Cong Cao

Cong Cao, Tianwei Lin, Dongliang He et al.

A common challenge posed to robust semantic segmentation is the expensive data annotation cost. Existing semi-supervised solutions show great potential for solving this problem. Their key idea is constructing consistency regularization with unsupervised data augmentation from unlabeled data for model training. The perturbations for unlabeled data enable the consistency training loss, which benefits semi-supervised semantic segmentation. However, these perturbations destroy image context and introduce unnatural boundaries, which is harmful for semantic segmentation. Besides, the widely adopted semi-supervised learning framework, i.e. mean-teacher, suffers performance limitation since the student model finally converges to the teacher model. In this paper, first of all, we propose a context friendly differentiable geometric warping to conduct unsupervised data augmentation; secondly, a novel adversarial dual-student framework is proposed to improve the Mean-Teacher from the following two aspects: (1) dual student models are learned independently except for a stabilization constraint to encourage exploiting model diversities; (2) adversarial training scheme is applied to both students and the discriminators are resorted to distinguish reliable pseudo-label of unlabeled data for self-training. Effectiveness is validated via extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC2012 and Cityscapes. Our solution significantly improves the performance and state-of-the-art results are achieved on both datasets. Remarkably, compared with fully supervision, our solution achieves comparable mIoU of 73.4% using only 12.5% annotated data on PASCAL VOC2012. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/cao-cong/ADS-SemiSeg.

Cong Cao, Huanjing Yue, Xin Liu et al.

Capturing high dynamic range (HDR) images (videos) is attractive because it can reveal the details in both dark and bright regions. Since the mainstream screens only support low dynamic range (LDR) content, tone mapping algorithm is required to compress the dynamic range of HDR images (videos). Although image tone mapping has been widely explored, video tone mapping is lagging behind, especially for the deep-learning-based methods, due to the lack of HDR-LDR video pairs. In this work, we propose a unified framework (IVTMNet) for unsupervised image and video tone mapping. To improve unsupervised training, we propose domain and instance based contrastive learning loss. Instead of using a universal feature extractor, such as VGG to extract the features for similarity measurement, we propose a novel latent code, which is an aggregation of the brightness and contrast of extracted features, to measure the similarity of different pairs. We totally construct two negative pairs and three positive pairs to constrain the latent codes of tone mapped results. For the network structure, we propose a spatial-feature-enhanced (SFE) module to enable information exchange and transformation of nonlocal regions. For video tone mapping, we propose a temporal-feature-replaced (TFR) module to efficiently utilize the temporal correlation and improve the temporal consistency of video tone-mapped results. We construct a large-scale unpaired HDR-LDR video dataset to facilitate the unsupervised training process for video tone mapping. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art image and video tone mapping methods. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/cao-cong/UnCLTMO.

Cong Cao, Huanjing Yue, Xin Liu et al.

Diffusion-based zero-shot image restoration and enhancement models have achieved great success in various tasks of image restoration and enhancement. However, directly applying them to video restoration and enhancement results in severe temporal flickering artifacts. In this paper, we propose the first framework for zero-shot video restoration and enhancement based on the pre-trained image diffusion model. By replacing the spatial self-attention layer with the proposed short-long-range (SLR) temporal attention layer, the pre-trained image diffusion model can take advantage of the temporal correlation between frames. We further propose temporal consistency guidance, spatial-temporal noise sharing, and an early stopping sampling strategy to improve temporally consistent sampling. Our method is a plug-and-play module that can be inserted into any diffusion-based image restoration or enhancement methods to further improve their performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/cao-cong/ZVRD.

Huanjing Yue, Shangbin Xie, Cong Cao et al.

RAW images preserve superior fidelity and rich scene information compared to RGB, making them essential for tasks in challenging imaging conditions. To alleviate the high cost of data collection, recent RGB-to-RAW conversion methods aim to synthesize RAW images from RGB. However, they overlook two key challenges: (i) the reconstruction difficulty varies with pixel intensity, and (ii) multi-camera conversion requires camera-specific adaptation. To address these issues, we propose SpiralDiff, a diffusion-based framework tailored for RGB-to-RAW conversion with a signal-dependent noise weighting strategy that adapts reconstruction fidelity across intensity levels. In addition, we introduce CamLoRA, a camera-aware lightweight adaptation module that enables a unified model to adapt to different camera-specific ISP characteristics. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of SpiralDiff in RGB-to-RAW conversion quality and its downstream benefits in RAW-based object detection. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Chuancy-TJU/SpiralDiff.

Menglin Kong, Ruichen Li, Fan Liu et al.

Landslide is a natural disaster that can easily threaten local ecology, people's lives and property. In this paper, we conduct modelling research on real unidirectional surface displacement data of recent landslides in the research area and propose a time series prediction framework named VMD-SegSigmoid-XGBoost-ClusterLSTM (VSXC-LSTM) based on variational mode decomposition, which can predict the landslide surface displacement more accurately. The model performs well on the test set. Except for the random item subsequence that is hard to fit, the root mean square error (RMSE) and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the trend item subsequence and the periodic item subsequence are both less than 0.1, and the RMSE is as low as 0.006 for the periodic item prediction module based on XGBoost\footnote{Accepted in ICANN2023}.

Menglin Kong, Shaojie Zhao, Juan Cheng et al.

There are two fundamental problems in applying deep learning/machine learning methods to disease classification tasks, one is the insufficient number and poor quality of training samples; another one is how to effectively fuse multiple source features and thus train robust classification models. To address these problems, inspired by the process of human learning knowledge, we propose the Feature-aware Fusion Correlation Neural Network (FaFCNN), which introduces a feature-aware interaction module and a feature alignment module based on domain adversarial learning. This is a general framework for disease classification, and FaFCNN improves the way existing methods obtain sample correlation features. The experimental results show that training using augmented features obtained by pre-training gradient boosting decision tree yields more performance gains than random-forest based methods. On the low-quality dataset with a large amount of missing data in our setup, FaFCNN obtains a consistently optimal performance compared to competitive baselines. In addition, extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method and the effectiveness of each component of the model\footnote{Accepted in IEEE SMC2023}.

Cong Cao, Huanjing Yue, Shangbin Xie et al.

Although diffusion-based zero-shot image restoration and enhancement methods have achieved great success, applying them to video restoration or enhancement will lead to severe temporal flickering. In this paper, we propose the first framework that utilizes the rapidly-developed video diffusion model to assist the image-based method in maintaining more temporal consistency for zero-shot video restoration and enhancement. We propose homologous latents fusion, heterogenous latents fusion, and a COT-based fusion ratio strategy to utilize both homologous and heterogenous text-to-video diffusion models to complement the image method. Moreover, we propose temporal-strengthening post-processing to utilize the image-to-video diffusion model to further improve temporal consistency. Our method is training-free and can be applied to any diffusion-based image restoration and enhancement methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Ri Su, Alphonse Houssou Hounye, Cong Cao et al.

The Click-though Rate (CTR) prediction task is a basic task in recommendation system. Most of the previous researches of CTR models built based on Wide \& deep structure and gradually evolved into parallel structures with different modules. However, the simple accumulation of parallel structures can lead to higher structural complexity and longer training time. Based on the Sigmoid activation function of output layer, the linear addition activation value of parallel structures in the training process is easy to make the samples fall into the weak gradient interval, resulting in the phenomenon of weak gradient, and reducing the effectiveness of training. To this end, this paper proposes a Parallel Heterogeneous Network (PHN) model, which constructs a network with parallel structure through three different interaction analysis methods, and uses Soft Selection Gating (SSG) to feature heterogeneous data with different structure. Finally, residual link with trainable parameters are used in the network to mitigate the influence of weak gradient phenomenon. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PHN in a large number of comparative experiments, and visualize the performance of the model in training process and structure.

Yu Liu, Wenxiao Zhang, Cong Cao et al.

Answering real-world open-domain multi-hop questions over massive corpora is a critical challenge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Recent research employs reinforcement learning (RL) to end-to-end optimize the retrieval-augmented reasoning process, directly enhancing its capacity to resolve complex queries. However, reliable deployment is hindered by two obstacles. 1) Retrieval Collapse: iterative retrieval over large corpora fails to locate intermediate evidence containing bridge answers without reasoning-guided planning, causing downstream reasoning to collapse. 2) Learning Instability: end-to-end trajectory training suffers from weak credit assignment across reasoning chains and poor error localization across modules, causing overfitting to benchmark-specific heuristics that limit transferability and stability. To address these problems, we propose PRISMA, a decoupled RL-guided framework featuring a Plan-Retrieve-Inspect-Solve-Memoize architecture. PRISMA's strength lies in reasoning-guided collaboration: the Inspector provides reasoning-based feedback to refine the Planner's decomposition and fine-grained retrieval, while enforcing evidence-grounded reasoning in the Solver. We optimize individual agent capabilities via Two-Stage Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Stage I calibrates the Planner and Solver as specialized experts in planning and reasoning, while Stage II utilizes Observation-Aware Residual Policy Optimization (OARPO) to enhance the Inspector's ability to verify context and trigger targeted recovery. Experiments show that PRISMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on ten benchmarks and can be deployed efficiently in real-world scenarios.

Diandian Guo, Fangfang Yuan, Cong Cao et al.

The prevalence of sarcasm in multimodal dialogues on the social platforms presents a crucial yet challenging task for understanding the true intent behind online content. Comprehensive sarcasm analysis requires two key aspects: Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (MSD) and Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE). Intuitively, the act of detection is the result of the reasoning process that explains the sarcasm. Current research predominantly focuses on addressing either MSD or MuSE as a single task. Even though some recent work has attempted to integrate these tasks, their inherent causal dependency is often overlooked. To bridge this gap, we propose MuVaC, a variational causal inference framework that mimics human cognitive mechanisms for understanding sarcasm, enabling robust multimodal feature learning to jointly optimize MSD and MuSE. Specifically, we first model MSD and MuSE from the perspective of structural causal models, establishing variational causal pathways to define the objectives for joint optimization. Next, we design an alignment-then-fusion approach to integrate multimodal features, providing robust fusion representations for sarcasm detection and explanation generation. Finally, we enhance the reasoning trustworthiness by ensuring consistency between detection results and explanations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MuVaC in public datasets, offering a new perspective for understanding multimodal sarcasm.

Huanjing Yue, Cong Cao, Lei Liao et al.

In recent years, raw video denoising has garnered increased attention due to the consistency with the imaging process and well-studied noise modeling in the raw domain. However, two problems still hinder the denoising performance. Firstly, there is no large dataset with realistic motions for supervised raw video denoising, as capturing noisy and clean frames for real dynamic scenes is difficult. To address this, we propose recapturing existing high-resolution videos displayed on a 4K screen with high-low ISO settings to construct noisy-clean paired frames. In this way, we construct a video denoising dataset (named as ReCRVD) with 120 groups of noisy-clean videos, whose ISO values ranging from 1600 to 25600. Secondly, while non-local temporal-spatial attention is beneficial for denoising, it often leads to heavy computation costs. We propose an efficient raw video denoising transformer network (RViDeformer) that explores both short and long-distance correlations. Specifically, we propose multi-branch spatial and temporal attention modules, which explore the patch correlations from local window, local low-resolution window, global downsampled window, and neighbor-involved window, and then they are fused together. We employ reparameterization to reduce computation costs. Our network is trained in both supervised and unsupervised manners, achieving the best performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the model trained with our proposed dataset (ReCRVD) outperforms the model trained with previous benchmark dataset (CRVD) when evaluated on the real-world outdoor noisy videos. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/cao-cong/RViDeformer.

Cong Cao, Jingyao Zhang, Kun Tong

We propose a Hierarchical Error-Corrective Graph FrameworkforAutonomousAgentswithLLM-BasedActionGeneration(HECG),whichincorporates three core innovations: (1) Multi-Dimensional Transferable Strategy (MDTS): by integrating task quality metrics (Q), confidence/cost metrics (C), reward metrics (R), and LLM-based semantic reasoning scores (LLM-Score), MDTS achieves multi-dimensional alignment between quantitative performance and semantic context, enabling more precise selection of high-quality candidate strate gies and effectively reducing the risk of negative transfer. (2) Error Matrix Classification (EMC): unlike simple confusion matrices or overall performance metrics, EMC provides structured attribution of task failures by categorizing errors into ten types, such as Strategy Errors (Strategy Whe) and Script Parsing Errors (Script-Parsing-Error), and decomposing them according to severity, typical actions, error descriptions, and recoverability. This allows precise analysis of the root causes of task failures, offering clear guidance for subsequent error correction and strategy optimization rather than relying solely on overall success rates or single performance metrics. (3) Causal-Context Graph Retrieval (CCGR): to enhance agent retrieval capabilities in dynamic task environments, we construct graphs from historical states, actions, and event sequences, where nodes store executed actions, next-step actions, execution states, transferable strategies, and other relevant information, and edges represent causal dependencies such as preconditions for transitions between nodes. CCGR identifies subgraphs most relevant to the current task context, effectively capturing structural relationships beyond vector similarity, allowing agents to fully leverage contextual information, accelerate strategy adaptation, and improve execution reliability in complex, multi-step tasks.

Cong Cao, Yujie Xu, Xiaodong Xu

In recent years, image editing has garnered growing attention. However, general image editing models often fail to produce satisfactory results when confronted with new styles. The challenge lies in how to effectively fine-tune general image editing models to new styles using only a limited amount of paired data. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel few-shot style editing framework. For this task, we construct a benchmark dataset that encompasses five distinct styles. Correspondingly, we propose a parameter-efficient multi-style Mixture-of-Experts Low-Rank Adaptation (MoE LoRA) with style-specific and style-shared routing mechanisms for jointly fine-tuning multiple styles. The style-specific routing ensures that different styles do not interfere with one another, while the style-shared routing adaptively allocates shared MoE LoRAs to learn common patterns. Our MoE LoRA can automatically determine the optimal ranks for each layer through a novel metric-guided approach that estimates the importance score of each single-rank component. Additionally, we explore the optimal location to insert LoRA within the Diffusion in Transformer (DiT) model and integrate adversarial learning and flow matching to guide the diffusion training process. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches with significantly fewer LoRA parameters.

Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan et al.

Multimodal sarcasm detection (MSD) is essential for various downstream tasks. Existing MSD methods tend to rely on spurious correlations. These methods often mistakenly prioritize non-essential features yet still make correct predictions, demonstrating poor generalizability beyond training environments. Regarding this phenomenon, this paper undertakes several initiatives. Firstly, we identify two primary causes that lead to the reliance of spurious correlations. Secondly, we address these challenges by proposing a novel method that integrate Multimodal Incongruities via Contrastive Learning (MICL) for multimodal sarcasm detection. Specifically, we first leverage incongruity to drive multi-view learning from three views: token-patch, entity-object, and sentiment. Then, we introduce extensive data augmentation to mitigate the biased learning of the textual modality. Additionally, we construct a test set, SPMSD, which consists potential spurious correlations to evaluate the the model's generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MICL on benchmark datasets, along with the analyses showcasing MICL's advancement in mitigating the effect of spurious correlation.

Ren Li, Cong Cao, Corentin Dumery et al.

Reconstructing 3D clothed humans from images is fundamental to applications like virtual try-on, avatar creation, and mixed reality. While recent advances have enhanced human body recovery, accurate reconstruction of garment geometry -- especially for loose-fitting clothing -- remains an open challenge. We present a novel method for high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction from single images that bridges 2D and 3D representations. Our approach combines Implicit Sewing Patterns (ISP) with a generative diffusion model to learn rich garment shape priors in a 2D UV space. A key innovation is our mapping model that establishes correspondences between 2D image pixels, UV pattern coordinates, and 3D geometry, enabling joint optimization of both 3D garment meshes and the corresponding 2D patterns by aligning learned priors with image observations. Despite training exclusively on synthetically simulated cloth data, our method generalizes effectively to real-world images, outperforming existing approaches on both tight- and loose-fitting garments. The reconstructed garments maintain physical plausibility while capturing fine geometric details, enabling downstream applications including garment retargeting and texture manipulation.

Cong Cao, Ramit Debnath, R. Michael Alvarez

Policymakers frequently analyze air quality and climate change in isolation, disregarding their interactions. This study explores the influence of specific climate factors on air quality by contrasting a regression model with K-Means Clustering, Hierarchical Clustering, and Random Forest techniques. We employ Physics-based Deep Learning (PBDL) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to examine the air pollution predictions. Our analysis utilizes ten years (2009-2018) of daily traffic, weather, and air pollution data from three major cities in Norway. Findings from feature selection reveal a correlation between rising heating degree days and heightened air pollution levels, suggesting increased heating activities in Norway are a contributing factor to worsening air quality. PBDL demonstrates superior accuracy in air pollution predictions compared to LSTM. This paper contributes to the growing literature on PBDL methods for more accurate air pollution predictions using environmental variables, aiding policymakers in formulating effective data-driven climate policies.

Yu Liu, Kun Peng, Wenxiao Zhang et al.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems deployed across organizational boundaries face fundamental tensions between security, accuracy, and efficiency. Current encryption methods expose plaintext during decryption, while federated architectures prevent resource integration and incur substantial overhead. We introduce Trans-RAG, implementing a novel vector space language paradigm where each organization's knowledge exists in a mathematically isolated semantic space. At the core lies vector2Trans, a multi-stage transformation technique that enables queries to dynamically "speak" each organization's vector space "language" through query-centric transformations, eliminating decryption overhead while maintaining native retrieval efficiency. Security evaluations demonstrate near-orthogonal vector spaces with 89.90° angular separation and 99.81% isolation rates. Experiments across 8 retrievers, 3 datasets, and 3 LLMs show minimal accuracy degradation (3.5% decrease in nDCG@10) and significant efficiency improvements over homomorphic encryption.

Yu Liu, Wenxiao Zhang, Cong Cao et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely used to ground Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-hop question answering. Recent work mainly focused on improving answer accuracy via fine-tuning and structured or reinforcement-based optimization. However, reliable reasoning in response generation faces three challenges: 1) Reasoning Collapse. Reasoning in multi-hop QA is inherently complex due to multi-hop composition and is further destabilized by noisy retrieval. 2) Reasoning-answer inconsistency. Due to the intrinsic uncertainty of LLM generation and exposure to evidence--distractor mixtures, models may produce correct answers that are not faithfully supported by their intermediate reasoning or evidence. 3) Loss of format control. Traditional chain-of-thought generation often deviates from required structured output formats, leading to incomplete or malformed structured content. To address these challenges, we propose CRAFT (Calibrated Reasoning with Answer-Faithful Traces), a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) based reinforcement learning framework that trains models to perform faithful reasoning during response generation. CRAFT employs dual reward mechanisms to optimize multi-hop reasoning: deterministic rewards ensure structural correctness while judge-based rewards verify semantic faithfulness. This optimization framework supports controllable trace variants that enable systematic analysis of how structure and scale affect reasoning performance and faithfulness. Experiments on three multi-hop QA benchmarks show that CRAFT improves both answer accuracy and reasoning faithfulness across model scales, with the CRAFT 7B model achieving competitive performance with closed-source LLMs across multiple reasoning trace settings.

Yu Liu, Yanbing Liu, Fangfang Yuan et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and dense retrievers have driven significant progress in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, existing approaches face significant challenges in complex reasoning-oriented multi-hop retrieval tasks: 1) Ineffective reasoning-oriented planning: Prior methods struggle to generate robust multi-step plans for complex queries, as rule-based decomposers perform poorly on out-of-template questions. 2) Suboptimal reasoning-driven retrieval: Related methods employ limited query reformulation, leading to iterative retrieval loops that often fail to locate golden documents. 3) Insufficient reasoning-guided filtering: Prevailing methods lack the fine-grained reasoning to effectively filter salient information from noisy results, hindering utilization of retrieved knowledge. Fundamentally, these limitations all stem from the weak coupling between retrieval and reasoning in current RAG architectures. We introduce the Orchestrated Planner-Executor Reasoning Architecture (OPERA), a novel reasoning-driven retrieval framework. OPERA's Goal Planning Module (GPM) decomposes questions into sub-goals, which are executed by a Reason-Execute Module (REM) with specialized components for precise reasoning and effective retrieval. To train OPERA, we propose Multi-Agents Progressive Group Relative Policy Optimization (MAPGRPO), a novel variant of GRPO. Experiments on complex multi-hop benchmarks show OPERA's superior performance, validating both the MAPGRPO method and OPERA's design.

Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan et al.

Analogical reasoning, particularly in multimodal contexts, is the foundation of human perception and creativity. Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) has recently sparked considerable discussion due to its emergent capabilities. In this paper, we delve into the multimodal analogical reasoning capability of MLLM. Specifically, we explore two facets: \textit{MLLM as an explainer} and \textit{MLLM as a predictor}. In \textit{MLLM as an explainer}, we primarily focus on whether MLLM can deeply comprehend multimodal analogical reasoning problems. We propose a unified prompt template and a method for harnessing the comprehension capabilities of MLLM to augment existing models. In \textit{MLLM as a predictor}, we aim to determine whether MLLM can directly solve multimodal analogical reasoning problems. The experiments show that our approach outperforms existing methods on popular datasets, providing preliminary evidence for the analogical reasoning capability of MLLM.

Cong Cao, Ren Li, Corentin Dumery et al.

Sewing patterns define the structural foundation of garments and are essential for applications such as fashion design, fabrication, and physical simulation. Despite progress in automated pattern generation, accurately modeling sewing patterns remains difficult due to the broad variability in panel geometry and seam arrangements. In this work, we introduce a sewing pattern modeling method based on an implicit representation. We represent each panel using a signed distance field that defines its boundary and an unsigned distance field that identifies seam endpoints, and encode these fields into a continuous latent space that enables differentiable meshing. A latent flow matching model learns distributions over panel combinations in this representation, and a stitching prediction module recovers seam relations from extracted edge segments. This formulation allows accurate modeling and generation of sewing patterns with complex structures. We further show that it can be used to estimate sewing patterns from images with improved accuracy relative to existing approaches, and supports applications such as pattern completion and refitting, providing a practical tool for digital fashion design.

Cong Cao, Xianhang Cheng, Jingyuan Liu et al.

We present LUIVITON, an end-to-end system for fully automated virtual try-on, capable of draping complex, multi-layer clothing onto diverse and arbitrarily posed humanoid characters. To address the challenge of aligning complex garments with arbitrary and highly diverse body shapes, we use SMPL as a proxy representation and separate the clothing-to-body draping problem into two correspondence tasks: 1) clothing-to-SMPL and 2) body-to-SMPL correspondence, where each has its unique challenges. While we address the clothing-to-SMPL fitting problem using a geometric learning-based approach for partial-to-complete shape correspondence prediction, we introduce a diffusion model-based approach for body-to-SMPL correspondence using multi-view consistent appearance features and a pre-trained 2D foundation model. Our method can handle complex geometries, non-manifold meshes, and generalizes effectively to a wide range of humanoid characters -- including humans, robots, cartoon subjects, creatures, and aliens, while maintaining computational efficiency for practical adoption. In addition to offering a fully automatic fitting solution, LUIVITON supports fast customization of clothing size, allowing users to adjust clothing sizes and material properties after they have been draped. We show that our system can produce high-quality 3D clothing fittings without any human labor, even when 2D clothing sewing patterns are not available.

Kun Peng, Cong Cao, Hao Peng et al.

Current Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) research follows a closed-domain assumption. However, there is no clear consensus on emotion classification in psychology, which presents a challenge for models when it comes to recognizing previously unseen emotions in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation (UERC) task for the first time and propose ProEmoTrans, a solid prototype-based emotion transfer framework. This prototype-based approach shows promise but still faces key challenges: First, implicit expressions complicate emotion definition, which we address by proposing an LLM-enhanced description approach. Second, utterance encoding in long conversations is difficult, which we tackle with a proposed parameter-free mechanism for efficient encoding and overfitting prevention. Finally, the Markovian flow nature of emotions is hard to transfer, which we address with an improved Attention Viterbi Decoding (AVD) method to transfer seen emotion transitions to unseen emotions. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that our method serves as a strong baseline for preliminary exploration in this new area.

Kun Peng, Cong Cao, Hao Peng et al.

Dialogues Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Extraction (DiaASQ) aims to extract all target-aspect-opinion-sentiment quadruples from a given multi-round, multi-participant dialogue. Existing methods typically learn word relations across entire dialogues, assuming a uniform distribution of sentiment elements. However, we find that dialogues often contain multiple semantically independent sub-dialogues without clear dependencies between them. Therefore, learning word relationships across the entire dialogue inevitably introduces additional noise into the extraction process. To address this, our method focuses on partitioning dialogues into semantically independent sub-dialogues. Achieving completeness while minimizing these sub-dialogues presents a significant challenge. Simply partitioning based on reply relationships is ineffective. Instead, we propose utilizing a structural entropy minimization algorithm to partition the dialogues. This approach aims to preserve relevant utterances while distinguishing irrelevant ones as much as possible. Furthermore, we introduce a two-step framework for quadruple extraction: first extracting individual sentiment elements at the utterance level, then matching quadruples at the sub-dialogue level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in DiaASQ with much lower computational costs.

Kun Peng, Chaodong Tong, Cong Cao et al.

Aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) aims to extract triplets composed of aspect terms, opinion terms, and sentiment polarities from given sentences. The table tagging method is a popular approach to addressing this task, which encodes a sentence into a 2-dimensional table, allowing for the tagging of relations between any two words. Previous efforts have focused on designing various downstream relation learning modules to better capture interactions between tokens in the table, revealing that a stronger capability to capture relations can lead to greater improvements in the model. Motivated by this, we attempt to directly utilize transformer layers as downstream relation learning modules. Due to the powerful semantic modeling capability of transformers, it is foreseeable that this will lead to excellent improvement. However, owing to the quadratic relation between the length of the table and the length of the input sentence sequence, using transformers directly faces two challenges: overly long table sequences and unfair local attention interaction. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Table-Transformer (T-T) for the tagging-based ASTE method. Specifically, we introduce a stripe attention mechanism with a loop-shift strategy to tackle these challenges. The former modifies the global attention mechanism to only attend to a 2-dimensional local attention window, while the latter facilitates interaction between different attention windows. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the T-T, as a downstream relation learning module, achieves state-of-the-art performance with lower computational costs.

Huanjing Yue, Cong Cao, Lei Liao et al.

In recent years, the supervised learning strategy for real noisy image denoising has been emerging and has achieved promising results. In contrast, realistic noise removal for raw noisy videos is rarely studied due to the lack of noisy-clean pairs for dynamic scenes. Clean video frames for dynamic scenes cannot be captured with a long-exposure shutter or averaging multi-shots as was done for static images. In this paper, we solve this problem by creating motions for controllable objects, such as toys, and capturing each static moment for multiple times to generate clean video frames. In this way, we construct a dataset with 55 groups of noisy-clean videos with ISO values ranging from 1600 to 25600. To our knowledge, this is the first dynamic video dataset with noisy-clean pairs. Correspondingly, we propose a raw video denoising network (RViDeNet) by exploring the temporal, spatial, and channel correlations of video frames. Since the raw video has Bayer patterns, we pack it into four sub-sequences, i.e RGBG sequences, which are denoised by the proposed RViDeNet separately and finally fused into a clean video. In addition, our network not only outputs a raw denoising result, but also the sRGB result by going through an image signal processing (ISP) module, which enables users to generate the sRGB result with their favourite ISPs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art video and raw image denoising algorithms on both indoor and outdoor videos.