Yao Du

Yi Liu, Yuekang Li, Gelei Deng et al.

The popularity of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems nowadays leads to an increasing need for improving their accessibility. Handling stuttering speech is an important feature for accessible ASR systems. To improve the accessibility of ASR systems for stutterers, we need to expose and analyze the failures of ASR systems on stuttering speech. The speech datasets recorded from stutterers are not diverse enough to expose most of the failures. Furthermore, these datasets lack ground truth information about the non-stuttered text, rendering them unsuitable as comprehensive test suites. Therefore, a methodology for generating stuttering speech as test inputs to test and analyze the performance of ASR systems is needed. However, generating valid test inputs in this scenario is challenging. The reason is that although the generated test inputs should mimic how stutterers speak, they should also be diverse enough to trigger more failures. To address the challenge, we propose ASTER, a technique for automatically testing the accessibility of ASR systems. ASTER can generate valid test cases by injecting five different types of stuttering. The generated test cases can both simulate realistic stuttering speech and expose failures in ASR systems. Moreover, ASTER can further enhance the quality of the test cases with a multi-objective optimization-based seed updating algorithm. We implemented ASTER as a framework and evaluated it on four open-source ASR models and three commercial ASR systems. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ASTER and find that it significantly increases the word error rate, match error rate, and word information loss in the evaluated ASR systems. Additionally, our user study demonstrates that the generated stuttering audio is indistinguishable from real-world stuttering audio clips.

Yao Du, Qiang Zhai, Weihang Dai et al.

Ordinal regression is a fundamental problem within the field of computer vision, with customised well-trained models on specific tasks. While pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have exhibited impressive performance on various vision tasks, their potential for ordinal regression has received less exploration. In this study, we first investigate CLIP's potential for ordinal regression, from which we expect the model could generalise to different ordinal regression tasks and scenarios. Unfortunately, vanilla CLIP fails on this task, since current VLMs have a well-documented limitation of encapsulating compositional concepts such as number sense. We propose a simple yet effective method called NumCLIP to improve the quantitative understanding of VLMs. We disassemble the exact image to number-specific text matching problem into coarse classification and fine prediction stages. We discretize and phrase each numerical bin with common language concept to better leverage the available pre-trained alignment in CLIP. To consider the inherent continuous property of ordinal regression, we propose a novel fine-grained cross-modal ranking-based regularisation loss specifically designed to keep both semantic and ordinal alignment in CLIP's feature space. Experimental results on three general ordinal regression tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of NumCLIP, with 10% and 3.83% accuracy improvement on historical image dating and image aesthetics assessment task, respectively. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/NumCLIP.

Bingsheng Yao, Yao Du, Yue Fu et al.

Advanced AI technologies are increasingly integrated into clinical domains to advance patient care. The design and development of clinical AI technologies necessitate seamless collaboration between clinical and technical experts. However, such interdisciplinary teams are often unsuccessful, with a lack of systematic analysis of collaboration barriers and coping strategies. This work examines two clinical AI collaborations in the context of speech-language pathology via semi-structured interviews with six clinical and seven technical experts. Using Activity Theory (AT) as our analytical lens, we examine persistent knowledge gaps and collaboration tensions across clinical and technical workflows, and show how clinical data can function as boundary objects while interdisciplinary collaborators may act as knowledge brokers to help address these challenges. Our findings contribute to CSCW research on interdisciplinary teams' data work by showing how shared clinical data, boundary objects, and broker roles shape coordination in early-stage clinical AI collaboration, and by providing insights into best practices for future collaboration.

Pan Xie, Qipeng Zhang, Taiyi Peng et al.

The Sign Language Production (SLP) project aims to automatically translate spoken languages into sign sequences. Our approach focuses on the transformation of sign gloss sequences into their corresponding sign pose sequences (G2P). In this paper, we present a novel solution for this task by converting the continuous pose space generation problem into a discrete sequence generation problem. We introduce the Pose-VQVAE framework, which combines Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with vector quantization to produce a discrete latent representation for continuous pose sequences. Additionally, we propose the G2P-DDM model, a discrete denoising diffusion architecture for length-varied discrete sequence data, to model the latent prior. To further enhance the quality of pose sequence generation in the discrete space, we present the CodeUnet model to leverage spatial-temporal information. Lastly, we develop a heuristic sequential clustering method to predict variable lengths of pose sequences for corresponding gloss sequences. Our results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art G2P models on the public SLP evaluation benchmark. For more generated results, please visit our project page: \textcolor{blue}{\url{https://slpdiffusier.github.io/g2p-ddm}}

Yuxuan Sun, Yuze Zhao, Yufeng Wang et al.

Evaluating software engineering capabilities has become a core component of modern large language models (LLMs); however, the key bottleneck hindering further scaling lies not in the scarcity of high-quality solutions, but in the lack of high-quality test suites. Test suites are indispensable both for synthesizing program repair trajectories and for providing precise feedback signals in reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, due to the high cost and difficulty of annotation, high-quality test suites have long been hard to obtain, while those automatically generated by LLMs tend to be superficial and lack sufficient discriminative power. As a first step toward constructing high-quality test suites, we introduce SWE-Mutation, a benchmark for evaluating LLM-generated test suites. The benchmark characterizes test suites by introducing systematically mutated solutions that attempt to ``fool'' the test suites and pass validation. We further propose an agentic, language-agnostic framework for automatically generating complex mutants. Our benchmark consists of 2,636 mutated variants derived from 800 original instances and includes a multilingual subset spanning nine programming languages. Experiments on seven LLMs reveal that even DeepSeek-V3.1 achieves only 10.20% verification and 36.15% detection rates, highlighting the inadequacy of current LLMs. Additionally, our agentic mutation strategy enhances realism, reducing average detection rates from 71.04% to 39.81% compared to conventional methods. These findings expose persistent deficiencies in the ability of current LLMs to generate reliable and discriminative test suites.

Zhihao Li, Yao Du, Yang Liu et al.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced greatly in general tasks. However, they still face challenges in geometric reasoning, a task that requires synergistic integration of visual recognition proficiency and complex reasoning strength. Existing MLLMs prioritize optimizing the LLM backbone to enhance problem-solving capabilities, while rarely emphasizing improvements in discerning visual elements. However, we reveal that MLLMs suffer from severe visual perception deficiencies, including inaccurate geometric comprehension and severe visual hallucinations, which constrain their reasoning performance. To address this issue, we revisit geometric reasoning through a visual-centric lens that highlights the role of visual perception. To achieve this, we propose EAGLE, a novel coarse-to-fine visual enhancement framework that progressively leverages LLMs' guidance to improve perception proficiency. Specifically, given the substantial disparity between geometric diagrams and natural images, we first introduce Geometric Knowledge Injection. This process explores fundamental knowledge from diagram-caption data to enhance recognition capabilities and improve geometry-language alignments. Then, recognizing that different elements contribute unequally in the reasoning process, we introduce Geometric Knowledge Refinement. This stage leverages LLM-driven chain-of-thought solutions to guide the vision encoder in adaptively prioritizing key elements, fostering a synergistic interplay between visual comprehension and mathematical reasoning. Finally, we develop EAGLE, a geometry expert with strong perception and reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness on three popular benchmarks.

Jing Liu, Zhengliang Guo, Yan Wang et al.

Federated learning (FL) is severely challenged by non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) client data, a problem that degrades global model performance, especially in multimodal perception settings. Conventional methods often fail to address the underlying semantic discrepancies between clients, leading to suboptimal performance for multimedia systems requiring robust perception. To overcome this, we introduce SemanticFL, a novel framework that leverages the rich semantic representations of pre-trained diffusion models to provide privacy-preserving guidance for local training. Our approach leverages multi-layer semantic representations from a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model (including VAE-encoded latents and U-Net hierarchical features) to create a shared latent space that aligns heterogeneous clients, facilitated by an efficient client-server architecture that offloads heavy computation to the server. A unified consistency mechanism, employing cross-modal contrastive learning, further stabilizes convergence. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmarks including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet under diverse heterogeneity scenarios. Our results demonstrate that SemanticFL surpasses existing federated learning approaches, achieving accuracy gains of up to 5.49% over FedAvg, validating its effectiveness in learning robust representations for heterogeneous and multimodal data for perception tasks.

Yao Du, Shanshan Li, Xiaomeng Li

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with numerical regression under long-tailed target distributions. Token-level supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and point-wise regression rewards bias learning toward high-density regions, leading to regression-to-the-mean behavior and poor tail performance. We identify the lack of cross-sample relational supervision as a key limitation of existing MLLM training paradigms. To address it, we propose a distribution-aware reinforcement learning framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization, which introduces batch-level comparison-based supervision via the Concordance Correlation Coefficient-based reward to align predicted and ground-truth distributions in terms of correlation, scale, and mean. The framework is plug-and-play, requiring no architectural modification. Experiments on a unified suite of long-tailed regression benchmarks show consistent improvements over SFT and existing MLLM regression methods, with particularly strong gains in medium- and few-shot regimes.

Yao Du, Jiarong Guo, Xiaomeng Li

Echocardiography is a vital non-invasive modality for cardiac assessment, with left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) serving as a key indicator of heart function. Existing LVEF estimation methods depend on large-scale annotated video datasets, which are costly and limit adaptability across various clinical settings. Recent vision-language models for echocardiography, such as EchoCLIP, apply image-to-text pretraining but fail to capture crucial temporal dynamics and localized cardiac structures essential for accurate diagnosis. To address these challenges, we propose CardiacCLIP, a video-based framework that enhances LVEF prediction through attention-based frame aggregation and multi-resolution input scaling. Specifically, we introduce MFL (Multi Frame Learning), a novel attention-based mechanism for selectively fusing informative frames, and EchoZoom, a multi-scale feature extraction strategy that refines spatial representations of cardiac structures. As a novel adaptation of CLIP models for few-shot echocardiogram video analysis, our approach significantly improves diagnostic accuracy, reducing MAE by 2.07 on the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset under 1-shot setting. The code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/CardiacCLIP.

Yufang Liu, Yao Du, Tao Ji et al.

Recent research has increasingly focused on multimodal mathematical reasoning, particularly emphasizing the creation of relevant datasets and benchmarks. Despite this, the role of visual information in reasoning has been underexplored. Our findings show that existing multimodal mathematical models minimally leverage visual information, and model performance remains largely unaffected by changes to or removal of images in the dataset. We attribute this to the dominance of textual information and answer options that inadvertently guide the model to correct answers. To improve evaluation methods, we introduce the HC-M3D dataset, specifically designed to require image reliance for problem-solving and to challenge models with similar, yet distinct, images that change the correct answer. In testing leading models, their failure to detect these subtle visual differences suggests limitations in current visual perception capabilities. Additionally, we observe that the common approach of improving general VQA capabilities by combining various types of image encoders does not contribute to math reasoning performance. This finding also presents a challenge to enhancing visual reliance during math reasoning. Our benchmark and code would be available at \href{https://github.com/Yufang-Liu/visual_modality_role}{https://github.com/Yufang-Liu/visual\_modality\_role}.

Jianmin Guo, Yao Du, Yizhen Yu et al.

We propose a dual-channel reservoir-computing scheme for inferring the dynamics of two distinct chaotic systems with a single machine. By augmenting a standard reservoir with a system-label channel and a parameter-control channel, the machine can be trained from time series collected from a few sampled states of the two systems. We show that the trained machine not only predicts the short-time evolution of the sampled states, but also reproduces the long-term statistical properties of unseen states, thereby enabling reconstruction of the bifurcation diagrams of both systems from partial observations. The effectiveness of the scheme is demonstrated for the Lorenz and Rössler systems in numerical simulations and for the Chua and Rossler circuits in experiments. Functional-network analysis further shows that the two target systems are encoded by distinct dynamical patterns in the reservoir. These results extend multifunctional and parameter-aware reservoir computing, and provide a route to data-driven inference of multiple nonlinear systems using a single machine.

Pan Xie, Taiyi Peng, Yao Du et al.

Sign Language Production (SLP) is the tough task of turning sign language into sign videos. The main goal of SLP is to create these videos using a sign gloss. In this research, we've developed a new method to make high-quality sign videos without using human poses as a middle step. Our model works in two main parts: first, it learns from a generator and the video's hidden features, and next, it uses another model to understand the order of these hidden features. To make this method even better for sign videos, we make several significant improvements. (i) In the first stage, we take an improved 3D VQ-GAN to learn downsampled latent representations. (ii) In the second stage, we introduce sequence-to-sequence attention to better leverage conditional information. (iii) The separated two-stage training discards the realistic visual semantic of the latent codes in the second stage. To endow the latent sequences semantic information, we extend the token-level autoregressive latent codes learning with perceptual loss and reconstruction loss for the prior model with visual perception. Compared with previous state-of-the-art approaches, our model performs consistently better on two word-level sign language datasets, i.e., WLASL and NMFs-CSL.

Jing Liu, Yao Du, Kun Yang et al.

Edge-cloud collaborative computing (ECCC) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for addressing the computational demands of modern intelligent applications, integrating cloud resources with edge devices to enable efficient, low-latency processing. Recent advancements in AI, particularly deep learning and large language models (LLMs), have dramatically enhanced the capabilities of these distributed systems, yet introduce significant challenges in model deployment and resource management. In this survey, we comprehensive examine the intersection of distributed intelligence and model optimization within edge-cloud environments, providing a structured tutorial on fundamental architectures, enabling technologies, and emerging applications. Additionally, we systematically analyze model optimization approaches, including compression, adaptation, and neural architecture search, alongside AI-driven resource management strategies that balance performance, energy efficiency, and latency requirements. We further explore critical aspects of privacy protection and security enhancement within ECCC systems and examines practical deployments through diverse applications, spanning autonomous driving, healthcare, and industrial automation. Performance analysis and benchmarking techniques are also thoroughly explored to establish evaluation standards for these complex systems. Furthermore, the review identifies critical research directions including LLMs deployment, 6G integration, neuromorphic computing, and quantum computing, offering a roadmap for addressing persistent challenges in heterogeneity management, real-time processing, and scalability. By bridging theoretical advancements and practical deployments, this survey offers researchers and practitioners a holistic perspective on leveraging AI to optimize distributed computing environments, fostering innovation in next-generation intelligent systems.

Xiaoyu Zheng, Jing Wen, Jiaxin Zhuang et al.

Polarization, as a new optical imaging tool, has been explored to assist in the diagnosis of pathology. Moreover, converting the polarimetric Mueller Matrix (MM) to standardized stained images becomes a promising approach to help pathologists interpret the results. However, existing methods for polarization-based virtual staining are still in the early stage, and the diffusion-based model, which has shown great potential in enhancing the fidelity of the generated images, has not been studied yet. In this paper, a Regulated Bridge Diffusion Model (RBDM) for polarization-based virtual staining is proposed. RBDM utilizes the bidirectional bridge diffusion process to learn the mapping from polarization images to other modalities such as H\&E and fluorescence. And to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct the experiment on our manually collected dataset, which consists of 18,000 paired polarization, fluorescence and H\&E images, due to the unavailability of the public dataset. The experiment results show that our model greatly outperforms other benchmark methods. Our dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

Yao Du, Huawei Fan, Xingang Wang

A new machine learning scheme, termed versatile reservoir computing, is proposed for sustaining the dynamics of heterogeneous complex networks. We show that a single, small-scale reservoir computer trained on time series from a subset of elements is able to replicate the dynamics of any element in a large-scale complex network, though the elements are of different intrinsic parameters and connectivities. Furthermore, by substituting failed elements with the trained machine, we demonstrate that the collective dynamics of the network can be preserved accurately over a finite time horizon. The capability and effectiveness of the proposed scheme are validated on three representative network models: a homogeneous complex network of non-identical phase oscillators, a heterogeneous complex network of non-identical phase oscillators, and a heterogeneous complex network of non-identical chaotic oscillators.

Ziyi Liu, Priyanka Dey, Jen-tse Huang et al.

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) refers to the ability to understand unfamiliar cultural contexts, a crucial skill for large language models (LLMs) to effectively engage with globally diverse users. Existing studies often focus on explicitly stated cultural norms, but fail to capture the subtle, implicit values that are common in daily conversation. To address this gap, we introduce CQBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' capability to infer implicit cultural values from natural conversational contexts. CQBench consists of multi character conversation based stories using values from the World Value Survey and the GlobalOpinions, with topics including ethical, religious, social, etc. Our automatic dataset construction pipeline integrates rigorous validation procedures (incorporation, consistency, and implicitness checks), achieving a 94.5% human model agreement in the final validation. To leverage CQBench data, we design three tasks of increasing complexity: attitude detection, value selection, and value extraction. These tasks evaluate whether models can detect attitude and recognize values embedded within natural dialogues rather than relying on explicit cultural knowledge. We find that while frontier models like o1 reach human level performance in value selection (0.809 F1), they still fall short in nuanced attitude detection (0.622 F1). Notably, finetuning a smaller LLaMA-3.2-3B on only 500 culturally rich examples improves performance by over 10%, even outperforming o3-mini in some cases. Using CQ-Bench, we provide insights into the current challenges in LLMs' CQ research and suggest practical pathways for enhancing LLMs' cross-cultural reasoning abilities.

Yao Du, Jiaxin Zhuang, Xiaoyu Zheng et al.

Histopathology image analysis is fundamental to digital pathology, with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining as the gold standard for diagnostic and prognostic assessments. While H&E imaging effectively highlights cellular and tissue structures, it lacks sensitivity to birefringence and tissue anisotropy, which are crucial for assessing collagen organization, fiber alignment, and microstructural alterations--key indicators of tumor progression, fibrosis, and other pathological conditions. To bridge this gap, we construct a polarization imaging system and curate a new dataset of over 13,000 paired Polar-H&E images. Visualizations of polarization properties reveal distinctive optical signatures in pathological tissues, underscoring its diagnostic value. Building on this dataset, we propose PolarHE, a dual-modality fusion framework that integrates H&E with polarization imaging, leveraging the latter ability to enhance tissue characterization. Our approach employs a feature decomposition strategy to disentangle common and modality specific features, ensuring effective multimodal representation learning. Through comprehensive validation, our approach significantly outperforms previous methods, achieving an accuracy of 86.70% on the Chaoyang dataset and 89.06% on the MHIST dataset. These results demonstrate that polarization imaging is a powerful and underutilized modality in computational pathology, enriching feature representation and improving diagnostic accuracy. PolarHE establishes a promising direction for multimodal learning, paving the way for more interpretable and generalizable pathology models.

Xin Jin, Chunle Guo, Xiaoming Li et al.

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Few-shot RAW Image Denoising track on MIPI 2024. In total, 165 participants were successfully registered, and 7 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art erformance on Few-shot RAW Image Denoising. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipichallenge.org/MIPI2024.

Yao Du, Carlos M. Mateo, Mirjana Maras et al.

Unlike a traditional gyroscope, a visual gyroscope estimates camera rotation through images. The integration of omnidirectional cameras, offering a larger field of view compared to traditional RGB cameras, has proven to yield more accurate and robust results. However, challenges arise in situations that lack features, have substantial noise causing significant errors, and where certain features in the images lack sufficient strength, leading to less precise prediction results. Here, we address these challenges by introducing a novel visual gyroscope, which combines an Efficient Multi-Mask-Filter Rotation Estimator(EMMFRE) and a Learning based optimization(LbTO) to provide a more efficient and accurate rotation estimation from spherical images. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy. The paper emphasizes the advantages of integrating machine learning to optimize analytical solutions, discusses limitations, and suggests directions for future research.

Yao Du, Qing Li, Huawei Fan et al.

Power systems dominated by renewable energy encounter frequently large, random disturbances, and a critical challenge faced in power-system management is how to anticipate accurately whether the perturbed systems will return to the functional state after the transient or collapse. Whereas model-based studies show that the key to addressing the challenge lies in the attracting basins of the functional and dysfunctional states in the phase space, the finding of the attracting basins for realistic power systems remains a challenge, as accurate models describing the system dynamics are generally unavailable. Here we propose a new machine learning technique, namely balanced reservoir computing, to infer the attracting basins of a typical power system based on measured data. Specifically, trained by the time series of a handful of perturbation events, we demonstrate that the trained machine can predict accurately whether the system will return to the functional state in response to a large, random perturbation, thereby reconstructing the attracting basin of the functional state. The working mechanism of the new machine is analyzed, and it is revealed that the success of the new machine is attributed to the good balance between the echo and fading properties of the reservoir network; the effect of noisy signals on the prediction performance is also investigated, and a stochastic-resonance-like phenomenon is observed. Finally, we demonstrate that the new technique can be also utilized to infer the attracting basins of coexisting attractors in typical chaotic systems.

Pan Xie, Zhi Cui, Yao Du et al.

Continuous sign language recognition (cSLR) is a public significant task that transcribes a sign language video into an ordered gloss sequence. It is important to capture the fine-grained gloss-level details, since there is no explicit alignment between sign video frames and the corresponding glosses. Among the past works, one promising way is to adopt a one-dimensional convolutional network (1D-CNN) to temporally fuse the sequential frames. However, CNNs are agnostic to similarity or dissimilarity, and thus are unable to capture local consistent semantics within temporally neighboring frames. To address the issue, we propose to adaptively fuse local features via temporal similarity for this task. Specifically, we devise a Multi-scale Local-Temporal Similarity Fusion Network (mLTSF-Net) as follows: 1) In terms of a specific video frame, we firstly select its similar neighbours with multi-scale receptive regions to accommodate different lengths of glosses. 2) To ensure temporal consistency, we then use position-aware convolution to temporally convolve each scale of selected frames. 3) To obtain a local-temporally enhanced frame-wise representation, we finally fuse the results of different scales using a content-dependent aggregator. We train our model in an end-to-end fashion, and the experimental results on RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014 datasets (RWTH) demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance compared with several state-of-the-art models.