Yang Lv

Sohan Salahuddin Mugdho, Md. Shahedul Hasan, Brahmdutta Dixit et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across diverse domains. However, typical Von Neumann compute paradigms face severe memory bottlenecks. Emerging near-memory and compute-in-memory approaches alleviate this but incur significant peripheral overhead. Computational Random Access Memory (CRAM) based on MRAM enables in-situ logic without peripheral overhead, offering a dense, energy-efficient solution. However, probabilistic MRAM switching induces gate-level errors that limit the scalability and reliability of CRAM for accelerating DNN. Moreover, the large number of sequential MRAM writes severely constrains CRAM throughput. To address these challenges, we propose an error-resilient CRAM (CRAM-ER) architecture for scalable in-memory matrix-vector multiplications (MVMs). Our error-aware hardware-software co-design framework leverages a hybrid spintronic-CRAM + CMOS adder-tree architecture to mitigate the impact of device-level errors, demonstrating MVM functionality with high area and energy efficiency. We further develop an error-aware model fine-tuning and fine-grained error correction for enhanced error resilience. Evaluations of the CMOS+spintronic hybrid architecture on DNN benchmarks show near-lossless accuracy while reducing CRAM latency by up to 2 orders of magnitude, outperforming CPU/GPU+high-bandwidth DRAM in both energy efficiency and energy-delay product.

Hui Liu, Chen Jia, Fan Shi et al.

Accurately segmenting structural cracks at the pixel level remains a major hurdle, as existing methods fail to integrate local textures with pixel dependencies, often leading to fragmented and incomplete predictions. Moreover, their high parameter counts and substantial computational demands hinder practical deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose CrackSCF, a Lightweight Cascaded Fusion Crack Segmentation Network designed to achieve robust crack segmentation with exceptional computational efficiency. We design a lightweight convolutional block (LRDS) to replace all standard convolutions. This approach efficiently captures local patterns while operating with a minimal computational footprint. For a holistic perception of crack structures, a lightweight Long-range Dependency Extractor (LDE) captures global dependencies. These are then intelligently unified with local patterns by our Staircase Cascaded Fusion Module (SCFM), ensuring the final segmentation maps are both seamless in continuity and rich in fine-grained detail. To comprehensively evaluate our method, this paper created the challenging TUT benchmark dataset and evaluated it alongside five other public datasets. The experimental results show that the CrackSCF method consistently outperforms the existing methods, and it demonstrates greater robustness in dealing with complex background noise. On the TUT dataset, CrackSCF achieved 0.8382 on F1 score and 0.8473 on mIoU, and it only required 4.79M parameters.

Yuantong Li, Lei Yuan, Zhihao Zheng et al.

Modern recommendation systems rank candidates by aggregating multiple behavioral signals through a value model. However, many commonly used signals are inherently affected by heterogeneous biases. For example, watch time naturally favors long-form content, loop rate favors short - form content, and comment probability favors videos over images. Such biases introduce two critical issues: (1) value model scores may be systematically misaligned with users' relative preferences - for instance, a seemingly low absolute like probability may represent exceptionally strong interest for a user who rarely engages; and (2) changes in value modeling rules can trigger abrupt and undesirable ecosystem shifts. In this work, we ask a fundamental question: can biased behavioral signals be systematically transformed into unbiased signals, under a user - defined notion of ``unbiasedness'', that are both personalized and adaptive? We propose a general, model-based debiasing (MBD) framework that addresses this challenge by augmenting it with distributional modeling. By conditioning on a flexible subset of features (partial feature set), we explicitly estimate the contextual mean and variance of the engagement distribution for arbitrary cohorts (e.g., specific video lengths or user regions) directly alongside the main prediction. This integration allows the framework to convert biased raw signals into unbiased representations, enabling the construction of higher-level, calibrated signals (such as percentiles or z - scores) suitable for the value model. Importantly, the definition of unbiasedness is flexible and controllable, allowing the system to adapt to different personalization objectives and modeling preferences. Crucially, this is implemented as a lightweight, built-in branch of the existing MTML ranking model, requiring no separate serving infrastructure.

Yu Huang, Liang Guo, Wanqian Guo et al.

In the field of environmental science, it is crucial to have robust evaluation metrics for large language models to ensure their efficacy and accuracy. We propose EnviroExam, a comprehensive evaluation method designed to assess the knowledge of large language models in the field of environmental science. EnviroExam is based on the curricula of top international universities, covering undergraduate, master's, and doctoral courses, and includes 936 questions across 42 core courses. By conducting 0-shot and 5-shot tests on 31 open-source large language models, EnviroExam reveals the performance differences among these models in the domain of environmental science and provides detailed evaluation standards. The results show that 61.3% of the models passed the 5-shot tests, while 48.39% passed the 0-shot tests. By introducing the coefficient of variation as an indicator, we evaluate the performance of mainstream open-source large language models in environmental science from multiple perspectives, providing effective criteria for selecting and fine-tuning language models in this field. Future research will involve constructing more domain-specific test sets using specialized environmental science textbooks to further enhance the accuracy and specificity of the evaluation.

Yang Lv, Brandon R. Zink, Robert P. Bloom et al.

Conventional computing paradigm struggles to fulfill the rapidly growing demands from emerging applications, especially those for machine intelligence, because much of the power and energy is consumed by constant data transfers between logic and memory modules. A new paradigm, called "computational random-access memory (CRAM)" has emerged to address this fundamental limitation. CRAM performs logic operations directly using the memory cells themselves, without having the data ever leave the memory. The energy and performance benefits of CRAM for both conventional and emerging applications have been well established by prior numerical studies. However, there lacks an experimental demonstration and study of CRAM to evaluate its computation accuracy, which is a realistic and application-critical metrics for its technological feasibility and competitiveness. In this work, a CRAM array based on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) is experimentally demonstrated. First, basic memory operations as well as 2-, 3-, and 5-input logic operations are studied. Then, a 1-bit full adder with two different designs is demonstrated. Based on the experimental results, a suite of modeling has been developed to characterize the accuracy of CRAM computation. Scalar addition, multiplication, and matrix multiplication, which are essential building blocks for many conventional and machine intelligence applications, are evaluated and show promising accuracy performance. With the confirmation of MTJ-based CRAM's accuracy, there is a strong case that this technology will have a significant impact on power- and energy-demanding applications of machine intelligence.

Yang Lv, Jinlong Lei, Peng Yi

In this paper, we explore how to optimize task allocation for robot swarms in dynamic environments, emphasizing the necessity of formulating robust, flexible, and scalable strategies for robot cooperation. We introduce a novel framework using a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec_POMDP), specifically designed for distributed robot swarm networks. At the core of our methodology is the Local Information Aggregation Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (LIA_MADDPG) algorithm, which merges centralized training with distributed execution (CTDE). During the centralized training phase, a local information aggregation (LIA) module is meticulously designed to gather critical data from neighboring robots, enhancing decision-making efficiency. In the distributed execution phase, a strategy improvement method is proposed to dynamically adjust task allocation based on changing and partially observable environmental conditions. Our empirical evaluations show that the LIA module can be seamlessly integrated into various CTDE-based MARL methods, significantly enhancing their performance. Additionally, by comparing LIA_MADDPG with six conventional reinforcement learning algorithms and a heuristic algorithm, we demonstrate its superior scalability, rapid adaptation to environmental changes, and ability to maintain both stability and convergence speed. These results underscore LIA_MADDPG's outstanding performance and its potential to significantly improve dynamic task allocation in robot swarms through enhanced local collaboration and adaptive strategy execution.

Yang Lv, Jin Cao, Ben Niu et al.

The Sixth-Generation (6G) network envisions pervasive artificial intelligence (AI) as a core goal, enabled by edge intelligence through on-device data utilization. To realize this vision, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a key paradigm for collaborative training across edge devices. However, the sensitivity and heterogeneity of edge data pose key challenges to FL: parameter sharing risks data reconstruction, and a unified global model struggles to adapt to diverse local distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning framework that integrates personalized differential privacy (DP) and adaptive model design. To protect training data, we leverage sample-level representations for knowledge sharing and apply a personalized DP strategy to resist reconstruction attacks. To ensure distribution-aware adaptation under privacy constraints, we develop a privacy-aware neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm that generates locally customized architectures and hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first personalized DP solution tailored for representation-based FL with theoretical convergence guarantees. Our scheme achieves strong privacy guarantees for training data while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods in model performance. Experiments on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that our scheme improves accuracy by 6.82\% over the federated NAS method PerFedRLNAS, while reducing model size to 1/10 and communication cost to 1/20.

Zhijun Zeng, Youjia Zheng, Chang Su et al.

Tissue mechanics--stiffness, density and impedance contrast--are broadly informative biomarkers across diseases, yet routine CT, MRI, and B-mode ultrasound rarely quantify them directly. While ultrasound tomography (UT) is intrinsically suited to in-vivo biomechanical assessment by capturing transmitted and reflected wavefields, efficient and accurate full-wave scattering models remain a bottleneck. Here, we introduce a generative neural physics framework that fuses generative models with physics-informed partial differential equation (PDE) solvers to produce rapid, high-fidelity 3D quantitative imaging of tissue mechanics. A compact neural surrogate for full-wave propagation is trained on limited cross-modality data, preserving physical accuracy while enabling efficient inversion. This enables, for the first time, accurate and efficient quantitative volumetric imaging of in vivo human breast and musculoskeletal tissues in under ten minutes, providing spatial maps of tissue mechanical properties not available from conventional reflection-mode or standard UT reconstructions. The resulting images reveal biomechanical features in bone, muscle, fat, and glandular tissues, maintaining structural resolution comparable to 3T MRI while providing substantially greater sensitivity to disease-related tissue mechanics.

Yang Lv, Jinlong Lei, Peng Yi

Two-stage Colonel Blotto game represents a typical adversarial resource allocation problem, in which two opposing agents sequentially allocate resources in a network topology across two phases: an initial resource deployment followed by multiple rounds of dynamic reallocation adjustments. The sequential dependency between game stages and the complex constraints imposed by the graph topology make it difficult for traditional approaches to attain a globally optimal strategy. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical graph Transformer framework called HGformer. By incorporating an enhanced graph Transformer encoder with structural biases and a two-agent hierarchical decision model, our approach enables efficient policy generation in large-scale adversarial environments. Moreover, we design a layer-by-layer feedback reinforcement learning algorithm that feeds the long-term returns from lower-level decisions back into the optimization of the higher-level strategy, thus bridging the coordination gap between the two decision-making stages. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing hierarchical decision-making or graph neural network methods, HGformer significantly improves resource allocation efficiency and adversarial payoff, achieving superior overall performance in complex dynamic game scenarios.

Yang Lv, Liangsheng Zhuang, Pengyu Luo

Session based recommendation has become one of the research hotpots in the field of recommendation systems due to its highly practical value.Previous deep learning methods mostly focus on the sequential characteristics within the current session,and neglect the context similarity and temporal similarity between sessions which contain abundant collaborative information.In this paper,we propose a novel neural networks framework,namely Neighborhood Enhanced and Time Aware Recommendation Machine(NETA) for session based recommendation. Firstly,we introduce an efficient neighborhood retrieve mechanism to find out similar sessions which includes collaborative information.Then we design a guided attention with time-aware mechanism to extract collaborative representation from neighborhood sessions.Especially,temporal recency between sessions is considered separately.Finally, we design a simple co-attention mechanism to determine the importance of complementary collaborative representation when predicting the next item.Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Hu Chen, Yi Zhang, Yunjin Chen et al.

Compressive sensing (CS) has proved effective for tomographic reconstruction from sparsely collected data or under-sampled measurements, which are practically important for few-view CT, tomosynthesis, interior tomography, and so on. To perform sparse-data CT, the iterative reconstruction commonly use regularizers in the CS framework. Currently, how to choose the parameters adaptively for regularization is a major open problem. In this paper, inspired by the idea of machine learning especially deep learning, we unfold a state-of-the-art "fields of experts" based iterative reconstruction scheme up to a number of iterations for data-driven training, construct a Learned Experts' Assessment-based Reconstruction Network ("LEARN") for sparse-data CT, and demonstrate the feasibility and merits of our LEARN network. The experimental results with our proposed LEARN network produces a competitive performance with the well-known Mayo Clinic Low-Dose Challenge Dataset relative to several state-of-the-art methods, in terms of artifact reduction, feature preservation, and computational speed. This is consistent to our insight that because all the regularization terms and parameters used in the iterative reconstruction are now learned from the training data, our LEARN network utilizes application-oriented knowledge more effectively and recovers underlying images more favorably than competing algorithms. Also, the number of layers in the LEARN network is only 12, reducing the computational complexity of typical iterative algorithms by orders of magnitude.