Xuan Ding
Publications
Pruning as a Cooperative Game: Surrogate-Assisted Layer Contribution Estimation for Large Language Models
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across various tasks, their deployment in real-world scenarios is still constrained by high computational demands. Layer-wise pruning, a commonly employed strategy to mitigate inference costs, can partially address this challenge. However, existing approaches generally depend on static heuristic rules and fail to account for the interdependencies among layers, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the pruning process. To this end, this paper proposes a game-theoretic framework that formulates layer pruning as a cooperative game in which each layer acts as a player and model performance serves as the utility. As computing exact Shapley values is computationally infeasible for large language models (LLMs), we propose using a lightweight surrogate network to estimate layer-wise marginal contributions. This network can predict LLM performance for arbitrary layer combinations at a low computational cost. Additionally, we employ stratified Monte Carlo mask sampling to further reduce the cost of Sharpley value estimation. This approach captures inter-layer dependencies and dynamically identifies critical layers for pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent superiority of our method in terms of perplexity and zero-shot accuracy, achieving more efficient and effective layer-wise pruning for large language models.
ONRW: Optimizing inversion noise for high-quality and robust watermark
Watermarking methods have always been effective means of protecting intellectual property, yet they face significant challenges. Although existing deep learning-based watermarking systems can hide watermarks in images with minimal impact on image quality, they often lack robustness when encountering image corruptions during transmission, which undermines their practical application value. To this end, we propose a high-quality and robust watermark framework based on the diffusion model. Our method first converts the clean image into inversion noise through a null-text optimization process, and after optimizing the inversion noise in the latent space, it produces a high-quality watermarked image through an iterative denoising process of the diffusion model. The iterative denoising process serves as a powerful purification mechanism, ensuring both the visual quality of the watermarked image and enhancing the robustness of the watermark against various corruptions. To prevent the optimizing of inversion noise from distorting the original semantics of the image, we specifically introduced self-attention constraints and pseudo-mask strategies. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method against various image corruptions. In particular, our method outperforms the stable signature method by an average of 10\% across 12 different image transformations on COCO datasets. Our codes are available at https://github.com/920927/ONRW.
AgentsEval: Clinically Faithful Evaluation of Medical Imaging Reports via Multi-Agent Reasoning
Evaluating the clinical correctness and reasoning fidelity of automatically generated medical imaging reports remains a critical yet unresolved challenge. Existing evaluation methods often fail to capture the structured diagnostic logic that underlies radiological interpretation, resulting in unreliable judgments and limited clinical relevance. We introduce AgentsEval, a multi-agent stream reasoning framework that emulates the collaborative diagnostic workflow of radiologists. By dividing the evaluation process into interpretable steps including criteria definition, evidence extraction, alignment, and consistency scoring, AgentsEval provides explicit reasoning traces and structured clinical feedback. We also construct a multi-domain perturbation-based benchmark covering five medical report datasets with diverse imaging modalities and controlled semantic variations. Experimental results demonstrate that AgentsEval delivers clinically aligned, semantically faithful, and interpretable evaluations that remain robust under paraphrastic, semantic, and stylistic perturbations. This framework represents a step toward transparent and clinically grounded assessment of medical report generation systems, fostering trustworthy integration of large language models into clinical practice.