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Yifan Gong

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10 papers

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JBHI Journal 2026 Journal Article

Multi-Source Discriminant Dynamic Domain Adaptation for Cross-Subject Motor Imagery EEG Recognition

Yifan Gong
Kaiting Shi
Xiaolong Niu
Lijun Yang
Xiaohui Yang
Chen Zheng

Electroencephalography (EEG) has emerged as a widely utilized signal in motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interfaces(BCI) due to its convenience and safety. Recently, deep learning methods have rapidly developed in the field of brain computer interfaces. However, traditional EEG classification methods often face challenges related to limited generalization capability across subjects. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-source discriminant dynamic domain adaptation model(MSD-DDA) aimed at fully leveraging domain adaptation to enhance the accuracy of motor imagery classification. The model adeptly handles global and local disparities in motor imagery classification by dynamically minimizing differences between global domain and local subdomain. Furthermore, to ensure discriminability and diversity in the target domain, we introduce batch kernel norm maximization of the difference, thereby enhancing the model’s discriminability in the target domain while preserving prediction diversity. To tackle variations in similarity between different source domains and the target domain, we devise a weighted joint prediction mechanism. This mechanism automatically adjusts the contribution weight of each source domain based on its similarity to the target domain, facilitating more precise discriminant prediction and improved adaptability to scenarios with multiple source domains. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a large number of experiments on datasets 1 and 2a of the Fourth BCI Competition and on the openBMI dataset, with average classification accuracy of 92. 43%, 79. 24% and 71. 96%, respectively. Finally, we compare the proposed method with several classical and recent algorithms, and prove that its performance is better than the existing methods.

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AAMAS Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Structured Agent Distillation for Large Language Model Agents

Jun Liu
Zhenglun Kong
Peiyan Dong
Changdi Yang
Tianqin Li
Yanyue Xie
Yifan Gong
Xuan Shen

Largelanguagemodels(LLMs)exhibitstrongcapabilitiesasdecisionmaking agents by interleaving reasoning and actions, as seen in ReAct-style frameworks. Yet, their practical deployment is constrained by high inference costs and large model sizes. We propose Structured Agent Distillation, the first framework to distill a ReAct-based LLM agent into a smaller model while preserving both reasoning fidelity and action consistency. Our method introduces a structured, span-level distillation strategy that explicitly segments trajectories into reasoning and action spans, enabling fine-grained alignment beyond standard token-level imitation. Unlike other advanced distillation methods, Our method segments trajectories into [REASON] and [ACT] spans, applying segmentspecific losses to align each component with the teacher’s behavior. This structure-aware supervision enables compact agents to better Corresponding Authors: Pu Zhao, Hao Tang. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4. 0 License. Proc. of the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2026), C. Amato, L. Dennis, V. Mascardi, J. Thangarajah (eds.), May 25 – 29, 2026, Paphos, Cyprus. © 2026 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www. ifaamas. org). https: //doi. org/10. 65109/OLHJ8062 replicate the teacher’s decision process. Experiments on ALFWorld, HotPotQA-ReAct, and WebShop show that our approach consistently outperforms token-level and imitation learning baselines, achieving significant compression with minimal performance drop. Scaling and ablation results further highlight the importance of span-level alignment for efficient and deployable agents. We will release code upon acceptance.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FairSMOE: Mitigating Multi-Attribute Fairness Problem with Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

Changdi Yang
Zheng Zhan
Ci Zhang
Yifan Gong
Yize Li
Zichong Meng
Jun Liu
Xuan Shen

Real‐world datasets usually contain multiple attributes, making it essential to ensure fairness across all of them simultaneously. However, different attributes may vary in difficulty, and no existing approaches have effectively addressed this issue. Consequently, an attribute‐adaptive strategy is needed to achieve fairness for all attributes. Multi‐task Learning (MTL) leverages shared information to optimize multiple tasks concurrently, while Sparsely‐Gated Mixture‐of‐Experts (SMoE) can dynamically allocate computational resources to the most needed tasks. In this work, we formulate multi‐attribute fairness issue as an MTL problem and employ SMoE to achieve desirable performance across all attributes simultaneously. We first analyze the feasibility and find the potentiality by formalizing multi-attribute fairness problem into a MTL problem and mitigating it by using SMoE. However, vanilla SMoE could lead to over-utilization problem which causes sub-optimal performance. We then proposed an innovative SMoE framework for multi-attribute fair image classification, which further improves multi-attribute fairness by redesigning the MoE layer and routing policy with fairness consideration. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness. Taking a DeiT-Small as the backbone, we achieve 77. 25% and 86. 01% accuracy on the ISIC2019 and CelebA dataset respectively with Multi-attribute Predictive Quality Disparity (PQD) score of 0. 801 and 0. 787, beating current state-of-the-art methods Muffin, InfoFair and MultiFair.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LazyDiT: Lazy Learning for the Acceleration of Diffusion Transformers

Xuan Shen
Zhao Song
Yufa Zhou
Bo Chen
Yanyu Li
Yifan Gong
Kai Zhang
Hao Tan

Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the preeminent models for a wide array of generative tasks, demonstrating superior performance and efficacy across various applications. The promising results come at the cost of slow inference, as each denoising step requires running the whole transformer model with a large amount of parameters. In this paper, we show that performing the full computation of the model at each diffusion step is unnecessary, as some computations can be skipped by lazily reusing the results of previous steps. Furthermore, we show that the lower bound of similarity between outputs at consecutive steps is notably high, and this similarity can be linearly approximated using the inputs. To verify our demonstrations, we propose the **LazyDiT**, a lazy learning framework that efficiently leverages cached results from earlier steps to skip redundant computations. Specifically, we incorporate lazy learning layers into the model, effectively trained to maximize laziness, enabling dynamic skipping of redundant computations. Experimental results show that LazyDiT outperforms the DDIM sampler across multiple diffusion transformer models at various resolutions. Furthermore, we implement our method on mobile devices, achieving better performance than DDIM with similar latency.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Exploring Token Pruning in Vision State Space Models

Zheng Zhan
Zhenglun Kong
Yifan Gong
Yushu Wu
Zichong Meng
Hangyu Zheng
Xuan Shen
Stratis Ioannidis

State Space Models (SSMs) have the advantage of keeping linear computational complexity compared to attention modules in transformers, and have been applied to vision tasks as a new type of powerful vision foundation model. Inspired by the observations that the final prediction in vision transformers (ViTs) is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, we take the novel step of enhancing the efficiency of SSM-based vision models through token-based pruning. However, direct applications of existing token pruning techniques designed for ViTs fail to deliver good performance, even with extensive fine-tuning. To address this issue, we revisit the unique computational characteristics of SSMs and discover that naive application disrupts the sequential token positions. This insight motivates us to design a novel and general token pruning method specifically for SSM-based vision models. We first introduce a pruning-aware hidden state alignment method to stabilize the neighborhood of remaining tokens for performance enhancement. Besides, based on our detailed analysis, we propose a token importance evaluation method adapted for SSM models, to guide the token pruning. With efficient implementation and practical acceleration methods, our method brings actual speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant computation reduction with minimal impact on performance across different tasks. Notably, we achieve 81. 7\% accuracy on ImageNet with a 41. 6\% reduction in the FLOPs for pruned PlainMamba-L3. Furthermore, our work provides deeper insights into understanding the behavior of SSM-based vision models for future research.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Fast and Memory-Efficient Video Diffusion Using Streamlined Inference

Zheng Zhan
Yushu Wu
Yifan Gong
Zichong Meng
Zhenglun Kong
Changdi Yang
Geng Yuan
Pu Zhao

The rapid progress in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC), especially with diffusion models, has significantly advanced development of high-quality video generation. However, current video diffusion models exhibit demanding computational requirements and high peak memory usage, especially for generating longer and higher-resolution videos. These limitations greatly hinder the practical application of video diffusion models on standard hardware platforms. To tackle this issue, we present a novel, training-free framework named Streamlined Inference, which leverages the temporal and spatial properties of video diffusion models. Our approach integrates three core components: Feature Slicer, Operator Grouping, and Step Rehash. Specifically, Feature Slicer effectively partitions input features into sub-features and Operator Grouping processes each sub-feature with a group of consecutive operators, resulting in significant memory reduction without sacrificing the quality or speed. Step Rehash further exploits the similarity between adjacent steps in diffusion, and accelerates inference through skipping unnecessary steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces peak memory and computational overhead, making it feasible to generate high-quality videos on a single consumer GPU (e. g. , reducing peak memory of Animatediff from 42GB to 11GB, featuring faster inference on 2080Ti).

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Search for Efficient Large Language Models

Xuan Shen
Pu Zhao
Yifan Gong
Zhenglun Kong
Zheng Zhan
Yushu Wu
Ming Lin
Chao Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have long held sway in the realms of artificial intelligence research. Numerous efficient techniques, including weight pruning, quantization, and distillation, have been embraced to compress LLMs, targeting memory reduction and inference acceleration, which underscore the redundancy in LLMs. However, most model compression techniques concentrate on weight optimization, overlooking the exploration of optimal architectures. Besides, traditional architecture search methods, limited by the elevated complexity with extensive parameters, struggle to demonstrate their effectiveness on LLMs. In this paper, we propose a training-free architecture search framework to identify optimal subnets that preserve the fundamental strengths of the original LLMs while achieving inference acceleration. Furthermore, after generating subnets that inherit specific weights from the original LLMs, we introduce a reformation algorithm that utilizes the omitted weights to rectify the inherited weights with a small amount of calibration data. Compared with SOTA training-free structured pruning works that can generate smaller networks, our method demonstrates superior performance across standard benchmarks. Furthermore, our generated subnets can directly reduce the usage of GPU memory and achieve inference acceleration.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

HotBEV: Hardware-oriented Transformer-based Multi-View 3D Detector for BEV Perception

Peiyan Dong
Zhenglun Kong
Xin Meng
Pinrui Yu
Yifan Gong
Geng Yuan
Hao Tang
Yanzhi Wang

The bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception plays a critical role in autonomous driving systems, involving the accurate and efficient detection and tracking of objects from a top-down perspective. To achieve real-time decision-making in self-driving scenarios, low-latency computation is essential. While recent approaches to BEV detection have focused on improving detection precision using Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS)-based or transformer-based schemas, the substantial computational and memory burden of these approaches increases the risk of system crashes when multiple on-vehicle tasks run simultaneously. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of literature on efficient BEV detector paradigms, let alone achieving realistic speedups. Unlike existing works that focus on reducing computation costs, this paper focuses on developing an efficient model design that prioritizes actual on-device latency. To achieve this goal, we propose a latency-aware design methodology that considers key hardware properties, such as memory access cost and degree of parallelism. Given the prevalence of GPUs as the main computation platform for autonomous driving systems, we develop a theoretical latency prediction model and introduce efficient building operators. By leveraging these operators and following an effective local-to-global visual modeling process, we propose a hardware-oriented backbone that is also optimized for strong feature capturing and fusing. Using these insights, we present a new hardware-oriented framework for efficient yet accurate camera-view BEV detectors. Experiments show that HotBEV achieves a 2\%$\sim$23\% NDS gain, and 2\%$\sim$7. 8\% mAP gain with a 1. 1$\times$$\sim$3. 4$\times$ speedups compared to existing works on V100; On multiple GPU devices such as GPU GTX 2080 and the low-end GTX 1080, HotBEV achieves 1. 1$\times$$\sim$6. 3$\times$ faster than others.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

SparCL: Sparse Continual Learning on the Edge

Zifeng Wang
Zheng Zhan
Yifan Gong
Geng Yuan
Wei Niu
Tong Jian
Bin Ren
Stratis Ioannidis

Existing work in continual learning (CL) focuses on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, i. e. , model performance deterioration on past tasks when learning a new task. However, the training efficiency of a CL system is under-investigated, which limits the real-world application of CL systems under resource-limited scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Sparse Continual Learning (SparCL), which is the first study that leverages sparsity to enable cost-effective continual learning on edge devices. SparCL achieves both training acceleration and accuracy preservation through the synergy of three aspects: weight sparsity, data efficiency, and gradient sparsity. Specifically, we propose task-aware dynamic masking (TDM) to learn a sparse network throughout the entire CL process, dynamic data removal (DDR) to remove less informative training data, and dynamic gradient masking (DGM) to sparsify the gradient updates. Each of them not only improves efficiency, but also further mitigates catastrophic forgetting. SparCL consistently improves the training efficiency of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) CL methods by at most 23X less training FLOPs, and, surprisingly, further improves the SOTA accuracy by at most 1. 7%. SparCL also outperforms competitive baselines obtained from adapting SOTA sparse training methods to the CL setting in both efficiency and accuracy. We also evaluate the effectiveness of SparCL on a real mobile phone, further indicating the practical potential of our method.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

MEST: Accurate and Fast Memory-Economic Sparse Training Framework on the Edge

Geng Yuan
Xiaolong Ma
Wei Niu
Zhengang Li
Zhenglun Kong
Ning Liu
Yifan Gong
Zheng Zhan

Recently, a new trend of exploring sparsity for accelerating neural network training has emerged, embracing the paradigm of training on the edge. This paper proposes a novel Memory-Economic Sparse Training (MEST) framework targeting for accurate and fast execution on edge devices. The proposed MEST framework consists of enhancements by Elastic Mutation (EM) and Soft Memory Bound (&S) that ensure superior accuracy at high sparsity ratios. Different from the existing works for sparse training, this current work reveals the importance of sparsity schemes on the performance of sparse training in terms of accuracy as well as training speed on real edge devices. On top of that, the paper proposes to employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. Our results suggest that unforgettable examples can be identified in-situ even during the dynamic exploration of sparsity masks in the sparse training process, and therefore can be removed for further training speedup on edge devices. Comparing with state-of-the-art (SOTA) works on accuracy, our MEST increases Top-1 accuracy significantly on ImageNet when using the same unstructured sparsity scheme. Systematical evaluation on accuracy, training speed, and memory footprint are conducted, where the proposed MEST framework consistently outperforms representative SOTA works. A reviewer strongly against our work based on his false assumptions and misunderstandings. On top of the previous submission, we employ data efficiency for further acceleration of sparse training. And we explore the impact of model sparsity, sparsity schemes, and sparse training algorithms on the number of removable training examples. Our codes are publicly available at: https: //github. com/boone891214/MEST.

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