Jingjing Wang

Yujie Luo, Xiangyuan Ru, Jingsheng Zheng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on general tasks, while often struggling to adapt to specialized domains without high-quality domain-specific data. Existing LLM-based data curation methods primarily rely on human-designed workflows, leaving it unexamined whether LLMs can autonomously execute an end-to-end data engineering pipeline for model specialization. We formalize \textbf{Autonomous Agentic Data Engineering}, a novel task designed to evaluate LLMs as autonomous data engineers that drive model specialization through end-to-end data curation. We frame data as an optimizable component and study agents that plan, generate, and iteratively optimize training data across multiple domains, guided by post-training performance improvement. Experiments show that autonomous LLM data engineers yield substantial gains, as GPT-5.2 constructs a training curriculum that improves a student model by \textbf{57.29\%}, entirely through iterative, agent-driven data adaptation. By illuminating both potential and bottlenecks, our study establishes autonomous data engineering as a measurable capability and charts a path toward agent-driven model specialization\footnote{Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataAgent.}.

Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Jingjing Wang et al.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

Yongkang Jin, Jianwen Luo, Jingjing Wang et al.

Multimedia Event Extraction (MEE) aims to identify events and their arguments from documents that contain both text and images. It requires grounding event semantics across different modalities. Progress in MEE is limited by the lack of annotated training data. M2E2 is the only established benchmark, but it provides annotations only for evaluation. This makes direct supervised training impractical. Existing methods mainly rely on cross-modal alignment or inference-time prompting with Vision--Language Models (VLMs). These approaches do not explicitly learn structured event representations and often produce weak argument grounding in multimodal settings. To address these limitations, we propose RMPL, a Relation-aware Multi-task Progressive Learning framework for MEE under low-resource conditions. RMPL incorporates heterogeneous supervision from unimodal event extraction and multimedia relation extraction with stage-wise training. The model is first trained with a unified schema to learn shared event-centric representations across modalities. It is then fine-tuned for event mention identification and argument role extraction using mixed textual and visual data. Experiments on the M2E2 benchmark with multiple VLMs show consistent improvements across different modality settings.

Wenyang Jia, Jingjing Wang, Xianneng Zou et al.

University campuses host abundant but fragmented GPU resources whose voluntary sharing is blocked by a mismatch between revocable, autonomous ownership and migration mechanisms that assume stationary failure hazards, homogeneous interconnects, and unbounded transfer windows. We present ReclaimNet, a network-layer migration protocol suite that treats provider reclaim as a first-class contract rather than a failure case, combining three mechanisms: (i) reclaim-aware checkpoint scheduling that jointly adapts to time-varying departure hazards and contended bandwidth across co-resident jobs; (ii) volatility-aware destination selection integrating topology, survival probability, and notice-window feasibility; and (iii) deadline-aware migration traffic control with edge enforcement and a submillisecond TC BPF kill-switch. A two-month deployment on a 54-node heterogeneous campus testbed reduces work loss by 66% over Slurm preempt-and-requeue and 38% over pipeline-redundancy checkpointing, with 38% shorter downtime and under 3% degradation of background research traffic. The prototype is open-sourced at the anonymous repository https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICNP2026-ReclaimNet/.

Zongwei Wu, Danda Pani Paudel, Deng-Ping Fan et al.

Depth cues are known to be useful for visual perception. However, direct measurement of depth is often impracticable. Fortunately, though, modern learning-based methods offer promising depth maps by inference in the wild. In this work, we adapt such depth inference models for object segmentation using the objects' "pop-out" prior in 3D. The "pop-out" is a simple composition prior that assumes objects reside on the background surface. Such compositional prior allows us to reason about objects in the 3D space. More specifically, we adapt the inferred depth maps such that objects can be localized using only 3D information. Such separation, however, requires knowledge about contact surface which we learn using the weak supervision of the segmentation mask. Our intermediate representation of contact surface, and thereby reasoning about objects purely in 3D, allows us to better transfer the depth knowledge into semantics. The proposed adaptation method uses only the depth model without needing the source data used for training, making the learning process efficient and practical. Our experiments on eight datasets of two challenging tasks, namely camouflaged object detection and salient object detection, consistently demonstrate the benefit of our method in terms of both performance and generalizability.

Xuanzhao Dong, Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen et al.

The advancement of general medical Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has shown great potential for building conversational assistants to support clinical diagnosis. However, their adaptation to highly specialized domains such as ophthalmology remains underexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, domain-specific instruction-tuning data. Existing ophthalmic datasets for conversational agents are often limited in scale and largely rely on images from established public benchmarks, limiting the scalability of ophthalmic MLLMs and their ability to capture real-world clinical complexity. To address this gap, we propose $\textbf{OphIn-Engine}$, an ophthalmology-specific instruction data curation pipeline that constructs high-quality instruction data from open-access ophthalmology web-scale videos. The pipeline integrates multimodal transcription for extracting image-transcript pairs, visual cue separation and scoring for identifying clinically relevant visual descriptions, and instruction synthesis with quality control for generating accurate and diverse clinical dialogues. Using this engine, we introduce $\textbf{OphIn-500K}$, a large-scale multimodal ophthalmology instruction-tuning dataset containing over 500,000 instruction instances and more than 151,000 unique images from over 29,000 video clips, formatted as visual question answering (VQA), multi-turn conversational interactions, and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Built upon this dataset, we further develop $\textbf{OphIn-VL}$, an ophthalmology-specific MLLM with advanced visual understanding and conversational capabilities. Comprehensive experiments and case studies demonstrate that OphIn-VL achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art general medical and domain-specific MLLMs.

Xuejun Yan, Hongyu Yan, Jingjing Wang et al.

The rapid development of point cloud learning has driven point cloud completion into a new era. However, the information flows of most existing completion methods are solely feedforward, and high-level information is rarely reused to improve low-level feature learning. To this end, we propose a novel Feedback Network (FBNet) for point cloud completion, in which present features are efficiently refined by rerouting subsequent fine-grained ones. Firstly, partial inputs are fed to a Hierarchical Graph-based Network (HGNet) to generate coarse shapes. Then, we cascade several Feedback-Aware Completion (FBAC) Blocks and unfold them across time recurrently. Feedback connections between two adjacent time steps exploit fine-grained features to improve present shape generations. The main challenge of building feedback connections is the dimension mismatching between present and subsequent features. To address this, the elaborately designed point Cross Transformer exploits efficient information from feedback features via cross attention strategy and then refines present features with the enhanced feedback features. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on several datasets demonstrate the superiority of proposed FBNet compared to state-of-the-art methods on point completion task.

Hang Du, Xuejun Yan, Jingjing Wang et al.

Point cloud upsampling focuses on generating a dense, uniform and proximity-to-surface point set. Most previous approaches accomplish these objectives by carefully designing a single-stage network, which makes it still challenging to generate a high-fidelity point distribution. Instead, upsampling point cloud in a coarse-to-fine manner is a decent solution. However, existing coarse-to-fine upsampling methods require extra training strategies, which are complicated and time-consuming during the training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective cascaded refinement network, consisting of three generation stages that have the same network architecture but achieve different objectives. Specifically, the first two upsampling stages generate the dense but coarse points progressively, while the last refinement stage further adjust the coarse points to a better position. To mitigate the learning conflicts between multiple stages and decrease the difficulty of regressing new points, we encourage each stage to predict the point offsets with respect to the input shape. In this manner, the proposed cascaded refinement network can be easily optimized without extra learning strategies. Moreover, we design a transformer-based feature extraction module to learn the informative global and local shape context. In inference phase, we can dynamically adjust the model efficiency and effectiveness, depending on the available computational resources. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-scanned datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Hang Du, Xuejun Yan, Jingjing Wang et al.

Most existing approaches for point cloud normal estimation aim to locally fit a geometric surface and calculate the normal from the fitted surface. Recently, learning-based methods have adopted a routine of predicting point-wise weights to solve the weighted least-squares surface fitting problem. Despite achieving remarkable progress, these methods overlook the approximation error of the fitting problem, resulting in a less accurate fitted surface. In this paper, we first carry out in-depth analysis of the approximation error in the surface fitting problem. Then, in order to bridge the gap between estimated and precise surface normals, we present two basic design principles: 1) applies the $Z$-direction Transform to rotate local patches for a better surface fitting with a lower approximation error; 2) models the error of the normal estimation as a learnable term. We implement these two principles using deep neural networks, and integrate them with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) normal estimation methods in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments verify our approaches bring benefits to point cloud normal estimation and push the frontier of state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Pengwei Yin, Jiawu Dai, Jingjing Wang et al.

Gaze estimation is the fundamental basis for many visual tasks. Yet, the high cost of acquiring gaze datasets with 3D annotations hinders the optimization and application of gaze estimation models. In this work, we propose a novel Head-Eye redirection parametric model based on Neural Radiance Field, which allows dense gaze data generation with view consistency and accurate gaze direction. Moreover, our head-eye redirection parametric model can decouple the face and eyes for separate neural rendering, so it can achieve the purpose of separately controlling the attributes of the face, identity, illumination, and eye gaze direction. Thus diverse 3D-aware gaze datasets could be obtained by manipulating the latent code belonging to different face attributions in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in domain generalization and domain adaptation for gaze estimation tasks.

Jie Liu, Jingjing Wang, Peng Zhang et al.

Currently, many face forgery detection methods aggregate spatial and frequency features to enhance the generalization ability and gain promising performance under the cross-dataset scenario. However, these methods only leverage one level frequency information which limits their expressive ability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a multi-scale wavelet transformer framework for face forgery detection. Specifically, to take full advantage of the multi-scale and multi-frequency wavelet representation, we gradually aggregate the multi-scale wavelet representation at different stages of the backbone network. To better fuse the frequency feature with the spatial features, frequency-based spatial attention is designed to guide the spatial feature extractor to concentrate more on forgery traces. Meanwhile, cross-modality attention is proposed to fuse the frequency features with the spatial features. These two attention modules are calculated through a unified transformer block for efficiency. A wide variety of experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and effective for both within and cross datasets.

Jingwei Yan, Jingjing Wang, Qiang Li et al.

Automatic facial action unit (AU) recognition is a challenging task due to the scarcity of manual annotations. To alleviate this problem, a large amount of efforts has been dedicated to exploiting various weakly supervised methods which leverage numerous unlabeled data. However, many aspects with regard to some unique properties of AUs, such as the regional and relational characteristics, are not sufficiently explored in previous works. Motivated by this, we take the AU properties into consideration and propose two auxiliary AU related tasks to bridge the gap between limited annotations and the model performance in a self-supervised manner via the unlabeled data. Specifically, to enhance the discrimination of regional features with AU relation embedding, we design a task of RoI inpainting to recover the randomly cropped AU patches. Meanwhile, a single image based optical flow estimation task is proposed to leverage the dynamic change of facial muscles and encode the motion information into the global feature representation. Based on these two self-supervised auxiliary tasks, local features, mutual relation and motion cues of AUs are better captured in the backbone network. Furthermore, by incorporating semi-supervised learning, we propose an end-to-end trainable framework named weakly supervised regional and temporal learning (WSRTL) for AU recognition. Extensive experiments on BP4D and DISFA demonstrate the superiority of our method and new state-of-the-art performances are achieved.

Yachun Li, Ying Lian, Jingjing Wang et al.

Iris presentation attack detection (PAD) has achieved remarkable success to ensure the reliability and security of iris recognition systems. Most existing methods exploit discriminative features in the spatial domain and report outstanding performance under intra-dataset settings. However, the degradation of performance is inevitable under cross-dataset settings, suffering from domain shift. In consideration of real-world applications, a small number of bonafide samples are easily accessible. We thus define a new domain adaptation setting called Few-shot One-class Domain Adaptation (FODA), where adaptation only relies on a limited number of target bonafide samples. To address this problem, we propose a novel FODA framework based on the expressive power of frequency information. Specifically, our method integrates frequency-related information through two proposed modules. Frequency-based Attention Module (FAM) aggregates frequency information into spatial attention and explicitly emphasizes high-frequency fine-grained features. Frequency Mixing Module (FMM) mixes certain frequency components to generate large-scale target-style samples for adaptation with limited target bonafide samples. Extensive experiments on LivDet-Iris 2017 dataset demonstrate the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance under both cross-dataset and intra-dataset settings.

Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Zhipeng Wang et al.

Long-horizon LLM agents require memory systems that remain accurate under fixed context budgets. However, existing systems struggle with two persistent challenges in long-term dialogue: (i) \textbf{disconnected evidence}, where multi-hop answers require linking facts distributed across time, and (ii) \textbf{state updates}, where evolving information (e.g., schedule changes) creates conflicts with older static logs. We propose AriadneMem, a structured memory system that addresses these failure modes via a decoupled two-phase pipeline. In the \textbf{offline construction phase}, AriadneMem employs \emph{entropy-aware gating} to filter noise and low-information message before LLM extraction and applies \emph{conflict-aware coarsening} to merge static duplicates while preserving state transitions as temporal edges. In the \textbf{online reasoning phase}, rather than relying on expensive iterative planning, AriadneMem executes \emph{algorithmic bridge discovery} to reconstruct missing logical paths between retrieved facts, followed by \emph{single-call topology-aware synthesis}. On LoCoMo experiments with GPT-4o, AriadneMem improves \textbf{Multi-Hop F1 by 15.2\%} and \textbf{Average F1 by 9.0\%} over strong baselines. Crucially, by offloading reasoning to the graph layer, AriadneMem reduces \textbf{total runtime by 77.8\%} using only \textbf{497} context tokens. The code is available at https://github.com/LLM-VLM-GSL/AriadneMem.

Yong Zhou, Yuanming Shi, Haibo Zhou et al.

The explosive growth of smart devices (e.g., mobile phones, vehicles, drones) with sensing, communication, and computation capabilities gives rise to an unprecedented amount of data. The generated massive data together with the rapid advancement of machine learning (ML) techniques spark a variety of intelligent applications. To distill intelligence for supporting these applications, federated learning (FL) emerges as an effective distributed ML framework, given its potential to enable privacy-preserving model training at the network edge. In this article, we discuss the challenges and solutions of achieving scalable wireless FL from the perspectives of both network design and resource orchestration. For network design, we discuss how task-oriented model aggregation affects the performance of wireless FL, followed by proposing effective wireless techniques to enhance the communication scalability via reducing the model aggregation distortion and improving the device participation. For resource orchestration, we identify the limitations of the existing optimization-based algorithms and propose three task-oriented learning algorithms to enhance the algorithmic scalability via achieving computation-efficient resource allocation for wireless FL. We highlight several potential research issues that deserve further study.

Qiang Li, Zhaoliang Yao, Jingjing Wang et al.

Assessing the blurriness of an object image is fundamentally important to improve the performance for object recognition and retrieval. The main challenge lies in the lack of abundant images with reliable labels and effective learning strategies. Current datasets are labeled with limited and confused quality levels. To overcome this limitation, we propose to label the rank relationships between pairwise images rather their quality levels, since it is much easier for humans to label, and establish a large-scale realistic face image blur assessment dataset with reliable labels. Based on this dataset, we propose a method to obtain the blur scores only with the pairwise rank labels as supervision. Moreover, to further improve the performance, we propose a self-supervised method based on quadruplet ranking consistency to leverage the unlabeled data more effectively. The supervised and self-supervised methods constitute a final semi-supervised learning framework, which can be trained end-to-end. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Qiang Li, Jingjing Wang, Zhaoliang Yao et al.

Learning from a label distribution has achieved promising results on ordinal regression tasks such as facial age and head pose estimation wherein, the concept of adaptive label distribution learning (ALDL) has drawn lots of attention recently for its superiority in theory. However, compared with the methods assuming fixed form label distribution, ALDL methods have not achieved better performance. We argue that existing ALDL algorithms do not fully exploit the intrinsic properties of ordinal regression. In this paper, we emphatically summarize that learning an adaptive label distribution on ordinal regression tasks should follow three principles. First, the probability corresponding to the ground-truth should be the highest in label distribution. Second, the probabilities of neighboring labels should decrease with the increase of distance away from the ground-truth, i.e., the distribution is unimodal. Third, the label distribution should vary with samples changing, and even be distinct for different instances with the same label, due to the different levels of difficulty and ambiguity. Under the premise of these principles, we propose a novel loss function for fully adaptive label distribution learning, namely unimodal-concentrated loss. Specifically, the unimodal loss derived from the learning to rank strategy constrains the distribution to be unimodal. Furthermore, the estimation error and the variance of the predicted distribution for a specific sample are integrated into the proposed concentrated loss to make the predicted distribution maximize at the ground-truth and vary according to the predicting uncertainty. Extensive experimental results on typical ordinal regression tasks including age and head pose estimation, show the superiority of our proposed unimodal-concentrated loss compared with existing loss functions.

Xiwen Chen, Jingjing Wang, Wenhui Zhu et al.

Black-box knowledge distillation for large language models presents a strict trade-off. Simple off-policy methods (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation) struggle to correct the student's inherent errors. Fully on-policy methods (e.g., Generative Adversarial Distillation) solve this via adversarial training but introduce well-known training instability and crippling computational overhead. To address this dilemma, we propose SODA (Semi On-policy Distillation with Alignment), a highly efficient alternative motivated by the inherent capability gap between frontier teachers and much smaller base models. Because a compact student model's natural, zero-shot responses are almost strictly inferior to the powerful teacher's targets, we can construct a highly effective contrastive signal simply by pairing the teacher's optimal response with a one-time static snapshot of the student's outputs. This demonstrates that exposing the small student to its own static inferior behaviors is sufficient for high-quality distribution alignment, eliminating the need for costly dynamic rollouts and fragile adversarial balancing. Extensive evaluations across four compact Qwen2.5 and Llama-3 models validate this semi on-policy paradigm. SODA matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 15 out of 16 benchmark results. More importantly, it achieves this superior distillation quality while training 10 times faster, consuming 27% less peak GPU memory, and completely eliminating adversarial instability.

Wenyang Jia, Jingjing Wang, Ziwei Yan et al.

Software defined networks offer global visibility, yet centralized control loops are too slow for transient congestion and bursty traffic dynamics. Existing learned traffic control schemes often rely on offline training, making them fragile under distribution shifts. We present PolicyCache-SDN, a hierarchical SDN traffic control framework that enables local online adaptation under centralized policy control. Its key abstraction is a policy envelope: the controller compiles network wide intent into bounded per path action spaces, while edge agents learn and execute metering, queueing, and rerouting decisions only within those bounds. Policy envelopes also make local actions auditable and reversible when they affect shared bottlenecks. Evaluation on a 1,024 host software SDN testbed shows that PolicyCache-SDN improves average core link utilization by 35.5% over Static ECMP and 18.3% over Centralized TE. It reduces elephant flow P99 FCT by 34.3% over end host congestion control, lowers SLA violations from 18.2% to 6.8%, and uses less than 2% CPU and 12 MB memory per edge agent. The source code is available in an anonymized repository at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JCC2026-PolicyCache-SDN/.

Jingjing Wang, Qianglin Liu, Zhuo Xiao et al.

Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy, and its incidence is rising globally. While ultrasound is the preferred imaging modality for detecting thyroid nodules, its diagnostic accuracy is often limited by challenges such as low image contrast and blurred nodule boundaries. To address these issues, we propose Nodule-DETR, a novel detection transformer (DETR) architecture designed for robust thyroid nodule detection in ultrasound images. Nodule-DETR introduces three key innovations: a Multi-Spectral Frequency-domain Channel Attention (MSFCA) module that leverages frequency analysis to enhance features of low-contrast nodules; a Hierarchical Feature Fusion (HFF) module for efficient multi-scale integration; and Multi-Scale Deformable Attention (MSDA) to flexibly capture small and irregularly shaped nodules. We conducted extensive experiments on a clinical dataset of real-world thyroid ultrasound images. The results demonstrate that Nodule-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the baseline model by a significant margin of 0.149 in mAP@0.5:0.95. The superior accuracy of Nodule-DETR highlights its significant potential for clinical application as an effective tool in computer-aided thyroid diagnosis. The code of work is available at https://github.com/wjj1wjj/Nodule-DETR.

Jingjing Wang, Zhuo Xiao, Xinning Yao et al.

Accurate detection of ultrasound nodules is essential for the early diagnosis and treatment of thyroid and breast cancers. However, this task remains challenging due to irregular nodule shapes, indistinct boundaries, substantial scale variations, and the presence of speckle noise that degrades structural visibility. To address these challenges, we propose a prior-guided DETR framework specifically designed for ultrasound nodule detection. Instead of relying on purely data-driven feature learning, the proposed framework progressively incorporates different prior knowledge at multiple stages of the network. First, a Spatially-adaptive Deformable FFN with Prior Regularization (SDFPR) is embedded into the CNN backbone to inject geometric priors into deformable sampling, stabilizing feature extraction for irregular and blurred nodules. Second, a Multi-scale Spatial-Frequency Feature Mixer (MSFFM) is designed to extract multi-scale structural priors, where spatial-domain processing emphasizes contour continuity and boundary cues, while frequency-domain modeling captures global morphology and suppresses speckle noise. Furthermore, a Dense Feature Interaction (DFI) mechanism propagates and exploits these prior-modulated features across all encoder layers, enabling the decoder to enhance query refinement under consistent geometric and structural guidance. Experiments conducted on two clinically collected thyroid ultrasound datasets (Thyroid I and Thyroid II) and two public benchmarks (TN3K and BUSI) for thyroid and breast nodules demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior accuracy compared with 18 detection methods, particularly in detecting morphologically complex nodules.The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/wjj1wjj/Ultrasound-DETR.

Feiyang Cai, Guijuan He, Yi Hu et al.

Molecular function is largely determined by structure. Accurately aligning molecular structure with natural language is therefore essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to reason about downstream chemical tasks. However, the substantial cost of human annotation makes it infeasible to construct large-scale, high-quality datasets of structure-grounded descriptions. In this work, we propose a fully automated annotation framework for generating precise molecular structure descriptions at scale. Our approach builds upon and extends a rule-based chemical nomenclature parser to interpret IUPAC names and construct enriched, structured XML metadata that explicitly encodes molecular structure. This metadata is then used to guide LLMs in producing accurate natural-language descriptions. Using this framework, we curate a large-scale dataset of approximately $163$k molecule-description pairs. A rigorous validation protocol combining LLM-based and expert human evaluation on a subset of $2,000$ molecules demonstrates a high description precision of $98.6\%$. The resulting dataset provides a reliable foundation for future molecule-language alignment, and the proposed annotation method is readily extensible to larger datasets and broader chemical tasks that rely on structural descriptions.

Sulian Thual, Feiyang Cai, Jingjing Wang et al.

Generative Deep Learning is a powerful tool for modeling of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in the tropics, yet its relationship to traditional theoretical frameworks remains poorly understood. Here we propose a video diffusion model, trained on atmospheric reanalysis, to synthetize long MJO sequences conditioned on key low-dimensional metrics. The generated MJOs capture key features including composites, power spectra and multiscale structures including convectively coupled waves, despite some bias. We then prompt the model to generate more tractable MJOs based on intentionally idealized low-dimensional conditionings, for example a perpetual MJO, an isolated modulation by seasons and/or the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, and so on. This enables deconstructing the underlying processes and identifying physical drivers. The present approach provides a practical framework for bridging the gap between low-dimensional MJO theory and high-resolution atmospheric complexity and will help tropical atmosphere prediction.

Runze Zhang, Guoguang Du, Xiaochuan Li et al.

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

Zhengru Fang, Yu Guo, Jingjing Wang et al.

Sharing and reconstructing a consistent spatial memory is a critical challenge in multi-agent systems, where partial observability and limited bandwidth often lead to catastrophic failures in coordination. We introduce a multi-agent predictive coding framework that formulate coordination as the minimization of mutual uncertainty among agents. Instantiated as an information bottleneck objective, it prompts agents to learn not only who and what to communicate but also when. At the foundation of this framework lies a grid-cell-like metric as internal spatial coding for self-localization, emerging spontaneously from self-supervised motion prediction. Building upon this internal spatial code, agents gradually develop a bandwidth-efficient communication mechanism and specialized neural populations that encode partners' locations: an artificial analogue of hippocampal social place cells (SPCs). These social representations are further enacted by a hierarchical reinforcement learning policy that actively explores to reduce joint uncertainty. On the Memory-Maze benchmark, our approach shows exceptional resilience to bandwidth constraints: success degrades gracefully from 73.5% to 64.4% as bandwidth shrinks from 128 to 4 bits/step, whereas a full-broadcast baseline collapses from 67.6% to 28.6%. Our findings establish a theoretically principled and biologically plausible basis for how complex social representations emerge from a unified predictive drive, leading to social collective intelligence.

Zhengru Fang, Zhenghao Liu, Jingjing Wang et al.

To support the Low Altitude Economy (LAE), it is essential to achieve precise localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban areas where global positioning system (GPS) signals are unavailable. Vision-based methods offer a viable alternative but face severe bandwidth, memory and processing constraints on lightweight UAVs. Inspired by mammalian spatial cognition, we propose a task-oriented communication framework, where UAVs equipped with multi-camera systems extract compact multi-view features and offload localization tasks to edge servers. We introduce the Orthogonally-constrained Variational Information Bottleneck encoder (O-VIB), which incorporates automatic relevance determination (ARD) to prune non-informative features while enforcing orthogonality to minimize redundancy. This enables efficient and accurate localization with minimal transmission cost. Extensive evaluation on a dedicated LAE UAV dataset shows that O-VIB achieves high-precision localization under stringent bandwidth budgets. Code and dataset will be made publicly available at: github.com/fangzr/TOC-Edge-Aerial.

Jingjing Wang, Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu et al.

LLM-powered coding agents spend the majority of their token budget reading repository files, yet much of the retrieved code is irrelevant to the task at hand. Existing learned pruners compress this context with a single-objective sequence labeler, collapsing all facets of code relevance into one score and one transition matrix. We show that this formulation creates a modeling bottleneck: a single CRF transition prior must serve heterogeneous retention patterns, including contiguous semantic spans and sparse structural support lines. We propose LaMR (Latent Multi-Rubric), a structured pruning framework that decomposes code relevance into two interpretable quality dimensions, semantic evidence and dependency support, each modeled by a dedicated CRF with dimension-specific transition dynamics. A mixture-of-experts gating network dynamically weights the per-rubric emissions conditioned on the query, and a final CRF layer on the fused emissions produces the aggregate keep-or-prune decision. To supervise each dimension without additional annotation cost, we derive multi-rubric labels from the existing training corpus via AST-based program analysis, simultaneously denoising the teacher's binary labels. By effectively filtering distracting noise, LaMR frequently matches or even outperforms unpruned full-context baselines. Experiments on four benchmarks (SWE-Bench Verified, SWE-QA, LCC, LongCodeQA) show that LaMR wins 12 of 16 head-to-head multi-turn comparisons. It saves up to 31% more tokens on multi-turn agent tasks and improves Exact Match by up to +3.5 on single-turn tasks, while performance is frequently enhanced by denoising the context, and any remaining drops are marginal.

Jingjing Wang, Joshua Luo, Grace Yang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs), representing a significant achievement in artificial intelligence (AI) research, have demonstrated their ability in a multitude of tasks. This project aims to explore the capabilities of GPT-3.5, a leading example of LLMs, in processing the sentiment analysis of Internet memes. Memes, which include both verbal and visual aspects, act as a powerful yet complex tool for expressing ideas and sentiments, demanding an understanding of societal norms and cultural contexts. Notably, the detection and moderation of hateful memes pose a significant challenge due to their implicit offensive nature. This project investigates GPT's proficiency in such subjective tasks, revealing its strengths and potential limitations. The tasks include the classification of meme sentiment, determination of humor type, and detection of implicit hate in memes. The performance evaluation, using datasets from SemEval-2020 Task 8 and Facebook hateful memes, offers a comparative understanding of GPT responses against human annotations. Despite GPT's remarkable progress, our findings underscore the challenges faced by these models in handling subjective tasks, which are rooted in their inherent limitations including contextual understanding, interpretation of implicit meanings, and data biases. This research contributes to the broader discourse on the applicability of AI in handling complex, context-dependent tasks, and offers valuable insights for future advancements.

Zongwei Wu, Jingjing Wang, Zhuyun Zhou et al.

Multi-sensor clues have shown promise for object segmentation, but inherent noise in each sensor, as well as the calibration error in practice, may bias the segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by mining the Cross-Modal Semantics to guide the fusion and decoding of multimodal features, with the aim of controlling the modal contribution based on relative entropy. We explore semantics among the multimodal inputs in two aspects: the modality-shared consistency and the modality-specific variation. Specifically, we propose a novel network, termed XMSNet, consisting of (1) all-round attentive fusion (AF), (2) coarse-to-fine decoder (CFD), and (3) cross-layer self-supervision. On the one hand, the AF block explicitly dissociates the shared and specific representation and learns to weight the modal contribution by adjusting the \textit{proportion, region,} and \textit{pattern}, depending upon the quality. On the other hand, our CFD initially decodes the shared feature and then refines the output through specificity-aware querying. Further, we enforce semantic consistency across the decoding layers to enable interaction across network hierarchies, improving feature discriminability. Exhaustive comparison on eleven datasets with depth or thermal clues, and on two challenging tasks, namely salient and camouflage object segmentation, validate our effectiveness in terms of both performance and robustness. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zongwei97/XMSNet.

Pengwei Yin, Guanzhong Zeng, Jingjing Wang et al.

Gaze estimation methods often experience significant performance degradation when evaluated across different domains, due to the domain gap between the testing and training data. Existing methods try to address this issue using various domain generalization approaches, but with little success because of the limited diversity of gaze datasets, such as appearance, wearable, and image quality. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework called CLIP-Gaze that utilizes a pre-trained vision-language model to leverage its transferable knowledge. Our framework is the first to leverage the vision-and-language cross-modality approach for gaze estimation task. Specifically, we extract gaze-relevant feature by pushing it away from gaze-irrelevant features which can be flexibly constructed via language descriptions. To learn more suitable prompts, we propose a personalized context optimization method for text prompt tuning. Furthermore, we utilize the relationship among gaze samples to refine the distribution of gaze-relevant features, thereby improving the generalization capability of the gaze estimation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent performance of CLIP-Gaze over existing methods on four cross-domain evaluations.

Huayu Li, ZhengXiao He, Xiwen Chen et al.

Learning meaningful representations from medical time series (MedTS) such as ECG or EEG signals is a critical challenge. These signals are often high-dimensional, variable-length and rife with noise. Existing self-supervised approaches, such as Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) are highly effective for pre-training general-purpose encoders. However, they do not explicitly learn compact and semantically interpretable latent representations, typically relying on heuristic aggregation strategies such as global average pooling or a designated [CLS] token. We propose a novel framework that compresses a variable-length MedTS into a fixed-size set of $k$ latent Fingerprint Tokens. Our architecture employs a cross-attention bottleneck to generate these tokens and is trained with a dual-objective function. The first objective is a reconstruction loss, which ensures the tokens are \textit{sufficient statistics} for the original data. The second, a diversity penalty based on the Total Coding Rate (TCR), explicitly minimizes the redundancy between tokens, encouraging them to become statistically \textit{disentangled} representations. We present the theoretical justification for our method, framing it as a novel \textbf{Disentangled Rate-Distortion} problem. This approach produces a low-dimensional, interpretable, and sample-efficient representation, where each token is encouraged to capture an independent factor of variation, paving the way for more robust digital biomarkers.

Peiying Yu, Guoxin Chen, Jingjing Wang

Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle with table reasoning tasks, particularly in maintaining consistency throughout multi-step reasoning processes. While existing approaches have explored various decomposition strategies, they often lack effective mechanisms to identify and correct errors in intermediate reasoning steps, leading to cascading error propagation. To address these issues, we propose Table-Critic, a novel multi-agent framework that facilitates collaborative criticism and iterative refinement of the reasoning process until convergence to correct solutions. Our framework consists of four specialized agents: a Judge for error identification, a Critic for comprehensive critiques, a Refiner for process improvement, and a Curator for pattern distillation. To effectively deal with diverse and unpredictable error types, we introduce a self-evolving template tree that systematically accumulates critique knowledge through experience-driven learning and guides future reflections. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that Table-Critic achieves substantial improvements over existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and error correction rates while maintaining computational efficiency and lower solution degradation rate.

Hang Du, Xuejun Yan, Jingjing Wang et al.

Recently, arbitrary-scale point cloud upsampling mechanism became increasingly popular due to its efficiency and convenience for practical applications. To achieve this, most previous approaches formulate it as a problem of surface approximation and employ point-based networks to learn surface representations. However, learning surfaces from sparse point clouds is more challenging, and thus they often suffer from the low-fidelity geometry approximation. To address it, we propose an arbitrary-scale Point cloud Upsampling framework using Voxel-based Network (\textbf{PU-VoxelNet}). Thanks to the completeness and regularity inherited from the voxel representation, voxel-based networks are capable of providing predefined grid space to approximate 3D surface, and an arbitrary number of points can be reconstructed according to the predicted density distribution within each grid cell. However, we investigate the inaccurate grid sampling caused by imprecise density predictions. To address this issue, a density-guided grid resampling method is developed to generate high-fidelity points while effectively avoiding sampling outliers. Further, to improve the fine-grained details, we present an auxiliary training supervision to enforce the latent geometric consistency among local surface patches. Extensive experiments indicate the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches not only in terms of fixed upsampling rates but also for arbitrary-scale upsampling.

Pengwei Yin, Jingjing Wang, Guanzhong Zeng et al.

The ability of gaze estimation models to generalize is often significantly hindered by various factors unrelated to gaze, especially when the training dataset is limited. Current strategies aim to address this challenge through different domain generalization techniques, yet they have had limited success due to the risk of overfitting when solely relying on value labels for regression. Recent progress in pre-trained vision-language models has motivated us to capitalize on the abundant semantic information available. We propose a novel approach in this paper, reframing the gaze estimation task as a vision-language alignment issue. Our proposed framework, named Language-Guided Gaze Estimation (LG-Gaze), learns continuous and geometry-sensitive features for gaze estimation benefit from the rich prior knowledges of vision-language models. Specifically, LG-Gaze aligns gaze features with continuous linguistic features through our proposed multimodal contrastive regression loss, which customizes adaptive weights for different negative samples. Furthermore, to better adapt to the labels for gaze estimation task, we propose a geometry-aware interpolation method to obtain more precise gaze embeddings. Through extensive experiments, we validate the efficacy of our framework in four different cross-domain evaluation tasks.

Junxiao Ma, Jingjing Wang, Jiamin Luo et al.

Prior studies on Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) mainly focus on detecting whether each video frame is abnormal or not in the video, which largely ignore the structured video semantic information (i.e., what, when, and where does the abnormal event happen). With this in mind, we propose a new chat-paradigm \textbf{M}ulti-scene Video Abnormal Event Extraction and Localization (M-VAE) task, aiming to extract the abnormal event quadruples (i.e., subject, event type, object, scene) and localize such event. Further, this paper believes that this new task faces two key challenges, i.e., global-local spatial modeling and global-local spatial balancing. To this end, this paper proposes a Global-local Spatial-sensitive Large Language Model (LLM) named Sherlock, i.e., acting like Sherlock Holmes to track down the criminal events, for this M-VAE task. Specifically, this model designs a Global-local Spatial-enhanced MoE (GSM) module and a Spatial Imbalance Regulator (SIR) to address the two challenges respectively. Extensive experiments on our M-VAE instruction dataset show the significant advantages of Sherlock over several advanced Video-LLMs. This justifies the importance of global-local spatial information for the M-VAE task and the effectiveness of Sherlock in capturing such information.

Guanzhong Zeng, Jingjing Wang, Zefu Xu et al.

Gaze estimation methods encounter significant performance deterioration when being evaluated across different domains, because of the domain gap between the testing and training data. Existing methods try to solve this issue by reducing the deviation of data distribution, however, they ignore the existence of label deviation in the data due to the acquisition mechanism of the gaze label and the individual physiological differences. In this paper, we first point out that the influence brought by the label deviation cannot be ignored, and propose a gaze label alignment algorithm (GLA) to eliminate the label distribution deviation. Specifically, we first train the feature extractor on all domains to get domain invariant features, and then select an anchor domain to train the gaze regressor. We predict the gaze label on remaining domains and use a mapping function to align the labels. Finally, these aligned labels can be used to train gaze estimation models. Therefore, our method can be combined with any existing method. Experimental results show that our GLA method can effectively alleviate the label distribution shift, and SOTA gaze estimation methods can be further improved obviously.

Jingyi Zhang, Peng Zhang, Jingjing Wang et al.

Previous face forgery detection methods mainly focus on appearance features, which may be easily attacked by sophisticated manipulation. Considering the majority of current face manipulation methods generate fake faces based on a single frame, which do not take frame consistency and coordination into consideration, artifacts on frame sequences are more effective for face forgery detection. However, current sequence-based face forgery detection methods use general video classification networks directly, which discard the special and discriminative motion information for face manipulation detection. To this end, we propose an effective sequence-based forgery detection framework based on an existing video classification method. To make the motion features more expressive for manipulation detection, we propose an alternative motion consistency block instead of the original motion features module. To make the learned features more generalizable, we propose an auxiliary anomaly detection block. With these two specially designed improvements, we make a general video classification network achieve promising results on three popular face forgery datasets.

Dan Zhang, Jingjing Wang, Feng Luo

In this paper, we present the Directly Denoising Diffusion Model (DDDM): a simple and generic approach for generating realistic images with few-step sampling, while multistep sampling is still preserved for better performance. DDDMs require no delicately designed samplers nor distillation on pre-trained distillation models. DDDMs train the diffusion model conditioned on an estimated target that was generated from previous training iterations of its own. To generate images, samples generated from the previous time step are also taken into consideration, guiding the generation process iteratively. We further propose Pseudo-LPIPS, a novel metric loss that is more robust to various values of hyperparameter. Despite its simplicity, the proposed approach can achieve strong performance in benchmark datasets. Our model achieves FID scores of 2.57 and 2.33 on CIFAR-10 in one-step and two-step sampling respectively, surpassing those obtained from GANs and distillation-based models. By extending the sampling to 1000 steps, we further reduce FID score to 1.79, aligning with state-of-the-art methods in the literature. For ImageNet 64x64, our approach stands as a competitive contender against leading models.

Jingjing Wang, Zhengdong Hong, Chong Bao et al.

Human-like generalization in open-world remains a fundamental challenge for robotic manipulation. Existing learning-based methods, including reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and vision-language-action-models (VLAs), often struggle with novel tasks and unseen environments. Another promising direction is to explore generalizable representations that capture fine-grained spatial and geometric relations for open-world manipulation. While large-language-model (LLMs) and vision-language-model (VLMs) provide strong semantic reasoning based on language or annotated 2D representations, their limited 3D awareness restricts their applicability to fine-grained manipulation. To address this, we propose LAMP, which lifts image-editing as 3D priors to extract inter-object 3D transformations as continuous, geometry-aware representations. Our key insight is that image-editing inherently encodes rich 2D spatial cues, and lifting these implicit cues into 3D transformations provides fine-grained and accurate guidance for open-world manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \codename delivers precise 3D transformations and achieves strong zero-shot generalization in open-world manipulation. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/LAMP/.

Jingjing Wang, Dan Zhang, Joshua Luo et al.

Ordinary differential equation (ODE) based generative models have emerged as a powerful approach for producing high-quality samples in many applications. However, the ODE-based methods either suffer the discretization error of numerical solvers of ODE, which restricts the quality of samples when only a few NFEs are used, or struggle with training instability. In this paper, we proposed Integration Flow, which directly learns the integral of ODE-based trajectory paths without solving the ODE functions. Moreover, Integration Flow explicitly incorporates the target state $\mathbf{x}_0$ as the anchor state in guiding the reverse-time dynamics. We have theoretically proven this can contribute to both stability and accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, Integration Flow is the first model with a unified structure to estimate ODE-based generative models and the first to show the exact straightness of 1-Rectified Flow without reflow. Through theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations, we show that Integration Flows achieve improved performance when it is applied to existing ODE-based models, such as diffusion models, Rectified Flows, and PFGM++. Specifically, Integration Flow achieves one-step generation on CIFAR10 with FIDs of 2.86 for the Variance Exploding (VE) diffusion model, 3.36 for rectified flow without reflow, and 2.91 for PFGM++; and on ImageNet with FIDs of 4.09 for VE diffusion model, 4.35 for rectified flow without reflow and 4.15 for PFGM++.

Jiamin Luo, Jingjing Wang, Junxiao Ma et al.

Prior studies on Visual Sentiment Understanding (VSU) primarily rely on the explicit scene information (e.g., facial expression) to judge visual sentiments, which largely ignore implicit scene information (e.g., human action, objection relation and visual background), while such information is critical for precisely discovering visual sentiments. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a new Omni-scene driven visual Sentiment Identifying, Locating and Attributing in videos (Omni-SILA) task, aiming to interactively and precisely identify, locate and attribute visual sentiments through both explicit and implicit scene information. Furthermore, this paper believes that this Omni-SILA task faces two key challenges: modeling scene and highlighting implicit scene beyond explicit. To this end, this paper proposes an Implicit-enhanced Causal MoE (ICM) approach for addressing the Omni-SILA task. Specifically, a Scene-Balanced MoE (SBM) and an Implicit-Enhanced Causal (IEC) blocks are tailored to model scene information and highlight the implicit scene information beyond explicit, respectively. Extensive experimental results on our constructed explicit and implicit Omni-SILA datasets demonstrate the great advantage of the proposed ICM approach over advanced Video-LLMs.

Hang Du, Yaping Xue, Weidong Dai et al.

In this report, we present the 1st place solution for ICCV 2023 OmniObject3D Challenge: Sparse-View Reconstruction. The challenge aims to evaluate approaches for novel view synthesis and surface reconstruction using only a few posed images of each object. We utilize Pixel-NeRF as the basic model, and apply depth supervision as well as coarse-to-fine positional encoding. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving sparse-view reconstruction quality. We ranked first in the final test with a PSNR of 25.44614.

Yiding Liu, Jingjing Wang, Jiamin Luo et al.

Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ASU) in interactive scenarios (e.g., Question-Answering and Dialogue) has attracted ever-more interest in recent years and achieved important progresses. However, existing studies on interactive ASU largely ignore the coreference issue for opinion targets (i.e., aspects), while this phenomenon is ubiquitous in interactive scenarios especially dialogues, limiting the ASU performance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) shows the powerful ability to integrate various NLP tasks with the chat paradigm. In this way, this paper proposes a new Chat-based Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ChatASU) task, aiming to explore LLMs' ability in understanding aspect sentiments in dialogue scenarios. Particularly, this ChatASU task introduces a sub-task, i.e., Aspect Chain Reasoning (ACR) task, to address the aspect coreference issue. On this basis, we propose a Trusted Self-reflexion Approach (TSA) with ChatGLM as backbone to ChatASU. Specifically, this TSA treats the ACR task as an auxiliary task to boost the performance of the primary ASU task, and further integrates trusted learning into reflexion mechanisms to alleviate the LLMs-intrinsic factual hallucination problem in TSA. Furthermore, a high-quality ChatASU dataset is annotated to evaluate TSA, and extensive experiments show that our proposed TSA can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art baselines, justifying the effectiveness of TSA to ChatASU and the importance of considering the coreference and hallucination issues in ChatASU.

Jiamin Luo, Jingjing Wang, Guodong Zhou

Multimodal Conversational Emotion (MCE) detection, generally spanning across the acoustic, vision and language modalities, has attracted increasing interest in the multimedia community. Previous studies predominantly focus on learning contextual information in conversations with only a few considering the topic information in single language modality, while always neglecting the acoustic and vision topic information. On this basis, we propose a model-agnostic Topic-enriched Diffusion (TopicDiff) approach for capturing multimodal topic information in MCE tasks. Particularly, we integrate the diffusion model into neural topic model to alleviate the diversity deficiency problem of neural topic model in capturing topic information. Detailed evaluations demonstrate the significant improvements of TopicDiff over the state-of-the-art MCE baselines, justifying the importance of multimodal topic information to MCE and the effectiveness of TopicDiff in capturing such information. Furthermore, we observe an interesting finding that the topic information in acoustic and vision is more discriminative and robust compared to the language.

Jingjing Wang, Qirui Hu, Chong Bao et al.

Inverse rendering in urban scenes is pivotal for applications like autonomous driving and digital twins. Yet, it faces significant challenges due to complex illumination conditions, including multi-illumination and indirect light and shadow effects. However, the effects of these challenges on intrinsic decomposition and 3D reconstruction have not been explored due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we present LightCity, a novel high-quality synthetic urban dataset featuring diverse illumination conditions with realistic indirect light and shadow effects. LightCity encompasses over 300 sky maps with highly controllable illumination, varying scales with street-level and aerial perspectives over 50K images, and rich properties such as depth, normal, material components, light and indirect light, etc. Besides, we leverage LightCity to benchmark three fundamental tasks in the urban environments and conduct a comprehensive analysis of these benchmarks, laying a robust foundation for advancing related research.

Changhong Liu, Jingjing Wang, Qiaosheng Zhang et al.

The white book released by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) calls for extremely high-security and low-latency communication over fading channels. Under the low-latency requirement, the corresponding fading model is quasi-static fading while high-security can be achieved via covert communication. In response to the call of ITU, we study the finite blocklength performance of optimal codes for covert communication over quasi-static multi-antenna fading channels, under the covertness metric of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In particular, we study all four cases regarding the availability of channel state information (CSI) for legitimate transmitter and receiver, and assume that the warden knows perfect CSI for the channel from the legitimate transmitter to itself. Specifically, we show that, when the blocklength is $n$, the first-order covert rate satisfies the square root law, scaling as $Θ(n^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ with the coefficient determined by the traces of the channel matrices of the legitimate users and the warden, and the second-order rate vanishes. In contrast to the non-covert result of Yang et al. (TIT, 2014), we show that CSI availability at the legitimate users does not affect the finite blocklength performance for covert communication. Furthermore, we reveal the significant spatial diversity gain provided by multiple-antenna systems for covert communication. For the covertness analysis, we extend the quasi-$η$-neighborhood framework to fading channels and address challenges arising from the random channel matrices. For the reliability analysis, due to the vanishing power imposed by the covertness constraint, we refine the non-covert analysis by Yang et al. (TIT, 2014), by carefully controlling higher-order terms and exploiting the properties of covert outage probability.

Yujie Jin, Wenxin Zhang, Jingjing Wang et al.

In the literature, prior research on Security-oriented Video Understanding (SVU) has predominantly focused on detecting and localize the threats (e.g., shootings, robberies) in videos, while largely lacking the effective capability to generate and evaluate the threat causes. Motivated by these gaps, this paper introduces a new chat paradigm SVU task, i.e., In-depth Security-oriented Video Understanding (DeepSVU), which aims to not only identify and locate the threats but also attribute and evaluate the causes threatening segments. Furthermore, this paper reveals two key challenges in the proposed task: 1) how to effectively model the coarse-to-fine physical-world information (e.g., human behavior, object interactions and background context) to boost the DeepSVU task; and 2) how to adaptively trade off these factors. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a new Unified Physical-world Regularized MoE (UPRM) approach. Specifically, UPRM incorporates two key components: the Unified Physical-world Enhanced MoE (UPE) Block and the Physical-world Trade-off Regularizer (PTR), to address the above two challenges, respectively. Extensive experiments conduct on our DeepSVU instructions datasets (i.e., UCF-C instructions and CUVA instructions) demonstrate that UPRM outperforms several advanced Video-LLMs as well as non-VLM approaches. Such information.These justify the importance of the coarse-to-fine physical-world information in the DeepSVU task and demonstrate the effectiveness of our UPRM in capturing such information.

Jiamin Luo, Xuqian Gu, Jingjing Wang et al.

Previous studies on visual customization primarily rely on the objective alignment between various control signals (e.g., language, layout and canny) and the edited images, which largely ignore the subjective emotional contents, and more importantly lack general-purpose foundation models for affective visual customization. With this in mind, this paper proposes an LLM-centric Affective Visual Customization (L-AVC) task, which focuses on generating images within modifying their subjective emotions via Multimodal LLM. Further, this paper contends that how to make the model efficiently align emotion conversion in semantics (named inter-emotion semantic conversion) and how to precisely retain emotion-agnostic contents (named exter-emotion semantic retaining) are rather important and challenging in this L-AVC task. To this end, this paper proposes an Efficient and Precise Emotion Manipulating approach for editing subjective emotions in images. Specifically, an Efficient Inter-emotion Converting (EIC) module is tailored to make the LLM efficiently align emotion conversion in semantics before and after editing, followed by a Precise Exter-emotion Retaining (PER) module to precisely retain the emotion-agnostic contents. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on our constructed L-AVC dataset demonstrate the great advantage of the proposed EPEM approach to the L-AVC task over several state-of-the-art baselines. This justifies the importance of emotion information for L-AVC and the effectiveness of EPEM in efficiently and precisely manipulating such information.

Zhentao Zhan, Xiaoliang Xu, Jingjing Wang et al.

Graph Similarity Computation (GSC) is a fundamental graph related task where Graph Edit Distance (GED) serves as a prevalent metric. GED is determined by an optimal alignment between a pair of graphs that partitions each into aligned (zero-cost) and unaligned (cost-incurring) substructures. Due to NP-hard nature of exact GED computation, GED approximations based on Graph Neural Network(GNN) have emerged. Existing GNN-based GED approaches typically learn node embeddings for each graph and then aggregate pairwise node similarities to estimate the final similarity. Despite their effectiveness, we identify a mismatch between this prevalent node-centric matching paradigm and the core principles of GED. This discrepancy leads to two critical limitations: (1) a failure to capture the global structural correspondence for optimal alignment, and (2) a misattribution of edit costs driven by spurious node level signals. To address these limitations, we propose GCGSim, a GED-consistent graph similarity learning framework centering on graph-level matching and substructure-level edit costs. Specifically, we make three core technical contributions. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that GCGSim achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our comprehensive analyses further validate that the framework effectively learns disentangled and semantically meaningful substructure representations.

Adam S. Jovine, Tinghan Ye, Francis Bahk et al.

Human experts often struggle to select the best option from a large set of items with multiple competing objectives, a process bottlenecked by the difficulty of formalizing complex, implicit preferences. To address this, we introduce LISTEN, a framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) as a zero-shot preference oracle, guided only by an expert's high-level priorities in natural language. To operate within LLM constraints like context windows and inference costs, we propose two iterative algorithms: LISTEN-U, which uses the LLM to refine a parametric utility function, and LISTEN-T, a non-parametric method that performs tournament-style selections over small batches of solutions. Evaluated on diverse tasks including flight booking, shopping, and exam scheduling, our results show LISTEN-U excels when preferences are parametrically aligned (a property we measure with a novel concordance metric), while LISTEN-T offers more robust performance. This work explores a promising direction for steering complex multi-objective decisions directly with natural language, reducing the cognitive burden of traditional preference elicitation.