Yuhang Li

Yeshwanth Venkatesha, Youngeun Kim, Hyoungseob Park et al.

Federated learning has been extensively studied and is the prevalent method for privacy-preserving distributed learning in edge devices. Correspondingly, continual learning is an emerging field targeted towards learning multiple tasks sequentially. However, there is little attention towards additional challenges emerging when federated aggregation is performed in a continual learning system. We identify \textit{client drift} as one of the key weaknesses that arise when vanilla federated averaging is applied in such a system, especially since each client can independently have different order of tasks. We outline a framework for performing Federated Continual Learning (FCL) by using NetTailor as a candidate continual learning approach and show the extent of the problem of client drift. We show that adaptive federated optimization can reduce the adverse impact of client drift and showcase its effectiveness on CIFAR100, MiniImagenet, and Decathlon benchmarks. Further, we provide an empirical analysis highlighting the interplay between different hyperparameters such as client and server learning rates, the number of local training iterations, and communication rounds. Finally, we evaluate our framework on useful characteristics of federated learning systems such as scalability, robustness to the skewness in clients' data distribution, and stragglers.

Chenchen Zhang, Yuhang Li, Can Xu et al.

The generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding from static code to dynamic, interactive visual artifacts. This progress is bottlenecked by a critical evaluation gap: established benchmarks focus on algorithmic correctness and are blind to the visual fidelity and interactive integrity that define modern user experiences. To bridge this gap, we introduce ArtifactsBench, a new benchmark and paradigm for the automated, multimodal evaluation of visual code generation. Our framework programmatically renders each generated artifact and captures its dynamic behavior through temporal screenshots. This visual evidence, alongside the source code, is then assessed by a Multimodal LLM (MLLM)-as-Judge, which is rigorously guided by a fine-grained, per-task checklist to ensure holistic and reproducible scoring. We construct a new benchmark of 1,825 diverse tasks and evaluate over 30 leading LLMs. Our automated evaluation achieves a striking 94.4% ranking consistency with WebDev Arena, the gold-standard for human preference in web development, and over 90% pairwise agreement with human experts. This establishes ArtifactsBench as the first framework to reliably automate the assessment of human-perceived quality at scale. Our analysis provides a high-resolution map of the current SOTA, revealing that generalist models often outperform domain-specific ones. We open-source ArtifactsBench, including the benchmark, evaluation harness, and baseline results at https://artifactsbenchmark.github.io/, to provide the community with a scalable and accurate tool to accelerate the development of user-centric generative models.

Junjie Li, Jianghong Ma, Xiaofeng Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models have advanced AI in applications like text-to-video generation and visual question answering. These models rely on visual encoders to convert non-text data into vectors, but current encoders either lack semantic alignment or overlook non-salient objects. We propose the Guiding Visual Encoder to Perceive Overlooked Information (GiVE) approach. GiVE enhances visual representation with an Attention-Guided Adapter (AG-Adapter) module and an Object-focused Visual Semantic Learning module. These incorporate three novel loss terms: Object-focused Image-Text Contrast (OITC) loss, Object-focused Image-Image Contrast (OIIC) loss, and Object-focused Image Discrimination (OID) loss, improving object consideration, retrieval accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Our contributions include dynamic visual focus adjustment, novel loss functions to enhance object retrieval, and the Multi-Object Instruction (MOInst) dataset. Experiments show our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.