arXiv subjects

Zishuo Bao

Publications and source records attributed to Zishuo Bao.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Distilling Token-Trained Models into Byte-Level Models

Byte Language Models (BLMs) have emerged as a promising direction for scaling language models beyond tokenization. However, existing BLMs typically require training from scratch on trillions of bytes, making them prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose an efficient distillation recipe that converts existing token-trained LLMs into BLMs while retaining comparable capabilities. Our recipe follows a two-stage curriculum: (1) Progressive Knowledge Distillation, which aligns byte-level representations with the embeddings of the token-trained teacher model; and (2) Byte-Level Supervised Fine-Tuning, which enables end-to-end generation entirely in the byte space. We validate our approach across multiple model families, including Llama, Qwen, and OLMo, and demonstrate that the distilled BLMs retain most of the teacher models' performance using only approximately 125B bytes.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Bayesian Optimization for Enhanced Language Models: Optimizing Acquisition Functions

With the rise of different language model architecture, fine-tuning is becoming even more important for down stream tasks Model gets messy, finding proper hyperparameters for fine-tuning. Although BO has been tried for hyperparameter tuning, most of the existing methods are oblivious to the fact that BO relies on careful choices of acquisition functions, which are essential components of BO that guide how much to explore versus exploit during the optimization process; Different acquisition functions have different levels of sensitivity towards training loss and validation performance; existing methods often just apply an acquisition function no matter if the training and validation performance are sensitive to the acquisition function or not. This work introduces{Bilevel - BO - SWA}, a model fusion approach coupled with a bilevel BO strategy to improve the fine - tunning of large language models. Our work on mixture of acquisition functions like EI and UCB into nested opt loops, where inner loop perform minimization of training loss while outer loops optimized w.r.t. val metric. Experiments on GLUE tasks using RoBERTA - base show that when using EI and UCB, there is an improvement in generalization, and fine - tuning can be improved by up to 2.7%.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Based on Causal Reasoning

With the rapid development of multimedia, the shift from unimodal textual sentiment analysis to multimodal image-text sentiment analysis has obtained academic and industrial attention in recent years. However, multimodal sentiment analysis is affected by unimodal data bias, e.g., text sentiment is misleading due to explicit sentiment semantic, leading to low accuracy in the final sentiment classification. In this paper, we propose a novel CounterFactual Multimodal Sentiment Analysis framework (CF-MSA) using causal counterfactual inference to construct multimodal sentiment causal inference. CF-MSA mitigates the direct effect from unimodal bias and ensures heterogeneity across modalities by differentiating the treatment variables between modalities. In addition, considering the information complementarity and bias differences between modalities, we propose a new optimisation objective to effectively integrate different modalities and reduce the inherent bias from each modality. Experimental results on two public datasets, MVSA-Single and MVSA-Multiple, demonstrate that the proposed CF-MSA has superior debiasing capability and achieves new state-of-the-art performances. We will release the code and datasets to facilitate future research.

cs.MM↗