Yao Zhang

Junlong Tong, Yao Zhang, Anhao Zhao et al.

Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) follow a read-then-generate paradigm, causing unnecessary latency and computation. Streaming LLMs alleviate this issue by generating while receiving inputs, but still struggle to decide when to interact with the stream. Existing methods either hard-code interaction timing or rely on costly external alignment signals, such as timing labels, reasoning trajectories, or stronger teachers. In this paper, we propose ProactiveLLM, which achieves active interaction by leveraging the model's endogenous states to guide interaction decisions. The model first learns to perceive semantic sufficiency from partial inputs through two complementary training mechanisms: mask-based streaming modeling and synchronized privileged self-distillation (SPSD). The former applies monotonic random masking to the input during training, simulating progressively revealed streaming inputs and enabling the model to learn local semantic dependencies from partial-input views. The latter aligns the partial-context student view with a full-context teacher view generated by the same evolving model, allowing privileged full-context evidence to guide the student's understanding under incomplete observations. Together, these mechanisms induce endogenous sufficiency cues without requiring external teachers or annotations, providing a versatile foundation for the plug-and-play integration of diverse decision heads. Extensive evaluation across text and speech streaming tasks confirms that ProactiveLLM significantly reduces interaction latency while maintaining quality, validating its capacity for dynamic and active interaction. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/ProactiveLLM.

Jianning Li, Zongwei Zhou, Jiancheng Yang et al.

Prior to the deep learning era, shape was commonly used to describe the objects. Nowadays, state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in medical imaging are predominantly diverging from computer vision, where voxel grids, meshes, point clouds, and implicit surface models are used. This is seen from numerous shape-related publications in premier vision conferences as well as the growing popularity of ShapeNet (about 51,300 models) and Princeton ModelNet (127,915 models). For the medical domain, we present a large collection of anatomical shapes (e.g., bones, organs, vessels) and 3D models of surgical instrument, called MedShapeNet, created to facilitate the translation of data-driven vision algorithms to medical applications and to adapt SOTA vision algorithms to medical problems. As a unique feature, we directly model the majority of shapes on the imaging data of real patients. As of today, MedShapeNet includes 23 dataset with more than 100,000 shapes that are paired with annotations (ground truth). Our data is freely accessible via a web interface and a Python application programming interface (API) and can be used for discriminative, reconstructive, and variational benchmarks as well as various applications in virtual, augmented, or mixed reality, and 3D printing. Exemplary, we present use cases in the fields of classification of brain tumors, facial and skull reconstructions, multi-class anatomy completion, education, and 3D printing. In future, we will extend the data and improve the interfaces. The project pages are: https://medshapenet.ikim.nrw/ and https://github.com/Jianningli/medshapenet-feedback

Yao Zhang, Nanjun He, Jiawei Yang et al.

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is desirable to joint learning of multimodal images. However, in clinical practice, it is not always possible to acquire a complete set of MRIs, and the problem of missing modalities causes severe performance degradation in existing multimodal segmentation methods. In this work, we present the first attempt to exploit the Transformer for multimodal brain tumor segmentation that is robust to any combinatorial subset of available modalities. Concretely, we propose a novel multimodal Medical Transformer (mmFormer) for incomplete multimodal learning with three main components: the hybrid modality-specific encoders that bridge a convolutional encoder and an intra-modal Transformer for both local and global context modeling within each modality; an inter-modal Transformer to build and align the long-range correlations across modalities for modality-invariant features with global semantics corresponding to tumor region; a decoder that performs a progressive up-sampling and fusion with the modality-invariant features to generate robust segmentation. Besides, auxiliary regularizers are introduced in both encoder and decoder to further enhance the model's robustness to incomplete modalities. We conduct extensive experiments on the public BraTS $2018$ dataset for brain tumor segmentation. The results demonstrate that the proposed mmFormer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for incomplete multimodal brain tumor segmentation on almost all subsets of incomplete modalities, especially by an average 19.07% improvement of Dice on tumor segmentation with only one available modality. The code is available at https://github.com/YaoZhang93/mmFormer.

Zhen Han, Ruotong Liao, Jindong Gu et al. · deepmind, oxford

Since conventional knowledge embedding models cannot take full advantage of the abundant textual information, there have been extensive research efforts in enhancing knowledge embedding using texts. However, existing enhancement approaches cannot apply to temporal knowledge graphs (tKGs), which contain time-dependent event knowledge with complex temporal dynamics. Specifically, existing enhancement approaches often assume knowledge embedding is time-independent. In contrast, the entity embedding in tKG models usually evolves, which poses the challenge of aligning temporally relevant texts with entities. To this end, we propose to study enhancing temporal knowledge embedding with textual data in this paper. As an approach to this task, we propose Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations (ECOLA), which takes the temporal aspect into account and injects textual information into temporal knowledge embedding. To evaluate ECOLA, we introduce three new datasets for training and evaluating ECOLA. Extensive experiments show that ECOLA significantly enhances temporal KG embedding models with up to 287% relative improvements regarding Hits@1 on the link prediction task. The code and models are publicly available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ECOLA.

Haokun Chen, Yao Zhang, Denis Krompass et al. · deepmind, oxford

Recently, foundation models have exhibited remarkable advancements in multi-modal learning. These models, equipped with millions (or billions) of parameters, typically require a substantial amount of data for finetuning. However, collecting and centralizing training data from diverse sectors becomes challenging due to distinct privacy regulations. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a promising solution, enabling multiple clients to collaboratively train neural networks without centralizing their local data. To alleviate client computation burdens and communication overheads, previous works have adapted Parameter-efficient Finetuning (PEFT) methods for FL. Hereby, only a small fraction of the model parameters are optimized and communicated during federated communications. Nevertheless, most previous works have focused on a single modality and neglected one common phenomenon, i.e., the presence of data heterogeneity across the clients. Therefore, in this work, we propose a finetuning framework tailored to heterogeneous multi-modal FL, called Federated Dual-Aadapter Teacher (FedDAT). Specifically, our approach leverages a Dual-Adapter Teacher (DAT) to address data heterogeneity by regularizing the client local updates and applying Mutual Knowledge Distillation (MKD) for an efficient knowledge transfer. FedDAT is the first approach that enables an efficient distributed finetuning of foundation models for a variety of heterogeneous Vision-Language tasks. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on four multi-modality FL benchmarks with different types of data heterogeneity, where FedDAT substantially outperforms the existing centralized PEFT methods adapted for FL.

Jiawei Yang, Hanbo Chen, Yu Zhao et al.

Whole slide image (WSI) classification often relies on deep weakly supervised multiple instance learning (MIL) methods to handle gigapixel resolution images and slide-level labels. Yet the decent performance of deep learning comes from harnessing massive datasets and diverse samples, urging the need for efficient training pipelines for scaling to large datasets and data augmentation techniques for diversifying samples. However, current MIL-based WSI classification pipelines are memory-expensive and computation-inefficient since they usually assemble tens of thousands of patches as bags for computation. On the other hand, despite their popularity in other tasks, data augmentations are unexplored for WSI MIL frameworks. To address them, we propose ReMix, a general and efficient framework for MIL based WSI classification. It comprises two steps: reduce and mix. First, it reduces the number of instances in WSI bags by substituting instances with instance prototypes, i.e., patch cluster centroids. Then, we propose a ``Mix-the-bag'' augmentation that contains four online, stochastic and flexible latent space augmentations. It brings diverse and reliable class-identity-preserving semantic changes in the latent space while enforcing semantic-perturbation invariance. We evaluate ReMix on two public datasets with two state-of-the-art MIL methods. In our experiments, consistent improvements in precision, accuracy, and recall have been achieved but with orders of magnitude reduced training time and memory consumption, demonstrating ReMix's effectiveness and efficiency. Code is available.

Wenqiang Lei, Yao Zhang, Feifan Song et al. · pku

Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.

Yao Zhang, Haokun Chen, Ahmed Frikha et al. · deepmind, oxford

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a multi-discipline research task. To produce the right answer, it requires an understanding of the visual content of images, the natural language questions, as well as commonsense reasoning over the information contained in the image and world knowledge. Recently, large-scale Vision-and-Language Pre-trained Models (VLPMs) have been the mainstream approach to VQA tasks due to their superior performance. The standard practice is to fine-tune large-scale VLPMs pre-trained on huge general-domain datasets using the domain-specific VQA datasets. However, in reality, the application domain can change over time, necessitating VLPMs to continually learn and adapt to new domains without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Most existing continual learning (CL) research concentrates on unimodal tasks, whereas a more practical application scenario, i.e, CL on cross-domain VQA, has not been studied. Motivated by this, we introduce CL-CrossVQA, a rigorous Continual Learning benchmark for Cross-domain Visual Question Answering, through which we conduct extensive experiments on 4 VLPMs, 4 CL approaches, and 5 VQA datasets from different domains. In addition, by probing the forgetting phenomenon of the intermediate layers, we provide insights into how model architecture affects CL performance, why CL approaches can help mitigate forgetting in VLPMs to some extent, and how to design CL approaches suitable for VLPMs in this challenging continual learning environment. To facilitate future work on CL for cross-domain VQA, we will release our datasets and code.

Jun Ma, Ronald Xie, Shamini Ayyadhury et al.

Cell segmentation is a critical step for quantitative single-cell analysis in microscopy images. Existing cell segmentation methods are often tailored to specific modalities or require manual interventions to specify hyper-parameters in different experimental settings. Here, we present a multi-modality cell segmentation benchmark, comprising over 1500 labeled images derived from more than 50 diverse biological experiments. The top participants developed a Transformer-based deep-learning algorithm that not only exceeds existing methods but can also be applied to diverse microscopy images across imaging platforms and tissue types without manual parameter adjustments. This benchmark and the improved algorithm offer promising avenues for more accurate and versatile cell analysis in microscopy imaging.

Xi Chen, Yun Xiong, Siqi Wang et al.

Layout planning is centrally important in the field of architecture and urban design. Among the various basic units carrying urban functions, residential community plays a vital part for supporting human life. Therefore, the layout planning of residential community has always been of concern, and has attracted particular attention since the advent of deep learning that facilitates the automated layout generation and spatial pattern recognition. However, the research circles generally suffer from the insufficiency of residential community layout benchmark or high-quality datasets, which hampers the future exploration of data-driven methods for residential community layout planning. The lack of datasets is largely due to the difficulties of large-scale real-world residential data acquisition and long-term expert screening. In order to address the issues and advance a benchmark dataset for various intelligent spatial design and analysis applications in the development of smart city, we introduce Residential Community Layout Planning (ReCo) Dataset, which is the first and largest open-source vector dataset related to real-world community to date. ReCo Dataset is presented in multiple data formats with 37,646 residential community layout plans, covering 598,728 residential buildings with height information. ReCo can be conveniently adapted for residential community layout related urban design tasks, e.g., generative layout design, morphological pattern recognition and spatial evaluation. To validate the utility of ReCo in automated residential community layout planning, two Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based generative models are further applied to the dataset. We expect ReCo Dataset to inspire more creative and practical work in intelligent design and beyond. The ReCo Dataset is published at: https://www.kaggle.com/fdudsde/reco-dataset.

Jiayu Lei, Lisong Dai, Haoyun Jiang et al. · harvard

Magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) have played a crucial role in brain disease diagnosis, with which a range of computer-aided artificial intelligence methods have been proposed. However, the early explorations usually focus on the limited types of brain diseases in one study and train the model on the data in a small scale, yielding the bottleneck of generalization. Towards a more effective and scalable paradigm, we propose a hierarchical knowledge-enhanced pre-training framework for the universal brain MRI diagnosis, termed as UniBrain. Specifically, UniBrain leverages a large-scale dataset of 24,770 imaging-report pairs from routine diagnostics. Different from previous pre-training techniques for the unitary vision or textual feature, or with the brute-force alignment between vision and language information, we leverage the unique characteristic of report information in different granularity to build a hierarchical alignment mechanism, which strengthens the efficiency in feature learning. Our UniBrain is validated on three real world datasets with severe class imbalance and the public BraTS2019 dataset. It not only consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art diagnostic methods by a large margin and provides a superior grounding performance but also shows comparable performance compared to expert radiologists on certain disease types.

Bin Yu, Yao Zhang, Haishan Liu et al.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are built on the premise that semantic understanding from pretrained language or vision-language backbones should guide robot action prediction. Yet robot fine-tuning is optimized as imitation over task-specific action distributions, and many evaluations can be solved through visual or instruction-action shortcuts. We introduce RoboSemanticBench (RSB), an embodied benchmark for diagnosing semantic grounding in action prediction: whether post-trained VLA models can use complex instruction semantics to select and manipulate the correct physical target. In each episode, a robot receives a multiple-choice math or general-knowledge question, observes candidate answer blocks, and must grasp the block corresponding to the correct answer. RSB covers controlled arithmetic, grade-school mathematical understanding, and commonsense or factual understanding under four-choice and ten-choice suites. Across representative VLA models, we find that many policies learn to grasp candidate blocks but select the semantically correct block at near-random or below-random rates after controlling for grasp success, revealing a persistent gap between backbone-level semantic competence and action prediction.

Jin Yuan, Shikai Chen, Yao Zhang et al.

Multi-label classification aims to recognize multiple objects or attributes from images. However, it is challenging to learn from proper label graphs to effectively characterize such inter-label correlations or dependencies. Current methods often use the co-occurrence probability of labels based on the training set as the adjacency matrix to model this correlation, which is greatly limited by the dataset and affects the model's generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a Graph Attention Transformer Network (GATN), a general framework for multi-label image classification that can effectively mine complex inter-label relationships. First, we use the cosine similarity based on the label word embedding as the initial correlation matrix, which can represent rich semantic information. Subsequently, we design the graph attention transformer layer to transfer this adjacency matrix to adapt to the current domain. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three datasets.

Jun Ma, Yao Zhang, Song Gu et al.

Quantitative organ assessment is an essential step in automated abdominal disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown great potential to automatize this process. However, most existing AI algorithms rely on many expert annotations and lack a comprehensive evaluation of accuracy and efficiency in real-world multinational settings. To overcome these limitations, we organized the FLARE 2022 Challenge, the largest abdominal organ analysis challenge to date, to benchmark fast, low-resource, accurate, annotation-efficient, and generalized AI algorithms. We constructed an intercontinental and multinational dataset from more than 50 medical groups, including Computed Tomography (CT) scans with different races, diseases, phases, and manufacturers. We independently validated that a set of AI algorithms achieved a median Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 90.0\% by using 50 labeled scans and 2000 unlabeled scans, which can significantly reduce annotation requirements. The best-performing algorithms successfully generalized to holdout external validation sets, achieving a median DSC of 89.5\%, 90.9\%, and 88.3\% on North American, European, and Asian cohorts, respectively. They also enabled automatic extraction of key organ biology features, which was labor-intensive with traditional manual measurements. This opens the potential to use unlabeled data to boost performance and alleviate annotation shortages for modern AI models.

Yao Zhang, Zijian Ma, Yunpu Ma et al.

LLM-based autonomous agents often fail to execute complex web tasks that require dynamic interaction due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of these environments. Existing LLM-based web agents typically rely on rigid, expert-designed policies specific to certain states and actions, which lack the flexibility and generalizability needed to adapt to unseen tasks. In contrast, humans excel by exploring unknowns, continuously adapting strategies, and resolving ambiguities through exploration. To emulate human-like adaptability, web agents need strategic exploration and complex decision-making. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is well-suited for this, but classical MCTS struggles with vast action spaces, unpredictable state transitions, and incomplete information in web tasks. In light of this, we develop WebPilot, a multi-agent system with a dual optimization strategy that improves MCTS to better handle complex web environments. Specifically, the Global Optimization phase involves generating a high-level plan by breaking down tasks into manageable subtasks and continuously refining this plan, thereby focusing the search process and mitigating the challenges posed by vast action spaces in classical MCTS. Subsequently, the Local Optimization phase executes each subtask using a tailored MCTS designed for complex environments, effectively addressing uncertainties and managing incomplete information. Experimental results on WebArena and MiniWoB++ demonstrate the effectiveness of WebPilot. Notably, on WebArena, WebPilot achieves SOTA performance with GPT-4, achieving a 93% relative increase in success rate over the concurrent tree search-based method. WebPilot marks a significant advancement in general autonomous agent capabilities, paving the way for more advanced and reliable decision-making in practical environments.

Yang Liu, Yao Zhang, Yixin Wang et al.

Recently, the dominant DETR-based approaches apply central-concept spatial prior to accelerate Transformer detector convergency. These methods gradually refine the reference points to the center of target objects and imbue object queries with the updated central reference information for spatially conditional attention. However, centralizing reference points may severely deteriorate queries' saliency and confuse detectors due to the indiscriminative spatial prior. To bridge the gap between the reference points of salient queries and Transformer detectors, we propose SAlient Point-based DETR (SAP-DETR) by treating object detection as a transformation from salient points to instance objects. In SAP-DETR, we explicitly initialize a query-specific reference point for each object query, gradually aggregate them into an instance object, and then predict the distance from each side of the bounding box to these points. By rapidly attending to query-specific reference region and other conditional extreme regions from the image features, SAP-DETR can effectively bridge the gap between the salient point and the query-based Transformer detector with a significant convergency speed. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that SAP-DETR achieves 1.4 times convergency speed with competitive performance. Under the standard training scheme, SAP-DETR stably promotes the SOTA approaches by 1.0 AP. Based on ResNet-DC-101, SAP-DETR achieves 46.9 AP.

Yao Zhang, Zhiwen Yu, Jun Zhang et al.

This paper considers optimal traffic signal control in smart cities, which has been taken as a complex networked system control problem. Given the interacting dynamics among traffic lights and road networks, attaining controller adaptivity and scalability stands out as a primary challenge. Capturing the spatial-temporal correlation among traffic lights under the framework of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a promising solution. Nevertheless, existing MARL algorithms ignore effective information aggregation which is fundamental for improving the learning capacity of decentralized agents. In this paper, we design a new decentralized control architecture with improved environmental observability to capture the spatial-temporal correlation. Specifically, we first develop a topology-aware information aggregation strategy to extract correlation-related information from unstructured data gathered in the road network. Particularly, we transfer the road network topology into a graph shift operator by forming a diffusion process on the topology, which subsequently facilitates the construction of graph signals. A diffusion convolution module is developed, forming a new MARL algorithm, which endows agents with the capabilities of graph learning. Extensive experiments based on both synthetic and real-world datasets verify that our proposal outperforms existing decentralized algorithms.

Chris Richardson, Yao Zhang, Kellen Gillespie et al.

Personalization, the ability to tailor a system to individual users, is an essential factor in user experience with natural language processing (NLP) systems. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), a key question is how to leverage these models to better personalize user experiences. To personalize a language model's output, a straightforward approach is to incorporate past user data into the language model prompt, but this approach can result in lengthy inputs exceeding limitations on input length and incurring latency and cost issues. Existing approaches tackle such challenges by selectively extracting relevant user data (i.e. selective retrieval) to construct a prompt for downstream tasks. However, retrieval-based methods are limited by potential information loss, lack of more profound user understanding, and cold-start challenges. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel summary-augmented approach by extending retrieval-augmented personalization with task-aware user summaries generated by LLMs. The summaries can be generated and stored offline, enabling real-world systems with runtime constraints like voice assistants to leverage the power of LLMs. Experiments show our method with 75% less of retrieved user data is on-par or outperforms retrieval augmentation on most tasks in the LaMP personalization benchmark. We demonstrate that offline summarization via LLMs and runtime retrieval enables better performance for personalization on a range of tasks under practical constraints.

Yao Zhang, Jiawei Yang, Yang Liu et al.

Purpose: Automated liver tumor segmentation from Computed Tomography (CT) images is a necessary prerequisite in the interventions of hepatic abnormalities and surgery planning. However, accurate liver tumor segmentation remains challenging due to the large variability of tumor sizes and inhomogeneous texture. Recent advances based on Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) for medical image segmentation drew on the success of learning discriminative pyramid features. In this paper, we propose a Decoupled Pyramid Correlation Network (DPC-Net) that exploits attention mechanisms to fully leverage both low- and high-level features embedded in FCN to segment liver tumor. Methods: We first design a powerful Pyramid Feature Encoder (PFE) to extract multi-level features from input images. Then we decouple the characteristics of features concerning spatial dimension (i.e., height, width, depth) and semantic dimension (i.e., channel). On top of that, we present two types of attention modules, Spatial Correlation (SpaCor) and Semantic Correlation (SemCor) modules, to recursively measure the correlation of multi-level features. The former selectively emphasizes global semantic information in low-level features with the guidance of high-level ones. The latter adaptively enhance spatial details in high-level features with the guidance of low-level ones. Results: We evaluate the DPC-Net on MICCAI 2017 LiTS Liver Tumor Segmentation (LiTS) challenge dataset. Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Average Symmetric Surface Distance (ASSD) are employed for evaluation. The proposed method obtains a DSC of 76.4% and an ASSD of 0.838 mm for liver tumor segmentation, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. It also achieves a competitive results with a DSC of 96.0% and an ASSD of 1.636 mm for liver segmentation.

Yao Zhang, Yun Xiong, Yongxiang Liao et al.

Temporal interaction graphs (TIGs), consisting of sequences of timestamped interaction events, are prevalent in fields like e-commerce and social networks. To better learn dynamic node embeddings that vary over time, researchers have proposed a series of temporal graph neural networks for TIGs. However, due to the entangled temporal and structural dependencies, existing methods have to process the sequence of events chronologically and consecutively to ensure node representations are up-to-date. This prevents existing models from parallelization and reduces their flexibility in industrial applications. To tackle the above challenge, in this paper, we propose TIGER, a TIG embedding model that can restart at any timestamp. We introduce a restarter module that generates surrogate representations acting as the warm initialization of node representations. By restarting from multiple timestamps simultaneously, we divide the sequence into multiple chunks and naturally enable the parallelization of the model. Moreover, in contrast to previous models that utilize a single memory unit, we introduce a dual memory module to better exploit neighborhood information and alleviate the staleness problem. Extensive experiments on four public datasets and one industrial dataset are conducted, and the results verify both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our work.

Zian Jia, Yun Xiong, Yuhong Nan et al.

Advance Persistent Threats (APTs), adopted by most delicate attackers, are becoming increasing common and pose great threat to various enterprises and institutions. Data provenance analysis on provenance graphs has emerged as a common approach in APT detection. However, previous works have exhibited several shortcomings: (1) requiring attack-containing data and a priori knowledge of APTs, (2) failing in extracting the rich contextual information buried within provenance graphs and (3) becoming impracticable due to their prohibitive computation overhead and memory consumption. In this paper, we introduce MAGIC, a novel and flexible self-supervised APT detection approach capable of performing multi-granularity detection under different level of supervision. MAGIC leverages masked graph representation learning to model benign system entities and behaviors, performing efficient deep feature extraction and structure abstraction on provenance graphs. By ferreting out anomalous system behaviors via outlier detection methods, MAGIC is able to perform both system entity level and batched log level APT detection. MAGIC is specially designed to handle concept drift with a model adaption mechanism and successfully applies to universal conditions and detection scenarios. We evaluate MAGIC on three widely-used datasets, including both real-world and simulated attacks. Evaluation results indicate that MAGIC achieves promising detection results in all scenarios and shows enormous advantage over state-of-the-art APT detection approaches in performance overhead.

Xi Chen, Yongxiang Liao, Yun Xiong et al.

Temporal Interaction Graphs (TIGs) are widely employed to model intricate real-world systems such as financial systems and social networks. To capture the dynamism and interdependencies of nodes, existing TIG embedding models need to process edges sequentially and chronologically. However, this requirement prevents it from being processed in parallel and struggle to accommodate burgeoning data volumes to GPU. Consequently, many large-scale temporal interaction graphs are confined to CPU processing. Furthermore, a generalized GPU scaling and acceleration approach remains unavailable. To facilitate large-scale TIGs' implementation on GPUs for acceleration, we introduce a novel training approach namely Streaming Edge Partitioning and Parallel Acceleration for Temporal Interaction Graph Embedding (SPEED). The SPEED is comprised of a Streaming Edge Partitioning Component (SEP) which addresses space overhead issue by assigning fewer nodes to each GPU, and a Parallel Acceleration Component (PAC) which enables simultaneous training of different sub-graphs, addressing time overhead issue. Our method can achieve a good balance in computing resources, computing time, and downstream task performance. Empirical validation across 7 real-world datasets demonstrates the potential to expedite training speeds by a factor of up to 19.29x. Simultaneously, resource consumption of a single-GPU can be diminished by up to 69%, thus enabling the multiple GPU-based training and acceleration encompassing millions of nodes and billions of edges. Furthermore, our approach also maintains its competitiveness in downstream tasks.

Feng Hou, Yao Zhang, Yang Liu et al.

Due to domain shift, deep neural networks (DNNs) usually fail to generalize well on unknown test data in practice. Domain generalization (DG) aims to overcome this issue by capturing domain-invariant representations from source domains. Motivated by the insight that only partial parameters of DNNs are optimized to extract domain-invariant representations, we expect a general model that is capable of well perceiving and emphatically updating such domain-invariant parameters. In this paper, we propose two modules of Domain Decoupling and Combination (DDC) and Domain-invariance-guided Backpropagation (DIGB), which can encourage such general model to focus on the parameters that have a unified optimization direction between pairs of contrastive samples. Our extensive experiments on two benchmarks have demonstrated that our proposed method has achieved state-of-the-art performance with strong generalization capability.

Siwei Zhang, Yun Xiong, Yao Zhang et al.

Continuous-time dynamic graph modeling is a crucial task for many real-world applications, such as financial risk management and fraud detection. Though existing dynamic graph modeling methods have achieved satisfactory results, they still suffer from three key limitations, hindering their scalability and further applicability. i) Indiscriminate updating. For incoming edges, existing methods would indiscriminately deal with them, which may lead to more time consumption and unexpected noisy information. ii) Ineffective node-wise long-term modeling. They heavily rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as a backbone, which has been demonstrated to be incapable of fully capturing node-wise long-term dependencies in event sequences. iii) Neglect of re-occurrence patterns. Dynamic graphs involve the repeated occurrence of neighbors that indicates their importance, which is disappointedly neglected by existing methods. In this paper, we present iLoRE, a novel dynamic graph modeling method with instant node-wise Long-term modeling and Re-occurrence preservation. To overcome the indiscriminate updating issue, we introduce the Adaptive Short-term Updater module that will automatically discard the useless or noisy edges, ensuring iLoRE's effectiveness and instant ability. We further propose the Long-term Updater to realize more effective node-wise long-term modeling, where we innovatively propose the Identity Attention mechanism to empower a Transformer-based updater, bypassing the limited effectiveness of typical RNN-dominated designs. Finally, the crucial re-occurrence patterns are also encoded into a graph module for informative representation learning, which will further improve the expressiveness of our method. Our experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our iLoRE for dynamic graph modeling.

Siwei Zhang, Yun Xiong, Yao Zhang et al.

Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) have shown remarkable performance in learning representation for continuous-time dynamic graphs. However, real-world dynamic graphs typically contain diverse and intricate noise. Noise can significantly degrade the quality of representation generation, impeding the effectiveness of TGNs in downstream tasks. Though structure learning is widely applied to mitigate noise in static graphs, its adaptation to dynamic graph settings poses two significant challenges. i) Noise dynamics. Existing structure learning methods are ill-equipped to address the temporal aspect of noise, hampering their effectiveness in such dynamic and ever-changing noise patterns. ii) More severe noise. Noise may be introduced along with multiple interactions between two nodes, leading to the re-pollution of these nodes and consequently causing more severe noise compared to static graphs. In this paper, we present RDGSL, a representation learning method in continuous-time dynamic graphs. Meanwhile, we propose dynamic graph structure learning, a novel supervisory signal that empowers RDGSL with the ability to effectively combat noise in dynamic graphs. To address the noise dynamics issue, we introduce the Dynamic Graph Filter, where we innovatively propose a dynamic noise function that dynamically captures both current and historical noise, enabling us to assess the temporal aspect of noise and generate a denoised graph. We further propose the Temporal Embedding Learner to tackle the challenge of more severe noise, which utilizes an attention mechanism to selectively turn a blind eye to noisy edges and hence focus on normal edges, enhancing the expressiveness for representation generation that remains resilient to noise. Our method demonstrates robustness towards downstream tasks, resulting in up to 5.1% absolute AUC improvement in evolving classification versus the second-best baseline.

Yi Liu, Weizhe Wang, Ruitao Feng et al.

The rise of AI agent frameworks has introduced agent skills, modular packages containing instructions and executable code that dynamically extend agent capabilities. While this architecture enables powerful customization, skills execute with implicit trust and minimal vetting, creating a significant yet uncharacterized attack surface. We conduct the first large-scale empirical security analysis of this emerging ecosystem, collecting 42,447 skills from two major marketplaces and systematically analyzing 31,132 using SkillScan, a multi-stage detection framework integrating static analysis with LLM-based semantic classification. Our findings reveal pervasive security risks: 26.1% of skills contain at least one vulnerability, spanning 14 distinct patterns across four categories: prompt injection, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and supply chain risks. Data exfiltration (13.3%) and privilege escalation (11.8%) are most prevalent, while 5.2% of skills exhibit high-severity patterns strongly suggesting malicious intent. We find that skills bundling executable scripts are 2.12x more likely to contain vulnerabilities than instruction-only skills (OR=2.12, p<0.001). Our contributions include: (1) a grounded vulnerability taxonomy derived from 8,126 vulnerable skills, (2) a validated detection methodology achieving 86.7% precision and 82.5% recall, and (3) an open dataset and detection toolkit to support future research. These results demonstrate an urgent need for capability-based permission systems and mandatory security vetting before this attack vector is further exploited.

Changan Yang, Yaxing Chen, Yao Zhang et al.

Vehicular crowd intelligence (VCI) is an emerging research field. Facilitated by state-of-the-art vehicular ad-hoc networks and artificial intelligence, various VCI applications come to place, e.g., collaborative sensing, positioning, and mapping. The collaborative property of VCI applications generally requires data to be shared among participants, thus forming network-wide intelligence. How to fulfill this process without compromising data privacy remains a challenging issue. Although federated learning (FL) is a promising tool to solve the problem, adapting conventional FL frameworks to VCI is nontrivial. First, the centralized model aggregation is unreliable in VCI because of the existence of stragglers with unfavorable channel conditions. Second, existing FL schemes are vulnerable to Non-IID data, which is intensified by the data heterogeneity in VCI. This paper proposes a novel federated learning framework called RaftFed to facilitate privacy-preserving VCI. The experimental results show that RaftFed performs better than baselines regarding communication overhead, model accuracy, and model convergence.

Jun Ma, Yao Zhang, Song Gu et al.

Organ and cancer segmentation in abdomen Computed Tomography (CT) scans is the prerequisite for precise cancer diagnosis and treatment. Most existing benchmarks and algorithms are tailored to specific cancer types, limiting their ability to provide comprehensive cancer analysis. This work presents the first international competition on abdominal organ and pan-cancer segmentation by providing a large-scale and diverse dataset, including 4650 CT scans with various cancer types from over 40 medical centers. The winning team established a new state-of-the-art with a deep learning-based cascaded framework, achieving average Dice Similarity Coefficient scores of 92.3% for organs and 64.9% for lesions on the hidden multi-national testing set. The dataset and code of top teams are publicly available, offering a benchmark platform to drive further innovations https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/12239.

Yao Zhang, Yun Xiong, Yiheng Sun et al.

Risk scoring systems have been widely deployed in many applications, which assign risk scores to users according to their behavior sequences. Though many deep learning methods with sophisticated designs have achieved promising results, the black-box nature hinders their applications due to fairness, explainability, and compliance consideration. Rule-based systems are considered reliable in these sensitive scenarios. However, building a rule system is labor-intensive. Experts need to find informative statistics from user behavior sequences, design rules based on statistics and assign weights to each rule. In this paper, we bridge the gap between effective but black-box models and transparent rule models. We propose a two-stage method, RuDi, that distills the knowledge of black-box teacher models into rule-based student models. We design a Monte Carlo tree search-based statistics generation method that can provide a set of informative statistics in the first stage. Then statistics are composed into logical rules with our proposed neural logical networks by mimicking the outputs of teacher models. We evaluate RuDi on three real-world public datasets and an industrial dataset to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Yao Zhang, Yuchen Song, Xiao Luo et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation and text synthesis, yet their potential for symbolic physical reasoning in domain-specific scientific problems remains underexplored. We present a mathematical reasoning enhanced generative AI approach for optical communication formula derivation, focusing on the fiber nonlinear interference modelling. By guiding an LLM with structured prompts, we successfully reconstructed the known closed-form ISRS GN expressions and further derived a novel approximation tailored for multi-span C and C+L band transmissions. Numerical validations show that the LLM-derived model produces central-channel GSNRs nearly identical to baseline models, with mean absolute error across all channels and spans below 0.109 dB, demonstrating both physical consistency and practical accuracy.

Guanlong Wu, Zhaohan li, Yao Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on Key-Value (KV) caching to accelerate inference, and many serving systems further share the KV cache across users' requests to reduce redundant computation. While widely adopted, unrestricted cross-user sharing introduces side-channel vulnerabilities, allowing an adversary to infer user inputs by probing for cache reuse. Existing defenses disable sharing entirely to prevent leakage; yet such a coarse-grained strategy sacrifices substantial reuse potential, since prompts often include large portions of privacy-irrelevant segments, such as system instructions or publicly accessible materials. Building on this, we present CachePrune, a privacy-aware KV cache sharing mechanism that enables fine-grained reuse of KV entries across requests. Realizing such fine granularity requires token-level cache management, as reusable segments vary in length and position due to sensitivity masking, making reuse more complex than the fixed-size or sentence-level chunking used in existing coarse-grained schemes. Specifically, CachePrune makes fine-grained reuse practical by addressing two key challenges: accurately and efficiently deriving reusable KV segments and efficiently retrieving them over variable-length spans. We implement CachePrune on top of vLLM and evaluate it on three datasets, showing that it eliminates direct leakage through KV cache reuse side channels while reducing TTFT by 4.5x and increasing cache hit rates by 44% compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Tongquan Zhou, Siyi Cao, Siruo Zhou et al.

ChatGPT is a publicly available chatbot that can quickly generate texts on given topics, but it is unknown whether the chatbot is really superior to human writers in all aspects of writing and whether its writing quality can be prominently improved on the basis of updating commands. Consequently, this study compared the writing performance on a narrative topic by ChatGPT and Chinese intermediate English (CIE) learners so as to reveal the chatbot's advantage and disadvantage in writing. The data were analyzed in terms of five discourse components using Coh-Metrix (a special instrument for analyzing language discourses), and the results revealed that ChatGPT performed better than human writers in narrativity, word concreteness, and referential cohesion, but worse in syntactic simplicity and deep cohesion in its initial version. After more revision commands were updated, while the resulting version was facilitated in syntactic simplicity, yet it is still lagged far behind CIE learners' writing in deep cohesion. In addition, the correlation analysis of the discourse components suggests that narrativity was correlated with referential cohesion in both ChatGPT and human writers, but the correlations varied within each group.

Huibin Zhang, Zhengkun Zhang, Yao Zhang et al.

Procedural Multimodal Documents (PMDs) organize textual instructions and corresponding images step by step. Comprehending PMDs and inducing their representations for the downstream reasoning tasks is designated as Procedural MultiModal Machine Comprehension (M3C). In this study, we approach Procedural M3C at a fine-grained level (compared with existing explorations at a document or sentence level), that is, entity. With delicate consideration, we model entity both in its temporal and cross-modal relation and propose a novel Temporal-Modal Entity Graph (TMEG). Specifically, graph structure is formulated to capture textual and visual entities and trace their temporal-modal evolution. In addition, a graph aggregation module is introduced to conduct graph encoding and reasoning. Comprehensive experiments across three Procedural M3C tasks are conducted on a traditional dataset RecipeQA and our new dataset CraftQA, which can better evaluate the generalization of TMEG.

Yao Zhang, Zhuchenyang Liu, Yanlan He et al.

Text-motion retrieval aims to learn a semantically aligned latent space between natural language descriptions and 3D human motion skeleton sequences, enabling bidirectional search across the two modalities. Most existing methods use a dual-encoder framework that compresses motion and text into global embeddings, discarding fine-grained local correspondences, and thus reducing accuracy. Additionally, these global-embedding methods offer limited interpretability of the retrieval results. To overcome these limitations, we propose an interpretable, joint-angle-based motion representation that maps joint-level local features into a structured pseudo-image, compatible with pre-trained Vision Transformers. For text-to-motion retrieval, we employ MaxSim, a token-wise late interaction mechanism, and enhance it with Masked Language Modeling regularization to foster robust, interpretable text-motion alignment. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art text-motion retrieval approaches while offering interpretable fine-grained correspondences between text and motion. The code is available in the supplementary material.

Haokun Chen, Jianing Li, Yao Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve impressive performance once optimized on massive datasets. Such datasets often contain sensitive or copyrighted content, raising significant data privacy concerns. Regulatory frameworks mandating the 'right to be forgotten' drive the need for machine unlearning. This technique allows for the removal of target data without resource-consuming retraining. However, while well-studied for text, visual concept unlearning in MLLMs remains underexplored. A primary challenge is precisely removing a target visual concept without disrupting model performance on related entities. To address this, we introduce AUVIC, a novel visual concept unlearning framework for MLLMs. AUVIC applies adversarial perturbations to enable precise forgetting. This approach effectively isolates the target concept while avoiding unintended effects on similar entities. To evaluate our method, we construct VCUBench. It is the first benchmark designed to assess visual concept unlearning in group contexts. Experimental results demonstrate that AUVIC achieves state-of-the-art target forgetting rates while incurs minimal performance degradation on non-target concepts.

Xi Chen, Yun Xiong, Siwei Zhang et al.

Discrete-Time Dynamic Graphs (DTDGs), which are prevalent in real-world implementations and notable for their ease of data acquisition, have garnered considerable attention from both academic researchers and industry practitioners. The representation learning of DTDGs has been extensively applied to model the dynamics of temporally changing entities and their evolving connections. Currently, DTDG representation learning predominantly relies on GNN+RNN architectures, which manifest the inherent limitations of both Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). GNNs suffer from the over-smoothing issue as the models architecture goes deeper, while RNNs struggle to capture long-term dependencies effectively. GNN+RNN architectures also grapple with scaling to large graph sizes and long sequences. Additionally, these methods often compute node representations separately and focus solely on individual node characteristics, thereby overlooking the behavior intersections between the two nodes whose link is being predicted, such as instances where the two nodes appear together in the same context or share common neighbors. This paper introduces a novel representation learning method DTFormer for DTDGs, pivoting from the traditional GNN+RNN framework to a Transformer-based architecture. Our approach exploits the attention mechanism to concurrently process topological information within the graph at each timestamp and temporal dynamics of graphs along the timestamps, circumventing the aforementioned fundamental weakness of both GNNs and RNNs. Moreover, we enhance the model's expressive capability by incorporating the intersection relationships among nodes and integrating a multi-patching module. Extensive experiments conducted on six public dynamic graph benchmark datasets confirm our model's efficacy, achieving the SOTA performance.

Xiongfei Wu, Mingfei Cheng, Xiaoning Ren et al.

Recent advances in foundation models (FMs), including large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), and world models, have opened new opportunities for autonomous driving systems (ADSs) in perception, reasoning, decision-making, and interaction. However, ADSs are safety-critical cyber-physical systems, and integrating FMs into them raises substantial software engineering challenges in data curation, system design, deployment, evaluation, and assurance. To clarify this rapidly evolving landscape, we present an initial roadmap, grounded in a structured literature review, for integrating FMs into autonomous driving across three dimensions: FM infrastructure, in-vehicle integration, and practical deployment. For each dimension, we summarize the state of the art, identify key challenges, and highlight open research opportunities. Based on this analysis, we outline research directions for building reliable, safe, and trustworthy FM-enabled ADSs.

Lang Qin, Yao Zhang, Hongru Liang et al.

Accurate knowledge selection is critical in knowledge-grounded dialogue systems. Towards a closer look at it, we offer a novel perspective to organize existing literature, i.e., knowledge selection coupled with, after, and before generation. We focus on the third under-explored category of study, which can not only select knowledge accurately in advance, but has the advantage to reduce the learning, adjustment, and interpretation burden of subsequent response generation models, especially LLMs. We propose GATE, a generator-agnostic knowledge selection method, to prepare knowledge for subsequent response generation models by selecting context-related knowledge among different knowledge structures and variable knowledge requirements. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of GATE, and indicate that knowledge selection before generation is a lightweight yet effective way to facilitate LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to generate more informative responses.

Yao Zhang, Shijie Tang, Zeyu Li et al.

Web agents hold great potential for automating complex computer tasks, yet their interactions involve long-horizon, sequential decision-making with irreversible actions. In such settings, outcome-based supervision is sparse and delayed, often rewarding incorrect trajectories and failing to support inference-time scaling. This motivates the use of Process Reward Models (WebPRMs) for web navigation, but existing approaches remain limited: scalar WebPRMs collapse progress into coarse, weakly grounded signals, while checklist-based WebPRMs rely on brittle template matching that fails under layout or semantic changes and often mislabels superficially correct actions as successful, providing little insight or interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce WebArbiter, a reasoning-first, principle-inducing WebPRM that formulates reward modeling as text generation, producing structured justifications that conclude with a preference verdict and identify the action most conducive to task completion under the current context. Training follows a two-stage pipeline: reasoning distillation equips the model with coherent principle-guided reasoning, and reinforcement learning corrects teacher biases by directly aligning verdicts with correctness, enabling stronger generalization. To support systematic evaluation, we release WebPRMBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning four diverse web environments with rich tasks and high-quality preference annotations. On WebPRMBench, WebArbiter-7B outperforms the strongest baseline, GPT-5, by 9.1 points. In reward-guided trajectory search on WebArena-Lite, it surpasses the best prior WebPRM by up to 7.2 points, underscoring its robustness and practical value in real-world complex web tasks.

Fei Long, Yao Zhang, Jiaming Lv et al.

Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) has recently made notable progress through set matching and efficient adaptation of large-scale pre-trained models. However, two key limitations persist. First, existing set matching metrics typically rely on cosine similarity to measure inter-frame linear dependencies and then perform matching with only instance-level information, thus failing to capture more complex patterns such as nonlinear relationships and overlooking task-specific cues. Second, for efficient adaptation of CLIP to FSAR, recent work performing fine-tuning via skip-fusion layers (which we refer to as side layers) has significantly reduced memory cost. However, the newly introduced side layers are often difficult to optimize under limited data conditions. To address these limitations, we propose TS-FSAR, a framework comprising three components: (1) a visual Ladder Side Network (LSN) for efficient CLIP fine-tuning; (2) a metric called Task-Specific Distance Correlation Matching (TS-DCM), which uses $α$-distance correlation to model both linear and nonlinear inter-frame dependencies and leverages a task prototype to enable task-specific matching; and (3) a Guiding LSN with Adapted CLIP (GLAC) module, which regularizes LSN using the adapted frozen CLIP to improve training for better $α$-distance correlation estimation under limited supervision. Extensive experiments on five widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that our TS-FSAR yields superior performance compared to prior state-of-the-arts.

Yao Zhang, Chenyang Lin, Shijie Tang et al.

The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limiting adaptability and scalability. We propose SwarmAgentic, a framework for fully automated agentic system generation that constructs agentic systems from scratch and jointly optimizes agent functionality and collaboration as interdependent components through language-driven exploration. To enable efficient search over system-level structures, SwarmAgentic maintains a population of candidate systems and evolves them via feedback-guided updates, drawing inspiration from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We evaluate our method on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks involving high-level planning, system-level coordination, and creative reasoning. Given only a task description and an objective function, SwarmAgentic outperforms all baselines, achieving a +261.8% relative improvement over ADAS on the TravelPlanner benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of full automation in structurally unconstrained tasks. This framework marks a significant step toward scalable and autonomous agentic system design, bridging swarm intelligence with fully automated system multi-agent generation. Our code is publicly released at https://yaoz720.github.io/SwarmAgentic/.

Xiaowen Ma, Chenyang Lin, Yao Zhang et al.

Leveraging multiple Large Language Models(LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network(ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative "team" focused on a specific subtask. Agentic Neural Network follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase-Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase-Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables ANN to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across four benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. Our findings indicate that ANN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for multi-agent systems, combining the collaborative capabilities of LLMs with the efficiency and flexibility of neural network principles. We plan to open-source the entire framework.

Xinning Chai, Yao Zhang, Yuxuan Zhang et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in efficient image super-resolution. However, for CNN-based methods, performance gains often require deeper networks and larger feature maps, which increase complexity and inference costs. Inspired by LoRA's success in fine-tuning large language models, we explore its application to lightweight models and propose Distillation-Supervised Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation (DSCLoRA), which improves model performance without increasing architectural complexity or inference costs. Specifically, we integrate ConvLoRA into the efficient SR network SPAN by replacing the SPAB module with the proposed SConvLB module and incorporating ConvLoRA layers into both the pixel shuffle block and its preceding convolutional layer. DSCLoRA leverages low-rank decomposition for parameter updates and employs a spatial feature affinity-based knowledge distillation strategy to transfer second-order statistical information from teacher models (pre-trained SPAN) to student models (ours). This method preserves the core knowledge of lightweight models and facilitates optimal solution discovery under certain conditions. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that DSCLoRA improves PSNR and SSIM over SPAN while maintaining its efficiency and competitive image quality. Notably, DSCLoRA ranked first in the Overall Performance Track of the NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge. Our code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/Yaozzz666/DSCF-SR.

Qi Cheng, Licheng Liu, Yao Zhang et al.

Agroecosystem, which heavily influenced by human actions and accounts for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), plays a crucial role in mitigating global climate change and securing environmental sustainability. However, we can't manage what we can't measure. Accurately quantifying the pools and fluxes in the carbon, nutrient, and water nexus of the agroecosystem is therefore essential for understanding the underlying drivers of GHG and developing effective mitigation strategies. Conventional approaches like soil sampling, process-based models, and black-box machine learning models are facing challenges such as data sparsity, high spatiotemporal heterogeneity, and complex subsurface biogeochemical and physical processes. Developing new trustworthy approaches such as AI-empowered models, will require the AI-ready benchmark dataset and outlined protocols, which unfortunately do not exist. In this work, we introduce a first-of-its-kind spatial-temporal agroecosystem GHG benchmark dataset that integrates physics-based model simulations from Ecosys and DayCent with real-world observations from eddy covariance flux towers and controlled-environment facilities. We evaluate the performance of various sequential deep learning models on carbon and nitrogen flux prediction, including LSTM-based models, temporal CNN-based model, and Transformer-based models. Furthermore, we explored transfer learning to leverage simulated data to improve the generalization of deep learning models on real-world observations. Our benchmark dataset and evaluation framework contribute to the development of more accurate and scalable AI-driven agroecosystem models, advancing our understanding of ecosystem-climate interactions.

Tongquan Zhou, Yao Zhang, Siyi Cao et al.

ChatGPT has shown its great power in text processing, including its reasoning ability from text reading. However, there has not been any direct comparison between human readers and ChatGPT in reasoning ability related to text reading. This study was undertaken to investigate how ChatGPTs (i.e., ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus) and Chinese senior school students as ESL learners exhibited their reasoning ability from English narrative texts. Additionally, we compared the two ChatGPTs in the reasoning performances when commands were updated elaborately. The whole study was composed of three reasoning tests: Test 1 for commonsense inference, Test 2 for emotional inference, and Test 3 for causal inference. The results showed that in Test 1, the students outdid the two ChatGPT versions in local-culture-related inferences but performed worse than the chatbots in daily-life inferences. In Test 2, ChatGPT Plus excelled whereas ChatGPT lagged behind in accuracy. In association with both accuracy and frequency of correct responses, the students were inferior to the two chatbots. Compared with ChatGPTs' better performance in positive emotions, the students showed their superiority in inferring negative emotions. In Test 3, the students demonstrated better logical analysis, outdoing both chatbots. In updating command condition, ChatGPT Plus displayed good causal reasoning ability while ChatGPT kept unchanged. Our study reveals that human readers and ChatGPTs have their respective advantages and disadvantages in drawing inferences from text reading comprehension, unlocking a complementary relationship in text-based reasoning.

Yu Li, Qiang Hu, Yao Zhang et al.

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable collaborative reasoning capabilities but introduce new attack surfaces, such as the sleeper agent, which behave benignly during routine operation and gradually accumulate trust, only revealing malicious behaviors when specific conditions or triggers are met. Existing defense works primarily focus on static graph optimization or hierarchical data management, often failing to adapt to evolving adversarial strategies or suffering from high false-positive rates (FPR) due to rigid blocking policies. To address this, we propose DynaTrust, a novel defense method against sleeper agents. DynaTrust models MAS as a dynamic trust graph~(DTG), and treats trust as a continuous, evolving process rather than a static attribute. It dynamically updates the trust of each agent based on its historical behaviors and the confidence of selected expert agents. Instead of simply blocking, DynaTrust autonomously restructures the graph to isolate compromised agents and restore task connectivity to ensure the usability of MAS. To assess the effectiveness of DynaTrust, we evaluate it on mixed benchmarks derived from AdvBench and HumanEval. The results demonstrate that DynaTrust outperforms the state-of-the-art method AgentShield by increasing the defense success rate by 41.7%, achieving rates exceeding 86% under adversarial conditions. Furthermore, it effectively balances security with utility by significantly reducing FPR, ensuring uninterrupted system operations through graph adaptation.

Zhuchenyang Liu, Yao Zhang, Yalan He et al.

Flex sensors are widely used in e-textiles for detecting joint motions and, subsequently, full-body movements. A critical initial step in utilizing these sensors is determining the optimal placement on the body to accurately capture human motions. This task requires a combination of expertise in fields such as anatomy, biomechanics, and textile design, which is seldom found in a single practitioner. Generative AI, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), has recently shown promise in facilitating design. However, to our knowledge, the extent to which LLMs can aid in the e-textile design process remains largely unexplored in the literature. To address this open question, we conducted a case study focusing on shoulder motion detection using flex sensors. We enlisted three human designers to participate in an experiment involving human-AI collaborative design. We examined design efficiency across three scenarios: designs produced by LLMs alone, by humans alone, and through collaboration between LLMs and human designers. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed an intriguing relationship between expertise and outcomes: the least experienced human designer achieved continuous improvement through collaboration, ultimately matching the best performance achieved by humans alone, whereas the most experienced human designer experienced a decline in performance. Additionally, the effectiveness of human-AI collaboration is affected by the granularity of feedback - incremental adjustments outperformed sweeping redesigns - and the level of abstraction, with observation-oriented feedback producing better outcomes than prescriptive anatomical directives. These findings offer valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges associated with human-AI collaborative e-textile design.

Yongjie Xiao, Hongru Liang, Peixin Qin et al.

Despite the great potential of large language models(LLMs) in machine comprehension, it is still disturbing to fully count on them in real-world scenarios. This is probably because there is no rational explanation for whether the comprehension process of LLMs is aligned with that of experts. In this paper, we propose SCOP to carefully examine how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive view. Specifically, it is equipped with a systematical definition of five requisite skills during the comprehension process, a strict framework to construct testing data for these skills, and a detailed analysis of advanced open-sourced and closed-sourced LLMs using the testing data. With SCOP, we find that it is still challenging for LLMs to perform an expert-level comprehension process. Even so, we notice that LLMs share some similarities with experts, e.g., performing better at comprehending local information than global information. Further analysis reveals that LLMs can be somewhat unreliable -- they might reach correct answers through flawed comprehension processes. Based on SCOP, we suggest that one direction for improving LLMs is to focus more on the comprehension process, ensuring all comprehension skills are thoroughly developed during training.

Yang Liu, Yao Zhang, Yixin Wang et al.

Transformer, an attention-based encoder-decoder model, has already revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP). Inspired by such significant achievements, some pioneering works have recently been done on employing Transformer-liked architectures in the computer vision (CV) field, which have demonstrated their effectiveness on three fundamental CV tasks (classification, detection, and segmentation) as well as multiple sensory data stream (images, point clouds, and vision-language data). Because of their competitive modeling capabilities, the visual Transformers have achieved impressive performance improvements over multiple benchmarks as compared with modern Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs). In this survey, we have reviewed over one hundred of different visual Transformers comprehensively according to three fundamental CV tasks and different data stream types, where a taxonomy is proposed to organize the representative methods according to their motivations, structures, and application scenarios. Because of their differences on training settings and dedicated vision tasks, we have also evaluated and compared all these existing visual Transformers under different configurations. Furthermore, we have revealed a series of essential but unexploited aspects that may empower such visual Transformers to stand out from numerous architectures, e.g., slack high-level semantic embeddings to bridge the gap between the visual Transformers and the sequential ones. Finally, three promising research directions are suggested for future investment. We will continue to update the latest articles and their released source codes at https://github.com/liuyang-ict/awesome-visual-transformers.

Jiawei Yang, Yao Zhang, Yuan Liang et al.

Deep learning models are notoriously data-hungry. Thus, there is an urging need for data-efficient techniques in medical image analysis, where well-annotated data are costly and time consuming to collect. Motivated by the recently revived "Copy-Paste" augmentation, we propose TumorCP, a simple but effective object-level data augmentation method tailored for tumor segmentation. TumorCP is online and stochastic, providing unlimited augmentation possibilities for tumors' subjects, locations, appearances, as well as morphologies. Experiments on kidney tumor segmentation task demonstrate that TumorCP surpasses the strong baseline by a remarkable margin of 7.12% on tumor Dice. Moreover, together with image-level data augmentation, it beats the current state-of-the-art by 2.32% on tumor Dice. Comprehensive ablation studies are performed to validate the effectiveness of TumorCP. Meanwhile, we show that TumorCP can lead to striking improvements in extremely low-data regimes. Evaluated with only 10% labeled data, TumorCP significantly boosts tumor Dice by 21.87%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first work exploring and extending the "Copy-Paste" design in medical imaging domain. Code is available at: https://github.com/YaoZhang93/TumorCP.