Ren Chen

CL
h-index41
10papers
962citations
Novelty52%
AI Score54

10 Papers

88.2AIMay 31
DAG-MoE: From Simple Mixture to Structural Aggregation in Mixture-of-Experts

Jiarui Feng, Hanqing Zeng, Karish Grover et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a leading approach for decoupling parameter count from computational cost in large language models, yet effectively scaling MoE performance remains a challenge. Prior work shows that fine-grained experts enlarge the space of expert combinations and improve flexibility, but they also impose substantial routing overhead, creating a new scalability bottleneck. In this paper, we explore a complementary axis for scaling -- how expert outputs are aggregated. We theoretically show that replacing the standard weighted-summation aggregation with structural aggregation expands the expert-combination space without altering the experts or router, and enables possible multi-step reasoning within a single MoE layer. To this end, we propose DAG-MoE, a sparse MoE framework that employs a lightweight module to automatically learn the optimal aggregation structure among the selected experts. Extensive experiments under standard language modeling settings show that DAG-MoE consistently improves performance in both pretraining and fine-tuning, surpassing traditional MoE baselines.

CLJul 24, 2023
LLM-Rec: Personalized Recommendation via Prompting Large Language Models

Hanjia Lyu, Song Jiang, Hanqing Zeng et al.

Text-based recommendation holds a wide range of practical applications due to its versatility, as textual descriptions can represent nearly any type of item. However, directly employing the original item descriptions may not yield optimal recommendation performance due to the lack of comprehensive information to align with user preferences. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable ability to harness commonsense knowledge and reasoning. In this study, we introduce a novel approach, coined LLM-Rec, which incorporates four distinct prompting strategies of text enrichment for improving personalized text-based recommendations. Our empirical experiments reveal that using LLM-augmented text significantly enhances recommendation quality. Even basic MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) models achieve comparable or even better results than complex content-based methods. Notably, the success of LLM-Rec lies in its prompting strategies, which effectively tap into the language model's comprehension of both general and specific item characteristics. This highlights the importance of employing diverse prompts and input augmentation techniques to boost the recommendation effectiveness of LLMs.

IRJan 7Code
Efficient Sequential Recommendation for Long Term User Interest Via Personalization

Qiang Zhang, Hanchao Yu, Ivan Ji et al.

Recent years have witnessed success of sequential modeling, generative recommender, and large language model for recommendation. Though the scaling law has been validated for sequential models, it showed inefficiency in computational capacity when considering real-world applications like recommendation, due to the non-linear(quadratic) increasing nature of the transformer model. To improve the efficiency of the sequential model, we introduced a novel approach to sequential recommendation that leverages personalization techniques to enhance efficiency and performance. Our method compresses long user interaction histories into learnable tokens, which are then combined with recent interactions to generate recommendations. This approach significantly reduces computational costs while maintaining high recommendation accuracy. Our method could be applied to existing transformer based recommendation models, e.g., HSTU and HLLM. Extensive experiments on multiple sequential models demonstrate its versatility and effectiveness. Source code is available at \href{https://github.com/facebookresearch/PerSRec}{https://github.com/facebookresearch/PerSRec}.

99.9LGMar 10
ReMix: Reinforcement routing for mixtures of LoRAs in LLM finetuning

Ruizhong Qiu, Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia et al.

Low-rank adapters (LoRAs) are a parameter-efficient finetuning technique that injects trainable low-rank matrices into pretrained models to adapt them to new tasks. Mixture-of-LoRAs models expand neural networks efficiently by routing each layer input to a small subset of specialized LoRAs of the layer. Existing Mixture-of-LoRAs routers assign a learned routing weight to each LoRA to enable end-to-end training of the router. Despite their empirical promise, we observe that the routing weights are typically extremely imbalanced across LoRAs in practice, where only one or two LoRAs often dominate the routing weights. This essentially limits the number of effective LoRAs and thus severely hinders the expressive power of existing Mixture-of-LoRAs models. In this work, we attribute this weakness to the nature of learnable routing weights and rethink the fundamental design of the router. To address this critical issue, we propose a new router designed that we call Reinforcement Routing for Mixture-of-LoRAs (ReMix). Our key idea is using non-learnable routing weights to ensure all active LoRAs to be equally effective, with no LoRA dominating the routing weights. However, our routers cannot be trained directly via gradient descent due to our non-learnable routing weights. Hence, we further propose an unbiased gradient estimator for the router by employing the reinforce leave-one-out (RLOO) technique, where we regard the supervision loss as the reward and the router as the policy in reinforcement learning. Our gradient estimator also enables to scale up training compute to boost the predictive performance of our ReMix. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ReMix significantly outperform state-of-the-art parameter-efficient finetuning methods under a comparable number of activated parameters.

82.8CLMay 18
Code as Agent Harness

Xuying Ning, Katherine Tieu, Dongqi Fu et al.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding and generating code, from competitive programming to repository-level software engineering. In emerging agentic systems, code is no longer only a target output. It increasingly serves as an operational substrate for agent reasoning, acting, environment modeling, and execution-based verification. We frame this shift through the lens of agent harnesses and introduce code as agent harness: a unified view that centers code as the basis for agent infrastructure. To systematically study this perspective, we organize the survey around three connected layers. First, we study the harness interface, where code connects agents to reasoning, action, and environment modeling. Second, we examine harness mechanisms: planning, memory, and tool use for long-horizon execution, together with feedback-driven control and optimization that make harness reliable and adaptive. Third, we discuss scaling the harness from single-agent systems to multi-agent settings, where shared code artifacts support multi-agent coordination, review, and verification. Across these layers, we summarize representative methods and practical applications of code as agent harness, spanning coding assistants, GUI/OS automation, embodied agents, scientific discovery, personalization and recommendation, DevOps, and enterprise workflows. We further outline open challenges for harness engineering, including evaluation beyond final task success, verification under incomplete feedback, regression-free harness improvement, consistent shared state across multiple agents, human oversight for safety-critical actions, and extensions to multimodal environments. By centering code as the harness of agentic AI, this survey provides a unified roadmap toward executable, verifiable, and stateful AI agent systems.

CLApr 18, 2024
Reka Core, Flash, and Edge: A Series of Powerful Multimodal Language Models

Reka Team, Aitor Ormazabal, Che Zheng et al. · pku

We introduce Reka Core, Flash, and Edge, a series of powerful multimodal language models trained from scratch by Reka. Reka models are able to process and reason with text, images, video, and audio inputs. This technical report discusses details of training some of these models and provides comprehensive evaluation results. We show that Reka Edge and Reka Flash are not only state-of-the-art but also outperform many much larger models, delivering outsized values for their respective compute class. Meanwhile, our most capable and largest model, Reka Core, approaches the best frontier models on both automatic evaluations and blind human evaluations. On image question answering benchmarks (e.g. MMMU, VQAv2), Core performs competitively to GPT4-V. Meanwhile, on multimodal chat, Core ranks as the second most preferred model under a blind third-party human evaluation setup, outperforming other models such as Claude 3 Opus. On text benchmarks, Core not only performs competitively to other frontier models on a set of well-established benchmarks (e.g. MMLU, GSM8K) but also outperforms GPT4-0613 on human evaluation. On video question answering (Perception-Test), Core outperforms Gemini Ultra. Models are shipped in production at http://chat.reka.ai . A showcase of non cherry picked qualitative examples can also be found at http://showcase.reka.ai .

LGJan 19, 2022
Decoupling the Depth and Scope of Graph Neural Networks

Hanqing Zeng, Muhan Zhang, Yinglong Xia et al.

State-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have limited scalability with respect to the graph and model sizes. On large graphs, increasing the model depth often means exponential expansion of the scope (i.e., receptive field). Beyond just a few layers, two fundamental challenges emerge: 1. degraded expressivity due to oversmoothing, and 2. expensive computation due to neighborhood explosion. We propose a design principle to decouple the depth and scope of GNNs -- to generate representation of a target entity (i.e., a node or an edge), we first extract a localized subgraph as the bounded-size scope, and then apply a GNN of arbitrary depth on top of the subgraph. A properly extracted subgraph consists of a small number of critical neighbors, while excluding irrelevant ones. The GNN, no matter how deep it is, smooths the local neighborhood into informative representation rather than oversmoothing the global graph into "white noise". Theoretically, decoupling improves the GNN expressive power from the perspectives of graph signal processing (GCN), function approximation (GraphSAGE) and topological learning (GIN). Empirically, on seven graphs (with up to 110M nodes) and six backbone GNN architectures, our design achieves significant accuracy improvement with orders of magnitude reduction in computation and hardware cost.

LGDec 2, 2020
Deep Graph Neural Networks with Shallow Subgraph Samplers

Hanqing Zeng, Muhan Zhang, Yinglong Xia et al.

While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful models for learning representations on graphs, most state-of-the-art models do not have significant accuracy gain beyond two to three layers. Deep GNNs fundamentally need to address: 1). expressivity challenge due to oversmoothing, and 2). computation challenge due to neighborhood explosion. We propose a simple "deep GNN, shallow sampler" design principle to improve both the GNN accuracy and efficiency -- to generate representation of a target node, we use a deep GNN to pass messages only within a shallow, localized subgraph. A properly sampled subgraph may exclude irrelevant or even noisy nodes, and still preserve the critical neighbor features and graph structures. The deep GNN then smooths the informative local signals to enhance feature learning, rather than oversmoothing the global graph signals into just "white noise". We theoretically justify why the combination of deep GNNs with shallow samplers yields the best learning performance. We then propose various sampling algorithms and neural architecture extensions to achieve good empirical results. On the largest public graph dataset, ogbn-papers100M, we achieve state-of-the-art accuracy with an order of magnitude reduction in hardware cost.

CVApr 10, 2020
Deep Learning for Image and Point Cloud Fusion in Autonomous Driving: A Review

Yaodong Cui, Ren Chen, Wenbo Chu et al.

Autonomous vehicles were experiencing rapid development in the past few years. However, achieving full autonomy is not a trivial task, due to the nature of the complex and dynamic driving environment. Therefore, autonomous vehicles are equipped with a suite of different sensors to ensure robust, accurate environmental perception. In particular, the camera-LiDAR fusion is becoming an emerging research theme. However, so far there has been no critical review that focuses on deep-learning-based camera-LiDAR fusion methods. To bridge this gap and motivate future research, this paper devotes to review recent deep-learning-based data fusion approaches that leverage both image and point cloud. This review gives a brief overview of deep learning on image and point cloud data processing. Followed by in-depth reviews of camera-LiDAR fusion methods in depth completion, object detection, semantic segmentation, tracking and online cross-sensor calibration, which are organized based on their respective fusion levels. Furthermore, we compare these methods on publicly available datasets. Finally, we identified gaps and over-looked challenges between current academic researches and real-world applications. Based on these observations, we provide our insights and point out promising research directions.

CRJul 9, 2018
Personalized Difficulty Adjustment for Countering the Double-Spending Attack in Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols

Chi-Ning Chou, Yu-Jing Lin, Ren Chen et al.

Bitcoin is the first secure decentralized electronic currency system. However, it is known to be inefficient due to its proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm and has the potential hazard of double spending. In this paper, we aim to reduce the probability of double spending by decreasing the probability of consecutive winning. We first formalize a PoW-based decentralized secure network model in order to present a quantitative analysis. Next, to resolve the risk of double spending, we propose the personalized difficulty adjustment (PDA) mechanism which modifies the difficulty of each participant such that those who win more blocks in the past few rounds have a smaller probability to win in the next round. To analyze the performance of the PDA mechanism, we observe that the system can be modeled by a high-order Markov chain. Finally, we show that PDA effectively decreases the probability of consecutive winning and results in a more trustworthy PoW-based system.