Man Li

AI
9papers
113citations
Novelty43%
AI Score47

9 Papers

MLJun 5, 2023Code
MM-DAG: Multi-task DAG Learning for Multi-modal Data -- with Application for Traffic Congestion Analysis

Tian Lan, Ziyue Li, Zhishuai Li et al.

This paper proposes to learn Multi-task, Multi-modal Direct Acyclic Graphs (MM-DAGs), which are commonly observed in complex systems, e.g., traffic, manufacturing, and weather systems, whose variables are multi-modal with scalars, vectors, and functions. This paper takes the traffic congestion analysis as a concrete case, where a traffic intersection is usually regarded as a DAG. In a road network of multiple intersections, different intersections can only have some overlapping and distinct variables observed. For example, a signalized intersection has traffic light-related variables, whereas unsignalized ones do not. This encourages the multi-task design: with each DAG as a task, the MM-DAG tries to learn the multiple DAGs jointly so that their consensus and consistency are maximized. To this end, we innovatively propose a multi-modal regression for linear causal relationship description of different variables. Then we develop a novel Causality Difference (CD) measure and its differentiable approximator. Compared with existing SOTA measures, CD can penalize the causal structural difference among DAGs with distinct nodes and can better consider the uncertainty of causal orders. We rigidly prove our design's topological interpretation and consistency properties. We conduct thorough simulations and one case study to show the effectiveness of our MM-DAG. The code is available under https://github.com/Lantian72/MM-DAG

AIJun 3
Plan First, Judge Later, Run Better: A DMAIC-Inspired Agentic System for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Yongzi Yu, Ao Li, Le Wang et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown promise in automating complex data-analysis workflows, but their reliable deployment remains challenging in high-stakes industrial scenarios. Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) is essential for manufacturing quality, safety, and efficiency, yet existing LLM-based IAD agents mainly focus on execution while under-exploiting strategy formulation. Consequently, they struggle to handle heterogeneous modalities in a unified and cost-effective manner. Inspired by the DMAIC quality-management framework, we propose DMAIC-IAD (DMAIC-inspired Agentic Industrial Anomaly Detection), a "Plan First, Judge Later" multi-agent system that aligns LLM agents with structured industrial problem-solving. DMAIC-IAD distills heterogeneous references into standardized operating procedures (SOPs) before strategy generation, and introduces a pre-trained execution-free judge model to rank candidate strategies without costly runtime trials. Extensive experiments across four modalities show that DMAIC-IAD improves average detection performance over applicable agentic baselines by 37.76%.

LGJun 26, 2022
Wiener Graph Deconvolutional Network Improves Graph Self-Supervised Learning

Jiashun Cheng, Man Li, Jia Li et al.

Graph self-supervised learning (SSL) has been vastly employed to learn representations from unlabeled graphs. Existing methods can be roughly divided into predictive learning and contrastive learning, where the latter one attracts more research attention with better empirical performance. We argue that, however, predictive models weaponed with powerful decoder could achieve comparable or even better representation power than contrastive models. In this work, we propose a Wiener Graph Deconvolutional Network (WGDN), an augmentation-adaptive decoder empowered by graph wiener filter to perform information reconstruction. Theoretical analysis proves the superior reconstruction ability of graph wiener filter. Extensive experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

AIMay 28
AgentDoG 1.5: A Lightweight and Scalable Alignment Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security

Dongrui Liu, Yu Li, Zhonghao Yang et al.

Modern open-world agents such as OpenClaw exhibit powerful cross-environment execution capabilities yet introduce broad new safety risk sources. Meanwhile, advanced frontier AI models drastically lower attack barriers, rendering current agent alignment frameworks inadequate for real-world deployment. To tackle these emerging threats, we propose a lightweight and scalable agent safety alignment framework. Specifically, we update the agent safety taxonomy to accommodate emergent risks from Codex and OpenClaw execution scenarios. We further build a taxonomy-guided data engine with influence-function purification to train lightweight AgentDoG 1.5 variants (0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 8B parameters) using only around 1k samples, achieving comparable performance with leading closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4). Based on AgentDoG 1.5, we construct a highly efficient agentic safety SFT and RL training environment, which reduces deployment overhead in Docker-level environments by two orders of magnitude. Finally, we deploy AgentDoG 1.5 as a training-free online guardrail for real-time safety moderation. Extensive experimental results indicate that AgentDoG 1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in diverse and complex interactive agentic scenarios. All models and datasets are openly released.

LGSep 23, 2024
Enabling Tensor Decomposition for Time-Series Classification via A Simple Pseudo-Laplacian Contrast

Man Li, Ziyue Li, Lijun Sun et al.

Tensor decomposition has emerged as a prominent technique to learn low-dimensional representation under the supervision of reconstruction error, primarily benefiting data inference tasks like completion and imputation, but not classification task. We argue that the non-uniqueness and rotation invariance of tensor decomposition allow us to identify the directions with largest class-variability and simple graph Laplacian can effectively achieve this objective. Therefore we propose a novel Pseudo Laplacian Contrast (PLC) tensor decomposition framework, which integrates the data augmentation and cross-view Laplacian to enable the extraction of class-aware representations while effectively capturing the intrinsic low-rank structure within reconstruction constraint. An unsupervised alternative optimization algorithm is further developed to iteratively estimate the pseudo graph and minimize the loss using Alternating Least Square (ALS). Extensive experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

AIMay 12
LGMT: Logic-Grounded Metamorphic Testing for Evaluating the Reasoning Reliability of LLMs

Zenghui Zhou, Man Li, Xiaoke Fang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on logical reasoning benchmarks, yet their reliability remains uncertain. Existing evaluations rely on static benchmarks, which fail to assess robustness under logically equivalent transformations and often overestimate reasoning capability. We propose LGMT (Logic-Grounded Metamorphic Testing), an oracle-free framework that leverages first-order logic (FOL) to evaluate LLM reasoning. By deriving metamorphic relations from formal logical equivalences, LGMT constructs semantically invariant test cases and detects reasoning defects through cross-case consistency checking. Experiments on six state-of-the-art LLMs show that LGMT exposes substantial hidden defects missed by traditional reference-based evaluations. We further find that models are particularly sensitive to symbol-level and conclusion-level variations, and that advanced prompting such as Few-shot CoT only partially mitigates these issues. These results suggest that LLM evaluation should move beyond isolated correctness toward robustness under logical invariance. LGMT provides a principled and scalable approach for diagnosing reasoning failures.

CYJun 4, 2024
Comparative Analysis Vision of Worldwide AI Courses

Jianing Xia, Man Li, Jianxin Li

This research investigates the curriculum structures of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) education across universities worldwide. By examining the curricula of leading universities, the research seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of AI education on a global scale, facilitating the alignment of educational practices with the evolving needs of the AI landscape. This research delves into the diverse course structures of leading universities, exploring contemporary trends and priorities to reveal the nuanced approaches in AI education. It also investigates the core AI topics and learning contents frequently taught, comparing them with the CS2023 curriculum guidance to identify convergence and divergence. Additionally, it examines how universities across different countries approach AI education, analyzing educational objectives, priorities, potential careers, and methodologies to understand the global landscape and implications of AI pedagogy.

IVMay 7, 2020
Joint Prediction and Time Estimation of COVID-19 Developing Severe Symptoms using Chest CT Scan

Xiaofeng Zhu, Bin Song, Feng Shi et al.

With the rapidly worldwide spread of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), it is of great importance to conduct early diagnosis of COVID-19 and predict the time that patients might convert to the severe stage, for designing effective treatment plan and reducing the clinicians' workloads. In this study, we propose a joint classification and regression method to determine whether the patient would develop severe symptoms in the later time, and if yes, predict the possible conversion time that the patient would spend to convert to the severe stage. To do this, the proposed method takes into account 1) the weight for each sample to reduce the outliers' influence and explore the problem of imbalance classification, and 2) the weight for each feature via a sparsity regularization term to remove the redundant features of high-dimensional data and learn the shared information across the classification task and the regression task. To our knowledge, this study is the first work to predict the disease progression and the conversion time, which could help clinicians to deal with the potential severe cases in time or even save the patients' lives. Experimental analysis was conducted on a real data set from two hospitals with 422 chest computed tomography (CT) scans, where 52 cases were converted to severe on average 5.64 days and 34 cases were severe at admission. Results show that our method achieves the best classification (e.g., 85.91% of accuracy) and regression (e.g., 0.462 of the correlation coefficient) performance, compared to all comparison methods. Moreover, our proposed method yields 76.97% of accuracy for predicting the severe cases, 0.524 of the correlation coefficient, and 0.55 days difference for the converted time.

NCJan 19, 2019
Convolution Forgetting Curve Model for Repeated Learning

Yanlu Xie, Yue Chen, Man Li

Most of mathematic forgetting curve models fit well with the forgetting data under the learning condition of one time rather than repeated. In the paper, a convolution model of forgetting curve is proposed to simulate the memory process during learning. In this model, the memory ability (i.e. the central procedure in the working memory model) and learning material (i.e. the input in the working memory model) is regarded as the system function and the input function, respectively. The status of forgetting (i.e. the output in the working memory model) is regarded as output function or the convolution result of the memory ability and learning material. The model is applied to simulate the forgetting curves in different situations. The results show that the model is able to simulate the forgetting curves not only in one time learning condition but also in multi-times condition. The model is further verified in the experiments of Mandarin tone learning for Japanese learners. And the predicted curve fits well on the test points.