Hua Jiang

Aldino Rizaldy, Fabian Ewald Fassnacht, Ahmed Jamal Afifi et al.

Detailed structural and species information on individual tree level is increasingly important to support precision forestry, biodiversity conservation, and provide reference data for biomass and carbon mapping. Point clouds from airborne and ground-based laser scanning are currently the most suitable data source to rapidly derive such information at scale. Recent advancements in deep learning improved segmenting and classifying individual trees and identifying semantic tree components. However, deep learning models typically require large amounts of annotated training data which limits further improvement. Producing dense, high-quality annotations for 3D point clouds, especially in complex forests, is labor-intensive and challenging to scale. We explore strategies to reduce dependence on large annotated datasets using self-supervised and transfer learning architectures. Our objective is to improve performance across three tasks: instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and tree classification using realistic and operational training sets. Our findings indicate that combining self-supervised learning with domain adaptation significantly enhances instance segmentation compared to training from scratch (AP50 +16.98%), self-supervised learning suffices for semantic segmentation (mIoU +1.79%), and hierarchical transfer learning enables accurate classification of unseen species (Jaccard +6.07%). To simplify use and encourage uptake, we integrated the tasks into a unified framework, streamlining the process from raw point clouds to tree delineation, structural analysis, and species classification. Pretrained models reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by ~21%. This open-source contribution aims to accelerate operational extraction of individual tree information from laser scanning point clouds to support forestry, biodiversity, and carbon mapping.

Yixiong Chen, Li Liu, Jingxian Li et al.

In medical image analysis, transfer learning is a powerful method for deep neural networks (DNNs) to generalize well on limited medical data. Prior efforts have focused on developing pre-training algorithms on domains such as lung ultrasound, chest X-ray, and liver CT to bridge domain gaps. However, we find that model fine-tuning also plays a crucial role in adapting medical knowledge to target tasks. The common fine-tuning method is manually picking transferable layers (e.g., the last few layers) to update, which is labor-expensive. In this work, we propose a meta-learning-based LR tuner, named MetaLR, to make different layers automatically co-adapt to downstream tasks based on their transferabilities across domains. MetaLR learns appropriate LRs for different layers in an online manner, preventing highly transferable layers from forgetting their medical representation abilities and driving less transferable layers to adapt actively to new domains. Extensive experiments on various medical applications show that MetaLR outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) fine-tuning strategies. Codes are released.

Yang Li, Cheng Yu, Guangzhi Sun et al.

Modelling prosody variation is critical for synthesizing natural and expressive speech in end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In this paper, a cross-utterance conditional VAE (CUC-VAE) is proposed to estimate a posterior probability distribution of the latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features obtained from both past and future sentences. At inference time, instead of the standard Gaussian distribution used by VAE, CUC-VAE allows sampling from an utterance-specific prior distribution conditioned on cross-utterance information, which allows the prosody features generated by the TTS system to be related to the context and is more similar to how humans naturally produce prosody. The performance of CUC-VAE is evaluated via a qualitative listening test for naturalness, intelligibility and quantitative measurements, including word error rates and the standard deviation of prosody attributes. Experimental results on LJ-Speech and LibriTTS data show that the proposed CUC-VAE TTS system improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins.

Yanli Liu, Jiming Zhao, Chu-Min Li et al.

Maximum Common induced Subgraph (MCS) is an important NP-hard problem with wide real-world applications. Branch-and-Bound (BnB) is the basis of a class of efficient algorithms for MCS, consisting in successively selecting vertices to match and pruning when it is discovered that a solution better than the best solution found so far does not exist. The method of selecting the vertices to match is essential for the performance of BnB. In this paper, we propose a new value function and a hybrid selection strategy used in reinforcement learning to define a new vertex selection method, and propose a new BnB algorithm, called McSplitDAL, for MCS. Extensive experiments show that McSplitDAL significantly improves the current best BnB algorithms, McSplit+LL and McSplit+RL. An empirical analysis is also performed to illustrate why the new value function and the hybrid selection strategy are effective.

Xiong Zhang, Hong Peng, Zhenli He et al.

Anomalies often occur in real-world information networks/graphs, such as malevolent users, malicious comments, banned users, and fake news in social graphs. The latest graph anomaly detection methods use a novel mechanism called truncated affinity maximization (TAM) to detect anomaly nodes without using any label information and achieve impressive results. TAM maximizes the affinities among the normal nodes while truncating the affinities of the anomalous nodes to identify the anomalies. However, existing TAM-based methods truncate suspicious nodes according to a rigid threshold that ignores the specificity and high-order affinities of different nodes. This inevitably causes inefficient truncations from both normal and anomalous nodes, limiting the effectiveness of anomaly detection. To this end, this paper proposes a novel truncation model combining contextual and global affinity to truncate the anomalous nodes. The core idea of the work is to use contextual truncation to decrease the affinity of anomalous nodes, while global truncation increases the affinity of normal nodes. Extensive experiments on massive real-world datasets show that our method surpasses peer methods in most graph anomaly detection tasks. In highlights, compared with previous state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method has +15\% $\sim$ +20\% improvements in two famous real-world datasets, Amazon and YelpChi. Notably, our method works well in large datasets, Amazin-all and YelpChi-all, and achieves the best results, while most previous models cannot complete the tasks.

Hua Jiang, Sayan Mandal, Brandon Kirincich et al.

This paper introduces a unified, hardware-independent baremetal runtime architecture designed to enable high-performance machine learning (ML) inference on heterogeneous accelerators, such as AI Engine (AIE) arrays, without the overhead of an underlying real-time or general-purpose operating system. Existing edge-deployment frameworks, such as TinyML, often rely on real-time operating systems (RTOS), which introduce unnecessary complexity and performance bottlenecks. To address this, our solution fundamentally decouples the runtime from hardware specifics by flattening complex control logic into linear, executable Runtime Control Blocks (RCBs). This "Control as Data" paradigm allows high-level models, including Adaptive Data Flow (ADF) graphs, to be executed by a generic engine through a minimal Runtime Hardware Abstraction Layer (RHAL). We further integrate Runtime Platform Management (RTPM) to handle system-level orchestration (including a lightweight network stack) and a Runtime In-Memory File System (RIMFS) to manage data in OS-free environments. We demonstrate the framework's efficacy with a ResNet-18 image classification implementation. Experimental results show 9.2$\times$ higher compute efficiency (throughput per AIE tile) compared to Linux-based Vitis AI deployment, 3--7$\times$ reduction in data movement overhead, and near-zero latency variance (CV~$=0.03\%$). The system achieves 68.78\% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet using only 28 AIE tiles compared to Vitis AI's 304 tiles, validating both the efficiency and correctness of this unified bare-metal architecture.

Jing He, Hua Jiang, Cheng Li et al.

This work introduces a novel theoretical framework grounded in Random Matrix Theory (RMT) for analyzing Transformer training dynamics. We focus on the underlying mechanisms that drive performance improvements and derive principled early-stopping criteria. Empirically, we observe that the spectral density of the shallow self-attention matrix V consistently evolves into a heavy-tailed distribution. Utilizing the PL (Power Law) fit to this matrix as a probe, we demarcate training into three stages: structural exploration, heavy-tailed structure stabilization, and convergence saturation. This staging provides guidance for preliminary stopping decisions. Crucially, we propose two consistent and validation-free criteria: a quantitative metric for heavy-tailed dynamics and a novel spectral signature indicative of convergence. The strong alignment between these criteria highlights the utility of RMT for monitoring and diagnosing the progression of Transformer model training.

Sayan Mandal, Hua Jiang

Automated code review adoption lags in compliance-heavy settings, where static analyzers produce high-volume, low-rationale outputs, and naive LLM use risks hallucination and incurring cost overhead. We present a production system for grounded, PR-native review that pairs static-analysis findings with AST-guided context extraction and a single-GPU, on-demand serving stack (quantized open-weight model, multi-tier caching) to deliver concise explanations and remediation guidance. Evaluated on safety-oriented C/C++ standards, the approach achieves sub-minute median first-feedback (offline p50 build+LLM 59.8s) while maintaining competitive violation reduction and lower violation rates versus larger proprietary models. The architecture is decoupled: teams can adopt the grounding/prompting layer or the serving layer independently. A small internal survey (n=8) provides directional signals of reduced triage effort and moderate perceived grounding, with participants reporting fewer human review iterations. We outline operational lessons and limitations, emphasizing reproducibility, auditability, and pathways to broader standards and assisted patching.

Yixuan Zhang, Wenxin Zhang, Hua Jiang et al.

Biological neurons communicate through spike trains, discrete, irregular bursts of activity that exhibit variability far beyond the modeling capacity of conventional variational autoencoders (VAEs). Recent work, such as the Poisson-VAE, makes a biologically inspired move by modeling spike counts using the Poisson distribution. However, they impose a rigid constraint: equal mean and variance, which fails to reflect the true stochastic nature of neural activity. In this work, we challenge this constraint and introduce NegBio-VAE, a principled extension of the VAE framework that models spike counts using the negative binomial distribution. This shift grants explicit control over dispersion, unlocking a broader and more accurate family of neural representations. We further develop two ELBO optimization schemes and two differentiable reparameterization strategies tailored to the negative binomial setting. By introducing one additional dispersion parameter, NegBio-VAE generalizes the Poisson latent model to a negative binomial formulation. Empirical results demonstrate this minor yet impactful change leads to significant gains in reconstruction fidelity, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling overdispersion in spike-like activations.

Zhijun Zeng, Zhen Hou, Ting Li et al.

We develop a deep learning approach to predicting a set of ventilator parameters for a mechanically ventilated septic patient using a long and short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) model. We focus on short-term predictions of a set of ventilator parameters for the septic patient in emergency intensive care unit (EICU). The short-term predictability of the model provides attending physicians with early warnings to make timely adjustment to the treatment of the patient in the EICU. The patient specific deep learning model can be trained on any given critically ill patient, making it an intelligent aide for physicians to use in emergent medical situations.

Yan-li Liu, Chu-min Li, Hua Jiang et al.

Branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithms are widely used to solve combinatorial problems, and the performance crucially depends on its branching heuristic.In this work, we consider a typical problem of maximum common subgraph (MCS), and propose a branching heuristic inspired from reinforcement learning with a goal of reaching a tree leaf as early as possible to greatly reduce the search tree size.Extensive experiments show that our method is beneficial and outperforms current best BnB algorithm for the MCS.

Kun Tu, Bruno Ribeiro, Hua Jiang et al.

Recommendation systems for online dating have recently attracted much attention from the research community. In this paper we proposed a two-side matching framework for online dating recommendations and design an LDA model to learn the user preferences from the observed user messaging behavior and user profile features. Experimental results using data from a large online dating website shows that two-sided matching improves significantly the rate of successful matches by as much as 45%. Finally, using simulated matchings we show that the the LDA model can correctly capture user preferences.