Shengsheng Qian

Dizhan Xue, Shengsheng Qian, Zuyi Zhou et al.

In recent years, cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the process of understanding and reasoning across different modalities, has emerged as a pivotal area with applications spanning from multimedia analysis to healthcare diagnostics. As the deployment of AI systems becomes more ubiquitous, the demand for transparency and comprehensibility in these systems' decision-making processes has intensified. This survey delves into the realm of interpretable cross-modal reasoning (I-CMR), where the objective is not only to achieve high predictive performance but also to provide human-understandable explanations for the results. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the typical methods with a three-level taxonomy for I-CMR. Furthermore, this survey reviews the existing CMR datasets with annotations for explanations. Finally, this survey summarizes the challenges for I-CMR and discusses potential future directions. In conclusion, this survey aims to catalyze the progress of this emerging research area by providing researchers with a panoramic and comprehensive perspective, illuminating the state of the art and discerning the opportunities. The summarized methods, datasets, and other resources are available at https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Interpretable-Cross-modal-Reasoning.

Shengsheng Qian, Zuyi Zhou, Dizhan Xue et al.

Cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the intricate process of synthesizing and drawing inferences across divergent sensory modalities, is increasingly recognized as a crucial capability in the progression toward more sophisticated and anthropomorphic artificial intelligence systems. Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a class of AI algorithms specifically engineered to parse, produce, and engage with human language on an extensive scale. The recent trend of deploying LLMs to tackle CMR tasks has marked a new mainstream of approaches for enhancing their effectiveness. This survey offers a nuanced exposition of current methodologies applied in CMR using LLMs, classifying these into a detailed three-tiered taxonomy. Moreover, the survey delves into the principal design strategies and operational techniques of prototypical models within this domain. Additionally, it articulates the prevailing challenges associated with the integration of LLMs in CMR and identifies prospective research directions. To sum up, this survey endeavors to expedite progress within this burgeoning field by endowing scholars with a holistic and detailed vista, showcasing the vanguard of current research whilst pinpointing potential avenues for advancement. An associated GitHub repository that collects the relevant papers can be found at https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Cross-modal-Reasoning-with-LLMs

Jun Hu, Bryan Hooi, Shengsheng Qian et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been utilized to build Collaborative Filtering (CF) models to predict user preferences based on historical user-item interactions. However, there is relatively little understanding of how GNN-based CF models relate to some traditional Network Representation Learning (NRL) approaches. In this paper, we show the equivalence between some state-of-the-art GNN-based CF models and a traditional 1-layer NRL model based on context encoding. Based on a Markov process that trades off two types of distances, we present Markov Graph Diffusion Collaborative Filtering (MGDCF) to generalize some state-of-the-art GNN-based CF models. Instead of considering the GNN as a trainable black box that propagates learnable user/item vertex embeddings, we treat GNNs as an untrainable Markov process that can construct constant context features of vertices for a traditional NRL model that encodes context features with a fully-connected layer. Such simplification can help us to better understand how GNNs benefit CF models. Especially, it helps us realize that ranking losses play crucial roles in GNN-based CF tasks. With our proposed simple yet powerful ranking loss InfoBPR, the NRL model can still perform well without the context features constructed by GNNs. We conduct experiments to perform detailed analysis on MGDCF.

Zhenyu Yang, Kairui Zhang, Yuhang Hu et al.

Despite significant progress in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) for offline video understanding, existing online Video-LLMs typically struggle to simultaneously process continuous frame-by-frame inputs and determine optimal response timing, often compromising real-time responsiveness and narrative coherence. To address these limitations, we introduce LiveStar, a pioneering live streaming assistant that achieves always-on proactive responses through adaptive streaming decoding. Specifically, LiveStar incorporates: (1) a training strategy enabling incremental video-language alignment for variable-length video streams, preserving temporal consistency across dynamically evolving frame sequences; (2) a response-silence decoding framework that determines optimal proactive response timing via a single forward pass verification; (3) memory-aware acceleration via peak-end memory compression for online inference on 10+ minute videos, combined with streaming key-value cache to achieve 1.53x faster inference. We also construct an OmniStar dataset, a comprehensive dataset for training and benchmarking that encompasses 15 diverse real-world scenarios and 5 evaluation tasks for online video understanding. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks demonstrate LiveStar's state-of-the-art performance, achieving an average 19.5% improvement in semantic correctness with 18.1% reduced timing difference compared to existing online Video-LLMs, while improving FPS by 12.0% across all five OmniStar tasks. Our model and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/yzy-bupt/LiveStar.

Zhenyu Yang, Yuhang Hu, Zemin Du et al.

Despite the significant advancements of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on established benchmarks, there remains a notable gap in suitable evaluation regarding their applicability in the emerging domain of long-context streaming video understanding. Current benchmarks for video understanding typically emphasize isolated single-instance text inputs and fail to evaluate the capacity to sustain temporal reasoning throughout the entire duration of video streams. To address these limitations, we introduce SVBench, a pioneering benchmark with temporal multi-turn question-answering chains specifically designed to thoroughly assess the capabilities of streaming video understanding of current LVLMs. We design a semi-automated annotation pipeline to obtain 49,979 Question-Answer (QA) pairs of 1,353 streaming videos, which includes generating QA chains that represent a series of consecutive multi-turn dialogues over video segments and constructing temporal linkages between successive QA chains. Our experimental results, obtained from 14 models in dialogue and streaming evaluations, reveal that while the closed-source GPT-4o outperforms others, most open-source LVLMs struggle with long-context streaming video understanding. We also construct a StreamingChat model, which significantly outperforms open-source LVLMs on our SVBench and achieves comparable performance on diverse vision-language benchmarks. We expect SVBench to advance the research of streaming video understanding by providing a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current LVLMs. Our benchmark and model can be accessed at https://github.com/sotayang/SVBench.

Shengsheng Qian, Dizhan Xue, Yifei Wang et al.

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is an effective paradigm for learning representations from unlabeled data, such as text, images, and videos. However, researchers have recently found that SSL is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. The attacker can embed hidden SSL backdoors via a few poisoned examples in the training dataset and maliciously manipulate the behavior of downstream models. To defend against SSL backdoor attacks, a feasible route is to detect and remove the poisonous samples in the training set. However, the existing SSL backdoor defense method fails to detect the poisonous samples precisely. In this paper, we propose to erase the SSL backdoor by cluster activation masking and propose a novel PoisonCAM method. After obtaining the threat model trained on the poisoned dataset, our method can precisely detect poisonous samples based on the assumption that masking the backdoor trigger can effectively change the activation of a downstream clustering model. In experiments, our PoisonCAM achieves 96\% accuracy for backdoor trigger detection compared to 3\% of the state-of-the-art method on poisoned ImageNet-100. Moreover, our proposed PoisonCAM significantly improves the performance of the trained SSL model under backdoor attacks compared to the state-of-the-art method. Our code, data, and trained models will be open once this paper is accepted.

Yuhang Hu, Zhenyu Yang, Shihan Wang et al.

The rapid growth of streaming video applications demands multimodal models with enhanced capabilities for temporal dynamics understanding and complex reasoning. However, current Video Question Answering (VideoQA) datasets suffer from two critical limitations: 1) Static annotation mechanisms fail to capture the evolving nature of answers in temporal video streams, and 2) The absence of explicit reasoning process annotations restricts model interpretability and logical deduction capabilities. To address these challenges, We introduce StreamingCoT, the first dataset explicitly designed for temporally evolving reasoning in streaming VideoQA and multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) tasks. Our framework first establishes a dynamic hierarchical annotation architecture that generates per-second dense descriptions and constructs temporally-dependent semantic segments through similarity fusion, paired with question-answer sets constrained by temporal evolution patterns. We further propose an explicit reasoning chain generation paradigm that extracts spatiotemporal objects via keyframe semantic alignment, derives object state transition-based reasoning paths using large language models, and ensures logical coherence through human-verified validation. This dataset establishes a foundation for advancing research in streaming video understanding, complex temporal reasoning, and multimodal inference. Our StreamingCoT and its construction toolkit can be accessed at https://github.com/Fleeting-hyh/StreamingCoT.

Yifei Wang, Dizhan Xue, Shengjie Zhang et al.

With the prosperity of large language models (LLMs), powerful LLM-based intelligent agents have been developed to provide customized services with a set of user-defined tools. State-of-the-art methods for constructing LLM agents adopt trained LLMs and further fine-tune them on data for the agent task. However, we show that such methods are vulnerable to our proposed backdoor attacks named BadAgent on various agent tasks, where a backdoor can be embedded by fine-tuning on the backdoor data. At test time, the attacker can manipulate the deployed LLM agents to execute harmful operations by showing the trigger in the agent input or environment. To our surprise, our proposed attack methods are extremely robust even after fine-tuning on trustworthy data. Though backdoor attacks have been studied extensively in natural language processing, to the best of our knowledge, we could be the first to study them on LLM agents that are more dangerous due to the permission to use external tools. Our work demonstrates the clear risk of constructing LLM agents based on untrusted LLMs or data. Our code is public at https://github.com/DPamK/BadAgent

Jun Hu, Shengsheng Qian, Quan Fang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in processing graph data by extracting and propagating structure-aware features. Existing GNN research designs various propagation schemes to guide the aggregation of neighbor information. Recently the field has advanced from local propagation schemes that focus on local neighbors towards extended propagation schemes that can directly deal with extended neighbors consisting of both local and high-order neighbors. Despite the impressive performance, existing approaches are still insufficient to build an efficient and learnable extended propagation scheme that can adaptively adjust the influence of local and high-order neighbors. This paper proposes an efficient yet effective end-to-end framework, namely Contrastive Adaptive Propagation Graph Neural Networks (CAPGNN), to address these issues by combining Personalized PageRank and attention techniques. CAPGNN models the learnable extended propagation scheme with a polynomial of a sparse local affinity matrix, where the polynomial relies on Personalized PageRank to provide superior initial coefficients. In order to adaptively adjust the influence of both local and high-order neighbors, a coefficient-attention model is introduced to learn to adjust the coefficients of the polynomial. In addition, we leverage self-supervised learning techniques and design a negative-free entropy-aware contrastive loss to explicitly take advantage of unlabeled data for training. We implement CAPGNN as two different versions named CAPGCN and CAPGAT, which use static and dynamic sparse local affinity matrices, respectively. Experiments on graph benchmark datasets suggest that CAPGNN can consistently outperform or match state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/hujunxianligong/CAPGNN.

Desheng Cai, Jun Hu, Quan Zhao et al.

In this paper, we present GRecX, an open-source TensorFlow framework for benchmarking GNN-based recommendation models in an efficient and unified way. GRecX consists of core libraries for building GNN-based recommendation benchmarks, as well as the implementations of popular GNN-based recommendation models. The core libraries provide essential components for building efficient and unified benchmarks, including FastMetrics (efficient metrics computation libraries), VectorSearch (efficient similarity search libraries for dense vectors), BatchEval (efficient mini-batch evaluation libraries), and DataManager (unified dataset management libraries). Especially, to provide a unified benchmark for the fair comparison of different complex GNN-based recommendation models, we design a new metric GRMF-X and integrate it into the FastMetrics component. Based on a TensorFlow GNN library tf_geometric, GRecX carefully implements a variety of popular GNN-based recommendation models. We carefully implement these baseline models to reproduce the performance reported in the literature, and our implementations are usually more efficient and friendly. In conclusion, GRecX enables uses to train and benchmark GNN-based recommendation baselines in an efficient and unified way. We conduct experiments with GRecX, and the experimental results show that GRecX allows us to train and benchmark GNN-based recommendation baselines in an efficient and unified way. The source code of GRecX is available at https://github.com/maenzhier/GRecX.

Xingyu Lu, Yuhang Hu, Changyi Liu et al.

Mathematical reasoning presents a significant challenge to the cognitive capabilities of LLMs. Various methods have been proposed to enhance the mathematical ability of LLMs. However, few recognize the value of state transition for LLM reasoning. In this work, we define mathematical problem-solving as a process of transiting from an initial unsolved state to the final resolved state, and propose Kwai-STaR framework, which transforms LLMs into State-Transition Reasoners to improve their intuitive reasoning capabilities. Our approach comprises three main steps: (1) Define the state space tailored to the mathematical reasoning. (2) Generate state-transition data based on the state space. (3) Convert original LLMs into State-Transition Reasoners via a curricular training strategy. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of Kwai-STaR in enhancing mathematical reasoning: After training on the small-scale Kwai-STaR dataset, general LLMs, including Mistral-7B and LLaMA-3, achieve considerable performance gain on the GSM8K and GSM-Hard dataset. Additionally, the state transition-based design endows Kwai-STaR with remarkable training and inference efficiency. Further experiments are underway to establish the generality of Kwai-STaR.

Dizhan Xue, Shengsheng Qian, Chuanrui Hu et al.

Short-video platforms have gained immense popularity, captivating the interest of millions, if not billions, of users globally. Recently, researchers have highlighted the significance of analyzing the propagation of short-videos, which typically involves discovering commercial values, public opinions, user behaviors, etc. This paper proposes a new Short-video Propagation Influence Rating (SPIR) task and aims to promote SPIR from both the dataset and method perspectives. First, we propose a new Cross-platform Short-Video (XS-Video) dataset, which aims to provide a large-scale and real-world short-video propagation network across various platforms to facilitate the research on short-video propagation. Our XS-Video dataset includes 117,720 videos, 381,926 samples, and 535 topics across 5 biggest Chinese platforms, annotated with the propagation influence from level 0 to 9. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale short-video dataset that contains cross-platform data or provides all of the views, likes, shares, collects, fans, comments, and comment content. Second, we propose a Large Graph Model (LGM) named NetGPT, based on a novel three-stage training mechanism, to bridge heterogeneous graph-structured data with the powerful reasoning ability and knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our NetGPT can comprehend and analyze the short-video propagation graph, enabling it to predict the long-term propagation influence of short-videos. Comprehensive experimental results evaluated by both classification and regression metrics on our XS-Video dataset indicate the superiority of our method for SPIR.

Song Liu, Haoqi Fan, Shengsheng Qian et al.

Video-Text Retrieval has been a hot research topic with the growth of multimedia data on the internet. Transformer for video-text learning has attracted increasing attention due to its promising performance. However, existing cross-modal transformer approaches typically suffer from two major limitations: 1) Exploitation of the transformer architecture where different layers have different feature characteristics is limited; 2) End-to-end training mechanism limits negative sample interactions in a mini-batch. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Hierarchical Transformer (HiT) for video-text retrieval. HiT performs Hierarchical Cross-modal Contrastive Matching in both feature-level and semantic-level, achieving multi-view and comprehensive retrieval results. Moreover, inspired by MoCo, we propose Momentum Cross-modal Contrast for cross-modal learning to enable large-scale negative sample interactions on-the-fly, which contributes to the generation of more precise and discriminative representations. Experimental results on the three major Video-Text Retrieval benchmark datasets demonstrate the advantages of our method.

Jun Hu, Shengsheng Qian, Quan Fang et al.

We introduce tf_geometric, an efficient and friendly library for graph deep learning, which is compatible with both TensorFlow 1.x and 2.x. tf_geometric provides kernel libraries for building Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as well as implementations of popular GNNs. The kernel libraries consist of infrastructures for building efficient GNNs, including graph data structures, graph map-reduce framework, graph mini-batch strategy, etc. These infrastructures enable tf_geometric to support single-graph computation, multi-graph computation, graph mini-batch, distributed training, etc.; therefore, tf_geometric can be used for a variety of graph deep learning tasks, such as transductive node classification, inductive node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. Based on the kernel libraries, tf_geometric implements a variety of popular GNN models for different tasks. To facilitate the implementation of GNNs, tf_geometric also provides some other libraries for dataset management, graph sampling, etc. Different from existing popular GNN libraries, tf_geometric provides not only Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) APIs, but also Functional APIs, which enable tf_geometric to handle advanced graph deep learning tasks such as graph meta-learning. The APIs of tf_geometric are friendly, and they are suitable for both beginners and experts. In this paper, we first present an overview of tf_geometric's framework. Then, we conduct experiments on some benchmark datasets and report the performance of several popular GNN models implemented by tf_geometric.

Lei Sang, Min Xu, Shengsheng Qian et al.

Network embedding represents nodes in a continuous vector space and preserves structure information from the Network. Existing methods usually adopt a "one-size-fits-all" approach when concerning multi-scale structure information, such as first- and second-order proximity of nodes, ignoring the fact that different scales play different roles in the embedding learning. In this paper, we propose an Attention-based Adversarial Autoencoder Network Embedding(AAANE) framework, which promotes the collaboration of different scales and lets them vote for robust representations. The proposed AAANE consists of two components: 1) Attention-based autoencoder effectively capture the highly non-linear network structure, which can de-emphasize irrelevant scales during training. 2) An adversarial regularization guides the autoencoder learn robust representations by matching the posterior distribution of the latent embeddings to given prior distribution. This is the first attempt to introduce attention mechanisms to multi-scale network embedding. Experimental results on real-world networks show that our learned attention parameters are different for every network and the proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches for network embedding.