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Zhiru Zhang

17 accepted papers

2026

FlashDLM: Accelerating Diffusion Language Model Inference via Efficient KV Caching and Guided Diffusion

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion language models offer parallel token generation and inherent bidirectionality, promising more efficient and powerful sequence modeling compared to autoregressive approaches. However, state-of-the-art diffusion models~(e.g., Dream 7B, LLaDA 8B) suffer from slow inference. While they match t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

HeuriGym: An Agentic Benchmark for LLM-Crafted Heuristics in Combinatorial Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in reasoning and agent-based problem-solving, current evaluation methodologies fail to adequately assess their capabilities: existing benchmarks either rely on closed-ended questions prone to saturation and memorization, o…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Learning from Students: Applying t-Distributions to Explore Accurate and Efficient Formats for LLMs

ICML 2024poster

The increasing size of large language models (LLMs) traditionally requires low-precision integer formats to meet strict latency and power demands. Yet recently, alternative formats such as Normal Float (NF4) have increased model accuracy at the cost of increased chip area. In this work, we first con…

2024

ShadowLLM: Predictor-based Contextual Sparsity for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

The high power consumption and latency-sensitive deployments of large language models (LLMs) have motivated efficiency techniques like quantization and sparsity. Contextual sparsity, where the sparsity pattern is input-dependent, is crucial in LLMs because the permanent removal of attention heads or…

2023

Binarized Neural Machine Translation

NeurIPS 2023poster

The rapid scaling of language models is motivating research using low-bitwidth quantization. In this work, we propose a novel binarization technique for Transformers applied to machine translation (BMT), the first of its kind. We identify and address the problem of inflated dot-product variance when…

2022

Understanding Hyperdimensional Computing for Parallel Single-Pass Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging learning paradigm that computes with high dimensional binary vectors. There is an active line of research on HDC in the community of emerging hardware because of its energy efficiency and ultra-low latency---but HDC suffers from low model accuracy, wit…

2021

BulletTrain: Accelerating Robust Neural Network Training via Boundary Example Mining

NeurIPS 2021poster

Neural network robustness has become a central topic in machine learning in recent years. Most training algorithms that improve the model's robustness to adversarial and common corruptions also introduce a large computational overhead, requiring as many as ten times the number of forward and backwar…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2021

SPADE: A Spectral Method for Black-Box Adversarial Robustness Evaluation

ICML 2021spotlight

A black-box spectral method is introduced for evaluating the adversarial robustness of a given machine learning (ML) model. Our approach, named SPADE, exploits bijective distance mapping between the input/output graphs constructed for approximating the manifolds corresponding to the input/output dat…

2020

GraphZoom: A Multi-level Spectral Approach for Accurate and Scalable Graph Embedding

ICLR 2020talk

Graph embedding techniques have been increasingly deployed in a multitude of different applications that involve learning on non-Euclidean data. However, existing graph embedding models either fail to incorporate node attribute information during training or suffer from node attribute noise, which c…

Cited by 155SourcecodeScholar
2020

Precision Gating: Improving Neural Network Efficiency with Dynamic Dual-Precision Activations

ICLR 2020poster

We propose precision gating (PG), an end-to-end trainable dynamic dual-precision quantization technique for deep neural networks. PG computes most features in a low precision and only a small proportion of important features in a higher precision to preserve accuracy. The proposed approach is appl…

Cited by 33SourcecodeScholar
2019

Building Efficient Deep Neural Networks With Unitary Group Convolutions

CVPR 2019poster

We propose unitary group convolutions (UGConvs), a building block for CNNs which compose a group convolution with unitary transforms in feature space to learn a richer set of representations than group convolution alone. UGConvs generalize two disparate ideas in CNN architecture, channel shuffling (…

Cited by 34PDFScholar
2019

Improving Neural Network Quantization without Retraining using Outlier Channel Splitting

ICML 2019oral

Quantization can improve the execution latency and energy efficiency of neural networks on both commodity GPUs and specialized accelerators. The majority of existing literature focuses on training quantized DNNs, while this work examines the less-studied topic of quantizing a floating-point model wi…