Zhiyuan Yu

Li Shen, Yan Sun, Zhiyuan Yu et al.

The field of deep learning has witnessed significant progress, particularly in computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), and speech. The use of large-scale models trained on vast amounts of data holds immense promise for practical applications, enhancing industrial productivity and facilitating social development. With the increasing demands on computational capacity, though numerous studies have explored the efficient training, a comprehensive summarization on acceleration techniques of training deep learning models is still much anticipated. In this survey, we present a detailed review for training acceleration. We consider the fundamental update formulation and split its basic components into five main perspectives: (1) data-centric: including dataset regularization, data sampling, and data-centric curriculum learning techniques, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the data samples; (2) model-centric, including acceleration of basic modules, compression training, model initialization and model-centric curriculum learning techniques, which focus on accelerating the training via reducing the calculations on parameters; (3) optimization-centric, including the selection of learning rate, the employment of large batchsize, the designs of efficient objectives, and model average techniques, which pay attention to the training policy and improving the generality for the large-scale models; (4) budgeted training, including some distinctive acceleration methods on source-constrained situations; (5) system-centric, including some efficient open-source distributed libraries/systems which provide adequate hardware support for the implementation of acceleration algorithms. By presenting this comprehensive taxonomy, our survey presents a comprehensive review to understand the general mechanisms within each component and their joint interaction.

Shafizur Rahman Seeam, Zhengxiong Li, Zhiyuan Yu et al.

Hybrid local--cloud agents enrich user requests with context from persistent working state before delegating capability-intensive subtasks to a cloud language model (CLM). While this enrichment can improve task success, it also exposes unnecessary information in the cloud-bound payload, including task-irrelevant context, carryover from prior workflows, and overly specific sensitive details, resulting in \emph{over-disclosure}. Existing solutions either isolate workflows to limit cross-workflow leakage or apply general-purpose sanitization that does not reason over LC-assembled payload scope. We present \textsc{PrivScope}, a trusted on-device payload governor that enforces \emph{task-scoped disclosure} at the local--CLM boundary, without requiring cloud-side changes. Its key idea: sensitive information should reach the cloud only when required for the delegated subtask, and then only in the least revealing form preserving utility. \textsc{PrivScope} extracts disclosure units from the assembled payload and keeps direct identifiers and account-linked values on device. The remaining units pass through cloud-necessity control, which determines what is actually needed; units that must reach the cloud are abstracted to the least-specific representation sufficient for the task. On 100 medical-booking workflows across three commercial CLMs, \textsc{PrivScope} eliminates profile leakage (0.0\% vs.\ 17.7\%), more than halves attacker re-identification (23.1\% vs.\ 64.3\%), and achieves the highest candidate recall on every CLM tested while preserving task success close to the unprotected baseline on GPT-4o-mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash. Gains hold across five local backbones and add only seconds of on-device latency on commodity hardware.

Xiaogeng Liu, Zhiyuan Yu, Yizhe Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in processing and generating human language, powered by their ability to interpret and follow instructions. However, their capabilities can be exploited through prompt injection attacks. These attacks manipulate LLM-integrated applications into producing responses aligned with the attacker's injected content, deviating from the user's actual requests. The substantial risks posed by these attacks underscore the need for a thorough understanding of the threats. Yet, research in this area faces challenges due to the lack of a unified goal for such attacks and their reliance on manually crafted prompts, complicating comprehensive assessments of prompt injection robustness. We introduce a unified framework for understanding the objectives of prompt injection attacks and present an automated gradient-based method for generating highly effective and universal prompt injection data, even in the face of defensive measures. With only five training samples (0.3% relative to the test data), our attack can achieve superior performance compared with baselines. Our findings emphasize the importance of gradient-based testing, which can avoid overestimation of robustness, especially for defense mechanisms.