arXiv subjects

Zhong Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Zhong Zheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

Distributed MoE-based Uplink Detection for Cell-Free Communication Systems

Cell-free Massive multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) is recognized as a key technology for beyond-5G networks, where distributed access points (APs) jointly serve user equipments (UEs) to address the inherent inter-cell interference issue inherent in cellular systems. While conventional distributed signal detection methods offer a practical balance between performance and fronthaul load, they are fundamentally limited by linear processing constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based uplink detection framework by introducing the distributed mixture of experts detection network (DMoE-DetNet). In this architecture, each AP acts as a local expert employing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for non-linear feature extraction, and transmits the local minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection results and statistical channel information to the central processing unit (CPU). In the CPU, an attention-based encoder module captures complex spatio-temporal dependencies among users for global feature fusion, with a gating network at the central processor dynamically weighting the contributions from different APs. At last, a linear detector outputs the symbol probability. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DMoE-DetNet significantly outperforms conventional linear processing based cell-free signal detection methods in terms of symbol error rate, showcasing the potential of artificial intelligence-enabled communication systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Coordinated Power Management on Heterogeneous Systems

Performance prediction is essential for energy-efficient computing in heterogeneous computing systems that integrate CPUs and GPUs. However, traditional performance modeling methods often rely on exhaustive offline profiling, which becomes impractical due to the large setting space and the high cost of profiling large-scale applications. In this paper, we present OPEN, a framework consists of offline and online phases. The offline phase involves building a performance predictor and constructing an initial dense matrix. In the online phase, OPEN performs lightweight online profiling, and leverages the performance predictor with collaborative filtering to make performance prediction. We evaluate OPEN on multiple heterogeneous systems, including those equipped with A100 and A30 GPUs. Results show that OPEN achieves prediction accuracy up to 98.29\%. This demonstrates that OPEN effectively reduces profiling cost while maintaining high accuracy, making it practical for power-aware performance modeling in modern HPC environments. Overall, OPEN provides a lightweight solution for performance prediction under power constraints, enabling better runtime decisions in power-aware computing environments.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

EcoShift: Performance-Aware Power Management for Power-Constrained Heterogeneous Systems

Power-constrained HPC systems increasingly run heterogeneous CPU--GPU applications under strict cluster-wide power limits. Existing cluster-wide power management policies rely on fair-share or utilization heuristics and do not capture application-specific sensitivity to CPU and GPU power caps, leading to inefficient use of reclaimed power. We present EcoShift, a performance-aware cluster-wide power management framework. EcoShift combines online performance prediction with a dynamic-programming-based allocator to distribute reclaimed power across CPU--GPU applications for maximum average performance improvement. Through emulation-based evaluation on two heterogeneous Intel CPU and NVIDIA A100/H100 GPU platforms with diverse CPU--GPU workloads, EcoShift consistently outperforms state-of-the-art policies, achieving up to 6% average performance improvement while preserving the cluster-wide power constraint.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Towards Energy Efficient Co-Scheduling in HPC

Modern multi GPU HPC systems expose substantial computational capacity, yet inefficient GPU allocation often leads to wasted energy and underutilization. In practice, GPU applications exhibit heterogeneous and nonlinear scaling, making it inefficient to always use all available GPUs. We present EcoSched, an online scheduler that jointly optimizes GPU count selection and application coscheduling to improve workload level efficiency on multi GPU systems. EcoSched uses lightweight runtime profiling to estimate relative performance across GPU counts, applies a score based policy to balance energy efficiency and idle resources, and incorporates NUMA aware placement to mitigate interference. We implement EcoSched on heterogeneous CPU GPU platforms and evaluate it with diverse workloads on H100, A100, and V100 systems. EcoSched achieves up to 14.8% energy savings, 30.1% makespan improvement, and 40.4% EDP reduction over baseline schedulers, with modest performance overhead. These results show that jointly selecting GPU counts and coscheduling actions is essential for efficient multi GPU workload execution.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Regret-Optimal Q-Learning with Low Cost for Single-Agent and Federated Reinforcement Learning

Motivated by real-world settings where data collection and policy deployment -- whether for a single agent or across multiple agents -- are costly, we study the problem of on-policy single-agent reinforcement learning (RL) and federated RL (FRL) with a focus on minimizing burn-in costs (the sample sizes needed to reach near-optimal regret) and policy switching or communication costs. In parallel finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with $S$ states and $A$ actions, existing methods either require superlinear burn-in costs in $S$ and $A$ or fail to achieve logarithmic switching or communication costs. We propose two novel model-free RL algorithms -- Q-EarlySettled-LowCost and FedQ-EarlySettled-LowCost -- that are the first in the literature to simultaneously achieve: (i) the best near-optimal regret among all known model-free RL or FRL algorithms, (ii) low burn-in cost that scales linearly with $S$ and $A$, and (iii) logarithmic policy switching cost for single-agent RL or communication cost for FRL. Additionally, we establish gap-dependent theoretical guarantees for both regret and switching/communication costs, improving or matching the best-known gap-dependent bounds.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

Gap-Dependent Bounds for Nearly Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation

We study gap-dependent performance guarantees for nearly minimax-optimal algorithms in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation. While prior works have established gap-dependent regret bounds in this setting, existing analyses do not apply to algorithms that achieve the nearly minimax-optimal worst-case regret bound $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{H^3K})$, where $d$ is the feature dimension, $H$ is the horizon length, and $K$ is the number of episodes. We bridge this gap by providing the first gap-dependent regret bound for the nearly minimax-optimal algorithm LSVI-UCB++ (He et al., 2023). Our analysis yields improved dependencies on both $d$ and $H$ compared to previous gap-dependent results. Moreover, leveraging the low policy-switching property of LSVI-UCB++, we introduce a concurrent variant that enables efficient parallel exploration across multiple agents and establish the first gap-dependent sample complexity upper bound for online multi-agent RL with linear function approximation, achieving linear speedup with respect to the number of agents.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Algorithms for Robust Phase Retrieval

This paper considers the robust phase retrieval, which can be cast as a nonsmooth and nonconvex composite optimization problem. We propose two first-order algorithms with adaptive step sizes: the subgradient algorithm (AdaSubGrad) and the inexact proximal linear algorithm (AdaIPL). Our contribution lies in the novel design of adaptive step sizes based on quantiles of the absolute residuals. Local linear convergences of both algorithms are analyzed under different regimes for the hyper-parameters. Numerical experiments on synthetic datasets and image recovery also demonstrate that our methods are competitive against the existing methods in the literature utilizing predetermined (possibly impractical) step sizes, such as the subgradient methods and the inexact proximal linear method.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

A New Inexact Manifold Proximal Linear Algorithm with Adaptive Stopping Criteria

This paper proposes a new inexact manifold proximal linear (IManPL) algorithm for solving nonsmooth, nonconvex composite optimization problems over an embedded submanifold. At each iteration, IManPL solves a convex subproblem inexactly, guided by two adaptive stopping criteria. We establish convergence guarantees and show that IManPL achieves the best first-order oracle complexity for solving this class of problems. Numerical experiments on sparse spectral clustering and sparse principal component analysis demonstrate that our methods outperform existing approaches.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Collapsing Categories for Regression with Mixed Predictors

Categorical predictors are omnipresent in everyday regression practice: in fact, most regression data involve some categorical predictors, and this tendency is increasing in modern applications with more complex structures and larger data sizes. However, including too many categories in a regression model would seriously hamper accuracy, as the information in the data is fragmented by the multitude of categories. In this paper, we introduce a systematic method to reduce the complexity of categorical predictors by adaptively collapsing categories in regressions, so as to enhance the performance of regression estimation. Our method is based on the {\em pairwise vector fused LASSO}, which automatically fuses the categories that bear a similar regression relation with the response. We develop our method under a wide class of regression models defined by a general loss function, which includes linear models and generalized linear models as special cases. We rigorously established the category collapsing consistency of our method, developed an Inexact Proximal Gradient Descent algorithm to implement it, and proved the feasibility and convergence of our algorithm. Through simulations and an application to Spotify music data, we demonstrate that our method can effectively reduce categorical complexity while improving prediction performance, making it a powerful tool for regression with mixed predictors.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Gap-Dependent Bounds for Federated $Q$-learning

We present the first gap-dependent analysis of regret and communication cost for on-policy federated $Q$-Learning in tabular episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs). Existing FRL methods focus on worst-case scenarios, leading to $\sqrt{T}$-type regret bounds and communication cost bounds with a $\log T$ term scaling with the number of agents $M$, states $S$, and actions $A$, where $T$ is the average total number of steps per agent. In contrast, our novel framework leverages the benign structures of MDPs, such as a strictly positive suboptimality gap, to achieve a $\log T$-type regret bound and a refined communication cost bound that disentangles exploration and exploitation. Our gap-dependent regret bound reveals a distinct multi-agent speedup pattern, and our gap-dependent communication cost bound removes the dependence on $MSA$ from the $\log T$ term. Notably, our gap-dependent communication cost bound also yields a better global switching cost when $M=1$, removing $SA$ from the $\log T$ term.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Mutual Information-oriented ISAC Beamforming Design for Large Dimensional Antenna Array

Existing integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) beamforming design were mostly designed under perfect instantaneous channel state information (CSI), limiting their use in practical dynamic environments. In this paper, we study the beamforming design for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ISAC systems based on statistical CSI, with the weighted mutual information (MI) comprising sensing and communication perspectives adopted as the performance metric. In particular, the operator-valued free probability theory is utilized to derive the closed-form expression for the weighted MI under statistical CSI. Subsequently, an efficient projected gradient ascent (PGA) algorithm is proposed to optimize the transmit beamforming matrix with the aim of maximizing the weighted MI.Numerical results validate that the derived closed-form expression matches well with the Monte Carlo simulation results and the proposed optimization algorithm is able to improve the weighted MI significantly. We also illustrate the trade-off between sensing and communication MI.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Wireless Channel Identification via Conditional Diffusion Model

The identification of channel scenarios in wireless systems plays a crucial role in channel modeling, radio fingerprint positioning, and transceiver design. Traditional methods to classify channel scenarios are based on typical statistical characteristics of channels, such as K-factor, path loss, delay spread, etc. However, statistic-based channel identification methods cannot accurately differentiate implicit features induced by dynamic scatterers, thus performing very poorly in identifying similar channel scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel channel scenario identification method, formulating the identification task as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. Furthermore, the MAP estimation is reformulated by a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which is then approximated and solved by the conditional generative diffusion model. Specifically, we leverage a transformer network to capture hidden channel features in multiple latent noise spaces within the reverse process of the conditional generative diffusion model. These detailed features, which directly affect likelihood functions in MLE, enable highly accurate scenario identification. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms traditional methods, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), back-propagation neural networks (BPNNs), and random forest-based classifiers, improving the identification accuracy by more than 10%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

MSWAL: 3D Multi-class Segmentation of Whole Abdominal Lesions Dataset

With the significantly increasing incidence and prevalence of abdominal diseases, there is a need to embrace greater use of new innovations and technology for the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Although deep-learning methods have notably been developed to assist radiologists in diagnosing abdominal diseases, existing models have the restricted ability to segment common lesions in the abdomen due to missing annotations for typical abdominal pathologies in their training datasets. To address the limitation, we introduce MSWAL, the first 3D Multi-class Segmentation of the Whole Abdominal Lesions dataset, which broadens the coverage of various common lesion types, such as gallstones, kidney stones, liver tumors, kidney tumors, pancreatic cancer, liver cysts, and kidney cysts. With CT scans collected from 694 patients (191,417 slices) of different genders across various scanning phases, MSWAL demonstrates strong robustness and generalizability. The transfer learning experiment from MSWAL to two public datasets, LiTS and KiTS, effectively demonstrates consistent improvements, with Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) increase of 3.00% for liver tumors and 0.89% for kidney tumors, demonstrating that the comprehensive annotations and diverse lesion types in MSWAL facilitate effective learning across different domains and data distributions. Furthermore, we propose Inception nnU-Net, a novel segmentation framework that effectively integrates an Inception module with the nnU-Net architecture to extract information from different receptive fields, achieving significant enhancement in both voxel-level DSC and region-level F1 compared to the cutting-edge public algorithms on MSWAL. Our dataset will be released after being accepted, and the code is publicly released at https://github.com/tiuxuxsh76075/MSWAL-.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Federated Q-Learning with Reference-Advantage Decomposition: Almost Optimal Regret and Logarithmic Communication Cost

In this paper, we consider model-free federated reinforcement learning for tabular episodic Markov decision processes. Under the coordination of a central server, multiple agents collaboratively explore the environment and learn an optimal policy without sharing their raw data. Despite recent advances in federated Q-learning algorithms achieving near-linear regret speedup with low communication cost, existing algorithms only attain suboptimal regrets compared to the information bound. We propose a novel model-free federated Q-learning algorithm, termed FedQ-Advantage. Our algorithm leverages reference-advantage decomposition for variance reduction and operates under two distinct mechanisms: synchronization between the agents and the server, and policy update, both triggered by events. We prove that our algorithm not only requires a lower logarithmic communication cost but also achieves an almost optimal regret, reaching the information bound up to a logarithmic factor and near-linear regret speedup compared to its single-agent counterpart when the time horizon is sufficiently large.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Gap-Dependent Bounds for Q-Learning using Reference-Advantage Decomposition

We study the gap-dependent bounds of two important algorithms for on-policy Q-learning for finite-horizon episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs): UCB-Advantage (Zhang et al. 2020) and Q-EarlySettled-Advantage (Li et al. 2021). UCB-Advantage and Q-EarlySettled-Advantage improve upon the results based on Hoeffding-type bonuses and achieve the almost optimal $\sqrt{T}$-type regret bound in the worst-case scenario, where $T$ is the total number of steps. However, the benign structures of the MDPs such as a strictly positive suboptimality gap can significantly improve the regret. While gap-dependent regret bounds have been obtained for Q-learning with Hoeffding-type bonuses, it remains an open question to establish gap-dependent regret bounds for Q-learning using variance estimators in their bonuses and reference-advantage decomposition for variance reduction. We develop a novel error decomposition framework to prove gap-dependent regret bounds of UCB-Advantage and Q-EarlySettled-Advantage that are logarithmic in $T$ and improve upon existing ones for Q-learning algorithms. Moreover, we establish the gap-dependent bound for the policy switching cost of UCB-Advantage and improve that under the worst-case MDPs. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first gap-dependent regret analysis for Q-learning using variance estimators and reference-advantage decomposition and also provides the first gap-dependent analysis on policy switching cost for Q-learning.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Exploring Uncore Frequency Scaling for Heterogeneous Computing

High-performance computing (HPC) systems are essential for scientific discovery and engineering innovation. However, their growing power demands pose significant challenges, particularly as systems scale to the exascale level. Prior uncore frequency tuning studies have primarily focused on conventional HPC workloads running on homogeneous systems. As HPC advances toward heterogeneous computing, integrating diverse GPU workloads on heterogeneous CPU-GPU systems, it is crucial to revisit and enhance uncore scaling. Our investigation reveals that uncore frequency scales down only when CPU power approaches its TDP (Thermal Design Power), an uncommon scenario in GPU-dominant applications, resulting in unnecessary power waste in modern heterogeneous computing systems. To address this, we present MAGUS, a user-transparent uncore frequency scaling runtime for heterogeneous computing. Effective uncore tuning is inherently complex, requiring dynamic detection of application execution phases that affect uncore utilization. Moreover, any robust strategy must work across a diverse range of applications, each with unique behaviors and resource requirements. Finally, an efficient runtime should introduce minimal overhead. We incorporate several key techniques in the design of MAGUS, including monitoring and predicting memory throughput, managing frequent phase transitions, and leveraging vendor-supplied power management support. We evaluate MAGUS using a diverse set of GPU benchmarks and applications across multiple heterogeneous systems with different CPU and GPU architectures. The experimental results show that MAGUS achieves up to 27% energy savings and 26% energy-delay product (EDP) reduction compared to the default settings while maintaining a performance loss below 5% and an overhead under 1%.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

More for Less: Integrating Capability-Predominant and Capacity-Predominant Computing

Capability jobs (e.g., large, long-running tasks) and capacity jobs (e.g., small, short-running tasks) are two common types of workloads in high-performance computing (HPC). Different HPC systems are typically deployed to handle distinct computing workloads. For example, Theta at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) primarily serves capability jobs, while Cori at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) predominantly handles capacity workloads. However, this segregation often leads to inefficient resource utilization and higher costs due to the need for operating separate computing platforms. This work examines what-if scenarios for integrating siloed platforms. Specifically, we collect and characterize two real workloads from production systems at DOE laboratories, representing capabilitypredominant and capacity-predominant computing, respectively. We investigate two approaches to unification. Workload fusion explores how efficiently resources are utilized when a unified system accommodates diverse workloads, whereas workload injection identifies opportunities to enhance resource utilization on capability computing systems by leveraging capacity jobs. Finally, through extensive trace-based, event-driven simulations, we explore the potential benefits of co-scheduling both types of jobs on a unified system to enhance resource utilization and reduce costs, offering new insights for future research in unified computing.

cs.DC↗