Weiqi Luo

Zitao Liu, Qiongqiong Liu, Jiahao Chen et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the task of using students' historical learning interaction data to model their knowledge mastery over time so as to make predictions on their future interaction performance. Recently, remarkable progress has been made of using various deep learning techniques to solve the KT problem. However, the success behind deep learning based knowledge tracing (DLKT) approaches is still left somewhat unknown and proper measurement and analysis of these DLKT approaches remain a challenge. First, data preprocessing procedures in existing works are often private and custom, which limits experimental standardization. Furthermore, existing DLKT studies often differ in terms of the evaluation protocol and are far away real-world educational contexts. To address these problems, we introduce a comprehensive python based benchmark platform, \textsc{pyKT}, to guarantee valid comparisons across DLKT methods via thorough evaluations. The \textsc{pyKT} library consists of a standardized set of integrated data preprocessing procedures on 7 popular datasets across different domains, and 10 frequently compared DLKT model implementations for transparent experiments. Results from our fine-grained and rigorous empirical KT studies yield a set of observations and suggestions for effective DLKT, e.g., wrong evaluation setting may cause label leakage that generally leads to performance inflation; and the improvement of many DLKT approaches is minimal compared to the very first DLKT model proposed by Piech et al. \cite{piech2015deep}. We have open sourced \textsc{pyKT} and our experimental results at https://pykt.org/. We welcome contributions from other research groups and practitioners.

Zitao Liu, Qiongqiong Liu, Jiahao Chen et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interactions with intelligent tutoring systems. Recently, many works present lots of special methods for applying deep neural networks to KT from different perspectives like model architecture, adversarial augmentation and etc., which make the overall algorithm and system become more and more complex. Furthermore, due to the lack of standardized evaluation protocol \citep{liu2022pykt}, there is no widely agreed KT baselines and published experimental comparisons become inconsistent and self-contradictory, i.e., the reported AUC scores of DKT on ASSISTments2009 range from 0.721 to 0.821 \citep{minn2018deep,yeung2018addressing}. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a strong but simple baseline method to deal with the KT task named \textsc{simpleKT}. Inspired by the Rasch model in psychometrics, we explicitly model question-specific variations to capture the individual differences among questions covering the same set of knowledge components that are a generalization of terms of concepts or skills needed for learners to accomplish steps in a task or a problem. Furthermore, instead of using sophisticated representations to capture student forgetting behaviors, we use the ordinary dot-product attention function to extract the time-aware information embedded in the student learning interactions. Extensive experiments show that such a simple baseline is able to always rank top 3 in terms of AUC scores and achieve 57 wins, 3 ties and 16 loss against 12 DLKT baseline methods on 7 public datasets of different domains. We believe this work serves as a strong baseline for future KT research. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/pykt-team/pykt-toolkit}\footnote{We merged our model to the \textsc{pyKT} benchmark at \url{https://pykt.org/}.}.

Shuyan Huang, Zitao Liu, Xiangyu Zhao et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interaction sequences. With the advanced capability of capturing contextual long-term dependency, attention mechanism becomes one of the essential components in many deep learning based KT (DLKT) models. In spite of the impressive performance achieved by these attentional DLKT models, many of them are often vulnerable to run the risk of overfitting, especially on small-scale educational datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose \textsc{sparseKT}, a simple yet effective framework to improve the robustness and generalization of the attention based DLKT approaches. Specifically, we incorporate a k-selection module to only pick items with the highest attention scores. We propose two sparsification heuristics : (1) soft-thresholding sparse attention and (2) top-$K$ sparse attention. We show that our \textsc{sparseKT} is able to help attentional KT models get rid of irrelevant student interactions and have comparable predictive performance when compared to 11 state-of-the-art KT models on three publicly available real-world educational datasets. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/pykt-team/pykt-toolkit}\footnote{We merged our model to the \textsc{pyKT} benchmark at \url{https://pykt.org/}.}.

Jiahao Chen, Shuyan Huang, Zitao Liu et al.

Online dialogic instructions are a set of pedagogical instructions used in real-world online educational contexts to motivate students, help understand learning materials, and build effective study habits. In spite of the popularity and advantages of online learning, the education technology and educational data mining communities still suffer from the lack of large-scale, high-quality, and well-annotated teaching instruction datasets to study computational approaches to automatically detect online dialogic instructions and further improve the online teaching effectiveness. Therefore, in this paper, we present a dataset of online dialogic instruction detection, \textsc{DialogID}, which contains 30,431 effective dialogic instructions. These teaching instructions are well annotated into 8 categories. Furthermore, we utilize the prevalent pre-trained language models (PLMs) and propose a simple yet effective adversarial training learning paradigm to improve the quality and generalization of dialogic instruction detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms a wide range of baseline methods. The data and our code are available for research purposes from: https://github.com/ai4ed/DialogID.

Qiongqiong Liu, Yaying Huang, Zitao Liu et al.

Sentence completion (SC) questions present a sentence with one or more blanks that need to be filled in, three to five possible words or phrases as options. SC questions are widely used for students learning English as a Second Language (ESL). In this paper, we present a large-scale SC dataset, \textsc{SC-Ques}, which is made up of 289,148 ESL SC questions from real-world standardized English examinations. Furthermore, we build a comprehensive benchmark of automatically solving the SC questions by training the large-scale pre-trained language models on the proposed \textsc{SC-Ques} dataset. We conduct detailed analysis of the baseline models performance, limitations and trade-offs. The data and our code are available for research purposes from: \url{https://github.com/ai4ed/SC-Ques}.

Keyang Chen, Mingxuan Jiang, Yongsheng Zhao et al.

Money laundering poses severe risks to global financial systems, driving the widespread adoption of machine learning for transaction monitoring. However, progress remains stifled by the lack of realistic benchmarks. Existing transaction-graph datasets suffer from two pervasive limitations: (i) they provide sparse node-level semantics beyond anonymized identifiers, and (ii) they rely on template-driven anomaly injection, which biases benchmarks toward static structural motifs and yields overly optimistic assessments of model robustness. We propose TransXion, a benchmark ecosystem for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) research that integrates profile-aware simulation of normal activity with stochastic, non-template synthesis of illicit subgraphs.TransXion jointly models persistent entity profiles and conditional transaction behavior, enabling evaluation of "out-of-character" anomalies where observed activity contradicts an entity's socio-economic context. The resulting dataset comprises approximately 3 million transactions among 50,000 entities, each endowed with rich demographic and behavioral attributes. Empirical analyses show that TransXion reproduces key structural properties of payment networks, including heavy-tailed activity distributions and localized subgraph structure. Across a diverse array of detection models spanning multiple algorithmic paradigms, TransXion yields substantially lower detection performance than widely used benchmarks, demonstrating increased difficulty and realism. TransXion provides a more faithful testbed for developing context-aware and robust AML detection methods. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/chaos-max/TransXion.

Jiahao Chen, Zitao Liu, Shuyan Huang et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is a crucial technique to predict students' future performance by observing their historical learning processes. Due to the powerful representation ability of deep neural networks, remarkable progress has been made by using deep learning techniques to solve the KT problem. The majority of existing approaches rely on the \emph{homogeneous question} assumption that questions have equivalent contributions if they share the same set of knowledge components. Unfortunately, this assumption is inaccurate in real-world educational scenarios. Furthermore, it is very challenging to interpret the prediction results from the existing deep learning based KT models. Therefore, in this paper, we present QIKT, a question-centric interpretable KT model to address the above challenges. The proposed QIKT approach explicitly models students' knowledge state variations at a fine-grained level with question-sensitive cognitive representations that are jointly learned from a question-centric knowledge acquisition module and a question-centric problem solving module. Meanwhile, the QIKT utilizes an item response theory based prediction layer to generate interpretable prediction results. The proposed QIKT model is evaluated on three public real-world educational datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach is superior on the KT prediction task, and it outperforms a wide range of deep learning based KT models in terms of prediction accuracy with better model interpretability. To encourage reproducible results, we have provided all the datasets and code at \url{https://pykt.org/}.

Zitao Liu, Qiongqiong Liu, Jiahao Chen et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interactions with intelligent tutoring systems. Recent studies have applied multiple types of deep neural networks to solve the KT problem. However, there are two important factors in real-world educational data that are not well represented. First, most existing works augment input representations with the co-occurrence matrix of questions and knowledge components\footnote{\label{ft:kc}A KC is a generalization of everyday terms like concept, principle, fact, or skill.} (KCs) but fail to explicitly integrate such intrinsic relations into the final response prediction task. Second, the individualized historical performance of students has not been well captured. In this paper, we proposed \emph{AT-DKT} to improve the prediction performance of the original deep knowledge tracing model with two auxiliary learning tasks, i.e., \emph{question tagging (QT) prediction task} and \emph{individualized prior knowledge (IK) prediction task}. Specifically, the QT task helps learn better question representations by predicting whether questions contain specific KCs. The IK task captures students' global historical performance by progressively predicting student-level prior knowledge that is hidden in students' historical learning interactions. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world educational datasets and compare the proposed approach to both deep sequential KT models and non-sequential models. Experimental results show that \emph{AT-DKT} outperforms all sequential models with more than 0.9\% improvements of AUC for all datasets, and is almost the second best compared to non-sequential models. Furthermore, we conduct both ablation studies and quantitative analysis to show the effectiveness of auxiliary tasks and the superior prediction outcomes of \emph{AT-DKT}.

Haobo Wang, Weiqi Luo, Xiaojun Jia et al.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) are vulnerable to transfer-based adversarial perturbations, enabling attackers to optimize on surrogate models and manipulate black-box VLM outputs. Prior targeted transfer attacks often overfit surrogate-specific embedding space by relying on a single reference and emphasizing final-layer alignment, which underutilizes intermediate semantics and degrades transfer across heterogeneous VLMs. To address this, we propose SGHA-Attack, a Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Alignment framework that adopts multiple target references and enforces intermediate-layer consistency. Concretely, we generate a visually grounded reference pool by sampling a frozen text-to-image model conditioned on the target prompt, and then carefully select the Top-K most semantically relevant anchors under the surrogate to form a weighted mixture for stable optimization guidance. Building on these anchors, SGHA-Attack injects target semantics throughout the feature hierarchy by aligning intermediate visual representations at both global and spatial granularities across multiple depths, and by synchronizing intermediate visual and textual features in a shared latent subspace to provide early cross-modal supervision before the final projection. Extensive experiments on open-source and commercial black-box VLMs show that SGHA-Attack achieves stronger targeted transferability than prior methods and remains robust under preprocessing and purification defenses.

Ziyi Xi, Wenmin Huang, Kangkang Wei et al.

With the rapid evolution of AI Generated Content (AIGC), forged images produced through this technology are inherently more deceptive and require less human intervention compared to traditional Computer-generated Graphics (CG). However, owing to the disparities between CG and AIGC, conventional CG detection methods tend to be inadequate in identifying AIGC-produced images. To address this issue, our research concentrates on the text-to-image generation process in AIGC. Initially, we first assemble two text-to-image databases utilizing two distinct AI systems, DALLE2 and DreamStudio. Aiming to holistically capture the inherent anomalies produced by AIGC, we develope a robust dual-stream network comprised of a residual stream and a content stream. The former employs the Spatial Rich Model (SRM) to meticulously extract various texture information from images, while the latter seeks to capture additional forged traces in low frequency, thereby extracting complementary information that the residual stream may overlook. To enhance the information exchange between these two streams, we incorporate a cross multi-head attention mechanism. Numerous comparative experiments are performed on both databases, and the results show that our detection method consistently outperforms traditional CG detection techniques across a range of image resolutions. Moreover, our method exhibits superior performance through a series of robustness tests and cross-database experiments. When applied to widely recognized traditional CG benchmarks such as SPL2018 and DsTok, our approach significantly exceeds the capabilities of other existing methods in the field of CG detection.

Shuyan Huang, Qiongqiong Liu, Jiahao Chen et al.

We propose a simple but effective method to recommend exercises with high quality and diversity for students. Our method is made up of three key components: (1) candidate generation module; (2) diversity-promoting module; and (3) scope restriction module. The proposed method improves the overall recommendation performance in terms of recall, and increases the diversity of the recommended candidates by 0.81\% compared to the baselines.

Haobo Wang, Xiaorong Ma, Weiqi Luo et al.

Adversarial perturbations can mislead Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) recognize a benign image as a specific target object, posing serious risks in safety-critical scenarios such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. This makes transfer-based targeted attacks crucial for understanding and improving black-box MLLM robustness. Existing transfer-based targeted attack methods typically rely on the final global features of the surrogate encoder and anchor optimization to original-resolution target crops, leading to their limited transferability and robustness. To address these challenges, we propose Progressive Resolution Processing and Adaptive Feature Alignment (PRAF-Attack), a targeted transfer-based attack framework that integrates multi-scale global semantic guidance with robust intermediate-layer local alignment. Unlike prior methods that align only the surrogate encoder's final layer, we design an adaptive feature alignment strategy that leverages intermediate representations to enhance transferability. Specifically, we introduce an adaptive intermediate layer selection mechanism to identify transferable hierarchical features across surrogate ensembles via gradient consistency, along with an adaptive patch-level optimization strategy that preserves highly correlated local regions through efficient patch filtering. To overcome the reliance on fixed original-resolution target crops, we propose a progressive resolution processing strategy that gradually refines optimization from coarse to fine, enabling the attack to better exploit target information at multiple scales and achieve stronger transferability. We evaluate PRAF-Attack on a diverse suite of black-box MLLMs, including six open-source models and six closed-source commercial APIs. Compared with seven state-of-the-art targeted attack baselines, the proposed PRAF-Attack consistently achieves superior transferability.

Jiahao Chen, Zitao Liu, Weiqi Luo

In this paper, we investigate the opportunities of automating the judgment process in online one-on-one math classes. We build a Wide & Deep framework to learn fine-grained predictive representations from a limited amount of noisy classroom conversation data that perform better student judgments. We conducted experiments on the task of predicting students' levels of mastery of example questions and the results demonstrate the superiority and availability of our model in terms of various evaluation metrics.

Xiaodong Cai, Hai Lin, Shaoxiong Zhan et al.

Token sampling strategies critically influence text generation quality in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods introduce additional hyperparameters, requiring extensive tuning and complicating deployment. We present Entropy Equilibrium Sampling (EES), an auxiliary hyperparameter-free approach inspired by information theory that can dynamically adjust candidate sets by balancing normalized entropy with probability mass. We evaluate EES on both reasoning and generation tasks across a range of model architectures. Our results show that EES consistently performs well across temperature settings, delivering competitive accuracy and coherence while maintaining diversity. By eliminating the need for hyperparameter tuning, EES greatly simplifies deployment while improving performance. Code is available at https://github.com/shuanncai/EES

Tianqiao Liu, Zui Chen, Zitao Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in significantly longer output sequences, leading to increased computational costs and latency during inference. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compress the CoT process through semantic alignment, enabling more efficient decoding while preserving the benefits of CoT reasoning. Our method introduces an auxiliary CoT model that learns to generate and compress the full thought process into a compact special token representation semantically aligned with the original CoT output. This compressed representation is then integrated into the input of the Hidden Chain-of-Thought (HCoT) model. The training process follows a two-stage procedure: First, the CoT model is optimized to generate the compressed token representations aligned with the ground-truth CoT outputs using a contrastive loss. Subsequently, with the CoT model parameters frozen, the HCoT model is fine-tuned to generate accurate subsequent predictions conditioned on the prefix instruction and the compressed CoT representations from the CoT model. Extensive experiments across three challenging domains - mathematical reasoning, agent invocation, and question answering - demonstrate that our semantic compression approach achieves competitive or improved performance compared to the full CoT baseline, while providing significant speedups of at least 1.5x in decoding time. Moreover, incorporating contrastive learning objectives further enhances the quality of the compressed representations, leading to better CoT prompting and improved task accuracy. Our work paves the way for more efficient exploitation of multi-step reasoning capabilities in LLMs across a wide range of applications.

Ziyi Xi, Hao Lin, Weiqi Luo

With the development of computer graphics technology, the images synthesized by computer software become more and more closer to the photographs. While computer graphics technology brings us a grand visual feast in the field of games and movies, it may also be utilized by someone with bad intentions to guide public opinions and cause political crisis or social unrest. Therefore, how to distinguish the computer-generated graphics (CG) from the photographs (PG) has become an important topic in the field of digital image forensics. This paper proposes a dual stream convolutional neural network based on channel joint and softpool. The proposed network architecture includes a residual module for extracting image noise information and a joint channel information extraction module for capturing the shallow semantic information of image. In addition, we also design a residual structure to enhance feature extraction and reduce the loss of information in residual flow. The joint channel information extraction module can obtain the shallow semantic information of the input image which can be used as the information supplement block of the residual module. The whole network uses SoftPool to reduce the information loss of down-sampling for image. Finally, we fuse the two flows to get the classification results. Experiments on SPL2018 and DsTok show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods, especially on the DsTok dataset. For example, the performance of our model surpasses the state-of-the-art by a large margin of 3%.

Ziliang Chen, Xin Huang, Quanlong Guan et al.

The vision community is undergoing the unprecedented progress with the emergence of Vision-Language Pretraining Models (VLMs). Prompt learning plays as the holy grail of accessing VLMs since it enables their fast adaptation to downstream tasks with limited resources. Whereas existing researches milling around single-prompt paradigms, rarely investigate the technical potential behind their multi-prompt learning counterparts. This paper aims to provide a principled retrospect for vision-language multi-prompt learning. We extend the recent constant modality gap phenomenon to learnable prompts and then, justify the superiority of vision-language transfer with multi-prompt augmentation, empirically and theoretically. In terms of this observation, we propose an Energy-based Multi-prompt Learning (EMPL) to generate multiple prompt embeddings by drawing instances from an energy-based distribution, which is implicitly defined by VLMs. So our EMPL is not only parameter-efficient but also rigorously lead to the balance between in-domain and out-of-domain open-vocabulary generalization. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to justify our claims and the excellence of EMPL.

Mingliang Hou, Yinuo Wang, Teng Guo et al.

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are pivotal for creating fine-grained learner profiles in modern intelligent education platforms. However, these models are trained on sensitive student data, raising significant privacy concerns. While membership inference attacks (MIA) have been studied in various domains, their application to CDMs remains a critical research gap, leaving their privacy risks unquantified. This paper is the first to systematically investigate MIA against CDMs. We introduce a novel and realistic grey box threat model that exploits the explainability features of these platforms, where a model's internal knowledge state vectors are exposed to users through visualizations such as radar charts. We demonstrate that these vectors can be accurately reverse-engineered from such visualizations, creating a potent attack surface. Based on this threat model, we propose a profile-based MIA (P-MIA) framework that leverages both the model's final prediction probabilities and the exposed internal knowledge state vectors as features. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets against mainstream CDMs show that our grey-box attack significantly outperforms standard black-box baselines. Furthermore, we showcase the utility of P-MIA as an auditing tool by successfully evaluating the efficacy of machine unlearning techniques and revealing their limitations.

Mingliang Hou, Yinuo Wang, Teng Guo et al.

The need to remove specific student data from cognitive diagnosis (CD) models has become a pressing requirement, driven by users' growing assertion of their "right to be forgotten". However, existing CD models are largely designed without privacy considerations and lack effective data unlearning mechanisms. Directly applying general purpose unlearning algorithms is suboptimal, as they struggle to balance unlearning completeness, model utility, and efficiency when confronted with the unique heterogeneous structure of CD models. To address this, our paper presents the first systematic study of the data unlearning problem for CD models, proposing a novel and efficient algorithm: hierarchical importanceguided forgetting (HIF). Our key insight is that parameter importance in CD models exhibits distinct layer wise characteristics. HIF leverages this via an innovative smoothing mechanism that combines individual and layer, level importance, enabling a more precise distinction of parameters associated with the data to be unlearned. Experiments on three real world datasets show that HIF significantly outperforms baselines on key metrics, offering the first effective solution for CD models to respond to user data removal requests and for deploying high-performance, privacy preserving AI systems

Quanlong Guan, Tong Zhu, Liangda Fang et al.

Belief revision and update, two significant types of belief change, both focus on how an agent modify her beliefs in presence of new information. The most striking difference between them is that the former studies the change of beliefs in a static world while the latter concentrates on a dynamically-changing world. The famous AGM and KM postulates were proposed to capture rational belief revision and update, respectively. However, both of them are too permissive to exclude some unreasonable changes in the iteration. In response to this weakness, the DP postulates and its extensions for iterated belief revision were presented. Furthermore, Rodrigues integrated these postulates in belief update. Unfortunately, his approach does not meet the basic requirement of iterated belief update. This paper is intended to solve this problem of Rodrigues's approach. Firstly, we present a modification of the original KM postulates based on belief states. Subsequently, we migrate several well-known postulates for iterated belief revision to iterated belief update. Moreover, we provide the exact semantic characterizations based on partial preorders for each of the proposed postulates. Finally, we analyze the compatibility between the above iterated postulates and the KM postulates for belief update.

Yuegui Huang, Zhiyuan Fang, Weiqi Luo et al.

Despite the computational efficiency of MoE models, the excessive memory footprint and I/O overhead inherent in multi-expert architectures pose formidable challenges for real-time inference on resource-constrained edge platforms. While existing static methods struggle with a rigid latency-accuracy trade-off, we observe that expert importance is highly skewed and depth-dependent. Motivated by these insights, we propose DyMoE, a dynamic mixed-precision quantization framework designed for high-performance edge inference. Leveraging insights into expert importance skewness and depth-dependent sensitivity, DyMoE introduces: (1) importance-aware prioritization to dynamically quantize experts at runtime; (2) depth-adaptive scheduling to preserve semantic integrity in critical layers; and (3) look-ahead prefetching to overlap I/O stalls. Experimental results on commercial edge hardware show that DyMoE reduces Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) by 3.44x-22.7x and up to a 14.58x speedup in Time-Per-Output-Token (TPOT) compared to state-of-the-art offloading baselines, enabling real-time, accuracy-preserving MoE inference on resource-constrained edge devices.

Tianqiao Liu, Xueyi Li, Hao Wang et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest in extending their capabilities to multimodal scenarios, particularly for speech-to-speech conversational systems. However, existing multimodal models handling interleaved audio and text rely on autoregressive methods, overlooking that text depends on target-target relations whereas audio depends mainly on source-target relations. In this work, we propose Text-to-Talk (TtT), a unified audio-text framework that integrates autoregressive (AR) text generation with non-autoregressive (NAR) audio diffusion in a single Transformer. By leveraging the any-order autoregressive property of absorbing discrete diffusion, our approach provides a unified training objective for text and audio. To support this hybrid generation paradigm, we design a modality-aware attention mechanism that enforces causal decoding for text while allowing bidirectional modeling within audio spans, and further introduce three training strategies that reduce train-test discrepancies. During inference, TtT employs block-wise diffusion to synthesize audio in parallel while flexibly handling variable-length outputs. Extensive experiments across Audio-QA and ASR tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with detailed ablation studies validating each proposed component. We will open-source our models, data and code to facilitate future research in this direction.

Lei Sun, Andrea Alfarano, Peiqi Duan et al.

This paper presents an overview of NTIRE 2025 the First Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring, detailing the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary goal of the challenge is to design an event-based method that achieves high-quality image deblurring, with performance quantitatively assessed using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Notably, there are no restrictions on computational complexity or model size. The task focuses on leveraging both events and images as inputs for single-image deblurring. A total of 199 participants registered, among whom 15 teams successfully submitted valid results, offering valuable insights into the current state of event-based image deblurring. We anticipate that this challenge will drive further advancements in event-based vision research.

Yiran Ma, Zui Chen, Tianqiao Liu et al.

Step-level reward models (SRMs) can significantly enhance mathematical reasoning performance through process supervision or step-level preference alignment based on reinforcement learning. The performance of SRMs is pivotal, as they serve as critical guidelines, ensuring that each step in the reasoning process is aligned with desired outcomes. Recently, AlphaZero-like methods, where Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is employed for automatic step-level preference annotation, have proven particularly effective. However, the precise mechanisms behind the success of SRMs remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, this study delves into the counterintuitive aspects of SRMs, particularly focusing on MCTS-based approaches. Our findings reveal that the removal of natural language descriptions of thought processes has minimal impact on the efficacy of SRMs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SRMs are adept at assessing the complex logical coherence present in mathematical language while having difficulty in natural language. These insights provide a nuanced understanding of the core elements that drive effective step-level reward modeling in mathematical reasoning. By shedding light on these mechanisms, this study offers valuable guidance for developing more efficient and streamlined SRMs, which can be achieved by focusing on the crucial parts of mathematical reasoning.

Wenmin Huang, Weiqi Luo, Xiaochun Cao et al.

Facial attribute editing aims to modify target attributes while preserving attribute-irrelevant content and overall image fidelity. Existing GAN-based methods provide favorable controllability, but often suffer from weak alignment between style codes and attribute semantics. Diffusion-based methods can synthesize highly realistic images; however, their editing precision is limited by the entanglement of semantic directions among different attributes. In this paper, we propose AttDiff-GAN, a hybrid framework that combines GAN-based attribute manipulation with diffusion-based image generation. A key challenge in such integration lies in the inconsistency between one-step adversarial learning and multi-step diffusion denoising, which makes effective optimization difficult. To address this issue, we decouple attribute editing from image synthesis by introducing a feature-level adversarial learning scheme to learn explicit attribute manipulation, and then using the manipulated features to guide the diffusion process for image generation, while also removing the reliance on semantic direction-based editing. Moreover, we enhance style-attribute alignment by introducing PriorMapper, which incorporates facial priors into style generation, and RefineExtractor, which captures global semantic relationships through a Transformer for more precise style extraction. Experimental results on CelebA-HQ show that the proposed method achieves more accurate facial attribute editing and better preservation of non-target attributes than state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Wenmin Huang, Weiqi Luo, Xiaochun Cao et al.

Facial attribute editing and style manipulation are crucial for applications like virtual avatars and photo editing. However, achieving precise control over facial attributes without altering unrelated features is challenging due to the complexity of facial structures and the strong correlations between attributes. While conditional GANs have shown progress, they are limited by accuracy issues and training instability. Diffusion models, though promising, face challenges in style manipulation due to the limited expressiveness of semantic directions. In this paper, we propose LatRef-Diff, a novel diffusion-based framework that addresses these limitations. We replace the traditional semantic directions in diffusion models with style codes and propose two methods for generating them: latent and reference guidance. Based on these style codes, we design a style modulation module that integrates them into the target image, enabling both random and customized style manipulation. This module incorporates learnable vectors, cross-attention mechanisms, and a hierarchical design to improve accuracy and image quality. Additionally, to enhance training stability while eliminating the need for paired images (e.g., before and after editing), we propose a forward-backward consistency training strategy. This strategy first removes the target attribute approximately using image-specific semantic directions and then restores it via style modulation, guided by perceptual and classification losses. Extensive experiments on CelebA-HQ demonstrate that LatRef-Diff achieves state-of-the-art performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our model's design choices.

Jinming Yang, Zimu Ji, Weiqi Luo et al.

With the rapid development of the online education and large language model, the existing educational tools still suffer from incomplete service, insufficient performance and weak interactivity in terms of courseware generation, interactive notes and quality assurance of content. In particular, the proposed generative agent EZYer : 1) Teacher Module: Integrating the Text Corpus retrieval and in-depth generation technologies, it automatically generates structured teaching materials and LaTeX Beamer courseware in line with the high school mathematics syllabus and supports user-defined image insertion. 2) Student Module: Throughout the collaborative interaction of the four roles of Teacher, Assistant, Top Student and Struggling Student, Note Taker summarizes and generates academic notes to enhance the depth and interest of learning. 3) Controller: set up keyword filtering system, content scoring system, role co-validation system, and dynamic content correction system. This ensure academic strictness and pedagogical propriety of EZYer inputs and outputs. In order to evaluate EZYer, this paper designs five-dimensional evaluation indexes of content accuracy, knowledge coverage, usability, formatting correctness and visual design and appeal, and scores 100 Beamer and Notes generated by EZYer by five large language models, separately, and the results show that the quality of EZYer-generated content is excellent and has a good application prospect.

Zui Chen, Tianqiao Liu, Mi Tian et al.

Mathematical reasoning remains a challenging area for large language models (LLMs), prompting the development of math-specific LLMs such as LLEMMA, DeepSeekMath, and Qwen2-Math, among others. These models typically follow a two-stage training paradigm: pre-training with math-related corpora and post-training with problem datasets for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Despite these efforts, the improvements in mathematical reasoning achieved through continued pre-training (CPT) are often less significant compared to those obtained via SFT. This study addresses this discrepancy by exploring alternative strategies during the pre-training phase, focusing on the use of problem-solving data over general mathematical corpora. We investigate three primary research questions: (1) Can problem-solving data enhance the model's mathematical reasoning capabilities more effectively than general mathematical corpora during CPT? (2) Are synthetic data from the same source equally effective, and which synthesis methods are most efficient? (3) How do the capabilities developed from the same problem-solving data differ between the CPT and SFT stages, and what factors contribute to these differences? Our findings indicate that problem-solving data significantly enhances the model's mathematical capabilities compared to general mathematical corpora. We also identify effective data synthesis methods, demonstrating that the tutorship amplification synthesis method achieves the best performance. Furthermore, while SFT facilitates instruction-following abilities, it underperforms compared to CPT with the same data, which can be partially attributed to its poor learning capacity for more challenging problem-solving data. These insights provide valuable guidance for optimizing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs, culminating in our development of a powerful mathematical base model called MathGPT-8B.

Xinghe Cheng, Xufang Zhou, Liangda Fang et al.

With the widespread adoption of online education platforms, an increasing number of students are gaining new knowledge through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Exercise recommendation have made strides toward improving student learning outcomes. However, existing methods not only struggle with high dropout rates but also fail to match the diverse learning pace of students. They frequently face difficulties in adjusting to inactive students' learning patterns and in accommodating individualized learning paces, resulting in limited accuracy and diversity in recommendations. To tackle these challenges, we propose Neural Re-ranking for Diversified Exercise Recommendation (in short, NR4DER). NR4DER first leverages the mLSTM model to improve the effectiveness of the exercise filter module. It then employs a sequence enhancement method to enhance the representation of inactive students, accurately matches students with exercises of appropriate difficulty. Finally, it utilizes neural re-ranking to generate diverse recommendation lists based on individual students' learning histories. Extensive experimental results indicate that NR4DER significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple real-world datasets and effectively caters to the diverse learning pace of students.

Xueyi Li, Zhuoneng Zhou, Zitao Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential for automatic short answer grading (ASAG), significantly boosting student assessment efficiency and scalability in educational scenarios. However, their vulnerability to adversarial manipulation raises critical concerns about automatic grading fairness and reliability. In this paper, we introduce GradingAttack, a fine-grained adversarial attack framework that systematically evaluates the vulnerability of LLM based ASAG models. Specifically, we align general-purpose attack methods with the specific objectives of ASAG by designing token-level and prompt-level strategies that manipulate grading outcomes while maintaining high camouflage. Furthermore, to quantify attack camouflage, we propose a novel evaluation metric that balances attack success and camouflage. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that both attack strategies effectively mislead grading models, with prompt-level attacks achieving higher success rates and token-level attacks exhibiting superior camouflage capability. Our findings underscore the need for robust defenses to ensure fairness and reliability in ASAG. Our code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GradingAttack.

Kangkang Wei, Weiqi Luo, Shunquan Tan et al.

Up to now, most existing steganalytic methods are designed for grayscale images, and they are not suitable for color images that are widely used in current social networks. In this paper, we design a universal color image steganalysis network (called UCNet) in spatial and JPEG domains. The proposed method includes preprocessing, convolutional, and classification modules. To preserve the steganographic artifacts in each color channel, in preprocessing module, we firstly separate the input image into three channels according to the corresponding embedding spaces (i.e. RGB for spatial steganography and YCbCr for JPEG steganography), and then extract the image residuals with 62 fixed high-pass filters, finally concatenate all truncated residuals for subsequent analysis rather than adding them together with normal convolution like existing CNN-based steganalyzers. To accelerate the network convergence and effectively reduce the number of parameters, in convolutional module, we carefully design three types of layers with different shortcut connections and group convolution structures to further learn high-level steganalytic features. In classification module, we employ a global average pooling and fully connected layer for classification. We conduct extensive experiments on ALASKA II to demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art results compared with the modern CNN-based steganalyzers (e.g., SRNet and J-YeNet) in both spatial and JPEG domains, while keeping relatively few memory requirements and training time. Furthermore, we also provide necessary descriptions and many ablation experiments to verify the rationality of the network design.

Hao Lin, Weiqi Luo, Kangkang Wei et al.

With the rapid development of deep learning technology, more and more face forgeries by deepfake are widely spread on social media, causing serious social concern. Face forgery detection has become a research hotspot in recent years, and many related methods have been proposed until now. For those images with low quality and/or diverse sources, however, the detection performances of existing methods are still far from satisfactory. In this paper, we propose an improved Xception with dual attention mechanism and feature fusion for face forgery detection. Different from the middle flow in original Xception model, we try to catch different high-semantic features of the face images using different levels of convolution, and introduce the convolutional block attention module and feature fusion to refine and reorganize those high-semantic features. In the exit flow, we employ the self-attention mechanism and depthwise separable convolution to learn the global information and local information of the fused features separately to improve the classification the ability of the proposed model. Experimental results evaluated on three Deepfake datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms Xception as well as other related methods both in effectiveness and generalization ability.

Sihang Chen, Weiqi Luo, Chao Yu

In recent years, quantitative investment methods combined with artificial intelligence have attracted more and more attention from investors and researchers. Existing related methods based on the supervised learning are not very suitable for learning problems with long-term goals and delayed rewards in real futures trading. In this paper, therefore, we model the price prediction problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and optimize it by reinforcement learning with expert trajectory. In the proposed method, we employ more than 100 short-term alpha factors instead of price, volume and several technical factors in used existing methods to describe the states of MDP. Furthermore, unlike DQN (deep Q-learning) and BC (behavior cloning) in related methods, we introduce expert experience in training stage, and consider both the expert-environment interaction and the agent-environment interaction to design the temporal difference error so that the agents are more adaptable for inevitable noise in financial data. Experimental results evaluated on share price index futures in China, including IF (CSI 300) and IC (CSI 500), show that the advantages of the proposed method compared with three typical technical analysis and two deep leaning based methods.

Hongwei Huang, Weiqi Luo, Guoqiang Zeng et al.

Deep Learning (DL) techniques allow ones to train models from a dataset to solve tasks. DL has attracted much interest given its fancy performance and potential market value, while security issues are amongst the most colossal concerns. However, the DL models may be prone to the membership inference attack, where an attacker determines whether a given sample is from the training dataset. Efforts have been made to hinder the attack but unfortunately, they may lead to a major overhead or impaired usability. In this paper, we propose and implement DAMIA, leveraging Domain Adaptation (DA) as a defense aginist membership inference attacks. Our observation is that during the training process, DA obfuscates the dataset to be protected using another related dataset, and derives a model that underlyingly extracts the features from both datasets. Seeing that the model is obfuscated, membership inference fails, while the extracted features provide supports for usability. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validates our intuition. The model trained by DAMIA has a negligible footprint to the usability. Our experiment also excludes factors that may hinder the performance of DAMIA, providing a potential guideline to vendors and researchers to benefit from our solution in a timely manner.

Zhijian Shao, Jian Weng, Yue Zhang et al.

The popularity of Internet-of-Things (IoT) comes with security concerns. Attacks against wireless communication venues of IoT (e.g., Man-in-the-Middle attacks) have grown at an alarming rate over the past decade. Pairing, which allows the establishment of the secure communicating channels for IoT devices without a prior relationship, is thus a paramount capability. Existing secure pairing protocols require auxiliary equipment/peripheral (e.g., displays, speakers and sensors) to achieve authentication, which is unacceptable for low-priced devices such as smart lamps. This paper studies how to design a peripheral-free secure pairing protocol. Concretely, we design the protocol, termed SwitchPairing, via out-of-box power supplying chargers and on-board clocks, achieving security and economics at the same time. When a user wants to pair two or more devices, he/she connects the pairing devices to the same power source, and presses/releases the switch on/off button several times. Then, the press and release timing can be used to derive symmetric keys. We implement a prototype via two CC2640R2F development boards from Texas Instruments (TI) due to its prevalence. Extensive experiments and user studies are also conducted to benchmark our protocol in terms of efficiency and security.

Bolin Chen, Weiqi Luo, Peijia Zheng et al.

It is well known that the designing or improving embedding cost becomes a key issue for current steganographic methods. Unlike existing works, we propose a novel framework to enhance the steganography security via post-processing on the embedding units (i.e., pixel values and DCT coefficients) of stego directly. In this paper, we firstly analyze the characteristics of STCs (Syndrome-Trellis Codes), and then design the rule for post-processing to ensure the correct extraction of hidden message. Since the steganography artifacts are typically reflected on image residuals, we try to reduce the residual distance between cover and the modified stego in order to enhance steganography security. To this end, we model the post-processing as a non-linear integer programming, and implement it via heuristic search. In addition, we carefully determine several important issues in the proposed post-processing, such as the candidate embedding units to be modified, the direction and amplitude of post-modification, the adaptive filters for getting residuals, and the distance measure of residuals. Extensive experimental results evaluated on both hand-crafted steganalytic features and deep learning based ones demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively enhance the security of most modern steganographic methods both in spatial and JPEG domains.

Huaxiao Mo, Tingting Song, Bolin Chen et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based methods have significantly improved the performance of image steganalysis compared with conventional ones based on hand-crafted features. However, many existing literatures on computer vision have pointed out that those effective CNN-based methods can be easily fooled by adversarial examples. In this paper, we propose a novel steganography framework based on adversarial example in an iterative manner. The proposed framework first starts from an existing embedding cost, such as J-UNIWARD in this work, and then updates the cost iteratively based on adversarial examples derived from a series of steganalytic networks until achieving satisfactory results. We carefully analyze two important factors that would affect the security performance of the proposed framework, i.e. the percentage of selected gradients with larger amplitude and the adversarial intensity to modify embedding cost. The experimental results evaluated on three modern steganalytic models, including GFR, SCA-GFR and SRNet, show that the proposed framework is very promising to enhance the security performances of JPEG steganography.

Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Jiasi Weng et al.

With the popularity of Blockchain comes grave security-related concerns. Achieving privacy and traceability simultaneously remains an open question. Efforts have been made to address the issues, while they may subject to specific scenarios. This paper studies how to provide a more general solution for this open question. Concretely, we propose Onionchain, featuring a suite of protocols, offering both traceability and privacy. As the term implies, our Onionchain is inspired by Onion routing. We investigate the principles of Onion routing carefully and integrate its mechanism together with Blockchain technology. We advocate the Blockchain community to adopt Onionchain with the regards of privacy and traceability. To this end, a case-study of Onionchain, which runs in the context of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), is proposed, providing the community a guideline to follow. Systematic security analysis and extensive experiments are also conducted to validate our secure and cost-effective Onionchain.

Bolin Chen, Haodong Li, Weiqi Luo

In recent years, image forensics has attracted more and more attention, and many forensic methods have been proposed for identifying image processing operations. Up to now, most existing methods are based on hand crafted features, and just one specific operation is considered in their methods. In many forensic scenarios, however, multiple classification for various image processing operations is more practical. Besides, it is difficult to obtain effective features by hand for some image processing operations. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based method to adaptively learn discriminative features for identifying typical image processing operations. We carefully design the high pass filter bank to get the image residuals of the input image, the channel expansion layer to mix up the resulting residuals, the pooling layers, and the activation functions employed in our method. The extensive results show that the proposed method can outperform the currently best method based on hand crafted features and three related methods based on CNN for image steganalysis and/or forensics, achieving the state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we provide more supplementary results to show the rationality and robustness of the proposed model.

Haodong Li, Weiqi Luo, Quanquan Rao et al.

The fingerprint-copy attack aims to confuse camera identification based on sensor pattern noise. However, the triangle test shows that the forged images undergone fingerprint-copy attack would share a non-PRNU (Photo-response nonuniformity) component with every stolen image, and thus can detect fingerprint-copy attack. In this paper, we propose an improved fingerprint-copy attack scheme. Our main idea is to superimpose the estimated fingerprint into the target image dispersedly, via employing a block-wise method and using the stolen images randomly and partly. We also develop a practical method to determine the strength of the superimposed fingerprint based on objective image quality. In such a way, the impact of non-PRNU component on the triangle test is reduced, and our improved fingerprint-copy attack is difficultly detected. The experiments evaluated on 2,900 images from 4 cameras show that our scheme can effectively fool camera identification, and significantly degrade the performance of the triangle test simultaneously.

Haodong Li, Weiqi Luo, Xiaoqing Qiu et al.

Image forensics have attracted wide attention during the past decade. Though many forensic methods have been proposed to identify image forgeries, most of them are targeted ones, since their proposed features are highly dependent on the image operation under investigation. The performance of the well-designed features for detecting the targeted operation usually degrades significantly for other operations. On the other hand, a wise attacker can perform anti-forensics to fool the existing forensic methods, making countering anti-forensics become an urgent need. In this paper, we try to find a universal feature to detect various image processing and anti-forensic operations. Based on our extensive experiments and analysis, we find that any image processing/anti-forensic operations would inevitably modify many image pixels. This would change some inherent statistics within original images, which is similar to the case of steganography. Therefore, we model image processing/anti-forensic operations as steganography problems, and propose a detection strategy by applying steganalytic features. With some advanced steganalytic features, we are able to detect various image operations and further identify their types. In our experiments, we have tested several steganalytic features on 11 different kinds of typical image processing operations and 4 kinds of anti-forensic operations. The experimental results have shown that the proposed strategy significantly outperforms the existing forensic methods in both effectiveness and universality.