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Liang Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Wang.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

FineQ: Software-Hardware Co-Design for Low-Bit Fine-Grained Mixed-Precision Quantization of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the natural language processing paradigm but impose substantial demands on memory and computational resources. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to reduce memory consumption of LLMs. However, advanced single-precision quantization methods experience significant accuracy degradation when quantizing to ultra-low bits. Existing mixed-precision quantization methods are quantized by groups with coarse granularity. Employing high precision for group data leads to substantial memory overhead, whereas low precision severely impacts model accuracy. To address this issue, we propose FineQ, software-hardware co-design for low-bit fine-grained mixed-precision quantization of LLMs. First, FineQ partitions the weights into finer-grained clusters and considers the distribution of outliers within these clusters, thus achieving a balance between model accuracy and memory overhead. Then, we propose an outlier protection mechanism within clusters that uses 3 bits to represent outliers and introduce an encoding scheme for index and data concatenation to enable aligned memory access. Finally, we introduce an accelerator utilizing temporal coding that effectively supports the quantization algorithm while simplifying the multipliers in the systolic array. FineQ achieves higher model accuracy compared to the SOTA mixed-precision quantization algorithm at a close average bit-width. Meanwhile, the accelerator achieves up to 1.79x energy efficiency and reduces the area of the systolic array by 61.2%.

cs.LG↗

GOT4Rec: Graph of Thoughts for Sequential Recommendation

With their vast open-world knowledge and reasoning abilities, large language models (LLMs) have become a promising tool for sequential recommendation. Researchers have explored various methods to harness these capabilities, but most existing approaches rely on simple input-output prompting, failing to effectively bridge the gap between LLMs' general knowledge and the specific needs of recommendation tasks. While reasoning strategies like chain-of-thought (CoT) have been introduced to enhance performance, they often produce inaccurate recommendations due to underutilized user preference information and insufficient reasoning depth. To address these challenges, we propose GOT4Rec, a novel sequential recommendation method leveraging the graph of thoughts (GoT) reasoning strategy. Our method focuses on three key types of information in user histories: short-term interests, long-term interests and collaborative information from other users. It enables LLMs to reason independently and generate recommendations, subsequently aggregating results to derive final items. This method allows LLMs, with enhanced reasoning capabilities, to better utilize the user sequence information, producing more accurate recommendations and comprehensive explanations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GOT4Rec, outperforming existing state-of-the-art baselines with an average improvement of 37.11%. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GOT4Rec.

cs.IR↗

Fast Adversarial Training with Weak-to-Strong Spatial-Temporal Consistency in the Frequency Domain on Videos

Adversarial Training (AT) has been shown to significantly enhance adversarial robustness via a min-max optimization approach. However, its effectiveness in video recognition tasks is hampered by two main challenges. First, fast adversarial training for video models remains largely unexplored, which severely impedes its practical applications. Specifically, most video adversarial training methods are computationally costly, with long training times and high expenses. Second, existing methods struggle with the trade-off between clean accuracy and adversarial robustness. To address these challenges, we introduce Video Fast Adversarial Training with Weak-to-Strong consistency (VFAT-WS), the first fast adversarial training method for video data. Specifically, VFAT-WS incorporates the following key designs: First, it integrates a straightforward yet effective temporal frequency augmentation (TF-AUG), and its spatial-temporal enhanced form STF-AUG, along with a single-step PGD attack to boost training efficiency and robustness. Second, it devises a weak-to-strong spatial-temporal consistency regularization, which seamlessly integrates the simpler TF-AUG and the more complex STF-AUG. Leveraging the consistency regularization, it steers the learning process from simple to complex augmentations. Both of them work together to achieve a better trade-off between clean accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on UCF-101 and HMDB-51 with both CNN and Transformer-based models demonstrate that VFAT-WS achieves great improvements in adversarial robustness and corruption robustness, while accelerating training by nearly 490%.

cs.CV↗

Identifying eclipsing binary stars with TESS data based on a new hybrid deep learning model

Eclipsing binary systems (EBs), as foundational objects in stellar astrophysics, have garnered significant attention in recent years. These systems exhibit periodic decreases in light intensity when one star obscures the other from the observer's perspective, producing characteristic light curves (LCs). With the advent of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a vast repository of stellar LCs has become available, offering unprecedented opportunities for discovering new EBs. To efficiently identify such systems, we propose a novel method that combines LC data and generalized Lomb-Scargle periodograms (GLS) data to classify EBs. At the core of this method is CNN Attention LSTM Net (CALNet), a hybrid deep learning model integrating Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and an Attention Mechanism based on the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM). We collected 4,225 EB samples, utilizing their 2-minute cadence LCs for model training and validation. CALNet achieved a recall rate of 99.1%, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness. Applying it to TESS 2-minute LCs from Sectors 1 to 74, we identified 9,351 new EBs after manual visual inspection, significantly expanding the known sample size. This work highlights the potential of advanced deep-learning techniques in large-scale astronomical surveys and provides a valuable resource for further studies on EBs.

astro-ph.SR↗

WT-BCP: Wavelet Transform based Bidirectional Copy-Paste for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSMIS) shows promise in reducing reliance on scarce labeled medical data. However, SSMIS field confronts challenges such as distribution mismatches between labeled and unlabeled data, artificial perturbations causing training biases, and inadequate use of raw image information, especially low-frequency (LF) and high-frequency (HF) components.To address these challenges, we propose a Wavelet Transform based Bidirectional Copy-Paste SSMIS framework, named WT-BCP, which improves upon the Mean Teacher approach. Our method enhances unlabeled data understanding by copying random crops between labeled and unlabeled images and employs WT to extract LF and HF details.We propose a multi-input and multi-output model named XNet-Plus, to receive the fused information after WT. Moreover, consistency training among multiple outputs helps to mitigate learning biases introduced by artificial perturbations. During consistency training, the mixed images resulting from WT are fed into both models, with the student model's output being supervised by pseudo-labels and ground-truth. Extensive experiments conducted on 2D and 3D datasets confirm the effectiveness of our model.Code: https://github.com/simzhangbest/WT-BCP.

cs.CV↗

Uncertainty Calibration for Counterfactual Propensity Estimation in Recommendation

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) is a reliable indicator of online customers' preferences, making it crucial for developing recommender systems. A major challenge in predicting CVR is severe selection bias, arising from users' inherent self-selection behavior and the system's item selection process. To mitigate this issue, the inverse propensity score (IPS) is employed to weight the prediction error of each observed instance. However, current propensity score estimations are unreliable due to the lack of a quality measure. To address this, we evaluate the quality of propensity scores from the perspective of uncertainty calibration, proposing the use of Expected Calibration Error (ECE) as a measure of propensity-score quality, which quantifies the extent to which predicted probabilities are overconfident by assessing the difference between predicted probabilities and actual observed frequencies. Miscalibrated propensity scores can lead to distorted IPS weights, thereby compromising the debiasing process in CVR prediction. In this paper, we introduce a model-agnostic calibration framework for propensity-based debiasing of CVR predictions. Theoretical analysis on bias and generalization bounds demonstrates the superiority of calibrated propensity estimates over uncalibrated ones. Experiments conducted on the Coat, Yahoo and KuaiRand datasets show improved uncertainty calibration, as evidenced by lower ECE values, leading to enhanced CVR prediction outcomes.

cs.AI↗

Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

We address the task of Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) under the zero-shot setting. Zero-shot VLN-CE is particularly challenging due to the absence of expert demonstrations for training and minimal environment structural prior to guide navigation. To confront these challenges, we propose a Constraint-Aware Navigator (CA-Nav), which reframes zero-shot VLN-CE as a sequential, constraint-aware sub-instruction completion process. CA-Nav continuously translates sub-instructions into navigation plans using two core modules: the Constraint-Aware Sub-instruction Manager (CSM) and the Constraint-Aware Value Mapper (CVM). CSM defines the completion criteria for decomposed sub-instructions as constraints and tracks navigation progress by switching sub-instructions in a constraint-aware manner. CVM, guided by CSM's constraints, generates a value map on the fly and refines it using superpixel clustering to improve navigation stability. CA-Nav achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two VLN-CE benchmarks, surpassing the previous best method by 12 percent and 13 percent in Success Rate on the validation unseen splits of R2R-CE and RxR-CE, respectively. Moreover, CA-Nav demonstrates its effectiveness in real-world robot deployments across various indoor scenes and instructions.

cs.RO↗

MME-Unify: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models

Existing MLLM benchmarks face significant challenges in evaluating Unified MLLMs (U-MLLMs) due to: 1) lack of standardized benchmarks for traditional tasks, leading to inconsistent comparisons; 2) absence of benchmarks for mixed-modality generation, which fails to assess multimodal reasoning capabilities. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to systematically assess U-MLLMs. Our benchmark includes: Standardized Traditional Task Evaluation. We sample from 12 datasets, covering 10 tasks with 30 subtasks, ensuring consistent and fair comparisons across studies." 2. Unified Task Assessment. We introduce five novel tasks testing multimodal reasoning, including image editing, commonsense QA with image generation, and geometric reasoning. 3. Comprehensive Model Benchmarking. We evaluate 12 leading U-MLLMs, such as Janus-Pro, EMU3, VILA-U, and Gemini2-flash, alongside specialized understanding (e.g., Claude-3.5-Sonnet) and generation models (e.g., DALL-E-3). Our findings reveal substantial performance gaps in existing U-MLLMs, highlighting the need for more robust models capable of handling mixed-modality tasks effectively. The code and evaluation data can be found in https://mme-unify.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

SINCon: Mitigate LLM-Generated Malicious Message Injection Attack for Rumor Detection

In the era of rapidly evolving large language models (LLMs), state-of-the-art rumor detection systems, particularly those based on Message Propagation Trees (MPTs), which represent a conversation tree with the post as its root and the replies as its descendants, are facing increasing threats from adversarial attacks that leverage LLMs to generate and inject malicious messages. Existing methods are based on the assumption that different nodes exhibit varying degrees of influence on predictions. They define nodes with high predictive influence as important nodes and target them for attacks. If the model treats nodes' predictive influence more uniformly, attackers will find it harder to target high predictive influence nodes. In this paper, we propose Similarizing the predictive Influence of Nodes with Contrastive Learning (SINCon), a defense mechanism that encourages the model to learn graph representations where nodes with varying importance have a more uniform influence on predictions. Extensive experiments on the Twitter and Weibo datasets demonstrate that SINCon not only preserves high classification accuracy on clean data but also significantly enhances resistance against LLM-driven message injection attacks.

cs.CR↗

Aligning Multimodal LLM with Human Preference: A Survey

Large language models (LLMs) can handle a wide variety of general tasks with simple prompts, without the need for task-specific training. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built upon LLMs, have demonstrated impressive potential in tackling complex tasks involving visual, auditory, and textual data. However, critical issues related to truthfulness, safety, o1-like reasoning, and alignment with human preference remain insufficiently addressed. This gap has spurred the emergence of various alignment algorithms, each targeting different application scenarios and optimization goals. Recent studies have shown that alignment algorithms are a powerful approach to resolving the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of alignment algorithms for MLLMs. Specifically, we explore four key aspects: (1) the application scenarios covered by alignment algorithms, including general image understanding, multi-image, video, and audio, and extended multimodal applications; (2) the core factors in constructing alignment datasets, including data sources, model responses, and preference annotations; (3) the benchmarks used to evaluate alignment algorithms; and (4) a discussion of potential future directions for the development of alignment algorithms. This work seeks to help researchers organize current advancements in the field and inspire better alignment methods. The project page of this paper is available at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models/tree/Alignment.

cs.CV↗

MAO: Efficient Model-Agnostic Optimization of Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Though CLIP-based prompt tuning significantly enhances pre-trained Vision-Language Models, existing research focuses on reconstructing the model architecture, e.g., additional loss calculation and meta-networks. These approaches generally lead to increased complexity and extended training cost. To maintain the efficiency of the tuning process, we propose plug-and-play Model-Agnostic Optimization (MAO) for prompt tuning. Without altering any components of the prompt tuning backbone, we introduce a Data-Driven Enhancement framework to optimize the distribution of the initial data, and incorporate an Alterable Regularization module to boost the task-specific feature processing pipeline, thereby improving overall performance while maintaining low computational cost. Extensive experiments on MAO demonstrate its outstanding performance and efficiency. The code of MAO is available at: https://github.com/JREion/M.A.O .

cs.CV↗

Bootstrap Your Own Context Length

We introduce a bootstrapping approach to train long-context language models by exploiting their short-context capabilities only. Our method utilizes a simple agent workflow to synthesize diverse long-context instruction tuning data, thereby eliminating the necessity for manual data collection and annotation. The proposed data synthesis workflow requires only a short-context language model, a text retriever, and a document collection, all of which are readily accessible within the open-source ecosystem. Subsequently, language models are fine-tuned using the synthesized data to extend their context lengths. In this manner, we effectively transfer the short-context capabilities of language models to long-context scenarios through a bootstrapping process. We conduct experiments with the open-source Llama-3 family of models and demonstrate that our method can successfully extend the context length to up to 1M tokens, achieving superior performance across various benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

Agents Play Thousands of 3D Video Games

We present PORTAL, a novel framework for developing artificial intelligence agents capable of playing thousands of 3D video games through language-guided policy generation. By transforming decision-making problems into language modeling tasks, our approach leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate behavior trees represented in domain-specific language (DSL). This method eliminates the computational burden associated with traditional reinforcement learning approaches while preserving strategic depth and rapid adaptability. Our framework introduces a hybrid policy structure that combines rule-based nodes with neural network components, enabling both high-level strategic reasoning and precise low-level control. A dual-feedback mechanism incorporating quantitative game metrics and vision-language model analysis facilitates iterative policy improvement at both tactical and strategic levels. The resulting policies are instantaneously deployable, human-interpretable, and capable of generalizing across diverse gaming environments. Experimental results demonstrate PORTAL's effectiveness across thousands of first-person shooter (FPS) games, showcasing significant improvements in development efficiency, policy generalization, and behavior diversity compared to traditional approaches. PORTAL represents a significant advancement in game AI development, offering a practical solution for creating sophisticated agents that can operate across thousands of commercial video games with minimal development overhead. Experiment results on the 3D video games are best viewed on https://zhongwen.one/projects/portal .

cs.LG↗

DPC: Dual-Prompt Collaboration for Tuning Vision-Language Models

The Base-New Trade-off (BNT) problem universally exists during the optimization of CLIP-based prompt tuning, where continuous fine-tuning on base (target) classes leads to a simultaneous decrease of generalization ability on new (unseen) classes. Existing approaches attempt to regulate the prompt tuning process to balance BNT by appending constraints. However, imposed on the same target prompt, these constraints fail to fully avert the mutual exclusivity between the optimization directions for base and new. As a novel solution to this challenge, we propose the plug-and-play Dual-Prompt Collaboration (DPC) framework, the first that decoupling the optimization processes of base and new tasks at the prompt level. Specifically, we clone a learnable parallel prompt based on the backbone prompt, and introduce a variable Weighting-Decoupling framework to independently control the optimization directions of dual prompts specific to base or new tasks, thus avoiding the conflict in generalization. Meanwhile, we propose a Dynamic Hard Negative Optimizer, utilizing dual prompts to construct a more challenging optimization task on base classes for enhancement. For interpretability, we prove the feature channel invariance of the prompt vector during the optimization process, providing theoretical support for the Weighting-Decoupling of DPC. Extensive experiments on multiple backbones demonstrate that DPC can significantly improve base performance without introducing any external knowledge beyond the base classes, while maintaining generalization to new classes. Code is available at: https://github.com/JREion/DPC.

cs.CV↗

Machine-learning heat flux closure for multi-moment fluid modeling of nonlinear Landau damping

Nonlinear plasma physics problems are usually simulated through comprehensive modeling of phase space. The extreme computational cost of such simulations has motivated the development of multi-moment fluid models. However, a major challenge has been finding a suitable fluid closure for these fluid models. Recent developments in physics-informed machine learning have led to a renewed interest in constructing accurate fluid closure terms. In this study, we take an approach that integrates kinetic physics from the first-principles Vlasov simulations into a fluid model (through the heat flux closure term) using the Fourier neural operator - a neural network architecture. Without resolving the phase space dynamics, this new fluid model is capable of capturing the nonlinear evolution of the Landau damping process that exactly matches the Vlasov simulation results. This machine learning-assisted new approach provides a computationally affordable framework that surpasses previous fluid models in accurately modeling the kinetic evolution of complex plasma systems.

physics.plasm-ph↗

Test-Time Discovery via Hashing Memory

We introduce Test-Time Discovery (TTD) as a novel task that addresses class shifts during testing, requiring models to simultaneously identify emerging categories while preserving previously learned ones. A key challenge in TTD is distinguishing newly discovered classes from those already identified. To address this, we propose a training-free, hash-based memory mechanism that enhances class discovery through fine-grained comparisons with past test samples. Leveraging the characteristics of unknown classes, our approach introduces hash representation based on feature scale and directions, utilizing Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) for efficient grouping of similar samples. This enables test samples to be easily and quickly compared with relevant past instances. Furthermore, we design a collaborative classification strategy, combining a prototype classifier for known classes with an LSH-based classifier for novel ones. To enhance reliability, we incorporate a self-correction mechanism that refines memory labels through hash-based neighbor retrieval, ensuring more stable and accurate class assignments. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves good discovery of novel categories while maintaining performance on known classes, establishing a new paradigm in model testing. Our code is available at https://github.com/fanlyu/ttd.

cs.CV↗

Personalized Text Generation with Contrastive Activation Steering

Personalized text generation aims to infer users' writing style preferences from their historical texts and generate outputs that faithfully reflect these stylistic characteristics. Existing solutions primarily adopt two paradigms: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). While these approaches have advanced the field, they suffer from two critical limitations: (1) the entanglement of content semantics and stylistic patterns in historical texts impedes accurate modeling of user-specific writing preferences; and (2) scalability challenges arising from both RAG's inference latency by retrieval operations and PEFT's parameter storage requirements for per user model. To overcome these limitations, we propose StyleVector, a training-free framework that disentangles and represents personalized writing style as a vector in LLM's activation space, enabling style-steered generation during inference without requiring costly retrieval or parameter storage. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a significant 8% relative improvement in personalized generation while reducing storage requirements by 1700 times over PEFT method.

cs.CL↗