Lin Ning 0001

dblp:38/3526-1 · DBLP profile ↗
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14ranked-venue papers
7as first author
7since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-9458-7946ORCID · verified

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 3 first-author · 4 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 5 · 3 first-author · 3 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 3 · 2 first-author · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Recurrent Neural Networks Meet Context-Free Grammar: Two Birds with One Stone
abstract
This work addresses a key challenge in the effective adoption of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) by reducing inference time and expanding the scope of a prediction. It introduces compressed learning, a novel approach that integrates Context-Free Grammar (CFG) and online tokenization into the training and inference of RNNs for streaming inputs. Through a hierarchical compression algorithm, it compresses an input sequence to a CFG and makes predictions based on the compressed sequence. Its algorithm design employs a set of techniques to overcome the issues from the myopic nature of online tokenization, the tension between inference accuracy and compression rate, and other complexities in sequence compression and prediction. Its effectiveness is theoretically analyzed and empirically validated on 16 real-world sequences, including program function calls, memory traces, and system logs. Empirical results demonstrate that compressed learning can successfully recognize and leverage repetitive patterns in input sequences, and effectively translate them into dramatic (1–1,762 \(\times\) ) inference speedups as well as much (1–7,830 \(\times\) ) expanded prediction scope, while keeping the inference accuracy satisfactory.
Hui Guan 0001, Umang Chaudhary, Yuanchao Xu 0001, Lin Ning 0001, Lijun Zhang 0005, Xipeng Shen
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data4
2025 RLPF: Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback for User Summarization with LLMs
abstract
LLM-powered personalization agent systems employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict users’ behavior from their past activities. However, their effectiveness often hinges on the ability to effectively leverage extensive, long user historical data due to its inherent noise and length of such data. Existing pre-trained LLMs may generate summaries that are concise but lack the necessary context for downstream tasks, hindering their utility in personalization systems. To address these challenges, we introduce Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback (RLPF). RLPF fine-tunes LLMs to generate concise, human-readable user summaries that are optimized for downstream task performance. By maximizing the usefulness of the generated summaries, RLPF effectively distills extensive user history data while preserving essential information for downstream tasks. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in both extrinsic downstream task utility and intrinsic summary quality, surpassing baseline methods by up to 22% and achieving an up to 84.59% win rate on Factuality, Abstractiveness, and Readability. RLPF also achieves a remarkable 74% reduction while improving performance on 16 out of 19 unseen tasks and/or datasets, showcasing its generalizability. This approach offers a promising solution for enhancing LLM personalization by effectively transforming long, noisy user histories into informative and human-readable representations.
Jiaxing Wu, Lin Ning 0001, Harrison Lee 0001, Neo Wu, Sushant Prakash, Shawn O'Banion, Bradley Green
AAAI2
2022 What Do We Mean by Generalization in Federated Learning?
Honglin Yuan 0002, Warren R. Morningstar, Lin Ning 0001, Karan Singhal
ICLR3
2022 EANA: Reducing Privacy Risk on Large-scale Recommendation Models
abstract
Embedding-based deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in large-scale recommendation systems. Differentially-private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) provides a way to enable personalized experiences while preserving user privacy by injecting noise into every model parameter during the training process. However, it is challenging to apply DP-SGD to large-scale embedding-based DNNs due to its effect on training speed. This happens because the noise added by DP-SGD causes normally sparse gradients to become dense, introducing a large communication overhead between workers and parameter servers in a typical distributed training framework. This paper proposes embedding-aware noise addition (EANA) to mitigate the communication overhead, making training a large-scale embedding-based DNN possible. We examine the privacy benefit of EANA both analytically and empirically using secret sharer techniques. We demonstrate that training with EANA can achieve reasonable model precision while providing good practical privacy protection as measured by the secret sharer tests. Experiments on a real-world, large-scale dataset and model show that EANA is much faster than standard DP-SGD, improving the training speed by 54X and unblocking the training of a large-scale embedding-based DNN with reduced privacy risk.
Lin Ning 0001, Steve Chien, Shuang Song 0001, Yunqi Xue, Devora Berlowitz
RecSys1
2022 General Reuse-Centric CNN Accelerator
abstract
This article introduces the firstgeneral reuse-centric acceleratorfor CNN inferences. Unlike prior work that exploits similarities only across consecutive video frames,general reuse-centric acceleratoris able to discover similarities among arbitrary patches within an image or across independent images, and translate them into computation time and energy savings. Experiments show that the accelerator complements both prior software-based CNN and various CNN hardware accelerators, producing up to 14.96X speedups for similarity discovery, up to 2.70X speedups for overall inference.
Nihat Mert Cicek, Lin Ning 0001, Ozcan Ozturk 0001, Xipeng Shen
IEEE Trans. Computers2
2021 Recurrent Neural Networks Meet Context-Free Grammar: Two Birds with One Stone
abstract
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are widely used for various prediction tasks on sequences such as text, speed signals, program traces, and system logs. Due to RNNs’ inherently sequential behavior, one key challenge for the effective adoption of RNNs is to reduce the time spent on RNN inference and to increase the scope of a prediction. This work introduces CFG-guided compressed learning, an approach that creatively integrates Context-Free Grammar (CFG) and online tokenization into RNN learning and inference for streaming inputs. Through a hierarchical compression algorithm, it compresses an input sequence to a CFG and makes predictions based on the compressed sequence. Its algorithm design employs a set of techniques to overcome the issues from the myopic nature of online tokenization, the tension between inference accuracy and compression rate, and other complexities. Experiments on 16 real-world sequences of various types validate that the proposed compressed learning can successfully recognize and leverage repetitive patterns in input sequences, and effectively translate them into dramatic (1-1762×) inference speedups as well as much (1-7830×) expanded prediction scope, while keeping the inference accuracy satisfactory.
Hui Guan 0001, Umana Chaudhary, Yuanchao Xu 0001, Lin Ning 0001, Lijun Zhang 0005, Xipeng Shen
ICDM4
2021 Simple Augmentation Goes a Long Way: ADRL for DNN Quantization
Lin Ning 0001, Guoyang Chen, Weifeng Zhang 0003, Xipeng Shen
ICLR1
2019 Adaptive Deep Reuse: Accelerating CNN Training on the Fly
abstract
This work proposes adaptive deep reuse, a method for accelerating CNN training by identifying and avoiding the unnecessary computations contained in each specific training on the fly. It makes two-fold major contributions. (1) It empirically proves the existence of a lot of similarities among neuron vectors in both forward and backward propagation of CNN. (2) It introduces the first adaptive strategy for translating the similarities into computation reuse in CNN training. The strategy adaptively adjusts the strength of reuse based on the different tolerance of precision relaxation in different CNN training stages. Experiments show that adaptive deep reuse saves 69% CNN training time with no accuracy loss.
Lin Ning 0001, Hui Guan 0001, Xipeng Shen
ICDE1
2019 Deep reuse: streamline CNN inference on the fly via coarse-grained computation reuse
abstract
This paper presents deep reuse, a method for speeding up CNN inferences by detecting and exploiting deep reusable computations on the fly. It empirically reveals the massive similarities among neuron vectors in activation maps, both within CNN inferences on an input and across inputs. It gives an in-depth study on how to effectively turn the similarities into beneficial computation reuse to speed up CNN inferences. The investigation covers various factors, ranging from the clustering methods for similarity detection, to clustering scopes, similarity metrics, and neuron vector granularities. The insights help create deep reuse. As an on-line method, deep reuse is easy to apply, and adapts to each CNN (compressed or not) and its input. Using no special hardware support or CNN model changes, this method speeds up inferences by 1.77--2X (up to 4.3X layer-wise) on the fly with virtually no (
Lin Ning 0001, Xipeng Shen
ICS1
2019 In-Place Zero-Space Memory Protection for CNN
abstract
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are being actively explored for safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles and aerospace, where it is essential to ensure the reliability of inference results in the presence of possible memory faults. Traditional methods such as error correction codes (ECC) and Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) are CNN-oblivious and incur substantial memory overhead and energy cost. This paper introduces in-place zero-space ECC assisted with a new training scheme weight distribution-oriented training. The new method provides the first known zero space cost memory protection for CNNs without compromising the reliability offered by traditional ECC.
Hui Guan 0001, Lin Ning 0001, Xipeng Shen, Huiyang Zhou, Seung-Hwan Lim
NeurIPS2
2018 LCD: A Fast Contrastive Divergence Based Algorithm for Restricted Boltzmann Machine
Lin Ning 0001, Randall Pittman, Xipeng Shen
Neural Networks1
2017 POSTER: Cutting the Fat: Speeding Up RBM for Fast Deep Learning Through Generalized Redundancy Elimination
abstract
Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is the building block of Deep Belief Nets and other deep learning tools. Fast learning and prediction are both essential for practical usage of RBM-based machine learning techniques. This paper presents a concept named generalized redundancy elimination to avoid most of the the computations required in RBM learning and prediction without changing the results. It consists of two optimization techniques. The first is called bounds-based filtering, which, through triangular inequality, replaces expensive calculations of many vector dot products with fast bounds calculations. The second is delta product, which effectively detects and avoids many repeated calculations in the core operation of RBM, Gibbs Sampling. The optimizations are applicable to both the standard contrastive divergence learning algorithm and its variations. In addition, the paper presents how to address some complexities these optimizations create for them to be used together and for them to be implemented efficiently on massively parallel processors. Results show that the optimizations can produce several-fold (up to 3X for training and 5.3X for prediction) speedups.
Lin Ning 0001, Randall Pittman, Xipeng Shen
PACT1
2017 LCD: A Fast Contrastive Divergence Based Algorithm for Restricted Boltzmann Machine
abstract
Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is the building block of Deep Belief Nets and other deep learning tools. Fast learning and prediction are both essential for practical usage of RBM-based machine learning techniques. This paper proposes Lean Contrastive Divergence (LCD), a modified Contrastive Divergence (CD) algorithm, to accelerate RBM learning and prediction without changing the results. LCD avoids most of the required computations with two optimization techniques. The first is called bounds-based filtering, which, through triangle inequality, replaces expensive calculations of many vector dot products with fast bounds calculations. The second is delta product, which effectively detects and avoids many repeated calculations in the core operation of RBM, Gibbs Sampling. The optimizations are applicable to both the standard contrastive divergence learning algorithm and its variations. Results show that the optimizations can produce several-fold (up to 3X for training and 5.3X for prediction) speedups.
Lin Ning 0001, Randall Pittman, Xipeng Shen
ICDM1
2017 Generalizations of the theory and deployment of triangular inequality for compiler-based strength reduction
abstract
Triangular Inequality (TI) has been used in many manual algorithm designs to achieve good efficiency in solving some distance calculation-based problems. This paper presents our generalization of the idea into a compiler optimization technique, named TI-based strength reduction. The generalization consists of three parts. The first is the establishment of the theoretic foundation of this new optimization via the development of a new form of TI named Angular Triangular Inequality, along with several fundamental theorems. The second is the revealing of the properties of the new forms of TI and the proposal of guided TI adaptation, a systematic method to address the difficulties in effective deployments of TI optimizations. The third is an integration of the new optimization technique in an open-source compiler. Experiments on a set of data mining and machine learning algorithms show that the new technique can speed up the standard implementations by as much as 134X and 46X on average for distance-related problems, outperforming previous TI-based optimizations by 2.35X on average. It also extends the applicability of TI-based optimizations to vector related problems, producing tens of times of speedup.
Yufei Ding 0001, Lin Ning 0001, Hui Guan 0001, Xipeng Shen
PLDI2