Yingjie Niu

Yingjie Niu, Ming Ding, Maoning Ge et al.

Transformer-based models have gained popularity in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and are extensively utilized in computer vision tasks and multi-modal models such as GPT4. This paper presents a novel method to enhance the explainability of Transformer-based image classification models. Our method aims to improve trust in classification results and empower users to gain a deeper understanding of the model for downstream tasks by providing visualizations of class-specific maps. We introduce two modules: the ``Relationship Weighted Out" and the ``Cut" modules. The ``Relationship Weighted Out" module focuses on extracting class-specific information from intermediate layers, enabling us to highlight relevant features. Additionally, the ``Cut" module performs fine-grained feature decomposition, taking into account factors such as position, texture, and color. By integrating these modules, we generate dense class-specific visual explainability maps. We validate our method with extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the ImageNet dataset. Furthermore, we conduct a large number of experiments on the LRN dataset, specifically designed for automatic driving danger alerts, to evaluate the explainability of our method in complex backgrounds. The results demonstrate a significant improvement over previous methods. Moreover, we conduct ablation experiments to validate the effectiveness of each module. Through these experiments, we are able to confirm the respective contributions of each module, thus solidifying the overall effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Yingjie Niu, Lanxin Lu, Rian Dolphin et al.

Accurate and robust stock trend forecasting has been a crucial and challenging task, as stock price changes are influenced by multiple factors. Graph neural network-based methods have recently achieved remarkable success in this domain by constructing stock relationship graphs that reflect internal factors and relationships between stocks. However, most of these methods rely on predefined factors to construct static stock relationship graphs due to the lack of suitable datasets, failing to capture the dynamic changes in stock relationships. Moreover, the evaluation of relationship graphs in these methods is often tied to the performance of neural network models on downstream tasks, leading to confusion and imprecision. To address these issues, we introduce the SPNews dataset, collected based on S\&P 500 Index stocks, to facilitate the construction of dynamic relationship graphs. Furthermore, we propose a novel set of financial relationship graph evaluation methods that are independent of downstream tasks. By using the relationship graph to explain historical financial phenomena, we assess its validity before constructing a graph neural network, ensuring the graph's effectiveness in capturing relevant financial relationships. Experimental results demonstrate that our evaluation methods can effectively differentiate between various financial relationship graphs, yielding more interpretable results compared to traditional approaches. We make our source code publicly available on GitHub to promote reproducibility and further research in this area.

Yingjie Niu, Ming Ding, Keisuke Fujii et al.

Traffic accidents frequently lead to fatal injuries, contributing to over 50 million deaths until 2023. To mitigate driving hazards and ensure personal safety, it is crucial to assist vehicles in anticipating important objects during travel. Previous research on important object detection primarily assessed the importance of individual participants, treating them as independent entities and frequently overlooking the connections between these participants. Unfortunately, this approach has proven less effective in detecting important objects in complex scenarios. In response, we introduce Driving scene Relationship self-Understanding transformer (DRUformer), designed to enhance the important object detection task. The DRUformer is a transformer-based multi-modal important object detection model that takes into account the relationships between all the participants in the driving scenario. Recognizing that driving intention also significantly affects the detection of important objects during driving, we have incorporated a module for embedding driving intention. To assess the performance of our approach, we conducted a comparative experiment on the DRAMA dataset, pitting our model against other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. The results demonstrated a noteworthy 16.2\% improvement in mIoU and a substantial 12.3\% boost in ACC compared to SOTA methods. Furthermore, we conducted a qualitative analysis of our model's ability to detect important objects across different road scenarios and classes, highlighting its effectiveness in diverse contexts. Finally, we conducted various ablation studies to assess the efficiency of the proposed modules in our DRUformer model.

Yingjie Niu, Changhong Jin, Rian Dolphin et al.

Language models can be used to identify relationships between financial entities in text. However, while structured output mechanisms exist, prompting-based pipelines still incur autoregressive decoding costs and decouple graph construction from downstream optimization. We propose \emph{Relational Probing}, which replaces the standard language-model head with a relation head that induces a relational graph directly from language-model hidden states and is trained jointly with the downstream task model for stock-trend prediction. This approach both learns semantic representations and preserves the strict structure of the induced relational graph. It enables language-model outputs to go beyond text, allowing them to be reshaped into task-specific formats for downstream models. To enhance reproducibility, we provide an operational definition of small language models (SLMs): models that can be fine-tuned end-to-end on a single 24GB GPU under specified batch-size and sequence-length settings. Experiments use Qwen3 backbones (0.6B/1.7B/4B) as upstream SLMs and compare against a co-occurrence baseline. Relational Probing yields consistent performance improvements at competitive inference cost.

Cheng Xu, Changhong Jin, Yingjie Niu et al.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed fake news detection and fact-checking tasks from simple classification to complex reasoning. However, evaluation frameworks have not kept pace. Current benchmarks are static, making them vulnerable to benchmark data contamination (BDC) and ineffective at assessing reasoning under temporal uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveFact a continuously updated benchmark that simulates the real-world "fog of war" in misinformation detection. LiveFact uses dynamic, temporal evidence sets to evaluate models on their ability to reason with evolving, incomplete information rather than on memorized knowledge. We propose a dual-mode evaluation: Classification Mode for final verification and Inference Mode for evidence-based reasoning, along with a component to monitor BDC explicitly. Tests with 22 LLMs show that open-source Mixture-of-Experts models, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B, now match or outperform proprietary state-of-the-art systems. More importantly, our analysis finds a significant "reasoning gap." Capable models exhibit epistemic humility by recognizing unverifiable claims in early data slices-an aspect traditional static benchmarks overlook. LiveFact sets a sustainable standard for evaluating robust, temporally aware AI verification.

Yingjie Niu, Mingchuan Zhao, Valerio Poti et al.

Graph representation learning methods have been widely adopted in financial applications to enhance company representations by leveraging inter-firm relationships. However, current approaches face three key challenges: (1) The advantages of relational information are obscured by limitations in downstream task designs; (2) Existing graph models specifically designed for stock prediction often suffer from excessive complexity and poor generalization; (3) Experience-based construction of corporate relationship graphs lacks effective comparison of different graph structures. To address these limitations, we propose a long-term stock prediction task and develop a Node-level Graph Attention Network (NGAT) specifically tailored for corporate relationship graphs. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate the limitations of existing graph comparison methods based on model downstream task performance. Experimental results across two datasets consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed task and model. The project is publicly available on GitHub to encourage reproducibility and future research.

Xiangkai Zhang, Dizhe Zhang, WenZhuo Cao et al.

Obstacle avoidance in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a fundamental capability, has gained increasing attention with the growing focus on spatial intelligence. However, current obstacle-avoidance methods mainly depend on limited field-of-view sensors and are ill-suited for UAV scenarios which require full-spatial awareness when the movement direction differs from the UAV's heading. This limitation motivates us to explore omnidirectional obstacle avoidance for panoramic drones with full-view perception. We first study an under explored problem setting in which a UAV must generate collision-free motion in environments with obstacles from arbitrary directions, and then construct a benchmark that consists of three representative flight tasks. Based on such settings, we propose Fly360, a two-stage perception-decision pipeline with a fixed random-yaw training strategy. At the perception stage, panoramic RGB observations are input and converted into depth maps as a robust intermediate representation. For the policy network, it is lightweight and used to output body-frame velocity commands from depth inputs. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that Fly360 achieves stable omnidirectional obstacle avoidance and outperforms forward-view baselines across all tasks. Our model is available at https://zxkai.github.io/fly360/

Yingjie Niu, Linyi Yang, Ruihai Dong et al.

There have been growing concerns regarding the out-of-domain generalization ability of natural language processing (NLP) models, particularly in question-answering (QA) tasks. Current synthesized data augmentation methods for QA are hampered by increased training costs. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that combines prompting methods and linear probing then fine-tuning strategy, which does not entail additional cost. Our method has been theoretically and empirically shown to be effective in enhancing the generalization ability of both generative and discriminative models. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with an average increase in F1 score of 4.5%-7.9%. Furthermore, our method can be easily integrated into any pre-trained models and offers a promising solution to the under-explored cross-domain QA task. We release our source code at GitHub*.

Valerio Antonini, Yingjie Niu, Manuela Nayantara Jeyaraj et al.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, a dire need to effectively identify the individuals who may have come in close-contact to others who have been infected with COVID-19 has risen. This process of identifying individuals, also termed as 'Contact tracing', has significant implications for the containment and control of the spread of this virus. However, manual tracing has proven to be ineffective calling for automated contact tracing approaches. As such, this research presents an automated machine learning system for identifying individuals who may have come in contact with others infected with COVID-19 using sensor data transmitted through handheld devices. This paper describes the different approaches followed in arriving at an optimal solution model that effectually predicts whether a person has been in close proximity to an infected individual using a gradient boosting algorithm and time series feature extraction.