Bing Bai

Gongjin Lan, Qiangqiang Lai, Bing Bai et al.

Automotive engine assembly and disassembly are common and crucial programs in the automotive industry. Traditional education trains students to learn automotive engine assembly and disassembly in lecture courses and then to operate with physical engines, which are generally low effectiveness and high cost. In this work, we developed a multi-layer structured Virtual Reality (VR) system to provide students with training in automotive engine (Buick Verano) assembly and disassembly. We designed the VR training system with The VR training system is designed to have several major features, including replaceable engine parts and reusable tools, friendly user interfaces and guidance, and bottom-up designed multi-layer architecture, which can be extended to various engine models. The VR system is evaluated with controlled experiments of two groups of students. The results demonstrate that our VR training system provides remarkable usability in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Currently, our VR system has been demonstrated and employed in the courses of Chinese colleges to train students in automotive engine assembly and disassembly. A free-to-use executable file (Microsoft Windows) and open-source code are available at https://github.com/LadissonLai/SUSTech_VREngine for facilitating the development of VR systems in the automotive industry. Finally, a video describing the operations in our VR training system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe4YTwwAC4

Fangfei Lin, Bing Bai, Kun Bai et al.

Hierarchical clustering recursively partitions data at an increasingly finer granularity. In real-world applications, multi-view data have become increasingly important. This raises a less investigated problem, i.e., multi-view hierarchical clustering, to better understand the hierarchical structure of multi-view data. To this end, we propose a novel neural network-based model, namely Contrastive Multi-view Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering (CMHHC). It consists of three components, i.e., multi-view alignment learning, aligned feature similarity learning, and continuous hyperbolic hierarchical clustering. First, we align sample-level representations across multiple views in a contrastive way to capture the view-invariance information. Next, we utilize both the manifold and Euclidean similarities to improve the metric property. Then, we embed the representations into a hyperbolic space and optimize the hyperbolic embeddings via a continuous relaxation of hierarchical clustering loss. Finally, a binary clustering tree is decoded from optimized hyperbolic embeddings. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its components.

Yingsong Huang, Bing Bai, Shengwei Zhao et al.

Learning against label noise is a vital topic to guarantee a reliable performance for deep neural networks. Recent research usually refers to dynamic noise modeling with model output probabilities and loss values, and then separates clean and noisy samples. These methods have gained notable success. However, unlike cherry-picked data, existing approaches often cannot perform well when facing imbalanced datasets, a common scenario in the real world. We thoroughly investigate this phenomenon and point out two major issues that hinder the performance, i.e., \emph{inter-class loss distribution discrepancy} and \emph{misleading predictions due to uncertainty}. The first issue is that existing methods often perform class-agnostic noise modeling. However, loss distributions show a significant discrepancy among classes under class imbalance, and class-agnostic noise modeling can easily get confused with noisy samples and samples in minority classes. The second issue refers to that models may output misleading predictions due to epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty, thus existing methods that rely solely on the output probabilities may fail to distinguish confident samples. Inspired by our observations, we propose an Uncertainty-aware Label Correction framework~(ULC) to handle label noise on imbalanced datasets. First, we perform epistemic uncertainty-aware class-specific noise modeling to identify trustworthy clean samples and refine/discard highly confident true/corrupted labels. Then, we introduce aleatoric uncertainty in the subsequent learning process to prevent noise accumulation in the label noise modeling process. We conduct experiments on several synthetic and real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, especially on imbalanced datasets.

Yong Liu, Ximan Liu, Guoqing Yang et al.

LLMs and MLLMs have become indispensable tools across a wide range of applications. E-commerce, however, poses distinctive challenges -- including intricate domain knowledge, long-tail product evidence, heterogeneous visual data, and the interplay among multiple stakeholder roles -- that diverge substantially from the general world knowledge these models are primarily trained on, often causing a notable gap between their open-domain and e-commerce performance. To systematically quantify this gap, we introduce OxyEcomBench, a unified multimodal benchmark comprising approximately 6,300 high-quality instances for real-world bilingual Chinese--English e-commerce. Although several e-commerce benchmarks have been proposed, they typically adopt a single stakeholder perspective, target a narrow set of tasks, or address isolated challenges, making it difficult to holistically assess models' understanding of the full e-commerce pipeline. OxyEcomBench addresses these limitations by jointly covering platform operators, merchants, and customers across 6 capability aspects and 29 tasks, supporting text-only and mixed-modality inputs with single-image, multi-image, single-turn, and multi-turn configurations. All data is sourced from authentic e-commerce platforms and verified by domain experts. The benchmark further adopts a difficulty-aware design with a four-level P0--P3 rubric applied to all 29 tasks whose difficulty admits stable expert consensus, and rigorously prioritizes visually salient multimodal cases in which key evidence resides in images rather than text alone. Evaluations on 20 mainstream LLMs and MLLMs show that even the leading models attain modest performance and that performance gaps narrow on OxyEcomBench, suggesting that insufficient e-commerce-specific knowledge infusion mutes the advantages of advanced general-purpose models in this domain.

Yao Liu, Hang Shao, Bing Bai

This paper introduces a new Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) architecture inspired by a class of partial differential equations (PDEs) called quasi-linear hyperbolic systems. With comparable performance on the image classification task, it allows for the modification of the weights via a continuous group of symmetry. This is a significant shift from traditional models where the architecture and weights are essentially fixed. We wish to promote the (internal) symmetry as a new desirable property for a neural network, and to draw attention to the PDE perspective in analyzing and interpreting ConvNets in the broader Deep Learning community.

Jian Liang, Bing Bai, Yuren Cao et al.

Model interpretation is essential in data mining and knowledge discovery. It can help understand the intrinsic model working mechanism and check if the model has undesired characteristics. A popular way of performing model interpretation is Instance-wise Feature Selection (IFS), which provides an importance score of each feature representing the data samples to explain how the model generates the specific output. In this paper, we propose a Model-agnostic Effective Efficient Direct (MEED) IFS framework for model interpretation, mitigating concerns about sanity, combinatorial shortcuts, model identifiability, and information transmission. Also, we focus on the following setting: using selected features to directly predict the output of the given model, which serves as a primary evaluation metric for model-interpretation methods. Apart from the features, we involve the output of the given model as an additional input to learn an explainer based on more accurate information. To learn the explainer, besides fidelity, we propose an Adversarial Infidelity Learning (AIL) mechanism to boost the explanation learning by screening relatively unimportant features. Through theoretical and experimental analysis, we show that our AIL mechanism can help learn the desired conditional distribution between selected features and targets. Moreover, we extend our framework by integrating efficient interpretation methods as proper priors to provide a warm start. Comprehensive empirical evaluation results are provided by quantitative metrics and human evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. Our code is publicly available online at https://github.com/langlrsw/MEED.

Chunyu Wei, Siyuan He, Yu Wang et al.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is crucial in applications like fraud detection and cybersecurity. Despite recent advancements using graph neural networks (GNNs), two major challenges persist. At the model level, most methods adopt a transductive learning paradigm, which assumes static graph structures, making them unsuitable for dynamic, evolving networks. At the data level, the extreme class imbalance, where anomalous nodes are rare, leads to biased models that fail to generalize to unseen anomalies. These challenges are interdependent: static transductive frameworks limit effective data augmentation, while imbalance exacerbates model distortion in inductive learning settings. To address these challenges, we propose a novel data-centric framework that integrates dynamic graph modeling with balanced anomaly synthesis. Our framework features: (1) a discrete ego-graph diffusion model, which captures the local topology of anomalies to generate ego-graphs aligned with anomalous structural distribution, and (2) a curriculum anomaly augmentation mechanism, which dynamically adjusts synthetic data generation during training, focusing on underrepresented anomaly patterns to improve detection and generalization. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of our framework.

Yingsong Huang, Hui Guo, Jing Huang et al.

The rapid progress of diffusion models highlights the growing need for detecting generated images. Previous research demonstrates that incorporating diffusion-based measurements, such as reconstruction error, can enhance the generalizability of detectors. However, ignoring the differing impacts of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty on reconstruction error can undermine detection performance. Aleatoric uncertainty, arising from inherent data noise, creates ambiguity that impedes accurate detection of generated images. As it reflects random variations within the data (e.g., noise in natural textures), it does not help distinguish generated images. In contrast, epistemic uncertainty, which represents the model's lack of knowledge about unfamiliar patterns, supports detection. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Diffusion Epistemic Uncertainty with Asymmetric Learning~(DEUA), for detecting diffusion-generated images. We introduce Diffusion Epistemic Uncertainty~(DEU) estimation via the Laplace approximation to assess the proximity of data to the manifold of diffusion-generated samples. Additionally, an asymmetric loss function is introduced to train a balanced classifier with larger margins, further enhancing generalizability. Extensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks validate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.

Chunyu Wei, Wenji Hu, Xingjia Hao et al.

Graph anomaly detection faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of reliable anomaly-labeled datasets, driving the development of unsupervised methods. Graph autoencoders (GAEs) have emerged as a dominant approach by reconstructing graph structures and node features while deriving anomaly scores from reconstruction errors. However, relying solely on reconstruction error for anomaly detection has limitations, as it increases the sensitivity to noise and overfitting. To address these issues, we propose Graph Evidential Learning (GEL), a probabilistic framework that redefines the reconstruction process through evidential learning. By modeling node features and graph topology using evidential distributions, GEL quantifies two types of uncertainty: graph uncertainty and reconstruction uncertainty, incorporating them into the anomaly scoring mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GEL achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high robustness against noise and structural perturbations.

Liuhui Ding, Dachuan Li, Bowen Liu et al.

Uncertainties in Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based perception and vehicle's motion pose challenges to the development of safe autonomous driving vehicles. In this paper, we propose a safe motion planning framework featuring the quantification and propagation of DNN-based perception uncertainties and motion uncertainties. Contributions of this work are twofold: (1) A Bayesian Deep Neural network model which detects 3D objects and quantitatively captures the associated aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties of DNNs; (2) An uncertainty-aware motion planning algorithm (PU-RRT) that accounts for uncertainties in object detection and ego-vehicle's motion. The proposed approaches are validated via simulated complex scenarios built in CARLA. Experimental results show that the proposed motion planning scheme can cope with uncertainties of DNN-based perception and vehicle motion, and improve the operational safety of autonomous vehicles while still achieving desirable efficiency.

Yueming Zhang, Xiaolin Song, Bing Bai et al.

In an autonomous driving system, it is essential to recognize vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists from images. Besides the high accuracy of the prediction, the requirement of real-time running brings new challenges for convolutional network models. In this report, we introduce a real-time method to detect the 2D objects from images. We aggregate several popular one-stage object detectors and train the models of variety input strategies independently, to yield better performance for accurate multi-scale detection of each category, especially for small objects. For model acceleration, we leverage TensorRT to optimize the inference time of our detection pipeline. As shown in the leaderboard, our proposed detection framework ranks the 2nd place with 75.00% L1 mAP and 69.72% L2 mAP in the real-time 2D detection track of the Waymo Open Dataset Challenges, while our framework achieves the latency of 45.8ms/frame on an Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU.

Bing Bai, Jianyao Huang, Guan-Ru Qiao et al.

Quantum random number generators (QRNGs) can produce true random numbers. Yet, the two most important QRNG parameters highly desired for practical applications, i.e., speed and size, have to be compromised during implementations. Here, we present the fastest and miniaturized QRNG with a record real-time output rate as high as 18.8 Gbps by combining a photonic integrated chip and the technology of optimized randomness extraction. We assemble the photonic integrated circuit designed for vacuum state QRNG implementation, InGaAs homodyne detector and high-bandwidth transimpedance amplifier into a single chip using hybrid packaging, which exhibits the excellent characteristics of integration and high-frequency response. With a sample rate of 2.5 GSa/s in a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter and subsequent paralleled postprocessing in a field programmable gate array, the QRNG outputs ultrafast random bitstreams via a fiber optic transceiver, whose real-time speed is validated in a personal computer.

Guanhua Zhang, Bing Bai, Jian Liang et al.

Recent studies show that crowd-sourced Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets may suffer from significant biases like annotation artifacts. Models utilizing these superficial clues gain mirage advantages on the in-domain testing set, which makes the evaluation results over-estimated. The lack of trustworthy evaluation settings and benchmarks stalls the progress of NLI research. In this paper, we propose to assess a model's trustworthy generalization performance with cross-datasets evaluation. We present a new unified cross-datasets benchmark with 14 NLI datasets, and re-evaluate 9 widely-used neural network-based NLI models as well as 5 recently proposed debiasing methods for annotation artifacts. Our proposed evaluation scheme and experimental baselines could provide a basis to inspire future reliable NLI research.

Jian Liang, Yuren Cao, Shuang Li et al.

Authentication is the task of confirming the matching relationship between a data instance and a given identity. Typical examples of authentication problems include face recognition and person re-identification. Data-driven authentication could be affected by undesired biases, i.e., the models are often trained in one domain (e.g., for people wearing spring outfits) while applied in other domains (e.g., they change the clothes to summer outfits). Previous works have made efforts to eliminate domain-difference. They typically assume domain annotations are provided, and all the domains share classes. However, for authentication, there could be a large number of domains shared by different identities/classes, and it is impossible to annotate these domains exhaustively. It could make domain-difference challenging to model and eliminate. In this paper, we propose a domain-agnostic method that eliminates domain-difference without domain labels. We alternately perform latent domain discovery and domain-difference elimination until our model no longer detects domain-difference. In our approach, the latent domains are discovered by learning the heterogeneous predictive relationships between inputs and outputs. Then domain-difference is eliminated in both class-dependent and class-independent spaces to improve robustness of elimination. We further extend our method to a meta-learning framework to pursue more thorough domain-difference elimination. Comprehensive empirical evaluation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method.

Chang Wang, Jian Liang, Mingkai Huang et al.

We present HDP-VFL, the first hybrid differentially private (DP) framework for vertical federated learning (VFL) to demonstrate that it is possible to jointly learn a generalized linear model (GLM) from vertically partitioned data with only a negligible cost, w.r.t. training time, accuracy, etc., comparing to idealized non-private VFL. Our work builds on the recent advances in VFL-based collaborative training among different organizations which rely on protocols like Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to secure computation and training. In particular, we analyze how VFL's intermediate result (IR) can leak private information of the training data during communication and design a DP-based privacy-preserving algorithm to ensure the data confidentiality of VFL participants. We mathematically prove that our algorithm not only provides utility guarantees for VFL, but also offers multi-level privacy, i.e. DP w.r.t. IR and joint differential privacy (JDP) w.r.t. model weights. Experimental results demonstrate that our work, under adequate privacy budgets, is quantitatively and qualitatively similar to GLMs, learned in idealized non-private VFL setting, rather than the increased cost in memory and processing time in most prior works based on HE or MPC. Our codes will be released if this paper is accepted.

Mingkai Huang, Hao Li, Bing Bai et al.

Privacy-preserving recommendations are recently gaining momentum, since the decentralized user data is increasingly harder to collect, by recommendation service providers, due to the serious concerns over user privacy and data security. This situation is further exacerbated by the strict government regulations such as Europe's General Data Privacy Regulations(GDPR). Federated Learning(FL) is a newly developed privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm to bridge data repositories without compromising data security and privacy. Thus many federated recommendation(FedRec) algorithms have been proposed to realize personalized privacy-preserving recommendations. However, existing FedRec algorithms, mostly extended from traditional collaborative filtering(CF) method, cannot address cold-start problem well. In addition, their performance overhead w.r.t. model accuracy, trained in a federated setting, is often non-negligible comparing to centralized recommendations. This paper studies this issue and presents FL-MV-DSSM, a generic content-based federated multi-view recommendation framework that not only addresses the cold-start problem, but also significantly boosts the recommendation performance by learning a federated model from multiple data source for capturing richer user-level features. The new federated multi-view setting, proposed by FL-MV-DSSM, opens new usage models and brings in new security challenges to FL in recommendation scenarios. We prove the security guarantees of \xxx, and empirical evaluations on FL-MV-DSSM and its variations with public datasets demonstrate its effectiveness. Our codes will be released if this paper is accepted.

Bing Bai, Jian Liang, Guanhua Zhang et al.

Attention-based methods have played important roles in model interpretations, where the calculated attention weights are expected to highlight the critical parts of inputs~(e.g., keywords in sentences). However, recent research found that attention-as-importance interpretations often do not work as we expected. For example, learned attention weights sometimes highlight less meaningful tokens like "[SEP]", ",", and ".", and are frequently uncorrelated with other feature importance indicators like gradient-based measures. A recent debate over whether attention is an explanation or not has drawn considerable interest. In this paper, we demonstrate that one root cause of this phenomenon is the combinatorial shortcuts, which means that, in addition to the highlighted parts, the attention weights themselves may carry extra information that could be utilized by downstream models after attention layers. As a result, the attention weights are no longer pure importance indicators. We theoretically analyze combinatorial shortcuts, design one intuitive experiment to show their existence, and propose two methods to mitigate this issue. We conduct empirical studies on attention-based interpretation models. The results show that the proposed methods can effectively improve the interpretability of attention mechanisms.

Junqi Zhang, Bing Bai, Ye Lin et al.

In this paper, we report our recent practice at Tencent for user modeling based on mobile app usage. User behaviors on mobile app usage, including retention, installation, and uninstallation, can be a good indicator for both long-term and short-term interests of users. For example, if a user installs Snapseed recently, she might have a growing interest in photographing. Such information is valuable for numerous downstream applications, including advertising, recommendations, etc. Traditionally, user modeling from mobile app usage heavily relies on handcrafted feature engineering, which requires onerous human work for different downstream applications, and could be sub-optimal without domain experts. However, automatic user modeling based on mobile app usage faces unique challenges, including (1) retention, installation, and uninstallation are heterogeneous but need to be modeled collectively, (2) user behaviors are distributed unevenly over time, and (3) many long-tailed apps suffer from serious sparsity. In this paper, we present a tailored AutoEncoder-coupled Transformer Network (AETN), by which we overcome these challenges and achieve the goals of reducing manual efforts and boosting performance. We have deployed the model at Tencent, and both online/offline experiments from multiple domains of downstream applications have demonstrated the effectiveness of the output user embeddings.

Guanhua Zhang, Bing Bai, Junqi Zhang et al.

With the recent proliferation of the use of text classifications, researchers have found that there are certain unintended biases in text classification datasets. For example, texts containing some demographic identity-terms (e.g., "gay", "black") are more likely to be abusive in existing abusive language detection datasets. As a result, models trained with these datasets may consider sentences like "She makes me happy to be gay" as abusive simply because of the word "gay." In this paper, we formalize the unintended biases in text classification datasets as a kind of selection bias from the non-discrimination distribution to the discrimination distribution. Based on this formalization, we further propose a model-agnostic debiasing training framework by recovering the non-discrimination distribution using instance weighting, which does not require any extra resources or annotations apart from a pre-defined set of demographic identity-terms. Experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively alleviate the impacts of the unintended biases without significantly hurting models' generalization ability.

Bing Bai, Guanhua Zhang, Ye Lin et al.

Nowadays, news apps have taken over the popularity of paper-based media, providing a great opportunity for personalization. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based sequential recommendation is a popular approach that utilizes users' recent browsing history to predict future items. This approach is limited that it does not consider the societal influences of news consumption, i.e., users may follow popular topics that are constantly changing, while certain hot topics might be spreading only among specific groups of people. Such societal impact is difficult to predict given only users' own reading histories. On the other hand, the traditional User-based Collaborative Filtering (UserCF) makes recommendations based on the interests of the "neighbors", which provides the possibility to supplement the weaknesses of RNN-based methods. However, conventional UserCF only uses a single similarity metric to model the relationships between users, which is too coarse-grained and thus limits the performance. In this paper, we propose a framework of deep neural networks to integrate the RNN-based sequential recommendations and the key ideas from UserCF, to develop Collaborative Sequential Recommendation Networks (CSRNs). Firstly, we build a directed co-reading network of users, to capture the fine-grained topic-specific similarities between users in a vector space. Then, the CSRN model encodes users with RNNs, and learns to attend to neighbors and summarize what news they are reading at the moment. Finally, news articles are recommended according to both the user's own state and the summarized state of the neighbors. Experiments on two public datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches significantly.

Christopher Malon, Bing Bai

We propose a framework for answering open domain multi-hop questions in which partial information is read and used to generate followup questions, to finally be answered by a pretrained single-hop answer extractor. This framework makes each hop interpretable, and makes the retrieval associated with later hops as flexible and specific as for the first hop. As a first instantiation of this framework, we train a pointer-generator network to predict followup questions based on the question and partial information. This provides a novel application of a neural question generation network, which is applied to give weak ground truth single-hop followup questions based on the final answers and their supporting facts. Learning to generate followup questions that select the relevant answer spans against downstream supporting facts, while avoiding distracting premises, poses an exciting semantic challenge for text generation. We present an evaluation using the two-hop bridge questions of HotpotQA.

Guanhua Zhang, Bing Bai, Junqi Zhang et al.

Natural language inference (NLI) aims at predicting the relationship between a given pair of premise and hypothesis. However, several works have found that there widely exists a bias pattern called annotation artifacts in NLI datasets, making it possible to identify the label only by looking at the hypothesis. This irregularity makes the evaluation results over-estimated and affects models' generalization ability. In this paper, we consider a more trust-worthy setting, i.e., cross-dataset evaluation. We explore the impacts of annotation artifacts in cross-dataset testing. Furthermore, we propose a training framework to mitigate the impacts of the bias pattern. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods can alleviate the negative effect of the artifacts and improve the generalization ability of models.

Guanhua Zhang, Bing Bai, Jian Liang et al.

Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) has gained substantial attention from both academics and the industry, and rich public datasets contribute a lot to this process. However, biased datasets can also hurt the generalization performance of trained models and give untrustworthy evaluation results. For many NLSM datasets, the providers select some pairs of sentences into the datasets, and this sampling procedure can easily bring unintended pattern, i.e., selection bias. One example is the QuoraQP dataset, where some content-independent naive features are unreasonably predictive. Such features are the reflection of the selection bias and termed as the leakage features. In this paper, we investigate the problem of selection bias on six NLSM datasets and find that four out of them are significantly biased. We further propose a training and evaluation framework to alleviate the bias. Experimental results on QuoraQP suggest that the proposed framework can improve the generalization ability of trained models, and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions.