Chao Xue

Zilong Zhang, Chujie Qin, Chunle Guo et al.

This work presents Robust Representation Learning via Adaptive Mask (RAM++), a two-stage framework for all-in-one image restoration. RAM++ integrates high-level semantic understanding with low-level texture generation to achieve content-oriented robust restoration. It addresses the limitations of existing degradation-oriented methods in extreme scenarios (e.g., degradations strongly coupled with image structures). RAM++ also mitigates common challenges such as unbalanced performance across tasks, overfitting to seen degradations, and weak generalization to unseen ones through three key designs: 1) Adaptive Semantic-Aware Mask (AdaSAM): a pretraining strategy that applies pixel-level masks to semantically rich and textured regions. This design enables the network to learn both generative priors and image content priors from various degradations. 2) Mask Attribute Conductance (MAC): a selective fine-tuning strategy that adjusts the layers with higher contributions to bridge the integrity gap between masked pretraining and full-image fine-tuning while retaining learned priors. 3) Robust Feature Regularization (RFR): a strategy that leverages DINOv2's semantically consistent and degradation-invariant representations, together with efficient feature fusion, to achieve faithful and semantically coherent restoration. With these designs, RAM++ achieves robust, well-balanced, and state-of-the-art performance across seen, unseen, extreme, and mixed degradations. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/DragonisCV/RAM

Canhui Wu, Qiong Cao, Chang Li et al.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance on complex tasks but often suffer from excessive verbosity, known as "overthinking." Existing solutions via reinforcement learning (RL) typically penalize generated tokens to promote conciseness. However, these methods encounter two challenges: responses with fewer tokens do not always correspond to fewer reasoning steps, and models may develop hacking behavior in later stages of training by discarding reasoning steps to minimize token usage. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Step Pruner (SP)}, an RL framework that steers LRMs toward more efficient reasoning by favoring compact reasoning steps. Our step-aware reward function prioritizes correctness while imposing penalties for redundant steps, and withholds rewards for incorrect responses to prevent the reinforcement of erroneous reasoning. Moreover, we propose a dynamic stopping mechanism: when the length of any output step exceeds the upper limit, we halt updates to prevent hacking behavior caused by merging steps. Extensive experiments across four reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SP achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while significantly reducing response length. For instance, on AIME24, SP reduces token usage by \textbf{69.7\%}.

Mengting Hu, Shiwan Zhao, Honglei Guo et al.

Aspect category detection (ACD) in sentiment analysis aims to identify the aspect categories mentioned in a sentence. In this paper, we formulate ACD in the few-shot learning scenario. However, existing few-shot learning approaches mainly focus on single-label predictions. These methods can not work well for the ACD task since a sentence may contain multiple aspect categories. Therefore, we propose a multi-label few-shot learning method based on the prototypical network. To alleviate the noise, we design two effective attention mechanisms. The support-set attention aims to extract better prototypes by removing irrelevant aspects. The query-set attention computes multiple prototype-specific representations for each query instance, which are then used to compute accurate distances with the corresponding prototypes. To achieve multi-label inference, we further learn a dynamic threshold per instance by a policy network. Extensive experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines.

Tao Wang, Junsong Wang, Chang Xu et al.

Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference, especially when deploying to edge or IoT devices with limited computation capacity and power consumption budget. The uniform bit width quantization across all the layers is usually sub-optimal and the exploration of hybrid quantization for different layers is vital for efficient deep compression. In this paper, we employ the meta learning method to automatically realize low-bit hybrid quantization of neural networks. A MetaQuantNet, together with a Quantization function, are trained to generate the quantized weights for the target DNN. Then, we apply a genetic algorithm to search the best hybrid quantization policy that meets compression constraints. With the best searched quantization policy, we subsequently retrain or finetune to further improve the performance of the quantized target network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the performance of searched hybrid quantization scheme surpass that of uniform bitwidth counterpart. Compared to the existing reinforcement learning (RL) based hybrid quantization search approach that relies on tedious explorations, our meta learning approach is more efficient and effective for any compression requirements since the MetaQuantNet only needs be trained once.

Atin Sood, Benjamin Elder, Benjamin Herta et al.

Application of neural networks to a vast variety of practical applications is transforming the way AI is applied in practice. Pre-trained neural network models available through APIs or capability to custom train pre-built neural network architectures with customer data has made the consumption of AI by developers much simpler and resulted in broad adoption of these complex AI models. While prebuilt network models exist for certain scenarios, to try and meet the constraints that are unique to each application, AI teams need to think about developing custom neural network architectures that can meet the tradeoff between accuracy and memory footprint to achieve the tight constraints of their unique use-cases. However, only a small proportion of data science teams have the skills and experience needed to create a neural network from scratch, and the demand far exceeds the supply. In this paper, we present NeuNetS : An automated Neural Network Synthesis engine for custom neural network design that is available as part of IBM's AI OpenScale's product. NeuNetS is available for both Text and Image domains and can build neural networks for specific tasks in a fraction of the time it takes today with human effort, and with accuracy similar to that of human-designed AI models.