Haitao Xu

Haitao Xu, Songwei Liu, Yuyang Xu et al.

To address the challenge of increasing network size, researchers have developed sparse models through network pruning. However, maintaining model accuracy while achieving significant speedups on general computing devices remains an open problem. In this paper, we present a novel mobile inference acceleration framework SparseByteNN, which leverages fine-grained kernel sparsity to achieve real-time execution as well as high accuracy. Our framework consists of two parts: (a) A fine-grained kernel sparsity schema with a sparsity granularity between structured pruning and unstructured pruning. It designs multiple sparse patterns for different operators. Combined with our proposed whole network rearrangement strategy, the schema achieves a high compression rate and high precision at the same time. (b) Inference engine co-optimized with the sparse pattern. The conventional wisdom is that this reduction in theoretical FLOPs does not translate into real-world efficiency gains. We aim to correct this misconception by introducing a family of efficient sparse kernels for ARM and WebAssembly. Equipped with our efficient implementation of sparse primitives, we show that sparse versions of MobileNet-v1 outperform strong dense baselines on the efficiency-accuracy curve. Experimental results on Qualcomm 855 show that for 30% sparse MobileNet-v1, SparseByteNN achieves 1.27x speedup over the dense version and 1.29x speedup over the state-of-the-art sparse inference engine MNN with a slight accuracy drop of 0.224%. The source code of SparseByteNN will be available at https://github.com/lswzjuer/SparseByteNN

Zhenhua Xu, Haobo Zhang, Zhebo Wang et al.

Existing invasive (backdoor) fingerprints suffer from high-perplexity triggers that are easily filtered, fixed response patterns exposed by heuristic detectors, and spurious activations on benign inputs. We introduce \textsc{ForgetMark}, a stealthy fingerprinting framework that encodes provenance via targeted unlearning. It builds a compact, human-readable key--value set with an assistant model and predictive-entropy ranking, then trains lightweight LoRA adapters to suppress the original values on their keys while preserving general capabilities. Ownership is verified under black/gray-box access by aggregating likelihood and semantic evidence into a fingerprint success rate. By relying on probabilistic forgetting traces rather than fixed trigger--response patterns, \textsc{ForgetMark} avoids high-perplexity triggers, reduces detectability, and lowers false triggers. Across diverse architectures and settings, it achieves 100\% ownership verification on fingerprinted models while maintaining standard performance, surpasses backdoor baselines in stealthiness and robustness to model merging, and remains effective under moderate incremental fine-tuning. Our code and data are available at \href{https://github.com/Xuzhenhua55/ForgetMark}{https://github.com/Xuzhenhua55/ForgetMark}.

Jing Chen, Shixiang Pan, Yujie Fan et al.

Accurate spatiotemporal pattern analysis is critical in fields such as urban traffic, meteorology, and public health monitoring. However, existing methods face performance bottlenecks, typically yielding only incremental gains and often exhibiting limited cross-domain transferability. We analyze this bottleneck through spatial and temporal entropy measures, which are used as diagnostic indicators of spatiotemporal complexity mismatch rather than as guarantees that entropy alignment alone yields better forecasting. Empirically, larger mismatch is often accompanied by higher prediction uncertainty, especially under a fixed model-capacity budget. Guided by this diagnostic, we propose a scalable, adaptive framework that harmonizes spatial and temporal feature representations. Spatial dimensionality is compressed via low-rank matrix embedding to preserve essential structure, while an extended temporal horizon captures long-range dependencies and mitigates cumulative errors arising from temporal heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on urban traffic, meteorological, and epidemic datasets demonstrate substantial accuracy gains and broad applicability across the evaluated domains, suggesting that the framework is promising for a wide range of spatiotemporal tasks beyond the current study. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/ST-Balance/ST-Balance.

Ye Tian, Yifan Jia, Yanbin Wang et al.

The success of smart contracts has made them a target for attacks, but their closed-source nature often forces vulnerability detection to work on bytecode, which is inherently more challenging than source-code-based analysis. While recent studies try to align source and bytecode embeddings during training to transfer knowledge, current methods rely on graph-level alignment that obscures fine-grained structural and semantic correlations between the two modalities. Moreover, the absence of precise vulnerability patterns and granular annotations in bytecode leads to depriving the model of crucial supervisory signals for learning discriminant features. We propose ExDoS to transfer rich semantic knowledge from source code to bytecode, effectively supplementing the source code prior in practical settings. Specifically, we construct semantic graphs from source code and control-flow graphs from bytecode. To address obscured local signals in graph-level contract embeddings, we propose a Dual-Attention Graph Network introducing a novel node attention aggregation module to enhance local pattern capture in graph embeddings. Furthermore, by summarizing existing source-code vulnerability patterns and designing corresponding bytecode-level patterns for the three target vulnerabilities, we provide an aligned pattern framework that facilitates fine-grained cross-modal alignment and the capture of function-level vulnerability signals. Finally, we propose a dual-focus objective for our cross-modal distillation framework, comprising: a Global Semantic Distillation Loss for transferring graph-level knowledge and a Local Semantic Distillation Loss enabling expert-guided, fine-grained vulnerability-specific distillation. Experiments on real-world contracts demonstrate that our method achieves consistent F1-score improvements (3%--6%) over strong baselines.

Junjie Li, Jiawei Wang, Miyu Li et al.

Depth estimation plays a great potential role in obstacle avoidance and navigation for further Mars exploration missions. Compared to traditional stereo matching, learning-based stereo depth estimation provides a data-driven approach to infer dense and precise depth maps from stereo image pairs. However, these methods always suffer performance degradation in environments with sparse textures and lacking geometric constraints, such as the unstructured terrain of Mars. To address these challenges, we propose M3Depth, a depth estimation model tailored for Mars rovers. Considering the sparse and smooth texture of Martian terrain, which is primarily composed of low-frequency features, our model incorporates a convolutional kernel based on wavelet transform that effectively captures low-frequency response and expands the receptive field. Additionally, we introduce a consistency loss that explicitly models the complementary relationship between depth map and surface normal map, utilizing the surface normal as a geometric constraint to enhance the accuracy of depth estimation. Besides, a pixel-wise refinement module with mutual boosting mechanism is designed to iteratively refine both depth and surface normal predictions. Experimental results on synthetic Mars datasets with depth annotations show that M3Depth achieves a 16% improvement in depth estimation accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art methods in depth estimation. Furthermore, the model demonstrates strong applicability in real-world Martian scenarios, offering a promising solution for future Mars exploration missions.

Yujie Li, Yanbin Wang, Haitao Xu et al.

Adversarial attacks induce misclassification by introducing subtle perturbations. Recently, diffusion models are applied to the image classifiers to improve adversarial robustness through adversarial training or by purifying adversarial noise. However, diffusion-based adversarial training often encounters convergence challenges and high computational expenses. Additionally, diffusion-based purification inevitably causes data shift and is deemed susceptible to stronger adaptive attacks. To tackle these issues, we propose the Truth Maximization Diffusion Classifier (TMDC), a generative Bayesian classifier that builds upon pre-trained diffusion models and the Bayesian theorem. Unlike data-driven classifiers, TMDC, guided by Bayesian principles, utilizes the conditional likelihood from diffusion models to determine the class probabilities of input images, thereby insulating against the influences of data shift and the limitations of adversarial training. Moreover, to enhance TMDC's resilience against more potent adversarial attacks, we propose an optimization strategy for diffusion classifiers. This strategy involves post-training the diffusion model on perturbed datasets with ground-truth labels as conditions, guiding the diffusion model to learn the data distribution and maximizing the likelihood under the ground-truth labels. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CIFAR10 dataset against heavy white-box attacks and strong adaptive attacks. Specifically, TMDC achieves robust accuracies of 82.81% against $l_{\infty}$ norm-bounded perturbations and 86.05% against $l_{2}$ norm-bounded perturbations, respectively, with $ε=0.05$.

Jian Wang, Chaokang Jiang, Haitao Xu

Diffusion-based models are redefining the state-of-the-art in end-to-end autonomous driving, yet their performance is increasingly hampered by a reliance on transformer-based fusion. These architectures face fundamental limitations: quadratic computational complexity restricts the use of high-resolution features, and a lack of spatial priors prevents them from effectively modeling the inherent structure of Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. This paper introduces GMF-Drive (Gated Mamba Fusion for Driving), an end-to-end framework that overcomes these challenges through two principled innovations. First, we supersede the information-limited histogram-based LiDAR representation with a geometrically-augmented pillar format encoding shape descriptors and statistical features, preserving critical 3D geometric details. Second, we propose a novel hierarchical gated mamba fusion (GM-Fusion) architecture that substitutes an expensive transformer with a highly efficient, spatially-aware state-space model (SSM). Our core BEV-SSM leverages directional sequencing and adaptive fusion mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies with linear complexity, while explicitly respecting the unique spatial properties of the driving scene. Extensive experiments on the challenging NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that GMF-Drive achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming DiffusionDrive. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the efficacy of each component, demonstrating that task-specific SSMs can surpass a general-purpose transformer in both performance and efficiency for autonomous driving.

Jiaojiao Li, Shiyao Duan, Haitao XU et al.

The inherent difficulty in acquiring accurately co-registered RGB-hyperspectral image (HSI) pairs has significantly impeded the practical deployment of current data-driven Hyperspectral Image Generation (HIG) networks in engineering applications. Gleichzeitig, the ill-posed nature of the aligning constraints, compounded with the complexities of mining cross-domain features, also hinders the advancement of unpaired HIG (UnHIG) tasks. In this paper, we conquer these challenges by modeling the UnHIG to range space interaction and compensations of null space through Range-Null Space Decomposition (RND) methodology. Specifically, the introduced contrastive learning effectively aligns the geometric and spectral distributions of unpaired data by building the interaction of range space, considering the consistent feature in degradation process. Following this, we map the frequency representations of dual-domain input and thoroughly mining the null space, like degraded and high-frequency components, through the proposed Non-uniform Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks. Extensive comparative experiments demonstrate that it establishes a new benchmark in UnHIG.

Yihong Leng, Jiaojiao Li, Haitao Xu et al.

Current hyperspectral image (HSI) reconstruction methods primarily rely on image-level approaches, which are time-consuming to form abundant high-quality HSIs through imagers. In contrast, spectrometers offer a more efficient alternative by capturing high-fidelity point spectra, enabling pixel-level HSI reconstruction that balances accuracy and label efficiency. To this end, we introduce a pixel-level spectral super-resolution (Pixel-SSR) paradigm that reconstructs HSI from RGB and point spectra. Despite its advantages, Pixel-SSR presents two key challenges: 1) generalizability to novel scenes lacking point spectra, and 2) effective information extraction to promote reconstruction accuracy. To address the first challenge, a Gamma-modeled strategy is investigated to synthesize point spectra based on their intrinsic properties, including nonnegativity, a skewed distribution, and a positive correlation. Furthermore, complementary three-branch prompts from RGB and point spectra are extracted with a Dynamic Prompt Mamba (DyPro-Mamba), which progressively directs the reconstruction with global spatial distributions, edge details, and spectral dependency. Comprehensive evaluations, including horizontal comparisons with leading methods and vertical assessments across unsupervised and image-level supervised paradigms, demonstrate that ours achieves competitive reconstruction accuracy with efficient label consumption.

Haitao Xu, Brendan McCane, Lech Szymanski et al.

We show that reinforcement learning agents that learn by surprise (surprisal) get stuck at abrupt environmental transition boundaries because these transitions are difficult to learn. We propose a counter-intuitive solution that we call Mutual Information Minimising Exploration (MIME) where an agent learns a latent representation of the environment without trying to predict the future states. We show that our agent performs significantly better over sharp transition boundaries while matching the performance of surprisal driven agents elsewhere. In particular, we show state-of-the-art performance on difficult learning games such as Gravitar, Montezuma's Revenge and Doom.

Haitao Xu, Brendan McCane, Lech Szymanski

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We introduce a new definition of surprise and its RL implementation named Variational Assorted Surprise Exploration (VASE). VASE uses a Bayesian neural network as a model of the environment dynamics and is trained using variational inference, alternately updating the accuracy of the agent's model and policy. Our experiments show that in continuous control sparse reward environments VASE outperforms other surprise-based exploration techniques.