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Wei Chu

Wei Chu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

The Attention Market: Interpreting Online Fair Re-ranking as Manifold Optimization under Walrasian Equilibrium

Fair re-ranking aims to promote long-tail items and enhance diversity within groups in information retrieval. While previous research on online fairness-aware re-ranking has shown promising outcomes, our comprehensive evaluation of online fair re-ranking methods over 20 settings reveals significant performance disparities among existing methods. To uncover the root causes of these inconsistencies, we reformulate fair re-ranking within an attentional market framework governed by a Walrasian Equilibrium, where the fairness is treated as a taxation cost. This market-based formulation is then coupled with manifold optimization, demonstrating that seeking this equilibrium is equivalent to performing gradient descent on a specific ranking manifold constructed by the market. Different re-ranking settings induce distinct manifold geometries, and these intrinsic geometric differences dictate the gradient landscapes and optimization trajectories. We propose ManifoldRank, an efficient online fair re-ranking algorithm. ManifoldRank adjusts gradients to align with the ranking manifold, considering various contextual settings. On the supply side, it incorporates a gradient adjustment based on different fairness requirements, accounting for associated costs. On the demand side, it empirically predicts an additional gradient adjustment term derived from the ranking scores. By integrating these two gradient adjustments, ManifoldRank effectively balances fairness and accuracy. Experimental results across multiple datasets confirm ManifoldRank's effectiveness.

preprint2022arXiv

ESCM$^2$: Entire Space Counterfactual Multi-Task Model for Post-Click Conversion Rate Estimation

Accurate estimation of post-click conversion rate is critical for building recommender systems, which has long been confronted with sample selection bias and data sparsity issues. Methods in the Entire Space Multi-task Model (ESMM) family leverage the sequential pattern of user actions, i.e. $impression\rightarrow click \rightarrow conversion$ to address data sparsity issue. However, they still fail to ensure the unbiasedness of CVR estimates. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate that ESMM suffers from the following two problems: (1) Inherent Estimation Bias (IEB), where the estimated CVR of ESMM is inherently higher than the ground truth; (2) Potential Independence Priority (PIP) for CTCVR estimation, where there is a risk that the ESMM overlooks the causality from click to conversion. To this end, we devise a principled approach named Entire Space Counterfactual Multi-task Modelling (ESCM$^2$), which employs a counterfactual risk miminizer as a regularizer in ESMM to address both IEB and PIP issues simultaneously. Extensive experiments on offline datasets and online environments demonstrate that our proposed ESCM$^2$ can largely mitigate the inherent IEB and PIP issues and achieve better performance than baseline models.

preprint2022arXiv

PIE: a Parameter and Inference Efficient Solution for Large Scale Knowledge Graph Embedding Reasoning

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding methods which map entities and relations to unique embeddings in the KG have shown promising results on many reasoning tasks. However, the same embedding dimension for both dense entities and sparse entities will cause either over parameterization (sparse entities) or under fitting (dense entities). Normally, a large dimension is set to get better performance. Meanwhile, the inference time grows log-linearly with the number of entities for all entities are traversed and compared. Both the parameter and inference become challenges when working with huge amounts of entities. Thus, we propose PIE, a \textbf{p}arameter and \textbf{i}nference \textbf{e}fficient solution. Inspired from tensor decomposition methods, we find that decompose entity embedding matrix into low rank matrices can reduce more than half of the parameters while maintaining comparable performance. To accelerate model inference, we propose a self-supervised auxiliary task, which can be seen as fine-grained entity typing. By randomly masking and recovering entities' connected relations, the task learns the co-occurrence of entity and relations. Utilizing the fine grained typing, we can filter unrelated entities during inference and get targets with possibly sub-linear time requirement. Experiments on link prediction benchmarks demonstrate the proposed key capabilities. Moreover, we prove effectiveness of the proposed solution on the Open Graph Benchmark large scale challenge dataset WikiKG90Mv2 and achieve the state of the art performance.

preprint2022arXiv

Training Protocol Matters: Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition via Training Protocol Searching

The development of scene text recognition (STR) in the era of deep learning has been mainly focused on novel architectures of STR models. However, training protocol (i.e., settings of the hyper-parameters involved in the training of STR models), which plays an equally important role in successfully training a good STR model, is under-explored for scene text recognition. In this work, we attempt to improve the accuracy of existing STR models by searching for optimal training protocol. Specifically, we develop a training protocol search algorithm, based on a newly designed search space and an efficient search algorithm using evolutionary optimization and proxy tasks. Experimental results show that our searched training protocol can improve the recognition accuracy of mainstream STR models by 2.7%~3.9%. In particular, with the searched training protocol, TRBA-Net achieves 2.1% higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art STR model (i.e., EFIFSTR), while the inference speed is 2.3x and 3.7x faster on CPU and GPU respectively. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the generalization ability of the training protocol found by our search method. Code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/STR_TPSearch.

preprint2022arXiv

Variational Policy Propagation for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

We propose a \emph{collaborative} multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm named variational policy propagation (VPP) to learn a \emph{joint} policy through the interactions over agents. We prove that the joint policy is a Markov Random Field under some mild conditions, which in turn reduces the policy space effectively. We integrate the variational inference as special differentiable layers in policy such that the actions can be efficiently sampled from the Markov Random Field and the overall policy is differentiable. We evaluate our algorithm on several large scale challenging tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms previous state-of-the-arts.

preprint2021arXiv

CASS-NAT: CTC Alignment-based Single Step Non-autoregressive Transformer for Speech Recognition

We propose a CTC alignment-based single step non-autoregressive transformer (CASS-NAT) for speech recognition. Specifically, the CTC alignment contains the information of (a) the number of tokens for decoder input, and (b) the time span of acoustics for each token. The information are used to extract acoustic representation for each token in parallel, referred to as token-level acoustic embedding which substitutes the word embedding in autoregressive transformer (AT) to achieve parallel generation in decoder. During inference, an error-based alignment sampling method is proposed to be applied to the CTC output space, reducing the WER and retaining the parallelism as well. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves WERs of 3.8%/9.1% on Librispeech test clean/other dataset without an external LM, and a CER of 5.8% on Aishell1 Mandarin corpus, respectively1. Compared to the AT baseline, the CASS-NAT has a performance reduction on WER, but is 51.2x faster in terms of RTF. When decoding with an oracle CTC alignment, the lower bound of WER without LM reaches 2.3% on the test-clean set, indicating the potential of the proposed method.

preprint2021arXiv

On-chip integrated waveguide amplifiers on Erbium-doped thin film lithium niobate on insulator

We demonstrate on-chip light amplification with integrated optical waveguide fabricated on erbium-doped thin film lithium niobate on insulator (TFLNOI) using the photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE) technique. A maximum internal net gain of 18 dB in the small-signal-gain regime is measured at the peak emission wavelength of 1530 nm for a waveguide length of 3.6 cm, indicating a differential gain per unit length of 5 dB/cm. This work paves the way to the monolithic integration of diverse active and passive photonic components on the TFLNOI platform.

preprint2020arXiv

High-index-contrast single-mode optical waveguides fabricated on lithium niobate by photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE)

We report fabrication of low loss single mode waveguides on lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) cladded by a layer of SiO2. Our technique, termed photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE), relies on patterning of a chromium film into the mask shape by femtosecond laser micromachining and subsequent chemo-mechanical etching of the lithium niobate thin film. The high-index-contrast single mode waveguide is measured to have a propagation loss of 0.13 dB/cm. Furthermore, waveguide tapers are fabricated for boosting the coupling efficiency.

preprint2020arXiv

Incubation Induced Light Concentration Beyond the Diffraction Limit for High-Resolution Glass Printing

In the past two decades, tremendous efforts have been exerted to understand and control the delivery of ultrashort laser pulses into various types of transparent materials ranging from glass and crystal to polymer and even bio-materials. This approach opens up the route toward determinative and highly localized modification within the transparent materials, enabling three-dimensional (3D) micromachining of the materials into sophisticated structures and devices with the extreme geometrical flexibility. Owing to the linear diffraction and nonlinear self-focusing effects, the focal volume typically exhibits an asymmetric profile stretching along the longitudinal direction. This effect becomes more severe when focusing deeply into the transparent substrates for printing objects of large heights. In this work a new laser-material interaction regime is identified with the exceptional incubation effect originating from self-regulated multiple-pulse interactions with accumulated material changes. Our finding reveals a focal-volume-invariant modification deeply inside the fused silica glass, in striking contrary to the traditional believes that the geometrical shape of the laser induced modification follows the intensity distribution of the inscription laser. A macro-scale geometrically complex glass sculpture is successfully manufactured with the incubation assisted ultrashort laser inscription at uniform micrometer resolutions in all three dimensions.

preprint2020arXiv

Riemannian Proximal Policy Optimization

In this paper, We propose a general Riemannian proximal optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence to solve Markov decision process (MDP) problems. To model policy functions in MDP, we employ Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and formulate it as a nonconvex optimization problem in the Riemannian space of positive semidefinite matrices. For two given policy functions, we also provide its lower bound on policy improvement by using bounds derived from the Wasserstein distance of GMMs. Preliminary experiments show the efficacy of our proposed Riemannian proximal policy optimization algorithm.

preprint2020arXiv

SpellGCN: Incorporating Phonological and Visual Similarities into Language Models for Chinese Spelling Check

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is a task to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese natural language. Existing methods have made attempts to incorporate the similarity knowledge between Chinese characters. However, they take the similarity knowledge as either an external input resource or just heuristic rules. This paper proposes to incorporate phonological and visual similarity knowledge into language models for CSC via a specialized graph convolutional network (SpellGCN). The model builds a graph over the characters, and SpellGCN is learned to map this graph into a set of inter-dependent character classifiers. These classifiers are applied to the representations extracted by another network, such as BERT, enabling the whole network to be end-to-end trainable. Experiments (The dataset and all code for this paper are available at https://github.com/ACL2020SpellGCN/SpellGCN) are conducted on three human-annotated datasets. Our method achieves superior performance against previous models by a large margin.

preprint2019arXiv

A compact and efficient three-dimensional microfluidic mixer

Microfluidic mixing is a fundamental functionality in most lab on a chip (LOC) systems,whereas realization of efficient mixing is challenging in microfluidic channels due to the small Reynolds numbers. Here, we design and fabricate a compact three-dimensional (3D) micromixer to enable efficient mixing at various flow rates. The performance of the fabricated micromixer was examined using blue and red inks. The extreme flexibility in fabricating microfluidic structures of arbitrary 3D geometries using femtosecond laser micromachining allows us to tackle the major disadvantageous effects for optimizing the mixing efficiency.

preprint2019arXiv

Efficient Electro-optical Tuning of Optical Frequency Microcomb on a Monolithically Integrated High-Q Lithium Niobate Microdisk

We demonstrate efficient tuning of a monolithically integrated lithium niobate microdisk (LN) optical frequency microcomb. Utilizing the high optical quality (Q) factor (i.e., Q~7.1*10^6) of the microdisk, the microcomb spans over a spectral bandwidth of ~200 nm at a pump power as low as 20.4 mW. Combining the large eletro-optic coefficient of LN and optimum design of the geometry of microelectrodes, we demonstrate electro-optical tuning of the comb with a spectral range of 400 pm and a tuning efficiency of ~38 pm/100V.

preprint2019arXiv

Extreme nonlinear Raman interaction of an ultrashort nitrogen ion laser with an impulsively excited molecular wavepacket

We report generation of cascaded rotational Raman scattering up to 58th orders in coherently excited CO_2 molecules. The high-order Raman scattering, which produces a quasiperiodic frequency comb with more than 600 sidebands, is obtained using an intense femtosecond laser to impulsively excite rotational coherence and the femtosecond-laser-induced N_2^+ lasing to generate cascaded Raman signals. The novel configuration allows this experiment to be performed with a single femtosecond laser beam at free-space standoff locations. It is revealed that the efficient spectral extension of Raman signals is attributed to the specific spectra-temporal structures of N_2^+ lasing, the ideal spatial overlap of femtosecond laser and N2+ lasing, and the guiding effect of molecular alignment. The Raman spectrum extending above 2000 cm^-1 naturally corresponds to a femtosecond pulse train due to the periodic revivals of molecular rotational wavepackets.

preprint2019arXiv

Freeform microfluidic networks encapsulated in laser printed three-dimensional macro-scale glass objects

Large-scale microfluidic microsystems with complex three-dimensional (3D) configurations are highly in demand by both fundamental research and industrial application, holding the potentials for fostering a wide range of innovative applications such as lab-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip as well as continuous-flow manufacturing of fine chemicals. However, freeform fabrication of such systems remains challenging for most of the current fabrication techniques in terms of fabrication resolution, flexibility, and achievable footprint size. Here, we report ultrashort pulse laser microfabrication of freeform microfluidic circuits with high aspect ratios and tunable diameters embedded in 3D printed glass objects. We achieve uniform microfluidic channel diameter by carefully distributing a string of extra access ports along the microfluidic channels for avoiding the over-etching in the thin microfluidic channels. After the chemical etching is completed, the extra access ports are sealed using carbon dioxide laser induced localized glass melting. We demonstrate a model hand of fused silica with a size of ~3 cm * 2.7 cm * 1.1 cm in which the whole blood vessel system is encapsulated.

preprint2018arXiv

Polarization-insensitive space-selective etching in fused silica induced by picosecond laser irradiation

It is well known that when the fused silica is irradiated with focused femtosecond laser beams, space selective chemical etching can be achieved. The etching rate depends sensitively on the polarization of the laser. Surprisingly, we observe that by chirping the Fourier-transform-limited femtosecond laser pulses to picosecond pulses, the polarization dependence of the etching rate disappears, whereas an efficient etching rate can still be maintained. Observation with a scanning electron microscope reveals that the chirped pulses can induce interconnected nanocracks in the irradiated areas which facilitates efficient introduction of the etchant into the microchannel. The reported technology is of great use for fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) microfluidic systems and glass-based 3D printing.