Xiaohong Zhang

Han Yang, Qiuli Wang, Yue Zhang et al.

Radiologists possess diverse training and clinical experiences, leading to variations in the segmentation annotations of lung nodules and resulting in segmentation uncertainty.Conventional methods typically select a single annotation as the learning target or attempt to learn a latent space comprising multiple annotations. However, these approaches fail to leverage the valuable information inherent in the consensus and disagreements among the multiple annotations. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Attention Mechanism (UAAM) that utilizes consensus and disagreements among multiple annotations to facilitate better segmentation. To this end, we introduce the Multi-Confidence Mask (MCM), which combines a Low-Confidence (LC) Mask and a High-Confidence (HC) Mask.The LC mask indicates regions with low segmentation confidence, where radiologists may have different segmentation choices. Following UAAM, we further design an Uncertainty-Guide Multi-Confidence Segmentation Network (UGMCS-Net), which contains three modules: a Feature Extracting Module that captures a general feature of a lung nodule, an Uncertainty-Aware Module that produces three features for the the annotations' union, intersection, and annotation set, and an Intersection-Union Constraining Module that uses distances between the three features to balance the predictions of final segmentation and MCM. To comprehensively demonstrate the performance of our method, we propose a Complex Nodule Validation on LIDC-IDRI, which tests UGMCS-Net's segmentation performance on lung nodules that are difficult to segment using common methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the segmentation performance on nodules that are difficult to segment using conventional methods.

Xiaoyu Zhan, Xinyu Fu, Chenghao Yang et al.

Speech-driven gestures and facial animations are fundamental to expressive digital avatars in games, virtual production, and interactive media. However, existing methods are either limited to a single modality for audio motion alignment, failing to fully utilize the potential of massive human motion data, or are constrained by the representation ability and throughput of multimodal models, which makes it difficult to achieve high-quality motion generation or real-time performance. We present UMo, a unified sparse motion modeling architecture for real-time co-speech avatars, which processes text, audio, and motion tokens within a unified formulation. Leveraging a spatially sparse Mixture-of-Experts framework and a temporally sparse, keyframe-centric design, UMo efficiently performs real-time dense reconstruction, enabling temporally coherent and high-fidelity animation generation for both facial expressions and gestures. Furthermore, we implement a multi-stage training strategy with targeted audio augmentation to enhance acoustic diversity and semantic consistency. Consequently, UMo preserves fine-grained speech-motion alignment even under strict latency constraints. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that UMo achieves better output quality under low latency and real-time performance constraints, offering a practical solution for high-fidelity real-time co-speech avatars.

Ziliang Wang, Xiaohong Zhang, Kechi Zhang et al.

Individual objects, whether users or services, within a specific region often exhibit similar network states due to their shared origin from the same city or autonomous system (AS). Despite this regional network similarity, many existing techniques overlook its potential, resulting in subpar performance arising from challenges such as data sparsity and label imbalance. In this paper, we introduce the regional-based dual latent state learning network(R2SL), a novel deep learning framework designed to overcome the pitfalls of traditional individual object-based prediction techniques in Quality of Service (QoS) prediction. Unlike its predecessors, R2SL captures the nuances of regional network behavior by deriving two distinct regional network latent states: the city-network latent state and the AS-network latent state. These states are constructed utilizing aggregated data from common regions rather than individual object data. Furthermore, R2SL adopts an enhanced Huber loss function that adjusts its linear loss component, providing a remedy for prevalent label imbalance issues. To cap off the prediction process, a multi-scale perception network is leveraged to interpret the integrated feature map, a fusion of regional network latent features and other pertinent information, ultimately accomplishing the QoS prediction. Through rigorous testing on real-world QoS datasets, R2SL demonstrates superior performance compared to prevailing state-of-the-art methods. Our R2SL approach ushers in an innovative avenue for precise QoS predictions by fully harnessing the regional network similarities inherent in objects.

Ziliang Wang, Xiaohong Zhang, Ze Shi Li et al.

Accurate Quality of Service (QoS) prediction is essential for enhancing user satisfaction in web recommendation systems, yet existing prediction models often overlook feature noise, focusing predominantly on label noise. In this paper, we present the Probabilistic Deep Supervision Network (PDS-Net), a robust framework designed to effectively identify and mitigate feature noise, thereby improving QoS prediction accuracy. PDS-Net operates with a dual-branch architecture: the main branch utilizes a decoder network to learn a Gaussian-based prior distribution from known features, while the second branch derives a posterior distribution based on true labels. A key innovation of PDS-Net is its condition-based noise recognition loss function, which enables precise identification of noisy features in objects (users or services). Once noisy features are identified, PDS-Net refines the feature's prior distribution, aligning it with the posterior distribution, and propagates this adjusted distribution to intermediate layers, effectively reducing noise interference. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world QoS datasets demonstrate that PDS-Net consistently outperforms existing models, achieving an average improvement of 8.91% in MAE on Dataset D1 and 8.32% on Dataset D2 compared to the ate-of-the-art. These results highlight PDS-Net's ability to accurately capture complex user-service relationships and handle feature noise, underscoring its robustness and versatility across diverse QoS prediction environments.

Jiarui Lv, Feng Zhu, Xiaohong Zhang

Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are fundamental sensing components in multi-source integrated navigation systems, and their performance directly determines the accuracy and reliability of solutions. However, the precision of low-cost IMUs is inherently constrained by hardware limitations. Recently, generative artificial intelligence has demonstrated remarkable capability in modeling complex data distributions and reconstructing high-fidelity signals. Motivated by this, we propose a diffusion-based generative learning framework for synthesizing high-fidelity virtual IMU data from low-cost IMU measurements. Specifically, a conditional diffusion model based on a U-Net architecture is constructed, where high-grade IMU measurements are utilized as ground-truth priors and low-cost IMU measurements are employed as conditional inputs. The virtual IMU data generated by the model is used for subsequent navigation and localization tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated virtual IMU data significantly outperform the original low-cost IMU measurements in both positioning and attitude estimation. Furthermore, we transfer the model to airborne mapping experiments, where the proposed method produces thinner and more consistent point clouds. Overall, the proposed framework breaks the performance limits of low-cost IMU and demonstrates the potential of diffusion-based generative learning for virtual high-grade IMU data.

Tao Yin, Xiaohong Zhang, Jiacheng Zhang et al.

Effectively integrating molecular graph structures with Large Language Models (LLMs) is a key challenge in drug discovery. Most existing multi-modal alignment methods typically process these structures by fine-tuning the LLM or adding a static adapter simultaneously. However, these approaches have two main limitations: (1) it optimizes a shared parameter space across all molecular inputs, limiting the model's ability to capture instance-specific structural features; and (2) fine-tuning the LLM for molecular tasks can lead to catastrophic forgetting, undermining its general reasoning capabilities. In this paper, instead of static task-oriented adaptation, we propose an instance-specific parameter space alignment approach for each molecule on-the-fly. To this end, we introduce Molecule-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (MoRA) that produces a unique set of low-rank adaptation weights for each input molecular graph. These weights are then dynamically injected into a frozen LLM, allowing the model to adapt its reasoning to the structure of each molecular input, while preserving the LLM's core knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that on key molecular tasks, such as chemical reaction prediction and molecular captioning, MoRA's instance-specific dynamic adaptation outperforms statically adapted baselines, including a 14.1% relative improvement in reaction prediction exact match and a 22% reduction in error for quantum property prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/jk-sounds/MoRA.

Tao Yin, Xiaohong Zhang, Shaochen Fu et al.

One main challenge in time series anomaly detection for industrial IoT lies in the complex spatio-temporal couplings within multivariate data. However, traditional anomaly detection methods focus on modeling spatial or temporal dependencies independently, resulting in suboptimal representation learning and limited sensitivity to anomalous dispersion in high-dimensional spaces. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis showing that both normal and anomalous samples tend to scatter in high-dimensional space, especially anomalous samples are markedly more dispersed. We formalize this dispersion phenomenon as scattering, quantified by the mean pairwise distance among sample representations, and leverage it as an inductive signal to enhance spatio-temporal anomaly detection. Technically, we propose ScatterAD to model representation scattering across temporal and topological dimensions. ScatterAD incorporates a topological encoder for capturing graph-structured scattering and a temporal encoder for constraining over-scattering through mean squared error minimization between neighboring time steps. We introduce a contrastive fusion mechanism to ensure the complementarity of the learned temporal and topological representations. Additionally, we theoretically show that maximizing the conditional mutual information between temporal and topological views improves cross-view consistency and enhances more discriminative representations. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show that ScatterAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on multivariate time series anomaly detection. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/jk-sounds/ScatterAD.

Zhihao Shuai, Yinan Chen, Shunqiang Mao et al.

Weakly supervised medical image segmentation (MIS) using generative models is crucial for clinical diagnosis. However, the accuracy of the segmentation results is often limited by insufficient supervision and the complex nature of medical imaging. Existing models also only provide a single outcome, which does not allow for the measurement of uncertainty. In this paper, we introduce DiffSeg, a segmentation model for skin lesions based on diffusion difference which exploits diffusion model principles to ex-tract noise-based features from images with diverse semantic information. By discerning difference between these noise features, the model identifies diseased areas. Moreover, its multi-output capability mimics doctors' annotation behavior, facilitating the visualization of segmentation result consistency and ambiguity. Additionally, it quantifies output uncertainty using Generalized Energy Distance (GED), aiding interpretability and decision-making for physicians. Finally, the model integrates outputs through the Dense Conditional Random Field (DenseCRF) algorithm to refine the segmentation boundaries by considering inter-pixel correlations, which improves the accuracy and optimizes the segmentation results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffSeg on the ISIC 2018 Challenge dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art U-Net-based methods.

Ziliang Wang, Xiaohong Zhang, Ze Shi Li et al.

Accurate prediction of Quality of Service (QoS) metrics is fundamental for selecting and managing cloud based services. Traditional QoS models rely on manual feature engineering and yield only point estimates, offering no insight into the confidence of their predictions. In this paper, we propose QoSBERT, the first framework that reformulates QoS prediction as a semantic regression task based on pre trained language models. Unlike previous approaches relying on sparse numerical features, QoSBERT automatically encodes user service metadata into natural language descriptions, enabling deep semantic understanding. Furthermore, we integrate a Monte Carlo Dropout based uncertainty estimation module, allowing for trustworthy and risk-aware service quality prediction, which is crucial yet underexplored in existing QoS models. QoSBERT applies attentive pooling over contextualized embeddings and a lightweight multilayer perceptron regressor, fine tuned jointly to minimize absolute error. We further exploit the resulting uncertainty estimates to select high quality training samples, improving robustness in low resource settings. On standard QoS benchmark datasets, QoSBERT achieves an average reduction of 11.7% in MAE and 6.7% in RMSE for response time prediction, and 6.9% in MAE for throughput prediction compared to the strongest baselines, while providing well calibrated confidence intervals for robust and trustworthy service quality estimation. Our approach not only advances the accuracy of service quality prediction but also delivers reliable uncertainty quantification, paving the way for more trustworthy, data driven service selection and optimization.

Guowei Yin, Sheng Huang, Luwen Huangfu et al.

Feature quality is paramount for classification performance, particularly in few-shot scenarios. Contrastive learning, a widely adopted technique for enhancing feature quality, leverages sample relations to extract intrinsic features that capture semantic information and has achieved remarkable success in Few-Shot Learning (FSL). Nevertheless, current few-shot contrastive learning approaches often overlook the semantic similarity discrepancies at different granularities when employing the same modeling approach for different sample relations, which limits the potential of few-shot contrastive learning. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet effective contrastive learning approach, Multi-Grained Relation Contrastive Learning (MGRCL), as a pre-training feature learning model to boost few-shot learning by meticulously modeling sample relations at different granularities. MGRCL categorizes sample relations into three types: intra-sample relation of the same sample under different transformations, intra-class relation of homogenous samples, and inter-class relation of inhomogeneous samples. In MGRCL, we design Transformation Consistency Learning (TCL) to ensure the rigorous semantic consistency of a sample under different transformations by aligning predictions of input pairs. Furthermore, to preserve discriminative information, we employ Class Contrastive Learning (CCL) to ensure that a sample is always closer to its homogenous samples than its inhomogeneous ones, as homogenous samples share similar semantic content while inhomogeneous samples have different semantic content. Our method is assessed across four popular FSL benchmarks, showing that such a simple pre-training feature learning method surpasses a majority of leading FSL methods. Moreover, our method can be incorporated into other FSL methods as the pre-trained model and help them obtain significant performance gains.

Yuting Lu, Ziliang Wang, Weixin Xu et al.

Clinical deployment requires segmentation models to stay stable under distribution shifts and perturbations. The mainstream solution is adversarial training (AT) to improve robustness; however, AT often brings a clean--robustness trade-off and high training/tuning cost, which limits scalability and maintainability in medical imaging. We propose \emph{Layer-wise Noise-Guided Selective Wavelet Reconstruction (LNG-SWR)}. During training, we inject small, zero-mean noise at multiple layers to learn a frequency-bias prior that steers representations away from noise-sensitive directions. We then apply prior-guided selective wavelet reconstruction on the input/feature branch to achieve frequency adaptation: suppress noise-sensitive bands, enhance directional structures and shape cues, and stabilize boundary responses while maintaining spectral consistency. The framework is backbone-agnostic and adds low additional inference overhead. It can serve as a plug-in enhancement to AT and also improves robustness without AT. On CT and ultrasound datasets, under a unified protocol with PGD-$L_{\infty}/L_{2}$ and SSAH, LNG-SWR delivers consistent gains on clean Dice/IoU and significantly reduces the performance drop under strong attacks; combining LNG-SWR with AT yields additive gains. When combined with adversarial training, robustness improves further without sacrificing clean accuracy, indicating an engineering-friendly and scalable path to robust segmentation. These results indicate that LNG-SWR provides a simple, effective, and engineering-friendly path to robust medical image segmentation in both adversarial and standard training regimes.

Feng Zhu, Zihang Zhang, Kangcheng Teng et al.

High-precision navigation and positioning systems are critical for applications in autonomous vehicles and mobile mapping, where robust and continuous localization is essential. To test and enhance the performance of algorithms, some research institutions and companies have successively constructed and publicly released datasets. However, existing datasets still suffer from limitations in sensor diversity and environmental coverage. To address these shortcomings and advance development in related fields, the SmartPNT Multisource Integrated Navigation, Positioning, and Attitude Dataset has been developed. This dataset integrates data from multiple sensors, including Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), optical cameras, and LiDAR, to provide a rich and versatile resource for research in multi-sensor fusion and high-precision navigation. The dataset construction process is thoroughly documented, encompassing sensor configurations, coordinate system definitions, and calibration procedures for both cameras and LiDAR. A standardized framework for data collection and processing ensures consistency and scalability, enabling large-scale analysis. Validation using state-of-the-art Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms, such as VINS-Mono and LIO-SAM, demonstrates the dataset's applicability for advanced navigation research. Covering a wide range of real-world scenarios, including urban areas, campuses, tunnels, and suburban environments, the dataset offers a valuable tool for advancing navigation technologies and addressing challenges in complex environments. By providing a publicly accessible, high-quality dataset, this work aims to bridge gaps in sensor diversity, data accessibility, and environmental representation, fostering further innovation in the field.

Fei Ding, Xiaohong Zhang, Justin Sybrandt et al.

Graph representation learning based on graph neural networks (GNNs) can greatly improve the performance of downstream tasks, such as node and graph classification. However, the general GNN models do not aggregate node information in a hierarchical manner, and can miss key higher-order structural features of many graphs. The hierarchical aggregation also enables the graph representations to be explainable. In addition, supervised graph representation learning requires labeled data, which is expensive and error-prone. To address these issues, we present an unsupervised graph representation learning method, Unsupervised Hierarchical Graph Representation (UHGR), which can generate hierarchical representations of graphs. Our method focuses on maximizing mutual information between "local" and high-level "global" representations, which enables us to learn the node embeddings and graph embeddings without any labeled data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we perform the node and graph classification using the learned node and graph embeddings. The results show that the proposed method achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art supervised methods on several benchmarks. In addition, our visualization of hierarchical representations indicates that our method can capture meaningful and interpretable clusters.

Sheng Huang, Dan Yang, Bo Liu et al.

Inspired by the recently remarkable successes of Sparse Representation (SR), Collaborative Representation (CR) and sparse graph, we present a novel hypergraph model named Regression-based Hypergraph (RH) which utilizes the regression models to construct the high quality hypergraphs. Moreover, we plug RH into two conventional hypergraph learning frameworks, namely hypergraph spectral clustering and hypergraph transduction, to present Regression-based Hypergraph Spectral Clustering (RHSC) and Regression-based Hypergraph Transduction (RHT) models for addressing the image clustering and classification issues. Sparse Representation and Collaborative Representation are employed to instantiate two RH instances and their RHSC and RHT algorithms. The experimental results on six popular image databases demonstrate that the proposed RH learning algorithms achieve promising image clustering and classification performances, and also validate that RH can inherit the desirable properties from both hypergraph models and regression models.

Sheng Huang, Dan Yang, Jia Zhou et al.

Motivated by the remarkable successes of Graph-based Transduction (GT) and Sparse Representation (SR), we present a novel Classifier named Sparse Graph-based Classifier (SGC) for image classification. In SGC, SR is leveraged to measure the correlation (similarity) of each two samples and a graph is constructed for encoding these correlations. Then the Laplacian eigenmapping is adopted for deriving the graph Laplacian of the graph. Finally, SGC can be obtained by plugging the graph Laplacian into the conventional GT framework. In the image classification procedure, SGC utilizes the correlations, which are encoded in the learned graph Laplacian, to infer the labels of unlabeled images. SGC inherits the merits of both GT and SR. Compared to SR, SGC improves the robustness and the discriminating power of GT. Compared to GT, SGC sufficiently exploits the whole data. Therefore it alleviates the undercomplete dictionary issue suffered by SR. Four popular image databases are employed for evaluation. The results demonstrate that SGC can achieve a promising performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art classifiers, particularly in the small training sample size case and the noisy sample case.

Sheng Huang, Dan Yang, Haopeng Zhang et al.

We further exploit the representational power of Haar wavelet and present a novel low-level face representation named Shape Primitives Histogram (SPH) for face recognition. Since human faces exist abundant shape features, we address the face representation issue from the perspective of the shape feature extraction. In our approach, we divide faces into a number of tiny shape fragments and reduce these shape fragments to several uniform atomic shape patterns called Shape Primitives. A convolution with Haar Wavelet templates is applied to each shape fragment to identify its belonging shape primitive. After that, we do a histogram statistic of shape primitives in each spatial local image patch for incorporating the spatial information. Finally, each face is represented as a feature vector via concatenating all the local histograms of shape primitives. Four popular face databases, namely ORL, AR, Yale-B and LFW-a databases, are employed to evaluate SPH and experimentally study the choices of the parameters. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperform the state-of-the-arts.

Sheng Huang, Dan Yang, Fei Yang et al.

We present an improved Locality Preserving Projections (LPP) method, named Gloablity-Locality Preserving Projections (GLPP), to preserve both the global and local geometric structures of data. In our approach, an additional constraint of the geometry of classes is imposed to the objective function of conventional LPP for respecting some more global manifold structures. Moreover, we formulate a two-dimensional extension of GLPP (2D-GLPP) as an example to show how to extend GLPP with some other statistical techniques. We apply our works to face recognition on four popular face databases, namely ORL, Yale, FERET and LFW-A databases, and extensive experimental results demonstrate that the considered global manifold information can significantly improve the performance of LPP and the proposed face recognition methods outperform the state-of-the-arts.