Mingyu Zhao

Lipeng Ma, Weidong Yang, Sihang Jiang et al.

Logs play a critical role in providing essential information for system monitoring and troubleshooting. Recently, with the success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP), smaller PLMs (such as BERT) and LLMs (like GPT-4) have become the current mainstream approaches for log analysis. Despite the remarkable capabilities of LLMs, their higher cost and inefficient inference present significant challenges in leveraging the full potential of LLMs to analyze logs. In contrast, smaller PLMs can be fine-tuned for specific tasks even with limited computational resources, making them more practical. However, these smaller PLMs face challenges in understanding logs comprehensively due to their limited expert knowledge. To address the lack of expert knowledge and enhance log understanding for smaller PLMs, this paper introduces a novel and practical knowledge enhancement framework, called LUK, which acquires expert knowledge from LLMs automatically and then enhances the smaller PLM for log analysis with these expert knowledge. LUK can take full advantage of both types of models. Specifically, we design a multi-expert collaboration framework based on LLMs with different roles to acquire expert knowledge. In addition, we propose two novel pre-training tasks to enhance the log pre-training with expert knowledge. LUK achieves state-of-the-art results on different log analysis tasks and extensive experiments demonstrate expert knowledge from LLMs can be utilized more effectively to understand logs. Our source code and detailed experimental data are available at https://github.com/LeaperOvO/LUK.

Sen Zhang, Xiaoxiao He, Di Liu et al.

We present Large Sign Language Models (LSLM), a novel framework for translating 3D American Sign Language (ASL) by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as the backbone, which can benefit hearing-impaired individuals' virtual communication. Unlike existing sign language recognition methods that rely on 2D video, our approach directly utilizes 3D sign language data to capture rich spatial, gestural, and depth information in 3D scenes. This enables more accurate and resilient translation, enhancing digital communication accessibility for the hearing-impaired community. Beyond the task of ASL translation, our work explores the integration of complex, embodied multimodal languages into the processing capabilities of LLMs, moving beyond purely text-based inputs to broaden their understanding of human communication. We investigate both direct translation from 3D gesture features to text and an instruction-guided setting where translations can be modulated by external prompts, offering greater flexibility. This work provides a foundational step toward inclusive, multimodal intelligent systems capable of understanding diverse forms of language.

Mingyu Zhao, Haoran Bai, Yu Tian et al.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) prediction, a central problem in modern marketing, is characterized by a unique zero-inflated and long-tail data distribution. This distribution presents two fundamental challenges: (1) the vast majority of low-to-medium value users numerically overwhelm the small but critically important segment of high-value "whale" users, and (2) significant value heterogeneity exists even within the low-to-medium value user base. Common approaches either rely on rigid statistical assumptions or attempt to decouple ranking and regression using ordered buckets; however, they often enforce ordinality through loss-based constraints rather than inherent architectural design, failing to balance global accuracy with high-value precision. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{C}ascaded \textbf{O}rdinal-\textbf{R}esidual Networks \textbf{(CC-OR-Net)}, a novel unified framework that achieves a more robust decoupling through \textbf{structural decomposition}, where ranking is architecturally guaranteed. CC-OR-Net integrates three specialized components: a \textit{structural ordinal decomposition module} for robust ranking, an \textit{intra-bucket residual module} for fine-grained regression, and a \textit{targeted high-value augmentation module} for precision on top-tier users. Evaluated on real-world datasets with over 300M users, CC-OR-Net achieves a superior trade-off across all key business metrics, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in creating a holistic and commercially valuable LTV prediction solution.

Han Li, Vibhor Malik, Zahra Zanjani Foumani et al.

A/B testing remains the gold standard for evaluating modifications to e-commerce storefronts, yet it diverts traffic, requires weeks to reach statistical significance, and risks degrading user experience. We present SimGym, a framework for simulating A/B tests on e-commerce storefronts using vision-language model (VLM) agents operating in a live browser. The framework comprises three key components: (a) a traffic-grounded persona generation pipeline that derives per-shop buyer archetypes and intents from production clickstream data; (b) a live-browser agent architecture that combines multimodal perception over visual and browser-structured observations with episodic memory and guardrails to conduct coherent shopping sessions across control and treatment storefronts; and (c) an evaluation protocol that compares simulated outcome shifts with observed shifts in real buyer behavior. We validate SimGym on A/B tests of visually driven UI theme changes from a major e-commerce platform across diverse storefronts and product categories. Empirical results show that SimGym agents achieve strong agreement with observed outcome shifts, attaining 77% directional alignment with add-to-cart shifts observed across interface variants in real-buyer traffic. It reduces experimental cycles from weeks to under an hour, enabling rapid experimentation without exposing real buyers to candidate variants.

Mingyu Zhao, Xingyu Huang, Ziyu Lyu et al.

Graph learning methods have been extensively applied in diverse application areas. However, what kind of inherent graph properties e.g. graph proximity, graph structural information has been encoded into graph representation learning for downstream tasks is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel graph probing framework (GraphProbe) to investigate and interpret whether the family of graph learning methods has encoded different levels of knowledge in graph representation learning. Based on the intrinsic properties of graphs, we design three probes to systematically investigate the graph representation learning process from different perspectives, respectively the node-wise level, the path-wise level, and the structural level. We construct a thorough evaluation benchmark with nine representative graph learning methods from random walk based approaches, basic graph neural networks and self-supervised graph methods, and probe them on six benchmark datasets for node classification, link prediction and graph classification. The experimental evaluation verify that GraphProbe can estimate the capability of graph representation learning. Remaking results have been concluded: GCN and WeightedGCN methods are relatively versatile methods achieving better results with respect to different tasks.

Can Jin, Ying Li, Mingyu Zhao et al.

Visual prompting has gained popularity as a method for adapting pre-trained models to specific tasks, particularly in the realm of parameter-efficient tuning. However, existing visual prompting techniques often pad the prompt parameters around the image, limiting the interaction between the visual prompts and the original image to a small set of patches while neglecting the inductive bias present in shared information across different patches. In this study, we conduct a thorough preliminary investigation to identify and address these limitations. We propose a novel visual prompt design, introducing Low-Rank matrix multiplication for Visual Prompting (LoR-VP), which enables shared and patch-specific information across rows and columns of image pixels. Extensive experiments across seven network architectures and four datasets demonstrate significant improvements in both performance and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art visual prompting methods, achieving up to 6 times faster training times, utilizing 18 times fewer visual prompt parameters, and delivering a 3.1% improvement in performance. The code is available as https://github.com/jincan333/LoR-VP.

Chinmay Savadikar, Mingyu Zhao, Yuanzheng Zhu et al.

Developing and evaluating e-commerce web agents requires environments that preserve meaningful task structure while enabling controllable, reproducible, and scalable scientific comparison. Existing methodologies force a tradeoff: live storefronts provide realism but are non-stationary, difficult to inspect, and irreproducible, while hand-built sandbox benchmarks provide control but cover only a narrow range of layouts, catalogs, policies, and interaction patterns. We argue that the core bottleneck is methodological: the field lacks a scalable way to construct evaluation settings that are simultaneously realistic, diverse, controllable, inspectable, and reproducible. We introduce ShopGym, an integrated framework for realistic simulation and scalable benchmarking of e-commerce web agents. ShopGym is a framework for constructing e-commerce simulation environments and grounded benchmark tasks. Its simulation layer, ShopArena, converts live seed storefronts into self-contained sandbox shops through anonymized shop specifications and a staged, validated generation process. On top of these simulated storefronts, ShopGuru synthesizes benchmark tasks across seven skill categories, grounding each task in the shop's catalog, navigation structure, policies, and interaction affordances. Together, ShopArena and ShopGuru produce self-contained, resettable, inspectable, and stable evaluation artifacts that preserve structural properties and agent-evaluation signals relevant to shopping tasks. We validate the framework through graph-based structural analysis and agent-based behavioral evaluation with 224 generated tasks across six sandbox shops: three constructed with synthetic data and three with real data. Our results show that the synthetic shops preserve key structural properties of live storefronts, with agent performance on synthetic shops positively correlated with performance on live storefronts.

Yang Zhou, Mingyu Zhao, Zhenting Wang et al.

We present M^3-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating multimodal tool use under the Model Context Protocol. The benchmark targets realistic, multi-hop and multi-threaded workflows that require visual grounding and textual reasoning, cross-tool dependencies, and persistence of intermediate resources across steps. We introduce a similarity-driven alignment that serializes each tool call, embeds signatures with a sentence encoder, and performs similarity-bucketed Hungarian matching to obtain auditable one-to-one correspondences. On top of this alignment, we report interpretable metrics that decouple semantic fidelity from workflow consistency. The benchmark spans 28 servers with 231 tools, and provides standardized trajectories curated through an Executor & Judge pipeline with human verification; an auxiliary four large language models (LLMs) judge ensemble reports end-task Task Completion and information grounding. Evaluations of representative state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) reveal persistent gaps in multimodal MCP tool use, particularly in argument fidelity and structure consistency, underscoring the need for methods that jointly reason over images, text, and tool graphs. Our Benchmark's anonymous repository is at https://github.com/EtaYang10th/Open-M3-Bench

Zhan Li, Mingyu Zhao, Xin Dong et al.

Projector-based adversarial attack aims to project carefully designed light patterns (i.e., adversarial projections) onto scenes to deceive deep image classifiers. It has potential applications in privacy protection and the development of more robust classifiers. However, existing approaches primarily focus on individual classifiers and fixed camera poses, often neglecting the complexities of multi-classifier systems and scenarios with varying camera poses. This limitation reduces their effectiveness when introducing new classifiers or camera poses. In this paper, we introduce Classifier-Agnostic Projector-Based Adversarial Attack (CAPAA) to address these issues. First, we develop a novel classifier-agnostic adversarial loss and optimization framework that aggregates adversarial and stealthiness loss gradients from multiple classifiers. Then, we propose an attention-based gradient weighting mechanism that concentrates perturbations on regions of high classification activation, thereby improving the robustness of adversarial projections when applied to scenes with varying camera poses. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that CAPAA achieves both a higher attack success rate and greater stealthiness compared to existing baselines. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ZhanLiQxQ/CAPAA.

Alberto Castelo, Zahra Zanjani Foumani, Ailin Fan et al.

A/B testing remains the gold standard for evaluating e-commerce UI changes, yet it diverts traffic, takes weeks to reach significance, and risks harming user experience. We introduce SimGym, a scalable system for rapid offline A/B testing using traffic-grounded synthetic buyers powered by Large Language Model agents operating in a live browser. SimGym extracts per-shop buyer profiles and intents from production interaction data, identifies distinct behavioral archetypes, and simulates cohort-weighted sessions across control and treatment storefronts. We validate SimGym against real human outcomes from real UI changes on a major e-commerce platform under confounder control. Even without alignment post training, SimGym agents achieve state of the art alignment with observed outcome shifts and reduces experiment cycles from weeks to under an hour , enabling rapid experimentation without exposure to real buyers.

Mingyu Zhao, Zhanfu Yang, Yang Zhou et al.

This paper employs a multimodal approach for continuous sign recognition by first using ML for detecting the start and end frames of signs in videos of American Sign Language (ASL) sentences, and then by recognizing the segmented signs. For improved robustness we use 3D skeletal features extracted from sign language videos to take into account the convergence of sign properties and their dynamics that tend to cluster at sign boundaries. Another focus of this paper is the incorporation of information from 3D handshape for boundary detection. To detect handshapes normally expected at the beginning and end of signs, we pretrain a handshape classifier for detection of 87 linguistically defined canonical handshape categories using a dataset that we created by integrating and normalizing several existing datasets. A multimodal fusion module is then used to unify the pretrained sign video segmentation framework and handshape classification models. Finally, the estimated boundaries are used for sign recognition, where the recognition model is trained on a large database containing both citation-form isolated signs and signs pre-segmented (based on manual annotations) from continuous signing-as such signs often differ a bit in certain respects. We evaluate our method on the ASLLRP corpus and demonstrate significant improvements over previous work.