Rui Luo

Zuyao Xu, Yuqi Qiu, Lu Sun et al.

Citations provide the basis for trusting scientific claims; when they are invalid or fabricated, this trust collapses. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), this risk has intensified: LLMs are increasingly used for academic writing, yet their tendency to fabricate citations (``ghost citations'') poses a systemic threat to citation validity. To quantify this threat and inform mitigation, we develop CiteVerifier, an open-source framework for large-scale citation verification, and conduct the first comprehensive study of citation validity in the LLM era through three experiments built on it. We benchmark 13 state-of-the-art LLMs on citation generation across 40 research domains, finding that all models hallucinate citations at rates from 14.23\% to 94.93\%, with significant variation across research domains. Moreover, we analyze 2.2 million citations from 56,381 papers published at top-tier AI/ML and Security venues (2020--2025), confirming that 1.07\% of papers contain invalid or fabricated citations (604 papers), with an 80.9\% increase in 2025 alone. Furthermore, we survey 97 researchers and analyze 94 valid responses after removing 3 conflicting samples, revealing a critical ``verification gap'': 41.5\% of researchers copy-paste BibTeX without checking and 44.4\% choose no-action responses when encountering suspicious references; meanwhile, 76.7\% of reviewers do not thoroughly check references and 80.0\% never suspect fake citations. Our findings reveal an accelerating crisis where unreliable AI tools, combined with inadequate human verification by researchers and insufficient peer review scrutiny, enable fabricated citations to contaminate the scientific record. We propose interventions for researchers, venues, and tool developers to protect citation integrity.

Peng Jia, Ruiqi Sun, Nan Li et al.

Strong lensing in galaxy clusters probes properties of dense cores of dark matter halos in mass, studies the distant universe at flux levels and spatial resolutions otherwise unavailable, and constrains cosmological models independently. The next-generation large scale sky imaging surveys are expected to discover thousands of cluster-scale strong lenses, which would lead to unprecedented opportunities for applying cluster-scale strong lenses to solve astrophysical and cosmological problems. However, the large dataset challenges astronomers to identify and extract strong lensing signals, particularly strongly lensed arcs, because of their complexity and variety. Hence, we propose a framework to detect cluster-scale strongly lensed arcs, which contains a transformer-based detection algorithm and an image simulation algorithm. We embed prior information of strongly lensed arcs at cluster-scale into the training data through simulation and then train the detection algorithm with simulated images. We use the trained transformer to detect strongly lensed arcs from simulated and real data. Results show that our approach could achieve 99.63 % accuracy rate, 90.32 % recall rate, 85.37 % precision rate and 0.23 % false positive rate in detection of strongly lensed arcs from simulated images and could detect almost all strongly lensed arcs in real observation images. Besides, with an interpretation method, we have shown that our method could identify important information embedded in simulated data. Next step, to test the reliability and usability of our approach, we will apply it to available observations (e.g., DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys) and simulated data of upcoming large-scale sky surveys, such as the Euclid and the CSST.

Rui Luo, Fei Liu, Wenhao Liang et al.

In the field of intelligent education, knowledge tracing (KT) has attracted increasing attention, which estimates and traces students' mastery of knowledge concepts to provide high-quality education. In KT, there are natural graph structures among questions and knowledge concepts so some studies explored the application of graph neural networks (GNNs) to improve the performance of the KT models which have not used graph structure. However, most of them ignored both the questions' difficulties and students' attempts at questions. Actually, questions with the same knowledge concepts have different difficulties, and students' different attempts also represent different knowledge mastery. In this paper, we propose a difficulty and attempts boosted graph-based KT (DAGKT), using rich information from students' records. Moreover, a novel method is designed to establish the question similarity relationship inspired by the F1 score. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DAGKT.

Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou

Machine learning classification tasks often benefit from predicting a set of possible labels with confidence scores to capture uncertainty. However, existing methods struggle with the high-dimensional nature of the data and the lack of well-calibrated probabilities from modern classification models. We propose a novel conformal prediction method that employs a rank-based score function suitable for classification models that predict the order of labels correctly, even if not well-calibrated. Our approach constructs prediction sets that achieve the desired coverage rate while managing their size. We provide a theoretical analysis of the expected size of the conformal prediction sets based on the rank distribution of the underlying classifier. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques on various datasets, providing reliable uncertainty quantification. Our contributions include a novel conformal prediction method, theoretical analysis, and empirical evaluation. This work advances the practical deployment of machine learning systems by enabling reliable uncertainty quantification.

Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou

This paper introduces Conformal Thresholded Intervals (CTI), a novel conformal regression method that aims to produce the smallest possible prediction set with guaranteed coverage. Unlike existing methods that rely on nested conformal frameworks and full conditional distribution estimation, CTI estimates the conditional probability density for a new response to fall into each interquantile interval using off-the-shelf multi-output quantile regression. By leveraging the inverse relationship between interval length and probability density, CTI constructs prediction sets by thresholding the estimated conditional interquantile intervals based on their length. The optimal threshold is determined using a calibration set to ensure marginal coverage, effectively balancing the trade-off between prediction set size and coverage. CTI's approach is computationally efficient and avoids the complexity of estimating the full conditional distribution. The method is theoretically grounded, with provable guarantees for marginal coverage and achieving the smallest prediction size given by Neyman-Pearson . Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CTI achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art conformal regression methods across various datasets, consistently producing smaller prediction sets while maintaining the desired coverage level. The proposed method offers a simple yet effective solution for reliable uncertainty quantification in regression tasks, making it an attractive choice for practitioners seeking accurate and efficient conformal prediction.

Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou

Conformal prediction is a powerful framework for constructing prediction sets with valid coverage guarantees in multi-class classification. However, existing methods often rely on a single score function, which can limit their efficiency and informativeness. We propose a novel approach that combines multiple score functions to improve the performance of conformal predictors by identifying optimal weights that minimize prediction set size. Our theoretical analysis establishes a connection between the weighted score functions and subgraph classes of functions studied in Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory, providing a rigorous mathematical basis for understanding the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms single-score conformal predictors while maintaining valid coverage, offering a principled and data-driven way to enhance the efficiency and practicality of conformal prediction in classification tasks.

Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou

Uncertainty quantification is essential in decision-making, especially when joint distributions of random variables are involved. While conformal prediction provides distribution-free prediction sets with valid coverage guarantees, it traditionally focuses on single predictions. This paper introduces novel conformal prediction methods for estimating the sum or average of unknown labels over specific index sets. We develop conformal prediction intervals for single target to the prediction interval for sum of multiple targets. Under permutation invariant assumptions, we prove the validity of our proposed method. We also apply our algorithms on class average estimation and path cost prediction tasks, and we show that our method outperforms existing conformalized approaches as well as non-conformal approaches.

Rui Luo, Nicolo Colombo

Conformal Prediction (CP) is a powerful framework for constructing prediction sets with guaranteed coverage. However, recent studies have shown that integrating confidence calibration with CP can lead to a degradation in efficiency. In this paper, We propose an adaptive approach that considers the classifier's uncertainty and employs entropy-based reweighting to enhance the efficiency of prediction sets for conformal classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that this method significantly improves efficiency.

Jie Bao, Chuangyin Dang, Rui Luo et al.

As deep learning models are increasingly deployed in high-risk applications, robust defenses against adversarial attacks and reliable performance guarantees become paramount. Moreover, accuracy alone does not provide sufficient assurance or reliable uncertainty estimates for these models. This study advances adversarial training by leveraging principles from Conformal Prediction. Specifically, we develop an adversarial attack method, termed OPSA (OPtimal Size Attack), designed to reduce the efficiency of conformal prediction at any significance level by maximizing model uncertainty without requiring coverage guarantees. Correspondingly, we introduce OPSA-AT (Adversarial Training), a defense strategy that integrates OPSA within a novel conformal training paradigm. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our OPSA attack method induces greater uncertainty compared to baseline approaches for various defenses. Conversely, our OPSA-AT defensive model significantly enhances robustness not only against OPSA but also other adversarial attacks, and maintains reliable prediction. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of this integrated approach for developing trustworthy and resilient deep learning models for safety-critical domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/bjbbbb/Enhancing-Adversarial-Robustness-with-Conformal-Prediction.

Xiaoyi Su, Zhixin Zhou, Rui Luo

Conformal prediction (CP) provides finite-sample, distribution-free marginal coverage, but standard conformal regression intervals can be inefficient under heteroscedasticity and skewness. In particular, popular constructions such as conformalized quantile regression (CQR) often inherit a fixed notion of center and enforce equal-tailed errors, which can displace the interval away from high-density regions and produce unnecessarily wide sets. We propose Co-optimization for Adaptive Conformal Prediction (CoCP), a framework that learns prediction intervals by jointly optimizing a center $m(x)$ and a radius $h(x)$.CoCP alternates between (i) learning $h(x)$ via quantile regression on the folded absolute residual around the current center, and (ii) refining $m(x)$ with a differentiable soft-coverage objective whose gradients concentrate near the current boundaries, effectively correcting mis-centering without estimating the full conditional density. Finite-sample marginal validity is guaranteed by split-conformal calibration with a normalized nonconformity score. Theory characterizes the population fixed point of the soft objective and shows that, under standard regularity conditions, CoCP asymptotically approaches the length-minimizing conditional interval at the target coverage level as the estimation error and smoothing vanish. Experiments on synthetic and real benchmarks demonstrate that CoCP yields consistently shorter intervals and achieves state-of-the-art conditional-coverage diagnostics.

Rui Luo, Vikram Krishnamurthy

This study presents a novel deep learning method, called GATv2-GCN, for predicting player performance in sports. To construct a dynamic player interaction graph, we leverage player statistics and their interactions during gameplay. We use a graph attention network to capture the attention that each player pays to each other, allowing for more accurate modeling of the dynamic player interactions. To handle the multivariate player statistics time series, we incorporate a temporal convolution layer, which provides the model with temporal predictive power. We evaluate the performance of our model using real-world sports data, demonstrating its effectiveness in predicting player performance. Furthermore, we explore the potential use of our model in a sports betting context, providing insights into profitable strategies that leverage our predictive power. The proposed method has the potential to advance the state-of-the-art in player performance prediction and to provide valuable insights for sports analytics and betting industries.

Ting Wang, Zhixin Zhou, Rui Luo

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been widely used in a variety of fields because of their great potential in representing graph-structured data. However, lacking of rigorous uncertainty estimations limits their application in high-stakes. Conformal Prediction (CP) can produce statistically guaranteed uncertainty estimates by using the classifier's probability estimates to obtain prediction sets, which contains the true class with a user-specified probability. In this paper, we propose a Rank-based CP during training framework to GNNs (RCP-GNN) for reliable uncertainty estimates to enhance the trustworthiness of GNNs in the node classification scenario. By exploiting rank information of the classifier's outcome, prediction sets with desired coverage rate can be efficiently constructed. The strategy of CP during training with differentiable rank-based conformity loss function is further explored to adapt prediction sets according to network topology information. In this way, the composition of prediction sets can be guided by the goal of jointly reducing inefficiency and probability estimation errors. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets show that our model achieves any pre-defined target marginal coverage while significantly reducing the inefficiency compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Rui Luo, Jie Bao, Zhixin Zhou et al.

Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to the reliability and safety of deep learning models, especially in critical domains such as medical imaging. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates conformal prediction with game-theoretic defensive strategies to enhance model robustness against both known and unknown adversarial perturbations. We address three primary research questions: constructing valid and efficient conformal prediction sets under known attacks (RQ1), ensuring coverage under unknown attacks through conservative thresholding (RQ2), and determining optimal defensive strategies within a zero-sum game framework (RQ3). Our methodology involves training specialized defensive models against specific attack types and employing maximum and minimum classifiers to aggregate defenses effectively. Extensive experiments conducted on the MedMNIST datasets, including PathMNIST, OrganAMNIST, and TissueMNIST, demonstrate that our approach maintains high coverage guarantees while minimizing prediction set sizes. The game-theoretic analysis reveals that the optimal defensive strategy often converges to a singular robust model, outperforming uniform and simple strategies across all evaluated datasets. This work advances the state-of-the-art in uncertainty quantification and adversarial robustness, providing a reliable mechanism for deploying deep learning models in adversarial environments.

Rui Luo, Jonas Mariager Jakobsen, Wesley Roozing et al.

Physical human-robot interaction offers the potential to leverage human intelligence and robot physical capabilities to enable a range of exciting applications, e.g., collaborative robots for rehabilitation. Safety is critical for the successful deployment of this kind of robotic system. In recent years, Control Barrier Function (CBF) has emerged as an effective approach to enforce safety guarantees, which has been widely applied in various applications, from adaptive cruise control to navigation of legged robots. CBFs can be solved in a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem, which can include many CBF-formulated tasks. To manage a large number of safety tasks, a hierarchical CBF has been used to allow hierarchical relaxation of safety tasks to ensure the feasibility of a solution in the presence of conflicting tasks. In this work, we propose to use a CBF-based Hierarchical Quadratic Programming (HQP) framework in physical human-robot interaction to allow us to design both performance tasks (e.g., preserve the desired behavior at the human-robot interaction point) and safety tasks at any level of a hierarchy to balance the safety and the performance in a more flexible way. Extensive experiments were carried out on a real redundant robot to validate the effectiveness, flexibility, and generality of this approach.

Lingxuan Tang, Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou et al.

This paper investigates the application of probabilistic prediction methodologies in route planning within a road network context. Specifically, we introduce the Conformalized Quantile Regression for Graph Autoencoders (CQR-GAE), which leverages the conformal prediction technique to offer a coverage guarantee, thus improving the reliability and robustness of our predictions. By incorporating uncertainty sets derived from CQR-GAE, we substantially improve the decision-making process in route planning under a robust optimization framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying the CQR-GAE model to a real-world traffic scenario. The results indicate that our model significantly outperforms baseline methods, offering a promising avenue for advancing intelligent transportation systems.

Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou

We introduce Volume-Sorted Prediction Set (VSPS), a novel method for uncertainty quantification in multi-target regression that uses conditional normalizing flows with conformal calibration. This approach constructs flexible, non-convex predictive regions with guaranteed coverage probabilities, overcoming limitations of traditional methods. By learning a transformation where the conditional distribution of responses follows a known form, VSPS identifies dense regions in the original space using the Jacobian determinant. This enables the creation of prediction regions that adapt to the true underlying distribution, focusing on areas of high probability density. Experimental results demonstrate that VSPS produces smaller, more informative prediction regions while maintaining robust coverage guarantees, enhancing uncertainty modeling in complex, high-dimensional settings.

Zheng Zhang, Jie Bao, Zhixin Zhou et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at modeling relational data but face significant challenges in high-stakes domains due to unquantified uncertainty. Conformal prediction (CP) offers statistical coverage guarantees, but existing methods often produce overly conservative prediction intervals that fail to account for graph heteroscedasticity and structural biases. While residual reweighting CP variants address some of these limitations, they neglect graph topology, cluster-specific uncertainties, and risk data leakage by reusing training sets. To address these issues, we propose Residual Reweighted GNN (RR-GNN), a framework designed to generate minimal prediction sets with provable marginal coverage guarantees. RR-GNN introduces three major innovations to enhance prediction performance. First, it employs Graph-Structured Mondrian CP to partition nodes or edges into communities based on topological features, ensuring cluster-conditional coverage that reflects heterogeneity. Second, it uses Residual-Adaptive Nonconformity Scores by training a secondary GNN on a held-out calibration set to estimate task-specific residuals, dynamically adjusting prediction intervals according to node or edge uncertainty. Third, it adopts a Cross-Training Protocol, which alternates the optimization of the primary GNN and the residual predictor to prevent information leakage while maintaining graph dependencies. We validate RR-GNN on 15 real-world graphs across diverse tasks, including node classification, regression, and edge weight prediction. Compared to CP baselines, RR-GNN achieves improved efficiency over state-of-the-art methods, with no loss of coverage.

Xiaoyi Su, Zhixin Zhou, Rui Luo

Conformal inference is a statistical method used to construct prediction sets for point predictors, providing reliable uncertainty quantification with probability guarantees. This method utilizes historical labeled data to estimate the conformity or nonconformity between predictions and true labels. However, conducting conformal inference for hidden states under hidden Markov models (HMMs) presents a significant challenge, as the hidden state data is unavailable, resulting in the absence of a true label set to serve as a conformal calibration set. This paper proposes an adaptive conformal inference framework that leverages a particle filtering approach to address this issue. Rather than directly focusing on the unobservable hidden state, we innovatively use weighted particles as an approximation of the actual posterior distribution of the hidden state. Our goal is to produce prediction sets that encompass these particles to achieve a specific aggregate weight sum, referred to as the aggregated coverage level. The proposed framework can adapt online to the time-varying distribution of data and achieve the defined marginal aggregated coverage level in both one-step and multi-step inference over the long term. We verify the effectiveness of this approach through a real-time target localization simulation study.

Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou

Uncertainty quantification is becoming increasingly important in image segmentation, especially for high-stakes applications like medical imaging. While conformal risk control generalizes conformal prediction beyond standard miscoverage to handle various loss functions such as false negative rate, its application to segmentation often yields inadequate conditional risk control: some images experience very high false negative rates while others have negligibly small ones. We develop Conformal Risk Adaptation (CRA), which introduces a new score function for creating adaptive prediction sets that significantly improve conditional risk control for segmentation tasks. We establish a novel theoretical framework that demonstrates a fundamental connection between conformal risk control and conformal prediction through a weighted quantile approach, applicable to any score function. To address the challenge of poorly calibrated probabilities in segmentation models, we introduce a specialized probability calibration framework that enhances the reliability of pixel-wise inclusion estimates. Using these calibrated probabilities, we propose Calibrated Conformal Risk Adaptation (CCRA) and a stratified variant (CCRA-S) that partitions images based on their characteristics and applies group-specific thresholds to further enhance conditional risk control. Our experiments on polyp segmentation demonstrate that all three methods (CRA, CCRA, and CCRA-S) provide valid marginal risk control and deliver more consistent conditional risk control across diverse images compared to standard approaches, offering a principled approach to uncertainty quantification that is particularly valuable for high-stakes and personalized segmentation applications.

Jie Bao, Zhixin Zhou, Wen Jung Li et al.

Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for effective diagnosis and treatment planning but is often challenged by domain shifts caused by variations in imaging devices, acquisition conditions, and patient-specific attributes. Traditional domain generalization methods typically require inclusion of parts of the test domain within the training set, which is not always feasible in clinical settings with limited diverse data. Additionally, although diffusion models have demonstrated strong capabilities in image generation and style transfer, they often fail to preserve the critical structural information necessary for precise medical analysis. To address these issues, we propose a novel medical image segmentation method that combines diffusion models and Structure-Preserving Network for structure-aware one-shot image stylization. Our approach effectively mitigates domain shifts by transforming images from various sources into a consistent style while maintaining the location, size, and shape of lesions. This ensures robust and accurate segmentation even when the target domain is absent from the training data. Experimental evaluations on colonoscopy polyp segmentation and skin lesion segmentation datasets show that our method enhances the robustness and accuracy of segmentation models, achieving superior performance metrics compared to baseline models without style transfer. This structure-aware stylization framework offers a practical solution for improving medical image segmentation across diverse domains, facilitating more reliable clinical diagnoses.

Rui Luo, Nicolo Colombo

Predicting edge weights on graphs has various applications, from transportation systems to social networks. This paper describes a Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach for edge weight prediction with guaranteed coverage. We leverage conformal prediction to calibrate the GNN outputs and produce valid prediction intervals. We handle data heteroscedasticity through error reweighting and Conformalized Quantile Regression (CQR). We compare the performance of our method against baseline techniques on real-world transportation datasets. Our approach has better coverage and efficiency than all baselines and showcases robustness and adaptability.

Xin Shen, Xiaonan Zhao, Rui Luo

Fine-grained multi-label classification models have broad applications in e-commerce, such as visual based label predictions ranging from fashion attribute detection to brand recognition. One challenge to achieve satisfactory performance for those classification tasks in real world is the wild visual background signal that contains irrelevant pixels which confuses model to focus onto the region of interest and make prediction upon the specific region. In this paper, we introduce a generic semantic-embedding deep neural network to apply the spatial awareness semantic feature incorporating a channel-wise attention based model to leverage the localization guidance to boost model performance for multi-label prediction. We observed an Avg.relative improvement of 15.27% in terms of AUC score across all labels compared to the baseline approach. Core experiment and ablation studies involve multi-label fashion attribute classification performed on Instagram fashion apparels' image. We compared the model performances among our approach, baseline approach, and 3 alternative approaches to leverage semantic features. Results show favorable performance for our approach.

Rui Luo, Buddhika Nettasinghe, Vikram Krishnamurthy

This paper studies detecting anomalous edges in directed graphs that model social networks. We exploit edge exchangeability as a criterion for distinguishing anomalous edges from normal edges. Then we present an anomaly detector based on conformal prediction theory; this detector has a guaranteed upper bound for false positive rate. In numerical experiments, we show that the proposed algorithm achieves superior performance to baseline methods.

Yixin Wu, Rui Luo, Chen Zhang et al.

In this paper, we characterize the noise of stochastic gradients and analyze the noise-induced dynamics during training deep neural networks by gradient-based optimizers. Specifically, we firstly show that the stochastic gradient noise possesses finite variance, and therefore the classical Central Limit Theorem (CLT) applies; this indicates that the gradient noise is asymptotically Gaussian. Such an asymptotic result validates the wide-accepted assumption of Gaussian noise. We clarify that the recently observed phenomenon of heavy tails within gradient noise may not be intrinsic properties, but the consequence of insufficient mini-batch size; the gradient noise, which is a sum of limited i.i.d. random variables, has not reached the asymptotic regime of CLT, thus deviates from Gaussian. We quantitatively measure the goodness of Gaussian approximation of the noise, which supports our conclusion. Secondly, we analyze the noise-induced dynamics of stochastic gradient descent using the Langevin equation, granting for momentum hyperparameter in the optimizer with a physical interpretation. We then proceed to demonstrate the existence of the steady-state distribution of stochastic gradient descent and approximate the distribution at a small learning rate.

Yuxiao Chen, Jianbo Yuan, Long Zhao et al.

Cross-modal attention mechanisms have been widely applied to the image-text matching task and have achieved remarkable improvements thanks to its capability of learning fine-grained relevance across different modalities. However, the cross-modal attention models of existing methods could be sub-optimal and inaccurate because there is no direct supervision provided during the training process. In this work, we propose two novel training strategies, namely Contrastive Content Re-sourcing (CCR) and Contrastive Content Swapping (CCS) constraints, to address such limitations. These constraints supervise the training of cross-modal attention models in a contrastive learning manner without requiring explicit attention annotations. They are plug-in training strategies and can be easily integrated into existing cross-modal attention models. Additionally, we introduce three metrics including Attention Precision, Recall, and F1-Score to quantitatively measure the quality of learned attention models. We evaluate the proposed constraints by incorporating them into four state-of-the-art cross-modal attention-based image-text matching models. Experimental results on both Flickr30k and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate that integrating these constraints improves the model performance in terms of both retrieval performance and attention metrics.

Maozhen Wang, Rui Luo, Aykut Ozgun Onol et al.

Avoiding obstacles in the perceived world has been the classical approach to autonomous mobile robot navigation. However, this usually leads to unnatural and inefficient motions that significantly differ from the way humans move in tight and dynamic spaces, as we do not refrain interacting with the environment around us when necessary. Inspired by this observation, we propose a framework for autonomous robot navigation among movable obstacles (NAMO) that is based on the theory of affordances and contact-implicit motion planning. We consider a realistic scenario in which a mobile service robot negotiates unknown obstacles in the environment while navigating to a goal state. An affordance extraction procedure is performed for novel obstacles to detect their movability, and a contact-implicit trajectory optimization method is used to enable the robot to interact with movable obstacles to improve the task performance or to complete an otherwise infeasible task. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework by hardware experiments with Toyota's Human Support Robot.

Zhaoqing Peng, Junqi Jin, Lan Luo et al.

To drive purchase in online advertising, it is of the advertiser's great interest to optimize the sequential advertising strategy whose performance and interpretability are both important. The lack of interpretability in existing deep reinforcement learning methods makes it not easy to understand, diagnose and further optimize the strategy. In this paper, we propose our Deep Intents Sequential Advertising (DISA) method to address these issues. The key part of interpretability is to understand a consumer's purchase intent which is, however, unobservable (called hidden states). In this paper, we model this intention as a latent variable and formulate the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) where the underlying intents are inferred based on the observable behaviors. Large-scale industrial offline and online experiments demonstrate our method's superior performance over several baselines. The inferred hidden states are analyzed, and the results prove the rationality of our inference.

Xiaonan Zhao, Huan Qi, Rui Luo et al.

We address the problem of distance metric learning in visual similarity search, defined as learning an image embedding model which projects images into Euclidean space where semantically and visually similar images are closer and dissimilar images are further from one another. We present a weakly supervised adaptive triplet loss (ATL) capable of capturing fine-grained semantic similarity that encourages the learned image embedding models to generalize well on cross-domain data. The method uses weakly labeled product description data to implicitly determine fine grained semantic classes, avoiding the need to annotate large amounts of training data. We evaluate on the Amazon fashion retrieval benchmark and DeepFashion in-shop retrieval data. The method boosts the performance of triplet loss baseline by 10.6% on cross-domain data and out-performs the state-of-art model on all evaluation metrics.

Mohammed Amin Abdullah, Hang Ren, Haitham Bou Ammar et al.

Reinforcement learning algorithms, though successful, tend to over-fit to training environments hampering their application to the real-world. This paper proposes $\text{W}\text{R}^{2}\text{L}$ -- a robust reinforcement learning algorithm with significant robust performance on low and high-dimensional control tasks. Our method formalises robust reinforcement learning as a novel min-max game with a Wasserstein constraint for a correct and convergent solver. Apart from the formulation, we also propose an efficient and scalable solver following a novel zero-order optimisation method that we believe can be useful to numerical optimisation in general. We empirically demonstrate significant gains compared to standard and robust state-of-the-art algorithms on high-dimensional MuJuCo environments.

Jianbo Yuan, Haofu Liao, Rui Luo et al.

Generating radiology reports is time-consuming and requires extensive expertise in practice. Therefore, reliable automatic radiology report generation is highly desired to alleviate the workload. Although deep learning techniques have been successfully applied to image classification and image captioning tasks, radiology report generation remains challenging in regards to understanding and linking complicated medical visual contents with accurate natural language descriptions. In addition, the data scales of open-access datasets that contain paired medical images and reports remain very limited. To cope with these practical challenges, we propose a generative encoder-decoder model and focus on chest x-ray images and reports with the following improvements. First, we pretrain the encoder with a large number of chest x-ray images to accurately recognize 14 common radiographic observations, while taking advantage of the multi-view images by enforcing the cross-view consistency. Second, we synthesize multi-view visual features based on a sentence-level attention mechanism in a late fusion fashion. In addition, in order to enrich the decoder with descriptive semantics and enforce the correctness of the deterministic medical-related contents such as mentions of organs or diagnoses, we extract medical concepts based on the radiology reports in the training data and fine-tune the encoder to extract the most frequent medical concepts from the x-ray images. Such concepts are fused with each decoding step by a word-level attention model. The experimental results conducted on the Indiana University Chest X-Ray dataset demonstrate that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with other baseline approaches.

Rui Luo, Qiang Zhang, Yaodong Yang et al.

In this paper, we present a new practical method for Bayesian learning that can rapidly draw representative samples from complex posterior distributions with multiple isolated modes in the presence of mini-batch noise. This is achieved by simulating a collection of replicas in parallel with different temperatures and periodically swapping them. When evolving the replicas' states, the Nosé-Hoover dynamics is applied, which adaptively neutralizes the mini-batch noise. To perform proper exchanges, a new protocol is developed with a noise-aware test of acceptance, by which the detailed balance is reserved in an asymptotic way. While its efficacy on complex multimodal posteriors has been illustrated by testing over synthetic distributions, experiments with deep Bayesian neural networks on large-scale datasets have shown its significant improvements over strong baselines.

Ying Wen, Yaodong Yang, Rui Luo et al.

Though limited in real-world decision making, most multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) models assume perfectly rational agents -- a property hardly met due to individual's cognitive limitation and/or the tractability of the decision problem. In this paper, we introduce generalized recursive reasoning (GR2) as a novel framework to model agents with different \emph{hierarchical} levels of rationality; our framework enables agents to exhibit varying levels of "thinking" ability thereby allowing higher-level agents to best respond to various less sophisticated learners. We contribute both theoretically and empirically. On the theory side, we devise the hierarchical framework of GR2 through probabilistic graphical models and prove the existence of a perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Within the GR2, we propose a practical actor-critic solver, and demonstrate its convergent property to a stationary point in two-player games through Lyapunov analysis. On the empirical side, we validate our findings on a variety of MARL benchmarks. Precisely, we first illustrate the hierarchical thinking process on the Keynes Beauty Contest, and then demonstrate significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art opponent modeling baselines on the normal-form games and the cooperative navigation benchmark.

Ying Wen, Yaodong Yang, Rui Luo et al.

Humans are capable of attributing latent mental contents such as beliefs or intentions to others. The social skill is critical in daily life for reasoning about the potential consequences of others' behaviors so as to plan ahead. It is known that humans use such reasoning ability recursively by considering what others believe about their own beliefs. In this paper, we start from level-$1$ recursion and introduce a probabilistic recursive reasoning (PR2) framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our hypothesis is that it is beneficial for each agent to account for how the opponents would react to its future behaviors. Under the PR2 framework, we adopt variational Bayes methods to approximate the opponents' conditional policies, to which each agent finds the best response and then improve their own policies. We develop decentralized-training-decentralized-execution algorithms, namely PR2-Q and PR2-Actor-Critic, that are proved to converge in the self-play scenarios when there exists one Nash equilibrium. Our methods are tested on both the matrix game and the differential game, which have a non-trivial equilibrium where common gradient-based methods fail to converge. Our experiments show that it is critical to reason about how the opponents believe about what the agent believes. We expect our work to contribute a new idea of modeling the opponents to the multi-agent reinforcement learning community.

Rui Luo, Qiang Zhang, Yuanyuan Liu

We propose a new sampler that integrates the protocol of parallel tempering with the Nosé-Hoover (NH) dynamics. The proposed method can efficiently draw representative samples from complex posterior distributions with multiple isolated modes in the presence of noise arising from stochastic gradient. It potentially facilitates deep Bayesian learning on large datasets where complex multimodal posteriors and mini-batch gradient are encountered.

Qiang Zhang, Rui Luo, Yaodong Yang et al.

Volatility is a quantity of measurement for the price movements of stocks or options which indicates the uncertainty within financial markets. As an indicator of the level of risk or the degree of variation, volatility is important to analyse the financial market, and it is taken into consideration in various decision-making processes in financial activities. On the other hand, recent advancement in deep learning techniques has shown strong capabilities in modelling sequential data, such as speech and natural language. In this paper, we empirically study the applicability of the latest deep structures with respect to the volatility modelling problem, through which we aim to provide an empirical guidance for the theoretical analysis of the marriage between deep learning techniques and financial applications in the future. We examine both the traditional approaches and the deep sequential models on the task of volatility prediction, including the most recent variants of convolutional and recurrent networks, such as the dilated architecture. Accordingly, experiments with real-world stock price datasets are performed on a set of 1314 daily stock series for 2018 days of transaction. The evaluation and comparison are based on the negative log likelihood (NLL) of real-world stock price time series. The result shows that the dilated neural models, including dilated CNN and Dilated RNN, produce most accurate estimation and prediction, outperforming various widely-used deterministic models in the GARCH family and several recently proposed stochastic models. In addition, the high flexibility and rich expressive power are validated in this study.

Yaodong Yang, Rui Luo, Minne Li et al.

Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods are limited typically to a small number of agents. When the agent number increases largely, the learning becomes intractable due to the curse of the dimensionality and the exponential growth of agent interactions. In this paper, we present \emph{Mean Field Reinforcement Learning} where the interactions within the population of agents are approximated by those between a single agent and the average effect from the overall population or neighboring agents; the interplay between the two entities is mutually reinforced: the learning of the individual agent's optimal policy depends on the dynamics of the population, while the dynamics of the population change according to the collective patterns of the individual policies. We develop practical mean field Q-learning and mean field Actor-Critic algorithms and analyze the convergence of the solution to Nash equilibrium. Experiments on Gaussian squeeze, Ising model, and battle games justify the learning effectiveness of our mean field approaches. In addition, we report the first result to solve the Ising model via model-free reinforcement learning methods.

Rui Luo, Jianhong Wang, Yaodong Yang et al.

We propose a new sampling method, the thermostat-assisted continuously-tempered Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, for Bayesian learning on large datasets and multimodal distributions. It simulates the Nosé-Hoover dynamics of a continuously-tempered Hamiltonian system built on the distribution of interest. A significant advantage of this method is that it is not only able to efficiently draw representative i.i.d. samples when the distribution contains multiple isolated modes, but capable of adaptively neutralising the noise arising from mini-batches and maintaining accurate sampling. While the properties of this method have been studied using synthetic distributions, experiments on three real datasets also demonstrated the gain of performance over several strong baselines with various types of neural networks plunged in.

Rui Luo, Weinan Zhang, Xiaojun Xu et al.

In this paper, we show that the recent integration of statistical models with deep recurrent neural networks provides a new way of formulating volatility (the degree of variation of time series) models that have been widely used in time series analysis and prediction in finance. The model comprises a pair of complementary stochastic recurrent neural networks: the generative network models the joint distribution of the stochastic volatility process; the inference network approximates the conditional distribution of the latent variables given the observables. Our focus here is on the formulation of temporal dynamics of volatility over time under a stochastic recurrent neural network framework. Experiments on real-world stock price datasets demonstrate that the proposed model generates a better volatility estimation and prediction that outperforms mainstream methods, e.g., deterministic models such as GARCH and its variants, and stochastic models namely the MCMC-based model \emph{stochvol} as well as the Gaussian process volatility model \emph{GPVol}, on average negative log-likelihood.

Yaodong Yang, Rui Luo, Yuanyuan Liu

The Tweedie Compound Poisson-Gamma model is routinely used for modeling non-negative continuous data with a discrete probability mass at zero. Mixed models with random effects account for the covariance structure related to the grouping hierarchy in the data. An important application of Tweedie mixed models is pricing the insurance policies, e.g. car insurance. However, the intractable likelihood function, the unknown variance function, and the hierarchical structure of mixed effects have presented considerable challenges for drawing inferences on Tweedie. In this study, we tackle the Bayesian Tweedie mixed-effects models via variational inference approaches. In particular, we empower the posterior approximation by implicit models trained in an adversarial setting. To reduce the variance of gradients, we reparameterize random effects, and integrate out one local latent variable of Tweedie. We also employ a flexible hyper prior to ensure the richness of the approximation. Our method is evaluated on both simulated and real-world data. Results show that the proposed method has smaller estimation bias on the random effects compared to traditional inference methods including MCMC; it also achieves a state-of-the-art predictive performance, meanwhile offering a richer estimation of the variance function.

Ying Wen, Weinan Zhang, Rui Luo et al.

Recently, the rapid development of word embedding and neural networks has brought new inspiration to various NLP and IR tasks. In this paper, we describe a staged hybrid model combining Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNN) with highway layers. The highway network module is incorporated in the middle takes the output of the bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network (Bi-RNN) module in the first stage and provides the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) module in the last stage with the input. The experiment shows that our model outperforms common neural network models (CNN, RNN, Bi-RNN) on a sentiment analysis task. Besides, the analysis of how sequence length influences the RCNN with highway layers shows that our model could learn good representation for the long text.