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Taifeng Wang

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13 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Exploring Polyglot Harmony: On Multilingual Data Allocation for Large Language Models Pretraining

Ping Guo
Yubing Ren
Binbin Liu
Fengze Liu
Haobin Lin
Yifan Zhang
Bingni Zhang
Taifeng Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to a wide range of applications worldwide, driving an unprecedented global demand for effective multilingual capabilities. Central to achieving robust multilingual performance is the strategic allocation of language proportions within training corpora. However, determining optimal language ratios is highly challenging due to intricate cross-lingual interactions and sensitivity to dataset scale. This paper introduces CLIMB (Cross-Lingual Interaction-aware Multilingual Balancing), a novel framework designed to systematically optimize multilingual data allocation. At its core, CLIMB introduces a cross-lingual interaction-aware language ratio, explicitly quantifying each language’s effective allocation by capturing inter-language dependencies. Leveraging this ratio, CLIMB proposes a principled two-step optimization procedure—first equalizing marginal benefits across languages, then maximizing the magnitude of the resulting language allocation vectors—significantly simplifying the inherently complex multilingual optimization problem. Extensive experiments confirm that CLIMB can accurately measure cross-lingual interactions across various multilingual settings. LLMs trained with CLIMB-derived proportions consistently achieve state-of-the-art multilingual performance, even achieve competitive performance with open-sourced LLMs trained with more tokens.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MoORE: SVD-based Model MoE-ization for Conflict- and Oblivion-Resistant Multi-Task Adaptation

Shen Yuan
Yin Zheng
Taifeng Wang
Binbin Liu
Hongteng Xu

Adapting large-scale foundation models in multi-task scenarios often suffers from task conflict and oblivion. To mitigate such issues, we propose a novel "model MoE-ization" strategy that leads to a conflict- and oblivion-resistant multi-task adaptation method. Given a weight matrix of a pre-trained model, our method applies SVD to it and introduces a learnable router to adjust its singular values based on tasks and samples. Accordingly, the weight matrix becomes a Mixture of Orthogonal Rank-one Experts (MoORE), in which each expert corresponds to the outer product of a left singular vector and the corresponding right one. We can improve the model capacity by imposing a learnable orthogonal transform on the right singular vectors. Unlike low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its MoE-driven variants, MoORE guarantees the experts' orthogonality and maintains the column space of the original weight matrix. These two properties make the adapted model resistant to the conflicts among the new tasks and the oblivion of its original tasks, respectively. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that MoORE outperforms existing multi-task adaptation methods consistently, showing its superiority in terms of conflict- and oblivion-resistance. The code is available at https: //github. com/DaShenZi721/MoORE.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MuRating: A High Quality Data Selecting Approach to Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining

Zhixun Chen
Ping Guo
Wenhan Han
Yifan Zhang
Binbin Liu
Haobin Lin
Fengze Liu
Yan Zhao

Data quality is a critical driver of large language model performance, yet existing model-based selection methods focus almost exclusively on English, neglecting other languages that are essential in the training mix for multilingual LLMs. We introduce MuRating, a scalable framework that transfers high-quality English data-quality signals into a multilingual autorater, capable of handling 17 languages. MuRating aggregates multiple English autoraters via pairwise comparisons to learn unified document quality scores, then projects these judgments through translation to train a multilingual evaluator on monolingual, cross-lingual, and parallel text pairs. Applied to web data, MuRating selects balanced subsets of English and multilingual content to pretrain LLaMA-architecture models of 1. 2B and 7B parameters. Compared to strong baselines, including QuRater, FineWeb2-HQ, AskLLM, DCLM, our approach increases average accuracy on both English benchmarks and multilingual evaluations. Extensive analyses further validate that pairwise training provides greater stability and robustness than pointwise scoring, underscoring the effectiveness of MuRating as a general multilingual data-selection framework.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Size-Generalizable RNA Structure Evaluation by Exploring Hierarchical Geometries

Zongzhao Li
Jiacheng Cen
Wenbing Huang 0001
Taifeng Wang
Le Song

Understanding the 3D structure of RNA is essential for deciphering its function and developing RNA-based therapeutics. Geometric Graph Neural Networks (GeoGNNs) that conform to the $\mathrm{E}(3)$-symmetry have advanced RNA structure evaluation, a crucial step toward RNA structure prediction. However, existing GeoGNNs are still defective in two aspects: 1. inefficient or incapable of capturing the full geometries of RNA; 2. limited generalization ability when the size of RNA significantly differs between training and test datasets. In this paper, we propose EquiRNA, a novel equivariant GNN model by exploring the three-level hierarchical geometries of RNA. At its core, EquiRNA effectively addresses the size generalization challenge by reusing the representation of nucleotide, the common building block shared across RNAs of varying sizes. Moreover, by adopting a scalarization-based equivariant GNN as the backbone, our model maintains directional information while offering higher computational efficiency compared to existing GeoGNNs. Additionally, we propose a size-insensitive $K$-nearest neighbor sampling strategy to enhance the model's robustness to RNA size shifts. We test our approach on our created benchmark as well as an existing dataset. The results show that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, providing a robust baseline for RNA 3D structure modeling and evaluation.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

LogicMP: A Neuro-symbolic Approach for Encoding First-order Logic Constraints

Weidi Xu
Jingwei Wang
Lele Xie
Jianshan He
Hongting Zhou
Taifeng Wang
Xiaopei Wan
Jingdong Chen

Integrating first-order logic constraints (FOLCs) with neural networks is a crucial but challenging problem since it involves modeling intricate correlations to satisfy the constraints. This paper proposes a novel neural layer, LogicMP, which performs mean-field variational inference over a Markov Logic Network (MLN). It can be plugged into any off-the-shelf neural network to encode FOLCs while retaining modularity and efficiency. By exploiting the structure and symmetries in MLNs, we theoretically demonstrate that our well-designed, efficient mean-field iterations greatly mitigate the difficulty of MLN inference, reducing the inference from sequential calculation to a series of parallel tensor operations. Empirical results in three kinds of tasks over images, graphs, and text show that LogicMP outperforms advanced competitors in both performance and efficiency.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

xTrimoGene: An Efficient and Scalable Representation Learner for Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data

Jing Gong
Minsheng Hao
Xingyi Cheng
Xin Zeng
Chiming Liu
Jianzhu Ma
Xuegong Zhang
Taifeng Wang

Advances in high-throughput sequencing technology have led to significant progress in measuring gene expressions at the single-cell level. The amount of publicly available single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data is already surpassing 50M records for humans with each record measuring 20, 000 genes. This highlights the need for unsupervised representation learning to fully ingest these data, yet classical transformer architectures are prohibitive to train on such data in terms of both computation and memory. To address this challenge, we propose a novel asymmetric encoder-decoder transformer for scRNA-seq data, called xTrimoGene$^\alpha$ (or xTrimoGene for short), which leverages the sparse characteristic of the data to scale up the pre-training. This scalable design of xTrimoGene reduces FLOPs by one to two orders of magnitude compared to classical transformers while maintaining high accuracy, enabling us to train the largest transformer models over the largest scRNA-seq dataset today. Our experiments also show that the performance of xTrimoGene improves as we scale up the model sizes, and it also leads to SOTA performance over various downstream tasks, such as cell type annotation, perturb-seq effect prediction, and drug combination prediction. xTrimoGene model is now available for use as a service via the following link: https: //api. biomap. com/xTrimoGene/apply.

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ICML Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent with Delay Compensation

Shuxin Zheng
Qi Meng
Taifeng Wang
Wei Chen 0034
Nenghai Yu
Zhiming Ma
Tie-Yan Liu

With the fast development of deep learning, it has become common to learn big neural networks using massive training data. Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (ASGD) is widely adopted to fulfill this task for its efficiency, which is, however, known to suffer from the problem of delayed gradients. That is, when a local worker adds its gradient to the global model, the global model may have been updated by other workers and this gradient becomes “delayed”. We propose a novel technology to compensate this delay, so as to make the optimization behavior of ASGD closer to that of sequential SGD. This is achieved by leveraging Taylor expansion of the gradient function and efficient approximators to the Hessian matrix of the loss function. We call the new algorithm Delay Compensated ASGD (DC-ASGD). We evaluated the proposed algorithm on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that DC-ASGD outperforms both synchronous SGD and asynchronous SGD, and nearly approaches the performance of sequential SGD.

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AAAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Asynchronous Stochastic Proximal Optimization Algorithms with Variance Reduction

Qi Meng
Wei Chen
Jingcheng Yu
Taifeng Wang
Zhi-Ming Ma
Tie-Yan Liu

Regularized empirical risk minimization (R-ERM) is an important branch of machine learning, since it constrains the capacity of the hypothesis space and guarantees the generalization ability of the learning algorithm. Two classic proximal optimization algorithms, i. e. , proximal stochastic gradient descent (ProxSGD) and proximal stochastic coordinate descent (ProxSCD) have been widely used to solve the R-ERM problem. Recently, variance reduction technique was proposed to improve ProxSGD and ProxSCD, and the corresponding ProxSVRG and ProxSVRCD have better convergence rate. These proximal algorithms with variance reduction technique have also achieved great success in applications at small and moderate scales. However, in order to solve large-scale R- ERM problems and make more practical impacts, the parallel versions of these algorithms are sorely needed. In this paper, we propose asynchronous ProxSVRG (Async-ProxSVRG) and asynchronous ProxSVRCD (Async-ProxSVRCD) algorithms, and prove that Async-ProxSVRG can achieve near linear speedup when the training data is sparse, while Async- ProxSVRCD can achieve near linear speedup regardless of the sparse condition, as long as the number of block partitions are appropriately set. We have conducted experiments on a regularized logistic regression task. The results veriﬁed our theoretical ﬁndings and demonstrated the practical efﬁciency of the asynchronous stochastic proximal algorithms with variance reduction.

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AAAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Generalization Error Bounds for Optimization Algorithms via Stability

Qi Meng
Yue Wang
Wei Chen
Taifeng Wang
Zhi-Ming Ma
Tie-Yan Liu

Many machine learning tasks can be formulated as Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization (R-ERM), and solved by optimization algorithms such as gradient descent (GD), stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and stochastic variance reduction (SVRG). Conventional analysis on these optimization algorithms focuses on their convergence rates during the training process, however, people in the machine learning community may care more about the generalization performance of the learned model on unseen test data. In this paper, we investigate on this issue, by using stability as a tool. In particular, we decompose the generalization error for R-ERM, and derive its upper bound for both convex and nonconvex cases. In convex cases, we prove that the generalization error can be bounded by the convergence rate of the optimization algorithm and the stability of the R-ERM process, both in expectation (in the order of O(1/n) + Eρ(T)), where ρ(T) is the convergence error and T is the number of iterations) and in high probability (in the order of O log 1/δ √ n + ρ(T) with probability 1 − δ). For nonconvex cases, we can also obtain a similar expected generalization error bound. Our theorems indicate that 1) along with the training process, the generalization error will decrease for all the optimization algorithms under our investigation; 2) Comparatively speaking, SVRG has better generalization ability than GD and SGD. We have conducted experiments on both convex and nonconvex problems, and the experimental results verify our theoretical ﬁndings.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

LightGBM: A Highly Efficient Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

Guolin Ke
Qi Meng
Thomas Finley
Taifeng Wang
Wei Chen
Weidong Ma
Qiwei Ye
Tie-Yan Liu

Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) is a popular machine learning algorithm, and has quite a few effective implementations such as XGBoost and pGBRT. Although many engineering optimizations have been adopted in these implementations, the efficiency and scalability are still unsatisfactory when the feature dimension is high and data size is large. A major reason is that for each feature, they need to scan all the data instances to estimate the information gain of all possible split points, which is very time consuming. To tackle this problem, we propose two novel techniques: \emph{Gradient-based One-Side Sampling} (GOSS) and \emph{Exclusive Feature Bundling} (EFB). With GOSS, we exclude a significant proportion of data instances with small gradients, and only use the rest to estimate the information gain. We prove that, since the data instances with larger gradients play a more important role in the computation of information gain, GOSS can obtain quite accurate estimation of the information gain with a much smaller data size. With EFB, we bundle mutually exclusive features (i. e. , they rarely take nonzero values simultaneously), to reduce the number of features. We prove that finding the optimal bundling of exclusive features is NP-hard, but a greedy algorithm can achieve quite good approximation ratio (and thus can effectively reduce the number of features without hurting the accuracy of split point determination by much). We call our new GBDT implementation with GOSS and EFB \emph{LightGBM}. Our experiments on multiple public datasets show that, LightGBM speeds up the training process of conventional GBDT by up to over 20 times while achieving almost the same accuracy.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

A Communication-Efficient Parallel Algorithm for Decision Tree

Qi Meng
Guolin Ke
Taifeng Wang
Wei Chen
Qiwei Ye
Zhi-Ming Ma
Tie-Yan Liu

Decision tree (and its extensions such as Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and Random Forest) is a widely used machine learning algorithm, due to its practical effectiveness and model interpretability. With the emergence of big data, there is an increasing need to parallelize the training process of decision tree. However, most existing attempts along this line suffer from high communication costs. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called \emph{Parallel Voting Decision Tree (PV-Tree)}, to tackle this challenge. After partitioning the training data onto a number of (e. g. , $M$) machines, this algorithm performs both local voting and global voting in each iteration. For local voting, the top-$k$ attributes are selected from each machine according to its local data. Then, the indices of these top attributes are aggregated by a server, and the globally top-$2k$ attributes are determined by a majority voting among these local candidates. Finally, the full-grained histograms of the globally top-$2k$ attributes are collected from local machines in order to identify the best (most informative) attribute and its split point. PV-Tree can achieve a very low communication cost (independent of the total number of attributes) and thus can scale out very well. Furthermore, theoretical analysis shows that this algorithm can learn a near optimal decision tree, since it can find the best attribute with a large probability. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that PV-Tree significantly outperforms the existing parallel decision tree algorithms in the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency.

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IJCAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Asynchronous Accelerated Stochastic Gradient Descent

Qi Meng
Wei Chen
Jingcheng Yu
Taifeng Wang
Zhi-Ming Ma
Tie-Yan Liu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used optimization algorithm in machine learning. In order to accelerate the convergence of SGD, a few advanced techniques have been developed in recent years, including variance reduction, stochastic coordinate sampling, and Nesterov's acceleration method. Furthermore, in order to improve the training speed and/or leverage larger-scale training data, asynchronous parallelization of SGD has also been studied. Then, a natural question is whether these techniques can be seamlessly integrated with each other, and whether the integration has desirable theoretical guarantee on its convergence. In this paper, we provide our formal answer to this question. In particular, we consider the asynchronous parallelization of SGD, accelerated by leveraging variance reduction, coordinate sampling, and Nesterov's method. We call the new algorithm asynchronous accelerated SGD (AASGD). Theoretically, we proved a convergence rate of AASGD, which indicates that (i) the three acceleration methods are complementary to each other and can make their own contributions to the improvement of convergence rate; (ii) asynchronous parallelization does not hurt the convergence rate, and can achieve considerable speedup under appropriate parameter setting. Empirically, we tested AASGD on a few benchmark datasets. The experimental results verified our theoretical findings and indicated that AASGD could be a highly effective and efficient algorithm for practical use.

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AAAI Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Sequential Click Prediction for Sponsored Search with Recurrent Neural Networks

Yuyu Zhang
Hanjun Dai
Chang Xu
Jun Feng
Taifeng Wang
Jiang Bian
Bin Wang
Tie-Yan Liu

Click prediction is one of the fundamental problems in sponsored search. Most of existing studies took advantage of machine learning approaches to predict ad click for each event of ad view independently. However, as observed in the real-world sponsored search system, user’s behaviors on ads yield high dependency on how the user behaved along with the past time, especially in terms of what queries she submitted, what ads she clicked or ignored, and how long she spent on the landing pages of clicked ads, etc. Inspired by these observations, we introduce a novel framework based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). Compared to traditional methods, this framework directly models the dependency on user’s sequential behaviors into the click prediction process through the recurrent structure in RNN. Large scale evaluations on the click-through logs from a commercial search engine demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the click prediction accuracy, compared to sequence-independent approaches.

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