computational efficiency
EDBench: Large-Scale Electron Density Data for Molecular Modeling
Existing molecular machine learning force fields (MLFFs) generally focus on the learning of atoms, molecules, and simple quantum chemical properties (such as energy and force), but ignore the importance of electron density (ED) ฯ(r) in accurately understanding molecular force fields (MFFs). ED describes the probability of finding electrons at specific locations around atoms or molecules, which uniquely determines all ground state properties (such as energy, molecular structure, etc.) of interactive multi-particle systems according to the HohenbergKohn theorem. However, the calculation of ED relies on the time-consuming first-principles density functional theory (DFT), which leads to the lack of largescale ED data and limits its application in MLFFs. In this paper, we introduce EDBench, a large-scale, high-quality dataset of ED designed to advance learningbased research at the electronic scale. Built upon the PCQM4Mv2, EDBench provides accurate ED data, covering 3.3 million molecules. To comprehensively evaluate the ability of models to understand and utilize electronic information, we design a suite of ED-centric benchmark tasks spanning prediction, retrieval, and generation. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that learning from EDBench is not only feasible but also achieves high accuracy. Moreover, we show that learning-based methods can efficiently calculate ED with comparable precision while significantly reducing the computational cost relative to traditional DFT calculations. All data and benchmarks from EDBench will be freely available, laying a robust foundation for ED-driven drug discovery and materials science.
PubSub-VFL: Towards Efficient Two-Party Split Learning in Heterogeneous Environments via Publisher/Subscriber Architecture
With the rapid advancement of the digital economy, data collaboration between organizations has become a well-established business model, driving the growth of various industries. However, privacy concerns make direct data sharing impractical. To address this, Two-Party Split Learning (a.k.a. Vertical Federated Learning (VFL)) has emerged as a promising solution for secure collaborative learning. Despite its advantages, this architecture still suffers from low computational resource utilization and training efficiency.
EAReranker: Efficient Embedding Adequacy Assessment for Retrieval Augmented Generation
With the increasing adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for knowledge-intensive tasks, ensuring the adequacy of retrieved documents has become critically important for generation quality. Traditional reranking approaches face three significant challenges: substantial computational overhead that scales with document length, dependency on plain text that limits application in sensitive scenarios, and insufficient assessment of document value beyond simple relevance metrics. We propose EAReranker, an efficient embedding-based adequacy assessment framework that evaluates document utility for RAG systems without requiring access to original text content.
PhySwin: An Efficient and Physically-Informed Foundation Model for Multispectral Earth Observation
Recent progress on Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs) aims toward universal representations for Earth observation imagery. However, current efforts often scale up in size significantly without addressing efficiency constraints critical for real-world applications (e.g., onboard processing, rapid disaster response) or treat multispectral (MS) data as generic imagery, overlooking valuable physical priors. We introduce PhySwin, a foundation model for MS data that integrates physical priors with computational efficiency. PhySwin combines three innovations: (i) physics-informed pretraining objectives leveraging radiometric constraints to enhance feature learning; (ii) an efficient MixMAE formulation tailored to SwinV2 for low-FLOP, scalable pretraining; and (iii) token-efficient spectral embedding to retain spectral detail without increasing token counts. Pretrained on over 1M Sentinel-2 tiles, PhySwin achieves SOTA results (+1.32% mIoU segmentation, +0.80% F1 change detection) while reducing inference latency by up to 14.4 and computational complexity by up to 43.6 compared to ViT-based RSFMs.
Inspired Image Restoration
Image restoration aims to recover sharp, high-quality images from degraded, lowquality inputs. Existing methods have progressively advanced from task-specific designs to general architectures, all-in-one frameworks, and composite degradation handling. Despite these advances, computational efficiency remains a critical factor for practical deployment. In this work, we present BioIR, an efficient and universal image restoration framework inspired by the human visual system. Specifically, we design two bio-inspired modules, Peripheral-to-Foveal (P2F) and Foveal-to-Peripheral (F2P), to emulate the perceptual processes of human vision, with a particular focus on the functional interplay between foveal and peripheral pathways. P2F delivers large-field contextual signals to foveal regions based on pixel-to-region affinity, while F2P propagates fine-grained spatial details through a static-to-dynamic two-stage integration strategy. Leveraging the biologically motivated design, BioIR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three representative image restoration settings: single-degradation, all-in-one, and composite degradation. Moreover, BioIR maintains high computational efficiency and fast inference speed, making it highly suitable for real-world applications. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/c-yn/BioIR.
Fast Training of Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting via Expert Loss Integration
Mahtout, Btissame El, Ziel, Florian
We propose a novel adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework for time series forecasting that enhances expert specialization by incorporating expert-specific loss information directly into the training process. Notably, the overall objective comprises the base forecasting loss and expert-specific losses, allowing expert-level prediction errors to jointly shape training alongside the global forecasting loss. This framework is further combined with a partial online learning strategy, enabling incremental updates of both the gating mechanism and expert parameters. This approach significantly reduces computational cost by eliminating the need for repeated full model retraining. By integrating expert-level loss awareness with efficient online optimization, the proposed method achieves improved learning efficiency while maintaining strong predictive performance. Empirical results across economic, tourism, and energy datasets with varying frequencies demonstrate that the proposed approach generally outperforms both statistical methods and state-of-the-art neural network models, such as Transformers and WaveNet, in forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the expert-specific loss integration strategy, highlighting its contribution to enhancing predictive performance.
e197fe307eb3467035f892dc100d570a-Supplemental-Conference.pdf
In addition to the radar plot, we present the specific numerical values for the prediction and driving performance metrics to provide a more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the system's performance, as demonstrated in Table 1. The static evaluation metrics, ADE and FDE, are trained and validated on the Alignment dataset collected from the SUMMIT simulator. The task-driven evaluation metrics, including safety, efficiency, comfort, and driving performance, are derived from interactive closed-loop scenarios. The process for calculating these metrics is described in Appendix C. Results in Table 1 are used to plot the correlation map between ADE/FDE and driving performance, which surprisingly indicates no strong correlation between static evaluation metrics and real driving performance. Moreover, to ensure the comparability between prediction performance metrics and driving performance metrics in the radar plot, we normalize all metrics to the scale of [0, 1]. B.1 The RVOPlanner The Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle (RVO) planner is developed based on [8], which expands on the concept of velocity obstacles [4] to consider the reactive behaviors of exo-agents.
MMD GAN: Towards Deeper Understanding of Moment Matching Network
Generative moment matching network (GMMN) is a deep generative model that differs from Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) by replacing the discriminator in GAN with a two-sample test based on kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). Although some theoretical guarantees of MMD have been studied, the empirical performance of GMMN is still not as competitive as that of GAN on challenging and large benchmark datasets. The computational efficiency of GMMN is also less desirable in comparison with GAN, partially due to its requirement for a rather large batch size during the training. In this paper, we propose to improve both the model expressiveness of GMMN and its computational efficiency by introducing {\it adversarial kernel learning} techniques, as the replacement of a fixed Gaussian kernel in the original GMMN. The new approach combines the key ideas in both GMMN and GAN, hence we name it MMD-GAN. The new distance measure in MMD-GAN is a meaningful loss that enjoys the advantage of weak$^*$ topology and can be optimized via gradient descent with relatively small batch sizes. In our evaluation on multiple benchmark datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10, CelebA and LSUN, the performance of MMD-GAN significantly outperforms GMMN, and is competitive with other representative GAN works.