Feng Yu

Jiafeng Liu, Yuanliang Dong, Zehua Cheng et al.

In this work, we propose a permutation invariant language model, SymphonyNet, as a solution for symbolic symphony music generation. We propose a novel Multi-track Multi-instrument Repeatable (MMR) representation for symphonic music and model the music sequence using a Transformer-based auto-regressive language model with specific 3-D positional embedding. To overcome length overflow when modeling extra-long symphony tokens, we also propose a modified Byte Pair Encoding algorithm (Music BPE) for music tokens and introduce a novel linear transformer decoder architecture as a backbone. Meanwhile, we train the decoder to learn automatic orchestration as a joint task by masking instrument information from the input. We also introduce a large-scale symbolic symphony dataset for the advance of symphony generation research. Empirical results show that the proposed approach can generate coherent, novel, complex and harmonious symphony as a pioneer solution for multi-track multi-instrument symbolic music generation.

Yiu-ming Cheung, Juyong Jiang, Feng Yu et al.

Despite enormous research interest and rapid application of federated learning (FL) to various areas, existing studies mostly focus on supervised federated learning under the horizontally partitioned local dataset setting. This paper will study the unsupervised FL under the vertically partitioned dataset setting. Accordingly, we propose the federated principal component analysis for vertically partitioned dataset (VFedPCA) method, which reduces the dimensionality across the joint datasets over all the clients and extracts the principal component feature information for downstream data analysis. We further take advantage of the nonlinear dimensionality reduction and propose the vertical federated advanced kernel principal component analysis (VFedAKPCA) method, which can effectively and collaboratively model the nonlinear nature existing in many real datasets. In addition, we study two communication topologies. The first is a server-client topology where a semi-trusted server coordinates the federated training, while the second is the fully-decentralized topology which further eliminates the requirement of the server by allowing clients themselves to communicate with their neighbors. Extensive experiments conducted on five types of real-world datasets corroborate the efficacy of VFedPCA and VFedAKPCA under the vertically partitioned FL setting. Code is available at: https://github.com/juyongjiang/VFedPCA-VFedAKPCA

Monan Zhou, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu et al.

The EMelodyGen system focuses on emotional melody generation in ABC notation controlled by the musical feature template. Owing to the scarcity of well-structured and emotionally labeled sheet music, we designed a template for controlling emotional melody generation by statistical correlations between musical features and emotion labels derived from small-scale emotional symbolic music datasets and music psychology conclusions. We then automatically annotated a large, well-structured sheet music collection with rough emotional labels by the template, converted them into ABC notation, and reduced label imbalance by data augmentation, resulting in a dataset named Rough4Q. Our system backbone pre-trained on Rough4Q can achieve up to 99% music21 parsing rate and melodies generated by our template can lead to a 91% alignment on emotional expressions in blind listening tests. Ablation studies further validated the effectiveness of the feature controls in the template. Available code and demos are at https://github.com/monetjoe/EMelodyGen.

Qingyun Zou, Feng Yu, Hongshi Tan et al.

We ask whether agentic AI systems built for software engineering transfer to realistic hardware engineering. Existing hardware LLM benchmarks isolate sub-tasks but none jointly requires repository navigation, hierarchy-aware localization, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) executable verification, and maintenance-style patching. We introduce \textbf{Phoenix-bench}, a synchronized corpus of 511 verified Verilator instances from 114 GitHub repositories, each shipped with the developer patch, design-flow labels, fail-to-pass and pass-to-pass testbenches, and a Docker-pinned EDA environment so resolved-rate differences reflect agent behavior rather than toolchain availability. Using Phoenix-bench we run a uniform evaluation of four commercial agents and eight open-source agentic structures across four LLM backbones, plus two diagnostic interventions (file-level oracle localization and one round of testbench-log feedback). Three findings emerge. (i)~Software and hardware are fundamentally different engineering tasks: the same agent loses 37\% to 58\% from SWE-bench Verified to Phoenix-bench because hardware bugs propagate across parallel instantiated modules through signal flow rather than along a software-style call graph, and software-tuned agents stop at the symptom file instead of tracing back through the instantiation chain. (ii)~Failures concentrate on design control-flow / finite state machine (FSM) bugs, verification testbench bugs, and hard cases that demand cross-hierarchy signal-flow tracking and coordinated multi-file edits. (iii)~Localization granularity matters far more than localization itself: a perfect file-level oracle yields only $+1.4$\% because the agent then breaks files that did not need editing, while a single round of test case feedback lifts resolved rate by $42$\% to $45$\% because the test case tells \emph{where} the bug is and \emph{what} the fix has to look like.

Yida Gu, Fakang Wang, Jianhao Fu et al.

As training scales grow, collective communication libraries (CCL) increasingly face anomalies arising from complex interactions among hardware, software, and environmental factors. These anomalies typically manifest as slow/hang communication, the most frequent and time-consuming category to diagnose. However, traditional diagnostic methods remain inaccurate and inefficient, frequently requiring hours or even days for root cause analysis. To address this, we propose CCL-D, a high-precision diagnostic system designed to detect and locate slow/hang anomalies in large-scale distributed training. CCL-D integrates a rank-level real-time probe with an intelligent decision analyzer. The probe measures cross-layer anomaly metrics using a lightweight distributed tracing framework to monitor communication traffic. The analyzer performs automated anomaly detection and root-cause location, precisely identifying the faulty GPU rank. Deployed on a 4,000-GPU cluster over one year, CCL-D achieved near-complete coverage of known slow/hang anomalies and pinpointed affected ranks within 6 minutes-substantially outperforming existing solutions.

Feng Yu, Xiangyu Wu, Yang Yang et al.

Multimodal learning integrates data from diverse sensors to effectively harness information from different modalities. However, recent studies reveal that joint learning often overfits certain modalities while neglecting others, leading to performance inferior to that of unimodal learning. Although previous efforts have sought to balance modal contributions or combine joint and unimodal learning, thereby mitigating the degradation of weaker modalities with promising outcomes, few have examined the relationship between joint and unimodal learning from an information-theoretic perspective. In this paper, we theoretically analyze modality competition and propose a method for multimodal classification by maximizing the total correlation between multimodal features and labels. By maximizing this objective, our approach alleviates modality competition while capturing inter-modal interactions via feature alignment. Building on Mutual Information Neural Estimation (MINE), we introduce Total Correlation Neural Estimation (TCNE) to derive a lower bound for total correlation. Subsequently, we present TCMax, a hyperparameter-free loss function that maximizes total correlation through variational bound optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TCMax outperforms state-of-the-art joint and unimodal learning approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/hubaak/TCMax.

Xiangyu Wu, Dongming Jiang, Feng Yu et al.

Mainstream Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods for adapting vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, typically rely on Shannon Entropy (SE) at test time to measure prediction uncertainty and inconsistency. However, since CLIP has a built-in bias from pretraining on highly imbalanced web-crawled data, SE inevitably results in producing biased estimates of uncertainty entropy. To address this issue, we notably find and demonstrate that Tsallis Entropy (TE), a generalized form of SE, is naturally suited for characterizing biased distributions by introducing a non-extensive parameter q, with the performance of SE serving as a lower bound for TE. Building upon this, we generalize TE into Adaptive Debiasing Tsallis Entropy (ADTE) for TTA, customizing a class-specific parameter q^l derived by normalizing the estimated label bias from continuously incoming test instances, for each category. This adaptive approach allows ADTE to accurately select high-confidence views and seamlessly integrate with a label adjustment strategy to enhance adaptation, without introducing distribution-specific hyperparameter tuning. Besides, our investigation reveals that both TE and ADTE can serve as direct, advanced alternatives to SE in TTA, without any other modifications. Experimental results show that ADTE outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ImageNet and its five variants, and achieves the highest average performance on 10 cross-domain benchmarks, regardless of the model architecture or text prompts used. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jinx630/ADTE.

Feng Yu, Hongshi Tan, Yao Chen et al.

The widespread adoption of mixed-precision quantization in large language models (LLMs) has created demand for hardware that can efficiently perform multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations across mixed datatypes and switch datatypes at runtime. Existing FPGA-based MAC solutions fall short due to limitations in fixed-datatype design, inefficient spatial or temporal resource sharing, and poor support for mixed-precision execution. These limitations collectively lead to under-utilization of DSP resources, limiting achievable parallelism and throughput. In this work, we present XtraMAC, a novel MAC architecture that unifies integer, floating-point, and mixed-precision operations within a single, datatype-adaptive microarchitecture. XtraMAC decomposes all supported MAC formats into a shared integer mantissa product with lightweight sign and exponent handling, enabling dynamic operand packing and efficient DSP resource sharing with constant latency and initiation interval of one across all datatypes. Evaluated on an AMD Xilinx U55c FPGA, XtraMAC achieves 1.4-2.0x higher compute density, reduces per-operation LUT, FF, and DSP consumption by 27-51%, and delivers up to 1.9x greater energy efficiency and 1.2x speedup on representative mixed-precision LLM workloads. The implementation of XtraMAC is open-sourced at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/XtraMAC.

Gengmo Zhou, Zhen Wang, Feng Yu et al.

Virtual Screening is an essential technique in the early phases of drug discovery, aimed at identifying promising drug candidates from vast molecular libraries. Recently, ligand-based virtual screening has garnered significant attention due to its efficacy in conducting extensive database screenings without relying on specific protein-binding site information. Obtaining binding affinity data for complexes is highly expensive, resulting in a limited amount of available data that covers a relatively small chemical space. Moreover, these datasets contain a significant amount of inconsistent noise. It is challenging to identify an inductive bias that consistently maintains the integrity of molecular activity during data augmentation. To tackle these challenges, we propose S-MolSearch, the first framework to our knowledge, that leverages molecular 3D information and affinity information in semi-supervised contrastive learning for ligand-based virtual screening. Drawing on the principles of inverse optimal transport, S-MolSearch efficiently processes both labeled and unlabeled data, training molecular structural encoders while generating soft labels for the unlabeled data. This design allows S-MolSearch to adaptively utilize unlabeled data within the learning process. Empirically, S-MolSearch demonstrates superior performance on widely-used benchmarks LIT-PCBA and DUD-E. It surpasses both structure-based and ligand-based virtual screening methods for AUROC, BEDROC and EF.

Yan Pei, Jiahui Xu, Qianhao Chen et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are easily corrupted by various artifacts, making artifact removal crucial for improving signal quality in scenarios such as disease diagnosis and brain-computer interface (BCI). In this paper, we present a fully convolutional neural architecture, called DTP-Net, which consists of a Densely Connected Temporal Pyramid (DTP) sandwiched between a pair of learnable time-frequency transformations for end-to-end electroencephalogram (EEG) denoising. The proposed method first transforms a single-channel EEG signal of arbitrary length into the time-frequency domain via an Encoder layer. Then, noises, such as ocular and muscle artifacts, are extracted by DTP in a multi-scale fashion and reduced. Finally, a Decoder layer is employed to reconstruct the artifact-reduced EEG signal. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the representation learning behavior of each module in DTP-Net to substantiate its robustness and reliability. Extensive experiments conducted on two public semi-simulated datasets demonstrate the effective artifact removal performance of DTP-Net, which outperforms state-of-art approaches. Experimental results demonstrate cleaner waveforms and significant improvement in Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and Relative Root Mean Square Error (RRMSE) after denoised by the proposed model. Moreover, the proposed DTP-Net is applied in a specific BCI downstream task, improving the classification accuracy by up to 5.55% compared to that of the raw signals, validating its potential applications in the fields of EEG-based neuroscience and neuro-engineering.

Ling Team, Binwei Zeng, Chao Huang et al.

In this technical report, we tackle the challenges of training large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, focusing on overcoming cost inefficiency and resource limitations prevalent in such systems. To address these issues, we present two differently sized MoE large language models (LLMs), namely Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus (referred to as "Bailing" in Chinese, spelled Bǎilíng in Pinyin). Ling-Lite contains 16.8 billion parameters with 2.75 billion activated parameters, while Ling-Plus boasts 290 billion parameters with 28.8 billion activated parameters. Both models exhibit comparable performance to leading industry benchmarks. This report offers actionable insights to improve the efficiency and accessibility of AI development in resource-constrained settings, promoting more scalable and sustainable technologies. Specifically, to reduce training costs for large-scale MoE models, we propose innovative methods for (1) optimization of model architecture and training processes, (2) refinement of training anomaly handling, and (3) enhancement of model evaluation efficiency. Additionally, leveraging high-quality data generated from knowledge graphs, our models demonstrate superior capabilities in tool use compared to other models. Ultimately, our experimental findings demonstrate that a 300B MoE LLM can be effectively trained on lower-performance devices while achieving comparable performance to models of a similar scale, including dense and MoE models. Compared to high-performance devices, utilizing a lower-specification hardware system during the pre-training phase demonstrates significant cost savings, reducing computing costs by approximately 20%. The models can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI.

Miao Lin, Feng Yu, Rui Ning et al.

Deep neural networks are highly susceptible to backdoor attacks, yet most defense methods to date rely on balanced data, overlooking the pervasive class imbalance in real-world scenarios that can amplify backdoor threats. This paper presents the first in-depth investigation of how the dataset imbalance amplifies backdoor vulnerability, showing that (i) the imbalance induces a majority-class bias that increases susceptibility and (ii) conventional defenses degrade significantly as the imbalance grows. To address this, we propose Randomized Probability Perturbation (RPP), a certified poisoned-sample detection framework that operates in a black-box setting using only model output probabilities. For any inspected sample, RPP determines whether the input has been backdoor-manipulated, while offering provable within-domain detectability guarantees and a probabilistic upper bound on the false positive rate. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks (MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10, TinyImageNet and ImageNet10) covering 10 backdoor attacks and 12 baseline defenses show that RPP achieves significantly higher detection accuracy than state-of-the-art defenses, particularly under dataset imbalance. RPP establishes a theoretical and practical foundation for defending against backdoor attacks in real-world environments with imbalanced data.

Jiayong Zhu, Jiangtong Li, Jinru Ding et al.

While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel in general visual tasks, their deployment in specialized financial contexts remains insufficient. Existing benchmarks prioritize isolated charts, often overlooking the need to integrate data from text, tables, and images within comprehensive financial documents. To address this limitation, we introduce FINDOCMRE, a multi-image document-level benchmark designed for financial multimodal reasoning. We construct the dataset via a semi-automated pipeline that combines Visual-Centric Generation with Expert Verification, thereby minimizing text bias and ensuring high annotation quality. Spanning twelve domains, the benchmark comprises 12,207 samples derived from 2,878 financial reports, designed to evaluate multi-image processing and document-level understanding across five distinct task types. Extensive experiments with eleven representative LMMs reveal that no model surpasses an overall score of 65, highlighting challenges in integrating visual grounding with logical reasoning within complex document environments. Specifically, we observe a significant performance divergence across tasks, where models exhibit proficiency in semantic narrative construction but struggle with numerical estimation and cross-page visual grounding. FINDOCMRE serves as a rigorous benchmark to guide the evolution of financial LMMs towards expert-level document analysis and reasoning.

Gengmo Zhou, Feng Yu, Wenda Wang et al.

Enzymes are crucial catalysts that enable a wide range of biochemical reactions. Efficiently identifying specific enzymes from vast protein libraries is essential for advancing biocatalysis. Traditional computational methods for enzyme screening and retrieval are time-consuming and resource-intensive. Recently, deep learning approaches have shown promise. However, these methods focus solely on the interaction between enzymes and reactions, overlooking the inherent hierarchical relationships within each domain. To address these limitations, we introduce FGW-CLIP, a novel contrastive learning framework based on optimizing the fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance. FGW-CLIP incorporates multiple alignments, including inter-domain alignment between reactions and enzymes and intra-domain alignment within enzymes and reactions. By introducing a tailored regularization term, our method minimizes the Gromov-Wasserstein distance between enzyme and reaction spaces, which enhances information integration across these domains. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of FGW-CLIP in challenging enzyme-reaction tasks. On the widely-used EnzymeMap benchmark, FGW-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance in enzyme virtual screening, as measured by BEDROC and EF metrics. Moreover, FGW-CLIP consistently outperforms across all three splits of ReactZyme, the largest enzyme-reaction benchmark, demonstrating robust generalization to novel enzymes and reactions. These results position FGW-CLIP as a promising framework for enzyme discovery in complex biochemical settings, with strong adaptability across diverse screening scenarios.

Hsin-Hsiung Huang, Feng Yu, Xing Fan et al.

While matrix variate regression models have been studied in many existing works, classical statistical and computational methods for the analysis of the regression coefficient estimation are highly affected by high dimensional and noisy matrix-valued predictors. To address these issues, this paper proposes a framework of matrix variate regression models based on a rank constraint, vector regularization (e.g., sparsity), and a general loss function with three special cases considered: ordinary matrix regression, robust matrix regression, and matrix logistic regression. We also propose an alternating projected gradient descent algorithm. Based on analyzing our objective functions on manifolds with bounded curvature, we show that the algorithm is guaranteed to converge, all accumulation points of the iterates have estimation errors in the order of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ asymptotically and substantially attaining the minimax rate. Our theoretical analysis can be applied to general optimization problems on manifolds with bounded curvature and can be considered an important technical contribution to this work. We validate the proposed method through simulation studies and real image data examples.

Yachao Liang, Min Yu, Gang Li et al.

Detection of face forgery videos remains a formidable challenge in the field of digital forensics, especially the generalization to unseen datasets and common perturbations. In this paper, we tackle this issue by leveraging the synergy between audio and visual speech elements, embarking on a novel approach through audio-visual speech representation learning. Our work is motivated by the finding that audio signals, enriched with speech content, can provide precise information effectively reflecting facial movements. To this end, we first learn precise audio-visual speech representations on real videos via a self-supervised masked prediction task, which encodes both local and global semantic information simultaneously. Then, the derived model is directly transferred to the forgery detection task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of cross-dataset generalization and robustness, without the participation of any fake video in model training. Code is available at https://github.com/Eleven4AI/SpeechForensics.

Xiangyu Wu, Feng Yu, Qing-Guo Chen et al.

Mainstream test-time adaptation (TTA) techniques endeavor to mitigate distribution shifts via entropy minimization for multi-class classification, inherently increasing the probability of the most confident class. However, when encountering multi-label instances, the primary challenge stems from the varying number of labels per image, and prioritizing only the highest probability class inevitably undermines the adaptation of other positive labels. To address this issue, we investigate TTA within multi-label scenario (ML--TTA), developing Bound Entropy Minimization (BEM) objective to simultaneously increase the confidence of multiple top predicted labels. Specifically, to determine the number of labels for each augmented view, we retrieve a paired caption with yielded textual labels for that view. These labels are allocated to both the view and caption, called weak label set and strong label set with the same size k. Following this, the proposed BEM considers the highest top-k predicted labels from view and caption as a single entity, respectively, learning both view and caption prompts concurrently. By binding top-k predicted labels, BEM overcomes the limitation of vanilla entropy minimization, which exclusively optimizes the most confident class. Across the MSCOCO, VOC, and NUSWIDE multi-label datasets, our ML--TTA framework equipped with BEM exhibits superior performance compared to the latest SOTA methods, across various model architectures, prompt initialization, and varying label scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Jinx630/ML-TTA.

Miao Lin, MD Saifur Rahman Mazumder, Feng Yu et al.

Randomized Smoothing (RS) offers formal $\ell_2$ guarantees for arbitrary base classifiers but faces two key practical bottlenecks: (i) it often relies on noise-augmented training to achieve nontrivial certificates, which increases training cost, can reduce clean accuracy, and weakens RS as a genuinely post-hoc defense; and (ii) certification is computationally expensive, typically requiring tens of thousands of noisy forward passes per input, which hinders deployment, especially on resource-constrained edge devices. To address both limitations, we propose Laplace-Bridged Smoothing (LBS), an analytic reformulation of RS that replaces high-dimensional input-space Monte Carlo (MC) sampling with efficient computations in a low-dimensional probability space. LBS preserves formal robustness guarantees without requiring noise-augmented training while substantially reducing certification burden. On CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, LBS attains stronger certified robustness than RS and reduces per-sample certification cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Notably, on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and Raspberry Pi 4, LBS achieves speedups of up to $494\times$, enabling practical certified deployment on real-world edge devices. Finally, we provide theoretical justification for the analytic formulation and certificate validity of LBS.

Chuanchuan Sun, Zhen Yu, Qin Fan et al.

Background: Pregnancy-associated thrombotic microangiopathy (P-TMA) is rare but life-threatening. Early risk prediction before overt clinical presentation remains challenging, as the associated laboratory abnormalities are subtle, multidimensional, and frequently masked by common physiological changes such as gestational thrombocytopenia and pregnancy-related proteinuria, thus overlapping heavily with benign obstetric and renal conditions. This complexity is poorly captured by univariate or rule-based approaches; however, it is addressable by machine learning, which can extract latent, time-dependent risk signatures from longitudinal clinical tests. Methods: This retrospective study included 300 pregnancies comprising 142 P-TMA cases and 158 controls. After exclusion of identifiers and non-informative variables, 146 longitudinal laboratory predictors were retained. Participants were divided into a training cohort (80%) and a held-out test cohort (20%) using stratified sampling. Five algorithms were evaluated: logistic regression, support vector machine with radial basis function kernel, random forest, extra trees, and gradient boosting. The final model was selected by mean cross-validated AUROC, refitted on the full training cohort, and evaluated once in the held-out test cohort. Interpretability analyses examined global feature importance and distributional patterns of leading predictors. Results: Gradient boosting was prespecified by cross-validation in the training cohort. The model achieved an AUROC of 0.872 (95% CI: 0.769-0.952) and an AUPRC of 0.883 (95% CI: 0.780-0.959) in a held-out test cohort, with sensitivity of 0.750 and specificity of 0.812. Conclusions: Longitudinal clinical laboratory tests obtained during routine care contained informative and clinically plausible signals for P-TMA risk. Notably, cystatin C at week 6 showed promise as an early monitoring indicator.

Qingyun Zou, Feng Yu, Hongshi Tan et al.

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compiles algorithmic C/C++ descriptions into hardware, with Quality of Results (QoR) -- latency and resource utilization -- critically governed by pragma configurations and code structure. Existing LLM-based HLS approaches train for functional correctness but ignore QoR entirely. We observe that reinforcement learning (RL) for HLS does not require absolute synthesis results -- only relative comparisons between candidates. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{HLS-Seek}, a QoR-aware NL-to-HLS framework that replaces expensive synthesis-in-the-loop RL with a comparative proxy reward model achieving 99.53\% Pareto-dominance accuracy. To prevent reward hacking, we introduce \textit{uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo (MC) dropout switching} that selectively invokes real Vitis HLS synthesis for low-confidence candidates and online updates the proxy, creating a self-improving reward system. HLS-Seek achieves 81.5\% syntax correctness pass@1 and 81.4\% Func@5 on HLS-eval with only 7B parameters, surpassing GPT-5.1 and other frontier models while achieving 8.5$\times$ faster training than real-reward RL. On QoR evaluation, HLS-Seek achieves the lowest latency on 16/30 kernels and Pareto-dominates HLS-specific baselines on 9 kernels.

Z-Image Team, Huanqia Cai, Sihan Cao et al.

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently dominated by proprietary systems, such as Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.0. Leading open-source alternatives, including Qwen-Image, Hunyuan-Image-3.0 and FLUX.2, are characterized by massive parameter counts (20B to 80B), making them impractical for inference, and fine-tuning on consumer-grade hardware. To address this gap, we propose Z-Image, an efficient 6B-parameter foundation generative model built upon a Scalable Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer (S3-DiT) architecture that challenges the "scale-at-all-costs" paradigm. By systematically optimizing the entire model lifecycle -- from a curated data infrastructure to a streamlined training curriculum -- we complete the full training workflow in just 314K H800 GPU hours (approx. $630K). Our few-step distillation scheme with reward post-training further yields Z-Image-Turbo, offering both sub-second inference latency on an enterprise-grade H800 GPU and compatibility with consumer-grade hardware (<16GB VRAM). Additionally, our omni-pre-training paradigm also enables efficient training of Z-Image-Edit, an editing model with impressive instruction-following capabilities. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model achieves performance comparable to or surpassing that of leading competitors across various dimensions. Most notably, Z-Image exhibits exceptional capabilities in photorealistic image generation and bilingual text rendering, delivering results that rival top-tier commercial models, thereby demonstrating that state-of-the-art results are achievable with significantly reduced computational overhead. We publicly release our code, weights, and online demo to foster the development of accessible, budget-friendly, yet state-of-the-art generative models.

Yongsheng Feng, Yuetonghui Xu, Jiehui Luo et al.

Source separation is a fundamental task in speech, music, and audio processing, and it also provides cleaner and larger data for training generative models. However, improving separation performance in practice often depends on increasingly large networks, inflating training and deployment costs. Motivated by recent advances in inference-time scaling for generative modeling, we propose Training-Time and Inference-Time Scalable Discriminative Source Separation (TISDiSS), a unified framework that integrates early-split multi-loss supervision, shared-parameter design, and dynamic inference repetitions. TISDiSS enables flexible speed-performance trade-offs by adjusting inference depth without retraining additional models. We further provide systematic analyses of architectural and training choices and show that training with more inference repetitions improves shallow-inference performance, benefiting low-latency applications. Experiments on standard speech separation benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with a reduced parameter count, establishing TISDiSS as a scalable and practical framework for adaptive source separation. Code is available at https://github.com/WingSingFung/TISDiSS.

Xiangyu Wu, Feng Yu, Yang Yang et al.

The integration of prompt tuning with multimodal learning has shown significant generalization abilities for various downstream tasks. Despite advancements, existing methods heavily depend on massive modality-specific labeled data (e.g., video, audio, and image), or are customized for a single modality. In this study, we present Text as Any-Modality by Consistent Prompt Tuning (TaAM-CPT), a scalable approach for constructing a general representation model toward unlimited modalities using solely text data. TaAM-CPT comprises modality prompt pools, text construction, and modality-aligned text encoders from pre-trained models, which allows for extending new modalities by simply adding prompt pools and modality-aligned text encoders. To harmonize the learning across different modalities, TaAM-CPT designs intra- and inter-modal learning objectives, which can capture category details within modalities while maintaining semantic consistency across different modalities. Benefiting from its scalable architecture and pre-trained models, TaAM-CPT can be seamlessly extended to accommodate unlimited modalities. Remarkably, without any modality-specific labeled data, TaAM-CPT achieves leading results on diverse datasets spanning various modalities, including video classification, image classification, and audio classification. The code is available at https://github.com/Jinx630/TaAM-CPT.

Feng Yu, He Li, Sige Bian et al.

Face video super-resolution algorithm aims to reconstruct realistic face details through continuous input video sequences. However, existing video processing algorithms usually contain redundant parameters to guarantee different super-resolution scenes. In this work, we focus on super-resolution of face areas in original video scenes, while rest areas are interpolated. This specific super-resolved task makes it possible to cut redundant parameters in general video super-resolution networks. We construct a dataset consisting entirely of face video sequences for network training and evaluation, and conduct hyper-parameter optimization in our experiments. We use three combined strategies to optimize the network parameters with a simultaneous train-evaluation method to accelerate optimization process. Results show that simultaneous train-evaluation method improves the training speed and facilitates the generation of efficient networks. The generated network can reduce at least 52.4% parameters and 20.7% FLOPs, achieve better performance on PSNR, SSIM compared with state-of-art video super-resolution algorithms. When processing 36x36x1x3 input video frame sequences, the efficient network provides 47.62 FPS real-time processing performance. We name our proposal as hyper-parameter optimization for face Video Super-Resolution (HO-FVSR), which is open-sourced at https://github.com/yphone/efficient-network-for-face-VSR.

Guoxin Wang, Xuyang Cao, Shan An et al.

Deep learning approaches, together with neuroimaging techniques, play an important role in psychiatric disorders classification. Previous studies on psychiatric disorders diagnosis mainly focus on using functional connectivity matrices of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) as input, which still needs to fully utilize the rich temporal information of the time series of rs-fMRI data. In this work, we proposed a multi-dimension-embedding-aware modality fusion transformer (MFFormer) for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder classification using rs-fMRI and T1 weighted structural MRI (T1w sMRI). Concretely, to fully utilize the temporal information of rs-fMRI and spatial information of sMRI, we constructed a deep learning architecture that takes as input 2D time series of rs-fMRI and 3D volumes T1w. Furthermore, to promote intra-modality attention and information fusion across different modalities, a fusion transformer module (FTM) is designed through extensive self-attention of hybrid feature maps of multi-modality. In addition, a dimension-up and dimension-down strategy is suggested to properly align feature maps of multi-dimensional from different modalities. Experimental results on our private and public OpenfMRI datasets show that our proposed MFFormer performs better than that using a single modality or multi-modality MRI on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder diagnosis.

Jiafeng Liu, Yuanliang Dong, Hongjia Liu et al.

A common design pattern in high-quality music generation is to handle structure and fidelity in different representation spaces: a generator first models high-level structure, followed by diffusion-based or neural decoding stages that reconstruct fine details. In this work, we explore an alternative view: both may be progressively modeled within a single deep acoustic-token hierarchy. To study this, we build a 64-layer residual vector quantization (RVQ) acoustic representation and propose a two-stage coarse-to-fine generation framework. A backbone model first generates coarse acoustic tokens for the full track, and a super-resolution model then completes finer tokens within the same acoustic token space. The super-resolution stage works at full-track scale and refines tokens layer by layer while running in parallel over time, leading to a fixed 62-step inference process. To jointly improve lyric alignment and fine-detail reconstruction, we further introduce hybrid-attention training: the alignment objective uses causal attention, while layer-wise refinement uses full attention. A key finding is that text--vocal alignment can emerge within pure acoustic-token language modeling, without requiring a separate semantic token stage. Moreover, initializing the super-resolution model from the trained backbone significantly improves convergence and final quality. Taken together, our results suggest that high-quality music generation can be effectively pursued without separating structure and fidelity into heterogeneous representation spaces. Instead, both can be progressively modeled within a unified acoustic-token hierarchy, pointing toward a simpler and more unified path to high-quality music generation.

Yashan Wang, Shangda Wu, Jianhuai Hu et al.

We introduce NotaGen, a symbolic music generation model aiming to explore the potential of producing high-quality classical sheet music. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), NotaGen adopts pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning paradigms (henceforth referred to as the LLM training paradigms). It is pre-trained on 1.6M pieces of music in ABC notation, and then fine-tuned on approximately 9K high-quality classical compositions conditioned on "period-composer-instrumentation" prompts. For reinforcement learning, we propose the CLaMP-DPO method, which further enhances generation quality and controllability without requiring human annotations or predefined rewards. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of CLaMP-DPO in symbolic music generation models with different architectures and encoding schemes. Furthermore, subjective A/B tests show that NotaGen outperforms baseline models against human compositions, greatly advancing musical aesthetics in symbolic music generation.

Longfei Huang, Feng Yu, Zhihao Guan et al.

This report presents a solution for the zero-shot referring expression comprehension task. Visual-language multimodal base models (such as CLIP, SAM) have gained significant attention in recent years as a cornerstone of mainstream research. One of the key applications of multimodal base models lies in their ability to generalize to zero-shot downstream tasks. Unlike traditional referring expression comprehension, zero-shot referring expression comprehension aims to apply pre-trained visual-language models directly to the task without specific training. Recent studies have enhanced the zero-shot performance of multimodal base models in referring expression comprehension tasks by introducing visual prompts. To address the zero-shot referring expression comprehension challenge, we introduced a combination of visual prompts and considered the influence of textual prompts, employing joint prediction tailored to the data characteristics. Ultimately, our approach achieved accuracy rates of 84.825 on the A leaderboard and 71.460 on the B leaderboard, securing the first position.

Zi Wang, Fei Wu, Feng Yu et al.

Edge-AI, the convergence of edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI), has become a promising paradigm that enables the deployment of advanced AI models at the network edge, close to users. In Edge-AI, federated continual learning (FCL) has emerged as an imperative framework, which fuses knowledge from different clients while preserving data privacy and retaining knowledge from previous tasks as it learns new ones. By so doing, FCL aims to ensure stable and reliable performance of learning models in dynamic and distributed environments. In this survey, we thoroughly review the state-of-the-art research and present the first comprehensive survey of FCL for Edge-AI. We categorize FCL methods based on three task characteristics: federated class continual learning, federated domain continual learning, and federated task continual learning. For each category, an in-depth investigation and review of the representative methods are provided, covering background, challenges, problem formalisation, solutions, and limitations. Besides, existing real-world applications empowered by FCL are reviewed, indicating the current progress and potential of FCL in diverse application domains. Furthermore, we discuss and highlight several prospective research directions of FCL such as algorithm-hardware co-design for FCL and FCL with foundation models, which could provide insights into the future development and practical deployment of FCL in the era of Edge-AI.

Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan et al.

Challenges in managing linguistic diversity and integrating various musical modalities are faced by current music information retrieval systems. These limitations reduce their effectiveness in a global, multimodal music environment. To address these issues, we introduce CLaMP 2, a system compatible with 101 languages that supports both ABC notation (a text-based musical notation format) and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) for music information retrieval. CLaMP 2, pre-trained on 1.5 million ABC-MIDI-text triplets, includes a multilingual text encoder and a multimodal music encoder aligned via contrastive learning. By leveraging large language models, we obtain refined and consistent multilingual descriptions at scale, significantly reducing textual noise and balancing language distribution. Our experiments show that CLaMP 2 achieves state-of-the-art results in both multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities, thus establishing a new standard for inclusive and global music information retrieval.

Xuzheng He, Nan Nan, Zhilin Wang et al.

Generating symphonic music requires simultaneously managing high-level structural form and dense, multi-track orchestration. Existing symbolic models often struggle with a "complexity-control imbalance", in which scaling bottlenecks limit long-term granular steerability. We present SymphonyGen, a 3D hierarchical framework for contemporary cinematic orchestration. SymphonyGen employs a cascading decoder architecture that decomposes the Bar, Track, and Event axes, improving computational efficiency and scalability over conventional 1D or 2D models. We introduce "short-score" conditioning via a beat-quantized multi-voice harmony skeleton, enabling outline control while preserving textural diversity. The model is further refined using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a cross-modal audio-perceptual reward, aligning symbolic output with modern acoustic expectations. Additionally, we implement a dissonance-averse sampling algorithm to suppress unintended tonal clashes during inference. Objective evaluations show that both reinforcement learning and dissonance-averse sampling effectively enhance harmonic cleanliness while maintaining melodic expression. Subjective evaluations demonstrate that SymphonyGen outperforms baselines in musicality and preference for orchestral music generation. Demo page: https://symphonygen.github.io/

Linzuo Zhang, Yu Hu, Feng Yu et al.

-Navigation through narrow and irregular gaps is an essential skill in autonomous drones for applications such as inspection, search-and-rescue, and disaster response. However, traditional planning and control methods rely on explicit gap extraction and measurement, while recent end-to-end approaches often assume regularly shaped gaps, leading to poor generalization and limited practicality. In this work, we present a fully vision-based, end-to-end framework that maps depth images directly to control commands, enabling drones to traverse complex gaps within unseen environments. Operating in the Special Euclidean group SE(3), where position and orientation are tightly coupled, the framework leverages differentiable simulation, a Stop-Gradient operator, and a Bimodal Initialization Distribution to achieve stable traversal through consecutive gaps. Two auxiliary prediction modules-a gap-crossing success classifier and a traversability predictor-further enhance continuous navigation and safety. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the approach's effectiveness, generalization capability, and practical robustness.

Ao Zhuang, Feng Yu, Tianbao Zhang et al.

We present QuadAgent, a training-free agent system for agile quadrotor flight guided by vision-language inputs. Unlike prior end-to-end or serial agent approaches, QuadAgent decouples high-level reasoning from low-level control using an asynchronous multi-agent architecture: Foreground Workflow Agents handle active tasks and user commands, while Background Agents perform look-ahead reasoning. The system maintains scene memory via the Impression Graph, a lightweight topological map built from sparse keyframes, and ensures safe flight with a vision-based obstacle avoidance network. Simulation results show that QuadAgent outperforms baseline methods in efficiency and responsiveness. Real-world experiments demonstrate that it can interpret complex instructions, reason about its surroundings, and navigate cluttered indoor spaces at speeds up to 5 m/s.

Feng Yu, MD Saifur Rahman Mazumder, Ying Su et al.

Effective feature selection is essential for high-dimensional data analysis and machine learning. Unsupervised feature selection (UFS) aims to simultaneously cluster data and identify the most discriminative features. Most existing UFS methods linearly project features into a pseudo-label space for clustering, but they suffer from two critical limitations: (1) an oversimplified linear mapping that fails to capture complex feature relationships, and (2) an assumption of uniform cluster distributions, ignoring outliers prevalent in real-world data. To address these issues, we propose the Robust Autoencoder-based Unsupervised Feature Selection (RAEUFS) model, which leverages a deep autoencoder to learn nonlinear feature representations while inherently improving robustness to outliers. We further develop an efficient optimization algorithm for RAEUFS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art UFS approaches in both clean and outlier-contaminated data settings.

Feng Yu, Teng Zhang, Gilad Lerman

We present the subspace-constrained Tyler's estimator (STE) designed for recovering a low-dimensional subspace within a dataset that may be highly corrupted with outliers. STE is a fusion of the Tyler's M-estimator (TME) and a variant of the fast median subspace. Our theoretical analysis suggests that, under a common inlier-outlier model, STE can effectively recover the underlying subspace, even when it contains a smaller fraction of inliers relative to other methods in the field of robust subspace recovery. We apply STE in the context of Structure from Motion (SfM) in two ways: for robust estimation of the fundamental matrix and for the removal of outlying cameras, enhancing the robustness of the SfM pipeline. Numerical experiments confirm the state-of-the-art performance of our method in these applications. This research makes significant contributions to the field of robust subspace recovery, particularly in the context of computer vision and 3D reconstruction.

Feng Yu, Lixin Shen, Guohui Song

Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) models are extensively used in signal processing and machine learning for promoting sparsity through hierarchical priors. The hyperparameters in SBL models are crucial for the model's performance, but they are often difficult to estimate due to the non-convexity and the high-dimensionality of the associated objective function. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for hyperparameter estimation in SBL models, encompassing well-known algorithms such as the expectation-maximization (EM), MacKay, and convex bounding (CB) algorithms. These algorithms are cohesively interpreted within an alternating minimization and linearization (AML) paradigm, distinguished by their unique linearized surrogate functions. Additionally, a novel algorithm within the AML framework is introduced, showing enhanced efficiency, especially under low signal noise ratios. This is further improved by a new alternating minimization and quadratic approximation (AMQ) paradigm, which includes a proximal regularization term. The paper substantiates these advancements with thorough convergence analysis and numerical experiments, demonstrating the algorithm's effectiveness in various noise conditions and signal-to-noise ratios.

Guoxin Wang, Sheng Shi, Shan An et al.

Previous research on the diagnosis of Bipolar disorder has mainly focused on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, their accuracy can not meet the requirements of clinical diagnosis. Efficient multimodal fusion strategies have great potential for applications in multimodal data and can further improve the performance of medical diagnosis models. In this work, we utilize both sMRI and fMRI data and propose a novel multimodal diagnosis model for bipolar disorder. The proposed Patch Pyramid Feature Extraction Module extracts sMRI features, and the spatio-temporal pyramid structure extracts the fMRI features. Finally, they are fused by a fusion module to output diagnosis results with a classifier. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms others in balanced accuracy from 0.657 to 0.732 on the OpenfMRI dataset, and achieves the state of the art.

Wei Dai, Dequan Zheng, Feng Yu et al.

With the advancement of artificial intelligence and computer vision technologies, multimodal emotion recognition has become a prominent research topic. However, existing methods face challenges such as heterogeneous data fusion and the effective utilization of modality correlations. This paper proposes a novel multimodal emotion recognition approach, DeepMSI-MER, based on the integration of contrastive learning and visual sequence compression. The proposed method enhances cross-modal feature fusion through contrastive learning and reduces redundancy in the visual modality by leveraging visual sequence compression. Experimental results on two public datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD, demonstrate that DeepMSI-MER significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of emotion recognition, validating the effectiveness of multimodal feature fusion and the proposed approach.

Yang Su, Feng Yu, Yu Hu et al.

Autonomous drone racing in complex environments requires agile, high-speed flight while maintaining reliable obstacle avoidance. Differentiable-physics-based policy learning has recently demonstrated high sample efficiency and remarkable performance across various tasks, including agile drone flight and quadruped locomotion. However, applying such methods to drone racing remains difficult, as key objective like gate traversal are inherently hard to express as smooth, differentiable losses. To address these challenges, we propose DiffRacing, a novel vector field-augmented differentiable policy learning framework. DiffRacing integrates differentiable losses and vector fields into the training process to provide continuous and stable gradient signals, balancing obstacle avoidance and high-speed gate traversal. In addition, a differentiable Delta Action Model compensates for dynamics mismatch, enabling efficient sim-to-real transfer without explicit system identification. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that DiffRacing achieves superior sample efficiency, faster convergence, and robust flight performance, thereby demonstrating that vector fields can augment traditional gradient-based policy learning with a task-specific geometric prior.

Tianle Wang, Sirui Zhang, Xinyi Tong et al.

This paper presents an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that identifies recurring patterns -- referred to as ``music-words'' -- from symbolic music data. These patterns are fundamental to musical structure and reflect the cognitive processes involved in composition. However, extracting these patterns remains challenging because of the inherent semantic ambiguity in musical interpretation. We formulate the task of music-word discovery as a statistical optimization problem and propose a two-stage Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based learning framework: 1. Developing a music-word dictionary; 2. Reconstructing the music data. When evaluated against human expert annotations, the algorithm achieved an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.61. Our findings indicate that minimizing code length effectively addresses semantic ambiguity, suggesting that human optimization of encoding systems shapes musical semantics. This approach enables computers to extract ``basic building blocks'' from music data, facilitating structural analysis and sparse encoding. The method has two primary applications. First, in AI music, it supports downstream tasks such as music generation, classification, style transfer, and improvisation. Second, in musicology, it provides a tool for analyzing compositional patterns and offers insights into the principle of minimal encoding across diverse musical styles and composers.

Feng Yu, Jia Hu, Geyong Min

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods must be resource-efficient yet handle heterogeneous reasoning transformations, and classical low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is constrained by the nominal rank $r$. Hadamard-style extensions like HiRA raise the nominal rank but couple every update to the global energy pattern of the frozen weight matrix, while ABBA trades this inductive bias for fully learned dense intermediates. To address the limitation of global modulation, we propose Block Hadamard high-Rank Adaptation (BHRA), which partitions each weight matrix and applies HiRA-style multiplicative modulation independently within every block, preserving the PEFT parameter footprint while unlocking localized rank amplification. Our empirical analyses reveal that this blockwise design maintains rich spectra across rank budgets, mitigating the collapse induced by global modulation. Across eight commonsense reasoning tasks and two arithmetic benchmarks with Llama-3.2 1B/3B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma-2 9B, BHRA consistently surpasses strong PEFT baselines under matched parameter budgets.

Changjian Chen, Pengcheng Wang, Fei Lyu et al.

Hybrid rice breeding crossbreeds different rice lines and cultivates the resulting hybrids in fields to select those with desirable agronomic traits, such as higher yields. Recently, genomic selection has emerged as an efficient way for hybrid rice breeding. It predicts the traits of hybrids based on their genes, which helps exclude many undesired hybrids, largely reducing the workload of field cultivation. However, due to the limited accuracy of genomic prediction models, breeders still need to combine their experience with the models to identify regulatory genes that control traits and select hybrids, which remains a time-consuming process. To ease this process, in this paper, we proposed a visual analysis method to facilitate interactive hybrid rice breeding. Regulatory gene identification and hybrid selection naturally ensemble a dual-analysis task. Therefore, we developed a parametric dual projection method with theoretical guarantees to facilitate interactive dual analysis. Based on this dual projection method, we further developed a gene visualization and a hybrid visualization to verify the identified regulatory genes and hybrids. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through the quantitative evaluation of the parametric dual projection method, identified regulatory genes and desired hybrids in the case study, and positive feedback from breeders.

Feng Yu, Jia Hu, Geyong Min

Federated Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (FedPEFT) reduces communication and computation costs in federated fine-tuning of pre-trained models by updating only a small subset of model parameters. However, existing approaches assume static data distributions, failing to adequately address real-world scenarios where new classes continually emerge, particularly in Federated Class Incremental Learning (FCIL). FCIL faces two key challenges: catastrophic forgetting and performance degradation caused by non-IID data across clients. Unlike current methods that maintain separate task-specific components or suffer from aggregation noise during parameter aggregation, we propose Federated Task-agnostic Low-rank Residual Adaptation (Fed-TaLoRA), a novel parameter-efficient approach for fine-tuning in resource-constrained FCIL scenarios. Specifically, we fine-tune only shared task-agnostic LoRA parameters across sequential tasks, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting while enabling efficient knowledge transfer among clients. Based on a theoretical analysis of aggregation, we develop a novel residual weight update mechanism that ensures accurate knowledge consolidation with minimal overhead. Our methodological innovations are attributed to three key strategies: task-agnostic adaptation, post-aggregation model calibration, and strategic placement of LoRA modules. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fed-TaLoRA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in diverse data heterogeneity scenarios while substantially reducing resource requirements.

Tianqi Tu, Hui Wang, Jiangbo Pei et al.

Background: Renal chronicity indices (CI) have been identified as strong predictors of long-term outcomes in lupus nephritis (LN) patients. However, assessment by pathologists is hindered by challenges such as substantial time requirements, high interobserver variation, and susceptibility to fatigue. This study aims to develop an effective deep learning (DL) pipeline that automates the assessment of CI and provides valuable prognostic insights from a disease-specific perspective. Methods: We curated a dataset comprising 282 slides obtained from 141 patients across two independent cohorts with a complete 10-years follow-up. Our DL pipeline was developed on 60 slides (22,410 patch images) from 30 patients in the training cohort and evaluated on both an internal testing set (148 slides, 77,605 patch images) and an external testing set (74 slides, 27,522 patch images). Results: The study included two cohorts with slight demographic differences, particularly in age and hemoglobin levels. The DL pipeline showed high segmentation performance across tissue compartments and histopathologic lesions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The DL pipeline also demonstrated a strong correlation with pathologists in assessing CI, significantly improving interobserver agreement. Additionally, the DL pipeline enhanced prognostic accuracy, particularly in outcome prediction, when combined with clinical parameters and pathologist-assessed CIs Conclusions: The DL pipeline demonstrated accuracy and efficiency in assessing CI in LN, showing promise in improving interobserver agreement among pathologists. It also exhibited significant value in prognostic analysis and enhancing outcome prediction in LN patients, offering a valuable tool for clinical decision-making.

Xing Fan, Marianna Pensky, Feng Yu et al.

The paper considers a Mixture Multilayer Stochastic Block Model (MMLSBM), where layers can be partitioned into groups of similar networks, and networks in each group are equipped with a distinct Stochastic Block Model. The goal is to partition the multilayer network into clusters of similar layers, and to identify communities in those layers. Jing et al. (2020) introduced the MMLSBM and developed a clustering methodology, TWIST, based on regularized tensor decomposition. The present paper proposes a different technique, an alternating minimization algorithm (ALMA), that aims at simultaneous recovery of the layer partition, together with estimation of the matrices of connection probabilities of the distinct layers. Compared to TWIST, ALMA achieves higher accuracy both theoretically and numerically.

Yichen Xu, Yanqiao Zhu, Feng Yu et al.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, whose aim is to predict the probability of whether a user will click on an item, is an essential task for many online applications. Due to the nature of data sparsity and high dimensionality of CTR prediction, a key to making effective prediction is to model high-order feature interaction. An efficient way to do this is to perform inner product of feature embeddings with self-attentive neural networks. To better model complex feature interaction, in this paper we propose a novel DisentanglEd Self-atTentIve NEtwork (DESTINE) framework for CTR prediction that explicitly decouples the computation of unary feature importance from pairwise interaction. Specifically, the unary term models the general importance of one feature on all other features, whereas the pairwise interaction term contributes to learning the pure impact for each feature pair. We conduct extensive experiments using two real-world benchmark datasets. The results show that DESTINE not only maintains computational efficiency but achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.

Yanqiao Zhu, Yichen Xu, Feng Yu et al.

Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.

Yanqiao Zhu, Yichen Xu, Feng Yu et al.

Unsupervised graph representation learning aims to learn low-dimensional node embeddings without supervision while preserving graph topological structures and node attributive features. Previous graph neural networks (GNN) require a large number of labeled nodes, which may not be accessible in real-world graph data. In this paper, we present a novel cluster-aware graph neural network (CAGNN) model for unsupervised graph representation learning using self-supervised techniques. In CAGNN, we perform clustering on the node embeddings and update the model parameters by predicting the cluster assignments. Moreover, we observe that graphs often contain inter-class edges, which mislead the GNN model to aggregate noisy information from neighborhood nodes. We further refine the graph topology by strengthening intra-class edges and reducing node connections between different classes based on cluster labels, which better preserves cluster structures in the embedding space. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two benchmark tasks using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model over existing baseline methods. Notably, our model gains over 7% improvements in terms of accuracy on node clustering over state-of-the-arts.

Zeyu Cui, Feng Yu, Shu Wu et al.

Item representations in recommendation systems are expected to reveal the properties of items. Collaborative recommender methods usually represent an item as one single latent vector. Nowadays the e-commercial platforms provide various kinds of attribute information for items (e.g., category, price and style of clothing). Utilizing these attribute information for better item representations is popular in recent years. Some studies use the given attribute information as side information, which is concatenated with the item latent vector to augment representations. However, the mixed item representations fail to fully exploit the rich attribute information or provide explanation in recommender systems. To this end, we propose a fine-grained Disentangled Item Representation (DIR) for recommender systems in this paper, where the items are represented as several separated attribute vectors instead of a single latent vector. In this way, the items are represented at the attribute level, which can provide fine-grained information of items in recommendation. We introduce a learning strategy, LearnDIR, which can allocate the corresponding attribute vectors to items. We show how DIR can be applied to two typical models, Matrix Factorization (MF) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that the models developed under the framework of DIR are effective and efficient. Even using fewer parameters, the proposed model can outperform the state-of-the-art methods, especially in the cold-start situation. In addition, we make visualizations to show that our proposition can provide explanation for users in real-world applications.

Shu Wu, Feng Yu, Xueli Yu et al.

The CTR (Click-Through Rate) prediction plays a central role in the domain of computational advertising and recommender systems. There exists several kinds of methods proposed in this field, such as Logistic Regression (LR), Factorization Machines (FM) and deep learning based methods like Wide&Deep, Neural Factorization Machines (NFM) and DeepFM. However, such approaches generally use the vector-product of each pair of features, which have ignored the different semantic spaces of the feature interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel Tensor-based Feature interaction Network (TFNet) model, which introduces an operating tensor to elaborate feature interactions via multi-slice matrices in multiple semantic spaces. Extensive offline and online experiments show that TFNet: 1) outperforms the competitive compared methods on the typical Criteo and Avazu datasets; 2) achieves large improvement of revenue and click rate in online A/B tests in the largest Chinese App recommender system, Tencent MyApp.