Yang Hu

Zhuangwei Shi, Yang Hu, Guangliang Mo et al.

Stock market plays an important role in the economic development. Due to the complex volatility of the stock market, the research and prediction on the change of the stock price, can avoid the risk for the investors. The traditional time series model ARIMA can not describe the nonlinearity, and can not achieve satisfactory results in the stock prediction. As neural networks are with strong nonlinear generalization ability, this paper proposes an attention-based CNN-LSTM and XGBoost hybrid model to predict the stock price. The model constructed in this paper integrates the time series model, the Convolutional Neural Networks with Attention mechanism, the Long Short-Term Memory network, and XGBoost regressor in a non-linear relationship, and improves the prediction accuracy. The model can fully mine the historical information of the stock market in multiple periods. The stock data is first preprocessed through ARIMA. Then, the deep learning architecture formed in pretraining-finetuning framework is adopted. The pre-training model is the Attention-based CNN-LSTM model based on sequence-to-sequence framework. The model first uses convolution to extract the deep features of the original stock data, and then uses the Long Short-Term Memory networks to mine the long-term time series features. Finally, the XGBoost model is adopted for fine-tuning. The results show that the hybrid model is more effective and the prediction accuracy is relatively high, which can help investors or institutions to make decisions and achieve the purpose of expanding return and avoiding risk. Source code is available at https://github.com/zshicode/Attention-CLX-stock-prediction.

Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Richard Shaw et al.

This paper reviews the challenge on constrained high dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2022. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, datasets, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating an HDR image from multiple respective low dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed of two tracks with an emphasis on fidelity and complexity constraints: In Track 1, participants are asked to optimize objective fidelity scores while imposing a low-complexity constraint (i.e. solutions can not exceed a given number of operations). In Track 2, participants are asked to minimize the complexity of their solutions while imposing a constraint on fidelity scores (i.e. solutions are required to obtain a higher fidelity score than the prescribed baseline). Both tracks use the same data and metrics: Fidelity is measured by means of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth HDR image (computed both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation), while complexity metrics include the number of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations and runtime (in seconds).

Qian Liang, Yan Chen, Yang Hu

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) has gained significant attention in recent years for its ability to extract physiological signals from facial videos. While existing rPPG measurement methods have shown satisfactory performance in intra-dataset and cross-dataset scenarios, they often overlook the incremental learning scenario, where training data is presented sequentially, resulting in the issue of catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, most existing class incremental learning approaches are unsuitable for rPPG measurement. In this paper, we present a novel method named ADDP to tackle continual learning for rPPG measurement. We first employ adapter to efficiently finetune the model on new tasks. Then we design domain prototypes that are more applicable to rPPG signal regression than commonly used class prototypes. Based on these prototypes, we propose a feature augmentation strategy to consolidate the past knowledge and an inference simplification strategy to convert potentially forgotten tasks into familiar ones for the model. To evaluate ADDP and enable fair comparisons, we create the first continual learning protocol for rPPG measurement. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for rPPG continual learning. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/MayYoY/rPPGDIL}

Yang Hu, Xiyuan Wang, Zhouchen Lin et al.

Link prediction is one important application of graph neural networks (GNNs). Most existing GNNs for link prediction are based on one-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) test. 1-WL-GNNs first compute node representations by iteratively passing neighboring node features to the center, and then obtain link representations by aggregating the pairwise node representations. As pointed out by previous works, this two-step procedure results in low discriminating power, as 1-WL-GNNs by nature learn node-level representations instead of link-level. In this paper, we study a completely different approach which can directly obtain node pair (link) representations based on \textit{two-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman (2-WL) tests}. 2-WL tests directly use links (2-tuples) as message passing units instead of nodes, and thus can directly obtain link representations. We theoretically analyze the expressive power of 2-WL tests to discriminate non-isomorphic links, and prove their superior link discriminating power than 1-WL. Based on different 2-WL variants, we propose a series of novel 2-WL-GNN models for link prediction. Experiments on a wide range of real-world datasets demonstrate their competitive performance to state-of-the-art baselines and superiority over plain 1-WL-GNNs.

Runyu Zhang, Yang Hu, Na Li

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and risk-sensitive MDPs are both powerful tools for making decisions in the presence of uncertainties. Previous efforts have aimed to establish their connections, revealing equivalences in specific formulations. This paper introduces a new formulation for risk-sensitive MDPs, which assesses risk in a slightly different manner compared to the classical Markov risk measure (Ruszczyński 2010), and establishes its equivalence with a class of soft robust MDP (RMDP) problems, including the standard RMDP as a special case. Leveraging this equivalence, we further derive the policy gradient theorem for both problems, proving gradient domination and global convergence of the exact policy gradient method under the tabular setting with direct parameterization. This forms a sharp contrast to the Markov risk measure, known to be potentially non-gradient-dominant (Huang et al. 2021). We also propose a sample-based offline learning algorithm, namely the robust fitted-Z iteration (RFZI), for a specific soft RMDP problem with a KL-divergence regularization term (or equivalently the risk-sensitive MDP with an entropy risk measure). We showcase its streamlined design and less stringent assumptions due to the equivalence and analyze its sample complexity

Cong Yu, Dongheng Zhang, Zhi Wu et al.

This paper introduces a novel framework, i.e., RFPose-OT, to enable the 3D human pose estimation from Radio Frequency (RF) signals. Different from existing methods that predict human poses from RF signals on the signal level directly, we consider the structure difference between the RF signals and the human poses, propose to transform the RF signals to the pose domain on the feature level based on Optimal Transport (OT) theory, and generate human poses from the transformed features. To evaluate RFPose-OT, we build a radio system and a multi-view camera system to acquire the RF signal data and the ground-truth human poses. The experimental results in basic indoor environment, occlusion indoor environment, and outdoor environment, all demonstrate that RFPose-OT can predict 3D human poses with higher precision than the state-of-the-art methods.

Michael A. Bender, Guy E. Blelloch, Martin Farach-Colton et al.

We study the problem of constructing concurrent objects in a setting where $P$ processes run in parallel and interact through a shared memory that is subject to write contention. Our goal is to transform hardware primitives that are subject to write contention into ones that handle contention gracefully. We give contention-resolution algorithms for several basic primitives, and analyze them under a relaxed, roughly-synchronous stochastic scheduler, where processes run at roughly the same rate up to a constant factor with high probability. Specifically, we construct read/write registers and CAS registers that have latency $O(\log P)$ w.h.p. under our scheduler model, using $O(1)$ hardware read/write registers and, in the case of our CAS construction, one hardware CAS register. Our algorithms guarantee performance even when their operations are invoked by an adaptive adversary that is able to see the entire history of operations so far, including their timing and return values. This allows them to be used as building blocks inside larger programs; using this compositionality property, we obtain several other constructions (LL/SC, fetch-and-increment, bounded max registers, and counters). To complement our constructions, we give a trade-off showing that even under a perfectly synchronous schedule and even if each process only executes one operation, any algorithm that implements any of the primitives that we consider, uses space $M$, and has latency at most $L$ with high probability must have expected latency at least $Ω(\log_{ML} P)$.

Yang Hu, Wenxi Wang

IAM misconfigurations are a major cause of privilege escalation (PE) attacks in the cloud, leading to data breaches and major financial losses. Existing PE detectors have two main limits: they cover only some PE types, so many attacks are missed, and they require full access to cloud configurations, which customers may not want to share because of sensitive information. We present TAC, the first IAM PE detection framework that supports both whitebox and greybox analysis for Amazon Web Services (AWS). To improve coverage, we systematically study how permissions are acquired in AWS IAM and identify five PE categories. All five share one pattern: permissions spread across entities. We define this as permission flows and manually extract 219 templates from more than 14,000 AWS operations. Based on this, we build TAC-WB, a whitebox detector with broad PE coverage. We also build TAC-GB, the first greybox PE detector, which works with partial configurations. Customers can choose which entities to reveal and whether to answer questions about permissions. TAC-GB uses a dynamic query process that adapts to each response and uses reinforcement learning with graph neural networks to ask the most useful questions while reducing interaction. We also create TAC-Bench, a benchmark with 2,500 tasks reflecting real-world IAM misconfigurations. Experiments show that TAC-WB finds all PEs missed by prior tools, while TAC-GB outperforms other greybox methods and often matches whitebox methods even with limited query budgets.

Yingxue Xu, Guihua Wen, Yang Hu et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to estimate a transferable model for unlabeled target domains by exploiting labeled source data. Optimal Transport (OT) based methods have recently been proven to be a promising solution for UDA with a solid theoretical foundation and competitive performance. However, most of these methods solely focus on domain-level OT alignment by leveraging the geometry of domains for domain-invariant features based on the global embeddings of images. However, global representations of images may destroy image structure, leading to the loss of local details that offer category-discriminative information. This study proposes an end-to-end Deep Hierarchical Optimal Transport method (DeepHOT), which aims to learn both domain-invariant and category-discriminative representations by mining hierarchical structural relations among domains. The main idea is to incorporate a domain-level OT and image-level OT into a unified OT framework, hierarchical optimal transport, to model the underlying geometry in both domain space and image space. In DeepHOT framework, an image-level OT serves as the ground distance metric for the domain-level OT, leading to the hierarchical structural distance. Compared with the ground distance of the conventional domain-level OT, the image-level OT captures structural associations among local regions of images that are beneficial to classification. In this way, DeepHOT, a unified OT framework, not only aligns domains by domain-level OT, but also enhances the discriminative power through image-level OT. Moreover, to overcome the limitation of high computational complexity, we propose a robust and efficient implementation of DeepHOT by approximating origin OT with sliced Wasserstein distance in image-level OT and accomplishing the mini-batch unbalanced domain-level OT.

Tianyang Dai, Ming Chang, Yan Chen et al.

Unsupervised remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) promises to leverage unlabeled video data, but its potential is hindered by a critical challenge: training on low-quality "in-the-wild" videos severely degrades model performance. An essential step missing here is to assess the suitability of the videos for rPPG model learning before using them for the task. Existing video quality assessment (VQA) methods are mainly designed for human perception and not directly applicable to the above purpose. In this work, we propose rPPG-VQA, a novel framework for assessing video suitability for rPPG. We integrate signal-level and scene-level analyses and design a dual-branch assessment architecture. The signal-level branch evaluates the physiological signal quality of the videos via robust signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation with a multi-method consensus mechanism, and the scene-level branch uses a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to identify interferences like motion and unstable lighting. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage adaptive sampling (TAS) strategy that utilizes the quality score to curate optimal training datasets. Experiments show that by training on large-scale, "in-the-wild" videos filtered by our framework, we can develop unsupervised rPPG models that achieve a substantial improvement in accuracy on standard benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tianyang-Dai/rPPG-VQA.

Jinwu Chen, Qidie Wu, Bin Li et al.

Optimizing CUDA kernels is a challenging and labor-intensive task, given the need for hardware-software co-design expertise and the proprietary nature of high-performance kernel libraries. While recent large language models (LLMs) combined with evolutionary algorithms show promise in automatic kernel optimization, existing approaches often fall short in performance due to their suboptimal agent designs and mismatched evolution representations. This work identifies these mismatches and proposes cuPilot, a strategy-coordinated multi-agent framework that introduces strategy as an intermediate semantic representation for kernel evolution. Key contributions include a strategy-coordinated evolution algorithm, roofline-guided prompting, and strategy-level population initialization. Experimental results show that the generated kernels by cuPilot achieve an average speed up of 3.09$\times$ over PyTorch on a benchmark of 100 kernels. On the GEMM tasks, cuPilot showcases sophisticated optimizations and achieves high utilization of critical hardware units. The generated kernels are open-sourced at https://github.com/champloo2878/cuPilot-Kernels.git.

Willem Bonnaffé, CRUK ICGC Prostate Group, Freddie Hamdy et al.

Recent advances in attention-based multiple instance learning (MIL) have improved our insights into the tissue regions that models rely on to make predictions in digital pathology. However, the interpretability of these approaches is still limited. In particular, they do not report whether high-attention regions are positively or negatively associated with the class labels or how well these regions correspond to previously established clinical and biological knowledge. We address this by introducing a post-training methodology to analyse MIL models. Firstly, we introduce prediction-attention-weighted (PAW) maps by combining tile-level attention and prediction scores produced by a refined encoder, allowing us to quantify the predictive contribution of high-attention regions. Secondly, we introduce a biological feature instantiation technique by integrating PAW maps with nuclei segmentation masks. This further improves interpretability by providing biologically meaningful features related to the cellular organisation of the tissue and facilitates comparisons with known clinical features. We illustrate the utility of our approach by comparing PAW maps obtained for prostate cancer diagnosis (i.e. samples containing malignant tissue, 381/516 tissue samples) and prognosis (i.e. samples from patients with biochemical recurrence following surgery, 98/663 tissue samples) in a cohort of patients from the international cancer genome consortium (ICGC UK Prostate Group). Our approach reveals that regions that are predictive of adverse prognosis do not tend to co-locate with the tumour regions, indicating that non-cancer cells should also be studied when evaluating prognosis.

ZeBin Ji, Yang Hu, Xiuli Bi et al.

It is essential for understanding neural network decisions to interpret the functionality (also known as concepts) of neurons. Existing approaches describe neuron concepts by generating natural language descriptions, thereby advancing the understanding of the neural network's decision-making mechanism. However, these approaches assume that each neuron has well-defined functions and provides discriminative features for neural network decision-making. In fact, some neurons may be redundant or may offer misleading concepts. Thus, the descriptions for such neurons may cause misinterpretations of the factors driving the neural network's decisions. To address the issue, we introduce a verification of neuron functions, which checks whether the generated concept highly activates the corresponding neuron. Furthermore, we propose a Select-Hypothesize-Verify framework for interpreting neuron functionality. This framework consists of: 1) selecting activation samples that best capture a neuron's well-defined functional behavior through activation-distribution analysis; 2) forming hypotheses about concepts for the selected neurons; and 3) verifying whether the generated concepts accurately reflect the functionality of the neuron. Extensive experiments show that our method produces more accurate neuron concepts. Our generated concepts activate the corresponding neurons with a probability approximately 1.5 times that of the current state-of-the-art method.

Zebin Xing, Xingyu Zhang, Yang Hu et al.

We propose GoalFlow, an end-to-end autonomous driving method for generating high-quality multimodal trajectories. In autonomous driving scenarios, there is rarely a single suitable trajectory. Recent methods have increasingly focused on modeling multimodal trajectory distributions. However, they suffer from trajectory selection complexity and reduced trajectory quality due to high trajectory divergence and inconsistencies between guidance and scene information. To address these issues, we introduce GoalFlow, a novel method that effectively constrains the generative process to produce high-quality, multimodal trajectories. To resolve the trajectory divergence problem inherent in diffusion-based methods, GoalFlow constrains the generated trajectories by introducing a goal point. GoalFlow establishes a novel scoring mechanism that selects the most appropriate goal point from the candidate points based on scene information. Furthermore, GoalFlow employs an efficient generative method, Flow Matching, to generate multimodal trajectories, and incorporates a refined scoring mechanism to select the optimal trajectory from the candidates. Our experimental results, validated on the Navsim\cite{Dauner2024_navsim}, demonstrate that GoalFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering robust multimodal trajectories for autonomous driving. GoalFlow achieved PDMS of 90.3, significantly surpassing other methods. Compared with other diffusion-policy-based methods, our approach requires only a single denoising step to obtain excellent performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/GoalFlow.

Zhihuan Wei, Xinhang Chen, Danyang Han et al.

General aviation fault diagnosis and efficient maintenance are critical to flight safety; however, deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained edge devices poses dual challenges in computational capacity and interpretability. This paper proposes LiteInception--a lightweight interpretable fault diagnosis framework designed for edge deployment. The framework adopts a two-stage cascaded architecture aligned with standard maintenance workflows: Stage 1 performs high-recall fault detection, and Stage 2 conducts fine-grained fault classification on anomalous samples, thereby decoupling optimization objectives and enabling on-demand allocation of computational resources. For model compression, a multi-method fusion strategy based on mutual information, gradient analysis, and SE attention weights is proposed to reduce the input sensor channels from 23 to 15, and a 1+1 branch LiteInception architecture is introduced that compresses InceptionTime parameters by 70%, accelerates CPU inference by over 8x, with less than 3% F1 loss. Furthermore, knowledge distillation is introduced as a precision-recall regulation mechanism, enabling the same lightweight model to adapt to different scenarios--such as safety-critical and auxiliary diagnosis--by switching training strategies. Finally, a dual-layer interpretability framework integrating four attribution methods is constructed, providing traceable evidence chains of "which sensor x which time period." Experiments on the NGAFID dataset demonstrate a fault detection accuracy of 81.92% with 83.24% recall, and a fault identification accuracy of 77.00%, validating the framework's favorable balance among efficiency, accuracy, and interpretability.

Jiarui Zhang, Ruixu Geng, Xiaolong Du et al.

Passive non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging has witnessed rapid development in recent years, due to its ability to image objects that are out of sight. The light transport condition plays an important role in this task since changing the conditions will lead to different imaging models. Existing learning-based NLOS methods usually train independent models for different light transport conditions, which is computationally inefficient and impairs the practicality of the models. In this work, we propose NLOS-LTM, a novel passive NLOS imaging method that effectively handles multiple light transport conditions with a single network. We achieve this by inferring a latent light transport representation from the projection image and using this representation to modulate the network that reconstructs the hidden image from the projection image. We train a light transport encoder together with a vector quantizer to obtain the light transport representation. To further regulate this representation, we jointly learn both the reconstruction network and the reprojection network during training. A set of light transport modulation blocks is used to modulate the two jointly trained networks in a multi-scale way. Extensive experiments on a large-scale passive NLOS dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/JerryOctopus/NLOS-LTM.

Dong Zhao, Ruizhi Yang, Shuang Wang et al.

Presently, self-training stands as a prevailing approach in cross-domain semantic segmentation, enhancing model efficacy by training with pixels assigned with reliable pseudo-labels. However, we find two critical limitations in this paradigm. (1) The majority of reliable pixels exhibit a speckle-shaped pattern and are primarily located in the central semantic region. This presents challenges for the model in accurately learning semantics. (2) Category noise in speckle pixels is difficult to locate and correct, leading to error accumulation in self-training. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach called Semantic Connectivity-driven pseudo-labeling (SeCo). This approach formulates pseudo-labels at the connectivity level and thus can facilitate learning structured and low-noise semantics. Specifically, SeCo comprises two key components: Pixel Semantic Aggregation (PSA) and Semantic Connectivity Correction (SCC). Initially, PSA divides semantics into 'stuff' and 'things' categories and aggregates speckled pseudo-labels into semantic connectivity through efficient interaction with the Segment Anything Model (SAM). This enables us not only to obtain accurate boundaries but also simplifies noise localization. Subsequently, SCC introduces a simple connectivity classification task, which enables locating and correcting connectivity noise with the guidance of loss distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SeCo can be flexibly applied to various cross-domain semantic segmentation tasks, including traditional unsupervised, source-free, and black-box domain adaptation, significantly improving the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/DZhaoXd/SeCo.

Yang Hu, Xingyu Zhang, Xueji Fang et al.

We propose SLOT (Sample-specific Language Model Optimization at Test-time), a novel and parameter-efficient test-time inference approach that enhances a language model's ability to more accurately respond to individual prompts. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex instructions, leading to poor performances on those not well represented among general samples. To address this, SLOT conducts few optimization steps at test-time to update a light-weight sample-specific parameter vector. It is added to the final hidden layer before the output head, and enables efficient adaptation by caching the last layer features during per-sample optimization. By minimizing the cross-entropy loss on the input prompt only, SLOT helps the model better aligned with and follow each given instruction. In experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the compared models across multiple benchmarks and LLMs. For example, Qwen2.5-7B with SLOT achieves an accuracy gain of 8.6% on GSM8K from 57.54% to 66.19%, while DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B with SLOT achieves a SOTA accuracy of 68.69% on GPQA among 70B-level models. Our code is available at https://github.com/maple-research-lab/SLOT.

Jia Chen, Yixian Chun, Yuanyi Liu et al.

High-Dimensional and Incomplete matrices, which usually contain a large amount of valuable latent information, can be well represented by a Latent Factor Analysis model. The performance of an LFA model heavily rely on its optimization process. Thereby, some prior studies employ the Particle Swarm Optimization to enhance an LFA model's optimization process. However, the particles within the swarm follow the static evolution paths and only share the global best information, which limits the particles' searching area to cause sub-optimum issue. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Dynamic-neighbor-cooperated Hierarchical PSO-enhanced LFA model with two-fold main ideas. First is the neighbor-cooperated strategy, which enhances the randomly chosen neighbor's velocity for particles' evolution. Second is the dynamic hyper-parameter tunning. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets are conducted to evaluate the proposed DHPL model. The results substantiate that DHPL achieves a higher accuracy without hyper-parameters tunning than the existing PSO-incorporated LFA models in representing an HDI matrix.

Yang Hu, Xiao Wang, Zezhen Ding et al.

Diffusion-based models have significant achievements in time series generation but suffer from inefficient computation: solving high-dimensional ODEs/SDEs via iterative numerical solvers demands hundreds to thousands of drift function evaluations per sample, incurring prohibitive costs. To resolve this, we propose FlowTS, an ODE-based model that leverages rectified flow with straight-line transport in probability space. By learning geodesic paths between distributions, FlowTS achieves computational efficiency through exact linear trajectory simulation, accelerating training and generation while improving performances. We further introduce an adaptive sampling strategy inspired by the exploration-exploitation trade-off, balancing noise adaptation and precision. Notably, FlowTS enables seamless adaptation from unconditional to conditional generation without retraining, ensuring efficient real-world deployment. Also, to enhance generation authenticity, FlowTS integrates trend and seasonality decomposition, attention registers (for global context aggregation), and Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) (for position information). For unconditional setting, extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowTS achieves state-of-the-art performance, with context FID scores of 0.019 and 0.011 on Stock and ETTh datasets (prev. best: 0.067, 0.061). For conditional setting, we have achieved superior performance in solar forecasting (MSE 213, prev. best: 375) and MuJoCo imputation tasks (MSE 7e-5, prev. best 2.7e-4). The code is available at https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/FlowTS.

Willem Bonnaffé, Yang Hu, Andrea Chatrian et al.

Histopathologists establish cancer grade by assessing histological structures, such as glands in prostate cancer. Yet, digital pathology pipelines often rely on grid-based tiling that ignores tissue architecture. This introduces irrelevant information and limits interpretability. We introduce histology-informed tiling (HIT), which uses semantic segmentation to extract glands from whole slide images (WSIs) as biologically meaningful input patches for multiple-instance learning (MIL) and phenotyping. Trained on 137 samples from the ProMPT cohort, HIT achieved a gland-level Dice score of 0.83 +/- 0.17. By extracting 380,000 glands from 760 WSIs across ICGC-C and TCGA-PRAD cohorts, HIT improved MIL models AUCs by 10% for detecting copy number variation (CNVs) in genes related to epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMT) and MYC, and revealed 15 gland clusters, several of which were associated with cancer relapse, oncogenic mutations, and high Gleason. Therefore, HIT improved the accuracy and interpretability of MIL predictions, while streamlining computations by focussing on biologically meaningful structures during feature extraction.

Song Yu, Yang Hu, Haokang Ding et al.

Camouflaged Object Detection is challenging due to the high degree of similarity between camouflaged objects and their surrounding backgrounds. Current COD methods mainly rely on edge extraction in the spatial domain and local pixel-level information, neglecting the importance of global structural features. Additionally, they fail to effectively leverage the importance of phase spectrum information within frequency domain features. To this end, we propose a COD framework BASFNet based on boundary-aware frequency domain and spatial domain fusion.This method uses dual guided integration of frequency domain and spatial domain features. A phase-spectrum-based frequency-enhanced edge exploration module (FEEM) and a spatial core segmentation module (SCSM) are introduced to jointly capture the boundary and object features of camouflaged objects. These features are then effectively integrated through a spatial-frequency fusion interaction module (SFFIM). Furthermore, the boundary detection is further optimized through an boundary-aware training strategy. BASFNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, validating the effectiveness of the fusion of frequency and spatial domain information in COD tasks.

Wenzheng Zhang, Bingzheng Liu, Yang Hu et al.

Quantization-Aware Training from scratch has emerged as a promising approach for building efficient large language models (LLMs) with extremely low-bit weights (sub 2-bit), which can offer substantial advantages for edge deployment. However, existing methods still fail to achieve satisfactory accuracy and scalability. In this work, we identify a parameter democratization effect as a key bottleneck: the sensitivity of all parameters becomes homogenized, severely limiting expressivity. To address this, we propose pQuant, a method that decouples parameters by splitting linear layers into two specialized branches: a dominant 1-bit branch for efficient computation and a compact high-precision branch dedicated to preserving the most sensitive parameters. Through tailored feature scaling, we explicitly guide the model to allocate sensitive parameters to the high-precision branch. Furthermore, we extend this branch into multiple, sparsely-activated experts, enabling efficient capacity scaling. Extensive experiments indicate our pQuant achieves state-of-the-art performance in extremely low-bit quantization.

Jiaqi Lv, Xufeng He, Yanchen Liu et al.

The rapid growth of deep learning has driven exponential increases in model parameters and computational demands. NVIDIA GPUs and their CUDA-based software ecosystem provide robust support for parallel computing, significantly alleviating computational bottlenecks. Meanwhile, due to the cultivation of user programming habits and the high performance of GPUs, the CUDA ecosystem has established a dominant position in the field of parallel software. This dominance requires other hardware platforms to support CUDA-based software with performance portability. However, translating CUDA code to other platforms poses significant challenges due to differences in parallel programming paradigms and hardware architectures. Existing approaches rely on language extensions, domain-specific languages (DSLs), or compilers but face limitations in workload coverage and generalizability. Moreover, these methods often incur substantial development costs. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated extraordinary potential in various vertical domains, especially in code-related tasks. However, the performance of existing LLMs in CUDA transpilation, particularly for high-performance code, remains suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for generating high-performance CUDA and corresponding platform code pairs, leveraging AI compiler and automatic optimization technology. We further enhance the framework with a graph-based data augmentation method and introduce HPCTransEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLM performance on CUDA transpilation. We conduct experiments using CUDA-to-CPU transpilation as a case study on leading LLMs. The speedup ratio of the CPU operators has an average improvemnet of 43.8\%, highlighting the potential of LLMs to address compatibility challenges within the CUDA ecosystem. Our code is available at https://github.com/PJLAB-CHIP/HPCTransCompile.

Yang Hu, Na Li

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the joint identification of system dynamics and noise covariance in linear systems, under general noise distributions beyond Gaussian. Specifically, we would like to simultaneously estimate the dynamical matrix $A$ and the noise covariance matrix $\varSigma$ using state transition data. The formulation builds upon a novel parameterization of the state-transition distribution, which enables more effective use of distributional "shape" information for improved identification accuracy. We introduce two practical estimators, namely the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and the score-matching estimator (SME), to solve the joint dynamics-covariance identification problem, and provide rigorous analysis of their statistical properties and sample complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed estimators outperform the ordinary least squares (OLS) baseline.

Yuyang Zhang, Yang Hu, Bo Dai et al.

Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and robustness. In this paper, we propose a variant of the SAC algorithm that parameterizes the policy with flow-based models, leveraging their rich expressiveness. In the algorithm, we evaluate the flow-based policy utilizing the instantaneous change-of-variable technique and update the policy with an online variant of flow matching developed in this paper. This online variant, termed importance sampling flow matching (ISFM), enables policy update with only samples from a user-specified sampling distribution rather than the unknown target distribution. We develop a theoretical analysis of ISFM, characterizing how different choices of sampling distributions affect the learning efficiency. Finally, we conduct a case study of our algorithm on the max-entropy linear quadratic regulator problems, demonstrating that the proposed algorithm learns the optimal action distribution.

Xinhang Chen, Zhihuan Wei, Yang Hu et al.

Whole-aircraft diagnosis for general aviation faces threefold challenges: data uncertainty, task heterogeneity, and computational inefficiency. Existing end-to-end approaches uniformly model health discrimination and fault characterization, overlooking intrinsic receptive field conflicts between global context modeling and local feature extraction, while incurring prohibitive training costs under severe class imbalance. To address these, this study proposes the Diagnosis Decomposition Framework (DDF), explicitly decoupling diagnosis into Anomaly Detection (AD) and Fault Classification (FC) subtasks via the Long-Micro Scale Diagnostician (LMSD). Employing a "long-range global screening and micro-scale local precise diagnosis" strategy, LMSD utilizes Convolutional Tokenizer with Multi-Head Self-Attention (ConvTokMHSA) for global operational pattern discrimination and Multi-Micro Kernel Network (MMK Net) for local fault feature extraction. Decoupled training separates "large-sample lightweight" and "small-sample complex" optimization pathways, significantly reducing computational overhead. Concurrently, Keyness Extraction Layer (KEL) via knowledge distillation furnishes physically traceable explanations for two-stage decisions, materializing interpretability-by-design. Experiments on the NGAFID real-world aviation dataset demonstrate approximately 4-8% improvement in Multi-Class Weighted Penalty Metric (MCWPM) over baselines with substantially reduced training time, validating comprehensive advantages in task adaptability, interpretability, and efficiency. This provides a deployable methodology for general aviation health management.

Mingcong Song, Xinru Tang, Fengfan Hou et al.

Meeting growing demands for low latency and cost efficiency in production-grade large language model (LLM) serving systems requires integrating advanced optimization techniques. However, dynamic and unpredictable input-output lengths of LLM, compounded by these optimizations, exacerbate the issues of workload variability, making it difficult to maintain high efficiency on AI accelerators, especially DSAs with tile-based programming models. To address this challenge, we introduce XY-Serve, a versatile, Ascend native, end-to-end production LLM-serving system. The core idea is an abstraction mechanism that smooths out the workload variability by decomposing computations into unified, hardware-friendly, fine-grained meta primitives. For attention, we propose a meta-kernel that computes the basic pattern of matmul-softmax-matmul with architectural-aware tile sizes. For GEMM, we introduce a virtual padding scheme that adapts to dynamic shape changes while using highly efficient GEMM primitives with assorted fixed tile sizes. XY-Serve sits harmoniously with vLLM. Experimental results show up to 89% end-to-end throughput improvement compared with current publicly available baselines on Ascend NPUs. Additionally, our approach outperforms existing GEMM (average 14.6% faster) and attention (average 21.5% faster) kernels relative to existing libraries. While the work is Ascend native, we believe the approach can be readily applicable to SIMT architectures as well.

Yadong Li, Dongheng Zhang, Ruixu Geng et al.

Recent advancements have showcased the potential of handheld millimeter-wave (mmWave) imaging, which applies synthetic aperture radar (SAR) principles in portable settings. However, existing studies addressing handheld motion errors either rely on costly tracking devices or employ simplified imaging models, leading to impractical deployment or limited performance. In this paper, we present IFNet, a novel deep unfolding network that combines the strengths of signal processing models and deep neural networks to achieve robust imaging and focusing for handheld mmWave systems. We first formulate the handheld imaging model by integrating multiple priors about mmWave images and handheld phase errors. Furthermore, we transform the optimization processes into an iterative network structure for improved and efficient imaging performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IFNet effectively compensates for handheld phase errors and recovers high-fidelity images from severely distorted signals. In comparison with existing methods, IFNet can achieve at least 11.89 dB improvement in average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and 64.91% improvement in average structural similarity index measure (SSIM) on a real-world dataset.

Lee Xiong, Zhirong Chen, Rahul Mayuranath et al.

We present LLaTTE (LLM-Style Latent Transformers for Temporal Events), a scalable transformer architecture for production ads recommendation. Through systematic experiments, we demonstrate that sequence modeling in recommendation systems follows predictable power-law scaling similar to LLMs. Crucially, we find that semantic features bend the scaling curve: they are a prerequisite for scaling, enabling the model to effectively utilize the capacity of deeper and longer architectures. To realize the benefits of continued scaling under strict latency constraints, we introduce a two-stage architecture that offloads the heavy computation of large, long-context models to an asynchronous upstream user model. We demonstrate that upstream improvements transfer predictably to downstream ranking tasks. Deployed as the largest user model at Meta, this multi-stage framework drives a 4.3\% conversion uplift on Facebook Feed and Reels with minimal serving overhead, establishing a practical blueprint for harnessing scaling laws in industrial recommender systems.

Stephen Chong Zhao, Yang Hu, Jason Lee et al.

The integration of human and artificial intelligence offers a powerful avenue for advancing our understanding of information processing, as each system provides unique computational insights. However, despite the promise of human-AI integration, current AI models are largely trained on massive datasets, optimized for population-level performance, lacking mechanisms to align their computations with individual users' perceptual semantics and neural dynamics. Here we show that integrating human behavioral insights and millisecond scale neural data within a fine tuned CLIP based model not only captures generalized and individualized aspects of perception but also over doubles behavioral performance compared to the unmodified CLIP baseline. By embedding human inductive biases and mirroring dynamic neural processes during training, personalized neural fine tuning improves predictions of human similarity judgments and tracks the temporal evolution of individual neural responses. Our work establishes a novel, interpretable framework for designing adaptive AI systems, with broad implications for neuroscience, personalized medicine, and human-computer interaction.

Ziang Xu, Bin Li, Yang Hu et al.

Accurate 3D mapping in endoscopy enables quantitative, holistic lesion characterization within the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, requiring reliable depth and pose estimation. However, endoscopy systems are monocular, and existing methods relying on synthetic datasets or complex models often lack generalizability in challenging endoscopic conditions. We propose a robust self-supervised monocular depth and pose estimation framework that incorporates a Generative Latent Bank and a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). The Generative Latent Bank leverages extensive depth scenes from natural images to condition the depth network, enhancing realism and robustness of depth predictions through latent feature priors. For pose estimation, we reformulate it within a VAE framework, treating pose transitions as latent variables to regularize scale, stabilize z-axis prominence, and improve x-y sensitivity. This dual refinement pipeline enables accurate depth and pose predictions, effectively addressing the GI tract's complex textures and lighting. Extensive evaluations on SimCol and EndoSLAM datasets confirm our framework's superior performance over published self-supervised methods in endoscopic depth and pose estimation.

Yong Si, Mingfei Lu, Jing Li et al.

Decision-making in military aviation Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) faces significant challenges due to the "curse of dimensionality" in large-scale fleet operations, combined with sparse feedback and stochastic mission profiles. To address these issues, this paper proposes Smart Commander, a novel Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) framework designed to optimize sequential maintenance and logistics decisions. The framework decomposes the complex control problem into a two-tier hierarchy: a strategic General Commander manages fleet-level availability and cost objectives, while tactical Operation Commanders execute specific actions for sortie generation, maintenance scheduling, and resource allocation. The proposed approach is validated within a custom-built, high-fidelity discrete-event simulation environment that captures the dynamics of aircraft configuration and support logistics.By integrating layered reward shaping with planning-enhanced neural networks, the method effectively addresses the difficulty of sparse and delayed rewards. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Smart Commander significantly outperforms conventional monolithic Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and rule-based baselines. Notably, it achieves a substantial reduction in training time while demonstrating superior scalability and robustness in failure-prone environments. These results highlight the potential of HRL as a reliable paradigm for next-generation intelligent fleet management.

Jarosław Byrka, Yuhao Guo, Yang Hu et al.

In this work we propose a single rounding algorithm for the fractional solutions of the standard LP relaxation for $k$-clustering. As a starting point, we obtain an iterative rounding $(\frac{3^p + 1}{2})$-Lagrangian Multiplier-Perserving (LMP) approximation for the $k$-clustering problem with the cost function being the $p$-th power of the distance. Such an algorithm outputs a random solution that opens $k$ facilities \emph{in expectation}, whose cost in expectation is at most $\frac{3^p + 1}{2}$ times the optimum cost. Thus, we recover the $2$-LMP approximation for $k$-median by Jain et al.~[JACM'03], which played a central role in deriving the current best $2$ approximation for $k$-median. Unlike the result of Jain et al., our algorithm is based on LP rounding, and it can be easily adapted to the $L_p^p$-cost setting. For the Euclidean $k$-means problem, the LMP factor we obtain is $\frac{11}{3}$, which is better than the $5$ approximation given by this framework for general metrics. Then, we show how to convert the LMP-approximation algorithms to a true-approximation, with only a $(1+\varepsilon)$ factor loss in the approximation ratio. We obtain a ($\frac{3^p + 1}{2}+\varepsilon$)-approximation algorithm for $k$-clustering with cost function being the $p$-th power of the distance, for $p \geq 1$. This reproduces the best known ($2+\varepsilon$)-approximation for $k$-median by Cohen-Addad et al. [STOC'25], and improves the approximation factor for metric $k$-means from 5.83 by Charikar at al. [FOCS'25] to $5+\varepsilon$ in our framework. Moreover, the same algorithm, but with a specialized analysis, attains ($4+\varepsilon$)-approximation for Euclidean $k$-means matching the recent result by Charikar et al. [STOC'26].

Zhihuan Wei, Yang Hu, Xinhang Chen et al.

Fault diagnosis of general aviation aircraft faces challenges including scarce real fault data, diverse fault types, and weak fault signatures. This paper proposes an intelligent fault diagnosis framework based on multi-fidelity digital twin, integrating four modules: high-fidelity flight dynamics simulation, FMEA-driven fault injection, multi-fidelity residual feature extraction, and large language model (LLM)-enhanced interpretable report generation. A digital twin is constructed using the JSBSim six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) flight dynamics engine, generating 23-channel engine health monitoring data via semi-empirical sensor synthesis equations. A three-layer fault injection engine based on failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) models the physical causal propagation of 19 engine fault types. A multi-fidelity residual computation framework comprising paired-mirror residuals and GRU surrogate prediction residuals is proposed: the high-fidelity path obtains clean fault deviation signals using nominal mirror trajectories with identical initial conditions, while the low-fidelity path achieves online real-time residual computation through a multi-step prediction GRU surrogate model. A 1D-CNN classifier performs end-to-end diagnosis of 20 fault classes. An LLM diagnostic report engine enhanced with FMEA knowledge fuses classification results, residual evidence, and domain causal knowledge to generate interpretable natural language reports. Experiments show the paired-mirror residual scheme achieves a Macro-F1 of 96.2% on the 20-class task, while the GRU surrogate scheme achieves 4.3x inference acceleration at only 0.6% performance cost. Comparison across 24 schemes reveals that residual feature quality contributes approximately 5x more to diagnostic performance than classifier architecture, establishing the "residual quality first" design principle.

Jingui Ma, Yang Hu, Luyang Tang et al.

Recently, 3D Gaussian Spatting (3DGS) has gained widespread attention in Novel View Synthesis (NVS) due to the remarkable real-time rendering performance. However, the substantial cost of storage and transmission of vanilla 3DGS hinders its further application (hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes for a single scene). Motivated by the achievements of prediction in video compression, we introduce the prediction technique into the anchor-based Gaussian representation to effectively reduce the bit rate. Specifically, we propose a spatial condition-based prediction module to utilize the grid-captured scene information for prediction, with a residual compensation strategy designed to learn the missing fine-grained information. Besides, to further compress the residual, we propose an instance-aware hyper prior, developing a structure-aware and instance-aware entropy model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our prediction-based compression framework and each technical component. Even compared with SOTA compression method, our framework still achieves a bit rate savings of 24.42 percent. Code is to be released!

Yang Hu, Jinxia Zhang, Kaihua Zhang et al.

Camouflaged object detection (COD) remains a challenging task in computer vision. Existing methods often resort to additional branches for edge supervision, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this, we propose the Co-Supervised Spotlight Shifting Network (CS$^3$Net), a compact single-branch framework inspired by how shifting light source exposes camouflage. Our spotlight shifting strategy replaces multi-branch designs by generating supervisory signals that highlight boundary cues. Within CS$^3$Net, a Projection Aware Attention (PAA) module is devised to strengthen feature extraction, while the Extended Neighbor Connection Decoder (ENCD) enhances final predictions. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that CS$^3$Net not only achieves superior performance, but also reduces Multiply-Accumulate operations (MACs) by 32.13% compared to state-of-the-art COD methods, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and effectiveness.

Huizheng Wang, Hongbin Wang, Shaojun Wei et al.

Attention-based Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and shown strong performance in computer vision (CV) tasks. However, as the input sequence varies, the computational bottlenecks in Transformer models exhibit dynamic behavior across stages, which calls for a cross-stage sparse acceleration strategy. Unfortunately, most existing sparse Transformer approaches are single-stage based, and their sparsity prediction mechanisms lead to significant power overhead when applied across multiple stages. To this end, this paper proposes a log-domain attention prediction algorithm-architecture co-design, named LAPA. First, an asymmetric leading one computing (ALOC) scheme is designed to eliminate expensive multiplications. Next, a mixed-precision multi-round shifting accumulation (MRSA) mechanism is further proposed to mitigate the accumulation overhead. A data-feature dependent filter (DDF) strategy is designed to work in concert with the MRSA process. Finally, an elaborate accelerator is designed to translate the theoretical enhancement into practical hardware improvement. Experimental results show that LAPA achieves 3.52x, 3.24x and 2.79x higher energy efficiency than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) works Spatten, Sanger and FACT, respectively.

Xiyu Luo, Haodong Li, Xinxing Cheng et al.

Image-to-image translation models have achieved notable success in converting images across visual domains and are increasingly used for medical tasks such as predicting post-operative outcomes and modeling disease progression. However, most existing methods primarily aim to match the target distribution and often neglect spatial correspondences between the source and translated images. This limitation can lead to structural inconsistencies and hallucinations, undermining the reliability and interpretability of the predictions. These challenges are accentuated in clinical applications by the stringent requirement for anatomical accuracy. In this work, we present TraceTrans, a novel deformable image translation model designed for post-operative prediction that generates images aligned with the target distribution while explicitly revealing spatial correspondences with the pre-operative input. The framework employs an encoder for feature extraction and dual decoders for predicting spatial deformations and synthesizing the translated image. The predicted deformation field imposes spatial constraints on the generated output, ensuring anatomical consistency with the source. Extensive experiments on medical cosmetology and brain MRI datasets demonstrate that TraceTrans delivers accurate and interpretable post-operative predictions, highlighting its potential for reliable clinical deployment.

Yushu Zhao, Yubin Qin, Yang Wang et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have recently demonstrated exceptional performance across a diverse range of applications. The principle of sparse activation in MoE models facilitates an offloading strategy, wherein active experts are maintained in GPU HBM, while inactive experts are stored in CPU DRAM. The efficacy of this approach, however, is fundamentally constrained by the limited bandwidth of the CPU-GPU interconnect. To mitigate this bottleneck, existing approaches have employed prefetching to accelerate MoE inference. These methods attempt to predict and prefetch the required experts using specially trained modules. Nevertheless, such techniques are often encumbered by significant training overhead and have shown diminished effectiveness on recent MoE models with fine-grained expert segmentation. In this paper, we propose MoBiLE, a plug-and-play offloading-based MoE inference framework with \textit{mixture of big-little experts}. It reduces the number of experts for unimportant tokens to half for acceleration while maintaining full experts for important tokens to guarantee model quality. Further, a dedicated fallback and prefetching mechanism is designed for switching between little and big experts to improve memory efficiency. We evaluate MoBiLE on four typical modern MoE architectures and challenging generative tasks. Our results show that MoBiLE achieves a speedup of 1.60x to 1.72x compared to the baseline on a consumer GPU system, with negligible degradation in accuracy.

Yuxiang Xiao, Yang Hu, Bin Li et al.

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have demonstrated strong representational capabilities through self-supervised pre-training on large-scale, unannotated histopathology image datasets. However, their diverse yet opaque pretraining contexts, shaped by both data-related and structural/training factors, introduce latent biases that hinder generalisability and transparency in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose AdaFusion, a novel prompt-guided inference framework that, to our knowledge, is among the very first to dynamically integrate complementary knowledge from multiple PFMs. Our method compresses and aligns tile-level features from diverse models and employs a lightweight attention mechanism to adaptively fuse them based on tissue phenotype context. We evaluate AdaFusion on three real-world benchmarks spanning treatment response prediction, tumour grading, and spatial gene expression inference. Our approach consistently surpasses individual PFMs across both classification and regression tasks, while offering interpretable insights into each model's biosemantic specialisation. These results highlight AdaFusion's ability to bridge heterogeneous PFMs, achieving both enhanced performance and interpretability of model-specific inductive biases.

Yajie Bao, Yang Hu, Haojie Ren et al.

In decision-making under uncertainty, Contextual Robust Optimization (CRO) provides reliability by minimizing the worst-case decision loss over a prediction set, hedging against label variability. While recent advances use conformal prediction to construct prediction sets for machine learning models, the downstream decisions critically depend on model selection. This paper introduces novel model selection frameworks for CRO that unify robustness control with decision risk minimization. We first propose Conformalized Robust Optimization with Model Selection (CROMS), which automatically selects models to approximately minimize the average decision risk in CRO solutions. We develop two algorithms: E-CROMS, which is computationally efficient, and F-CROMS, which enjoys a marginal robustness guarantee in finite samples. Further, we introduce Conformalized Robust Optimization with Individualized Model Selection (CROiMS), which performs individualized model selection by minimizing the conditional decision risk given the covariate of test data. This framework advances conformal prediction methodology by enabling covariate-aware model selection. Theoretically, CROiMS achieves asymptotic conditional robustness and decision efficiency under mild assumptions. Numerical results demonstrate significant improvements in decision efficiency and robustness across diverse synthetic and real-world applications, outperforming baseline approaches.

Yu Zhang, Yang Hu, De Wang

Human spatiotemporal behavior simulation is critical for urban planning research, yet traditional rule-based and statistical approaches suffer from high computational costs, limited generalizability, and poor scalability. While large language models (LLMs) show promise as "world simulators," they face challenges in spatiotemporal reasoning including limited spatial cognition, lack of physical constraint understanding, and group homogenization tendencies. This paper introduces a framework integrating chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enhance LLMs' capability in simulating spatiotemporal behaviors that correspond with validation data patterns. The methodology combines human-like progressive reasoning through a five-stage cognitive framework with comprehensive data processing via six specialized MCP tool categories: temporal management, spatial navigation, environmental perception, personal memory, social collaboration, and experience evaluation. Experiments in Shanghai's Lujiazui district validate the framework's effectiveness across 1,000 generated samples. Results demonstrate high similarity with real mobile signaling data, achieving generation quality scores of 7.86 to 8.36 across different base models. Parallel processing experiments show efficiency improvements, with generation times decreasing from 1.30 to 0.17 minutes per sample when scaling from 2 to 12 processes. This work contributes to integrating CoT reasoning with MCP for urban behavior modeling, advancing LLMs applications in urban computing and providing a practical approach for synthetic mobility data generation. The framework offers a foundation for smart city planning, transportation forecasting, and participatory urban design applications.

Yang Hu, Runchen Wang, Stephen Chong Zhao et al.

We introduce Perceptual-Initialization (PI), a paradigm shift in visual representation learning that incorporates human perceptual structure during the initialization phase rather than as a downstream fine-tuning step. By integrating human-derived triplet embeddings from the NIGHTS dataset to initialize a CLIP vision encoder, followed by self-supervised learning on YFCC15M, our approach demonstrates significant zero-shot performance improvements, without any task-specific fine-tuning, across 29 zero shot classification and 2 retrieval benchmarks. On ImageNet-1K, zero-shot gains emerge after approximately 15 epochs of pretraining. Benefits are observed across datasets of various scales, with improvements manifesting at different stages of the pretraining process depending on dataset characteristics. Our approach consistently enhances zero-shot top-1 accuracy, top-5 accuracy, and retrieval recall (e.g., R@1, R@5) across these diverse evaluation tasks, without requiring any adaptation to target domains. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom of using human-perceptual data primarily for fine-tuning and demonstrate that embedding human perceptual structure during early representation learning yields more capable and vision-language aligned systems that generalize immediately to unseen tasks. Our work shows that "beginning with you", starting with human perception, provides a stronger foundation for general-purpose vision-language intelligence.

Xiao Zhang, Yaoyao Ding, Yang Hu et al.

Deep learning (DL) workloads mainly run on accelerators like GPUs. Recent DL quantization techniques demand a new matrix multiplication operator with mixed input data types, further complicating GPU optimization. Prior high-level compilers like Triton lack the expressiveness to implement key optimizations like fine-grained data pipelines and hardware-friendly memory layouts for these operators, while low-level programming models, such as Hidet, Graphene, and CUTLASS, require significant programming efforts. To balance expressiveness with engineering effort, we propose Hexcute, a tile-based programming language that exposes shared memory and register abstractions to enable fine-grained optimization for these operators. Additionally, Hexcute leverages task mapping to schedule the GPU program, and to reduce programming efforts, it automates layout and task mapping synthesis with a novel type-inference-based algorithm. Our evaluation shows that Hexcute generalizes to a wide range of DL operators, achieves 1.7-11.28$\times$ speedup over existing DL compilers for mixed-type operators, and brings up to 2.91$\times$ speedup in the end-to-end evaluation.

Haldun Balim, Yang Hu, Yuyang Zhang et al.

Imitation learning is a widely used approach for training agents to replicate expert behavior in complex decision-making tasks. However, existing methods often struggle with compounding errors and limited generalization, due to the inherent challenge of error correction and the distribution shift between training and deployment. In this paper, we present a novel model-based imitation learning framework inspired by model predictive control, which addresses these limitations by integrating predictive modeling through multi-step state predictions. Our method outperforms traditional behavior cloning numerical benchmarks, demonstrating superior robustness to distribution shift and measurement noise both in available data and during execution. Furthermore, we provide theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity and error bounds of our method, offering insights into its convergence properties.

Qi Zang, Shuang Wang, Dong Zhao et al.

Change detection has essential significance for the region's development, in which pseudo-changes between bitemporal images induced by imaging environmental factors are key challenges. Existing transformation-based methods regard pseudo-changes as a kind of style shift and alleviate it by transforming bitemporal images into the same style using generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, their efforts are limited by two drawbacks: 1) Transformed images suffer from distortion that reduces feature discrimination. 2) Alignment hampers the model from learning domain-agnostic representations that degrades performance on scenes with domain shifts from the training data. Therefore, oriented from pseudo-changes caused by style differences, we present a generalizable domain-agnostic difference learning network (DonaNet). For the drawback 1), we argue for local-level statistics as style proxies to assist against domain shifts. For the drawback 2), DonaNet learns domain-agnostic representations by removing domain-specific style of encoded features and highlighting the class characteristics of objects. In the removal, we propose a domain difference removal module to reduce feature variance while preserving discriminative properties and propose its enhanced version to provide possibilities for eliminating more style by decorrelating the correlation between features. In the highlighting, we propose a cross-temporal generalization learning strategy to imitate latent domain shifts, thus enabling the model to extract feature representations more robust to shifts actively. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrate that DonaNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods with a smaller model size and is more robust to domain shift.

Tao Yang, Yang Hu, Feihong Lu et al.

Social bots have become widely known by users of social platforms. To prevent social bots from spreading harmful speech, many novel bot detections are proposed. However, with the evolution of social bots, detection methods struggle to give high-confidence answers for samples. This motivates us to quantify the uncertainty of the outputs, informing the confidence of the results. Therefore, we propose an uncertainty-aware bot detection method to inform the confidence and use the uncertainty score to pick a high-confidence decision from multiple views of a social network under different environments. Specifically, our proposed BotUmc uses LLM to extract information from tweets. Then, we construct a graph based on the extracted information, the original user information, and the user relationship and generate multiple views of the graph by causal interference. Lastly, an uncertainty loss is used to force the model to quantify the uncertainty of results and select the result with low uncertainty in one view as the final decision. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method.

Yu Zhang, Shujun Peng, Nengwu Wu et al.

Recently, substantial advancements have been made in training language models to carry out step-by-step reasoning for solving intricate numerical reasoning tasks. Beyond the methods used to solve these problems, the structure and formulation of the problems themselves also play a crucial role in determining the performance of large language models. We observe that even small changes in the surface form of mathematical problems can have a profound impact on both the answer distribution and solve rate. This highlights the vulnerability of LLMs to surface-level variations, revealing its limited robustness when reasoning through complex problems. In this paper, we propose RM-PoT, a three-stage framework that integrates problem reformulation (RM), code-aided reasoning (PoT), and domain-aware few-shot learning to address these limitations. Our approach first reformulates the input problem into diverse surface forms to reduce structural bias, then retrieves five semantically aligned examples from a pre-constructed domain-specific question bank to provide contextual guidance, and finally generates executable Python code for precise computation.

Zechao Zhan, Dehong Gao, Jinxia Zhang et al.

Text-guided image editing model has achieved great success in general domain. However, directly applying these models to the fashion domain may encounter two issues: (1) Inaccurate localization of editing region; (2) Weak editing magnitude. To address these issues, the MADiff model is proposed. Specifically, to more accurately identify editing region, the MaskNet is proposed, in which the foreground region, densepose and mask prompts from large language model are fed into a lightweight UNet to predict the mask for editing region. To strengthen the editing magnitude, the Attention-Enhanced Diffusion Model is proposed, where the noise map, attention map, and the mask from MaskNet are fed into the proposed Attention Processor to produce a refined noise map. By integrating the refined noise map into the diffusion model, the edited image can better align with the target prompt. Given the absence of benchmarks in fashion image editing, we constructed a dataset named Fashion-E, comprising 28390 image-text pairs in the training set, and 2639 image-text pairs for four types of fashion tasks in the evaluation set. Extensive experiments on Fashion-E demonstrate that our proposed method can accurately predict the mask of editing region and significantly enhance editing magnitude in fashion image editing compared to the state-of-the-art methods.