Bo Lei
Publications
Spike-driven Large Language Model
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily based on large-scale dense matrix multiplications. Inspired by the brain's information processing mechanism, we explore the fundamental question: how to effectively integrate the brain's spiking-driven characteristics into LLM inference. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) possess spike-driven characteristics, and some works have attempted to combine SNNs with Transformers. However, achieving spike-driven LLMs with billions of parameters, relying solely on sparse additions, remains a challenge in the SNN field. To address the issues of limited representational capacity and sparsity in existing spike encoding schemes at the LLM level, we propose SDLLM, a spike-driven large language model that eliminates dense matrix multiplications through sparse addition operations. Specifically, we use the plug-and-play gamma-SQP two-step spike encoding method to ensure that the quantization process aligns with the model's semantic space, mitigating representation degradation caused by binary spikes. Furthermore, we introduce bidirectional encoding under symmetric quantization and membrane potential clipping mechanisms, leading to spike trains with no or low firing counts dominating, significantly reducing the model's spike firing rate, while halving the number of time steps. Experimental results show that SDLLM not only significantly reduces inference costs but also achieves state-of-the-art task performance under the spike-based paradigm. For example, compared to previous spike-based LLMs, SDLLM reduces energy consumption by 7x and improves accuracy by 4.2%. Our model provides inspiration for the architecture design of the next generation of event-driven neuromorphic chips.
Training-Free Representation Guidance for Diffusion Models with a Representation Alignment Projector
Recent progress in generative modeling has enabled high-quality visual synthesis with diffusion-based frameworks, supporting controllable sampling and large-scale training. Inference-time guidance methods such as classifier-free and representative guidance enhance semantic alignment by modifying sampling dynamics; however, they do not fully exploit unsupervised feature representations. Although such visual representations contain rich semantic structure, their integration during generation is constrained by the absence of ground-truth reference images at inference. This work reveals semantic drift in the early denoising stages of diffusion transformers, where stochasticity results in inconsistent alignment even under identical conditioning. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a guidance scheme using a representation alignment projector that injects representations predicted by a projector into intermediate sampling steps, providing an effective semantic anchor without modifying the model architecture. Experiments on SiTs and REPAs show notable improvements in class-conditional ImageNet synthesis, achieving substantially lower FID scores; for example, REPA-XL/2 improves from 5.9 to 3.3, and the proposed method outperforms representative guidance when applied to SiT models. The approach further yields complementary gains when combined with classifier-free guidance, demonstrating enhanced semantic coherence and visual fidelity. These results establish representation-informed diffusion sampling as a practical strategy for reinforcing semantic preservation and image consistency.