Shurui Li

Tianpeng Bu, Xin Liu, Qihua Chen et al.

While GUI agents have advanced rapidly, they often lack the robustness to recover from their own errors, hindering real-world deployment. To bridge this gap at both the evaluation and data levels, we introduce GUI-RobustEval and propose Robustness-driven Trajectory Synthesis. GUI-RobustEval contains $1,216$ executable test cases that systematically measure error recovery capabilities across a broad and realistic spectrum of error modes. At the data level, RoTS is a scalable synthesis framework that creates $800k$ high-quality data via a tree-based pipeline that proactively discovers diverse error modes and synthesizes corresponding recovery steps. Our two models, RoTS-7B and RoTS-32B, fine-tuned on our dataset, both demonstrate significant gains on GUI-RobustEval and traditional GUI benchmarks. Notably, RoTS-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance on OSWorld, with a $47.4\%$ success rate and a $33.8\%$ All-Pass@4 score, suggesting that improved long-horizon error recovery ability contributes to both robustness and overall performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/RoTS.

Hao Jiang, Shurui Li, Tianpeng Bu et al.

Recent advances in online reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, they often exhibit an imbalanced exploration-exploitation trade-off, resulting in unstable optimization and sub-optimal performance. We introduce IB-Score, a novel metric grounded in Information Bottleneck theory that evaluates policy's exploration-exploitation balance by quantifying the trade-off between step-level reasoning diversity and mutual information shared with the correct answer. Analysis based on IB-Score shows that popular online RL approaches (e.g., GRPO) with common regularizers fail to consistently maintain balance during training with suboptimal results. To address this, we propose Information Bottleneck-driven Tree-based Policy Optimization (IB-TPO), a principled framework that formulates IB-Score as a fine-grained optimization objective and utilizes a novel IB-guided tree sampling strategy that not only improves the efficiency of online sampling with 50% more trajectories under the same token budget, but also reuses the tree structure for effective IB-Score Monte Carlo estimation. Extensive experiments across standard benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms GRPO baseline by 2.9% to 3.6% and also outperforms other state-of-the-art online RL approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/EfficientRL.

Shurui Li, Hangbo Yang, Chee Wei Wong et al.

The last few years have seen a lot of work to address the challenge of low-latency and high-throughput convolutional neural network inference. Integrated photonics has the potential to dramatically accelerate neural networks because of its low-latency nature. Combined with the concept of Joint Transform Correlator (JTC), the computationally expensive convolution functions can be computed instantaneously (time of flight of light) with almost no cost. This 'free' convolution computation provides the theoretical basis of the proposed PhotoFourier JTC-based CNN accelerator. PhotoFourier addresses a myriad of challenges posed by on-chip photonic computing in the Fourier domain including 1D lenses and high-cost optoelectronic conversions. The proposed PhotoFourier accelerator achieves more than 28X better energy-delay product compared to state-of-art photonic neural network accelerators.

Changli Tang, Shurui Li, Junliang Wang et al.

Deciphering brain function through non-invasive recordings requires synthesizing complementary high-frequency electromagnetic (EEG/MEG) and low-frequency metabolic (fMRI) signals. However, despite their shared neural origins, extreme discrepancies have traditionally confined these modalities to isolated analysis pipelines, hindering a holistic interpretation of brain activity. To bridge this fragmentation, we introduce \textbf{NOBEL}, a \textbf{n}euro-\textbf{o}mni-modal \textbf{b}rain-\textbf{e}ncoding \textbf{l}arge language model (LLM) that unifies these heterogeneous signals within the LLM's semantic embedding space. Our architecture integrates a unified encoder for EEG and MEG with a novel dual-path strategy for fMRI, aligning non-invasive brain signals and external sensory stimuli into a shared token space, then leverages an LLM as a universal backbone. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that NOBEL serves as a robust generalist across standard single-modal tasks. We also show that the synergistic fusion of electromagnetic and metabolic signals yields higher decoding accuracy than unimodal baselines, validating the complementary nature of multiple neural modalities. Furthermore, NOBEL exhibits strong capabilities in stimulus-aware decoding, effectively interpreting visual semantics from multi-subject fMRI data on the NSD and HAD datasets while uniquely leveraging direct stimulus inputs to verify causal links between sensory signals and neural responses. NOBEL thus takes a step towards unifying non-invasive brain decoding, demonstrating the promising potential of omni-modal brain understanding.

Tianmu Li, Shurui Li, Puneet Gupta

Approximate computing methods have shown great potential for deep learning. Due to the reduced hardware costs, these methods are especially suitable for inference tasks on battery-operated devices that are constrained by their power budget. However, approximate computing hasn't reached its full potential due to the lack of work on training methods. In this work, we discuss training methods for approximate hardware. We demonstrate how training needs to be specialized for approximate hardware, and propose methods to speed up the training process by up to 18X.

Shurui Li

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence necessitate a re-examination of the epistemological foundations upon which we attribute consciousness. As AI systems increasingly mimic human behavior and interaction with high fidelity, the concept of a "perfect mimic"-an entity empirically indistinguishable from a human through observation and interaction-shifts from hypothetical to technologically plausible. This paper argues that such developments pose a fundamental challenge to the consistency of our mind-recognition practices. Consciousness attributions rely heavily, if not exclusively, on empirical evidence derived from behavior and interaction. If a perfect mimic provides evidence identical to that of humans, any refusal to grant it equivalent epistemic status must invoke inaccessible factors, such as qualia, substrate requirements, or origin. Selectively invoking such factors risks a debilitating dilemma: either we undermine the rational basis for attributing consciousness to others (epistemological solipsism), or we accept inconsistent reasoning. I contend that epistemic consistency demands we ascribe the same status to empirically indistinguishable entities, regardless of metaphysical assumptions. The perfect mimic thus acts as an epistemic mirror, forcing critical reflection on the assumptions underlying intersubjective recognition in light of advancing AI. This analysis carries significant implications for theories of consciousness and ethical frameworks concerning artificial agents.

Shreya Saha, Shurui Li, Greta Tuckute et al.

The human language system represents both linguistic forms and meanings, but the abstractness of the meaning representations remains debated. Here, we searched for abstract representations of meaning in the language cortex by modeling neural responses to sentences using representations from vision and language models. When we generate images corresponding to sentences and extract vision model embeddings, we find that aggregating across multiple generated images yields increasingly accurate predictions of language cortex responses, sometimes rivaling large language models. Similarly, averaging embeddings across multiple paraphrases of a sentence improves prediction accuracy compared to any single paraphrase. Enriching paraphrases with contextual details that may be implicit (e.g., augmenting "I had a pancake" to include details like "maple syrup") further increases prediction accuracy, even surpassing predictions based on the embedding of the original sentence, suggesting that the language system maintains richer and broader semantic representations than language models. Together, these results demonstrate the existence of highly abstract, form-independent meaning representations within the language cortex.

Shurui Li, Puneet Gupta

Applications of neural networks on edge systems have proliferated in recent years but the ever-increasing model size makes neural networks not able to deploy on resource-constrained microcontrollers efficiently. We propose bit-serial weight pools, an end-to-end framework that includes network compression and acceleration of arbitrary sub-byte precision. The framework can achieve up to 8x compression compared to 8-bit networks by sharing a pool of weights across the entire network. We further propose a bit-serial lookup based software implementation that allows runtime-bitwidth tradeoff and is able to achieve more than 2.8x speedup and 7.5x storage compression compared to 8-bit weight pool networks, with less than 1% accuracy drop.

Zibo Hu, Shurui Li, Russell L. T. Schwartz et al.

Convolutional neural networks are paramount in image and signal processing including the relevant classification and training tasks alike and constitute for the majority of machine learning compute demand today. With convolution operations being computationally intensive, next generation hardware accelerators need to offer parallelization and algorithmic-hardware homomorphism. Fortunately, diffractive display optics is capable of million-channel parallel data processing at low latency, however, thus far only showed tens of Hertz slow single image and kernel capability, thereby significantly underdelivering from its performance potential. Here, we demonstrate an operation-parallelized high-throughput Fourier optic convolutional neural network accelerator. For the first time simultaneously processing of multiple kernels in Fourier domain enabled by optical diffraction has been achieved alongside with already conventional in the field input parallelism. Additionally, we show an about one hundred times system speed up over existing optical diffraction-based processors and this demonstration rivals performance of modern electronic solutions. Therefore, this system is capable of processing large-scale matrices about ten times faster than state of art electronic systems.

Shurui Li, Jianqin Xu, Jing Qian et al.

Deep learning, accounting for the use of an elaborate neural network, has recently been developed as an efficient and powerful tool to solve diverse problems in physics and other sciences. In the present work, we propose a novel learning method based on a hybrid network integrating two different kinds of neural networks: Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM) and Deep Residual Network(ResNet), in order to overcome the difficulty met in numerically simulating strongly-oscillating dynamical evolutions of physical systems. By taking the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in a double-well potential as an example, we show that our new method makes a high efficient pre-learning and a high-fidelity prediction about the whole dynamics. This benefits from the advantage of the combination of the LSTM and the ResNet and is impossibly achieved by a single network in the case of direct learning. Our method can be applied for simulating complex cooperative dynamics in a system with fast multiple-frequency oscillations with the aid of auxiliary spectrum analysis.

Shurui Li, Wojciech Romaszkan, Alexander Graening et al.

Quantization is spearheading the increase in performance and efficiency of neural network computing systems making headway into commodity hardware. We present SWIS - Shared Weight bIt Sparsity, a quantization framework for efficient neural network inference acceleration delivering improved performance and storage compression through an offline weight decomposition and scheduling algorithm. SWIS can achieve up to 54.3% (19.8%) point accuracy improvement compared to weight truncation when quantizing MobileNet-v2 to 4 (2) bits post-training (with retraining) showing the strength of leveraging shared bit-sparsity in weights. SWIS accelerator gives up to 6x speedup and 1.9x energy improvement overstate of the art bit-serial architectures.

Yunkai Zhang, Qiao Jiang, Shurui Li et al.

Time series forecasting with limited data is a challenging yet critical task. While transformers have achieved outstanding performances in time series forecasting, they often require many training samples due to the large number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we propose a training technique for transformers that prepares the training windows through random sampling. As input time steps need not be consecutive, the number of distinct samples increases from linearly to combinatorially many. By breaking the temporal order, this technique also helps transformers to capture dependencies among time steps in finer granularity. We achieve competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art on real-world datasets.