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Yankai Lin

Yankai Lin contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

MiniCPM-o 4.5: Towards Real-Time Full-Duplex Omni-Modal Interaction

Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has brought AI capabilities from static offline data processing to real-time streaming interaction, yet they still remain far from human-level multimodal interaction. The key bottlenecks are no longer modality coverage or latency alone, but the interaction paradigm itself. First, perception and response are still separated into alternating phases, preventing models from incorporating new inputs for timely adjustment during generation. Second, most current models remain reactive, responding only to explicit user requests instead of acting proactively in the evolving multimodal environment. We present MiniCPM-o 4.5, our latest effort towards human-like multimodal interaction, which mitigates these gaps by real-time full-duplex omni-modal interaction. It can see, listen, and speak simultaneously in real-time, while also exhibiting proactive behaviors such as issuing reminders or comments based on its continuous understanding of the live scene. The key technique behind MiniCPM-o 4.5 is Omni-Flow, a unified streaming framework that aligns omni-modal inputs and outputs along a shared temporal axis. This formulation converts conventional turn-based interaction into a full-duplex, time-aligned process, enabling simultaneous perception and response and allowing proactive behavior to arise within the same framework. With a total of 9B parameters, MiniCPM-o 4.5 approaches Gemini 2.5 Flash in vision-language capabilities, delivering state-of-the-art open-source performance at its scale. It also surpasses Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B in omni-modal understanding and delivers better speech generation, with significantly higher computation efficiency. Driven by its efficient architecture design and inference optimization, the model can perform real-time full-duplex omni-modal interaction on edge devices with less than 12GB RAM cost.

preprint2022arXiv

A Roadmap for Big Model

With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.

preprint2022arXiv

A Simple but Effective Pluggable Entity Lookup Table for Pre-trained Language Models

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) cannot well recall rich factual knowledge of entities exhibited in large-scale corpora, especially those rare entities. In this paper, we propose to build a simple but effective Pluggable Entity Lookup Table (PELT) on demand by aggregating the entity's output representations of multiple occurrences in the corpora. PELT can be compatibly plugged as inputs to infuse supplemental entity knowledge into PLMs. Compared to previous knowledge-enhanced PLMs, PELT only requires 0.2%-5% pre-computation with capability of acquiring knowledge from out-of-domain corpora for domain adaptation scenario. The experiments on knowledge-related tasks demonstrate that our method, PELT, can flexibly and effectively transfer entity knowledge from related corpora into PLMs with different architectures.

preprint2022arXiv

ELLE: Efficient Lifelong Pre-training for Emerging Data

Current pre-trained language models (PLM) are typically trained with static data, ignoring that in real-world scenarios, streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. This requires PLMs to integrate the information from all the sources in a lifelong manner. Although this goal could be achieved by exhaustive pre-training on all the existing data, such a process is known to be computationally expensive. To this end, we propose ELLE, aiming at efficient lifelong pre-training for emerging data. Specifically, ELLE consists of (1) function preserved model expansion, which flexibly expands an existing PLM's width and depth to improve the efficiency of knowledge acquisition; and (2) pre-trained domain prompts, which disentangle the versatile knowledge learned during pre-training and stimulate the proper knowledge for downstream tasks. We experiment ELLE with streaming data from 5 domains on BERT and GPT. The results show the superiority of ELLE over various lifelong learning baselines in both pre-training efficiency and downstream performances. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/ELLE.

preprint2022arXiv

Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks

Hyperbolic neural networks have shown great potential for modeling complex data. However, existing hyperbolic networks are not completely hyperbolic, as they encode features in a hyperbolic space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space (a Euclidean subspace) at the origin of the hyperbolic space. This hybrid method greatly limits the modeling ability of networks. In this paper, we propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolic networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting the Lorentz transformations (including boost and rotation) to formalize essential operations of neural networks. Moreover, we also prove that linear transformation in tangent spaces used by existing hyperbolic networks is a relaxation of the Lorentz rotation and does not include the boost, implicitly limiting the capabilities of existing hyperbolic networks. The experimental results on four NLP tasks show that our method has better performance for building both shallow and deep networks. Our code will be released to facilitate follow-up research.

preprint2022arXiv

Knowledge Inheritance for Pre-trained Language Models

Recent explorations of large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) have revealed the power of PLMs with huge amounts of parameters, setting off a wave of training ever-larger PLMs. However, it requires tremendous computational resources to train a large-scale PLM, which may be practically unaffordable. In addition, existing large-scale PLMs are mainly trained from scratch individually, ignoring that many well-trained PLMs are available. To this end, we explore the question how could existing PLMs benefit training large-scale PLMs in future. Specifically, we introduce a pre-training framework named "knowledge inheritance" (KI) and explore how could knowledge distillation serve as auxiliary supervision during pre-training to efficiently learn larger PLMs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of KI in training efficiency. We also conduct empirical analyses to explore the effects of teacher PLMs' pre-training settings, including model architecture, pre-training data, etc. Finally, we show that KI could be applied to domain adaptation and knowledge transfer.

preprint2022arXiv

Manual-Guided Dialogue for Flexible Conversational Agents

How to build and use dialogue data efficiently, and how to deploy models in different domains at scale can be two critical issues in building a task-oriented dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a novel manual-guided dialogue scheme to alleviate these problems, where the agent learns the tasks from both dialogue and manuals. The manual is an unstructured textual document that guides the agent in interacting with users and the database during the conversation. Our proposed scheme reduces the dependence of dialogue models on fine-grained domain ontology, and makes them more flexible to adapt to various domains. We then contribute a fully-annotated multi-domain dataset MagDial to support our scheme. It introduces three dialogue modeling subtasks: instruction matching, argument filling, and response generation. Modeling these subtasks is consistent with the human agent's behavior patterns. Experiments demonstrate that the manual-guided dialogue scheme improves data efficiency and domain scalability in building dialogue systems. The dataset and benchmark will be publicly available for promoting future research.

preprint2022arXiv

MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts

Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge. However, the computational patterns of FFNs are still unclear. In this work, we study the computational patterns of FFNs and observe that most inputs only activate a tiny ratio of neurons of FFNs. This phenomenon is similar to the sparsity of the human brain, which drives research on functional partitions of the human brain. To verify whether functional partitions also emerge in FFNs, we propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters, namely MoEfication. Specifically, MoEfication consists of two phases: (1) splitting the parameters of FFNs into multiple functional partitions as experts, and (2) building expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input. Experimental results show that MoEfication can conditionally use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance for different models on various downstream tasks. Besides, MoEfication brings two advantages: (1) it significantly reduces the FLOPS of inference, i.e., 2x speedup with 25% of FFN parameters, and (2) it provides a fine-grained perspective to study the inner mechanism of FFNs. The source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/MoEfication.

preprint2022arXiv

On Length Divergence Bias in Textual Matching Models

Despite the remarkable success deep models have achieved in Textual Matching (TM) tasks, it still remains unclear whether they truly understand language or measure the semantic similarity of texts by exploiting statistical bias in datasets. In this work, we provide a new perspective to study this issue -- via the length divergence bias. We find the length divergence heuristic widely exists in prevalent TM datasets, providing direct cues for prediction. To determine whether TM models have adopted such heuristic, we introduce an adversarial evaluation scheme which invalidates the heuristic. In this adversarial setting, all TM models perform worse, indicating they have indeed adopted this heuristic. Through a well-designed probing experiment, we empirically validate that the bias of TM models can be attributed in part to extracting the text length information during training. To alleviate the length divergence bias, we propose an adversarial training method. The results demonstrate we successfully improve the robustness and generalization ability of models at the same time.

preprint2022arXiv

Packed Levitated Marker for Entity and Relation Extraction

Recent entity and relation extraction works focus on investigating how to obtain a better span representation from the pre-trained encoder. However, a major limitation of existing works is that they ignore the interrelation between spans (pairs). In this work, we propose a novel span representation approach, named Packed Levitated Markers (PL-Marker), to consider the interrelation between the spans (pairs) by strategically packing the markers in the encoder. In particular, we propose a neighborhood-oriented packing strategy, which considers the neighbor spans integrally to better model the entity boundary information. Furthermore, for those more complicated span pair classification tasks, we design a subject-oriented packing strategy, which packs each subject and all its objects to model the interrelation between the same-subject span pairs. The experimental results show that, with the enhanced marker feature, our model advances baselines on six NER benchmarks, and obtains a 4.1%-4.3% strict relation F1 improvement with higher speed over previous state-of-the-art models on ACE04 and ACE05.

preprint2022arXiv

Rethinking the Promotion Brought by Contrastive Learning to Semi-Supervised Node Classification

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has proven highly effective in promoting the performance of Semi-Supervised Node Classification (SSNC). However, existing GCL methods are generally transferred from other fields like CV or NLP, whose underlying working mechanism remains under-explored. In this work, we first deeply probe the working mechanism of GCL in SSNC, and find that the promotion brought by GCL is severely unevenly distributed: the improvement mainly comes from subgraphs with less annotated information, which is fundamentally different from contrastive learning in other fields. However, existing GCL methods generally ignore this uneven distribution of annotated information and apply GCL evenly to the whole graph. To remedy this issue and further improve GCL in SSNC, we propose the Topology InFormation gain-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning (TIFA-GCL) framework that considers the annotated information distribution across graph in GCL. Extensive experiments on six benchmark graph datasets, including the enormous OGB-Products graph, show that TIFA-GCL can bring a larger improvement than existing GCL methods in both transductive and inductive settings. Further experiments demonstrate the generalizability and interpretability of TIFA-GCL.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards a General Pre-training Framework for Adaptive Learning in MOOCs

Adaptive learning aims to stimulate and meet the needs of individual learners, which requires sophisticated system-level coordination of diverse tasks, including modeling learning resources, estimating student states, and making personalized recommendations. Existing deep learning methods have achieved great success over statistical models; however, they still lack generalization for diverse tasks and suffer from insufficient capacity since they are composed of highly-coupled task-specific architectures and rely on small-scale, coarse-grained recommendation scenarios. To realize the idea of general adaptive systems proposed in pedagogical theory, with the emerging pre-training techniques in NLP, we try to conduct a practical exploration on applying pre-training to adaptive learning, to propose a unified framework based on data observation and learning style analysis, properly leveraging heterogeneous learning elements. Through a series of downstream tasks of Learning Recommendation, Learning Resource Evaluation, Knowledge Tracing, and Dropout Prediction, we find that course structures, text, and knowledge are helpful for modeling and inherently coherent to student non-sequential learning behaviors and that indirectly relevant information included in the pre-training foundation can be shared across downstream tasks to facilitate effectiveness. We finally build a simplified systematic application of adaptive learning and reflect on the insights brought back to pedagogy. The source code and dataset will be released.

preprint2021arXiv

Asynchronous Distributed Optimization via Dual Decomposition and Block Coordinate Subgradient Methods

We study the problem of minimizing the sum of potentially non-differentiable convex cost functions with partially overlapping dependences in an asynchronous manner, where communication in the network is not coordinated. We study the behavior of an asynchronous algorithm based on dual decomposition and block coordinate subgradient methods under assumptions weaker than those used in the literature. At the same time, we allow different agents to use local stepsizes with no global coordination. Sufficient conditions are provided for almost sure convergence to the solution of the optimization problem. Under additional assumptions, we establish a sublinear convergence rate that in turn can be strengthened to linear convergence rate if the problem is strongly convex and has Lipschitz gradients. We also extend available results in the literature by allowing multiple and potentially overlapping blocks to be updated at the same time with non-uniform and potentially time varying probabilities assigned to different blocks. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

preprint2020arXiv

HighwayGraph: Modelling Long-distance Node Relations for Improving General Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are efficient approaches to process graph-structured data. Modelling long-distance node relations is essential for GNN training and applications. However, conventional GNNs suffer from bad performance in modelling long-distance node relations due to limited-layer information propagation. Existing studies focus on building deep GNN architectures, which face the over-smoothing issue and cannot model node relations in particularly long distance. To address this issue, we propose to model long-distance node relations by simply relying on shallow GNN architectures with two solutions: (1) Implicitly modelling by learning to predict node pair relations (2) Explicitly modelling by adding edges between nodes that potentially have the same label. To combine our two solutions, we propose a model-agnostic training framework named HighwayGraph, which overcomes the challenge of insufficient labeled nodes by sampling node pairs from the training set and adopting the self-training method. Extensive experimental results show that our HighwayGraph achieves consistent and significant improvements over four representative GNNs on three benchmark datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning to Recover from Multi-Modality Errors for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation

Non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) predicts the entire target sequence simultaneously and significantly accelerates inference process. However, NAT discards the dependency information in a sentence, and thus inevitably suffers from the multi-modality problem: the target tokens may be provided by different possible translations, often causing token repetitions or missing. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel semi-autoregressive model RecoverSAT in this work, which generates a translation as a sequence of segments. The segments are generated simultaneously while each segment is predicted token-by-token. By dynamically determining segment length and deleting repetitive segments, RecoverSAT is capable of recovering from repetitive and missing token errors. Experimental results on three widely-used benchmark datasets show that our proposed model achieves more than 4$\times$ speedup while maintaining comparable performance compared with the corresponding autoregressive model.