based optimizer refines the model parameters to minimize the discrepancy between simulated and real point clouds. Experiments using various radar hardware validate DiffSBR's capability for fine-grained 3D reconstruction, even for novel objects unseen by the radar previously. By integrating physics-based simulation with gradient optimization, DiffSBR transcends the limitations of data-driven approaches and pioneers a new paradigm for mmWave sensing.

Songlin Xu, Xinyu Zhang

Student simulation presents a transformative approach to enhance learning outcomes, advance educational research, and ultimately shape the future of effective pedagogy. We explore the feasibility of using large language models (LLMs), a remarkable achievement in AI, to simulate student learning behaviors. Unlike conventional machine learning based prediction, we leverage LLMs to instantiate virtual students with specific demographics and uncover intricate correlations among learning experiences, course materials, understanding levels, and engagement. Our objective is not merely to predict learning outcomes but to replicate learning behaviors and patterns of real students. We validate this hypothesis through three experiments. The first experiment, based on a dataset of N = 145, simulates student learning outcomes from demographic data, revealing parallels with actual students concerning various demographic factors. The second experiment (N = 4524) results in increasingly realistic simulated behaviors with more assessment history for virtual students modelling. The third experiment (N = 27), incorporating prior knowledge and course interactions, indicates a strong link between virtual students' learning behaviors and fine-grained mappings from test questions, course materials, engagement and understanding levels. Collectively, these findings deepen our understanding of LLMs and demonstrate its viability for student simulation, empowering more adaptable curricula design to enhance inclusivity and educational effectiveness.

Xinyu Zhang, Weiyu Sun, Ying Chen

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving paradigm for collaboratively training a global model from decentralized clients. However, the performance of FL is hindered by non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data and device heterogeneity. In this work, we revisit this key challenge through the lens of gradient conflicts on the server side. Specifically, we first investigate the gradient conflict phenomenon among multiple clients and reveal that stronger heterogeneity leads to more severe gradient conflicts. To tackle this issue, we propose FedGH, a simple yet effective method that mitigates local drifts through Gradient Harmonization. This technique projects one gradient vector onto the orthogonal plane of the other within conflicting client pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedGH consistently enhances multiple state-of-the-art FL baselines across diverse benchmarks and non-IID scenarios. Notably, FedGH yields more significant improvements in scenarios with stronger heterogeneity. As a plug-and-play module, FedGH can be seamlessly integrated into any FL framework without requiring hyperparameter tuning.

Yixiang Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Jinran Wang et al.

The Structured Dialogue System, referred to as SuDoSys, is an innovative Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbot designed to provide psychological counseling. SuDoSys leverages the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Problem Management Plus (PM+) guidelines to deliver stage-aware multi-turn dialogues. Existing methods for employing an LLM in multi-turn psychological counseling typically involve direct fine-tuning using generated dialogues, often neglecting the dynamic stage shifts of counseling sessions. Unlike previous approaches, SuDoSys considers the different stages of counseling and stores essential information throughout the counseling process, ensuring coherent and directed conversations. The system employs an LLM, a stage-aware instruction generator, a response unpacker, a topic database, and a stage controller to maintain dialogue flow. In addition, we propose a novel technique that simulates counseling clients to interact with the evaluated system and evaluate its performance automatically. When assessed using both objective and subjective evaluations, SuDoSys demonstrates its effectiveness in generating logically coherent responses. The system's code and program scripts for evaluation are open-sourced.

Christopher E. Mower, Yuhui Wan, Hongzhan Yu et al.

We present a framework for intuitive robot programming by non-experts, leveraging natural language prompts and contextual information from the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our system integrates large language models (LLMs), enabling non-experts to articulate task requirements to the system through a chat interface. Key features of the framework include: integration of ROS with an AI agent connected to a plethora of open-source and commercial LLMs, automatic extraction of a behavior from the LLM output and execution of ROS actions/services, support for three behavior modes (sequence, behavior tree, state machine), imitation learning for adding new robot actions to the library of possible actions, and LLM reflection via human and environment feedback. Extensive experiments validate the framework, showcasing robustness, scalability, and versatility in diverse scenarios, including long-horizon tasks, tabletop rearrangements, and remote supervisory control. To facilitate the adoption of our framework and support the reproduction of our results, we have made our code open-source. You can access it at: https://github.com/huawei-noah/HEBO/tree/master/ROSLLM.

Mengting Chen, Yuxin Fang, Xinggang Wang et al.

Few-shot learning is a challenging task that aims at training a classifier for unseen classes with only a few training examples. The main difficulty of few-shot learning lies in the lack of intra-class diversity within insufficient training samples. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel generative framework, Diversity Transfer Network (DTN), that learns to transfer latent diversities from known categories and composite them with support features to generate diverse samples for novel categories in feature space. The learning problem of the sample generation (i.e., diversity transfer) is solved via minimizing an effective meta-classification loss in a single-stage network, instead of the generative loss in previous works. Besides, an organized auxiliary task co-training over known categories is proposed to stabilize the meta-training process of DTN. We perform extensive experiments and ablation studies on three datasets, i.e., \emph{mini}ImageNet, CIFAR100 and CUB. The results show that DTN, with single-stage training and faster convergence speed, obtains the state-of-the-art results among the feature generation based few-shot learning methods. Code and supplementary material are available at: \texttt{https://github.com/Yuxin-CV/DTN}

Songlin Xu, Xinyu Zhang, Lianhui Qin

Student simulation in online education is important to address dynamic learning behaviors of students with diverse backgrounds. Existing simulation models based on deep learning usually need massive training data, lacking prior knowledge in educational contexts. Large language models (LLMs) may contain such prior knowledge since they are pre-trained from a large corpus. However, because student behaviors are dynamic and multifaceted with individual differences, directly prompting LLMs is not robust nor accurate enough to capture fine-grained interactions among diverse student personas, learning behaviors, and learning outcomes. This work tackles this problem by presenting a newly annotated fine-grained large-scale dataset and proposing EduAgent, a novel generative agent framework incorporating cognitive prior knowledge (i.e., theoretical findings revealed in cognitive science) to guide LLMs to first reason correlations among various behaviors and then make simulations. Our two experiments show that EduAgent could not only mimic and predict learning behaviors of real students but also generate realistic learning behaviors of virtual students without real data.

Songlin Xu, Hao-Ning Wen, Hongyi Pan et al.

Student simulation supports educators to improve teaching by interacting with virtual students. However, most existing approaches ignore the modulation effects of course materials because of two challenges: the lack of datasets with granularly annotated course materials, and the limitation of existing simulation models in processing extremely long textual data. To solve the challenges, we first run a 6-week education workshop from N = 60 students to collect fine-grained data using a custom built online education system, which logs students' learning behaviors as they interact with lecture materials over time. Second, we propose a transferable iterative reflection (TIR) module that augments both prompting-based and finetuning-based large language models (LLMs) for simulating learning behaviors. Our comprehensive experiments show that TIR enables the LLMs to perform more accurate student simulation than classical deep learning models, even with limited demonstration data. Our TIR approach better captures the granular dynamism of learning performance and inter-student correlations in classrooms, paving the way towards a ''digital twin'' for online education.

Crystina Zhang, Jing Lu, Vinh Q. Tran et al. · mit

Human understanding of text depends on general semantic concepts of words rather than their superficial forms. To what extent does our human intuition transfer to language models? In this work, we study the degree to which current multilingual language models (mLMs) understand based on subword-level semantic concepts. To this end, we form "semantic tokens" by merging the semantically similar subwords and their embeddings, and evaluate the updated mLMs on five heterogeneous multilingual downstream tasks. Results show that the general shared semantics could get the models a long way in making the predictions on mLMs with different tokenizers and model sizes. Inspections of the grouped subwords show that they exhibit a wide range of semantic similarities, including synonyms and translations across many languages and scripts. Lastly, we find that the zero-shot results with semantic tokens are on par with or even better than the original models on certain classification tasks, suggesting that the shared subword-level semantics may serve as the anchors for cross-lingual transfer.

Songlin Xu, Dongyin Hu, Ru Wang et al.

Human visual attention is susceptible to social influences. In education, peer effects impact student learning, but their precise role in modulating attention remains unclear. Our experiment (N=311) demonstrates that displaying peer visual attention regions when students watch online course videos enhances their focus and engagement. However, students retain adaptability in following peer attention cues. Overall, guided peer attention improves learning experiences and outcomes. These findings elucidate how peer visual attention shapes students' gaze patterns, deepening understanding of peer influence on learning. They also offer insights into designing adaptive online learning interventions leveraging peer attention modelling to optimize student attentiveness and success.

Shijin Gong, Huihang Liu, Xinyu Zhang

We consider data-driven inventory and pricing decisions in the feature-based newsvendor problem, where demand is influenced by both price and contextual features and is modeled without any structural assumptions. The unknown demand distribution results in a challenging conditional stochastic optimization problem, further complicated by decision-dependent uncertainty and the integration of features. Inspired by recent advances in deep generative learning, we propose a novel approach leveraging conditional deep generative models (cDGMs) to address these challenges. cDGMs learn the demand distribution and generate probabilistic demand forecasts conditioned on price and features. This generative approach enables accurate profit estimation and supports the design of algorithms for two key objectives: (1) optimizing inventory for arbitrary prices, and (2) jointly determining optimal pricing and inventory levels. We provide theoretical guarantees for our approach, including the consistency of profit estimation and convergence of our decisions to the optimal solution. Extensive simulations-ranging from simple to complex scenarios, including one involving textual features-and a real-world case study demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our method opens a new paradigm in management science and operations research, is adaptable to extensions of the newsvendor and pricing problems, and holds potential for solving other conditional stochastic optimization problems.

Yuling Chen, Juan Ma, Xianmin Wang et al.

Rational secure multi-party computation (RSMC) means two or more rational parties to complete a function on private inputs. In the process, the rational parties choose strategies to maximize utility, which will cause players to maliciously execute the protocol and undermine the fairness and correctness of the protocol. To solve this problem, we leverage game theory to propose the direction entropy-based solution. First, we utilize the direction vector of the direction entropy to examine the player's strategy uncertainty and quantify its strategy from different dimensions. Specifically, when parties choose a cooperation strategy, the direction vector is positive, and the information transmitted is positive, conversely, it is negative information. Then, we provide mutual information to construct new utility functions for the players. What's more, we measure the mutual information of players to appraise their strategies. Finally, we prove in detail the protocol we gave, and the result show that the fairness problem in rational secure two-party computation. We also prove that the proposed protocol reaches the Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using mutual information to construct utility, and the results show that the utility obtained when the player is honest will be higher.

Xianan Zhang, Wei Wang, Xuedou Xiao et al.

Some important indoor localization applications, such as localizing a lost kid in a shopping mall, call for a new peer-to-peer localization technique that can localize an individual's smartphone or wearables by directly using another's on-body devices in unknown indoor environments. However, current localization solutions either require pre-deployed infrastructures or multiple antennas in both transceivers, impending their wide-scale application. In this paper, we present P2PLocate, a peer-to-peer localization system that enables a single-antenna device co-located with a batteryless backscatter tag to localize another single-antenna device with decimeter-level accuracy. P2PLocate leverages the multipath variations intentionally created by an on-body backscatter tag, coupled with spatial information offered by user movements, to accomplish this objective without relying on any pre-deployed infrastructures or pre-training. P2PLocate incorporates novel algorithms to address two major challenges: (i) interference with strong direct-path signal while extracting multipath variations, and (ii) lack of direction information while using single-antenna transceivers. We implement P2PLocate on commercial off-the-shelf Google Nexus 6p, Intel 5300 WiFi card, and Raspberry Pi B4. Real-world experiments reveal that P2PLocate can localize both static and mobile targets with a median accuracy of 0.88 m.