Efficient Generative Model Training via Embedded Representation Warmup

Diffusion models excel at generating high-dimensional data but fall short in training efficiency and representation quality compared to self-supervised methods. We identify a key bottleneck: the underutilization of high-quality, semantically rich representations during training notably slows down convergence. Our systematic analysis reveals a critical representation processing region -- primarily in the early layers -- where semantic and structural pattern learning takes place before generation can occur. To address this, we propose Embedded Representation Warmup (ERW), a plug-and-play framework where in the first stage we get the ERW module serves as a warmup that initializes the early layers of the diffusion model with high-quality, pretrained representations. This warmup minimizes the burden of learning representations from scratch, thereby accelerating convergence and boosting performance. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that ERW's efficacy depends on its precise integration into specific neural network layers -- termed the representation processing region -- where the model primarily processes and transforms feature representations for later generation. We further establish that ERW not only accelerates training convergence but also enhances representation quality: empirically, our method achieves a 40$\times$ acceleration in training speed compared to REPA, the current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LINs-lab/ERW.

Rethinking Key-Value Cache Compression Techniques for Large Language Model Serving

Key-Value cache (\texttt{KV} \texttt{cache}) compression has emerged as a promising technique to optimize Large Language Model (LLM) serving. It primarily decreases the memory consumption of \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} to reduce the computation cost. Despite the development of many compression algorithms, their applications in production environments are still not prevalent. In this paper, we revisit mainstream \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} compression solutions from a practical perspective. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we comprehensively review existing algorithmic designs and benchmark studies for \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} compression and identify missing pieces in their performance measurement, which could hinder their adoption in practice. Second, we empirically evaluate representative \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} compression methods to uncover two key issues that affect the computational efficiency: (1) while compressing \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} can reduce memory consumption, current implementations (e.g., FlashAttention, PagedAttention) do not optimize for production-level LLM serving, resulting in suboptimal throughput performance; (2) compressing \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} may lead to longer outputs, resulting in increased end-to-end latency. We further investigate the accuracy performance of individual samples rather than the overall performance, revealing the intrinsic limitations in \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} compression when handling specific LLM tasks. Third, we provide tools to shed light on future \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} compression studies and facilitate their practical deployment in production. They are open-sourced in \href{https://github.com/LLMkvsys/rethink-kv-compression}{https://github.com/LLMkvsys/rethink-kv-compression}.

CRCL: Causal Representation Consistency Learning for Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) remains a fundamental yet formidable task in the video understanding community, with promising applications in areas such as information forensics and public safety protection. Due to the rarity and diversity of anomalies, existing methods only use easily collected regular events to model the inherent normality of normal spatial-temporal patterns in an unsupervised manner. Previous studies have shown that existing unsupervised VAD models are incapable of label-independent data offsets (e.g., scene changes) in real-world scenarios and may fail to respond to light anomalies due to the overgeneralization of deep neural networks. Inspired by causality learning, we argue that there exist causal factors that can adequately generalize the prototypical patterns of regular events and present significant deviations when anomalous instances occur. In this regard, we propose Causal Representation Consistency Learning (CRCL) to implicitly mine potential scene-robust causal variable in unsupervised video normality learning. Specifically, building on the structural causal models, we propose scene-debiasing learning and causality-inspired normality learning to strip away entangled scene bias in deep representations and learn causal video normality, respectively. Extensive experiments on benchmarks validate the superiority of our method over conventional deep representation learning. Moreover, ablation studies and extension validation show that the CRCL can cope with label-independent biases in multi-scene settings and maintain stable performance with only limited training data available.

External Large Foundation Model: How to Efficiently Serve Trillions of Parameters for Online Ads Recommendation

Ads recommendation is a prominent service of online advertising systems and has been actively studied. Recent studies indicate that scaling-up and advanced design of the recommendation model can bring significant performance improvement. However, with a larger model scale, such prior studies have a significantly increasing gap from industry as they often neglect two fundamental challenges in industrial-scale applications. First, training and inference budgets are restricted for the model to be served, exceeding which may incur latency and impair user experience. Second, large-volume data arrive in a streaming mode with data distributions dynamically shifting, as new users/ads join and existing users/ads leave the system. We propose the External Large Foundation Model (ExFM) framework to address the overlooked challenges. Specifically, we develop external distillation and a data augmentation system (DAS) to control the computational cost of training/inference while maintaining high performance. We design the teacher in a way like a foundation model (FM) that can serve multiple students as vertical models (VMs) to amortize its building cost. We propose Auxiliary Head and Student Adapter to mitigate the data distribution gap between FM and VMs caused by the streaming data issue. Comprehensive experiments on internal industrial-scale applications and public datasets demonstrate significant performance gain by ExFM.

A Survey on Video Analytics in Cloud-Edge-Terminal Collaborative Systems

The explosive growth of video data has driven the development of distributed video analytics in cloud-edge-terminal collaborative (CETC) systems, enabling efficient video processing, real-time inference, and privacy-preserving analysis. Among multiple advantages, CETC systems can distribute video processing tasks and enable adaptive analytics across cloud, edge, and terminal devices, leading to breakthroughs in video surveillance, autonomous driving, and smart cities. In this survey, we first analyze fundamental architectural components, including hierarchical, distributed, and hybrid frameworks, alongside edge computing platforms and resource management mechanisms. Building upon these foundations, edge-centric approaches emphasize on-device processing, edge-assisted offloading, and edge intelligence, while cloud-centric methods leverage powerful computational capabilities for complex video understanding and model training. Our investigation also covers hybrid video analytics incorporating adaptive task offloading and resource-aware scheduling techniques that optimize performance across the entire system. Beyond conventional approaches, recent advances in large language models and multimodal integration reveal both opportunities and challenges in platform scalability, data protection, and system reliability. Future directions also encompass explainable systems, efficient processing mechanisms, and advanced video analytics, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in this dynamic field.

Multi-agent KTO: Reinforcing Strategic Interactions of Large Language Model in Language Game

Achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) requires AI agents that can not only make stratigic decisions but also engage in flexible and meaningful communication. Inspired by Wittgenstein's language game theory in Philosophical Investigations, we propose that language agents can learn through in-context interaction rather than traditional multi-stage frameworks that separate decision-making from language expression. Using Werewolf, a social deduction game that tests language understanding, strategic interaction, and adaptability, we develop the Multi-agent Kahneman & Tversky's Optimization (MaKTO). MaKTO engages diverse models in extensive gameplay to generate unpaired desirable and unacceptable responses, then employs KTO to refine the model's decision-making process. In 9-player Werewolf games, MaKTO achieves a 61% average win rate across various models, outperforming GPT-4o and two-stage RL agents by relative improvements of 23.0% and 10.9%, respectively. Notably, MaKTO also demonstrates human-like performance, winning 60% against expert players and showing only 49% detectability in Turing-style blind tests. These results showcase MaKTO's superior decision-making, strategic adaptation, and natural language generation in complex social deduction games.

A Survey on Diffusion Models for Anomaly Detection

Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as a powerful class of generative AI models, showing remarkable potential in anomaly detection (AD) tasks across various domains, such as cybersecurity, fraud detection, healthcare, and manufacturing. The intersection of these two fields, termed diffusion models for anomaly detection (DMAD), offers promising solutions for identifying deviations in increasingly complex and high-dimensional data. In this survey, we systematically review recent advances in DMAD research and investigate their capabilities. We begin by presenting the fundamental concepts of AD and DMs, followed by a comprehensive analysis of classic DM architectures including DDPMs, DDIMs, and Score SDEs. We further categorize existing DMAD methods into reconstruction-based, density-based, and hybrid approaches, providing detailed examinations of their methodological innovations. We also explore the diverse tasks across different data modalities, encompassing image, time series, video, and multimodal data analysis. Furthermore, we discuss critical challenges and emerging research directions, including computational efficiency, model interpretability, robustness enhancement, edge-cloud collaboration, and integration with large language models. The collection of DMAD research papers and resources is available at https://github.com/fdjingliu/DMAD.

DSRC: Learning Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware Collaborative Representation against Corruptions

As a potential application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, multi-agent collaborative perception has achieved significant success in 3D object detection. While these methods have demonstrated impressive results on standard benchmarks, the robustness of such approaches in the face of complex real-world environments requires additional verification. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of collaborative perception methods in the presence of natural corruptions typical of real-world environments. Furthermore, we propose DSRC, a robustness-enhanced collaborative perception method aiming to learn Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware collaborative Representation against Corruptions. DSRC consists of two key designs: i) a semantic-guided sparse-to-dense distillation framework, which constructs multi-view dense objects painted by ground truth bounding boxes to effectively learn density-insensitive and semantic-aware collaborative representation; ii) a feature-to-point cloud reconstruction approach to better fuse critical collaborative representation across agents. To thoroughly evaluate DSRC, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world and simulated datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms SOTA collaborative perception methods in both clean and corrupted conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/Terry9a/DSRC.

Generative Modeling with Explicit Memory

Recent studies indicate that the denoising process in deep generative diffusion models implicitly learns and memorizes semantic information from the data distribution. These findings suggest that capturing more complex data distributions requires larger neural networks, leading to a substantial increase in computational demands, which in turn become the primary bottleneck in both training and inference of diffusion models. To this end, we introduce \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{M}odeling with \textbf{E}xplicit \textbf{M}emory (GMem), leveraging an external memory bank in both training and sampling phases of diffusion models. This approach preserves semantic information from data distributions, reducing reliance on neural network capacity for learning and generalizing across diverse datasets. The results are significant: our GMem enhances both training, sampling efficiency, and generation quality. For instance, on ImageNet at $256 \times 256$ resolution, GMem accelerates SiT training by over $46.7\times$, achieving the performance of a SiT model trained for $7M$ steps in fewer than $150K$ steps. Compared to the most efficient existing method, REPA, GMem still offers a $16\times$ speedup, attaining an FID score of 5.75 within $250K$ steps, whereas REPA requires over $4M$ steps. Additionally, our method achieves state-of-the-art generation quality, with an FID score of {3.56} without classifier-free guidance on ImageNet $256\times256$. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/LINs-lab/GMem}.

The ISCSLP 2024 Conversational Voice Clone (CoVoC) Challenge: Tasks, Results and Findings

The ISCSLP 2024 Conversational Voice Clone (CoVoC) Challenge aims to benchmark and advance zero-shot spontaneous style voice cloning, particularly focusing on generating spontaneous behaviors in conversational speech. The challenge comprises two tracks: an unconstrained track without limitation on data and model usage, and a constrained track only allowing the use of constrained open-source datasets. A 100-hour high-quality conversational speech dataset is also made available with the challenge. This paper details the data, tracks, submitted systems, evaluation results, and findings.