Bob Zhang

Chunwei Tian, Menghua Zheng, Wangmeng Zuo et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used for image denoising via automatically mining accurate structure information. However, most of existing CNNs depend on enlarging depth of designed networks to obtain better denoising performance, which may cause training difficulty. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage image denoising CNN with the wavelet transform (MWDCNN) via three stages, i.e., a dynamic convolutional block (DCB), two cascaded wavelet transform and enhancement blocks (WEBs) and a residual block (RB). DCB uses a dynamic convolution to dynamically adjust parameters of several convolutions for making a tradeoff between denoising performance and computational costs. WEB uses a combination of signal processing technique (i.e., wavelet transformation) and discriminative learning to suppress noise for recovering more detailed information in image denoising. To further remove redundant features, RB is used to refine obtained features for improving denoising effects and reconstruct clean images via improved residual dense architectures. Experimental results show that the proposed MWDCNN outperforms some popular denoising methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Codes are available at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/MWDCNN.

Ziyuan Yang, Andrew Beng Jin Teoh, Bob Zhang et al.

Palmprint as biometrics has gained increasing attention recently due to its discriminative ability and robustness. However, existing methods mainly improve palmprint verification within one spectrum, which is challenging to verify across different spectrums. Additionally, in distributed server-client-based deployment, palmprint verification systems predominantly necessitate clients to transmit private data for model training on the centralized server, thereby engendering privacy apprehensions. To alleviate the above issues, in this paper, we propose a physics-driven spectrum-consistent federated learning method for palmprint verification, dubbed as PSFed-Palm. PSFed-Palm draws upon the inherent physical properties of distinct wavelength spectrums, wherein images acquired under similar wavelengths display heightened resemblances. Our approach first partitions clients into short- and long-spectrum groups according to the wavelength range of their local spectrum images. Subsequently, we introduce anchor models for short- and long-spectrum, which constrain the optimization directions of local models associated with long- and short-spectrum images. Specifically, a spectrum-consistent loss that enforces the model parameters and feature representation to align with their corresponding anchor models is designed. Finally, we impose constraints on the local models to ensure their consistency with the global model, effectively preventing model drift. This measure guarantees spectrum consistency while protecting data privacy, as there is no need to share local data. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the efficacy of our proposed PSFed-Palm approach. The proposed PSFed-Palm demonstrates compelling performance despite only a limited number of training data. The codes will be released at https://github.com/Zi-YuanYang/PSFed-Palm.

Jie Wen, Zheng Zhang, Lunke Fei et al.

Conventional multi-view clustering seeks to partition data into respective groups based on the assumption that all views are fully observed. However, in practical applications, such as disease diagnosis, multimedia analysis, and recommendation system, it is common to observe that not all views of samples are available in many cases, which leads to the failure of the conventional multi-view clustering methods. Clustering on such incomplete multi-view data is referred to as incomplete multi-view clustering. In view of the promising application prospects, the research of incomplete multi-view clustering has noticeable advances in recent years. However, there is no survey to summarize the current progresses and point out the future research directions. To this end, we review the recent studies of incomplete multi-view clustering. Importantly, we provide some frameworks to unify the corresponding incomplete multi-view clustering methods, and make an in-depth comparative analysis for some representative methods from theoretical and experimental perspectives. Finally, some open problems in the incomplete multi-view clustering field are offered for researchers.

Qing Wang, Bo Li, Jialu Liang et al.

Drug-information question answering is a high-stakes setting where hallucinated facts can mislead clinical decision-making and the provenance of each cited fact matters as much as the fact itself. We present DrugClaw, a multi-agent retrieval-augmented system that queries a registry of drug and pharmacovigilance skills via a reflection-driven state-machine workflow and returns answers grounded in primary regulatory or peer-reviewed records. We also contribute DrugAudit, a 3,772-item authority-aware benchmark with an evaluation panel that scores upstream-of-gold source match, token-level semantic snippet overlap, and citation faithfulness under a dual-judge LLM-as-judge protocol with inter-judge kappa = 0.88 (almost-perfect). Across DrugAudit plus drug-related subsets of MedQA (751) and PubMedQA (512), DrugClaw is top-1 on every column of the headline table: composite Evidence Index under both judges, judge-mediated answer correctness, primary-source rate (0.918, +10.1 pp over next-best), faithfulness (0.887, +5.9 pp), MedQA (0.920), and PubMedQA (0.693).

Shuoyuan Wang, Jindong Wang, Guoqing Wang et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as formidable tools, showing their strong capability in handling various open-vocabulary tasks in image recognition, text-driven visual content generation, and visual chatbots, to name a few. In recent years, considerable efforts and resources have been devoted to adaptation methods for improving downstream performance of VLMs, particularly on parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like prompt learning. However, a crucial aspect that has been largely overlooked is the confidence calibration problem in fine-tuned VLMs, which could greatly reduce reliability when deploying such models in the real world. This paper bridges the gap by systematically investigating the confidence calibration problem in the context of prompt learning and reveals that existing calibration methods are insufficient to address the problem, especially in the open-vocabulary setting. To solve the problem, we present a simple and effective approach called Distance-Aware Calibration (DAC), which is based on scaling the temperature using as guidance the distance between predicted text labels and base classes. The experiments with 7 distinct prompt learning methods applied across 11 diverse downstream datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DAC, which achieves high efficacy without sacrificing the inference speed. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-stat-Sustech/CLIP_Calibration.

Chunwei Tian, Mingjian Song, Xiaopeng Fan et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks can extract more accurate structural information via deep architectures to obtain good performance in image super-resolution. However, it is not easy to find effect of important layers in a single network architecture to decrease performance of super-resolution. In this paper, we design a tree-guided CNN for image super-resolution (TSRNet). It uses a tree architecture to guide a deep network to enhance effect of key nodes to amplify the relation of hierarchical information for improving the ability of recovering images. To prevent insufficiency of the obtained structural information, cosine transform techniques in the TSRNet are used to extract cross-domain information to improve the performance of image super-resolution. Adaptive Nesterov momentum optimizer (Adan) is applied to optimize parameters to boost effectiveness of training a super-resolution model. Extended experiments can verify superiority of the proposed TSRNet for restoring high-quality images. Its code can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/TSRNet.

Chunwei Tian, Kai Liu, Bob Zhang et al.

Stable consumer electronic systems can assist traffic better. Good traffic consumer electronic systems require collaborative work between traffic algorithms and hardware. However, performance of popular traffic algorithms containing vehicle detection methods based on deep networks via learning data relation rather than learning differences in different lighting and occlusions is limited. In this paper, we present a dynamic Transformer network for vehicle detection (DTNet). DTNet utilizes a dynamic convolution to guide a deep network to dynamically generate weights to enhance adaptability of an obtained detector. Taking into relations of different information account, a mixed attention mechanism based channel attention and Transformer is exploited to strengthen relations of channels and pixels to extract more salient information for vehicle detection. To overcome the drawback of difference in an image account, a translation-variant convolution relies on spatial location information to refine obtained structural information for vehicle detection. Experimental results illustrate that our DTNet is competitive for vehicle detection. Code of the proposed DTNet can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/DTNet.

Jie Wen, Zheng Zhang, Yong Xu et al.

In recent years, incomplete multi-view clustering, which studies the challenging multi-view clustering problem on missing views, has received growing research interests. Although a series of methods have been proposed to address this issue, the following problems still exist: 1) Almost all of the existing methods are based on shallow models, which is difficult to obtain discriminative common representations. 2) These methods are generally sensitive to noise or outliers since the negative samples are treated equally as the important samples. In this paper, we propose a novel incomplete multi-view clustering network, called Cognitive Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering Network (CDIMC-net), to address these issues. Specifically, it captures the high-level features and local structure of each view by incorporating the view-specific deep encoders and graph embedding strategy into a framework. Moreover, based on the human cognition, i.e., learning from easy to hard, it introduces a self-paced strategy to select the most confident samples for model training, which can reduce the negative influence of outliers. Experimental results on several incomplete datasets show that CDIMC-net outperforms the state-of-the-art incomplete multi-view clustering methods.

Chengrui Gao, Ziyuan Yang, Wei Jia et al.

Palmprint recognition has emerged as a prominent biometric technology, widely applied in diverse scenarios. Traditional handcrafted methods for palmprint recognition often fall short in representation capability, as they heavily depend on researchers' prior knowledge. Deep learning (DL) has been introduced to address this limitation, leveraging its remarkable successes across various domains. While existing surveys focus narrowly on specific tasks within palmprint recognition-often grounded in traditional methodologies-there remains a significant gap in comprehensive research exploring DL-based approaches across all facets of palmprint recognition. This paper bridges that gap by thoroughly reviewing recent advancements in DL-powered palmprint recognition. The paper systematically examines progress across key tasks, including region-of-interest segmentation, feature extraction, and security/privacy-oriented challenges. Beyond highlighting these advancements, the paper identifies current challenges and uncovers promising opportunities for future research. By consolidating state-of-the-art progress, this review serves as a valuable resource for researchers, enabling them to stay abreast of cutting-edge technologies and drive innovation in palmprint recognition.

Bo Li, Bob Zhang, Chengyang Zhang et al.

In the field of image-based drug discovery, capturing the phenotypic response of cells to various drug treatments and perturbations is a crucial step. However, existing methods require computationally extensive and complex multi-step procedures, which can introduce inefficiencies, limit generalizability, and increase potential errors. To address these challenges, we present PhenoProfiler, an innovative model designed to efficiently and effectively extract morphological representations, enabling the elucidation of phenotypic changes induced by treatments. PhenoProfiler is designed as an end-to-end tool that processes whole-slide multi-channel images directly into low-dimensional quantitative representations, eliminating the extensive computational steps required by existing methods. It also includes a multi-objective learning module to enhance robustness, accuracy, and generalization in morphological representation learning. PhenoProfiler is rigorously evaluated on large-scale publicly available datasets, including over 230,000 whole-slide multi-channel images in end-to-end scenarios and more than 8.42 million single-cell images in non-end-to-end settings. Across these benchmarks, PhenoProfiler consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 20%, demonstrating substantial improvements in both accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, PhenoProfiler uses a tailored phenotype correction strategy to emphasize relative phenotypic changes under treatments, facilitating the detection of biologically meaningful signals. UMAP visualizations of treatment profiles demonstrate PhenoProfiler ability to effectively cluster treatments with similar biological annotations, thereby enhancing interpretability. These findings establish PhenoProfiler as a scalable, generalizable, and robust tool for phenotypic learning.

Ming Lu, Leyuan Fang, Muxing Li et al.

The use of deep learning for water extraction requires precise pixel-level labels. However, it is very difficult to label high-resolution remote sensing images at the pixel level. Therefore, we study how to utilize point labels to extract water bodies and propose a novel method called the neighbor feature aggregation network (NFANet). Compared with pixellevel labels, point labels are much easier to obtain, but they will lose much information. In this paper, we take advantage of the similarity between the adjacent pixels of a local water-body, and propose a neighbor sampler to resample remote sensing images. Then, the sampled images are sent to the network for feature aggregation. In addition, we use an improved recursive training algorithm to further improve the extraction accuracy, making the water boundary more natural. Furthermore, our method utilizes neighboring features instead of global or local features to learn more representative features. The experimental results show that the proposed NFANet method not only outperforms other studied weakly supervised approaches, but also obtains similar results as the state-of-the-art ones.

Shaoning Zeng, Bob Zhang

In the generator of typical Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a noise is inputted to generate fake samples via a series of convolutional operations. However, current noise generation models merely relies on the information from the pixel space, which increases the difficulty to approach the target distribution. Fortunately, the long proven wavelet transformation is able to decompose multiple spectral information from the images. In this work, we propose a novel multi-channel wavelet-based filtering method for GANs, to cope with this problem. When embedding a wavelet deconvolution layer in the generator, the resultant GAN, called WaveletGAN, takes advantage of the wavelet deconvolution to learn a filtering with multiple channels, which can efficiently homogenize the generated noise via an averaging operation, so as to generate high-fidelity samples. We conducted benchmark experiments on the Fashion-MNIST, KMNIST and SVHN datasets through an open GAN benchmark tool. The results show that WaveletGAN has excellent performance in generating high-fidelity samples, thanks to the smallest FIDs obtained on these datasets.

Jianhang Zhou, Shaoning Zeng, Bob Zhang

The two-stage strategy has been widely used in image classification. However, these methods barely take the classification criteria of the first stage into consideration in the second prediction stage. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage representation method (TSR), and convert it to a Single-Teacher Single-Student (STSS) problem in our two-stage image classification framework. We seek the nearest neighbours of the test sample to choose candidate target classes. Meanwhile, the first stage classifier is formulated as the teacher, which holds the classification scores. The samples of the candidate classes are utilized to learn a student classifier based on L2-minimization in the second stage. The student will be supervised by the teacher classifier, which approves the student only if it obtains a higher score. In actuality, the proposed framework generates a stronger classifier by staging two weaker classifiers in a novel way. The experiments conducted on several face and object databases show that our proposed framework is effective and outperforms multiple popular classification methods.

Shaoning Zeng, Bob Zhang, Yanghao Zhang et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks provide a powerful feature learning capability for image classification. The deep image features can be utilized to deal with many image understanding tasks like image classification and object recognition. However, the robustness obtained in one dataset can be hardly reproduced in the other domain, which leads to inefficient models far from state-of-the-art. We propose a deep collaborative weight-based classification (DeepCWC) method to resolve this problem, by providing a novel option to fully take advantage of deep features in classic machine learning. It firstly performs the L2-norm based collaborative representation on the original images, as well as the deep features extracted by deep CNN models. Then, two distance vectors, obtained based on the pair of linear representations, are fused together via a novel collaborative weight. This collaborative weight enables deep and classic representations to weigh each other. We observed the complementarity between two representations in a series of experiments on 10 facial and object datasets. The proposed DeepCWC produces very promising classification results, and outperforms many other benchmark methods, especially the ones claimed for Fashion-MNIST. The code is going to be published in our public repository.

Jinxing Li, Bob Zhang, Guangming Lu et al.

Due to the impressive learning power, deep learning has achieved a remarkable performance in supervised hash function learning. In this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric supervised deep hashing method to preserve the semantic structure among different categories and generate the binary codes simultaneously. Specifically, two asymmetric deep networks are constructed to reveal the similarity between each pair of images according to their semantic labels. The deep hash functions are then learned through two networks by minimizing the gap between the learned features and discrete codes. Furthermore, since the binary codes in the Hamming space also should keep the semantic affinity existing in the original space, another asymmetric pairwise loss is introduced to capture the similarity between the binary codes and real-value features. This asymmetric loss not only improves the retrieval performance, but also contributes to a quick convergence at the training phase. By taking advantage of the two-stream deep structures and two types of asymmetric pairwise functions, an alternating algorithm is designed to optimize the deep features and high-quality binary codes efficiently. Experimental results on three real-world datasets substantiate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach as compared with state-of-the-art.