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Yiren Zhao

22 accepted papers

2025

Cached Multi-Lora Composition for Multi-Concept Image Generation

ICLR 2025poster

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted technique in text-to-image models, enabling precise rendering of multiple distinct elements, such as characters and styles, in multi-concept image generation. However, current approaches face significant challenges when composing these LoRAs…

2025

Hardware and Software Platform Inference

ICML 2025poster

It is now a common business practice to buy access to large language model (LLM) inference rather than self-host, because of significant upfront hardware infrastructure and energy costs. However, as a buyer, there is no mechanism to verify the authenticity of the advertised service including the ser…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Mixture of Weight-shared Heterogeneous Group Attention Experts for Dynamic Token-wise KV Optimization

EMNLP 2025

Transformer models face scalability challenges in causal language modeling (CLM) due to inefficient memory allocation for growing key-value (KV) caches, which strains compute and storage resources. Existing methods like Grouped Query Attention (GQA) and token-level KV optimization improve efficiency

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Omni-DNA: A Genomic Model Supporting Sequence Understanding, Long-context, and Textual Annotation

NeurIPS 2025poster

The interpretation of genomic sequences is crucial for understanding biological processes. To handle the growing volume of DNA sequence data, Genomic Foundation Models (GFMs) have been developed by adapting architectures and training paradigms from Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite their remarka…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

QERA: an Analytical Framework for Quantization Error Reconstruction

ICLR 2025poster

The growing number of parameters and computational demands of large language models (LLMs) present significant challenges for their efficient deployment. Recently, there is an increasing interest in quantizing weights to extremely low precision while offsetting the resulting error with low-rank, hig…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Refining Salience-Aware Sparse Fine-Tuning Strategies for Language Models

ACL 2025long

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained prominence through low-rank adaptation methods like LoRA. In this paper, we focus on sparsity-based PEFT (SPEFT), which introduces trainable sparse adaptations to the weight matrices in the model, offering greater flexibility in selecting fine-tuned…

2024

Absorb & Escape: Overcoming Single Model Limitations in Generating Heterogeneous Genomic Sequences

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent advances in immunology and synthetic biology have accelerated the development of deep generative methods for DNA sequence design. Two dominant approaches in this field are AutoRegressive (AR) models and Diffusion Models (DMs). However, genomic sequences are functionally heterogeneous, consist…

2024

GV-Rep: A Large-Scale Dataset for Genetic Variant Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Genetic variants (GVs) are defined as differences in the DNA sequences among individuals and play a crucial role in diagnosing and treating genetic diseases. The rapid decrease in next generation sequencing cost, analogous to Moore’s Law, has led to an exponential increase in the availability of pat…

2024

LQER: Low-Rank Quantization Error Reconstruction for LLMs

ICML 2024poster

Post-training quantization of Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging. In this work, we introduce **L**ow-rank **Q**uantization **E**rror **R**eduction (LQER), which combines quantization and low-rank approximation to recover the model capability. LQER leverages an activation-induced scale matri…

2023

Adaptive Channel Sparsity for Federated Learning Under System Heterogeneity

CVPR 2023poster

Owing to the non-i.i.d. nature of client data, channel neurons in federated-learned models may specialize to distinct features for different clients. Yet, existing channel-sparse federated learning (FL) algorithms prescribe fixed sparsity strategies for client models, and may thus prevent clients fr…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2023

Architectural Backdoors in Neural Networks

CVPR 2023poster

Machine learning is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. Previous literature has demonstrated that at the training stage attackers can manipulate data (Gu et al.) and data sampling procedures (Shumailov et al.) to control model behaviour. A common attack goal is to plant backdoors i.e. force the…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2023

Dynamic Stashing Quantization for Efficient Transformer Training

EMNLP 2023short findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Unfortunately, the immense amount of computations and memory accesses required for LLM training makes them prohibitively expensive in terms of hardware cost, and thus challeng…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

MiliPoint: A Point Cloud Dataset for mmWave Radar

NeurIPS 2023poster

Millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar has emerged as an attractive and cost-effective alternative for human activity sensing compared to traditional camera-based systems. mmWave radars are also non-intrusive, providing better protection for user privacy. However, as a Radio Frequency based technology, mmWa…

2023

Revisiting Automated Prompting: Are We Actually Doing Better?

ACL 2023short

Current literature demonstrates that Large Language Models (LLMs) are great few-shot learners, and prompting significantly increases their performance on a range of downstream tasks in a few-shot learning setting. An attempt to automate human-led prompting followed, with some progress achieved. In p…

2023

Revisiting Block-based Quantisation: What is Important for Sub-8-bit LLM Inference?

EMNLP 2023long main

The inference of Large language models (LLMs) requires immense computation and memory resources. To curtail these costs, quantisation has emerged as a promising solution, but existing LLM quantisation mainly focuses on 8-bit. In this work, we explore the statistical and learning properties of the LL…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

DAdaQuant: Doubly-adaptive quantization for communication-efficient Federated Learning

ICML 2022spotlight

Federated Learning (FL) is a powerful technique to train a model on a server with data from several clients in a privacy-preserving manner. FL incurs significant communication costs because it repeatedly transmits the model between the server and clients. Recently proposed algorithms quantize the mo…

Cited by 84SourcePDFScholar
2022

Rapid Model Architecture Adaption for Meta-Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Network Architecture Search (NAS) methods have recently gathered much attention. They design networks with better performance and use a much shorter search time compared to traditional manual tuning. Despite their efficiency in model deployments, most NAS algorithms target a single task on a fixed h…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Manipulating SGD with Data Ordering Attacks

NeurIPS 2021poster

Machine learning is vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks. It is now well understood that by changing the underlying data distribution, an adversary can poison the model trained with it or introduce backdoors. In this paper we present a novel class of training-time attacks that require no changes…

Cited by 102SourcePDFScholar
2021

Markpainting: Adversarial Machine Learning meets Inpainting

ICML 2021spotlight

Inpainting is a learned interpolation technique that is based on generative modeling and used to populate masked or missing pieces in an image; it has wide applications in picture editing and retouching. Recently, inpainting started being used for watermark removal, raising concerns. In this paper w…

2020

Pay Attention to Features, Transfer Learn Faster CNNs

ICLR 2020poster

Deep convolutional neural networks are now widely deployed in vision applications, but a limited size of training data can restrict their task performance. Transfer learning offers the chance for CNNs to learn with limited data samples by transferring knowledge from models pretrained on large datase…

Cited by 132SourceScholar
2019

Dynamic Channel Pruning: Feature Boosting and Suppression

ICLR 2019poster

Making deep convolutional neural networks more accurate typically comes at the cost of increased computational and memory resources. In this paper, we reduce this cost by exploiting the fact that the importance of features computed by convolutional layers is highly input-dependent, and propose featu…

2019

Focused Quantization for Sparse CNNs

NeurIPS 2019poster

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are powerful tools for a wide range of vision tasks, but the enormous amount of memory and compute resources required by CNNs poses a challenge in deploying them on constrained devices. Existing compression techniques, while excelling at reducing model sizes…