papers

Publications (91)

math.OC2024

An Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Method with Non-negative Gauss-Newton Stepsizes

Antonio Orvieto, Lin Xiao

We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss fun…

cs.CV2025

Salient Object Detection in Traffic Scene through the TSOD10K Dataset

Yu Qiu, Yuhang Sun, Jie Mei +2

Traffic Salient Object Detection (TSOD) aims to segment the objects critical to driving safety by combining semantic (e.g., collision risks) and visual saliency. Unlike SOD in natu…

math.OC2017

DSCOVR: Randomized Primal-Dual Block Coordinate Algorithms for Asynchronous Distributed Optimization

Lin Xiao, Adams Wei Yu, Qihang Lin +1

Machine learning with big data often involves large optimization models. For distributed optimization over a cluster of machines, frequent communication and synchronization of all…

stat.ML2019

Using Statistics to Automate Stochastic Optimization

Hunter Lang, Pengchuan Zhang, Lin Xiao

Despite the development of numerous adaptive optimizers, tuning the learning rate of stochastic gradient methods remains a major roadblock to obtaining good practical performance i…

cs.IT2018

Secrecy Energy Efficiency Maximization for UAV-Enabled Mobile Relaying

Lin Xiao, Yu Xu, Dingcheng Yang +1

This paper investigates the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) maximization problem for unmanned aerial vehicle enabled mobile relaying system, where a high-mobility UAV is exploited…

astro-ph.HE2023

A Superluminous Supernova Lightened by Collisions with Pulsational Pair-instability Shells

Weili Lin, Xiaofeng Wang, Lin Yan +23

Superluminous supernovae are among the most energetic stellar explosions in the Universe, but their energy sources remain an open question. Here we present long-term observations o…

astro-ph.HE2026

The environmental dependence of mid-IR luminous dusty Supernovae

Lin Xiao, Zeyue Peng, Lluis Galbany +10

Using the Spitzer and WISE images, we discovered 42 mid-IR luminous dusty supernovae with local integral-field spectroscopy data. The observed mid-IR emission indicates the presenc…

astro-ph.SR2025

Very Late-Time JWST and Keck Spectra of the Oxygen-Rich Supernova 1995N

Geoffrey C. Clayton, R. Wesson, Ori D. Fox +43

We present new {\it JWST}/MIRI MRS and Keck spectra of SN 1995N obtained in 2022--2023, more than 10,000 days after the supernova (SN) explosion. These spectra are among the latest…

cs.LG2022

FedShuffle: Recipes for Better Use of Local Work in Federated Learning

Samuel Horváth, Maziar Sanjabi, Lin Xiao +2

The practice of applying several local updates before aggregation across clients has been empirically shown to be a successful approach to overcoming the communication bottleneck i…

astro-ph.HE2023

The environmental dependence of Spitzer dusty Supernovae

Lin Xiao, Tamás Szalai, Lluís Galbany +9

Thanks to the mid-infrared capability offered by Spitzer, systematic searches of dust in SNe have been carried out over the past decade. Studies have revealed the presence of a sub…

cs.CL2022

On Continual Model Refinement in Out-of-Distribution Data Streams

Bill Yuchen Lin, Sida Wang, Xi Victoria Lin +4

Real-world natural language processing (NLP) models need to be continually updated to fix the prediction errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) data streams while overcoming catastrop…

astro-ph.GA2017

Spatially resolved MaNGA observations of the host galaxy of superluminous supernova 2017egm

Ting-Wan Chen, Patricia Schady, Lin Xiao +6

Superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) are found predominantly in dwarf galaxies, indicating that their progenitors have a low metallicity. However, the most nearby SLSN to date, SN 2017…

math.OC2013

On the Complexity Analysis of Randomized Block-Coordinate Descent Methods

Zhaosong Lu, Lin Xiao

In this paper we analyze the randomized block-coordinate descent (RBCD) methods proposed in [8,11] for minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a block-separable convex f…

astro-ph.HE2023

JWST Discovery of Dust Reservoirs in Nearby Type IIP Supernovae 2004et and 2017eaw

Melissa Shahbandeh, Arkaprabha Sarangi, Tea Temim +36

Supernova (SN) explosions have been sought for decades as a possible source of dust in the Universe, providing the seeds of galaxies, stars, and planetary systems. SN 1987A offers…

math.OC2021

Multi-Level Composite Stochastic Optimization via Nested Variance Reduction

Junyu Zhang, Lin Xiao

We consider multi-level composite optimization problems where each mapping in the composition is the expectation over a family of random smooth mappings or the sum of some finite n…

cs.LG2025

LoRe: Personalizing LLMs via Low-Rank Reward Modeling

Avinandan Bose, Zhihan Xiong, Yuejie Chi +3

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to accommodate diverse user preferences is essential for enhancing alignment and user satisfaction. Traditional reinforcement learning fr…

astro-ph.SR2024

The radius variations of accreting main sequence stars and mass transfer instability

Zi-Qi Zhao, Zhen-Wei Li, Lin Xiao +2

Many previous works studied the dynamical timescale mass transfer stability criteria based on the donor response with neglecting the stellar structure of the accretor. In this lett…

cs.LG2019

Label-aware Document Representation via Hybrid Attention for Extreme Multi-Label Text Classification

Xin Huang, Boli Chen, Lin Xiao +1

Extreme multi-label text classification (XMTC) aims at tagging a document with most relevant labels from an extremely large-scale label set. It is a challenging problem especially…

cs.LG2010

Robust Distributed Online Prediction

Ofer Dekel, Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Ohad Shamir +1

The standard model of online prediction deals with serial processing of inputs by a single processor. However, in large-scale online prediction problems, where inputs arrive at a h…

math.OC2025

Bregman Douglas-Rachford Splitting Method

Shiqian Ma, Lin Xiao, Renbo Zhao

In this paper, we propose the Bregman Douglas-Rachford splitting (BDRS) method and its variant Bregman Peaceman-Rachford splitting method for solving maximal monotone inclusion pro…

math.PR2007

Fastest mixing Markov chain on graphs with symmetries

Stephen Boyd, Persi Diaconis, Pablo A. Parrilo +1

We show how to exploit symmetries of a graph to efficiently compute the fastest mixing Markov chain on the graph (i.e., find the transition probabilities on the edges to minimize t…

cs.LG2025

PARQ: Piecewise-Affine Regularized Quantization

Lisa Jin, Jianhao Ma, Zechun Liu +3

We develop a principled method for quantization-aware training (QAT) of large-scale machine learning models. Specifically, we show that convex, piecewise-affine regularization (PAR…

math.OC2014

A Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method with Progressive Variance Reduction

Lin Xiao, Tong Zhang

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex functio…

cs.LG2025

Incentivize without Bonus: Provably Efficient Model-based Online Multi-agent RL for Markov Games

Tong Yang, Bo Dai, Lin Xiao +1

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) lies at the heart of a plethora of applications involving the interaction of a group of agents in a shared unknown environment. A prominen…

stat.ML2020

Statistical Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Methods

Pengchuan Zhang, Hunter Lang, Qiang Liu +1

We propose a statistical adaptive procedure called SALSA for automatically scheduling the learning rate (step size) in stochastic gradient methods. SALSA first uses a smoothed stoc…

math.OC2019

From low probability to high confidence in stochastic convex optimization

Damek Davis, Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy, Lin Xiao +1

Standard results in stochastic convex optimization bound the number of samples that an algorithm needs to generate a point with small function value in expectation. More nuanced hi…

astro-ph.GA2015

Core-Collapse Supernova Rate Synthesis Within 11 Mpc

Lin Xiao, J. J. Eldridge

The 11 Mpc H-alpha and Ultraviolet Galaxy (11HUGS) Survey traces the star formation activity of nearby galaxies. In addition within this volume the detection completeness of core-c…

cs.LG2018

SBEED: Convergent Reinforcement Learning with Nonlinear Function Approximation

Bo Dai, Albert Shaw, Lihong Li +5

When function approximation is used, solving the Bellman optimality equation with stability guarantees has remained a major open problem in reinforcement learning for decades. The…

math.OC2017

Variational Gram Functions: Convex Analysis and Optimization

Amin Jalali, Maryam Fazel, Lin Xiao

We propose a new class of convex penalty functions, called \emph{variational Gram functions} (VGFs), that can promote pairwise relations, such as orthogonality, among a set of vect…

math.ST2023

Noisy recovery from random linear observations: Sharp minimax rates under elliptical constraints

Reese Pathak, Martin J. Wainwright, Lin Xiao

Estimation problems with constrained parameter spaces arise in various settings. In many of these problems, the observations available to the statistician can be modelled as arisin…

math.OC2018

Adaptive Stochastic Variance Reduction for Subsampled Newton Method with Cubic Regularization

Junyu Zhang, Lin Xiao, Shuzhong Zhang

The cubic regularized Newton method of Nesterov and Polyak has become increasingly popular for non-convex optimization because of its capability of finding an approximate local sol…

math.OC2021

Accelerated Bregman Proximal Gradient Methods for Relatively Smooth Convex Optimization

Filip Hanzely, Peter Richtarik, Lin Xiao

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is differentiable and relatively smooth with respect to a reference convex function, and the other can be…

cs.LG2019

Understanding the Role of Momentum in Stochastic Gradient Methods

Igor Gitman, Hunter Lang, Pengchuan Zhang +1

The use of momentum in stochastic gradient methods has become a widespread practice in machine learning. Different variants of momentum, including heavy-ball momentum, Nesterov's a…

math.OC2020

Statistically Preconditioned Accelerated Gradient Method for Distributed Optimization

Hadrien Hendrikx, Lin Xiao, Sebastien Bubeck +2

We consider the setting of distributed empirical risk minimization where multiple machines compute the gradients in parallel and a centralized server updates the model parameters.…

math.OC2017

Exploiting Strong Convexity from Data with Primal-Dual First-Order Algorithms

Jialei Wang, Lin Xiao

We consider empirical risk minimization of linear predictors with convex loss functions. Such problems can be reformulated as convex-concave saddle point problems, and thus are wel…

cs.GT2022

Faster Last-iterate Convergence of Policy Optimization in Zero-Sum Markov Games

Shicong Cen, Yuejie Chi, Simon S. Du +1

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) -- where multiple agents learn to interact in a shared dynamic environment -- permeates across a wide range of critical applications. Whil…

math.OC2022

On the Convergence Rates of Policy Gradient Methods

Lin Xiao

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a g…

eess.SP2019

Joint Computation and Communication Design for UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing in IoT

Tiankui Zhang, Yu Xu, Jonathan Loo +2

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) system is a prominent concept, where a UAV equipped with a MEC server is deployed to serve a number of terminal d…

astro-ph.HE2023

Serendipitous detection of the dusty Type IIL SN 1980K with JWST/MIRI

Szanna Zsíros, Tamás Szalai, Ilse De Looze +39

We present mid-infrared (mid-IR) imaging of the Type IIL supernova (SN) 1980K with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) more than 40 yr post-explosion. SN 1980K, located in the ne…

math.OC2015

A Randomized Nonmonotone Block Proximal Gradient Method for a Class of Structured Nonlinear Programming

Zhaosong Lu, Lin Xiao

We propose a randomized nonmonotone block proximal gradient (RNBPG) method for minimizing the sum of a smooth (possibly nonconvex) function and a block-separable (possibly nonconve…

astro-ph.GA2025

Properties of the cores and filaments in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud and its L1688 hub-filament system

Bo-Sheng Jia, Guo-Yin Zhang, Alexander Menshchikov +9

Analyzing filaments and cores in molecular clouds is key to understanding galactic star formation and its environmental dependence. This paper studies the properties and distributi…

cs.CL2021

Does Head Label Help for Long-Tailed Multi-Label Text Classification

Lin Xiao, Xiangliang Zhang, Liping Jing +2

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) aims to annotate documents with the most relevant labels from a number of candidate labels. In real applications, the distribution of label f…

math.OC2020

Stochastic optimization with decision-dependent distributions

Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy, Lin Xiao

Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population res…

cs.LG2023

Linear Convergence of Natural Policy Gradient Methods with Log-Linear Policies

Rui Yuan, Simon S. Du, Robert M. Gower +2

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear pol…

math.OC2015

Stochastic Primal-Dual Coordinate Method for Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization

Yuchen Zhang, Lin Xiao

We consider a generic convex optimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization of linear predictors. The problem structure allows us to reformulate it as…

math.OC2014

An Accelerated Proximal Coordinate Gradient Method and its Application to Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization

Qihang Lin, Zhaosong Lu, Lin Xiao

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is smooth and given by a gradient oracle, and the other is separable over blocks of coordinates and has a…

astro-ph.HE2022

A Mid-infrared Study of Superluminous Supernovae

Luming Sun, Lin Xiao, Ge Li

We present the mid-infrared (MIR) light curves (LC) of 10 superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) at based on WISE data at 3.4 and 4.6 m. Three of them, including PS15br, SN…

astro-ph.GA2021

Infrared Echoes of Optical Tidal Disruption Events: ~1% Dust Covering Factor or Less at sub-parsec Scale

Ning Jiang, Tinggui Wang, Xueyang Hu +3

The past decade has experienced an explosive increase of optically-discovered tidal disruption events (TDEs) with the advent of modern time-domain surveys. However, we still lack a…

cs.LG2025

Exploration from a Primal-Dual Lens: Value-Incentivized Actor-Critic Methods for Sample-Efficient Online RL

Tong Yang, Bo Dai, Lin Xiao +1

Online reinforcement learning (RL) with complex function approximations such as transformers and deep neural networks plays a significant role in the modern practice of artificial…

cs.LG2012

Optimal Distributed Online Prediction using Mini-Batches

Ofer Dekel, Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Ohad Shamir +1

Online prediction methods are typically presented as serial algorithms running on a single processor. However, in the age of web-scale prediction problems, it is increasingly commo…

cs.LG2024

Dual Approximation Policy Optimization

Zhihan Xiong, Maryam Fazel, Lin Xiao

We propose Dual Approximation Policy Optimization (DAPO), a framework that incorporates general function approximation into policy mirror descent methods. In contrast to the popula…

cs.CL2020

Improving Self-supervised Pre-training via a Fully-Explored Masked Language Model

Mingzhi Zheng, Dinghan Shen, Yelong Shen +2

Masked Language Model (MLM) framework has been widely adopted for self-supervised language pre-training. In this paper, we argue that randomly sampled masks in MLM would lead to un…

astro-ph.SR2022

Prospects of Searching for Type Ia Supernovae with 2.5-m Wide Field Survey Telescope

Maokai Hu, Lei Hu, Ji-an Jiang +4

Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are the thermonuclear explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf (WD) and are well-known as a distance indicator. However, it is still unclear how WDs inc…

astro-ph.SR2024

Mass Ratio Distribution of Hierarchical Triple Systems from the LAMOST-MRS Survey

Tongyu He, Jiangdan Li, Xuefei Chen +3

Hierarchical triple-star systems consists of three components organised into an inner binary (,) and a more distant outer tertiary () star. The LAMOST Medium-R…

astro-ph.HE2024

JWST/MIRI Observations of Newly Formed Dust in the Cold, Dense Shell of the Type IIn SN 2005ip

Melissa Shahbandeh, Ori D. Fox, Tea Temim +42

Dust from core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe), specifically Type IIP SNe, has been suggested to be a significant source of the dust observed in high-redshift galaxies. CCSNe eject lar…

cs.IR2020

Jointly Modeling Intra- and Inter-transaction Dependencies with Hierarchical Attentive Transaction Embeddings for Next-item Recommendation

Shoujin Wang, Longbing Cao, Liang Hu +4

A transaction-based recommender system (TBRS) aims to predict the next item by modeling dependencies in transactional data. Generally, two kinds of dependencies considered are intr…

stat.ML2024

Joint Linked Component Analysis for Multiview Data

Lin Xiao, Luo Xiao

In this work, we propose the joint linked component analysis (joint\_LCA) for multiview data. Unlike classic methods which extract the shared components in a sequential manner, the…

cs.LG2015

End-to-end Learning of LDA by Mirror-Descent Back Propagation over a Deep Architecture

Jianshu Chen, Ji He, Yelong Shen +5

We develop a fully discriminative learning approach for supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model using Back Propagation (i.e., BP-sLDA), which maximizes the posterior pro…

cs.LG2022

Grad-GradaGrad? A Non-Monotone Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Method

Aaron Defazio, Baoyu Zhou, Lin Xiao

The classical AdaGrad method adapts the learning rate by dividing by the square root of a sum of squared gradients. Because this sum on the denominator is increasing, the method ca…

math.OC2015

Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization of Self-Concordant Empirical Loss

Yuchen Zhang, Lin Xiao

We consider distributed convex optimization problems originated from sample average approximation of stochastic optimization, or empirical risk minimization in machine learning. We…

cs.CV2025

SHYI: Action Support for Contrastive Learning in High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Generation

Tianxiang Xia, Lin Xiao, Yannick Montorfani +3

In this project, we address the issue of infidelity in text-to-image generation, particularly for actions involving multiple objects. For this we build on top of the CONFORM framew…

cond-mat.mtrl-sci2020

Seeded growth of high-quality transition metal dichalcogenide single crystals via chemical vapor transport

Hao Li, Junku Liu, Nan Guo +5

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are van der Waals layered materials with sizable and tunable bandgaps, offering promising platforms for two-dimensional electronics and opto…

stat.ME2024

Sparse and Integrative Principal Component Analysis for Multiview Data

Lin Xiao, Luo Xiao

We consider dimension reduction of multiview data, which are emerging in scientific studies. Formulating multiview data as multi-variate data with block structures corresponding to…

cs.LG2019

Hyperbolic Interaction Model For Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification

Boli Chen, Xin Huang, Lin Xiao +2

Different from the traditional classification tasks which assume mutual exclusion of labels, hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) aims to assign multiple labels to every…

cs.MM2025

DiffCL: A Diffusion-Based Contrastive Learning Framework with Semantic Alignment for Multimodal Recommendations

Qiya Song, Jiajun Hu, Lin Xiao +3

Multimodal recommendation systems integrate diverse multimodal information into the feature representations of both items and users, thereby enabling a more comprehensive modeling…

cs.MM2024

Multimodal Graph Neural Network for Recommendation with Dynamic De-redundancy and Modality-Guided Feature De-noisy

Feng Mo, Lin Xiao, Qiya Song +2

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become crucial in multimodal recommendation tasks because of their powerful ability to capture complex relationships between neighboring nodes. Ho…

cs.LG2022

Federated Learning with Partial Model Personalization

Krishna Pillutla, Kshitiz Malik, Abdelrahman Mohamed +3

We consider two federated learning algorithms for training partially personalized models, where the shared and personal parameters are updated either simultaneously or alternately…

astro-ph.SR2024

A 3 mm line survey towards the circumstellar envelope of the carbon-rich AGB star IRC+10216 (CW Leo)

Juan Tuo, Xiaohu Li, Jixian Sun +14

We present an unbiased 3 mm spectral line survey (between 84.5 and 115.8 GHz), conducted by the Purple Mountain Observatory 13.7 meter radio telescope, together with updated m…

eess.SY2021

Cross-Platform Simulation Architecture with application to truck platooning impact assessment

Andres Ladino, Lin Xiao, Kingsley Adjenugwhure +2

Simulation-based traffic impact assessment studies of advanced technologies such as truck platooning need to be carried out to ascertain their benefits for traffic efficiency, safe…

astro-ph.GA2019

The distance, supernova rate and supernova progenitors of NGC 6946

J. J. Eldridge, Lin Xiao

The distance to the fireworks galaxy NGC 6946 is highly uncertain. Recent distance estimates using the tip of the red giant branch of 7.7 to 7.8 Mpc are larger than the distance co…

cs.CL2022

Pairwise Instance Relation Augmentation for Long-tailed Multi-label Text Classification

Lin Xiao, Pengyu Xu, Liping Jing +1

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is one of the key tasks in natural language processing. It aims to assign multiple target labels to one document. Due to the uneven popularit…

astro-ph.GA2017

Emission-line Diagnostics of Nearby HII Regions Including Supernova Hosts

Lin Xiao, J. J. Eldridge, Elizabeth Stanway +1

We present a new model of the optical nebular emission from HII regions by combin- ing the results of the Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis (bpass) code with the photoion- i…

astro-ph.GA2022

Chemical variations across the TMC-1 boundary: molecular tracers from translucent phase to dense phase

Long-Fei Chen, Di Li, Donghui Quan +4

We investigated the chemical evolutions of gas phase and grain surface species across the Taurus molecular cloud-1 (TMC-1) filament from translucent phase to dense phase. By compar…

math.OC2019

A Stochastic Composite Gradient Method with Incremental Variance Reduction

Junyu Zhang, Lin Xiao

We consider the problem of minimizing the composition of a smooth (nonconvex) function and a smooth vector mapping, where the inner mapping is in the form of an expectation over so…

astro-ph.GA2018

Core-collapse supernovae ages and metallicities from emission-line diagnostics of nearby stellar populations

Lin Xiao, L. Galbany, J. J. Eldridge +1

Massive stars are the main objects that illuminate H II regions and they evolve quickly to end their lives in core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe). Thus it is important to investigate…

astro-ph.SR2025

JWST/MIRI detects the dusty SN1993J about 30 years after explosion

Tamás Szalai, Szanna Zsíros, Jacob Jencson +37

Core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) have long been considered to contribute significantly to the cosmic dust budget. New dust cools quickly and is therefore detectable at mid-infrared…

math.OC2021

Stochastic Variance-Reduced Prox-Linear Algorithms for Nonconvex Composite Optimization

Junyu Zhang, Lin Xiao

We consider minimization of composite functions of the form , where and are convex functions (which can be nonsmooth) and is a smooth vector mapping. In a…

cs.LG2018

Learning SMaLL Predictors

Vikas K. Garg, Ofer Dekel, Lin Xiao

We present a new machine learning technique for training small resource-constrained predictors. Our algorithm, the Sparse Multiprototype Linear Learner (SMaLL), is inspired by the…

cs.LG2013

Online Classification Using a Voted RDA Method

Tianbing Xu, Jianfeng Gao, Lin Xiao +1

We propose a voted dual averaging method for online classification problems with explicit regularization. This method employs the update rule of the regularized dual averaging (RDA…

cs.CL2023

Importance Estimation from Multiple Perspectives for Keyphrase Extraction

Mingyang Song, Liping Jing, Lin Xiao

Keyphrase extraction is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing, which usually contains two main parts: candidate keyphrase extraction and keyphrase importance estimation…

nucl-th2016

Direct Urca processes involving singlet proton superfluidity in neutron star cooling

Yan Xu, Xiu Lin Huang, Xiao Jun Zhang +4

A detailed description of the baryon direct Urca processes A: , B: , C: related to the…

cs.LG2025

Quantization through Piecewise-Affine Regularization: Optimization and Statistical Guarantees

Jianhao Ma, Lin Xiao

Optimization problems over discrete or quantized variables are very challenging in general due to the combinatorial nature of their search space. Piecewise-affine regularization (P…

cs.LG2017

Stochastic Variance Reduction Methods for Policy Evaluation

Simon S. Du, Jianshu Chen, Lihong Li +2

Policy evaluation is a crucial step in many reinforcement-learning procedures, which estimates a value function that predicts states' long-term value under a given policy. In this…

cs.LG2025

Fast Clifford Neural Layers

Tianxiang Xia, Max Neuwinger, Lin Xiao

Clifford Neural Layers improve PDE modeling by introducing Clifford Algebra into neural networks. In this project we focus on optimizing the inference of 2/3D Clifford convolutiona…

astro-ph.GA2018

Emission-line diagnostics of nearby HII regions including interacting binary populations

Lin Xiao, Elizabeth Stanway, J. J. Eldridge

We present numerical models of the nebular emission from H II regions around young stellar populations over a range of compositions and ages. The synthetic stellar pop- ulations in…

cs.CL2026

Cold-Start Personalization via Training-Free Priors from Structured World Models

Avinandan Bose, Shuyue Stella Li, Faeze Brahman +6

Cold-start personalization requires inferring user preferences through interaction when no user-specific historical data is available. The core challenge is a routing problem: each…

math.OC2012

A Proximal-Gradient Homotopy Method for the Sparse Least-Squares Problem

Lin Xiao, Tong Zhang

We consider solving the -regularized least-squares (-LS) problem in the context of sparse recovery, for applications such as compressed sensing. The standard proxim…

cs.LG2026

Smoothing DiLoCo with Primal Averaging for Faster Training of LLMs

Aaron Defazio, Konstantin Mishchenko, Parameswaran Raman +2

We propose Generalized Primal Averaging (GPA), an extension of Nesterov's method that unifies and generalizes recent averaging-based optimizers like single-worker DiLoCo and Schedu…

cs.LG2022

BiT: Robustly Binarized Multi-distilled Transformer

Zechun Liu, Barlas Oguz, Aasish Pappu +5

Modern pre-trained transformers have rapidly advanced the state-of-the-art in machine learning, but have also grown in parameters and computational complexity, making them increasi…

math.OC2025

Stochastic Approximation with Block Coordinate Optimal Stepsizes

Tao Jiang, Lin Xiao

We consider stochastic approximation with block-coordinate stepsizes and propose adaptive stepsize rules that aim to minimize the expected distance from the next iterate to an (unk…

cs.LG2025

ParetoQ: Improving Scaling Laws in Extremely Low-bit LLM Quantization

Zechun Liu, Changsheng Zhao, Hanxian Huang +13

The optimal bit-width for achieving the best trade-off between quantized model size and accuracy has been a subject of ongoing debate. While some advocate for 4-bit quantization, o…