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Lijun Zhang

130 accepted papers

2026

ASTRA: Communication-Efficient Acceleration for Multi-Device Transformer Inference

ICML 2026poster

Multi-device inference can reduce Transformer latency by parallelizing computation. However, existing methods require high inter-device bandwidth, making them impractical for bandwidth-constrained environments. We present ASTRA, a communication-efficient framework that integrates sequence parallelis…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

BadThink: Triggered Overthinking Attacks on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models

AAAI 2026technical

Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but have also introduced their computational efficiency as a new attack surface. In this paper, we propose BadThink, the first backdoor attack designed to delib

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Certifying the Full YOLO Pipeline: A Probabilistic Verification Approach

ICLR 2026poster

Object detection systems are essential in safety-critical applications, but they are vulnerable to object disappearance (OD) threat, in which valid objects become undetected under small input perturbations, creating serious risks. This paper addresses the problem of verifying the robustness of YOLO…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Convergence Analysis of the Lion Optimizer in Centralized and Distributed Settings

ICML 2026poster

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive convergence analysis for the Lion optimizer. First, we establish that the original Lion achieves a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(d^{1/2}T^{-1/4})$, where $d$ denotes the problem dimension and $T$ is the iteration number. To improve this rate, we propose a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Decentralized Online Convex Optimization with Efficient Communication: Improved Algorithm and Lower Bounds

ICML 2026poster

We investigate decentralized online convex optimization with compressed communication, where $n$ learners connected by a network collaboratively minimize a sequence of global loss functions using only local information and compressed data from neighbors. Prior work has established regret bounds of $…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Hallucination-aware Intermediate Representation Editing in Large Vision-Lanugage Models

ICLR 2026poster

Large Vision-Language Models have demonstrated exceptional performance in multimodal reasoning and complex scene understanding. However, these models still face significant hallucination issues, where outputs contradict visual facts. Recent research on hallucination mitigation has focused on retrain…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Parameter-Free Clustering via Self-Supervised Consensus Maximization

AAAI 2026technical

Clustering is a fundamental task in unsupervised learning, but most existing methods heavily rely on hyperparameters such as the number of clusters or other sensitive settings, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this long-standing challenge, we propose a novel and fully

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Revisiting Matrix Sketching in Linear Bandits: Achieving Sublinear Regret via Dyadic Block Sketching

ICLR 2026poster

Linear bandits have become a cornerstone of online learning and sequential decision-making, providing solid theoretical foundations for balancing exploration and exploitation. Within this domain, matrix sketching serves as a critical component for achieving computational efficiency, especially when…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SL-CBM: Enhancing Concept Bottleneck Models with Semantic Locality for Better Interpretability

AAAI 2026technical

Explainable AI (XAI) is crucial for building transparent and trustworthy machine learning systems, especially in high-stakes domains. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have emerged as a promising ante-hoc approach that provides interpretable, concept-level explanations by explicitly modeling human-un

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Sparse Relaxed-Lasso Steering: Automatic Sparse-Autoencoder Feature Selection for Precise Image Editing

ICML 2026poster

Precise, training-free editing of text-to-image diffusion models requires balancing alignment (faithful attribute manifestation), consistency (preserving non-target content), and quality (artifact-free textures). Sparse autoencoder (SAE) steering offers interpretable, smooth ``slider-like'' control …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Towards Fully Parameter-Free Stochastic Optimization: Grid Search with Self-Bounding Analysis

ICML 2026poster

Parameter-free stochastic optimization aims to design algorithms that are agnostic to the underlying problem parameters while still achieving convergence rates competitive with optimally tuned methods. While some parameter-free methods do not require the specific values of the problem parameters, th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CoreGuard: Safeguarding Foundational Capabilities of LLMs Against Model Stealing in Edge Deployment

NeurIPS 2025poster

Proprietary large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong generalization capabilities across diverse tasks and are increasingly deployed on edge devices for efficiency and privacy reasons. However, deploying proprietary LLMs at the edge without adequate protection introduces critical security threats.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Dimension-Free Adaptive Subgradient Methods with Frequent Directions

ICML 2025poster

In this paper, we investigate the acceleration of adaptive subgradient methods through frequent directions (FD), a widely-used matrix sketching technique. The state-of-the-art regret bound exhibits a _linear_ dependence on the dimensionality $d$, leading to unsatisfactory guarantees for high-dimensi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Dual Consolidation for Pre-Trained Model-Based Domain-Incremental Learning

CVPR 2025poster

Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) involves the progressive adaptation of a model to new concepts across different domains. While recent advances in pre-trained models provide a solid foundation for DIL, learning new concepts often results in the catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Spec…

2025

External Knowledge Injection for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning

ICCV 2025poster

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables learning systems to continuously adapt to evolving data streams. With the advancement of pre-training, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) offers a promising starting point for CIL. However, CLIP makes decisions by matching visual embed…

2025

Generalizability of Neural Networks Minimizing Empirical Risk Based on Expressive Power

ICLR 2025poster

The primary objective of learning methods is generalization. Classic generalization bounds, based on VC-dimension or Rademacher complexity, are uniformly applicable to all networks in the hypothesis space. On the other hand, algorithm-dependent generalization bounds, like stability bounds, address m…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

HFE-RWKV: High-Frequency Enhanced RWKV Model for Efficient Left Ventricle Segmentation in Pediatric Echocardiograms

ICASSP 2025accepted

Automated ventricular function analysis can improve healthcare in resource-scarce areas, but current segmentation methods struggle with accurately delineating the irregular shape of the left ventricle due to a lack of emphasis on exploring the high-frequency target boundary features, and computation…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Octopus: Alleviating Hallucination via Dynamic Contrastive Decoding

CVPR 2025highlight

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have obtained impressive performance in visual content understanding and multi-modal reasoning. Unfortunately, these large models suffer from serious hallucination problems and tend to generate fabricated responses. Recently, several Contrastive Decoding (CD) str…

2025

One-step Label Shift Adaptation via Robust Weight Estimation

IJCAI 2025

Label shift is a prevalent phenomenon encountered in open environments, characterized by a notable discrepancy in the label distributions between the source (training) and target (test) domains, whereas the conditional distributions given the labels remain invariant. Existing label shift methods ado

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Online Nonsubmodular Optimization with Delayed Feedback in the Bandit Setting

AAAI 2025technical

We investigate the online nonsubmodular optimization with delayed feedback in the bandit setting, where the loss function is α-weakly DR-submodular and β-weakly DR-supermodular. Previous work has established an (α,β)-regret bound of O(nd^⅓T^⅔), where n is the dimensionality and d is the maximum…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Risk-aware Direct Preference Optimization under Nested Risk Measure

NeurIPS 2025poster

When fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human values and intentions, maximizing the estimated reward can lead to superior performance, but it also introduces potential risks due to deviations from the reference model's intended behavior. Most existing methods typicall…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

SPACE: Noise Contrastive Estimation Stabilizes Self-Play Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Self-play fine-tuning has demonstrated promising abilities in adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks with limited real-world data. The basic principle is to iteratively refine the model with real samples and synthetic ones generated from itself. However, the existing methods prima…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SeCon-RAG: A Two-Stage Semantic Filtering and Conflict-Free Framework for Trustworthy RAG

NeurIPS 2025poster

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems enhance large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge but are vulnerable to corpus poisoning and contamination attacks, which can compromise output integrity. Existing defenses often apply aggressive filtering, leading to unnecessary loss of valuab…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Towards Unbiased Information Extraction and Adaptation in Cross-Domain Recommendation

AAAI 2025technical

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) leverages additional knowledge from auxiliary domains to address the long-standing data sparsity issue. However, existing methods typically acquire this knowledge by minimizing the average loss over all domains, overlooking the fact that different domains possess di…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Training Verification-Friendly Neural Networks via Neuron Behavior Consistency

AAAI 2025technical

Formal verification provides critical security assurances for neural networks, yet its practical application suffers from the long verification time. This work introduces a novel method for training verification-friendly neural networks, which are robust, easy to verify, and relatively accurate. Our…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Triplets Better Than Pairs: Towards Stable and Effective Self-Play Fine-Tuning for LLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recently, self-play fine-tuning (SPIN) has been proposed to adapt large language models to downstream applications with scarce expert-annotated data, by iteratively generating synthetic responses from the model itself. However, SPIN is designed to optimize the current reward advantages of annotated…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

A Multi-Scale Convolutional Hybrid Attention Residual Network for Enhancing Underwater Image and Identifying Underwater Multi-Scene Sea Cucumber

RA-L 2024

At present, the use of underwater robots to replace underwater manual work is a future development direction. The complex and changeable underwater environment brings great difficulties to the operation of robots. In order to improve the problem of color distortion and degradation of sea cucumber im

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2024

Adaptive Variance Reduction for Stochastic Optimization under Weaker Assumptions

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper explores adaptive variance reduction methods for stochastic optimization based on the STORM technique. Existing adaptive extensions of STORM rely on strong assumptions like bounded gradients and bounded function values, or suffer an additional $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ term in the convergence…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Advancing Tool-Augmented Large Language Models: Integrating Insights from Errors in Inference Trees

NeurIPS 2024poster

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage tools, often in the form of APIs, to improve their reasoning capabilities on complex tasks. This enables them to act as intelligent agents interacting with the real world. The recently introduced ToolLLaMA model by Qin et al. [2023] utilizes the d…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Asynchronous Large Language Model Enhanced Planner for Autonomous Driving

ECCV 2024poster

"Despite real-time planners exhibiting remarkable performance in autonomous driving, the growing exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened avenues for enhancing the interpretability and controllability of motion planning. Nevertheless, LLM-based planners continue to encounter significan…

2024

Attack-Resilient Image Watermarking Using Stable Diffusion

NeurIPS 2024poster

Watermarking images is critical for tracking image provenance and proving ownership. With the advent of generative models, such as stable diffusion, that can create fake but realistic images, watermarking has become particularly important to make human-created images reliably identifiable. Unfortuna…

2024

CricaVPR: Cross-image Correlation-aware Representation Learning for Visual Place Recognition

CVPR 2024poster

Over the past decade most methods in visual place recognition (VPR) have used neural networks to produce feature representations. These networks typically produce a global representation of a place image using only this image itself and neglect the cross-image variations (e.g. viewpoint and illumina…

2024

Deep Homography Estimation for Visual Place Recognition

AAAI 2024technical

Visual place recognition (VPR) is a fundamental task for many applications such as robot localization and augmented reality. Recently, the hierarchical VPR methods have received considerable attention due to the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. They usually first use global features to ret…

2024

Deep Semantic Graph Transformer for Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation

AAAI 2024technical

Most Graph Convolutional Networks based 3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods were involved in single-view 3D HPE and utilized certain spatial graphs, existing key problems such as depth ambiguity, insufficient feature representation, or limited receptive fields. To address these issues, we propose…

2024

Efficient Algorithms for Empirical Group Distributionally Robust Optimization and Beyond

ICML 2024poster

In this paper, we investigate the empirical counterpart of Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (GDRO), which aims to minimize the maximal empirical risk across $m$ distinct groups. We formulate empirical GDRO as a *two-level* finite-sum convex-concave minimax optimization problem and develop…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Efficient Sign-Based Optimization: Accelerating Convergence via Variance Reduction

NeurIPS 2024poster

Sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) is a communication-efficient method that transmits only the sign of stochastic gradients for parameter updating. Existing literature has demonstrated that signSGD can achieve a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(d^{1/2}T^{-1/4})$, where $d$ represents the dim…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Efficient Stochastic Approximation of Minimax Excess Risk Optimization

ICML 2024poster

While traditional distributionally robust optimization (DRO) aims to minimize the maximal risk over a set of distributions, Agarwal & Zhang (2022) recently proposed a variant that replaces risk with *excess risk*. Compared to DRO, the new formulation—minimax excess risk optimization (MERO) has the a…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Generalization Bound and New Algorithm for Clean-Label Backdoor Attack

ICML 2024poster

The generalization bound is a crucial theoretical tool for assessing the generalizability of learning methods and there exist vast literatures on generalizability of normal learning, adversarial learning, and data poisoning. Unlike other data poison attacks, the backdoor attack has the special prope…

2024

High-Probability Bound for Non-Smooth Non-Convex Stochastic Optimization with Heavy Tails

ICML 2024poster

Recently, Cutkosky et al. introduce the online-to-non-convex framework, which utilizes online learning methods to solve non-smooth non-convex optimization problems, and achieves an $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3}\delta^{-1})$ gradient complexity for finding $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points. However,…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Improved Regret for Bandit Convex Optimization with Delayed Feedback

NeurIPS 2024poster

We investigate bandit convex optimization (BCO) with delayed feedback, where only the loss value of the action is revealed under an arbitrary delay. Let $n,T,\bar{d}$ denote the dimensionality, time horizon, and average delay, respectively. Previous studies have achieved an $O(\sqrt{n}T^{3/4}+(n\bar…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Non-stationary Projection-Free Online Learning with Dynamic and Adaptive Regret Guarantees

AAAI 2024technical

Projection-free online learning has drawn increasing interest due to its efficiency in solving high-dimensional problems with complicated constraints. However, most existing projection-free online methods focus on minimizing the static regret, which unfortunately fails to capture the challenge of ch…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

Online Composite Optimization Between Stochastic and Adversarial Environments

NeurIPS 2024poster

We study online composite optimization under the Stochastically Extended Adversarial (SEA) model. Specifically, each loss function consists of two parts: a fixed non-smooth and convex regularizer, and a time-varying function which can be chosen either stochastically, adversarially, or in a manner th…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Projection-Free Variance Reduction Methods for Stochastic Constrained Multi-Level Compositional Optimization

ICML 2024poster

This paper investigates projection-free algorithms for stochastic constrained multi-level optimization. In this context, the objective function is a nested composition of several smooth functions, and the decision set is closed and convex. Existing projection-free algorithms for solving this problem…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Scalable Constrained Policy Optimization for Safe Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

A challenging problem in seeking to bring multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques into real-world applications, such as autonomous driving and drone swarms, is how to control multiple agents safely and cooperatively to accomplish tasks. Most existing safe MARL methods learn the centrali…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Small-loss Adaptive Regret for Online Convex Optimization

ICML 2024poster

To deal with changing environments, adaptive regret has been proposed to minimize the regret over every interval. Previous studies have established a small-loss adaptive regret bound for general convex functions under the smoothness condition, offering the advantage of being much tighter than minima…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

SuperVLAD: Compact and Robust Image Descriptors for Visual Place Recognition

NeurIPS 2024poster

Visual place recognition (VPR) is an essential task for multiple applications such as augmented reality and robot localization. Over the past decade, mainstream methods in the VPR area have been to use feature representation based on global aggregation, as exemplified by NetVLAD. These features are…

2024

Thinking Forward: Memory-Efficient Federated Finetuning of Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) in federated learning (FL) settings has become increasingly important as it allows resource-constrained devices to finetune a model using private data. However, finetuning LLMs using backpropagation requires excessive memory (especially from intermediate activ…

2024

To Cool or not to Cool? Temperature Network Meets Large Foundation Models via DRO

ICML 2024poster

The temperature parameter plays a profound role during training and/or inference with large foundation models (LFMs) such as large language models (LLMs) and CLIP models. Particularly, it adjusts the logits in the softmax function in LLMs, which is crucial for next token generation, and it scales th…

2024

Towards Seamless Adaptation of Pre-trained Models for Visual Place Recognition

ICLR 2024poster

Recent studies show that vision models pre-trained in generic visual learning tasks with large-scale data can provide useful feature representations for a wide range of visual perception problems. However, few attempts have been made to exploit pre-trained foundation models in visual place recogniti…

2024

Universal Online Convex Optimization with $1$ Projection per Round

NeurIPS 2024poster

To address the uncertainty in function types, recent progress in online convex optimization (OCO) has spurred the development of universal algorithms that simultaneously attain minimax rates for multiple types of convex functions. However, for a $T$-round online problem, state-of-the-art methods typ…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

AANet: Aggregation and Alignment Network with Semi-hard Positive Sample Mining for Hierarchical Place Recognition

ICRA 2023poster

Visual place recognition (VPR) is one of the research hotspots in robotics, which uses visual information to locate robots. Recently, the hierarchical two-stage VPR methods have become popular in this field due to the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. These methods retrieve the top-k candid…

Cited by 13SourcecodeScholar
2023

Blockwise Stochastic Variance-Reduced Methods with Parallel Speedup for Multi-Block Bilevel Optimization

ICML 2023poster

In this paper, we consider non-convex multi-block bilevel optimization (MBBO) problems, which involve $m\gg 1$ lower level problems and have important applications in machine learning. Designing a stochastic gradient and controlling its variance is more intricate due to the hierarchical sampling of…

2023

Distributed Projection-Free Online Learning for Smooth and Convex Losses

AAAI 2023technical

We investigate the problem of distributed online convex optimization with complicated constraints, in which the projection operation could be the computational bottleneck. To avoid projections, distributed online projection-free methods have been proposed and attain an O(T^{3/4}) regret bound for ge…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2023

Efficient Algorithms for Generalized Linear Bandits with Heavy-tailed Rewards

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper investigates the problem of generalized linear bandits with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $(1+\epsilon)$-th moment is bounded for some $\epsilon\in (0,1]$. Although there exist methods for generalized linear bandits, most of them focus on bounded or sub-Gaussian rewards and are not well-sui…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Flow: Per-instance Personalized Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Federated learning (FL) suffers from data heterogeneity, where the diverse data distributions across clients make it challenging to train a single global model effectively. Existing personalization approaches aim to address the data heterogeneity issue by creating a personalized model for each clien…

2023

Learning Unnormalized Statistical Models via Compositional Optimization

ICML 2023poster

Learning unnormalized statistical models (e.g., energy-based models) is computationally challenging due to the complexity of handling the partition function. To eschew this complexity, noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) has been proposed by formulating the objective as the logistic loss of the real…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Not All Semantics are Created Equal: Contrastive Self-supervised Learning with Automatic Temperature Individualization

ICML 2023poster

In this paper, we aim to optimize a contrastive loss with individualized temperatures in a principled manner. The common practice of using a global temperature parameter $\tau$ ignores the fact that ``not all semantics are created equal", meaning that different anchor data may have different numbers…

2023

Optimistic Online Mirror Descent for Bridging Stochastic and Adversarial Online Convex Optimization

ICML 2023poster

Stochastically Extended Adversarial (SEA) model is introduced by Sachs et al. (2022) as an interpolation between stochastic and adversarial online convex optimization. Under the smoothness condition, they demonstrate that the expected regret of optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) depends…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

Set-membership Belief State-based Reinforcement Learning for POMDPs

ICML 2023poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant progress in areas such as Atari games and robotic control, where the agents have perfect sensing capabilities. However, in many real-world sequential decision-making tasks, the observation data could be noisy or incomplete due to the intrinsic low qua…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Stochastic Approximation Approaches to Group Distributionally Robust Optimization

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper investigates group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO), with the purpose to learn a model that performs well over $m$ different distributions. First, we formulate GDRO as a stochastic convex-concave saddle-point problem, and demonstrate that stochastic mirror descent (SMD), using…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

TrajPAC: Towards Robustness Verification of Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Models

ICCV 2023poster

Robust pedestrian trajectory forecasting is crucial to developing safe autonomous vehicles. Although previous works have studied adversarial robustness in the context of trajectory forecasting, some significant issues remain unaddressed. In this work, we try to tackle these crucial problems. Firstly…

Cited by 11PDFcodeScholar
2022

A Simple yet Universal Strategy for Online Convex Optimization

ICML 2022oral

Recently, several universal methods have been proposed for online convex optimization, and attain minimax rates for multiple types of convex functions simultaneously. However, they need to design and optimize one surrogate loss for each type of functions, making it difficult to exploit the structure…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2022

AutoMTL: A Programming Framework for Automating Efficient Multi-Task Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Multi-task learning (MTL) jointly learns a set of tasks by sharing parameters among tasks. It is a promising approach for reducing storage costs while improving task accuracy for many computer vision tasks. The effective adoption of MTL faces two main challenges. The first challenge is to determine…

2022

Large-scale Stochastic Optimization of NDCG Surrogates for Deep Learning with Provable Convergence

ICML 2022spotlight

NDCG, namely Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain, is a widely used ranking metric in information retrieval and machine learning. However, efficient and provable stochastic methods for maximizing NDCG are still lacking, especially for deep models. In this paper, we propose a principled approach to…

2022

Momentum Accelerates the Convergence of Stochastic AUPRC Maximization

AISTATS 2022poster

In this paper, we study stochastic optimization of areas under precision-recall curves (AUPRC), which is widely used for combating imbalanced classification tasks. Although a few methods have been proposed for maximizing AUPRC, stochastic optimization of AUPRC with convergence guarantee remains an u…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2022

Multi-block-Single-probe Variance Reduced Estimator for Coupled Compositional Optimization

NeurIPS 2022accept

Variance reduction techniques such as SPIDER/SARAH/STORM have been extensively studied to improve the convergence rates of stochastic non-convex optimization, which usually maintain and update a sequence of estimators for a single function across iterations. What if we need to track multiple functi…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2022

Optimal Algorithms for Stochastic Multi-Level Compositional Optimization

ICML 2022spotlight

In this paper, we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-level compositional optimization, where the objective function is a composition of multiple smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Existing methods for solving this problem either suffer from sub-optimal sample complexities or need a h…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

Provable Stochastic Optimization for Global Contrastive Learning: Small Batch Does Not Harm Performance

ICML 2022spotlight

In this paper, we study contrastive learning from an optimization perspective, aiming to analyze and address a fundamental issue of existing contrastive learning methods that either rely on a large batch size or a large dictionary of feature vectors. We consider a global objective for contrastive le…

2022

Robust Pressure Matching with ATF Perturbation Constraints for Sound Field Control

ICASSP 2022accepted

Sound field control systems deployed in room acoustic environments require knowing the acoustic channel impulse responses between the loudspeakers and matching microphones, which are challenging to estimate accurately due to perturbations caused by such factors as temperature changes and sensors’ po…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Smoothed Online Convex Optimization Based on Discounted-Normal-Predictor

NeurIPS 2022accept

In this paper, we investigate an online prediction strategy named as Discounted-Normal-Predictor [Kapralov and Panigrahy, 2010] for smoothed online convex optimization (SOCO), in which the learner needs to minimize not only the hitting cost but also the switching cost. In the setting of learning wit…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2021

Deep Unified Cross-Modality Hashing by Pairwise Data Alignment

IJCAI 2021poster

With the increasing amount of multimedia data, cross-modality hashing has made great progress as it achieves sub-linear search time and low memory space. However, due to the huge discrepancy between different modalities, most existing cross-modality hashing methods cannot learn unified hash codes an…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2021

Dual Adaptivity: A Universal Algorithm for Minimizing the Adaptive Regret of Convex Functions

NeurIPS 2021poster

To deal with changing environments, a new performance measure—adaptive regret, defined as the maximum static regret over any interval, was proposed in online learning. Under the setting of online convex optimization, several algorithms have been successfully developed to minimize the adaptive regret…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2021

HRegNet: A Hierarchical Network for Large-Scale Outdoor LiDAR Point Cloud Registration

ICCV 2021poster

Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem in 3D computer vision. Outdoor LiDAR point clouds are typically large-scale and complexly distributed, which makes the registration challenging. In this paper, we propose an efficient hierarchical network named HRegNet for large-scale outdoor LiDAR p…

Cited by 133PDFcodeScholar
2021

Online Convex Optimization with Continuous Switching Constraint

NeurIPS 2021poster

In many sequential decision making applications, the change of decision would bring an additional cost, such as the wear-and-tear cost associated with changing server status. To control the switching cost, we introduce the problem of online convex optimization with continuous switching constraint, w…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2021

Synthesizing Good-Enough Strategies for LTLf Specifications

IJCAI 2021poster

We consider the problem of synthesizing good-enough (GE)-strategies for linear temporal logic (LTL) over finite traces or LTLf for short. The problem of synthesizing GE-strategies for an LTL formula φ over infinite traces reduces to the problem of synthesizing winning strategies for the formula (∃O…

2021

Variational Autoencoders for Hyperspectral Unmixing with Endmember Variability

ICASSP 2021accepted

Spectral signatures are usually affected by variations in environmental conditions. The spectral variability is thus one of the most important and challenging problems to be addressed in hyperspectral unmixing. Generally, it is a non-trivial task to model the endmember variability, and existing spec…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

A Fast Reduced-Rank Sound Zone Control Algorithm Using The Conjugate Gradient Method

ICASSP 2020accepted

Sound zone control enables different users to enjoy different audio contents in the same acoustic environment. Generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GEVD)-based methods allow us to control the tradeoff between the acoustic contrast (AC) and signal distortion (SD). However, such methods have a high c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Bandit Convex Optimization in Non-stationary Environments

AISTATS 2020poster

Bandit Convex Optimization (BCO) is a fundamental framework for modeling sequential decision-making with partial information, where the only feedback available to the player is the one-point or two-point function values. In this paper, we investigate BCO in non-stationary environments and choose the…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2020

How does Weight Correlation Affect Generalisation Ability of Deep Neural Networks?

NeurIPS 2020poster

This paper studies the novel concept of weight correlation in deep neural networks and discusses its impact on the networks' generalisation ability. For fully-connected layers, the weight correlation is defined as the average cosine similarity between weight vectors of neurons, and for convolutional…

Cited by 65SourcePDFScholar
2020

Nearly Optimal Regret for Stochastic Linear Bandits with Heavy-Tailed Payoffs

IJCAI 2020poster

In this paper, we study the problem of stochastic linear bandits with finite action sets. Most of existing work assume the payoffs are bounded or sub-Gaussian, which may be violated in some scenarios such as financial markets. To settle this issue, we analyze the linear bandits with heavy-tailed pay…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Projection-free Distributed Online Convex Optimization with $O(\sqrtT)$ Communication Complexity

ICML 2020poster

To deal with complicated constraints via locally light computations in distributed online learning, a recent study has presented a projection-free algorithm called distributed online conditional gradient (D-OCG), and achieved an $O(T^{3/4})$ regret bound, where $T$ is the number of prediction rounds…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar
2020

SAdam: A Variant of Adam for Strongly Convex Functions

ICLR 2020poster

The Adam algorithm has become extremely popular for large-scale machine learning. Under convexity condition, it has been proved to enjoy a data-dependent $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound where $T$ is the time horizon. However, whether strong convexity can be utilized to further improve the performance rem…

Cited by 52SourcecodeScholar
2020

Stochastic Optimization for Non-convex Inf-Projection Problems

ICML 2020poster

In this paper, we study a family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth inf-projection minimization problems, where the target objective function is equal to minimization of a joint function over another variable. This problem include difference of convex (DC) functions and a family of bi-convex func…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2019

2.5D Multizone Reproduction with Active Control of Scattered Sound Fields

ICASSP 2019accepted

Multizone reproduction has been focused on reproducing sounds in an empty listening space. However, there are always scatterers such as human heads in sound zones, generating scattered sound fields and causing degraded system performance. In this work, we develop a modal-domain method for 2.5D multi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2019

Adaptivity and Optimality: A Universal Algorithm for Online Convex Optimization

UAI 2019poster

In this paper, we study adaptive online convex optimization, and aim to design a universal algorithm that achieves optimal regret bounds for multiple common types of loss functions. Existing universal methods are limited in the sense that they are optimal for only a subclass of loss functions. To ad…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2019

Deep Hybrid Networks Based Response Selection for Multi-turn Dialogue Systems

ICASSP 2019accepted

Proper response selection is an important challenge for a meaningful multi-turn dialogue. To this end, not only the coherence among the whole dialogue but also the interaction between utterance in adjacent turns need to be properly employed as the context for response selection. In this paper, we pr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

2.5D Multizone Reproduction Using Weighted Mode Matching

ICASSP 2018accepted

The mode matching based multizone reproduction has mainly been focused on a purely 2D theory which is inadequate to fit the 3D reality. Its extension to the 3D theory however requires many secondary sources and a high computational complexity. In this paper, a weighted mode matching approach is deve…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

A Simple Analysis for Exp-concave Empirical Minimization with Arbitrary Convex Regularizer

AISTATS 2018poster

In this paper, we present a simple analysis of fast rates with high probability of empirical minimization for it stochastic composite optimization over a finite-dimensional bounded convex set with exponential concave loss functions and an arbitrary convex regularization. To the best of our knowle…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Fast Rates of ERM and Stochastic Approximation: Adaptive to Error Bound Conditions

NeurIPS 2018poster

Error bound conditions (EBC) are properties that characterize the growth of an objective function when a point is moved away from the optimal set. They have recently received increasing attention in the field of optimization for developing optimization algorithms with fast convergence. However,…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2017

A Richer Theory of Convex Constrained Optimization with Reduced Projections and Improved Rates

ICML 2017poster

This paper focuses on convex constrained optimization problems, where the solution is subject to a convex inequality constraint. In particular, we aim at challenging problems for which both projection into the constrained domain and a linear optimization under the inequality constraint are time-cons…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2017

Improved Dynamic Regret for Non-degenerate Functions

NeurIPS 2017poster

Recently, there has been a growing research interest in the analysis of dynamic regret, which measures the performance of an online learner against a sequence of local minimizers. By exploiting the strong convexity, previous studies have shown that the dynamic regret can be upper bounded by the path…

Cited by 143SourcePDFScholar
2016

Online Stochastic Linear Optimization under One-bit Feedback

ICML 2016poster

In this paper, we study a special bandit setting of online stochastic linear optimization, where only one-bit of information is revealed to the learner at each round. This problem has found many applications including online advertisement and online recommendation. We assume the binary feedback is a…

Cited by 78SourcePDFScholar
2016

Tracking Slowly Moving Clairvoyant: Optimal Dynamic Regret of Online Learning with True and Noisy Gradient

ICML 2016poster

This work focuses on dynamic regret of online convex optimization that compares the performance of online learning to a clairvoyant who knows the sequence of loss functions in advance and hence selects the minimizer of the loss function at each step. By assuming that the clairvoyant moves slowly (i.…

Cited by 155SourcePDFScholar
2015

An Explicit Sampling Dependent Spectral Error Bound for Column Subset Selection

ICML 2015poster

In this paper, we consider the problem of column subset selection. We present a novel analysis of the spectral norm reconstruction for a simple randomized algorithm and establish a new bound that depends explicitly on the sampling probabilities. The sampling dependent error bound (i) allows us to be…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar