Yao Shu

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32ranked-venue papers
10as first author
27since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict

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

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 27 · 8 first-author · 25 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 5 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Optimization and Robustness-Informed Membership Inference Attacks for LLMs
abstract
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns over training data privacy. Membership Inference Attacks (MIA), aiming to identify whether specific data was used for training, pose significant privacy risks. However, existing MIA methods struggle to address the scale and complexity of modern LLMs. This paper introduces OR-MIA, a novel MIA framework inspired by model optimization and input robustness. First, training data points are expected to exhibit smaller gradient norms due to optimization dynamics. Second, member samples show greater stability, with gradient norms being less sensitive to controlled input perturbations. OR-MIA leverages these principles by perturbing inputs, computing gradient norms, and using them as features for a robust classifier to distinguish members from non-members. Evaluations on LLMs (70M to 6B parameters) and various datasets demonstrate that OR-MIA outperforms existing methods, achieving over 90% accuracy. Our findings highlight a critical vulnerability in LLMs and underscore the need for improved privacy-preserving training paradigms.
Zichen Song 0001, Yao Shu
AAAI4
2026 Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time
abstract
Jian Mu, Qixin Zhang, Zhiyong Wang, Menglin Yang, Shuang Qiu, Chengwei Qin, Zhongxiang Dai, Yao Shu. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.
Jian Mu, Menglin Yang 0001, Chengwei Qin, Zhongxiang Dai, Yao Shu
ACL (1)8
2025 FSL-Rectifier: Rectify Outliers in Few-Shot Learning via Test-Time Augmentation
abstract
Few-shot learning (FSL) commonly requires a model to identify images (queries) that belong to classes unseen during training, based on a few labelled samples of the new classes (support set) as reference. So far, plenty of algorithms involve training data augmentation to improve the generalization capability of FSL models, but outlier queries or support images during inference can still pose great generalization challenges. In this work, to reduce the bias caused by the outlier samples, we generate additional test-class samples by combining original samples with suitable train-class samples via a generative image combiner. Then, we obtain averaged features via an augmentor, which leads to more typical representations through the averaging. We experimentally and theoretically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, obtaining a test accuracy improvement proportion of around 10% (e.g., from 46.86% to 53.28%) for trained FSL models. Importantly, given a pretrained image combiner, our method is training-free for off-the-shelf FSL models, whose performance can be improved without extra datasets nor further training of the models themselves.
Yunwei Bai, Ying Kiat Tan, Shiming Chen 0002, Yao Shu, Tsuhan Chen
AAAI4
2025 Flexora: Flexible Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence, but their performance on specific tasks is often limited by knowledge boundaries.While fine-tuning techniques like low-rank adaptation (LoRA) aim to address this, they can suffer from overfitting.We propose flexible low-rank adaptation (Flexora), a novel method that automatically selects the most critical layers for fine-tuning to optimize performance across diverse downstream tasks.Flexora formulates layer selection as a hyperparameter optimization problem, employs unrolled differentiation for efficient solving, and identifies the most impactful layers based on optimized hyperparameters.Extensive experiments across various pre-trained models and natural language tasks demonstrate that Flexora consistently outperforms existing baselines.We provide theoretical insights and comprehensive ablation studies to elucidate the effectiveness of Flexora.Therefore, Flexora offers a robust solution to enhance LoRA finetuning for LLMs, potentially advancing the field of adaptive language model optimization.
Chenxing Wei, Yao Shu, Ying Tiffany He
ACL (1)2
2025 PAFT: Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning
abstract
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often causes overfitting to specific prompt wording, where minor phrasing variations drastically reduce performance.To address this, we propose Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning (PAFT), a method that enhances robustness through dynamic prompt variation during training.PAFT first generates diverse synthetic prompts, then continuously samples from this set to construct training instances, forcing models to learn fundamental task principles rather than surface-level patterns.Across systematic evaluations using both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT), PAFT demonstrates substantially improved prompt robustness, achieving 7% higher generalization accuracy on unseen prompts than standard methods.In addition to enhanced robustness, PAFT consistently yields superior overall performance on established benchmarks for question answering, mathematical reasoning, and tool use.Notably, models trained with PAFT attain 3.2× faster inference speeds due to reduced prompt sensitivity.Ablation studies further validate effectiveness of PAFT, while theoretical analysis reveals that PAFT can effectively enhance the cross-domain generalization ability of LLM.
Chenxing Wei, Mingwen Ou, Ying He 0006, Yao Shu, F. Richard Yu
EMNLP4
2025 Multinoulli Extension: A Lossless Yet Effective Probabilistic Framework for Subset Selection over Partition Constraints
abstract
Identifying the most representative subset for a close-to-submodular objective while satisfying the predefined partition constraint is a fundamental task with numerous applications in machine learning. However, the existing distorted local-search methods are often hindered by their prohibitive query complexities and the rigid requirement for prior knowledge of difficult-to-obtain structural parameters. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel algorithm titled **Multinoulli-SCG**, which not only is parameter-free, but also can achieve the same approximation guarantees as the distorted local-search methods with significantly fewer function evaluations. The core of our **Multinoulli-SCG** algorithm is an innovative continuous-relaxation framework named Multinoulli Extension(***ME***), which can effectively convert the discrete subset selection problem subject to partition constraints into a solvable continuous maximization focused on learning the optimal multinoulli priors across the considered partition. In sharp contrast with the well-established multi-linear extension for submodular subset selection, a notable advantage of our proposed ***ME*** is its intrinsic capacity to provide a lossless rounding scheme for any set function. Finally, we validate the practical efficacy of our proposed algorithms by applying them to video summarization, bayesian A-optimal design and coverage maximization.
Qixin Zhang 0001, Can Jin, Puning Zhao, Yao Shu, Li Shen 0008, Dacheng Tao
ICML5
2025 Refining Adaptive Zeroth-Order Optimization at Ease
abstract
Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such as ZO-AdaMM have shown promise, they are fundamentally limited by their underutilization of moment information during optimization, usually resulting in underperforming convergence. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces *Refined Adaptive Zeroth-Order Optimization* (R-AdaZO). Specifically, we first show the untapped variance reduction effect of first moment estimate on ZO gradient estimation, which improves the accuracy and stability of ZO updates. We then refine the second moment estimate based on these variance-reduced gradient estimates to better capture the geometry of the optimization landscape, enabling a more effective scaling of ZO updates. We present rigorous theoretical analysis to show **_(a)_** *the first analysis* to the variance reduction of first moment estimate in ZO optimization, **_(b)_** *the improved second moment estimates* with a more accurate approximation of its variance-free ideal, **_(c)_** *the first variance-aware convergence framework* for adaptive ZO methods, which may be of independent interest, and **_(d)_** *the faster convergence* of R-AdaZO than existing baselines like ZO-AdaMM. Our extensive experiments, including synthetic problems, black-box adversarial attack, and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), further verify the superior convergence of R-AdaZO, indicating that R-AdaZO offers an improved solution for real-world ZO optimization challenges.
Yao Shu, Qixin Zhang 0001, Kun He 0001, Zhongxiang Dai
ICML1
2025 Ferret: Federated Full-Parameter Tuning at Scale for Large Language Models
abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable in numerous real-world applications. However, fine-tuning these models at scale, especially in federated settings where data privacy and communication efficiency are critical, presents significant challenges. Existing approaches often resort to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to mitigate communication overhead, but this typically comes at the cost of model accuracy. To this end, we propose *federated full-parameter tuning at scale for LLMs* (Ferret), **the first first-order method with shared randomness** to enable scalable full-parameter tuning of LLMs across decentralized data sources while maintaining competitive model accuracy. Ferret accomplishes this through three aspects: **(i)** it employs widely used first-order methods for efficient local updates; **(ii)** it projects these updates into a low-dimensional space to considerably reduce communication overhead; and **(iii)** it reconstructs local updates from this low-dimensional space with shared randomness to facilitate effective full-parameter global aggregation, ensuring fast convergence and competitive final performance. Our rigorous theoretical analyses and insights along with extensive experiments, show that Ferret significantly enhances the scalability of existing federated full-parameter tuning approaches by achieving high computational efficiency, reduced communication overhead, and fast convergence, all while maintaining competitive model accuracy. Our implementation is available at [https://github.com/allen4747/Ferret](https://github.com/allen4747/Ferret).
Yao Shu, Wenyang Hu, See-Kiong Ng, Kian Hsiang Low, F. Richard Yu
ICML1
2025 WMarkGPT: Watermarked Image Understanding via Multimodal Large Language Models
abstract
Invisible watermarking is widely used to protect digital images from unauthorized use. Accurate assessment of watermarking efficacy is crucial for advancing algorithmic development. However, existing statistical metrics, such as PSNR, rely on access to original images, which are often unavailable in text-driven generative watermarking and fail to capture critical aspects of watermarking, particularly visibility. More importantly, these metrics fail to account for potential corruption of image content. To address these limitations, we propose WMarkGPT, the first multimodal large language model (MLLM) specifically designed for comprehensive watermarked image understanding, without accessing original images. WMarkGPT not only predicts watermark visibility but also generates detailed textual descriptions of its location, content, and impact on image semantics, enabling a more nuanced interpretation of watermarked images. Tackling the challenge of precise location description and understanding images with vastly different content, we construct three visual question-answering (VQA) datasets: an object location-aware dataset, a synthetic watermarking dataset, and a real watermarking dataset. We introduce a meticulously designed three-stage learning pipeline to progressively equip WMarkGPT with the necessary abilities. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real watermarking QA datasets demonstrate that WMarkGPT outperforms existing MLLMs, achieving significant improvements in visibility prediction and content description. The datasets and code are released at https://github.com/TanSongBai/WMarkGPT.
Songbai Tan, Xuerui Qiu, Yao Shu, Linrui Xu, Huiping Zhuang, Ming Li 0011, F. Richard Yu
ICML3
2025 ReDit: Reward Dithering for Improved LLM Policy Optimization
abstract
DeepSeek-R1 has successfully enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capabilities through its rule-based reward system. While it's a ''perfect'' reward system that effectively mitigates reward hacking, such reward functions are often discrete. Our experimental observations suggest that discrete rewards can lead to gradient anomaly, unstable optimization, and slow convergence. To address this issue, we propose ReDit (Reward Dithering), a method that dithers the discrete reward signal by adding simple random noise. With this perturbed reward, exploratory gradients are continuously provided throughout the learning process, enabling smoother gradient updates and accelerating convergence. The injected noise also introduces stochasticity into flat reward regions, encouraging the model to explore novel policies and escape local optima. Experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ReDit. On average, ReDit achieves performance comparable to vanilla GRPO with only approximately 10% the training steps, and furthermore, still exhibits a 4% performance improvement over vanilla GRPO when trained for a similar duration. Visualizations confirm significant mitigation of gradient issues with ReDit. Moreover, theoretical analyses are provided to further validate these advantages.
Chenxing Wei, Jiarui Yu, Ying He 0006, Hande Dong, Yao Shu, F. Richard Yu
NeurIPS5
2025 Effective Policy Learning for Multi-Agent Online Coordination Beyond Submodular Objectives
abstract
In this paper, we present two effective policy learning algorithms for multi-agent online coordination(MA-OC) problem. The first one, **MA-SPL**, not only can achieve the optimal $(1-\frac{c}{e})$-approximation guarantee for the MA-OC problem with submodular objectives but also can handle the unexplored $\alpha$-weakly DR-submodular and $(\gamma,\beta)$-weakly submodular scenarios, where $c$ is the curvature of the investigated submodular functions, $\alpha$ denotes the diminishing-return(DR) ratio and the tuple$(\gamma,\beta)$ represents the submodularity ratios. Subsequently, in order to reduce the reliance on the unknown parameters $\alpha,\gamma,\beta$ inherent in the **MA-SPL** algorithm, we then introduce the second online algorithm named **MA-MPL**. This **MA-MPL** algorithm is entirely *parameter-free* and simultaneously can maintain the same approximation ratio as the first **MA-SPL** algorithm. The core of our **MA-SPL** and **MA-MPL** algorithms is a novel continuous-relaxation technique term as policy-based continuous extension. Compared with the well-established multi-linear extension, a notable advantage of this new policy-based continuous extension is its ability to provide a lossless rounding scheme for any set function, thereby enabling us to tackle the challenging weakly submodular objective functions. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
Qixin Zhang 0001, Can Jin, Xikun Zhang 0007, Yao Shu, Puning Zhao, Li Shen 0008, Dacheng Tao
NeurIPS5
2025 Characterizing Logs in Vulnerability Reports: In-Depth Analysis and Security Implications
abstract
Software logs provide a rich source of data for tracing, debugging, and detecting software bugs. However, the valuable data contained within logs attached to vulnerability reports remains largely unexplored. This study aims to bridge this gap by investigating the characteristics, rationales, and potential of logs for software vulnerability management. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of 1,118 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) linked to issue reports, specifically focusing on the distribution and content of logs included in these reports. Our analysis reveals that exception logs are the most prevalent type across various vulnerability categories and life cycle phases. In addition, we further discover seven key rationales for attaching logs to vulnerability reports, highlighting the multifaceted role of logs in vulnerability reporting and analysis. Furthermore, we explore the feasibility of using logs to assist in vulnerability management, specifically for vulnerability location and security issue detection. Our experiments show that exception logs effectively target at least one vulnerable function in 65.6% of analyzed vulnerabilities. To support security issue detection, we apply three different approaches, i.e., heuristic rule-based, K-means++, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We evaluate the three approaches on a total of 158,730 issue reports from 72 projects hosted on GitHub and Bugzilla. The results show that heuristic rule-based and K-means++ approaches successfully identify true security issues, with a precision of 44.1% and 46.7% respectively. Overall, our findings highlight the significant potential of analyzing logs in vulnerability reports to strengthen software security practices and inspire future studies.
Yao Shu, Lianyu Zheng, Jinfu Chen 0006, Jifeng Xuan
SANER1
2024 Robustifying and Boosting Training-Free Neural Architecture Search
abstract
Neural architecture search (NAS) has become a key component of AutoML and a standard tool to automate the design of deep neural networks. Recently, training-free NAS as an emerging paradigm has successfully reduced the search costs of standard training-based NAS by estimating the true architecture performance with only training-free metrics. Nevertheless, the estimation ability of these metrics typically varies across different tasks, making it challenging to achieve robust and consistently good search performance on diverse tasks with only a single training-free metric. Meanwhile, the estimation gap between training-free metrics and the true architecture performances limits training-free NAS to achieve superior performance. To address these challenges, we propose the robustifying and boosting training-free NAS (RoBoT) algorithm which (a) employs the optimized combination of existing training-free metrics explored from Bayesian optimization to develop a robust and consistently better-performing metric on diverse tasks, and (b) applies greedy search, i.e., the exploitation, on the newly developed metric to bridge the aforementioned gap and consequently to boost the search performance of standard training-free NAS further. Remarkably, the expected performance of our RoBoT can be theoretically guaranteed, which improves over the existing training-free NAS under mild conditions with additional interesting insights. Our extensive experiments on various NAS benchmark tasks yield substantial empirical evidence to support our theoretical results.
Zhenfeng He, Yao Shu, Zhongxiang Dai, Kian Hsiang Low
ICLR2
2024 Use Your INSTINCT: INSTruction optimization for LLMs usIng Neural bandits Coupled with Transformers
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable instruction-following capabilities and achieved impressive performances in various applications. However, the performances of LLMs depend heavily on the instructions given to them, which are typically manually tuned with substantial human efforts. Recent work has used the query-efficient Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithm to automatically optimize the instructions given to black-box LLMs. However, BO usually falls short when optimizing highly sophisticated (e.g., high-dimensional) objective functions, such as the functions mapping an instruction to the performance of an LLM. This is mainly due to the limited expressive power of the Gaussian process (GP) which is used by BO as a surrogate to model the objective function. Meanwhile, it has been repeatedly shown that neural networks (NNs), especially pre-trained transformers, possess strong expressive power and can model highly complex functions. So, we adopt a neural bandit algorithm which replaces the GP in BO by an NN surrogate to optimize instructions for black-box LLMs. More importantly, the neural bandit algorithm allows us to naturally couple the NN surrogate with the hidden representation learned by a pre-trained transformer (i.e., an open-source LLM), which significantly boosts its performance. These motivate us to propose our INSTruction optimization usIng Neural bandits Coupled with Transformers (INSTINCT) algorithm. We perform instruction optimization for ChatGPT and use extensive experiments to show that INSTINCT consistently outperforms baselines in different tasks, e.g., various instruction induction tasks and the task of improving zero-shot chain-of-thought instructions. Our code is available at https://github.com/xqlin98/INSTINCT.
Xiaoqiang Lin, Zhaoxuan Wu, Zhongxiang Dai, Wenyang Hu, Yao Shu, See-Kiong Ng, Patrick Jaillet, Kian Hsiang Low
ICML5
2024 Localized Zeroth-Order Prompt Optimization
abstract
The efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and generating natural language has aroused a wide interest in developing prompt-based methods to harness the power of black-box LLMs. Existing methodologies usually prioritize a global optimization for finding the global optimum, which however will perform poorly in certain tasks. This thus motivates us to re-think the necessity of finding a global optimum in prompt optimization. To answer this, we conduct a thorough empirical study on prompt optimization and draw two major insights. Contrasting with the rarity of global optimum, local optima are usually prevalent and well-performed, which can be more worthwhile for efficient prompt optimization (**Insight I**). The choice of the input domain, covering both the generation and the representation of prompts, affects the identification of well-performing local optima (**Insight II**). Inspired by these insights, we propose a novel algorithm, namely localized zeroth-order prompt optimization (ZOPO), which incorporates a Neural Tangent Kernel-based derived Gaussian process into standard zeroth-order optimization for an efficient search of well-performing local optima in prompt optimization. Remarkably, ZOPO outperforms existing baselines in terms of both the optimization performance and the query efficiency, which we demonstrate through extensive experiments.
Wenyang Hu, Yao Shu, Zongmin Yu, Zhaoxuan Wu, Xiaoqiang Lin, Zhongxiang Dai, See-Kiong Ng, Kian Hsiang Low
NeurIPS2
2024 OptEx: Expediting First-Order Optimization with Approximately Parallelized Iterations
abstract
First-order optimization (FOO) algorithms are pivotal in numerous computational domains, such as reinforcement learning and deep learning. However, their application to complex tasks often entails significant optimization inefficiency due to their need of many sequential iterations for convergence. In response, we introduce first-order optimization expedited with approximately parallelized iterations (OptEx), the first general framework that enhances the time efficiency of FOO by leveraging parallel computing to directly mitigate its requirement of many sequential iterations for convergence. To achieve this, OptEx utilizes a kernelized gradient estimation that is based on the history of evaluated gradients to predict the gradients required by the next few sequential iterations in FOO, which helps to break the inherent iterative dependency and hence enables the approximate parallelization of iterations in FOO. We further establish theoretical guarantees for the estimation error of our kernelized gradient estimation and the iteration complexity of SGD-based OptEx, confirming that the estimation error diminishes to zero as the history of gradients accumulates and that our SGD-based OptEx enjoys an effective acceleration rate of Θ(√N ) over standard SGD given parallelism of N, in terms of the sequential iterations required for convergence. Finally, we provide extensive empirical studies, including synthetic functions, reinforcement learning tasks, and neural network training on various datasets, to underscore the substantial efficiency improvements achieved by our OptEx in practice.
Yao Shu, Jiongfeng Fang, Ying He 0006, F. Richard Yu
NeurIPS1
2024 Prompt Optimization with EASE? Efficient Ordering-aware Automated Selection of Exemplars
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in real-world applications. The capability of *in-context learning* (ICL) allows us to adapt an LLM to downstream tasks by including input-label exemplars in the prompt without model fine-tuning. However, the quality of these exemplars in the prompt greatly impacts performance, highlighting the need for an effective automated exemplar selection method. Recent studies have explored retrieval-based approaches to select exemplars tailored to individual test queries, which can be undesirable due to extra test-time computation and an increased risk of data exposure. Moreover, existing methods fail to adequately account for the impact of exemplar ordering on the performance. On the other hand, the impact of the *instruction*, another essential component in the prompt given to the LLM, is often overlooked in existing exemplar selection methods. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method named $\texttt{EASE}$, which leverages the hidden embedding from a pre-trained language model to represent ordered sets of exemplars and uses a neural bandit algorithm to optimize the sets of exemplars *while accounting for exemplar ordering*. Our $\texttt{EASE}$ can efficiently find an ordered set of exemplars that *performs well for all test queries* from a given task, thereby eliminating test-time computation. Importantly, $\texttt{EASE}$ can be readily extended to *jointly optimize both the exemplars and the instruction*. Through extensive empirical evaluations (including novel tasks), we demonstrate the superiority of $\texttt{EASE}$ over existing methods, and reveal practical insights about the impact of exemplar selection on ICL, which may be of independent interest. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhaoxuanWu/EASE-Prompt-Optimization.
Zhaoxuan Wu, Xiaoqiang Lin, Zhongxiang Dai, Wenyang Hu, Yao Shu, See-Kiong Ng, Patrick Jaillet, Kian Hsiang Low
NeurIPS5
2023 Federated Neural Bandits
Zhongxiang Dai, Yao Shu, Arun Verma, Flint Xiaofeng Fan, Kian Hsiang Low, Patrick Jaillet
ICLR2
2023 Zeroth-Order Optimization with Trajectory-Informed Derivative Estimation
Yao Shu, Zhongxiang Dai, Weicong Sng, Arun Verma, Patrick Jaillet, Kian Hsiang Low
ICLR1
2023 Quantum Bayesian Optimization
abstract
Kernelized bandits, also known as Bayesian optimization (BO), has been a prevalent method for optimizing complicated black-box reward functions. Various BO algorithms have been theoretically shown to enjoy upper bounds on their cumulative regret which are sub-linear in the number $T$ of iterations, and a regret lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ has been derived which represents the unavoidable regrets for any classical BO algorithm. Recent works on quantum bandits have shown that with the aid of quantum computing, it is possible to achieve tighter regret upper bounds better than their corresponding classical lower bounds. However, these works are restricted to either multi-armed or linear bandits, and are hence not able to solve sophisticated real-world problems with non-linear reward functions. To this end, we introduce the quantum-Gaussian process-upper confidence bound (Q-GP-UCB) algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, our Q-GP-UCB is the first BO algorithm able to achieve a regret upper bound of $\mathcal{O}(\text{poly}\log T)$, which is significantly smaller than its regret lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ in the classical setting. Moreover, thanks to our novel analysis of the confidence ellipsoid, our Q-GP-UCB with the linear kernel achieves a smaller regret than the quantum linear UCB algorithm from the previous work. We use simulations, as well as an experiment using a real quantum computer, to verify that the theoretical quantum speedup achieved by our Q-GP-UCB is also potentially relevant in practice.
Zhongxiang Dai, Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Arun Verma, Yao Shu, Kian Hsiang Low, Patrick Jaillet
NeurIPS4
2023 Exploiting Correlated Auxiliary Feedback in Parameterized Bandits
abstract
We study a novel variant of the parameterized bandits problem in which the learner can observe additional auxiliary feedback that is correlated with the observed reward. The auxiliary feedback is readily available in many real-life applications, e.g., an online platform that wants to recommend the best-rated services to its users can observe the user's rating of service (rewards) and collect additional information like service delivery time (auxiliary feedback). In this paper, we first develop a method that exploits auxiliary feedback to build a reward estimator with tight confidence bounds, leading to a smaller regret. We then characterize the regret reduction in terms of the correlation coefficient between reward and its auxiliary feedback. Experimental results in different settings also verify the performance gain achieved by our proposed method.
Arun Verma, Zhongxiang Dai, Yao Shu, Kian Hsiang Low
NeurIPS3
2022 NASI: Label- and Data-agnostic Neural Architecture Search at Initialization
Yao Shu, Shaofeng Cai, Zhongxiang Dai, Beng Chin Ooi, Kian Hsiang Low
ICLR1
2022 DAVINZ: Data Valuation using Deep Neural Networks at Initialization
abstract
Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in developing trustworthy methods to evaluate the value of data in many real-world applications (e.g., collaborative machine learning, data marketplaces). Existing data valuation methods typically valuate data using the generalization performance of converged machine learning models after their long-term model training, hence making data valuation on large complex deep neural networks (DNNs) unaffordable. To this end, we theoretically derive a domain-aware generalization bound to estimate the generalization performance of DNNs without model training. We then exploit this theoretically derived generalization bound to develop a novel training-free data valuation method named data valuation at initialization (DAVINZ) on DNNs, which consistently achieves remarkable effectiveness and efficiency in practice. Moreover, our training-free DAVINZ, surprisingly, can even theoretically and empirically enjoy the desirable properties that training-based data valuation methods usually attain, thus making it more trustworthy in practice.
Zhaoxuan Wu, Yao Shu, Kian Hsiang Low
ICML2
2022 Sample-Then-Optimize Batch Neural Thompson Sampling
abstract
Bayesian optimization (BO), which uses a Gaussian process (GP) as a surrogate to model its objective function, is popular for black-box optimization. However, due to the limitations of GPs, BO underperforms in some problems such as those with categorical, high-dimensional or image inputs. To this end, recent works have used the highly expressive neural networks (NNs) as the surrogate model and derived theoretical guarantees using the theory of neural tangent kernel (NTK). However, these works suffer from the limitations of the requirement to invert an extremely large parameter matrix and the restriction to the sequential (rather than batch) setting. To overcome these limitations, we introduce two algorithms based on the Thompson sampling (TS) policy named Sample-Then-Optimize Batch Neural TS (STO-BNTS) and STO-BNTS-Linear. To choose an input query, we only need to train an NN (resp. a linear model) and then choose the query by maximizing the trained NN (resp. linear model), which is equivalently sampled from the GP posterior with the NTK as the kernel function. As a result, our algorithms sidestep the need to invert the large parameter matrix yet still preserve the validity of the TS policy. Next, we derive regret upper bounds for our algorithms with batch evaluations, and use insights from batch BO and NTK to show that they are asymptotically no-regret under certain conditions. Finally, we verify their empirical effectiveness using practical AutoML and reinforcement learning experiments.
Zhongxiang Dai, Yao Shu, Kian Hsiang Low, Patrick Jaillet
NeurIPS2
2022 Unifying and Boosting Gradient-Based Training-Free Neural Architecture Search
abstract
Neural architecture search (NAS) has gained immense popularity owing to its ability to automate neural architecture design. A number of training-free metrics are recently proposed to realize NAS without training, hence making NAS more scalable. Despite their competitive empirical performances, a unified theoretical understanding of these training-free metrics is lacking. As a consequence, (a) the relationships among these metrics are unclear, (b) there is no theoretical interpretation for their empirical performances, and (c) there may exist untapped potential in existing training-free NAS, which probably can be unveiled through a unified theoretical understanding. To this end, this paper presents a unified theoretical analysis of gradient-based training-free NAS, which allows us to (a) theoretically study their relationships, (b) theoretically guarantee their generalization performances, and (c) exploit our unified theoretical understanding to develop a novel framework named hybrid NAS (HNAS) which consistently boosts training-free NAS in a principled way. Remarkably, HNAS can enjoy the advantages of both training-free (i.e., the superior search efficiency) and training-based (i.e., the remarkable search effectiveness) NAS, which we have demonstrated through extensive experiments.
Yao Shu, Zhongxiang Dai, Zhaoxuan Wu, Kian Hsiang Low
NeurIPS1
2022 Neural ensemble search via Bayesian sampling
abstract
Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) has been applied to automate the design of neural networks in real-world applications. A large number of algorithms have been developed to improve the search cost or the performance of the final selected architectures in NAS. Unfortunately, these NAS algorithms aim to select only one single well-performing architecture from their search spaces and thus have overlooked the capability of neural network ensemble (i.e., an ensemble of neural networks with diverse architectures) in achieving improved performance over a single final selected architecture. To this end, we introduce a novel neural ensemble search algorithm, called neural ensemble search via Bayesian sampling (NESBS), to effectively and efficiently select well-performing neural network ensembles from a NAS search space. In our extensive experiments, NESBS algorithm is shown to be able to achieve improved performance over state-of-the-art NAS algorithms while incurring a comparable search cost, thus indicating the superior performance of our NESBS algorithm over these NAS algorithms in practice.
Yao Shu, Zhongxiang Dai, Kian Hsiang Low
UAI1
2021 Dynamic Routing Networks
abstract
The deployment of deep neural networks in real-world applications is mostly restricted by their high inference costs. Extensive efforts have been made to improve the accuracy with expert-designed or algorithm-searched architectures. However, the incremental improvement is typically achieved with increasingly more expensive models that only a small portion of input instances really need. Inference with a static architecture that processes all input instances via the same transformation would thus incur unnecessary computational costs. Therefore, customizing the model capacity in an instance-aware manner is much needed for higher inference efficiency. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Routing Networks (DRNets), which support efficient instance-aware inference by routing the input instance to only necessary transformation branches selected from a candidate set of branches for each connection between transformation nodes. The branch selection is dynamically determined via the corresponding branch importance weights, which are first generated from lightweight hyper-networks (RouterNets) and then recalibrated with Gumbel-Softmax before the selection. Extensive experiments show that DRNets can reduce a substantial amount of parameter size and FLOPs during inference with prediction performance comparable to state-of-the-art architectures.
Shaofeng Cai, Yao Shu, Wei Wang 0059
WACV2
2020 Understanding Architectures Learnt by Cell-based Neural Architecture Search
Yao Shu, Wei Wang 0059, Shaofeng Cai
ICLR1
2020 Multimodal information fusion based human movement recognition
Yao Shu, Heng Zhang 0012
Multim. Tools Appl.1
2019 Wireless non-invasive motion tracking of functional behavior
Heng Zhang 0012, Jan D. Smeddinck, Rainer Malaka, Yao Shu, Zengjun Fu, Michael Lawo
Pervasive Mob. Comput.4
2018 WiTT: Modeling and the evaluation of table tennis actions based on WIFI signals
abstract
In recent years, with the rapid developments in science and technology which have taken place, wireless signals have evolved from a simple communication medium to something which can be used for environmentally aware tools. Many researchers have applied wireless signals to the research fields of human perception and human behavior recognition. At present, vision-based and sensor-based action recognition represent two mainstream methods. However, the former is sensitive to the levels of light available and the environment, and the latter requires users to wear (or deploy) devices which may cause the user inconvenience. Action recognition systems based on wireless signals can avoid these difficulties, and at low cost. Wi-Fi signals have been used to realize keystroke recognition, gesture recognition, and simple human behavior recognition. Inspired by this and the urgent need for the implementation of indoor somatosensory games and other application requirements which include human motion recognition, this paper presents a Table Tennis action recognition system based on Wi-Fi signals, which is termed WiTT. In family environment, Wi-Fi signals is always seriously affected by other wireless signals and environmental factors. WiTT uses discrete wavelet decomposition and support vector machines and other techniques, and it achieves a greater than 96.34% detection rate in detecting table tennis actions and a 90.33% recognition accuracy in classifying 6 different table tennis actions.
Yao Shu, Kuang-I Shu, Heng Zhang 0012
ICPR2
2005 An OO-based Design Model of Software Agent
abstract
How to implement software agent is a key problem for developing agent-oriented programming languages and tools. Aiming to solve this problem based on the OO technology, this paper first discusses differences between agent and object, and then puts forward an implemental architecture of software agent based on the OO technology and a simplified improvement of the BDI agent model. An OO-based design framework of software agent is also proposed by using the POAD method finally. These research results are helpful to clarify how to suitably extend the OO method for solving the key problem
Jianxing Li, Xinjun Mao, Yao Shu
PDCAT3