Offline multi-objective optimization aims to identify Pareto-optimal solutions given a dataset of designs and their objective values. In this work, we propose a preference-guided diffusion model that generates Pareto-optimal designs by leveraging a classifier-based guidance mechanism. Our guidance classifier is a preference model trained to predict the probability that one design dominates another, directing the diffusion model toward optimal regions of the design space. Crucially, this preference model generalizes beyond the training distribution, enabling the discovery of Pareto-optimal solutions outside the observed dataset. We introduce a novel diversity-aware preference guidance, augmenting Pareto dominance preference with diversity criteria. This ensures that generated solutions are optimal and well-distributed across the objective space, a capability absent in prior generative methods for offline multi-objective optimization. We evaluate our approach on various continuous offline multi-objective optimization tasks and find that it consistently outperforms other inverse/generative approaches while remaining competitive with forward/ surrogate-based optimization methods. Our results highlight the effectiveness of classifier-guided diffusion models in generating diverse and high-quality solutions that approximate the Pareto front well.

Data pruning, which aims to downsize a large training set into a small informative subset, is crucial for reducing the enormous computational costs of modern deep learning. Though large-scale data collections invariably contain annotation noise and numerous robust learning methods have been developed, data pruning for the noise-robust learning scenario has received little attention. With state-ofthe-art Re-labeling methods that self-correct erroneous labels while training, it is challenging to identify which subset induces the most accurate re-labeling of erroneous labels in the entire training set.

Non-interactive cryptographic computing, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), provides a promising solution for private neural network training on encrypted data. One challenge of FHE-based private training is its large computational overhead, especially the multiple rounds of forward and backward execution on each encrypted data sample. Considering the existence of largely redundant data samples, pruning them will significantly speed up the training, as proven in plain non-FHE training. Executing the data pruning of encrypted data on the server side is not trivial since the knowledge calculation of data pruning needs complex and expensive executions on encrypted data. There is a lack of FHE-based data pruning protocol for efficient, private training. In this paper, we propose, \textit{HEPrune}, to construct a FHE data-pruning protocol and then design an FHE-friendly data-pruning algorithm under client-aided or non-client-aided settings, respectively. We also observed that data sample pruning may not always remove ciphertexts, leaving large empty slots and limiting the effects of data pruning. Thus, in HEPrune, we further propose ciphertext-wise pruning to reduce ciphertext computation numbers without hurting accuracy. Experimental results show that our work can achieve a $16\times$ speedup with only a $0.6\%$ accuracy drop over prior work.

Recently, data pruning, distillation, and coreset selection have been developed to streamline data volume by \textit{retaining}, \textit{synthesizing}, or \textit{selecting} a small yet informative subset from the full set. Among these methods, data pruning incurs the least additional training cost and offers the most practical acceleration benefits. However, it is the most vulnerable, often suffering significant performance degradation with imbalanced or biased data schema, thus raising concerns about its accuracy and reliability in on-device deployment. Therefore, there is a looming need for a new data pruning paradigm that maintains the efficiency of previous practices while ensuring balance and robustness.Unlike the fields of computer vision and natural language processing, where mature solutions have been developed to address these issues, graph neural networks (GNNs) continue to struggle with increasingly large-scale, imbalanced, and noisy datasets, lacking a unified dataset pruning solution. To achieve this, we introduce a novel dynamic soft-pruning method, \ourmethod, designed to update the training ``basket'' during the process using trainable prototypes.

Spatio-temporal forecasting is fundamental to intelligent systems in transportation, climate science, and urban planning. However, training deep learning models on the massive, often redundant, datasets from these domains presents a significant computational bottleneck. Existing solutions typically focus on optimizing model architectures or optimizers, while overlooking the inherent inefficiency of the training data itself. This conventional approach of iterating over the entire static dataset each epoch wastes considerable resources on easy-to-learn or repetitive samples. In this paper, we explore a novel training-efficiency techniques, namely learning from complexity with dynamic sample pruning, ST-Prune, for spatio-temporal forecasting. Through dynamic sample pruning, we aim to intelligently identify the most informative samples based on the model's real-time learning state, thereby accelerating convergence and improving training efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world spatio-temporal datasets show that ST-Prune significantly accelerates the training speed while maintaining or even improving the model performance, and it also has scalability and universality.

However, such datasets also pose significant challenges in terms of computational and storage resources. It is important to note that these datasets may contain redundant or noisy samples that are either irrelevant or harmful to the model's performance.