Technology
FairDD: Fair Dataset Distillation
Condensing large datasets into smaller synthetic counterparts has demonstrated its promise for image classification. However, previous research has overlooked a crucial concern in image recognition: ensuring that models trained on condensed datasets are unbiased towards protected attributes (PA), such as gender and race. Our investigation reveals that dataset distillation fails to alleviate the unfairness towards minority groups within original datasets.
Partition to Evolve: Niching-enhanced Evolution with LLMs for Automated Algorithm Discovery
Large language model-assisted Evolutionary Search (LES) has emerged as a promising approach for Automated Algorithm Discovery (AAD). While many evolutionary search strategies have been developed for classic optimization problems, LES operates in abstract language spaces, presenting unique challenges for applying these strategies effectively. To address this, we propose a general LES framework that incorporates feature-assisted niche construction within abstract search spaces, enabling the seamless integration of niche-based search strategies from evolutionary computation. Building on this framework, we introduce PartEvo, an LES method that combines niche collaborative search and advanced prompting strategies to improve algorithm discovery efficiency. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world optimization problems show that PartEvo outperforms human-designed baselines and surpasses prior LES methods, such as Eoh and Funsearch. In particular, on resource scheduling tasks, PartEvo generates meta-heuristics with low design costs, achieving up to 90.1\% performance improvement over widely-used baseline algorithms, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.
Group-Level Data Selection for Efficient Pretraining
The efficiency and quality of language model pretraining are largely determined by the way pretraining data are selected. In this paper, we introduce, an efficient group-level data selection approach to optimize the speed-quality frontier of language model pretraining. Specifically, Group-MATES parameterizes costly group-level selection with a relational data influence model. To train this model, we sample training trajectories of the language model and collect oracle data influences alongside. The relational data influence model approximates the oracle data influence by weighting individual influence with relationships among training data. To enable efficient selection with our relational data influence model, we partition the dataset into small clusters using relationship weights and select data within each cluster independently.
Non-stationary Equivariant Graph Neural Networks for Physical Dynamics Simulation
To enhance the generalization ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) in learning and simulation physical dynamics, a series of equivariant GNNs have been developed to incorporate the symmetric inductive bias. However, the existing methods do not take into account the non-stationarity nature of physical dynamics, where the joint distribution changes over time. Moreover, previous approaches for modeling non-stationary time series typically involve normalizing the data, which disrupts the symmetric assumption inherent in physical dynamics. To model the non-stationary physical dynamics while preserving the symmetric inductive bias, we introduce a Non-Stationary Equivariant Graph Neural Network (NS-EGNN) to capture the non-stationarity in physical dynamics while preserving the symmetric property of the model. Specifically, NS-EGNN employs Fourier Transform on segments of physical dynamics to extract time-varying frequency information from the trajectories. It then uses the first and second-order differences to mitigate non-stationarity, followed by pooling for future predictions. Through capturing varying frequency characteristics and alleviate the linear and quadric trend in the raw physical dynamics, NS-EGNN better models the temporal dependencies in the physical dynamics. NS-EGNN has been applied on various types of physical dynamics, including molecular, motion and protein dynamics.
G-Net: A Provably Easy Construction of High-Accuracy Random Binary Neural Networks
We propose a novel randomized algorithm for constructing binary neural networks with tunable accuracy. This approach is motivated by hyperdimensional computing (HDC), which is a brain-inspired paradigm that leverages high-dimensional vector representations, offering efficient hardware implementation and robustness to model corruptions. Unlike traditional low-precision methods that use quantization, we consider binary embeddings of data as points in the hypercube equipped with the Hamming distance. We propose a novel family of floating-point neural networks, G-Nets, which are general enough to mimic standard network layers. Each floating-point G-Net has a randomized binary embedding, an embedded hyperdimensional (EHD) G-Net, that retains the accuracy of its floating-point counterparts, with theoretical guarantees, due to the concentration of measure. Empirically, our binary models match convolutional neural network accuracies and outperform prior HDC models by large margins, for example, we achieve almost 30\% higher accuracy on CIFAR-10 compared to prior HDC models. G-Nets are a theoretically justified bridge between neural networks and randomized binary neural networks, opening a new direction for constructing robust binary/quantized deep learning models. Our implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/GNet2025/GNet}.
CLEAR: Conv-Like Linearization Revs Pre-Trained Diffusion Transformers Up
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become a leading architecture in image generation. However, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms, which are responsible for modeling token-wise relationships, results in significant latency when generating high-resolution images. To address this issue, we aim at a linear attention mechanism in this paper that reduces the complexity of pre-trained DiTs to linear. We begin our exploration with a comprehensive summary of existing efficient attention mechanisms and identify four key factors crucial for successful linearization of pre-trained DiTs: locality, formulation consistency, high-rank attention maps, and feature integrity. Based on these insights, we introduce a convolution-like local attention strategy termed CLEAR, which limits feature interactions to a local window around each query token, and thus achieves linear complexity. Our experiments indicate that, by fine-tuning the attention layer on merely 10K self-generated samples for 10K iterations, we can effectively transfer knowledge from a pre-trained DiT to a student model with linear complexity, yielding results comparable to the teacher model. Simultaneously, it reduces attention computations by 99.5% and accelerates generation by 6.3 times for generating 8K-resolution images. Furthermore, we investigate favorable properties in the distilled attention layers, such as zero-shot generalization across various models and plugins, and improved support for multi-GPU parallel inference. Models and codes will be available.
SparseMVC: Probing Cross-view Sparsity Variations for Multi-view Clustering
Existing multi-view clustering methods employ various strategies to address data-level sparsity and view-level dynamic fusion. However, we identify a critical yet overlooked issue: varying sparsity across views. Cross-view sparsity variations lead to encoding discrepancies, heightening sample-level semantic heterogeneity and making view-level dynamic weighting inappropriate. To tackle these challenges, we propose Adaptive Sparse Autoencoders for Multi-View Clustering (SparseMVC), a framework with three key modules. Initially, the sparse autoencoder probes the sparsity of each view and adaptively adjusts encoding formats via an entropy-matching loss term, mitigating cross-view inconsistencies. Subsequently, the correlation-informed sample reweighting module employs attention mechanisms to assign weights by capturing correlations between early-fused global and view-specific features, reducing encoding discrepancies and balancing contributions. Furthermore, the cross-view distribution alignment module aligns feature distributions during the late fusion stage, accommodating datasets with an arbitrary number of views. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SparseMVC achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance.
Efficient Prompt Compression with Evaluator Heads for Long-Context Transformer Inference
Although applications involving long-context inputs are crucial for the effective utilization of large language models (LLMs), they also result in increased computational costs and reduced performance. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient, training-free prompt compression method that retains key information within compressed prompts. We identify specific attention heads in transformer-based LLMs, which we designate as evaluator heads, that are capable of selecting tokens in long inputs that are most significant for inference. Building on this discovery, we develop EHPC, an Evaluator Head-based Prompt Compression method, which enables LLMs to rapidly skim through'' input prompts by leveraging only the first few layers with evaluator heads during the pre-filling stage, subsequently passing only the important tokens to the model for inference. EHPC achieves state-of-the-art results across two mainstream benchmarks: prompt compression and long-context inference acceleration. Consequently, it effectively improves performance with the reduced costs associated with commercial API calls compared to prompt compressing methods. We further demonstrate that EHPC attains competitive results compared to key-value cache-based acceleration methods, thereby highlighting its potential to enhance the efficiency of LLMs for long-context tasks.
scMRDR: A scalable and flexible framework for unpaired single-cell multi-omics data integration
Advances in single-cell sequencing have enabled high-resolution profiling of diverse molecular modalities, while integrating unpaired multi-omics single-cell data remains challenging. Existing approaches either rely on pair information or prior correspondences, or require computing a global pairwise coupling matrix, limiting their scalability and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce a scalable and flexible generative framework called single-cell Multi-omics Regularized Disentangled Representations (scMRDR) for unpaired multi-omics integration. Specifically, we disentangle each cell's latent representations into modality-shared and modality-specific components using a well-designed $\beta$-VAE architecture, which are augmented with isometric regularization to preserve intra-omics biological heterogeneity, adversarial objective to encourage cross-modal alignment, and masked reconstruction loss strategy to address the issue of missing features across modalities. Our method achieves excellent performance on benchmark datasets in terms of batch correction, modality alignment, and biological signal preservation. Crucially, it scales effectively to large-scale datasets and supports integration of more than two omics, offering a powerful and flexible solution for large-scale multi-omics data integration and downstream biological discovery.
On Learning Verifiers and Implications to Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Chain-of-Thought reasoning has emerged as a powerful approach for solving complex mathematical and logical problems. However, it can often veer off track through incorrect or unsubstantiated inferences. Formal mathematical reasoning, which can be checked with a formal verifier, is one approach to addressing this issue. However, currently LLMs are simply not good enough to solve complex problems in a formal way, and even just formalizing an informal problem statement can be challenging. Motivated by this fact, in this work we consider the problem of learning reliable verifiers for sequential reasoning, including natural language Chain-of-Thought reasoning. That is, given a problem statement and step-by-step solution in natural language, the aim of the verifier is to output [Yes] if the reasoning steps in the solution are all valid, and [No] otherwise. In this work we give a formal PAC-learning framework for studying this problem. We propose and analyze several natural verification goals, at different levels of strength, in this framework. We provide sample complexity upper-bounds for learning verifiers satisfying these goals, as well as lower-bound and impossibility results for learning other natural verification objectives without additional assumptions.