Ying Liu

Ruitao Zhang, Xueying Han, Ijaz Gul et al.

Acute leukemia is a type of blood cancer with a high mortality rate. Current therapeutic methods include bone marrow transplantation, supportive therapy, and chemotherapy. Although a satisfactory remission of the disease can be achieved, the risk of recurrence is still high. Therefore, novel treatments are demanding. Chimeric antigen receptor-T (CAR-T) therapy has emerged as a promising approach to treat and cure acute leukemia. To harness the therapeutic potential of CAR-T cell therapy for blood diseases, reliable cell morphological identification is crucial. Nevertheless, the identification of CAR-T cells is a big challenge posed by their phenotypic similarity with other blood cells. To address this substantial clinical challenge, herein we first construct a CAR-T dataset with 500 original microscopy images after staining. Following that, we create a novel integrated model called RCMNet (ResNet18 with CBAM and MHSA) that combines the convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer. The model shows 99.63% top-1 accuracy on the public dataset. Compared with previous reports, our model obtains satisfactory results for image classification. Although testing on the CAR-T cells dataset, a decent performance is observed, which is attributed to the limited size of the dataset. Transfer learning is adapted for RCMNet and a maximum of 83.36% accuracy has been achieved, which is higher than other SOTA models. The study evaluates the effectiveness of RCMNet on a big public dataset and translates it to a clinical dataset for diagnostic applications.

Ying Liu, Lei Liu, Wei-Peng Chen

The combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet-of-Things (IoT), which is denoted as AI-powered Internet-of-Things (AIoT), is capable of processing huge amount of data generated from a large number of devices and handling complex problems in social infrastructures. As AI and IoT technologies are becoming mature, in this paper, we propose to apply AIoT technologies for traffic light control, which is an essential component for intelligent transportation system, to improve the efficiency of smart city's road system. Specifically, various sensors such as surveillance cameras provide real-time information for intelligent traffic light control system to observe the states of both motorized traffic and non-motorized traffic. In this paper, we propose an intelligent traffic light control solution by using distributed multi-agent Q learning, considering the traffic information at the neighboring intersections as well as local motorized and non-motorized traffic, to improve the overall performance of the entire control system. By using the proposed multi-agent Q learning algorithm, our solution is targeting to optimize both the motorized and non-motorized traffic. In addition, we considered many constraints/rules for traffic light control in the real world, and integrate these constraints in the learning algorithm, which can facilitate the proposed solution to be deployed in real operational scenarios. We conducted numerical simulations for a real-world map with real-world traffic data. The simulation results show that our proposed solution outperforms existing solutions in terms of vehicle and pedestrian queue lengths, waiting time at intersections, and many other key performance metrics.

Yiting Lu, Jun Fu, Xin Li et al.

Coronary CT Angiography (CCTA) is susceptible to various distortions (e.g., artifacts and noise), which severely compromise the exact diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. The appropriate CCTA Vessel-level Image Quality Assessment (CCTA VIQA) algorithm can be used to reduce the risk of error diagnosis. The primary challenges of CCTA VIQA are that the local part of coronary that determines final quality is hard to locate. To tackle the challenge, we formulate CCTA VIQA as a multiple-instance learning (MIL) problem, and exploit Transformer-based MIL backbone (termed as T-MIL) to aggregate the multiple instances along the coronary centerline into the final quality. However, not all instances are informative for final quality. There are some quality-irrelevant/negative instances intervening the exact quality assessment(e.g., instances covering only background or the coronary in instances is not identifiable). Therefore, we propose a Progressive Reinforcement learning based Instance Discarding module (termed as PRID) to progressively remove quality-irrelevant/negative instances for CCTA VIQA. Based on the above two modules, we propose a Reinforced Transformer Network (RTN) for automatic CCTA VIQA based on end-to-end optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the real-world CCTA dataset, exceeding previous MIL methods by a large margin.

Jindong Li, Ying Liu, Yali Fu et al.

LLMs are increasingly equipped with safety alignment mechanisms, yet recent studies demonstrate that they remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that elicit harmful behaviors without explicit policy violations. While a growing body of work has explored automated jailbreak strategies, existing methods face several fundamental challenges, including the lack of systematic utilization of both successful and failed attack experiences, as well as the absence of principled mechanisms for composing and selecting reusable attack rules under diverse constraints. As a result, existing methods struggle to accumulate transferable knowledge over time and to reliably adapt attack strategies across different targets and evolving safety mechanisms. To address these issues, we propose a Self-Evolving Rule-Driven Training-Free Jailbreak (SRTJ) framework that systematically discovers, composes, and refines attack strategies through interaction and feedback, without updating model parameters. Specifically, SRTJ couples experience-driven attack generation with answer set programming (ASP)-based rule selection and constraint-aware composition, where iterative verifier feedback is leveraged to jointly refine successful strategies and analyze failure patterns. The resulting rule memory evolves in a hierarchical multi-level manner, explicitly organizing distilled attack knowledge into long-term, middle-term, and short-term rules, thereby capturing both stable transferable strategies and transient adaptive behaviors to effectively balance exploration and exploitation across attack attempts. Extensive experiments on mainstream jailbreak benchmark (HarmBench) demonstrate that SRTJ achieves strong and stable attack performance across different target LLMs, while exhibiting improved robustness and generalization compared to existing jailbreak methods. The code is available at https://github.com/TheSolkatt/SRTJ.

Junhui Liang, Ying Liu, Vladimir Vlassov

Fashion understanding is a hot topic in computer vision, with many applications having great business value in the market. Fashion understanding remains a difficult challenge for computer vision due to the immense diversity of garments and various scenes and backgrounds. In this work, we try removing the background from fashion images to boost data quality and increase model performance. Having fashion images of evident persons in fully visible garments, we can utilize Salient Object Detection to achieve the background removal of fashion data to our expectations. A fashion image with the background removed is claimed as the "rembg" image, contrasting with the original one in the fashion dataset. We conducted extensive comparative experiments with these two types of images on multiple aspects of model training, including model architectures, model initialization, compatibility with other training tricks and data augmentations, and target task types. Our experiments show that background removal can effectively work for fashion data in simple and shallow networks that are not susceptible to overfitting. It can improve model accuracy by up to 5% in the classification on the FashionStyle14 dataset when training models from scratch. However, background removal does not perform well in deep neural networks due to incompatibility with other regularization techniques like batch normalization, pre-trained initialization, and data augmentations introducing randomness. The loss of background pixels invalidates many existing training tricks in the model training, adding the risk of overfitting for deep models.

Heinrich Dinkel, Jiahao Zhou, Guanbo Wang et al.

This paper presents the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate and advance the performance of pre-trained audio encoders as front-end modules for Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). While LALMs have shown remarkable understanding of complex acoustic scenes, their performance depends on the semantic richness of the underlying audio encoder representations. This challenge addresses the integration gap by providing a unified generative evaluation framework, XARES-LLM, which assesses submitted encoders across a diverse suite of downstream classification and generation tasks. By decoupling encoder development from LLM fine-tuning, the challenge establishes a standardized protocol for general-purpose audio representations that can effectively be used for the next generation of multimodal language models.

Kai Tian, Jialun Wang, Chuan Lin et al.

With the rapid advancement of underwater net-working and multi-agent coordination technologies, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) ad-hoc networks have emerged as a pivotal framework for executing complex maritime missions, such as multi-target tracking. However, traditional data-centricarchitectures struggle to maintain operational consistency under highly dynamic topological fluctuations and severely constrained acoustic communication bandwidth. This article proposes a scene-adaptive embodied intelligence (EI) architecture for multi-AUV ad-hoc networks, which re-envisions AUVs as embodied entities by integrating perception, decision-making, and physical execution into a unified cognitive loop. To materialize the functional interaction between these layers, we define a beacon-based communication and control model that treats the communication link as a dynamic constraint-aware channel, effectively bridging the gap between high-level policy inference and decentralized physical actuation. Specifically, the proposed architecture employs a three-layer functional framework and introduces a Scene-Adaptive MARL (SA-MARL) algorithm featuring a dual-path critic mechanism. By integrating a scene critic network and a general critic network through a weight-based dynamic fusion process, SA-MARL effectively decouples specialized tracking tasks from global safety constraints, facilitating autonomous policy evolution. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposedscheme significantly accelerates policy convergence and achieves superior tracking accuracy compared to mainstream MARL approaches, maintaining robust performance even under intense environmental interference and fluid topological shifts.

Guoyun Tu, Ying Liu, Vladimir Vlassov

Image captioning is a significant field across computer vision and natural language processing. We propose and present AIC-AB NET, a novel Attribute-Information-Combined Attention-Based Network that combines spatial attention architecture and text attributes in an encoder-decoder. For caption generation, adaptive spatial attention determines which image region best represents the image and whether to attend to the visual features or the visual sentinel. Text attribute information is synchronously fed into the decoder to help image recognition and reduce uncertainty. We have tested and evaluated our AICAB NET on the MS COCO dataset and a new proposed Fashion dataset. The Fashion dataset is employed as a benchmark of single-object images. The results show the superior performance of the proposed model compared to the state-of-the-art baseline and ablated models on both the images from MSCOCO and our single-object images. Our AIC-AB NET outperforms the baseline adaptive attention network by 0.017 (CIDEr score) on the MS COCO dataset and 0.095 (CIDEr score) on the Fashion dataset.

Zhu Liu, Cunliang Kong, Ying Liu et al.

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in general language understanding tasks. However, as a family of generative methods with the objective of next token prediction, the semantic evolution with the depth of these models are not fully explored, unlike their predecessors, such as BERT-like architectures. In this paper, we specifically investigate the bottom-up evolution of lexical semantics for a popular LLM, namely Llama2, by probing its hidden states at the end of each layer using a contextualized word identification task. Our experiments show that the representations in lower layers encode lexical semantics, while the higher layers, with weaker semantic induction, are responsible for prediction. This is in contrast to models with discriminative objectives, such as mask language modeling, where the higher layers obtain better lexical semantics. The conclusion is further supported by the monotonic increase in performance via the hidden states for the last meaningless symbols, such as punctuation, in the prompting strategy. Our codes are available at https://github.com/RyanLiut/LLM_LexSem.

Ying Liu, Yuntao Shou, Wei Ai et al.

In real-world scenarios, audio and video signals are often subject to environmental noise and limited acquisition conditions, resulting in extracted features containing excessive noise. Furthermore, there is an imbalance in data quality and information carrying capacity between different modalities. These two issues together lead to information distortion and weight bias during the fusion phase, impairing overall recognition performance. Most existing methods neglect the impact of noisy modalities and rely on implicit weighting to model modality importance, thereby failing to explicitly account for the predominant contribution of the textual modality in emotion understanding. To address these issues, we propose a relation-aware denoising and diffusion attention fusion model for MCER. Specifically, we first design a differential Transformer that explicitly computes the differences between two attention maps, thereby enhancing temporally consistent information while suppressing time-irrelevant noise, which leads to effective denoising in both audio and video modalities. Second, we construct modality-specific and cross-modality relation subgraphs to capture speaker-dependent emotional dependencies, enabling fine-grained modeling of intra- and inter-modal relationships. Finally, we introduce a text-guided cross-modal diffusion mechanism that leverages self-attention to model intra-modal dependencies and adaptively diffuses audiovisual information into the textual stream, ensuring more robust and semantically aligned multimodal fusion.

Ying Liu, Haozhu Wang, Huixue Zhou et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful approach for tackling complex medical decision-making problems such as treatment planning, personalized medicine, and optimizing the scheduling of surgeries and appointments. It has gained significant attention in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to its ability to learn optimal strategies for tasks such as dialogue systems, machine translation, and question-answering. This paper presents a review of the RL techniques in NLP, highlighting key advancements, challenges, and applications in healthcare. The review begins by visualizing a roadmap of machine learning and its applications in healthcare. And then it explores the integration of RL with NLP tasks. We examined dialogue systems where RL enables the learning of conversational strategies, RL-based machine translation models, question-answering systems, text summarization, and information extraction. Additionally, ethical considerations and biases in RL-NLP systems are addressed.

Zhiyuan Liu, Daocheng Fu, Pinlong Cai et al.

High-fidelity and controllable 3D simulation is essential for addressing the long-tail data scarcity in Autonomous Driving (AD), yet existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve photorealistic rendering and interactive traffic editing. Current approaches often falter in large-angle novel view synthesis and suffer from geometric or lighting artifacts during asset manipulation. To address these challenges, we propose SymDrive, a unified diffusion-based framework capable of joint high-quality rendering and scene editing. We introduce a Symmetric Auto-regressive Online Restoration paradigm, which constructs paired symmetric views to recover fine-grained details via a ground-truth-guided dual-view formulation and utilizes an auto-regressive strategy for consistent lateral view generation. Furthermore, we leverage this restoration capability to enable a training-free harmonization mechanism, treating vehicle insertion as context-aware inpainting to ensure seamless lighting and shadow consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SymDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance in both novel-view enhancement and realistic 3D vehicle insertion.

Yin Luo, Qingchao Kong, Nan Xu et al.

As the latest advancements in natural language processing, large language models (LLMs) have achieved human-level language understanding and generation abilities in many real-world tasks, and even have been regarded as a potential path to the artificial general intelligence. To better facilitate research on LLMs, many open-source LLMs, such as Llama 2 and Falcon, have recently been proposed and gained comparable performances to proprietary models. However, these models are primarily designed for English scenarios and exhibit poor performances in Chinese contexts. In this technical report, we propose YAYI 2, including both base and chat models, with 30 billion parameters. YAYI 2 is pre-trained from scratch on a multilingual corpus which contains 2.65 trillion tokens filtered by our pre-training data processing pipeline. The base model is aligned with human values through supervised fine-tuning with millions of instructions and reinforcement learning from human feedback. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, such as MMLU and CMMLU, consistently demonstrate that the proposed YAYI 2 outperforms other similar sized open-source models.

Yiqi Liang, Ying Liu, Dandan Long et al.

While portrait sketch generation is a special task in sketch synthesis, most existing methods are pixel-based, limiting their interpretability and editability. With the rise of vector generation techniques, representing sketches using vector elements may provide more flexible manipulation. However, due to the overlapping nature of vector graphics and the coarse detail modeling, existing vectorization methods struggle to capture facial integrity and fine-grained details, and lack semantic control. To address these issues, we propose PortraVec, a framework for converting pixel-based portrait images into vector sketches with text control. Specifically, we propose a two-stage image-guided generation module using Attention-aware Offset Sampling to capture face structure while correcting detail deviations, and a text-guided manipulation module based on Region-based Parameter Freezing to enable local semantic editing while maintaining global consistency. Experiments show that PortraVec achieves superior structural consistency, visual fidelity, and semantic controllability compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Jianze Wang, Ying Liu, Jinlong Chen et al.

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories under token-level teacher supervision, but existing methods are capped by a single-teacher capability ceiling: when the teacher errs, the student inherits the error. OPD also remains largely unexplored in agentic tasks, where per-step errors compound across long trajectories and destabilize training. We propose MAD-OPD (Multi-Agent Debate-driven On-Policy Distillation), which breaks this ceiling by recasting the distillation teacher as a deliberative collective of teachers that debate over the student's on-policy state; the debate produces an emergent collective intelligence that supplies token-level supervision, with each teacher's contribution weighted by its post-debate confidence. To extend OPD to agentic tasks, we also introduce On-Policy Agentic Distillation (OPAD), which adds step-level sampling to stabilize training under multi-step error compounding. We additionally derive a task-adaptive divergence principle, selecting JSD (Jensen-Shannon divergence) for agentic stability and reverse KL (Kullback-Leibler) divergence for code generation, and verify it both theoretically and empirically. Across six teacher-student configurations (Qwen3 and Qwen3.5; 1.7B-14B students, 8B-32B teachers) and five agentic and code benchmarks, MAD-OPD ranks first across all six configurations; on the 14B+8B$\to$4B setting it lifts the agentic average by $+2.4\%$ and the code average by $+3.7\%$ over the stronger single-teacher OPD.

Yifei Pei, Ying Liu, Nam Ling

Learned image compression has achieved competitive rate-distortion performance, but very-low-bitrate reconstruction remains difficult because the transmitted representation often cannot preserve fine textures and local structures. Perceptual and generative codecs address this problem by using learned reconstruction priors, and controllable codecs allow one model to cover different bitrate and reconstruction preferences. However, controllability alone does not resolve the decoder-side reconstruction-prior problem: under severe bit constraints, the decoder must infer missing details from limited transmitted information, while existing codebook-based controllable designs generally rely on single-codebook token-based priors. This paper proposes Adaptive Fused Prior Transfer for Controllable Generative Image Compression (AFP-GIC), a controllable codec that transfers an adaptive fused prior from a frozen pretrained AdaCode model. Encoder-side fused-prior features guide latent formation, while the decoder predicts a compatible fused prior from the compressed representation and selected control variables, enabling prior-guided reconstruction without transmitting the fused prior itself. A motivating analysis relates decoder-side fused-prior alignment to a reconstruction-error upper bound and shows that the fused-prior family contains single-codebook choices as special cases. Under the unified benchmark, AFP-GIC reduces decoder latency by 18.1% and the overall parameter count by 31.10 million (20.5%) relative to DC-VIC. Experiments on Kodak, CLIC2020, and DIV2K show competitive PSNR, with the clearest perceptual gains in NIQE scores and very-low-bitrate visual comparisons.

Zuopeng Zhao, Ying Liu, Kanyaphakphachsorn Pharksuwan et al.

Remote sensing image generation provides a reliable data foundation for remote sensing large models and downstream tasks. However, existing controllable remote sensing image generation methods typically rely on traditional techniques such as segmentation and edge detection, which do not fully leverage terrain or atmospheric conditions. As a result, the generated images often lack accuracy and naturalness when dealing with complex terrains and atmospheric phenomena. In this paper, we propose a novel remote sensing image generation framework, D2-CDIG, which integrates diffusion models with a dual-prior control mechanism. By incorporating both Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and cloud-fog information as dual prior knowledge, D2-CDIG precisely controls ground features and atmospheric phenomena within the generated images. Specifically, D2-CDIG decouples the terrain and atmospheric generation processes through independent control of ground and atmospheric branches. Additionally, a refined cloud-fog slider is introduced to flexibly adjust cloud thickness and distribution. During training, ground and atmospheric control signals are injected in layers to ensure a seamless transition within the images. Compared to traditional methods based on segmentation or edge detection, D2-CDIG shows significant improvements in image quality, detail richness, and realism. D2-CDIG offers a flexible and precise solution for remote sensing image generation, providing high-quality data for training large remote sensing models and downstream tasks.

Zuopeng Zhao, Ying Liu, Xiaoyu Li et al.

Existing diffusion models have made significant progress in generating realistic images. However, their direct adaptation to remote sensing imagery often disregards intrinsic physical laws. This oversight frequently leads to spectral distortion and radiometric inconsistency, severely limiting the scientific utility of generated data. To address this issue, this paper introduces AnyBand-Diff, a novel spectral-prior-guided diffusion framework tailored for robust spectral reconstruction. Specifically, we design a Masked Conditional Diffusion backbone integrated with a dual stochastic masking strategy, empowering the model to recover complete spectral information from arbitrary band subsets. Subsequently, to ensure radiometric fidelity, a Physics-Guided Sampling mechanism is proposed, leveraging gradients from a differentiable physical model to explicitly steer the denoising trajectory toward the manifold of physically plausible solutions. Furthermore, a Multi-Scale Physical Loss is formulated to enforce rigorous constraints across pixel, region, and global levels in a joint manner. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of AnyBand-Diff in generating reliable imagery and achieving accurate spectral reconstruction, contributing to the advancement of physics-aware generative methods for Earth observation.

Pallavi Zambare, Venkata Nikhil Thanikella, Nikhil Padmanabh Kottur et al.

In this paper, we present NetMoniAI, an agentic AI framework for automatic network monitoring and security that integrates decentralized analysis with lightweight centralized coordination. The framework consists of two layers: autonomous micro-agents at each node perform local traffic analysis and anomaly detection. A central controller then aggregates insights across nodes to detect coordinated attacks and maintain system-wide situational awareness. We evaluated NetMoniAI on a local micro-testbed and through NS-3 simulations. Results confirm that the two-tier agentic-AI design scales under resource constraints, reduces redundancy, and improves response time without compromising accuracy. To facilitate broader adoption and reproducibility, the complete framework is available as open source. This enables researchers and practitioners to replicate, validate, and extend it across diverse network environments and threat scenarios. Github link: https://github.com/pzambare3/NetMoniAI

Zhu Liu, Zhen Hu, Ying Liu

We present the results of our system for the CoMeDi Shared Task, which predicts majority votes (Subtask 1) and annotator disagreements (Subtask 2). Our approach combines model ensemble strategies with MLP-based and threshold-based methods trained on pretrained language models. Treating individual models as virtual annotators, we simulate the annotation process by designing aggregation measures that incorporate continuous relatedness scores and discrete classification labels to capture both majority and disagreement. Additionally, we employ anisotropy removal techniques to enhance performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, particularly for Subtask 2. Notably, we find that standard deviation on continuous relatedness scores among different model manipulations correlates with human disagreement annotations compared to metrics on aggregated discrete labels. The code will be published at https://github.com/RyanLiut/CoMeDi_Solution.

Jiechao Gao, Rohan Kumar Yadav, Yuangang Li et al.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) like BERT provide strong semantic representations but are costly and opaque, while symbolic models such as the Tsetlin Machine (TM) offer transparency but lack semantic generalization. We propose a semantic bootstrapping framework that transfers LLM knowledge into symbolic form, combining interpretability with semantic capacity. Given a class label, an LLM generates sub-intents that guide synthetic data creation through a three-stage curriculum (seed, core, enriched), expanding semantic diversity. A Non-Negated TM (NTM) learns from these examples to extract high-confidence literals as interpretable semantic cues. Injecting these cues into real data enables a TM to align clause logic with LLM-inferred semantics. Our method requires no embeddings or runtime LLM calls, yet equips symbolic models with pretrained semantic priors. Across multiple text classification tasks, it improves interpretability and accuracy over vanilla TM, achieving performance comparable to BERT while remaining fully symbolic and efficient.

Xinlei Xiong, Wenbo Hu, Shuxun Zhou et al.

Weather forecasting is fundamentally challenged by the chaotic nature of the atmosphere, necessitating probabilistic approaches to quantify uncertainty. While traditional ensemble prediction (EPS) addresses this through computationally intensive simulations, recent advances in Bayesian Deep Learning (BDL) offer a promising but often disconnected alternative. We bridge these paradigms through a unified hybrid Bayesian Deep Learning framework for ensemble weather forecasting that explicitly decomposes predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components, learned via variational inference and a physics-informed stochastic perturbation scheme modeling flow-dependent atmospheric dynamics, respectively. We further establish a unified theoretical framework that rigorously connects BDL and EPS, providing formal theorems that decompose total predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components under the hybrid BDL framework. We validate our framework on the large-scale 40-year ERA5 reanalysis dataset (1979-2019) with 0.25° spatial resolution. Experimental results show that our method not only improves forecast accuracy and yields better-calibrated uncertainty quantification but also achieves superior computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art probabilistic diffusion models. We commit to making our code open-source upon acceptance of this paper.

Shilong Li, Ge Bai, Zhang Zhang et al.

Predicting unseen relations that cannot be observed during the training phase is a challenging task in relation extraction. Previous works have made progress by matching the semantics between input instances and label descriptions. However, fine-grained matching often requires laborious manual annotation, and rich interactions between instances and label descriptions come with significant computational overhead. In this work, we propose an efficient multi-grained matching approach that uses virtual entity matching to reduce manual annotation cost, and fuses coarse-grained recall and fine-grained classification for rich interactions with guaranteed inference speed. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous State Of The Art (SOTA) methods, and achieves a balance between inference efficiency and prediction accuracy in zero-shot relation extraction tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/longls777/EMMA.

Zhu Liu, Cunliang Kong, Ying Liu et al.

Semantic map models (SMMs) construct a network-like conceptual space from cross-linguistic instances or forms, based on the connectivity hypothesis. This approach has been widely used to represent similarity and entailment relationships in cross-linguistic concept comparisons. However, most SMMs are manually built by human experts using bottom-up procedures, which are often labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based algorithm that automatically generates conceptual spaces and SMMs in a top-down manner. The algorithm begins by creating a dense graph, which is subsequently pruned into maximum spanning trees, selected according to metrics we propose. These evaluation metrics include both intrinsic and extrinsic measures, considering factors such as network structure and the trade-off between precision and coverage. A case study on cross-linguistic supplementary adverbs demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our model compared to human annotations and other automated methods. The tool is available at https://github.com/RyanLiut/SemanticMapModel.

Zhu Liu, Ying Liu

Word sense disambiguation (WSD), which aims to determine an appropriate sense for a target word given its context, is crucial for natural language understanding. Existing supervised methods treat WSD as a classification task and have achieved remarkable performance. However, they ignore uncertainty estimation (UE) in the real-world setting, where the data is always noisy and out of distribution. This paper extensively studies UE on the benchmark designed for WSD. Specifically, we first compare four uncertainty scores for a state-of-the-art WSD model and verify that the conventional predictive probabilities obtained at the end of the model are inadequate to quantify uncertainty. Then, we examine the capability of capturing data and model uncertainties by the model with the selected UE score on well-designed test scenarios and discover that the model reflects data uncertainty satisfactorily but underestimates model uncertainty. Furthermore, we explore numerous lexical properties that intrinsically affect data uncertainty and provide a detailed analysis of four critical aspects: the syntactic category, morphology, sense granularity, and semantic relations. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanLiut/WSD-UE.

Weibin Meng, Federico Zaiter, Yuheng Huang et al.

Logs are one of the most valuable data sources for managing large-scale online services. After a failure is detected/diagnosed/predicted, operators still have to inspect the raw logs to gain a summarized view before take actions. However, manual or rule-based log summarization has become inefficient and ineffective. In this work, we propose LogSummary, an automatic, unsupervised end-to-end log summarization framework for online services. LogSummary obtains the summarized triples of important logs for a given log sequence. It integrates a novel information extraction method taking both semantic information and domain knowledge into consideration, with a new triple ranking approach using the global knowledge learned from all logs. Given the lack of a publicly-available gold standard for log summarization, we have manually labelled the summaries of four open-source log datasets and made them publicly available. The evaluation on these datasets as well as the case studies on real-world logs demonstrate that LogSummary produces a highly representative (average ROUGE F1 score of 0.741) summaries. We have packaged LogSummary into an open-source toolkit and hope that it can benefit for future NLP-powered summarization works.

Wenzhe He, Xiaojun Chen, Wentang Chen et al.

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) aims to generate a complete semantic scene from an incomplete input. Existing approaches often employ dense network architectures with a high parameter count, leading to increased model complexity and resource demands. To address these limitations, we propose RWKV-PCSSC, a lightweight point cloud semantic scene completion network inspired by the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a RWKV Seed Generator (RWKV-SG) module that can aggregate features from a partial point cloud to produce a coarse point cloud with coarse features. Subsequently, the point-wise feature of the point cloud is progressively restored through multiple stages of the RWKV Point Deconvolution (RWKV-PD) modules. By leveraging a compact and efficient design, our method achieves a lightweight model representation. Experimental results demonstrate that RWKV-PCSSC reduces the parameter count by 4.18$\times$ and improves memory efficiency by 1.37$\times$ compared to state-of-the-art methods PointSSC. Furthermore, our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on established indoor (SSC-PC, NYUCAD-PC) and outdoor (PointSSC) scene dataset, as well as on our proposed datasets (NYUCAD-PC-V2, 3D-FRONT-PC).

Binxian Su, Haoye Lou, Shucheng Zhu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used in urban planning, but since gendered space theory highlights how gender hierarchies are embedded in spatial organization, there is concern that LLMs may reproduce or amplify such biases. We introduce SPAGBias - the first systematic framework to evaluate spatial gender bias in LLMs. It combines a taxonomy of 62 urban micro-spaces, a prompt library, and three diagnostic layers: explicit (forced-choice resampling), probabilistic (token-level asymmetry), and constructional (semantic and narrative role analysis). Testing six representative models, we identify structured gender-space associations that go beyond the public-private divide, forming nuanced micro-level mappings. Story generation reveals how emotion, wording, and social roles jointly shape "spatial gender narratives". We also examine how prompt design, temperature, and model scale influence bias expression. Tracing experiments indicate that these patterns are embedded and reinforced across the model pipeline (pre-training, instruction tuning, and reward modeling), with model associations found to substantially exceed real-world distributions. Downstream experiments further reveal that such biases produce concrete failures in both normative and descriptive application settings. This work connects sociological theory with computational analysis, extending bias research into the spatial domain and uncovering how LLMs encode social gender cognition through language.

Zheng Chen, Zongwei Wu, Eduard Zamfir et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

Wenjie Wang, Wei Wu, Ying Liu et al.

Medical document OCR is challenging due to complex layouts, domain-specific terminology, and noisy annotations, while requiring strict field-level exact matching. Existing OCR systems and general-purpose vision-language models often fail to reliably parse such documents. We propose MeDocVL, a post-trained vision-language model for query-driven medical document parsing. Our framework combines Training-driven Label Refinement to construct high-quality supervision from noisy annotations, with a Noise-aware Hybrid Post-training strategy that integrates reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning to achieve robust and precise extraction. Experiments on medical invoice benchmarks show that MeDocVL consistently outperforms conventional OCR systems and strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance under noisy supervision.

Shucheng Zhu, Weikang Wang, Ying Liu

While nationality is a pivotal demographic element that enhances the performance of language models, it has received far less scrutiny regarding inherent biases. This study investigates nationality bias in ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), a large language model (LLM) designed for text generation. The research covers 195 countries, 4 temperature settings, and 3 distinct prompt types, generating 4,680 discourses about nationality descriptions in Chinese and English. Automated metrics were used to analyze the nationality bias, and expert annotators alongside ChatGPT itself evaluated the perceived bias. The results show that ChatGPT's generated discourses are predominantly positive, especially compared to its predecessor, GPT-2. However, when prompted with negative inclinations, it occasionally produces negative content. Despite ChatGPT considering its generated text as neutral, it shows consistent self-awareness about nationality bias when subjected to the same pair-wise comparison annotation framework used by human annotators. In conclusion, while ChatGPT's generated texts seem friendly and positive, they reflect the inherent nationality biases in the real world. This bias may vary across different language versions of ChatGPT, indicating diverse cultural perspectives. The study highlights the subtle and pervasive nature of biases within LLMs, emphasizing the need for further scrutiny.

Ying Liu, Ge Bai, Chenji Lu et al.

Despite the remarkable advancements in Visual Question Answering (VQA), the challenge of mitigating the language bias introduced by textual information remains unresolved. Previous approaches capture language bias from a coarse-grained perspective. However, the finer-grained information within a sentence, such as context and keywords, can result in different biases. Due to the ignorance of fine-grained information, most existing methods fail to sufficiently capture language bias. In this paper, we propose a novel causal intervention training scheme named CIBi to eliminate language bias from a finer-grained perspective. Specifically, we divide the language bias into context bias and keyword bias. We employ causal intervention and contrastive learning to eliminate context bias and improve the multi-modal representation. Additionally, we design a new question-only branch based on counterfactual generation to distill and eliminate keyword bias. Experimental results illustrate that CIBi is applicable to various VQA models, yielding competitive performance.

Xuelin Liu, Yanfei Zhu, Shucheng Zhu et al.

Proper moral beliefs are fundamental for language models, yet assessing these beliefs poses a significant challenge. This study introduces a novel three-module framework to evaluate the moral beliefs of four prominent large language models. Initially, we constructed a dataset containing 472 moral choice scenarios in Chinese, derived from moral words. The decision-making process of the models in these scenarios reveals their moral principle preferences. By ranking these moral choices, we discern the varying moral beliefs held by different language models. Additionally, through moral debates, we investigate the firmness of these models to their moral choices. Our findings indicate that English language models, namely ChatGPT and Gemini, closely mirror moral decisions of the sample of Chinese university students, demonstrating strong adherence to their choices and a preference for individualistic moral beliefs. In contrast, Chinese models such as Ernie and ChatGLM lean towards collectivist moral beliefs, exhibiting ambiguity in their moral choices and debates. This study also uncovers gender bias embedded within the moral beliefs of all examined language models. Our methodology offers an innovative means to assess moral beliefs in both artificial and human intelligence, facilitating a comparison of moral values across different cultures.

Hong Zhang, Ying Liu, Romit Maulik

Classical neural ODEs trained with explicit methods are intrinsically limited by stability, crippling their efficiency and robustness for stiff learning problems that are common in graph learning and scientific machine learning. We present a semi-implicit neural ODE approach that exploits the partitionable structure of the underlying dynamics. Our technique leads to an implicit neural network with significant computational advantages over existing approaches because of enhanced stability and efficient linear solves during time integration. We show that our approach outperforms existing approaches on a variety of applications including graph classification and learning complex dynamical systems. We also demonstrate that our approach can train challenging neural ODEs where both explicit methods and fully implicit methods are intractable.

Jiaqi Wang, Mengtian Kang, Yong Liu et al.

Machine learning-based fundus image diagnosis technologies trigger worldwide interest owing to their benefits such as reducing medical resource power and providing objective evaluation results. However, current methods are commonly based on supervised methods, bringing in a heavy workload to biomedical staff and hence suffering in expanding effective databases. To address this issue, in this article, we established a label-free method, name 'SSVT',which can automatically analyze un-labeled fundus images and generate high evaluation accuracy of 97.0% of four main eye diseases based on six public datasets and two datasets collected by Beijing Tongren Hospital. The promising results showcased the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised learning method, and the strong application potential in biomedical resource shortage regions to improve global eye health.

Ying Liu, Junchao Zhang, Caiyun Wu

Diffusion models excel at image restoration via probabilistic modeling of forward noise addition and reverse denoising, and their ability to handle complex noise while preserving fine details makes them well-suited for Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE). Mainstream diffusion based LLIE methods either adopt a two-stage pipeline or an auxiliary correction network to refine U-Net outputs, which severs the intrinsic link between enhancement and denoising and leads to suboptimal performance owing to inconsistent optimization objectives. To address these issues, we propose the Signal Attenuation Diffusion Model (SADM), a novel diffusion process that integrates the signal attenuation mechanism into the diffusion pipeline, enabling simultaneous brightness adjustment and noise suppression in a single stage. Specifically, the signal attenuation coefficient simulates the inherent signal attenuation of low-light degradation in the forward noise addition process, encoding the physical priors of low-light degradation to explicitly guide reverse denoising toward the concurrent optimization of brightness recovery and noise suppression, thereby eliminating the need for extra correction modules or staged training relied on by existing methods. We validate that our design maintains consistency with Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models(DDIM) via multi-scale pyramid sampling, balancing interpretability, restoration quality, and computational efficiency.

Bowen Qin, Chen Yue, Fang Yin et al.

We conduct a moderate-scale contamination-free (to some extent) evaluation of current large reasoning models (LRMs) with some preliminary findings. We also release ROME, our evaluation benchmark for vision language models intended to test reasoning from visual clues. We attach links to the benchmark, evaluation data, and other updates on this website: https://flageval-baai.github.io/LRM-Eval/

Pallavi Zambare, Venkata Nikhil Thanikella, Ying Liu

When combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with autonomous agents, used in network monitoring and decision-making systems, this will create serious security issues. In this research, the MAESTRO framework consisting of the seven layers threat modeling architecture in the system was used to expose, evaluate, and eliminate vulnerabilities of agentic AI. The prototype agent system was constructed and implemented, using Python, LangChain, and telemetry in WebSockets, and deployed with inference, memory, parameter tuning, and anomaly detection modules. Two practical threat cases were confirmed as follows: (i) resource denial of service by traffic replay denial-of-service, and (ii) memory poisoning by tampering with the historical log file maintained by the agent. These situations resulted in measurable levels of performance degradation, i.e. telemetry updates were delayed, and computational loads were increased, as a result of poor system adaptations. It was suggested to use a multilayered defense-in-depth approach with memory isolation, validation of planners and anomaly response systems in real-time. These findings verify that MAESTRO is viable in operational threat mapping, prospective risk scoring, and the basis of the resilient system design. The authors bring attention to the importance of the enforcement of memory integrity, paying attention to the adaptation logic monitoring, and cross-layer communication protection that guarantee the agentic AI reliability in adversarial settings.

Yong Liu, Mengtian Kang, Shuo Gao et al.

Fundus diseases are major causes of visual impairment and blindness worldwide, especially in underdeveloped regions, where the shortage of ophthalmologists hinders timely diagnosis. AI-assisted fundus image analysis has several advantages, such as high accuracy, reduced workload, and improved accessibility, but it requires a large amount of expert-annotated data to build reliable models. To address this dilemma, we propose a general self-supervised machine learning framework that can handle diverse fundus diseases from unlabeled fundus images. Our method's AUC surpasses existing supervised approaches by 15.7%, and even exceeds performance of a single human expert. Furthermore, our model adapts well to various datasets from different regions, races, and heterogeneous image sources or qualities from multiple cameras or devices. Our method offers a label-free general framework to diagnose fundus diseases, which could potentially benefit telehealth programs for early screening of people at risk of vision loss.

Long Chen, Huixin Bai, Mingxin Wang et al.

Accurate modeling of inter-stock relationships is critical for stock price forecasting. However, existing methods predominantly focus on single-state relationships, neglecting the essential complementarity between dynamic and static inter-stock relations. To solve this problem, we propose a Dual Relation Fusion Network (DRFN) to capture the long-term relative stability of stock relation structures while retaining the flexibility to respond to sudden market shifts. Our approach features a novel relative static relation component that models time-varying long-term patterns and incorporates overnight informational influences. We capture dynamic inter-stock relationships through distance-aware mechanisms, while evolving long-term structures via recurrent fusion of dynamic relations from the prior day with the pre-defined static relations. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the baselines across different markets, with high sensitivity to the co-movement of relational strength and stock price.

Ying Liu, Can Li, Ting Zhang et al.

The conversational capabilities of large language models hold significant promise for enabling scalable and interactive tutoring. While prior research has primarily examined their ability to generate Socratic questions, it often overlooks a critical aspect: adaptively guiding learners in accordance with their cognitive states. This study moves beyond question generation to emphasize instructional guidance capability. We ask: Can LLMs emulate expert tutors who dynamically adjust strategies in response to learners' states? To investigate this, we propose GuideEval, a benchmark grounded in authentic educational dialogues that evaluates pedagogical guidance through a three-phase behavioral framework: (1) Perception, inferring learner states; (2) Orchestration, adapting instructional strategies; and (3) Elicitation, stimulating proper reflections. Empirical results indicate that existing LLMs often fail to provide effective adaptive scaffolding when learners experience confusion or require redirection. To complement the quantitative evaluation, we conduct a detailed failure case analysis, providing an intuitive understanding of these shortcomings. Furthermore, we introduce a behavior-guided finetuning strategy that leverages behavior-prompted instructional dialogues, substantially enhancing guidance performance. By shifting the focus from isolated content evaluation to learner-centered state-aware interaction, our work advocates a more dialogic paradigm for evaluating Socratic LLMs.

Pallavi Zambare, Venkata Nikhil Thanikella, Ying Liu

Pedestrian intention prediction is essential for autonomous driving in complex urban environments. Conventional approaches depend on supervised learning over frame sequences and require extensive retraining to adapt to new scenarios. Here, we introduce BF-PIP (Beyond Frames Pedestrian Intention Prediction), a zero-shot approach built upon Gemini 2.5 Pro. It infers crossing intentions directly from short, continuous video clips enriched with structured JAAD metadata. In contrast to GPT-4V based methods that operate on discrete frames, BF-PIP processes uninterrupted temporal clips. It also incorporates bounding-box annotations and ego-vehicle speed via specialized multimodal prompts. Without any additional training, BF-PIP achieves 73% prediction accuracy, outperforming a GPT-4V baseline by 18 %. These findings illustrate that combining temporal video inputs with contextual cues enhances spatiotemporal perception and improves intent inference under ambiguous conditions. This approach paves the way for agile, retraining-free perception module in intelligent transportation system.

Defeng Liu, Ying Liu, Carson Eisenach

In this work, we study how to efficiently apply reinforcement learning (RL) for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems by leveraging intervention models. The key of the proposed methodology is to better explore the solution space by simulating and composing the stochastic processes using pre-trained deep learning (DL) models. We demonstrate our approach on a challenging real-world application, the multi-sourcing multi-period inventory management problem in supply chain optimization. In particular, we employ deep RL models for learning and forecasting the stochastic supply chain processes under a range of assumptions. Moreover, we also introduce a constraint coordination mechanism, designed to forecast dual costs given the cross-products constraints in the inventory network. We highlight that instead of directly modeling the complex physical constraints into the RL optimization problem and solving the stochastic problem as a whole, our approach breaks down those supply chain processes into scalable and composable DL modules, leading to improved performance on large real-world datasets. We also outline open problems for future research to further investigate the efficacy of such models.

Zhu Liu, Zhen Hu, Lei Dai et al.

Semantic map models represent meanings or functions as nodes in a graph constrained by the local connectivity hypothesis, with edges indicating their associations. Widely used in typological linguistics, these models compare interrelated meanings across languages. Traditionally built manually in a bottom-up manner, they are inefficient for large datasets and lack visualization and evaluation tools. This paper introduces XISM, an interactive tool based on our prior algorithm, which constructs semantic maps from user data via a top-down approach, displays candidate maps, and evaluates them using multiple metrics. Users can refine maps by editing edges, combining data-driven efficiency with expert knowledge. This human-in-the-loop design benefits both typologists and computational linguists. The system https://770103knev48.vicp.fun/ and a demonstration video https://youtu.be/S-wsVDF2HSI?si=1OrcF41tRznaifhZ are publicly available.

Wei Wu, Wenjie Wang, Yang Tan et al.

This report presents Team PA-VGG's solution for the ICDAR'25 Competition on Understanding Chinese College Entrance Exam Papers. In addition to leveraging high-resolution image processing and a multi-image end-to-end input strategy to address the challenges of dense OCR extraction and complex document layouts in Gaokao papers, our approach introduces domain-specific post-training strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that our post-training approach achieves the most outstanding performance, securing first place with an accuracy rate of 89.6%.

Ying Liu, Yijing Hua, Haojiang Chai et al.

Open-vocabulary detectors are proposed to locate and recognize objects in novel classes. However, variations in vision-aware language vocabulary data used for open-vocabulary learning can lead to unfair and unreliable evaluations. Recent evaluation methods have attempted to address this issue by incorporating object properties or adding locations and characteristics to the captions. Nevertheless, since these properties and locations depend on the specific details of the images instead of classes, detectors can not make accurate predictions without precise descriptions provided through human annotation. This paper introduces 3F-OVD, a novel task that extends supervised fine-grained object detection to the open-vocabulary setting. Our task is intuitive and challenging, requiring a deep understanding of Fine-grained captions and careful attention to Fine-grained details in images in order to accurately detect Fine-grained objects. Additionally, due to the scarcity of qualified fine-grained object detection datasets, we have created a new dataset, NEU-171K, tailored for both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detectors on our dataset for both settings. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective post-processing technique.

Zhu Liu, Ying Liu, KangYang Luo et al.

Lexico-semantic networks represent words as nodes and their semantic relatedness as edges. While such networks are traditionally constructed using embeddings from encoder-based models or static vectors, embeddings from decoder-only large language models (LLMs) remain underexplored. Unlike encoder models, LLMs are trained with a next-token prediction objective, which does not directly encode the meaning of the current token. In this paper, we construct lexico-semantic networks from the input embeddings of LLMs with varying parameter scales and conduct a comparative analysis of their global and local structures. Our results show that these networks exhibit small-world properties, characterized by high clustering and short path lengths. Moreover, larger LLMs yield more intricate networks with less small-world effects and longer paths, reflecting richer semantic structures and relations. We further validate our approach through analyses of common conceptual pairs, structured lexical relations derived from WordNet, and a cross-lingual semantic network for qualitative words.

Min Li, Chen Chen, Zhuang Xiong et al.

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is an MRI phase-based post-processing technique to extract the distribution of tissue susceptibilities, demonstrating significant potential in studying neurological diseases. However, the ill-conditioned nature of dipole inversion makes QSM reconstruction from the tissue field prone to noise and artifacts. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based IR2QSM method for QSM reconstruction. It is designed by iterating four times of a reverse concatenations and middle recurrent modules enhanced U-net, which could dramatically improve the efficiency of latent feature utilization. Simulated and in vivo experiments were conducted to compare IR2QSM with several traditional algorithms (MEDI and iLSQR) and state-of-the-art deep learning methods (U-net, xQSM, and LPCNN). The results indicated that IR2QSM was able to obtain QSM images with significantly increased accuracy and mitigated artifacts over other methods. Particularly, IR2QSM demonstrated on average the best NRMSE (27.59%) in simulated experiments, which is 15.48%, 7.86%, 17.24%, 9.26%, and 29.13% lower than iLSQR, MEDI, U-net, xQSM, LPCNN, respectively, and led to improved QSM results with fewer artifacts for the in vivo data.

Runyan Yang, Huibao Yang, Xiqing Zhang et al.

Recently, there have been attempts to integrate various speech processing tasks into a unified model. However, few previous works directly demonstrated that joint optimization of diverse tasks in multitask speech models has positive influence on the performance of individual tasks. In this paper we present a multitask speech model -- PolySpeech, which supports speech recognition, speech synthesis, and two speech classification tasks. PolySpeech takes multi-modal language model as its core structure and uses semantic representations as speech inputs. We introduce semantic speech embedding tokenization and speech reconstruction methods to PolySpeech, enabling efficient generation of high-quality speech for any given speaker. PolySpeech shows competitiveness across various tasks compared to single-task models. In our experiments, multitask optimization achieves performance comparable to single-task optimization and is especially beneficial for specific tasks.

Ying Liu, Liucheng Guo, Valeri A. Makarovc et al.

Automated hand gesture recognition has long been a focal point in the AI community. Traditionally, research in this field has predominantly focused on scenarios with access to a continuous flow of hand's images. This focus has been driven by the widespread use of cameras and the abundant availability of image data. However, there is an increasing demand for gesture recognition technologies that operate on low-power sensor devices. This is due to the rising concerns for data leakage and end-user privacy, as well as the limited battery capacity and the computing power in low-cost devices. Moreover, the challenge in data collection for individually designed hardware also hinders the generalisation of a gesture recognition model. In this study, we unveil a novel methodology for pattern recognition systems using adaptive and agile error correction, designed to enhance the performance of legacy gesture recognition models on devices with limited battery capacity and computing power. This system comprises a compact Support Vector Machine as the base model for live gesture recognition. Additionally, it features an adaptive agile error corrector that employs few-shot learning within the feature space induced by high-dimensional kernel mappings. The error corrector can be customised for each user, allowing for dynamic adjustments to the gesture prediction based on their movement patterns while maintaining the agile performance of its base model on a low-cost and low-power micro-controller. This proposed system is distinguished by its compact size, rapid processing speed, and low power consumption, making it ideal for a wide range of embedded systems.