Ning Cao

CV
h-index12
11papers
61citations
Novelty50%
AI Score52

11 Papers

LGFeb 13
Bus-Conditioned Zero-Shot Trajectory Generation via Task Arithmetic

Shuai Liu, Ning Cao, Yile Chen et al.

Mobility trajectory data provide essential support for smart city applications. However, such data are often difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, most existing trajectory generation methods implicitly assume that at least a subset of real mobility data from target city is available, which limits their applicability in data-inaccessible scenarios. In this work, we propose a new problem setting, called bus-conditioned zero-shot trajectory generation, where no mobility trajectories from a target city are accessible. The generation process relies solely on source city mobility data and publicly available bus timetables from both cities. Under this setting, we propose MobTA, the first approach to introduce task arithmetic into trajectory generation. MobTA models the parameter shift from bus-timetable-based trajectory generation to mobility trajectory generation in source city, and applies this shift to target city through arithmetic operations on task vectors. This enables trajectory generation that reflects target-city mobility patterns without requiring any real mobility data from it. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze MobTA's stability across base and instruction-tuned LLMs. Extensive experiments show that MobTA significantly outperforms existing methods, and achieves performance close to models finetuned using target city mobility trajectories.

LGAug 26, 2024
Towards Graph Prompt Learning: A Survey and Beyond

Qingqing Long, Yuchen Yan, Peiyan Zhang et al.

Large-scale "pre-train and prompt learning" paradigms have demonstrated remarkable adaptability, enabling broad applications across diverse domains such as question answering, image recognition, and multimodal retrieval. This approach fully leverages the potential of large-scale pre-trained models, reducing downstream data requirements and computational costs while enhancing model applicability across various tasks. Graphs, as versatile data structures that capture relationships between entities, play pivotal roles in fields such as social network analysis, recommender systems, and biological graphs. Despite the success of pre-train and prompt learning paradigms in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), their application in graph domains remains nascent. In graph-structured data, not only do the node and edge features often have disparate distributions, but the topological structures also differ significantly. This diversity in graph data can lead to incompatible patterns or gaps between pre-training and fine-tuning on downstream graphs. We aim to bridge this gap by summarizing methods for alleviating these disparities. This includes exploring prompt design methodologies, comparing related techniques, assessing application scenarios and datasets, and identifying unresolved problems and challenges. This survey categorizes over 100 relevant works in this field, summarizing general design principles and the latest applications, including text-attributed graphs, molecules, proteins, and recommendation systems. Through this extensive review, we provide a foundational understanding of graph prompt learning, aiming to impact not only the graph mining community but also the broader Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) community.

NEMar 21, 2024Code
SpikeGraphormer: A High-Performance Graph Transformer with Spiking Graph Attention

Yundong Sun, Dongjie Zhu, Yansong Wang et al.

Recently, Graph Transformers have emerged as a promising solution to alleviate the inherent limitations of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and enhance graph representation performance. Unfortunately, Graph Transformers are computationally expensive due to the quadratic complexity inherent in self-attention when applied over large-scale graphs, especially for node tasks. In contrast, spiking neural networks (SNNs), with event-driven and binary spikes properties, can perform energy-efficient computation. In this work, we propose a novel insight into integrating SNNs with Graph Transformers and design a Spiking Graph Attention (SGA) module. The matrix multiplication is replaced by sparse addition and mask operations. The linear complexity enables all-pair node interactions on large-scale graphs with limited GPU memory. To our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to introduce SNNs into Graph Transformers. Furthermore, we design SpikeGraphormer, a Dual-branch architecture, combining a sparse GNN branch with our SGA-driven Graph Transformer branch, which can simultaneously perform all-pair node interactions and capture local neighborhoods. SpikeGraphormer consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches across various datasets and makes substantial improvements in training time, inference time, and GPU memory cost (10 ~ 20x lower than vanilla self-attention). It also performs well in cross-domain applications (image and text classification). We release our code at https://github.com/PHD-lanyu/SpikeGraphormer.

CVFeb 2
SurfSplat: Conquering Feedforward 2D Gaussian Splatting with Surface Continuity Priors

Bing He, Jingnan Gao, Yunuo Chen et al.

Reconstructing 3D scenes from sparse images remains a challenging task due to the difficulty of recovering accurate geometry and texture without optimization. Recent approaches leverage generalizable models to generate 3D scenes using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) primitive. However, they often fail to produce continuous surfaces and instead yield discrete, color-biased point clouds that appear plausible at normal resolution but reveal severe artifacts under close-up views. To address this issue, we present SurfSplat, a feedforward framework based on 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) primitive, which provides stronger anisotropy and higher geometric precision. By incorporating a surface continuity prior and a forced alpha blending strategy, SurfSplat reconstructs coherent geometry together with faithful textures. Furthermore, we introduce High-Resolution Rendering Consistency (HRRC), a new evaluation metric designed to evaluate high-resolution reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on RealEstate10K, DL3DV, and ScanNet demonstrate that SurfSplat consistently outperforms prior methods on both standard metrics and HRRC, establishing a robust solution for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs. Project page: https://hebing-sjtu.github.io/SurfSplat-website/

LGOct 11, 2024Code
NextLocLLM: Location Semantics Modeling and Coordinate-Based Next Location Prediction with LLMs

Shuai Liu, Ning Cao, Yile Chen et al.

Next location prediction is a critical task in human mobility analysis.Existing methods typically formulate it as a classification task based on discrete location IDs, which hinders spatial continuity modeling and limits generalization to new cities. In this paper, we propose NextLocLLM, a novel framework that reformulates next-location prediction as coordinate regression and integrates LLMs for both location semantics encoding and coordinate-level prediction. To model location functional semantics, it constructs LLM-enhanced POI embeddings by leveraging language understanding capabilities of LLMs to extract functional semantics from textual descriptions of POI categories. These POI embeddings are combined with spatiotemporal trajectory representation and fed into the same LLM, enabling unified semantic and predictive modeling. A lightweight regression head generates coordinate outputs, which are mapped to top-k candidate locations via post-prediction retrieval module, ensuring structured outputs. Experiments across diverse cities show that NextLocLLM outperforms existing baselines in both supervised and zero-shot settings. Code is available at: https://github.com/liuwj2000/NexelocLLM.

IVFeb 22, 2025
Large Language Model for Lossless Image Compression with Visual Prompts

Junhao Du, Chuqin Zhou, Ning Cao et al.

Recent advancements in deep learning have driven significant progress in lossless image compression. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), preliminary attempts have been made to leverage the extensive prior knowledge embedded in these pretrained models to enhance lossless image compression, particularly by improving the entropy model. However, a significant challenge remains in bridging the gap between the textual prior knowledge within LLMs and lossless image compression. To tackle this challenge and unlock the potential of LLMs, this paper introduces a novel paradigm for lossless image compression that incorporates LLMs with visual prompts. Specifically, we first generate a lossy reconstruction of the input image as visual prompts, from which we extract features to serve as visual embeddings for the LLM. The residual between the original image and the lossy reconstruction is then fed into the LLM along with these visual embeddings, enabling the LLM to function as an entropy model to predict the probability distribution of the residual. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art compression performance, surpassing both traditional and learning-based lossless image codecs. Furthermore, our approach can be easily extended to images from other domains, such as medical and screen content images, achieving impressive performance. These results highlight the potential of LLMs for lossless image compression and may inspire further research in related directions.

AIMay 30, 2025
Mixture-of-Experts for Personalized and Semantic-Aware Next Location Prediction

Shuai Liu, Ning Cao, Yile Chen et al.

Next location prediction plays a critical role in understanding human mobility patterns. However, existing approaches face two core limitations: (1) they fall short in capturing the complex, multi-functional semantics of real-world locations; and (2) they lack the capacity to model heterogeneous behavioral dynamics across diverse user groups. To tackle these challenges, we introduce NextLocMoE, a novel framework built upon large language models (LLMs) and structured around a dual-level Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. Our architecture comprises two specialized modules: a Location Semantics MoE that operates at the embedding level to encode rich functional semantics of locations, and a Personalized MoE embedded within the Transformer backbone to dynamically adapt to individual user mobility patterns. In addition, we incorporate a history-aware routing mechanism that leverages long-term trajectory data to enhance expert selection and ensure prediction stability. Empirical evaluations across several real-world urban datasets show that NextLocMoE achieves superior performance in terms of predictive accuracy, cross-domain generalization, and interpretability

CVSep 22, 2025
4DGCPro: Efficient Hierarchical 4D Gaussian Compression for Progressive Volumetric Video Streaming

Zihan Zheng, Zhenlong Wu, Houqiang Zhong et al.

Achieving seamless viewing of high-fidelity volumetric video, comparable to 2D video experiences, remains an open challenge. Existing volumetric video compression methods either lack the flexibility to adjust quality and bitrate within a single model for efficient streaming across diverse networks and devices, or struggle with real-time decoding and rendering on lightweight mobile platforms. To address these challenges, we introduce 4DGCPro, a novel hierarchical 4D Gaussian compression framework that facilitates real-time mobile decoding and high-quality rendering via progressive volumetric video streaming in a single bitstream. Specifically, we propose a perceptually-weighted and compression-friendly hierarchical 4D Gaussian representation with motion-aware adaptive grouping to reduce temporal redundancy, preserve coherence, and enable scalable multi-level detail streaming. Furthermore, we present an end-to-end entropy-optimized training scheme, which incorporates layer-wise rate-distortion (RD) supervision and attribute-specific entropy modeling for efficient bitstream generation. Extensive experiments show that 4DGCPro enables flexible quality and multiple bitrate within a single model, achieving real-time decoding and rendering on mobile devices while outperforming existing methods in RD performance across multiple datasets. Project Page: https://mediax-sjtu.github.io/4DGCPro

CVSep 22, 2025
4D-MoDe: Towards Editable and Scalable Volumetric Streaming via Motion-Decoupled 4D Gaussian Compression

Houqiang Zhong, Zihan Zheng, Qiang Hu et al.

Volumetric video has emerged as a key medium for immersive telepresence and augmented/virtual reality, enabling six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) navigation and realistic spatial interactions. However, delivering high-quality dynamic volumetric content at scale remains challenging due to massive data volume, complex motion, and limited editability of existing representations. In this paper, we present 4D-MoDe, a motion-decoupled 4D Gaussian compression framework designed for scalable and editable volumetric video streaming. Our method introduces a layered representation that explicitly separates static backgrounds from dynamic foregrounds using a lookahead-based motion decomposition strategy, significantly reducing temporal redundancy and enabling selective background/foreground streaming. To capture continuous motion trajectories, we employ a multi-resolution motion estimation grid and a lightweight shared MLP, complemented by a dynamic Gaussian compensation mechanism to model emergent content. An adaptive grouping scheme dynamically inserts background keyframes to balance temporal consistency and compression efficiency. Furthermore, an entropy-aware training pipeline jointly optimizes the motion fields and Gaussian parameters under a rate-distortion (RD) objective, while employing range-based and KD-tree compression to minimize storage overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that 4D-MoDe consistently achieves competitive reconstruction quality with an order of magnitude lower storage cost (e.g., as low as \textbf{11.4} KB/frame) compared to state-of-the-art methods, while supporting practical applications such as background replacement and foreground-only streaming.

CVJul 15, 2025
Robust ID-Specific Face Restoration via Alignment Learning

Yushun Fang, Lu Liu, Xiang Gao et al.

The latest developments in Face Restoration have yielded significant advancements in visual quality through the utilization of diverse diffusion priors. Nevertheless, the uncertainty of face identity introduced by identity-obscure inputs and stochastic generative processes remains unresolved. To address this challenge, we present Robust ID-Specific Face Restoration (RIDFR), a novel ID-specific face restoration framework based on diffusion models. Specifically, RIDFR leverages a pre-trained diffusion model in conjunction with two parallel conditioning modules. The Content Injection Module inputs the severely degraded image, while the Identity Injection Module integrates the specific identity from a given image. Subsequently, RIDFR incorporates Alignment Learning, which aligns the restoration results from multiple references with the same identity in order to suppress the interference of ID-irrelevant face semantics (e.g. pose, expression, make-up, hair style). Experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, reconstructing high-quality ID-specific results with high identity fidelity and demonstrating strong robustness.

LGOct 16, 2018
Security Matters: A Survey on Adversarial Machine Learning

Guofu Li, Pengjia Zhu, Jin Li et al.

Adversarial machine learning is a fast growing research area, which considers the scenarios when machine learning systems may face potential adversarial attackers, who intentionally synthesize input data to make a well-trained model to make mistake. It always involves a defending side, usually a classifier, and an attacking side that aims to cause incorrect output. The earliest studies on the adversarial examples for machine learning algorithms start from the information security area, which considers a much wider varieties of attacking methods. But recent research focus that popularized by the deep learning community places strong emphasis on how the "imperceivable" perturbations on the normal inputs may cause dramatic mistakes by the deep learning with supposed super-human accuracy. This paper serves to give a comprehensive introduction to a range of aspects of the adversarial deep learning topic, including its foundations, typical attacking and defending strategies, and some extended studies.