arXiv subjects

Jiechao Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Jiechao Gao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

AMAS: Adaptively Determining Communication Topology for LLM-based Multi-Agent System

Although large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing capabilities, their practical implementation as autonomous multi-agent systems (MAS) for industrial problem-solving encounters persistent barriers. Conventional MAS architectures are fundamentally restricted by inflexible, hand-crafted graph topologies that lack contextual responsiveness, resulting in diminished efficacy across varied academic and commercial workloads. To surmount these constraints, we introduce AMAS, a paradigm-shifting framework that redefines LLM-based MAS through a novel dynamic graph designer. This component autonomously identifies task-specific optimal graph configurations via lightweight LLM adaptation, eliminating the reliance on monolithic, universally applied structural templates. Instead, AMAS exploits the intrinsic properties of individual inputs to intelligently direct query trajectories through task-optimized agent pathways. Rigorous validation across question answering, mathematical deduction, and code generation benchmarks confirms that AMAS systematically exceeds state-of-the-art single-agent and multi-agent approaches across diverse LLM architectures. Our investigation establishes that context-sensitive structural adaptability constitutes a foundational requirement for high-performance LLM MAS deployments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

FT-MDT: Extracting Decision Trees from Medical Texts via a Novel Low-rank Adaptation Method

Knowledge of the medical decision process, which can be modeled as medical decision trees (MDTs), is critical to building clinical decision support systems. However, current MDT construction methods rely heavily on time-consuming and laborious manual annotation. To address this challenge, we propose PI-LoRA (Path-Integrated LoRA), a novel low-rank adaptation method for automatically extracting MDTs from clinical guidelines and textbooks. We integrate gradient path information to capture synergistic effects between different modules, enabling more effective and reliable rank allocation. This framework ensures that the most critical modules receive appropriate rank allocations while less important ones are pruned, resulting in a more efficient and accurate model for extracting medical decision trees from clinical texts. Extensive experiments on medical guideline datasets demonstrate that our PI-LoRA method significantly outperforms existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches for the Text2MDT task, achieving better accuracy with substantially reduced model complexity. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results while maintaining a lightweight architecture, making it particularly suitable for clinical decision support systems where computational resources may be limited.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The Confidence Paradox: Can LLM Know When It's Wrong

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) models often produce overconfident or ethically misaligned responses, especially under uncertainty. Existing models like LayoutLMv3, UDOP, and DONUT focus on accuracy but lack ethical calibration. We propose HonestVQA, a model-agnostic, self-supervised framework that aligns model confidence with correctness using weighted loss and contrastive learning. We introduce two new metrics Honesty Score (H-Score) and Ethical Confidence Index (ECI)-to evaluate ethical alignment. HonestVQA improves accuracy and F1 by up to 4.3% across SpDocVQA, InfographicsVQA, and SROIE datasets, while reducing overconfidence. It also generalizes well across domains, achieving 78.9% accuracy and 76.1% F1-score.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

LLMs on a Budget? Say HOLA

Running Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is constrained by high compute and memory demands posing a barrier for real-time applications in sectors like healthcare, education, and embedded systems. Current solutions such as quantization, pruning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offer only partial optimizations and often compromise on speed or accuracy. We introduce HOLA, an end-to-end optimization framework for efficient LLM deployment. Internally, it leverages Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD) for faster inference without quality loss. Externally, AdaComp-RAG adjusts retrieval complexity based on context needs. Together with LoBi, which blends structured pruning (LoRA) and quantization, HOLA delivers significant gains: 17.6% EMA on GSM8K, 10.5% MCA on ARC, and reduced latency and memory on edge devices like Jetson Nano--proving both scalable and production-ready.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

FinRL Contests: Benchmarking Data-driven Financial Reinforcement Learning Agents

Financial reinforcement learning (FinRL) is now a practical paradigm for financial engineering. However, applying RL strategies to real-world trading tasks remains a challenge for individuals, as it is error-prone and engineering-heavy. The non-stationarity of financial data, low signal-to-noise ratios, and various market frictions require deep accumulations. Although numerous FinRL methods have been developed for tasks such as stock/crypto trading and portfolio management, the lack of standardized task definitions, real-time high-quality datasets, close-to-real market environments, and robust baselines has hindered consistent reproduction in both open-source community and FinTech industry. To bridge this gap, we organized a series of FinRL Contests from 2023 to 2025, covering a diverse range of financial tasks such as stock trading, order execution, crypto trading, and the use of large language model (LLM)-engineered signals. These contests attracted 200+ participants from 100+ institutions over 20+ countries. To encourage participations, we provided starter kits featuring GPU-optimized parallel market environments, ensemble learning, and comprehensive instructions. In this paper, we summarize these benchmarking efforts, detailing task formulations, data curation pipelines, environment implementations, evaluation protocols, participant performance, and organizational insights. It guides our follow-up FinRL contests, and also provides a reference for FinAI contests alike.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

Can We Predict Your Next Move Without Breaking Your Privacy?

We propose FLLL3M--Federated Learning with Large Language Models for Mobility Modeling--a privacy-preserving framework for Next-Location Prediction (NxLP). By retaining user data locally and leveraging LLMs through an efficient outer product mechanism, FLLL3M ensures high accuracy with low resource demands. It achieves SOT results on Gowalla (Acc@1: 12.55, MRR: 0.1422), WeePlace (10.71, 0.1285), Brightkite (10.42, 0.1169), and FourSquare (8.71, 0.1023), while reducing parameters by up to 45.6% and memory usage by 52.7%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Track Any Anomalous Object: A Granular Video Anomaly Detection Pipeline

Video anomaly detection (VAD) is crucial in scenarios such as surveillance and autonomous driving, where timely detection of unexpected activities is essential. Although existing methods have primarily focused on detecting anomalous objects in videos -- either by identifying anomalous frames or objects -- they often neglect finer-grained analysis, such as anomalous pixels, which limits their ability to capture a broader range of anomalies. To address this challenge, we propose a new framework called Track Any Anomalous Object (TAO), which introduces a granular video anomaly detection pipeline that, for the first time, integrates the detection of multiple fine-grained anomalous objects into a unified framework. Unlike methods that assign anomaly scores to every pixel, our approach transforms the problem into pixel-level tracking of anomalous objects. By linking anomaly scores to downstream tasks such as segmentation and tracking, our method removes the need for threshold tuning and achieves more precise anomaly localization in long and complex video sequences. Experiments demonstrate that TAO sets new benchmarks in accuracy and robustness. Project page available online.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Federated Neural Architecture Search with Model-Agnostic Meta Learning

Federated Learning (FL) often struggles with data heterogeneity due to the naturally uneven distribution of user data across devices. Federated Neural Architecture Search (NAS) enables collaborative search for optimal model architectures tailored to heterogeneous data to achieve higher accuracy. However, this process is time-consuming due to extensive search space and retraining. To overcome this, we introduce FedMetaNAS, a framework that integrates meta-learning with NAS within the FL context to expedite the architecture search by pruning the search space and eliminating the retraining stage. Our approach first utilizes the Gumbel-Softmax reparameterization to facilitate relaxation of the mixed operations in the search space. We then refine the local search process by incorporating Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning, where a task-specific learner adapts both weights and architecture parameters (alphas) for individual tasks, while a meta learner adjusts the overall model weights and alphas based on the gradient information from task learners. Following the meta-update, we propose soft pruning using the same trick on search space to gradually sparsify the architecture, ensuring that the performance of the chosen architecture remains robust after pruning which allows for immediate use of the model without retraining. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that FedMetaNAS significantly accelerates the search process by more than 50\% with higher accuracy compared to FedNAS.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learning Novel Transformer Architecture for Time-series Forecasting

Despite the success of Transformer-based models in the time-series prediction (TSP) tasks, the existing Transformer architecture still face limitations and the literature lacks comprehensive explorations into alternative architectures. To address these challenges, we propose AutoFormer-TS, a novel framework that leverages a comprehensive search space for Transformer architectures tailored to TSP tasks. Our framework introduces a differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) method, AB-DARTS, which improves upon existing DNAS approaches by enhancing the identification of optimal operations within the architecture. AutoFormer-TS systematically explores alternative attention mechanisms, activation functions, and encoding operations, moving beyond the traditional Transformer design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoFormer-TS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across various TSP benchmarks, achieving superior forecasting accuracy while maintaining reasonable training efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Adapting Large Language Models for Time Series Modeling via a Novel Parameter-efficient Adaptation Method

Time series modeling holds significant importance in many real-world applications and has been extensively studied. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. A series of recent studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the current literature have yet striked a high-quality balance between (a) effectively aligning the time series and natural language modalities, and (b) keeping the inference efficiency. To address the above issues, we now propose the Time-LlaMA framework. Time-LlaMA first converts the time series input into token embeddings through a linear tokenization mechanism. Second, the time series token embeddings are aligned with the text prompts. Third, to further adapt the LLM backbone for time series modeling, we have developed a dynamic low-rank adaptation technique (D-LoRA). D-LoRA dynamically chooses the most suitable LoRA modules at each layer of the Transformer backbone for each time series input, enhancing the model's predictive capabilities. Our experimental results on an extensive collection of challenging real-world time series tasks confirm that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

DRUM: Learning Demonstration Retriever for Large MUlti-modal Models

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in dealing with new tasks with the help of in-context learning (ICL). In the study of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), when implementing ICL, researchers usually adopts the naive strategies like fixed demonstrations across different samples, or selecting demonstrations directly via a visual-language embedding model. These methods does not guarantee the configured demonstrations fit the need of the LVLMs. To address this issue, we now propose a novel framework, \underline{d}emonstration \underline{r}etriever for large m\underline{u}lti-modal \underline{m}odel (DRUM), which fine-tunes the visual-language embedding model to better meet the LVLM's needs. First, we discuss the retrieval strategies for a visual-language task, assuming an embedding model is given. And we propose to concate the image and text embeddings to enhance the retrieval performance. Second, we propose to re-rank the demonstrations retrieved by the embedding model via the LVLM's feedbacks, and calculate a list-wise ranking loss for training the embedding model. Third, we propose an iterative demonstration mining strategy to improve the training of the embedding model. Through extensive experiments on 3 types of visual-language tasks, 7 benchmark datasets, our DRUM framework is proven to be effective in boosting the LVLM's in-context learning performance via retrieving more proper demonstrations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

FedMetaMed: Federated Meta-Learning for Personalized Medication in Distributed Healthcare Systems

Personalized medication aims to tailor healthcare to individual patient characteristics. However, the heterogeneity of patient data across healthcare systems presents significant challenges to achieving accurate and effective personalized treatments. Ethical concerns further complicate the aggregation of large volumes of data from diverse institutions. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising decentralized solution by enabling collaborative model training through the exchange of client models rather than raw data, thus preserving privacy. However, existing FL methods often suffer from retrogression during server aggregation, leading to a decline in model performance in real-world medical FL settings. To address data variability in distributed healthcare systems, we introduce Federated Meta-Learning for Personalized Medication (FedMetaMed), which combines federated learning and meta-learning to create models that adapt to diverse patient data across healthcare systems. The FedMetaMed framework aims to produce superior personalized models for individual clients by addressing these limitations. Specifically, we introduce Cumulative Fourier Aggregation (CFA) at the server to improve stability and effectiveness in global knowledge aggregation. CFA achieves this by gradually integrating client models from low to high frequencies. At the client level, we implement a Collaborative Transfer Optimization (CTO) strategy with a three-step process - Retrieve, Reciprocate, and Refine - to enhance the personalized local model through seamless global knowledge transfer. Experiments on real-world medical imaging datasets demonstrate that FedMetaMed outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods, showing superior generalization even on out-of-distribution cohorts.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Fed-LDR: Federated Local Data-infused Graph Creation with Node-centric Model Refinement

The rapid acceleration of global urbanization has introduced novel challenges in enhancing urban infrastructure and services. Spatio-temporal data, integrating spatial and temporal dimensions, has emerged as a critical tool for understanding urban phenomena and promoting sustainability. In this context, Federated Learning (FL) has gained prominence as a distributed learning paradigm aligned with the privacy requirements of urban IoT environments. However, integrating traditional and deep learning models into the FL framework poses significant challenges, particularly in capturing complex spatio-temporal dependencies and adapting to diverse urban conditions. To address these challenges, we propose the Federated Local Data-Infused Graph Creation with Node-centric Model Refinement (Fed-LDR) algorithm. Fed-LDR leverages FL and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) to enhance spatio-temporal data analysis in urban environments. The algorithm comprises two key modules: (1) the Local Data-Infused Graph Creation (LDIGC) module, which dynamically reconfigures adjacency matrices to reflect evolving spatial relationships within urban environments, and (2) the Node-centric Model Refinement (NoMoR) module, which customizes model parameters for individual urban nodes to accommodate heterogeneity. Evaluations on the PeMSD4 and PeMSD8 datasets demonstrate Fed-LDR's superior performance over six baseline methods. Fed-LDR achieved the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values of 20.15 and 17.30, and the lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values of 32.30 and 27.15, respectively, while maintaining a high correlation coefficient of 0.96 across both datasets. Notably, on the PeMSD4 dataset, Fed-LDR reduced MAE and RMSE by up to 81\% and 78\%, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline FedMedian.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

FODA-PG for Enhanced Medical Imaging Narrative Generation: Adaptive Differentiation of Normal and Abnormal Attributes

Automatic Medical Imaging Narrative generation aims to alleviate the workload of radiologists by producing accurate clinical descriptions directly from radiological images. However, the subtle visual nuances and domain-specific terminology in medical images pose significant challenges compared to generic image captioning tasks. Existing approaches often neglect the vital distinction between normal and abnormal findings, leading to suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose FODA-PG, a novel Fine-grained Organ-Disease Adaptive Partitioning Graph framework that addresses these limitations through domain-adaptive learning. FODA-PG constructs a granular graphical representation of radiological findings by separating disease-related attributes into distinct "disease-specific" and "disease-free" categories based on their clinical significance and location. This adaptive partitioning enables our model to capture the nuanced differences between normal and pathological states, mitigating the impact of data biases. By integrating this fine-grained semantic knowledge into a powerful transformer-based architecture and providing rigorous mathematical justifications for its effectiveness, FODA-PG generates precise and clinically coherent reports with enhanced generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on the IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the importance of domain adaptation in medical report generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Differentially Private Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Model Using Federated Learning

The surge in interest and application of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a drive to fine-tune these models to suit specific applications, such as finance and medical science. However, concerns regarding data privacy have emerged, especially when multiple stakeholders aim to collaboratively enhance LLMs using sensitive data. In this scenario, federated learning becomes a natural choice, allowing decentralized fine-tuning without exposing raw data to central servers. Motivated by this, we investigate how data privacy can be ensured in LLM fine-tuning through practical federated learning approaches, enabling secure contributions from multiple parties to enhance LLMs. Yet, challenges arise: 1) despite avoiding raw data exposure, there is a risk of inferring sensitive information from model outputs, and 2) federated learning for LLMs incurs notable communication overhead. To address these challenges, this article introduces DP-LoRA, a novel federated learning algorithm tailored for LLMs. DP-LoRA preserves data privacy by employing a Gaussian mechanism that adds noise in weight updates, maintaining individual data privacy while facilitating collaborative model training. Moreover, DP-LoRA optimizes communication efficiency via low-rank adaptation, minimizing the transmission of updated weights during distributed training. The experimental results across medical, financial, and general datasets using various LLMs demonstrate that DP-LoRA effectively ensures strict privacy constraints while minimizing communication overhead.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Improving Source-Free Target Adaptation with Vision Transformers Leveraging Domain Representation Images

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods facilitate knowledge transfer from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, navigating the obstacle of domain shift. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a staple in UDA, the rise of Vision Transformers (ViTs) provides new avenues for domain generalization. This paper presents an innovative method to bolster ViT performance in source-free target adaptation, beginning with an evaluation of how key, query, and value elements affect ViT outcomes. Experiments indicate that altering the key component has negligible effects on Transformer performance. Leveraging this discovery, we introduce Domain Representation Images (DRIs), feeding embeddings through the key element. DRIs act as domain-specific markers, effortlessly merging with the training regimen. To assess our method, we perform target adaptation tests on the Cross Instance DRI source-only (SO) control. We measure the efficacy of target adaptation with and without DRIs, against existing benchmarks like SHOT-B* and adaptations via CDTrans. Findings demonstrate that excluding DRIs offers limited gains over SHOT-B*, while their inclusion in the key segment boosts average precision promoting superior domain generalization. This research underscores the vital role of DRIs in enhancing ViT efficiency in UDA scenarios, setting a precedent for further domain adaptation explorations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

From Simulations to Reality: Enhancing Multi-Robot Exploration for Urban Search and Rescue

In this study, we present a novel hybrid algorithm, combining Levy Flight (LF) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) (LF-PSO), tailored for efficient multi-robot exploration in unknown environments with limited communication and no global positioning information. The research addresses the growing interest in employing multiple autonomous robots for exploration tasks, particularly in scenarios such as Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) operations. Multiple robots offer advantages like increased task coverage, robustness, flexibility, and scalability. However, existing approaches often make assumptions such as search area, robot positioning, communication restrictions, and target information that may not hold in real-world situations. The hybrid algorithm leverages LF, known for its effectiveness in large space exploration with sparse targets, and incorporates inter-robot repulsion as a social component through PSO. This combination enhances area exploration efficiency. We redefine the local best and global best positions to suit scenarios without continuous target information. Experimental simulations in a controlled environment demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness, showcasing improved area coverage compared to traditional methods. In the process of refining our approach and testing it in complex, obstacle-rich environments, the presented work holds promise for enhancing multi-robot exploration in scenarios with limited information and communication capabilities.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2023

Dynamic Datasets and Market Environments for Financial Reinforcement Learning

The financial market is a particularly challenging playground for deep reinforcement learning due to its unique feature of dynamic datasets. Building high-quality market environments for training financial reinforcement learning (FinRL) agents is difficult due to major factors such as the low signal-to-noise ratio of financial data, survivorship bias of historical data, and model overfitting. In this paper, we present FinRL-Meta, a data-centric and openly accessible library that processes dynamic datasets from real-world markets into gym-style market environments and has been actively maintained by the AI4Finance community. First, following a DataOps paradigm, we provide hundreds of market environments through an automatic data curation pipeline. Second, we provide homegrown examples and reproduce popular research papers as stepping stones for users to design new trading strategies. We also deploy the library on cloud platforms so that users can visualize their own results and assess the relative performance via community-wise competitions. Third, we provide dozens of Jupyter/Python demos organized into a curriculum and a documentation website to serve the rapidly growing community. The open-source codes for the data curation pipeline are available at https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRL-Meta

cs.LG↗