Fu Lee Wang

Yongzhen Wang, Xuefeng Yan, Fu Lee Wang et al.

While the wisdom of training an image dehazing model on synthetic hazy data can alleviate the difficulty of collecting real-world hazy/clean image pairs, it brings the well-known domain shift problem. From a different yet new perspective, this paper explores contrastive learning with an adversarial training effort to leverage unpaired real-world hazy and clean images, thus bridging the gap between synthetic and real-world haze is avoided. We propose an effective unsupervised contrastive learning paradigm for image dehazing, dubbed UCL-Dehaze. Unpaired real-world clean and hazy images are easily captured, and will serve as the important positive and negative samples respectively when training our UCL-Dehaze network. To train the network more effectively, we formulate a new self-contrastive perceptual loss function, which encourages the restored images to approach the positive samples and keep away from the negative samples in the embedding space. Besides the overall network architecture of UCL-Dehaze, adversarial training is utilized to align the distributions between the positive samples and the dehazed images. Compared with recent image dehazing works, UCL-Dehaze does not require paired data during training and utilizes unpaired positive/negative data to better enhance the dehazing performance. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our UCL-Dehaze and demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-arts, even only 1,800 unpaired real-world images are used to train our network. Source code has been available at https://github.com/yz-wang/UCL-Dehaze.

Yongzhen Wang, Xuefeng Yan, Kaiwen Zhang et al.

Adverse weather conditions such as haze, rain, and snow often impair the quality of captured images, causing detection networks trained on normal images to generalize poorly in these scenarios. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question - if the combination of image restoration and object detection, can boost the performance of cutting-edge detectors in adverse weather conditions. To answer it, we propose an effective yet unified detection paradigm that bridges these two subtasks together via dynamic enhancement learning to discern objects in adverse weather conditions, called TogetherNet. Different from existing efforts that intuitively apply image dehazing/deraining as a pre-processing step, TogetherNet considers a multi-task joint learning problem. Following the joint learning scheme, clean features produced by the restoration network can be shared to learn better object detection in the detection network, thus helping TogetherNet enhance the detection capacity in adverse weather conditions. Besides the joint learning architecture, we design a new Dynamic Transformer Feature Enhancement module to improve the feature extraction and representation capabilities of TogetherNet. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our TogetherNet outperforms the state-of-the-art detection approaches by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively. Source code is available at https://github.com/yz-wang/TogetherNet.

Chen Chen, Yisen Wang, Honghua Chen et al.

Semantic segmentation of point clouds, aiming to assign each point a semantic category, is critical to 3D scene understanding.Despite of significant advances in recent years, most of existing methods still suffer from either the object-level misclassification or the boundary-level ambiguity. In this paper, we present a robust semantic segmentation network by deeply exploring the geometry of point clouds, dubbed GeoSegNet. Our GeoSegNet consists of a multi-geometry based encoder and a boundary-guided decoder. In the encoder, we develop a new residual geometry module from multi-geometry perspectives to extract object-level features. In the decoder, we introduce a contrastive boundary learning module to enhance the geometric representation of boundary points. Benefiting from the geometric encoder-decoder modeling, our GeoSegNet can infer the segmentation of objects effectively while making the intersections (boundaries) of two or more objects clear. Experiments show obvious improvements of our method over its competitors in terms of the overall segmentation accuracy and object boundary clearness. Code is available at https://github.com/Chen-yuiyui/GeoSegNet.

Jie Wang, Yongzhen Wang, Yidan Feng et al.

Image smoothing is a fundamental low-level vision task that aims to preserve salient structures of an image while removing insignificant details. Deep learning has been explored in image smoothing to deal with the complex entanglement of semantic structures and trivial details. However, current methods neglect two important facts in smoothing: 1) naive pixel-level regression supervised by the limited number of high-quality smoothing ground-truth could lead to domain shift and cause generalization problems towards real-world images; 2) texture appearance is closely related to object semantics, so that image smoothing requires awareness of semantic difference to apply adaptive smoothing strengths. To address these issues, we propose a novel Contrastive Semantic-Guided Image Smoothing Network (CSGIS-Net) that combines both contrastive prior and semantic prior to facilitate robust image smoothing. The supervision signal is augmented by leveraging undesired smoothing effects as negative teachers, and by incorporating segmentation tasks to encourage semantic distinctiveness. To realize the proposed network, we also enrich the original VOC dataset with texture enhancement and smoothing labels, namely VOC-smooth, which first bridges image smoothing and semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CSGIS-Net outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by a large margin. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wangjie6866/CSGIS-Net.

Xianming Li, Zongxi Li, Xiaotian Luo et al.

Self-attention-based models have achieved remarkable progress in short-text mining. However, the quadratic computational complexities restrict their application in long text processing. Prior works have adopted the chunking strategy to divide long documents into chunks and stack a self-attention backbone with the recurrent structure to extract semantic representation. Such an approach disables parallelization of the attention mechanism, significantly increasing the training cost and raising hardware requirements. Revisiting the self-attention mechanism and the recurrent structure, this paper proposes a novel long-document encoding model, Recurrent Attention Network (RAN), to enable the recurrent operation of self-attention. Combining the advantages from both sides, the well-designed RAN is capable of extracting global semantics in both token-level and document-level representations, making it inherently compatible with both sequential and classification tasks, respectively. Furthermore, RAN is computationally scalable as it supports parallelization on long document processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the long-text encoding ability of the proposed RAN model on both classification and sequential tasks, showing its potential for a wide range of applications.

Yuyin Lu, Ziran Liang, Yanghui Rao et al.

Reliable reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenged by their propensity for hallucination. While augmenting LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) improves factual accuracy, existing KG-augmented methods fail to quantify epistemic uncertainty in both the retrieved evidence and LLMs' reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce DoublyCal, a framework built on a novel double-calibration principle. DoublyCal employs a lightweight proxy model to first generate KG evidence alongside a calibrated evidence confidence. This calibrated supporting evidence then guides a black-box LLM, yielding final predictions that are not only more accurate but also well-calibrated, with confidence scores traceable to the uncertainty of the supporting evidence. Experiments on knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that DoublyCal significantly improves both the accuracy and confidence calibration of black-box LLMs while maintaining low token cost.

Peng Wu, Lipeng Gu, Xuefeng Yan et al.

Large imbalance often exists between the foreground points (i.e., objects) and the background points in outdoor LiDAR point clouds. It hinders cutting-edge detectors from focusing on informative areas to produce accurate 3D object detection results. This paper proposes a novel object detection network by semantical point-voxel feature interaction, dubbed PV-RCNN++. Unlike most of existing methods, PV-RCNN++ explores the semantic information to enhance the quality of object detection. First, a semantic segmentation module is proposed to retain more discriminative foreground keypoints. Such a module will guide our PV-RCNN++ to integrate more object-related point-wise and voxel-wise features in the pivotal areas. Then, to make points and voxels interact efficiently, we utilize voxel query based on Manhattan distance to quickly sample voxel-wise features around keypoints. Such the voxel query will reduce the time complexity from O(N) to O(K), compared to the ball query. Further, to avoid being stuck in learning only local features, an attention-based residual PointNet module is designed to expand the receptive field to adaptively aggregate the neighboring voxel-wise features into keypoints. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that PV-RCNN++ achieves 81.60$\%$, 40.18$\%$, 68.21$\%$ 3D mAP on Car, Pedestrian, and Cyclist, achieving comparable or even better performance to the state-of-the-arts.

Zhaowei Chen, Peng Li, Zeyong Wei et al.

We propose GeoGCN, a novel geometric dual-domain graph convolution network for point cloud denoising (PCD). Beyond the traditional wisdom of PCD, to fully exploit the geometric information of point clouds, we define two kinds of surface normals, one is called Real Normal (RN), and the other is Virtual Normal (VN). RN preserves the local details of noisy point clouds while VN avoids the global shape shrinkage during denoising. GeoGCN is a new PCD paradigm that, 1) first regresses point positions by spatialbased GCN with the help of VNs, 2) then estimates initial RNs by performing Principal Component Analysis on the regressed points, and 3) finally regresses fine RNs by normalbased GCN. Unlike existing PCD methods, GeoGCN not only exploits two kinds of geometry expertise (i.e., RN and VN) but also benefits from training data. Experiments validate that GeoGCN outperforms SOTAs in terms of both noise-robustness and local-and-global feature preservation.

Lipeng Gu, Xuefeng Yan, Peng Cui et al.

There is a trend to fuse multi-modal information for 3D object detection (3OD). However, the challenging problems of low lightweightness, poor flexibility of plug-and-play, and inaccurate alignment of features are still not well-solved, when designing multi-modal fusion newtorks. We propose PointSee, a lightweight, flexible and effective multi-modal fusion solution to facilitate various 3OD networks by semantic feature enhancement of LiDAR point clouds assembled with scene images. Beyond the existing wisdom of 3OD, PointSee consists of a hidden module (HM) and a seen module (SM): HM decorates LiDAR point clouds using 2D image information in an offline fusion manner, leading to minimal or even no adaptations of existing 3OD networks; SM further enriches the LiDAR point clouds by acquiring point-wise representative semantic features, leading to enhanced performance of existing 3OD networks. Besides the new architecture of PointSee, we propose a simple yet efficient training strategy, to ease the potential inaccurate regressions of 2D object detection networks. Extensive experiments on the popular outdoor/indoor benchmarks show numerical improvements of our PointSee over twenty-two state-of-the-arts.

Fei Hu, Honghua Chen, Xuequan Lu et al.

How will you repair a physical object with large missings? You may first recover its global yet coarse shape and stepwise increase its local details. We are motivated to imitate the above physical repair procedure to address the point cloud completion task. We propose a novel stepwise point cloud completion network (SPCNet) for various 3D models with large missings. SPCNet has a hierarchical bottom-to-up network architecture. It fulfills shape completion in an iterative manner, which 1) first infers the global feature of the coarse result; 2) then infers the local feature with the aid of global feature; and 3) finally infers the detailed result with the help of local feature and coarse result. Beyond the wisdom of simulating the physical repair, we newly design a cycle loss %based training strategy to enhance the generalization and robustness of SPCNet. Extensive experiments clearly show the superiority of our SPCNet over the state-of-the-art methods on 3D point clouds with large missings.

Yiyang Shen, Yongzhen Wang, Mingqiang Wei et al.

Rain is one of the most common weather which can completely degrade the image quality and interfere with the performance of many computer vision tasks, especially under heavy rain conditions. We observe that: (i) rain is a mixture of rain streaks and rainy haze; (ii) the scene depth determines the intensity of rain streaks and the transformation into the rainy haze; (iii) most existing deraining methods are only trained on synthetic rainy images, and hence generalize poorly to the real-world scenes. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new SEMI-supervised Mixture Of rain REmoval Generative Adversarial Network (Semi-MoreGAN), which consists of four key modules: (I) a novel attentional depth prediction network to provide precise depth estimation; (ii) a context feature prediction network composed of several well-designed detailed residual blocks to produce detailed image context features; (iii) a pyramid depth-guided non-local network to effectively integrate the image context with the depth information, and produce the final rain-free images; and (iv) a comprehensive semi-supervised loss function to make the model not limited to synthetic datasets but generalize smoothly to real-world heavy rainy scenes. Extensive experiments show clear improvements of our approach over twenty representative state-of-the-arts on both synthetic and real-world rainy images.

Lingling Xu, Haoran Xie, S. Joe Qin et al.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) involves identifying sentiment towards specific aspect terms in a sentence and allows us to uncover nuanced perspectives and attitudes on particular aspects of a product, service, or topic. However, the scarcity of labeled data poses a significant challenge to training high-quality models. To address this issue, we explore the potential of data augmentation using ChatGPT, a well-performing large language model (LLM), to enhance the sentiment classification performance towards aspect terms. Specifically, we explore three data augmentation strategies based on ChatGPT: context-focused, aspect-focused, and context-aspect data augmentation techniques. Context-focused data augmentation focuses on changing the word expression of context words in the sentence while keeping aspect terms unchanged. In contrast, aspect-focused data augmentation aims to change aspect terms but keep context words unchanged. Context-Aspect data augmentation integrates the above two data augmentations to generate augmented samples. Furthermore, we incorporate contrastive learning into the ABSA tasks to improve performance. Extensive experiments show that all three data augmentation techniques lead to performance improvements, with the context-aspect data augmentation strategy performing best and surpassing the performance of the baseline models.

Mingqiang Wei, Qian Sun, Haoran Xie et al.

Searching by image is popular yet still challenging due to the extensive interference arose from i) data variations (e.g., background, pose, visual angle, brightness) of real-world captured images and ii) similar images in the query dataset. This paper studies a practically meaningful problem of beauty product retrieval (BPR) by neural networks. We broadly extract different types of image features, and raise an intriguing question that whether these features are beneficial to i) suppress data variations of real-world captured images, and ii) distinguish one image from others which look very similar but are intrinsically different beauty products in the dataset, therefore leading to an enhanced capability of BPR. To answer it, we present a novel variable-attention neural network to understand the combination of multiple features (termed VM-Net) of beauty product images. Considering that there are few publicly released training datasets for BPR, we establish a new dataset with more than one million images classified into more than 20K categories to improve both the generalization and anti-interference abilities of VM-Net and other methods. We verify the performance of VM-Net and its competitors on the benchmark dataset Perfect-500K, where VM-Net shows clear improvements over the competitors in terms of MAP@7. The source code and dataset will be released upon publication.

Yuyin Lu, Hegang Chen, Pengbo Mao et al.

Topic taxonomy discovery aims at uncovering topics of different abstraction levels and constructing hierarchical relations between them. Unfortunately, most of prior work can hardly model semantic scopes of words and topics by holding the Euclidean embedding space assumption. What's worse, they infer asymmetric hierarchical relations by symmetric distances between topic embeddings. As a result, existing methods suffer from problems of low-quality topics at high abstraction levels and inaccurate hierarchical relations. To alleviate these problems, this paper develops a Box embedding-based Topic Model (BoxTM) that maps words and topics into the box embedding space, where the asymmetric metric is defined to properly infer hierarchical relations among topics. Additionally, our BoxTM explicitly infers upper-level topics based on correlation between specific topics through recursive clustering on topic boxes. Finally, extensive experiments validate high-quality of the topic taxonomy learned by BoxTM.

Wenshuai Liu, Yaru Fu, Yongna Guo et al.

Digital twins (DTs) have emerged as a promising enabler for representing the real-time states of physical worlds and realizing self-sustaining systems. In practice, DTs of physical devices, such as mobile users (MUs), are commonly deployed in multi-access edge computing (MEC) networks for the sake of reducing latency. To ensure the accuracy and fidelity of DTs, it is essential for MUs to regularly synchronize their status with their DTs. However, MU mobility introduces significant challenges to DT synchronization. Firstly, MU mobility triggers DT migration which could cause synchronization failures. Secondly, MUs require frequent synchronization with their DTs to ensure DT fidelity. Nonetheless, DT migration among MEC servers, caused by MU mobility, may occur infrequently. Accordingly, we propose a two-timescale DT synchronization and migration framework with reliability consideration by establishing a non-convex stochastic problem to minimize the long-term average energy consumption of MUs. We use Lyapunov theory to convert the reliability constraints and reformulate the new problem as a partially observable Markov decision-making process (POMDP). Furthermore, we develop a heterogeneous agent proximal policy optimization with Beta distribution (Beta-HAPPO) method to solve it. Numerical results show that our proposed Beta-HAPPO method achieves significant improvements in energy savings when compared with other benchmarks.

Baian Chen, Liangliang Nan, Haoran Xie et al.

Capturing both local and global features of irregular point clouds is essential to 3D object detection (3OD). However, mainstream 3D detectors, e.g., VoteNet and its variants, either abandon considerable local features during pooling operations or ignore many global features in the whole scene context. This paper explores new modules to simultaneously learn local-global features of scene point clouds that serve 3OD positively. To this end, we propose an effective 3OD network via simultaneous local-global feature learning (dubbed 3DLG-Detector). 3DLG-Detector has two key contributions. First, it develops a Dynamic Points Interaction (DPI) module that preserves effective local features during pooling. Besides, DPI is detachable and can be incorporated into existing 3OD networks to boost their performance. Second, it develops a Global Context Aggregation module to aggregate multi-scale features from different layers of the encoder to achieve scene context-awareness. Our method shows improvements over thirteen competitors in terms of detection accuracy and robustness on both the SUN RGB-D and ScanNet datasets. Source code will be available upon publication.

Fu Lee Wang, Yidan Feng, Haoran Xie et al.

Image filters are fast, lightweight and effective, which make these conventional wisdoms preferable as basic tools in vision tasks. In practical scenarios, users have to tweak parameters multiple times to obtain satisfied results. This inconvenience heavily discounts the efficiency and user experience. We propose basis composition learning on single image filters to automatically determine their optimal formulas. The feasibility is based on a two-step strategy: first, we build a set of filtered basis (FB) consisting of approximations under selected parameter configurations; second, a dual-branch composition module is proposed to learn how the candidates in FB are combined to better approximate the target image. Our method is simple yet effective in practice; it renders filters to be user-friendly and benefits fundamental low-level vision problems including denoising, deraining and texture removal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an appropriate balance among the performance, time complexity and memory efficiency.

Yihua Fan, Yongzhen Wang, Mingqiang Wei et al.

Adverse weather conditions often impair the quality of captured images, inevitably inducing cutting-edge object detection models for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question: can the combination of image restoration and object detection enhance detection performance in adverse weather conditions? To answer it, we propose an effective architecture that bridges image dehazing and object detection together via guidance information and task-driven learning to achieve detection-friendly dehazing, termed FriendNet. FriendNet aims to deliver both high-quality perception and high detection capacity. Different from existing efforts that intuitively treat image dehazing as pre-processing, FriendNet establishes a positive correlation between these two tasks. Clean features generated by the dehazing network potentially contribute to improvements in object detection performance. Conversely, object detection crucially guides the learning process of the image dehazing network under the task-driven learning scheme. We shed light on how downstream tasks can guide upstream dehazing processes, considering both network architecture and learning objectives. We design Guidance Fusion Block (GFB) and Guidance Attention Block (GAB) to facilitate the integration of detection information into the network. Furthermore, the incorporation of the detection task loss aids in refining the optimization process. Additionally, we introduce a new Physics-aware Feature Enhancement Block (PFEB), which integrates physics-based priors to enhance the feature extraction and representation capabilities. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods on both image quality and detection precision. Our source code is available at https://github.com/fanyihua0309/FriendNet.

Lingling Xu, Haoran Xie, Si-Zhao Joe Qin et al.

With the continuous growth in the number of parameters of transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the enormous size and computational demands of these models pose significant challenges for adapting them to specific downstream tasks, especially in environments with limited computational resources. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an effective solution by reducing the number of fine-tuning parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. The demands for fine-tuning PLMs, especially LLMs, have led to a surge in the development of PEFT methods, as depicted in Fig. 1. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of PEFT methods for PLMs. We summarize these PEFT methods, discuss their applications, and outline future directions. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using several representative PEFT methods to better understand their effectiveness in parameter efficiency and memory efficiency. By offering insights into the latest advancements and practical applications, this survey serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by PEFT in the context of PLMs.

Haoguang Lu, Jiacheng Chen, Zhenguo Yang et al.

Recent advancements in text-guided image editing have achieved notable success by leveraging natural language prompts for fine-grained semantic control. However, certain editing semantics are challenging to specify precisely using textual descriptions alone. A practical alternative involves learning editing semantics from paired source-target examples. Existing exemplar-based editing methods still rely on text prompts describing the change within paired examples or learning implicit text-based editing instructions. In this paper, we introduce PairEdit, a novel visual editing method designed to effectively learn complex editing semantics from a limited number of image pairs or even a single image pair, without using any textual guidance. We propose a target noise prediction that explicitly models semantic variations within paired images through a guidance direction term. Moreover, we introduce a content-preserving noise schedule to facilitate more effective semantic learning. We also propose optimizing distinct LoRAs to disentangle the learning of semantic variations from content. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that PairEdit successfully learns intricate semantics while significantly improving content consistency compared to baseline methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/xudonmao/PairEdit.

Wuzhou Quan, Wei Zhao, Weiming Wang et al.

Many targets are often very small in infrared images due to the long-distance imaging meachnism. UNet and its variants, as popular detection backbone networks, downsample the local features early and cause the irreversible loss of these local features, leading to both the missed and false detection of small targets in infrared images. We propose HintU, a novel network to recover the local features lost by various UNet-based methods for effective infrared small target detection. HintU has two key contributions. First, it introduces the "Hint" mechanism for the first time, i.e., leveraging the prior knowledge of target locations to highlight critical local features. Second, it improves the mainstream UNet-based architecture to preserve target pixels even after downsampling. HintU can shift the focus of various networks (e.g., vanilla UNet, UNet++, UIUNet, MiM+, and HCFNet) from the irrelevant background pixels to a more restricted area from the beginning. Experimental results on three datasets NUDT-SIRST, SIRSTv2 and IRSTD1K demonstrate that HintU enhances the performance of existing methods with only an additional 1.88 ms cost (on RTX Titan). Additionally, the explicit constraints of HintU enhance the generalization ability of UNet-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Wuzhou-Quan/HintU.

Xinmeng Xu, Haoran Xie, S. Joe Qin et al.

Stage-wise audio-visual encoders propagate fused intermediate states across layers, making the formation of later representations depend on the readiness of earlier fusion states. Strong local audio-visual agreement provides useful correspondence evidence, yet a fused state also needs sufficient cross-layer and cross-modal support before it can reliably guide later fusion. This paper studies this issue through propagation-aware representation readiness and formulates premature perceptual commitment as a readiness-deficiency problem, where local plausibility, propagation influence, and support insufficiency jointly appear at an intermediate stage. We propose the Delayed Perceptual Commitment Network (DPC-Net), an encoder-level framework that estimates an observable readiness-deficiency surrogate, localizes the intervention-sensitive bottleneck, and applies support-aware correction with cross-layer and cross-modal evidence. DPC-Net preserves task-specific heads, losses, decoding modules, and evaluation protocols, making it applicable to different audio-visual tasks through encoder-side intervention. Experiments on audio-visual speech separation, audio-visual event localization, and audio-visual speech recognition show consistent improvements across reconstruction, localization, and recognition regimes. Further analyses on component contribution, selection criteria, counterfactual intervention, and readiness trajectories support the effectiveness of readiness-guided bottleneck correction.

Haote Zhang, Lipeng Gu, Wuzhou Quan et al.

Visible-infrared object detection aims to enhance the detection robustness by exploiting the complementary information of visible and infrared image pairs. However, its performance is often limited by frequent misalignments caused by resolution disparities, spatial displacements, and modality inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose the Wavelet-guided Misalignment-aware Network (WMNet), a unified framework designed to adaptively address different cross-modal misalignment patterns. WMNet incorporates wavelet-based multi-frequency analysis and modality-aware fusion mechanisms to improve the alignment and integration of cross-modal features. By jointly exploiting low and high-frequency information and introducing adaptive guidance across modalities, WMNet alleviates the adverse effects of noise, illumination variation, and spatial misalignment. Furthermore, it enhances the representation of salient target features while suppressing spurious or misleading information, thereby promoting more accurate and robust detection. Extensive evaluations on the DVTOD, DroneVehicle, and M3FD datasets demonstrate that WMNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on misaligned cross-modal object detection tasks, confirming its effectiveness and practical applicability.

Xin Li, Peng Li, Zeyong Wei et al.

Introducing BERT into cross-modal settings raises difficulties in its optimization for handling multiple modalities. Both the BERT architecture and training objective need to be adapted to incorporate and model information from different modalities. In this paper, we address these challenges by exploring the implicit semantic and geometric correlations between 2D and 3D data of the same objects/scenes. We propose a new cross-modal BERT-style self-supervised learning paradigm, called Cross-BERT. To facilitate pretraining for irregular and sparse point clouds, we design two self-supervised tasks to boost cross-modal interaction. The first task, referred to as Point-Image Alignment, aims to align features between unimodal and cross-modal representations to capture the correspondences between the 2D and 3D modalities. The second task, termed Masked Cross-modal Modeling, further improves mask modeling of BERT by incorporating high-dimensional semantic information obtained by cross-modal interaction. By performing cross-modal interaction, Cross-BERT can smoothly reconstruct the masked tokens during pretraining, leading to notable performance enhancements for downstream tasks. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that Cross-BERT outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in 3D downstream applications. Our work highlights the effectiveness of leveraging cross-modal 2D knowledge to strengthen 3D point cloud representation and the transferable capability of BERT across modalities.

Yuyin Lu, Hegang Chen, Shanrui Xie et al.

Complex Query Answering (CQA) over incomplete Knowledge Graphs (KGs), typically formalized as reasoning with Existential First-Order predicate logic with one free variable (EFO\textsubscript{1}), faces a fundamental tradeoff between logic fidelity and computational efficiency. This work establishes a Grounding-Skolemization dichotomy to systematically analyze this challenge and motivate a paradigm shift in CQA. While Grounding-based methods inherently suffer from combinatorial explosion, most Skolemization-based methods neglect to explicitly model Skolem functions and compromise logical consistency. To address these limitations, we propose the Logic-constrained Vector Symbolic Architecture (LVSA), a neuro-symbolic framework that unifies a differentiable Skolemization module and a neural negator, as well as a logical constraint-driven optimization protocol to harmonize geometric and logical requirements. Theoretically, LVSA guarantees universality for all EFO\textsubscript{1} queries with low computational complexity. Empirically, it outperforms state-of-the-art Skolemization-based methods and reduces inference costs by orders of magnitude compared to Grounding-based baselines.

Hegang Chen, Yuyin Lu, Zhiming Dai et al.

Recent advances in sequencing technologies have enabled researchers to explore cellular heterogeneity at single-cell resolution. Meanwhile, interpretability has gained prominence parallel to the rapid increase in the complexity and performance of deep learning models. In recent years, topic models have been widely used for interpretable single-cell embedding learning and clustering analysis, which we refer to as single-cell embedded topic models. However, previous studies evaluated the interpretability of the models mainly through qualitative analysis, and these single-cell embedded topic models suffer from the potential problem of interpretation collapse. Furthermore, their neglect of external biological knowledge constrains analytical performance. Here, we present scE2TM, an external knowledge-guided single-cell embedded topic model that provides a high-quality cell embedding and strong interpretation, contributing to comprehensive scRNA-seq data analysis. Our comprehensive evaluation across 20 scRNA-seq datasets demonstrates that scE2TM achieves significant clustering performance gains compared to 7 state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we propose a new interpretability evaluation benchmark that introduces 10 metrics to quantitatively assess the interpretability of single-cell embedded topic models. The results show that the interpretation provided by scE2TM performs encouragingly in terms of diversity and consistency with the underlying biological signals, contributing to a better revealing of the underlying biological mechanisms.

Jingjing Wang, Hongjie Zhu, Haoran Xie et al.

\Graph similarity computation is an essential task in many real-world graph-related applications such as retrieving the similar drugs given a query chemical compound or finding the user's potential friends from the social network database. Graph Edit Distance (GED) and Maximum Common Subgraphs (MCS) are the two commonly used domain-agnostic metrics to evaluate graph similarity in practice. Unfortunately, computing the exact GED is known to be a NP-hard problem. To solve this limitation, neural network based models have been proposed to approximate the calculations of GED/MCS. However, deep learning models are well-known ``black boxes'', thus the typically characteristic one-to-one node/subgraph alignment process in the classical computations of GED and MCS cannot be seen. Existing methods have paid attention to approximating the node/subgraph alignment (soft alignment), but the one-to-one node alignment (hard alignment) has not yet been solved. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose a novel interpretable neural node alignment model without relying on node alignment ground truth information. Firstly, the quadratic assignment problem in classical GED computation is relaxed to a linear alignment via embedding the features in the node embedding space. Secondly, a differentiable Gumbel-Sinkhorn module is proposed to unsupervised generate the optimal one-to-one node alignment matrix. Experimental results in real-world graph datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in graph similarity computation and graph retrieval tasks, achieving up to 16\% reduction in the Mean Squared Error and up to 12\% improvement in the retrieval evaluation metrics, respectively.

Lianyu Pang, Jian Yin, Baoquan Zhao et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image models have enabled high-quality personalized image synthesis of user-provided concepts with flexible textual control. In this work, we analyze the limitations of two primary techniques in text-to-image personalization: Textual Inversion and DreamBooth. When integrating the learned concept into new prompts, Textual Inversion tends to overfit the concept, while DreamBooth often overlooks it. We attribute these issues to the incorrect learning of the embedding alignment for the concept. We introduce AttnDreamBooth, a novel approach that addresses these issues by separately learning the embedding alignment, the attention map, and the subject identity in different training stages. We also introduce a cross-attention map regularization term to enhance the learning of the attention map. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in identity preservation and text alignment compared to the baseline methods.

Yicheng Zhu, Yiqiao Qiu, Qingyuan Wu et al.

Cross-domain sentiment classification has been a hot spot these years, which aims to learn a reliable classifier using labeled data from a source domain and evaluate it on a target domain. In this vein, most approaches utilized domain adaptation that maps data from different domains into a common feature space. To further improve the model performance, several methods targeted to mine domain-specific information were proposed. However, most of them only utilized a limited part of domain-specific information. In this study, we first develop a method of extracting domain-specific words based on the topic information derived from topic models. Then, we propose a Topic Driven Adaptive Network (TDAN) for cross-domain sentiment classification. The network consists of two sub-networks: a semantics attention network and a domain-specific word attention network, the structures of which are based on transformers. These sub-networks take different forms of input and their outputs are fused as the feature vector. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our TDAN on sentiment classification across domains. Case studies also indicate that topic models have the potential to add value to cross-domain sentiment classification by discovering interpretable and low-dimensional subspaces.