Jiajun Bu

Sheng Zhou, Hongjia Xu, Zhuonan Zheng et al.

Clustering is a fundamental machine learning task which has been widely studied in the literature. Classic clustering methods follow the assumption that data are represented as features in a vectorized form through various representation learning techniques. As the data become increasingly complicated and complex, the shallow (traditional) clustering methods can no longer handle the high-dimensional data type. With the huge success of deep learning, especially the deep unsupervised learning, many representation learning techniques with deep architectures have been proposed in the past decade. Recently, the concept of Deep Clustering, i.e., jointly optimizing the representation learning and clustering, has been proposed and hence attracted growing attention in the community. Motivated by the tremendous success of deep learning in clustering, one of the most fundamental machine learning tasks, and the large number of recent advances in this direction, in this paper we conduct a comprehensive survey on deep clustering by proposing a new taxonomy of different state-of-the-art approaches. We summarize the essential components of deep clustering and categorize existing methods by the ways they design interactions between deep representation learning and clustering. Moreover, this survey also provides the popular benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics and open-source implementations to clearly illustrate various experimental settings. Last but not least, we discuss the practical applications of deep clustering and suggest challenging topics deserving further investigations as future directions.

Hangdi Xing, Feiyu Gao, Rujiao Long et al.

Table structure recognition (TSR) aims at extracting tables in images into machine-understandable formats. Recent methods solve this problem by predicting the adjacency relations of detected cell boxes, or learning to generate the corresponding markup sequences from the table images. However, they either count on additional heuristic rules to recover the table structures, or require a huge amount of training data and time-consuming sequential decoders. In this paper, we propose an alternative paradigm. We model TSR as a logical location regression problem and propose a new TSR framework called LORE, standing for LOgical location REgression network, which for the first time combines logical location regression together with spatial location regression of table cells. Our proposed LORE is conceptually simpler, easier to train and more accurate than previous TSR models of other paradigms. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that LORE consistently outperforms prior arts. Code is available at https:// github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/DocumentUnderstanding/LORE-TSR.

Meihan Liu, Zhen Zhang, Jiachen Tang et al.

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) involves the transfer of knowledge from a label-rich source graph to an unlabeled target graph under domain discrepancies. Despite the proliferation of methods designed for this emerging task, the lack of standard experimental settings and fair performance comparisons makes it challenging to understand which and when models perform well across different scenarios. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for unsupervised graph domain adaptation named GDABench, which encompasses 16 algorithms across 5 datasets with 74 adaptation tasks. Through extensive experiments, we observe that the performance of current UGDA models varies significantly across different datasets and adaptation scenarios. Specifically, we recognize that when the source and target graphs face significant distribution shifts, it is imperative to formulate strategies to effectively address and mitigate graph structural shifts. We also find that with appropriate neighbourhood aggregation mechanisms, simple GNN variants can even surpass state-of-the-art UGDA baselines. To facilitate reproducibility, we have developed an easy-to-use library PyGDA for training and evaluating existing UGDA methods, providing a standardized platform in this community. Our source codes and datasets can be found at: https://github.com/pygda-team/pygda.

Yufan Shen, Chuwei Luo, Zhaoqing Zhu et al.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results on document visual question answering (VQA) task, particularly after training on document instruction datasets. An effective evaluation method for document instruction data is crucial in constructing instruction data with high efficacy, which, in turn, facilitates the training of LLMs and MLLMs for document VQA. However, most existing evaluation methods for instruction data are limited to the textual content of the instructions themselves, thereby hindering the effective assessment of document instruction datasets and constraining their construction. In this paper, we propose ProcTag, a data-oriented method that assesses the efficacy of document instruction data. ProcTag innovatively performs tagging on the execution process of instructions rather than the instruction text itself. By leveraging the diversity and complexity of these tags to assess the efficacy of the given dataset, ProcTag enables selective sampling or filtering of document instructions. Furthermore, DocLayPrompt, a novel semi-structured layout-aware document prompting strategy, is proposed for effectively representing documents. Experiments demonstrate that sampling existing open-sourced and generated document VQA/instruction datasets with ProcTag significantly outperforms current methods for evaluating instruction data. Impressively, with ProcTag-based sampling in the generated document datasets, only 30.5\% of the document instructions are required to achieve 100\% efficacy compared to the complete dataset. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/DocumentUnderstanding/ProcTag.

Shuyi Zhang, Ke Liu, Jingjun Gu et al.

Implicit Neural Representation (INR) has gained increasing popularity as a data representation method, serving as a prerequisite for innovative generation models. Unlike gradient-based methods, which exhibit lower efficiency in inference, the adoption of hyper-network for generating parameters in Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP), responsible for executing INR functions, has surfaced as a promising and efficient alternative. However, as a global continuous function, MLP is challenging in modeling highly discontinuous signals, resulting in slow convergence during the training phase and inaccurate reconstruction performance. Moreover, MLP requires massive representation parameters, which implies inefficiencies in data representation. In this paper, we propose a novel Attention-based Localized INR (ANR) composed of a localized attention layer (LAL) and a global MLP that integrates coordinate features with data features and converts them to meaningful outputs. Subsequently, we design an instance representation framework that delivers a transformer-like hyper-network to represent data instances as a compact representation vector. With instance-specific representation vector and instance-agnostic ANR parameters, the target signals are well reconstructed as a continuous function. We further address aliasing artifacts with variational coordinates when obtaining the super-resolution inference results. Extensive experimentation across four datasets showcases the notable efficacy of our ANR method, e.g. enhancing the PSNR value from 37.95dB to 47.25dB on the CelebA dataset. Code is released at https://github.com/Roninton/ANR.

Huangwei Chen, Wu Li, Junhao Jia et al.

The initial outpatient consultation is critical for clinical decision-making, yet it is often conducted by a single physician under time pressure, making it prone to cognitive biases and incomplete evidence capture. Although the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) reduces these risks, they are costly and difficult to scale to real-time intake. We propose Aegle, a synchronous virtual MDT framework that brings MDT-level reasoning to outpatient consultations via a graph-based multi-agent architecture. Aegle formalizes the consultation state using a structured SOAP representation, separating evidence collection from diagnostic reasoning to improve traceability and bias control. An orchestrator dynamically activates specialist agents, which perform decoupled parallel reasoning and are subsequently integrated by an aggregator into a coherent clinical note. Experiments on ClinicalBench and a real-world RAPID-IPN dataset across 24 departments and 53 metrics show that Aegle consistently outperforms state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models in documentation quality and consultation capability, while also improving final diagnosis accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/HovChen/Aegle.

Zhengxin Pan, Haishuai Wang, Fangyu Wu et al.

Cross-modal matching, a fundamental task in bridging vision and language, has recently garnered substantial research interest. Despite the development of numerous methods aimed at quantifying the semantic relatedness between image-text pairs, these methods often fall short of achieving both outstanding performance and high efficiency. In this paper, we propose the crOss-Modal sInkhorn maTching (OMIT) network as an effective solution to effectively improving performance while maintaining efficiency. Rooted in the theoretical foundations of Optimal Transport, OMIT harnesses the capabilities of Cross-modal Mover's Distance to precisely compute the similarity between fine-grained visual and textual fragments, utilizing Sinkhorn iterations for efficient approximation. To further alleviate the issue of redundant alignments, we seamlessly integrate partial matching into OMIT, leveraging local-to-global similarities to eliminate the interference of irrelevant fragments. We conduct extensive evaluations of OMIT on two benchmark image-text retrieval datasets, namely Flickr30K and MS-COCO. The superior performance achieved by OMIT on both datasets unequivocally demonstrates its effectiveness in cross-modal matching. Furthermore, through comprehensive visualization analysis, we elucidate OMIT's inherent tendency towards focal matching, thereby shedding light on its efficacy. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ppanzx/OMIT.

Ming Gu, Gaoming Yang, Sheng Zhou et al.

Graph clustering is a fundamental task in graph analysis, and recent advances in utilizing graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown impressive results. Despite the success of existing GNN-based graph clustering methods, they often overlook the quality of graph structure, which is inherent in real-world graphs due to their sparse and multifarious nature, leading to subpar performance. Graph structure learning allows refining the input graph by adding missing links and removing spurious connections. However, previous endeavors in graph structure learning have predominantly centered around supervised settings, and cannot be directly applied to our specific clustering tasks due to the absence of ground-truth labels. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel method called \textbf{ho}mophily-enhanced structure \textbf{le}arning for graph clustering (HoLe). Our motivation stems from the observation that subtly enhancing the degree of homophily within the graph structure can significantly improve GNNs and clustering outcomes. To realize this objective, we develop two clustering-oriented structure learning modules, i.e., hierarchical correlation estimation and cluster-aware sparsification. The former module enables a more accurate estimation of pairwise node relationships by leveraging guidance from latent and clustering spaces, while the latter one generates a sparsified structure based on the similarity matrix and clustering assignments. Additionally, we devise a joint optimization approach alternating between training the homophily-enhanced structure learning and GNN-based clustering, thereby enforcing their reciprocal effects. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets of various types and scales, across a range of clustering metrics, demonstrate the superiority of HoLe against state-of-the-art baselines.

Jingru Li, Sheng Zhou, Liangcheng Li et al.

Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) is a widely-used strategy for Knowledge Distillation (KD) whose training data is not available. It trains a lightweight student model with the aid of a large pretrained teacher model without any access to training data. However, existing DFKD methods suffer from inadequate and unstable training process, as they do not adjust the generation target dynamically based on the status of the student model during learning. To address this limitation, we propose a novel DFKD method called CuDFKD. It teaches students by a dynamic strategy that gradually generates easy-to-hard pseudo samples, mirroring how humans learn. Besides, CuDFKD adapts the generation target dynamically according to the status of student model. Moreover, We provide a theoretical analysis of the majorization minimization (MM) algorithm and explain the convergence of CuDFKD. To measure the robustness and fidelity of DFKD methods, we propose two more metrics, and experiments shows CuDFKD has comparable performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) DFKD methods on all datasets. Experiments also present that our CuDFKD has the fastest convergence and best robustness over other SOTA DFKD methods.

Dian Qin, Haishuai Wang, Zhe Liu et al.

3D convolutional neural networks have revealed superior performance in processing volumetric data such as video and medical imaging. However, the competitive performance by leveraging 3D networks results in huge computational costs, which are far beyond that of 2D networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Hilbert curve-based cross-dimensionality distillation approach that facilitates the knowledge of 3D networks to improve the performance of 2D networks. The proposed Hilbert Distillation (HD) method preserves the structural information via the Hilbert curve, which maps high-dimensional (>=2) representations to one-dimensional continuous space-filling curves. Since the distilled 2D networks are supervised by the curves converted from dimensionally heterogeneous 3D features, the 2D networks are given an informative view in terms of learning structural information embedded in well-trained high-dimensional representations. We further propose a Variable-length Hilbert Distillation (VHD) method to dynamically shorten the walking stride of the Hilbert curve in activation feature areas and lengthen the stride in context feature areas, forcing the 2D networks to pay more attention to learning from activation features. The proposed algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art distillation techniques adapted to cross-dimensionality distillation on two classification tasks. Moreover, the distilled 2D networks by the proposed method achieve competitive performance with the original 3D networks, indicating the lightweight distilled 2D networks could potentially be the substitution of cumbersome 3D networks in the real-world scenario.

Chengxi Li, Kai Fan, Jiajun Bu et al.

Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes so that the resulting verse can be sung to the accompanying melody, which is a challenging problem that has attracted some interests in different aspects of the translation process. In this paper, we propose Lyrics-Melody Translation with Adaptive Grouping (LTAG), a holistic solution to automatic song translation by jointly modeling lyrics translation and lyrics-melody alignment. It is a novel encoder-decoder framework that can simultaneously translate the source lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step through an adaptive note grouping module. To address data scarcity, we commissioned a small amount of training data annotated specifically for this task and used large amounts of augmented data through back-translation. Experiments conducted on an English-Chinese song translation data set show the effectiveness of our model in both automatic and human evaluation.

Huangwei Chen, Junhao Jia, Ruocheng Li et al.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) progresses as a continuous and irreversible deterioration of the retina, following a well-defined clinical trajectory from mild to severe stages. However, most existing ordinal regression approaches model DR severity as a set of static, symmetric ranks, capturing relative order while ignoring the inherent unidirectional nature of disease progression. As a result, the learned feature representations may violate biological plausibility, allowing implausible proximity between non-consecutive stages or even reverse transitions. To bridge this gap, we propose Directed Ordinal Diffusion Regularization (D-ODR), which explicitly models the feature space as a directed flow by constructing a progression-constrained directed graph that strictly enforces forward disease evolution. By performing multi-scale diffusion on this directed structure, D-ODR imposes penalties on score inversions along valid progression paths, thereby effectively preventing the model from learning biologically inconsistent reverse transitions. This mechanism aligns the feature representation with the natural trajectory of DR worsening. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D-ODR yields superior grading performance compared to state-of-the-art ordinal regression and DR-specific grading methods, offering a more clinically reliable assessment of disease severity. Our code is available on https://github.com/HovChen/D-ODR.

Chaojie Shen, Jingjun Gu, Zihao Zhao et al.

Accurate Couinaud liver segmentation is critical for preoperative surgical planning and tumor localization.However, existing methods primarily rely on image intensity and spatial location cues, without explicitly modeling vascular topology. As a result, they often produce indistinct boundaries near vessels and show limited generalization under anatomical variability.We propose VasGuideNet, the first Couinaud segmentation framework explicitly guided by vascular topology. Specifically, skeletonized vessels, Euclidean distance transform (EDT)--derived geometry, and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) connectivity are encoded into topology features using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). These features are then injected into a 3D encoder--decoder backbone via a cross-attention fusion module. To further improve inter-class separability and anatomical consistency, we introduce a Structural Contrastive Loss (SCL) with a global memory bank.On Task08_HepaticVessel and our private LASSD dataset, VasGuideNet achieves Dice scores of 83.68% and 76.65% with RVDs of 1.68 and 7.08, respectively. It consistently outperforms representative baselines including UNETR, Swin UNETR, and G-UNETR++, delivering higher Dice/mIoU and lower RVD across datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness for anatomically consistent segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/Qacket/VasGuideNet.git.

Chunpeng Zhou, Kangjie Ning, Haishuai Wang et al.

The application of 3D ground-penetrating radar (3D-GPR) for subgrade distress detection has gained widespread popularity. To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of detection, pioneering studies have attempted to adopt automatic detection techniques, particularly deep learning. However, existing works typically rely on traditional 1D A-scan, 2D B-scan or 3D C-scan data of the GPR, resulting in either insufficient spatial information or high computational complexity. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel methodology for the subgrade distress detection task by leveraging the multi-view information from 3D-GPR data. Moreover, we construct a real multi-view image dataset derived from the original 3D-GPR data for the detection task, which provides richer spatial information compared to A-scan and B-scan data, while reducing computational complexity compared to C-scan data. Subsequently, we develop a novel \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{V}iew \textbf{V}usion and \textbf{D}istillation framework, \textbf{GPR-MVFD}, specifically designed to optimally utilize the multi-view GPR dataset. This framework ingeniously incorporates multi-view distillation and attention-based fusion to facilitate significant feature extraction for subgrade distresses. In addition, a self-adaptive learning mechanism is adopted to stabilize the model training and prevent performance degeneration in each branch. Extensive experiments conducted on this new GPR benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed framework. Our framework outperforms not only the existing GPR baselines, but also the state-of-the-art methods in the fields of multi-view learning, multi-modal learning, and knowledge distillation. We will release the constructed multi-view GPR dataset with expert-annotated labels and the source codes of the proposed framework.

Yuanchen Bei, Hao Xu, Sheng Zhou et al.

Dynamic graph data mining has gained popularity in recent years due to the rich information contained in dynamic graphs and their widespread use in the real world. Despite the advances in dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs), the rich information and diverse downstream tasks have posed significant difficulties for the practical application of DGNNs in industrial scenarios. To this end, in this paper, we propose to address them by pre-training and present the Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (CPDG). CPDG tackles the challenges of pre-training for DGNNs, including generalization capability and long-short term modeling capability, through a flexible structural-temporal subgraph sampler along with structural-temporal contrastive pre-training schemes. Extensive experiments conducted on both large-scale research and industrial dynamic graph datasets show that CPDG outperforms existing methods in dynamic graph pre-training for various downstream tasks under three transfer settings.

Zirui Shao, Feiyu Gao, Hangdi Xing et al.

In the era of content creation revolution propelled by advancements in generative models, the field of web design remains unexplored despite its critical role in modern digital communication. The web design process is complex and often time-consuming, especially for those with limited expertise. In this paper, we introduce Web Rendering Parameters Generation (WebRPG), a new task that aims at automating the generation for visual presentation of web pages based on their HTML code. WebRPG would contribute to a faster web development workflow. Since there is no existing benchmark available, we develop a new dataset for WebRPG through an automated pipeline. Moreover, we present baseline models, utilizing VAE to manage numerous elements and rendering parameters, along with custom HTML embedding for capturing essential semantic and hierarchical information from HTML. Extensive experiments, including customized quantitative evaluations for this specific task, are conducted to evaluate the quality of the generated results.

Ziwei Wang, Junjie Zheng, Leyang Yang et al.

Autonomous Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable digital automation on end-user devices. While scaling both parameters and data has yielded substantial gains, advanced methods still suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. When facing complex in-the-wild scenarios, lightweight GUI agents are bottlenecked by limited capacity and poor task scalability under end-to-end episodic learning, impeding adaptation to multi-agent systems (MAS), while training multiple skill-specific experts remains costly. Can we strike an effective trade-off in this cost-scalability dilemma, enabling lightweight MLLMs to participate in realistic GUI workflows? To address these challenges, we propose the LAMO framework, which endows a lightweight MLLM with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability, allowing multi-role orchestration to expand its capability boundary for GUI automation. LAMO combines role-oriented data synthesis with a two-stage training recipe: (i) supervised fine-tuning with Perplexity-Weighted Cross-Entropy optimization for knowledge distillation and visual perception enhancement, and (ii) reinforcement learning for role-oriented cooperative exploration. With LAMO, we develop a task-scalable native GUI agent, LAMO-3B, supporting monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. When paired with advanced planners as a plug-and-play policy executor, LAMO-3B can continuously benefit from planner advances, enabling a higher performance ceiling. Extensive static and online evaluations validate the effectiveness of our design.

Ke Liu, Feng Liu, Haishuai Wang et al.

$\textit{Implicit neural representations}$ (INRs) aim to learn a $\textit{continuous function}$ (i.e., a neural network) to represent an image, where the input and output of the function are pixel coordinates and RGB/Gray values, respectively. However, images tend to consist of many objects whose colors are not perfectly consistent, resulting in the challenge that image is actually a $\textit{discontinuous piecewise function}$ and cannot be well estimated by a continuous function. In this paper, we empirically investigate that if a neural network is enforced to fit a discontinuous piecewise function to reach a fixed small error, the time costs will increase exponentially with respect to the boundaries in the spatial domain of the target signal. We name this phenomenon the $\textit{exponential-increase}$ hypothesis. Under the $\textit{exponential-increase}$ hypothesis, learning INRs for images with many objects will converge very slowly. To address this issue, we first prove that partitioning a complex signal into several sub-regions and utilizing piecewise INRs to fit that signal can significantly speed up the convergence. Based on this fact, we introduce a simple partition mechanism to boost the performance of two INR methods for image reconstruction: one for learning INRs, and the other for learning-to-learn INRs. In both cases, we partition an image into different sub-regions and dedicate smaller networks for each part. In addition, we further propose two partition rules based on regular grids and semantic segmentation maps, respectively. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed partitioning methods in terms of learning INR for a single image (ordinary learning framework) and the learning-to-learn framework.

Weizhi Zhang, Yuanchen Bei, Liangwei Yang et al. · tsinghua

Cold-start problem is one of the long-standing challenges in recommender systems, focusing on accurately modeling new or interaction-limited users or items to provide better recommendations. Due to the diversification of internet platforms and the exponential growth of users and items, the importance of cold-start recommendation (CSR) is becoming increasingly evident. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous success and possess strong capabilities in modeling user and item information, providing new potential for cold-start recommendations. However, the research community on CSR still lacks a comprehensive review and reflection in this field. Based on this, in this paper, we stand in the context of the era of large language models and provide a comprehensive review and discussion on the roadmap, related literature, and future directions of CSR. Specifically, we have conducted an exploration of the development path of how existing CSR utilizes information, from content features, graph relations, and domain information, to the world knowledge possessed by large language models, aiming to provide new insights for both the research and industrial communities on CSR. Related resources of cold-start recommendations are collected and continuously updated for the community in https://github.com/YuanchenBei/Awesome-Cold-Start-Recommendation.

Yang Chen, Yufan Shen, Wenxuan Huang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive performance across various visual tasks. Subsequent investigations into enhancing their visual reasoning abilities have significantly expanded their performance envelope. However, a critical bottleneck in the advancement of MLLMs toward deep visual reasoning is their heavy reliance on curated image-text supervision. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel framework, ``Reasoning-Rendering-Visual-Feedback'' (RRVF), that enables MLLMs to learn complex visual reasoning from only raw images. This framework builds on the ``Asymmetry of Verification'' principle, i.e., verifying the rendered output against the source image is substantially easier than performing deep visual reasoning to generate a faithful, structured representation such as code. We demonstrate that this relative ease provides an ideal reward signal for optimization via Reinforcement Learning (RL), thereby reducing reliance on image-text supervision. RRVF implements a closed-loop iterative process encompassing reasoning, rendering, and visual feedback components, enabling the model to perform complex reasoning, including self-correction through multi-turn interactions. This process is optimized end-to-end using the GRPO algorithm. Extensive evaluations are conducted on image-to-code generation across two diverse domains: data charts and web interfaces. The RRVF-trained model not only outperforms existing similarly sized open-source MLLMs and supervised fine-tuning baselines but also exhibits superior generalization. Notably, the model outperforms the more advanced MLLM used to generate visual feedback during training. Code is available at https://github.com/L-O-I/RRVF.

Mengxuan Li, Ke Liu, Hongyang Chen et al.

Time series anomaly detection aims to identify unusual patterns in data or deviations from systems' expected behavior. The reconstruction-based methods are the mainstream in this task, which learn point-wise representation via unsupervised learning. However, the unlabeled anomaly points in training data may cause these reconstruction-based methods to learn and reconstruct anomalous data, resulting in the challenge of capturing normal patterns. In this paper, we propose a time series anomaly detection method based on implicit neural representation (INR) reconstruction, named TSINR, to address this challenge. Due to the property of spectral bias, TSINR enables prioritizing low-frequency signals and exhibiting poorer performance on high-frequency abnormal data. Specifically, we adopt INR to parameterize time series data as a continuous function and employ a transformer-based architecture to predict the INR of given data. As a result, the proposed TSINR method achieves the advantage of capturing the temporal continuity and thus is more sensitive to discontinuous anomaly data. In addition, we further design a novel form of INR continuous function to learn inter- and intra-channel information, and leverage a pre-trained large language model to amplify the intense fluctuations in anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSINR achieves superior overall performance on both univariate and multivariate time series anomaly detection benchmarks compared to other state-of-the-art reconstruction-based methods. Our codes are available.

Xiaojun Ye, Chun Wang, Yiren Song et al.

Movie Audio Description (AD) aims to narrate visual content during dialogue-free segments, particularly benefiting blind and visually impaired (BVI) audiences. Compared with general video captioning, AD demands plot-relevant narration with explicit character name references, posing unique challenges in movie understanding.To identify active main characters and focus on storyline-relevant regions, we propose FocusedAD, a novel framework that delivers character-centric movie audio descriptions. It includes: (i) a Character Perception Module(CPM) for tracking character regions and linking them to names; (ii) a Dynamic Prior Module(DPM) that injects contextual cues from prior ADs and subtitles via learnable soft prompts; and (iii) a Focused Caption Module(FCM) that generates narrations enriched with plot-relevant details and named characters. To overcome limitations in character identification, we also introduce an automated pipeline for building character query banks. FocusedAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including strong zero-shot results on MAD-eval-Named and our newly proposed Cinepile-AD dataset. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/Thorin215/FocusedAD .

Haishuai Wang, Yang Gao, Xin Zheng et al.

Graph Neural Architecture Search (GNAS) has shown promising results in finding the best graph neural network architecture on a given graph dataset. However, existing GNAS methods still require intensive human labor and rich domain knowledge when designing the search space and search strategy. To this end, we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into GNAS and present a new GNAS model based on LLMs (GNAS-LLM for short). The basic idea of GNAS-LLM is to design a new class of GNAS prompts for LLMs to guide LLMs towards understanding the generative task of graph neural architectures. The prompts consist of descriptions of the search space, search strategy, and search feedback of GNAS. By iteratively running LLMs with the prompts, GNAS-LLM generates more accurate graph neural network architectures with fast convergence. Experimental results show that GNAS-LLM outperforms the state-of-the-art GNAS methods on four benchmark graph datasets, with an average improvement of 0.7% on the validation sets and 0.3% on the test sets. Besides, GNAS-LLM achieves an average improvement of 1.0% on the test sets based on the search space from AutoGEL.

Ming Gu, Zhuonan Zheng, Sheng Zhou et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success but are often considered to be challenged by varying levels of homophily in graphs. Recent \textit{empirical} studies have surprisingly shown that homophilic GNNs can perform well across datasets of different homophily levels with proper hyperparameter tuning, but the underlying theory and effective architectures remain unclear. To advance GNN universality across varying homophily, we theoretically revisit GNN message passing and uncover a novel \textit{smoothness-generalization dilemma}, where increasing hops inevitably enhances smoothness at the cost of generalization. This dilemma hinders learning in high-order homophilic neighborhoods and all heterophilic ones, where generalization is critical due to complex neighborhood class distributions that are sensitive to shifts induced by noise or sparsity. To address this, we introduce the Inceptive Graph Neural Network (IGNN) built on three simple yet effective design principles, which alleviate the dilemma by enabling distinct hop-wise generalization alongside improved overall generalization with adaptive smoothness. Benchmarking against 30 baselines demonstrates IGNN's superiority and reveals notable universality in certain homophilic GNN variants. Our code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/galogm/IGNN}{https://github.com/galogm/IGNN}.

Jiachen Tang, Zhonghao Wang, Sirui Chen et al.

Graph Transformers (GTs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. By leveraging attention mechanisms, GTs are capable of modeling long-range dependencies and complex structural relationships beyond local neighborhoods. However, their applicable scenarios are still underexplored, this highlights the need to identify when and why they excel. Furthermore, unlike GNNs, which predominantly rely on message-passing mechanisms, GTs exhibit a diverse design space in areas such as positional encoding, attention mechanisms, and graph-specific adaptations. Yet, it remains unclear which of these design choices are truly effective and under what conditions. As a result, the community currently lacks a comprehensive benchmark and library to promote a deeper understanding and further development of GTs. To address this gap, this paper introduces OpenGT, a comprehensive benchmark for Graph Transformers. OpenGT enables fair comparisons and multidimensional analysis by establishing standardized experimental settings and incorporating a broad selection of state-of-the-art GNNs and GTs. Our benchmark evaluates GTs from multiple perspectives, encompassing diverse tasks and datasets with varying properties. Through extensive experiments, our benchmark has uncovered several critical insights, including the difficulty of transferring models across task levels, the limitations of local attention, the efficiency trade-offs in several models, the application scenarios of specific positional encodings, and the preprocessing overhead of some positional encodings. We aspire for this work to establish a foundation for future graph transformer research emphasizing fairness, reproducibility, and generalizability. We have developed an easy-to-use library OpenGT for training and evaluating existing GTs. The benchmark code is available at https://github.com/eaglelab-zju/OpenGT.

Qingsong Lv, Jiasheng Sun, Sheng Zhou et al.

To reduce computational overhead while maintaining model performance, model pruning techniques have been proposed. Among these, structured pruning, which removes entire convolutional channels or layers, significantly enhances computational efficiency and is compatible with hardware acceleration. However, existing pruning methods that rely solely on image features or gradients often result in the retention of redundant channels, negatively impacting inference efficiency. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel pruning method called Feature-Gradient Pruning (FGP). This approach integrates both feature-based and gradient-based information to more effectively evaluate the importance of channels across various target classes, enabling a more accurate identification of channels that are critical to model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves both model compactness and practicality while maintaining stable performance. Experiments conducted across multiple tasks and datasets show that FGP significantly reduces computational costs and minimizes accuracy loss compared to existing methods, highlighting its effectiveness in optimizing pruning outcomes. The source code is available at: https://github.com/FGP-code/FGP.

Ming Gu, Ziwei Wang, Sicen Lai et al.

Ensuring web accessibility is crucial for advancing social welfare, justice, and equality in digital spaces, yet the vast majority of website user interfaces remain non-compliant, due in part to the resource-intensive and unscalable nature of current auditing practices. While WCAG-EM offers a structured methodology for site-wise conformance evaluation, it involves great human efforts and lacks practical support for execution at scale. In this work, we present an auditing framework, AAA, which operationalizes WCAG-EM through a human-AI partnership model. AAA is anchored by two key innovations: GRASP, a graph-based multimodal sampling method that ensures representative page coverage via learned embeddings of visual, textual, and relational cues; and MaC, a multimodal large language model-based copilot that supports auditors through cross-modal reasoning and intelligent assistance in high-effort tasks. Together, these components enable scalable, end-to-end web accessibility auditing, empowering human auditors with AI-enhanced assistance for real-world impact. We further contribute four novel datasets designed for benchmarking core stages of the audit pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, providing insights that small-scale language models can serve as capable experts when fine-tuned.

Guanbao Liang, Yuanchen Bei, Sheng Zhou et al.

Automatic prompt optimization is a promising approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, yet existing methods typically search for a specific prompt specialized to a fixed task. This paradigm limits generalization across heterogeneous queries and prevents models from accumulating reusable prompting knowledge over time. In this paper, we propose MemAPO, a memory-driven framework that reconceptualizes prompt optimization as generalizable and self-evolving experience accumulation. MemAPO maintains a dual-memory mechanism that distills successful reasoning trajectories into reusable strategy templates while organizing incorrect generations into structured error patterns that capture recurrent failure modes. Given a new prompt, the framework retrieves both relevant strategies and failure patterns to compose prompts that promote effective reasoning while discouraging known mistakes. Through iterative self-reflection and memory editing, MemAPO continuously updates its memory, enabling prompt optimization to improve over time rather than restarting from scratch for each task. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that MemAPO consistently outperforms representative prompt optimization baselines while substantially reducing optimization cost.

Tianyuan Huang, Zepeng Zhu, Hangdi Xing et al.

Braille plays a vital role in education and information accessibility for visually impaired individuals. However, Braille information processing faces challenges such as data scarcity and ambiguities in mixed-text contexts. We construct English and Chinese Braille Mixed Datasets (EBMD/CBMD) with mathematical formulas to support diverse Braille domain research, and propose a syntax tree-based augmentation method tailored for Braille data. To address the underperformance of traditional fine-tuning methods in Braille-related tasks, we investigate Braille Knowledge-Based Fine-Tuning (BKFT), which reduces the learning difficulty of Braille contextual features. BrailleLLM employs BKFT via instruction tuning to achieve unified Braille translation, formula-to-Braille conversion, and mixed-text translation. Experiments demonstrate that BKFT achieves significant performance improvements over conventional fine-tuning in Braille translation scenarios. Our open-sourced datasets and methodologies establish a foundation for low-resource multilingual Braille research.

Chengyu Lai, Sheng Zhou, Zhimeng Jiang et al.

Recommendation systems play a pivotal role in suggesting items to users based on their preferences. However, in online platforms, these systems inevitably offer unsuitable recommendations due to limited model capacity, poor data quality, or evolving user interests. Enhancing user experience necessitates efficiently rectify such unsuitable recommendation behaviors. This paper introduces a novel and significant task termed recommendation editing, which focuses on modifying known and unsuitable recommendation behaviors. Specifically, this task aims to adjust the recommendation model to eliminate known unsuitable items without accessing training data or retraining the model. We formally define the problem of recommendation editing with three primary objectives: strict rectification, collaborative rectification, and concentrated rectification. Three evaluation metrics are developed to quantitatively assess the achievement of each objective. We present a straightforward yet effective benchmark for recommendation editing using novel Editing Bayesian Personalized Ranking Loss. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we establish a comprehensive benchmark that incorporates various methods from related fields. Codebase is available at https://github.com/cycl2018/Recommendation-Editing.

Zhonghao Wang, Danyu Sun, Sheng Zhou et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) exhibit strong potential in node classification task through a message-passing mechanism. However, their performance often hinges on high-quality node labels, which are challenging to obtain in real-world scenarios due to unreliable sources or adversarial attacks. Consequently, label noise is common in real-world graph data, negatively impacting GNNs by propagating incorrect information during training. To address this issue, the study of Graph Neural Networks under Label Noise (GLN) has recently gained traction. However, due to variations in dataset selection, data splitting, and preprocessing techniques, the community currently lacks a comprehensive benchmark, which impedes deeper understanding and further development of GLN. To fill this gap, we introduce NoisyGL in this paper, the first comprehensive benchmark for graph neural networks under label noise. NoisyGL enables fair comparisons and detailed analyses of GLN methods on noisy labeled graph data across various datasets, with unified experimental settings and interface. Our benchmark has uncovered several important insights that were missed in previous research, and we believe these findings will be highly beneficial for future studies. We hope our open-source benchmark library will foster further advancements in this field. The code of the benchmark can be found in https://github.com/eaglelab-zju/NoisyGL.

Sheng Zhou, Yucheng Wang, Defang Chen et al.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims at transferring knowledge from a larger well-optimized teacher network to a smaller learnable student network.Existing KD methods have mainly considered two types of knowledge, namely the individual knowledge and the relational knowledge. However, these two types of knowledge are usually modeled independently while the inherent correlations between them are largely ignored. It is critical for sufficient student network learning to integrate both individual knowledge and relational knowledge while reserving their inherent correlation. In this paper, we propose to distill the novel holistic knowledge based on an attributed graph constructed among instances. The holistic knowledge is represented as a unified graph-based embedding by aggregating individual knowledge from relational neighborhood samples with graph neural networks, the student network is learned by distilling the holistic knowledge in a contrastive manner. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted on benchmark datasets, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code has been published in https://github.com/wyc-ruiker/HKD

Meihan Liu, Zeyu Fang, Zhen Zhang et al.

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labelled source graph to an unlabelled target graph in order to address the distribution shifts between graph domains. Previous works have primarily focused on aligning data from the source and target graph in the representation space learned by graph neural networks (GNNs). However, the inherent generalization capability of GNNs has been largely overlooked. Motivated by our empirical analysis, we reevaluate the role of GNNs in graph domain adaptation and uncover the pivotal role of the propagation process in GNNs for adapting to different graph domains. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of UGDA and derive a generalization bound for multi-layer GNNs. By formulating GNN Lipschitz for k-layer GNNs, we show that the target risk bound can be tighter by removing propagation layers in source graph and stacking multiple propagation layers in target graph. Based on the empirical and theoretical analysis mentioned above, we propose a simple yet effective approach called A2GNN for graph domain adaptation. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed A2GNN framework.

Xianwei Mao, Kai Ye, Sheng Zhou et al.

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to answer questions by integrating visual information with external knowledge. However, retrieved knowledge is often noisy, partially irrelevant, or misaligned with the visual content, while internal model knowledge is difficult to control and interpret. Naive aggregation of these sources limits reasoning effectiveness and reduces answer accuracy. To address this, we propose MaS-VQA, a selection-driven framework that tightly couples explicit knowledge filtering with implicit knowledge reasoning. MaS-VQA first retrieves candidate passages and applies a Mask-and-Select mechanism to jointly prune irrelevant image regions and weakly relevant knowledge fragments, producing compact, high-signal multimodal knowledge . This filtered knowledge then guides the activation of internal knowledge in a constrained semantic space, enabling complementary co-modeling of explicit and implicit knowledge for robust answer prediction. Experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate consistent performance gains across multiple MLLM backbones, and ablations verify that the selection mechanism effectively reduces noise and enhances knowledge utilization.

Yuanchen Bei, Sheng Zhou, Qiaoyu Tan et al.

Unsupervised graph anomaly detection is crucial for various practical applications as it aims to identify anomalies in a graph that exhibit rare patterns deviating significantly from the majority of nodes. Recent advancements have utilized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn high-quality node representations for anomaly detection by aggregating information from neighborhoods. However, the presence of anomalies may render the observed neighborhood unreliable and result in misleading information aggregation for node representation learning. Selecting the proper neighborhood is critical for graph anomaly detection but also challenging due to the absence of anomaly-oriented guidance and the interdependence with representation learning. To address these issues, we utilize the advantages of reinforcement learning in adaptively learning in complex environments and propose a novel method that incorporates Reinforcement neighborhood selection for unsupervised graph ANomaly Detection (RAND). RAND begins by enriching the candidate neighbor pool of the given central node with multiple types of indirect neighbors. Next, RAND designs a tailored reinforcement anomaly evaluation module to assess the reliability and reward of considering the given neighbor. Finally, RAND selects the most reliable subset of neighbors based on these rewards and introduces an anomaly-aware aggregator to amplify messages from reliable neighbors while diminishing messages from unreliable ones. Extensive experiments on both three synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate that RAND outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Zhen Zhang, Meihan Liu, Anhui Wang et al.

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) has emerged as a practical solution to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source graph to a completely unlabelled target graph. However, most methods require a labelled source graph to provide supervision signals, which might not be accessible in the real-world settings due to regulations and privacy concerns. In this paper, we explore the scenario of source-free unsupervised graph domain adaptation, which tries to address the domain adaptation problem without accessing the labelled source graph. Specifically, we present a novel paradigm called GraphCTA, which performs model adaptation and graph adaptation collaboratively through a series of procedures: (1) conduct model adaptation based on node's neighborhood predictions in target graph considering both local and global information; (2) perform graph adaptation by updating graph structure and node attributes via neighborhood contrastive learning; and (3) the updated graph serves as an input to facilitate the subsequent iteration of model adaptation, thereby establishing a collaborative loop between model adaptation and graph adaptation. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on various public datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms recent source-free baselines by large margins.

Ziwei Wang, Weizhi Chen, Leyang Yang et al.

Graphical user interface (GUI) has become integral to modern society, making it crucial to be understood for human-centric systems. However, unlike natural images or documents, GUIs comprise artificially designed graphical elements arranged to convey specific semantic meanings. Current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) already proficient in processing graphical and textual components suffer from hurdles in GUI understanding due to the lack of explicit spatial structure modeling. Moreover, obtaining high-quality spatial structure data is challenging due to privacy issues and noisy environments. To address these challenges, we present MP-GUI, a specially designed MLLM for GUI understanding. MP-GUI features three precisely specialized perceivers to extract graphical, textual, and spatial modalities from the screen as GUI-tailored visual clues, with spatial structure refinement strategy and adaptively combined via a fusion gate to meet the specific preferences of different GUI understanding tasks. To cope with the scarcity of training data, we also introduce a pipeline for automatically data collecting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MP-GUI achieves impressive results on various GUI understanding tasks with limited data.

Jialong Guo, Ke liu, Jiangchao Yao et al.

Neural Representations for Videos (NeRV) has emerged as a promising implicit neural representation (INR) approach for video analysis, which represents videos as neural networks with frame indexes as inputs. However, NeRV-based methods are time-consuming when adapting to a large number of diverse videos, as each video requires a separate NeRV model to be trained from scratch. In addition, NeRV-based methods spatially require generating a high-dimension signal (i.e., an entire image) from the input of a low-dimension timestamp, and a video typically consists of tens of frames temporally that have a minor change between adjacent frames. To improve the efficiency of video representation, we propose Meta Neural Representations for Videos, named MetaNeRV, a novel framework for fast NeRV representation for unseen videos. MetaNeRV leverages a meta-learning framework to learn an optimal parameter initialization, which serves as a good starting point for adapting to new videos. To address the unique spatial and temporal characteristics of video modality, we further introduce spatial-temporal guidance to improve the representation capabilities of MetaNeRV. Specifically, the spatial guidance with a multi-resolution loss aims to capture the information from different resolution stages, and the temporal guidance with an effective progressive learning strategy could gradually refine the number of fitted frames during the meta-learning process. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of MetaNeRV for video representations and video compression.

Yuanchen Bei, Weizhi Zhang, Siwen Wang et al.

AI agents have experienced a paradigm shift, from early dominance by reinforcement learning (RL) to the rise of agents powered by large language models (LLMs), and now further advancing towards a synergistic fusion of RL and LLM capabilities. This progression has endowed AI agents with increasingly strong abilities. Despite these advances, to accomplish complex real-world tasks, agents are required to plan and execute effectively, maintain reliable memory, and coordinate smoothly with other agents. Achieving these capabilities involves contending with ever-present intricate information, operations, and interactions. In light of this challenge, data structurization can play a promising role by transforming intricate and disorganized data into well-structured forms that agents can more effectively understand and process. In this context, graphs, with their natural advantage in organizing, managing, and harnessing intricate data relationships, present a powerful data paradigm for structurization to support the capabilities demanded by advanced AI agents. To this end, this survey presents a first systematic review of how graphs can empower AI agents. Specifically, we explore the integration of graph techniques with core agent functionalities, highlight notable applications, and identify prospective avenues for future research. By comprehensively surveying this burgeoning intersection, we hope to inspire the development of next-generation AI agents equipped to tackle increasingly sophisticated challenges with graphs. Related resources are collected and continuously updated for the community in the Github link.

Yuanchen Bei, Weizhi Chen, Hao Chen et al.

Multi-label node classification is an important yet under-explored domain in graph mining as many real-world nodes belong to multiple categories rather than just a single one. Although a few efforts have been made by utilizing Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) to learn node representations and model correlations between multiple labels in the embedding space, they still suffer from the ambiguous feature and ambiguous topology induced by multiple labels, which reduces the credibility of the messages delivered in graphs and overlooks the label correlations on graph data. Therefore, it is crucial to reduce the ambiguity and empower the GCNs for accurate classification. However, this is quite challenging due to the requirement of retaining the distinctiveness of each label while fully harnessing the correlation between labels simultaneously. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Correlation-aware Graph Convolutional Network (CorGCN) for multi-label node classification. By introducing a novel Correlation-Aware Graph Decomposition module, CorGCN can learn a graph that contains rich label-correlated information for each label. It then employs a Correlation-Enhanced Graph Convolution to model the relationships between labels during message passing to further bolster the classification process. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CorGCN.

Zirui Shao, Feiyu Gao, Zhaoqing Zhu et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding, a rapidly growing research area with significant industrial demand. As a multimodal task, document understanding requires models to possess both perceptual and cognitive abilities. However, due to different types of annotation noise in training, current MLLMs often face conflicts between perception and cognition. Taking a document VQA task (cognition) as an example, an MLLM might generate answers that do not match the corresponding visual content identified by its OCR (perception). This conflict suggests that the MLLM might struggle to establish an intrinsic connection between the information it "sees" and what it "understands". Such conflicts challenge the intuitive notion that cognition is consistent with perception, hindering the performance and explainability of MLLMs. In this paper, we define the conflicts between cognition and perception as Cognition and Perception (C&P) knowledge conflicts, a form of multimodal knowledge conflict, and systematically assess them with a focus on document understanding. Our analysis reveals that even GPT-4o, a leading MLLM, achieves only 75.26% C&P consistency. To mitigate the C&P knowledge conflicts, we propose a novel method called Multimodal Knowledge Consistency Fine-tuning. Our method reduces C&P knowledge conflicts across all tested MLLMs and enhances their performance in both cognitive and perceptual tasks.

Yuanchen Bei, Sheng Zhou, Jinke Shi et al.

Unsupervised graph anomaly detection aims at identifying rare patterns that deviate from the majority in a graph without the aid of labels, which is important for a variety of real-world applications. Recent advances have utilized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn effective node representations by aggregating information from neighborhoods. This is motivated by the hypothesis that nodes in the graph tend to exhibit consistent behaviors with their neighborhoods. However, such consistency can be disrupted by graph anomalies in multiple ways. Most existing methods directly employ GNNs to learn representations, disregarding the negative impact of graph anomalies on GNNs, resulting in sub-optimal node representations and anomaly detection performance. While a few recent approaches have redesigned GNNs for graph anomaly detection under semi-supervised label guidance, how to address the adverse effects of graph anomalies on GNNs in unsupervised scenarios and learn effective representations for anomaly detection are still under-explored. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework for Guarding Graph Neural Networks for Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection (G3AD). Specifically, G3AD first introduces two auxiliary networks along with correlation constraints to guard the GNNs against inconsistent information encoding. Furthermore, G3AD introduces an adaptive caching module to guard the GNNs from directly reconstructing the observed graph data that contains anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our G3AD can outperform twenty state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world graph anomaly datasets, with flexible generalization ability in different GNN backbones.

Weizhi Chen, Ziwei Wang, Leyang Yang et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents possess significant commercial and social value, and GUI agents powered by advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential. Currently, existing GUI agents usually utilize sequential episodes of multi-step operations across pages as the prior GUI knowledge, which fails to capture the complex transition relationship between pages, making it challenging for the agents to deeply perceive the GUI environment and generalize to new scenarios. Therefore, we design an automated pipeline to transform the sequential episodes into page graphs, which explicitly model the graph structure of the pages that are naturally connected by actions. To fully utilize the page graphs, we further introduce Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to effectively retrieve reliable perception guidelines of GUI from them, and a tailored multi-agent framework PG-Agent with task decomposition strategy is proposed to be injected with the guidelines so that it can generalize to unseen scenarios. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PG-Agent, even with limited episodes for page graph construction.

Kai Ye, Xianwei Mao, Sheng Zhou et al.

Knowledge-intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) frequently suffers from severe knowledge conflicts caused by the inherent limitations of open-domain retrieval. However, existing paradigms face critical limitations due to the lack of generalizable conflict detection and intra-model constraint mechanisms to handle conflicting evidence. To address these challenges, we propose the REAL (Reasoning-Pivot Alignment) framework centered on the novel concept of the Reasoning-Pivot. Distinct from reasoning steps that prioritize internal self-derivation, a reasoning-pivot serves as an atomic unit (node or edge) in the reasoning chain that emphasizes knowledge linkage, and it typically relies on external evidence to complete the reasoning. Supported by our constructed REAL-VQA dataset, our approach integrates Reasoning-Pivot Aware SFT (RPA-SFT) to train a generalizable discriminator by aligning conflicts with pivot extraction, and employs Reasoning-Pivot Guided Decoding (RPGD), an intra-model decoding strategy that leverages these pivots for targeted conflict mitigation. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that REAL significantly enhances discrimination accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of our pivot-driven resolution paradigm.

Jielong Lu, Zhihao Wu, Jiajun Yu et al.

Integrating multi-omics datasets through data-driven analysis offers a comprehensive understanding of the complex biological processes underlying various diseases, particularly cancer. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently demonstrated remarkable ability to exploit relational structures in biological data, enabling advances in multi-omics integration for cancer subtype classification. Existing approaches often neglect the intricate coupling between heterogeneous omics, limiting their capacity to resolve subtle cancer subtype heterogeneity critical for precision oncology. To address these limitations, we propose a framework named Graph Transformer for Multi-omics Cancer Subtype Classification (GTMancer). This framework builds upon the GNN optimization problem and extends its application to complex multi-omics data. Specifically, our method leverages contrastive learning to embed multi-omics data into a unified semantic space. We unroll the multiplex graph optimization problem in that unified space and introduce dual sets of attention coefficients to capture structural graph priors both within and among multi-omics data. This approach enables global omics information to guide the refining of the representations of individual omics. Empirical experiments on seven real-world cancer datasets demonstrate that GTMancer outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Chunpeng Zhou, Qianqian Shen, Zhi Yu et al.

Recent advancements in fine-tuning Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLMs) have garnered significant attention for their effectiveness in downstream few-shot learning tasks.While these recent approaches exhibits some performance improvements, they often suffer from excessive training parameters and high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Block matrix-based low-rank adaptation framework, called Block-LoRA, for fine-tuning VLMs on downstream few-shot tasks. Inspired by recent work on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Block-LoRA partitions the original low-rank decomposition matrix of LoRA into a series of sub-matrices while sharing all down-projection sub-matrices. This structure not only reduces the number of training parameters, but also transforms certain complex matrix multiplication operations into simpler matrix addition, significantly lowering the computational cost of fine-tuning. Notably, Block-LoRA enables fine-tuning CLIP on the ImageNet few-shot benchmark using a single 24GB GPU. We also show that Block-LoRA has the more tighter bound of generalization error than vanilla LoRA. Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments demonstrate that Block-LoRA achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art CLIP-based few-shot methods, while maintaining a low training parameters count and reduced computational overhead.

Zeyu Fang, Ming Gu, Sheng Zhou et al.

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) plays a crucial role in identifying abnormal patterns within data without labeled examples, holding significant practical implications across various domains. Although the individual contributions of representation learning and clustering to anomaly detection are well-established, their interdependencies remain under-explored due to the absence of a unified theoretical framework. Consequently, their collective potential to enhance anomaly detection performance remains largely untapped. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic mixture model for anomaly detection to establish a theoretical connection among representation learning, clustering, and anomaly detection. By maximizing a novel anomaly-aware data likelihood, representation learning and clustering can effectively reduce the adverse impact of anomalous data and collaboratively benefit anomaly detection. Meanwhile, a theoretically substantiated anomaly score is naturally derived from this framework. Lastly, drawing inspiration from gravitational analysis in physics, we have devised an improved anomaly score that more effectively harnesses the combined power of representation learning and clustering. Extensive experiments, involving 17 baseline methods across 30 diverse datasets, validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of the proposed method, surpassing state-of-the-art methods.

Chunpeng Zhou, Haishuai Wang, Xilu Yuan et al.

Few-shot Learning aims to learn and distinguish new categories with a very limited number of available images, presenting a significant challenge in the realm of deep learning. Recent researchers have sought to leverage the additional textual or linguistic information of these rare categories with a pre-trained language model to facilitate learning, thus partially alleviating the problem of insufficient supervision signals. However, the full potential of the textual information and pre-trained language model have been underestimated in the few-shot learning till now, resulting in limited performance enhancements. To address this, we propose a simple but effective framework for few-shot learning tasks, specifically designed to exploit the textual information and language model. In more detail, we explicitly exploit the zero-shot capability of the pre-trained language model with the learnable prompt. And we just add the visual feature with the textual feature for inference directly without the intricate designed fusion modules in previous works. Additionally, we apply the self-ensemble and distillation to further enhance these components. Our extensive experiments conducted across four widely used few-shot datasets demonstrate that our simple framework achieves impressive results. Particularly noteworthy is its outstanding performance in the 1-shot learning task, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by an average of 3.0\% in classification accuracy. \footnote{We will make the source codes of the proposed framework publicly available upon acceptance. }.

Chengxi Li, Feiyu Gao, Jiajun Bu et al.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is an emerging fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract aspects, classify corresponding sentiment polarities and find opinions as the causes of sentiment. The latest research tends to solve the ABSA task in a unified way with end-to-end frameworks. Yet, these frameworks get fine-tuned from downstream tasks without any task-adaptive modification. Specifically, they do not use task-related knowledge well or explicitly model relations between aspect and opinion terms, hindering them from better performance. In this paper, we propose SentiPrompt to use sentiment knowledge enhanced prompts to tune the language model in the unified framework. We inject sentiment knowledge regarding aspects, opinions, and polarities into prompt and explicitly model term relations via constructing consistency and polarity judgment templates from the ground truth triplets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can outperform strong baselines on Triplet Extraction, Pair Extraction, and Aspect Term Extraction with Sentiment Classification by a notable margin.

Dian Qin, Jiajun Bu, Zhe Liu et al.

Recent advances have been made in applying convolutional neural networks to achieve more precise prediction results for medical image segmentation problems. However, the success of existing methods has highly relied on huge computational complexity and massive storage, which is impractical in the real-world scenario. To deal with this problem, we propose an efficient architecture by distilling knowledge from well-trained medical image segmentation networks to train another lightweight network. This architecture empowers the lightweight network to get a significant improvement on segmentation capability while retaining its runtime efficiency. We further devise a novel distillation module tailored for medical image segmentation to transfer semantic region information from teacher to student network. It forces the student network to mimic the extent of difference of representations calculated from different tissue regions. This module avoids the ambiguous boundary problem encountered when dealing with medical imaging but instead encodes the internal information of each semantic region for transferring. Benefited from our module, the lightweight network could receive an improvement of up to 32.6% in our experiment while maintaining its portability in the inference phase. The entire structure has been verified on two widely accepted public CT datasets LiTS17 and KiTS19. We demonstrate that a lightweight network distilled by our method has non-negligible value in the scenario which requires relatively high operating speed and low storage usage.