CEMay 29Code
Beyond Knowledge to Agency: Evaluating Expertise, Autonomy, and Integrity in Finance with CNFinBenchJinru Ding, Chao Ding, Yidong Jiang et al.
As large language models (LLMs) become high-privilege agents in risk-sensitive settings, they introduce systemic threats beyond hallucination, where minor compliance errors can cause critical data leaks. However, existing benchmarks focus on rule-based QA, lacking agentic execution modeling, overlooking compliance drift in adversarial interactions, and relying on binary safety metrics that fail to capture behavioral degradation. To bridge these gaps, we present CNFinBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 29 subtasks grounded in the triad of expertise, autonomy, and integrity. It assesses domain-specific capabilities through certified regulatory corpora and professional financial tasks, reconstructs end-to-end agent workflows from requirement parsing to tool verification, and simulates multi-turn adversarial attacks that induce behavioral compliance drift. To quantify safety degradation, we introduce the Harmful Instruction Compliance Score (HICS), a multi-dimensional safety metric that integrates risk-type-specific deductions, multi-turn consistency tracking, and severity-adjusted penalty scaling based on fine-grained violation triggers. Evaluations over 22 open-/closed-source models reveal: LLMs perform well in applied tasks yet lack robust rule understanding, suffer a 15.4 decline from single modules to full execution chains, and collapse rapidly in multi-turn attacks, with average violations surging by 159.05% in Round 2. CNFinBench is available at https://cnfinbench.opencompass.org.cn and https://github.com/VertiAIBench/CNFinBench.
ROJun 26, 2023
RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object ManipulationAnkit Goyal, Jie Xu, Yijie Guo et al. · nvidia
For 3D object manipulation, methods that build an explicit 3D representation perform better than those relying only on camera images. But using explicit 3D representations like voxels comes at large computing cost, adversely affecting scalability. In this work, we propose RVT, a multi-view transformer for 3D manipulation that is both scalable and accurate. Some key features of RVT are an attention mechanism to aggregate information across views and re-rendering of the camera input from virtual views around the robot workspace. In simulations, we find that a single RVT model works well across 18 RLBench tasks with 249 task variations, achieving 26% higher relative success than the existing state-of-the-art method (PerAct). It also trains 36X faster than PerAct for achieving the same performance and achieves 2.3X the inference speed of PerAct. Further, RVT can perform a variety of manipulation tasks in the real world with just a few ($\sim$10) demonstrations per task. Visual results, code, and trained model are provided at https://robotic-view-transformer.github.io/.
LGApr 14, 2022
Accelerated Policy Learning with Parallel Differentiable SimulationJie Xu, Viktor Makoviychuk, Yashraj Narang et al. · gatech, nvidia
Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent problems such as local minima and exploding/vanishing numerical gradients prevent these methods from being generally applied to control tasks with complex contact-rich dynamics, such as humanoid locomotion in classical RL benchmarks. In this work we present a high-performance differentiable simulator and a new policy learning algorithm (SHAC) that can effectively leverage simulation gradients, even in the presence of non-smoothness. Our learning algorithm alleviates problems with local minima through a smooth critic function, avoids vanishing/exploding gradients through a truncated learning window, and allows many physical environments to be run in parallel. We evaluate our method on classical RL control tasks, and show substantial improvements in sample efficiency and wall-clock time over state-of-the-art RL and differentiable simulation-based algorithms. In addition, we demonstrate the scalability of our method by applying it to the challenging high-dimensional problem of muscle-actuated locomotion with a large action space, achieving a greater than 17x reduction in training time over the best-performing established RL algorithm.
CVJun 3
Multi-Granularity 3D Kidney Lesion Characterization from CT VolumesRenjie Liang, Zhengkang Fan, Jinqian Pan et al.
Radiology reports describe kidney lesions by type, size, enhancement, and attenuation, yet existing 3D methods predict only at the patient or organ level. We reformulate kidney CT characterization as a per-lesion set-prediction task: one model emits a variable number of lesions per kidney, each with four clinical attributes. We curated 2,619 CT volumes from 788 patients at one academic medical center, with multi-granularity side- and per-lesion labels, and used KiTS23 (489 cases) for zero-shot external validation. We propose \textbf{LesionDETR}, a DETR-style architecture with size-distance Hungarian matching and a hierarchical loss that aggregates per-slot outputs to side-level objectives. Across four input representations and six encoder initializations, two design choices dominate: a segmentation mask as an input channel, and same-domain abdominal pretraining (SuPreM); generic large-corpus pretraining is no better than random initialization. LesionDETR reaches bilateral side-level abnormality AUC $0.799 \pm 0.009$ on UF-Health and $0.817 \pm 0.072$ on KiTS23. A count-conditioned variant reaches per-lesion mAP $0.190 \pm 0.083$ on cystic lesions; rare solid-lesion AP stays at the noise floor, pointing to targeted data collection, not architecture, as the next bottleneck. The framework yields verified per-lesion predictions for downstream structured report generation.
RONov 2, 2023Code
Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot ImitatorsXinghang Li, Minghuan Liu, Hanbo Zhang et al.
Recent progress in vision language foundation models has shown their ability to understand multimodal data and resolve complicated vision language tasks, including robotics manipulation. We seek a straightforward way of making use of existing vision-language models (VLMs) with simple fine-tuning on robotics data. To this end, we derive a simple and novel vision-language manipulation framework, dubbed RoboFlamingo, built upon the open-source VLMs, OpenFlamingo. Unlike prior works, RoboFlamingo utilizes pre-trained VLMs for single-step vision-language comprehension, models sequential history information with an explicit policy head, and is slightly fine-tuned by imitation learning only on language-conditioned manipulation datasets. Such a decomposition provides RoboFlamingo the flexibility for open-loop control and deployment on low-performance platforms. By exceeding the state-of-the-art performance with a large margin on the tested benchmark, we show RoboFlamingo can be an effective and competitive alternative to adapt VLMs to robot control. Our extensive experimental results also reveal several interesting conclusions regarding the behavior of different pre-trained VLMs on manipulation tasks. We believe RoboFlamingo has the potential to be a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution for robotics manipulation, empowering everyone with the ability to fine-tune their own robotics policy.
LGOct 13, 2022Code
Variational Graph Generator for Multi-View Graph ClusteringJianpeng Chen, Yawen Ling, Jie Xu et al.
Multi-view graph clustering (MGC) methods are increasingly being studied due to the explosion of multi-view data with graph structural information. The critical point of MGC is to better utilize view-specific and view-common information in features and graphs of multiple views. However, existing works have an inherent limitation that they are unable to concurrently utilize the consensus graph information across multiple graphs and the view-specific feature information. To address this issue, we propose Variational Graph Generator for Multi-View Graph Clustering (VGMGC). Specifically, a novel variational graph generator is proposed to extract common information among multiple graphs. This generator infers a reliable variational consensus graph based on a priori assumption over multiple graphs. Then a simple yet effective graph encoder in conjunction with the multi-view clustering objective is presented to learn the desired graph embeddings for clustering, which embeds the inferred view-common graph and view-specific graphs together with features. Finally, theoretical results illustrate the rationality of the VGMGC by analyzing the uncertainty of the inferred consensus graph with the information bottleneck principle.Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our VGMGC over SOTAs. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/cjpcool/VGMGC.
CVJul 16, 2022Code
Semi-Supervised Keypoint Detector and Descriptor for Retinal Image MatchingJiazhen Liu, Xirong Li, Qijie Wei et al.
For retinal image matching (RIM), we propose SuperRetina, the first end-to-end method with jointly trainable keypoint detector and descriptor. SuperRetina is trained in a novel semi-supervised manner. A small set of (nearly 100) images are incompletely labeled and used to supervise the network to detect keypoints on the vascular tree. To attack the incompleteness of manual labeling, we propose Progressive Keypoint Expansion to enrich the keypoint labels at each training epoch. By utilizing a keypoint-based improved triplet loss as its description loss, SuperRetina produces highly discriminative descriptors at full input image size. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets justify the viability of SuperRetina. Even with manual labeling replaced by auto labeling and thus making the training process fully manual-annotation free, SuperRetina compares favorably against a number of strong baselines for two RIM tasks, i.e. image registration and identity verification. SuperRetina will be open source.
AIJul 17, 2023
TableGPT: Towards Unifying Tables, Nature Language and Commands into One GPTLiangyu Zha, Junlin Zhou, Liyao Li et al.
Tables are prevalent in real-world databases, requiring significant time and effort for humans to analyze and manipulate. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to interact with tables using natural language input, bringing this capability closer to reality. In this paper, we present TableGPT, a unified fine-tuned framework that enables LLMs to understand and operate on tables using external functional commands. It introduces the capability to seamlessly interact with tables, enabling a wide range of functionalities such as question answering, data manipulation (e.g., insert, delete, query, and modify operations), data visualization, analysis report generation, and automated prediction. TableGPT aims to provide convenience and accessibility to users by empowering them to effortlessly leverage tabular data. At the core of TableGPT lies the novel concept of global tabular representations, which empowers LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire table beyond meta-information. By jointly training LLMs on both table and text modalities, TableGPT achieves a deep understanding of tabular data and the ability to perform complex operations on tables through chain-of-command instructions. Importantly, TableGPT offers the advantage of being a self-contained system rather than relying on external API interfaces. Moreover, it supports efficient data process flow, query rejection (when appropriate) and private deployment, enabling faster domain data fine-tuning and ensuring data privacy, which enhances the framework's adaptability to specific use cases.
SOFTMay 29
Tensor gradient flow for rod-like liquid crystals from molecular model with closure approximation by quasi-entropyYongyong Cai, Jie Xu, Haixin Zhang
In tensor dynamics for liquid crystals derived from molecular models, a common problem is closure approximation. For rod-like molecules, the Bingham closure has proved to outperform other methods because it inherits the gradient flow structure of the molecular model, but is difficult to achieve efficient computations maintaining the gradient flow structure. We propose a closure approximation by the quasi-entropy that has been successfully applied to the free energy, based on which we construct the tensor gradient flow. The quasi-entropy closure has the same symmetry properties as the Bingham closure. The resulting tensor gradient flow is able to constrain the eigenvalues of the tensor within the physical range, guaranteeing the positive definiteness of the dissipation operator given by the higher-order tensors. The quasi-entropy closure is easy to implement since it can be reduced to minimizing an elementary function of three variables. As a result, we construct a numerical scheme preserving the eigenvalue constraints and energy dissipation, with the closure approximation decoupled from solving the scheme. Numerical simulations are carried out for the interface between the isotropic and the uniaxial nematic phase, as well as the defect evolutions, where the higher-order tensors indeed make a difference.
ITJul 3, 2022
Task-Oriented Sensing, Computation, and Communication Integration for Multi-Device Edge AIDingzhu Wen, Peixi Liu, Guangxu Zhu et al.
This paper studies a new multi-device edge artificial-intelligent (AI) system, which jointly exploits the AI model split inference and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) to enable low-latency intelligent services at the network edge. In this system, multiple ISAC devices perform radar sensing to obtain multi-view data, and then offload the quantized version of extracted features to a centralized edge server, which conducts model inference based on the cascaded feature vectors. Under this setup and by considering classification tasks, we measure the inference accuracy by adopting an approximate but tractable metric, namely discriminant gain, which is defined as the distance of two classes in the Euclidean feature space under normalized covariance. To maximize the discriminant gain, we first quantify the influence of the sensing, computation, and communication processes on it with a derived closed-form expression. Then, an end-to-end task-oriented resource management approach is developed by integrating the three processes into a joint design. This integrated sensing, computation, and communication (ISCC) design approach, however, leads to a challenging non-convex optimization problem, due to the complicated form of discriminant gain and the device heterogeneity in terms of channel gain, quantization level, and generated feature subsets. Remarkably, the considered non-convex problem can be optimally solved based on the sum-of-ratios method. This gives the optimal ISCC scheme, that jointly determines the transmit power and time allocation at multiple devices for sensing and communication, as well as their quantization bits allocation for computation distortion control. By using human motions recognition as a concrete AI inference task, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the performance of our derived optimal ISCC scheme.
LGOct 9, 2022
Deep Clustering: A Comprehensive SurveyYazhou Ren, Jingyu Pu, Zhimeng Yang et al.
Cluster analysis plays an indispensable role in machine learning and data mining. Learning a good data representation is crucial for clustering algorithms. Recently, deep clustering, which can learn clustering-friendly representations using deep neural networks, has been broadly applied in a wide range of clustering tasks. Existing surveys for deep clustering mainly focus on the single-view fields and the network architectures, ignoring the complex application scenarios of clustering. To address this issue, in this paper we provide a comprehensive survey for deep clustering in views of data sources. With different data sources and initial conditions, we systematically distinguish the clustering methods in terms of methodology, prior knowledge, and architecture. Concretely, deep clustering methods are introduced according to four categories, i.e., traditional single-view deep clustering, semi-supervised deep clustering, deep multi-view clustering, and deep transfer clustering. Finally, we discuss the open challenges and potential future opportunities in different fields of deep clustering.
LGMar 17, 2022
GATE: Graph CCA for Temporal SElf-supervised Learning for Label-efficient fMRI AnalysisLiang Peng, Nan Wang, Jie Xu et al.
In this work, we focus on the challenging task, neuro-disease classification, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In population graph-based disease analysis, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) have achieved remarkable success. However, these achievements are inseparable from abundant labeled data and sensitive to spurious signals. To improve fMRI representation learning and classification under a label-efficient setting, we propose a novel and theory-driven self-supervised learning (SSL) framework on GCNs, namely Graph CCA for Temporal self-supervised learning on fMRI analysis GATE. Concretely, it is demanding to design a suitable and effective SSL strategy to extract formation and robust features for fMRI. To this end, we investigate several new graph augmentation strategies from fMRI dynamic functional connectives (FC) for SSL training. Further, we leverage canonical-correlation analysis (CCA) on different temporal embeddings and present the theoretical implications. Consequently, this yields a novel two-step GCN learning procedure comprised of (i) SSL on an unlabeled fMRI population graph and (ii) fine-tuning on a small labeled fMRI dataset for a classification task. Our method is tested on two independent fMRI datasets, demonstrating superior performance on autism and dementia diagnosis.
CVMar 29
Project Imaging-X: A Survey of 1000+ Open-Access Medical Imaging Datasets for Foundation Model DevelopmentZhongying Deng, Cheng Tang, Ziyan Huang et al. · pku
Foundation models have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse domains and tasks, primarily due to the thrive of large-scale, diverse, and high-quality datasets. However, in the field of medical imaging, the curation and assembling of such medical datasets are highly challenging due to the reliance on clinical expertise and strict ethical and privacy constraints, resulting in a scarcity of large-scale unified medical datasets and hindering the development of powerful medical foundation models. In this work, we present the largest survey to date of medical image datasets, covering over 1,000 open-access datasets with a systematic catalog of their modalities, tasks, anatomies, annotations, limitations, and potential for integration. Our analysis exposes a landscape that is modest in scale, fragmented across narrowly scoped tasks, and unevenly distributed across organs and modalities, which in turn limits the utility of existing medical image datasets for developing versatile and robust medical foundation models. To turn fragmentation into scale, we propose a metadata-driven fusion paradigm (MDFP) that integrates public datasets with shared modalities or tasks, thereby transforming multiple small data silos into larger, more coherent resources. Building on MDFP, we release an interactive discovery portal that enables end-to-end, automated medical image dataset integration, and compile all surveyed datasets into a unified, structured table that clearly summarizes their key characteristics and provides reference links, offering the community an accessible and comprehensive repository. By charting the current terrain and offering a principled path to dataset consolidation, our survey provides a practical roadmap for scaling medical imaging corpora, supporting faster data discovery, more principled dataset creation, and more capable medical foundation models.
CVAug 23, 2023
OFVL-MS: Once for Visual Localization across Multiple Indoor ScenesTao Xie, Kun Dai, Siyi Lu et al.
In this work, we seek to predict camera poses across scenes with a multi-task learning manner, where we view the localization of each scene as a new task. We propose OFVL-MS, a unified framework that dispenses with the traditional practice of training a model for each individual scene and relieves gradient conflict induced by optimizing multiple scenes collectively, enabling efficient storage yet precise visual localization for all scenes. Technically, in the forward pass of OFVL-MS, we design a layer-adaptive sharing policy with a learnable score for each layer to automatically determine whether the layer is shared or not. Such sharing policy empowers us to acquire task-shared parameters for a reduction of storage cost and task-specific parameters for learning scene-related features to alleviate gradient conflict. In the backward pass of OFVL-MS, we introduce a gradient normalization algorithm that homogenizes the gradient magnitude of the task-shared parameters so that all tasks converge at the same pace. Furthermore, a sparse penalty loss is applied on the learnable scores to facilitate parameter sharing for all tasks without performance degradation. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and our new released indoor dataset LIVL, showing that OFVL-MS families significantly outperform the state-of-the-arts with fewer parameters. We also verify that OFVL-MS can generalize to a new scene with much few parameters while gaining superior localization performance.
NAMay 30
Tensor gradient flow with quasi-entropy for smectic liquid crystals and discretizations keeping coupled physical constraintsJie Xu, Xiaomei Yao
A gradient flow for the concentration and a $2\times 2$ tensor is constructed to describe smectic liquid crystals. The free energy consists of the entropy term and interaction term involving squared second order spatial derivatives. The entropy term incorporates the concentration in the quasi-entropy originally proposed for the tensor only, which is a strictly convex and lower semicontinuous function imposing coupled constraints between the concentration and the tensor. An evolution equation for the boundary normal derivative of the concentration is proposed in addition to the equations for the concentration and the tensor, giving an energy dissipation system. Numerical schemes are designed with emphases on using the entropy term to keep the coupled constraints, and the discretization of the boundary normal derivatives satisfying summation by parts. Existence, uniqueness, energy dissipation and error estimates are established. Numerical results indicate the efficiency and robustness of the scheme. Configurations of defects different from other layer structures are observed.
SIJun 14, 2022
RoSGAS: Adaptive Social Bot Detection with Reinforced Self-Supervised GNN Architecture SearchYingguang Yang, Renyu Yang, Yangyang Li et al.
Social bots are referred to as the automated accounts on social networks that make attempts to behave like human. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been massively applied to the field of social bot detection, a huge amount of domain expertise and prior knowledge is heavily engaged in the state-of-the art approaches to design a dedicated neural network architecture for a specific classification task. Involving oversized nodes and network layers in the model design, however, usually causes the over-smoothing problem and the lack of embedding discrimination. In this paper, we propose RoSGAS, a novel Reinforced and Self-supervised GNN Architecture Search framework to adaptively pinpoint the most suitable multi-hop neighborhood and the number of layers in the GNN architecture. More specifically, we consider the social bot detection problem as a user-centric subgraph embedding and classification task. We exploit heterogeneous information network to present the user connectivity by leveraging account metadata, relationships, behavioral features and content features. RoSGAS uses a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism for navigating the search of optimal neighborhood and network layers to learn individually the subgraph embedding for each target user. A nearest neighbor mechanism is developed for accelerating the RL training process, and RoSGAS can learn more discriminative subgraph embedding with the aid of self-supervised learning. Experiments on 5 Twitter datasets show that RoSGAS outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy, training efficiency and stability, and has better generalization when handling unseen samples.
CLNov 7, 2022
AD-BERT: Using Pre-trained contextualized embeddings to Predict the Progression from Mild Cognitive Impairment to Alzheimer's DiseaseChengsheng Mao, Jie Xu, Luke Rasmussen et al.
Objective: We develop a deep learning framework based on the pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model using unstructured clinical notes from electronic health records (EHRs) to predict the risk of disease progression from Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Materials and Methods: We identified 3657 patients diagnosed with MCI together with their progress notes from Northwestern Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse (NMEDW) between 2000-2020. The progress notes no later than the first MCI diagnosis were used for the prediction. We first preprocessed the notes by deidentification, cleaning and splitting, and then pretrained a BERT model for AD (AD-BERT) based on the publicly available Bio+Clinical BERT on the preprocessed notes. The embeddings of all the sections of a patient's notes processed by AD-BERT were combined by MaxPooling to compute the probability of MCI-to-AD progression. For replication, we conducted a similar set of experiments on 2563 MCI patients identified at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) during the same timeframe. Results: Compared with the 7 baseline models, the AD-BERT model achieved the best performance on both datasets, with Area Under receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC) of 0.8170 and F1 score of 0.4178 on NMEDW dataset and AUC of 0.8830 and F1 score of 0.6836 on WCM dataset. Conclusion: We developed a deep learning framework using BERT models which provide an effective solution for prediction of MCI-to-AD progression using clinical note analysis.
SPJul 7, 2023
Over-the-Air Computation in OFDM Systems with Imperfect Channel State InformationYilong Chen, Huijun Xing, Jie Xu et al.
This paper studies the over-the-air computation (AirComp) in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system with imperfect channel state information (CSI), in which multiple single-antenna wireless devices (WDs) simultaneously send uncoded signals to a multi-antenna access point (AP) for distributed functional computation over multiple subcarriers. In particular, we consider two scenarios with best-effort and error-constrained computation tasks, with the objectives of minimizing the average computation mean squared error (MSE) and the computation outage probability over the multiple subcarriers, respectively. Towards this end, we jointly optimize the transmit coefficients at the WDs and the receive beamforming vectors at the AP over subcarriers, subject to the maximum transmit power constraints at individual WDs. First, for the special case with a single receive antenna at the AP, we propose the semi-closed-form globally optimal solutions to the two problems using the Lagrange-duality method. It is shown that at each subcarrier, the WDs' optimized power control policy for average MSE minimization follows a regularized channel inversion structure, while that for computation outage probability minimization follows an on-off regularized channel inversion, with the regularization dependent on the transmit power budget and channel estimation error. Next, for the general case with multiple receive antennas at the AP, we present efficient algorithms based on alternating optimization and convex optimization to find converged solutions to both problems.
CLAug 15, 2023
LLM-Mini-CEX: Automatic Evaluation of Large Language Model for Diagnostic ConversationXiaoming Shi, Jie Xu, Jinru Ding et al.
There is an increasing interest in developing LLMs for medical diagnosis to improve diagnosis efficiency. Despite their alluring technological potential, there is no unified and comprehensive evaluation criterion, leading to the inability to evaluate the quality and potential risks of medical LLMs, further hindering the application of LLMs in medical treatment scenarios. Besides, current evaluations heavily rely on labor-intensive interactions with LLMs to obtain diagnostic dialogues and human evaluation on the quality of diagnosis dialogue. To tackle the lack of unified and comprehensive evaluation criterion, we first initially establish an evaluation criterion, termed LLM-specific Mini-CEX to assess the diagnostic capabilities of LLMs effectively, based on original Mini-CEX. To address the labor-intensive interaction problem, we develop a patient simulator to engage in automatic conversations with LLMs, and utilize ChatGPT for evaluating diagnosis dialogues automatically. Experimental results show that the LLM-specific Mini-CEX is adequate and necessary to evaluate medical diagnosis dialogue. Besides, ChatGPT can replace manual evaluation on the metrics of humanistic qualities and provides reproducible and automated comparisons between different LLMs.
LGSep 24, 2023
Federated Deep Multi-View Clustering with Global Self-SupervisionXinyue Chen, Jie Xu, Yazhou Ren et al.
Federated multi-view clustering has the potential to learn a global clustering model from data distributed across multiple devices. In this setting, label information is unknown and data privacy must be preserved, leading to two major challenges. First, views on different clients often have feature heterogeneity, and mining their complementary cluster information is not trivial. Second, the storage and usage of data from multiple clients in a distributed environment can lead to incompleteness of multi-view data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel federated deep multi-view clustering method that can mine complementary cluster structures from multiple clients, while dealing with data incompleteness and privacy concerns. Specifically, in the server environment, we propose sample alignment and data extension techniques to explore the complementary cluster structures of multiple views. The server then distributes global prototypes and global pseudo-labels to each client as global self-supervised information. In the client environment, multiple clients use the global self-supervised information and deep autoencoders to learn view-specific cluster assignments and embedded features, which are then uploaded to the server for refining the global self-supervised information. Finally, the results of our extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method exhibits superior performance in addressing the challenges of incomplete multi-view data in distributed environments.
CVJan 12, 2023Code
Towards High Performance One-Stage Human Pose EstimationLing Li, Lin Zhao, Linhao Xu et al.
Making top-down human pose estimation method present both good performance and high efficiency is appealing. Mask RCNN can largely improve the efficiency by conducting person detection and pose estimation in a single framework, as the features provided by the backbone are able to be shared by the two tasks. However, the performance is not as good as traditional two-stage methods. In this paper, we aim to largely advance the human pose estimation results of Mask-RCNN and still keep the efficiency. Specifically, we make improvements on the whole process of pose estimation, which contains feature extraction and keypoint detection. The part of feature extraction is ensured to get enough and valuable information of pose. Then, we introduce a Global Context Module into the keypoints detection branch to enlarge the receptive field, as it is crucial to successful human pose estimation. On the COCO val2017 set, our model using the ResNet-50 backbone achieves an AP of 68.1, which is 2.6 higher than Mask RCNN (AP of 65.5). Compared to the classic two-stage top-down method SimpleBaseline, our model largely narrows the performance gap (68.1 AP vs. 68.9 AP) with a much faster inference speed (77 ms vs. 168 ms), demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/lingl_space/maskrcnn_keypoint_refined.
LGAug 14, 2023
Machine Unlearning: Solutions and ChallengesJie Xu, Zihan Wu, Cong Wang et al.
Machine learning models may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, posing risks of privacy breaches, security vulnerabilities, and performance degradation. To address these issues, machine unlearning has emerged as a critical technique to selectively remove specific training data points' influence on trained models. This paper provides a comprehensive taxonomy and analysis of the solutions in machine unlearning. We categorize existing solutions into exact unlearning approaches that remove data influence thoroughly and approximate unlearning approaches that efficiently minimize data influence. By comprehensively reviewing solutions, we identify and discuss their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we propose future directions to advance machine unlearning and establish it as an essential capability for trustworthy and adaptive machine learning models. This paper provides researchers with a roadmap of open problems, encouraging impactful contributions to address real-world needs for selective data removal.
LGMar 30, 2023
Investigating and Mitigating the Side Effects of Noisy Views for Self-Supervised Clustering Algorithms in Practical Multi-View ScenariosJie Xu, Yazhou Ren, Xiaolong Wang et al.
Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims at exploring category structures among multi-view data in self-supervised manners. Multiple views provide more information than single views and thus existing MVC methods can achieve satisfactory performance. However, their performance might seriously degenerate when the views are noisy in practical multi-view scenarios. In this paper, we formally investigate the drawback of noisy views and then propose a theoretically grounded deep MVC method (namely MVCAN) to address this issue. Specifically, we propose a novel MVC objective that enables un-shared parameters and inconsistent clustering predictions across multiple views to reduce the side effects of noisy views. Furthermore, a two-level multi-view iterative optimization is designed to generate robust learning targets for refining individual views' representation learning. Theoretical analysis reveals that MVCAN works by achieving the multi-view consistency, complementarity, and noise robustness. Finally, experiments on extensive public datasets demonstrate that MVCAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods and is robust against the existence of noisy views.
LGMay 27
Dimensionality Reduction for Robust Federated Learning: A Theoretical Analysis and Convergence GuaranteeShiyuan Zuo, Jiashuo Li, Rongfei Fan et al.
Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train models without sharing raw data, but it is highly vulnerable to Byzantine attacks. Existing robust approaches can neutralize these threats but incur substantial computational overhead during high-dimensional gradient aggregation, an overhead that scales poorly with model size and increasingly dominates the training cost as modern models grow larger. To address this computational bottleneck, we propose Projected Dimensionality Reduction (PDR), a universal acceleration framework for vector-level distance-based robust aggregators, which performs robust aggregation by compressing gradients into a drastically smaller subspace via sparse random projection to efficiently compute reliability weights. This approach reduces the server computational complexity to an optimal $ \mathcal{O}(Mp) $, where $ M $ is the number of clients and $ p $ is the model dimension, matching the theoretical lower bound required merely to read the gradients. We establish convergence guarantees under standard FL assumptions in prior Byzantine-robust FL analyses. By leveraging the Subspace Embedding Theorem, we show that PDR achieves optimal convergence rates of $ \mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T}) $ for non-convex functions and $ \mathcal{O}(1/T) $ for strongly convex functions, where $ T $ denotes the number of iterations. Crucially, we mathematically demonstrate that this massive acceleration comes almost for free, merely inflating the inherent Byzantine error floor by a bounded, tunable factor of $ \frac{1+ε}{1-ε} $. Experimental results on benchmark datasets confirm that integrating PDR with existing aggregators yields orders of magnitude speedups in time efficiency while maintaining highly competitive convergence performance.
AIMay 27
SafeMed-R1: Clinician-Audited Safety and Ethics Alignment for Medical Large Language ModelsChao Ding, Mouxiao Bian, Tianbin Li et al.
Large language models(LLMs) increasingly match expert performance on licensing examinations, yet routine clinical use remains limited because governance requires auditable reasoning, safety and ethics alignment, and resilience to adversarial misuse. Here we present SafeMed-R1, trained with a traceable Clinical Trust Signals(CTS) pipeline that links each reasoning instance to clinician rubric scores and edit histories, and aligned through safety and ethics supervision and red team stress testing. SafeMed-R1 attains a macro-averaged accuracy of 79.6% across clinical benchmarks. Under adversarial safety testing, it shows the lowest aggregated risk and reduces unsafe outputs by about 3 to 5% relative to its baseline. In a paired expert study of 30 medication safety vignettes, SafeMed-R1 matches PGY1 and PGY2 residents on medical correctness and scores higher for medication safety, guideline consistency, and clinical usefulness. Collectively, these results suggest that clinician-audited supervision provenance, together with domain-tailored safety and ethics alignment, can strengthen governance-relevant evidence without relying on inference-time retrieval or citation grounding.
CVFeb 25
Enhancing Renal Tumor Malignancy Prediction: Deep Learning with Automatic 3D CT Organ Focused AttentionZhengkang Fan, Chengkun Sun, Russell Terry et al.
Accurate prediction of malignancy in renal tumors is crucial for informing clinical decisions and optimizing treatment strategies. However, existing imaging modalities lack the necessary accuracy to reliably predict malignancy before surgical intervention. While deep learning has shown promise in malignancy prediction using 3D CT images, traditional approaches often rely on manual segmentation to isolate the tumor region and reduce noise, which enhances predictive performance. Manual segmentation, however, is labor-intensive, costly, and dependent on expert knowledge. In this study, a deep learning framework was developed utilizing an Organ Focused Attention (OFA) loss function to modify the attention of image patches so that organ patches attend only to other organ patches. Hence, no segmentation of 3D renal CT images is required at deployment time for malignancy prediction. The proposed framework achieved an AUC of 0.685 and an F1-score of 0.872 on a private dataset from the UF Integrated Data Repository (IDR), and an AUC of 0.760 and an F1-score of 0.852 on the publicly available KiTS21 dataset. These results surpass the performance of conventional models that rely on segmentation-based cropping for noise reduction, demonstrating the frameworks ability to enhance predictive accuracy without explicit segmentation input. The findings suggest that this approach offers a more efficient and reliable method for malignancy prediction, thereby enhancing clinical decision-making in renal cancer diagnosis.
CYApr 26, 2023
Towards clinical AI fairness: A translational perspectiveMingxuan Liu, Yilin Ning, Salinelat Teixayavong et al.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated the ability to extract insights from data, but the issue of fairness remains a concern in high-stakes fields such as healthcare. Despite extensive discussion and efforts in algorithm development, AI fairness and clinical concerns have not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we discuss the misalignment between technical and clinical perspectives of AI fairness, highlight the barriers to AI fairness' translation to healthcare, advocate multidisciplinary collaboration to bridge the knowledge gap, and provide possible solutions to address the clinical concerns pertaining to AI fairness.
CLFeb 23, 2023
Generative Sentiment Transfer via Adaptive MaskingYingze Xie, Jie Xu, LiQiang Qiao et al.
Sentiment transfer aims at revising the input text to satisfy a given sentiment polarity while retaining the original semantic content. The nucleus of sentiment transfer lies in precisely separating the sentiment information from the content information. Existing explicit approaches generally identify and mask sentiment tokens simply based on prior linguistic knowledge and manually-defined rules, leading to low generality and undesirable transfer performance. In this paper, we view the positions to be masked as the learnable parameters, and further propose a novel AM-ST model to learn adaptive task-relevant masks based on the attention mechanism. Moreover, a sentiment-aware masked language model is further proposed to fill in the blanks in the masked positions by incorporating both context and sentiment polarity to capture the multi-grained semantics comprehensively. AM-ST is thoroughly evaluated on two popular datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposal.
CLFeb 25Code
From Comprehension to Reasoning: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Automated Financial Research ReportingYiyun Zhu, Yidong Jiang, Ziwen Xu et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate financial research reports, shifting from auxiliary analytic tools to primary content producers. Yet recent real-world deployments reveal persistent failures--factual errors, numerical inconsistencies, fabricated references, and shallow analysis--that can distort assessments of corporate fundamentals and ultimately trigger severe economic losses. However, existing financial benchmarks focus on comprehension over completed reports rather than evaluating whether a model can produce reliable analysis. Moreover, current evaluation frameworks merely flag hallucinations and lack structured measures for deeper analytical skills, leaving key analytical bottlenecks undiscovered. To address these gaps, we introduce FinReasoning, a benchmark that decomposes Chinese research-report generation into three stages aligned with real analyst workflows, assessing semantic consistency, data alignment, and deep insight. We further propose a fine-grained evaluation framework that strengthens hallucination-correction assessment and incorporates a 12-indicator rubric for core analytical skills. Based on the evaluation results, FinReasoning reveals that most models exhibit a understanding-execution gap: they can identify errors but struggle to generate accurate corrections; they can retrieve data but have difficulty returning it in correct format. Furthermore, no model achieves overwhelming superiority across all three tracks; Doubao-Seed-1.8, GPT-5, and Kimi-K2 rank as the top three in overall performance, yet each exhibits a distinct capability distribution. The evaluation resource is available at https://github.com/TongjiFinLab/FinReasoning.
DCApr 10, 2023
Accelerating Hybrid Federated Learning Convergence under Partial ParticipationJieming Bian, Lei Wang, Kun Yang et al.
Over the past few years, Federated Learning (FL) has become a popular distributed machine learning paradigm. FL involves a group of clients with decentralized data who collaborate to learn a common model under the coordination of a centralized server, with the goal of protecting clients' privacy by ensuring that local datasets never leave the clients and that the server only performs model aggregation. However, in realistic scenarios, the server may be able to collect a small amount of data that approximately mimics the population distribution and has stronger computational ability to perform the learning process. To address this, we focus on the hybrid FL framework in this paper. While previous hybrid FL work has shown that the alternative training of clients and server can increase convergence speed, it has focused on the scenario where clients fully participate and ignores the negative effect of partial participation. In this paper, we provide theoretical analysis of hybrid FL under clients' partial participation to validate that partial participation is the key constraint on convergence speed. We then propose a new algorithm called FedCLG, which investigates the two-fold role of the server in hybrid FL. Firstly, the server needs to process the training steps using its small amount of local datasets. Secondly, the server's calculated gradient needs to guide the participated clients' training and the server's aggregation. We validate our theoretical findings through numerical experiments, which show that our proposed method FedCLG outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
LGNov 6, 2023
CAFE: Carbon-Aware Federated Learning in Geographically Distributed Data CentersJieming Bian, Lei Wang, Shaolei Ren et al.
Training large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models demands significant computational power and energy, leading to increased carbon footprint with potential environmental repercussions. This paper delves into the challenges of training AI models across geographically distributed (geo-distributed) data centers, emphasizing the balance between learning performance and carbon footprint. We consider Federated Learning (FL) as a solution, which prioritizes model parameter exchange over raw data, ensuring data privacy and compliance with local regulations. Given the variability in carbon intensity across regions, we propose a new framework called CAFE (short for Carbon-Aware Federated Learning) to optimize training within a fixed carbon footprint budget. Our approach incorporates coreset selection to assess learning performance, employs the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty framework to address the unpredictability of future carbon intensity, and devises an efficient algorithm to address the combinatorial complexity of the data center selection. Through extensive simulations using real-world carbon intensity data, we demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm, highlighting its superiority over existing methods in optimizing learning performance while minimizing environmental impact.
ITNov 21, 2023
Knowledge Base Enabled Semantic Communication: A Generative PerspectiveJinke Ren, Zezhong Zhang, Jie Xu et al.
Semantic communication is widely touted as a key technology for propelling the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. However, providing effective semantic representation is quite challenging in practice. To address this issue, this article takes a crack at exploiting semantic knowledge base (KB) to usher in a new era of generative semantic communication. Via semantic KB, source messages can be characterized in low-dimensional subspaces without compromising their desired meanings, thus significantly enhancing the communication efficiency. The fundamental principle of semantic KB is first introduced, and a generative semantic communication architecture is developed by presenting three sub-KBs, namely source, task, and channel KBs. Then, the detailed construction approaches for each sub-KB are described, followed by their utilization in terms of semantic coding and transmission. A case study is also provided to showcase the superiority of generative semantic communication over conventional syntactic communication and classical semantic communication. In a nutshell, this article establishes a scientific foundation for the exciting uncharted frontier of generative semantic communication.
NIMay 23
Low-Altitude Wireless Networks: The Next Horizon of Wireless InfrastructureYuanhao Cui, Jiali Nie, Weijie Yuan et al.
Low-altitude airspace, roughly defined as the region up to 3000 meters above ground level, is envisioned as a new spatial domain for daily human and machine activities. This article introduces the concept of the Low-Altitude Wireless Network (LAWN), which represents a paradigm shift from the current ground-based communication-only network to a three-dimensional (3D) multifunctional network. We analyze the key driving forces, network architecture, and limiting factors of LAWN, with a particular focus on the tight integration of communication, sensing, and control in highly dynamic airspace environments. By establishing the coupling between airspace capacity and wireless channel capacity, we reveal the intrinsic limits of airspace management and identify the fundamental challenges and opportunities associated with its evolution.
CLOct 31, 2025Code
MedCalc-Eval and MedCalc-Env: Advancing Medical Calculation Capabilities of Large Language ModelsKangkun Mao, Jinru Ding, Jiayuan Chen et al.
As large language models (LLMs) enter the medical domain, most benchmarks evaluate them on question answering or descriptive reasoning, overlooking quantitative reasoning critical to clinical decision-making. Existing datasets like MedCalc-Bench cover few calculation tasks and fail to reflect real-world computational scenarios. We introduce MedCalc-Eval, the largest benchmark for assessing LLMs' medical calculation abilities, comprising 700+ tasks across two types: equation-based (e.g., Cockcroft-Gault, BMI, BSA) and rule-based scoring systems (e.g., Apgar, Glasgow Coma Scale). These tasks span diverse specialties including internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and cardiology, offering a broader and more challenging evaluation setting. To improve performance, we further develop MedCalc-Env, a reinforcement learning environment built on the InternBootcamp framework, enabling multi-step clinical reasoning and planning. Fine-tuning a Qwen2.5-32B model within this environment achieves state-of-the-art results on MedCalc-Eval, with notable gains in numerical sensitivity, formula selection, and reasoning robustness. Remaining challenges include unit conversion, multi-condition logic, and contextual understanding. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/maokangkun/MedCalc-Eval.
LGJun 9, 2022
Accelerating Asynchronous Federated Learning Convergence via Opportunistic Mobile RelayingJieming Bian, Jie Xu
This paper presents a study on asynchronous Federated Learning (FL) in a mobile network setting. The majority of FL algorithms assume that communication between clients and the server is always available, however, this is not the case in many real-world systems. To address this issue, the paper explores the impact of mobility on the convergence performance of asynchronous FL. By exploiting mobility, the study shows that clients can indirectly communicate with the server through another client serving as a relay, creating additional communication opportunities. This enables clients to upload local model updates sooner or receive fresher global models. We propose a new FL algorithm, called FedMobile, that incorporates opportunistic relaying and addresses key questions such as when and how to relay. We prove that FedMobile achieves a convergence rate $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{NT}})$, where $N$ is the number of clients and $T$ is the number of communication slots, and show that the optimal design involves an interesting trade-off on the best timing of relaying. The paper also presents an extension that considers data manipulation before relaying to reduce the cost and enhance privacy. Experiment results on a synthetic dataset and two real-world datasets verify our theoretical findings.
LGMar 28, 2023
On the Local Cache Update Rules in Streaming Federated LearningHeqiang Wang, Jieming Bian, Jie Xu
In this study, we address the emerging field of Streaming Federated Learning (SFL) and propose local cache update rules to manage dynamic data distributions and limited cache capacity. Traditional federated learning relies on fixed data sets, whereas in SFL, data is streamed, and its distribution changes over time, leading to discrepancies between the local training dataset and long-term distribution. To mitigate this problem, we propose three local cache update rules - First-In-First-Out (FIFO), Static Ratio Selective Replacement (SRSR), and Dynamic Ratio Selective Replacement (DRSR) - that update the local cache of each client while considering the limited cache capacity. Furthermore, we derive a convergence bound for our proposed SFL algorithm as a function of the distribution discrepancy between the long-term data distribution and the client's local training dataset. We then evaluate our proposed algorithm on two datasets: a network traffic classification dataset and an image classification dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed local cache update rules significantly reduce the distribution discrepancy and outperform the baseline methods. Our study advances the field of SFL and provides practical cache management solutions in federated learning.
DCFeb 14, 2023
Federated Learning via Indirect Server-Client CommunicationsJieming Bian, Cong Shen, Jie Xu
Federated Learning (FL) is a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving distributed machine learning framework that has gained a significant amount of research attention recently. Despite the different forms of FL algorithms (e.g., synchronous FL, asynchronous FL) and the underlying optimization methods, nearly all existing works implicitly assumed the existence of a communication infrastructure that facilitates the direct communication between the server and the clients for the model data exchange. This assumption, however, does not hold in many real-world applications that can benefit from distributed learning but lack a proper communication infrastructure (e.g., smart sensing in remote areas). In this paper, we propose a novel FL framework, named FedEx (short for FL via Model Express Delivery), that utilizes mobile transporters (e.g., Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to establish indirect communication channels between the server and the clients. Two algorithms, called FedEx-Sync and FedEx-Async, are developed depending on whether the transporters adopt a synchronized or an asynchronized schedule. Even though the indirect communications introduce heterogeneous delays to clients for both the global model dissemination and the local model collection, we prove the convergence of both versions of FedEx. The convergence analysis subsequently sheds lights on how to assign clients to different transporters and design the routes among the clients. The performance of FedEx is evaluated through experiments in a simulated network on two public datasets.
CVApr 15
Artificial intelligence application in lymphoma diagnosis with Vision Transformer using weakly supervised trainingNghia, Nguyen, Amer Wahed et al.
Vision transformers (ViT) have been shown to allow for more flexible feature detection and can outperform convolutional neural network (CNN) when pre-trained on sufficient data. Due to their promising feature detection capabilities, we deployed ViTs for morphological classification of anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) versus classic Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL). We had previously designed a ViT model which was trained on a small dataset of 1,200 image patches in fully supervised training. That model achieved a diagnostic accuracy of 100% and an F1 score of 1.0 on the independent test set. Since fully supervised training is not a practical method due to lack of expertise resources in both the training and testing phases, we conducted a recent study on a modified approach to training data (weakly supervised training) and show that labeling training image patch automatically at the slide level of each whole-slide-image is a more practical solution for clinical use of Vision Transformer. Our ViT model, trained on a larger dataset of 100,000 image patches, yields evaluation metrics with significant accuracy, F1 score, and area under the curve (AUC) at 91.85%, 0.92, and 0.98, respectively. These are respectable values that qualify this ViT model, with weakly supervised training, as a suitable tool for a deep learning module in clinical model development using automated image patch extraction.
CVMar 16Code
Beyond the Embedding Bottleneck: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented 3D CT Report GenerationRenjie Liang, Yiling Ma, Yang Xing et al.
Automated radiology report generation from 3D CT volumes often suffers from incomplete pathology coverage. We provide empirical evidence that this limitation stems from a representational bottleneck: contrastive 3D CT embeddings encode discriminative pathology signals, yet exhibit severe dimensional concentration, with as few as 2 effective dimensions out of 512. Corroborating this, scaling the language model yields no measurable improvement, suggesting that the bottleneck lies in the visual representation rather than the generator. This bottleneck limits both generation and retrieval; naive static retrieval fails to improve clinical efficacy and can even degrade performance. We propose \textbf{AdaRAG-CT}, an adaptive augmentation framework that compensates for this visual bottleneck by introducing supplementary textual information through controlled retrieval and selectively integrating it during generation. On the CT-RATE benchmark, AdaRAG-CT achieves state-of-the-art clinical efficacy, improving Clinical F1 from 0.420 (CT-Agent) to 0.480 (+6 points); ablation studies confirm that both the retrieval and generation components contribute to the improvement. Code is available at https://github.com/renjie-liang/Adaptive-RAG-for-3DCT-Report-Generation.
CVDec 16, 2025
Native Intelligence Emerges from Large-Scale Clinical Practice: A Retinal Foundation Model with Deployment EfficiencyJia Guo, Jiawei Du, Shengzhu Yang et al.
Current retinal foundation models remain constrained by curated research datasets that lack authentic clinical context, and require extensive task-specific optimization for each application, limiting their deployment efficiency in low-resource settings. Here, we show that these barriers can be overcome by building clinical native intelligence directly from real-world medical practice. Our key insight is that large-scale telemedicine programs, where expert centers provide remote consultations across distributed facilities, represent a natural reservoir for learning clinical image interpretation. We present ReVision, a retinal foundation model that learns from the natural alignment between 485,980 color fundus photographs and their corresponding diagnostic reports, accumulated through a decade-long telemedicine program spanning 162 medical institutions across China. Through extensive evaluation across 27 ophthalmic benchmarks, we demonstrate that ReVison enables deployment efficiency with minimal local resources. Without any task-specific training, ReVision achieves zero-shot disease detection with an average AUROC of 0.946 across 12 public benchmarks and 0.952 on 3 independent clinical cohorts. When minimal adaptation is feasible, ReVision matches extensively fine-tuned alternatives while requiring orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters and labeled examples. The learned representations also transfer effectively to new clinical sites, imaging domains, imaging modalities, and systemic health prediction tasks. In a prospective reader study with 33 ophthalmologists, ReVision's zero-shot assistance improved diagnostic accuracy by 14.8% across all experience levels. These results demonstrate that clinical native intelligence can be directly extracted from clinical archives without any further annotation to build medical AI systems suited to various low-resource settings.
DCApr 21, 2023
Joint Client Assignment and UAV Route Planning for Indirect-Communication Federated LearningJieming Bian, Cong Shen, Jie Xu
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning approach that enables the creation of shared models for powerful applications while allowing data to remain on devices. This approach provides benefits such as improved data privacy, security, and reduced latency. However, in some systems, direct communication between clients and servers may not be possible, such as remote areas without proper communication infrastructure. To overcome this challenge, a new framework called FedEx (Federated Learning via Model Express Delivery) is proposed. This framework employs mobile transporters, such as UAVs, to establish indirect communication channels between the server and clients. These transporters act as intermediaries and allow for model information exchange. The use of indirect communication presents new challenges for convergence analysis and optimization, as the delay introduced by the transporters' movement creates issues for both global model dissemination and local model collection. To address this, two algorithms, FedEx-Sync and FedEx-Async, are proposed for synchronized and asynchronized learning at the transporter level. Additionally, a bi-level optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the joint client assignment and route planning problem. Experimental validation using two public datasets in a simulated network demonstrates consistent results with the theory, proving the efficacy of FedEx.
LGMay 26, 2022
Combating Client Dropout in Federated Learning via Friend Model SubstitutionHeqiang Wang, Jie Xu
Federated learning (FL) is a new distributed machine learning framework known for its benefits on data privacy and communication efficiency. Since full client participation in many cases is infeasible due to constrained resources, partial participation FL algorithms have been investigated that proactively select/sample a subset of clients, aiming to achieve learning performance close to the full participation case. This paper studies a passive partial client participation scenario that is much less well understood, where partial participation is a result of external events, namely client dropout, rather than a decision of the FL algorithm. We cast FL with client dropout as a special case of a larger class of FL problems where clients can submit substitute (possibly inaccurate) local model updates. Based on our convergence analysis, we develop a new algorithm FL-FDMS that discovers friends of clients (i.e., clients whose data distributions are similar) on-the-fly and uses friends' local updates as substitutes for the dropout clients, thereby reducing the substitution error and improving the convergence performance. A complexity reduction mechanism is also incorporated into FL-FDMS, making it both theoretically sound and practically useful. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 confirmed the superior performance of FL-FDMS in handling client dropout in FL.
LGAug 13, 2024
Prioritizing Modalities: Flexible Importance Scheduling in Federated Multimodal LearningJieming Bian, Lei Wang, Jie Xu
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that enables devices to collaboratively train models without sharing their local data, ensuring user privacy and scalability. However, applying FL to real-world data presents challenges, particularly as most existing FL research focuses on unimodal data. Multimodal Federated Learning (MFL) has emerged to address these challenges, leveraging modality-specific encoder models to process diverse datasets. Current MFL methods often uniformly allocate computational frequencies across all modalities, which is inefficient for IoT devices with limited resources. In this paper, we propose FlexMod, a novel approach to enhance computational efficiency in MFL by adaptively allocating training resources for each modality encoder based on their importance and training requirements. We employ prototype learning to assess the quality of modality encoders, use Shapley values to quantify the importance of each modality, and adopt the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) method from deep reinforcement learning to optimize the allocation of training resources. Our method prioritizes critical modalities, optimizing model performance and resource utilization. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the performance of MFL models.
LGMay 1
Finite-Sample Analysis of Elimination in Active Hypothesis TestingZiyuan Lin, Hoang Ngoc Nguyen, Jie Xu et al.
A fixed-confidence, finite-sample problem of active hypothesis testing arises in many safety-critical applications. Situated in the context of sequential hypothesis testing, this paper studies the effect of hypothesis elimination on the stopping time. We introduce an elimination-augmented Track-and-Stop algorithm, in which champion-specific active-opponent sets are progressively pruned, and sensing effort is reallocated toward the surviving alternatives. Our analysis derives a non-asymptotic upper bound on the expected stopping time. The gain in finite-sample from elimination appears on the scale of the non-leading term, resulting from tighter tracking and concentration constants on the reduced hypothesis set. Furthermore, we introduce an aggressiveness parameter to modulate the trade-off between faster elimination and weaker confidence guarantee. An experimental study on synthetic Gaussian instances confirms the theoretical predictions.
LGDec 25, 2025
Global-Graph Guided and Local-Graph Weighted Contrastive Learning for Unified Clustering on Incomplete and Noise Multi-View DataHongqing He, Jie Xu, Wenyuan Yang et al.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) plays an important role in exploring complementary information for multi-view clustering (MVC) and has attracted increasing attention. Nevertheless, real-world multi-view data suffer from data incompleteness or noise, resulting in rare-paired samples or mis-paired samples which significantly challenges the effectiveness of CL-based MVC. That is, rare-paired issue prevents MVC from extracting sufficient multi-view complementary information, and mis-paired issue causes contrastive learning to optimize the model in the wrong direction. To address these issues, we propose a unified CL-based MVC framework for enhancing clustering effectiveness on incomplete and noise multi-view data. First, to overcome the rare-paired issue, we design a global-graph guided contrastive learning, where all view samples construct a global-view affinity graph to form new sample pairs for fully exploring complementary information. Second, to mitigate the mis-paired issue, we propose a local-graph weighted contrastive learning, which leverages local neighbors to generate pair-wise weights to adaptively strength or weaken the pair-wise contrastive learning. Our method is imputation-free and can be integrated into a unified global-local graph-guided contrastive learning framework. Extensive experiments on both incomplete and noise settings of multi-view data demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches.
CEMay 18
FinDocMRE: A Benchmark for Document-Level Financial Multimodal Reasoning EvaluationJiayong Zhu, Jiangtong Li, Jinru Ding et al.
While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel in general visual tasks, their deployment in specialized financial contexts remains insufficient. Existing benchmarks prioritize isolated charts, often overlooking the need to integrate data from text, tables, and images within comprehensive financial documents. To address this limitation, we introduce FINDOCMRE, a multi-image document-level benchmark designed for financial multimodal reasoning. We construct the dataset via a semi-automated pipeline that combines Visual-Centric Generation with Expert Verification, thereby minimizing text bias and ensuring high annotation quality. Spanning twelve domains, the benchmark comprises 12,207 samples derived from 2,878 financial reports, designed to evaluate multi-image processing and document-level understanding across five distinct task types. Extensive experiments with eleven representative LMMs reveal that no model surpasses an overall score of 65, highlighting challenges in integrating visual grounding with logical reasoning within complex document environments. Specifically, we observe a significant performance divergence across tasks, where models exhibit proficiency in semantic narrative construction but struggle with numerical estimation and cross-page visual grounding. FINDOCMRE serves as a rigorous benchmark to guide the evolution of financial LMMs towards expert-level document analysis and reasoning.
ROOct 18, 2023
InViG: Benchmarking Interactive Visual Grounding with 500K Human-Robot InteractionsHanbo Zhang, Jie Xu, Yuchen Mo et al.
Ambiguity is ubiquitous in human communication. Previous approaches in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) have often relied on predefined interaction templates, leading to reduced performance in realistic and open-ended scenarios. To address these issues, we present a large-scale dataset, \invig, for interactive visual grounding under language ambiguity. Our dataset comprises over 520K images accompanied by open-ended goal-oriented disambiguation dialogues, encompassing millions of object instances and corresponding question-answer pairs. Leveraging the \invig dataset, we conduct extensive studies and propose a set of baseline solutions for end-to-end interactive visual disambiguation and grounding, achieving a 45.6\% success rate during validation. To the best of our knowledge, the \invig dataset is the first large-scale dataset for resolving open-ended interactive visual grounding, presenting a practical yet highly challenging benchmark for ambiguity-aware HRI. Codes and datasets are available at: \href{https://openivg.github.io}{https://openivg.github.io}.
SPApr 29, 2024Code
Joint Signal Detection and Automatic Modulation Classification via Deep LearningHuijun Xing, Xuhui Zhang, Shuo Chang et al.
Signal detection and modulation classification are two crucial tasks in various wireless communication systems. Different from prior works that investigate them independently, this paper studies the joint signal detection and automatic modulation classification (AMC) by considering a realistic and complex scenario, in which multiple signals with different modulation schemes coexist at different carrier frequencies. We first generate a coexisting RADIOML dataset (CRML23) to facilitate the joint design. Different from the publicly available AMC dataset ignoring the signal detection step and containing only one signal, our synthetic dataset covers the more realistic multiple-signal coexisting scenario. Then, we present a joint framework for detection and classification (JDM) for such a multiple-signal coexisting environment, which consists of two modules for signal detection and AMC, respectively. In particular, these two modules are interconnected using a designated data structure called "proposal". Finally, we conduct extensive simulations over the newly developed dataset, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our designs. Our code and dataset are now available as open-source (https://github.com/Singingkettle/ChangShuoRadioData).
LGDec 25, 2025
Missing Pattern Tree based Decision Grouping and Ensemble for Deep Incomplete Multi-View ClusteringWenyuan Yang, Jie Xu, Hongqing He et al.
Real-world multi-view data usually exhibits highly inconsistent missing patterns which challenges the effectiveness of incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC). Although existing IMVC methods have made progress from both imputation-based and imputation-free routes, they have overlooked the pair under-utilization issue, i.e., inconsistent missing patterns make the incomplete but available multi-view pairs unable to be fully utilized, thereby limiting the model performance. To address this, we propose a novel missing-pattern tree based IMVC framework entitled TreeEIC. Specifically, to achieve full exploitation of available multi-view pairs, TreeEIC first defines the missing-pattern tree model to group data into multiple decision sets according to different missing patterns, and then performs multi-view clustering within each set. Furthermore, a multi-view decision ensemble module is proposed to aggregate clustering results from all decision sets, which infers uncertainty-based weights to suppress unreliable clustering decisions and produce robust decisions. Finally, an ensemble-to-individual knowledge distillation module transfers the ensemble knowledge to view-specific clustering models, which enables ensemble and individual modules to promote each other by optimizing cross-view consistency and inter-cluster discrimination losses. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our TreeEIC achieves state-of-the-art IMVC performance and exhibits superior robustness under highly inconsistent missing patterns.
CEApr 11
GasLiteAA: Optimizing ERC-4337 for Efficient and Secure Gas SponsorshipHongxu Su, Mingzhe Liu, Jie Xu et al.
ERC-4337, the Ethereum account abstraction standard, simplifies account management and transaction fee payment in decentralized applications by introducing programmable smart contract wallets and gas sponsorship via paymasters. However, its heavy reliance on on-chain validation and frequent state updates incurs substantial gas overhead, leading to performance bottlenecks and limiting scalability in large-scale deployments. To mitigate these issues, we propose GasLiteAA, a framework that optimize ERC-4337 by offloading paymaster logic to Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). GasLiteAA delegates the secure execution of stateful gas sponsorship logic and user quota management to TEE, enforcing validation rules off-chain while anchoring their integrity on-chain via lightweight cryptographic attestations. This verifiable offloading architecture significantly reduces on-chain computation and storage costs without sacrificing verifiability or decentralization. Experimental results demonstrate that GasLiteAA substantially lowers transaction fees, while remaining fully compatible with Ethereum Layer 1. By balancing security, efficiency, and deployability, GasLiteAA provides a practical and scalable approach to gas sponsorship for account-abstraction-based decentralized applications.