Xiao Zhang

Xiao Zhang, Ruoxi Jiang, William Gao et al.

We show that introducing a weighting factor to reduce the influence of identity shortcuts in residual networks significantly enhances semantic feature learning in generative representation learning frameworks, such as masked autoencoders (MAEs) and diffusion models. Our modification notably improves feature quality, raising ImageNet-1K K-Nearest Neighbor accuracy from 27.4% to 63.9% and linear probing accuracy from 67.8% to 72.7% for MAEs with a ViT-B/16 backbone, while also enhancing generation quality in diffusion models. This significant gap suggests that, while residual connection structure serves an essential role in facilitating gradient propagation, it may have a harmful side effect of reducing capacity for abstract learning by virtue of injecting an echo of shallower representations into deeper layers. We ameliorate this downside via a fixed formula for monotonically decreasing the contribution of identity connections as layer depth increases. Our design promotes the gradual development of feature abstractions, without impacting network trainability. Analyzing the representations learned by our modified residual networks, we find correlation between low effective feature rank and downstream task performance.

Ruoxi Jiang, Xiao Zhang, Karan Jakhar et al.

Neural PDE solvers offer a powerful tool for modeling complex dynamical systems, but often struggle with error accumulation over long time horizons and maintaining stability and physical consistency. We introduce a multiscale implicit neural emulator that enhances long-term prediction accuracy by conditioning on a hierarchy of lower-dimensional future state representations. Drawing inspiration from the stability properties of numerical implicit time-stepping methods, our approach leverages predictions several steps ahead in time at increasing compression rates for next-timestep refinements. By actively adjusting the temporal downsampling ratios, our design enables the model to capture dynamics across multiple granularities and enforce long-range temporal coherence. Experiments on turbulent fluid dynamics show that our method achieves high short-term accuracy and produces long-term stable forecasts, significantly outperforming autoregressive baselines while adding minimal computational overhead.

Tewodros Ayalew, Xiao Zhang, Kevin Yuanbo Wu et al.

We present PROGRESSOR, a novel framework that learns a task-agnostic reward function from videos, enabling policy training through goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) without manual supervision. Underlying this reward is an estimate of the distribution over task progress as a function of the current, initial, and goal observations that is learned in a self-supervised fashion. Crucially, PROGRESSOR refines rewards adversarially during online RL training by pushing back predictions for out-of-distribution observations, to mitigate distribution shift inherent in non-expert observations. Utilizing this progress prediction as a dense reward together with an adversarial push-back, we show that PROGRESSOR enables robots to learn complex behaviors without any external supervision. Pretrained on large-scale egocentric human video from EPIC-KITCHENS, PROGRESSOR requires no fine-tuning on in-domain task-specific data for generalization to real-robot offline RL under noisy demonstrations, outperforming contemporary methods that provide dense visual reward for robotic learning. Our findings highlight the potential of PROGRESSOR for scalable robotic applications where direct action labels and task-specific rewards are not readily available.

Xiao Zhang, Ruoxi Jiang, Rebecca Willett et al.

We introduce nested diffusion models, an efficient and powerful hierarchical generative framework that substantially enhances the generation quality of diffusion models, particularly for images of complex scenes. Our approach employs a series of diffusion models to progressively generate latent variables at different semantic levels. Each model in this series is conditioned on the output of the preceding higher-level models, culminating in image generation. Hierarchical latent variables guide the generation process along predefined semantic pathways, allowing our approach to capture intricate structural details while significantly improving image quality. To construct these latent variables, we leverage a pre-trained visual encoder, which learns strong semantic visual representations, and modulate its capacity via dimensionality reduction and noise injection. Across multiple datasets, our system demonstrates significant enhancements in image quality for both unconditional and class/text conditional generation. Moreover, our unconditional generation system substantially outperforms the baseline conditional system. These advancements incur minimal computational overhead as the more abstract levels of our hierarchy work with lower-dimensional representations.

Xinyuan Wang, Chengwei Pan, Hongming Dai et al.

Coronary microvascular disease constitutes a substantial risk to human health. Employing computer-aided analysis and diagnostic systems, medical professionals can intervene early in disease progression, with 3D vessel segmentation serving as a crucial component. Nevertheless, conventional U-Net architectures tend to yield incoherent and imprecise segmentation outcomes, particularly for small vessel structures. While models with attention mechanisms, such as Transformers and large convolutional kernels, demonstrate superior performance, their extensive computational demands during training and inference lead to increased time complexity. In this study, we leverage Fourier domain learning as a substitute for multi-scale convolutional kernels in 3D hierarchical segmentation models, which can reduce computational expenses while preserving global receptive fields within the network. Furthermore, a zero-parameter frequency domain fusion method is designed to improve the skip connections in U-Net architecture. Experimental results on a public dataset and an in-house dataset indicate that our novel Fourier transformation-based network achieves remarkable dice performance (84.37\% on ASACA500 and 80.32\% on ImageCAS) in tubular vessel segmentation tasks and substantially reduces computational requirements without compromising global receptive fields.

Wangze Ni, Han Wu, Peng Cheng et al.

By allowing users to obscure their transactions via including "mixins" (chaff coins), ring signature schemes have been widely used to protect a sender's identity of a transaction in privacy-preserving blockchain systems, like Monero and Bytecoin. However, recent works point out that the existing ring signature scheme is vulnerable to the "chain-reaction" analysis (i.e., the spent coin in a given ring signature can be deduced through elimination). Especially, when the diversity of mixins is low, the spent coin will have a high risk to be detected. To overcome the weakness, the ring signature should be consisted of a set of mixins with high diversity and produce observations having "similar" distributions for any two coins. In this paper, we propose a notion, namely $ε$-coin-indistinguishability ($ε$-CI), to formally define the "similar" distribution guaranteed through a differential privacy scheme. Then, we formally define the CI-aware mixins selection problem with disjoint-superset constraint (CIA-MS-DS), which aims to find a mixin set that has maximal diversity and satisfies the constraints of $ε$-CI and the budget. In CIA-MS-DS, each ring signature is either disjoint with or the superset of its preceding ring signatures. We prove that CIA-MS-DS is NP-hard and thus intractable. To solve the CIA-MS-DS problem, we propose two approximation algorithms, namely the Progressive Algorithm and the Game Theoretic Algorithm, with theoretic guarantees. Through extensive experiments on both real data sets and synthetic data sets, we demonstrate the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approaches.