Yao Yang

Junwu Zhang, Mang Ye, Yao Yang

This paper studies a novel privacy-preserving anonymization problem for pedestrian images, which preserves personal identity information (PII) for authorized models and prevents PII from being recognized by third parties. Conventional anonymization methods unavoidably cause semantic information loss, leading to limited data utility. Besides, existing learned anonymization techniques, while retaining various identity-irrelevant utilities, will change the pedestrian identity, and thus are unsuitable for training robust re-identification models. To explore the privacy-utility trade-off for pedestrian images, we propose a joint learning reversible anonymization framework, which can reversibly generate full-body anonymous images with little performance drop on person re-identification tasks. The core idea is that we adopt desensitized images generated by conventional methods as the initial privacy-preserving supervision and jointly train an anonymization encoder with a recovery decoder and an identity-invariant model. We further propose a progressive training strategy to improve the performance, which iteratively upgrades the initial anonymization supervision. Experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of our anonymized pedestrian images for privacy protection, which boosts the re-identification performance while preserving privacy. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/whuzjw/privacy-reid}.

Xiaolin Zheng, Zhongyu Wang, Chaochao Chen et al.

Building a graph neural network (GNN)-based recommender system without violating user privacy proves challenging. Existing methods can be divided into federated GNNs and decentralized GNNs. But both methods have undesirable effects, i.e., low communication efficiency and privacy leakage. This paper proposes DGREC, a novel decentralized GNN for privacy-preserving recommendations, where users can choose to publicize their interactions. It includes three stages, i.e., graph construction, local gradient calculation, and global gradient passing. The first stage builds a local inner-item hypergraph for each user and a global inter-user graph. The second stage models user preference and calculates gradients on each local device. The third stage designs a local differential privacy mechanism named secure gradient-sharing, which proves strong privacy-preserving of users' private data. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets to validate the consistent superiority of our framework.

Jian Zhu, Xin Zou, Xi Wang et al.

In recent years, Multi-View Clustering (MVC) has been significantly advanced under the influence of deep learning. By integrating heterogeneous data from multiple views, MVC enhances clustering analysis, making multi-view fusion critical to clustering performance. However, there is a problem of low-quality data in multi-view fusion. This problem primarily arises from two reasons: 1) Certain views are contaminated by noisy data. 2) Some views suffer from missing data. This paper proposes a novel Stochastic Generative Diffusion Fusion (SGDF) method to address this problem. SGDF leverages a multiple generative mechanism for the multi-view feature of each sample. It is robust to low-quality data. Building on SGDF, we further present the Generative Diffusion Contrastive Network (GDCN). Extensive experiments show that GDCN achieves the state-of-the-art results in deep MVC tasks. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/HackerHyper/GDCN.

Hanyi Hu, Long Zhang, Shuan Li et al.

Financial frauds cause billions of losses annually and yet it lacks efficient approaches in detecting frauds considering user profile and their behaviors simultaneously in social network . A social network forms a graph structure whilst Graph neural networks (GNN), a promising research domain in Deep Learning, can seamlessly process non-Euclidean graph data . In financial fraud detection, the modus operandi of criminals can be identified by analyzing user profile and their behaviors such as transaction, loaning etc. as well as their social connectivity. Currently, most GNNs are incapable of selecting important neighbors since the neighbors' edge attributes (i.e., behaviors) are ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel behavior information aggregation network (BIAN) to combine the user behaviors with other user features. Different from its close "relatives" such as Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Graph Transformer Networks (GTN), it aggregates neighbors based on neighboring edge attribute distribution, namely, user behaviors in financial social network. The experimental results on a real-world large-scale financial social network dataset, DGraph, show that BIAN obtains the 10.2% gain in AUROC comparing with the State-Of-The-Art models.

Hanyi Hu, Qiao Han, Kui Chen et al.

To mitigate the susceptibility of neural networks to adversarial attacks, adversarial training has emerged as a prevalent and effective defense strategy. Intrinsically, this countermeasure incurs a trade-off, as it sacrifices the model's accuracy in processing normal samples. To reconcile the trade-off, we pioneer the incorporation of null-space projection into adversarial training and propose two innovative Null-space Projection based Adversarial Training(NPAT) algorithms tackling sample generation and gradient optimization, named Null-space Projected Data Augmentation (NPDA) and Null-space Projected Gradient Descent (NPGD), to search for an overarching optimal solutions, which enhance robustness with almost zero deterioration in generalization performance. Adversarial samples and perturbations are constrained within the null-space of the decision boundary utilizing a closed-form null-space projector, effectively mitigating threat of attack stemming from unreliable features. Subsequently, we conducted experiments on the CIFAR10 and SVHN datasets and reveal that our methodology can seamlessly combine with adversarial training methods and obtain comparable robustness while keeping generalization close to a high-accuracy model.

Yongtao Yao, Yao Yang, Haorui Shi et al.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent science, intelligent edge computing has been widely adopted. However, the limitations of traditional methods, such as poor adaptability and the slow convergence of heuristic algorithms, are becoming increasingly evident. To enable sustainable and resource-efficient edge applications, this paper proposes an online task offloading framework for wireless powered mobile edge computing (MEC) networks, called Quantum Attention-based Reinforcement learning for Online Offloading (QAROO). The system employs a binary offloading strategy with the aim of co-optimizing computing and energy resources in dynamic channel environments. In response to the issues of poor adaptability in traditional approaches and the slow convergence of heuristic algorithms, the framework integrates quantum neural networks and attention mechanisms, introducing three key improvements: using recurrent neural networks to enhance temporal modeling capability, proposing an uncertainty-guided quantization method to improve exploration efficiency, and incorporating attention mechanisms into quantum networks to strengthen feature representation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms comparative schemes in terms of normalized computation speed and processing time, offering an efficient and stable solution for online task offloading in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) dynamic environments.

Zesen Lyu, Dandan Zhang, Wei Ye et al.

Spatial reasoning is a core component of human cognition, enabling individuals to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. It relies on a nuanced understanding of spatial structures and inter-object relationships, serving as the foundation for complex reasoning and decision-making. To investigate whether current vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit similar capability, we introduce Jigsaw-Puzzles, a novel benchmark consisting of 1,100 carefully curated real-world images with high spatial complexity. Based on this dataset, we design five tasks to rigorously evaluate VLMs' spatial perception, structural understanding, and reasoning capabilities, while deliberately minimizing reliance on domain-specific knowledge to better isolate and assess the general spatial reasoning capability. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across 24 state-of-the-art VLMs. The results show that even the strongest model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves only 77.14% overall accuracy and performs particularly poorly on the Order Generation task, with only 30.00% accuracy, far below the performance exceeding 90% achieved by human participants. This persistent gap underscores the need for continued progress, positioning Jigsaw-Puzzles as a challenging and diagnostic benchmark for advancing spatial reasoning research in VLMs. Our project page is at https://zesen01.github.io/jigsaw-puzzles.

Junyu Lai, Jiakun Zhang, Shuo Xu et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked considerable interest in automated theorem proving and a prominent line of research integrates stepwise LLM-based provers into tree search. In this paper, we introduce a novel proof-state exploration approach for training data synthesis, designed to produce diverse tactics across a wide range of intermediate proof states, thereby facilitating effective one-shot fine-tuning of LLM as the policy model. We also propose an adaptive beam size strategy, which effectively takes advantage of our data synthesis method and achieves a trade-off between exploration and exploitation during tree search. Evaluations on the MiniF2F and ProofNet benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines under the stringent Pass@1 metric, attaining an average pass rate of $60.74\%$ on MiniF2F and $21.18\%$ on ProofNet. These results underscore the impact of large-scale synthetic data in advancing automated theorem proving.

Wenguo Li, Xinling Guo, Xu Jiao et al.

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL), which has a broad range of real-world applications, has received much attention in both academia and industry. Enterprises aspire to exploit more valuable features of the same users from diverse departments to boost their model prediction skills. VFL addresses this demand and concurrently secures individual parties from exposing their raw data. However, conventional VFL encounters a bottleneck as it only leverages aligned samples, whose size shrinks with more parties involved, resulting in data scarcity and the waste of unaligned data. To address this problem, we propose a novel VFL Hybrid Local Pre-training (VFLHLP) approach. VFLHLP first pre-trains local networks on the local data of participating parties. Then it utilizes these pre-trained networks to adjust the sub-model for the labeled party or enhance representation learning for other parties during downstream federated learning on aligned data, boosting the performance of federated models. The experimental results on real-world advertising datasets, demonstrate that our approach achieves the best performance over baseline methods by large margins. The ablation study further illustrates the contribution of each technique in VFLHLP to its overall performance.

Qiao Han, yong huang, xinling Guo et al.

Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples, which can easily fool DNNs into making incorrect predictions. To mitigate this deficiency, we propose a novel adversarial defense method called "Immunity" (Innovative MoE with MUtual information \& positioN stabilITY) based on a modified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture in this work. The key enhancements to the standard MoE are two-fold: 1) integrating of Random Switch Gates (RSGs) to obtain diverse network structures via random permutation of RSG parameters at evaluation time, despite of RSGs being determined after one-time training; 2) devising innovative Mutual Information (MI)-based and Position Stability-based loss functions by capitalizing on Grad-CAM's explanatory power to increase the diversity and the causality of expert networks. Notably, our MI-based loss operates directly on the heatmaps, thereby inducing subtler negative impacts on the classification performance when compared to other losses of the same type, theoretically. Extensive evaluation validates the efficacy of the proposed approach in improving adversarial robustness against a wide range of attacks.

Yurui Dong, Luozhijie Jin, Yao Yang et al.

Purpose: Emotion is a fundamental component of human communication, shaping understanding, trust, and engagement across domains such as education, healthcare, and mental health. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and knowledge generation capabilities, they still struggle to express emotions in a consistent, controllable, and contextually appropriate manner. This limitation restricts their potential for authentic human-AI interaction. Methods: We propose a controllable emotion generation framework based on Emotion Vectors (EVs) - latent representations derived from internal activation shifts between neutral and emotion-conditioned responses. By injecting these vectors into the hidden states of pretrained LLMs during inference, our method enables fine-grained, continuous modulation of emotional tone without any additional training or architectural modification. We further provide theoretical analysis proving that EV steering enhances emotional expressivity while maintaining semantic fidelity and linguistic fluency. Results: Extensive experiments across multiple LLM families show that the proposed approach achieves consistent emotional alignment, stable topic adherence, and controllable affect intensity. Compared with existing prompt-based and fine-tuning-based baselines, our method demonstrates superior flexibility and generalizability. Conclusion: Emotion Vector (EV) steering provides an efficient and interpretable means of bridging rational reasoning and affective understanding in large language models, offering a promising direction for building emotionally resonant AI systems capable of more natural human-machine interaction.

Mingqian Li, Qiao Han, Ruifeng Li et al.

In multi-task learning, labels are often missing irregularly across samples, which can be fully labeled, partially labeled or unlabeled. The irregular label presence often appears in scientific studies due to experimental limitations. It triggers a demand for a new training and inference mechanism that could accommodate irregularly present labels and maximize their utility. This work focuses on the two-label learning task and proposes a novel training and inference framework, Dual-Label Learning (DLL). The DLL framework formulates the problem into a dual-function system, in which the two functions should simultaneously satisfy standard supervision, structural duality and probabilistic duality. DLL features a dual-tower model architecture that allows for explicit information exchange between labels, aimed at maximizing the utility of partially available labels. During training, missing labels are imputed as part of the forward propagation process, while during inference, labels are predicted jointly as unknowns of a bivariate system of equations. Our theoretical analysis guarantees the feasibility of DLL, and extensive experiments are conducted to verify that by explicitly modeling label correlation and maximizing label utility, our method makes consistently better prediction than baseline approaches by up to 9.6% gain in F1-score or 10.2% reduction in MAPE. Remarkably, DLL maintains robust performance at a label missing rate of up to 60%, achieving even better results than baseline approaches at lower missing rates down to only 10%.

Qiao Han, Mingqian Li, Yao Yang et al.

Block-wise missing data poses significant challenges in real-world data imputation tasks. Compared to scattered missing data, block-wise gaps exacerbate adverse effects on subsequent analytic and machine learning tasks, as the lack of local neighboring elements significantly reduces the interpolation capability and predictive power. However, this issue has not received adequate attention. Most SOTA matrix completion methods appeared less effective, primarily due to overreliance on neighboring elements for predictions. We systematically analyze the issue and propose a novel matrix completion method ``BlockEcho" for a more comprehensive solution. This method creatively integrates Matrix Factorization (MF) within Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to explicitly retain long-distance inter-element relationships in the original matrix. Besides, we incorporate an additional discriminator for GAN, comparing the generator's intermediate progress with pre-trained MF results to constrain high-order feature distributions. Subsequently, we evaluate BlockEcho on public datasets across three domains. Results demonstrate superior performance over both traditional and SOTA methods when imputing block-wise missing data, especially at higher missing rates. The advantage also holds for scattered missing data at high missing rates. We also contribute on the analyses in providing theoretical justification on the optimality and convergence of fusing MF and GAN for missing block data.

Yitao Shen, Yue Wang, Xingyu Lu et al.

Technology companies building consumer-facing platforms may have access to massive-scale user population. In recent years, promotion with quantifiable incentive has become a popular approach for increasing active users on such platforms. On one hand, increased user activities can introduce network effect, bring in advertisement audience, and produce other benefits. On the other hand, massive-scale promotion causes massive cost. Therefore making promotion campaigns efficient in terms of return-on-investment (ROI) is of great interest to many companies. This paper proposes a practical two-stage framework that can optimize the ROI of various massive-scale promotion campaigns. In the first stage, users' personal promotion-response curves are modeled by machine learning techniques. In the second stage, business objectives and resource constraints are formulated into an optimization problem, the decision variables of which are how much incentive to give to each user. In order to do effective optimization in the second stage, counterfactual prediction and noise-reduction are essential for the first stage. We leverage existing counterfactual prediction techniques to correct treatment bias in data. We also introduce a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture, the deep-isotonic-promotion-network (DIPN), to reduce noise in the promotion response curves. The DIPN architecture incorporates our prior knowledge of response curve shape, by enforcing isotonicity and smoothness. It out-performed regular DNN and other state-of-the-art shape-constrained models in our experiments.

Yao Yang, Andrew Nam, Mohamad M. Nasr-Azadani et al.

In this study, we introduce a novel platform Resource-Aware AutoML (RA-AutoML) which enables flexible and generalized algorithms to build machine learning models subjected to multiple objectives, as well as resource and hard-ware constraints. RA-AutoML intelligently conducts Hyper-Parameter Search(HPS) as well as Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to build models optimizing predefined objectives. RA-AutoML is a versatile framework that allows user to prescribe many resource/hardware constraints along with objectives demanded by the problem at hand or business requirements. At its core, RA-AutoML relies on our in-house search-engine algorithm,MOBOGA, which combines a modified constraint-aware Bayesian Optimization and Genetic Algorithm to construct Pareto optimal candidates. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset shows very good accuracy compared to results obtained by state-of-art neural network models, while subjected to resource constraints in the form of model size.

Soheil Esmaeilzadeh, Yao Yang, Ehsan Adeli

In this work, we use a deep learning framework for simultaneous classification and regression of Parkinson disease diagnosis based on MR-Images and personal information (i.e. age, gender). We intend to facilitate and increase the confidence in Parkinson disease diagnosis through our deep learning framework.

Yao Yang

It has been the standard teaching of today that backward stability analysis is taught as absolute, just as in Newtonian physics time is taught absolute time. We will prove it is not true in general. It depends on algorithms. We will prove that forward and mixed stability anlaysis are absolutely invalid stability analysis in the sense that they have absolutely wrong reference points for detecting huge element growth of any algoritms(if any), even an "ideal" or "desirable" backward stability analysis is not so "ideal" or "desirable" in general. Any of forward stable, backward stable and mixed stable algorihms as in Demmel, Kahan , Parlett and other's papers and text books, see Demmel(6) and Higham(8)may not be really stable at all because they may fail to detect and expose any potential instabilities of the algorithm in corresponding stability analysis. Therefore, it is impossible to prove an algorithm is stable according to the standard teachin of today, just as it is impossible to prove a mathematical equuation(Maxwell's) is a law of physics according to the standard teaching in Newtonian physics.