Dueling Over Dessert, Mastering the Art of Repeated Cake Cutting

We consider the setting of repeated fair division between two players, denoted Alice and Bob, with private valuations over a cake. In each round, a new cake arrives, which is identical to the ones in previous rounds. Alice cuts the cake at a point of her choice, while Bob chooses the left piece or the right piece, leaving the remainder for Alice. We consider two versions: sequential, where Bob observes Alice's cut point before choosing left/right, and simultaneous, where he only observes her cut point after making his choice. The simultaneous version was first considered by Aumann and Maschler (1995). We observe that if Bob is almost myopic and chooses his favorite piece too often, then he can be systematically exploited by Alice through a strategy akin to a binary search. This strategy allows Alice to approximate Bob's preferences with increasing precision, thereby securing a disproportionate share of the resource over time. We analyze the limits of how much a player can exploit the other one and show that fair utility profiles are in fact achievable. Specifically, the players can enforce the equitable utility profile of $(1/2, 1/2)$ in the limit on every trajectory of play, by keeping the other player's utility to approximately $1/2$ on average while guaranteeing they themselves get at least approximately $1/2$ on average. We show this theorem using a connection with Blackwell approachability. Finally, we analyze a natural dynamic known as fictitious play, where players best respond to the empirical distribution of the other player. We show that fictitious play converges to the equitable utility profile of $(1/2, 1/2)$ at a rate of $O(1/\sqrt{T})$.

Two Trades is not Baffled: Condensing Graph via Crafting Rational Gradient Matching

Training on large-scale graphs has achieved remarkable results in graph representation learning, but its cost and storage have raised growing concerns. As one of the most promising directions, graph condensation methods address these issues by employing gradient matching, aiming to condense the full graph into a more concise yet information-rich synthetic set. Though encouraging, these strategies primarily emphasize matching directions of the gradients, which leads to deviations in the training trajectories. Such deviations are further magnified by the differences between the condensation and evaluation phases, culminating in accumulated errors, which detrimentally affect the performance of the condensed graphs. In light of this, we propose a novel graph condensation method named \textbf{C}raf\textbf{T}ing \textbf{R}ationa\textbf{L} trajectory (\textbf{CTRL}), which offers an optimized starting point closer to the original dataset's feature distribution and a more refined strategy for gradient matching. Theoretically, CTRL can effectively neutralize the impact of accumulated errors on the performance of condensed graphs. We provide extensive experiments on various graph datasets and downstream tasks to support the effectiveness of CTRL. Code is released at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/CTRL.

MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models

Molecular Relational Learning (MRL), aiming to understand interactions between molecular pairs, plays a pivotal role in advancing biochemical research. Recently, the adoption of large language models (LLMs), known for their vast knowledge repositories and advanced logical inference capabilities, has emerged as a promising way for efficient and effective MRL. Despite their potential, these methods predominantly rely on the textual data, thus not fully harnessing the wealth of structural information inherent in molecular graphs. Moreover, the absence of a unified framework exacerbates the information underutilization, as it hinders the sharing of interaction rationale learned across diverse datasets. To address these challenges, this work proposes a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for Molecular inTeraction prediction following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory, termed MolTC, which can efficiently integrate rich graphical information of molecular pairs. For achieving a unified MRL, MolTC innovatively develops a dynamic parameter-sharing strategy for cross-dataset information exchange, and introduces a Multi-hierarchical CoT principle to refine training paradigm. Our experiments, conducted across twelve varied datasets involving over 4,000,000 molecular pairs, demonstrate the superiority of our method over current GNN and LLM-based baselines. On the top of that, a comprehensive Molecular Interactive Instructions dataset is constructed for the development of biochemical LLM, including our MolTC. Code is available at https://github.com/MangoKiller/MolTC.

Modeling Spatio-temporal Dynamical Systems with Neural Discrete Learning and Levels-of-Experts

In this paper, we address the issue of modeling and estimating changes in the state of the spatio-temporal dynamical systems based on a sequence of observations like video frames. Traditional numerical simulation systems depend largely on the initial settings and correctness of the constructed partial differential equations (PDEs). Despite recent efforts yielding significant success in discovering data-driven PDEs with neural networks, the limitations posed by singular scenarios and the absence of local insights prevent them from performing effectively in a broader real-world context. To this end, this paper propose the universal expert module -- that is, optical flow estimation component, to capture the evolution laws of general physical processes in a data-driven fashion. To enhance local insight, we painstakingly design a finer-grained physical pipeline, since local characteristics may be influenced by various internal contextual information, which may contradict the macroscopic properties of the whole system. Further, we harness currently popular neural discrete learning to unveil the underlying important features in its latent space, this process better injects interpretability, which can help us obtain a powerful prior over these discrete random variables. We conduct extensive experiments and ablations to demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves large performance margins, compared with the existing SOTA baselines.

EXGC: Bridging Efficiency and Explainability in Graph Condensation

Graph representation learning on vast datasets, like web data, has made significant strides. However, the associated computational and storage overheads raise concerns. In sight of this, Graph condensation (GCond) has been introduced to distill these large real datasets into a more concise yet information-rich synthetic graph. Despite acceleration efforts, existing GCond methods mainly grapple with efficiency, especially on expansive web data graphs. Hence, in this work, we pinpoint two major inefficiencies of current paradigms: (1) the concurrent updating of a vast parameter set, and (2) pronounced parameter redundancy. To counteract these two limitations correspondingly, we first (1) employ the Mean-Field variational approximation for convergence acceleration, and then (2) propose the objective of Gradient Information Bottleneck (GDIB) to prune redundancy. By incorporating the leading explanation techniques (e.g., GNNExplainer and GSAT) to instantiate the GDIB, our EXGC, the Efficient and eXplainable Graph Condensation method is proposed, which can markedly boost efficiency and inject explainability. Our extensive evaluations across eight datasets underscore EXGC's superiority and relevance. Code is available at https://github.com/MangoKiller/EXGC.

Two Heads Are Better Than One: Boosting Graph Sparse Training via Semantic and Topological Awareness

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in various graph learning tasks but face computational challenges when applied to large-scale graphs. A promising solution is to remove non-essential edges to reduce the computational overheads in GNN. Previous literature generally falls into two categories: topology-guided and semantic-guided. The former maintains certain graph topological properties yet often underperforms on GNNs due to low integration with neural network training. The latter performs well at lower sparsity on GNNs but faces performance collapse at higher sparsity levels. With this in mind, we take the first step to propose a new research line and concept termed Graph Sparse Training (GST), which dynamically manipulates sparsity at the data level. Specifically, GST initially constructs a topology & semantic anchor at a low training cost, followed by performing dynamic sparse training to align the sparse graph with the anchor. We introduce the Equilibria Sparsification Principle to guide this process, effectively balancing the preservation of both topological and semantic information. Ultimately, GST produces a sparse graph with maximum topological integrity and no performance degradation. Extensive experiments on 6 datasets and 5 backbones showcase that GST (I) identifies subgraphs at higher graph sparsity levels (1.67%~15.85% $\uparrow$) than state-of-the-art sparsification methods, (II) preserves more key spectral properties, (III) achieves 1.27-3.42$\times$ speedup in GNN inference and (IV) successfully helps graph adversarial defense and graph lottery tickets.

SwapNet: Efficient Swapping for DNN Inference on Edge AI Devices Beyond the Memory Budget

Executing deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge artificial intelligence (AI) devices enables various autonomous mobile computing applications. However, the memory budget of edge AI devices restricts the number and complexity of DNNs allowed in such applications. Existing solutions, such as model compression or cloud offloading, reduce the memory footprint of DNN inference at the cost of decreased model accuracy or autonomy. To avoid these drawbacks, we divide DNN into blocks and swap them in and out in order, such that large DNNs can execute within a small memory budget. Nevertheless, naive swapping on edge AI devices induces significant delays due to the redundant memory operations in the DNN development ecosystem for edge AI devices. To this end, we develop SwapNet, an efficient DNN block swapping middleware for edge AI devices. We systematically eliminate the unnecessary memory operations during block swapping while retaining compatible with the deep learning frameworks, GPU backends, and hardware architectures of edge AI devices. We further showcase the utility of SwapNet via a multi-DNN scheduling scheme. Evaluations on eleven DNN inference tasks in three applications demonstrate that SwapNet achieves almost the same latency as the case with sufficient memory even when DNNs demand 2.32x to 5.81x memory beyond the available budget. The design of SwapNet also provides novel and feasible insights for deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge AI devices in the future.

Earthfarseer: Versatile Spatio-Temporal Dynamical Systems Modeling in One Model

Efficiently modeling spatio-temporal (ST) physical processes and observations presents a challenging problem for the deep learning community. Many recent studies have concentrated on meticulously reconciling various advantages, leading to designed models that are neither simple nor practical. To address this issue, this paper presents a systematic study on existing shortcomings faced by off-the-shelf models, including lack of local fidelity, poor prediction performance over long time-steps,low scalability, and inefficiency. To systematically address the aforementioned problems, we propose an EarthFarseer, a concise framework that combines parallel local convolutions and global Fourier-based transformer architectures, enabling dynamically capture the local-global spatial interactions and dependencies. EarthFarseer also incorporates a multi-scale fully convolutional and Fourier architectures to efficiently and effectively capture the temporal evolution. Our proposal demonstrates strong adaptability across various tasks and datasets, with fast convergence and better local fidelity in long time-steps predictions. Extensive experiments and visualizations over eight human society physical and natural physical datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of EarthFarseer. We release our code at https://github.com/easylearningscores/EarthFarseer.

TMT-VIS: Taxonomy-aware Multi-dataset Joint Training for Video Instance Segmentation

Training on large-scale datasets can boost the performance of video instance segmentation while the annotated datasets for VIS are hard to scale up due to the high labor cost. What we possess are numerous isolated filed-specific datasets, thus, it is appealing to jointly train models across the aggregation of datasets to enhance data volume and diversity. However, due to the heterogeneity in category space, as mask precision increases with the data volume, simply utilizing multiple datasets will dilute the attention of models on different taxonomies. Thus, increasing the data scale and enriching taxonomy space while improving classification precision is important. In this work, we analyze that providing extra taxonomy information can help models concentrate on specific taxonomy, and propose our model named Taxonomy-aware Multi-dataset Joint Training for Video Instance Segmentation (TMT-VIS) to address this vital challenge. Specifically, we design a two-stage taxonomy aggregation module that first compiles taxonomy information from input videos and then aggregates these taxonomy priors into instance queries before the transformer decoder. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on four popular and challenging benchmarks, including YouTube-VIS 2019, YouTube-VIS 2021, OVIS, and UVO. Our model shows significant improvement over the baseline solutions, and sets new state-of-the-art records on all benchmarks. These appealing and encouraging results demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/rkzheng99/TMT-VIS(https://github.com/rkzheng99/TMT-VIS)

Attend Who is Weak: Enhancing Graph Condensation via Cross-Free Adversarial Training

In this paper, we study the \textit{graph condensation} problem by compressing the large, complex graph into a concise, synthetic representation that preserves the most essential and discriminative information of structure and features. We seminally propose the concept of Shock Absorber (a type of perturbation) that enhances the robustness and stability of the original graphs against changes in an adversarial training fashion. Concretely, (I) we forcibly match the gradients between pre-selected graph neural networks (GNNs) trained on a synthetic, simplified graph and the original training graph at regularly spaced intervals. (II) Before each update synthetic graph point, a Shock Absorber serves as a gradient attacker to maximize the distance between the synthetic dataset and the original graph by selectively perturbing the parts that are underrepresented or insufficiently informative. We iteratively repeat the above two processes (I and II) in an adversarial training fashion to maintain the highly-informative context without losing correlation with the original dataset. More importantly, our shock absorber and the synthesized graph parallelly share the backward process in a free training manner. Compared to the original adversarial training, it introduces almost no additional time overhead. We validate our framework across 8 datasets (3 graph and 5 node classification datasets) and achieve prominent results: for example, on Cora, Citeseer and Ogbn-Arxiv, we can gain nearly 1.13% to 5.03% improvements compare with SOTA models. Moreover, our algorithm adds only about 0.2% to 2.2% additional time overhead over Flicker, Citeseer and Ogbn-Arxiv. Compared to the general adversarial training, our approach improves time efficiency by nearly 4-fold.