Ze Yang

Haiyang Wang, Shaoshuai Shi, Ze Yang et al. · pku

As a fundamental problem in computer vision, 3D object detection is experiencing rapid growth. To extract the point-wise features from the irregularly and sparsely distributed points, previous methods usually take a feature grouping module to aggregate the point features to an object candidate. However, these methods have not yet leveraged the surface geometry of foreground objects to enhance grouping and 3D box generation. In this paper, we propose the RBGNet framework, a voting-based 3D detector for accurate 3D object detection from point clouds. In order to learn better representations of object shape to enhance cluster features for predicting 3D boxes, we propose a ray-based feature grouping module, which aggregates the point-wise features on object surfaces using a group of determined rays uniformly emitted from cluster centers. Considering the fact that foreground points are more meaningful for box estimation, we design a novel foreground biased sampling strategy in downsample process to sample more points on object surfaces and further boost the detection performance. Our model achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection performance on ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D with remarkable performance gains. Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/RBGNet.

Ze Yang, Yun Chen, Jingkang Wang et al. · utoronto

Rigorously testing autonomy systems is essential for making safe self-driving vehicles (SDV) a reality. It requires one to generate safety critical scenarios beyond what can be collected safely in the world, as many scenarios happen rarely on public roads. To accurately evaluate performance, we need to test the SDV on these scenarios in closed-loop, where the SDV and other actors interact with each other at each timestep. Previously recorded driving logs provide a rich resource to build these new scenarios from, but for closed loop evaluation, we need to modify the sensor data based on the new scene configuration and the SDV's decisions, as actors might be added or removed and the trajectories of existing actors and the SDV will differ from the original log. In this paper, we present UniSim, a neural sensor simulator that takes a single recorded log captured by a sensor-equipped vehicle and converts it into a realistic closed-loop multi-sensor simulation. UniSim builds neural feature grids to reconstruct both the static background and dynamic actors in the scene, and composites them together to simulate LiDAR and camera data at new viewpoints, with actors added or removed and at new placements. To better handle extrapolated views, we incorporate learnable priors for dynamic objects, and leverage a convolutional network to complete unseen regions. Our experiments show UniSim can simulate realistic sensor data with small domain gap on downstream tasks. With UniSim, we demonstrate closed-loop evaluation of an autonomy system on safety-critical scenarios as if it were in the real world.

Ze Yang, Chi Zhang, Ruibo Li et al.

Few-shot object detection (FSOD), which aims at learning a generic detector that can adapt to unseen tasks with scarce training samples, has witnessed consistent improvement recently. However, most existing methods ignore the efficiency issues, e.g., high computational complexity and slow adaptation speed. Notably, efficiency has become an increasingly important evaluation metric for few-shot techniques due to an emerging trend toward embedded AI. To this end, we present an efficient pretrain-transfer framework (PTF) baseline with no computational increment, which achieves comparable results with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Upon this baseline, we devise an initializer named knowledge inheritance (KI) to reliably initialize the novel weights for the box classifier, which effectively facilitates the knowledge transfer process and boosts the adaptation speed. Within the KI initializer, we propose an adaptive length re-scaling (ALR) strategy to alleviate the vector length inconsistency between the predicted novel weights and the pretrained base weights. Finally, our approach not only achieves the SOTA results across three public benchmarks, i.e., PASCAL VOC, COCO and LVIS, but also exhibits high efficiency with 1.8-100x faster adaptation speed against the other methods on COCO/LVIS benchmark during few-shot transfer. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to consider the efficiency problem in FSOD. We hope to motivate a trend toward powerful yet efficient few-shot technique development. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Ze-Yang/Efficient-FSOD.

Jingkang Wang, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Yun Chen et al. · utoronto

Realistic simulation is key to enabling safe and scalable development of % self-driving vehicles. A core component is simulating the sensors so that the entire autonomy system can be tested in simulation. Sensor simulation involves modeling traffic participants, such as vehicles, with high quality appearance and articulated geometry, and rendering them in real time. The self-driving industry has typically employed artists to build these assets. However, this is expensive, slow, and may not reflect reality. Instead, reconstructing assets automatically from sensor data collected in the wild would provide a better path to generating a diverse and large set with good real-world coverage. Nevertheless, current reconstruction approaches struggle on in-the-wild sensor data, due to its sparsity and noise. To tackle these issues, we present CADSim, which combines part-aware object-class priors via a small set of CAD models with differentiable rendering to automatically reconstruct vehicle geometry, including articulated wheels, with high-quality appearance. Our experiments show our method recovers more accurate shapes from sparse data compared to existing approaches. Importantly, it also trains and renders efficiently. We demonstrate our reconstructed vehicles in several applications, including accurate testing of autonomy perception systems.

Ze Yang, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Yun Chen et al. · utoronto

Reconstructing objects from real world data and rendering them at novel views is critical to bringing realism, diversity and scale to simulation for robotics training and testing. In this work, we present NeuSim, a novel approach that estimates accurate geometry and realistic appearance from sparse in-the-wild data captured at distance and at limited viewpoints. Towards this goal, we represent the object surface as a neural signed distance function and leverage both LiDAR and camera sensor data to reconstruct smooth and accurate geometry and normals. We model the object appearance with a robust physics-inspired reflectance representation effective for in-the-wild data. Our experiments show that NeuSim has strong view synthesis performance on challenging scenarios with sparse training views. Furthermore, we showcase composing NeuSim assets into a virtual world and generating realistic multi-sensor data for evaluating self-driving perception models.

Lunjun Zhang, Yuwen Xiong, Ze Yang et al.

Learning world models can teach an agent how the world works in an unsupervised manner. Even though it can be viewed as a special case of sequence modeling, progress for scaling world models on robotic applications such as autonomous driving has been somewhat less rapid than scaling language models with Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT). We identify two reasons as major bottlenecks: dealing with complex and unstructured observation space, and having a scalable generative model. Consequently, we propose Copilot4D, a novel world modeling approach that first tokenizes sensor observations with VQVAE, then predicts the future via discrete diffusion. To efficiently decode and denoise tokens in parallel, we recast Masked Generative Image Transformer as discrete diffusion and enhance it with a few simple changes, resulting in notable improvement. When applied to learning world models on point cloud observations, Copilot4D reduces prior SOTA Chamfer distance by more than 65% for 1s prediction, and more than 50% for 3s prediction, across NuScenes, KITTI Odometry, and Argoverse2 datasets. Our results demonstrate that discrete diffusion on tokenized agent experience can unlock the power of GPT-like unsupervised learning for robotics.

Jeffrey Yunfan Liu, Yun Chen, Ze Yang et al.

We propose a new method for realistic real-time novel-view synthesis (NVS) of large scenes. Existing neural rendering methods generate realistic results, but primarily work for small scale scenes (<50 square meters) and have difficulty at large scale (>10000 square meters). Traditional graphics-based rasterization rendering is fast for large scenes but lacks realism and requires expensive manually created assets. Our approach combines the best of both worlds by taking a moderate-quality scaffold mesh as input and learning a neural texture field and shader to model view-dependant effects to enhance realism, while still using the standard graphics pipeline for real-time rendering. Our method outperforms existing neural rendering methods, providing at least 30x faster rendering with comparable or better realism for large self-driving and drone scenes. Our work is the first to enable real-time rendering of large real-world scenes.

Yun Chen, Jingkang Wang, Ze Yang et al.

Large scale 3D scene reconstruction is important for applications such as virtual reality and simulation. Existing neural rendering approaches (e.g., NeRF, 3DGS) have achieved realistic reconstructions on large scenes, but optimize per scene, which is expensive and slow, and exhibit noticeable artifacts under large view changes due to overfitting. Generalizable approaches or large reconstruction models are fast, but primarily work for small scenes/objects and often produce lower quality rendering results. In this work, we introduce G3R, a generalizable reconstruction approach that can efficiently predict high-quality 3D scene representations for large scenes. We propose to learn a reconstruction network that takes the gradient feedback signals from differentiable rendering to iteratively update a 3D scene representation, combining the benefits of high photorealism from per-scene optimization with data-driven priors from fast feed-forward prediction methods. Experiments on urban-driving and drone datasets show that G3R generalizes across diverse large scenes and accelerates the reconstruction process by at least 10x while achieving comparable or better realism compared to 3DGS, and also being more robust to large view changes.

Ze Yang, George Chen, Haowei Zhang et al.

Self-driving vehicles (SDVs) require accurate calibration of LiDARs and cameras to fuse sensor data accurately for autonomy. Traditional calibration methods typically leverage fiducials captured in a controlled and structured scene and compute correspondences to optimize over. These approaches are costly and require substantial infrastructure and operations, making it challenging to scale for vehicle fleets. In this work, we propose UniCal, a unified framework for effortlessly calibrating SDVs equipped with multiple LiDARs and cameras. Our approach is built upon a differentiable scene representation capable of rendering multi-view geometrically and photometrically consistent sensor observations. We jointly learn the sensor calibration and the underlying scene representation through differentiable volume rendering, utilizing outdoor sensor data without the need for specific calibration fiducials. This "drive-and-calibrate" approach significantly reduces costs and operational overhead compared to existing calibration systems, enabling efficient calibration for large SDV fleets at scale. To ensure geometric consistency across observations from different sensors, we introduce a novel surface alignment loss that combines feature-based registration with neural rendering. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that UniCal outperforms or matches the accuracy of existing calibration approaches while being more efficient, demonstrating the value of UniCal for scalable calibration.

Zilinghan Li, Shilan He, Ze Yang et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm enabling collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. In today's landscape, where most data is proprietary, confidential, and distributed, FL has become a promising approach to leverage such data effectively, particularly in sensitive domains such as medicine and the electric grid. Heterogeneity and security are the key challenges in FL, however, most existing FL frameworks either fail to address these challenges adequately or lack the flexibility to incorporate new solutions. To this end, we present the recent advances in developing APPFL, an extensible framework and benchmarking suite for federated learning, which offers comprehensive solutions for heterogeneity and security concerns, as well as user-friendly interfaces for integrating new algorithms or adapting to new applications. We demonstrate the capabilities of APPFL through extensive experiments evaluating various aspects of FL, including communication efficiency, privacy preservation, computational performance, and resource utilization. We further highlight the extensibility of APPFL through case studies in vertical, hierarchical, and decentralized FL. APPFL is fully open-sourced on GitHub at https://github.com/APPFL/APPFL.

Jingkang Wang, Henry Che, Yun Chen et al.

Reconstructing large-scale dynamic scenes from visual observations is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with critical implications for robotics and autonomous systems. While recent differentiable rendering methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved impressive photorealistic reconstruction, they suffer from scalability limitations and require annotations to decouple actor motion. Existing self-supervised methods attempt to eliminate explicit annotations by leveraging motion cues and geometric priors, yet they remain constrained by per-scene optimization and sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we introduce Flux4D, a simple and scalable framework for 4D reconstruction of large-scale dynamic scenes. Flux4D directly predicts 3D Gaussians and their motion dynamics to reconstruct sensor observations in a fully unsupervised manner. By adopting only photometric losses and enforcing an "as static as possible" regularization, Flux4D learns to decompose dynamic elements directly from raw data without requiring pre-trained supervised models or foundational priors simply by training across many scenes. Our approach enables efficient reconstruction of dynamic scenes within seconds, scales effectively to large datasets, and generalizes well to unseen environments, including rare and unknown objects. Experiments on outdoor driving datasets show Flux4D significantly outperforms existing methods in scalability, generalization, and reconstruction quality.

Ze Yang, Liran Wang, Zhoujin Tian et al.

Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success and become a milestone in NLP, abstractive conversational summarization remains a challenging but less studied task. The difficulty lies in two aspects. One is the lack of large-scale conversational summary data. Another is that applying the existing pre-trained models to this task is tricky because of the structural dependence within the conversation and its informal expression, etc. In this work, we first build a large-scale (11M) pretraining dataset called RCS, based on the multi-person discussions in the Reddit community. We then present TANet, a thread-aware Transformer-based network. Unlike the existing pre-trained models that treat a conversation as a sequence of sentences, we argue that the inherent contextual dependency among the utterances plays an essential role in understanding the entire conversation and thus propose two new techniques to incorporate the structural information into our model. The first is thread-aware attention which is computed by taking into account the contextual dependency within utterances. Second, we apply thread prediction loss to predict the relations between utterances. We evaluate our model on four datasets of real conversations, covering types of meeting transcripts, customer-service records, and forum threads. Experimental results demonstrate that TANET achieves a new state-of-the-art in terms of both automatic evaluation and human judgment.

Henry Che, Jingkang Wang, Yun Chen et al.

Urban scene reconstruction from real-world observations has emerged as a powerful tool for self-driving development and testing. While current neural rendering approaches achieve high-fidelity rendering along the recorded trajectories, their quality degrades significantly under large viewpoint shifts, limiting the applicability for closed-loop simulation. Recent works have shown promising results in using diffusion models to enhance quality at these challenging viewpoints and distill improvements back into 3D representations. However, they often require costly per-scene optimization, and the distilled representations remain fragile and fail to generalize beyond limited synthesized views. To address these limitations, we propose GenRe, a novel diffusion-guided generalizable enhancer for urban scene reconstruction. GenRe takes as input any pretrained 3D Gaussian representation and fixes the deficiencies within a few minutes. By learning to distill generative priors across diverse scenes, GenRe produces robust and high-fidelity representation efficiently that generalizes reliably to challenging unseen viewpoints (e.g., lane change). Experiments show that GenRe outperforms existing methods in both quality and efficiency and benefits various downstream tasks, enabling robust and scalable sensor simulation for autonomous driving.

Qiang Wan, Ze Yang, Dawei Yang et al.

Generative Recommendation (GR) has gained traction for its merits of superior performance and cold-start capability. As the vital role in GR, Semantic Identifiers (SIDs) represent item semantics through discrete tokens. However, current techniques for SID generation based on vector quantization face two main challenges: (i) training instability, stemming from insufficient gradient propagation through the straight-through estimator and sensitivity to initialization; and (ii) inefficient SID quality assessment, where industrial practice still depends on costly GR training and A/B testing. To address these challenges, we propose Reference Vector-Guided Rating Residual Quantization VAE (R3-VAE). This framework incorporates three key innovations: (i) a reference vector that functions as a semantic anchor for the initial features, thereby mitigating sensitivity to initialization; (ii) a dot product-based rating mechanism designed to stabilize the training process and prevent codebook collapse; and (iii) two SID evaluation metrics, Semantic Cohesion and Preference Discrimination, serving as regularization terms during training. Empirical results on six benchmarks demonstrate that R3-VAE outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 14.2% in Recall@10 and 15.5% in NDCG@10 across three Amazon datasets. Furthermore, we perform GR training and online A/B tests on Toutiao. Our method achieves a 1.62% improvement in MRR and a 0.83% gain in StayTime/U versus baselines. Additionally, we employ R3-VAE to replace the item ID of CTR model, resulting in significant improvements in content cold start by 15.36%, corroborating the strong applicability and business value in industry-scale recommendation scenarios.

Xiao Lin, Zhining Liu, Ze Yang et al.

Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language and images. Reader discretion is advised. Recently, vision-language models have demonstrated increasing influence in morally sensitive domains such as autonomous driving and medical analysis, owing to their powerful multimodal reasoning capabilities. As these models are deployed in high-stakes real-world applications, it is of paramount importance to ensure that their outputs align with human moral values and remain within moral boundaries. However, existing work on moral alignment either focuses solely on textual modalities or relies heavily on AI-generated images, leading to distributional biases and reduced realism. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MORALISE, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the moral alignment of vision-language models (VLMs) using diverse, expert-verified real-world data. We begin by proposing a comprehensive taxonomy of 13 moral topics grounded in Turiel's Domain Theory, spanning the personal, interpersonal, and societal moral domains encountered in everyday life. Built on this framework, we manually curate 2,481 high-quality image-text pairs, each annotated with two fine-grained labels: (1) topic annotation, identifying the violated moral topic(s), and (2) modality annotation, indicating whether the violation arises from the image or the text. For evaluation, we encompass two tasks, \textit{moral judgment} and \textit{moral norm attribution}, to assess models' awareness of moral violations and their reasoning ability on morally salient content. Extensive experiments on 19 popular open- and closed-source VLMs show that MORALISE poses a significant challenge, revealing persistent moral limitations in current state-of-the-art models. The full benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ze1025/MORALISE.

Zhining Liu, Tianyi Wang, Xiao Lin et al.

Despite substantial efforts toward improving the moral alignment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), it remains unclear whether their ethical judgments are stable in realistic settings. This work studies moral robustness in VLMs, defined as the ability to preserve moral judgments under textual and visual perturbations that do not alter the underlying moral context. We systematically probe VLMs with a diverse set of model-agnostic multimodal perturbations and find that their moral stances are highly fragile, frequently flipping under simple manipulations. Our analysis reveals systematic vulnerabilities across perturbation types, moral domains, and model scales, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. We further show that lightweight inference-time interventions can partially restore moral stability. These results demonstrate that moral alignment alone is insufficient and that moral robustness is a necessary criterion for the responsible deployment of VLMs.

Zhining Liu, Ze Yang, Xiao Lin et al.

Time-series forecasting plays a critical role in many real-world applications. Although increasingly powerful models have been developed and achieved superior results on benchmark datasets, through a fine-grained sample-level inspection, we find that (i) no single model consistently outperforms others across different test samples, but instead (ii) each model excels in specific cases. These findings prompt us to explore how to adaptively leverage the distinct strengths of various forecasting models for different samples. We introduce TimeFuse, a framework for collective time-series forecasting with sample-level adaptive fusion of heterogeneous models. TimeFuse utilizes meta-features to characterize input time series and trains a learnable fusor to predict optimal model fusion weights for any given input. The fusor can leverage samples from diverse datasets for joint training, allowing it to adapt to a wide variety of temporal patterns and thus generalize to new inputs, even from unseen datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of TimeFuse in various long-/short-term forecasting tasks, achieving near-universal improvement over the state-of-the-art individual models. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhiningLiu1998/TimeFuse.

Zhining Liu, Zihao Li, Ze Yang et al.

Class-imbalanced learning (CIL) on tabular data is important in many real-world applications where the minority class holds the critical but rare outcomes. In this paper, we present CLIMB, a comprehensive benchmark for class-imbalanced learning on tabular data. CLIMB includes 73 real-world datasets across diverse domains and imbalance levels, along with unified implementations of 29 representative CIL algorithms. Built on a high-quality open-source Python package with unified API designs, detailed documentation, and rigorous code quality controls, CLIMB supports easy implementation and comparison between different CIL algorithms. Through extensive experiments, we provide practical insights on method accuracy and efficiency, highlighting the limitations of naive rebalancing, the effectiveness of ensembles, and the importance of data quality. Our code, documentation, and examples are available at https://github.com/ZhiningLiu1998/imbalanced-ensemble.

Ze Yang, Yinghao Xu, Han Xue et al.

We present a new object representation, called Dense RepPoints, that utilizes a large set of points to describe an object at multiple levels, including both box level and pixel level. Techniques are proposed to efficiently process these dense points, maintaining near-constant complexity with increasing point numbers. Dense RepPoints is shown to represent and learn object segments well, with the use of a novel distance transform sampling method combined with set-to-set supervision. The distance transform sampling combines the strengths of contour and grid representations, leading to performance that surpasses counterparts based on contours or grids. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/justimyhxu/Dense-RepPoints}.

Ze Yang, Shaohui Liu, Han Hu et al.

Modern object detectors rely heavily on rectangular bounding boxes, such as anchors, proposals and the final predictions, to represent objects at various recognition stages. The bounding box is convenient to use but provides only a coarse localization of objects and leads to a correspondingly coarse extraction of object features. In this paper, we present \textbf{RepPoints} (representative points), a new finer representation of objects as a set of sample points useful for both localization and recognition. Given ground truth localization and recognition targets for training, RepPoints learn to automatically arrange themselves in a manner that bounds the spatial extent of an object and indicates semantically significant local areas. They furthermore do not require the use of anchors to sample a space of bounding boxes. We show that an anchor-free object detector based on RepPoints can be as effective as the state-of-the-art anchor-based detection methods, with 46.5 AP and 67.4 $AP_{50}$ on the COCO test-dev detection benchmark, using ResNet-101 model. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RepPoints.

Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Wutao Lin et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have been widely employed in industry to address various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, many engineers find it a big overhead when they have to choose from multiple frameworks, compare different types of models, and understand various optimization mechanisms. An NLP toolkit for DNN models with both generality and flexibility can greatly improve the productivity of engineers by saving their learning cost and guiding them to find optimal solutions to their tasks. In this paper, we introduce NeuronBlocks\footnote{Code: \url{https://github.com/Microsoft/NeuronBlocks}} \footnote{Demo: \url{https://youtu.be/x6cOpVSZcdo}}, a toolkit encapsulating a suite of neural network modules as building blocks to construct various DNN models with complex architecture. This toolkit empowers engineers to build, train, and test various NLP models through simple configuration of JSON files. The experiments on several NLP datasets such as GLUE, WikiQA and CoNLL-2003 demonstrate the effectiveness of NeuronBlocks.

Ze Yang, Jingkang Wang, Haowei Zhang et al.

High-quality 3D assets for traffic participants are critical for multi-sensor simulation, which is essential for the safe end-to-end development of autonomy. Building assets from in-the-wild data is key for diversity and realism, but existing neural-rendering based reconstruction methods are slow and generate assets that render well only from viewpoints close to the original observations, limiting their usefulness in simulation. Recent diffusion-based generative models build complete and diverse assets, but perform poorly on in-the-wild driving scenes, where observed actors are captured under sparse and limited fields of view, and are partially occluded. In this work, we propose a 3D latent diffusion model that learns on in-the-wild LiDAR and camera data captured by a sensor platform and generates high-quality 3D assets with complete geometry and appearance. Key to our method is a "reconstruct-then-generate" approach that first leverages occlusion-aware neural rendering trained over multiple scenes to build a high-quality latent space for objects, and then trains a diffusion model that operates on the latent space. We show our method outperforms existing reconstruction and generation based methods, unlocking diverse and scalable content creation for simulation.

Ava Pun, Gary Sun, Jingkang Wang et al. · cmu

Different outdoor illumination conditions drastically alter the appearance of urban scenes, and they can harm the performance of image-based robot perception systems if not seen during training. Camera simulation provides a cost-effective solution to create a large dataset of images captured under different lighting conditions. Towards this goal, we propose LightSim, a neural lighting camera simulation system that enables diverse, realistic, and controllable data generation. LightSim automatically builds lighting-aware digital twins at scale from collected raw sensor data and decomposes the scene into dynamic actors and static background with accurate geometry, appearance, and estimated scene lighting. These digital twins enable actor insertion, modification, removal, and rendering from a new viewpoint, all in a lighting-aware manner. LightSim then combines physically-based and learnable deferred rendering to perform realistic relighting of modified scenes, such as altering the sun location and modifying the shadows or changing the sun brightness, producing spatially- and temporally-consistent camera videos. Our experiments show that LightSim generates more realistic relighting results than prior work. Importantly, training perception models on data generated by LightSim can significantly improve their performance.

Yihong Jin, Ze Yang, Xinhe Xu et al.

With the rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their large-scale experimentation in cloud-computing spaces, the challenge of guaranteeing their security and efficiency in a failure scenario has become a main issue. To ensure the reliability and availability of large-scale language models in cloud computing scenarios, such as frequent resource failures, network problems, and computational overheads, this study proposes a novel adaptive fault tolerance mechanism. It builds upon known fault-tolerant mechanisms, such as checkpointing, redundancy, and state transposition, introducing dynamic resource allocation and prediction of failure based on real-time performance metrics. The hybrid model integrates data driven deep learning-based anomaly detection technique underlining the contribution of cloud orchestration middleware for predictive prevention of system failures. Additionally, the model integrates adaptive checkpointing and recovery strategies that dynamically adapt according to load and system state to minimize the influence on the performance of the model and minimize downtime. The experimental results demonstrate that the designed model considerably enhances the fault tolerance in large-scale cloud surroundings, and decreases the system downtime by $\mathbf{30\%}$, and has a better modeling availability than the classical fault tolerance mechanism.

Ze Yang, Yihong Jin, Xinhe Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by understanding and generating human-like text. However, the increasing demand for more sophisticated LLMs presents significant computational challenges due to their scale and complexity. This paper introduces Hardware Accelerated Decoding (HADES), a novel approach to enhance the performance and energy efficiency of LLMs. We address the design of an LLM accelerator with hardware-level speculative decoding support, a concept not previously explored in existing literature. Our work demonstrates how speculative decoding can significantly improve the efficiency of LLM operations, paving the way for more advanced and practical applications of these models.

Shichao Dong, Ze Yang, Guosheng Lin

Data augmentation plays a crucial role in deep learning, enhancing the generalization and robustness of learning-based models. Standard approaches involve simple transformations like rotations and flips for generating extra data. However, these augmentations are limited by their initial dataset, lacking high-level diversity. Recently, large models such as language models and diffusion models have shown exceptional capabilities in perception and content generation. In this work, we propose a new paradigm to automatically generate 3D labeled training data by harnessing the power of pretrained large foundation models. For each target semantic class, we first generate 2D images of a single object in various structure and appearance via diffusion models and chatGPT generated text prompts. Beyond texture augmentation, we propose a method to automatically alter the shape of objects within 2D images. Subsequently, we transform these augmented images into 3D objects and construct virtual scenes by random composition. This method can automatically produce a substantial amount of 3D scene data without the need of real data, providing significant benefits in addressing few-shot learning challenges and mitigating long-tailed class imbalances. By providing a flexible augmentation approach, our work contributes to enhancing 3D data diversity and advancing model capabilities in scene understanding tasks.

Emre Can Acikgoz, Jeremiah Greer, Akul Datta et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with API-calling capabilities enabled building effective Language Agents (LA), while also revolutionizing the conventional task-oriented dialogue (TOD) paradigm. However, current approaches face a critical dilemma: TOD systems are often trained on a limited set of target APIs, requiring new data to maintain their quality when interfacing with new services, while LAs are not trained to maintain user intent over multi-turn conversations. Because both robust multi-turn management and advanced function calling are crucial for effective conversational agents, we evaluate these skills on three popular benchmarks: MultiWOZ 2.4 (TOD), BFCL V3 (LA), and API-Bank (LA), and our analyses reveal that specialized approaches excel in one domain but underperform in the other. To bridge this chasm, we introduce CoALM (Conversational Agentic Language Model), a unified approach that integrates both conversational and agentic capabilities. We created CoALM-IT, a carefully constructed multi-task dataset that interleave multi-turn ReAct reasoning with complex API usage. Using CoALM-IT, we train three models CoALM 8B, CoALM 70B, and CoALM 405B, which outperform top domain-specific models, including GPT-4o, across all three benchmarks. This demonstrates the feasibility of a single model approach for both TOD and LA, setting a new standard for conversational agents.

Ze Yang, Yihong Jin, Yihan Zhang et al.

The fast development of large language models (LLMs) and popularization of cloud computing have led to increasing concerns on privacy safeguarding and data security of cross-cloud model deployment and training as the key challenges. We present a new framework for addressing these issues along with enabling privacy preserving collaboration on training between distributed clouds based on federated learning. Our mechanism encompasses cutting-edge cryptographic primitives, dynamic model aggregation techniques, and cross-cloud data harmonization solutions to enhance security, efficiency, and scalability to the traditional federated learning paradigm. Furthermore, we proposed a hybrid aggregation scheme to mitigate the threat of Data Leakage and to optimize the aggregation of model updates, thus achieving substantial enhancement on the model effectiveness and stability. Experimental results demonstrate that the training efficiency, privacy protection, and model accuracy of the proposed model compare favorably to those of the traditional federated learning method.

Yihong Jin, Ze Yang

The rapid expansion of AI inference services in the cloud necessitates a robust scalability solution to manage dynamic workloads and maintain high performance. This study proposes a comprehensive scalability optimization framework for cloud AI inference services, focusing on real-time load balancing and autoscaling strategies. The proposed model is a hybrid approach that combines reinforcement learning for adaptive load distribution and deep neural networks for accurate demand forecasting. This multi-layered approach enables the system to anticipate workload fluctuations and proactively adjust resources, ensuring maximum resource utilisation and minimising latency. Furthermore, the incorporation of a decentralised decision-making process within the model serves to enhance fault tolerance and reduce response time in scaling operations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model enhances load balancing efficiency by 35\ and reduces response delay by 28\, thereby exhibiting a substantial optimization effect in comparison with conventional scalability solutions.

Tianqi, Ding, Dawei Xiang et al.

The rapid growth of industrial automation has highlighted the need for precise and efficient defect detection in large-scale machinery. Traditional inspection techniques, involving manual procedures such as scaling tall structures for visual evaluation, are labor-intensive, subjective, and often hazardous. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces an automated defect detection framework built on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and the concept of digital twins. The system utilizes UAVs to capture images and reconstruct 3D models of machinery, producing both a standard reference model and a current-state model for comparison. Alignment of the models is achieved through the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, enabling precise point cloud analysis to detect deviations that signify potential defects. By eliminating manual inspection, this method improves accuracy, enhances operational safety, and offers a scalable solution for defect detection. The proposed approach demonstrates great promise for reliable and efficient industrial applications.

Yihong Jin, Ze Yang, Xinhe Xu

As more and more attacks have been detected on Ethereum smart contracts, it has seriously affected finance and credibility. Current anti-fraud detection techniques, including code parsing or manual feature extraction, still have some shortcomings, although some generalization or adaptability can be obtained. In the face of this situation, this paper proposes to use graphical representation learning technology to find transaction patterns and distinguish malicious transaction contracts, that is, to represent Ethereum transaction data as graphs, and then use advanced ML technology to obtain reliable and accurate results. Taking into account the sample imbalance, we treated with SMOTE-ENN and tested several models, in which MLP performed better than GCN, but the exact effect depends on its field trials. Our research opens up more possibilities for trust and security in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Ze Yang, Yihong Jin, Juntian Liu et al.

The rapidly evolving cloud platforms and the escalating complexity of network traffic demand proper network traffic monitoring and anomaly detection to ensure network security and performance. This paper introduces a large language model (LLM)-based network traffic monitoring and anomaly detection system. In addition to existing models such as autoencoders and decision trees, we harness the power of large language models for processing sequence data from network traffic, which allows us a better capture of underlying complex patterns, as well as slight fluctuations in the dataset. We show for a given detection task, the need for a hybrid model that incorporates the attention mechanism of the transformer architecture into a supervised learning framework in order to achieve better accuracy. A pre-trained large language model analyzes and predicts the probable network traffic, and an anomaly detection layer that considers temporality and context is added. Moreover, we present a novel transfer learning-based methodology to enhance the model's effectiveness to quickly adapt to unknown network structures and adversarial conditions without requiring extensive labeled datasets. Actual results show that the designed model outperforms traditional methods in detection accuracy and computational efficiency, effectively identify various network anomalies such as zero-day attacks and traffic congestion pattern, and significantly reduce the false positive rate.

Yihong Jin, Ze Yang, Juntian Liu et al.

With the rapid development of multi-cloud environments, it is increasingly important to ensure the security and reliability of intelligent monitoring systems. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection and early warning mechanism for intelligent monitoring system in multi-cloud environment based on Large-Scale Language Model (LLM). On the basis of the existing monitoring framework, the proposed model innovatively introduces a multi-level feature extraction method, which combines the natural language processing ability of LLM with traditional machine learning methods to enhance the accuracy of anomaly detection and improve the real-time response efficiency. By introducing the contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, the model dynamically adapts to different cloud service providers and environments, so as to more effectively detect abnormal patterns and predict potential failures. Experimental results show that the proposed model is significantly better than the traditional anomaly detection system in terms of detection accuracy and latency, and significantly improves the resilience and active management ability of cloud infrastructure.

Yangyang Zhuang, Wenjia Jiang, Jiayu Zhang et al.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, and their application in the medical domain holds particular promise due to the demand for high generalizability and reliance on interdisciplinary knowledge. However, existing medical agent systems often rely on static, manually crafted workflows that lack the flexibility to accommodate diverse diagnostic requirements and adapt to emerging clinical scenarios. Motivated by the success of automated machine learning (AutoML), this paper introduces a novel framework for the automated design of medical agent architectures. Specifically, we define a hierarchical and expressive agent search space that enables dynamic workflow adaptation through structured modifications at the node, structural, and framework levels. Our framework conceptualizes medical agents as graph-based architectures composed of diverse, functional node types and supports iterative self-improvement guided by diagnostic feedback. Experimental results on skin disease diagnosis tasks demonstrate that the proposed method effectively evolves workflow structures and significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy over time. This work represents the first fully automated framework for medical agent architecture design and offers a scalable, adaptable foundation for deploying intelligent agents in real-world clinical environments.

Nan Song, Xiaofeng Yang, Ze Yang et al.

Lifelong few-shot customization for text-to-image diffusion aims to continually generalize existing models for new tasks with minimal data while preserving old knowledge. Current customization diffusion models excel in few-shot tasks but struggle with catastrophic forgetting problems in lifelong generations. In this study, we identify and categorize the catastrophic forgetting problems into two folds: relevant concepts forgetting and previous concepts forgetting. To address these challenges, we first devise a data-free knowledge distillation strategy to tackle relevant concepts forgetting. Unlike existing methods that rely on additional real data or offline replay of original concept data, our approach enables on-the-fly knowledge distillation to retain the previous concepts while learning new ones, without accessing any previous data. Second, we develop an In-Context Generation (ICGen) paradigm that allows the diffusion model to be conditioned upon the input vision context, which facilitates the few-shot generation and mitigates the issue of previous concepts forgetting. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Lifelong Few-Shot Diffusion (LFS-Diffusion) method can produce high-quality and accurate images while maintaining previously learned knowledge.

Minhui Zhu, Minyang Tian, Xiaocheng Yang et al.

While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LLMs on unpublished, research-level reasoning tasks that broadly covers modern physics research areas, including condensed matter, quantum physics, atomic, molecular & optical physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, mathematical physics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics and biophysics. CritPt consists of 71 composite research challenges designed to simulate full-scale research projects at the entry level, which are also decomposed to 190 simpler checkpoint tasks for more fine-grained insights. All problems are newly created by 50+ active physics researchers based on their own research. Every problem is hand-curated to admit a guess-resistant and machine-verifiable answer and is evaluated by an automated grading pipeline heavily customized for advanced physics-specific output formats. We find that while current state-of-the-art LLMs show early promise on isolated checkpoints, they remain far from being able to reliably solve full research-scale challenges: the best average accuracy among base models is only 5.7%, achieved by GPT-5 (high), moderately rising to around 10% when equipped with coding tools. Through the realistic yet standardized evaluation offered by CritPt, we highlight a large disconnect between current model capabilities and realistic physics research demands, offering a foundation to guide the development of scientifically grounded AI tools.

Yanyan Li, Ze Yang, Keisuke Tateno et al.

Minimal parametrization of 3D lines plays a critical role in camera localization and structural mapping. Existing representations in robotics and computer vision predominantly handle independent lines, overlooking structural regularities such as sets of parallel lines that are pervasive in man-made environments. This paper introduces \textbf{RiemanLine}, a unified minimal representation for 3D lines formulated on Riemannian manifolds that jointly accommodates both individual lines and parallel-line groups. Our key idea is to decouple each line landmark into global and local components: a shared vanishing direction optimized on the unit sphere $\mathcal{S}^2$, and scaled normal vectors constrained on orthogonal subspaces, enabling compact encoding of structural regularities. For $n$ parallel lines, the proposed representation reduces the parameter space from $4n$ (orthonormal form) to $2n+2$, naturally embedding parallelism without explicit constraints. We further integrate this parameterization into a factor graph framework, allowing global direction alignment and local reprojection optimization within a unified manifold-based bundle adjustment. Extensive experiments on ICL-NUIM, TartanAir, and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves significantly more accurate pose estimation and line reconstruction, while reducing parameter dimensionality and improving convergence stability.

Yun Chen, Matthew Haines, Jingkang Wang et al.

High-fidelity sensor simulation of light-based sensors such as cameras and LiDARs is critical for safe and accurate autonomy testing. Neural radiance field (NeRF)-based methods that reconstruct sensor observations via ray-casting of implicit representations have demonstrated accurate simulation of driving scenes, but are slow to train and render, hampering scale. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated faster training and rendering times through rasterization, but is primarily restricted to pinhole camera sensors, preventing usage for realistic multi-sensor autonomy evaluation. Moreover, both NeRF and 3DGS couple the representation with the rendering procedure (implicit networks for ray-based evaluation, particles for rasterization), preventing interoperability, which is key for general usage. In this work, we present Sparse Local Fields (SaLF), a novel volumetric representation that supports rasterization and raytracing. SaLF represents volumes as a sparse set of 3D voxel primitives, where each voxel is a local implicit field. SaLF has fast training (<30 min) and rendering capabilities (50+ FPS for camera and 600+ FPS LiDAR), has adaptive pruning and densification to easily handle large scenes, and can support non-pinhole cameras and spinning LiDARs. We demonstrate that SaLF has similar realism as existing self-driving sensor simulation methods while improving efficiency and enhancing capabilities, enabling more scalable simulation. https://waabi.ai/salf/

Ze Yang, Yihong Jin, Juntian Liu et al.

As the scale and complexity of cloud-based AI systems continue to increase, the detection and adaptive recovery of system faults have become the core challenges to ensure service reliability and continuity. In this paper, we propose an Intelligent Fault Self-Healing Mechanism (IFSHM) that integrates Large Language Model (LLM) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), aiming to realize a fault recovery framework with semantic understanding and policy optimization capabilities in cloud AI systems. On the basis of the traditional DRL-based control model, the proposed method constructs a two-stage hybrid architecture: (1) an LLM-driven fault semantic interpretation module, which can dynamically extract deep contextual semantics from multi-source logs and system indicators to accurately identify potential fault modes; (2) DRL recovery strategy optimizer, based on reinforcement learning, learns the dynamic matching of fault types and response behaviors in the cloud environment. The innovation of this method lies in the introduction of LLM for environment modeling and action space abstraction, which greatly improves the exploration efficiency and generalization ability of reinforcement learning. At the same time, a memory-guided meta-controller is introduced, combined with reinforcement learning playback and LLM prompt fine-tuning strategy, to achieve continuous adaptation to new failure modes and avoid catastrophic forgetting. Experimental results on the cloud fault injection platform show that compared with the existing DRL and rule methods, the IFSHM framework shortens the system recovery time by 37% with unknown fault scenarios.

Ze Yang, Haofei Wang, Feng Lu

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) monitors heart rate without requiring physical contact, which allows for a wide variety of applications. Deep learning-based rPPG have demonstrated superior performance over the traditional approaches in controlled context. However, the lighting situation in indoor space is typically complex, with uneven light distribution and frequent variations in illumination. It lacks a fair comparison of different methods under different illuminations using the same dataset. In this paper, we present a public dataset, namely the BH-rPPG dataset, which contains data from thirty five subjects under three illuminations: low, medium, and high illumination. We also provide the ground truth heart rate measured by an oximeter. We evaluate the performance of three deep learning-based methods (Deepphys, rPPGNet, and Physnet) to that of four traditional methods (CHROM, GREEN, ICA, and POS) using two public datasets: the UBFC-rPPG dataset and the BH-rPPG dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that traditional methods are generally more resistant to fluctuating illuminations. We found that the Physnet achieves lowest mean absolute error (MAE) among deep learning-based method under medium illumination, whereas the CHROM achieves 1.04 beats per minute (BPM), outperforming the Physnet by 80$\%$. Additionally, we investigate potential methods for improving performance of deep learning-based methods. We find that brightness augmentation make model more robust to variation illumination. These findings suggest that while developing deep learning-based heart rate estimation algorithms, illumination variation should be taken into account. This work serves as a benchmark for rPPG performance evaluation and it opens a pathway for future investigation into deep learning-based rPPG under illumination variations.

Ze Yang, Shenlong Wang, Sivabalan Manivasagam et al.

Constructing and animating humans is an important component for building virtual worlds in a wide variety of applications such as virtual reality or robotics testing in simulation. As there are exponentially many variations of humans with different shape, pose and clothing, it is critical to develop methods that can automatically reconstruct and animate humans at scale from real world data. Towards this goal, we represent the pedestrian's shape, pose and skinning weights as neural implicit functions that are directly learned from data. This representation enables us to handle a wide variety of different pedestrian shapes and poses without explicitly fitting a human parametric body model, allowing us to handle a wider range of human geometries and topologies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various datasets and show that our reconstructions outperform existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our re-animation experiments show that we can generate 3D human animations at scale from a single RGB image (and/or an optional LiDAR sweep) as input.

Ze Yang, Siva Manivasagam, Ming Liang et al.

Sensor simulation is a key component for testing the performance of self-driving vehicles and for data augmentation to better train perception systems. Typical approaches rely on artists to create both 3D assets and their animations to generate a new scenario. This, however, does not scale. In contrast, we propose to recover the shape and motion of pedestrians from sensor readings captured in the wild by a self-driving car driving around. Towards this goal, we formulate the problem as energy minimization in a deep structured model that exploits human shape priors, reprojection consistency with 2D poses extracted from images, and a ray-caster that encourages the reconstructed mesh to agree with the LiDAR readings. Importantly, we do not require any ground-truth 3D scans or 3D pose annotations. We then incorporate the reconstructed pedestrian assets bank in a realistic LiDAR simulation system by performing motion retargeting, and show that the simulated LiDAR data can be used to significantly reduce the amount of annotated real-world data required for visual perception tasks.

Ze Yang, Wei Wu, Can Xu et al.

Generating responses following a desired style has great potentials to extend applications of open-domain dialogue systems, yet is refrained by lacking of parallel data for training. In this work, we explore the challenging task with pre-trained language models that have brought breakthrough to various natural language tasks. To this end, we introduce a KL loss and a style classifier to the fine-tuning step in order to steer response generation towards the target style in both a word-level and a sentence-level. Comprehensive empirical studies with two public datasets indicate that our model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of both style consistency and contextual coherence.

Ze Yang, Wei Wu, Huang Hu et al.

We consider grounding open domain dialogues with images. Existing work assumes that both an image and a textual context are available, but image-grounded dialogues by nature are more difficult to obtain than textual dialogues. Thus, we propose learning a response generation model with both image-grounded dialogues and textual dialogues by assuming that the visual scene information at the time of a conversation can be represented by an image, and trying to recover the latent images of the textual dialogues through text-to-image generation techniques. The likelihood of the two types of dialogues is then formulated by a response generator and an image reconstructor that are learned within a conditional variational auto-encoding framework. Empirical studies are conducted in both image-grounded conversation and text-based conversation. In the first scenario, image-grounded dialogues, especially under a low-resource setting, can be effectively augmented by textual dialogues with latent images; while in the second scenario, latent images can enrich the content of responses and at the same time keep them relevant to contexts.

Ze Yang, Yali Wang, Xianyu Chen et al.

Few-shot object detection is a challenging but realistic scenario, where only a few annotated training images are available for training detectors. A popular approach to handle this problem is transfer learning, i.e., fine-tuning a detector pretrained on a source-domain benchmark. However, such transferred detector often fails to recognize new objects in the target domain, due to low data diversity of training samples. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Context-Transformer within a concise deep transfer framework. Specifically, Context-Transformer can effectively leverage source-domain object knowledge as guidance, and automatically exploit contexts from only a few training images in the target domain. Subsequently, it can adaptively integrate these relational clues to enhance the discriminative power of detector, in order to reduce object confusion in few-shot scenarios. Moreover, Context-Transformer is flexibly embedded in the popular SSD-style detectors, which makes it a plug-and-play module for end-to-end few-shot learning. Finally, we evaluate Context-Transformer on the challenging settings of few-shot detection and incremental few-shot detection. The experimental results show that, our framework outperforms the recent state-of-the-art approaches.

Ze Yang, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong et al.

Deep pre-training and fine-tuning models (such as BERT and OpenAI GPT) have demonstrated excellent results in question answering areas. However, due to the sheer amount of model parameters, the inference speed of these models is very slow. How to apply these complex models to real business scenarios becomes a challenging but practical problem. Previous model compression methods usually suffer from information loss during the model compression procedure, leading to inferior models compared with the original one. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Two-stage Multi-teacher Knowledge Distillation (TMKD for short) method for web Question Answering system. We first develop a general Q\&A distillation task for student model pre-training, and further fine-tune this pre-trained student model with multi-teacher knowledge distillation on downstream tasks (like Web Q\&A task, MNLI, SNLI, RTE tasks from GLUE), which effectively reduces the overfitting bias in individual teacher models, and transfers more general knowledge to the student model. The experiment results show that our method can significantly outperform the baseline methods and even achieve comparable results with the original teacher models, along with substantial speedup of model inference.

Jinchen Xuan, Yunchang Yang, Ze Yang et al.

Generative models, especially Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have received significant attention recently. However, it has been observed that in terms of some attributes, e.g. the number of simple geometric primitives in an image, GANs are not able to learn the target distribution in practice. Motivated by this observation, we discover two specific problems of GANs leading to anomalous generalization behaviour, which we refer to as the sample insufficiency and the pixel-wise combination. For the first problem of sample insufficiency, we show theoretically and empirically that the batchsize of the training samples in practice may be insufficient for the discriminator to learn an accurate discrimination function. It could result in unstable training dynamics for the generator, leading to anomalous generalization. For the second problem of pixel-wise combination, we find that besides recognizing the positive training samples as real, under certain circumstances, the discriminator could be fooled to recognize the pixel-wise combinations (e.g. pixel-wise average) of the positive training samples as real. However, those combinations could be visually different from the real samples in the target distribution. With the fooled discriminator as reference, the generator would obtain biased supervision further, leading to the anomalous generalization behaviour. Additionally, in this paper, we propose methods to mitigate the anomalous generalization of GANs. Extensive experiments on benchmark show our proposed methods improve the FID score up to 30\% on natural image dataset.

Ze Yang, Can Xu, Wei Wu et al.

Automatic news comment generation is a new testbed for techniques of natural language generation. In this paper, we propose a "read-attend-comment" procedure for news comment generation and formalize the procedure with a reading network and a generation network. The reading network comprehends a news article and distills some important points from it, then the generation network creates a comment by attending to the extracted discrete points and the news title. We optimize the model in an end-to-end manner by maximizing a variational lower bound of the true objective using the back-propagation algorithm. Experimental results on two datasets indicate that our model can significantly outperform existing methods in terms of both automatic evaluation and human judgment.

Ze Yang, Wei Wu, Jian Yang et al.

We study open domain response generation with limited message-response pairs. The problem exists in real-world applications but is less explored by the existing work. Since the paired data now is no longer enough to train a neural generation model, we consider leveraging the large scale of unpaired data that are much easier to obtain, and propose response generation with both paired and unpaired data. The generation model is defined by an encoder-decoder architecture with templates as prior, where the templates are estimated from the unpaired data as a neural hidden semi-markov model. By this means, response generation learned from the small paired data can be aided by the semantic and syntactic knowledge in the large unpaired data. To balance the effect of the prior and the input message to response generation, we propose learning the whole generation model with an adversarial approach. Empirical studies on question response generation and sentiment response generation indicate that when only a few pairs are available, our model can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art response generation models in terms of both automatic and human evaluation.

Ze Yang, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong et al.

Deep pre-training and fine-tuning models (like BERT, OpenAI GPT) have demonstrated excellent results in question answering areas. However, due to the sheer amount of model parameters, the inference speed of these models is very slow. How to apply these complex models to real business scenarios becomes a challenging but practical problem. Previous works often leverage model compression approaches to resolve this problem. However, these methods usually induce information loss during the model compression procedure, leading to incomparable results between compressed model and the original model. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Multi-task Knowledge Distillation Model (MKDM for short) for web-scale Question Answering system, by distilling knowledge from multiple teacher models to a light-weight student model. In this way, more generalized knowledge can be transferred. The experiment results show that our method can significantly outperform the baseline methods and even achieve comparable results with the original teacher models, along with significant speedup of model inference.