Hao Yan

Xudong Xie, Hao Yan, Liang Yin et al.

Multimodal document understanding is a challenging task to process and comprehend large amounts of textual and visual information. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of this task. However, existing methods typically focus on either plain text or a limited number of document images, struggling to handle long PDF documents with interleaved text and images, especially for academic papers. In this paper, we introduce PDF-WuKong, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that is designed to enhance multimodal question-answering (QA) for long PDF documents. PDF-WuKong incorporates a sparse sampler that operates on both text and image representations, significantly improving the efficiency and capability of the MLLM. The sparse sampler selects the paragraphs or diagrams most pertinent to user queries. To effectively train and evaluate our model, we construct PaperPDF, a dataset consisting of a broad collection of English and Chinese academic papers. Multiple strategies are proposed to build high-quality 1.1 million QA pairs along with their corresponding evidence sources. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and high efficiency of our approach over other models on the task of long multimodal document understanding, surpassing proprietary products by an average of 8.6% on F1. Our code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/yh-hust/PDF-Wukong.

Zixiang Wang, Hao Yan, Changsong Wei et al.

The behavior decision-making subsystem is a key component of the autonomous driving system, which reflects the decision-making ability of the vehicle and the driver, and is an important symbol of the high-level intelligence of the vehicle. However, the existing rule-based decision-making schemes are limited by the prior knowledge of designers, and it is difficult to cope with complex and changeable traffic scenarios. In this work, an advanced deep reinforcement learning model is adopted, which can autonomously learn and optimize driving strategies in a complex and changeable traffic environment by modeling the driving decision-making process as a reinforcement learning problem. Specifically, we used Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for comparative experiments. DQN guides the agent to choose the best action by approximating the state-action value function, while PPO improves the decision-making quality by optimizing the policy function. We also introduce improvements in the design of the reward function to promote the robustness and adaptability of the model in real-world driving situations. Experimental results show that the decision-making strategy based on deep reinforcement learning has better performance than the traditional rule-based method in a variety of driving tasks.

Zixiang Wang, Hao Yan, Yining Wang et al.

Reinforcement learning continuously optimizes decision-making based on real-time feedback reward signals through continuous interaction with the environment, demonstrating strong adaptive and self-learning capabilities. In recent years, it has become one of the key methods to achieve autonomous navigation of robots. In this work, an autonomous robot navigation method based on reinforcement learning is introduced. We use the Deep Q Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) models to optimize the path planning and decision-making process through the continuous interaction between the robot and the environment, and the reward signals with real-time feedback. By combining the Q-value function with the deep neural network, deep Q network can handle high-dimensional state space, so as to realize path planning in complex environments. Proximal policy optimization is a strategy gradient-based method, which enables robots to explore and utilize environmental information more efficiently by optimizing policy functions. These methods not only improve the robot's navigation ability in the unknown environment, but also enhance its adaptive and self-learning capabilities. Through multiple training and simulation experiments, we have verified the effectiveness and robustness of these models in various complex scenarios.

Ali Sarabi, Arash Sarabi, Hao Yan et al.

Coccidioidomycosis, commonly known as Valley Fever, remains a significant public health concern in endemic regions of the southwestern United States. This study develops the first graph neural network (GNN) model for forecasting Valley Fever incidence in Arizona. The model integrates surveillance case data with environmental predictors using graph structures, including soil conditions, atmospheric variables, agricultural indicators, and air quality metrics. Our approach explores correlation-based relationships among variables influencing disease transmission. The model captures critical delays in disease progression through lagged effects, enhancing its capacity to reflect complex temporal dependencies in disease ecology. Results demonstrate that the GNN architecture effectively models Valley Fever trends and provides insights into key environmental drivers of disease incidence. These findings can inform early warning systems and guide resource allocation for disease prevention efforts in high-risk areas.