Source author record

Tianyi Zhou

Tianyi Zhou appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

ResearcherUnclaimed source record

Catalog footprint

What is connected

23works
11topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Connect this record

Log in to claim

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent papers, topics, institutions and collaborators without losing the researcher page.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

23 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

How Language Models Process Negation

We study how Large Language Models (LLMs) process negation mechanistically. First, we establish that even though open-weight models often provide wrong answers to questions involving negation, they do possess internal components that process negation correctly. Their poor accuracy is due to late-layer attention behavior that promotes simple shortcuts; ablating those attention modules greatly improves accuracy on negation-related questions. Second, we uncover how models process negation. We consider two hypotheses: models could use attention heads that attend to the phrase being negated and suppress related concepts, or they could directly construct a representation of the entire negative phrase (e.g., representing "not gas" as a vector that promotes liquids and solids). We apply a range of observational and causal interpretability techniques on Mistral-7B and Llama-3.1-8B to show that models implement both mechanisms, with the "constructive" mechanism being more prominent. Combined, our work deepens the understanding of LLMs' internals, highlighting construction-dominant computations and the coexistence of competing mechanisms within LLMs.

preprint2025arXiv

PharmaShip: An Entity-Centric, Reading-Order-Supervised Benchmark for Chinese Pharmaceutical Shipping Documents

We present PharmaShip, a real-world Chinese dataset of scanned pharmaceutical shipping documents designed to stress-test pre-trained text-layout models under noisy OCR and heterogeneous templates. PharmaShip covers three complementary tasks-sequence entity recognition (SER), relation extraction (RE), and reading order prediction (ROP)-and adopts an entity-centric evaluation protocol to minimize confounds across architectures. We benchmark five representative baselines spanning pixel-aware and geometry-aware families (LiLT, LayoutLMv3-base, GeoLayoutLM and their available RORE-enhanced variants), and standardize preprocessing, splits, and optimization. Experiments show that pixels and explicit geometry provide complementary inductive biases, yet neither alone is sufficient: injecting reading-order-oriented regularization consistently improves SER and EL and yields the most robust configuration, while longer positional coverage stabilizes late-page predictions and reduces truncation artifacts. ROP is accurate at the word level but challenging at the segment level, reflecting boundary ambiguity and long-range crossings. PharmaShip thus establishes a controlled, reproducible benchmark for safety-critical document understanding in the pharmaceutical domain and highlights sequence-aware constraints as a transferable bias for structure modeling. We release the dataset at https://github.com/KevinYuLei/PharmaShip.

preprint2024arXiv

Tracking sustainability: co-evolution of economic and ecological activities in the industrialization of the United Kingdom and China

The co-evolution of economic and ecological activities represents one of the fundamental challenges in the realm of sustainable development. This study on the word trends in mainstream newspapers from the UK and China reveals that both early-industrialised countries and latecomers follow three modes of economic and ecological co-evolution. First, both economic and ecological words demonstrate an S-shaped growth trajectory, and the mode underscores the importance of information propagation, whilst also highlighting the crucial role of self-organisation in the accept society. Second, the co-occurrence of these two type words exhibits a Z-shaped relationship: for two-thirds of the observed period, they display synergistic interactions, while the remaining time shows trade-offs. Lastly, the words related to ecological degradation follow M-shaped trajectories in parallel with economic growth, suggesting periodic disruptions and reconstructions in their interrelationships. Our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the co-evolutionary mechanisms that govern collective behaviours in human society.

preprint2023arXiv

Faster Sinkhorn's Algorithm with Small Treewidth

Computing optimal transport (OT) distances such as the earth mover's distance is a fundamental problem in machine learning, statistics, and computer vision. In this paper, we study the problem of approximating the general OT distance between two discrete distributions of size $n$. Given the cost matrix $C=AA^\top$ where $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$, we proposed a faster Sinkhorn's Algorithm to approximate the OT distance when matrix $A$ has treewidth $τ$. To approximate the OT distance, our algorithm improves the state-of-the-art results [Dvurechensky, Gasnikov, and Kroshnin ICML 2018] from $\widetilde{O}(ε^{-2} n^2)$ time to $\widetilde{O}(ε^{-2} n τ)$ time.

preprint2022arXiv

FedNoiL: A Simple Two-Level Sampling Method for Federated Learning with Noisy Labels

Federated learning (FL) aims at training a global model on the server side while the training data are collected and located at the local devices. Hence, the labels in practice are usually annotated by clients of varying expertise or criteria and thus contain different amounts of noises. Local training on noisy labels can easily result in overfitting to noisy labels, which is devastating to the global model through aggregation. Although recent robust FL methods take malicious clients into account, they have not addressed local noisy labels on each device and the impact to the global model. In this paper, we develop a simple two-level sampling method "FedNoiL" that (1) selects clients for more robust global aggregation on the server; and (2) selects clean labels and correct pseudo-labels at the client end for more robust local training. The sampling probabilities are built upon clean label detection by the global model. Moreover, we investigate different schedules changing the local epochs between aggregations over the course of FL, which notably improves the communication and computation efficiency in noisy label setting. In experiments with homogeneous/heterogeneous data distributions and noise ratios, we observed that direct combinations of SOTA FL methods with SOTA noisy-label learning methods can easily fail but our method consistently achieves better and robust performance.

preprint2022arXiv

FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients

Heterogeneity across clients in federated learning (FL) usually hinders the optimization convergence and generalization performance when the aggregation of clients' knowledge occurs in the gradient space. For example, clients may differ in terms of data distribution, network latency, input/output space, and/or model architecture, which can easily lead to the misalignment of their local gradients. To improve the tolerance to heterogeneity, we propose a novel federated prototype learning (FedProto) framework in which the clients and server communicate the abstract class prototypes instead of the gradients. FedProto aggregates the local prototypes collected from different clients, and then sends the global prototypes back to all clients to regularize the training of local models. The training on each client aims to minimize the classification error on the local data while keeping the resulting local prototypes sufficiently close to the corresponding global ones. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis to the convergence rate of FedProto under non-convex objectives. In experiments, we propose a benchmark setting tailored for heterogeneous FL, with FedProto outperforming several recent FL approaches on multiple datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Omni-Scale CNNs: a simple and effective kernel size configuration for time series classification

The Receptive Field (RF) size has been one of the most important factors for One Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNNs) on time series classification tasks. Large efforts have been taken to choose the appropriate size because it has a huge influence on the performance and differs significantly for each dataset. In this paper, we propose an Omni-Scale block (OS-block) for 1D-CNNs, where the kernel sizes are decided by a simple and universal rule. Particularly, it is a set of kernel sizes that can efficiently cover the best RF size across different datasets via consisting of multiple prime numbers according to the length of the time series. The experiment result shows that models with the OS-block can achieve a similar performance as models with the searched optimal RF size and due to the strong optimal RF size capture ability, simple 1D-CNN models with OS-block achieves the state-of-the-art performance on four time series benchmarks, including both univariate and multivariate data from multiple domains. Comprehensive analysis and discussions shed light on why the OS-block can capture optimal RF sizes across different datasets. Code available [https://github.com/Wensi-Tang/OS-CNN]

preprint2022arXiv

On the Convergence of Clustered Federated Learning

Knowledge sharing and model personalization are essential components to tackle the non-IID challenge in federated learning (FL). Most existing FL methods focus on two extremes: 1) to learn a shared model to serve all clients with non-IID data, and 2) to learn personalized models for each client, namely personalized FL. There is a trade-off solution, namely clustered FL or cluster-wise personalized FL, which aims to cluster similar clients into one cluster, and then learn a shared model for all clients within a cluster. This paper is to revisit the research of clustered FL by formulating them into a bi-level optimization framework that could unify existing methods. We propose a new theoretical analysis framework to prove the convergence by considering the clusterability among clients. In addition, we embody this framework in an algorithm, named Weighted Clustered Federated Learning (WeCFL). Empirical analysis verifies the theoretical results and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed WeCFL under the proposed cluster-wise non-IID settings.

preprint2022arXiv

Personalized Federated Learning With Graph

Knowledge sharing and model personalization are two key components in the conceptual framework of personalized federated learning (PFL). Existing PFL methods focus on proposing new model personalization mechanisms while simply implementing knowledge sharing by aggregating models from all clients, regardless of their relation graph. This paper aims to enhance the knowledge-sharing process in PFL by leveraging the graph-based structural information among clients. We propose a novel structured federated learning (SFL) framework to learn both the global and personalized models simultaneously using client-wise relation graphs and clients' private data. We cast SFL with graph into a novel optimization problem that can model the client-wise complex relations and graph-based structural topology by a unified framework. Moreover, in addition to using an existing relation graph, SFL could be expanded to learn the hidden relations among clients. Experiments on traffic and image benchmark datasets can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. All implementation codes are available on Github

preprint2022arXiv

Phrase-level Textual Adversarial Attack with Label Preservation

Generating high-quality textual adversarial examples is critical for investigating the pitfalls of natural language processing (NLP) models and further promoting their robustness. Existing attacks are usually realized through word-level or sentence-level perturbations, which either limit the perturbation space or sacrifice fluency and textual quality, both affecting the attack effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Phrase-Level Textual Adversarial aTtack (PLAT) that generates adversarial samples through phrase-level perturbations. PLAT first extracts the vulnerable phrases as attack targets by a syntactic parser, and then perturbs them by a pre-trained blank-infilling model. Such flexible perturbation design substantially expands the search space for more effective attacks without introducing too many modifications, and meanwhile maintaining the textual fluency and grammaticality via contextualized generation using surrounding texts. Moreover, we develop a label-preservation filter leveraging the likelihoods of language models fine-tuned on each class, rather than textual similarity, to rule out those perturbations that potentially alter the original class label for humans. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that PLAT has a superior attack effectiveness as well as a better label consistency than strong baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Token Dropping for Efficient BERT Pretraining

Transformer-based models generally allocate the same amount of computation for each token in a given sequence. We develop a simple but effective "token dropping" method to accelerate the pretraining of transformer models, such as BERT, without degrading its performance on downstream tasks. In short, we drop unimportant tokens starting from an intermediate layer in the model to make the model focus on important tokens; the dropped tokens are later picked up by the last layer of the model so that the model still produces full-length sequences. We leverage the already built-in masked language modeling (MLM) loss to identify unimportant tokens with practically no computational overhead. In our experiments, this simple approach reduces the pretraining cost of BERT by 25% while achieving similar overall fine-tuning performance on standard downstream tasks.

preprint2021arXiv

Isometric Propagation Network for Generalized Zero-shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify images of an unseen class only based on a few attributes describing that class but no access to any training sample. A popular strategy is to learn a mapping between the semantic space of class attributes and the visual space of images based on the seen classes and their data. Thus, an unseen class image can be ideally mapped to its corresponding class attributes. The key challenge is how to align the representations in the two spaces. For most ZSL settings, the attributes for each seen/unseen class are only represented by a vector while the seen-class data provide much more information. Thus, the imbalanced supervision from the semantic and the visual space can make the learned mapping easily overfitting to the seen classes. To resolve this problem, we propose Isometric Propagation Network (IPN), which learns to strengthen the relation between classes within each space and align the class dependency in the two spaces. Specifically, IPN learns to propagate the class representations on an auto-generated graph within each space. In contrast to only aligning the resulted static representation, we regularize the two dynamic propagation procedures to be isometric in terms of the two graphs' edge weights per step by minimizing a consistency loss between them. IPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular ZSL benchmarks. To evaluate the generalization capability of IPN, we further build two larger benchmarks with more diverse unseen classes and demonstrate the advantages of IPN on them.

preprint2021arXiv

Structure-Augmented Text Representation Learning for Efficient Knowledge Graph Completion

Human-curated knowledge graphs provide critical supportive information to various natural language processing tasks, but these graphs are usually incomplete, urging auto-completion of them. Prevalent graph embedding approaches, e.g., TransE, learn structured knowledge via representing graph elements into dense embeddings and capturing their triple-level relationship with spatial distance. However, they are hardly generalizable to the elements never visited in training and are intrinsically vulnerable to graph incompleteness. In contrast, textual encoding approaches, e.g., KG-BERT, resort to graph triple's text and triple-level contextualized representations. They are generalizable enough and robust to the incompleteness, especially when coupled with pre-trained encoders. But two major drawbacks limit the performance: (1) high overheads due to the costly scoring of all possible triples in inference, and (2) a lack of structured knowledge in the textual encoder. In this paper, we follow the textual encoding paradigm and aim to alleviate its drawbacks by augmenting it with graph embedding techniques -- a complementary hybrid of both paradigms. Specifically, we partition each triple into two asymmetric parts as in translation-based graph embedding approach, and encode both parts into contextualized representations by a Siamese-style textual encoder. Built upon the representations, our model employs both deterministic classifier and spatial measurement for representation and structure learning respectively. Moreover, we develop a self-adaptive ensemble scheme to further improve the performance by incorporating triple scores from an existing graph embedding model. In experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks and a zero-shot dataset for link prediction, with highlights of inference costs reduced by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to a textual encoding method.

preprint2020arXiv

Collaborative Inference for Efficient Remote Monitoring

While current machine learning models have impressive performance over a wide range of applications, their large size and complexity render them unsuitable for tasks such as remote monitoring on edge devices with limited storage and computational power. A naive approach to resolve this on the model level is to use simpler architectures, but this sacrifices prediction accuracy and is unsuitable for monitoring applications requiring accurate detection of the onset of adverse events. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution to this problem by decomposing the predictive model as the sum of a simple function which serves as a local monitoring tool, and a complex correction term to be evaluated on the server. A sign requirement is imposed on the latter to ensure that the local monitoring function is safe, in the sense that it can effectively serve as an early warning system. Our analysis quantifies the trade-offs between model complexity and performance, and serves as a guidance for architecture design. We validate our proposed framework on a series of monitoring experiments, where we succeed at learning monitoring models with significantly reduced complexity that minimally violate the safety requirement. More broadly, our framework is useful for learning classifiers in applications where false negatives are significantly more costly compared to false positives.

preprint2020arXiv

Conditional Self-Attention for Query-based Summarization

Self-attention mechanisms have achieved great success on a variety of NLP tasks due to its flexibility of capturing dependency between arbitrary positions in a sequence. For problems such as query-based summarization (Qsumm) and knowledge graph reasoning where each input sequence is associated with an extra query, explicitly modeling such conditional contextual dependencies can lead to a more accurate solution, which however cannot be captured by existing self-attention mechanisms. In this paper, we propose \textit{conditional self-attention} (CSA), a neural network module designed for conditional dependency modeling. CSA works by adjusting the pairwise attention between input tokens in a self-attention module with the matching score of the inputs to the given query. Thereby, the contextual dependencies modeled by CSA will be highly relevant to the query. We further studied variants of CSA defined by different types of attention. Experiments on Debatepedia and HotpotQA benchmark datasets show CSA consistently outperforms vanilla Transformer and previous models for the Qsumm problem.

preprint2016arXiv

Scaling Submodular Maximization via Pruned Submodularity Graphs

We propose a new random pruning method (called "submodular sparsification (SS)") to reduce the cost of submodular maximization. The pruning is applied via a "submodularity graph" over the $n$ ground elements, where each directed edge is associated with a pairwise dependency defined by the submodular function. In each step, SS prunes a $1-1/\sqrt{c}$ (for $c>1$) fraction of the nodes using weights on edges computed based on only a small number ($O(\log n)$) of randomly sampled nodes. The algorithm requires $\log_{\sqrt{c}}n$ steps with a small and highly parallelizable per-step computation. An accuracy-speed tradeoff parameter $c$, set as $c = 8$, leads to a fast shrink rate $\sqrt{2}/4$ and small iteration complexity $\log_{2\sqrt{2}}n$. Analysis shows that w.h.p., the greedy algorithm on the pruned set of size $O(\log^2 n)$ can achieve a guarantee similar to that of processing the original dataset. In news and video summarization tasks, SS is able to substantially reduce both computational costs and memory usage, while maintaining (or even slightly exceeding) the quality of the original (and much more costly) greedy algorithm.

preprint2014arXiv

Divide-and-Conquer Learning by Anchoring a Conical Hull

We reduce a broad class of machine learning problems, usually addressed by EM or sampling, to the problem of finding the $k$ extremal rays spanning the conical hull of a data point set. These $k$ "anchors" lead to a global solution and a more interpretable model that can even outperform EM and sampling on generalization error. To find the $k$ anchors, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer learning scheme "DCA" that distributes the problem to $\mathcal O(k\log k)$ same-type sub-problems on different low-D random hyperplanes, each can be solved by any solver. For the 2D sub-problem, we present a non-iterative solver that only needs to compute an array of cosine values and its max/min entries. DCA also provides a faster subroutine for other methods to check whether a point is covered in a conical hull, which improves algorithm design in multiple dimensions and brings significant speedup to learning. We apply our method to GMM, HMM, LDA, NMF and subspace clustering, then show its competitive performance and scalability over other methods on rich datasets.

preprint2013arXiv

Unmixing Incoherent Structures of Big Data by Randomized or Greedy Decomposition

Learning big data by matrix decomposition always suffers from expensive computation, mixing of complicated structures and noise. In this paper, we study more adaptive models and efficient algorithms that decompose a data matrix as the sum of semantic components with incoherent structures. We firstly introduce "GO decomposition (GoDec)", an alternating projection method estimating the low-rank part $L$ and the sparse part $S$ from data matrix $X=L+S+G$ corrupted by noise $G$. Two acceleration strategies are proposed to obtain scalable unmixing algorithm on big data: 1) Bilateral random projection (BRP) is developed to speed up the update of $L$ in GoDec by a closed-form built from left and right random projections of $X-S$ in lower dimensions; 2) Greedy bilateral (GreB) paradigm updates the left and right factors of $L$ in a mutually adaptive and greedy incremental manner, and achieve significant improvement in both time and sample complexities. Then we proposes three nontrivial variants of GoDec that generalizes GoDec to more general data type and whose fast algorithms can be derived from the two strategies......

preprint2011arXiv

Bilateral Random Projections

Low-rank structure have been profoundly studied in data mining and machine learning. In this paper, we show a dense matrix $X$'s low-rank approximation can be rapidly built from its left and right random projections $Y_1=XA_1$ and $Y_2=X^TA_2$, or bilateral random projection (BRP). We then show power scheme can further improve the precision. The deterministic, average and deviation bounds of the proposed method and its power scheme modification are proved theoretically. The effectiveness and the efficiency of BRP based low-rank approximation is empirically verified on both artificial and real datasets.

preprint2011arXiv

Hamming Compressed Sensing

Compressed sensing (CS) and 1-bit CS cannot directly recover quantized signals and require time consuming recovery. In this paper, we introduce \textit{Hamming compressed sensing} (HCS) that directly recovers a k-bit quantized signal of dimensional $n$ from its 1-bit measurements via invoking $n$ times of Kullback-Leibler divergence based nearest neighbor search. Compared with CS and 1-bit CS, HCS allows the signal to be dense, takes considerably less (linear) recovery time and requires substantially less measurements ($\mathcal O(\log n)$). Moreover, HCS recovery can accelerate the subsequent 1-bit CS dequantizer. We study a quantized recovery error bound of HCS for general signals and "HCS+dequantizer" recovery error bound for sparse signals. Extensive numerical simulations verify the appealing accuracy, robustness, efficiency and consistency of HCS.

preprint2011arXiv

Multi-label Learning via Structured Decomposition and Group Sparsity

In multi-label learning, each sample is associated with several labels. Existing works indicate that exploring correlations between labels improve the prediction performance. However, embedding the label correlations into the training process significantly increases the problem size. Moreover, the mapping of the label structure in the feature space is not clear. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-label learning method "Structured Decomposition + Group Sparsity (SDGS)". In SDGS, we learn a feature subspace for each label from the structured decomposition of the training data, and predict the labels of a new sample from its group sparse representation on the multi-subspace obtained from the structured decomposition. In particular, in the training stage, we decompose the data matrix $X\in R^{n\times p}$ as $X=\sum_{i=1}^kL^i+S$, wherein the rows of $L^i$ associated with samples that belong to label $i$ are nonzero and consist a low-rank matrix, while the other rows are all-zeros, the residual $S$ is a sparse matrix. The row space of $L_i$ is the feature subspace corresponding to label $i$. This decomposition can be efficiently obtained via randomized optimization. In the prediction stage, we estimate the group sparse representation of a new sample on the multi-subspace via group \emph{lasso}. The nonzero representation coefficients tend to concentrate on the subspaces of labels that the sample belongs to, and thus an effective prediction can be obtained. We evaluate SDGS on several real datasets and compare it with popular methods. Results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of SDGS.

preprint2010arXiv

Manifold Elastic Net: A Unified Framework for Sparse Dimension Reduction

It is difficult to find the optimal sparse solution of a manifold learning based dimensionality reduction algorithm. The lasso or the elastic net penalized manifold learning based dimensionality reduction is not directly a lasso penalized least square problem and thus the least angle regression (LARS) (Efron et al. \cite{LARS}), one of the most popular algorithms in sparse learning, cannot be applied. Therefore, most current approaches take indirect ways or have strict settings, which can be inconvenient for applications. In this paper, we proposed the manifold elastic net or MEN for short. MEN incorporates the merits of both the manifold learning based dimensionality reduction and the sparse learning based dimensionality reduction. By using a series of equivalent transformations, we show MEN is equivalent to the lasso penalized least square problem and thus LARS is adopted to obtain the optimal sparse solution of MEN. In particular, MEN has the following advantages for subsequent classification: 1) the local geometry of samples is well preserved for low dimensional data representation, 2) both the margin maximization and the classification error minimization are considered for sparse projection calculation, 3) the projection matrix of MEN improves the parsimony in computation, 4) the elastic net penalty reduces the over-fitting problem, and 5) the projection matrix of MEN can be interpreted psychologically and physiologically. Experimental evidence on face recognition over various popular datasets suggests that MEN is superior to top level dimensionality reduction algorithms.

preprint2010arXiv

NESVM: a Fast Gradient Method for Support Vector Machines

Support vector machines (SVMs) are invaluable tools for many practical applications in artificial intelligence, e.g., classification and event recognition. However, popular SVM solvers are not sufficiently efficient for applications with a great deal of samples as well as a large number of features. In this paper, thus, we present NESVM, a fast gradient SVM solver that can optimize various SVM models, e.g., classical SVM, linear programming SVM and least square SVM. Compared against SVM-Perf \cite{SVM_Perf}\cite{PerfML} (its convergence rate in solving the dual SVM is upper bounded by $\mathcal O(1/\sqrt{k})$, wherein $k$ is the number of iterations.) and Pegasos \cite{Pegasos} (online SVM that converges at rate $\mathcal O(1/k)$ for the primal SVM), NESVM achieves the optimal convergence rate at $\mathcal O(1/k^{2})$ and a linear time complexity. In particular, NESVM smoothes the non-differentiable hinge loss and $\ell_1$-norm in the primal SVM. Then the optimal gradient method without any line search is adopted to solve the optimization. In each iteration round, the current gradient and historical gradients are combined to determine the descent direction, while the Lipschitz constant determines the step size. Only two matrix-vector multiplications are required in each iteration round. Therefore, NESVM is more efficient than existing SVM solvers. In addition, NESVM is available for both linear and nonlinear kernels. We also propose "homotopy NESVM" to accelerate NESVM by dynamically decreasing the smooth parameter and using the continuation method. Our experiments on census income categorization, indoor/outdoor scene classification, event recognition and scene recognition suggest the efficiency and the effectiveness of NESVM. The MATLAB code of NESVM will be available on our website for further assessment.