Applications of the Transformer Architecture in AI-Assisted English Reading Comprehension

This paper studies interpretable and fair artificial intelligence architectures for understanding English reading. Introduced transformer-based models, integrating advanced attention mechanisms and gradient-based feature attribution. The model's lack of interpretability, reduction of algorithmic bias, and unreliable performance in learning environments are the current issues faced in natural language teaching. A unified technical pipeline has been constructed, including adversarial bias correction methods, token-level attribution analysis, and multi-head attention heatmap visualization. Experimental validation was conducted using a large-scale labeled English reading comprehension dataset, and the data partitioning scheme and parameter optimization procedures have been determined. The method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models for this task in terms of accuracy and macro-average F1 score; in some aspects, it even surpasses or closely matches the results of human evaluations. In multi-week user experiments, the explainable transformer improved teachers' trust and operability in feedback-based assessments within the scoring system. The proposed method aims to ensure high prediction accuracy and fairness for different learners. This indicates that it is a real-world educational application based on artificial intelligence with a focus on interpretation. Improve the user experience in AI-assisted reading comprehension systems, counteract biases, and enhance the details explained by transformers.

Gradient Descent with Projection Finds Over-Parameterized Neural Networks for Learning Low-Degree Polynomials with Nearly Minimax Optimal Rate

We study the problem of learning a low-degree spherical polynomial of degree $k_0 = Θ(1) \ge 1$ defined on the unit sphere in $\RR^d$ by training an over-parameterized two-layer neural network with augmented feature in this paper. Our main result is the significantly improved sample complexity for learning such low-degree polynomials. We show that, for any regression risk $\eps \in (0, Θ(d^{-k_0})]$, an over-parameterized two-layer neural network trained by a novel Gradient Descent with Projection (GDP) requires a sample complexity of $n \asymp Θ( \log(4/δ) \cdot d^{k_0}/\eps)$ with probability $1-δ$ for $δ\in (0,1)$, in contrast with the representative sample complexity $Θ(d^{k_0} \max\set{\eps^{-2},\log d})$. Moreover, such sample complexity is nearly unimprovable since the trained network renders a nearly optimal rate of the nonparametric regression risk of the order $\log({4}/δ) \cdot Θ(d^{k_0}/{n})$ with probability at least $1-δ$. On the other hand, the minimax optimal rate for the regression risk with a kernel of rank $Θ(d^{k_0})$ is $Θ(d^{k_0}/{n})$, so that the rate of the nonparametric regression risk of the network trained by GDP is nearly minimax optimal. In the case that the ground truth degree $k_0$ is unknown, we present a novel and provable adaptive degree selection algorithm which identifies the true degree and achieves the same nearly optimal regression rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a nearly optimal risk bound is obtained by training an over-parameterized neural network with a popular activation function (ReLU) and algorithmic guarantee for learning low-degree spherical polynomials. Due to the feature learning capability of GDP, our results are beyond the regular Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) limit.

Discovering Decoupled Functional Modules in Large Language Models

Understanding the internal functional organization of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for improving their trustworthiness and performance. However, how LLMs organize different functions into modules remains highly unexplored. To bridge this gap, we formulate a functional module discovery problem and propose an Unsupervised LLM Cross-layer MOdule Discovery (ULCMOD) framework that simultaneously disentangles the large set of neurons in the entire LLM into modules while discovering the topics of input samples related to these modules. Our framework introduces a novel objective function and an efficient Iterative Decoupling (IterD) algorithm. Extensive experiments show that our method discovers high-quality, disentangled modules that capture more meaningful semantic information and achieve superior performance in various downstream tasks. Moreover, our qualitative analysis reveals that the discovered modules show semantic coherence, correspond to interpretable specializations, and a clear spatial and hierarchical organization within the LLM. Our work provides a novel tool for interpreting the functional modules of LLMs, filling a critical blank in LLM's interpretability research.

Toward Real-World High-Precision Image Matting and Segmentation

High-precision scene parsing tasks, including image matting and dichotomous segmentation, aim to accurately predict masks with extremely fine details (such as hair). Most existing methods focus on salient, single foreground objects. While interactive methods allow for target adjustment, their class-agnostic design restricts generalization across different categories. Furthermore, the scarcity of high-quality annotation has led to a reliance on inharmonious synthetic data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a Foreground Consistent Learning model, dubbed as FCLM, to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first introduce a Depth-Aware Distillation strategy where we transfer the depth-related knowledge for better foreground representation. Considering the data dilemma, we term the processing of synthetic data as domain adaptation problem where we propose a domain-invariant learning strategy to focus on foreground learning. To support interactive prediction, we contribute an Object-Oriented Decoder that can receive both visual and language prompts to predict the referring target. Experimental results show that our method quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms SOTA methods.

Adacc: Adaptive Compression and Activation Checkpointing for LLM Memory Management

Training large language models often employs recomputation to alleviate memory pressure, which can introduce up to 30% overhead in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose Adacc, a novel memory management framework that combines adaptive compression and activation checkpointing to reduce the GPU memory footprint. It comprises three modules: (1) We design layer-specific compression algorithms that account for outliers in LLM tensors, instead of directly quantizing floats from FP16 to INT4, to ensure model accuracy. (2) We propose an optimal scheduling policy that employs MILP to determine the best memory optimization for each tensor. (3) To accommodate changes in training tensors, we introduce an adaptive policy evolution mechanism that adjusts the policy during training to enhance throughput. Experimental results show that Adacc can accelerate the LLM training by 1.01x to 1.37x compared to state-of-the-art frameworks, while maintaining comparable model accuracy to the Baseline.

Efficient Star Distillation Attention Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution

In recent years, the performance of lightweight Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) has been improved significantly with the application of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Large Kernel Attention (LKA). However, existing information distillation modules for lightweight SISR struggle to map inputs into High-Dimensional Non-Linear (HDNL) feature spaces, limiting their representation learning. And their LKA modules possess restricted ability to capture the multi-shape multi-scale information for long-range dependencies while encountering a quadratic increase in the computational burden with increasing convolutional kernel size of its depth-wise convolutional layer. To address these issues, we firstly propose a Star Distillation Module (SDM) to enhance the discriminative representation learning via information distillation in the HDNL feature spaces. Besides, we present a Multi-shape Multi-scale Large Kernel Attention (MM-LKA) module to learn representative long-range dependencies while incurring low computational and memory footprints, leading to improving the performance of CNN-based self-attention significantly. Integrating SDM and MM-LKA, we develop a Residual Star Distillation Attention Module (RSDAM) and take it as the building block of the proposed efficient Star Distillation Attention Network (SDAN) which possesses high reconstruction efficiency to recover a higher-quality image from the corresponding low-resolution (LR) counterpart. When compared with other lightweight state-of-the-art SISR methods, extensive experiments show that our SDAN with low model complexity yields superior performance quantitatively and visually.

Beyond Templates: Dynamic Adaptation of Reasoning Demonstrations via Feasibility-Aware Exploration

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet aligning such abilities to small language models (SLMs) remains a challenge due to distributional mismatches and limited model capacity. Existing reasoning datasets, typically designed for powerful LLMs, often lead to degraded performance when directly applied to weaker models. In this work, we introduce Dynamic Adaptation of Reasoning Trajectories (DART), a novel data adaptation framework that bridges the capability gap between expert reasoning trajectories and diverse SLMs. Instead of uniformly imitating expert steps, DART employs a selective imitation strategy guided by step-wise adaptability estimation via solution simulation. When expert steps surpass the student's capacity -- signaled by an Imitation Gap -- the student autonomously explores alternative reasoning paths, constrained by outcome consistency. We validate DART across multiple reasoning benchmarks and model scales, demonstrating that it significantly improves generalization and data efficiency over static fine-tuning. Our method enhances supervision quality by aligning training signals with the student's reasoning capabilities, offering a scalable solution for reasoning alignment in resource-constrained models.

Temporal Consistency Constrained Transferable Adversarial Attacks with Background Mixup for Action Recognition

Action recognition models using deep learning are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are transferable across other models trained on the same data modality. Existing transferable attack methods face two major challenges: 1) they heavily rely on the assumption that the decision boundaries of the surrogate (a.k.a., source) model and the target model are similar, which limits the adversarial transferability; and 2) their decision boundary difference makes the attack direction uncertain, which may result in the gradient oscillation, weakening the adversarial attack. This motivates us to propose a Background Mixup-induced Temporal Consistency (BMTC) attack method for action recognition. From the input transformation perspective, we design a model-agnostic background adversarial mixup module to reduce the surrogate-target model dependency. In particular, we randomly sample one video from each category and make its background frame, while selecting the background frame with the top attack ability for mixup with the clean frame by reinforcement learning. Moreover, to ensure an explicit attack direction, we leverage the background category as guidance for updating the gradient of adversarial example, and design a temporal gradient consistency loss, which strengthens the stability of the attack direction on subsequent frames. Empirical studies on two video datasets, i.e., UCF101 and Kinetics-400, and one image dataset, i.e., ImageNet, demonstrate that our method significantly boosts the transferability of adversarial examples across several action/image recognition models. Our code is available at https://github.com/mlvccn/BMTC_TransferAttackVid.

Comparator-Adaptive $Φ$-Regret: Improved Bounds, Simpler Algorithms, and Applications to Games

In the classic expert problem, $\Phi$-regret measures the gap between the learner's total loss and that achieved by applying the best action transformation $\phi \in \Phi$. A recent work by Lu et al., [2025] introduces an adaptive algorithm whose regret against a comparator $\phi$ depends on a certain sparsity-based complexity measure of $\phi$, (almost) recovering and interpolating optimal bounds for standard regret notions such as external, internal, and swap regret. In this work, we propose a general idea to achieve an even better comparator-adaptive $\Phi$-regret bound via much simpler algorithms compared to Lu et al., [2025]. Specifically, we discover a prior distribution over all possible binary transformations and show that it suffices to achieve prior-dependent regret against these transformations. Then, we propose two concrete and efficient algorithms to achieve so, where the first one learns over multiple copies of a prior-aware variant of the Kernelized MWU algorithm of Farina et al., [2022], and the second one learns over multiple copies of a prior-aware variant of the BM-reduction [Blum and Mansour, 2007]. To further showcase the power of our methods and the advantages over Lu et al., [2025] besides the simplicity and better regret bounds, we also show that our second approach can be extended to the game setting to achieve accelerated and adaptive convergence rate to $\Phi$-equilibria for a class of general-sum games. When specified to the special case of correlated equilibria, our bound improves over the existing ones from Anagnostides et al., [2022a,b]

Accurate KV Cache Quantization with Outlier Tokens Tracing

The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) come at the cost of substantial computational resources during deployment. While KV Cache can significantly reduce recomputation during inference, it also introduces additional memory overhead. KV Cache quantization presents a promising solution, striking a good balance between memory usage and accuracy. Previous research has shown that the Keys are distributed by channel, while the Values are distributed by token. Consequently, the common practice is to apply channel-wise quantization to the Keys and token-wise quantization to the Values. However, our further investigation reveals that a small subset of unusual tokens exhibit unique characteristics that deviate from this pattern, which can substantially impact quantization accuracy. To address this, we develop a simple yet effective method to identify these tokens accurately during the decoding process and exclude them from quantization as outlier tokens, significantly improving overall accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant accuracy improvements under 2-bit quantization and can deliver a 6.4 times reduction in memory usage and a 2.3 times increase in throughput.