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Shuxin Zheng

Shuxin Zheng contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

10 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

FutureWorld: A Live Reinforcement Learning Environment for Predictive Agents with Real-World Outcome Rewards

Live future prediction refers to the task of making predictions about real-world events before they unfold. This task is increasingly studied using large language model-based agent systems, and it is important for building agents that can continually learn from the real world. It can provide a large number of prediction questions grounded in diverse real-world events, while preventing answer leakage. To leverage the advantages of future prediction, we present FutureWorld, a live agentic reinforcement learning environment that closes the training loop between prediction, outcome realization, and parameter updates. Specifically, we modify and extend verl-tool, resulting in a new framework that we call verl-tool-future. Unlike standard reinforcement learning training frameworks that rely on immediate rewards, verl-tool-future stores prediction-time rollouts, backfills rewards after real-world outcomes become available, and then replays the completed trajectories for policy update. Across three open-source agents, successive FutureWorld training rounds lead to consistent improvements in prediction accuracy, probabilistic scoring, and calibration, demonstrating that delayed real-world outcome feedback can serve as an effective reinforcement learning signal.

preprint2023arXiv

Benchmarking Graphormer on Large-Scale Molecular Modeling Datasets

This technical note describes the recent updates of Graphormer, including architecture design modifications, and the adaption to 3D molecular dynamics simulation. With these simple modifications, Graphormer could attain better results on large-scale molecular modeling datasets than the vanilla one, and the performance gain could be consistently obtained on 2D and 3D molecular graph modeling tasks. In addition, we show that with a global receptive field and an adaptive aggregation strategy, Graphormer is more powerful than classic message-passing-based GNNs. Empirically, Graphormer could achieve much less MAE than the originally reported results on the PCQM4M quantum chemistry dataset used in KDD Cup 2021. In the meanwhile, it greatly outperforms the competitors in the recent Open Catalyst Challenge, which is a competition track on NeurIPS 2021 workshop, and aims to model the catalyst-adsorbate reaction system with advanced AI models. All codes could be found at https://github.com/Microsoft/Graphormer.

preprint2023arXiv

Quantized Training of Gradient Boosting Decision Trees

Recent years have witnessed significant success in Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT) for a wide range of machine learning applications. Generally, a consensus about GBDT's training algorithms is gradients and statistics are computed based on high-precision floating points. In this paper, we investigate an essentially important question which has been largely ignored by the previous literature: how many bits are needed for representing gradients in training GBDT? To solve this mystery, we propose to quantize all the high-precision gradients in a very simple yet effective way in the GBDT's training algorithm. Surprisingly, both our theoretical analysis and empirical studies show that the necessary precisions of gradients without hurting any performance can be quite low, e.g., 2 or 3 bits. With low-precision gradients, most arithmetic operations in GBDT training can be replaced by integer operations of 8, 16, or 32 bits. Promisingly, these findings may pave the way for much more efficient training of GBDT from several aspects: (1) speeding up the computation of gradient statistics in histograms; (2) compressing the communication cost of high-precision statistical information during distributed training; (3) the inspiration of utilization and development of hardware architectures which well support low-precision computation for GBDT training. Benchmarked on CPUs, GPUs, and distributed clusters, we observe up to 2$\times$ speedup of our simple quantization strategy compared with SOTA GBDT systems on extensive datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness and potential of the low-precision training of GBDT. The code will be released to the official repository of LightGBM.

preprint2022arXiv

An Empirical Study of Graphormer on Large-Scale Molecular Modeling Datasets

This technical note describes the recent updates of Graphormer, including architecture design modifications, and the adaption to 3D molecular dynamics simulation. The "Graphormer-V2" could attain better results on large-scale molecular modeling datasets than the vanilla one, and the performance gain could be consistently obtained on downstream tasks. In addition, we show that with a global receptive field and an adaptive aggregation strategy, Graphormer is more powerful than classic message-passing-based GNNs. Graphormer-V2 achieves much less MAE than the vanilla Graphormer on the PCQM4M quantum chemistry dataset used in KDD Cup 2021, where the latter one won the first place in this competition. In the meanwhile, Graphormer-V2 greatly outperforms the competitors in the recent Open Catalyst Challenge, which is a competition track on NeurIPS 2021 workshop, and aims to model the catalyst-adsorbate reaction system with advanced AI models. All models could be found at \url{https://github.com/Microsoft/Graphormer}.

preprint2021arXiv

Revisiting Language Encoding in Learning Multilingual Representations

Transformer has demonstrated its great power to learn contextual word representations for multiple languages in a single model. To process multilingual sentences in the model, a learnable vector is usually assigned to each language, which is called "language embedding". The language embedding can be either added to the word embedding or attached at the beginning of the sentence. It serves as a language-specific signal for the Transformer to capture contextual representations across languages. In this paper, we revisit the use of language embedding and identify several problems in the existing formulations. By investigating the interaction between language embedding and word embedding in the self-attention module, we find that the current methods cannot reflect the language-specific word correlation well. Given these findings, we propose a new approach called Cross-lingual Language Projection (XLP) to replace language embedding. For a sentence, XLP projects the word embeddings into language-specific semantic space, and then the projected embeddings will be fed into the Transformer model to process with their language-specific meanings. In such a way, XLP achieves the purpose of appropriately encoding "language" in a multilingual Transformer model. Experimental results show that XLP can freely and significantly boost the model performance on extensive multilingual benchmark datasets. Codes and models will be released at https://github.com/lsj2408/XLP.

preprint2020arXiv

Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent with Delay Compensation

With the fast development of deep learning, it has become common to learn big neural networks using massive training data. Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (ASGD) is widely adopted to fulfill this task for its efficiency, which is, however, known to suffer from the problem of delayed gradients. That is, when a local worker adds its gradient to the global model, the global model may have been updated by other workers and this gradient becomes "delayed". We propose a novel technology to compensate this delay, so as to make the optimization behavior of ASGD closer to that of sequential SGD. This is achieved by leveraging Taylor expansion of the gradient function and efficient approximation to the Hessian matrix of the loss function. We call the new algorithm Delay Compensated ASGD (DC-ASGD). We evaluated the proposed algorithm on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that DC-ASGD outperforms both synchronous SGD and asynchronous SGD, and nearly approaches the performance of sequential SGD.

preprint2020arXiv

Invertible Image Rescaling

High-resolution digital images are usually downscaled to fit various display screens or save the cost of storage and bandwidth, meanwhile the post-upscaling is adpoted to recover the original resolutions or the details in the zoom-in images. However, typical image downscaling is a non-injective mapping due to the loss of high-frequency information, which leads to the ill-posed problem of the inverse upscaling procedure and poses great challenges for recovering details from the downscaled low-resolution images. Simply upscaling with image super-resolution methods results in unsatisfactory recovering performance. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by modeling the downscaling and upscaling processes from a new perspective, i.e. an invertible bijective transformation, which can largely mitigate the ill-posed nature of image upscaling. We develop an Invertible Rescaling Net (IRN) with deliberately designed framework and objectives to produce visually-pleasing low-resolution images and meanwhile capture the distribution of the lost information using a latent variable following a specified distribution in the downscaling process. In this way, upscaling is made tractable by inversely passing a randomly-drawn latent variable with the low-resolution image through the network. Experimental results demonstrate the significant improvement of our model over existing methods in terms of both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of image upscaling reconstruction from downscaled images.

preprint2020arXiv

MC-BERT: Efficient Language Pre-Training via a Meta Controller

Pre-trained contextual representations (e.g., BERT) have become the foundation to achieve state-of-the-art results on many NLP tasks. However, large-scale pre-training is computationally expensive. ELECTRA, an early attempt to accelerate pre-training, trains a discriminative model that predicts whether each input token was replaced by a generator. Our studies reveal that ELECTRA's success is mainly due to its reduced complexity of the pre-training task: the binary classification (replaced token detection) is more efficient to learn than the generation task (masked language modeling). However, such a simplified task is less semantically informative. To achieve better efficiency and effectiveness, we propose a novel meta-learning framework, MC-BERT. The pre-training task is a multi-choice cloze test with a reject option, where a meta controller network provides training input and candidates. Results over GLUE natural language understanding benchmark demonstrate that our proposed method is both efficient and effective: it outperforms baselines on GLUE semantic tasks given the same computational budget.

preprint2020arXiv

Modeling Lost Information in Lossy Image Compression

Lossy image compression is one of the most commonly used operators for digital images. Most recently proposed deep-learning-based image compression methods leverage the auto-encoder structure, and reach a series of promising results in this field. The images are encoded into low dimensional latent features first, and entropy coded subsequently by exploiting the statistical redundancy. However, the information lost during encoding is unfortunately inevitable, which poses a significant challenge to the decoder to reconstruct the original images. In this work, we propose a novel invertible framework called Invertible Lossy Compression (ILC) to largely mitigate the information loss problem. Specifically, ILC introduces an invertible encoding module to replace the encoder-decoder structure to produce the low dimensional informative latent representation, meanwhile, transform the lost information into an auxiliary latent variable that won't be further coded or stored. The latent representation is quantized and encoded into bit-stream, and the latent variable is forced to follow a specified distribution, i.e. isotropic Gaussian distribution. In this way, recovering the original image is made tractable by easily drawing a surrogate latent variable and applying the inverse pass of the module with the sampled variable and decoded latent features. Experimental results demonstrate that with a new component replacing the auto-encoder in image compression methods, ILC can significantly outperform the baseline method on extensive benchmark datasets by combining with the existing compression algorithms.

preprint2020arXiv

On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture

The Transformer is widely used in natural language processing tasks. To train a Transformer however, one usually needs a carefully designed learning rate warm-up stage, which is shown to be crucial to the final performance but will slow down the optimization and bring more hyper-parameter tunings. In this paper, we first study theoretically why the learning rate warm-up stage is essential and show that the location of layer normalization matters. Specifically, we prove with mean field theory that at initialization, for the original-designed Post-LN Transformer, which places the layer normalization between the residual blocks, the expected gradients of the parameters near the output layer are large. Therefore, using a large learning rate on those gradients makes the training unstable. The warm-up stage is practically helpful for avoiding this problem. On the other hand, our theory also shows that if the layer normalization is put inside the residual blocks (recently proposed as Pre-LN Transformer), the gradients are well-behaved at initialization. This motivates us to remove the warm-up stage for the training of Pre-LN Transformers. We show in our experiments that Pre-LN Transformers without the warm-up stage can reach comparable results with baselines while requiring significantly less training time and hyper-parameter tuning on a wide range of applications.