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Fangchen Yu

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6 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

UltraTWD: Optimizing Ultrametric Trees for Tree-Wasserstein Distance

Fangchen Yu
Yanzhen Chen
Jiaxing Wei
Jianfeng Mao
Wenye Li 0001
Qiang Sun 0007

The Wasserstein distance is a widely used metric for measuring differences between distributions, but its super-cubic time complexity introduces substantial computational burdens. To mitigate this, the tree-Wasserstein distance (TWD) offers a linear-time approximation by leveraging a tree structure; however, existing TWD methods often compromise accuracy due to suboptimal tree structures and edge weights. To address it, we introduce UltraTWD, a novel unsupervised framework that simultaneously optimizes both ultrametric tree structures and edge weights to more faithfully approximate the cost matrix. Specifically, we develop algorithms based on minimum spanning trees, iterative projection, and gradient descent to efficiently learn high-quality ultrametric trees. Empirical results across document retrieval, ranking, and classification tasks demonstrate that UltraTWD achieves superior approximation accuracy and competitive downstream performance. Code is available at: https: //github. com/NeXAIS/UltraTWD.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

FedLF: Layer-Wise Fair Federated Learning

Zibin Pan
Chi Li
Fangchen Yu
Shuyi Wang
Haijin Wang
Xiaoying Tang
Junhua Zhao

Fairness has become an important concern in Federated Learning (FL). An unfair model that performs well for some clients while performing poorly for others can reduce the willingness of clients to participate. In this work, we identify a direct cause of unfairness in FL - the use of an unfair direction to update the global model, which favors some clients while conflicting with other clients’ gradients at the model and layer levels. To address these issues, we propose a layer-wise fair Federated Learning algorithm (FedLF). Firstly, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem with an effective fair-driven objective for FL. A layer-wise fair direction is then calculated to mitigate the model and layer-level gradient conflicts and reduce the improvement bias. We further provide the theoretical analysis on how FedLF can improve fairness and guarantee convergence. Extensive experiments on different learning tasks and models demonstrate that FedLF outperforms the SOTA FL algorithms in terms of accuracy and fairness. The source code is available at https://github.com/zibinpan/FedLF.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Boosting Spectral Clustering on Incomplete Data via Kernel Correction and Affinity Learning

Fangchen Yu
Runze Zhao
Zhan Shi
Yiwen Lu
Jicong Fan
Yicheng Zeng
Jianfeng Mao
Wenye Li

Spectral clustering has gained popularity for clustering non-convex data due to its simplicity and effectiveness. It is essential to construct a similarity graph using a high-quality affinity measure that models the local neighborhood relations among the data samples. However, incomplete data can lead to inaccurate affinity measures, resulting in degraded clustering performance. To address these issues, we propose an imputation-free framework with two novel approaches to improve spectral clustering on incomplete data. Firstly, we introduce a new kernel correction method that enhances the quality of the kernel matrix estimated on incomplete data with a theoretical guarantee, benefiting classical spectral clustering on pre-defined kernels. Secondly, we develop a series of affinity learning methods that equip the self-expressive framework with $\ell_p$-norm to construct an intrinsic affinity matrix with an adaptive extension. Our methods outperform existing data imputation and distance calibration techniques on benchmark datasets, offering a promising solution to spectral clustering on incomplete data in various real-world applications.

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ECAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Highly-Efficient Robinson-Foulds Distance Estimation with Matrix Correction

Fangchen Yu
Rui Bao
Jianfeng Mao
Wenye Li 0001

Phylogenetic trees are essential in studying evolutionary relationships, and the Robinson-Foulds (RF) distance is a widely used metric to calculate pairwise dissimilarities between phylogenetic trees, with various applications in both the biology and computing communities. However, generating a precise RF distance matrix becomes difficult or even intractable when tree information is partially missing. To address this issue, we introduce a novel distance correction algorithm for estimating the RF distance matrix of incomplete phylogenetic trees. Our method innovatively harnesses the assumption of Euclidean embedding, correcting an approximate distance matrix into a valid distance metric, guaranteed to be closer to the unknown ground-truth. Despite its simplicity, our approach exhibits robust performance, efficiency, and scalability in empirical evaluations, outperforming classical distance correction algorithms and holding potential benefits in downstream applications. Our code is available at https: //github. com/CUHKSZ-Yu/EMC.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Metric Nearness Made Practical

Wenye Li
Fangchen Yu
Zichen Ma

Given a square matrix with noisy dissimilarity measures between pairs of data samples, the metric nearness model computes the best approximation of the matrix from a set of valid distance metrics. Despite its wide applications in machine learning and data processing tasks, the model faces non-trivial computational requirements in seeking the solution due to the large number of metric constraints associated with the feasible region. Our work designed a practical approach in two stages to tackle the challenge and improve the model's scalability and applicability. The first stage computes a fast yet high-quality approximate solution from a set of isometrically embeddable metrics, further improved by an effective heuristic. The second stage refines the approximate solution with the Halpern-Lions-Wittmann-Bauschke projection algorithm, which converges quickly to the optimal solution. In empirical evaluations, the proposed approach runs at least an order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art solutions, with significantly improved scalability, complete conformity to constraints, less memory consumption, and other desirable features in real applications.

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UAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Online estimation of similarity matrices with incomplete data

Fangchen Yu
Yicheng Zeng
Jianfeng Mao
Wenye Li 0001

The similarity matrix measures pairwise similarities between a set of data points and is an essential concept in data processing, routinely used in practical applications. Obtaining a similarity matrix is typically straightforward when data points are completely observed. However, incomplete observations can make it challenging to obtain a high-quality similarity matrix, which becomes even more complex in online data. To address this challenge, we propose matrix correction algorithms that leverage the positive semi-definiteness (PSD) of the similarity matrix to improve similarity estimation in both offline and online scenarios. Our approaches have a solid theoretical guarantee of performance and excellent potential for parallel execution on large-scale data. Empirical evaluations demonstrate their high effectiveness and efficiency with significantly improved results over classical imputation-based methods, benefiting downstream applications with superior performance. Our code is available at \url{https: //github. com/CUHKSZ-Yu/OnMC}.

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