Sio-Kei Im

Junhao Wei, Baili Lu, Zhenhong Peng et al.

Sequence-based deep learning offers a scalable alternative to structure-based scoring for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction. However, progress is hard to interpret when architectural priors are evaluated on canonical PDBbind-style splits that leak similarity classes across folds. We present HonestAffinity, a compact 1D-input predictor to isolate two priors under a leak-aware protocol: frozen ESM-2 (650M) protein embeddings and a learned binary pocket-position marker. We evaluate a multi-scale convolutional/Transformer template in three variants: HonestAffinity-Pocket, HonestAffinity-NoPocket, and HonestAffinity-Pocket-NoESM. All three train on 11,513 LP-PDBBind complexes in ~3 GPU-hours. We benchmark against five baselines on the LP-PDBBind 3-tier no-leak hold-out, CASF-2016, and a CASF-2016 non-train subset. Our central finding is a split-conditioned reversal rather than a uniformly best prior: HonestAffinity-Pocket achieves the best mean Pearson R on validation and CASF-2016 splits, whereas HonestAffinity-Pocket-NoESM achieves the best mean Pearson R on every strict LP no-leak tier (test_cl1-cl3). Both the pocket marker and ESM-2 input improve performance on familiar splits but reduce Pearson R on strict no-leak tiers. We argue models should report paired canonical and leak-proof ablations, and that deployment-regime-matched variants better describe these reversals than a single default. Code and scripts are linked in the footnote; checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.

Lei Dong, Bowie Liu, Dennis Wong et al.

A grand Motzkin path with air pockets is a non-empty lattice path in the first and fourth quadrant of $\mathbb{Z}^2$, starting at the origin $(0,0)$, ending on the $x$-axis, and consisting of up-steps $(1, 1)$, horizontal steps $(1, 0)$, down-steps $(1, -k)$ where $k \geq 1$, and with no consecutive down-steps. A {grand Dyck path with air pockets} is a grand Motzkin path with air pockets that uses no horizontal steps. We present the first known 2-Gray codes for grand Motzkin paths with air pockets. Setting the number of horizontal steps to zero in our algorithm yields the first known 2-Gray codes for grand Dyck paths with air pockets. Our three-stage algorithm generates each path in constant amortized time per string, using $O(n^2)$ memory. We also provide enumeration formulae for grand Motzkin paths and grand Dyck paths with air pockets.

Yifu Zhao, Xiaofan Zou, Junhao Wei et al.

Learning-assisted algorithm design often has to make reliable search decisions under small evaluation budgets, where committing to a single metaheuristic can be unreliable. We propose WASHH, a Whale-guided Adaptive Selection Hyper-Heuristic for continuous black-box optimization. WASHH uses WOA as the main exploitation backbone, but treats PSO-style memory, GWO-style leader averaging, DE-style variation, local coordinate search, and anchor-guided refinement as selectable search behaviors. An online reward controller allocates evaluations according to observed improvements, while anchor refinement exploits inexpensive reference configurations such as box centers or default model settings without bypassing black-box evaluation. On ten 30-dimensional benchmark functions with 10 independent runs and 12,000 evaluations, WASHH achieves the best average rank, 1.10, and is best or tied best on all ten functions. It strictly improves over WOA on eight functions and ties WOA at the numerical optimum on Rastrigin and Griewank. We further study SVC hyperparameter configuration for breast cancer diagnosis under a 300-evaluation budget. WASHH obtains the lowest mean validation log loss among the compared optimizers, suggesting that anchor-aware selection hyper-heuristics are a practical lightweight direction for LEAD systems.

Junhao Wei, Yanxiao Li, Seyedali Mirjalili et al.

The Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) has shown strong optimization ability but still suffers from premature convergence and weak search diversity. To address these issues, this paper proposes an enhanced WOA variant called CICDWOA. The proposed algorithm introduces a Good Nodes Set (GNS) method for uniform population initialization, a Collective Cognitive Sharing (CCS) mechanism to enhance group collaboration, and an Enhanced Spiral Updating strategy based on the Cauchy Inverse Cumulative Distribution (CICD) to strengthen global exploration and local exploitation balance. In addition, a nonlinear convergence factor and a Hybrid Gaussian-Cauchy mutation based on Differential Evolution (DE) further improve convergence efficiency and population diversity. CICDWOA was evaluated on 23 benchmark functions, 2D robot path planning problems, 3D UAV path planning tasks and 10 engineering design problems. Statistical experiment results show that CICDWOA achieves faster convergence, higher accuracy, and better robustness than classical WOA and other advanced metaheuristic algorithms. CICDWOA gained average Friedman value of 1.6790, ranking first among the SOTA algorithms. And the results of engineering simulations confirm that CICDWOA provides an effective and general framework for solving complex optimization and engineering problems. The code of CICDWOA are available on \href{URL}{https://github.com/JunhaoWei-mpu/ROBIS-Lab/tree/CICDWOA}.

Yanfeng Li, Yue Sun, Keren Fu et al.

Existing multi-object image generation methods face difficulties in achieving precise alignment between localized image generation regions and their corresponding semantics based on language descriptions, frequently resulting in inconsistent object quantities and attribute aliasing. To mitigate this limitation, mainstream approaches typically rely on external control signals to explicitly constrain the spatial layout, local semantic and visual attributes of images. However, this strong dependency makes the input format rigid, rendering it incompatible with the heterogeneous resource conditions of users and diverse constraint requirements. To address these challenges, we propose MoGen, a user-friendly multi-object image generation method. First, we design a Regional Semantic Anchor (RSA) module that precisely anchors phrase units in language descriptions to their corresponding image regions during the generation process, enabling text-to-image generation that follows quantity specifications for multiple objects. Building upon this foundation, we further introduce an Adaptive Multi-modal Guidance (AMG) module, which adaptively parses and integrates various combinations of multi-source control signals to formulate corresponding structured intent. This intent subsequently guides selective constraints on scene layouts and object attributes, achieving dynamic fine-grained control. Experimental results demonstrate that MoGen significantly outperforms existing methods in generation quality, quantity consistency, and fine-grained control, while exhibiting superior accessibility and control flexibility. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tear-kitty/MoGen/tree/master.

Junhao Wei, Yanxiao Li, Bidong Chen et al.

We present a unified experiment, analysis, and benchmark study of multivariate time-series (MTS) anomaly detection. Ten family-representative detectors -- spanning statistical, reconstruction, association, frequency, and generic-transformer families -- are evaluated on five datasets (SMD, MSL, SMAP, PSM, and MSDS) under effectiveness, efficiency, robustness, and cross-dataset generalisation. All methods share the same windowing, scoring, hardware, and metric protocols. Effectiveness, ablation, and robustness use three random seeds; cross-dataset transfer uses seed~0 because each extra seed requires $250$ source-target evaluations. The benchmark yields three method-independent findings: no single-bias baseline dominates; absolute perturbation VUS-ROC is more informative than retention ratios; and MSDS behaves as an event-dense deployment workload rather than a sparse point-anomaly benchmark. Under this protocol we also introduce \ours{}, an adaptive detector family combining a NOTEARS-constrained directed channel-graph view with optional patch-attention and temporal-association views. \ours{} achieves the best macro-average VUS-ROC ($0.675$, $+5.1$~pt over the second-best LSTM-AE), ranks first overall, and reaches the top-3 on all five datasets. Its wins on MSL and MSDS are narrow, while its average and robustness gains are larger: under the same three-seed robustness protocol for every method, it obtains the strongest absolute VUS-ROC across noise, channel dropout, and time-shift perturbations. We release the MSDS preprocessing protocol, configurations, scripts, and seed-level metric dumps.

Junhao Wei, Haochen Li, Yanxiao Li et al.

Mining anomalies from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) state-estimation logs is challenging because failures are sparse, temporally structured, and distributed across heterogeneous PX4 telemetry streams with variable sensor availability and missing values. We present AeroTSBoost, a temporal-statistical boosting framework for real-world UAV telemetry anomaly mining. AeroTSBoost aligns multivariate flight logs, converts each window into deterministic descriptors that capture distributional shifts, quantile structure, endpoint drift, local dynamics, and lag correlation, and trains a class-balanced LightGBM detector. On UAV-SEAD, AeroTSBoost achieves the strongest AUPRC among evaluated classical, supervised tabular, neural reconstruction, recurrent, Granger-causality-based, and frequency-domain baselines. Across five seeds, it reaches $0.7516\pm0.0043$ AUPRC and $0.5342\pm0.0108$ threshold-swept event F1, improving AUPRC by 5.79 absolute points over the strongest non-AeroTSBoost baseline. Under purged chronological and leave-log-out protocols, it remains the best AUPRC method, reaching $0.6066\pm0.0193$ and $0.6388\pm0.0315$, respectively. On related ALFA fixed-wing UAV fault logs, AeroTSBoost reaches $0.9259\pm0.0076$ leave-sequence-out AUPRC, ahead of RandomForest ($0.8835\pm0.0797$) and moments-only ($0.8700\pm0.0481$). These results show that deterministic temporal-statistical representations remain highly competitive for sparse anomaly mining in operational cyber-physical telemetry.

Dexing Yao, Haochen Li, Junhao Wei et al.

Autonomous UAV flight in confined, wall-dense environments requires low-latency and reliable motion planning under strict safety constraints. Traditional optimization-based planners suffer from mapping latency and easily fall into local minima when navigating through dense structural obstacles. Meanwhile, existing end-to-end learning methods struggle to extract fine-grained geometric features from raw depth images and lack hard kinodynamic constraints, leading to unpredictable collisions near walls. To address these issues, we propose KIO-planner, an attention-guided single-stage trajectory planning framework. First, we integrate a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) into the perception backbone to adaptively focus on critical structural edges and traversable space. Second, we introduce a novel Dual Mapping mechanism--comprising physical bounds activation and a deterministic Geometric Safety Shield in the depth-pixel space--to enforce kinodynamic feasibility and collision-free flight without global map fusion. Extensive high-fidelity simulated experiments demonstrate that KIO-planner enables highly agile navigation at speeds up to 3.0 m/s. Compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, KIO-planner achieves lower inference latency (approximately 24 ms) and generates significantly smoother trajectories, reducing control cost by 28.4%. Most notably, our Dual Mapping substantially increases the worst-case safety margin, measured by minimum distance to obstacles, from 0.48 m to 0.76 m, ensuring fast, smooth, and safer navigation in highly constrained environments.

Junhao Wei, Yanxiao Li, Yifu Zhao et al.

UAV multi-site inspection often reduces to choosing a high-quality visiting order after target sites have been extracted from a map. This paper develops LA-BHH, a landscape-aware bandit hyper-heuristic that learns an operator-selection policy online for this routing layer. LA-BHH treats 2-opt, swap, relocate, and Or-opt moves as low-level arms, builds context from static landscape descriptors and online search-state features, and updates a LinUCB controller from improvement rewards during the same run. Experimental results on 45 generated Euclidean TSP instances show that LA-BHH achieves the best mean final gap and convergence AUC, with 0.0223 and 0.0389 respectively. It reduces final gap by 17.6\% over UCB-HH, 22.6\% over Random-HH, and 68.2\% over nearest-neighbor construction. Ablation results further show that contextual credit assignment, 2-opt repair, and stagnation-aware state use are the main contributors.

Haijian Lai, Bowen Liu, Man Xu et al.

We introduce an empowered transposed Fully Connected Weighted (t-FCW) graph representation to embed point clouds into a metric space. While original t-FCW has shown promising results for point cloud classification, the reasons behind its effectiveness and its broader applicability remained unclear. In this work, we analyze the properties that make the empowered and original t-FCW effective and design a network that uses the empowered t-FCW exclusively as feature extractors. From an interpretability perspective, we build memory banks for classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation using the empowered t-FCW. Our analysis reveals that the empowered t-FCW inherits robustness from surface descriptors, provides interpretability through dimension-wise relations. These properties enable a highly efficient and interpretable network, which processes the ModelNet40 classification problem in approximately 7 seconds on an NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPU. Importantly, empowered t-FCW can function both as a lightweight standalone baseline and as a complementary plug-in to existing deep models.

Chak Fong Chong, Xinyi Fang, Jielong Guo et al.

Large-scale image datasets are often partially labeled, where only a few categories' labels are known for each image. Assigning pseudo-labels to unknown labels to gain additional training signals has become prevalent for training deep classification models. However, some pseudo-labels are inevitably incorrect, leading to a notable decline in the model classification performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Category-wise Fine-Tuning (CFT), aiming to reduce model inaccuracies caused by the wrong pseudo-labels. In particular, CFT employs known labels without pseudo-labels to fine-tune the logistic regressions of trained models individually to calibrate each category's model predictions. Genetic Algorithm, seldom used for training deep models, is also utilized in CFT to maximize the classification performance directly. CFT is applied to well-trained models, unlike most existing methods that train models from scratch. Hence, CFT is general and compatible with models trained with different methods and schemes, as demonstrated through extensive experiments. CFT requires only a few seconds for each category for calibration with consumer-grade GPUs. We achieve state-of-the-art results on three benchmarking datasets, including the CheXpert chest X-ray competition dataset (ensemble mAUC 93.33%, single model 91.82%), partially labeled MS-COCO (average mAP 83.69%), and Open Image V3 (mAP 85.31%), outperforming the previous bests by 0.28%, 2.21%, 2.50%, and 0.91%, respectively. The single model on CheXpert has been officially evaluated by the competition server, endorsing the correctness of the result. The outstanding results and generalizability indicate that CFT could be substantial and prevalent for classification model development. Code is available at: https://github.com/maxium0526/category-wise-fine-tuning.

Junhao Wei, Yanxiao Li, Yifu Zhao et al.

Learning-assisted hyper-heuristics can select among dispatching rules while preserving the feasibility and interpretability of constructive Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) heuristics. Their main computational cost lies in label generation rather than model fitting, since each supervised label usually requires rolling out candidate rules from a partial schedule. We study this label-cost problem together with a reliability problem: a learned selector should not switch away from a strong default rule unless the predicted gain is credible. The proposed selector uses regret-normalized rollout labels, a contextual KNN uncertainty estimate, and a gate that acts only when the predicted improvement exceeds an uncertainty-adjusted margin. We also vary rollout depth and breadth to measure the cost-quality trade-off. On synthetic JSSP instances, the gated selector achieves the lowest mean RPD among learned selectors, remains close to the best fixed dispatching rule, and reduces Random-HH mean RPD by more than an order of magnitude.

Yaofei Duan, Yuhao Huang, Xin Yang et al.

Deep learning-based diagnostic models often suffer performance drops due to distribution shifts between training (source) and test (target) domains. Collecting and labeling sufficient target domain data for model retraining represents an optimal solution, yet is limited by time and scarce resources. Active learning (AL) offers an efficient approach to reduce annotation costs while maintaining performance, but struggles to handle the challenge posed by distribution variations across different datasets. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised Active learning framework for Domain Adaptation, named ADAptation, which efficiently selects informative samples from multi-domain data pools under limited annotation budget. As a fundamental step, our method first utilizes the distribution homogenization capabilities of diffusion models to bridge cross-dataset gaps by translating target images into source-domain style. We then introduce two key innovations: (a) a hypersphere-constrained contrastive learning network for compact feature clustering, and (b) a dual-scoring mechanism that quantifies and balances sample uncertainty and representativeness. Extensive experiments on four breast ultrasound datasets (three public and one in-house/multi-center) across five common deep classifiers demonstrate that our method surpasses existing strong AL-based competitors, validating its effectiveness and generalization for clinical domain adaptation. The code is available at the anonymized link: https://github.com/miccai25-966/ADAptation.

Bowen Liu, Haijian Lai, Chan-Tong Lam et al.

Although many complex models were proposed to analyze time series data, some studies have demonstrated remarkable performance with simpler structures. A recent study proposed a non-parametric framework for 3D point cloud classification, which has the potential to be adapted for time series forecasting and enable interpretability. Inspired by the previous works, we present TSNN, a non-parametric and interpretable framework for traffic time series forecasting. TSNN consists of multiple layers that decouple the time series by matching the entries in a memory bank, where the memory bank is constructed using a similar matching process within the training set. It leverages the periodicity in traffic data to enhance forecasting accuracy while maintaining a simple model architecture. The proposed model operates without trainable parameters, preserving its inherent interpretability. In the experiments, TSNN achieves competitive performance compared to the typical deep learning models in four real-world traffic flow datasets. We also visualize the decoupling process to show the effectiveness of the components. Finally, we demonstrate the interpretability of the model and illustrate the contribution of each time step within the memory bank.

Junhao Wei, Yanxiao Li, Dexing Yao et al.

Agile unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in cluttered environments demands a planning architecture that is both computationally efficient and structurally expressive enough to reason over multiple feasible motions. This paper presents SAGA, a robust self-attention and goal-aware anchor-based planner for safe UAV autonomous navigation. SAGA formulates local planning as a one-stage joint regression-and-ranking problem over a fixed lattice of motion anchors. Given a depth image and a body-frame motion state, the planner predicts refined terminal states and planning scores for all anchors in a single forward pass, after which the best candidate is decoded into a dynamically feasible trajectory. The key idea of SAGA is to transform anchor-aligned features into geometry-aware tokens and perform cross-anchor global reasoning with self-attention. To preserve directional structure in the token space, we further introduce a polar positional encoding derived from anchor yaw and pitch. In addition, a goal-aware modulation module injects velocity, acceleration, and target information into the token representation before final score prediction. Experiments in cluttered pillar-map environments under maximum speed settings of 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0~m/s show that SAGA consistently achieves a 100\% success rate, while YOPO drops from 90.91\% to 62.50\%, Ego-planner from 71.43\% to 52.63\%, and Fast-planner from 52.63\% to 38.46\%. Under the 4.0~m/s maximum speed setting, SAGA also improves average safety from 1.9843~m to 2.3888~m and minimum safety from 0.4390~m to 0.7576~m over YOPO, while reducing total flight time from 40.4631~s to 27.4901~s. The comparison with SAGA w/o PPE further shows that explicit polar positional encoding is critical for stable cross-anchor reasoning and safe passage selection in cluttered scenes.

Xinyi Fang, Xu Yang, Chak Fong Chong et al.

Accurate classification of laryngeal vascular as benign or malignant is crucial for early detection of laryngeal cancer. However, organizations with limited access to laryngeal vascular images face challenges due to the lack of large and homogeneous public datasets for effective learning. Distinguished from the most familiar works, which directly transfer the ImageNet pre-trained models to the target domain for fine-tuning, this work pioneers exploring two-step heterogeneous transfer learning (THTL) for laryngeal lesion classification with nine deep-learning models, utilizing the diabetic retinopathy color fundus images, semantically non-identical yet vascular images, as the intermediate domain. Attention visualization technique, Layer Class Activate Map (LayerCAM), reveals a novel finding that yet the intermediate and the target domain both reflect vascular structure to a certain extent, the prevalent radial vascular pattern in the intermediate domain prevents learning the features of twisted and tangled vessels that distinguish the malignant class in the target domain, summarizes a vital rule for laryngeal lesion classification using THTL. To address this, we introduce an enhanced fine-tuning strategy in THTL called Step-Wise Fine-Tuning (SWFT) and apply it to the ResNet models. SWFT progressively refines model performance by accumulating fine-tuning layers from back to front, guided by the visualization results of LayerCAM. Comparison with the original THTL approach shows significant improvements. For ResNet18, the accuracy and malignant recall increases by 26.1% and 79.8%, respectively, while for ResNet50, these indicators improve by 20.4% and 62.2%, respectively.

Ka-Hou Chan, Sio-Kei Im, Wei Ke

This article introduces a multiple classifier method to improve the performance of concatenate-designed neural networks, such as ResNet and DenseNet, with the purpose to alleviate the pressure on the final classifier. We give the design of the classifiers, which collects the features produced between the network sets, and present the constituent layers and the activation function for the classifiers, to calculate the classification score of each classifier. We use the L2 normalization method to obtain the classifier score instead of the Softmax normalization. We also determine the conditions that can enhance convergence. As a result, the proposed classifiers are able to improve the accuracy in the experimental cases significantly, and show that the method not only has better performance than the original models, but also produces faster convergence. Moreover, our classifiers are general and can be applied to all classification related concatenate-designed network models.