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Qian Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Qian Huang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2024

Dissipativeness of the hyperbolic quadrature method of moments for kinetic equations

This paper presents a dissipativeness analysis of a quadrature method of moments (called HyQMOM) for the one-dimensional BGK equation. The method has exhibited its good performance in numerous applications. However, its mathematical foundation has not been clarified. Here we present an analytical proof of the strict hyperbolicity of the HyQMOM-induced moment closure systems by introducing a polynomial-based closure technique. As a byproduct, a class of numerical schemes for the HyQMOM system is shown to be realizability preserving under CFL-type conditions. We also show that the system preserves the dissipative properties of the kinetic equation by verifying a certain structural stability condition. The proof uses a newly introduced affine invariance and the homogeneity of the HyQMOM and heavily relies on the theory of orthogonal polynomials associated with realizable moments, in particular, the moments of the standard normal distribution.

math.NA↗
arXiv2024

MLAgentBench: Evaluating Language Agents on Machine Learning Experimentation

A central aspect of machine learning research is experimentation, the process of designing and running experiments, analyzing the results, and iterating towards some positive outcome (e.g., improving accuracy). Could agents driven by powerful language models perform machine learning experimentation effectively? To answer this question, we introduce MLAgentBench, a suite of 13 tasks ranging from improving model performance on CIFAR-10 to recent research problems like BabyLM. For each task, an agent can perform actions like reading/writing files, executing code, and inspecting outputs. We then construct an agent that can perform ML experimentation based on ReAct framework. We benchmark agents based on Claude v1.0, Claude v2.1, Claude v3 Opus, GPT-4, GPT-4-turbo, Gemini-Pro, and Mixtral and find that a Claude v3 Opus agent is the best in terms of success rate. It can build compelling ML models over many tasks in MLAgentBench with 37.5% average success rate. Our agents also display highly interpretable plans and actions. However, the success rates vary considerably; they span from 100% on well-established older datasets to as low as 0% on recent Kaggle challenges created potentially after the underlying LM was trained. Finally, we identify several key challenges for LM-based agents such as long-term planning and reducing hallucination. Our code is released at https://github.com/snap-stanford/MLAgentBench.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2024

Real-time 3D human action recognition based on Hyperpoint sequence

Real-time 3D human action recognition has broad industrial applications, such as surveillance, human-computer interaction, and healthcare monitoring. By relying on complex spatio-temporal local encoding, most existing point cloud sequence networks capture spatio-temporal local structures to recognize 3D human actions. To simplify the point cloud sequence modeling task, we propose a lightweight and effective point cloud sequence network referred to as SequentialPointNet for real-time 3D action recognition. Instead of capturing spatio-temporal local structures, SequentialPointNet encodes the temporal evolution of static appearances to recognize human actions. Firstly, we define a novel type of point data, Hyperpoint, to better describe the temporally changing human appearances. A theoretical foundation is provided to clarify the information equivalence property for converting point cloud sequences into Hyperpoint sequences. Secondly, the point cloud sequence modeling task is decomposed into a Hyperpoint embedding task and a Hyperpoint sequence modeling task. Specifically, for Hyperpoint embedding, the static point cloud technology is employed to convert point cloud sequences into Hyperpoint sequences, which introduces inherent frame-level parallelism; for Hyperpoint sequence modeling, a Hyperpoint-Mixer module is designed as the basic building block to learning the spatio-temporal features of human actions. Extensive experiments on three widely-used 3D action recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed SequentialPointNet achieves competitive classification performance with up to 10X faster than existing approaches.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2024

Select2Col: Leveraging Spatial-Temporal Importance of Semantic Information for Efficient Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception by leveraging the shared semantic information plays a crucial role in overcoming the individual limitations of isolated agents. However, existing collaborative perception methods tend to focus solely on the spatial features of semantic information, while neglecting the importance of the temporal dimension. Consequently, the potential benefits of collaboration remain underutilized. In this article, we propose Select2Col, a novel collaborative perception framework that takes into account the \underline{s}patial-t\underline{e}mpora\underline{l} importanc\underline{e} of semanti\underline{c} informa\underline{t}ion. Within the Select2Col, we develop a collaborator selection method that utilizes a lightweight graph neural network (GNN) to estimate the importance of semantic information (IoSI) of each collaborator in enhancing perception performance, thereby identifying contributive collaborators while excluding those that potentially bring negative impact. Moreover, we present a semantic information fusion algorithm called HPHA (historical prior hybrid attention), which integrates multi-scale attention and short-term attention modules to capture the IoSI in feature representation from the spatial and temporal dimensions respectively, and assigns IoSI-consistent weights for efficient fusion of information from selected collaborators. Extensive experiments on three open datasets demonstrate that our proposed Select2Col significantly improves the perception performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code associated with this research is publicly available at https://github.com/huangqzj/Select2Col/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

An Improved Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm for Solving the Problem of Investigation Path Planning

Informationization is a prevailing trend in today's world. The increasing demand for information in decision-making processes poses significant challenges for investigation activities, particularly in terms of effectively allocating limited resources to plan investigation programs. This paper addresses the investigation path planning problem by formulating it as a multi-traveling salesman problem (MTSP). Our objective is to minimize costs, and to achieve this, we propose a chaotic artificial fish swarm algorithm based on multiple population differential evolution (DE-CAFSA). To overcome the limitations of the artificial fish swarm algorithm, such as low optimization accuracy and the inability to consider global and local information, we incorporate adaptive field of view and step size adjustments, replace random behavior with the 2-opt operation, and introduce chaos theory and sub-optimal solutions to enhance optimization accuracy and search performance. Additionally, we integrate the differential evolution algorithm to create a hybrid algorithm that leverages the complementary advantages of both approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that DE-CAFSA outperforms other algorithms on various public datasets of different sizes, as well as showcasing excellent performance on the examples proposed in this study.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2023

Multiscale Motion-Aware and Spatial-Temporal-Channel Contextual Coding Network for Learned Video Compression

Recently, learned video compression has achieved exciting performance. Following the traditional hybrid prediction coding framework, most learned methods generally adopt the motion estimation motion compensation (MEMC) method to remove inter-frame redundancy. However, inaccurate motion vector (MV) usually lead to the distortion of reconstructed frame. In addition, most approaches ignore the spatial and channel redundancy. To solve above problems, we propose a motion-aware and spatial-temporal-channel contextual coding based video compression network (MASTC-VC), which learns the latent representation and uses variational autoencoders (VAEs) to capture the characteristics of intra-frame pixels and inter-frame motion. Specifically, we design a multiscale motion-aware module (MS-MAM) to estimate spatial-temporal-channel consistent motion vector by utilizing the multiscale motion prediction information in a coarse-to-fine way. On the top of it, we further propose a spatial-temporal-channel contextual module (STCCM), which explores the correlation of latent representation to reduce the bit consumption from spatial, temporal and channel aspects respectively. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed MASTC-VC is surprior to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on three public benchmark datasets. More specifically, our method brings average 10.15\% BD-rate savings against H.265/HEVC (HM-16.20) in PSNR metric and average 23.93\% BD-rate savings against H.266/VVC (VTM-13.2) in MS-SSIM metric.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2023

Holistic Evaluation of Language Models

Language models (LMs) are becoming the foundation for almost all major language technologies, but their capabilities, limitations, and risks are not well understood. We present Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) to improve the transparency of language models. First, we taxonomize the vast space of potential scenarios (i.e. use cases) and metrics (i.e. desiderata) that are of interest for LMs. Then we select a broad subset based on coverage and feasibility, noting what's missing or underrepresented (e.g. question answering for neglected English dialects, metrics for trustworthiness). Second, we adopt a multi-metric approach: We measure 7 metrics (accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness, bias, toxicity, and efficiency) for each of 16 core scenarios when possible (87.5% of the time). This ensures metrics beyond accuracy don't fall to the wayside, and that trade-offs are clearly exposed. We also perform 7 targeted evaluations, based on 26 targeted scenarios, to analyze specific aspects (e.g. reasoning, disinformation). Third, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 30 prominent language models (spanning open, limited-access, and closed models) on all 42 scenarios, 21 of which were not previously used in mainstream LM evaluation. Prior to HELM, models on average were evaluated on just 17.9% of the core HELM scenarios, with some prominent models not sharing a single scenario in common. We improve this to 96.0%: now all 30 models have been densely benchmarked on the same core scenarios and metrics under standardized conditions. Our evaluation surfaces 25 top-level findings. For full transparency, we release all raw model prompts and completions publicly for further analysis, as well as a general modular toolkit. We intend for HELM to be a living benchmark for the community, continuously updated with new scenarios, metrics, and models.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

DD-GCN: Directed Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely used in skeleton-based human action recognition. In GCN-based methods, the spatio-temporal graph is fundamental for capturing motion patterns. However, existing approaches ignore the physical dependency and synchronized spatio-temporal correlations between joints, which limits the representation capability of GCNs. To solve these problems, we construct the directed diffusion graph for action modeling and introduce the activity partition strategy to optimize the weight sharing mechanism of graph convolution kernels. In addition, we present the spatio-temporal synchronization encoder to embed synchronized spatio-temporal semantics. Finally, we propose Directed Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (DD-GCN) for action recognition, and the experiments on three public datasets: NTU-RGB+D, NTU-RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Enhancing Nucleus Segmentation with HARU-Net: A Hybrid Attention Based Residual U-Blocks Network

Nucleus image segmentation is a crucial step in the analysis, pathological diagnosis, and classification, which heavily relies on the quality of nucleus segmentation. However, the complexity of issues such as variations in nucleus size, blurred nucleus contours, uneven staining, cell clustering, and overlapping cells poses significant challenges. Current methods for nucleus segmentation primarily rely on nuclear morphology or contour-based approaches. Nuclear morphology-based methods exhibit limited generalization ability and struggle to effectively predict irregular-shaped nuclei, while contour-based extraction methods face challenges in accurately segmenting overlapping nuclei. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a dual-branch network using hybrid attention based residual U-blocks for nucleus instance segmentation. The network simultaneously predicts target information and target contours. Additionally, we introduce a post-processing method that combines the target information and target contours to distinguish overlapping nuclei and generate an instance segmentation image. Within the network, we propose a context fusion block (CF-block) that effectively extracts and merges contextual information from the network. Extensive quantitative evaluations are conducted to assess the performance of our method. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art approaches on the BNS, MoNuSeg, CoNSeg, and CPM-17 datasets.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2023

A Voting-Stacking Ensemble of Inception Networks for Cervical Cytology Classification

Cervical cancer is one of the most severe diseases threatening women's health. Early detection and diagnosis can significantly reduce cancer risk, in which cervical cytology classification is indispensable. Researchers have recently designed many networks for automated cervical cancer diagnosis, but the limited accuracy and bulky size of these individual models cannot meet practical application needs. To address this issue, we propose a Voting-Stacking ensemble strategy, which employs three Inception networks as base learners and integrates their outputs through a voting ensemble. The samples misclassified by the ensemble model generate a new training set on which a linear classification model is trained as the meta-learner and performs the final predictions. In addition, a multi-level Stacking ensemble framework is designed to improve performance further. The method is evaluated on the SIPakMed, Herlev, and Mendeley datasets, achieving accuracies of 100%, 100%, and 100%, respectively. The experimental results outperform the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, demonstrating its potential for reducing screening workload and helping pathologists detect cervical cancer.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner

Medicine, by its nature, is a multifaceted domain that requires the synthesis of information across various modalities. Medical generative vision-language models (VLMs) make a first step in this direction and promise many exciting clinical applications. However, existing models typically have to be fine-tuned on sizeable down-stream datasets, which poses a significant limitation as in many medical applications data is scarce, necessitating models that are capable of learning from few examples in real-time. Here we propose Med-Flamingo, a multimodal few-shot learner adapted to the medical domain. Based on OpenFlamingo-9B, we continue pre-training on paired and interleaved medical image-text data from publications and textbooks. Med-Flamingo unlocks few-shot generative medical visual question answering (VQA) abilities, which we evaluate on several datasets including a novel challenging open-ended VQA dataset of visual USMLE-style problems. Furthermore, we conduct the first human evaluation for generative medical VQA where physicians review the problems and blinded generations in an interactive app. Med-Flamingo improves performance in generative medical VQA by up to 20\% in clinician's rating and firstly enables multimodal medical few-shot adaptations, such as rationale generation. We release our model, code, and evaluation app under https://github.com/snap-stanford/med-flamingo.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Pivoting on the spatial dimension for mobile telecom energy-saving

Improving energy efficiency is vital for the 5G mobile telecommunication network, while the conventional temporal shutdown strategy is exhausting its energy-saving potential. Inspired by the symmetricity between the temporal peaks and valleys and the geographical hot and cold-spots in network traffic, we propose a new strategy for telecom energy-saving which matches the base station cells with traffic hotspots as much as possible to reduce waste. We showed deductively and empirically that the probability density function of the spatial distribution of network traffic typically has a steep power-law form, which gives rise to temporally stable traffic hotspot areas that occupies only about 13% of the space and also have proper sizes suitable for spatial optimization. A simplified model hence built yields up to 19.59% energy savings for the 4G network, and 29.68% for a hypothetical 5G network, prominent margins over what the temporal shutdown approach would gain.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2023

Just One Byte (per gradient): A Note on Low-Bandwidth Decentralized Language Model Finetuning Using Shared Randomness

Language model training in distributed settings is limited by the communication cost of gradient exchanges. In this short note, we extend recent work from Malladi et al. (2023), using shared randomness to perform distributed fine-tuning with low bandwidth. The method is a natural decentralized extension of memory-efficient Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA). Each iteration, each machine seeds a Random Number Generator (RNG) to perform local reproducible perturbations on model weights and calculate and exchange scalar projected gradients, which are then used to update each model. By using a (machine, sample) identifier as the random seed, each model can regenerate one another's perturbations. As machines only exchange single-byte projected gradients, this is highly communication efficient. There are also potential privacy benefits, as projected gradients may be calculated on different training data, and models never access the other's data. Our approach not only drastically reduces communication bandwidth requirements but also accommodates dynamic addition or removal of machines during the training process and retains the memory-efficient and inference-only advantages of recent work. We perform proof-of-concept experiments to demonstrate the potential usefulness of this method, building off of rich literature on distributed optimization and memory-efficient training.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Stability analysis of an extended quadrature method of moments for kinetic equations

This paper performs a stability analysis of a class of moment closure systems derived with an extended quadrature method of moments (EQMOM) for the one-dimensional BGK equation. The class is characterized with a kernel function. A sufficient condition on the kernel is identified for the EQMOM-derived moment systems to be strictly hyperbolic. We also investigate the realizability of the moment method. Moreover, sufficient and necessary conditions are established for the two-node systems to be well-defined and strictly hyperbolic, and to preserve the dissipation property of the kinetic equation.

math.NA↗
arXiv2023

Parsel: Algorithmic Reasoning with Language Models by Composing Decompositions

Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning tasks like generating complex programs. For these tasks, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework enabling automatic implementation and validation of complex algorithms with code LLMs. With Parsel, we automatically decompose algorithmic tasks into hierarchical natural language function descriptions and then search over combinations of possible function implementations using tests. We show that Parsel can be used across domains requiring hierarchical reasoning, including program synthesis and robotic planning. We find that, using Parsel, LLMs solve more competition-level problems in the APPS dataset, resulting in pass rates over 75\% higher than prior results from directly sampling AlphaCode and Codex, while often using a smaller sample budget. Moreover, with automatically generated tests, we find that Parsel can improve the state-of-the-art pass@1 performance on HumanEval from 67\% to 85\%. We also find that LLM-generated robotic plans using Parsel are more than twice as likely to be considered accurate than directly generated plans. Lastly, we explore how Parsel addresses LLM limitations and discuss how Parsel may be useful for human programmers. We release our code at https://github.com/ezelikman/parsel

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Lexinvariant Language Models

Token embeddings, a mapping from discrete lexical symbols to continuous vectors, are at the heart of any language model (LM). However, lexical symbol meanings can also be determined and even redefined by their structural role in a long context. In this paper, we ask: is it possible for a language model to be performant without \emph{any} fixed token embeddings? Such a language model would have to rely entirely on the co-occurence and repetition of tokens in the context rather than the \textit{a priori} identity of any token. To answer this, we study \textit{lexinvariant}language models that are invariant to lexical symbols and therefore do not need fixed token embeddings in practice. First, we prove that we can construct a lexinvariant LM to converge to the true language model at a uniform rate that is polynomial in terms of the context length, with a constant factor that is sublinear in the vocabulary size. Second, to build a lexinvariant LM, we simply encode tokens using random Gaussian vectors, such that each token maps to the same representation within each sequence but different representations across sequences. Empirically, we demonstrate that it can indeed attain perplexity comparable to that of a standard language model, given a sufficiently long context. We further explore two properties of the lexinvariant language models: First, given text generated from a substitution cipher of English, it implicitly implements Bayesian in-context deciphering and infers the mapping to the underlying real tokens with high accuracy. Second, it has on average 4X better accuracy over synthetic in-context reasoning tasks. Finally, we discuss regularizing standard language models towards lexinvariance and potential practical applications.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

PRODIGY: Enabling In-context Learning Over Graphs

In-context learning is the ability of a pretrained model to adapt to novel and diverse downstream tasks by conditioning on prompt examples, without optimizing any parameters. While large language models have demonstrated this ability, how in-context learning could be performed over graphs is unexplored. In this paper, we develop \textbf{Pr}etraining \textbf{O}ver \textbf{D}iverse \textbf{I}n-Context \textbf{G}raph S\textbf{y}stems (PRODIGY), the first pretraining framework that enables in-context learning over graphs. The key idea of our framework is to formulate in-context learning over graphs with a novel \emph{prompt graph} representation, which connects prompt examples and queries. We then propose a graph neural network architecture over the prompt graph and a corresponding family of in-context pretraining objectives. With PRODIGY, the pretrained model can directly perform novel downstream classification tasks on unseen graphs via in-context learning. We provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of our framework by showcasing its strong in-context learning performance on tasks involving citation networks and knowledge graphs. Our approach outperforms the in-context learning accuracy of contrastive pretraining baselines with hard-coded adaptation by 18\% on average across all setups. Moreover, it also outperforms standard finetuning with limited data by 33\% on average with in-context learning.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Discrete-velocity-direction models of BGK-type with minimum entropy: II. Weighted models

In this series of works, we develop a discrete-velocity-direction model (DVDM) with collisions of BGK-type for simulating gas flows, where the molecular motion is confined to some prescribed directions but the speed is still a continuous variable in each orientation. In this article, we introduce a weighted function in each orientation when recovering the macroscopic parameters. Moreover, the internal molecular degrees of freedom are considered. With this weighted DVDM, we develop three submodels by incorporating the discrete velocity method, the Gaussian-extended quadrature method of moments and the Hermite spectral method in each direction. These spatial-time submodels are novel multidimensional versions corresponding to the three approaches. Numerical tests with a series of 1-D and 2-D flow problems show the efficiency of the weighted DVDM.

physics.comp-ph↗