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Researcher profile

Yi Ding

Yi Ding contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine LearningPerformanceComputation and LanguageDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingHardware ArchitectureMethodologyApplicationsArtificial IntelligenceComputer Visioneess.SPeess.SYMultimediaNeural and Evolutionary Computingphysics.opticsSystems and Control

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Comparative Study of Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Large Language Models for Mental Health Forecasting using Smartphone Sensing Data

Smartphone sensing offers an unobtrusive and scalable way to track daily behaviors linked to mental health, capturing changes in sleep, mobility, and phone use that often precede symptoms of stress, anxiety, or depression. While most prior studies focus on detection that responds to existing conditions, forecasting mental health enables proactive support through Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive benchmarking study comparing traditional machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and large language model (LLM) approaches for mental health forecasting using the College Experience Sensing (CES) dataset, the most extensive longitudinal dataset of college student mental health to date. We systematically evaluate models across temporal windows, feature granularities, personalization strategies, and class imbalance handling. Our results show that DL models, particularly Transformer (Macro-F1 = 0.58), achieve the best overall performance, while LLMs show strength in contextual reasoning but weaker temporal modeling. Personalization substantially improves forecasts of severe mental health states. By revealing how different modeling approaches interpret phone sensing behavioral data over time, this work lays the groundwork for next-generation, adaptive, and human-centered mental health technologies that can advance both research and real-world well-being.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Addressing Performance Saturation for LLM RL via Precise Entropy Curve Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most RL algorithms suffer from performance saturation, preventing continued gains as RL training scales. This problem can be characterized by the collapse of entropy, a key diagnostic for exploration in RL. Existing attempts focus on preventing entropy collapse through regularization or clipping. However, their resulting entropy curves often exhibit instability in the long term, which hinders performance gains. In this paper, we introduce Entrocraft, a simple rejection-sampling approach that realizes user-customized entropy schedule by biasing the advantage distributions. Entrocraft requires no objective regularization and is advantage-estimator-agnostic. Theoretically, we relate per-step entropy change to the advantage distribution under minimal assumptions. This explains the behavior of existing RL and entropy-preserving methods. Entrocraft also enables a systematic study of entropy schedules, which reveals that linear annealing, which starts high and decays to a slightly lower target, performs best. Empirically, Entrocraft addresses performance saturation, significantly improving generalization, output diversity, and long-term training. It enables a 4B model to outperform an 8B baseline, sustains improvement for up to 4x longer before plateauing, and raises pass@K by 50% over the baseline.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Can a Unimodal Language Agent Provide Preferences to Tune a Multimodal Vision-Language Model?

To explore a more scalable path for adding multimodal capabilities to existing LLMs, this paper addresses a fundamental question: Can a unimodal LLM, relying solely on text, reason about its own informational needs and provide effective feedback to optimize a multimodal model? To answer this, we propose a method that enables a language agent to give feedback to a vision-language model (VLM) to adapt text generation to the agent's preferences. Our results from different experiments affirm this hypothesis, showing that LLM preference feedback significantly enhances VLM descriptions. Using our proposed method, we find that the VLM can generate multimodal scene descriptions to help the LLM better understand multimodal context, leading to improvements of maximum 13% in absolute accuracy compared to the baseline multimodal approach. Furthermore, a human study validated our AI-driven feedback, showing a 64.6% preference alignment rate between the LLM's choices and human judgments. Extensive experiments provide insights on how and why the method works and its limitations.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

From Muscle to Text with MyoText: sEMG to Text via Finger Classification and Transformer-Based Decoding

Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a direct neural interface for decoding muscle activity and offers a promising foundation for keyboard-free text input in wearable and mixed-reality systems. Previous sEMG-to-text studies mainly focused on recognizing letters directly from sEMG signals, forming an important first step toward translating muscle activity into text. Building on this foundation, we present MyoText, a hierarchical framework that decodes sEMG signals to text through physiologically grounded intermediate stages. MyoText first classifies finger activations from multichannel sEMG using a CNN-BiLSTM-Attention model, applies ergonomic typing priors to infer letters, and reconstructs full sentences with a fine-tuned T5 transformer. This modular design mirrors the natural hierarchy of typing, linking muscle intent to language output and reducing the search space for decoding. Evaluated on 30 users from the emg2qwerty dataset, MyoText outperforms baselines by achieving 85.4% finger-classification accuracy, 5.4% character error rate (CER), and 6.5% word error rate (WER). Beyond accuracy gains, this methodology establishes a principled pathway from neuromuscular signals to text, providing a blueprint for virtual and augmented-reality typing interfaces that operate entirely without physical keyboards. By integrating ergonomic structure with transformer-based linguistic reasoning, MyoText advances the feasibility of seamless, wearable neural input for future ubiquitous computing environments.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Cello: Efficient Computer Systems Optimization with Predictive Early Termination and Censored Regression

Sample-efficient machine learning (SEML) has been widely applied to find optimal latency and power tradeoffs for configurable computer systems. Instead of randomly sampling from the configuration space, SEML reduces the search cost by dramatically reducing the number of configurations that must be sampled to optimize system goals (e.g., low latency or energy). Nevertheless, SEML only reduces one component of cost -- the total number of samples collected -- but does not decrease the cost of collecting each sample. Critically, not all samples are equal; some take much longer to collect because they correspond to slow system configurations. This paper present Cello, a computer systems optimization framework that reduces sample collection costs -- especially those that come from the slowest configurations. The key insight is to predict ahead of time whether samples will have poor system behavior (e.g., long latency or high energy) and terminate these samples early before their measured system behavior surpasses the termination threshold, which we call it predictive early termination. To predict the future system behavior accurately before it manifests as high runtime or energy, Cello uses censored regression to produces accurate predictions for running samples. We evaluate Cello by optimizing latency and energy for Apache Spark workloads. We give Cello a fixed amount of time to search a combined space of hardware and software configuration parameters. Our evaluation shows that compared to the state-of-the-art SEML approach in computer systems optimization, Cello improves latency by 1.19X for minimizing latency under a power constraint, and improves energy by 1.18X for minimizing energy under a latency constraint.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Continuous Emotion Recognition using Visual-audio-linguistic information: A Technical Report for ABAW3

We propose a cross-modal co-attention model for continuous emotion recognition using visual-audio-linguistic information. The model consists of four blocks. The visual, audio, and linguistic blocks are used to learn the spatial-temporal features of the multi-modal input. A co-attention block is designed to fuse the learned features with the multi-head co-attention mechanism. The visual encoding from the visual block is concatenated with the attention feature to emphasize the visual information. To make full use of the data and alleviate over-fitting, cross-validation is carried out on the training and validation set. The concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) centering is used to merge the results from each fold. The achieved CCC on the test set is $0.520$ for valence and $0.602$ for arousal, which significantly outperforms the baseline method with the corresponding CCC of 0.180 and 0.170 for valence and arousal, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/sucv/ABAW3.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect with electromagnetic scattered field generated by a collection of particles of $\mathcal{L}$ types

A theoretical framework in the spherical polar coordinate system is developed to systematically treat the correlation between intensity fluctuations (CIF) of electromagnetic light waves on scattering from a collection of particles of $\mathcal{L}$ types. Two $\mathcal{L}\times \mathcal{L}$ matrices called pair-potential matrix (PPM) and pair-structure matrix (PSM) are introduced to jointly formulate the normalized CIF of the scattered field for the first time. We build a closed-form relation that associates the normalized CIF with the PPM and the PSM as well as the spectral degree of polarization $\mathcal{P}$ of the incident field, showing that the normalized CIF is closely related to the trace of the product of the PSM and the transpose of the PPM, and its dependence on $\mathcal{P}$ is completely determined by the scattering polar angle and azimuth angle. For a special case where the spatial distributions of scattering potentials of particles of different types are similar and the same is true of their density distributions, the PPM and the PSM will reduce to two new matrices whose elements separately quantify the degree of angular correlation of the scattering potentials of particles and their density distributions, and the number of species of particles in this special case appears as a scaled factor to ensure the normalization of the CIF. The effects of the off-diagonal elements of the PPM and the PSM on the normalized CIF and its dependence on $\mathcal{P}$ are illustrated by two numerical examples.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

NURD: Negative-Unlabeled Learning for Online Datacenter Straggler Prediction

Datacenters execute large computational jobs, which are composed of smaller tasks. A job completes when all its tasks finish, so stragglers -- rare, yet extremely slow tasks -- are a major impediment to datacenter performance. Accurately predicting stragglers would enable proactive intervention, allowing datacenter operators to mitigate stragglers before they delay a job. While much prior work applies machine learning to predict computer system performance, these approaches rely on complete labels -- i.e., sufficient examples of all possible behaviors, including straggling and non-straggling -- or strong assumptions about the underlying latency distributions -- e.g., whether Gaussian or not. Within a running job, however, none of this information is available until stragglers have revealed themselves when they have already delayed the job. To predict stragglers accurately and early without labeled positive examples or assumptions on latency distributions, this paper presents NURD, a novel Negative-Unlabeled learning approach with Reweighting and Distribution-compensation that only trains on negative and unlabeled streaming data. The key idea is to train a predictor using finished tasks of non-stragglers to predict latency for unlabeled running tasks, and then reweight each unlabeled task's prediction based on a weighting function of its feature space. We evaluate NURD on two production traces from Google and Alibaba, and find that compared to the best baseline approach, NURD produces 2--11 percentage point increases in the F1 score in terms of prediction accuracy, and 2.0--8.8 percentage point improvements in job completion time.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

SCOPE: Safe Exploration for Dynamic Computer Systems Optimization

Modern computer systems need to execute under strict safety constraints (e.g., a power limit), but doing so often conflicts with their ability to deliver high performance (i.e. minimal latency). Prior work uses machine learning to automatically tune hardware resources such that the system execution meets safety constraints optimally. Such solutions monitor past system executions to learn the system's behavior under different hardware resource allocations before dynamically tuning resources to optimize the application execution. However, system behavior can change significantly between different applications and even different inputs of the same applications. Hence, the models learned using data collected a priori are often suboptimal and violate safety constraints when used with new applications and inputs. To address this limitation, we introduce the concept of an execution space, which is the cross product of hardware resources, input features, and applications. To dynamically and safely allocate hardware resources from the execution space, we present SCOPE, a resource manager that leverages a novel safe exploration framework. We evaluate SCOPE's ability to deliver improved latency while minimizing power constraint violations by dynamically configuring hardware while running a variety of Apache Spark applications. Compared to prior approaches that minimize power constraint violations, SCOPE consumes comparable power while improving latency by up to 9.5X. Compared to prior approaches that minimize latency, SCOPE achieves similar latency but reduces power constraint violation rates by up to 45.88X, achieving almost zero safety constraint violations across all applications.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

TSception: Capturing Temporal Dynamics and Spatial Asymmetry from EEG for Emotion Recognition

The high temporal resolution and the asymmetric spatial activations are essential attributes of electroencephalogram (EEG) underlying emotional processes in the brain. To learn the temporal dynamics and spatial asymmetry of EEG towards accurate and generalized emotion recognition, we propose TSception, a multi-scale convolutional neural network that can classify emotions from EEG. TSception consists of dynamic temporal, asymmetric spatial, and high-level fusion layers, which learn discriminative representations in the time and channel dimensions simultaneously. The dynamic temporal layer consists of multi-scale 1D convolutional kernels whose lengths are related to the sampling rate of EEG, which learns the dynamic temporal and frequency representations of EEG. The asymmetric spatial layer takes advantage of the asymmetric EEG patterns for emotion, learning the discriminative global and hemisphere representations. The learned spatial representations will be fused by a high-level fusion layer. Using more generalized cross-validation settings, the proposed method is evaluated on two publicly available datasets DEAP and MAHNOB-HCI. The performance of the proposed network is compared with prior reported methods such as SVM, KNN, FBFgMDM, FBTSC, Unsupervised learning, DeepConvNet, ShallowConvNet, and EEGNet. TSception achieves higher classification accuracies and F1 scores than other methods in most of the experiments. The codes are available at https://github.com/yi-ding-cs/TSception

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Dynamical systems theory for causal inference with application to synthetic control methods

In this paper, we adopt results in nonlinear time series analysis for causal inference in dynamical settings.~Our motivation is policy analysis with panel data, particularly through the use of "synthetic control" methods. These methods regress pre-intervention outcomes of the treated unit to outcomes from a pool of control units, and then use the fitted regression model to estimate causal effects post-intervention. In this setting, we propose to screen out control units that have a weak dynamical relationship to the treated unit. In simulations, we show that this method can mitigate bias from "cherry-picking" of control units, which is usually an important concern. We illustrate on real-world applications, including the tobacco legislation example of \citet{Abadie2010}, and Brexit.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Minimax designs for causal effects in temporal experiments with treatment habituation

Randomized experiments are the gold standard for estimating the causal effects of an intervention. In the simplest setting, each experimental unit is randomly assigned to receive treatment or control, and then the outcomes in each treatment arm are compared. In many settings, however, randomized experiments need to be executed over several time periods such that treatment assignment happens at each time period. In such temporal experiments, it has been observed that the effects of an intervention on a given unit may be large when the unit is first exposed to it, but then it often attenuates, or even vanishes, after repeated exposures. This phenomenon is typically due to units' habituation to the intervention, or some other general form of learning, such as when users gradually start to ignore repeated mails sent by a promotional campaign. This paper proposes randomized designs for estimating causal effects in temporal experiments when habituation is present. We show that our designs are minimax optimal in a large class of practical designs. Our analysis is based on the randomization framework of causal inference, and imposes no parametric modeling assumptions on the outcomes.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

TSception: A Deep Learning Framework for Emotion Detection Using EEG

In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework, TSception, for emotion detection from electroencephalogram (EEG). TSception consists of temporal and spatial convolutional layers, which learn discriminative representations in the time and channel domains simultaneously. The temporal learner consists of multi-scale 1D convolutional kernels whose lengths are related to the sampling rate of the EEG signal, which learns multiple temporal and frequency representations. The spatial learner takes advantage of the asymmetry property of emotion responses at the frontal brain area to learn the discriminative representations from the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In our study, a system is designed to study the emotional arousal in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. EEG data were collected from 18 healthy subjects using this system to evaluate the performance of the proposed deep learning network for the classification of low and high emotional arousal states. The proposed method is compared with SVM, EEGNet, and LSTM. TSception achieves a high classification accuracy of 86.03%, which outperforms the prior methods significantly (p<0.05). The code is available at https://github.com/deepBrains/TSception

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access