Alada: Alternating Adaptation of Momentum Method for Memory-Efficient Matrix Optimization

This work proposes Alada, an adaptive momentum method for stochastic optimization over large-scale matrices. Alada employs a rank-one factorization approach to estimate the second moment of gradients, where factors are updated alternatively to minimize the estimation error. Alada achieves sublinear memory overheads and can be readily extended to optimizing tensor-shaped variables.We also equip Alada with a first moment estimation rule, which enhances the algorithm's robustness without incurring additional memory overheads. The theoretical performance of Alada aligns with that of traditional methods such as Adam. Numerical studies conducted on several natural language processing tasks demonstrate the reduction in memory overheads and the robustness in training large models relative to Adam and its variants.

MIRNet: Integrating Constrained Graph-Based Reasoning with Pre-training for Diagnostic Medical Imaging

Automated interpretation of medical images demands robust modeling of complex visual-semantic relationships while addressing annotation scarcity, label imbalance, and clinical plausibility constraints. We introduce MIRNet (Medical Image Reasoner Network), a novel framework that integrates self-supervised pre-training with constrained graph-based reasoning. Tongue image diagnosis is a particularly challenging domain that requires fine-grained visual and semantic understanding. Our approach leverages self-supervised masked autoencoder (MAE) to learn transferable visual representations from unlabeled data; employs graph attention networks (GAT) to model label correlations through expert-defined structured graphs; enforces clinical priors via constraint-aware optimization using KL divergence and regularization losses; and mitigates imbalance using asymmetric loss (ASL) and boosting ensembles. To address annotation scarcity, we also introduce TongueAtlas-4K, a comprehensive expert-curated benchmark comprising 4,000 images annotated with 22 diagnostic labels--representing the largest public dataset in tongue analysis. Validation shows our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. While optimized for tongue diagnosis, the framework readily generalizes to broader diagnostic medical imaging tasks.

What Matters in LLM-generated Data: Diversity and Its Effect on Model Fine-Tuning

With the remarkable generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs), using LLM-generated data to train downstream models has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate data scarcity in specific domains and reduce time-consuming annotations. However, recent studies have highlighted a critical issue: iterative training on self-generated data results in model collapse, where model performance degrades over time. Despite extensive research on the implications of LLM-generated data, these works often neglect the importance of data diversity, a key factor in data quality. In this work, we aim to understand the implications of the diversity of LLM-generated data on downstream model performance. Specifically, we explore how varying levels of diversity in LLM-generated data affect downstream model performance. Additionally, we investigate the performance of models trained on data that mixes different proportions of LLM-generated data, which we refer to as synthetic data. Our experimental results show that, with minimal distribution shift, moderately diverse LLM-generated data can enhance model performance in scenarios with insufficient labeled data, whereas highly diverse generated data has a negative impact. We hope our empirical findings will offer valuable guidance for future studies on LLMs as data generators.

SWE-Factory: Your Automated Factory for Issue Resolution Training Data and Evaluation Benchmarks

Constructing large-scale datasets for the GitHub issue resolution task is crucial for both training and evaluating the software engineering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the traditional process for creating such benchmarks is notoriously challenging and labor-intensive, particularly in the stages of setting up evaluation environments, grading test outcomes, and validating task instances. In this paper, we propose SWE-Factory, an automated pipeline designed to address these challenges. To tackle these issues, our pipeline integrates three core automated components. First, we introduce SWE-Builder, a multi-agent system that automates evaluation environment construction, which employs four specialized agents that work in a collaborative, iterative loop and leverages an environment memory pool to enhance efficiency. Second, we introduce a standardized, exit-code-based grading method that eliminates the need for manually writing custom parsers. Finally, we automate the fail2pass validation process using these reliable exit code signals. Experiments on 671 issues across four programming languages show that our pipeline can effectively construct valid task instances; for example, with GPT-4.1-mini, our SWE-Builder constructs 269 valid instances at $0.045 per instance, while with Gemini-2.5-flash, it achieves comparable performance at the lowest cost of $0.024 per instance. We also demonstrate that our exit-code-based grading achieves 100% accuracy compared to manual inspection, and our automated fail2pass validation reaches a precision of 0.92 and a recall of 1.00. We hope our automated pipeline will accelerate the collection of large-scale, high-quality GitHub issue resolution datasets for both training and evaluation. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/swe-factory.

Blind Spot Navigation: Evolutionary Discovery of Sensitive Semantic Concepts for LVLMs

Adversarial attacks aim to generate malicious inputs that mislead deep models, but beyond causing model failure, they cannot provide certain interpretable information such as ``\textit{What content in inputs make models more likely to fail?}'' However, this information is crucial for researchers to specifically improve model robustness. Recent research suggests that models may be particularly sensitive to certain semantics in visual inputs (such as ``wet,'' ``foggy''), making them prone to errors. Inspired by this, in this paper we conducted the first exploration on large vision-language models (LVLMs) and found that LVLMs indeed are susceptible to hallucinations and various errors when facing specific semantic concepts in images. To efficiently search for these sensitive concepts, we integrated large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) models to propose a novel semantic evolution framework. Randomly initialized semantic concepts undergo LLM-based crossover and mutation operations to form image descriptions, which are then converted by T2I models into visual inputs for LVLMs. The task-specific performance of LVLMs on each input is quantified as fitness scores for the involved semantics and serves as reward signals to further guide LLMs in exploring concepts that induce LVLMs. Extensive experiments on seven mainstream LVLMs and two multimodal tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Additionally, we provide interesting findings about the sensitive semantics of LVLMs, aiming to inspire further in-depth research.

Quantifying the Noise of Structural Perturbations on Graph Adversarial Attacks

Graph neural networks have been widely utilized to solve graph-related tasks because of their strong learning power in utilizing the local information of neighbors. However, recent studies on graph adversarial attacks have proven that current graph neural networks are not robust against malicious attacks. Yet much of the existing work has focused on the optimization objective based on attack performance to obtain (near) optimal perturbations, but paid less attention to the strength quantification of each perturbation such as the injection of a particular node/link, which makes the choice of perturbations a black-box model that lacks interpretability. In this work, we propose the concept of noise to quantify the attack strength of each adversarial link. Furthermore, we propose three attack strategies based on the defined noise and classification margins in terms of single and multiple steps optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets against three representative graph neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack strategies. Particularly, we also investigate the preferred patterns of effective adversarial perturbations by analyzing the corresponding properties of the selected perturbation nodes.

Mitigating the Structural Bias in Graph Adversarial Defenses

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in addressing various graph structure-related downstream tasks. However, recent studies have found that current GNNs are susceptible to malicious adversarial attacks. Given the inevitable presence of adversarial attacks in the real world, a variety of defense methods have been proposed to counter these attacks and enhance the robustness of GNNs. Despite the commendable performance of these defense methods, we have observed that they tend to exhibit a structural bias in terms of their defense capability on nodes with low degree (i.e., tail nodes), which is similar to the structural bias of traditional GNNs on nodes with low degree in the clean graph. Therefore, in this work, we propose a defense strategy by including hetero-homo augmented graph construction, $k$NN augmented graph construction, and multi-view node-wise attention modules to mitigate the structural bias of GNNs against adversarial attacks. Notably, the hetero-homo augmented graph consists of removing heterophilic links (i.e., links connecting nodes with dissimilar features) globally and adding homophilic links (i.e., links connecting nodes with similar features) for nodes with low degree. To further enhance the defense capability, an attention mechanism is adopted to adaptively combine the representations from the above two kinds of graph views. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the defense and debiasing effect of the proposed strategy on benchmark datasets.

GT-SVQ: A Linear-Time Graph Transformer for Node Classification Using Spiking Vector Quantization

Graph Transformers (GTs), which simultaneously integrate message-passing and self-attention mechanisms, have achieved promising empirical results in some graph prediction tasks. Although these approaches show the potential of Transformers in capturing long-range graph topology information, issues concerning the quadratic complexity and high computing energy consumption severely limit the scalability of GTs on large-scale graphs. Recently, as brain-inspired neural networks, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), facilitate the development of graph representation learning methods with lower computational and storage overhead through the unique event-driven spiking neurons. Inspired by these characteristics, we propose a linear-time Graph Transformer using Spiking Vector Quantization (GT-SVQ) for node classification. GT-SVQ reconstructs codebooks based on rate coding outputs from spiking neurons, and injects the codebooks into self-attention blocks to aggregate global information in linear complexity. Besides, spiking vector quantization effectively alleviates codebook collapse and the reliance on complex machinery (distance measure, auxiliary loss, etc.) present in previous vector quantization-based graph learning methods. In experiments, we compare GT-SVQ with other state-of-the-art baselines on node classification datasets ranging from small to large. Experimental results show that GT-SVQ has achieved competitive performances on most datasets while maintaining up to 130x faster inference speed compared to other GTs.

Towards an Understanding of Context Utilization in Code Intelligence

Code intelligence is an emerging domain in software engineering, aiming to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of various code-related tasks. Recent research suggests that incorporating contextual information beyond the basic original task inputs (i.e., source code) can substantially enhance model performance. Such contextual signals may be obtained directly or indirectly from sources such as API documentation or intermediate representations like abstract syntax trees can significantly improve the effectiveness of code intelligence. Despite growing academic interest, there is a lack of systematic analysis of context in code intelligence. To address this gap, we conduct an extensive literature review of 146 relevant studies published between September 2007 and August 2024. Our investigation yields four main contributions. (1) A quantitative analysis of the research landscape, including publication trends, venues, and the explored domains; (2) A novel taxonomy of context types used in code intelligence; (3) A task-oriented analysis investigating context integration strategies across diverse code intelligence tasks; (4) A critical evaluation of evaluation methodologies for context-aware methods. Based on these findings, we identify fundamental challenges in context utilization in current code intelligence systems and propose a research roadmap that outlines key opportunities for future research.

BACE-RUL: A Bi-directional Adversarial Network with Covariate Encoding for Machine Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) are crucial ways to avoid unnecessary maintenance for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and improve system reliability. Predicting the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is one of the most challenging tasks for PHM. Existing methods require prior knowledge about the system, contrived assumptions, or temporal mining to model the life cycles of machine equipment/devices, resulting in diminished accuracy and limited applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a Bi-directional Adversarial network with Covariate Encoding for machine Remaining Useful Life (BACE-RUL) prediction, which only adopts sensor measurements from the current life cycle to predict RUL rather than relying on previous consecutive cycle recordings. The current sensor measurements of mechanical devices are encoded to a conditional space to better understand the implicit inner mechanical status. The predictor is trained as a conditional generative network with the encoded sensor measurements as its conditions. Various experiments on several real-world datasets, including the turbofan aircraft engine dataset and the dataset collected from degradation experiments of Li-Ion battery cells, show that the proposed model is a general framework and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.