Can Li

Shraman Pal, Can Li

Many learning tasks in science and engineering are characterized by sparse datasets, which limits the effectiveness of purely data-driven approaches. At the same time, these problems are often accompanied by rich domain knowledge derived from physical laws, operational requirements, and expert heuristics. Such knowledge is frequently expressed as rules involving logical propositions and linear inequalities. Existing neuro-symbolic methods typically enforce these rules approximately through soft penalties, assume input-independent rules when designing specialized architectures, or rely on non-differentiable post-processing at inference time to achieve hard constraint satisfaction. While recent advances in differentiable optimization layers enable end-to-end feasibility enforcement within neural networks, extending these approaches to logical or mixed-integer rules remains challenging due to inherent nonconvexity. In this work, we propose a unified end-to-end framework for enforcing hard, input-dependent mixed integer linear constraints within neural networks. Our approach represents rules as disjunctive constraints and applies hierarchical convex relaxations to obtain convex hull formulations. These relaxations yield tractable linear constraints that can be embedded as differentiable optimization layers while enabling exact rule satisfaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on real-world datasets, achieving perfect rule satisfaction and strong predictive performance.

Liang Qiao, Hui Jiang, Ying Chen et al.

This paper presents DavarOCR, an open-source toolbox for OCR and document understanding tasks. DavarOCR currently implements 19 advanced algorithms, covering 9 different task forms. DavarOCR provides detailed usage instructions and the trained models for each algorithm. Compared with the previous opensource OCR toolbox, DavarOCR has relatively more complete support for the sub-tasks of the cutting-edge technology of document understanding. In order to promote the development and application of OCR technology in academia and industry, we pay more attention to the use of modules that different sub-domains of technology can share. DavarOCR is publicly released at https://github.com/hikopensource/Davar-Lab-OCR.

Can Li, Sheng Shao, Junyi Qu et al.

Machine learning models for medical images can help physicians diagnose and manage diseases. However, due to the fact that medical image annotation requires a great deal of manpower and expertise, as well as the fact that clinical departments perform image annotation based on task orientation, there is the problem of having fewer medical image annotation data with more unlabeled data and having many datasets that annotate only a single organ. In this paper, we present UniMOS, the first universal framework for achieving the utilization of fully and partially labeled images as well as unlabeled images. Specifically, we construct a Multi-Organ Segmentation (MOS) module over fully/partially labeled data as the basenet and designed a new target adaptive loss. Furthermore, we incorporate a semi-supervised training module that combines consistent regularization and pseudolabeling techniques on unlabeled data, which significantly improves the segmentation of unlabeled data. Experiments show that the framework exhibits excellent performance in several medical image segmentation tasks compared to other advanced methods, and also significantly improves data utilization and reduces annotation cost. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/lw8807001/UniMOS.

Can Li, Lei Bai, Lina Yao et al.

Transportation is the backbone of the economy and urban development. Improving the efficiency, sustainability, resilience, and intelligence of transportation systems is critical and also challenging. The constantly changing traffic conditions, the uncertain influence of external factors (e.g., weather, accidents), and the interactions among multiple travel modes and multi-type flows result in the dynamic and stochastic natures of transportation systems. The planning, operation, and control of transportation systems require flexible and adaptable strategies in order to deal with uncertainty, non-linearity, variability, and high complexity. In this context, Reinforcement Learning (RL) that enables autonomous decision-makers to interact with the complex environment, learn from the experiences, and select optimal actions has been rapidly emerging as one of the most useful approaches for smart transportation. This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis to identify the development of RL-based methods for transportation applications, typical journals/conferences, and leading topics in the field of intelligent transportation in recent ten years. Then, this paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of RL in transportation by categorizing different methods with respect to the specific application domains. The potential future research directions of RL applications and developments are also discussed.

Zhanzhan Cheng, Peng Zhang, Can Li et al.

Recently, automatically extracting information from visually rich documents (e.g., tickets and resumes) has become a hot and vital research topic due to its widespread commercial value. Most existing methods divide this task into two subparts: the text reading part for obtaining the plain text from the original document images and the information extraction part for extracting key contents. These methods mainly focus on improving the second, while neglecting that the two parts are highly correlated. This paper proposes a unified end-to-end information extraction framework from visually rich documents, where text reading and information extraction can reinforce each other via a well-designed multi-modal context block. Specifically, the text reading part provides multi-modal features like visual, textual and layout features. The multi-modal context block is developed to fuse the generated multi-modal features and even the prior knowledge from the pre-trained language model for better semantic representation. The information extraction part is responsible for generating key contents with the fused context features. The framework can be trained in an end-to-end trainable manner, achieving global optimization. What is more, we define and group visually rich documents into four categories across two dimensions, the layout and text type. For each document category, we provide or recommend the corresponding benchmarks, experimental settings and strong baselines for remedying the problem that this research area lacks the uniform evaluation standard. Extensive experiments on four kinds of benchmarks (from fixed layout to variable layout, from full-structured text to semi-unstructured text) are reported, demonstrating the proposed method's effectiveness. Data, source code and models are available.

Ercília Sousa, Can Li

A one dimensional fractional diffusion model with the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative is studied. First, a second order discretization for this derivative is presented and then an unconditionally stable weighted average finite difference method is derived. The stability of this scheme is established by von Neumann analysis. Some numerical results are shown, which demonstrate the efficiency and convergence of the method. Additionally, some physical properties of this fractional diffusion system are simulated, which further confirm the effectiveness of our method.

Can Li, Lei Bai, Wei Liu et al.

Considering the multimodal nature of transport systems and potential cross-modal correlations, there is a growing trend of enhancing demand forecasting accuracy by learning from multimodal data. These multimodal forecasting models can improve accuracy but be less practical when different parts of multimodal datasets are owned by different institutions who cannot directly share data among them. While various institutions may can not share their data with each other directly, they may share forecasting models trained by their data, where such models cannot be used to identify the exact information from their datasets. This study proposes an Unsupervised Knowledge Adaptation Demand Forecasting framework to forecast the demand of the target mode by utilizing a pre-trained model based on data of another mode, which does not require direct data sharing of the source mode. The proposed framework utilizes the potential shared patterns among multiple transport modes to improve forecasting performance while avoiding the direct sharing of data among different institutions. Specifically, a pre-trained forecasting model is first learned based on the data of a source mode, which can capture and memorize the source travel patterns. Then, the demand data of the target dataset is encoded into an individual knowledge part and a sharing knowledge part which will extract travel patterns by individual extraction network and sharing extraction network, respectively. The unsupervised knowledge adaptation strategy is utilized to form the sharing features for further forecasting by making the pre-trained network and the sharing extraction network analogous. Our findings illustrate that unsupervised knowledge adaptation by sharing the pre-trained model to the target mode can improve the forecasting performance without the dependence on direct data sharing.

Ruibin Mao, Bo Wen, Yahui Zhao et al.

Lifelong on-device learning is a key challenge for machine intelligence, and this requires learning from few, often single, samples. Memory augmented neural network has been proposed to achieve the goal, but the memory module has to be stored in an off-chip memory due to its size. Therefore the practical use has been heavily limited. Previous works on emerging memory-based implementation have difficulties in scaling up because different modules with various structures are difficult to integrate on the same chip and the small sense margin of the content addressable memory for the memory module heavily limited the degree of mismatch calculation. In this work, we implement the entire memory augmented neural network architecture in a fully integrated memristive crossbar platform and achieve an accuracy that closely matches standard software on digital hardware for the Omniglot dataset. The successful demonstration is supported by implementing new functions in crossbars in addition to widely reported matrix multiplications. For example, the locality-sensitive hashing operation is implemented in crossbar arrays by exploiting the intrinsic stochasticity of memristor devices. Besides, the content-addressable memory module is realized in crossbars, which also supports the degree of mismatches. Simulations based on experimentally validated models show such an implementation can be efficiently scaled up for one-shot learning on the Mini-ImageNet dataset. The successful demonstration paves the way for practical on-device lifelong learning and opens possibilities for novel attention-based algorithms not possible in conventional hardware.

Haifeng Wang, Hua Wu, Tian Wu et al.

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Song Wang, Zhu Wang, Can Li et al.

In comparison to conventional RGB cameras, the superior temporal resolution of event cameras allows them to capture rich information between frames, making them prime candidates for object tracking. Yet in practice, despite their theoretical advantages, the body of work on event-based multi-object tracking (MOT) remains in its infancy, especially in real-world settings where events from complex background and camera motion can easily obscure the true target motion. In this work, an event-based multi-object tracker, called SpikeMOT, is presented to address these challenges. SpikeMOT leverages spiking neural networks to extract sparse spatiotemporal features from event streams associated with objects. The resulting spike train representations are used to track the object movement at high frequency, while a simultaneous object detector provides updated spatial information of these objects at an equivalent frame rate. To evaluate the effectiveness of SpikeMOT, we introduce DSEC-MOT, the first large-scale event-based MOT benchmark incorporating fine-grained annotations for objects experiencing severe occlusions, frequent trajectory intersections, and long-term re-identification in real-world contexts. Extensive experiments employing DSEC-MOT and another event-based dataset, named FE240hz, demonstrate SpikeMOT's capability to achieve high tracking accuracy amidst challenging real-world scenarios, advancing the state-of-the-art in event-based multi-object tracking.

Can Li, Xiaoqian Jiang, Kai Zhang

Liver transplantation is a life-saving procedure for patients with end-stage liver disease. There are two main challenges in liver transplant: finding the best matching patient for a donor and ensuring transplant equity among different subpopulations. The current MELD scoring system evaluates a patient's mortality risk if not receiving an organ within 90 days. However, the donor-patient matching should also consider post-transplant risk factors, such as cardiovascular disease, chronic rejection, etc., which are all common complications after transplant. Accurate prediction of these risk scores remains a significant challenge. In this study, we used predictive models to solve the above challenges. Specifically, we proposed a deep-learning model to predict multiple risk factors after a liver transplant. By formulating it as a multi-task learning problem, the proposed deep neural network was trained to simultaneously predict the five post-transplant risks and achieve equal good performance by exploiting task-balancing techniques. We also proposed a novel fairness-achieving algorithm to ensure prediction fairness across different subpopulations. We used electronic health records of 160,360 liver transplant patients, including demographic information, clinical variables, and laboratory values, collected from the liver transplant records of the United States from 1987 to 2018. The model's performance was evaluated using various performance metrics such as AUROC and AUPRC. Our experiment results highlighted the success of our multitask model in achieving task balance while maintaining accuracy. The model significantly reduced the task discrepancy by 39%. Further application of the fairness-achieving algorithm substantially reduced fairness disparity among all sensitive attributes (gender, age group, and race/ethnicity) in each risk factor.

Hao Chen, Gonzalo E. Constante-Flores, Can Li

Decision-making problems can be represented as mathematical optimization models, finding wide applications in fields such as economics, engineering and manufacturing, transportation, and health care. Optimization models are mathematical abstractions of the problem of making the best decision while satisfying a set of requirements or constraints. One of the primary barriers to deploying these models in practice is the challenge of helping practitioners understand and interpret such models, particularly when they are infeasible, meaning no decision satisfies all the constraints. Existing methods for diagnosing infeasible optimization models often rely on expert systems, necessitating significant background knowledge in optimization. In this paper, we introduce OptiChat, a first-of-its-kind natural language-based system equipped with a chatbot GUI for engaging in interactive conversations about infeasible optimization models. OptiChat can provide natural language descriptions of the optimization model itself, identify potential sources of infeasibility, and offer suggestions to make the model feasible. The implementation of OptiChat is built on GPT-4, which interfaces with an optimization solver to identify the minimal subset of constraints that render the entire optimization problem infeasible, also known as the Irreducible Infeasible Subset (IIS). We utilize few-shot learning, expert chain-of-thought, key-retrieve, and sentiment prompts to enhance OptiChat's reliability. Our experiments demonstrate that OptiChat assists both expert and non-expert users in improving their understanding of the optimization models, enabling them to quickly identify the sources of infeasibility.

Can Li, Dejian Lai, Xiaoqian Jiang et al.

Liver transplantation often faces fairness challenges across subgroups defined by sensitive attributes such as age group, gender, and race/ethnicity. Machine learning models for outcome prediction can introduce additional biases. Therefore, we introduce Fairness through the Equitable Rate of Improvement in Multitask Learning (FERI) algorithm for fair predictions of graft failure risk in liver transplant patients. FERI constrains subgroup loss by balancing learning rates and preventing subgroup dominance in the training process. Our results show that FERI maintained high predictive accuracy with AUROC and AUPRC comparable to baseline models. More importantly, FERI demonstrated an ability to improve fairness without sacrificing accuracy. Specifically, for the gender, FERI reduced the demographic parity disparity by 71.74%, and for the age group, it decreased the equalized odds disparity by 40.46%. Therefore, the FERI algorithm advanced fairness-aware predictive modeling in healthcare and provides an invaluable tool for equitable healthcare systems.

Hanlei Zhang, Jincheng Bai, Xiabo Chen et al.

Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is a powerful tool to reveal the morphologies and structures of materials, thereby attracting intensive interests from the scientific and industrial communities. The outstanding spatial (atomic level) and temporal (ms level) resolutions of the STEM techniques generate fruitful amounts of high-definition data, thereby enabling the high-volume and high-speed analysis of materials. On the other hand, processing of the big dataset generated by STEM is time-consuming and beyond the capability of human-based manual work, which urgently calls for computer-based automation. In this work, we present a deep-learning mask region-based neural network (Mask R-CNN) for the recognition of nanoparticles imaged by STEM, as well as generating the associated dimensional analysis. The Mask R-CNN model was tested on simulated STEM-HAADF results with different Gaussian noises, particle shapes and particle sizes, and the results indicated that Gaussian noise has determining influence on the accuracy of recognition. By applying Gaussian and Non-Local Means filters on the noise-containing STEM-HAADF results, the influences of noises are largely mitigated, and recognition accuracy is significantly improved. This filtering-recognition approach was further applied to experimental STEM-HAADF results, which yields satisfying accuracy compared with the traditional threshold methods. The deep-learning-based method developed in this work has great potentials in analysis of the complicated structures and large data generated by STEM-HAADF.

Songtao Huang, Zhen Zhao, Can Li et al.

Real-world time series often have multiple frequency components that are intertwined with each other, making accurate time series forecasting challenging. Decomposing the mixed frequency components into multiple single frequency components is a natural choice. However, the information density of patterns varies across different frequencies, and employing a uniform modeling approach for different frequency components can lead to inaccurate characterization. To address this challenges, inspired by the flexibility of the recent Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), we propose a KAN-based Frequency Decomposition Learning architecture (TimeKAN) to address the complex forecasting challenges caused by multiple frequency mixtures. Specifically, TimeKAN mainly consists of three components: Cascaded Frequency Decomposition (CFD) blocks, Multi-order KAN Representation Learning (M-KAN) blocks and Frequency Mixing blocks. CFD blocks adopt a bottom-up cascading approach to obtain series representations for each frequency band. Benefiting from the high flexibility of KAN, we design a novel M-KAN block to learn and represent specific temporal patterns within each frequency band. Finally, Frequency Mixing blocks is used to recombine the frequency bands into the original format. Extensive experimental results across multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate that TimeKAN achieves state-of-the-art performance as an extremely lightweight architecture. Code is available at https://github.com/huangst21/TimeKAN.

Qi Liu, Can Li, Wanjing Ma

Traditional agent-based urban mobility simulations often rely on rigid rule-based systems that struggle to capture the complexity, adaptability, and behavioral diversity inherent in human travel decision making. Recent advancements in large language models and AI agent technologies present new opportunities to develop agents with enhanced reasoning capabilities, persistent memory, and adaptive learning. We introduce GATSim (Generative-Agent Transport Simulation), a novel framework that leverages these advancements to simulate urban mobility using generative agents with rich, human-like behaviors. Unlike conventional approaches, GATSim agents are characterized by diverse socioeconomic profiles, individual lifestyles, and evolving preferences shaped through psychologically informed memory systems, tool usage, and lifelong learning. The main contributions of this work are: (1) a comprehensive architecture that integrates an urban mobility foundation model with agent cognitive systems and a transport simulation environment; (2) a hierarchical memory designed for efficient retrieval of contextually relevant information, incorporating spatial and temporal associations, keyword matching, and semantic relevance; (3) innovative planning and reactive mechanisms for modeling adaptive mobility behaviors which integrate a multi-scale reflection process to transform specific travel experiences into generalized behavioral insights. We implement a prototype system and conduct systematic validation, demonstrating that generative agents produce believable and coherent travel behaviors. Experimental results indicate that generative agents perform at least as well as human annotators with 92\% posterior probability, while naturally producing realistic macroscopic traffic patterns. The code for the prototype implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/qiliuchn/gatsim.

Asha Ramanujam, Adam Elyoumi, Hao Chen et al.

Most existing safe reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks focus on robotics and control tasks, offering limited relevance to high-stakes domains that involve structured constraints, mixed-integer decisions, and industrial complexity. This gap hinders the advancement and deployment of safe RL in critical areas such as energy systems, manufacturing, and supply chains. To address this limitation, we present SafeOR-Gym, a benchmark suite of nine operations research (OR) environments tailored for safe RL under complex constraints. Each environment captures a realistic planning, scheduling, or control problems characterized by cost-based constraint violations, planning horizons, and hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces. The suite integrates seamlessly with the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) interface provided by OmniSafe. We evaluate several state-of-the-art safe RL algorithms across these environments, revealing a wide range of performance: while some tasks are tractable, others expose fundamental limitations in current approaches. SafeOR-Gym provides a challenging and practical testbed that aims to catalyze future research in safe RL for real-world decision-making problems. The SafeOR-Gym framework and all accompanying code are available at: https://github.com/li-group/SafeOR-Gym.

Can Li, Zhoujian Li, Ren Li et al.

World models for deformable objects should recover not only geometry and appearance, but also underlying physical dynamics, interaction grounding, and material behavior. Learning such a model from real videos is challenging because deformable linear, planar, and volumetric objects evolve under high-dimensional deformation, noisy interactions, and complex material response. The model must therefore infer a physical state from visual observations, roll it forward under new interactions, and render the resulting dynamics with high visual fidelity. We present DeformMaster, a video-derived interactive physics--neural world model that turns real interaction videos into an online interactive model of deformable objects within a unified dynamics-and-appearance framework. DeformMaster preserves structured physical rollout while using a neural residual to compensate for unmodeled effects, grounds sparse hand motion as distributed compliant actuator for hand--continuum interaction, represents material response with spatially varying constitutive experts, and drives high-fidelity 4D appearance from the predicted physical evolution. Experiments on real-world deformable-object sequences demonstrate DeformMaster's ability to roll out future dynamics and render dynamic appearance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while supporting novel action rollout, material-parameter variation, and dynamic novel-view synthesis.

Hao Chen, Chendi Qian, Christopher Morris et al.

Exact solution of hard combinatorial optimization problems often relies on strong convex relaxations, but solving these relaxations repeatedly inside a branch-and-bound algorithm can be prohibitively expensive. Hence, we consider this challenge for Max-Cut, where branch and bound commonly uses semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations to bound subproblems. We propose a Max-Cut-specific graph neural network that serves as a principled, lightweight neural proxy for these SDP solvers and can be plugged directly into an exact branch-and-bound framework. The proposed architecture has update steps of complexity $\mathcal{O}(n^2 + ne)$, and predicts both primal- and dual-feasible SDP solutions. The primal SDP solutions yield feasible Max-Cut solutions via the Goemans--Williamson algorithm. In addition, it is trained in a self-supervised fashion without requiring solved SDP relaxations as labels. Empirically, we show that our architecture can substantially reduce the cost of bounding in exact Max-Cut solving by up to $10.6 \times$ compared with using the state-of-the-art SDP solver Mosek. Our work highlights the potential of learned, validity-preserving surrogates for accelerating exact optimization over structured convex relaxations.

Hao Chen, Gonzalo E. Constante Flores, Can Li

Surrogate modeling is used to replace computationally expensive simulations. Neural networks have been widely applied as surrogate models that enable efficient evaluations over complex physical systems. Despite this, neural networks are data-driven models and devoid of any physics. The incorporation of physics into neural networks can improve generalization and data efficiency. The physics-informed neural network (PINN) is an approach to leverage known physical constraints present in the data, but it cannot strictly satisfy them in the predictions. This work proposes a novel physics-informed neural network, KKT-hPINN, which rigorously guarantees hard linear equality constraints through projection layers derived from KKT conditions. Numerical experiments on Aspen models of a continuous stirred-tank reactor (CSTR) unit, an extractive distillation subsystem, and a chemical plant demonstrate that this model can further enhance the prediction accuracy.

Shuhao Han, Haotian Fan, Fangyuan Kong et al.

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2025 challenge on Text to Image (T2I) generation model quality assessment, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2025. The aim of this challenge is to address the fine-grained quality assessment of text-to-image generation models. This challenge evaluates text-to-image models from two aspects: image-text alignment and image structural distortion detection, and is divided into the alignment track and the structural track. The alignment track uses the EvalMuse-40K, which contains around 40K AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) generated by 20 popular generative models. The alignment track has a total of 371 registered participants. A total of 1,883 submissions are received in the development phase, and 507 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 12 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. The structure track uses the EvalMuse-Structure, which contains 10,000 AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) with corresponding structural distortion mask. A total of 211 participants have registered in the structure track. A total of 1155 submissions are received in the development phase, and 487 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 8 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all methods have achieved better results than baseline methods, and the winning methods in both tracks have demonstrated superior prediction performance on T2I model quality assessment.

Mingrui Jiang, Yichun Xu, Zefan Li et al.

The unprecedented advancement of artificial intelligence has placed immense demands on computing hardware, but traditional silicon-based semiconductor technologies are approaching their physical and economic limit, prompting the exploration of novel computing paradigms. Memristor offers a promising solution, enabling in-memory analog computation and massive parallelism, which leads to low latency and power consumption. This manuscript reviews the current status of memristor-based machine learning accelerators, highlighting the milestones achieved in developing prototype chips, that not only accelerate neural networks inference but also tackle other machine learning tasks. More importantly, it discusses our opinion on current key challenges that remain in this field, such as device variation, the need for efficient peripheral circuitry, and systematic co-design and optimization. We also share our perspective on potential future directions, some of which address existing challenges while others explore untouched territories. By addressing these challenges through interdisciplinary efforts spanning device engineering, circuit design, and systems architecture, memristor-based accelerators could significantly advance the capabilities of AI hardware, particularly for edge applications where power efficiency is paramount.

Abdullah Khan, Rahul Nahar, Hao Chen et al.

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being applied to fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) in chemical processes. However, existing data-driven FDD platforms often lack interpretability for process operators and struggle to identify root causes of previously unseen faults. This paper presents FaultExplainer, an interactive tool designed to improve fault detection, diagnosis, and explanation in the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP). FaultExplainer integrates real-time sensor data visualization, Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based fault detection, and identification of top contributing variables within an interactive user interface powered by large language models (LLMs). We evaluate the LLMs' reasoning capabilities in two scenarios: one where historical root causes are provided, and one where they are not to mimic the challenge of previously unseen faults. Experimental results using GPT-4o and o1-preview models demonstrate the system's strengths in generating plausible and actionable explanations, while also highlighting its limitations, including reliance on PCA-selected features and occasional hallucinations.

Chao Li, Zhicheng Xu, Bo Wen et al.

In scenarios with limited training data or where explainability is crucial, conventional neural network-based machine learning models often face challenges. In contrast, Bayesian inference-based algorithms excel in providing interpretable predictions and reliable uncertainty estimation in these scenarios. While many state-of-the-art in-memory computing (IMC) architectures leverage emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies to offer unparalleled computing capacity and energy efficiency for neural network workloads, their application in Bayesian inference is limited. This is because the core operations in Bayesian inference differ significantly from the multiplication-accumulation (MAC) operations common in neural networks, rendering them generally unsuitable for direct implementation in most existing IMC designs. In this paper, we propose FeBiM, an efficient and compact Bayesian inference engine powered by multi-bit ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET)-based IMC. FeBiM effectively encodes the trained probabilities of a Bayesian inference model within a compact FeFET-based crossbar. It maps quantized logarithmic probabilities to discrete FeFET states. As a result, the accumulated outputs of the crossbar naturally represent the posterior probabilities, i.e., the Bayesian inference model's output given a set of observations. This approach enables efficient in-memory Bayesian inference without the need for additional calculation circuitry. As the first FeFET-based in-memory Bayesian inference engine, FeBiM achieves an impressive storage density of 26.32 Mb/mm$^{2}$ and a computing efficiency of 581.40 TOPS/W in a representative Bayesian classification task. These results demonstrate 10.7$\times$/43.4$\times$ improvement in compactness/efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art hardware implementation of Bayesian inference.

Amirhossein Mollaali, Gabriel Zufferey, Gonzalo Constante-Flores et al.

This paper proposes a new data-driven methodology for predicting intervals of post-fault voltage trajectories in power systems. We begin by introducing the Quantile Attention-Fourier Deep Operator Network (QAF-DeepONet), designed to capture the complex dynamics of voltage trajectories and reliably estimate quantiles of the target trajectory without any distributional assumptions. The proposed operator regression model maps the observed portion of the voltage trajectory to its unobserved post-fault trajectory. Our methodology employs a pre-training and fine-tuning process to address the challenge of limited data availability. To ensure data privacy in learning the pre-trained model, we use merging via federated learning with data from neighboring buses, enabling the model to learn the underlying voltage dynamics from such buses without directly sharing their data. After pre-training, we fine-tune the model with data from the target bus, allowing it to adapt to unique dynamics and operating conditions. Finally, we integrate conformal prediction into the fine-tuned model to ensure coverage guarantees for the predicted intervals. We evaluated the performance of the proposed methodology using the New England 39-bus test system considering detailed models of voltage and frequency controllers. Two metrics, Prediction Interval Coverage Probability (PICP) and Prediction Interval Normalized Average Width (PINAW), are used to numerically assess the model's performance in predicting intervals. The results show that the proposed approach offers practical and reliable uncertainty quantification in predicting the interval of post-fault voltage trajectories.

Junbo Zhao, Ting Zhang, Can Li et al.

Multi-step theorem prediction is a central challenge in automated reasoning. Existing neural-symbolic approaches rely heavily on supervised parametric models, which exhibit limited generalization to evolving theorem libraries. In this work, we explore training-free theorem prediction through the lens of in-context learning (ICL). We identify a critical scalability bottleneck, termed Structural Drift: as reasoning depth increases, the performance of vanilla ICL degrades sharply, often collapsing to near zero. We attribute this failure to the LLM's inability to recover latent topological dependencies, leading to unstructured exploration. To address this issue, we propose Theorem Precedence Graphs, which encode temporal dependencies from historical solution traces as directed graphs, and impose explicit topological constraints that effectively prune the search space during inference. Coupled with retrieval-augmented graph construction and a stepwise symbolic executor, our approach enables LLMs to act as structured planners without any gradient-based optimization. Experiments on the FormalGeo7k benchmark show that our method achieves 89.29% accuracy, substantially outperforming ICL baselines and matching state-of-the-art supervised models. These results indicate that explicit structural priors offer a promising direction for scaling LLM-based symbolic reasoning.

Gonzalo E. Constante-Flores, Hao Chen, Can Li

Deep learning models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical tasks where predictions must satisfy hard constraints, such as physical laws, fairness requirements, or safety limits. However, standard architectures lack built-in mechanisms to enforce such constraints, and existing approaches based on regularization or projection are often limited to simple constraints, computationally expensive, or lack feasibility guarantees. This paper proposes a model-agnostic framework for enforcing input-dependent linear equality and inequality constraints on neural network outputs. The architecture combines a task network trained for prediction accuracy with a safe network trained using decision rules from the stochastic and robust optimization literature to ensure feasibility across the entire input space. The final prediction is a convex combination of the two subnetworks, guaranteeing constraint satisfaction during both training and inference without iterative procedures or runtime optimization. We prove that the architecture is a universal approximator of constrained functions and derive computationally tractable formulations based on linear decision rules. Empirical results on benchmark regression tasks show that our method consistently satisfies constraints while maintaining competitive accuracy and low inference latency.

Hao Chen, Gonzalo Esteban Constante-Flores, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri et al.

Optimization models have been applied to solve a wide variety of decision-making problems. These models are usually developed by optimization experts but are used by practitioners without optimization expertise in various application domains. As a result, practitioners often struggle to interact with and draw useful conclusions from optimization models independently. To fill this gap, we introduce OptiChat, a natural language dialogue system designed to help practitioners interpret model formulation, diagnose infeasibility, analyze sensitivity, retrieve information, evaluate modifications, and provide counterfactual explanations. By augmenting large language models (LLMs) with functional calls and code generation tailored for optimization models, we enable seamless interaction and minimize the risk of hallucinations in OptiChat. We develop a new dataset to evaluate OptiChat's performance in explaining optimization models. Experiments demonstrate that OptiChat effectively bridges the gap between optimization models and practitioners, delivering autonomous, accurate, and instant responses.

Haechang Kim, Hao Chen, Can Li et al.

Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) has emerged as a promising approach in improving the transparency of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. However, there remains a gap between complex RL policies and domain experts, due to the limited comprehensibility of XRL results and isolated coverage of current XRL approaches that leave users uncertain about which tools to employ. To address these challenges, we introduce TalkToAgent, a multi-agent Large Language Models (LLM) framework that delivers interactive, natural language explanations for RL policies. The architecture with five specialized LLM agents (Coordinator, Explainer, Coder, Evaluator, and Debugger) enables TalkToAgent to automatically map user queries to relevant XRL tools and clarify an agent's actions in terms of either key state variables, expected outcomes, or counterfactual explanations. Moreover, our approach extends previous counterfactual explanations by deriving alternative scenarios from qualitative behavioral descriptions, or even new rule-based policies. We validated TalkToAgent on quadruple-tank process control problem, a well-known nonlinear control benchmark. Results demonstrated that TalkToAgent successfully mapped user queries into XRL tasks with high accuracy, and coder-debugger interactions minimized failures in counterfactual generation. Furthermore, qualitative evaluation confirmed that TalkToAgent effectively interpreted agent's actions and contextualized their meaning within the problem domain.

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.

Bo Wen, Guoyun Gao, Zhicheng Xu et al.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has raised concerns regarding its trustworthiness, especially in terms of interpretability and robustness. Tree-based models like Random Forest and XGBoost excel in interpretability and accuracy for tabular data, but scaling them remains computationally expensive due to poor data locality and high data dependence. Previous efforts to accelerate these models with analog content addressable memory (CAM) have struggled, due to the fact that the difficult-to-implement sharp decision boundaries are highly susceptible to device variations, which leads to poor hardware performance and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. This work presents a novel hardware-software co-design approach using $MoS_2$ Flash-based analog CAM with inherent soft boundaries, enabling efficient inference with soft tree-based models. Our soft tree model inference experiments on $MoS_2$ analog CAM arrays show this method achieves exceptional robustness against device variation and adversarial attacks while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy. Specifically, our fabricated analog CAM arrays achieve $96\%$ accuracy on Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) database, while maintaining decision explainability. Our experimentally calibrated model validated only a $0.6\%$ accuracy drop on the MNIST dataset under $10\%$ device threshold variation, compared to a $45.3\%$ drop for traditional decision trees. This work paves the way for specialized hardware that enhances AI's trustworthiness and efficiency.

Chengping He, Mingrui Jiang, Keyi Shan et al.

Brain-inspired computing aims to mimic cognitive functions like associative memory, the ability to recall complete patterns from partial cues. Memristor technology offers promising hardware for such neuromorphic systems due to its potential for efficient in-memory analog computing. Hopfield Neural Networks (HNNs) are a classic model for associative memory, but implementations on conventional hardware suffer from efficiency bottlenecks, while prior memristor-based HNNs faced challenges with vulnerability to hardware defects due to offline training, limited storage capacity, and difficulty processing analog patterns. Here we introduce and experimentally demonstrate on integrated memristor hardware a new hardware-adaptive learning algorithm for associative memories that significantly improves defect tolerance and capacity, and naturally extends to scalable multilayer architectures capable of handling both binary and continuous patterns. Our approach achieves 3x effective capacity under 50% device faults compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, its extension to multilayer architectures enables superlinear capacity scaling (\(\propto N^{1.49}\ for binary patterns) and effective recalling of continuous patterns (\propto N^{1.74}\ scaling), as compared to linear capacity scaling for previous HNNs. It also provides flexibility to adjust capacity by tuning hidden neurons for the same-sized patterns. By leveraging the massive parallelism of the hardware enabled by synchronous updates, it reduces energy by 8.8x and latency by 99.7% for 64-dimensional patterns over asynchronous schemes, with greater improvements at scale. This promises the development of more reliable memristor-based associative memory systems and enables new applications research due to the significantly improved capacity, efficiency, and flexibility.

Pulakesh Upadhyaya, Kai Zhang, Can Li et al.

Causal structure learning refers to a process of identifying causal structures from observational data, and it can have multiple applications in biomedicine and health care. This paper provides a practical review and tutorial on scalable causal structure learning models with examples of real-world data to help health care audiences understand and apply them. We reviewed traditional (combinatorial and score-based methods) for causal structure discovery and machine learning-based schemes. We also highlighted recent developments in biomedicine where causal structure learning can be applied to discover structures such as gene networks, brain connectivity networks, and those in cancer epidemiology. We also compared the performance of traditional and machine learning-based algorithms for causal discovery over some benchmark data sets. Machine learning-based approaches, including deep learning, have many advantages over traditional approaches, such as scalability, including a greater number of variables, and potentially being applied in a wide range of biomedical applications, such as genetics, if sufficient data are available. Furthermore, these models are more flexible than traditional models and are poised to positively affect many applications in the future.

Peng Zhang, Can Li, Liang Qiao et al.

Document layout analysis is crucial for understanding document structures. On this task, vision and semantics of documents, and relations between layout components contribute to the understanding process. Though many works have been proposed to exploit the above information, they show unsatisfactory results. NLP-based methods model layout analysis as a sequence labeling task and show insufficient capabilities in layout modeling. CV-based methods model layout analysis as a detection or segmentation task, but bear limitations of inefficient modality fusion and lack of relation modeling between layout components. To address the above limitations, we propose a unified framework VSR for document layout analysis, combining vision, semantics and relations. VSR supports both NLP-based and CV-based methods. Specifically, we first introduce vision through document image and semantics through text embedding maps. Then, modality-specific visual and semantic features are extracted using a two-stream network, which are adaptively fused to make full use of complementary information. Finally, given component candidates, a relation module based on graph neural network is incorported to model relations between components and output final results. On three popular benchmarks, VSR outperforms previous models by large margins. Code will be released soon.

Peng Jia, Mingyang Ma, Dongmei Cai et al.

The Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor is widely used to measure aberrations induced by atmospheric turbulence in adaptive optics systems. However if there exists strong atmospheric turbulence or the brightness of guide stars is low, the accuracy of wavefront measurements will be affected. In this paper, we propose a compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method. Instead of reconstructing wavefronts with slope measurements of all sub-apertures, our method reconstructs wavefronts with slope measurements of sub-apertures which have spot images with high signal to noise ratio. Besides, we further propose to use a deep neural network to accelerate wavefront reconstruction speed. During the training stage of the deep neural network, we propose to add a drop-out layer to simulate the compressive sensing process, which could increase development speed of our method. After training, the compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method can reconstruct wavefronts in high spatial resolution with slope measurements from only a small amount of sub-apertures. We integrate the straightforward compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method with image deconvolution algorithm to develop a high-order image restoration method. We use images restored by the high-order image restoration method to test the performance of our the compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method. The results show that our method can improve the accuracy of wavefront measurements and is suitable for real-time applications.

Can Li, Lei Bai, Wei Liu et al.

Accurate demand forecasting of different public transport modes(e.g., buses and light rails) is essential for public service operation.However, the development level of various modes often varies sig-nificantly, which makes it hard to predict the demand of the modeswith insufficient knowledge and sparse station distribution (i.e.,station-sparse mode). Intuitively, different public transit modes mayexhibit shared demand patterns temporally and spatially in a city.As such, we propose to enhance the demand prediction of station-sparse modes with the data from station-intensive mode and designaMemory-Augmented Multi-taskRecurrent Network (MATURE)to derive the transferable demand patterns from each mode andboost the prediction of station-sparse modes through adaptingthe relevant patterns from the station-intensive mode. Specifically,MATUREcomprises three components: 1) a memory-augmentedrecurrent network for strengthening the ability to capture the long-short term information and storing temporal knowledge of eachtransit mode; 2) a knowledge adaption module to adapt the rele-vant knowledge from a station-intensive source to station-sparsesources; 3) a multi-task learning framework to incorporate all theinformation and forecast the demand of multiple modes jointly.The experimental results on a real-world dataset covering four pub-lic transport modes demonstrate that our model can promote thedemand forecasting performance for the station-sparse modes.

Lei Bai, Lina Yao, Can Li et al.

Modeling complex spatial and temporal correlations in the correlated time series data is indispensable for understanding the traffic dynamics and predicting the future status of an evolving traffic system. Recent works focus on designing complicated graph neural network architectures to capture shared patterns with the help of pre-defined graphs. In this paper, we argue that learning node-specific patterns is essential for traffic forecasting while the pre-defined graph is avoidable. To this end, we propose two adaptive modules for enhancing Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) with new capabilities: 1) a Node Adaptive Parameter Learning (NAPL) module to capture node-specific patterns; 2) a Data Adaptive Graph Generation (DAGG) module to infer the inter-dependencies among different traffic series automatically. We further propose an Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (AGCRN) to capture fine-grained spatial and temporal correlations in traffic series automatically based on the two modules and recurrent networks. Our experiments on two real-world traffic datasets show AGCRN outperforms state-of-the-art by a significant margin without pre-defined graphs about spatial connections.