Deep Learning
Teamwork: Collaborative Diffusion with Low-rank Coordination and Adaptation
Large pretrained diffusion models can provide strong priors beneficial for many graphics applications. However, generative applications such as neural rendering and inverse methods such as SVBRDF estimation and intrinsic image decomposition require additional input or output channels. Current solutions for channel expansion are often application specific and these solutions can be difficult to adapt to different diffusion models or new tasks. This paper introduces Teamwork: a flexible and efficient unified solution for jointly increasing the number of input and output channels as well as adapting a pretrained diffusion model to new tasks. Teamwork achieves channel expansion without altering the pretrained diffusion model architecture by coordinating and adapting multiple instances of the base diffusion model (\ie, teammates). We employ a novel variation of Low Rank-Adaptation (LoRA) to jointly address both adaptation and coordination between the different teammates. Furthermore Teamwork supports dynamic (de)activation of teammates. We demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of Teamwork on a variety of generative and inverse graphics tasks such as inpainting, single image SVBRDF estimation, intrinsic decomposition, neural shading, and intrinsic image synthesis.
ARMOR: High-Performance Semi-Structured Pruning via Adaptive Matrix Factorization
Liu, Lawrence, Liu, Alexander, Wang, Mengdi, Zhao, Tuo, Yang, Lin F.
While semi-structured pruning, particularly 2:4 sparsity, offers a path to practical hardware acceleration, existing methods often incur substantial performance degradation. To bridge this gap, we introduce ARMOR: (Adaptive Representation with Matrix-factORization), a novel one-shot post-training pruning algorithm. Instead of directly pruning weights, ARMOR factorizes each weight matrix into a 2:4 sparse core wrapped by two low-overhead, block diagonal matrices. These wrappers act as efficient pre-and post-transformation error correctors, offering greater flexibility to preserve model quality compared to conventional 2:4 pruning techniques. The sparse core and block diagonal wrappers are chosen through a block coordinate descent algorithm that minimizes a layer-wise proxy loss. We theoretically prove this optimization is guaranteed to converge to a solution with a proxy loss less than or equal to state-of-the-art pruning algorithms. Experiments on Llama (Touvron et al., 2023; Dubey et al., 2024) and Qwen (Y ang et al., 2025) model families demonstrate that ARMOR consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art 2:4 pruning methods across a wide range of downstream tasks and perplexity evaluations. ARMOR achieves this superior performance while retaining the inference speedups and substantial memory usage reductions of 2:4 pruning, establishing a more effective trade-off between model compression and task accuracy. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities (Park et al., 2023; Huang & Y ang, 2025), yet their immense computational and memory requirements pose significant barriers to practical deployment.
KEO: Knowledge Extraction on OMIn via Knowledge Graphs and RAG for Safety-Critical Aviation Maintenance
Ai, Kuangshi, Karr, Jonathan A. Jr, Jiang, Meng, Chawla, Nitesh V., Wang, Chaoli
We present Knowledge Extraction on OMIn (KEO), a domain-specific knowledge extraction and reasoning framework with large language models (LLMs) in safety-critical contexts. Using the Operations and Maintenance Intelligence (OMIn) dataset, we construct a QA benchmark spanning global sensemaking and actionable maintenance tasks. KEO builds a structured Knowledge Graph (KG) and integrates it into a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline, enabling more coherent, dataset-wide reasoning than traditional text-chunk RAG. We evaluate locally deployable LLMs (Gemma-3, Phi-4, Mistral-Nemo) and employ stronger models (GPT-4o, Llama-3.3) as judges. Experiments show that KEO markedly improves global sensemaking by revealing patterns and system-level insights, while text-chunk RAG remains effective for fine-grained procedural tasks requiring localized retrieval. These findings underscore the promise of KG-augmented LLMs for secure, domain-specific QA and their potential in high-stakes reasoning.
CAM: A Constructivist View of Agentic Memory for LLM-Based Reading Comprehension
Li, Rui, Zhang, Zeyu, Bo, Xiaohe, Tian, Zihang, Chen, Xu, Dai, Quanyu, Dong, Zhenhua, Tang, Ruiming
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are confronted with overwhelming information volume when comprehending long-form documents. This challenge raises the imperative of a cohesive memory module, which can elevate vanilla LLMs into autonomous reading agents. Despite the emergence of some heuristic approaches, a systematic design principle remains absent. To fill this void, we draw inspiration from Jean Piaget's Constructivist Theory, illuminating three traits of the agentic memory -- structured schemata, flexible assimilation, and dynamic accommodation. This blueprint forges a clear path toward a more robust and efficient memory system for LLM-based reading comprehension. To this end, we develop CAM, a prototype implementation of Constructivist Agentic Memory that simultaneously embodies the structurality, flexibility, and dynamicity. At its core, CAM is endowed with an incremental overlapping clustering algorithm for structured memory development, supporting both coherent hierarchical summarization and online batch integration. During inference, CAM adaptively explores the memory structure to activate query-relevant information for contextual response, akin to the human associative process. Compared to existing approaches, our design demonstrates dual advantages in both performance and efficiency across diverse long-text reading comprehension tasks, including question answering, query-based summarization, and claim verification.
EEG-Based Acute Pain Classification: Machine Learning Model Comparison and Real-Time Clinical Feasibility
Mathrawala, Aavid, Kurup, Dhruv, Lau, Josie
Current pain assessment within hospitals often relies on self-reporting or non-specific EKG vital signs. This system leaves critically ill, sedated, and cognitively impaired patients vulnerable to undertreated pain and opioid overuse. Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a noninvasive method of measuring brain activity. This technology could potentially be applied as an assistive tool to highlight nociceptive processing in order to mitigate this issue. In this study, we compared machine learning models for classifying high-pain versus low/no-pain EEG epochs using data from fifty-two healthy adults exposed to laser-evoked pain at three intensities (low, medium, high). Each four-second epoch was transformed into a 537-feature vector spanning spectral power, band ratios, Hjorth parameters, entropy measures, coherence, wavelet energies, and peak-frequency metrics. Nine traditional machine learning models were evaluated with leave-one-participant-out cross-validation. A support vector machine with radial basis function kernel achieved the best offline performance with 88.9% accuracy and sub-millisecond inference time (1.02 ms). Our Feature importance analysis was consistent with current canonical pain physiology, showing contralateral alpha suppression, midline theta/alpha enhancement, and frontal gamma bursts. The real-time XGBoost model maintained an end-to-end latency of about 4 ms and 94.2% accuracy, demonstrating that an EEG-based pain monitor is technically feasible within a clinical setting and provides a pathway towards clinical validation.
Fundamental Limits of Crystalline Equivariant Graph Neural Networks: A Circuit Complexity Perspective
Cao, Yang, Song, Zhao, Zhang, Jiahao, Zhao, Jiale
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a core paradigm for learning on relational data. In materials science, equivariant GNNs (EGNNs) have emerged as a compelling backbone for crystalline-structure prediction, owing to their ability to respect Euclidean symmetries and periodic boundary conditions. Despite strong empirical performance, their expressive power in periodic, symmetry-constrained settings remains poorly understood. This work characterizes the intrinsic computational and expressive limits of EGNNs for crystalline-structure prediction through a circuit-complexity lens. We analyze the computations carried out by EGNN layers acting on node features, atomic coordinates, and lattice matrices, and prove that, under polynomial precision, embedding width $d=O(n)$ for $n$ nodes, $O(1)$ layers, and $O(1)$-depth, $O(n)$-width MLP instantiations of the message/update/readout maps, these models admit a simulation by a uniform $\mathsf{TC}^0$ threshold-circuit family of polynomial size (with an explicit constant-depth bound). Situating EGNNs within $\mathsf{TC}^0$ provides a concrete ceiling on the decision and prediction problems solvable by such architectures under realistic resource constraints and clarifies which architectural modifications (e.g., increased depth, richer geometric primitives, or wider layers) are required to transcend this regime. The analysis complements Weisfeiler-Lehman style results that do not directly transfer to periodic crystals, and offers a complexity-theoretic foundation for symmetry-aware graph learning on crystalline systems.
NorMuon: Making Muon more efficient and scalable
Li, Zichong, Liu, Liming, Liang, Chen, Chen, Weizhu, Zhao, Tuo
The choice of optimizer significantly impacts the training efficiency and computational costs of large language models (LLMs). Recently, the Muon optimizer has demonstrated promising results by orthogonalizing parameter updates, improving optimization geometry through better conditioning. Despite Muon's emergence as a candidate successor to Adam, the potential for jointly leveraging their strengths has not been systematically explored. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing NorMuon (Neuron-wise Normalized Muon), an optimizer that synergistically combines orthogonalization with neuron-level adaptive learning rates. Our analysis reveals that while Muon effectively reduces condition numbers, the resulting updates exhibit highly non-uniform neuron norms, causing certain neurons to dominate the optimization process. NorMuon addresses this imbalance by maintaining second-order momentum statistics for each neuron and applying row-wise normalization after orthogonalization, ensuring balanced parameter utilization while preserving Muon's conditioning benefits. To enable practical deployment at scale, we develop an efficient distributed implementation under the FSDP2 framework that strategically distributes orthogonalization computations across devices. Experiments across multiple model scales demonstrate that NorMuon consistently outperforms both Adam and Muon, achieving 21.74% better training efficiency than Adam and 11.31% improvement over Muon on 1.1 B pretraining setting, while maintaining a comparable memory footprint to Muon. Our findings suggest that orthogonalization and adaptive learning rates are complementary rather than competing approaches, opening new avenues for optimizer design in large-scale deep learning.
LANTERN: Scalable Distillation of Large Language Models for Job-Person Fit and Explanation
Fu, Zhoutong, Cao, Yihan, Chen, Yi-Lin, Lunia, Aman, Dong, Liming, Saraf, Neha, Jiang, Ruijie, Dai, Yun, Song, Qingquan, Wang, Tan, Li, Guoyao, Koh, Derek, Wei, Haichao, Wang, Zhipeng, Gupta, Aman, Jiang, Chengming, Shen, Jianqiang, Hong, Liangjie, Zhang, Wenjing
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, deploying LLMs at scale for domain specific applications, such as job-person fit and explanation in job seeking platforms, introduces distinct challenges. At LinkedIn, the job person fit task requires analyzing a candidate's public profile against job requirements to produce both a fit assessment and a detailed explanation. Directly applying open source or finetuned LLMs to this task often fails to yield high quality, actionable feedback due to the complexity of the domain and the need for structured outputs. Moreover, the large size of these models leads to high inference latency and limits scalability, making them unsuitable for online use. To address these challenges, we introduce LANTERN, a novel LLM knowledge distillation framework tailored specifically for job person fit tasks. LANTERN involves modeling over multiple objectives, an encoder model for classification purpose, and a decoder model for explanation purpose. To better distill the knowledge from a strong black box teacher model to multiple downstream models, LANTERN incorporates multi level knowledge distillation that integrates both data and logit level insights. In addition to introducing the knowledge distillation framework, we share our insights on post training techniques and prompt engineering, both of which are crucial for successfully adapting LLMs to domain specific downstream tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LANTERN significantly improves task specific metrics for both job person fit and explanation. Online evaluations further confirm its effectiveness, showing measurable gains in job seeker engagement, including a 0.24\% increase in apply rate and a 0.28\% increase in qualified applications.
Language Model as Planner and Formalizer under Constraints
Huang, Cassie, Mohan, Stuti, Yang, Ziyi, Tellex, Stefanie, Zhang, Li
LLMs have been widely used in planning, either as planners to generate action sequences end-to-end, or as formalizers to represent the planning domain and problem in a formal language that can derive plans deterministically. However, both lines of work rely on standard benchmarks that only include generic and simplistic environmental specifications, leading to potential overestimation of the planning ability of LLMs and safety concerns in downstream tasks. We bridge this gap by augmenting widely used planning benchmarks with manually annotated, fine-grained, and rich natural language constraints spanning four formally defined categories. Over 4 state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs, 3 formal languages, 5 methods, and 4 datasets, we show that the introduction of constraints not only consistently halves performance, but also significantly challenges robustness to problem complexity and lexical shift.
TensorBLEU: Vectorized GPU-based BLEU Score Implementation for Per-Sentence In-Training Evaluation
Modern natural language processing models have achieved unprecedented scale, yet the tools for their evaluation often remain a computational bottleneck, limiting the pace of research. This is particularly acute for in-training evaluation metrics, such as per-sentence reward signals in Reinforcement Learning, which must operate efficiently on batches of token IDs directly on the GPU. In this paper, we introduce TensorBLEU, a novel implementation of the BLEU metric designed from the ground up for this specific use case. Our approach is fully vectorized for GPU-accelerated, per-sentence computation within PyTorch and introduces a memory-efficient counting mechanism. By creating a compact, batch-specific dictionary of n-grams using \texttt{torch.unique}, our method avoids the prohibitive memory costs of traditional hashing-based vectorization, making it practical for large-vocabulary models. We benchmark TensorBLEU against NLTK, the standard library for token-ID-based BLEU calculation on the CPU. Experiments show that TensorBLEU provides speedups of over 13x on consumer-grade GPUs (NVIDIA T4) and exceeding 40x on data-center-class hardware (NVIDIA A100). This performance transforms a significant bottleneck into a negligible part of the training loop. By clearly defining its role as a "Token-ID BLEU" for development purposes and open-sourcing our implementation, we provide a powerful tool for accelerating research in areas like RL-based model fine-tuning.