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Bin Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Bin Cui.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Improving Low-Resource Sequence Labeling with Knowledge Fusion and Contextual Label Explanations

Sequence labeling remains a significant challenge in low-resource, domain-specific scenarios, particularly for character-dense languages like Chinese. Existing methods primarily focus on enhancing model comprehension and improving data diversity to boost performance. However, these approaches still struggle with inadequate model applicability and semantic distribution biases in domain-specific contexts. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework that combines an LLM-based knowledge enhancement workflow with a span-based Knowledge Fusion for Rich and Efficient Extraction (KnowFREE) model. Our workflow employs explanation prompts to generate precise contextual interpretations of target entities, effectively mitigating semantic biases and enriching the model's contextual understanding. The KnowFREE model further integrates extension label features, enabling efficient nested entity extraction without relying on external knowledge during inference. Experiments on multiple Chinese domain-specific sequence labeling datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the challenges posed by low-resource settings.

cs.CL↗

TridentServe: A Stage-level Serving System for Diffusion Pipelines

Diffusion pipelines, renowned for their powerful visual generation capabilities, have seen widespread adoption in generative vision tasks (e.g., text-to-image/video). These pipelines typically follow an encode--diffuse--decode three-stage architecture. Current serving systems deploy diffusion pipelines within a static, manual, and pipeline-level paradigm, allocating the same resources to every request and stage. However, through an in-depth analysis, we find that such a paradigm is inefficient due to the discrepancy in resource needs across the three stages of each request, as well as across different requests. Following the analysis, we propose the dynamic stage-level serving paradigm and develop TridentServe, a brand new diffusion serving system. TridentServe automatically, dynamically derives the placement plan (i.e., how each stage resides) for pipeline deployment and the dispatch plan (i.e., how the requests are routed) for request processing, co-optimizing the resource allocation for both model and requests. Extensive experiments show that TridentServe consistently improves SLO attainment and reduces average/P95 latencies by up to 2.5x and 3.6x/4.1x over existing works across a variety of workloads.

cs.DC↗

Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful new family of deep generative models with record-breaking performance in many applications, including image synthesis, video generation, and molecule design. In this survey, we provide an overview of the rapidly expanding body of work on diffusion models, categorizing the research into three key areas: efficient sampling, improved likelihood estimation, and handling data with special structures. We also discuss the potential for combining diffusion models with other generative models for enhanced results. We further review the wide-ranging applications of diffusion models in fields spanning from computer vision, natural language generation, temporal data modeling, to interdisciplinary applications in other scientific disciplines. This survey aims to provide a contextualized, in-depth look at the state of diffusion models, identifying the key areas of focus and pointing to potential areas for further exploration. Github: https://github.com/YangLing0818/Diffusion-Models-Papers-Survey-Taxonomy.

cs.LG↗

HermesFlow: Seamlessly Closing the Gap in Multimodal Understanding and Generation

The remarkable success of the autoregressive paradigm has made significant advancement in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), with powerful models like Show-o, Transfusion and Emu3 achieving notable progress in unified image understanding and generation. For the first time, we uncover a common phenomenon: the understanding capabilities of MLLMs are typically stronger than their generative capabilities, with a significant gap between the two. Building on this insight, we propose HermesFlow, a simple yet general framework designed to seamlessly bridge the gap between understanding and generation in MLLMs. Specifically, we take the homologous data as input to curate homologous preference data of both understanding and generation. Through Pair-DPO and self-play iterative optimization, HermesFlow effectively aligns multimodal understanding and generation using homologous preference data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over prior methods, particularly in narrowing the gap between multimodal understanding and generation. These findings highlight the potential of HermesFlow as a general alignment framework for next-generation multimodal foundation models. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/HermesFlow

cs.CV↗

SQLGovernor: An LLM-powered SQL Toolkit for Real World Application

SQL queries in real world analytical environments, whether written by humans or generated automatically often suffer from syntax errors, inefficiency, or semantic misalignment, especially in complex OLAP scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose SQLGovernor, an LLM powered SQL toolkit that unifies multiple functionalities, including syntax correction, query rewriting, query modification, and consistency verification within a structured framework enhanced by knowledge management. SQLGovernor introduces a fragment wise processing strategy to enable fine grained rewriting and localized error correction, significantly reducing the cognitive load on the LLM. It further incorporates a hybrid self learning mechanism guided by expert feedback, allowing the system to continuously improve through DBMS output analysis and rule validation. Experiments on benchmarks such as BIRD and BIRD CRITIC, as well as industrial datasets, show that SQLGovernor consistently boosts the performance of base models by up to 10%, while minimizing reliance on manual expertise. Deployed in production environments, SQLGovernor demonstrates strong practical utility and effective performance.

cs.DB↗

LobRA: Multi-tenant Fine-tuning over Heterogeneous Data

With the breakthrough of Transformer-based pre-trained models, the demand for fine-tuning (FT) to adapt the base pre-trained models to downstream applications continues to grow, so it is essential for service providers to reduce the cost of processing FT requests. Low-rank adaption (LoRA) is a widely used FT technique that only trains small-scale adapters and keeps the base model unaltered, conveying the possibility of processing multiple FT tasks by jointly training different LoRA adapters with a shared base model. Nevertheless, through in-depth analysis, we reveal the efficiency of joint FT is dampened by two heterogeneity issues in the training data -- the sequence length variation and skewness. To tackle these issues, we develop LobRA, a brand new framework that supports processing multiple FT tasks by jointly training LoRA adapters. Two innovative designs are introduced. Firstly, LobRA deploys the FT replicas (i.e., model replicas for FT) with heterogeneous resource usages and parallel configurations, matching the diverse workloads caused by the sequence length variation. Secondly, for each training step, LobRA takes account of the sequence length skewness and dispatches the training data among the heterogeneous FT replicas to achieve workload balance. We conduct experiments to assess the performance of LobRA, validating that it significantly reduces the GPU seconds required for joint FT by 45.03%-60.67%.

cs.DC↗

SynthVLM: Towards High-Quality and Efficient Synthesis of Image-Caption Datasets for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged, demonstrating remarkable vision-understanding capabilities. However, training these models requires large-scale datasets, which brings challenges related to efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of web data. In this paper, we introduce SynthVLM, a new data synthesis and curation method for generating image-caption pairs. Unlike traditional methods, where captions are generated from images, SynthVLM utilizes advanced diffusion models and high-quality captions to synthesize and select images from text captions, thereby creating precisely aligned image-text pairs. We further introduce SynthVLM-100K, a high-quality dataset consisting of 100K curated and synthesized image-caption pairs. In both model and human evaluations, SynthVLM-100K outperforms traditional real-world datasets. Leveraging this dataset, we develop a new family of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), SynthVLM-7B and SynthVLM-13B, which achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various vision question-answering (VQA) tasks. Notably, our models outperform LLaVA across most metrics with only 18\% pretrain data. Furthermore, SynthVLM-7B and SynthVLM-13B attain SOTA performance on the MMLU benchmark, demonstrating that the high-quality SynthVLM-100K dataset preserves language abilities.

cs.CV↗

Giant spin Hall effects and topological surface states in ternary-layered MAX carbides Mn+1AlCn (M= Nb, Ta, n=1, 2, 3)

In this work, we report a systematic study of the electronic structures, band topology, and intrinsic spin Hall effect (SHE) of the layered MAX carbides Mn+1AlCn (M= Nb, Ta, n=1, 2, 3) and explore the correlation effects on the SHE. The results show that M3AlC2 and M4AlC3 (M= Nb, Ta) share similar Dirac-band-crossing features near the Fermi level (EF) and form nodal lines in the absence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC). When the SOC is included, the Dirac band crossings are fully gapped, resulting in nontrivial Z2 topological invariants (1;000) with a pair of surface states on the (001) plane. Remarkably, the multiple gapped Dirac points contribute to locally strong spin Berry curvatures, which lead to large spin Hall conductivities and a giant spin Hall angle up to ~ 60% for Ta3AlC2. Moreover, we also elucidate the impact of Hubbard U correction on SHC. Our findings indicate that Ta3AlC2 might represent an intriguing layered Z2 topological metal with superior charge-to-spin conversion efficiency.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

SiriusBI: A Comprehensive LLM-Powered Solution for Data Analytics in Business Intelligence

With the proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Business Intelligence (BI), existing solutions face critical challenges in industrial deployments: functionality deficiencies from legacy systems failing to meet evolving LLM-era user demands, interaction limitations from single-round SQL generation paradigms inadequate for multi-round clarification, and cost for domain adaptation arising from cross-domain methods migration. We present SiriusBI, a practical LLM-powered BI system addressing the challenges of industrial deployments through three key innovations: (a) An end-to-end architecture integrating multi-module coordination to overcome functionality gaps in legacy systems; (b) A multi-round dialogue with querying mechanism, consisting of semantic completion, knowledge-guided clarification, and proactive querying processes, to resolve interaction constraints in SQL generation; (c) A data-conditioned SQL generation method selection strategy that supports both an efficient one-step Fine-Tuning approach and a two-step method leveraging Semantic Intermediate Representation for low-cost cross-domain applications. Experiments on both real-world datasets and public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SiriusBI. User studies further confirm that SiriusBI enhances both productivity and user experience. As an independent service on Tencent's data platform, SiriusBI is deployed across finance, advertising, and cloud sectors, serving dozens of enterprise clients. It achieves over 93% accuracy in SQL generation and reduces data analysts' query time from minutes to seconds in real-world applications.

cs.DB↗

Demystifying Cost-Efficiency in LLM Serving over Heterogeneous GPUs

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to increasingly diverse requests, accompanied with varying resource (compute and memory) demands to serve them. However, this in turn degrades the cost-efficiency of LLM serving as common practices primarily rely on homogeneous GPU resources. In response to this problem, this work conducts a thorough study about serving LLMs over heterogeneous GPU resources on cloud platforms. The rationale is that different GPU types exhibit distinct compute and memory characteristics, aligning well with the divergent resource demands of diverse requests. Particularly, through comprehensive benchmarking, we discover that the cost-efficiency of LLM serving can be substantially optimized by meticulously determining GPU composition, deployment configurations, and workload assignments. Subsequently, we design a scheduling algorithm via mixed-integer linear programming, aiming at deducing the most cost-efficient serving plan under the constraints of price budget and real-time GPU availability. Remarkably, our approach effectively outperforms homogeneous and heterogeneous baselines under a wide array of scenarios, covering diverse workload traces, varying GPU availablilities, and multi-model serving. This casts new light on more accessible and efficient LLM serving over heterogeneous cloud resources.

cs.DC↗

LogicPuzzleRL: Cultivating Robust Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) excel at many supervised tasks but often struggle with structured reasoning in unfamiliar settings. This discrepancy suggests that standard fine-tuning pipelines may instill narrow, domain-specific heuristics rather than fostering general-purpose thinking strategies. In this work, we propose a "play to learn" framework that fine-tunes LLMs through reinforcement learning on a suite of seven custom logic puzzles, each designed to cultivate distinct reasoning skills such as constraint propagation, spatial consistency, and symbolic deduction. Using a reinforcement learning setup with verifiable rewards, models receive binary feedback based on puzzle correctness, encouraging iterative, hypothesis-driven problem solving. We demonstrate that this training approach significantly improves out-of-distribution performance on a range of mathematical benchmarks, especially for mid-difficulty problems that require multi-step reasoning. Analyses across problem categories and difficulty levels reveal that puzzle training promotes transferable reasoning routines, strengthening algebraic manipulation, geometric inference, and combinatorial logic, while offering limited gains on rote or highly specialized tasks. These findings show that reinforcement learning over logic puzzles reshapes the internal reasoning of LLMs, enabling more robust and compositional generalization without relying on task-specific symbolic tools.

cs.LG↗

Modeling All-Atom Glycan Structures via Hierarchical Message Passing and Multi-Scale Pre-training

Understanding the various properties of glycans with machine learning has shown some preliminary promise. However, previous methods mainly focused on modeling the backbone structure of glycans as graphs of monosaccharides (i.e., sugar units), while they neglected the atomic structures underlying each monosaccharide, which are actually important indicators of glycan properties. We fill this blank by introducing the GlycanAA model for All-Atom-wise Glycan modeling. GlycanAA models a glycan as a heterogeneous graph with monosaccharide nodes representing its global backbone structure and atom nodes representing its local atomic-level structures. Based on such a graph, GlycanAA performs hierarchical message passing to capture from local atomic-level interactions to global monosaccharide-level interactions. To further enhance model capability, we pre-train GlycanAA on a high-quality unlabeled glycan dataset, deriving the PreGlycanAA model. We design a multi-scale mask prediction algorithm to endow the model about different levels of dependencies in a glycan. Extensive benchmark results show the superiority of GlycanAA over existing glycan encoders and verify the further improvements achieved by PreGlycanAA. We maintain all resources at https://github.com/kasawa1234/GlycanAA

cs.LG↗

SALE : Low-bit Estimation for Efficient Sparse Attention in Long-context LLM Prefilling

Many advanced Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long-context processing, but the self-attention module becomes a bottleneck during the prefilling stage of inference due to its quadratic time complexity with respect to sequence length. Existing sparse attention methods accelerate attention computation by skipping less significant regions of the attention map. However, these approaches typically perform coarse-grained inspection of the attention map, rendering considerable loss in model accuracy. In this paper, we propose SALE, a fine-grained sparse attention method that accelerates the long-context prefilling stage of LLM with negligible loss in model accuracy. SALE achieves fast and accurate fine-grained attention weight estimation through 4-bit quantized query-key products, followed by block-sparse attention to accelerate prefilling computations. For importance evaluation for query-key pairs, we adopt our Relative Attention Score metric, which offers significantly higher efficiency within our framework. We implement a custom CUDA kernel optimized for our approach for hardware efficiency, reducing the additional overhead to approximately 11% of the full attention latency. Notably, SALE requires no parameter training and can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems with trivial code modifications. Experiments on long-context benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, achieving at least 3.36x speedups on Llama-3.1-8B for sequences longer than 64K while maintaining model quality.

cs.LG↗

VersaTune: An Efficient Data Composition Framework for Training Multi-Capability LLMs

As demonstrated by the proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT and Claude series, LLMs have the potential to achieve remarkable proficiency across a wide range of domains, including law, medicine, finance, science, code, etc., all within a single model. These capabilities are further augmented during the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase. Despite their potential, existing work mainly focuses on domain-specific enhancements during fine-tuning, the challenge of which lies in catastrophic forgetting of knowledge across other domains. In this study, we introduce **VersaTune**, a novel data composition framework designed for enhancing LLMs' overall multi-domain capabilities during training. We begin with detecting the distribution of domain-specific knowledge within the base model, followed by the training data composition that aligns with the model's existing knowledge distribution. During the subsequent training process, domain weights are dynamically adjusted based on their learnable potential and forgetting degree. Experimental results indicate that VersaTune is effective in multi-domain fostering, with an improvement of 35.21\% in the overall multi-ability performances compared to uniform domain weights. Furthermore, we find that Qwen-2.5-32B + VersaTune even surpasses frontier models, including GPT-4o, Claude3.5-Sonnet and DeepSeek-V3 by 0.86\%, 4.76\% and 4.60\%. Additionally, in scenarios where flexible expansion of a specific domain is required, VersaTune reduces the performance degradation in other domains by 38.77\%, while preserving the training efficacy of the target domain.

cs.CL↗

Thinking Short and Right Over Thinking Long: Serving LLM Reasoning Efficiently and Accurately

Recent advances in test-time scaling suggest that Large Language Models (LLMs) can gain better capabilities by generating Chain-of-Thought reasoning (analogous to human thinking) to respond a given request, and meanwhile exploring more reasoning branches (i.e., generating multiple responses and ensembling them) can improve the final output quality. However, when incorporating the two scaling dimensions, we find that the system efficiency is dampened significantly for two reasons. Firstly, the time cost to generate the final output increases substantially as many reasoning branches would be trapped in the over-thinking dilemma, producing excessively long responses. Secondly, generating multiple reasoning branches for each request increases memory consumption, which is unsuitable for LLM serving since we can only batch a limited number of requests to process simultaneously. To address this, we present SART, a serving framework for efficient and accurate LLM reasoning. The essential idea is to manage the thinking to be short and right, rather than long. For one thing, we devise a redundant sampling with early stopping approach based on empirical observations and theoretic analysis, which increases the likelihood of obtaining short-thinking responses when sampling reasoning branches. For another, we propose to dynamically prune low-quality branches so that only right-thinking branches are maintained, reducing the memory consumption and allowing us to batch more requests. Experimental results demonstrate that SART not only improves the accuracy of LLM reasoning but also enhances the serving efficiency, outperforming existing methods by up to 28.2 times and on average 15.7 times in terms of efficiency when achieving the same level of accuracy.

cs.LG↗

SAS-Bench: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Short Answer Scoring with Large Language Models

Subjective Answer Grading (SAG) plays a crucial role in education, standardized testing, and automated assessment systems, particularly for evaluating short-form responses in Short Answer Scoring (SAS). However, existing approaches often produce coarse-grained scores and lack detailed reasoning. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential as zero-shot evaluators, they remain susceptible to bias, inconsistencies with human judgment, and limited transparency in scoring decisions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SAS-Bench, a benchmark specifically designed for LLM-based SAS tasks. SAS-Bench provides fine-grained, step-wise scoring, expert-annotated error categories, and a diverse range of question types derived from real-world subject-specific exams. This benchmark facilitates detailed evaluation of model reasoning processes and explainability. We also release an open-source dataset containing 1,030 questions and 4,109 student responses, each annotated by domain experts. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive experiments with various LLMs, identifying major challenges in scoring science-related questions and highlighting the effectiveness of few-shot prompting in improving scoring accuracy. Our work offers valuable insights into the development of more robust, fair, and educationally meaningful LLM-based evaluation systems.

cs.CL↗

RobGC: Towards Robust Graph Condensation

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted widespread attention for their impressive capability of graph representation learning. However, the increasing prevalence of large-scale graphs presents a significant challenge for GNN training due to their computational demands, limiting the applicability of GNNs in various scenarios. In response to this challenge, graph condensation (GC) is proposed as a promising acceleration solution, focusing on generating an informative compact graph that enables efficient training of GNNs while retaining performance. Despite the potential to accelerate GNN training, existing GC methods overlook the quality of large training graphs during both the training and inference stages. They indiscriminately emulate the training graph distributions, making the condensed graphs susceptible to noises within the training graph and significantly impeding the application of GC in intricate real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose robust graph condensation (RobGC), a plug-and-play approach for GC to extend the robustness and applicability of condensed graphs in noisy graph structure environments. Specifically, RobGC leverages the condensed graph as a feedback signal to guide the denoising process on the original training graph. A label propagation-based alternating optimization strategy is in place for the condensation and denoising processes, contributing to the mutual purification of the condensed graph and training graph. Additionally, as a GC method designed for inductive graph inference, RobGC facilitates test-time graph denoising by leveraging the noise-free condensed graph to calibrate the structure of the test graph. Extensive experiments show that RobGC is compatible with various GC methods, significantly boosting their robustness under different types and levels of graph structural noises.

cs.LG↗

Malleus: Straggler-Resilient Hybrid Parallel Training of Large-scale Models via Malleable Data and Model Parallelization

As the scale of models and training data continues to grow, there is an expanding reliance on more GPUs to train large-scale models, which inevitably increases the likelihood of encountering dynamic stragglers that some devices lag behind in performance occasionally. However, hybrid parallel training, one of the de facto paradigms to train large models, is typically sensitive to the stragglers. This paper presents Malleus, a straggler-resilient hybrid parallel training framework for large-scale models. Malleus quantifies the stragglers at the nuanced, per-GPU granularity during training, and develops a novel planning algorithm to deduce the optimal parallelization of GPU devices, pipeline stages, model layers, and training data, maximizing training efficiency when stragglers exist. In addition, once a shift in the straggler situation is detected, Malleus adaptively adjusts the parallelization via a re-planning process, and seamlessly and efficiently migrates the model states on the fly, without sacrificing the stability of the training tasks. Empirical results on large language models with up to 110B parameters show that Malleus consistently outperforms existing parallel training frameworks under various straggler situations, delivering on average 2.63-5.28 times of efficiency improvement.

cs.DC↗