Wei Liu

Linsey Pang, Amir Hossein Raffiee, Wei Liu et al.

Sequential recommendation models have achieved state-of-the-art performance using self-attention mechanism. It has since been found that moving beyond only using item ID and positional embeddings leads to a significant accuracy boost when predicting the next item. In recent literature, it was reported that a multi-dimensional kernel embedding with temporal contextual kernels to capture users' diverse behavioral patterns results in a substantial performance improvement. In this study, we further improve the sequential recommender model's robustness and generalization by introducing a mix-attention mechanism with a layer-wise noise injection (LNI) regularization. We refer to our proposed model as adaptive robust sequential recommendation framework (ADRRec), and demonstrate through extensive experiments that our model outperforms existing self-attention architectures.

Huaqin Zhao, Jiaxi Li, Yi Pan et al.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) poses significant memory challenges, as the back-propagation process demands extensive resources, especially with growing model sizes. Recent work, MeZO, addresses this issue using a zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method, which reduces memory consumption by matching the usage to the inference phase. However, MeZO experiences slow convergence due to varying curvatures across model parameters. To overcome this limitation, we introduce HELENE, a novel scalable and memory-efficient optimizer that integrates annealed A-GNB gradients with a diagonal Hessian estimation and layer-wise clipping, serving as a second-order pre-conditioner. This combination allows for faster and more stable convergence. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that HELENE improves convergence rates, particularly for models with heterogeneous layer dimensions, by reducing the dependency on the total parameter space dimension. Instead, the method scales with the largest layer dimension, making it highly suitable for modern LLM architectures. Experimental results on RoBERTa-large and OPT-1.3B across multiple tasks show that HELENE achieves up to a 20x speedup compared to MeZO, with average accuracy improvements of 1.5%. Furthermore, HELENE remains compatible with both full parameter tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), outperforming several state-of-the-art optimizers. The codes will be released after reviewing.

Yirui Chen, Pengjin Wei, Zhenhuan Liu et al.

Producing traversability maps and understanding the surroundings are crucial prerequisites for autonomous navigation. In this paper, we address the problem of traversability assessment using point clouds. We propose a novel pillar feature extraction module that utilizes PointNet to capture features from point clouds organized in vertical volume and a 2D encoder-decoder structure to conduct traversability classification instead of the widely used 3D convolutions. This results in less computational cost while even better performance is achieved at the same time. We then propose a new spatio-temporal attention module to fuse multi-frame information, which can properly handle the varying density problem of LIDAR point clouds, and this makes our module able to assess distant areas more accurately. Comprehensive experimental results on augmented Semantic KITTI and RELLIS-3D datasets show that our method is able to achieve superior performance over existing approaches both quantitatively and quantitatively.

Xiao Wang, Shiqian Ma, Donald Goldfarb et al.

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We propose a general framework for such methods, for which we prove almost sure convergence to stationary points and analyze its worst-case iteration complexity. When a randomly chosen iterate is returned as the output of such an algorithm, we prove that in the worst-case, the SFO-calls complexity is $O(ε^{-2})$ to ensure that the expectation of the squared norm of the gradient is smaller than the given accuracy tolerance $ε$. We also propose a specific algorithm, namely a stochastic damped L-BFGS (SdLBFGS) method, that falls under the proposed framework. {Moreover, we incorporate the SVRG variance reduction technique into the proposed SdLBFGS method, and analyze its SFO-calls complexity. Numerical results on a nonconvex binary classification problem using SVM, and a multiclass classification problem using neural networks are reported.