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Ping Hou

Publications and source records attributed to Ping Hou.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Xiaomi-TabLDM: A Tabular Foundation Model Technical Report

We introduce Xiaomi-TabLDM, a tabular large data foundation model for classification and regression via in-context learning, which delivers superior prediction accuracy without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Pretrained exclusively on synthetic data generated from structural causal models (SCMs), our model enables more flexible context utilization and more efficient capacity scaling. i) A new performance standard. Strong regression performance across benchmarks: Xiaomi-TabLDM ranks 1st on OpenML-CTR23 and 2nd on regression across TALENT, TabArena, and BCCO, demonstrating consistently strong regression performance across four complementary benchmark suites. Favorable performance--efficiency trade-off: Xiaomi-TabLDM combines strong predictive performance with substantially lower computational cost. For example, on TabArena regression, it achieves the second-highest Elo while using 82% less training time and 68% less prediction time than the top-ranked TabFM. ii) Large-scale synthetic pretraining. Xiaomi-TabLDM expands the coverage and diversity of synthetic tabular data used for pretraining. We also adopt a three-stage training strategy together with dual-stream feature grouping, lightweight Attention Residual, and sparse Mixture-of-Experts, enabling Xiaomi-TabLDM to learn richer feature interactions and expert specialization across diverse tabular tasks. iii) Test-time scaling. Xiaomi-TabLDM further extends tabular prediction through test-time compute scaling, where allocating additional computation at inference time consistently improves predictive performance over the base model.

cs.AI

Specification-Guided Synthesis of Deadlock-Free Communication Protocol Refinements with Large Language Models

Ensuring behavioural correctness in communication protocols is a central challenge in distributed software systems, as subtle inconsistencies can lead to deadlocks. In such settings, protocol refinement - the safe substitution of a protocol that preserves correctness and compatibility with other components - is essential. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation and program synthesis, yet lack mechanisms to reliably produce outputs with correct behaviour. Formal specification approaches, such as multiparty session types (MPST), offer rigorous guarantees, including deadlock freedom, but provide limited support for automatically constructing protocol refinements. In this paper, we present Syntropy, a framework for synthesising protocol refinements guided by MPST specifications and LLMs. It incorporates refinement constraints directly into the generation process, ensuring the generated variants satisfy these guarantees. Our comprehensive evaluation indicates that Syntropy achieves 95.6%-99.5% validity while maintaining high syntactic correctness, and produces diverse, non-trivial refinements across multiple LLMs.

cs.SE

Fearless Asynchronous Communications with Timed Multiparty Session Protocols

Session types using affinity and exception handling mechanisms have been developed to ensure the communication safety of protocols implemented in concurrent and distributed programming languages. Nevertheless, current affine session types are inadequate for specifying real-world asynchronous protocols, as they are usually imposed by time constraints which enable timeout exceptions to prevent indefinite blocking while awaiting valid messages. This paper proposes the first formal integration of affinity, time constraints, timeouts, and time-failure handling based on multiparty session types for supporting reliability in asynchronous distributed systems. With this theory, we statically guarantee that asynchronous timed communication is deadlock-free, communication safe, while being fearless -- never hindered by timeout errors or abrupt terminations. To implement our theory, we introduce a Rust toolchain designed to facilitate the implementation of safe affine timed protocols. Our toolchain leverages generic types and the time library to handle timed communications, integrated with optional types for affinity. We evaluate our approach by extending diverse examples from the literature to incorporate time and timeouts, demonstrating that our solution incurs negligible overhead compared with an untimed implementation. We also showcase the correctness by construction of our approach by implementing various real-world use cases, including a remote data protocol from the Internet of Remote Things domain, as well as protocols from real-time systems like Android motion sensors and smartwatches.

cs.PL

Less is More Revisited: Association with Global Protocols and Multiparty Sessions

Ensuring correctness of communication in distributed systems remains challenging. To address this, Multiparty session types (MPST), initially introduced by Honda et al. [52, 53], offer a type discipline in which a programmer or architect specifies an overall view of communication as a global protocol (global type), and each distributed program is locally type-checked against its end-point projection. In practice, the MPST framework has been integrated into over 25 programming languages or tools. Ten years after the emergence of MPST, Scalas and Yoshida [84] discovered that existing proofs of type safety using end-point projection with mergeability are flawed, where the mergeability operator enlarges the typability of MPST end-point programs, admits easy implementation, and is more efficient than alternative approaches, including model checking. Nevertheless, following the result in [84], the soundness of end-point projection (with mergeability) has been interpreted in the literature as problematic. We clarify this concern by proposing a new general proof technique for type soundness (subject reduction) of multiparty session $\pi$-calculus, which relies on an association relation between the behavioural semantics of a global type and its end-point projection. With this approach, behavioural properties, namely session fidelity, deadlock freedom, and liveness, are also guaranteed based on global types. Additionally, we provide detailed comparisons with existing MPST typing systems and discuss their respective proof methods for type soundness.

cs.PL

Crash-Stop Failures in Asynchronous Multiparty Session Types

Session types provide a typing discipline for message-passing systems. However, their theory often assumes an ideal world: one in which everything is reliable and without failures. Yet this is in stark contrast with distributed systems in the real world. To address this limitation, we introduce a new asynchronous multiparty session types (MPST) theory with crash-stop failures, where processes may crash arbitrarily and cease to interact after crashing. We augment asynchronous MPST and processes with crash handling branches, and integrate crash-stop failure semantics into types and processes. Our approach requires no user-level syntax extensions for global types, and features a formalisation of global semantics, which captures complex behaviours induced by crashed/crash handling processes. Our new theory covers the entire spectrum, ranging from the ideal world of total reliability to entirely unreliable scenarios where any process may crash, using optional reliability assumptions. Under these assumptions, we demonstrate the sound and complete correspondence between global and local type semantics, which guarantee deadlock-freedom, protocol conformance, and liveness of well-typed processes by construction, even in the presence of crashes.

cs.LO

The Use of Quantitative Metrics and Machine Learning to Predict Radiologist Interpretations of MRI Image Quality and Artifacts

A dataset of 3D-GRE and 3D-TSE brain 3T post contrast T1-weighted images as part of a quality improvement project were collected and shown to five neuro-radiologists who evaluated each sequence for both image quality and imaging artifacts. The same scans were processed using the MRQy tool for objective, quantitative image quality metrics. Using the combined radiologist and quantitative metrics dataset, a decision tree classifier with a bagging ensemble approach was trained to predict radiologist assessment using the quantitative metrics. A machine learning model was developed for the following three tasks: (1) determine the best model / performance for each MRI sequence and evaluation metric, (2) determine the best model / performance across all MRI sequences for each evaluation metric, and (3) determine the best general model / performance across all MRI sequences and evaluations. Model performance for imaging artifact was slightly higher than image quality, for example, the final generalized model AUROC for image quality was 0.77 (0.41 - 0.84, 95% CI) while imaging artifact was 0.78 (0.60 - 0.93, 95% CI). Further, it was noted that the generalized model performed slightly better than the individual models (AUROC 0.69 for 3D-GRE image quality, for example), indicating the value in comprehensive training data for these applications. These models could be deployed in the clinic as automatic checks for real-time image acquisition to prevent patient re-scanning requiring another appointment after retrospective radiologist analysis or improve reader confidence in the study. Further work needs to be done to validate the model described here on an external dataset. The results presented here suggest that MRQy could be used as a foundation for quantitative metrics as a surrogate for radiologist assessment.

physics.med-ph

Designing Asynchronous Multiparty Protocols with Crash-Stop Failures

Session types provide a typing discipline for message-passing systems. However, most session type approaches assume an ideal world: one in which everything is reliable and without failures. Yet this is in stark contrast with distributed systems in the real world. To address this limitation, we introduce Teatrino, a code generation toolchain that utilises asynchronous multiparty session types (MPST) with crash-stop semantics to support failure handling protocols. We augment asynchronous MPST and processes with crash handling branches. Our approach requires no user-level syntax extensions for global types and features a formalisation of global semantics, which captures complex behaviours induced by crashed/crash handling processes. The sound and complete correspondence between global and local type semantics guarantees deadlock-freedom, protocol conformance, and liveness of typed processes in the presence of crashes. Our theory is implemented in the toolchain Teatrino, which provides correctness by construction. Teatrino extends the Scribble multiparty protocol language to generate protocol-conforming Scala code, using the Effpi concurrent programming library. We extend both Scribble and Effpi to support crash-stop behaviour. We demonstrate the feasibility of our methodology and evaluate Teatrino with examples extended from both session type and distributed systems literature.

cs.PL

Quantified Differential Temporal Dynamic Logic for Verifying Properties of Distributed Hybrid Systems

We combine quantified differential dynamic logic (QdL) for reasoning about the possible behavior of distributed hybrid systems with temporal logic for reasoning about the temporal behavior during their operation. Our logic supports verification of temporal and non-temporal properties of distributed hybrid systems and provides a uniform treatment of discrete transitions, continuous evolution, and dynamic dimensionality-changes. For our combined logic, we generalize the semantics of dynamic modalities to refer to hybrid traces instead of final states. Further, we prove that this gives a conservative extension of QdL for distributed hybrid systems. On this basis, we provide a modular verification calculus that reduces correctness of temporal behavior of distributed hybrid systems to non-temporal reasoning, and prove that we obtain a complete axiomatization relative to the non-temporal base logic QdL. Using this calculus, we analyze temporal safety properties in a distributed air traffic control system where aircraft can appear dynamically.

cs.LO

LPC(ID): A Sequent Calculus Proof System for Propositional Logic Extended with Inductive Definitions

The logic FO(ID) uses ideas from the field of logic programming to extend first order logic with non-monotone inductive definitions. Such logic formally extends logic programming, abductive logic programming and datalog, and thus formalizes the view on these formalisms as logics of (generalized) inductive definitions. The goal of this paper is to study a deductive inference method for PC(ID), which is the propositional fragment of FO(ID). We introduce a formal proof system based on the sequent calculus (Gentzen-style deductive system) for this logic. As PC(ID) is an integration of classical propositional logic and propositional inductive definitions, our sequent calculus proof system integrates inference rules for propositional calculus and definitions. We present the soundness and completeness of this proof system with respect to a slightly restricted fragment of PC(ID). We also provide some complexity results for PC(ID). By developing the proof system for PC(ID), it helps us to enhance the understanding of proof-theoretic foundations of FO(ID), and therefore to investigate useful proof systems for FO(ID).

cs.LO