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Chuanlong Xie

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12 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Sliding-Window Merging for Compacting Patch-Redundant Layers in LLMs

Xuan Ding
Rui Sun
Yunjian Zhang
Xiu Yan
Yueqi Zhou
Kaihao Huang
Suzhong Fu
Angelica I Aviles-Rivero

Depth-wise pruning accelerates LLM inference in resource-constrained scenarios but suffers from performance degradation due to indiscriminate removal of entire Transformer layers. This paper reveals ``Patch-Like'' redundancy across layers via correlation analysis of the outputs of different layers in reproducing kernel Hilbert space, demonstrating consecutive layers exhibit high functional similarity. Building on this observation, this paper proposes Sliding-Window Merging (SWM) - a dynamic compression method that selects consecutive layers from top to bottom using a pre-defined similarity threshold, and compacts patch-redundant layers through a parameter consolidation, thereby simplifying the model structure while maintaining its performance. Extensive experiments on LLMs with various architectures and different parameter scales show that our method outperforms existing pruning techniques in both zero-shot inference performance and retraining recovery quality after pruning. In particular, in the experiment with 35\% pruning on the Vicuna-7B model, our method achieved a 1.654\% improvement in average performance on zero-shot tasks compared to the existing method. Moreover, we further reveal the potential of combining depth pruning with width pruning to enhance the pruning effect.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

An Efficient Framework for Enhancing Discriminative Models via Diffusion Techniques

Chunxiao Li
Xiaoxiao Wang
Boming Miao
Chuanlong Xie
Zizhe Wang
Yao Zhu

Image classification serves as the cornerstone of computer vision, traditionally achieved through discriminative models based on deep neural networks. Recent advancements have introduced classification methods derived from generative models, which offer the advantage of zero-shot classification. However, these methods suffer from two main drawbacks: high computational overhead and inferior performance compared to discriminative models. Inspired by the coordinated cognitive processes of rapid-slow pathway interactions in the human brain during visual signal recognition, we propose the Diffusion-Based Discriminative Model Enhancement Framework (DBMEF). This framework seamlessly integrates discriminative and generative models in a training-free manner, leveraging discriminative models for initial predictions and endowing deep neural networks with rethinking capabilities via diffusion models. Consequently, DBMEF can effectively enhance the classification accuracy and generalization capability of discriminative models in a plug-and-play manner. We have conducted extensive experiments across 17 prevalent deep model architectures with different training methods, including both CNN-based models such as ResNet and Transformer-based models like ViT, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DBMEF.Specifically, the framework yields a 1.51% performance improvement for ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset and 3.02% on the ImageNet-A dataset. In conclusion, our research introduces a novel paradigm for image classification, demonstrating stable improvements across different datasets and neural networks.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Provable Contrastive Continual Learning

Yichen Wen
Zhiquan Tan
Kaipeng Zheng
Chuanlong Xie
Weiran Huang 0001

Continual learning requires learning incremental tasks with dynamic data distributions. So far, it has been observed that employing a combination of contrastive loss and distillation loss for training in continual learning yields strong performance. To the best of our knowledge, however, this contrastive continual learning framework lacks convincing theoretical explanations. In this work, we fill this gap by establishing theoretical performance guarantees, which reveal how the performance of the model is bounded by training losses of previous tasks in the contrastive continual learning framework. Our theoretical explanations further support the idea that pre-training can benefit continual learning. Inspired by our theoretical analysis of these guarantees, we propose a novel contrastive continual learning algorithm called CILA, which uses adaptive distillation coefficients for different tasks. These distillation coefficients are easily computed by the ratio between average distillation losses and average contrastive losses from previous tasks. Our method shows great improvement on standard benchmarks and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

DAMix: Exploiting Deep Autoregressive Model Zoo for Improving Lossless Compression Generalization

Qishi Dong
Fengwei Zhou
Ning Kang
Chuanlong Xie
Shifeng Zhang
Jiawei Li
Heng Peng
Zhenguo Li

Deep generative models have demonstrated superior performance in lossless compression on identically distributed data. However, in real-world scenarios, data to be compressed are of various distributions and usually cannot be known in advance. Thus, commercially expected neural compression must have strong Out-of-Distribution (OoD) generalization capabilities. Compared with traditional compression methods, deep learning methods have intrinsic flaws for OoD generalization. In this work, we make the attempt to tackle this challenge via exploiting a zoo of Deep Autoregressive models (DAMix). We build a model zoo consisting of autoregressive models trained on data from diverse distributions. In the test phase, we select useful expert models by a simple model evaluation score and adaptively aggregate the predictions of selected models. By assuming the outputs from each expert model are biased in favor of their training distributions, a von Mises-Fisher based filter is proposed to recover the value of unbiased predictions that provides more accurate density estimations than a single model. We derive the posterior of unbiased predictions as well as concentration parameters in the filter, and a novel temporal Stein variational gradient descent for sequential data is proposed to adaptively update the posterior distributions. We evaluate DAMix on 22 image datasets, including in-distribution and OoD data, and demonstrate that making use of unbiased predictions has up to 45.6% improvement over the single model trained on ImageNet.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Fair-CDA: Continuous and Directional Augmentation for Group Fairness

Rui Sun
Fengwei Zhou
Zhenhua Dong
Chuanlong Xie
Lanqing Hong
Jiawei Li
Rui Zhang
Zhen Li

In this work, we propose Fair-CDA, a fine-grained data augmentation strategy for imposing fairness constraints. We use a feature disentanglement method to extract the features highly related to the sensitive attributes. Then we show that group fairness can be achieved by regularizing the models on transition paths of sensitive features between groups. By adjusting the perturbation strength in the direction of the paths, our proposed augmentation is controllable and auditable. To alleviate the accuracy degradation caused by fairness constraints, we further introduce a calibrated model to impute labels for the augmented data. Our proposed method does not assume any data generative model and ensures good generalization for both accuracy and fairness. Experimental results show that Fair-CDA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on widely-used benchmarks, e.g., Adult, CelebA and MovieLens. Especially, Fair-CDA obtains an 86.3% relative improvement for fairness while maintaining the accuracy on the Adult dataset. Moreover, we evaluate Fair-CDA in an online recommendation system to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of accuracy and fairness.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Boosting Out-of-distribution Detection with Typical Features

Yao Zhu
Yuefeng Chen
Chuanlong Xie
Xiaodan Li
Rong Zhang
Hui Xue'
Xiang Tian
Bolun Zheng

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical task for ensuring the reliability and safety of deep neural networks in real-world scenarios. Different from most previous OOD detection methods that focus on designing OOD scores or introducing diverse outlier examples to retrain the model, we delve into the obstacle factors in OOD detection from the perspective of typicality and regard the feature's high-probability region of the deep model as the feature's typical set. We propose to rectify the feature into its typical set and calculate the OOD score with the typical features to achieve reliable uncertainty estimation. The feature rectification can be conducted as a plug-and-play module with various OOD scores. We evaluate the superiority of our method on both the commonly used benchmark (CIFAR) and the more challenging high-resolution benchmark with large label space (ImageNet). Notably, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 5. 11% in the average FPR95 on the ImageNet benchmark.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Policy Diagnosis via Measuring Role Diversity in Cooperative Multi-agent RL

Siyi Hu
Chuanlong Xie
Xiaodan Liang
Xiaojun Chang

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is making rapid progress for solving tasks in a grid world and real-world scenarios, in which agents are given different attributes and goals, resulting in different behavior through the whole multi-agent task. In this study, we quantify the agent’s behavior difference and build its relationship with the policy performance via {\bf Role Diversity}, a metric to measure the characteristics of MARL tasks. We define role diversity from three perspectives: action-based, trajectory-based, and contribution-based to fully measure a multi-agent task. Through theoretical analysis, we find that the error bound in MARL can be decomposed into three parts that have a strong relation to the role diversity. The decomposed factors can significantly impact policy optimization in three popular directions including parameter sharing, communication mechanism, and credit assignment. The main experimental platforms are based on {\bf Multiagent Particle Environment (MPE) }and {\bf The StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC)}. Extensive experiments clearly show that role diversity can serve as a robust measurement for the characteristics of a multi-agent cooperation task and help diagnose whether the policy fits the current multi-agent system for better policy performance.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

ZooD: Exploiting Model Zoo for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Qishi Dong
Awais Muhammad
Fengwei Zhou
Chuanlong Xie
Tianyang Hu
Yongxin Yang
Sung-Ho Bae
Zhenguo Li

Recent advances on large-scale pre-training have shown great potentials of leveraging a large set of Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) for improving Out-of-Distribution (OoD) generalization, for which the goal is to perform well on possible unseen domains after fine-tuning on multiple training domains. However, maximally exploiting a zoo of PTMs is challenging since fine-tuning all possible combinations of PTMs is computationally prohibitive while accurate selection of PTMs requires tackling the possible data distribution shift for OoD tasks. In this work, we propose ZooD, a paradigm for PTMs ranking and ensemble with feature selection. Our proposed metric ranks PTMs by quantifying inter-class discriminability and inter-domain stability of the features extracted by the PTMs in a leave-one-domain-out cross-validation manner. The top-K ranked models are then aggregated for the target OoD task. To avoid accumulating noise induced by model ensemble, we propose an efficient variational EM algorithm to select informative features. We evaluate our paradigm on a diverse model zoo consisting of 35 models for various OoD tasks and demonstrate: (i) model ranking is better correlated with fine-tuning ranking than previous methods and up to 9859x faster than brute-force fine-tuning; (ii) OoD generalization after model ensemble with feature selection outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and the accuracy on most challenging task DomainNet is improved from 46. 5\% to 50. 6\%. Furthermore, we provide the fine-tuning results of 35 PTMs on 7 OoD datasets, hoping to help the research of model zoo and OoD generalization. Code will be available at \href{https: //gitee. com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/zood}{https: //gitee. com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/zood}.

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ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Asymptotic Normality and Confidence Intervals for Prediction Risk of the Min-Norm Least Squares Estimator

Zeng Li
Chuanlong Xie
Qinwen Wang

This paper quantifies the uncertainty of prediction risk for the min-norm least squares estimator in high-dimensional linear regression models. We establish the asymptotic normality of prediction risk when both the sample size and the number of features tend to infinity. Based on the newly established central limit theorems(CLTs), we derive the confidence intervals of the prediction risk under various scenarios. Our results demonstrate the sample-wise non-monotonicity of the prediction risk and confirm “more data hurt" phenomenon. Furthermore, the width of confidence intervals indicates that over-parameterization would enlarge the randomness of prediction performance.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

MetaAugment: Sample-Aware Data Augmentation Policy Learning

Fengwei Zhou
Jiawei Li
Chuanlong Xie
Fei Chen
Lanqing Hong
Rui Sun
Zhenguo Li

Automated data augmentation has shown superior performance in image recognition. Existing works search for datasetlevel augmentation policies without considering individual sample variations, which are likely to be sub-optimal. On the other hand, learning different policies for different samples naively could greatly increase the computing cost. In this paper, we learn a sample-aware data augmentation policy efficiently by formulating it as a sample reweighting problem. Specifically, an augmentation policy network takes a transformation and the corresponding augmented image as inputs, and outputs a weight to adjust the augmented image loss computed by a task network. At training stage, the task network minimizes the weighted losses of augmented training images, while the policy network minimizes the loss of the task network on a validation set via meta-learning. We theoretically prove the convergence of the training procedure and further derive the exact convergence rate. Superior performance is achieved on widely-used benchmarks including CIFAR-10/100, Omniglot, and ImageNet.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

MixACM: Mixup-Based Robustness Transfer via Distillation of Activated Channel Maps

Awais Muhammad
Fengwei Zhou
Chuanlong Xie
Jiawei Li
Sung-Ho Bae
Zhenguo Li

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarially crafted, small, and imperceptible changes in the natural inputs. The most effective defense mechanism against these examples is adversarial training which constructs adversarial examples during training by iterative maximization of loss. The model is then trained to minimize the loss on these constructed examples. This min-max optimization requires more data, larger capacity models, and additional computing resources. It also degrades the standard generalization performance of a model. Can we achieve robustness more efficiently? In this work, we explore this question from the perspective of knowledge transfer. First, we theoretically show the transferability of robustness from an adversarially trained teacher model to a student model with the help of mixup augmentation. Second, we propose a novel robustness transfer method called Mixup-Based Activated Channel Maps (MixACM) Transfer. MixACM transfers robustness from a robust teacher to a student by matching activated channel maps generated without expensive adversarial perturbations. Finally, extensive experiments on multiple datasets and different learning scenarios show our method can transfer robustness while also improving generalization on natural images.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Towards a Theoretical Framework of Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Haotian Ye
Chuanlong Xie
Tianle Cai
Ruichen Li
Zhenguo Li
Liwei Wang

Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is one of the central problems in modern machine learning. Recently, there is a surge of attempts to propose algorithms that mainly build upon the idea of extracting invariant features. Although intuitively reasonable, theoretical understanding of what kind of invariance can guarantee OOD generalization is still limited, and generalization to arbitrary out-of-distribution is clearly impossible. In this work, we take the first step towards rigorous and quantitative definitions of 1) what is OOD; and 2) what does it mean by saying an OOD problem is learnable. We also introduce a new concept of expansion function, which characterizes to what extent the variance is amplified in the test domains over the training domains, and therefore give a quantitative meaning of invariant features. Based on these, we prove an OOD generalization error bound. It turns out that OOD generalization largely depends on the expansion function. As recently pointed out by Gulrajani & Lopez-Paz (2020), any OOD learning algorithm without a model selection module is incomplete. Our theory naturally induces a model selection criterion. Extensive experiments on benchmark OOD datasets demonstrate that our model selection criterion has a significant advantage over baselines.

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