Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Fei Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Fei Liu.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Extremely Low Mass Ratio Contact Binaries. II. The First Photometric and Spectroscopic Investigations of Six Systems with Orbital Periods Longer than 0.5 days

The photometric and spectroscopic studies of six contact binaries were performed for the first time. The orbital periods of all the six targets are longer than 0.5d, and we discovered that their mass ratios are smaller than 0.15. So, they are extremely low mass-ratio contact binaries. Only one target is a W-subtype contact binary (ASASSN-V J105032.88+420829.0), while the others are A-subtype contact binaries. From orbital period analysis, ASASSN-V J075442.44+555623.2 shows no orbital period change. Three of the six targets demonstrate a secular period increase, and two targets for a secular period decrease. We investigated the LAMOST spectra employing the spectral subtraction method. All six contact binaries show no chromospheric emission line, implying no chromospheric activity. Their absolute parameters, initial masses, ages, energy transfer parameters, and instability parameters were calculated. The bolometric luminosity ratios ($(L_2/L_1)_{bol}$), the energy transfer parameters ($β$), the contact degrees ($f$), and the mass ratios ($q$) were collected for a sample of 218 contact binaries and we analyzed and discussed some correlations. The results by analyzing the relation between $β$, $f$ and $q$ indicate that the energy transfer parameter between the two components of extremely low mass-ratio contact binaries is independent of the contact degree. And the predicted cutoff mass ratio was estimated as 0.021 by analyzing the relation between $f$ and $q$.

astro-ph.SR↗

Pangu Ultra MoE: How to Train Your Big MoE on Ascend NPUs

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.

cs.CL↗

PLANET: A Collection of Benchmarks for Evaluating LLMs' Planning Capabilities

Planning is central to agents and agentic AI. The ability to plan, e.g., creating travel itineraries within a budget, holds immense potential in both scientific and commercial contexts. Moreover, optimal plans tend to require fewer resources compared to ad-hoc methods. To date, a comprehensive understanding of existing planning benchmarks appears to be lacking. Without it, comparing planning algorithms' performance across domains or selecting suitable algorithms for new scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we examine a range of planning benchmarks to identify commonly used testbeds for algorithm development and highlight potential gaps. These benchmarks are categorized into embodied environments, web navigation, scheduling, games and puzzles, and everyday task automation. Our study recommends the most appropriate benchmarks for various algorithms and offers insights to guide future benchmark development.

cs.AI↗

Toward Aligning Human and Robot Actions via Multi-Modal Demonstration Learning

Understanding action correspondence between humans and robots is essential for evaluating alignment in decision-making, particularly in human-robot collaboration and imitation learning within unstructured environments. We propose a multimodal demonstration learning framework that explicitly models human demonstrations from RGB video with robot demonstrations in voxelized RGB-D space. Focusing on the "pick and place" task from the RH20T dataset, we utilize data from 5 users across 10 diverse scenes. Our approach combines ResNet-based visual encoding for human intention modeling and a Perceiver Transformer for voxel-based robot action prediction. After 2000 training epochs, the human model reaches 71.67% accuracy, and the robot model achieves 71.8% accuracy, demonstrating the framework's potential for aligning complex, multimodal human and robot behaviors in manipulation tasks.

cs.RO↗

Probabilistic Task Parameterization of Tool-Tissue Interaction via Sparse Landmarks Tracking in Robotic Surgery

Accurate modeling of tool-tissue interactions in robotic surgery requires precise tracking of deformable tissues and integration of surgical domain knowledge. Traditional methods rely on labor-intensive annotations or rigid assumptions, limiting flexibility. We propose a framework combining sparse keypoint tracking and probabilistic modeling that propagates expert-annotated landmarks across endoscopic frames, even with large tissue deformations. Clustered tissue keypoints enable dynamic local transformation construction via PCA, and tool poses, tracked similarly, are expressed relative to these frames. Embedding these into a Task-Parameterized Gaussian Mixture Model (TP-GMM) integrates data-driven observations with labeled clinical expertise, effectively predicting relative tool-tissue poses and enhancing visual understanding of robotic surgical motions directly from video data.

cs.RO↗

Systematic Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge in LLM Alignment Tasks: Explainable Metrics and Diverse Prompt Templates

LLM-as-a-Judge has been widely applied to evaluate and compare different LLM alignmnet approaches (e.g., RLHF and DPO). However, concerns regarding its reliability have emerged, due to LLM judges' biases and inconsistent decision-making. Previous research has developed evaluation frameworks to assess reliability of LLM judges and their alignment with human preferences. However, the employed evaluation metrics often lack adequate explainability and fail to address LLM internal inconsistency. Additionally, existing studies inadequately explore the impact of various prompt templates when applying LLM-as-a-Judge methods, leading to potentially inconsistent comparisons between different alignment algorithms. In this work, we systematically evaluate LLM-as-a-Judge on alignment tasks by defining more theoretically interpretable evaluation metrics and explicitly mitigating LLM internal inconsistency from reliability metrics. We develop an open-source framework to evaluate, compare, and visualize the reliability and alignment of LLM judges, which facilitates practitioners to choose LLM judges for alignment tasks. In the experiments, we examine effects of diverse prompt templates on LLM-judge reliability and also demonstrate our developed framework by comparing various LLM judges on two common alignment datasets (i.e., TL;DR Summarization and HH-RLHF-Helpfulness). Our results indicate a significant impact of prompt templates on LLM judge performance, as well as a mediocre alignment level between the tested LLM judges and human evaluators.

cs.CL↗

Large Language Models for Multi-Facility Location Mechanism Design

Designing strategyproof mechanisms for multi-facility location that optimize social costs based on agent preferences had been challenging due to the extensive domain knowledge required and poor worst-case guarantees. Recently, deep learning models have been proposed as alternatives. However, these models require some domain knowledge and extensive hyperparameter tuning as well as lacking interpretability, which is crucial in practice when transparency of the learned mechanisms is mandatory. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, named LLMMech, that addresses these limitations by incorporating large language models (LLMs) into an evolutionary framework for generating interpretable, hyperparameter-free, empirically strategyproof, and nearly optimal mechanisms. Our experimental results, evaluated on various problem settings where the social cost is arbitrarily weighted across agents and the agent preferences may not be uniformly distributed, demonstrate that the LLM-generated mechanisms generally outperform existing handcrafted baselines and deep learning models. Furthermore, the mechanisms exhibit impressive generalizability to out-of-distribution agent preferences and to larger instances with more agents.

cs.LG↗

From Understanding to Excelling: Template-Free Algorithm Design through Structural-Functional Co-Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) have greatly accelerated the automation of algorithm generation and optimization. However, current methods such as EoH and FunSearch mainly rely on predefined templates and expert-specified functions that focus solely on the local evolution of key functionalities. Consequently, they fail to fully leverage the synergistic benefits of the overall architecture and the potential of global optimization. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end algorithm generation and optimization framework based on LLMs. Our approach utilizes the deep semantic understanding of LLMs to convert natural language requirements or human-authored papers into code solutions, and employs a two-dimensional co-evolution strategy to optimize both functional and structural aspects. This closed-loop process spans problem analysis, code generation, and global optimization, automatically identifying key algorithm modules for multi-level joint optimization and continually enhancing performance and design innovation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional local optimization approaches in both performance and innovation, while also exhibiting strong adaptability to unknown environments and breakthrough potential in structural design. By building on human research, our framework generates and optimizes novel algorithms that surpass those designed by human experts, broadening the applicability of LLMs for algorithm design and providing a novel solution pathway for automated algorithm development.

cs.SE↗

Seedream 2.0: A Native Chinese-English Bilingual Image Generation Foundation Model

Rapid advancement of diffusion models has catalyzed remarkable progress in the field of image generation. However, prevalent models such as Flux, SD3.5 and Midjourney, still grapple with issues like model bias, limited text rendering capabilities, and insufficient understanding of Chinese cultural nuances. To address these limitations, we present Seedream 2.0, a native Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model that excels across diverse dimensions, which adeptly manages text prompt in both Chinese and English, supporting bilingual image generation and text rendering. We develop a powerful data system that facilitates knowledge integration, and a caption system that balances the accuracy and richness for image description. Particularly, Seedream is integrated with a self-developed bilingual large language model as a text encoder, allowing it to learn native knowledge directly from massive data. This enable it to generate high-fidelity images with accurate cultural nuances and aesthetic expressions described in either Chinese or English. Beside, Glyph-Aligned ByT5 is applied for flexible character-level text rendering, while a Scaled ROPE generalizes well to untrained resolutions. Multi-phase post-training optimizations, including SFT and RLHF iterations, further improve the overall capability. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Seedream 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple aspects, including prompt-following, aesthetics, text rendering, and structural correctness. Furthermore, Seedream 2.0 has been optimized through multiple RLHF iterations to closely align its output with human preferences, as revealed by its outstanding ELO score. In addition, it can be readily adapted to an instruction-based image editing model, such as SeedEdit, with strong editing capability that balances instruction-following and image consistency.

cs.CV↗

Destroy and Repair Using Hyper Graphs for Routing

Recent advancements in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) have shown promise in solving routing problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) without handcrafted designs. Research in this domain has explored two primary categories of methods: iterative and non-iterative. While non-iterative methods struggle to generate near-optimal solutions directly, iterative methods simplify the task by learning local search steps. However, existing iterative methods are often limited by restricted neighborhood searches, leading to suboptimal results. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach that extends the search to larger neighborhoods by learning a destroy-and-repair strategy. Specifically, we introduce a Destroy-and-Repair framework based on Hyper-Graphs (DRHG). This framework reduces consecutive intact edges to hyper-edges, allowing the model to pay more attention to the destroyed part and decrease the complexity of encoding all nodes. Experiments demonstrate that DRHG achieves stateof-the-art performance on TSP with up to 10,000 nodes and shows strong generalization to real-world TSPLib and CVRPLib problems.

cs.LG↗

Multi-modal Multi-kernel Graph Learning for Autism Prediction and Biomarker Discovery

Due to its complexity, graph learning-based multi-modal integration and classification is one of the most challenging obstacles for disease prediction. To effectively offset the negative impact between modalities in the process of multi-modal integration and extract heterogeneous information from graphs, we propose a novel method called MMKGL (Multi-modal Multi-Kernel Graph Learning). For the problem of negative impact between modalities, we propose a multi-modal graph embedding module to construct a multi-modal graph. Different from conventional methods that manually construct static graphs for all modalities, each modality generates a separate graph by adaptive learning, where a function graph and a supervision graph are introduced for optimization during the multi-graph fusion embedding process. We then propose a multi-kernel graph learning module to extract heterogeneous information from the multi-modal graph. The information in the multi-modal graph at different levels is aggregated by convolutional kernels with different receptive field sizes, followed by generating a cross-kernel discovery tensor for disease prediction. Our method is evaluated on the benchmark Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) dataset and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, discriminative brain regions associated with autism are identified by our model, providing guidance for the study of autism pathology.

cs.LG↗

Robust Estimation and Inference for High-Dimensional Panel Data Models

This paper provides the relevant literature with a complete toolkit for conducting robust estimation and inference about the parameters of interest involved in a high-dimensional panel data framework. Specifically, (1) we allow for non-Gaussian, serially and cross-sectionally correlated and heteroskedastic error processes, (2) we develop an estimation method for high-dimensional long-run covariance matrix using a thresholded estimator, (3) we also allow for the number of regressors to grow faster than the sample size. Methodologically and technically, we develop two Nagaev--types of concentration inequalities: one for a partial sum and the other for a quadratic form, subject to a set of easily verifiable conditions. Leveraging these two inequalities, we derive a non-asymptotic bound for the LASSO estimator, achieve asymptotic normality via the node-wise LASSO regression, and establish a sharp convergence rate for the thresholded heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) estimator. We demonstrate the practical relevance of these theoretical results by investigating a high-dimensional panel data model with interactive effects. Moreover, we conduct extensive numerical studies using simulated and real data examples.

econ.EM↗

Multi-objective Evolution of Heuristic Using Large Language Model

Heuristics are commonly used to tackle various search and optimization problems. Design heuristics usually require tedious manual crafting with domain knowledge. Recent works have incorporated Large Language Models (LLMs) into automatic heuristic search, leveraging their powerful language and coding capacity. However, existing research focuses on the optimal performance on the target problem as the sole objective, neglecting other criteria such as efficiency and scalability, which are vital in practice. To tackle this challenge, we propose to model the heuristic search as a multi-objective optimization problem and consider introducing additional practical criteria beyond optimal performance. Due to the complexity of the search space, conventional multi-objective optimization methods struggle to effectively handle LLM-based multi-objective heuristic search. We propose the first LLM-based multi-objective heuristic search framework, Multi-objective Evolution of Heuristic (MEoH), which integrates LLMs in a zero-shot manner to generate a non-dominated set of heuristics to meet multiple design criteria. We design a new dominance-dissimilarity mechanism for effective population management and selection, which incorporates both code dissimilarity in the search space and dominance in the objective space. MEoH is demonstrated in two well-known combinatorial optimization problems: the online Bin Packing Problem (BPP) and the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The results indicate that a variety of elite heuristics are automatically generated in a single run, offering more trade-off options than the existing methods. It successfully achieves competitive or superior performance while improving efficiency up to 10 times. Moreover, we also observe that the multi-objective search introduces novel insights into heuristic design and leads to the discovery of diverse heuristics.

cs.AI↗

Stochastic Scovil--Schulz-DuBois machine and its three types of cycles

Three types of cycles are identified in the quantum jump trajectories of the Scovil--Schulz-DuBois (SSDB) machine: an R-cycle as refrigeration, an H-cycle as a heat engine, and an N-cycle in which the machine is neutral. The statistics of these cycles are investigated via a semi-Markov process method. We find that in the large time limit, whether the machine operates as a heat engine or refrigerator depends on the ratio between the numbers of R-cycles and H-cycles per unit time. Further increasing the hot bath temperature above a certain threshold does not increase the machine's power output. The cause is that, in this situation, the N-cycle has a greater probability than the H-cycle and R-cycle. Although the SSDB machine operates by randomly switching between these three cycles, at the level of a single quantum jump trajectory, its heat engine efficiency and the refrigerator's coefficient of performance remain constant.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

When SparseMoE Meets Noisy Interactions: An Ensemble View on Denoising Recommendation

Learning user preferences from implicit feedback is one of the core challenges in recommendation. The difficulty lies in the potential noise within implicit feedback. Therefore, various denoising recommendation methods have been proposed recently. However, most of them overly rely on the hyperparameter configurations, inevitably leading to inadequacies in model adaptability and generalization performance. In this study, we propose a novel Adaptive Ensemble Learning (AEL) for denoising recommendation, which employs a sparse gating network as a brain, selecting suitable experts to synthesize appropriate denoising capacities for different data samples. To address the ensemble learning shortcoming of model complexity and ensure sub-recommender diversity, we also proposed a novel method that stacks components to create sub-recommenders instead of directly constructing them. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that AEL outperforms others in kinds of popular metrics, even in the presence of substantial and dynamic noise. Our code is available at https://github.com/cpu9xx/AEL.

cs.IR↗

XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser

In the domain of Document AI, parsing semi-structured image form is a crucial Key Information Extraction (KIE) task. The advent of pre-trained multimodal models significantly empowers Document AI frameworks to extract key information from form documents in different formats such as PDF, Word, and images. Nonetheless, form parsing is still encumbered by notable challenges like subpar capabilities in multilingual parsing and diminished recall in industrial contexts in rich text and rich visuals. In this work, we introduce a simple but effective \textbf{M}ultimodal and \textbf{M}ultilingual semi-structured \textbf{FORM} \textbf{PARSER} (\textbf{XFormParser}), which anchored on a comprehensive Transformer-based pre-trained language model and innovatively amalgamates semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE) into a unified framework. Combined with Bi-LSTM, the performance of multilingual parsing is significantly improved. Furthermore, we develop InDFormSFT, a pioneering supervised fine-tuning (SFT) industrial dataset that specifically addresses the parsing needs of forms in various industrial contexts. XFormParser has demonstrated its unparalleled effectiveness and robustness through rigorous testing on established benchmarks. Compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, XFormParser notably achieves up to 1.79\% F1 score improvement on RE tasks in language-specific settings. It also exhibits exceptional cross-task performance improvements in multilingual and zero-shot settings. The codes, datasets, and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/zhbuaa0/xformparser.

cs.CL↗

Systematic Analysis of LLM Contributions to Planning: Solver, Verifier, Heuristic

In this work, we provide a systematic analysis of how large language models (LLMs) contribute to solving planning problems. In particular, we examine how LLMs perform when they are used as problem solver, solution verifier, and heuristic guidance to improve intermediate solutions. Our analysis reveals that although it is difficult for LLMs to generate correct plans out-of-the-box, LLMs are much better at providing feedback signals to intermediate/incomplete solutions in the form of comparative heuristic functions. This evaluation framework provides insights into how future work may design better LLM-based tree-search algorithms to solve diverse planning and reasoning problems. We also propose a novel benchmark to evaluate LLM's ability to learn user preferences on the fly, which has wide applications in practical settings.

cs.AI↗

Prompt Transfer for Dual-Aspect Cross Domain Cognitive Diagnosis

Cognitive Diagnosis (CD) aims to evaluate students' cognitive states based on their interaction data, enabling downstream applications such as exercise recommendation and personalized learning guidance. However, existing methods often struggle with accuracy drops in cross-domain cognitive diagnosis (CDCD), a practical yet challenging task. While some efforts have explored exercise-aspect CDCD, such as crosssubject scenarios, they fail to address the broader dual-aspect nature of CDCD, encompassing both student- and exerciseaspect variations. This diversity creates significant challenges in developing a scenario-agnostic framework. To address these gaps, we propose PromptCD, a simple yet effective framework that leverages soft prompt transfer for cognitive diagnosis. PromptCD is designed to adapt seamlessly across diverse CDCD scenarios, introducing PromptCD-S for student-aspect CDCD and PromptCD-E for exercise-aspect CDCD. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of PromptCD, consistently achieving superior performance across various CDCD scenarios. Our work offers a unified and generalizable approach to CDCD, advancing both theoretical and practical understanding in this critical domain. The implementation of our framework is publicly available at https://github.com/Publisher-PromptCD/PromptCD.

cs.LG↗