Zhiyuan Chen

Lei Wang, Chen Ma, Xueyang Feng et al.

Autonomous agents have long been a prominent research focus in both academic and industry communities. Previous research in this field often focuses on training agents with limited knowledge within isolated environments, which diverges significantly from human learning processes, and thus makes the agents hard to achieve human-like decisions. Recently, through the acquisition of vast amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in achieving human-level intelligence. This has sparked an upsurge in studies investigating LLM-based autonomous agents. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, delivering a systematic review of the field of LLM-based autonomous agents from a holistic perspective. More specifically, we first discuss the construction of LLM-based autonomous agents, for which we propose a unified framework that encompasses a majority of the previous work. Then, we present a comprehensive overview of the diverse applications of LLM-based autonomous agents in the fields of social science, natural science, and engineering. Finally, we delve into the evaluation strategies commonly used for LLM-based autonomous agents. Based on the previous studies, we also present several challenges and future directions in this field. To keep track of this field and continuously update our survey, we maintain a repository of relevant references at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/LLM-Agent-Survey.

Siyuan Li, Zedong Wang, Zicheng Liu et al.

By contextualizing the kernel as global as possible, Modern ConvNets have shown great potential in computer vision tasks. However, recent progress on multi-order game-theoretic interaction within deep neural networks (DNNs) reveals the representation bottleneck of modern ConvNets, where the expressive interactions have not been effectively encoded with the increased kernel size. To tackle this challenge, we propose a new family of modern ConvNets, dubbed MogaNet, for discriminative visual representation learning in pure ConvNet-based models with favorable complexity-performance trade-offs. MogaNet encapsulates conceptually simple yet effective convolutions and gated aggregation into a compact module, where discriminative features are efficiently gathered and contextualized adaptively. MogaNet exhibits great scalability, impressive efficiency of parameters, and competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art ViTs and ConvNets on ImageNet and various downstream vision benchmarks, including COCO object detection, ADE20K semantic segmentation, 2D&3D human pose estimation, and video prediction. Notably, MogaNet hits 80.0% and 87.8% accuracy with 5.2M and 181M parameters on ImageNet-1K, outperforming ParC-Net and ConvNeXt-L, while saving 59% FLOPs and 17M parameters, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AI/MogaNet.

Lei Wang, Jingsen Zhang, Hao Yang et al.

Simulating high quality user behavior data has always been a fundamental problem in human-centered applications, where the major difficulty originates from the intricate mechanism of human decision process. Recently, substantial evidences have suggested that by learning huge amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) can achieve human-like intelligence. We believe these models can provide significant opportunities to more believable user behavior simulation. To inspire such direction, we propose an LLM-based agent framework and design a sandbox environment to simulate real user behaviors. Based on extensive experiments, we find that the simulated behaviors of our method are very close to the ones of real humans. Concerning potential applications, we simulate and study two social phenomenons including (1) information cocoons and (2) user conformity behaviors. This research provides novel simulation paradigms for human-centered applications.

Lizhen Wang, Zhiyuan Chen, Tao Yu et al.

We present FaceVerse, a fine-grained 3D Neural Face Model, which is built from hybrid East Asian face datasets containing 60K fused RGB-D images and 2K high-fidelity 3D head scan models. A novel coarse-to-fine structure is proposed to take better advantage of our hybrid dataset. In the coarse module, we generate a base parametric model from large-scale RGB-D images, which is able to predict accurate rough 3D face models in different genders, ages, etc. Then in the fine module, a conditional StyleGAN architecture trained with high-fidelity scan models is introduced to enrich elaborate facial geometric and texture details. Note that different from previous methods, our base and detailed modules are both changeable, which enables an innovative application of adjusting both the basic attributes and the facial details of 3D face models. Furthermore, we propose a single-image fitting framework based on differentiable rendering. Rich experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Xiyang Huang, Renxiong Wei, Yihuai Xu et al.

This paper presents an overview of the ClinicalSkillQA 2026 shared task, which was organized with the BioNLP Workshop at ACL 2026. The goal of this shared task is to evaluate continuous perception and procedural reasoning in clinical skill assessment by requiring systems to reconstruct the correct temporal order of shuffled clinical key frames and generate rationales grounded in clinical workflow knowledge. The benchmark contains 200 test-only instances sampled from clinical skill videos, covering three emergency-care procedures. Each instance is annotated with the ground-truth temporal order and an expert-verified rationale. A total of seven teams participated in the task, collectively making 90 submissions, with four teams providing system description papers. Systems are evaluated using Task Accuracy, Pairwise Accuracy, and BERTScore, which measure exact sequence reconstruction, local temporal consistency, and rationale quality, respectively. In this paper, we describe the task setup, dataset construction, and evaluation criteria. We further summarize the methodologies adopted by participating teams and present a comprehensive analysis of the submitted systems. The official results suggest that current models still struggle with continuous perception and procedural reasoning, especially when they must integrate visual evidence, temporal structure, and clinical workflow knowledge.

Zhiyuan Chen, Jiajiong Cao, Zhiquan Chen et al.

The area of portrait image animation, propelled by audio input, has witnessed notable progress in the generation of lifelike and dynamic portraits. Conventional methods are limited to utilizing either audios or facial key points to drive images into videos, while they can yield satisfactory results, certain issues exist. For instance, methods driven solely by audios can be unstable at times due to the relatively weaker audio signal, while methods driven exclusively by facial key points, although more stable in driving, can result in unnatural outcomes due to the excessive control of key point information. In addressing the previously mentioned challenges, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach which we named EchoMimic. EchoMimic is concurrently trained using both audios and facial landmarks. Through the implementation of a novel training strategy, EchoMimic is capable of generating portrait videos not only by audios and facial landmarks individually, but also by a combination of both audios and selected facial landmarks. EchoMimic has been comprehensively compared with alternative algorithms across various public datasets and our collected dataset, showcasing superior performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Additional visualization and access to the source code can be located on the EchoMimic project page.

Zhiyuan Chen, Tianhao Chen, Chenggang Xie et al.

Proteins are fundamental components of biological systems and can be represented through various modalities, including sequences, structures, and textual descriptions. Despite the advances in deep learning and scientific large language models (LLMs) for protein research, current methodologies predominantly focus on limited specialized tasks -- often predicting one protein modality from another. These approaches restrict the understanding and generation of multimodal protein data. In contrast, large multimodal models have demonstrated potential capabilities in generating any-to-any content like text, images, and videos, thus enriching user interactions across various domains. Integrating these multimodal model technologies into protein research offers significant promise by potentially transforming how proteins are studied. To this end, we introduce HelixProtX, a system built upon the large multimodal model, aiming to offer a comprehensive solution to protein research by supporting any-to-any protein modality generation. Unlike existing methods, it allows for the transformation of any input protein modality into any desired protein modality. The experimental results affirm the advanced capabilities of HelixProtX, not only in generating functional descriptions from amino acid sequences but also in executing critical tasks such as designing protein sequences and structures from textual descriptions. Preliminary findings indicate that HelixProtX consistently achieves superior accuracy across a range of protein-related tasks, outperforming existing state-of-the-art models. By integrating multimodal large models into protein research, HelixProtX opens new avenues for understanding protein biology, thereby promising to accelerate scientific discovery.

Jiarui Wang, Huichao Chai, Yuanhang Zhang et al.

Real-time recommender systems execute multi-stage cascades (retrieval, pre-processing, fine-grained ranking) under strict tail-latency SLOs, leaving only tens of milliseconds for ranking. Generative recommendation (GR) models can improve quality by consuming long user-behavior sequences, but in production their online sequence length is tightly capped by the ranking-stage P99 budget. We observe that the majority of GR tokens encode user behaviors that are independent of the item candidates, suggesting an opportunity to pre-infer a user-behavior prefix once and reuse it during ranking rather than recomputing it on the critical path. Realizing this idea at industrial scale is non-trivial: the prefix cache must survive across multiple pipeline stages before the final ranking instance is determined, the user population implies cache footprints far beyond a single device, and indiscriminate pre-inference would overload shared resources under high QPS. We present RelayGR, a production system that enables in-HBM relay-race inference for GR. RelayGR selectively pre-infers long-term user prefixes, keeps their KV caches resident in HBM over the request lifecycle, and ensures the subsequent ranking can consume them without remote fetches. RelayGR combines three techniques: 1) a sequence-aware trigger that admits only at-risk requests under a bounded cache footprint and pre-inference load, 2) an affinity-aware router that co-locates cache production and consumption by routing both the auxiliary pre-infer signal and the ranking request to the same instance, and 3) a memory-aware expander that uses server-local DRAM to capture short-term cross-request reuse while avoiding redundant reloads. We implement RelayGR on Huawei Ascend NPUs and evaluate it with real queries. Under a fixed P99 SLO, RelayGR supports up to 1.5$\times$ longer sequences and improves SLO-compliant throughput by up to 3.6$\times$.

Bei Yan, Jie Zhang, Zhiyuan Chen et al.

Recently, large foundation models, including large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs), have become essential tools in critical fields such as law, finance, and healthcare. As these models increasingly integrate into our daily life, it is necessary to conduct moral evaluation to ensure that their outputs align with human values and remain within moral boundaries. Previous works primarily focus on LLMs, proposing moral datasets and benchmarks limited to text modality. However, given the rapid development of LVLMs, there is still a lack of multimodal moral evaluation methods. To bridge this gap, we introduce M$^3$oralBench, the first MultiModal Moral Benchmark for LVLMs. M$^3$oralBench expands the everyday moral scenarios in Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) and employs the text-to-image diffusion model, SD3.0, to create corresponding scenario images. It conducts moral evaluation across six moral foundations of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and encompasses tasks in moral judgement, moral classification, and moral response, providing a comprehensive assessment of model performance in multimodal moral understanding and reasoning. Extensive experiments on 10 popular open-source and closed-source LVLMs demonstrate that M$^3$oralBench is a challenging benchmark, exposing notable moral limitations in current models. Our benchmark is publicly available.

Yaping Zhang, Yupu Liang, Zhiyang Zhang et al.

Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) seeks to translate text embedded in document images from one language to another by jointly modeling both textual content and page layout, bridging optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP). The DIMT 2025 Challenge advances research on end-to-end document image translation, a rapidly evolving area within multimodal document understanding. The competition features two tracks, OCR-free and OCR-based, each with two subtasks for small (less than 1B parameters) and large (greater than 1B parameters) models. Participants submit a single unified DIMT system, with the option to incorporate provided OCR transcripts. Running from December 10, 2024 to April 20, 2025, the competition attracted 69 teams and 27 valid submissions in total. Track 1 had 34 teams and 13 valid submissions, while Track 2 had 35 teams and 14 valid submissions. In this report, we present the challenge motivation, dataset construction, task definitions, evaluation protocol, and a summary of results. Our analysis shows that large-model approaches establish a promising new paradigm for translating complex-layout document images and highlight substantial opportunities for future research.

Zhiyuan Chen, Love Jayesh Ahir, Ahmad Suleiman et al.

Privacy policies are intended to inform users about how software systems collect and handle data, yet they often remain vague or incomplete. This paper presents an empirical study of patterns in log-related statements within privacy policies and their alignment with privacy disclosures observed in Android application logs. We analyzed 1,000 Android apps across multiple categories, generating 86,836,964 log entries. Our findings reveal that while most applications (88.0%) provide privacy policies, only 28.5% explicitly mention logging practices. Among those that reference logging, most clearly describe what information is logged; however, 27.7% of log-related statements remain overly simplistic or vague, offering limited insight into actual data collection. We further observed widespread privacy leakages in application logs, with 67.6% of apps leaking sensitive information not mentioned in their policies. Alarmingly, only 4% of applications demonstrated consistent alignment between declared policy contents and actual logged data. These findings highlight that current privacy policies provide incomplete or ambiguous descriptions of logging practices, which frequently do not align with actual logging behaviors.

Yaping Zhang, Qixuan Zhang, Xingquan Zhang et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models has sparked growing interest in their potential for scientific research. However, scientific intelligence encompasses a broad spectrum of abilities ranging from understanding fundamental knowledge to conducting creative discovery, and existing benchmarks remain fragmented. Most focus on narrow tasks and fail to reflect the hierarchical and multi-disciplinary nature of real scientific inquiry. We introduce \textbf{HiSciBench}, a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate foundation models across five levels that mirror the complete scientific workflow: \textit{Scientific Literacy} (L1), \textit{Literature Parsing} (L2), \textit{Literature-based Question Answering} (L3), \textit{Literature Review Generation} (L4), and \textit{Scientific Discovery} (L5). HiSciBench contains 8,735 carefully curated instances spanning six major scientific disciplines, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and astronomy, and supports multimodal inputs including text, equations, figures, and tables, as well as cross-lingual evaluation. Unlike prior benchmarks that assess isolated abilities, HiSciBench provides an integrated, dependency-aware framework that enables detailed diagnosis of model capabilities across different stages of scientific reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations of leading models, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, and several multimodal systems, reveal substantial performance gaps: while models achieve up to 69\% accuracy on basic literacy tasks, performance declines sharply to 25\% on discovery-level challenges. HiSciBench establishes a new standard for evaluating scientific Intelligence and offers actionable insights for developing models that are not only more capable but also more reliable. The benchmark will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Zhaohui Li, Peng He, Zhiyuan Chen et al.

The need to evaluate instructional materials for K-12 science education has become increasingly important, as more educators use generative AI to create instructional materials. However, the review of instructional materials is time-consuming, expertise-intensive, and difficult to scale, motivating interest in automated evaluation approaches. While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on general evaluation tasks, their performance and reliability on instructional materials remain unclear. To address this gap, we formulate Automatic Instructional Materials Evaluation (AIME) as a generative AI task that predicts scores and evidence using the rubric designed by the educator. We create a benchmark dataset and develop baseline models for AIME. First, we curate the first AIME dataset, SciEval, consisting of instructional materials annotated with pedagogy-aligned evaluation scores and evidence-based rationales. Expert annotations achieve high inter-rater reliability, resulting in a dataset of 273 lesson-level instructional materials evaluated across 13 criteria (N=3549) using the EQuIP rubric. Second, we test mainstream LLMs (GPT, Gemini, Llama, and Qwen) on SciEval and find that none achieve strong performance. Then we fine-tune Qwen3 on SciEval. Results on a held-out test set show that domain-aligned fine-tuning can achieve up to 11 percent performance gains, highlighting the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning for AIME and facilitating the use of LLMs in other educational tasks.

Zhiyuan Chen, Zhenfeng Deng, Pan Deng et al.

Accurate prediction of RNA secondary structure underpins transcriptome annotation, mechanistic analysis of non-coding RNAs, and RNA therapeutic design. Recent gains from deep learning and RNA foundation models are difficult to interpret because current benchmarks may overestimate generalization across RNA families. We present the Comprehensive Hierarchical Annotation of Non-coding RNA Groups (CHANRG), a benchmark of 170{,}083 structurally non-redundant RNAs curated from more than 10 million sequences in Rfam~15.0 using structure-aware deduplication, genome-aware split design and multiscale structural evaluation. Across 29 predictors, foundation-model methods achieved the highest held-out accuracy but lost most of that advantage out of distribution, whereas structured decoders and direct neural predictors remained markedly more robust. This gap persisted after controlling for sequence length and reflected both loss of structural coverage and incorrect higher-order wiring. Together, CHANRG and a padding-free, symmetry-aware evaluation stack provide a stricter and batch-invariant framework for developing RNA structure predictors with demonstrable out-of-distribution robustness.

Varun Mandalapu, Lujie Karen Chen, Sushruta Shetty et al.

In recent years, there is a lot of interest in modeling students' digital traces in Learning Management System (LMS) to understand students' learning behavior patterns including aspects of meta-cognition and self-regulation, with the ultimate goal to turn those insights into actionable information to support students to improve their learning outcomes. In achieving this goal, however, there are two main issues that need to be addressed given the existing literature. Firstly, most of the current work is course-centered (i.e. models are built from data for a specific course) rather than student-centered; secondly, a vast majority of the models are correlational rather than causal. Those issues make it challenging to identify the most promising actionable factors for intervention at the student level where most of the campus-wide academic support is designed for. In this paper, we explored a student-centric analytical framework for LMS activity data that can provide not only correlational but causal insights mined from observational data. We demonstrated this approach using a dataset of 1651 computing major students at a public university in the US during one semester in the Fall of 2019. This dataset includes students' fine-grained LMS interaction logs and administrative data, e.g. demographics and academic performance. In addition, we expand the repository of LMS behavior indicators to include those that can characterize the time-of-the-day of login (e.g. chronotype). Our analysis showed that student login volume, compared with other login behavior indicators, is both strongly correlated and causally linked to student academic performance, especially among students with low academic performance. We envision that those insights will provide convincing evidence for college student support groups to launch student-centered and targeted interventions that are effective and scalable.

Zhiyuan Chen, Keyi Li, Yifan Jia et al.

Diffusion transformer (DiT) models have achieved remarkable success in image generation, thanks for their exceptional generative capabilities and scalability. Nonetheless, the iterative nature of diffusion models (DMs) results in high computation complexity, posing challenges for deployment. Although existing cache-based acceleration methods try to utilize the inherent temporal similarity to skip redundant computations of DiT, the lack of correction may induce potential quality degradation. In this paper, we propose increment-calibrated caching, a training-free method for DiT acceleration, where the calibration parameters are generated from the pre-trained model itself with low-rank approximation. To deal with the possible correction failure arising from outlier activations, we introduce channel-aware Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), which further strengthens the calibration effect. Experimental results show that our method always achieve better performance than existing naive caching methods with a similar computation resource budget. When compared with 35-step DDIM, our method eliminates more than 45% computation and improves IS by 12 at the cost of less than 0.06 FID increase. Code is available at https://github.com/ccccczzy/icc.

Yuelin Guo, Haoyu He, Zhiyuan Chen et al.

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted significant attention in recent years, as it does not require box-level annotations. State-of-the-art methods generally adopt a multi-module network, which employs WSDDN as the multiple instance detection network module and multiple instance refinement modules to refine performance. However, these approaches suffer from three key limitations. First, existing methods tend to generate pseudo GT boxes that either focus only on discriminative parts, failing to capture the whole object, or cover the entire object but fail to distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. Second, the foundational WSDDN architecture lacks a crucial background class representation for each proposal and exhibits a large semantic gap between its branches. Third, prior methods discard ignored proposals during optimization, leading to slow convergence. To address these challenges, we first design a heatmap-guided proposal selector (HGPS) algorithm, which utilizes dual thresholds on heatmaps to pre-select proposals, enabling pseudo GT boxes to both capture the full object extent and distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. We then present a weakly supervised basic detection network (WSBDN), which augments each proposal with a background class representation and uses heatmaps for pre-supervision to bridge the semantic gap between matrices. At last, we introduce a negative certainty supervision loss on ignored proposals to accelerate convergence. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We achieve mAP/mCorLoc scores of 58.5%/81.8% on VOC 2007 and 55.6%/80.5% on VOC 2012, performing favorably against the state-of-the-art WSOD methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyl2565309278/DTH-CP.

Yuchen Ren, Zhiyuan Chen, Lifeng Qiao et al.

RNA plays a pivotal role in translating genetic instructions into functional outcomes, underscoring its importance in biological processes and disease mechanisms. Despite the emergence of numerous deep learning approaches for RNA, particularly universal RNA language models, there remains a significant lack of standardized benchmarks to assess the effectiveness of these methods. In this study, we introduce the first comprehensive RNA benchmark BEACON (\textbf{BE}nchm\textbf{A}rk for \textbf{CO}mprehensive R\textbf{N}A Task and Language Models). First, BEACON comprises 13 distinct tasks derived from extensive previous work covering structural analysis, functional studies, and engineering applications, enabling a comprehensive assessment of the performance of methods on various RNA understanding tasks. Second, we examine a range of models, including traditional approaches like CNNs, as well as advanced RNA foundation models based on language models, offering valuable insights into the task-specific performances of these models. Third, we investigate the vital RNA language model components from the tokenizer and positional encoding aspects. Notably, our findings emphasize the superiority of single nucleotide tokenization and the effectiveness of Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi) over traditional positional encoding methods. Based on these insights, a simple yet strong baseline called BEACON-B is proposed, which can achieve outstanding performance with limited data and computational resources. The datasets and source code of our benchmark are available at https://github.com/terry-r123/RNABenchmark.

Zhiyuan Chen, Guang Yao, Wennan Ma et al.

Many efforts have been devoted to designing sampling, mining, and weighting strategies in high-level deep metric learning (DML) loss objectives. However, little attention has been paid to low-level but essential data transformation. In this paper, we develop a novel mechanism, the independent domain embedding augmentation learning ({IDEAL}) method. It can simultaneously learn multiple independent embedding spaces for multiple domains generated by predefined data transformations. Our IDEAL is orthogonal to existing DML techniques and can be seamlessly combined with prior DML approaches for enhanced performance. Empirical results on visual retrieval tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. For example, the IDEAL improves the performance of MS loss by a large margin, 84.5\% $\rightarrow$ 87.1\% on Cars-196, and 65.8\% $\rightarrow$ 69.5\% on CUB-200 at Recall$@1$. Our IDEAL with MS loss also achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on three image retrieval benchmarks, \ie, \emph{Cars-196}, \emph{CUB-200}, and \emph{SOP}. It outperforms the most recent DML approaches, such as Circle loss and XBM, significantly. The source code and pre-trained models of our method will be available at\emph{\url{https://github.com/emdata-ailab/IDEAL}}.

Mingfei Chen, Yue Liao, Si Liu et al.

Determining which image regions to concentrate on is critical for Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection. Conventional HOI detectors focus on either detected human and object pairs or pre-defined interaction locations, which limits learning of the effective features. In this paper, we reformulate HOI detection as an adaptive set prediction problem, with this novel formulation, we propose an Adaptive Set-based one-stage framework (AS-Net) with parallel instances and interaction branches. To attain this, we map a trainable interaction query set to an interaction prediction set with a transformer. Each query adaptively aggregates the interaction-relevant features from global contexts through multi-head co-attention. Besides, the training process is supervised adaptively by matching each ground truth with the interaction prediction. Furthermore, we design an effective instance-aware attention module to introduce instructive features from the instance branch into the interaction branch. Our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods without any extra human pose and language features on three challenging HOI detection datasets. Especially, we achieve over $31\%$ relative improvement on a large-scale HICO-DET dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/yoyomimi/AS-Net.

Zhiyuan Chen, Annan Li, Shilu Jiang et al.

Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) is an important computer vision task. The batch-hard triplet loss frequently used in video-based person Re-ID suffers from the Distance Variance among Different Positives (DVDP) problem. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a new metric learning method called Attribute-aware Identity-hard Triplet Loss (AITL), which reduces the intra-class variation among positive samples via calculating attribute distance. To achieve a complete model of video-based person Re-ID, a multi-task framework with Attribute-driven Spatio-Temporal Attention (ASTA) mechanism is also proposed. Extensive experiments on MARS and DukeMTMC-VID datasets shows that both the AITL and ASTA are very effective. Enhanced by them, even a simple light-weighted video-based person Re-ID baseline can outperform existing state-of-the-art approaches. The codes has been published on https://github.com/yuange250/Video-based-person-ReID-with-Attribute-information.

Zhiyuan Chen, Yuxuan Zhong, Fan Wang et al.

Effective navigation intelligence relies on long-term memory to support both immediate generalization and sustained adaptation. However, existing approaches face a dilemma: modular systems rely on explicit mapping but lack flexibility, while Transformer-based end-to-end models are constrained by fixed context windows, limiting persistent memory across extended interactions. We introduce StateLinFormer, a linear-attention navigation model trained with a stateful memory mechanism that preserves recurrent memory states across consecutive training segments instead of reinitializing them at each batch boundary. This training paradigm effectively approximates learning on infinitely long sequences, enabling the model to achieve long-horizon memory retention. Experiments across both MAZE and ProcTHOR environments demonstrate that StateLinFormer significantly outperforms its stateless linear-attention counterpart and standard Transformer baselines with fixed context windows. Notably, as interaction length increases, persistent stateful training substantially improves context-dependent adaptation, suggesting an enhancement in the model's In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities for navigation tasks.

Lei Zhang, Zhiyuan Chen

Shor-style quantum algorithms for the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) are highly sensitive to the exact semantics of their group-operation oracles. Consequently, minor implementation choices can invalidate the intended mathematical model and lead to misleading conclusions. This paper introduces a semantics-first verification perspective for an end-to-end, compilable ECDLP implementation built on Qrisp. We specify the implemented oracle at the level of program semantics, derive refinement-style verification obligations for its key components, and provide a high-level complexity argument for the resulting oracle family. A small case study highlights that (i) the core point-update primitive agrees with a classical reference on well-formed inputs, yet (ii) controlled execution may violate the expected control law under the evaluated toolchain, despite a passing trivial control sanity check. These results position semantic auditing as a practical prerequisite for trustworthy ECDLP-oriented quantum software.

Zhiyuan Chen, Yuelin Guo, Zitong Huang et al.

Object detection models demand large-scale annotated datasets, which are costly and labor-intensive to create. This motivated Imaginary Supervised Object Detection (ISOD), where models train on synthetic images and test on real images. However, existing methods face three limitations: (1) synthetic datasets suffer from simplistic prompts, poor image quality, and weak supervision; (2) DETR-based detectors, due to their random query initialization, struggle with slow convergence and overfitting to synthetic patterns, hindering real-world generalization; (3) uniform denoising pressure promotes model overfitting to pseudo-label noise. We propose Cascade HQP-DETR to address these limitations. First, we introduce a high-quality data pipeline using LLaMA-3, Flux, and Grounding DINO to generate the FluxVOC and FluxCOCO datasets, advancing ISOD from weak to full supervision. Second, our High-Quality Proposal guided query encoding initializes object queries with image-specific priors from SAM-generated proposals and RoI-pooled features, accelerating convergence while steering the model to learn transferable features instead of overfitting to synthetic patterns. Third, our cascade denoising algorithm dynamically adjusts training weights through progressively increasing IoU thresholds across decoder layers, guiding the model to learn robust boundaries from reliable visual cues rather than overfitting to noisy labels. Trained for just 12 epochs solely on FluxVOC, Cascade HQP-DETR achieves a SOTA 61.04\% mAP@0.5 on PASCAL VOC 2007, outperforming strong baselines, with its competitive real-data performance confirming the architecture's universal applicability.

Zhiyuan Chen, Wei Lu, Radhika Bhong et al.

A stable, reliable, and controllable orbit lock system is crucial to an electron (or ion) accelerator because the beam orbit and beam energy instability strongly affect the quality of the beam delivered to experimental halls. Currently, when the orbit lock system fails operators must manually intervene. This paper develops a Machine Learning based fault detection methodology to identify orbit lock anomalies and notify accelerator operations staff of the off-normal behavior. Our method is unsupervised, so it does not require labeled data. It uses Long-Short Memory Networks (LSTM) Auto Encoder to capture normal patterns and predict future values of monitoring sensors in the orbit lock system. Anomalies are detected when the prediction error exceeds a threshold. We conducted experiments using monitoring data from Jefferson Lab's Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). The results are promising: the percentage of real anomalies identified by our solution is 68.6%-89.3% using monitoring data of a single component in the orbit lock control system. The accuracy can be as high as 82%.

Zicheng Liu, Siyuan Li, Zhiyuan Chen et al.

The interactions between DNA, RNA, and proteins are fundamental to biological processes, as illustrated by the central dogma of molecular biology. Although modern biological pre-trained models have achieved great success in analyzing these macromolecules individually, their interconnected nature remains underexplored. This paper follows the guidance of the central dogma to redesign both the data and model pipeline and offers a comprehensive framework, Life-Code, that spans different biological functions. As for data flow, we propose a unified pipeline to integrate multi-omics data by reverse-transcribing RNA and reverse-translating amino acids into nucleotide-based sequences. As for the model, we design a codon tokenizer and a hybrid long-sequence architecture to encode the interactions between coding and non-coding regions through masked modeling pre-training. To model the translation and folding process with coding sequences, Life-Code learns protein structures of the corresponding amino acids by knowledge distillation from off-the-shelf protein language models. Such designs enable Life-Code to capture complex interactions within genetic sequences, providing a more comprehensive understanding of multi-omics with the central dogma. Extensive experiments show that Life-Code achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks across three omics, highlighting its potential for advancing multi-omics analysis and interpretation.

Zhiyuan Chen, Yuecong Min, Jie Zhang et al.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for integrating visual and textual information, supporting a wide range of multi-modal tasks. However, these models often suffer from hallucination, producing content that appears plausible but contradicts the input content or established world knowledge. This survey offers an in-depth review of hallucination evaluation benchmarks and detection methods across Image-to-Text (I2T) and Text-to-image (T2I) generation tasks. Specifically, we first propose a taxonomy of hallucination based on faithfulness and factuality, incorporating the common types of hallucinations observed in practice. Then we provide an overview of existing hallucination evaluation benchmarks for both T2I and I2T tasks, highlighting their construction process, evaluation objectives, and employed metrics. Furthermore, we summarize recent advances in hallucination detection methods, which aims to identify hallucinated content at the instance level and serve as a practical complement of benchmark-based evaluation. Finally, we highlight key limitations in current benchmarks and detection methods, and outline potential directions for future research.

Yupu Liang, Yaping Zhang, Zhiyang Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in document image tasks, especially Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, they struggle with Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT), which requires handling both cross-modal and cross-lingual challenges. Previous efforts to enhance DIMT capability through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on the DIMT dataset often result in the forgetting of the model's existing monolingual abilities, such as OCR. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel fine-tuning paradigm, named Synchronously Self-Reviewing (SSR) its OCR proficiency, inspired by the concept "Bilingual Cognitive Advantage". Specifically, SSR prompts the model to generate OCR text before producing translation text, which allows the model to leverage its strong monolingual OCR ability while learning to translate text across languages. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the proposed SSR learning helps mitigate catastrophic forgetting, improving the generalization ability of MLLMs on both OCR and DIMT tasks.

Fan Wang, Zhiyuan Chen, Yuxuan Zhong et al.

The capability of predicting environmental dynamics underpins both biological neural systems and general embodied AI in adapting to their surroundings. Yet prevailing approaches rest on static world models that falter when confronted with novel or rare configurations. We investigate in-context environment learning (ICEL), shifting attention from zero-shot performance to the growth and asymptotic limits of the world model. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we formalize in-context learning of a world model and identify two core mechanisms: environment recognition and environment learning; (2) we derive error upper-bounds for both mechanisms that expose how the mechanisms emerge; and (3) we empirically confirm that distinct ICL mechanisms exist in the world model, and we further investigate how data distribution and model architecture affect ICL in a manner consistent with theory. These findings demonstrate the potential of self-adapting world models and highlight the key factors behind the emergence of ICEL, most notably the necessity of long context and diverse environments.

Bei Yan, Zhiyuan Chen, Yuecong Min et al.

Despite rapid advances, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still suffer from hallucinations, i.e., generating content inconsistent with input or established world knowledge, which correspond to faithfulness and factuality hallucinations, respectively. Prior studies primarily evaluate faithfulness hallucination at a rather coarse level (e.g., object-level) and lack fine-grained analysis. Additionally, existing benchmarks often rely on costly manual curation or reused public datasets, raising concerns about scalability and data leakage. To address these limitations, we propose an automated data construction pipeline that produces scalable, controllable, and diverse evaluation data. We also design a hierarchical hallucination induction framework with input perturbations to simulate realistic noisy scenarios. Integrating these designs, we construct SHALE, a Scalable HALlucination Evaluation benchmark designed to assess both faithfulness and factuality hallucinations via a fine-grained hallucination categorization scheme. SHALE comprises over 30K image-instruction pairs spanning 12 representative visual perception aspects for faithfulness and 6 knowledge domains for factuality, considering both clean and noisy scenarios. Extensive experiments on over 20 mainstream LVLMs reveal significant factuality hallucinations and high sensitivity to semantic perturbations.

Zhiyuan Chen, Fan Lu, Guo Yu et al.

Tracking the 6DoF pose of unknown objects in monocular RGB video sequences is crucial for robotic manipulation. However, existing approaches typically rely on accurate depth information, which is non-trivial to obtain in real-world scenarios. Although depth estimation algorithms can be employed, geometric inaccuracy can lead to failures in RGBD-based pose tracking methods. To address this challenge, we introduce GSGTrack, a novel RGB-based pose tracking framework that jointly optimizes geometry and pose. Specifically, we adopt 3D Gaussian Splatting to create an optimizable 3D representation, which is learned simultaneously with a graph-based geometry optimization to capture the object's appearance features and refine its geometry. However, the joint optimization process is susceptible to perturbations from noisy pose and geometry data. Thus, we propose an object silhouette loss to address the issue of pixel-wise loss being overly sensitive to pose noise during tracking. To mitigate the geometric ambiguities caused by inaccurate depth information, we propose a geometry-consistent image pair selection strategy, which filters out low-confidence pairs and ensures robust geometric optimization. Extensive experiments on the OnePose and HO3D datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GSGTrack in both 6DoF pose tracking and object reconstruction.

Haitao Lin, Yufei Huang, Odin Zhang et al.

In recent years, AI-assisted drug design methods have been proposed to generate molecules given the pockets' structures of target proteins. Most of them are atom-level-based methods, which consider atoms as basic components and generate atom positions and types. In this way, however, it is hard to generate realistic fragments with complicated structures. To solve this, we propose D3FG, a functional-group-based diffusion model for pocket-specific molecule generation and elaboration. D3FG decomposes molecules into two categories of components: functional groups defined as rigid bodies and linkers as mass points. And the two kinds of components can together form complicated fragments that enhance ligand-protein interactions. To be specific, in the diffusion process, D3FG diffuses the data distribution of the positions, orientations, and types of the components into a prior distribution; In the generative process, the noise is gradually removed from the three variables by denoisers parameterized with designed equivariant graph neural networks. In the experiments, our method can generate molecules with more realistic 3D structures, competitive affinities toward the protein targets, and better drug properties. Besides, D3FG as a solution to a new task of molecule elaboration, could generate molecules with high affinities based on existing ligands and the hotspots of target proteins.

Alvin Chaidrata, Mariyam Imtha Shafeeu, Sze Ker Chew et al.

Customer service is the lifeblood of any business. Excellent customer service not only generates return business but also creates new customers. Looking at the demanding market to provide a 24/7 service to customers, many organisations are increasingly engaged in popular social media and text messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in providing a 24/7 service to customers in the current demanding market. In this paper, we present an intent matching based customer services chatbot (IMCSC), which is capable of replacing the customer service work of sales personnel, whilst interacting in a more natural and human-like manner through the employment of Natural Language Understanding (NLU). The bot is able to answer the most common frequently asked questions and we have also integrated features for the processing and exporting of customer orders to a Google Sheet.

Zhiyuan Chen, Xiaomin Fang, Zixu Hua et al.

Efficient exploration of the chemical space to search the candidate drugs that satisfy various constraints is a fundamental task of drug discovery. Advanced deep generative methods attempt to optimize the molecules in the compact latent space instead of the discrete original space, but the mapping between the original and latent spaces is always kept unchanged during the entire optimization process. The unchanged mapping makes those methods challenging to fast adapt to various optimization scenes and leads to the great demand for assessed molecules (samples) to provide optimization direction, which is a considerable expense for drug discovery. To this end, we design a sample-efficient molecular generative method, HelixMO, which explores the scene-sensitive latent space to promote sample efficiency. The scene-sensitive latent space focuses more on modeling the promising molecules by dynamically adjusting the space mapping by leveraging the correlations between the general and scene-specific characteristics during the optimization process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HelixMO can achieve competitive performance with only a few assessed samples on four molecular optimization scenes. Ablation studies verify the positive impact of the scene-specific latent space, which is capable of identifying the critical characteristics of the promising molecules. We also deployed HelixMO on the website PaddleHelix (https://paddlehelix.baidu.com/app/drug/drugdesign/forecast) to provide drug design service.

Siyuan Li, Zicheng Liu, Zelin Zang et al.

Unsupervised representation learning (URL), which learns compact embeddings of high-dimensional data without supervision, has made remarkable progress recently. However, the development of URLs for different requirements is independent, which limits the generalization of the algorithms, especially prohibitive as the number of tasks grows. For example, dimension reduction methods, t-SNE, and UMAP optimize pair-wise data relationships by preserving the global geometric structure, while self-supervised learning, SimCLR, and BYOL focus on mining the local statistics of instances under specific augmentations. To address this dilemma, we summarize and propose a unified similarity-based URL framework, GenURL, which can smoothly adapt to various URL tasks. In this paper, we regard URL tasks as different implicit constraints on the data geometric structure that help to seek optimal low-dimensional representations that boil down to data structural modeling (DSM) and low-dimensional transformation (LDT). Specifically, DMS provides a structure-based submodule to describe the global structures, and LDT learns compact low-dimensional embeddings with given pretext tasks. Moreover, an objective function, General Kullback-Leibler divergence (GKL), is proposed to connect DMS and LDT naturally. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GenURL achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance in self-supervised visual learning, unsupervised knowledge distillation (KD), graph embeddings (GE), and dimension reduction.

Tianrui Chai, Zhiyuan Chen, Annan Li et al.

Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) which aims to associate people across non-overlapping cameras using surveillance video is a challenging task. Pedestrian attribute, such as gender, age and clothing characteristics contains rich and supplementary information but is less explored in video person Re-ID. In this work, we propose a novel network architecture named Attribute Salience Assisted Network (ASA-Net) for attribute-assisted video person Re-ID, which achieved considerable improvement to existing works by two methods.First, to learn a better separation of the target from background, we propose to learn the visual attention from middle-level attribute instead of high-level identities. The proposed Attribute Salient Region Enhance (ASRE) module can attend more accurately on the body of pedestrian. Second, we found that many identity-irrelevant but object or subject-relevant factors like the view angle and movement of the target pedestrian can greatly influence the two dimensional appearance of a pedestrian. This problem can be mitigated by investigating both identity-relevant and identity-irrelevant attributes via a novel triplet loss which is referred as the Pose~\&~Motion-Invariant (PMI) triplet loss.

Zhiyuan Chen, Howe Seng Goh, Kai Ling Sin et al.

The intention of this research is to study and design an automated agriculture commodity price prediction system with novel machine learning techniques. Due to the increasing large amounts historical data of agricultural commodity prices and the need of performing accurate prediction of price fluctuations, the solution has largely shifted from statistical methods to machine learning area. However, the selection of proper set from historical data for forecasting still has limited consideration. On the other hand, when implementing machine learning techniques, finding a suitable model with optimal parameters for global solution, nonlinearity and avoiding curse of dimensionality are still biggest challenges, therefore machine learning strategies study are needed. In this research, we propose a web-based automated system to predict agriculture commodity price. In the two series experiments, five popular machine learning algorithms, ARIMA, SVR, Prophet, XGBoost and LSTM have been compared with large historical datasets in Malaysia and the most optimal algorithm, LSTM model with an average of 0.304 mean-square error has been selected as the prediction engine of the proposed system.

Jia Wei Chong, Zhiyuan Chen, Mei Shin Oh

Service manual documents are crucial to the engineering company as they provide guidelines and knowledge to service engineers. However, it has become inconvenient and inefficient for service engineers to retrieve specific knowledge from documents due to the complexity of resources. In this research, we propose an automated knowledge mining and document classification system with novel multi-model transfer learning approaches. Particularly, the classification performance of the system has been improved with three effective techniques: fine-tuning, pruning, and multi-model method. The fine-tuning technique optimizes a pre-trained BERT model by adding a feed-forward neural network layer and the pruning technique is used to retrain the BERT model with new data. The multi-model method initializes and trains multiple BERT models to overcome the randomness of data ordering during the fine-tuning process. In the first iteration of the training process, multiple BERT models are being trained simultaneously. The best model is then selected for the next phase of the training process with another two iterations and the training processes for other BERT models will be terminated. The performance of the proposed system has been evaluated by comparing with two robust baseline methods, BERT and BERT-CNN. Experimental results on a widely used Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (CoLA) dataset have shown that the proposed techniques perform better than these baseline methods in terms of accuracy and MCC score.

Ee Fey Goh, ZhiYuan Chen, Wei Xiang Lim

The conventional spatial convolution layers in the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are computationally expensive at the point where the training time could take days unless the number of layers, the number of training images or the size of the training images are reduced. The image size of 256x256 pixels is commonly used for most of the applications of CNN, but this image size is too small for applications like Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) classification where the image details are important for accurate classification. This research proposed Frequency Domain Convolution (FDC) and Frequency Domain Pooling (FDP) layers which were built with RFFT, kernel initialization strategy, convolution artifact removal and Channel Independent Convolution (CIC) to replace the conventional convolution and pooling layers. The FDC and FDP layers are used to build a Frequency Domain Convolutional Neural Network (FDCNN) to accelerate the training of large images for DR classification. The Full FDC layer is an extension of the FDC layer to allow direct use in conventional CNNs, it is also used to modify the VGG16 architecture. FDCNN is shown to be at least 54.21% faster and 70.74% more memory efficient compared to an equivalent CNN architecture. The modified VGG16 architecture with Full FDC layer is reported to achieve a shorter training time and a higher accuracy at 95.63% compared to the original VGG16 architecture for DR classification.

Zicheng Liu, Siyuan Li, Di Wu et al.

Data mixing augmentation have proved to be effective in improving the generalization ability of deep neural networks. While early methods mix samples by hand-crafted policies (e.g., linear interpolation), recent methods utilize saliency information to match the mixed samples and labels via complex offline optimization. However, there arises a trade-off between precise mixing policies and optimization complexity. To address this challenge, we propose a novel automatic mixup (AutoMix) framework, where the mixup policy is parameterized and serves the ultimate classification goal directly. Specifically, AutoMix reformulates the mixup classification into two sub-tasks (i.e., mixed sample generation and mixup classification) with corresponding sub-networks and solves them in a bi-level optimization framework. For the generation, a learnable lightweight mixup generator, Mix Block, is designed to generate mixed samples by modeling patch-wise relationships under the direct supervision of the corresponding mixed labels. To prevent the degradation and instability of bi-level optimization, we further introduce a momentum pipeline to train AutoMix in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on nine image benchmarks prove the superiority of AutoMix compared with state-of-the-art in various classification scenarios and downstream tasks.

Zhiyuan Chen, Isa Dino, Nik Ahmad Akram

This paper aims at improving the classification accuracy of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier with Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) training algorithm in order to properly classify failure and normal instances from oil and gas equipment data. Recent applications of failure analysis have made use of the SVM technique without implementing SMO training algorithm, while in our study we show that the proposed solution can perform much better when using the SMO training algorithm. Furthermore, we implement the ensemble approach, which is a hybrid rule based and neural network classifier to improve the performance of the SVM classifier (with SMO training algorithm). The optimization study is as a result of the underperformance of the classifier when dealing with imbalanced dataset. The selected best performing classifiers are combined together with SVM classifier (with SMO training algorithm) by using the stacking ensemble method which is to create an efficient ensemble predictive model that can handle the issue of imbalanced data. The classification performance of this predictive model is considerably better than the SVM with and without SMO training algorithm and many other conventional classifiers.

Le Dinh Van Khoa, Zhiyuan Chen

The pipelines transmission system is one of the growing aspects, which has existed for a long time in the energy industry. The cost of in-pipe exploration for maintaining service always draws lots of attention in this industry. Normally exploration methods (e.g. Magnetic flux leakage and eddy current) will establish the sensors stationary for each pipe milestone or carry sensors to travel inside the pipe. It makes the maintenance process very difficult due to the massive amount of sensors. One of the solutions is to implement machine learning techniques for the analysis of sensory data. Although SVMs can resolve this issue with kernel trick, the problem is that computing the kernel depends on the data size too. It is because the process can be exaggerated quickly if the number of support vectors becomes really large. Particularly LiDAR spins with an extremely rapid rate and the flow of input data might eventually lead to massive expansion. In our proposed approach, each sample is learned in an instant way and the supported kernel is computed simultaneously. In this research, incremental learning approach with online support vector machines (SVMs) is presented, which aims to deal with LiDAR sensory data only.

Wei Xiang Lim, Zhiyuan Chen, Amr Ahmed et al.

Diabetes is a global epidemic and it is increasing at an alarming rate. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) projected that the total number of people with diabetes globally may increase by 48%, from 425 million (year 2017) to 629 million (year 2045). Moreover, diabetes had caused millions of deaths and the number is increasing drastically. Therefore, this paper addresses the background of diabetes and its complications. In addition, this paper investigates innovative applications and past researches in the areas of diabetes management system with applied eye fundus and tongue digital images. Different types of existing applied eye fundus and tongue digital image processing with diabetes management systems in the market and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques from previous literature have been reviewed. The implication of this paper is to have an overview in diabetic research and what new machine learning techniques can be proposed in solving this global epidemic.

Kasra Babaei, ZhiYuan Chen, Tomas Maul

This paper proposes an autoencoder (AE) that is used for improving the performance of once-class classifiers for the purpose of detecting anomalies. Traditional one-class classifiers (OCCs) perform poorly under certain conditions such as high-dimensionality and sparsity. Also, the size of the training set plays an important role on the performance of one-class classifiers. Autoencoders have been widely used for obtaining useful latent variables from high-dimensional datasets. In the proposed approach, the AE is capable of deriving meaningful features from high-dimensional datasets while doing data augmentation at the same time. The augmented data is used for training the OCC algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed approach enhance the performance of OCC algorithms and also outperforms other well-known approaches.

Kasra Babaei, ZhiYuan Chen, Tomas Maul

Outlier detection (also known as anomaly detection or deviation detection) is a process of detecting data points in which their patterns deviate significantly from others. It is common to have outliers in industry applications, which could be generated by different causes such as human error, fraudulent activities, or system failure. Recently, density-based methods have shown promising results, particularly among which Local Outlier Factor (LOF) is arguably dominating. However, one of the major drawbacks of LOF is that it is computationally expensive. Motivated by the mentioned problem, this research presents a novel pruning-based procedure in which the execution time of LOF is reduced while the performance is maintained. A novel Prune-based Local Outlier Factor (PLOF) approach is proposed, in which prior to employing LOF, outlierness of each data instance is measured. Next, based on a threshold, data instances that require further investigation are separated and LOF score is only computed for these points. Extensive experiments have been conducted and results are promising. Comparison experiments with the original LOF and two state-of-the-art variants of LOF have shown that PLOF produces higher accuracy and precision while reducing execution time.

Pooja Parameshwarappa, Zhiyuan Chen, Gunes Koru

Publishing physical activity data can facilitate reproducible health-care research in several areas such as population health management, behavioral health research, and management of chronic health problems. However, publishing such data also brings high privacy risks related to re-identification which makes anonymization necessary. One of the challenges in anonymizing physical activity data collected periodically is its sequential nature. The existing anonymization techniques work sufficiently for cross-sectional data but have high computational costs when applied directly to sequential data. This paper presents an effective anonymization approach, Multi-level Clustering based anonymization to anonymize physical activity data. Compared with the conventional methods, the proposed approach improves time complexity by reducing the clustering time drastically. While doing so, it preserves the utility as much as the conventional approaches.

Ashwinkumar Ganesan, Pooja Parameshwarappa, Akshay Peshave et al.

Evolving cybersecurity threats are a persistent challenge for systemadministrators and security experts as new malwares are continu-ally released. Attackers may look for vulnerabilities in commercialproducts or execute sophisticated reconnaissance campaigns tounderstand a targets network and gather information on securityproducts like firewalls and intrusion detection / prevention systems(network or host-based). Many new attacks tend to be modificationsof existing ones. In such a scenario, rule-based systems fail to detectthe attack, even though there are minor differences in conditions /attributes between rules to identify the new and existing attack. Todetect these differences the IDS must be able to isolate the subset ofconditions that are true and predict the likely conditions (differentfrom the original) that must be observed. In this paper, we proposeaprobabilistic abductive reasoningapproach that augments an exist-ing rule-based IDS (snort [29]) to detect these evolved attacks by (a)Predicting rule conditions that are likely to occur (based on existingrules) and (b) able to generate new snort rules when provided withseed rule (i.e. a starting rule) to reduce the burden on experts toconstantly update them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of theapproach by generating new rules from the snort 2012 rules set andtesting it on the MACCDC 2012 dataset [6].

Zhiyuan Chen, Annan Li, Yunhong Wang

In this paper, we first tackle the problem of pedestrian attribute recognition by video-based approach. The challenge mainly lies in spatial and temporal modeling and how to integrating them for effective and dynamic pedestrian representation. To solve this problem, a novel multi-task model based on the conventional neural network and temporal attention strategy is proposed. Since publicly available dataset is rare, two new large-scale video datasets with expanded attribute definition are presented, on which the effectiveness of both video-based pedestrian attribute recognition methods and the proposed new network architecture is well demonstrated. The two datasets are published on http://irip.buaa.edu.cn/mars_duke_attributes/index.html.

Fan Yang, Zhiyuan Chen

Machine learning models have been widely used in security applications such as intrusion detection, spam filtering, and virus or malware detection. However, it is well-known that adversaries are always trying to adapt their attacks to evade detection. For example, an email spammer may guess what features spam detection models use and modify or remove those features to avoid detection. There has been some work on making machine learning models more robust to such attacks. However, one simple but promising approach called {\em randomization} is underexplored. This paper proposes a novel randomization-based approach to improve robustness of machine learning models against evasion attacks. The proposed approach incorporates randomization into both model training time and model application time (meaning when the model is used to detect attacks). We also apply this approach to random forest, an existing ML method which already has some degree of randomness. Experiments on intrusion detection and spam filtering data show that our approach further improves robustness of random-forest method. We also discuss how this approach can be applied to other ML models.

Zhiyuan Chen, Nianzu Ma, Bing Liu

This paper proposes a novel lifelong learning (LL) approach to sentiment classification. LL mimics the human continuous learning process, i.e., retaining the knowledge learned from past tasks and use it to help future learning. In this paper, we first discuss LL in general and then LL for sentiment classification in particular. The proposed LL approach adopts a Bayesian optimization framework based on stochastic gradient descent. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods significantly, which demonstrates that lifelong learning is a promising research direction.