decay function
Otters: An Energy-Efficient SpikingTransformer via Optical Time-to-First-Spike Encoding
Yan, Zhanglu, Mao, Jiayi, Liu, Qianhui, Li, Fanfan, Pan, Gang, Luo, Tao, Zhu, Bowen, Wong, Weng-Fai
However, such energy advantage is often unrealized because inference requires evaluating a temporal decay function and subsequent multiplication with the synaptic weights. We fabricated a custom indium oxide optoelectronic synapse, showing how its natural physical decay directly implements the required temporal function. By treating the device's analog output as the fused product of the synaptic weight and temporal decay, optoelectronic synaptic TTFS (named Otters) eliminates these expensive digital operations. To use the Otters paradigm in complex architectures like the transformer, which are challenging to train directly due to the sparsity issue, we introduce a novel quantized neural network-to-SNN conversion algorithm. This complete hardware-software co-design enables our model to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy across seven GLUE benchmark datasets and demonstrates a 1.77 improvement in energy efficiency over previous leading SNNs, based on a comprehensive analysis of compute, data movement, and memory access costs using energy measurements from a commercial 22nm process. Our work thus establishes a new paradigm for energy-efficient SNNs, translating fundamental device physics directly into powerful computational primitives. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their immense computational and energy costs hinder their deployment in resource-constrained environments such as edge devices (Lin et al., 2023; Jegham et al., 2025). This critical challenge has spurred research on more efficient, brain-inspired architectures, with spiking neural networks (SNNs) emerging as a promising candidate (Tang et al., 2025; Xing et al.).
An Event-based Fast Intensity Reconstruction Scheme for UAV Real-time Perception
Dong, Xin, Zhang, Yiwei, Cui, Yangjie, Xiang, Jinwu, Li, Daochun, Tu, Zhan
Event cameras offer significant advantages, including a wide dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and immunity to motion blur, making them highly promising for addressing challenging visual conditions. Extracting and utilizing effective information from asynchronous event streams is essential for the onboard implementation of event cameras. In this paper, we propose a streamlined event-based intensity reconstruction scheme, event-based single integration (ESI), to address such implementation challenges. This method guarantees the portability of conventional frame-based vision methods to event-based scenarios and maintains the intrinsic advantages of event cameras. The ESI approach reconstructs intensity images by performing a single integration of the event streams combined with an enhanced decay algorithm. Such a method enables real-time intensity reconstruction at a high frame rate, typically 100 FPS. Furthermore, the relatively low computation load of ESI fits onboard implementation suitably, such as in UAV-based visual tracking scenarios. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance comparison of ESI and state-of-the-art algorithms. Compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, ESI demonstrates remarkable runtime efficiency improvements, superior reconstruction quality, and a high frame rate. As a result, ESI enhances UAV onboard perception significantly under visual adversary surroundings. In-flight tests, ESI demonstrates effective performance for UAV onboard visual tracking under extremely low illumination conditions(2-10lux), whereas other comparative algorithms fail due to insufficient frame rate, poor image quality, or limited real-time performance.
Dynamic Rank Adjustment in Diffusion Policies for Efficient and Flexible Training
Sun, Xiatao, Yang, Shuo, Chen, Yinxing, Fan, Francis, Liang, Yiyan, Rakita, Daniel
Diffusion policies trained via offline behavioral cloning have recently gained traction in robotic motion generation. While effective, these policies typically require a large number of trainable parameters. This model size affords powerful representations but also incurs high computational cost during training. Ideally, it would be beneficial to dynamically adjust the trainable portion as needed, balancing representational power with computational efficiency. For example, while overparameterization enables diffusion policies to capture complex robotic behaviors via offline behavioral cloning, the increased computational demand makes online interactive imitation learning impractical due to longer training time. To address this challenge, we present a framework, called DRIFT, that uses the Singular Value Decomposition to enable dynamic rank adjustment during diffusion policy training. We implement and demonstrate the benefits of this framework in DRIFT-DAgger, an imitation learning algorithm that can seamlessly slide between an offline bootstrapping phase and an online interactive phase. We perform extensive experiments to better understand the proposed framework, and demonstrate that DRIFT-DAgger achieves improved sample efficiency and faster training with minimal impact on model performance.
Enhancing Social Media Personalization: Dynamic User Profile Embeddings and Multimodal Contextual Analysis Using Transformer Models
This study investigates the impact of dynamic user profile embedding on personalized context-aware experiences in social networks. A comparative analysis of multilingual and English transformer models was performed on a dataset of over twenty million data points. The analysis included a wide range of metrics and performance indicators to compare dynamic profile embeddings versus non-embeddings (effectively static profile embeddings). A comparative study using degradation functions was conducted. Extensive testing and research confirmed that dynamic embedding successfully tracks users' changing tastes and preferences, providing more accurate recommendations and higher user engagement. These results are important for social media platforms aiming to improve user experience through relevant features and sophisticated recommendation engines.
Expert-Guided Extinction of Toxic Tokens for Debiased Generation
Sun, Xueyao, Shi, Kaize, Tang, Haoran, Xu, Guandong, Li, Qing
Large language models (LLMs) can elicit social bias during generations, especially when inference with toxic prompts. Controlling the sensitive attributes in generation encounters challenges in data distribution, generalizability, and efficiency. Specifically, fine-tuning and retrieval demand extensive unbiased corpus, while direct prompting requires meticulously curated instructions for correcting the output in multiple rounds of thoughts but poses challenges on memory and inference latency. In this work, we propose the Expert-Guided Extinction of Toxic Tokens for Debiased Generation (EXPOSED) to eliminate the undesired harmful outputs for LLMs without the aforementioned requirements. EXPOSED constructs a debiasing expert based on the abundant toxic corpus to expose and elicit the potentially dangerous tokens. It then processes the output to the LLMs and constructs a fair distribution by suppressing and attenuating the toxic tokens. EXPOSED is evaluated on fairness benchmarks over three LLM families. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with other baselines, the proposed EXPOSED significantly reduces the potential social bias while balancing fairness and generation performance.