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Xinye Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Xinye Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Floating-point autotuning with customized precisions

Reduced-precision arithmetic offers significant opportunities to improve performance, memory usage, and energy efficiency in numerical applications, provided that numerical accuracy is preserved. This work investigates automated precision tuning through customized floating-point formats with user-defined exponent and significand sizes, enabling the emulation of emerging low-precision formats and the exploration of non-standard precision configurations within a unified mixed-precision framework. The proposed methodology, implemented in the PROMISE precision autotuning tool, combines numerical validation with a systematic search to generate program variants that satisfy user-defined accuracy requirements. To address the computational cost of this exploration, a containerized benchmarking framework supports parallel execution across multiple algorithms and parameter configurations. The approach is evaluated on a suite of numerical programs, including linear solvers and applications from the Rodinia benchmark. Results show that a substantial proportion of variables can be safely reduced to lower precision while preserving accuracy, indicating that standard double precision is often over-provisioned. These findings highlight the potential of automated precision tuning to derive efficient mixed-precision configurations tailored to application-specific accuracy requirements.

cs.MS↗

Integer-Quantized Hierarchical Matrices with Adaptive Bit Allocation

We present an adaptive bitwidth allocation method for quantizing low-rank factors in hierarchical matrices in order to decrease storage while meeting a given constraint on their reconstruction error. For the bitwidth allocation we formulate a discrete storage minimization problem and show that an optimal assignment can give larger singular values at least as many bits as smaller ones. We further develop a greedy algorithm that meets the specified max-norm quantization error budget. We investigate a hierarchical block partition in which all of the non-diagonal blocks are represented by quantized low-rank factors and only dense blocks remain dense; in this way a global reconstruction bound related to $η_k$ and $R_k$ is obtained, with the former and latter being bounds on the truncation and reconstruction arithmetic errors, respectively. Extensive simulations, carried out with kernel and BEM matrices under block-relative budgets, indicate that the proposed method achieves a reduction in storage of up to $44.3\times$ when compared to storing the complete matrix densely in FP64, and a reduction of up to $5.70\times$ when compared to the FP64 low-rank factors within the same partition, together with measured reconstruction errors that remained below the maximum norm bounds in all the hierarchical tests.

math.NA↗

ROTE: Benchmarking Neural Memorization on Complexity-Controlled Symbolic Sequences

We introduce ROTE (RollOut Testing of Exact memorization), a benchmarking protocol for evaluating symbolic memorization of neural architectures. We study memorization and the extension of symbolic rules in neural sequence models by using sequences whose complexity is regulated by Lempel--Ziv--Welch (LZW) compression. Under ROTE, each architecture is trained as the same finite-context conditional predictor and is evaluated using teacher-forced one-step prediction as well as closed-loop rollout on the withheld symbols. Following a shared prediction-and-rollout evaluation routine, the benchmark evaluates gated recurrent, minimal recurrent, attention-based, and hybrid recurrent-attention models with their native computational characteristics preserved. Beyond standard predictive metrics, the benchmark reports normalized string distances, training time, memory usage, and parameter count across an LZW-complexity sweep. The study establishes a connection between the complexity of algorithmic sequences and the memorization capacity of neural architectures, revealing the trade-offs involving memorization quality, rollout stability, and computational expense. Our software and reproducible experimental code can be obtained from https://github.com/nla-group/rote.

cs.LG↗

Precision autotuning for linear solvers via contextual bandit-based RL

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for \xy{responsive} precision tuning for linear solvers, which can be extended to general algorithms. The framework is formulated as a contextual bandit problem and solved using incremental action-value estimation with a discretized state space to select optimal precision configurations for computational steps, \xy{retaining} precision and computational efficiency. To verify its effectiveness, we apply the framework to iterative refinement for solving linear systems $Ax = b$. In this application, our approach dynamically chooses precisions based on calculated features from the system while maintaining acceptable accuracy and convergence. In detail, an action-value estimator takes discretized features (e.g., approximate condition number and matrix norm) as input and outputs estimated action values, from which a policy selects the actions (chosen precision configurations for specific steps), optimized via an $ε$-greedy strategy to maximize a multi-objective reward to balance accuracy and computational cost. Empirical results demonstrate effective precision selection, \xy{increasing the use of lower-precision arithmetic} while maintaining accuracy comparable to double-precision baselines. \xy{We further evaluate the learned policies in a compiled CPU GMRES-IR implementation using FP16, FP32, and FP64 arithmetic for solver-level native validation.} The framework generalizes to diverse out-of-sample data and provides insights into applying RL precision selection to other numerical algorithms, advancing mixed-precision numerical methods in scientific computing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on precision autotuning with RL with verification on unseen datasets.

cs.LG↗

CAT-LDP: Cloud-edge Adaptive Taxonomy under Local Differential Privacy

Recommender systems are widely used in daily life, but their direct collection and use of user preference data can also lead to privacy leakage. Existing privacy-preserving recommendation methods often find it hard to balance user privacy and recommendation performance. This problem is more serious in implicit-feedback settings, where data sparsity further increases the loss of useful signals caused by privacy perturbation. To solve this problem, we propose CAT-LDP, a cloud-local collaborative recommendation framework under local differential privacy constraints. CAT-LDP combines a hierarchical taxonomy tree with an adaptive privacy budget allocation strategy to keep more useful signals in users' active categories while protecting user privacy. Specifically, users upload perturbed category profiles that satisfy LDP. Based on these profiles, the cloud performs coarse-grained candidate generation, and the local device then carries out fine-grained reranking by using unperturbed local history. Experiments on the Amazon Video Games dataset show that CAT-LDP consistently outperforms its fixed-budget ablation variant and representative baselines on HR@K and NDCG@K under different privacy budgets. The results show that combining category-space modeling with cloud-local task decoupling can effectively reduce noise amplification in long-tail sparse settings and provide a better balance between privacy and utility for implicit-feedback recommendation.

cs.DB↗

Post-Corrected Raw-Score Martingale Posterior Sampling for von Mises-Fisher Models

We develop a finite-horizon calibration method for raw-score martingale posteriors, with von Mises--Fisher models as the main worked example. Starting from the maximum likelihood estimator, predictive paths are generated by simulating future observations from the current fitted model and updating the natural parameter by unpreconditioned score increments. The main methodological step is to separate predictive simulation from covariance calibration. Raw-score increments have Fisher-information covariance, whereas Bernstein--von Mises calibration requires inverse-information covariance. We therefore apply a terminal linear correction based on a local information estimate. For more efficient implementation, we also introduce a hybrid version that replaces the omitted tail of the infinite predictive continuation by a Gaussian approximation with matching leading-order quadratic variation. We prove fixed-n convergence, a finite-horizon approximation bound for the Gaussian tail, and a Bernstein--von Mises limit for the hybrid post-corrected sampler under local regularity and consistent terminal calibration. Simulations show that tail correction reduces truncation-induced underdispersion, and an OSCAR ocean-current example illustrates local directional uncertainty summaries.

stat.ME↗

QABBA: Symbolic Time-Series Compression via Integer-Quantized Aggregation

The expansion of time-series data from sensors and monitoring systems has made compact representations increasingly important. Such representations should retain signal structure while cutting storage, transmission and computation costs. Adaptive Brownian Bridge-based Aggregation (ABBA) addresses this need by converting long numerical series into short symbolic sequences, but reductions in parameter storage and computational precision remain desirable. We propose Quantized ABBA (QABBA), a quantized version of ABBA. By quantizing the symbolic centers, QABBA reduces the parameter footprint and enables integer arithmetic while maintaining high reconstruction quality. We establish several error bounds for the additional approximation introduced by quantization: a dimension-free bound on the excess error of each segment, a time-domain reconstruction-error bound, a stability condition for symbolic assignment, and a rule for allocating bits between segment lengths and increments. The resulting symbolic strings can be passed directly to a pretrained large language model (LLM) without any extra time-series embedding layer. Experiments on the Monash regression archive, UCR Time Series Classification Archive, and UEA Multivariate Time Series Classification Archive demonstrate a practical trade-off among storage, reconstruction accuracy and downstream predictive performance. QABBA therefore provides an error-controlled, low-precision symbolic representation for time-series compression and LLM-based analysis.

cs.LG↗

pychop: Emulating Low-Precision Arithmetic in Numerical Methods and Neural Networks

Motivated by the growing demand for reduced-precision arithmetic in computational science, we exploit lower-precision emulation in Python{--}widely regarded as the dominant programming language for numerical analysis and machine learning. Low-precision paradigms have revolutionized deep learning by enabling more efficient computation and reduced memory footprint while maintaining model fidelity. To better enable numerical experimentation with and exploration of reduced-precision computation, we developed \texttt{pychop}, which supports customizable floating-point formats and a comprehensive set of rounding modes in Python, allowing users to benefit from fast, reduced-precision emulation in numerous applications. \texttt{pychop} also provides flexible interfaces for array and tensor backends, enabling efficient reduced-precision emulation on both CPUs and GPUs for neural network deployment. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive exposition of the design and applications of \texttt{pychop}. Furthermore, we present empirical results on reduced-precision emulation for image classification and object detection using published datasets, illustrating the sensitivity to low precision and delivering valuable insights into its quantization-aware training and post-quantization impacts. Establishing itself as a foundational tool for advancing mixed-precision algorithms, \texttt{pychop} enables in-depth investigations into the effects of numerical precision in scientific computing and deep learning deployment, facilitating the development of novel hardware accelerators.

cs.LG↗

Estimating Condition Number with Graph Neural Networks

In this paper, we propose a fast method for estimating the condition number of sparse matrices using graph neural networks (GNNs). For efficient deployment of GNNs, we introduce a graph feature construction with $\mathrm{O}(\mathrm{nnz} + n)$ complexity, where $\mathrm{nnz}$ is the number of non-zero elements in the matrix and $n$ denotes the matrix dimension. We propose two schemes for estimating the matrix condition number using GNNs; one follows by decomposing the condition number and predicts the relatively more computationally intensive part $\|\mathbf{A}^{-1}\|$, without explicitly forming the inverse, while the other is to predict the whole condition number $κ$. Our approach can be extended to an arbitrary norm. Extensive experiments are conducted for the estimation of the 1-norm and 2-norm condition numbers, which show that our method achieves a significant speedup over the traditional numerical estimation methods. Our software for GNN condition number estimator is made publicly available at https://github.com/inEXASCALE/sparse-kappa.

cs.LG↗

Automated Numerical Stability Analysis of Deep Learning Operators

Finite-precision arithmetic unavoidably introduces numerical approximation errors. Numerical computations may use insufficient precision or an improper formulation, which leads to numerical instability. In this paper, we introduce a unified software tool for stochastic numerical validation of deep-learning operators. The tool follows CESTAC on supported exposed operations and uses an operator-level data-perturbation approximation for GEMM-like kernels. Our developed software not only enables numerical validation with a single computation pass but also detects the sources of numerical instability and provides numerical stability monitoring during deep learning training and inference. We verified its effectiveness on the detection of polluted operators with injected numerical instabilities across various tasks. We believe that our developed method and tools provide valuable insights into developing numerically stable computing kernels, which are particularly critical for numerically stable and efficient deep learning training and inference.

math.NA↗

Computing k-means in mixed precision

Motivated by the increasing availability of low- and mixed-precision arithmetic on modern hardware, we develop mixed-precision variants of Lloyd's algorithm for k-means clustering. The main ingredient is a family of mixed-precision kernels for Euclidean distance computation. These kernels are guided by rounding-error analysis and use a simple reliability test to decide whether the expanded distance formula can be evaluated safely with low precision or a higher-precision correction by the direct distance formula is required. Thus, most distance computations can be carried out with low precision, while high-precision arithmetic is used selectively when cancellation may lead to a loss of accuracy. We evaluate the proposed methods on large-scale distance-computation benchmarks, synthetic clustering problems, and image-segmentation tasks. The experiments verify that the mixed-precision kernels on GPUs can substantially improve performance while retaining the accuracy and convergence behavior of higher-precision baselines. In particular, our CUDA implementations achieve orders-of-magnitude speedups over the CPU implementation in \texttt{scikit-learn} and up to $4\times$ faster than the IEEE double-precision \texttt{cdist} routine of \texttt{PyTorch} on NVIDIA A100 GPU, while providing improved numerical robustness in cancellation-prone regimes. The resulting mixed-precision k-means methods are effective for clustering and image segmentation, although the observed gains depend on the dataset, feature dimension, and number of clusters. These results demonstrate that mixed-precision distance kernels can offer a useful trade-off between performance and accuracy for k-means clustering and suggest that similar ideas may be beneficial for other distance-based machine learning methods.

math.NA↗

Parallel Two-Stage Approach for Joint Symbolic Approximation of Time Series

As time-series applications grow larger, there is increasing demand for symbolic representations that are compact, accurate, and scalable across many signals and computing resources. Current ABBA-based symbolic approximation methods produce high-quality, shape-preserving representations, but they handle each time series separately and sequentially. This means they do not ensure consistent symbols across different series and cannot fully exploit modern multicore systems and distributed-memory systems. This paper presents a joint symbolic time-series approximation method for large-scale time series. The proposed method decouples local compression from global digitization: (i) time series are partitioned into independent domains that can be compressed in parallel, and (ii) the resulting pieces are digitized using a shared global dictionary. To further improve scalability, we introduce a two-stage parallel digitization scheme, in which aggregation is first performed locally and then merged globally without requiring a full-data reassignment step. Extensive experiments on time-series datasets and large synthetic benchmarks show that our approach maintains competitive reconstruction quality while substantially reducing runtime. These results show that joint symbolic approximation can serve as an efficient, high-level parallel tool for analyzing large-scale temporal data.

cs.DS↗

Using Laplace Transform To Optimize the Hallucination of Generation Models

To explore the feasibility of avoiding the confident error (or hallucination) of generation models (GMs), we formalise the system of GMs as a class of stochastic dynamical systems through the lens of control theory. Numerous factors can be attributed to the hallucination of the learning process of GMs, utilising knowledge of control theory allows us to analyse their system functions and system responses. Due to the high complexity of GMs when using various optimization methods, we cannot figure out their solution of Laplace transform, but from a macroscopic perspective, simulating the source response provides a virtual way to address the hallucination of GMs. We also find that the training progress is consistent with the corresponding system response, which offers us a useful way to develop a better optimization component. Finally, the hallucination problem of GMs is fundamentally optimized by using Laplace transform analysis.

math.OC↗

LLM-ABBA: Understanding time series via symbolic approximation

The success of large language models (LLMs) for time series has been demonstrated in previous work. Utilizing a symbolic time series representation, one can efficiently bridge the gap between LLMs and time series. However, the remaining challenge is to exploit the semantic information hidden in time series by using symbols or existing tokens of LLMs, while aligning the embedding space of LLMs according to the hidden information of time series. The symbolic time series approximation (STSA) method called adaptive Brownian bridge-based symbolic aggregation (ABBA) shows outstanding efficacy in preserving salient time series features by modeling time series patterns in terms of amplitude and period while using existing tokens of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce a method, called LLM-ABBA, that integrates ABBA into large language models for various downstream time series tasks. By symbolizing time series, LLM-ABBA compares favorably to the recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) in UCR and three medical time series classification tasks. Meanwhile, a fixed-polygonal chain trick in ABBA is introduced to avoid obvious drifting during forecasting tasks by significantly mitigating the effects of cumulative error arising from misused symbols during the transition from symbols to numerical values. In time series regression tasks, LLM-ABBA achieves the new SOTA on Time Series Extrinsic Regression (TSER) benchmarks. LLM-ABBA also shows competitive forecasting capability compared to recent SOTA time series forecasting results. We believe this framework can also seamlessly extend to other time series tasks. Our simulation code is publicly available at: https://github.com/inEXASCALE/llm-abba

cs.LG↗

QuantiPhy: A Quantitative Benchmark Evaluating Physical Reasoning Abilities of Vision-Language Models

Understanding the physical world is essential for generalist AI agents. However, it remains unclear whether state-of-the-art vision perception models (e.g., large VLMs) can reason physical properties quantitatively. Existing evaluations are predominantly VQA-based and qualitative, offering limited insight into whether these models can infer the kinematic quantities of moving objects from video observations. To address this, we present QuantiPhy, the first benchmark designed to quantitatively measure a VLM's physical reasoning ability. Comprising more than 3.3K video-text instances with numerical ground truth, QuantiPhy evaluates a VLM's performance on estimating an object's size, velocity, and acceleration at a given timestamp, using one of these properties as an input prior. The benchmark standardizes prompts and scoring to assess numerical accuracy, enabling fair comparisons across models. Our experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs reveal a consistent gap between their qualitative plausibility and actual numerical correctness. We further provide an in-depth analysis of key factors like background noise, counterfactual priors, and strategic prompting and find that state-of-the-art VLMs lean heavily on pre-trained world knowledge rather than faithfully using the provided visual and textual inputs as references when reasoning kinematic properties quantitatively. QuantiPhy offers the first rigorous, scalable testbed to move VLMs beyond mere verbal plausibility toward a numerically grounded physical understanding.

cs.AI↗

Mixed-Precision Conjugate Gradient Solvers with RL-Driven Precision Tuning

This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for dynamically optimizing numerical precision in the preconditioned conjugate gradient (CG) method. By modeling precision selection as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), we employ Q-learning to adaptively assign precision levels to key operations, striking an optimal balance between computational efficiency and numerical accuracy, while ensuring stability through double-precision scalar computations and residual computing. In practice, the algorithm is trained on a set of data and subsequently performs inference for precision selection on out-of-sample data, without requiring re-analysis or retraining for new datasets. This enables the method to adapt seamlessly to new problem instances without the computational overhead of recalibration. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of RL in enhancing solver's performance, marking the first application of RL to mixed-precision numerical methods. The findings highlight the approach's practical advantages, robustness, and scalability, providing valuable insights into its integration with iterative solvers and paving the way for AI-driven advancements in scientific computing.

cs.LG↗

Mixed precision HODLR matrices

Hierarchical matrix computations have attracted significant attention in the science and engineering community as exploiting data-sparse structures can significantly reduce the computational complexity of many important kernels. One particularly popular option within this class is the Hierarchical Off-Diagonal Low-Rank (HODLR) format. In this paper, we show that the off-diagonal blocks of HODLR matrices that are approximated by low-rank matrices can be represented in low precision without degenerating the quality of the overall approximation (with the error growth bounded by a factor of $2$). We also present an adaptive-precision scheme for constructing and storing HODLR matrices, and we prove that the use of mixed precision does not compromise the numerical stability of the resulting HODLR matrix--vector product and LU factorization. That is, the resulting error in these computations is not significantly greater than the case where we use one precision (say, double) for constructing and storing the HODLR matrix. Our analyses further give insight on how one must choose the working precision in HODLR matrix computations relative to the approximation error in order to not observe the effects of finite precision. Intuitively, when a HODLR matrix is subject to a high degree of approximation error, subsequent computations can be performed in a lower precision without detriment. We demonstrate the validity of our theoretical results through a range of numerical experiments.

math.NA↗

Fast and explainable clustering based on sorting

We introduce a fast and explainable clustering method called CLASSIX. It consists of two phases, namely a greedy aggregation phase of the sorted data into groups of nearby data points, followed by the merging of groups into clusters. The algorithm is controlled by two scalar parameters, namely a distance parameter for the aggregation and another parameter controlling the minimal cluster size. Extensive experiments are conducted to give a comprehensive evaluation of the clustering performance on synthetic and real-world datasets, with various cluster shapes and low to high feature dimensionality. Our experiments demonstrate that CLASSIX competes with state-of-the-art clustering algorithms. The algorithm has linear space complexity and achieves near linear time complexity on a wide range of problems. Its inherent simplicity allows for the generation of intuitive explanations of the computed clusters.

cs.LG↗