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Zhichao Lu

32 accepted papers

2026

Beyond the Lower Bound: Bridging Regret Minimization and Best Arm Identification in Lexicographic Bandits

AAAI 2026technical

In multi-objective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes reward vectors, aiming to maximize the reward for the highest

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Evolving Interdependent Operators with Large Language Models for Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization

ICML 2026poster

Neighborhood search operators are critical to the performance of Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) and rely heavily on expert design. Although recent LLM-based Automated Heuristic Design (AHD) methods have made notable progress, they primarily optimize individual heuristics or componen…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Hierarchical Representations for Cross-task Automated Heuristic Design using LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Designing heuristic algorithms for complex optimization problems is a time-consuming and expert-driven process. Recently, Automated Heuristic Design (AHD) using Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown significant promise for automating algorithm development. However, existing works mainly rely on pro…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Multimodal LLM-assisted Evolutionary Search for Programmatic Control Policies

ICLR 2026poster

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive success in control tasks. However, its policies, represented as opaque neural networks, are often difficult for humans to understand, verify, and debug, which undermines trust and hinders real-world deployment. This work addresses this challenge by…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

DEIM: DETR with Improved Matching for Fast Convergence

CVPR 2025poster

We introduce DEIM, an innovative and efficient training framework designed to accelerate convergence in real-time object detection with Transformer-based architectures (DETR). To mitigate the sparse supervision inherent in one-to-one (O2O) matching in DETR models, DEIM employs a Dense O2O matching s…

2025

Design Principle Transfer in Neural Architecture Search via Large Language Models

AAAI 2025technical

Transferable neural architecture search (TNAS) has been introduced to design efficient neural architectures for multiple tasks, to enhance the practical applicability of NAS in real-world scenarios. In TNAS, architectural knowledge accumulated in previous search processes is reused to warm up the ar…

2025

FAST: Foreground‑aware Diffusion with Accelerated Sampling Trajectory for Segmentation‑oriented Anomaly Synthesis

NeurIPS 2025poster

Industrial anomaly segmentation relies heavily on pixel-level annotations, yet real-world anomalies are often scarce, diverse, and costly to label. Segmentation-oriented industrial anomaly synthesis (SIAS) has emerged as a promising alternative; however, existing methods struggle to balance sampling…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Learning from Loss Landscape: Generalizable Mixed-Precision Quantization via Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Gradient Aligning

ICML 2025poster

Mixed Precision Quantization (MPQ) has become an essential technique for optimizing neural network by determining the optimal bitwidth per layer. Existing MPQ methods, however, face a major hurdle: they require a computationally expensive search for quantization strategies on large-scale datasets. T…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MOS-Attack: A Scalable Multi-objective Adversarial Attack Framework

CVPR 2025poster

Crafting adversarial examples is crucial for evaluating and enhancing the robustness of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), presenting a challenge equivalent to maximizing a non-differentiable 0-1 loss function. However, existing single objective methods, namely adversarial attacks focus on a surrogate…

2025

Mitigating Social Bias in Large Language Models: A Multi-Objective Approach Within a Multi-Agent Framework

AAAI 2025technical

Natural language processing (NLP) has seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, LLMs often produce socially biased outputs. Recent studies have mainly addressed this problem by prompting LLMs to behave ethically, but this approach…

2025

Multi-Objective Evolution of Heuristic Using Large Language Model

AAAI 2025technical

Heuristics are commonly used to tackle various search and optimization problems. Design heuristics usually require tedious manual crafting with domain knowledge. Recent works have incorporated Large Language Models (LLMs) into automatic heuristic search, leveraging their powerful language and coding…

2025

Revisiting Multimodal Fusion for 3D Anomaly Detection from an Architectural Perspective

AAAI 2025technical

Existing efforts to boost multimodal fusion of 3D anomaly detection (3D-AD) primarily concentrate on devising more effective multimodal fusion strategies. However, little attention was devoted to analyzing the role of multimodal fusion architecture (topology) design in contributing to 3D-AD. In this…

2025

SpikingSSMs: Learning Long Sequences with Sparse and Parallel Spiking State Space Models

AAAI 2025technical

Known as low energy consumption networks, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained a lot of attention within the past decades. While SNNs are increasing competitive with artificial neural networks (ANNs) for vision tasks, they are rarely used for long sequence tasks, despite their intrinsic tempor…

2025

Trade-offs in Image Generation: How Do Different Dimensions Interact?

ICCV 2025poster

Model performance in text-to-image (T2I) and image-to-image (I2I) generation often depends on multiple aspects, including quality, alignment, diversity, and robustness. However, models' complex trade-offs among these dimensions have been rarely explored due to (1) the lack of datasets that allow fin…

2025

Uncertainty-Guided Enhancement on Driving Perception System Via Foundation Models

ICRA 2025

Multimodal foundation models offer promising advancements for enhancing driving perception systems, but their high computational and financial costs pose challenges. We develop a method that leverages foundation models to refine predictions from existing driving perception modelssuch as enhancing ob

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2024

Evolution of Heuristics: Towards Efficient Automatic Algorithm Design Using Large Language Model

ICML 2024oral

Heuristics are widely used for dealing with complex search and optimization problems. However, manual design of heuristics can be often very labour extensive and requires rich working experience and knowledge. This paper proposes Evolution of Heuristic (EoH), a novel evolutionary paradigm that lever…

2024

Rethinking Unsupervised Outlier Detection via Multiple Thresholding

ECCV 2024poster

"In the realm of unsupervised image outlier detection, assigning outlier scores holds greater significance than its subsequent task: thresholding for predicting labels. This is because determining the optimal threshold on non-separable outlier score functions is an ill-posed problem. However, the la…

2024

Self-Para-Consistency: Improving Reasoning Tasks at Low Cost for Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Recently, the self-consistency decoding strategy has shown the ability to improve performance for complex reasoning tasks with large language models (LLMs). However, the costs may be high because the sampling process of the strategy generates some low-probability text, resulting in low-quality reaso…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Mitigating Task Interference in Multi-Task Learning via Explicit Task Routing With Non-Learnable Primitives

CVPR 2023poster

Multi-task learning (MTL) seeks to learn a single model to accomplish multiple tasks by leveraging shared information among the tasks. Existing MTL models, however, have been known to suffer from negative interference among tasks. Efforts to mitigate task interference have focused on either loss/gra…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Revisiting Residual Networks for Adversarial Robustness

CVPR 2023poster

Efforts to improve the adversarial robustness of convolutional neural networks have primarily focused on developing more effective adversarial training methods. In contrast, little attention was devoted to analyzing the role of architectural elements (e.g., topology, depth, and width) on adversarial…

2022

Learning from Weakly-Labeled Web Videos via Exploring Sub-concepts

AAAI 2022technical

Learning visual knowledge from massive weakly-labeled web videos has attracted growing research interests thanks to the large corpus of easily accessible video data on the Internet. However, for video action recognition, the action of interest might only exist in arbitrary clips of untrimmed web vid…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Multiview Transformers for Video Recognition

CVPR 2022poster

Video understanding requires reasoning at multiple spatiotemporal resolutions -- from short fine-grained motions to events taking place over longer durations. Although transformer architectures have recently advanced the state-of-the-art, they have not explicitly modelled different spatiotemporal re…

Cited by 348PDFcodeScholar
2022

VLMixer: Unpaired Vision-Language Pre-training via Cross-Modal CutMix

ICML 2022spotlight

Existing vision-language pre-training (VLP) methods primarily rely on paired image-text datasets, which are either annotated by enormous human labors or crawled from the internet followed by elaborate data cleaning techniques. To reduce the dependency on well-aligned image-text pairs, it is promisin…

2021

End-to-End Dense Video Captioning With Parallel Decoding

ICCV 2021poster

Dense video captioning aims to generate multiple associated captions with their temporal locations from the video. Previous methods follow a sophisticated "localize-then-describe" scheme, which heavily relies on numerous hand-crafted components. In this paper, we proposed a simple yet effective fram…

Cited by 238PDFcodeScholar
2021

The Surprising Impact of Mask-Head Architecture on Novel Class Segmentation

ICCV 2021poster

Instance segmentation models today are very accurate when trained on large annotated datasets, but collecting mask annotations at scale is prohibitively expensive. We address the partially supervised instance segmentation problem in which one can train on (significantly cheaper) bounding boxes for a…

Cited by 31PDFcodeScholar
2020

DOPS: Learning to Detect 3D Objects and Predict Their 3D Shapes

CVPR 2020poster

We propose DOPS, a fast single-stage 3D object detection method for LIDAR data. Previous methods often make domain-specific design decisions, for example projecting points into a bird-eye view image in autonomous driving scenarios. In contrast, we propose a general-purpose method that works on both…

Cited by 72PDFScholar
2020

MUXConv: Information Multiplexing in Convolutional Neural Networks

CVPR 2020poster

Convolutional neural networks have witnessed remarkable improvements in computational efficiency in recent years. A key driving force has been the idea of trading-off model expressivity and efficiency through a combination of 1x1 and depth-wise separable convolutions in lieu of a standard convolutio…

Cited by 75PDFcodeScholar
2020

NSGA-Net: Neural Architecture Search using Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2020poster

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the backbones of deep learning paradigms for numerous vision tasks. Early advancements in CNN architectures are primarily driven by human expertise and elaborate design. Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) was proposed with the aim of automating the ne…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

NSGANetV2: Evolutionary Multi-Objective Surrogate-Assisted Neural Architecture Search

ECCV 2020poster

In this paper, we propose an efficient NAS algorithm for generating task-specific models that are competitive under multiple competing objectives. It comprises of two surrogates, one at the architecture level to improve sample efficiency and one at the weights level, through a supernet, to improve g…

2020

RetinaTrack: Online Single Stage Joint Detection and Tracking

CVPR 2020poster

Traditionally multi-object tracking and object detection are performed using separate systems with most prior works focusing exclusively on one of these aspects over the other. Tracking systems clearly benefit from having access to accurate detections, however and there is ample evidence in literatu…

Cited by 279PDFcodeScholar