arXiv subjects

Qinghua Yao

Publications and source records attributed to Qinghua Yao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SeaEvo: Advancing Algorithm Discovery with Strategy Space Evolution

Large Language Model (LLM)-guided evolutionary search is increasingly used for automated algorithm discovery, yet most current methods track search progress primarily through executable programs and scalar fitness. Even when natural-language reasoning is used through heuristic descriptions or reflection, it typically remains transient mutation context or unstructured memory, rather than organized as persistent population-level state over strategic directions. As a result, evolutionary search can struggle to distinguish syntactically different implementations of the same idea, preserve lower-fitness but strategically promising directions, or detect when an entire family of strategies has saturated. We introduce \model, a modular strategy-space layer that turns language-level strategic reasoning into first-class population-level evolutionary state in LLM-driven program search. \model represents each candidate program with an explicit natural-language strategy, clusters the archive by strategy semantics, retrieves behaviorally complementary inspirations, and periodically navigates the strategy landscape to avoid saturated directions. Without modifying the underlying evolutionary algorithms, \model improves existing evolutionary backbones across algorithm discovery, systems optimization, and agent-scaffold design tasks in most settings. Across four systems benchmarks, \model achieves a 20.6% average relative improvement, with the best single run on Prism scoring 3$\times$ higher. These results suggest that persistent strategy representations provide a practical mechanism for improving the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of LLM-guided evolutionary search, pointing toward compound AI systems whose search capabilities benefit from the structured accumulation and reuse of algorithmic strategies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

ShapLoRA: Allocation of Low-rank Adaption on Large Language Models via Shapley Value Inspired Importance Estimation

Low-rank adaption (LoRA) is a representative method in the field of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), and is key to Democratizating the modern large language models (LLMs). The vanilla LoRA is implemented with uniform ranks, and the recent literature have found that properly allocating ranks on the LLM backbones results in performance boosts. However, the previous rank allocation methods have limitations since they rely on inexplanable and unreliable importance measures for the LoRA ranks. To address the above issues, we propose the ShapLoRA framework. Inspired by the explanable attribution measure Shapley Value, we combine the sensitivity-based measures with the idea of coalitions in the collaborative games among LoRA ranks, and propose a more explainable importance measure called Shapley sensitivity. In addition, we optimize the workflow of the existing works by: (a) calculating Shapley sensitivity on a separate validation set; (b) Setting up the allocating-retraining procedures for fair comparisons. We have conducted experiments on various challenging tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that our ShapLoRA method can outperform the recent baselines with comparable tunable parameters.\footnote{Codes and fine-tuned models will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

X-VFL: A New Vertical Federated Learning Framework with Cross Completion and Decision Subspace Alignment

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables collaborative learning by integrating disjoint feature subsets from multiple clients/parties. However, VFL typically faces two key challenges: i) the requirement for perfectly aligned data samples across all clients (missing features are not allowed); ii) the requirement for joint collaborative inference/prediction involving all clients (it does not support locally independent inference on a single client). To address these challenges, we propose X-VFL, a new VFL framework designed to deal with the non-aligned data samples with (partially) missing features and to support locally independent inference of new data samples for each client. In particular, we design two novel modules in X-VFL: Cross Completion (XCom) and Decision Subspace Alignment (DS-Align). XCom can complete/reconstruct missing features for non-aligned data samples by leveraging information from other clients. DS-Align aligns local features with completed and global features across all clients within the decision subspace, thus enabling locally independent inference at each client. Moreover, we provide convergence theorems for different algorithms used in training X-VFL, showing an $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate for SGD-type algorithms and an $O(1/T)$ rate for PAGE-type algorithms, where $T$ denotes the number of training update steps. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that X-VFL significantly outperforms existing methods, e.g., achieving a 15% improvement in accuracy on the image CIFAR-10 dataset and a 43% improvement on the medical MIMIC-III dataset. These results validate the practical effectiveness and superiority of X-VFL, particularly in scenarios involving partially missing features and locally independent inference.

cs.LG↗