Hanqing Li

Mengzhe He, Yali Wang, Jiaxi Wu et al.

Cross domain object detection is a realistic and challenging task in the wild. It suffers from performance degradation due to large shift of data distributions and lack of instance-level annotations in the target domain. Existing approaches mainly focus on either of these two difficulties, even though they are closely coupled in cross domain object detection. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Target-perceived Dual-branch Distillation (TDD) framework. By integrating detection branches of both source and target domains in a unified teacher-student learning scheme, it can reduce domain shift and generate reliable supervision effectively. In particular, we first introduce a distinct Target Proposal Perceiver between two domains. It can adaptively enhance source detector to perceive objects in a target image, by leveraging target proposal contexts from iterative cross-attention. Afterwards, we design a concise Dual Branch Self Distillation strategy for model training, which can progressively integrate complementary object knowledge from different domains via self-distillation in two branches. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a number of widely-used scenarios in cross domain object detection. The results show that our TDD significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on all the benchmarks. Our code and model will be available at https://github.com/Feobi1999/TDD.

Hanqing Li, Diego Klabjan, Jean Utke

This paper introduces a new, unsupervised method for automatic video summarization using ideas from generative adversarial networks but eliminating the discriminator, having a simple loss function, and separating training of different parts of the model. An iterative training strategy is also applied by alternately training the reconstructor and the frame selector for multiple iterations. Furthermore, a trainable mask vector is added to the model in summary generation during training and evaluation. The method also includes an unsupervised model selection algorithm. Results from experiments on two public datasets (SumMe and TVSum) and four datasets we created (Soccer, LoL, MLB, and ShortMLB) demonstrate the effectiveness of each component on the model performance, particularly the iterative training strategy. Evaluations and comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods highlight the advantages of the proposed method in performance, stability, and training efficiency.

Hulingxiao He, Wu Yuan, Yidian Huang et al.

In this work, we propose Branch-to-Trunk network (BTNet), a representation learning method for multi-resolution face recognition. It consists of a trunk network (TNet), namely a unified encoder, and multiple branch networks (BNets), namely resolution adapters. As per the input, a resolution-specific BNet is used and the output are implanted as feature maps in the feature pyramid of TNet, at a layer with the same resolution. The discriminability of tiny faces is significantly improved, as the interpolation error introduced by rescaling, especially up-sampling, is mitigated on the inputs. With branch distillation and backward-compatible training, BTNet transfers discriminative high-resolution information to multiple branches while guaranteeing representation compatibility. Our experiments demonstrate strong performance on face recognition benchmarks, both for multi-resolution identity matching and feature aggregation, with much less computation amount and parameter storage. We establish new state-of-the-art on the challenging QMUL-SurvFace 1: N face identification task. Our code is available at https://github.com/StevenSmith2000/BTNet.

Alin Fan, Hanqing Li, Sihan Lu et al.

Modern industrial recommendation systems improve recommendation performance by integrating multimodal representations from pre-trained models into ID-based Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction frameworks. However, existing approaches typically adopt modality-centric modeling strategies that process ID-based and multimodal embeddings independently, failing to capture fine-grained interactions between content semantics and behavioral signals. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Multimodal Fusion (DMF), which introduces a modality-enriched modeling strategy to enable fine-grained interactions between ID-based collaborative representations and multimodal representations for user interest modeling. Specifically, we construct target-aware features to bridge the semantic gap across different embedding spaces and leverage them as side information to enhance the effectiveness of user interest modeling. Furthermore, we design an inference-optimized attention mechanism that decouples the computation of target-aware features and ID-based embeddings before the attention layer, thereby alleviating the computational bottleneck introduced by incorporating target-aware features. To achieve comprehensive multimodal integration, DMF combines user interest representations learned under the modality-centric and modality-enriched modeling strategies. Offline experiments on public and industrial datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DMF. Moreover, DMF has been deployed on the product recommendation system of the international e-commerce platform Lazada, achieving relative improvements of 5.30% in CTCVR and 7.43% in GMV with negligible computational overhead.

Hanqing Li, Diego Klabjan

We explore a new language model inversion problem under strict black-box, zero-shot, and limited data conditions. We propose a novel training-free framework that reconstructs prompts using only a limited number of text outputs from a language model. Existing methods rely on the availability of a large number of outputs for both training and inference, an assumption that is unrealistic in the real world, and they can sometimes produce garbled text. In contrast, our approach, which relies on limited resources, consistently yields coherent and semantically meaningful prompts. Our framework leverages a large language model together with an optimization process inspired by the genetic algorithm to effectively recover prompts. Experimental results on several datasets derived from public sources indicate that our approach achieves high-quality prompt recovery and generates prompts more semantically and functionally aligned with the originals than current state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, use-case studies introduced demonstrate the method's strong potential for generating high-quality text data on perturbed prompts.

Hanqing Li, Kiran Sheena Jyothi, Henry Liang et al.

We propose a new, training-free method, Graph Reasoning via Retrieval Augmented Framework (GRRAF), that harnesses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) alongside the code-generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to address a wide range of graph reasoning tasks. In GRRAF, the target graph is stored in a graph database, and the LLM is prompted to generate executable code queries that retrieve the necessary information. This approach circumvents the limitations of existing methods that require extensive finetuning or depend on predefined algorithms, and it incorporates an error feedback loop with a time-out mechanism to ensure both correctness and efficiency. Experimental evaluations on the GraphInstruct dataset reveal that GRRAF achieves 100% accuracy on most graph reasoning tasks, including cycle detection, bipartite graph checks, shortest path computation, and maximum flow, while maintaining consistent token costs regardless of graph sizes. Imperfect but still very high performance is observed on subgraph matching. Notably, GRRAF scales effectively to large graphs with up to 10,000 nodes.

Hanqing Li, Melania Fedeli, Vinay Kolar et al.

The Internet comprises of interconnected, independently managed Autonomous Systems (AS) that rely on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for inter-domain routing. BGP anomalies--such as route leaks and hijacks--can divert traffic through unauthorized or inefficient paths, jeopardizing network reliability and security. Although existing rule-based and machine learning methods can detect these anomalies using structured metrics, they still require experts with in-depth BGP knowledge of, for example, AS relationships and historical incidents, to interpret events and propose remediation. In this paper, we introduce BEAR (BGP Event Analysis and Reporting), a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate comprehensive reports explaining detected BGP anomaly events. BEAR employs a multi-step reasoning process that translates tabular BGP data into detailed textual narratives, enhancing interpretability and analytical precision. To address the limited availability of publicly documented BGP anomalies, we also present a synthetic data generation framework powered by LLMs. Evaluations on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that BEAR achieves 100% accuracy, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and in-context learning baselines. This work pioneers an automated approach for explaining BGP anomaly events, offering valuable operational insights for network management.