Hongtao Wang

Peizhuo Li, Hongyi Li, Mingfeng Fan et al.

Agile humanoid locomotion across diverse challenging terrain demands both wide perceptual coverage and precise local geometry understanding. Motivated by the way humans selectively look at relevant terrain during locomotion, we introduce TAGA, a Terrain-aware Active Gaze learning framework for Attention-based humanoid control. By fusing vision, proprioception, and motion commands, our framework guides the model to learn anticipatory cues and actively attend to specific areas of the height scan, selectively using these informative regions for the downstream network. This adaptively increases the information density of observations under tight onboard computational constraints, thus enabling fine-grained perceptive locomotion over larger-scale terrains. We find that such gaze behaviors can naturally emerge through reinforcement learning alone, without requiring additional supervision or explicit guidance, significantly improve training efficiency. As a result, the trained policy demonstrates robust and generalizable locomotion in simulation and on hardware, including reliable terrain-aware foothold selection, elevated-platform traversal, competitive sparse-foothold traversal, and the largest reported real-world gap traversal distance of 1.2m among perceptive humanoid locomotion systems, while maintaining stability under severe perceptual disturbances and environmental interference.

Hongtao Wang, Jiangshe Zhang, Xiaoli Wei et al.

Picking the first arrival times of prestack gathers is called First Arrival Time (FAT) picking, which is an indispensable step in seismic data processing, and is mainly solved manually in the past. With the current increasing density of seismic data collection, the efficiency of manual picking has been unable to meet the actual needs. Therefore, automatic picking methods have been greatly developed in recent decades, especially those based on deep learning. However, few of the current supervised deep learning-based method can avoid the dependence on labeled samples. Besides, since the gather data is a set of signals which are greatly different from the natural images, it is difficult for the current method to solve the FAT picking problem in case of a low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). In this paper, for hard rock seismic gather data, we propose a Multi-Stage Segmentation Pickup Network (MSSPN), which solves the generalization problem across worksites and the picking problem in the case of low SNR. In MSSPN, there are four sub-models to simulate the manually picking processing, which is assumed to four stages from coarse to fine. Experiments on seven field datasets with different qualities show that our MSSPN outperforms benchmarks by a large margin.Particularly, our method can achieve more than 90\% accurate picking across worksites in the case of medium and high SNRs, and even fine-tuned model can achieve 88\% accurate picking of the dataset with low SNR.

Hongtao Wang, Se Yang, Yu Chen et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly leverage long term memory to support persistent and autonomous task execution. However, this capability also introduces a new attack surface: memory poisoning, where adversaries can inject malicious information to influence future behavior. Existing memory poisoning attacks often assume that injected content can be stored directly in memory, overlooking the selective extraction and rewriting stages in modern memory pipelines. This makes prior methods ineffective under realistic settings. In this paper, we propose MemPoison, a novel memory poisoning attack that bypasses selective memory mechanisms in LLM agents, where an attacker can inject triggerable backdoors into the agent's long-term memory through dialogue interactions, thereby misleading its subsequent responses. MemPoison introduces three key components: (i) a semantic relational bridge that binds the trigger and payload into a coherent statement to ensure they are extracted into memory together; (ii) entity masquerading that optimizes triggers to mimic named entities, resisting rewriting; and (iii) joint embedding optimization that shapes trigger-injected texts into a tight cluster in the embedding space while maintaining isolation from benign embeddings for stealth. Evaluations across different agent domains and memory mechanisms show MemPoison achieves attack success rates up to 0.95, outperforming existing baselines. Mechanistic analysis indicates that the attack exploits embedding-space anisotropy and shifts attention patterns, highlighting core vulnerabilities in selective memory systems. We evaluate multiple defense strategies and demonstrate their fundamental limitations in mitigating the attack.

Hongtao Wang, Renchi Yang, Haoran Zheng et al.

Dirty entity resolution (ER), which identifies records referring to the same real-world entity from a single, messy dataset, is a fundamental task in data management and mining. However, the dominant blocking-matching-clustering paradigm for ER suffers from critical flaws. Its cascaded, decoupled workflow essentially produces a static, sparse graph plagued by missing edges (due to blocking failures) and noisy links (due to matching errors), causing error propagation and yielding suboptimal clusters, particularly when rigid transitivity is imposed in the clustering. We contend that matching and clustering are fundamentally synergistic, both optimizing for the construction of an ideal entity graph. Building upon this insight, we propose Alper, a unified framework that integrates these steps into an iterative probabilistic label propagation process over a global, evolving graph. Unlike disjoint blocking, Alper refines the graph structure and labels dynamically by adaptively integrating "weak but cheap" signals from graph propagation with "strong but expensive" LLM-based pairwise queries. For higher cost-effectiveness, we formulate the signal selection as a constrained optimization problem maximizing cumulative marginal gain under a query budget, solved via our greedy algorithm with provable theoretical guarantees. Our extensive experiments over eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that Alper is consistently superior to state-of-the-art cascaded pipelines.

Huichi Zhou, Zehao Xu, Munan Zhao et al.

In this paper, we introduce the Multilingual Moral Reasoning Benchmark (MMRB) to evaluate the moral reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) across five typologically diverse languages and three levels of contextual complexity: sentence, paragraph, and document. Our results show moral reasoning performance degrades with increasing context complexity, particularly for low-resource languages such as Vietnamese. We further fine-tune the open-source LLaMA-3-8B model using curated monolingual data for alignment and poisoning. Surprisingly, low-resource languages have a stronger impact on multilingual reasoning than high-resource ones, highlighting their critical role in multilingual NLP.

Hongtao Wang, Renchi Yang, Wenqing Lin

New intent discovery (NID) seeks to recognize both new and known intents from unlabeled user utterances, which finds prevalent use in practical dialogue systems. Existing works towards NID mainly adopt a cascaded architecture, wherein the first stage focuses on encoding the utterances into informative text embeddings beforehand, while the latter is to group similar embeddings into clusters (i.e., intents), typically by K-Means. However, such a cascaded pipeline fails to leverage the feedback from both steps for mutual refinement, and, meanwhile, the embedding-only clustering overlooks nuanced textual semantics, leading to suboptimal performance. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes NILC, a novel clustering framework specially catered for effective NID. Particularly, NILC follows an iterative workflow, in which clustering assignments are judiciously updated by carefully refining cluster centroids and text embeddings of uncertain utterances with the aid of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, NILC first taps into LLMs to create additional semantic centroids for clusters, thereby enriching the contextual semantics of the Euclidean centroids of embeddings. Moreover, LLMs are then harnessed to augment hard samples (ambiguous or terse utterances) identified from clusters via rewriting for subsequent cluster correction. Further, we inject supervision signals through non-trivial techniques seeding and soft must links for more accurate NID in the semi-supervised setting. Extensive experiments comparing NILC against multiple recent baselines under both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings showcase that NILC can achieve significant performance improvements over six benchmark datasets of diverse domains consistently.

Hongtao Wang, Li Long, Jiangshe Zhang et al.

Contemporary automatic first break (FB) picking methods typically analyze 1D signals, 2D source gathers, or 3D source-receiver gathers. Utilizing higher-dimensional data, such as 2D or 3D, incorporates global features, improving the stability of local picking. Despite the benefits, high-dimensional data requires structured input and increases computational demands. Addressing this, we propose a novel approach using deep graph learning called DGL-FB, constructing a large graph to efficiently extract information. In this graph, each seismic trace is represented as a node, connected by edges that reflect similarities. To manage the size of the graph, we develop a subgraph sampling technique to streamline model training and inference. Our proposed framework, DGL-FB, leverages deep graph learning for FB picking. It encodes subgraphs into global features using a deep graph encoder. Subsequently, the encoded global features are combined with local node signals and fed into a ResUNet-based 1D segmentation network for FB detection. Field survey evaluations of DGL-FB show superior accuracy and stability compared to a 2D U-Net-based benchmark method.

Haoran Zheng, Renchi Yang, Hongtao Wang et al.

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MMAGs) are an expressive data model for representing the complex interconnections among entities that associate attributes from multiple data modalities (text, images, etc.). Clustering over such data finds numerous practical applications in real scenarios, including social community detection, medical data analytics, etc. However, as revealed by our empirical studies, existing multi-view clustering solutions largely rely on the high correlation between attributes across various views and overlook the unique characteristics (e.g., low modality-wise correlation and intense feature-wise noise) of multimodal attributes output by large pre-trained language and vision models in MMAGs, leading to suboptimal clustering performance. Inspired by foregoing empirical observations and our theoretical analyses with graph signal processing, we propose the Dual Graph Filtering (DGF) scheme, which innovatively incorporates a feature-wise denoising component into node representation learning, thereby effectively overcoming the limitations of traditional graph filters adopted in the extant multi-view graph clustering approaches. On top of that, DGF includes a tri-cross contrastive training strategy that employs instance-level contrastive learning across modalities, neighborhoods, and communities for learning robust and discriminative node representations. Our comprehensive experiments on eight benchmark MMAG datasets exhibit that DGF is able to outperform a wide range of state-of-the-art baselines consistently and significantly in terms of clustering quality measured against ground-truth labels.

Wei Yang, Yiran Zhu, Zilin Li et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) possess rich knowledge but often fail on hierarchical understanding tasks, where the goal is to predict a coarse-to-fine taxonomy path that remains consistent across all levels. We compare three inference paradigms for hierarchical VQA and find that stepwise reasoning, when conditioned on prior answers, significantly outperforms single-pass prompting. Further analysis indicates that the main limitation of current VLMs is their inability to maintain cross-level state, rather than a lack of taxonomic knowledge. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Self-Elicited Knowledge Distillation (SEKD), which requires no human labels or external tools: the same VLM is prompted to reason step by step and act as a teacher by exposing its hard labels, soft distributions, and decoder hidden states, while a single-pass student distills these signals. The student VLM remains efficient while approaching the accuracy of its multi-step teacher. It improves in-domain path consistency (HCA) by up to +29.50 percentage points, raises zero-shot HCA on an unseen taxonomy from 4.15% to 42.26%, and yields gains on challenging mathematical benchmarks. Because all supervision is self-elicited, SEKD scales to new taxonomies and datasets without annotation cost, providing a practical route to imbue compact VLMs with dependency-aware multi-step reasoning.

Hongtao Wang, Taiyan Zhang, Renchi Yang et al.

Text clustering aims to automatically partition a collection of documents into coherent groups based on their linguistic features. In the literature, this task is formulated either as metric clustering over pre-trained text embeddings or as graph clustering based on pairwise similarities derived from an oracle, e.g., a large machine learning model. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved this field by providing high-quality contextualized embeddings and accurate semantic similarity estimates. However, leveraging LLMs at scale introduces substantial computational and financial costs due to the large number of required API queries or inference calls. To address this issue, we propose Cequel, a cost-effective framework that achieves accurate text clustering under a limited budget of LLM queries. At its core, Cequel constructs must-link and cannot-link constraints by selectively querying LLMs on informative text pairs or triplets, identified via our proposed algorithms, EdgeLLM and TriangleLLM. These constraints are then utilized in a weighted constrained clustering algorithm to form high-quality clusters. Specifically, EdgeLLM and TriangleLLM employ carefully designed greedy selection strategies and prompting techniques to identify and extract informative constraints efficiently. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Cequel consistently outperforms existing methods in unsupervised text clustering under the same query budget.

Hongtao Wang, Renchi Yang, Hewen Wang et al.

Textual interaction networks (TINs) are an omnipresent data structure used to model the interplay between users and items on e-commerce websites, social networks, etc., where each interaction is associated with a text description. Classifying such textual interactions (TIC) finds extensive use in detecting spam reviews in e-commerce, fraudulent transactions in finance, and so on. Existing TIC solutions either (i) fail to capture the rich text semantics due to the use of context-free text embeddings, and/or (ii) disregard the bipartite structure and node heterogeneity of TINs, leading to compromised TIC performance. In this work, we propose SAFT, a new architecture that integrates language- and graph-based modules for the effective fusion of textual and structural semantics in the representation learning of interactions. In particular, line graph attention (LGA)/gated attention units (GAUs) and pretrained language models (PLMs) are capitalized on to model the interaction-level and token-level signals, which are further coupled via the proxy token in an iterative and contextualized fashion. Additionally, an efficient and theoretically-grounded approach is developed to encode the local and global topology information pertaining to interactions into structural embeddings. The resulting embeddings not only inject the structural features underlying TINs into the textual interaction encoding but also facilitate the design of graph sampling strategies. Extensive empirical evaluations on multiple real TIN datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAFT over the state-of-the-art baselines in TIC accuracy.

Hongtao Wang, Jiandong Liang, Lei Wang et al.

Residual moveout (RMO) provides critical information for travel time tomography. The current industry-standard method for fitting RMO involves scanning high-order polynomial equations. However, this analytical approach does not accurately capture local saltation, leading to low iteration efficiency in tomographic inversion. Supervised learning-based image segmentation methods for picking can effectively capture local variations; however, they encounter challenges such as a scarcity of reliable training samples and the high complexity of post-processing. To address these issues, this study proposes a deep learning-based cascade picking method. It distinguishes accurate and robust RMOs using a segmentation network and a post-processing technique based on trend regression. Additionally, a data synthesis method is introduced, enabling the segmentation network to be trained on synthetic datasets for effective picking in field data. Furthermore, a set of metrics is proposed to quantify the quality of automatically picked RMOs. Experimental results based on both model and real data demonstrate that, compared to semblance-based methods, our approach achieves greater picking density and accuracy.

Yurui Lai, Xiaoyang Lin, Renchi Yang et al.

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a potent tool for learning on graph-structured data and won fruitful successes in varied fields. The majority of GNNs follow the message-passing paradigm, where representations of each node are learned by recursively aggregating features of its neighbors. However, this mechanism brings severe over-smoothing and efficiency issues over high-degree graphs (HDGs), wherein most nodes have dozens (or even hundreds) of neighbors, such as social networks, transaction graphs, power grids, etc. Additionally, such graphs usually encompass rich and complex structure semantics, which are hard to capture merely by feature aggregations in GNNs. Motivated by the above limitations, we propose TADA, an efficient and effective front-mounted data augmentation framework for GNNs on HDGs. Under the hood, TADA includes two key modules: (i) feature expansion with structure embeddings, and (ii) topology- and attribute-aware graph sparsification. The former obtains augmented node features and enhanced model capacity by encoding the graph structure into high-quality structure embeddings with our highly-efficient sketching method. Further, by exploiting task-relevant features extracted from graph structures and attributes, the second module enables the accurate identification and reduction of numerous redundant/noisy edges from the input graph, thereby alleviating over-smoothing and facilitating faster feature aggregations over HDGs. Empirically, TADA considerably improves the predictive performance of mainstream GNN models on 8 real homophilic/heterophilic HDGs in terms of node classification, while achieving efficient training and inference processes.

Fangyuan Zhang, Huichi Zhou, Shuangjiao Li et al.

Deep neural networks have been proven to be vulnerable to adversarial examples and various methods have been proposed to defend against adversarial attacks for natural language processing tasks. However, previous defense methods have limitations in maintaining effective defense while ensuring the performance of the original task. In this paper, we propose a malicious perturbation based adversarial training method (MPAT) for building robust deep neural networks against textual adversarial attacks. Specifically, we construct a multi-level malicious example generation strategy to generate adversarial examples with malicious perturbations, which are used instead of original inputs for model training. Additionally, we employ a novel training objective function to ensure achieving the defense goal without compromising the performance on the original task. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our defense method by attacking five victim models on three benchmark datasets. The result demonstrates that our method is more effective against malicious adversarial attacks compared with previous defense methods while maintaining or further improving the performance on the original task.

Hongtao Wang, Jiangshe Zhang, Xiaoli Wei et al.

In seismic exploration, first break (FB) picking is a crucial aspect in the determination of subsurface velocity models, significantly influencing the placement of wells. Many deep neural networks (DNNs)-based automatic picking methods have been proposed to accelerate this processing. Significantly, the segmentation-based DNN methods provide a segmentation map and then estimate FB from the map using a picking threshold. However, the uncertainty of the results picked by DNNs still needs to be analyzed. Thus, the automatic picking methods applied in field datasets can not ensure robustness, especially in the case of a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we introduce uncertainty quantification into the FB picking task and propose a novel uncertainty-based picking deep learning network called UPNet. UPNet not only estimates the uncertainty of network output but also can filter the pickings with low confidence. Many experiments evaluate that UPNet exhibits higher accuracy and robustness than the deterministic DNN-based model, achieving State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance in field surveys. In addition, we verify that the measurement uncertainty is meaningful, which can provide a reference for human decision-making.

Xinlin Leng, Chenxu Li, Weifeng Xu et al.

Distributed privacy-preserving regression schemes have been developed and extended in various fields, where multiparty collaboratively and privately run optimization algorithms, e.g., Gradient Descent, to learn a set of optimal parameters. However, traditional Gradient-Descent based methods fail to solve problems which contains objective functions with L1 regularization, such as Lasso regression. In this paper, we present Federated Coordinate Descent, a new distributed scheme called FCD, to address this issue securely under multiparty scenarios. Specifically, through secure aggregation and added perturbations, our scheme guarantees that: (1) no local information is leaked to other parties, and (2) global model parameters are not exposed to cloud servers. The added perturbations can eventually be eliminated by each party to derive a global model with high performance. We show that the FCD scheme fills the gap of multiparty secure Coordinate Descent methods and is applicable for general linear regressions, including linear, ridge and lasso regressions. Theoretical security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that FCD can be performed effectively and efficiently, and provide as low MAE measure as centralized methods under tasks of three types of linear regressions on real-world UCI datasets.

Yecheng Shao, Yongbin Jin, Xianwei Liu et al.

Gaits and transitions are key components in legged locomotion. For legged robots, describing and reproducing gaits as well as transitions remain longstanding challenges. Reinforcement learning has become a powerful tool to formulate controllers for legged robots. Learning multiple gaits and transitions, nevertheless, is related to the multi-task learning problems. In this work, we present a novel framework for training a simple control policy for a quadruped robot to locomote in various gaits. Four independent phases are used as the interface between the gait generator and the control policy, which characterizes the movement of four feet. Guided by the phases, the quadruped robot is able to locomote according to the generated gaits, such as walk, trot, pacing and bounding, and to make transitions among those gaits. More general phases can be used to generate complex gaits, such as mixed rhythmic dancing. With the control policy, the Black Panther robot, a medium-dog-sized quadruped robot, can perform all learned motor skills while following the velocity commands smoothly and robustly in natural environment.

Zhaoyang Wang, Hongtao Wang

The adversarial attacks against deep neural networks on computer vision tasks have spawned many new technologies that help protect models from avoiding false predictions. Recently, word-level adversarial attacks on deep models of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks have also demonstrated strong power, e.g., fooling a sentiment classification neural network to make wrong decisions. Unfortunately, few previous literatures have discussed the defense of such word-level synonym substitution based attacks since they are hard to be perceived and detected. In this paper, we shed light on this problem and propose a novel defense framework called Random Substitution Encoding (RSE), which introduces a random substitution encoder into the training process of original neural networks. Extensive experiments on text classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on defense of word-level adversarial attacks, under various base and attack models.