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Meng Li

Publications and source records attributed to Meng Li.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

Ab Initio Nonparametric Variable Selection for Scalable Symbolic Regression with Large $p$

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering symbolic expressions that characterize nonlinear relationships in data, gaining increasing attention for its interpretability, compactness, and robustness. However, existing SR methods do not scale to datasets with a large number of input variables (referred to as extreme-scale SR), which is common in modern scientific applications. This ``large $p$'' setting, often accompanied by measurement error, leads to slow performance of SR methods and overly complex expressions that are difficult to interpret. To address this scalability challenge, we propose a method called PAN+SR, which combines a key idea of ab initio nonparametric variable selection with SR to efficiently pre-screen large input spaces and reduce search complexity while maintaining accuracy. The use of nonparametric methods eliminates model misspecification, supporting a strategy called parametric-assisted nonparametric (PAN). We also extend SRBench, an open-source benchmarking platform, by incorporating high-dimensional regression problems with various signal-to-noise ratios. Our results demonstrate that PAN+SR consistently enhances the performance of 19 contemporary SR methods, enabling several to achieve state-of-the-art performance on these challenging datasets.

stat.ML↗

Initial Model Incorporation for Deep Learning FWI: Pretraining or Denormalization?

Subsurface property neural network reparameterized full waveform inversion (FWI) has emerged as an effective unsupervised learning framework, which can invert stably with an inaccurate starting model. It updates the trainable neural network parameters instead of fine-tuning on the subsurface model directly. There are primarily two ways to embed the prior knowledge of the initial model into neural networks, that is, pretraining and denormalization. Pretraining first regulates the neural networks' parameters by fitting the initial velocity model; Denormalization directly adds the outputs of the network into the initial models without pretraining. In this letter, we systematically investigate the influence of the two ways of initial model incorporation for the neural network reparameterized FWI. We demonstrate that pretraining requires inverting the model perturbation based on a constant velocity value (mean) with a two-stage implementation. It leads to a complex workflow and inconsistency of objective functions in the two-stage process, causing the network parameters to become inactive and lose plasticity. Experimental results demonstrate that denormalization can simplify workflows, accelerate convergence, and enhance inversion accuracy compared with pretraining.

cs.LG↗

SwitchVLA: Execution-Aware Task Switching for Vision-Language-Action Models

Robots deployed in dynamic environments must be able to not only follow diverse language instructions but flexibly adapt when user intent changes mid-execution. While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced multi-task learning and instruction following, they typically assume static task intent, failing to respond when new instructions arrive during ongoing execution. This limitation hinders natural and robust interaction in dynamic settings, such as retail or household environments, where real-time intent changes are common. We propose SwitchVLA, a unified, execution-aware framework that enables smooth and reactive task switching without external planners or additional switch-specific data. We model task switching as a behavior modulation problem conditioned on execution state and instruction context. Expert demonstrations are segmented into temporally grounded contact phases, allowing the policy to infer task progress and adjust its behavior accordingly. A multi-behavior conditional policy is then trained to generate flexible action chunks under varying behavior modes through conditioned trajectory modeling. Experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation demonstrate that SwitchVLA enables robust instruction adherence, fluid task switching, and strong generalization-outperforming prior VLA baselines in both task success rate and interaction naturalness.

cs.RO↗

Representations of Fact, Fiction and Forecast in Large Language Models: Epistemics and Attitudes

Rational speakers are supposed to know what they know and what they do not know, and to generate expressions matching the strength of evidence. In contrast, it is still a challenge for current large language models to generate corresponding utterances based on the assessment of facts and confidence in an uncertain real-world environment. While it has recently become popular to estimate and calibrate confidence of LLMs with verbalized uncertainty, what is lacking is a careful examination of the linguistic knowledge of uncertainty encoded in the latent space of LLMs. In this paper, we draw on typological frameworks of epistemic expressions to evaluate LLMs' knowledge of epistemic modality, using controlled stories. Our experiments show that the performance of LLMs in generating epistemic expressions is limited and not robust, and hence the expressions of uncertainty generated by LLMs are not always reliable. To build uncertainty-aware LLMs, it is necessary to enrich semantic knowledge of epistemic modality in LLMs.

cs.CL↗

RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation

In this paper, we introduce RoboMIND (Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation), a dataset containing 107k demonstration trajectories across 479 diverse tasks involving 96 object classes. RoboMIND is collected through human teleoperation and encompasses comprehensive robotic-related information, including multi-view observations, proprioceptive robot state information, and linguistic task descriptions. To ensure data consistency and reliability for imitation learning, RoboMIND is built on a unified data collection platform and a standardized protocol, covering four distinct robotic embodiments: the Franka Emika Panda, the UR5e, the AgileX dual-arm robot, and a humanoid robot with dual dexterous hands. Our dataset also includes 5k real-world failure demonstrations, each accompanied by detailed causes, enabling failure reflection and correction during policy learning. Additionally, we created a digital twin environment in the Isaac Sim simulator, replicating the real-world tasks and assets, which facilitates the low-cost collection of additional training data and enables efficient evaluation. To demonstrate the quality and diversity of our dataset, we conducted extensive experiments using various imitation learning methods for single-task settings and state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for multi-task scenarios. By leveraging RoboMIND, the VLA models achieved high manipulation success rates and demonstrated strong generalization capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, RoboMIND is the largest multi-embodiment teleoperation dataset collected on a unified platform, providing large-scale and high-quality robotic training data. Our project is at https://x-humanoid-robomind.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

Optimal Transport-Based Token Weighting scheme for Enhanced Preference Optimization

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising framework for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences by directly optimizing the log-likelihood difference between chosen and rejected responses. However, existing methods assign equal importance to all tokens in the response, while humans focus on more meaningful parts. This leads to suboptimal preference optimization, as irrelevant or noisy tokens disproportionately influence DPO loss. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{T}ransport-based token weighting scheme for enhancing direct \textbf{P}reference \textbf{O}ptimization (OTPO). By emphasizing semantically meaningful token pairs and de-emphasizing less relevant ones, our method introduces a context-aware token weighting scheme that yields a more contrastive reward difference estimate. This adaptive weighting enhances reward stability, improves interpretability, and ensures that preference optimization focuses on meaningful differences between responses. Extensive experiments have validated OTPO's effectiveness in improving instruction-following ability across various settings\footnote{Code is available at https://github.com/Mimasss2/OTPO.}.

cs.CL↗

FPQVAR: Floating Point Quantization for Visual Autoregressive Model with FPGA Hardware Co-design

Visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling has marked a paradigm shift in image generation from next-token prediction to next-scale prediction. VAR predicts a set of tokens at each step from coarse to fine scale, leading to better image quality and faster inference speed compared to existing diffusion models. However, the large parameter size and computation cost hinder its deployment on edge devices. To reduce the memory and computation cost, we propose FPQVAR, an efficient post-training floating-point (FP) quantization framework for VAR featuring algorithm and hardware co-design. At the algorithm level, we first identify the challenges of quantizing VAR. To address them, we propose Dual Format Quantization for the highly imbalanced input activation. We further propose Group-wise Hadamard Transformation and GHT-Aware Learnable Transformation to address the time-varying outlier channels. At the hardware level, we design the first low-bit FP quantizer and multiplier with lookup tables on FPGA and propose the first FPGA-based VAR accelerator featuring low-bit FP computation and an elaborate two-level pipeline. Extensive experiments show that compared to the state-of-the-art quantization method, our proposed FPQVAR significantly improves Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) from 10.83 to 3.58, Inception Score (IS) from 175.9 to 241.5 under 4-bit quantization. FPQVAR also significantly improves the performance of 6-bit quantized VAR, bringing it on par with the FP16 model. Our accelerator on AMD-Xilinx VCK190 FPGA achieves a throughput of 1.1 image/s, which is 3.1x higher than the integer-based accelerator. It also demonstrates 3.6x and 2.8x higher energy efficiency compared to the integer-based accelerator and GPU baseline, respectively.

cs.CV↗

A Global Commuting Origin-Destination Flow Dataset for Urban Sustainable Development

Commuting Origin-Destination (OD) flows capture movements of people from residences to workplaces, representing the predominant form of intra-city mobility and serving as a critical reference for understanding urban dynamics and supporting sustainable policies. However, acquiring such data requires costly, time-consuming censuses. In this study, we introduce a commuting OD flow dataset for cities around the world, spanning 6 continents, 179 countries, and 1,625 cities, providing unprecedented coverage of dynamics under diverse urban environments. Specifically, we collected fine-grained demographic data, satellite imagery, and points of interest~(POIs) for each city as foundational inputs to characterize the functional roles of urban regions. Leveraging these, a deep generative model is employed to capture the complex relationships between urban geospatial features and human mobility, enabling the generation of commuting OD flows between urban regions. Comprehensively, validation shows that the spatial distributions of the generated flows closely align with real-world observations. We believe this dataset offers a valuable resource for advancing sustainable urban development research in urban science, data science, transportation engineering, and related fields.

cs.OH↗

Degradation-Aware Feature Perturbation for All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-one image restoration aims to recover clear images from various degradation types and levels with a unified model. Nonetheless, the significant variations among degradation types present challenges for training a universal model, often resulting in task interference, where the gradient update directions of different tasks may diverge due to shared parameters. To address this issue, motivated by the routing strategy, we propose DFPIR, a novel all-in-one image restorer that introduces Degradation-aware Feature Perturbations(DFP) to adjust the feature space to align with the unified parameter space. In this paper, the feature perturbations primarily include channel-wise perturbations and attention-wise perturbations. Specifically, channel-wise perturbations are implemented by shuffling the channels in high-dimensional space guided by degradation types, while attention-wise perturbations are achieved through selective masking in the attention space. To achieve these goals, we propose a Degradation-Guided Perturbation Block (DGPB) to implement these two functions, positioned between the encoding and decoding stages of the encoder-decoder architecture. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DFPIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on several all-in-one image restoration tasks including image denoising, image dehazing, image deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our codes are available at https://github.com/TxpHome/DFPIR.

cs.CV↗

Projection method for quasiperiodic elliptic equations and application to quasiperiodic homogenization

In this study, we address the challenge of solving elliptic equations with quasiperiodic coefficients. To achieve accurate and efficient computation, we introduce the projection method, which enables the embedding of quasiperiodic systems into higher-dimensional periodic systems. To enhance the computational efficiency, we propose a compressed storage strategy for the stiffness matrix by its multi-level block circulant structure, significantly reducing memory requirements. Furthermore, we design a diagonal preconditioner to efficiently solve the resulting high-dimensional linear system by reducing the condition number of the stiffness matrix. These techniques collectively contribute to the computational effectiveness of our proposed approach. Convergence analysis shows the polynomial accuracy of the proposed method. We demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our approach through a series of numerical examples. Moreover, we apply our method to achieve a highly accurate computation of the homogenized coefficients for a quasiperiodic multiscale elliptic equation.

math.NA↗

Error analysis for temporal second-order finite element approximations of axisymmetric mean curvature flow of genus-1 surfaces

Existing studies on the convergence of numerical methods for curvature flows primarily focus on first-order temporal schemes. In this paper, we establish a novel error analysis for parametric finite element approximations of genus-1 axisymmetric mean curvature flow, formulated using two classical second-order time-stepping methods: the Crank-Nicolson method and the BDF2 method. Our results establish optimal error bounds in both the L^2-norm and H^1-norm, along with a superconvergence result in the H^1-norm for each fully discrete approximation. Finally, we perform convergence experiments to validate the theoretical findings and present numerical simulations for various genus-1 surfaces. Through a series of comparative experiments, we also demonstrate that the methods proposed in this paper exhibit significant mesh advantages.

math.NA↗

Holistic Capability Preservation: Towards Compact Yet Comprehensive Reasoning Models

This technical report presents Ring-Lite-Distill, a lightweight reasoning model derived from our open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models (LLMs) Ling-Lite. This study demonstrates that through meticulous high-quality data curation and ingenious training paradigms, the compact MoE model Ling-Lite can be further trained to achieve exceptional reasoning capabilities, while maintaining its parameter-efficient architecture with only 2.75 billion activated parameters, establishing an efficient lightweight reasoning architecture. In particular, in constructing this model, we have not merely focused on enhancing advanced reasoning capabilities, exemplified by high-difficulty mathematical problem solving, but rather aimed to develop a reasoning model with more comprehensive competency coverage. Our approach ensures coverage across reasoning tasks of varying difficulty levels while preserving generic capabilities, such as instruction following, tool use, and knowledge retention. We show that, Ring-Lite-Distill's reasoning ability reaches a level comparable to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, while its general capabilities significantly surpass those of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B. The models are accessible at https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI

cs.LG↗

UniCAIM: A Unified CAM/CIM Architecture with Static-Dynamic KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in various natural language processing (NLP) applications. However, the high memory and computation cost induced by the KV cache limits the inference efficiency, especially for long input sequences. Compute-in-memory (CIM)-based accelerators have been proposed for LLM acceleration with KV cache pruning. However, as existing accelerators only support static pruning with a fixed pattern or dynamic pruning with primitive implementations, they suffer from either high accuracy degradation or low efficiency. In this paper, we propose a ferroelectric FET (FeFET)-based unified content addressable memory (CAM) and CIM architecture, dubbed as UniCAIM. UniCAIM features simultaneous support for static and dynamic pruning with 3 computation modes: 1) in the CAM mode, UniCAIM enables approximate similarity measurement in O(1) time for dynamic KV cache pruning with high energy efficiency; 2) in the charge-domain CIM mode, static pruning can be supported based on accumulative similarity score, which is much more flexible compared to fixed patterns; 3) in the current-domain mode, exact attention computation can be conducted with a subset of selected KV cache. We further propose a novel CAM/CIM cell design that leverages the multi-level characteristics of FeFETs for signed multibit storage of the KV cache and in-place attention computation. With extensive experimental results, we demonstrate UniCAIM can reduce the area-energy-delay product (AEDP) by 8.2-831x over the state-ofthe-art CIM-based LLM accelerators at the circuit level, along with high accuracy comparable with dense attention at the application level, showing its great potential for efficient long-context LLM inference.

cs.AR↗

HybriMoE: Hybrid CPU-GPU Scheduling and Cache Management for Efficient MoE Inference

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has demonstrated significant advantages as it enables to increase the model capacity without a proportional increase in computation. However, the large MoE model size still introduces substantial memory demands, which usually requires expert offloading on resource-constrained platforms and incurs significant overhead. Hybrid CPU-GPU inference has been proposed to leverage CPU computation to reduce expert loading overhead but faces major challenges: on one hand, the expert activation patterns of MoE models are highly unstable, rendering the fixed mapping strategies in existing works inefficient; on the other hand, the hybrid CPU-GPU schedule for MoE is inherently complex due to the diverse expert sizes, structures, uneven workload distribution, etc. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose HybriMoE, a hybrid CPU-GPU inference framework that improves resource utilization through a novel CPU-GPU scheduling and cache management system. HybriMoE introduces (i) a dynamic intra-layer scheduling strategy to balance workloads across CPU and GPU, (ii) an impact-driven inter-layer prefetching algorithm, and (iii) a score-based caching algorithm to mitigate expert activation instability. We implement HybriMoE on top of the kTransformers framework and evaluate it on three widely used MoE-based LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that HybriMoE achieves an average speedup of 1.33$\times$ in the prefill stage and 1.70$\times$ in the decode stage compared to state-of-the-art hybrid MoE inference framework. Our code is available at: https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/HybriMoE.

cs.LG↗

ReaLM: Reliable and Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Statistical Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance

The demand for efficient large language model (LLM) inference has propelled the development of dedicated accelerators. As accelerators are vulnerable to hardware faults due to aging, variation, etc, existing accelerator designs often reserve a large voltage margin or leverage algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) techniques to ensure LLM inference correctness. However, previous methods often overlook the inherent fault tolerance of LLMs, leading to high computation and energy overhead. To enable reliable yet efficient LLM inference, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm/circuit co-design framework, dubbed ReaLM. For the first time, we systematically characterize the fault tolerance of LLMs by performing a large-scale error injection study of representative LLMs and natural language understanding tasks. Then, we propose a statistical ABFT algorithm that fully leverages the error robustness to minimize error recovery as much as possible. We also customize the error detection circuits to enable a low-cost online collection of error statistics. Extensive experiments show that with only 1.42% circuit area and 1.79% power overhead, our ReaLM can reduce perplexity degradation from 18.54 to 0.29. Compared to existing methods, ReaLM consistently reduces recovery costs across different operating voltages and improves energy efficiency by up to 35.83% without compromising LLM performance. Our error injection code is available at https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/ReaLM_DAC25/

cs.AR↗

Bayesian Covariate-Dependent Graph Learning with a Dual Group Spike-and-Slab Prior

Covariate-dependent graph learning has gained increasing interest in the graphical modeling literature for the analysis of heterogeneous data. This task, however, poses challenges to modeling, computational efficiency, and interpretability. The parameter of interest can be naturally represented as a three-dimensional array with elements that can be grouped according to two directions, corresponding to node level and covariate level, respectively. In this article, we propose a novel dual group spike-and-slab prior that enables multi-level selection at covariate-level and node-level, as well as individual (local) level sparsity. We introduce a nested strategy with specific choices to address distinct challenges posed by the various grouping directions. For posterior inference, we develop a tuning-free Gibbs sampler for all parameters, which mitigates the difficulties of parameter tuning often encountered in high-dimensional graphical models and facilitates routine implementation. Through simulation studies, we demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods in its accuracy of graph recovery. We show the practical utility of our model via an application to microbiome data where we seek to better understand the interactions among microbes as well as how these are affected by relevant covariates.

stat.ME↗

Empower Vision Applications with LoRA LMM

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown significant progress in various complex vision tasks with the solid linguistic and reasoning capacity inherited from large language models (LMMs). Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) offers a promising method to integrate external knowledge into LMMs, compensating for their limitations on domain-specific tasks. However, the existing LoRA model serving is excessively computationally expensive and causes extremely high latency. In this paper, we present an end-to-end solution that empowers diverse vision tasks and enriches vision applications with LoRA LMMs. Our system, VaLoRA, enables accurate and efficient vision tasks by 1) an accuracy-aware LoRA adapter generation approach that generates LoRA adapters rich in domain-specific knowledge to meet application-specific accuracy requirements, 2) an adaptive-tiling LoRA adapters batching operator that efficiently computes concurrent heterogeneous LoRA adapters, and 3) a flexible LoRA adapter orchestration mechanism that manages application requests and LoRA adapters to achieve the lowest average response latency. We prototype VaLoRA on five popular vision tasks on three LMMs. Experiment results reveal that VaLoRA improves 24-62% of the accuracy compared to the original LMMs and reduces 20-89% of the latency compared to the state-of-the-art LoRA model serving systems.

cs.CV↗

A sharp-interface approach for simulating solid-state dewetting of thin films with double-bubble structure

We develop a sharp-interface model for solid-state dewetting of double-bubble thin films using an energy variational approach based on a newly proposed interfacial energy. This model characterizes the dynamic evolution of interfaces in double-bubble thin films, a process primarily governed by surface diffusion and junction/contact points migration, and fundamentally distinct from the behavior observed in a single thin film. Subsequently, a structure-preserving parametric finite element approximation is developed for the sharp-interface model, which can preserve both area conservation and energy stability. Extensive numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the convergence, structure-preserving properties, and superior mesh quality of the proposed method. Additionally, we investigate several specific evolution processes, including the equilibrium shapes of double-bubble thin films and the pinch-off dynamics of long islands.

math.NA↗