Rui Yao

Jiaqi Zhao, Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou et al.

Oriented object detection in remote sensing images is a challenging task due to objects being distributed in multi-orientation. Recently, end-to-end transformer-based methods have achieved success by eliminating the need for post-processing operators compared to traditional CNN-based methods. However, directly extending transformers to oriented object detection presents three main issues: 1) objects rotate arbitrarily, necessitating the encoding of angles along with position and size; 2) the geometric relations of oriented objects are lacking in self-attention, due to the absence of interaction between content and positional queries; and 3) oriented objects cause misalignment, mainly between values and positional queries in cross-attention, making accurate classification and localization difficult. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based oriented object detector, consisting of three dedicated modules to address these issues. First, Gaussian positional encoding is proposed to encode the angle, position, and size of oriented boxes using Gaussian distributions. Second, Wasserstein self-attention is proposed to introduce geometric relations and facilitate interaction between content and positional queries by utilizing Gaussian Wasserstein distance scores. Third, oriented cross-attention is proposed to align values and positional queries by rotating sampling points around the positional query according to their angles. Experiments on six datasets DIOR-R, a series of DOTA, HRSC2016 and ICDAR2015 show the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with previous end-to-end detectors, the OrientedFormer gains 1.16 and 1.21 AP$_{50}$ on DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 respectively, while reducing training epochs from 3$\times$ to 1$\times$. The codes are available at https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/OrientedFormer.

Jiaqi Zhao, Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou et al.

Oriented object detection presents a challenging task due to the presence of object instances with multiple orientations, varying scales, and dense distributions. Recently, end-to-end detectors have made significant strides by employing attention mechanisms and refining a fixed number of queries through consecutive decoder layers. However, existing end-to-end oriented object detectors still face two primary challenges: 1) misalignment between positional queries and keys, leading to inconsistency between classification and localization; and 2) the presence of a large number of similar queries, which complicates one-to-one label assignments and optimization. To address these limitations, we propose an end-to-end oriented detector called the Rotated Query Transformer, which integrates two key technologies: Rotated RoI Attention (RRoI Attention) and Selective Distinct Queries (SDQ). First, RRoI Attention aligns positional queries and keys from oriented regions of interest through cross-attention. Second, SDQ collects queries from intermediate decoder layers and filters out similar ones to generate distinct queries, thereby facilitating the optimization of one-to-one label assignments. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on four remote sensing datasets and one scene text dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To further validate its generalization capability, we also extend our approach to horizontal object detection The code is available at \url{https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/RQFormer}.

Yuchen Su, Zhiwen Shao, Yong Zhou et al.

Arbitrary-shaped scene text detection is a challenging task due to the variety of text changes in font, size, color, and orientation. Most existing regression based methods resort to regress the masks or contour points of text regions to model the text instances. However, regressing the complete masks requires high training complexity, and contour points are not sufficient to capture the details of highly curved texts. To tackle the above limitations, we propose a novel light-weight anchor-free text detection framework called TextDCT, which adopts the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to encode the text masks as compact vectors. Further, considering the imbalanced number of training samples among pyramid layers, we only employ a single-level head for top-down prediction. To model the multi-scale texts in a single-level head, we introduce a novel positive sampling strategy by treating the shrunk text region as positive samples, and design a feature awareness module (FAM) for spatial-awareness and scale-awareness by fusing rich contextual information and focusing on more significant features. Moreover, we propose a segmented non-maximum suppression (S-NMS) method that can filter low-quality mask regressions. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, which demonstrate our TextDCT obtains competitive performance on both accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, TextDCT achieves F-measure of 85.1 at 17.2 frames per second (FPS) and F-measure of 84.9 at 15.1 FPS for CTW1500 and Total-Text datasets, respectively.

Rui Yao, Shaowei Huang, Kai Sun et al.

In the risk assessment of cascading outages, the rationality of simulation and efficiency of computation are both of great significance. To overcome the drawback of sampling-based methods that huge computation resources are required and the shortcoming of initial contingency selection practices that the dependencies in sequences of outages are omitted, this paper proposes a novel risk assessment approach by searching on Markovian Tree. The Markovian tree model is reformulated from the quasi-dynamic multi-timescale simulation model proposed recently to ensure reasonable modeling and simulation of cascading outages. Then a tree search scheme is established to avoid duplicated simulations on same cascade paths, significantly saving computation time. To accelerate the convergence of risk assessment, a risk estimation index is proposed to guide the search for states with major contributions to the risk, and the risk assessment is realized based on the risk estimation index with a forward tree search and backward update algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated on a 4-node power system, and its convergence profile as well as efficiency is demonstrated on the RTS-96 test system.

Zhiwen Shao, Yuchen Su, Yong Zhou et al.

Contour based scene text detection methods have rapidly developed recently, but still suffer from inaccurate frontend contour initialization, multi-stage error accumulation, or deficient local information aggregation. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel arbitrary-shaped scene text detection framework named CT-Net by progressive contour regression with contour transformers. Specifically, we first employ a contour initialization module that generates coarse text contours without any post-processing. Then, we adopt contour refinement modules to adaptively refine text contours in an iterative manner, which are beneficial for context information capturing and progressive global contour deformation. Besides, we propose an adaptive training strategy to enable the contour transformers to learn more potential deformation paths, and introduce a re-score mechanism that can effectively suppress false positives. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, which demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our CT-Net over state-of-the-art methods. Particularly, CT-Net achieves F-measure of 86.1 at 11.2 frames per second (FPS) and F-measure of 87.8 at 10.1 FPS for CTW1500 and Total-Text datasets, respectively.

Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou, Jiaqi Zhao et al.

Recent real-time detection transformers have gained popularity due to their simplicity and efficiency. However, these detectors do not explicitly model object rotation, especially in remote sensing imagery where objects appear at arbitrary angles, leading to challenges in angle representation, matching cost, and training stability. In this paper, we propose a real-time oriented object detection transformer, the first real-time end-to-end oriented object detector to the best of our knowledge, that addresses the above issues. Specifically, angle distribution refinement is proposed to reformulate angle regression as an iterative refinement of probability distributions, thereby capturing the uncertainty of object rotation and providing a more fine-grained angle representation. Then, we incorporate a Chamfer distance cost into bipartite matching, measuring box distance via vertex sets, enabling more accurate geometric alignment and eliminating ambiguous matches. Moreover, we propose oriented contrastive denoising to stabilize training and analyze four noise modes. We observe that a ground truth can be assigned to different index queries across different decoder layers, and analyze this issue using the proposed instability metric. We design a series of model variants and experiments to validate the proposed method. Notably, our O2-DFINE-L, O2-RTDETR-R50 and O2-DEIM-R50 achieve 77.73%/78.45%/80.15% AP50 on DOTA1.0 and 132/119/119 FPS on the 2080ti GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/ai4rs.

Zhicheng Li, Kunyang Sun, Rui Yao et al.

Video shadow detection confronts two entwined difficulties: distinguishing shadows from complex backgrounds and modeling dynamic shadow deformations under varying illumination. To address shadow-background ambiguity, we leverage linguistic priors through the proposed Vision-language Match Module (VMM) and a Dark-aware Semantic Block (DSB), extracting text-guided features to explicitly differentiate shadows from dark objects. Furthermore, we introduce adaptive mask reweighting to downweight penumbra regions during training and apply edge masks at the final decoder stage for better supervision. For temporal modeling of variable shadow shapes, we propose a Tokenized Temporal Block (TTB) that decouples spatiotemporal learning. TTB summarizes cross-frame shadow semantics into learnable temporal tokens, enabling efficient sequence encoding with minimal computation overhead. Comprehensive Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and real-time inference efficiency. Codes are available at https://github.com/city-cheng/DTTNet.

Constantinos Daskalakis, Patroklos Stefanou, Rui Yao et al.

Truncated linear regression is a classical challenge in Statistics, wherein a label, $y = w^T x + \varepsilon$, and its corresponding feature vector, $x \in \mathbb{R}^k$, are only observed if the label falls in some subset $S \subseteq \mathbb{R}$; otherwise the existence of the pair $(x, y)$ is hidden from observation. Linear regression with truncated observations has remained a challenge, in its general form, since the early works of~\citet{tobin1958estimation,amemiya1973regression}. When the distribution of the error is normal with known variance, recent work of~\citet{daskalakis2019truncatedregression} provides computationally and statistically efficient estimators of the linear model, $w$. In this paper, we provide the first computationally and statistically efficient estimators for truncated linear regression when the noise variance is unknown, estimating both the linear model and the variance of the noise. Our estimator is based on an efficient implementation of Projected Stochastic Gradient Descent on the negative log-likelihood of the truncated sample. Importantly, we show that the error of our estimates is asymptotically normal, and we use this to provide explicit confidence regions for our estimates.

Mogens Fosgerau, Nikolaj Nielsen, Mads Paulsen et al.

This paper develops a sensitivity analysis framework for the perturbed utility route choice (PURC) model and the accompanying stochastic traffic equilibrium model. We derive analytical sensitivity expressions for the Jacobian of the individual optimal PURC flow and equilibrium link flows with respect to link cost parameters under general assumptions. This allows us to determine the marginal change in link flows following a marginal change in link costs across the network. We show how to implement these results while exploiting the sparsity generated by the PURC model. Numerical examples illustrate the use of our method for estimating equilibrium link flows after link cost shifts, identifying critical design parameters, and quantifying uncertainty in performance predictions. Finally, we demonstrate the method in a large-scale example. The findings have implications for network design, pricing strategies, and policy analysis in transportation planning and economics, providing a bridge between theoretical models and real-world applications.

Rui Yao, Kai Sun, Feng Liu et al.

Since cascading outages are major threats to power systems, it is important to reduce the risk of potential cascading outages. In this paper, a risk management method of cascading outages based on Markovian tree search is proposed. With the tree expansion on the cascading outage risk, risk gradient is computed efficiently by a forward-backward tree search scheme with good convergence, and it is then employed in an optimization model to minimize control cost while effectively reducing the cascading outage risk. To overcome the limitation with linearization in computing risk gradient, an iterative risk management (IRM) approach is further developed. Tests on the RTS-96 3-area system verify the accuracy of the computed risk gradient and its effectiveness for risk reduction. Time performance of the proposed IRM approach is tested on the RTS-96 system, a 410-bus US-Canada northeast system and a 1354-bus Mid-European system, and demonstrates its potentials for decision support on practical power systems online or on hourly basis.

Hancheng Zhu, Xinyu Liu, Rui Yao et al.

Image retouching has received significant attention due to its ability to achieve high-quality visual content. Existing approaches mainly rely on uniform pixel-wise color mapping across entire images, neglecting the inherent color variations induced by image content. This limitation hinders existing approaches from achieving adaptive retouching that accommodates both diverse color distributions and user-defined style preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Content-Adaptive image retouching method guided by Attribute-based Text Representation (CA-ATP). Specifically, we propose a content-adaptive curve mapping module, which leverages a series of basis curves to establish multiple color mapping relationships and learns the corresponding weight maps, enabling content-aware color adjustments. The proposed module can capture color diversity within the image content, allowing similar color values to receive distinct transformations based on their spatial context. In addition, we propose an attribute text prediction module that generates text representations from multiple image attributes, which explicitly represent user-defined style preferences. These attribute-based text representations are subsequently integrated with visual features via a multimodal model, providing user-friendly guidance for image retouching. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Constantinos Daskalakis, Vardis Kandiros, Rui Yao

We study the problem of learning the topology of a directed Gaussian Graphical Model under the equal-variance assumption, where the graph has $n$ nodes and maximum in-degree $d$. Prior work has established that $O(d \log n)$ samples are sufficient for this task. However, an important factor that is often overlooked in these analyses is the dependence on the condition number of the covariance matrix of the model. Indeed, all algorithms from prior work require a number of samples that grows polynomially with this condition number. In many cases this is unsatisfactory, since the condition number could grow polynomially with $n$, rendering these prior approaches impractical in high-dimensional settings. In this work, we provide an algorithm that recovers the underlying graph and prove that the number of samples required is independent of the condition number. Furthermore, we establish lower bounds that nearly match the upper bound up to a $d$-factor, thus providing an almost tight characterization of the true sample complexity of the problem. Moreover, under a further assumption that all the variances of the variables are bounded, we design a polynomial-time algorithm that recovers the underlying graph, at the cost of an additional polynomial dependence of the sample complexity on $d$. We complement our theoretical findings with simulations on synthetic datasets that confirm our predictions.

Constantinos Daskalakis, Vardis Kandiros, Rui Yao

We consider the problem of estimating Ising models over $n$ variables in Total Variation (TV) distance, given $l$ independent samples from the model. While the statistical complexity of the problem is well-understood [DMR20], identifying computationally and statistically efficient algorithms has been challenging. In particular, remarkable progress has occurred in several settings, such as when the underlying graph is a tree [DP21, BGPV21], when the entries of the interaction matrix follow a Gaussian distribution [GM24, CK24], or when the bulk of its eigenvalues lie in a small interval [AJK+24, KLV24], but no unified framework for polynomial-time estimation in TV exists so far. Our main contribution is a unified analysis of the Maximum Pseudo-Likelihood Estimator (MPLE) for two general classes of Ising models. The first class includes models that have bounded operator norm and satisfy the Modified Log-Sobolev Inequality (MLSI), a functional inequality that was introduced to study the convergence of the associated Glauber dynamics to stationarity. In the second class of models, the interaction matrix has bounded infinity norm (or bounded width), which is the most common assumption in the literature for structure learning of Ising models. We show how our general results for these classes yield polynomial-time algorithms and optimal or near-optimal sample complexity guarantees in a variety of settings. Our proofs employ a variety of tools from tensorization inequalities to measure decompositions and concentration bounds.

Jiayao Tan, Fan Lyu, Linyan Li et al.

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) perception is an innovative technology that enhances vehicle perception accuracy, thereby elevating the security and reliability of autonomous systems. However, existing V2X perception methods focus on static scenes from mainly vehicle-based vision, which is constrained by sensor capabilities and communication loads. To adapt V2X perception models to dynamic scenes, we propose to build V2X perception from road-to-vehicle vision and present Adaptive Road-to-Vehicle Perception (AR2VP) method. In AR2VP,we leverage roadside units to offer stable, wide-range sensing capabilities and serve as communication hubs. AR2VP is devised to tackle both intra-scene and inter-scene changes. For the former, we construct a dynamic perception representing module, which efficiently integrates vehicle perceptions, enabling vehicles to capture a more comprehensive range of dynamic factors within the scene.Moreover, we introduce a road-to-vehicle perception compensating module, aimed at preserving the maximized roadside unit perception information in the presence of intra-scene changes.For inter-scene changes, we implement an experience replay mechanism leveraging the roadside unit's storage capacity to retain a subset of historical scene data, maintaining model robustness in response to inter-scene shifts. We conduct perception experiment on 3D object detection and segmentation, and the results show that AR2VP excels in both performance-bandwidth trade-offs and adaptability within dynamic environments.

Junhao Chen, Yu Huang, Siyuan Li et al.

Multi-Turn Long-Form Question Answering (MT-LFQA) is a key application paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive domains. However, existing benchmarks are limited to single-turn dialogue, while multi-turn dialogue benchmarks typically assess other orthogonal capabilities rather than knowledge-intensive factuality. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce \textbf{KnowMT-Bench}, the \textit{first-ever} benchmark designed to systematically evaluate MT-LFQA for LLMs across knowledge-intensive fields, including medicine, finance, and law. To faithfully assess the model's real-world performance, KnowMT-Bench employs a dynamic evaluation setting where models generate their own multi-turn dialogue histories given logically progressive question sequences. The factual capability and information delivery efficiency of the \textit{final-turn} answer are then evaluated using a human-validated automated pipeline. Our experiments reveal that multi-turn contexts degrade performance: factual capability declines due to the contextual noise from self-generated histories, while information efficiency drops as models become more verbose with increasing dialogue length. We then investigate mitigation strategies, demonstrating that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can effectively alleviate and even reverse this factual degradation. These findings underscore the importance of our benchmark in evaluating and enhancing the conversational factual capabilities of LLMs in real-world knowledge-intensive applications. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/hardenyu21/KnowMT-Bench}{\textcolor{cyan}{\texttt{KnowMT-Bench}}}.

Shenglan Li, Rui Yao, Yong Zhou et al.

To reduce the reliance on large-scale annotations, self-supervised RGB-T tracking approaches have garnered significant attention. However, the omission of the object region by erroneous pseudo-label or the introduction of background noise affects the efficiency of modality fusion, while pseudo-label noise triggered by similar object noise can further affect the tracking performance. In this paper, we propose GDSTrack, a novel approach that introduces dynamic graph fusion and temporal diffusion to address the above challenges in self-supervised RGB-T tracking. GDSTrack dynamically fuses the modalities of neighboring frames, treats them as distractor noise, and leverages the denoising capability of a generative model. Specifically, by constructing an adjacency matrix via an Adjacency Matrix Generator (AMG), the proposed Modality-guided Dynamic Graph Fusion (MDGF) module uses a dynamic adjacency matrix to guide graph attention, focusing on and fusing the object's coherent regions. Temporal Graph-Informed Diffusion (TGID) models MDGF features from neighboring frames as interference, and thus improving robustness against similar-object noise. Extensive experiments conducted on four public RGB-T tracking datasets demonstrate that GDSTrack outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiShenglana/GDSTrack.

Zhenhuan Zhou, Along He, Yanlin Wu et al.

In medical images, various types of lesions often manifest significant differences in their shape and texture. Accurate medical image segmentation demands deep learning models with robust capabilities in multi-scale and boundary feature learning. However, previous networks still have limitations in addressing the above issues. Firstly, previous networks simultaneously fuse multi-level features or employ deep supervision to enhance multi-scale learning. However, this may lead to feature redundancy and excessive computational overhead, which is not conducive to network training and clinical deployment. Secondly, the majority of medical image segmentation networks exclusively learn features in the spatial domain, disregarding the abundant global information in the frequency domain. This results in a bias towards low-frequency components, neglecting crucial high-frequency information. To address these problems, we introduce SF-UNet, a spatial-frequency dual-domain attention network. It comprises two main components: the Multi-scale Progressive Channel Attention (MPCA) block, which progressively extract multi-scale features across adjacent encoder layers, and the lightweight Frequency-Spatial Attention (FSA) block, with only 0.05M parameters, enabling concurrent learning of texture and boundary features from both spatial and frequency domains. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed SF-UNet on three public datasets. Experimental results show that compared to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) medical image segmentation networks, SF-UNet achieves the best performance, and achieves up to 9.4\% and 10.78\% improvement in DSC and IOU. Codes will be released at https://github.com/nkicsl/SF-UNet.

Cunyuan Gao, Yi Hu, Yi Zhang et al.

In this work, we present our solution to the vehicle re-identification (vehicle Re-ID) track in AI City Challenge 2020 (AIC2020). The purpose of vehicle Re-ID is to retrieve the same vehicle appeared across multiple cameras, and it could make a great contribution to the Intelligent Traffic System(ITS) and smart city. Due to the vehicle's orientation, lighting and inter-class similarity, it is difficult to achieve robust and discriminative representation feature. For the vehicle Re-ID track in AIC2020, our method is to fuse features extracted from different networks in order to take advantages of these networks and achieve complementary features. For each single model, several methods such as multi-loss, filter grafting, semi-supervised are used to increase the representation ability as better as possible. Top performance in City-Scale Multi-Camera Vehicle Re-Identification demonstrated the advantage of our methods, and we got 5-th place in the vehicle Re-ID track of AIC2020. The codes are available at https://github.com/gggcy/AIC2020_ReID.

Siqi Feng, Rui Yao, Stephane Hess et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently present behaviorally irregular patterns, significantly limiting their practical potentials and theoretical validity in travel behavior modeling. This study proposes strong and weak behavioral regularities as novel metrics to evaluate the monotonicity of individual demand functions (known as the "law of demand"), and further designs a constrained optimization framework with six gradient regularizers to enhance DNNs' behavioral regularity. The proposed framework is applied to travel survey data from Chicago and London to examine the trade-off between predictive power and behavioral regularity for large vs. small sample scenarios and in-domain vs. out-of-domain generalizations. The results demonstrate that, unlike models with strong behavioral foundations such as the multinomial logit, the benchmark DNNs cannot guarantee behavioral regularity. However, gradient regularization (GR) increases DNNs' behavioral regularity by around 6 percentage points (pp) while retaining their relatively high predictive power. In the small sample scenario, GR is more effective than in the large sample scenario, simultaneously improving behavioral regularity by about 20 pp and log-likelihood by around 1.7%. Comparing with the in-domain generalization of DNNs, GR works more effectively in out-of-domain generalization: it drastically improves the behavioral regularity of poorly performing benchmark DNNs by around 65 pp, indicating the criticality of behavioral regularization for enhancing model transferability and application in forecasting. Moreover, the proposed framework is applicable to other NN-based choice models such as TasteNets. Future studies could use behavioral regularity as a metric along with log-likelihood in evaluating travel demand models, and investigate other methods to further enhance behavioral regularity when adopting complex machine learning models.

Idan Attias, Yuval Dagan, Constantinos Daskalakis et al.

We propose a new algorithm that finds an $\varepsilon$-approximate fixed point of a smooth function from the $n$-dimensional $\ell_2$ unit ball to itself. We use the general framework of finding approximate solutions to a variational inequality, a problem that subsumes fixed point computation and the computation of a Nash Equilibrium. The algorithm's runtime is bounded by $e^{O(n)}/\varepsilon$, under the smoothed-analysis framework. This is the first known algorithm in such a generality whose runtime is faster than $(1/\varepsilon)^{O(n)}$, which is a time that suffices for an exhaustive search. We complement this result with a lower bound of $e^{Ω(n)}$ on the query complexity for finding an $O(1)$-approximate fixed point on the unit ball, which holds even in the smoothed-analysis model, yet without the assumption that the function is smooth. Existing lower bounds are only known for the hypercube, and adapting them to the ball does not give non-trivial results even for finding $O(1/\sqrt{n})$-approximate fixed points.

Bing Liu, Le Wang, Mingming Liu et al.

Existing dehazing methods deal with real-world haze images with difficulty, especially scenes with thick haze. One of the main reasons is the lack of real-world paired data and robust priors. To avoid the costly collection of paired hazy and clear images, we propose an efficient semi-supervised image dehazing method via Expectation-Maximization and Bidirectional Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models (EM-B3DM) with a two-stage learning scheme. In the first stage, we employ the EM algorithm to decouple the joint distribution of paired hazy and clear images into two conditional distributions, which are then modeled using a unified Brownian Bridge diffusion model to directly capture the structural and content-related correlations between hazy and clear images. In the second stage, we leverage the pre-trained model and large-scale unpaired hazy and clear images to further improve the performance of image dehazing. Additionally, we introduce a detail-enhanced Residual Difference Convolution block (RDC) to capture gradient-level information, significantly enhancing the model's representation capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EM-B3DM achieves superior or at least comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Rui Yao, Qi Chai, Jinhai Yao et al.

"Fedspeak", the stylized and often nuanced language used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, encodes implicit policy signals and strategic stances. The Federal Open Market Committee strategically employs Fedspeak as a communication tool to shape market expectations and influence both domestic and global economic conditions. As such, automatically parsing and interpreting Fedspeak presents a high-impact challenge, with significant implications for financial forecasting, algorithmic trading, and data-driven policy analysis. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based, uncertainty-aware framework for deciphering Fedspeak and classifying its underlying monetary policy stance. Technically, to enrich the semantic and contextual representation of Fedspeak texts, we incorporate domain-specific reasoning grounded in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We further introduce a dynamic uncertainty decoding module to assess the confidence of model predictions, thereby enhancing both classification accuracy and model reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the policy stance analysis task. Moreover, statistical analysis reveals a significant positive correlation between perceptual uncertainty and model error rates, validating the effectiveness of perceptual uncertainty as a diagnostic signal.

Rui Yao, Shlomo Bekhor

This paper derives the generalized extreme value (GEV) model with implicit availability/perception (IAP) of alternatives and proposes a variational autoencoder (VAE) approach for choice set generation and implicit perception of alternatives. Specifically, the cross-nested logit (CNL) model with IAP is derived as an example of IAP-GEV models. The VAE approach is adapted to model the choice set generation process, in which the likelihood of perceiving chosen alternatives in the choice set is maximized. The VAE approach for route choice set generation is exemplified using a real dataset. IAP- CNL model estimated has the best performance in terms of goodness-of-fit and prediction performance, compared to multinomial logit models and conventional choice set generation methods.

Yichen Zhang, Hantao Cui, Jianzhe Liu et al.

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy, frequency response and its security are of significant concerns for reliable power system operations. Frequency-constrained unit commitment (FCUC) is proposed to address this challenge. Despite existing efforts in modeling frequency characteristics in unit commitment (UC), current strategies can only handle oversimplified low-order frequency response models and do not consider wide-range operating conditions. This paper presents a generic data-driven framework for FCUC under high renewable penetration. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are trained to predict the frequency response using real data or high-fidelity simulation data. Next, the DNN is reformulated as a set of mixed-integer linear constraints to be incorporated into the ordinary UC formulation. In the data generation phase, all possible power injections are considered, and a region-of-interests active sampling is proposed to include power injection samples with frequency nadirs closer to the UFLC threshold, which significantly enhances the accuracy of frequency constraints in FCUC. The proposed FCUC is verified on the the IEEE 39-bus system. Then, a full-order dynamic model simulation using PSS/E verifies the effectiveness of FCUC in frequency-secure generator commitments.

Chi Zhang, Guankai Li, Guosheng Lin et al.

Image co-segmentation is an active computer vision task that aims to segment the common objects from a set of images. Recently, researchers design various learning-based algorithms to undertake the co-segmentation task. The main difficulty in this task is how to effectively transfer information between images to make conditional predictions. In this paper, we present CycleSegNet, a novel framework for the co-segmentation task. Our network design has two key components: a region correspondence module which is the basic operation for exchanging information between local image regions, and a cycle refinement module, which utilizes ConvLSTMs to progressively update image representations and exchange information in a cycle and iterative manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four popular benchmark datasets -- PASCAL VOC dataset, MSRC dataset, Internet dataset, and iCoseg dataset, by 2.6%, 7.7%, 2.2%, and 2.9%, respectively.

Yichen Zhang, Jianzhe Liu, Feng Qiu et al.

Traditional methods for solvability region analysis can only have inner approximations with inconclusive conservatism. Machine learning methods have been proposed to approach the real region. In this letter, we propose a deep active learning framework for power system solvability prediction. Compared with the passive learning methods where the training is performed after all instances are labeled, the active learning selects most informative instances to be label and therefore significantly reduce the size of labeled dataset for training. In the active learning framework, the acquisition functions, which correspond to different sampling strategies, are defined in terms of the on-the-fly posterior probability from the classifier. The IEEE 39-bus system is employed to validate the proposed framework, where a two-dimensional case is illustrated to visualize the effectiveness of the sampling method followed by the full-dimensional numerical experiments.

Rui Yao, Shlomo Bekhor

Several route choice models developed in the literature were based on a relatively small number of observations. With the extensive use of tracking devices in recent surveys, there is a possibility to obtain insights with respect to the traveler's choice behavior. In this paper, different path generation algorithms are evaluated using a large GPS trajectory dataset. The dataset contains 6,000 observations from Tel-Aviv metropolitan area. An initial analysis is performed by generating a single route based on the shortest path. Almost 60% percent of the 6,000 observations can be covered (assuming a threshold of 80% overlap) using a single path. This result significantly contrasts previous literature findings. Link penalty, link elimination, simulation and via-node methods are applied to generate route sets, and the consistency of the algorithms are compared. A modified link penalty method, which accounts for preference of using higher hierarchical roads, provides a route set with 97% coverage (80% overlap threshold). The via-node method produces route set with satisfying coverage, and generates routes that are more heterogeneous (in terms number of links and routes ratio).

Zhiwen Shao, Yong Zhou, Jianfei Cai et al.

Facial action unit (AU) detection is challenging due to the difficulty in capturing correlated information from subtle and dynamic AUs. Existing methods often resort to the localization of correlated regions of AUs, in which predefining local AU attentions by correlated facial landmarks often discards essential parts, or learning global attention maps often contains irrelevant areas. Furthermore, existing relational reasoning methods often employ common patterns for all AUs while ignoring the specific way of each AU. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel adaptive attention and relation (AAR) framework for facial AU detection. Specifically, we propose an adaptive attention regression network to regress the global attention map of each AU under the constraint of attention predefinition and the guidance of AU detection, which is beneficial for capturing both specified dependencies by landmarks in strongly correlated regions and facial globally distributed dependencies in weakly correlated regions. Moreover, considering the diversity and dynamics of AUs, we propose an adaptive spatio-temporal graph convolutional network to simultaneously reason the independent pattern of each AU, the inter-dependencies among AUs, as well as the temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments show that our approach (i) achieves competitive performance on challenging benchmarks including BP4D, DISFA, and GFT in constrained scenarios and Aff-Wild2 in unconstrained scenarios, and (ii) can precisely learn the regional correlation distribution of each AU.

Rui Yao, Guosheng Lin, Shixiong Xia et al.

Object segmentation and object tracking are fundamental research area in the computer vision community. These two topics are diffcult to handle some common challenges, such as occlusion, deformation, motion blur, and scale variation. The former contains heterogeneous object, interacting object, edge ambiguity, and shape complexity. And the latter suffers from difficulties in handling fast motion, out-of-view, and real-time processing. Combining the two problems of video object segmentation and tracking (VOST) can overcome their respective difficulties and improve their performance. VOST can be widely applied to many practical applications such as video summarization, high definition video compression, human computer interaction, and autonomous vehicles. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art tracking methods, and classify these methods into different categories, and identify new trends. First, we provide a hierarchical categorization existing approaches, including unsupervised VOS, semi-supervised VOS, interactive VOS, weakly supervised VOS, and segmentation-based tracking methods. Second, we provide a detailed discussion and overview of the technical characteristics of the different methods. Third, we summarize the characteristics of the related video dataset, and provide a variety of evaluation metrics. Finally, we point out a set of interesting future works and draw our own conclusions.

Chi Zhang, Guosheng Lin, Fayao Liu et al.

Recent progress in semantic segmentation is driven by deep Convolutional Neural Networks and large-scale labeled image datasets. However, data labeling for pixel-wise segmentation is tedious and costly. Moreover, a trained model can only make predictions within a set of pre-defined classes. In this paper, we present CANet, a class-agnostic segmentation network that performs few-shot segmentation on new classes with only a few annotated images available. Our network consists of a two-branch dense comparison module which performs multi-level feature comparison between the support image and the query image, and an iterative optimization module which iteratively refines the predicted results. Furthermore, we introduce an attention mechanism to effectively fuse information from multiple support examples under the setting of k-shot learning. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 show that our method achieves a mean Intersection-over-Union score of 55.4% for 1-shot segmentation and 57.1% for 5-shot segmentation, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by a large margin of 14.6% and 13.2%, respectively.

Chi Zhang, Rui Yao, Jinpeng Cai

Vision based text entry systems aim to help disabled people achieve text communication using eye movement. Most previous methods have employed an existing eye tracker to predict gaze direction and design an input method based upon that. However, these methods can result in eye tracking quality becoming easily affected by various factors and lengthy amounts of time for calibration. Our paper presents a novel efficient gaze based text input method, which has the advantage of low cost and robustness. Users can type in words by looking at an on-screen keyboard and blinking. Rather than estimate gaze angles directly to track eyes, we introduce a method that divides the human gaze into nine directions. This method can effectively improve the accuracy of making a selection by gaze and blinks. We build a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for 9-direction gaze estimation. On the basis of the 9-direction gaze, we use a nine-key T9 input method which is widely used in candy bar phones. Bar phones were very popular in the world decades ago and have cultivated strong user habits and language models. To train a robust gaze estimator, we created a large-scale dataset with images of eyes sourced from 25 people. According to the results from our experiments, our CNN model is able to accurately estimate different people's gaze under various lighting conditions by different devices. In considering disable people's needs, we removed the complex calibration process. The input methods can run in screen mode and portable off-screen mode. Moreover, The datasets used in our experiments are made available to the community to allow further experimentation.

Rui Yao, Guosheng Lin, Qinfeng Shi et al.

Recognizing human activities in a sequence is a challenging area of research in ubiquitous computing. Most approaches use a fixed size sliding window over consecutive samples to extract features---either handcrafted or learned features---and predict a single label for all samples in the window. Two key problems emanate from this approach: i) the samples in one window may not always share the same label. Consequently, using one label for all samples within a window inevitably lead to loss of information; ii) the testing phase is constrained by the window size selected during training while the best window size is difficult to tune in practice. We propose an efficient algorithm that can predict the label of each sample, which we call dense labeling, in a sequence of human activities of arbitrary length using a fully convolutional network. In particular, our approach overcomes the problems posed by the sliding window step. Additionally, our algorithm learns both the features and classifier automatically. We release a new daily activity dataset based on a wearable sensor with hospitalized patients. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that our proposed approach is able to outperform the state-of-the-arts in terms of classification and label misalignment measures on three challenging datasets: Opportunity, Hand Gesture, and our new dataset.