Zenan Li

dblp:242/2285 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
30ranked-venue papers
11as first author
26since 2021 · last 2027
—ORCID · conflict

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

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 19 · 8 first-author · 19 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 6 · 3 first-author · 3 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 4 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 2 · 2 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Theory of computation · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2027 PIPO: Physics-informed deep reinforcement learning for pareto-optimal control for active suspension system
Cheng Wang 0028, Xiaoxian Cui, Guanyu Tao, Xinran Zhou, Zenan Li, Konghui Guo
Expert Syst. Appl.5
2026 FIGNet: A Robust and Interpretable Fuzzy-Irreversible Gated Network for Auditory Brainstem Response Classification
abstract
Auditory brainstem response (ABR) is an important tool for newborn hearing screening and neurological assessment. However, its signals are often difficult to be accurately resolved due to noise interference and weak waveforms, and the need for repeated measurements under multiple sound intensity conditions results in time-consuming data acquisition. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop an automatic classification model with high accuracy, robustness and good interpretability to achieve stable and effective recognition performance with minimal ABR data. This study presents FIGNet, a new deep learning model that combines type-2 fuzzy logic with a time-irreversible attention mechanism to address uncertainty and temporal direction in ABR signals. Fuzzy attention helps reduce the impact of noise, while the irreversible attention models the one-way nature of neural responses. Experiments on real ABR datasets show that FIGNet outperforms existing models in both binary and five-class classification tasks. It achieves 93.72% accuracy in binary classification and 84.42% accuracy in five-class classification. Visualization results-including confusion matrices, and accuracy curves under different noise levels-further confirm that FIGNet can focus on key waveform areas and stay reliable even in noisy conditions. These findings demonstrate that FIGNet offers fast, interpretable, and robust performance for clinical ABR analysis, achieving high classification accuracy under both clean and noisy conditions.
Ke Zhang 0040, Chunrui Zhao, Zenan Li, Caiwei Li, Desheng Jia, Yongchao Chen, Shang Yan, Xin Wang 0088, Yishu Teng, Hongguang Pan, Shixiong Chen
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics3
2025 PyEuclid: A Versatile Formal Plane Geometry System in Python
abstract
Abstract We introduce , a unified and versatile Python-based formal system for representing and reasoning about plane geometry problems. designs a new formal language that faithfully encodes geometric information, including diagrams, and integrates two complementary components to perform geometric reasoning: (1) a deductive database with an extensive set of inference rules for geometric properties, and (2) an algebraic system for solving diverse equations involving geometric quantities. By seamlessly combining these components, enables human-like reasoning and supports generating concise reasoning steps (proofs), either fully automatically or through interactive guidance. Benchmark evaluations demonstrate that outperforms existing tools, solving a broader range of problems across both proof generation and calculation tasks. Moreover, holds significant potential for educational use and integration with advanced deep learning systems.
Hangrui Bi, Zenan Li, Kaiyu Yang, Xujie Si
CAV (4)4
2025 Decoupling Training-Free Guided Diffusion by ADMM
abstract
In this paper, we consider the conditional generation problem by guiding off-the-shelf unconditional diffusion models with differentiable loss functions in a plug-and-play fashion. While previous research has primarily focused on balancing the unconditional diffusion model and the guided loss through a tuned weight hyperparameter, we propose a novel framework that distinctly decouples these two components. Specifically, we introduce two variables x and z, to represent the generated samples governed by the unconditional generation model and the guidance function, respectively. This decoupling reformulates conditional generation into two manageable subproblems, unified by the constraint x = z. Leveraging this setup, we develop a new algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to adaptively balance these components. Additionally, we establish the equivalence between the diffusion reverse step and the proximal operator of ADMM and provide a detailed convergence analysis of our algorithm under certain mild assumptions. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method ADMMDiff consistently generates high-quality samples while ensuring strong adherence to the conditioning criteria. It outperforms existing methods across a range of conditional generation tasks, including image generation with various guidance and controllable motion synthesis.
Youyuan Zhang, Zehua Liu, Zenan Li, James J. Clark, Xujie Si
CVPR3
2025 LoRA Decompose: Serving Fine-Tuned Models into LoRA-Like
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across diverse tasks but face increasing GPU-memory demands due to the growing variety and complexity of downstream tasks. Efficient inference has thus become essential, especially for resource-limited settings. In this paper, we propose LoRA Decompose, a novel compression approach based on a key insight: instruction-fine-tuned models share a common pretrained-like base component and differ primarily through low-rank, LoRA-like delta components. Leveraging this observation, we reformulate the inference problem as a constrained optimization task that jointly identifies a shared low-rank structure across multiple models, significantly reducing their memory footprints. We solve this optimization efficiently using a custom-designed block coordinate descent algorithm, converging quickly within a few iterations. Empirical experiments with Llama-2 7B and 13B models demonstrate that our method achieves a remarkable >32x GPU memory reduction while preserving task accuracy, allowing substantial efficiency gains for practical deployment.
Yibo Han, Tangzhi Xu, Zenan Li, Youshan Miao, Yuan Yao 0001, Ningyi Xu
ECAI3
2025 Proving Olympiad Inequalities by Synergizing LLMs and Symbolic Reasoning
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) can prove mathematical theorems formally by generating proof steps (\textit{a.k.a.} tactics) within a proof system. However, the space of possible tactics is vast and complex, while the available training data for formal proofs is limited, posing a significant challenge to LLM-based tactic generation. To address this, we introduce a neuro-symbolic tactic generator that synergizes the mathematical intuition learned by LLMs with domain-specific insights encoded by symbolic methods. The key aspect of this integration is identifying which parts of mathematical reasoning are best suited to LLMs and which to symbolic methods. While the high-level idea of neuro-symbolic integration is broadly applicable to various mathematical problems, in this paper, we focus specifically on Olympiad inequalities (Figure~1). We analyze how humans solve these problems and distill the techniques into two types of tactics: (1) scaling, handled by symbolic methods, and (2) rewriting, handled by LLMs. In addition, we combine symbolic tools with LLMs to prune and rank the proof goals for efficient proof search. We evaluate our framework on 161 challenging inequalities from multiple mathematics competitions, achieving state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforming existing LLM and symbolic approaches without requiring additional training data.
Zenan Li, Yuan Yao 0001, Xujie Si, Kaiyu Yang, Xiaoxing Ma
ICLR1
2025 Reviving DSP for Advanced Theorem Proving in the Era of Reasoning Models
abstract
Recent advancements, such as DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B and Kimina-Prover-Preview-72B, demonstrate a prevailing trend in leveraging reinforcement learning (RL)-based large-scale training for automated theorem proving. Surprisingly, we discover that even without any training, careful neuro-symbolic coordination of existing off-the-shelf reasoning models and tactic step provers can achieve comparable performance. This paper introduces DSP+, an improved version of the Draft, Sketch, and Prove framework, featuring a fine-grained and integrated neuro-symbolic enhancement for each phase: (1) In the draft phase, we prompt reasoning models to generate concise natural-language subgoals to benefit the sketch phase, removing thinking tokens and references to human-written proofs; (2) In the sketch phase, subgoals are autoformalized with hypotheses to benefit the proving phase, and sketch lines containing syntactic errors are masked according to predefined rules; (3) In the proving phase, we tightly integrate symbolic search methods like Aesop with step provers to establish proofs for the sketch subgoals. Experimental results show that, without any additional model training or fine-tuning, DSP+ solves 80.7%, 32.8%, and 24 out of 644 problems from miniF2F, ProofNet, and PutnamBench, respectively, while requiring fewer budgets compared to state-of-the-arts. DSP+ proves imo_2019_p1, an IMO problem in miniF2F that is not solved by any prior work. Additionally, DSP+ generates proof patterns comprehensible by human experts, facilitating the identification of formalization errors; For example, eight wrongly formalized statements in miniF2F are discovered. Our results highlight the potential of classical reasoning patterns besides the RL-based training. All components will be open-sourced.
Chenrui Cao, Liangcheng Song, Zenan Li, Xinyi Le
NeurIPS3
2025 A Theoretical Study on Bridging Internal Probability and Self-Consistency for LLM Reasoning
abstract
Test-time scaling seeks to improve the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by adding computational resources. A prevalent approach within the field is *sampling-based test-time scaling methods*, which enhance reasoning by generating multiple reasoning paths for a given input during inference. However, despite its practical success, the theoretical foundations remain underexplored. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical framework for analyzing sampling-based test-time scaling methods, grounded in the perspective of confidence estimation. Based on the framework, we analyze two dominant paradigms: self-consistency and perplexity, and reveal key limitations: self-consistency suffers from high estimation error while perplexity exhibits substantial modeling error and possible degradation of the estimation error convergence. To address these limitations, we introduce RPC, a hybrid method that leverages our theoretical insights through two key components: *Perplexity Consistency* and *Reasoning Pruning*. *Perplexity Consistency* combines the strengths of self-consistency and perplexity, boosting the convergence rate of estimation error from linear to exponential while preserving model error. *Reasoning Pruning* prevents degradation by eliminating low-probability reasoning paths. Both theoretical analysis and empirical results across seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that RPC has a strong potential for reducing reasoning error. Notably, RPC achieves reasoning performance comparable to self-consistency while not only enhancing confidence reliability but also reducing sampling costs by 50%. The code and resources are available at https://wnjxyk.github.io/RPC.
Zhi Zhou 0007, Tan Yuhao, Zenan Li, Yuan Yao 0001, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yufeng Li 0008, Xiaoxing Ma
NeurIPS3
2025 X-UniMotion: Animating Human Images with Expressive, Unified and Identity-Agnostic Motion Latents
abstract
We present X-UniMotion, a unified and expressive implicit latent representation for whole-body human motion, encompassing facial expressions, body poses, and hand gestures. Unlike prior motion transfer methods that rely on explicit skeletal poses and heuristic cross-identity adjustments, our approach encodes multi-granular human motion directly from a single image into a compact set of four disentangled latent tokens—one each for facial expression and body pose, and one per hand. These motion latents are both highly expressive and identity-agnostic, enabling high-fidelity, detailed cross-identity motion transfer across subjects with distinct identities, poses and spatial configurations. To achieve this, we introduce a self-supervised, end-to-end training framework that jointly learns the motion encoder and latent representation alongside a DiT-based video generative model, trained on large-scale video datasets spanning diverse human motions. Motion-identity disentanglement is enforced via 2D spatial and color augmentations, as well as synthetic 3D renderings of cross-identity subject pairs under shared poses. We further guide the learning of motion tokens using auxiliary decoders to promote fine-grained, semantically aligned, and normal-aware motion embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-UniMotion outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing highly expressive animations with superior motion expressiveness and identity preservation. Please refer to https://byteaigc.github.io/X-Unimotion/ for more information.
Guoxian Song, Xiaochen Zhao, You Xie, Tianpei Gu, Zenan Li, Linjie Luo
SIGGRAPH Asia6
2025 X-Actor: Emotional and Expressive Long-Range Portrait Acting from Audio
abstract
We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance—capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting. Please refer to https://byteaigc.github.io/X-Actor/ for more results.
Zenan Li, You Xie, Xiaochen Zhao, Tianpei Gu, Guoxian Song, Xin Chen 0040, Chao Liang 0004, Jianwen Jiang, Linjie Luo
SIGGRAPH Asia2
2025 Short-term traffic flow prediction based on spatial-temporal attention time gated convolutional network with particle swarm optimization
Zhongxing Li, Zenan Li, Chaofeng Pan
Appl. Intell.2
2024 Boosting Offline Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving with Hierarchical Latent Skills
abstract
Learning-based vehicle planning is receiving increasing attention with the emergence of diverse driving simulators and large-scale driving datasets. While offline reinforcement learning (RL) is well suited for these safety-critical tasks, it still struggles to plan over extended periods. In this work, we present a skill-based framework that enhances offline RL to overcome the long-horizon vehicle planning challenge. Specifically, we design a variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn skills from offline demonstrations. To mitigate posterior collapse of common VAEs, we introduce a two-branch sequence encoder to capture both discrete options and continuous variations of the complex driving skills. The final policy treats learned skills as actions and can be trained by any off-the-shelf offline RL algorithms. This facilitates a shift in focus from per-step actions to temporally extended skills, thereby enabling long-term reasoning into the future. Extensive results on CARLA prove that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines at both training and new scenarios. Additional visualizations and experiments demonstrate the interpretability and transferability of extracted skills.
Zenan Li, Fan Nie, Qiao Sun 0001, Fang Da, Hang Zhao 0021
ICRA1
2024 Autoformalize Mathematical Statements by Symbolic Equivalence and Semantic Consistency
abstract
Autoformalization, the task of automatically translating natural language descriptions into a formal language, poses a significant challenge across various domains, especially in mathematics. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have unveiled their promising capabilities to formalize even competition-level math problems. However, we observe a considerable discrepancy between pass@1 and pass@k accuracies in LLM-generated formalizations. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework that scores and selects the best result from k autoformalization candidates based on two complementary self-consistency methods: symbolic equivalence and semantic consistency. Elaborately, symbolic equivalence identifies the logical homogeneity among autoformalization candidates using automated theorem provers, and semantic consistency evaluates the preservation of the original meaning by informalizing the candidates and computing the similarity between the embeddings of the original and informalized texts. Our extensive experiments on the MATH and miniF2F datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances autoformalization accuracy, achieving up to 0.22-1.35x relative improvements across various LLMs and baseline methods.
Zenan Li, Xinming Wei, Xiaoxing Ma
NeurIPS1
2024 Neuro-Symbolic Data Generation for Math Reasoning
abstract
A critical question about Large Language Models (LLMs) is whether their apparent deficiency in mathematical reasoning is inherent, or merely a result of insufficient exposure to high-quality mathematical data. To explore this, we developed an automated method for generating high-quality, supervised mathematical datasets. The method carefully mutates existing math problems, ensuring both diversity and validity of the newly generated problems. This is achieved by a neuro-symbolic data generation framework combining the intuitive informalization strengths of LLMs, and the precise symbolic reasoning of math solvers along with projected Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling in the highly-irregular symbolic space. Empirical experiments demonstrate the high quality of data generated by the proposed method, and that the LLMs, specifically LLaMA-2 and Mistral, when realigned with the generated data, surpass their state-of-the-art counterparts.
Zenan Li, Zhi Zhou 0007, Yuan Yao 0001, Yufeng Li 0008, Chun Cao, Xiaoxing Ma
NeurIPS1
2023 Softened Symbol Grounding for Neuro-symbolic Systems
Zenan Li, Yuan Yao 0001, Taolue Chen 0001, Jingwei Xu 0001, Chun Cao, Xiaoxing Ma, Jian Lu 0001
ICLR1
2023 Learning with Logical Constraints but without Shortcut Satisfaction
Zenan Li, Zehua Liu, Yuan Yao 0001, Jingwei Xu 0001, Taolue Chen 0001, Xiaoxing Ma, Jian Lu 0001
ICLR1
2023 ROCO: A General Framework for Evaluating Robustness of Combinatorial Optimization Solvers on Graphs
Han Lu 0004, Zenan Li, Runzhong Wang, Qibing Ren, Xijun Li, Mingxuan Yuan, Xiaokang Yang 0001, Junchi Yan
ICLR2
2023 Lightweight Approaches to DNN Regression Error Reduction: An Uncertainty Alignment Perspective
abstract
Regression errors of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models refer to the case that predictions were correct by the old-version model but wrong by the new-version model. They frequently occur when upgrading DNN models in production systems, causing disproportionate user experience degradation. In this paper, we propose a lightweight regression error reduction approach with two goals: 1) requiring no model retraining and even data, and 2) not sacrificing the accuracy. The proposed approach is built upon the key insight rooted in the unmanaged model uncertainty, which is intrinsic to DNN models, but has not been thoroughly explored especially in the context of quality assurance of DNN models. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective ensemble strategy that estimates and aligns the two models' uncertainty. We show that a Pareto improvement that reduces the regression errors without compromising the overall accuracy can be guaranteed in theory and largely achieved in practice. Comprehensive experiments with various representative models and datasets confirm that our approaches significantly outperform the state-of-the-art alternatives.
Zenan Li, Maorun Zhang, Jingwei Xu 0001, Yuan Yao 0001, Chun Cao, Taolue Chen 0001, Xiaoxing Ma, Jian Lu 0001
ICSE1
2023 Neuro-symbolic Learning Yielding Logical Constraints
abstract
Neuro-symbolic systems combine the abilities of neural perception and logical reasoning. However, end-to-end learning of neuro-symbolic systems is still an unsolved challenge. This paper proposes a natural framework that fuses neural network training, symbol grounding, and logical constraint synthesis into a coherent and efficient end-to-end learning process. The capability of this framework comes from the improved interactions between the neural and the symbolic parts of the system in both the training and inference stages. Technically, to bridge the gap between the continuous neural network and the discrete logical constraint, we introduce a difference-of-convex programming technique to relax the logical constraints while maintaining their precision. We also employ cardinality constraints as the language for logical constraint learning and incorporate a trust region method to avoid the degeneracy of logical constraint in learning. Both theoretical analyses and empirical evaluations substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Zenan Li, Yunpeng Huang, Yuan Yao 0001, Jingwei Xu 0001, Taolue Chen 0001, Xiaoxing Ma, Jian Lu 0001
NeurIPS1
2023 On the Vulnerability of Graph Learning-based Collaborative Filtering
abstract
Graph learning-based collaborative filtering (GLCF), which is built upon the message-passing mechanism of graph neural networks (GNNs), has received great recent attention and exhibited superior performance in recommender systems. However, although GNNs can be easily compromised by adversarial attacks as shown by the prior work, little attention has been paid to the vulnerability of GLCF. Questions like can GLCF models be just as easily fooled as GNNs remain largely unexplored. In this article, we propose to study the vulnerability of GLCF. Specifically, we first propose an adversarial attack against CLCF. Considering the unique challenges of attacking GLCF, we propose to adopt the greedy strategy in searching for the local optimal perturbations and design a reasonable attacking utility function to handle the non-differentiable ranking-oriented metrics. Next, we propose a defense to robustify GCLF. The defense is based on the observation that attacks usually introduce suspicious interactions into the graph to manipulate the message-passing process. We then propose to measure the suspicious score of each interaction and further reduce the message weight of suspicious interactions. We also give a theoretical guarantee of its robustness. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of both our attack and defense.
Senrong Xu, Liangyue Li, Zenan Li, Yuan Yao 0001, Feng Xu 0007, Zulong Chen, Hanghang Tong
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.3
2022 On Collective Robustness of Bagging Against Data Poisoning
abstract
Bootstrap aggregating (bagging) is an effective ensemble protocol, which is believed can enhance robustness by its majority voting mechanism. Recent works further prove the sample-wise robustness certificates for certain forms of bagging (e.g. partition aggregation). Beyond these particular forms, in this paper, we propose the first collective certification for general bagging to compute the tight robustness against the global poisoning attack. Specifically, we compute the maximum number of simultaneously changed predictions via solving a binary integer linear programming (BILP) problem. Then we analyze the robustness of vanilla bagging and give the upper bound of the tolerable poison budget. Based on this analysis, we propose hash bagging to improve the robustness of vanilla bagging almost for free. This is achieved by modifying the random subsampling in vanilla bagging to a hash-based deterministic subsampling, as a way of controlling the influence scope for each poisoning sample universally. Our extensive experiments show the notable advantage in terms of applicability and robustness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Emiyalzn/ICML22-CRB.
Ruoxin Chen, Zenan Li, Jie Li 0002, Junchi Yan, Chentao Wu
ICML2
2022 Fair Representation Learning: An Alternative to Mutual Information
abstract
Learning fair representations is an essential task to reduce bias in data-oriented decision making. It protects minority subgroups by requiring the learned representations to be independent of sensitive attributes. To achieve independence, the vast majority of the existing work primarily relaxes it to the minimization of the mutual information between sensitive attributes and learned representations. However, direct computation of mutual information is computationally intractable, and various upper bounds currently used either are still intractable or contradict the utility of the learned representations. In this paper, we introduce distance covariance as a new dependence measure into fair representation learning. By observing that sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, and age group) are typically categorical, the distance covariance can be converted to a tractable penalty term without contradicting the utility desideratum. Based on the tractable penalty, we propose FairDisCo, a variational method to learn fair representations. Experiments demonstrate that FairDisCo outperforms existing competitors for fair representation learning.
Zenan Li, Yuan Yao 0001, Feng Xu 0007, Xiaoxing Ma, Miao Xu 0001, Hanghang Tong
KDD2
2022 GraphDE: A Generative Framework for Debiased Learning and Out-of-Distribution Detection on Graphs
abstract
Despite the remarkable success of graph neural networks (GNNs) for graph representation learning, they are generally built on the (unreliable) i.i.d. assumption across training and testing data. However, real-world graph data are universally comprised of outliers in training set and out-of-distribution (OOD) testing samples from unseen domains, which solicits effective models for i) debiased learning and ii) OOD detection, towards general trustworthy purpose. In this paper, we first mathematically formulate the two challenging problems for graph data and take an initiative on tackling them under a unified probabilistic model. Specifically, we model the graph generative process to characterize the distribution shifts of graph data together with an additionally introduced latent environment variable as an indicator. We then define a variational distribution, i.e., a recognition model, to infer the environment during training of GNN. By instantiating the generative models as two-component mixtures, we derive a tractable learning objective and theoretically justify that the model can i) automatically identify and down-weight outliers in the training procedure, and ii) induce an effective OOD detector simultaneously. Experiments on diverse datasets with different types of OOD data prove that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines for both debiasing and OOD detection tasks. The source code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/Emiyalzn/GraphDE.
Zenan Li, Qitian Wu, Fan Nie, Junchi Yan
NeurIPS1
2022 NodeFormer: A Scalable Graph Structure Learning Transformer for Node Classification
abstract
Graph neural networks have been extensively studied for learning with inter-connected data. Despite this, recent evidence has revealed GNNs' deficiencies related to over-squashing, heterophily, handling long-range dependencies, edge incompleteness and particularly, the absence of graphs altogether. While a plausible solution is to learn new adaptive topology for message passing, issues concerning quadratic complexity hinder simultaneous guarantees for scalability and precision in large networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel all-pair message passing scheme for efficiently propagating node signals between arbitrary nodes, as an important building block for a new class of Transformer networks for node classification on large graphs, dubbed as NodeFormer. Specifically, the efficient computation is enabled by a kernerlized Gumbel-Softmax operator that reduces the algorithmic complexity to linearity w.r.t. node numbers for learning latent graph structures from large, potentially fully-connected graphs in a differentiable manner. We also provide accompanying theory as justification for our design. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promising efficacy of the method in various tasks including node classification on graphs (with up to 2M nodes) and graph-enhanced applications (e.g., image classification) where input graphs are missing. The codes are available at https://github.com/qitianwu/NodeFormer.
Qitian Wu, Zenan Li, David P. Wipf, Junchi Yan
NeurIPS3
2022 A Deep Learning Dataloader with Shared Data Preparation
abstract
Executing a family of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training jobs on the same or similar datasets in parallel is typical in current deep learning scenarios. It is time-consuming and resource-intensive because each job repetitively prepares (i.e., loads and preprocesses) the data independently, causing redundant consumption of I/O and computations. Although the page cache or a centralized cache component can alleviate the redundancies by reusing the data prep work, each job's data sampled uniformly at random presents a low sampling locality in the shared dataset that causes the heavy cache thrashing. Prior work tries to solve the problem by enforcing all training jobs iterating over the dataset in the same order and requesting each data in lockstep, leading to strong constraints: all jobs must have the same dataset and run simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a dependent sampling algorithm (DSA) and domain-specific cache policy to relax the constraints. Besides, a novel tree data structure is designed to efficiently implement DSA. Based on the proposed technologies, we implemented a prototype system, named Joader, which can share data prep work as long as the datasets share partially. We evaluate the proposed Joader in practical scenarios, showing a greater versatility and superiority over training speed improvement (up to 500% in ResNet18).
Jingwei Xu 0001, Guochang Wang, Yuan Yao 0001, Zenan Li, Chun Cao, Hanghang Tong
NeurIPS5
2021 Towards effective metamorphic testing by algorithm stability for linear classification programs
Yingzhuo Yang, Zenan Li, Huiyan Wang 0001, Chang Xu 0001, Xiaoxing Ma
J. Syst. Softw.2
2020 Operational calibration: debugging confidence errors for DNNs in the field
abstract
Trained DNN models are increasingly adopted as integral parts of software systems, but they often perform deficiently in the field. A particularly damaging problem is that DNN models often give false predictions with high confidence, due to the unavoidable slight divergences between operation data and training data. To minimize the loss caused by inaccurate confidence, operational calibration, i.e., calibrating the confidence function of a DNN classifier against its operation domain, becomes a necessary debugging step in the engineering of the whole system.
Zenan Li, Xiaoxing Ma, Chang Xu 0001, Jingwei Xu 0001, Chun Cao, Jian Lu 0001
ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE1
2020 Predicted Robustness as QoS for Deep Neural Network Models
Yue-Huan Wang, Zenan Li, Jingwei Xu 0001, Ping Yu 0011, Taolue Chen 0001, Xiaoxing Ma
J. Comput. Sci. Technol.2
2019 Fast Robustness Prediction for Deep Neural Network
abstract
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved impressive performance in many difficult tasks. However, DNN models are essentially uninterpretable to humans, and unfortunately prone to adversarial attacks, which hinders their adoption in security and safety-critical scenarios. The robustness of a DNN model, which measures its stableness against adversarial attacks, becomes an important topic in both the machine learning and the software engineering communities. Analytical evaluation of DNN robustness is difficult due to the high-dimensionality of inputs, the huge amount of parameters, and the nonlinear network structure. In practice, the degree of robustness of DNNs is empirically approximated with adversarial searching, which is computationally expensive and cannot be applied in resource constrained settings such as embedded computing. In this paper, we propose to predict the robustness of a DNN model for each input with another DNN model, which takes the output of neurons of the former model as input. We train a regression model to encode the connections between output of the penultimate layer of a DNN model and its robustness. With this trained model, the robustness for an input can be predicted instantaneously. Experiments with MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets and LeNet, VGG and ResNet DNN models were conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed approach. The results indicated that our approach achieved 0.05-0.21 mean absolute errors and significantly outperformed confidence and surprise adequacy-based approaches.
Yue-Huan Wang, Zenan Li, Jingwei Xu 0001, Ping Yu 0004, Xiaoxing Ma
Internetware2
2019 Boosting operational DNN testing efficiency through conditioning
abstract
With the increasing adoption of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models as integral parts of software systems, efficient operational testing of DNNs is much in demand to ensure these models' actual performance in field conditions. A challenge is that the testing often needs to produce precise results with a very limited budget for labeling data collected in field.
Zenan Li, Xiaoxing Ma, Chang Xu 0001, Chun Cao, Jingwei Xu 0001, Jian Lu 0001
ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE1