Zeyu Yan

Zeyu Yan, Fei Wen, Peilin Liu

Recent studies in lossy compression show that distortion and perceptual quality are at odds with each other, which put forward the tradeoff between distortion and perception (D-P). Intuitively, to attain different perceptual quality, different decoders have to be trained. In this paper, we present a nontrivial finding that only two decoders are sufficient for optimally achieving arbitrary (an infinite number of different) D-P tradeoff. We prove that arbitrary points of the D-P tradeoff bound can be achieved by a simple linear interpolation between the outputs of a minimum MSE decoder and a specifically constructed perfect perceptual decoder. Meanwhile, the perceptual quality (in terms of the squared Wasserstein-2 distance metric) can be quantitatively controlled by the interpolation factor. Furthermore, to construct a perfect perceptual decoder, we propose two theoretically optimal training frameworks. The new frameworks are different from the distortion-plus-adversarial loss based heuristic framework widely used in existing methods, which are not only theoretically optimal but also can yield state-of-the-art performance in practical perceptual decoding. Finally, we validate our theoretical finding and demonstrate the superiority of our frameworks via experiments. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZeyuYan/Controllable-Perceptual-Compression

Zeyu Yan, Yanfei Yao, Xuanbing Wen et al.

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training across distributed feature spaces, which enables privacy-preserving learning without sharing raw data. However, recent studies have confirmed the feasibility of label inference attacks by internal adversaries. By strategically exploiting gradient vectors and semantic embeddings, attackers-through passive, active, or direct attacks-can accurately reconstruct private labels, leading to catastrophic data leakage. Existing defenses, which typically address isolated leakage vectors or are designed for specific types of attacks, remain vulnerable to emerging hybrid attacks that exploit multiple pathways simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose Label-Anonymized Defense with Substitution Gradient (LADSG), a unified and lightweight defense framework for VFL. LADSG first anonymizes true labels via soft distillation to reduce semantic exposure, then generates semantically-aligned substitute gradients to disrupt gradient-based leakage, and finally filters anomalous updates through gradient norm detection. It is scalable and compatible with standard VFL pipelines. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets show that LADSG reduces the success rates of all three types of label inference attacks by 30-60% with minimal computational overhead, demonstrating its practical effectiveness.

Wei Wang, Fei Wen, Zeyu Yan et al.

Recently, much progress has been made in unsupervised denoising learning. However, existing methods more or less rely on some assumptions on the signal and/or degradation model, which limits their practical performance. How to construct an optimal criterion for unsupervised denoising learning without any prior knowledge on the degradation model is still an open question. Toward answering this question, this work proposes a criterion for unsupervised denoising learning based on the optimal transport theory. This criterion has favorable properties, e.g., approximately maximal preservation of the information of the signal, whilst achieving perceptual reconstruction. Furthermore, though a relaxed unconstrained formulation is used in practical implementation, we prove that the relaxed formulation in theory has the same solution as the original constrained formulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data, including realistic photographic, microscopy, depth, and raw depth images, demonstrate that the proposed method even compares favorably with supervised methods, e.g., approaching the PSNR of supervised methods while having better perceptual quality. Particularly, for spatially correlated noise and realistic microscopy images, the proposed method not only achieves better perceptual quality but also has higher PSNR than supervised methods. Besides, it shows remarkable superiority in harsh practical conditions with complex noise, e.g., raw depth images. Code is available at https://github.com/wangweiSJTU/OTUR.

Fei Wen, Wei Wang, Zeyu Yan et al.

Optimal transport (OT) has recently been shown as a promising criterion for unsupervised restoration when no explicit prior model is available. Despite its theoretical appeal, OT still significantly falls short of supervised methods on challenging tasks such as super-resolution, deraining, and dehazing. In this paper, we propose a \emph{sparsity-aware optimal transport} (SOT) framework to bridge this gap by leveraging a key observation: the degradations in these tasks exhibit distinct sparsity in the frequency domain. Incorporating this sparsity prior into OT can significantly reduce the ambiguity of the inverse mapping for restoration and substantially boost performance. We provide analysis to show exploiting degradation sparsity benefits unsupervised restoration learning. Extensive experiments on real-world super-resolution, deraining, and dehazing demonstrate that SOT offers notable performance gains over standard OT, while achieving superior perceptual quality compared to existing supervised and unsupervised methods. In particular, SOT consistently outperforms existing unsupervised methods across all three tasks and narrows the performance gap to supervised counterparts.

Juli Zhang, Zeyu Yan, Jing Zhang et al.

Accurate remote sensing-based crop yield prediction remains a fundamental challenging task due to complex spatial patterns, heterogeneous spectral characteristics, and dynamic agricultural conditions. Existing methods often suffer from limited spatial modeling capacity, weak generalization across crop types and years. To address these challenges, we propose DFYP, a novel Dynamic Fusion framework for crop Yield Prediction, which combines spectral channel attention, edge-adaptive spatial modeling and a learnable fusion mechanism to improve robustness across diverse agricultural scenarios. Specifically, DFYP introduces three key components: (1) a Resolution-aware Channel Attention (RCA) module that enhances spectral representation by adaptively reweighting input channels based on resolution-specific characteristics; (2) an Adaptive Operator Learning Network (AOL-Net) that dynamically selects operators for convolutional kernels to improve edge-sensitive spatial feature extraction under varying crop and temporal conditions; and (3) a dual-branch architecture with a learnable fusion mechanism, which jointly models local spatial details and global contextual information to support cross-resolution and cross-crop generalization. Extensive experiments on multi-year datasets MODIS and multi-crop dataset Sentinel-2 demonstrate that DFYP consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines in RMSE, MAE, and R2 across different spatial resolutions, crop types, and time periods, showcasing its effectiveness and robustness for real-world agricultural monitoring.

Zeyu Yan, Fei Wen, Rendong Ying et al.

Lossy compression algorithms are typically designed to achieve the lowest possible distortion at a given bit rate. However, recent studies show that pursuing high perceptual quality would lead to increase of the lowest achievable distortion (e.g., MSE). This paper provides nontrivial results theoretically revealing that, \textit{1}) the cost of achieving perfect perception quality is exactly a doubling of the lowest achievable MSE distortion, \textit{2}) an optimal encoder for the "classic" rate-distortion problem is also optimal for the perceptual compression problem, \textit{3}) distortion loss is unnecessary for training a perceptual decoder. Further, we propose a novel training framework to achieve the lowest MSE distortion under perfect perception constraint at a given bit rate. This framework uses a GAN with discriminator conditioned on an MSE-optimized encoder, which is superior over the traditional framework using distortion plus adversarial loss. Experiments are provided to verify the theoretical finding and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed training framework.

Humphrey Yang, Zeyu Yan, Danli Luo et al.

This paper presents FoamFactor, a novel material with tunable stiffness and compressibility between hydration states, and a tailored pipeline to design and fabricate artifacts consisting of it. This technique compounds hydrogel with open-cell foams via additive manufacturing to produce a water-responsive composite material. Enabled by the large volumetric changes of hydrogel dispersions, the material is soft and compressible when dehydrated and becomes stiffer and rather incompressible when hydrated. Leveraging this material property transition, we explore its design space in various aspects pertaining to the transition of hydration states, including multi-functional shoes, amphibious cars, mechanical transmission systems, and self-deploying robotic grippers.

Jianqiang Ma, Zeyu Yan, Shuai Pang et al.

On the WikiSQL benchmark, state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems typically take a slot-filling approach by building several dedicated models for each type of slots. Such modularized systems are not only complex butalso of limited capacity for capturing inter-dependencies among SQL clauses. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel extraction-linking approach, where a unified extractor recognizes all types of slot mentions appearing in the question sentence before a linker maps the recognized columns to the table schema to generate executable SQL queries. Trained with automatically generated annotations, the proposed method achieves the first place on the WikiSQL benchmark.