Kaiqi Zhang

Xiaoxuan Peng, Kaiqi Zhang, Xinyu Lu et al.

Mastering terminal environments requires language agents capable of multi-step planning, feedback-grounded execution, and dynamic state adaptation. However, training such agents is currently bottlenecked by a reliance on scraped external repositories, which limits domain diversity, environment controllability, and the targeting of specific capability deficits. We introduce LiteCoder-Terminal-Gen, a zero-dependency synthesis pipeline that autonomously generates executable and verifiable terminal training environments directly from domain specifications. Using this framework, we construct two large-scale resources: LiteCoder-Terminal-SFT, comprising 11,255 expert trajectories across 10 domains, and LiteCoder-Terminal-RL, featuring 602 verifiable environments for trajectory-level preference optimization. Supervised fine-tuning of Qwen-family models on our SFT dataset yields agents that significantly outperform their base counterparts. Notably, our 32B variant achieves 29.06%, 18.54%, and 34.00% pass@1 on Terminal Bench 1.0, 2.0, and Pro, respectively. Furthermore, applying Direct Multi-turn Preference Optimization (DMPO) on our RL environments yields additional performance gains. These results systematically demonstrate that fully synthetic, executable environments offer a scalable and verifiable supervision signal for mastering complex, real-world command-line workflows.

Kaiqi Zhang, Ming Yin, Yu-Xiang Wang · princeton

Quantized neural networks have drawn a lot of attention as they reduce the space and computational complexity during the inference. Moreover, there has been folklore that quantization acts as an implicit regularizer and thus can improve the generalizability of neural networks, yet no existing work formalizes this interesting folklore. In this paper, we take the binary weights in a neural network as random variables under stochastic rounding, and study the distribution propagation over different layers in the neural network. We propose a quasi neural network to approximate the distribution propagation, which is a neural network with continuous parameters and smooth activation function. We derive the neural tangent kernel (NTK) for this quasi neural network, and show that the eigenvalue of NTK decays at approximately exponential rate, which is comparable to that of Gaussian kernel with randomized scale. This in turn indicates that the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) of a binary weight neural network covers a strict subset of functions compared with the one with real value weights. We use experiments to verify that the quasi neural network we proposed can well approximate binary weight neural network. Furthermore, binary weight neural network gives a lower generalization gap compared with real value weight neural network, which is similar to the difference between Gaussian kernel and Laplace kernel.

Kaiqi Zhang, Yu-Xiang Wang

We study the theory of neural network (NN) from the lens of classical nonparametric regression problems with a focus on NN's ability to adaptively estimate functions with heterogeneous smoothness -- a property of functions in Besov or Bounded Variation (BV) classes. Existing work on this problem requires tuning the NN architecture based on the function spaces and sample size. We consider a "Parallel NN" variant of deep ReLU networks and show that the standard $\ell_2$ regularization is equivalent to promoting the $\ell_p$-sparsity ($0<p<1$) in the coefficient vector of an end-to-end learned function bases, i.e., a dictionary. Using this equivalence, we further establish that by tuning only the regularization factor, such parallel NN achieves an estimation error arbitrarily close to the minimax rates for both the Besov and BV classes. Notably, it gets exponentially closer to minimax optimal as the NN gets deeper. Our research sheds new lights on why depth matters and how NNs are more powerful than kernel methods.

Zixuan Zhang, Kaiqi Zhang, Minshuo Chen et al.

Convolutional residual neural networks (ConvResNets), though overparameterized, can achieve remarkable prediction performance in practice, which cannot be well explained by conventional wisdom. To bridge this gap, we study the performance of ConvResNeXts, which cover ConvResNets as a special case, trained with weight decay from the perspective of nonparametric classification. Our analysis allows for infinitely many building blocks in ConvResNeXts, and shows that weight decay implicitly enforces sparsity on these blocks. Specifically, we consider a smooth target function supported on a low-dimensional manifold, then prove that ConvResNeXts can adapt to the function smoothness and low-dimensional structures and efficiently learn the function without suffering from the curse of dimensionality. Our findings partially justify the advantage of overparameterized ConvResNeXts over conventional machine learning models.

Xinyu Lu, Kaiqi Zhang, Jinglin Yang et al.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, vanilla RLVR suffers from inefficient exploration, particularly when confronting "hard samples" that yield nearzero success rates. In such scenarios, the reliance on sparse outcome rewards typically results in zero-advantage estimates, effectively starving the model of supervision signals despite the high informational value of these instances. To address this, we propose P^2O, a novel framework that synergizes Prompt Optimization with Policy Optimization. P^2O identifies hard samples during training iterations and leverages the GeneticPareto (GEPA) prompt optimization algorithm to evolve prompt templates that guide the model toward discovering successful trajectories. Crucially, unlike traditional prompt engineering methods that rely on input augmentation, P^2O distills the reasoning gains induced by these optimized prompts directly into the model parameters. This mechanism provides denser positive supervision signals for hard samples and accelerates convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that P^2O not only achieves superior performance on in-distribution datasets but also exhibits strong generalization, yielding substantial improvements on out-of-distribution benchmarks (+4.7% avg.).

Kaiqi Zhang, Jing Zhao, Rui Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit high inference latency due to their autoregressive decoding nature. While the draft head in speculative decoding mitigates this issue, its full potential remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce KOALA (K-layer Optimized Adversarial Learning Architecture), an orthogonal approach to the draft head. By transforming the conventional single-layer draft head into a multi-layer architecture and incorporating adversarial learning into the traditional supervised training, KOALA significantly improves the accuracy of the draft head in predicting subsequent tokens, thus more closely mirroring the functionality of LLMs. Although this improvement comes at the cost of slightly increased drafting overhead, KOALA substantially unlocks the draft head's potential, greatly enhancing speculative decoding. We conducted comprehensive evaluations of KOALA, including both autoregressive and non-autoregressive draft heads across various tasks, demonstrating a latency speedup ratio improvement of 0.24x-0.41x, which is 10.57%-14.09% faster than the original draft heads.

Kaiqi Zhang, Mingguan Yang, Dali Chang et al.

Iterative method selection is crucial for solving sparse linear systems because these methods inherently lack robustness. Though image-based selection approaches have shown promise, their feature extraction techniques might encode distinct matrices into identical image representations, leading to the same selection and suboptimal method. In this paper, we introduce RAF (Relative-Absolute Fusion), an efficient feature extraction technique to enhance image-based selection approaches. By simultaneously extracting and fusing image representations as relative features with corresponding numerical values as absolute features, RAF achieves comprehensive matrix representations that prevent feature ambiguity across distinct matrices, thus improving selection accuracy and unlocking the potential of image-based selection approaches. We conducted comprehensive evaluations of RAF on SuiteSparse and our developed BMCMat (Balanced Multi-Classification Matrix dataset), demonstrating solution time reductions of 0.08s-0.29s for sparse linear systems, which is 5.86%-11.50% faster than conventional image-based selection approaches and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. BMCMat is available at https://github.com/zkqq/BMCMat.

Tong Wang, Guanzhou Chen, Xiaodong Zhang et al.

Remote sensing image interpretation plays a critical role in environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster assessment. However, acquiring high-quality labeled data is often costly and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we proposes a multi-modal self-supervised learning framework that leverages high-resolution RGB images, multi-spectral data, and digital surface models (DSM) for pre-training. By designing an information-aware adaptive masking strategy, cross-modal masking mechanism, and multi-task self-supervised objectives, the framework effectively captures both the correlations across different modalities and the unique feature structures within each modality. We evaluated the proposed method on multiple downstream tasks, covering typical remote sensing applications such as scene classification, semantic segmentation, change detection, object detection, and depth estimation. Experiments are conducted on 15 remote sensing datasets, encompassing 26 tasks. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing pretraining approaches in most tasks. Specifically, on the Potsdam and Vaihingen semantic segmentation tasks, our method achieved mIoU scores of 78.30\% and 76.50\%, with only 50\% train-set. For the US3D depth estimation task, the RMSE error is reduced to 0.182, and for the binary change detection task in SECOND dataset, our method achieved mIoU scores of 47.51\%, surpassing the second CS-MAE by 3 percentage points. Our pretrain code, checkpoints, and HR-Pairs dataset can be found in https://github.com/CVEO/MSSDF.

Kaiqi Zhang, Shuai Yuan, Honghan Zhao

With the rapid development of large language models (LLM), the evaluation of LLM becomes increasingly important. Measuring text generation tasks such as summarization and article creation is very difficult. Especially in specific application domains (e.g., to-business or to-customer service), in-house evaluation criteria have to meet not only general standards (correctness, helpfulness and creativity, etc.) but also specific needs of customers and business security requirements at the same time, making the evaluation more difficult. So far, the evaluation of LLM in business scenarios has mainly relied on manual, which is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a model-based evaluation method: TALEC, which allows users to flexibly set their own evaluation criteria, and uses in-context learning (ICL) to teach judge model these in-house criteria. In addition, we try combining zero-shot and few-shot to make the judge model focus on more information. We also propose a prompt paradigm and an engineering approach to adjust and iterate the shots ,helping judge model to better understand the complex criteria. We then compare fine-tuning with ICL, finding that fine-tuning can be replaced by ICL. TALEC demonstrates a strong capability to accurately reflect human preferences and achieves a correlation of over 80% with human judgments, outperforming even the inter-human correlation in some tasks. The code is released in https://github.com/zlkqz/auto_eval

Tianyun Zhang, Shaokai Ye, Kaiqi Zhang et al.

Weight pruning methods for deep neural networks (DNNs) have been investigated recently, but prior work in this area is mainly heuristic, iterative pruning, thereby lacking guarantees on the weight reduction ratio and convergence time. To mitigate these limitations, we present a systematic weight pruning framework of DNNs using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We first formulate the weight pruning problem of DNNs as a nonconvex optimization problem with combinatorial constraints specifying the sparsity requirements, and then adopt the ADMM framework for systematic weight pruning. By using ADMM, the original nonconvex optimization problem is decomposed into two subproblems that are solved iteratively. One of these subproblems can be solved using stochastic gradient descent, the other can be solved analytically. Besides, our method achieves a fast convergence rate. The weight pruning results are very promising and consistently outperform the prior work. On the LeNet-5 model for the MNIST data set, we achieve 71.2 times weight reduction without accuracy loss. On the AlexNet model for the ImageNet data set, we achieve 21 times weight reduction without accuracy loss. When we focus on the convolutional layer pruning for computation reductions, we can reduce the total computation by five times compared with the prior work (achieving a total of 13.4 times weight reduction in convolutional layers). Our models and codes are released at https://github.com/KaiqiZhang/admm-pruning

Xiaoxian Yang, Qi Wang, Kaiqi Zhang et al.

Ultrasound imaging frequently encounters challenges, such as those related to elevated noise levels, diminished spatiotemporal resolution, and the complexity of anatomical structures. These factors significantly hinder the model's ability to accurately capture and analyze structural relationships and dynamic patterns across various regions of the heart. Mamba, an emerging model, is one of the most cutting-edge approaches that is widely applied to diverse vision and language tasks. To this end, this paper introduces a U-shaped deep learning model incorporating a large-window Mamba scale (LMS) module and a hierarchical feature fusion approach for echocardiographic segmentation. First, a cascaded residual block serves as an encoder and is employed to incrementally extract multiscale detailed features. Second, a large-window multiscale mamba module is integrated into the decoder to capture global dependencies across regions and enhance the segmentation capability for complex anatomical structures. Furthermore, our model introduces auxiliary losses at each decoder layer and employs a dual attention mechanism to fuse multilayer features both spatially and across channels. This approach enhances segmentation performance and accuracy in delineating complex anatomical structures. Finally, the experimental results using the EchoNet-Dynamic and CAMUS datasets demonstrate that the model outperforms other methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness. For the segmentation of the left ventricular endocardium (${LV}_{endo}$), the model achieved optimal values of 95.01 and 93.36, respectively, while for the left ventricular epicardium (${LV}_{epi}$), values of 87.35 and 87.80, respectively, were achieved. This represents an improvement ranging between 0.54 and 1.11 compared with the best-performing model.

R. Alexander Knipper, Charles S. Knipper, Kaiqi Zhang et al. · allen-ai, deepmind

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in real-world decision-making processes, it becomes crucial to examine the extent to which they exhibit cognitive biases. Extensively studied in the field of psychology, cognitive biases appear as systematic distortions commonly observed in human judgments. This paper presents a large-scale evaluation of eight well-established cognitive biases across 45 LLMs, analyzing over 2.8 million LLM responses generated through controlled prompt variations. To achieve this, we introduce a novel evaluation framework based on multiple-choice tasks, hand-curate a dataset of 220 decision scenarios targeting fundamental cognitive biases in collaboration with psychologists, and propose a scalable approach for generating diverse prompts from human-authored scenario templates. Our analysis shows that LLMs exhibit bias-consistent behavior in 17.8-57.3% of instances across a range of judgment and decision-making contexts targeting anchoring, availability, confirmation, framing, interpretation, overattribution, prospect theory, and representativeness biases. We find that both model size and prompt specificity play a significant role on bias susceptibility as follows: larger size (>32B parameters) can reduce bias in 39.5% of cases, while higher prompt detail reduces most biases by up to 14.9%, except in one case (Overattribution), which is exacerbated by up to 8.8%.

Dan Qiao, Kaiqi Zhang, Esha Singh et al.

We study the generalization of two-layer ReLU neural networks in a univariate nonparametric regression problem with noisy labels. This is a problem where kernels (\emph{e.g.} NTK) are provably sub-optimal and benign overfitting does not happen, thus disqualifying existing theory for interpolating (0-loss, global optimal) solutions. We present a new theory of generalization for local minima that gradient descent with a constant learning rate can \emph{stably} converge to. We show that gradient descent with a fixed learning rate $η$ can only find local minima that represent smooth functions with a certain weighted \emph{first order total variation} bounded by $1/η- 1/2 + \widetilde{O}(σ+ \sqrt{\mathrm{MSE}})$ where $σ$ is the label noise level, $\mathrm{MSE}$ is short for mean squared error against the ground truth, and $\widetilde{O}(\cdot)$ hides a logarithmic factor. Under mild assumptions, we also prove a nearly-optimal MSE bound of $\widetilde{O}(n^{-4/5})$ within the strict interior of the support of the $n$ data points. Our theoretical results are validated by extensive simulation that demonstrates large learning rate training induces sparse linear spline fits. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to obtain generalization bound via minima stability in the non-interpolation case and the first to show ReLU NNs without regularization can achieve near-optimal rates in nonparametric regression.

Yao Chen, Cole Hawkins, Kaiqi Zhang et al.

The deep neural network (DNN) based AI applications on the edge require both low-cost computing platforms and high-quality services. However, the limited memory, computing resources, and power budget of the edge devices constrain the effectiveness of the DNN algorithms. Developing edge-oriented AI algorithms and implementations (e.g., accelerators) is challenging. In this paper, we summarize our recent efforts for efficient on-device AI development from three aspects, including both training and inference. First, we present on-device training with ultra-low memory usage. We propose a novel rank-adaptive tensor-based tensorized neural network model, which offers orders-of-magnitude memory reduction during training. Second, we introduce an ultra-low bitwidth quantization method for DNN model compression, achieving the state-of-the-art accuracy under the same compression ratio. Third, we introduce an ultra-low latency DNN accelerator design, practicing the software/hardware co-design methodology. This paper emphasizes the importance and efficacy of training, quantization and accelerator design, and calls for more research breakthroughs in the area for AI on the edge.

Chunfeng Cui, Kaiqi Zhang, Talgat Daulbaev et al.

Active subspace is a model reduction method widely used in the uncertainty quantification community. In this paper, we propose analyzing the internal structure and vulnerability and deep neural networks using active subspace. Firstly, we employ the active subspace to measure the number of "active neurons" at each intermediate layer and reduce the number of neurons from several thousands to several dozens. This motivates us to change the network structure and to develop a new and more compact network, referred to as {ASNet}, that has significantly fewer model parameters. Secondly, we propose analyzing the vulnerability of a neural network using active subspace and finding an additive universal adversarial attack vector that can misclassify a dataset with a high probability. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 show that ASNet can achieve 23.98$\times$ parameter and 7.30$\times$ flops reduction. The universal active subspace attack vector can achieve around 20% higher attack ratio compared with the existing approach in all of our numerical experiments. The PyTorch codes for this paper are available online.

Shaokai Ye, Tianyun Zhang, Kaiqi Zhang et al.

Many model compression techniques of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been investigated, including weight pruning, weight clustering and quantization, etc. Weight pruning leverages the redundancy in the number of weights in DNNs, while weight clustering/quantization leverages the redundancy in the number of bit representations of weights. They can be effectively combined in order to exploit the maximum degree of redundancy. However, there lacks a systematic investigation in literature towards this direction. In this paper, we fill this void and develop a unified, systematic framework of DNN weight pruning and clustering/quantization using Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), a powerful technique in optimization theory to deal with non-convex optimization problems. Both DNN weight pruning and clustering/quantization, as well as their combinations, can be solved in a unified manner. For further performance improvement in this framework, we adopt multiple techniques including iterative weight quantization and retraining, joint weight clustering training and centroid updating, weight clustering retraining, etc. The proposed framework achieves significant improvements both in individual weight pruning and clustering/quantization problems, as well as their combinations. For weight pruning alone, we achieve 167x weight reduction in LeNet-5, 24.7x in AlexNet, and 23.4x in VGGNet, without any accuracy loss. For the combination of DNN weight pruning and clustering/quantization, we achieve 1,910x and 210x storage reduction of weight data on LeNet-5 and AlexNet, respectively, without accuracy loss. Our codes and models are released at the link http://bit.ly/2D3F0np

Shaokai Ye, Tianyun Zhang, Kaiqi Zhang et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) although achieving human-level performance in many domains, have very large model size that hinders their broader applications on edge computing devices. Extensive research work have been conducted on DNN model compression or pruning. However, most of the previous work took heuristic approaches. This work proposes a progressive weight pruning approach based on ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers), a powerful technique to deal with non-convex optimization problems with potentially combinatorial constraints. Motivated by dynamic programming, the proposed method reaches extremely high pruning rate by using partial prunings with moderate pruning rates. Therefore, it resolves the accuracy degradation and long convergence time problems when pursuing extremely high pruning ratios. It achieves up to 34 times pruning rate for ImageNet dataset and 167 times pruning rate for MNIST dataset, significantly higher than those reached by the literature work. Under the same number of epochs, the proposed method also achieves faster convergence and higher compression rates. The codes and pruned DNN models are released in the link bit.ly/2zxdlss

Tianyun Zhang, Shaokai Ye, Kaiqi Zhang et al.

Weight pruning methods of DNNs have been demonstrated to achieve a good model pruning rate without loss of accuracy, thereby alleviating the significant computation/storage requirements of large-scale DNNs. Structured weight pruning methods have been proposed to overcome the limitation of irregular network structure and demonstrated actual GPU acceleration. However, in prior work the pruning rate (degree of sparsity) and GPU acceleration are limited (to less than 50%) when accuracy needs to be maintained. In this work,we overcome these limitations by proposing a unified, systematic framework of structured weight pruning for DNNs. It is a framework that can be used to induce different types of structured sparsity, such as filter-wise, channel-wise, and shape-wise sparsity, as well non-structured sparsity. The proposed framework incorporates stochastic gradient descent with ADMM, and can be understood as a dynamic regularization method in which the regularization target is analytically updated in each iteration. Without loss of accuracy on the AlexNet model, we achieve 2.58X and 3.65X average measured speedup on two GPUs, clearly outperforming the prior work. The average speedups reach 3.15X and 8.52X when allowing a moderate ac-curacy loss of 2%. In this case the model compression for convolutional layers is 15.0X, corresponding to 11.93X measured CPU speedup. Our experiments on ResNet model and on other data sets like UCF101 and CIFAR-10 demonstrate the consistently higher performance of our framework.