Jing Du

Jing Du, Zesheng Ye, Lina Yao et al.

Recent sequential recommendation models rely increasingly on consecutive short-term user-item interaction sequences to model user interests. These approaches have, however, raised concerns about both short- and long-term interests. (1) {\it short-term}: interaction sequences may not result from a monolithic interest, but rather from several intertwined interests, even within a short period of time, resulting in their failures to model skip behaviors; (2) {\it long-term}: interaction sequences are primarily observed sparsely at discrete intervals, other than consecutively over the long run. This renders difficulty in inferring long-term interests, since only discrete interest representations can be derived, without taking into account interest dynamics across sequences. In this study, we address these concerns by learning (1) multi-scale representations of short-term interests; and (2) dynamics-aware representations of long-term interests. To this end, we present an \textbf{I}nterest \textbf{D}ynamics modeling framework using generative \textbf{N}eural \textbf{P}rocesses, coined IDNP, to model user interests from a functional perspective. IDNP learns a global interest function family to define each user's long-term interest as a function instantiation, manifesting interest dynamics through function continuity. Specifically, IDNP first encodes each user's short-term interactions into multi-scale representations, which are then summarized as user context. By combining latent global interest with user context, IDNP then reconstructs long-term user interest functions and predicts interactions at upcoming query timestep. Moreover, IDNP can model such interest functions even when interaction sequences are limited and non-consecutive. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts on various evaluation metrics.

Zesheng Ye, Jing Du, Lina Yao

Conditional Neural Processes~(CNPs) formulate distributions over functions and generate function observations with exact conditional likelihoods. CNPs, however, have limited expressivity for high-dimensional observations, since their predictive distribution is factorized into a product of unconstrained (typically) Gaussian outputs. Previously, this could be handled using latent variables or autoregressive likelihood, but at the expense of intractable training and quadratically increased complexity. Instead, we propose calibrating CNPs with an adversarial training scheme besides regular maximum likelihood estimates. Specifically, we train an energy-based model (EBM) with noise contrastive estimation, which enforces EBM to identify true observations from the generations of CNP. In this way, CNP must generate predictions closer to the ground-truth to fool EBM, instead of merely optimizing with respect to the fixed-form likelihood. From generative function reconstruction to downstream regression and classification tasks, we demonstrate that our method fits mainstream CNP members, showing effectiveness when unconstrained Gaussian likelihood is defined, requiring minimal computation overhead while preserving foundation properties of CNPs.

Yang Ye, Hengxu You, Jing Du

Human robot collaboration is becoming increasingly important as robots become more involved in various aspects of human life in the era of Artificial Intelligence. However, the issue of human operators trust in robots remains a significant concern, primarily due to the lack of adequate semantic understanding and communication between humans and robots. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, provides an opportunity to develop an interactive, communicative, and robust human-robot collaboration approach. This paper explores the impact of ChatGPT on trust in a human-robot collaboration assembly task. This study designs a robot control system called RoboGPT using ChatGPT to control a 7-degree-of-freedom robot arm to help human operators fetch, and place tools, while human operators can communicate with and control the robot arm using natural language. A human-subject experiment showed that incorporating ChatGPT in robots significantly increased trust in human-robot collaboration, which can be attributed to the robot's ability to communicate more effectively with humans. Furthermore, ChatGPT ability to understand the nuances of human language and respond appropriately helps to build a more natural and intuitive human-robot interaction. The findings of this study have significant implications for the development of human-robot collaboration systems.

Eden Shaveet, Zefan Sramek, Yumi Hamamoto et al.

Objective: Reliable identification of pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) content online suffers from two pervasive problems: 1) existing methods predominantly rely on text-based signals, failing to capture the inherently multimodal nature of multimedia content; and 2) these methods struggle to keep pace with the rapid evolution of references, memes, terminology, and contextual cues that underlie this content. Together, these limitations point to a gap: the absence of an expert-annotated reference standard capable of supporting real-time research and robust multimodal detection model training for pro-ED content on short-form video platforms. Method: To address this, we propose "zeitgeist-aware" multimodal (ZAM) datasets: continuously curated collections of annotated multimodal pro-ED content with inclusion criteria that evolve alongside the memetic zeitgeist: the variable essence of what is considered pro-ED as new media and references come into the cultural zeitgeist and are absorbed and interpreted in online spaces. Results: We present a rationale for such datasets, define their core characteristics, outline approaches for their curation, and describe our progress toward that end. Discussion: This dataset and pipeline architecture may benefit researchers across several fields who are interested in how pro-ED sentiment is encoded and transmitted through short-form video content across time, including for the purpose of responsive moderation efforts.

Hengxu You, Yang Ye, Tianyu Zhou et al.

Robot-based assembly in construction has emerged as a promising solution to address numerous challenges such as increasing costs, labor shortages, and the demand for safe and efficient construction processes. One of the main obstacles in realizing the full potential of these robotic systems is the need for effective and efficient sequence planning for construction tasks. Current approaches, including mathematical and heuristic techniques or machine learning methods, face limitations in their adaptability and scalability to dynamic construction environments. To expand the ability of the current robot system in sequential understanding, this paper introduces RoboGPT, a novel system that leverages the advanced reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT, a large language model, for automated sequence planning in robot-based assembly applied to construction tasks. The proposed system adapts ChatGPT for construction sequence planning and demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness through experimental evaluation including Two case studies and 80 trials about real construction tasks. The results show that RoboGPT-driven robots can handle complex construction operations and adapt to changes on the fly. This paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to enhance the capabilities and performance of robot-based assembly systems in the construction industry, and it paves the way for further integration of large language model technologies in the field of construction robotics.

Yuping Wang, Shuo Xing, Cui Can et al.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) constitutes a transformative technological wave that reconfigures industries through its unparalleled capabilities for content creation, reasoning, planning, and multimodal understanding. This revolutionary force offers the most promising path yet toward solving one of engineering's grandest challenges: achieving reliable, fully autonomous driving, particularly the pursuit of Level 5 autonomy. This survey delivers a comprehensive and critical synthesis of the emerging role of GenAI across the autonomous driving stack. We begin by distilling the principles and trade-offs of modern generative modeling, encompassing VAEs, GANs, Diffusion Models, and Large Language Models (LLMs). We then map their frontier applications in image, LiDAR, trajectory, occupancy, video generation as well as LLM-guided reasoning and decision making. We categorize practical applications, such as synthetic data workflows, end-to-end driving strategies, high-fidelity digital twin systems, smart transportation networks, and cross-domain transfer to embodied AI. We identify key obstacles and possibilities such as comprehensive generalization across rare cases, evaluation and safety checks, budget-limited implementation, regulatory compliance, ethical concerns, and environmental effects, while proposing research plans across theoretical assurances, trust metrics, transport integration, and socio-technical influence. By unifying these threads, the survey provides a forward-looking reference for researchers, engineers, and policymakers navigating the convergence of generative AI and advanced autonomous mobility. An actively maintained repository of cited works is available at https://github.com/taco-group/GenAI4AD.

Jing Du, Zesheng Ye, Congbo Ma et al.

Multi-modal recommendation (MMR) enriches item representations by introducing item content, e.g., visual and textual descriptions, to improve upon interaction-only recommenders. The success of MMR hinges on aligning these content modalities with user preferences derived from interaction data, yet dominant practices based on disentangling modality-invariant preference-driving signals from modality-specific preference-irrelevant noises are flawed. First, they assume a one-size-fits-all relevance of item content to user preferences for all users, which contradicts the user-conditional fact of preferences. Second, they optimize pairwise contrastive losses separately toward cross-modal alignment, systematically ignoring higher-order dependencies inherent when multiple content modalities jointly influence user choices. In this paper, we introduce GTC, a conditional Generative Total Correlation learning framework. We employ an interaction-guided diffusion model to perform user-aware content feature filtering, preserving only personalized features relevant to each individual user. Furthermore, to capture complete cross-modal dependencies, we optimize a tractable lower bound of the total correlation of item representations across all modalities. Experiments on standard MMR benchmarks show GTC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art, with gains of up to 28.30% in NDCG@5. Ablation studies validate both conditional preference-driven feature filtering and total correlation optimization, confirming the ability of GTC to model user-conditional relationships in MMR tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/jingdu-cs/GTC.

Chaolei Wang, Yang Luo, Jing Du et al.

Accurate 3D instance segmentation is crucial for high-quality scene understanding in the 3D vision domain. However, 3D instance segmentation based on 2D-to-3D lifting approaches struggle to produce precise instance-level segmentation, due to accumulated errors introduced during the lifting process from ambiguous semantic guidance and insufficient depth constraints. To tackle these challenges, we propose splitting and growing reliable semantic mask for high-fidelity 3D instance segmentation (SGS-3D), a novel "split-then-grow" framework that first purifies and splits ambiguous lifted masks using geometric primitives, and then grows them into complete instances within the scene. Unlike existing approaches that directly rely on raw lifted masks and sacrifice segmentation accuracy, SGS-3D serves as a training-free refinement method that jointly fuses semantic and geometric information, enabling effective cooperation between the two levels of representation. Specifically, for semantic guidance, we introduce a mask filtering strategy that leverages the co-occurrence of 3D geometry primitives to identify and remove ambiguous masks, thereby ensuring more reliable semantic consistency with the 3D object instances. For the geometric refinement, we construct fine-grained object instances by exploiting both spatial continuity and high-level features, particularly in the case of semantic ambiguity between distinct objects. Experimental results on ScanNet200, ScanNet++, and KITTI-360 demonstrate that SGS-3D substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness against inaccurate masks from pre-trained models, yielding high-fidelity object instances while maintaining strong generalization across diverse indoor and outdoor environments. Code is available in the supplementary materials.

Congbo Ma, Yuxia Wang, Jia Wu et al.

Social event detection involves identifying and categorizing important events from social media, which relies on labeled data, but annotation is costly and labor-intensive. To address this problem, we propose Augmentation framework for Social Event Detection (SED-Aug), a plug-and-play dual augmentation framework, which combines explicit text-based and implicit feature-space augmentation to enhance data diversity and model robustness. The explicit augmentation utilizes large language models to enhance textual information through five diverse generation strategies. For implicit augmentation, we design five novel perturbation techniques that operate in the feature space on structural fused embeddings. These perturbations are crafted to keep the semantic and relational properties of the embeddings and make them more diverse. Specifically, SED-Aug outperforms the best baseline model by approximately 17.67% on the Twitter2012 dataset and by about 15.57% on the Twitter2018 dataset in terms of the average F1 score. The code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/congboma/SED-Aug.

Jiaohao Wu, Yang Ye, Jing Du

Drones are vital for urban emergency search and rescue (SAR) due to the challenges of navigating dynamic environments with obstacles like buildings and wind. This paper presents a method that combines multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with a convolutional autoencoder to improve drone navigation in urban SAR. The approach uses MORL to achieve multiple goals and the autoencoder for cost-effective wind simulations. By utilizing imagery data of urban layouts, the drone can autonomously make navigation decisions, optimize paths, and counteract wind effects without traditional sensors. Tested on a New York City model, this method enhances drone SAR operations in complex urban settings.

Jiahao Wu, Hengxu You, Jing Du

This paper proposes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) progresses through several overlapping generations: AI 1.0 (Information AI), AI 2.0 (Agentic AI), AI 3.0 (Physical AI), and now a speculative AI 4.0 (Conscious AI). Each of these AI generations is driven by shifting priorities among algorithms, computing power, and data. AI 1.0 ushered in breakthroughs in pattern recognition and information processing, fueling advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems. AI 2.0 built on these foundations through real-time decision-making in digital environments, leveraging reinforcement learning and adaptive planning for agentic AI applications. AI 3.0 extended intelligence into physical contexts, integrating robotics, autonomous vehicles, and sensor-fused control systems to act in uncertain real-world settings. Building on these developments, AI 4.0 puts forward the bold vision of self-directed AI capable of setting its own goals, orchestrating complex training regimens, and possibly exhibiting elements of machine consciousness. This paper traces the historical foundations of AI across roughly seventy years, mapping how changes in technological bottlenecks from algorithmic innovation to high-performance computing to specialized data, have spurred each generational leap. It further highlights the ongoing synergies among AI 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0, and explores the profound ethical, regulatory, and philosophical challenges that arise when artificial systems approach (or aspire to) human-like autonomy. Ultimately, understanding these evolutions and their interdependencies is pivotal for guiding future research, crafting responsible governance, and ensuring that AI transformative potential benefits society as a whole.

Hengxu You, Tianyu Zhou, Jing Du

Robots engaged in complex manipulation tasks require robust material property recognition to ensure adaptability and precision. Traditionally, visual data has been the primary source for object perception; however, it often proves insufficient in scenarios where visibility is obstructed or detailed observation is needed. This gap highlights the necessity of tactile sensing as a complementary or primary input for material recognition. Tactile data becomes particularly essential in contact-rich, small-scale manipulations where subtle deformations and surface interactions cannot be accurately captured by vision alone. This letter presents a novel approach leveraging a temporal binding foundation model for tactile sequence understanding to enhance material property recognition. By processing tactile sensor data with a temporal focus, the proposed system captures the sequential nature of tactile interactions, similar to human fingertip perception. Additionally, this letter demonstrates that, through tailored and specific design, the foundation model can more effectively capture temporal information embedded in tactile sequences, advancing material property understanding. Experimental results validate the model's capability to capture these temporal patterns, confirming its utility for material property recognition in visually restricted scenarios. This work underscores the necessity of embedding advanced tactile data processing frameworks within robotic systems to achieve truly embodied and responsive manipulation capabilities.

Hengxu You, Yang Ye, Tianyu Zhou et al.

The drive for efficiency and safety in construction has boosted the role of robotics and automation. However, complex tasks like welding and pipe insertion pose challenges due to their need for precise adaptive force control, which complicates robotic training. This paper proposes a two-phase system to improve robot learning, integrating human-derived force feedback. The first phase captures real-time data from operators using a robot arm linked with a virtual simulator via ROS-Sharp. In the second phase, this feedback is converted into robotic motion instructions, using a generative approach to incorporate force feedback into the learning process. This method's effectiveness is demonstrated through improved task completion times and success rates. The framework simulates realistic force-based interactions, enhancing the training data's quality for precise robotic manipulation in construction tasks.

Jing Du, Zesheng Ye, Bin Guo et al.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) seeks to enable effective knowledge transfer across domains. Existing works rely on either representation alignment or transformation bridges, but they struggle on identifying domain-shared from domain-specific latent factors. Specifically, while CDR describes user representations as a joint distribution over two domains, these methods fail to account for its joint identifiability as they primarily fixate on the marginal distribution within a particular domain. Such a failure may overlook the conditionality between two domains and how it contributes to latent factor disentanglement, leading to negative transfer when domains are weakly correlated. In this study, we explore what should and should not be transferred in cross-domain user representations from a causality perspective. We propose a Hierarchical subspace disentanglement approach to explore the Joint IDentifiability of cross-domain joint distribution, termed HJID, to preserve domain-specific behaviors from domain-shared factors. HJID organizes user representations into layers: generic shallow subspaces and domain-oriented deep subspaces. We first encode the generic pattern in the shallow subspace by minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy of initial layer activation. Then, to dissect how domain-oriented latent factors are encoded in deeper layers activation, we construct a cross-domain causality-based data generation graph, which identifies cross-domain consistent and domain-specific components, adhering to the Minimal Change principle. This allows HJID to maintain stability whilst discovering unique factors for different domains, all within a generative framework of invertible transformations that guarantee the joint identifiability. With experiments on real-world datasets, we show that HJID outperforms SOTA methods on a range of strongly and weakly correlated CDR tasks.

Haley Stone, Jing Du, Hao Xue et al.

Pathogen genome data offers valuable structure for spatial models, but its utility is limited by incomplete sequencing coverage. We propose a probabilistic framework for inferring genetic distances between unsequenced cases and known sequences within defined transmission chains, using time-aware evolutionary distance modeling. The method estimates pairwise divergence from collection dates and observed genetic distances, enabling biologically plausible imputation grounded in observed divergence patterns, without requiring sequence alignment or known transmission chains. Applied to highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5 cases in wild birds in the United States, this approach supports scalable, uncertainty-aware augmentation of genomic datasets and enhances the integration of evolutionary information into spatiotemporal modeling workflows.

Songyang Liu, Muyang Fan, Weizi Li et al.

Traffic congestion remains a significant challenge in modern urban networks. Autonomous driving technologies have emerged as a potential solution. Among traffic control methods, reinforcement learning has shown superior performance over traffic signals in various scenarios. However, prior research has largely focused on small-scale networks or isolated intersections, leaving large-scale mixed traffic control largely unexplored. This study presents the first attempt to use decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning for large-scale mixed traffic control in which some intersections are managed by traffic signals and others by robot vehicles. Evaluating a real-world network in Colorado Springs, CO, USA with 14 intersections, we measure traffic efficiency via average waiting time of vehicles at intersections and the number of vehicles reaching their destinations within a time window (i.e., throughput). At 80% RV penetration rate, our method reduces waiting time from 6.17s to 5.09s and increases throughput from 454 vehicles per 500 seconds to 493 vehicles per 500 seconds, outperforming the baseline of fully signalized intersections. These findings suggest that integrating reinforcement learning-based control large-scale traffic can improve overall efficiency and may inform future urban planning strategies.

Dening Lu, Jun Zhou, Kyle Yilin Gao et al.

Point cloud segmentation is one of the most important tasks in computer vision with widespread scientific, industrial, and commercial applications. The research thereof has resulted in many breakthroughs in 3D object and scene understanding. Previous methods typically utilized hierarchical architectures for feature representation. However, the commonly used sampling and grouping methods in hierarchical networks are only based on point-wise three-dimensional coordinates, ignoring local semantic homogeneity of point clusters. Additionally, the prevalent Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) method is often a computational bottleneck. To address these issues, we propose a novel 3D point cloud representation network, called Dynamic Clustering Transformer Network (DCTNet). It has an encoder-decoder architecture, allowing for both local and global feature learning. Specifically, we propose novel semantic feature-based dynamic sampling and clustering methods in the encoder, which enables the model to be aware of local semantic homogeneity for local feature aggregation. Furthermore, in the decoder, we propose an efficient semantic feature-guided upsampling method. Our method was evaluated on an object-based dataset (ShapeNet), an urban navigation dataset (Toronto-3D), and a multispectral LiDAR dataset, verifying the performance of DCTNet across a wide variety of practical engineering applications. The inference speed of DCTNet is 3.8-16.8$\times$ faster than existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models on the ShapeNet dataset, while achieving an instance-wise mIoU of $86.6\%$, the current top score. Our method similarly outperforms previous methods on the other datasets, verifying it as the new State-of-the-Art in point cloud segmentation.

Yanran Wang, Jonghyuk Baek, Yichun Tang et al.

This work presents an approach for automating the discretization and approximation procedures in constructing digital representations of composites from Micro-CT images featuring intricate microstructures. The proposed method is guided by the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification, offering an effective approach for discretizing microstructural images. An SVM soft margin training process is introduced as a classification of heterogeneous material points, and image segmentation is accomplished by identifying support vectors through a local regularized optimization problem. In addition, an Interface-Modified Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (IM-RKPM) is proposed for appropriate approximations of weak discontinuities across material interfaces. The proposed method modifies the smooth kernel functions with a regularized heavy-side function concerning the material interfaces to alleviate Gibb's oscillations. This IM-RKPM is formulated without introducing duplicated degrees of freedom associated with the interface nodes commonly needed in the conventional treatments of weak discontinuities in the meshfree methods. Moreover, IM-RKPM can be implemented with various domain integration techniques, such as Stabilized Conforming Nodal Integration (SCNI). The extension of the proposed method to 3-dimension is straightforward, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through the image-based modeling of polymer-ceramic composite microstructures.

Jing Du, Shiliang Pu, Qinbo Dong et al.

Although modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems can achieve high performance, they may produce errors that weaken readers' experience and do harm to downstream tasks. To improve the accuracy and reliability of ASR hypotheses, we propose a cross-modal post-processing system for speech recognizers, which 1) fuses acoustic features and textual features from different modalities, 2) joints a confidence estimator and an error corrector in multi-task learning fashion and 3) unifies error correction and utterance rejection modules. Compared with single-modal or single-task models, our proposed system is proved to be more effective and efficient. Experiment result shows that our post-processing system leads to more than 10% relative reduction of character error rate (CER) for both single-speaker and multi-speaker speech on our industrial ASR system, with about 1.7ms latency for each token, which ensures that extra latency introduced by post-processing is acceptable in streaming speech recognition.

Weikai Tan, Nannan Qin, Lingfei Ma et al.

Semantic segmentation of large-scale outdoor point clouds is essential for urban scene understanding in various applications, especially autonomous driving and urban high-definition (HD) mapping. With rapid developments of mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems, massive point clouds are available for scene understanding, but publicly accessible large-scale labeled datasets, which are essential for developing learning-based methods, are still limited. This paper introduces Toronto-3D, a large-scale urban outdoor point cloud dataset acquired by a MLS system in Toronto, Canada for semantic segmentation. This dataset covers approximately 1 km of point clouds and consists of about 78.3 million points with 8 labeled object classes. Baseline experiments for semantic segmentation were conducted and the results confirmed the capability of this dataset to train deep learning models effectively. Toronto-3D is released to encourage new research, and the labels will be improved and updated with feedback from the research community.

Jing Du

It has been challenging to find ways to educate people to have better environmental consciousness. In some cases, people do not know what the right behaviors are to protect the environment. Game engine has been used in the AEC industry for visualization. However, it has barely been used in environmental consciousness education, for example, what operation can reduce building energy consumption, what items are recyclables. As social psychology studies show that video game can influence human behavior, a good designed game should provide the game player with right incentives and guide the users to make wiser choices for better environmental protection. This paper discussed a method to use serious game engines to educate the players the right actions that should be taken under in different scenarios. These actions in real life will results in a better environmental protection. The game proposed in this study is for residential home operation. Other scenarios such as restaurant operation, grocery store operations are discussed as expansion of this study. The game players points will be calculated based on their performance on different choices and when they surpass a certain level, different rewards will be gained in order for them to adjust their current living style. The purpose of the game is to raise the environmental consciousness among the game players and educate them the right actions they can make to better protect the environment while they are spending time on games.