Xi Zhu

Fake Lin, Binbin Hu, Xi Zhu et al.

Code Agents have achieved remarkable advances in recent years, exhibiting strong capabilities across a wide range of software engineering tasks. However, their misuse often produces bloated and disorganized code that impairing readability, extensibility, and robustness. Despite this risk, existing benchmarks largely evaluate functional correctness rather than long-term maintainability of code agents. In this paper, we propose SmellBench, an extensible code refactoring benchmark that proactively injects code smells into clean code snippets from real-world repositories. This design enables the generation of controlled, high-quality, and diverse refactoring cases with human-written ground truth. Specifically, it contains 294 cases spanning 7 popular smell types, 3 difficulty levels, 2 instruction settings across 7 real-world repositories. We further design 3 evaluation aspects covering functional correctness, localization ability, and refactoring quality assessment. Experiments with 2 popular agents and 6 large langauge models (LLMs) show that the best combination - Qwen Code + Claude Sonnet 4.5 - achieved only a 50.34 score of smell elimination. Further analysis reveals that this gap arises from a focus on local code smells and a lack of cross-file understanding, which hinders comprehensive smell elimination.

Xi Zhu, Xiya Cao, Zhiwei Dong et al.

Vision-centric Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation is essential for autonomous driving systems (ADS). Multi-frame temporal fusion which leverages historical information has been demonstrated to provide more comprehensive perception results. While most research focuses on ego-centric maps of fixed settings, long-range local map generation remains less explored. This work outlines a new paradigm, named NeMO, for generating local maps through the utilization of a readable and writable big map, a learning-based fusion module, and an interaction mechanism between the two. With an assumption that the feature distribution of all BEV grids follows an identical pattern, we adopt a shared-weight neural network for all grids to update the big map. This paradigm supports the fusion of longer time series and the generation of long-range BEV local maps. Furthermore, we release BDD-Map, a BDD100K-based dataset incorporating map element annotations, including lane lines, boundaries, and pedestrian crossing. Experiments on the NuScenes and BDD-Map datasets demonstrate that NeMO outperforms state-of-the-art map segmentation methods. We also provide a new scene-level BEV map evaluation setting along with the corresponding baseline for a more comprehensive comparison.

Xi Zhu, Likang Wang, Caifa Zhou et al.

The perception module of self-driving vehicles relies on a multi-sensor system to understand its environment. Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the rapid development of approaches that integrate multi-sensory measurements to enhance perception capabilities. This paper surveys the latest deep learning integration techniques applied to the perception module in autonomous driving systems, categorizing integration approaches based on "what, how, and when to integrate". A new taxonomy of integration is proposed, based on three dimensions: multi-view, multi-modality, and multi-frame. The integration operations and their pros and cons are summarized, providing new insights into the properties of an "ideal" data integration approach that can alleviate the limitations of existing methods. After reviewing hundreds of relevant papers, this survey concludes with a discussion of the key features of an optimal data integration approach.

Xi Zhu, Ziqi Wang, Kai Mei et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external evidence, but it also introduces knowledge conflicts when retrieved contextual knowledge (CK) and parametric knowledge (PK) disagree or are both unreliable. Existing approaches mainly coordinate which source to use, without explicitly asking whether each answer path is correct. We argue that faithful RAG requires LLM self-awareness, namely the ability to recognize the limits of its own knowledge and reasoning. To ground this problem, we construct a model-specific, ground-truth-aligned knowledge-conflict benchmark by evaluating LLM backbones on PK-only and CK-conditioned answer paths over approximately 69K query-context instances per backbone, drawn from five conflict-QA datasets. We then introduce SABER, a Self-Aware Belief Estimator for RAG that requires no LLM fine-tuning. SABER combines a self-prior with PK-side and CK-side conditional reasoning representations from multi-trace inference, then estimates reliability beliefs with two lightweight predictors to drive a 4-cell decision over trust PK, trust CK, trust either, or abstain. Across four LLM backbones, SABER improves end-to-end accuracy and conflict-specific faithfulness over ten inference-time and fine-tuning baselines, with the largest gains on conflict-heavy datasets. Under abstention, SABER's risk-coverage curve Pareto-dominates every prompt-based abstainer, providing a tunable balance between coverage and answer risk. Our code is available at https://github.com/xizhu1022/SABER.

Xi Zhu, Wei Zhang, Yijie Li et al.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is an advanced imaging technique characterizing tissue microstructure and white matter structural connectivity of the human brain. The demand for high-quality dMRI data is growing, driven by the need for better resolution and improved tissue contrast. However, acquiring high-quality dMRI data is expensive and time-consuming. In this context, deep generative modeling emerges as a promising solution to enhance image quality while minimizing acquisition costs and scanning time. In this study, we propose a novel generative approach to perform dMRI generation using deep diffusion models. It can generate high dimension (4D) and high resolution data preserving the gradients information and brain structure. We demonstrated our method through an image mapping task aimed at enhancing the quality of dMRI images from 3T to 7T. Our approach demonstrates highly enhanced performance in generating dMRI images when compared to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. This achievement underscores a substantial progression in enhancing dMRI quality, highlighting the potential of our novel generative approach to revolutionize dMRI imaging standards.

Yijie Li, Xi Zhu, Junyi Wang et al.

Diffusion MRI tractography enables in vivo reconstruction of white matter (WM) pathways. Two key tasks in tractography analysis include: 1) tractogram registration that aligns streamlines across individuals, and 2) streamline clustering that groups streamlines into compact fiber bundles. Although both tasks share the goal of capturing geometrically similar structures to characterize consistent WM organization, they are typically performed independently. In this work, we propose TractoRC, a unified probabilistic framework that jointly performs tractogram registration and streamline clustering within a single optimization scheme, enabling the two tasks to leverage complementary information. TractoRC learns a latent embedding space for streamline points, which serves as a shared representation for both tasks. Within this space, both tasks are formulated as probabilistic inference over structural representations: registration learns the distribution of anatomical landmarks as probabilistic keypoints to align tractograms across subjects, and clustering learns streamline structural prototypes that capture geometric similarity to form coherent streamline clusters. To support effective learning of this shared space, we introduce a transformation-equivariant self-supervised strategy to learn geometry-aware and transformation-invariant embeddings. Experiments demonstrate that jointly optimizing registration and clustering significantly improves performance in both tasks over state-of-the-art methods that treat them independently. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yishengpoxiao/TractoRC .

Jiahe Liu, Qinkai Yu, Jingcheng Niu et al.

Despite the success of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in grounding LLMs with external knowledge, its application over heterogeneous sources (e.g., private databases, global corpora, and APIs) remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches typically employ an LLM-as-a-Router to dispatch decomposed sub-queries to specific sources in a predictive manner. However, this "LLM-as-a-Router" strategy relies heavily on the semantic meaning of different data sources, often leading to routing errors when source boundaries are ambiguous. In this work, we introduce RealRoute System, a framework that shifts the paradigm from predictive routing to a robust Retrieve-then-Verify mechanism. RealRoute ensures \textit{evidence completeness through parallel, source-agnostic retrieval, followed by a dynamic verifier that cross-checks the results and synthesizes a factually grounded answer}. Our demonstration allows users to visualize the real-time "re-routing" process and inspect the verification chain across multiple knowledge silos. Experiments show that RealRoute significantly outperforms predictive baselines in the multi-hop Rag reasoning task. The RealRoute system is released as an open-source toolkit with a user-friendly web interface. The code is available at the URL: https://github.com/Joseph1951210/RealRoute.

Kai Mei, Xi Zhu, Wujiang Xu et al.

LLM-based intelligent agents face significant deployment challenges, particularly related to resource management. Allowing unrestricted access to LLM or tool resources can lead to inefficient or even potentially harmful resource allocation and utilization for agents. Furthermore, the absence of proper scheduling and resource management mechanisms in current agent designs hinders concurrent processing and limits overall system efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the architecture of AIOS (LLM-based AI Agent Operating System) under the context of managing LLM-based agents. It introduces a novel architecture for serving LLM-based agents by isolating resources and LLM-specific services from agent applications into an AIOS kernel. This AIOS kernel provides fundamental services (e.g., scheduling, context management, memory management, storage management, access control) for runtime agents. To enhance usability, AIOS also includes an AIOS SDK, a comprehensive suite of APIs designed for utilizing functionalities provided by the AIOS kernel. Experimental results demonstrate that using AIOS can achieve up to 2.1x faster execution for serving agents built by various agent frameworks. The source code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

Wujiang Xu, Jiaojiao Han, Minghao Guo et al.

LLM agents increasingly operate in open-ended environments spanning hundreds of sequential episodes, yet they remain largely stateless: each task is solved from scratch without converting past experience into better future behavior. The central obstacle is not \emph{what} to remember but \emph{how to use} what has been remembered, including which retrieval policy to apply, how to interpret prior outcomes, and when the current strategy itself must change. We introduce \emph{Agent Evolving Learning} (\ael{}), a two-timescale framework that addresses this obstacle. At the fast timescale, a Thompson Sampling bandit learns which memory retrieval policy to apply at each episode; at the slow timescale, LLM-driven reflection diagnoses failure patterns and injects causal insights into the agent's decision prompt, giving it an interpretive frame for the evidence it retrieves. On a sequential portfolio benchmark (10 sector-diverse tickers, 208 episodes, 5 random seeds), \ael{} achieves a Sharpe ratio of 2.13$\pm$0.47, outperforming five published self-improving methods and all non-LLM baselines while maintaining the lowest variance among all LLM-based approaches. A nine-variant ablation reveals a ``less is more'' pattern: memory and reflection together produce a 58\% cumulative improvement over the stateless baseline, yet every additional mechanism we test (planner evolution, per-tool selection, cold-start initialization, skill extraction, and three credit assignment methods) \emph{degrades} performance. This demonstrates that the bottleneck in agent self-improvement is \emph{self-diagnosing how to use} experience rather than adding architectural complexity. Code and data: https://github.com/WujiangXu/AEL.

Xi Zhu, Haochen Xue, Ziwei Zhao et al.

Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), where each node is associated with text descriptions, are ubiquitous in real-world scenarios. They typically exhibit distinctive structure and domain-specific knowledge, motivating the development of a Graph Foundation Model (GFM) that generalizes across diverse graphs and tasks. Despite large efforts to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for TAGs, existing approaches suffer from decoupled architectures with two-stage alignment, limiting their synergistic potential. Even worse, existing methods assign out-of-vocabulary (OOV) tokens to graph nodes, leading to graph-specific semantics, token explosion, and incompatibility with task-oriented prompt templates, which hinders cross-graph and cross-task transferability. To address these challenges, we propose PromptGFM, a versatile GFM for TAGs grounded in graph vocabulary learning. PromptGFM comprises two key components: (1) Graph Understanding Module, which explicitly prompts LLMs to replicate the finest GNN workflow within the text space, facilitating seamless GNN-LLM integration and elegant graph-text alignment; (2) Graph Inference Module, which establishes a language-based graph vocabulary ensuring expressiveness, transferability, and scalability, enabling readable instructions for LLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superiority and transferability across diverse graphs and tasks. The code is available at this: https://github.com/agiresearch/PromptGFM.

Ziqi Wang, Xi Zhu, Shuhang Lin et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has evolved into a family of paradigms with distinct performance profiles and resource demands, turning paradigm selection into a multi-criteria, context-dependent decision problem. Nevertheless, existing studies largely focus on isolated method improvements or query-only benchmarking, without systematically examining how RAG paradigms behave across diverse query-corpus contexts and effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. In this work, we introduce RAGRouter-Bench, the first dataset and benchmark for adaptive RAG routing. Grounded in query-corpus compatibility, the benchmark integrates three canonical query types, fine-grained corpus indicators capturing structural and semantic properties, and a unified protocol for evaluating both generation quality and resource consumption. Then, we implement standardized RAG paradigms with multiple backbone LLMs across all query-corpus combinations, constructing a comprehensive benchmark with quantitative metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations to inform context-aware and cost-effective RAG routing decisions. We further formulate routing as context-dependent paradigm selection and benchmark a range of query-corpus routers on the constructed dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that no one-size-fits-all paradigm exists across query-corpus pairs, and that adaptive routing yields more favorable effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs than fixed paradigm selection. These findings establish query-corpus compatibility as a central principle for adaptive RAG routing and position RAGRouter-Bench as a systematic testbed for next-generation RAG systems.

Linfeng Shi, Yan Li, Xi Zhu

As the rapid development of depth learning, object detection in aviatic remote sensing images has become increasingly popular in recent years. Most of the current Anchor Free detectors based on key point detection sampling directly regression and classification features, with the design of object loss function based on the horizontal bounding box. It is more challenging for complex and diverse aviatic remote sensing object. In this paper, we propose an Anchor Free aviatic remote sensing object detector (BWP-Det) to detect rotating and multi-scale object. Specifically, we design a interactive double-branch(IDB) up-sampling network, in which one branch gradually up-sampling is used for the prediction of Heatmap, and the other branch is used for the regression of boundary box parameters. We improve a weighted multi-scale convolution (WmConv) in order to highlight the difference between foreground and background. We extracted Pixel level attention features from the middle layer to guide the two branches to pay attention to effective object information in the sampling process. Finally, referring to the calculation idea of horizontal IoU, we design a rotating IoU based on the split polar coordinate plane, namely JIoU, which is expressed as the intersection ratio following discretization of the inner ellipse of the rotating bounding box, to solve the correlation between angle and side length in the regression process of the rotating bounding box. Ultimately, BWP-Det, our experiments on DOTA, UCAS-AOD and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show, achieves advanced performance with simpler models and fewer regression parameters.

Shuhang Lin, Zhencan Peng, Lingyao Li et al.

Recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have been propelled by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which grants the models access to vast external knowledge bases. Despite RAG's success in improving agent performance, agent-level cache management, particularly constructing, maintaining, and updating a compact, relevant corpus dynamically tailored to each agent's need, remains underexplored. Therefore, we introduce ARC (Agent RAG Cache Mechanism), a novel, annotation-free caching framework that dynamically manages small, high-value corpora for each agent. By synthesizing historical query distribution patterns with the intrinsic geometry of cached items in the embedding space, ARC automatically maintains a high-relevance cache. With comprehensive experiments on three retrieval datasets, our experimental results demonstrate that ARC reduces storage requirements to 0.015% of the original corpus while offering up to 79.8% has-answer rate and reducing average retrieval latency by 80%. Our results demonstrate that ARC can drastically enhance efficiency and effectiveness in RAG-powered LLM agents.

Minghao Guo, Ziyi Ye, Wujiang Xu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable human-like capabilities, yet their ability to replicate a specific individual remains under-explored. This paper presents a case study to investigate LLM-based individual simulation with a volunteer-contributed archive of private messaging history spanning over ten years. Based on the messaging data, we propose the "Individual Turing Test" to evaluate whether acquaintances of the volunteer can correctly identify which response in a multi-candidate pool most plausibly comes from the volunteer. We investigate prevalent LLM-based individual simulation approaches including: fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory-based approach, and hybrid methods that integrate fine-tuning and RAG or memory. Empirical results show that current LLM-based simulation methods do not pass the Individual Turing Test, but they perform substantially better when the same test is conducted on strangers to the target individual. Additionally, while fine-tuning improves the simulation in daily chats representing the language style of the individual, retrieval-augmented and memory-based approaches demonstrate stronger performance on questions involving personal opinions and preferences. These findings reveal a fundamental trade-off between parametric and non-parametric approaches to individual simulation with LLMs when given a longitudinal context.

Shanyong Wang, Shuhang Lin, Yining Zhao et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the alignment of models with general human preferences. However, a major challenge remains in adapting LLMs to individual preferences, which are not only diverse but also dynamic. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, Preference-Paired Fine-Tuning (PFT), designed to align models with contradictory and evolving individual preferences. We present a new dataset, Value Conflict Dilemma (VCD), which includes scenarios that involve conflicting human preferences, facilitating the evaluation of our approach. Our experiments demonstrate that PFT outperforms single-preference training methods, achieving up to 96.6% accuracy in multi-choice classification tasks and the highest open-ended generation score of 8.69. PFT also shows significant improvements over DPO, SFT and some traditional training methods, especially when handling conflicting preferences. Additionally, with limited user history data, models can inferring preference vector rapidly, achieving a 44.76% improvement in user-specific preference alignment in comparison to single-preference models.

Jingyuan Huang, Xi Zhu, Minghao Guo et al.

Web 2.0 social platforms are inherently centralized, with user data and algorithmic decisions controlled by the platform. However, users can only passively receive social predictions without being able to choose the underlying algorithm, which limits personalization. Fortunately, with the emergence of blockchain, users are allowed to choose algorithms that are tailored to their local situation, improving prediction results in a personalized way. In a blockchain environment, each user possesses its own model to perform the social prediction, capturing different perspectives on social interactions. In our work, we propose DeSocial, a decentralized social network learning framework deployed on an Ethereum (ETH) local development chain that integrates distributed data storage, node-level consensus, and user-driven model selection through Ganache. In the first stage, each user leverages DeSocial to evaluate multiple backbone models on their local subgraph. DeSocial coordinates the execution and returns model-wise prediction results, enabling the user to select the most suitable backbone for personalized social prediction. Then, DeSocial uniformly selects several validation nodes that possess the algorithm specified by each user, and aggregates the prediction results by majority voting, to prevent errors caused by any single model's misjudgment. Extensive experiments show that DeSocial has an evident improvement compared to the five classical centralized social network learning models, promoting user empowerment in blockchain-based decentralized social networks, showing the importance of multi-node validation and personalized algorithm selection based on blockchain. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/agiresearch/DeSocial.

Xinyuan Zheng, Orren Ravid, Robert A. J. Barry et al.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are developmental conditions characterized by restricted interests and difficulties in communication. The complexity of ASD has resulted in a deficiency of objective diagnostic biomarkers. Deep learning methods have gained recognition for addressing these challenges in neuroimaging analysis, but finding and interpreting such diagnostic biomarkers are still challenging computationally. Here, we propose a feature reduction pipeline using resting-state fMRI data. We used Craddock atlas and Power atlas to extract functional connectivity data from rs-fMRI, resulting in over 30 thousand features. By using a denoising variational autoencoder, our proposed pipeline further compresses the connectivity features into 5 latent Gaussian distributions, providing is a low-dimensional representation of the data to promote computational efficiency and interpretability. To test the method, we employed the extracted latent representations to classify ASD using traditional classifiers such as SVM on a large multi-site dataset. The 95% confidence interval for the prediction accuracy of SVM is [0.63, 0.76] after site harmonization using the extracted latent distributions. Without using DVAE for dimensionality reduction, the prediction accuracy is 0.70, which falls within the interval. The DVAE successfully encoded the diagnostic information from rs-fMRI data without sacrificing prediction performance. The runtime for training the DVAE and obtaining classification results from its extracted latent features was 7 times shorter compared to training classifiers directly on the raw data. Our findings suggest that the Power atlas provides more effective brain connectivity insights for diagnosing ASD than Craddock atlas. Additionally, we visualized the latent representations to gain insights into the brain networks contributing to the differences between ASD and neurotypical brains.

Yijie Li, Wei Zhang, Xi Zhu et al.

This paper presents DDTracking, a novel deep generative framework for diffusion MRI tractography that formulates streamline propagation as a conditional denoising diffusion process. In DDTracking, we introduce a dual-pathway encoding network that jointly models local spatial encoding (capturing fine-scale structural details at each streamline point) and global temporal dependencies (ensuring long-range consistency across the entire streamline). Furthermore, we design a conditional diffusion model module, which leverages the learned local and global embeddings to predict streamline propagation orientations for tractography in an end-to-end trainable manner. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across diverse, independently acquired dMRI datasets, including both synthetic and clinical data. Experiments on two well-established benchmarks with ground truth (ISMRM Challenge and TractoInferno) demonstrate that DDTracking largely outperforms current state-of-the-art tractography methods. Furthermore, our results highlight DDTracking's strong generalizability across heterogeneous datasets, spanning varying health conditions, age groups, imaging protocols, and scanner types. Collectively, DDTracking offers anatomically plausible and robust tractography, presenting a scalable, adaptable, and end-to-end learnable solution for broad dMRI applications. Code is available at: https://github.com/yishengpoxiao/DDtracking.git

Ruixi Zheng, Wei Zhang, Yijie Li et al.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is currently the only method for in vivo mapping of the brain's white matter (WM) connections. Tractometry is an advanced tractography analysis technique for along-tract profiling to investigate the morphology and microstructural properties along the fiber tracts. Tractometry has become an essential tool for studying local along-tract differences between different populations (e.g., health vs disease). In this study, we propose a novel atlas-guided fine-scale tractometry method, namely AGFS-Tractometry, that leverages tract spatial information and permutation testing to enhance the along-tract statistical analysis between populations. There are two major contributions in AGFS-Tractometry. First, we create a novel atlas-guided tract profiling template that enables consistent, fine-scale, along-tract parcellation of subject-specific fiber tracts. Second, we propose a novel nonparametric permutation testing group comparison method to enable simultaneous analysis across all along-tract parcels while correcting for multiple comparisons. We perform experimental evaluations on synthetic datasets with known group differences and in vivo real data. We compare AGFS-Tractometry with two state-of-the-art tractometry methods, including Automated Fiber-tract Quantification (AFQ) and BUndle ANalytics (BUAN). Our results show that the proposed AGFS-Tractometry obtains enhanced sensitivity and specificity in detecting local WM differences. In the real data analysis experiments, AGFS-Tractometry can identify more regions with significant differences, which are anatomically consistent with the existing literature. Overall, these demonstrate the ability of AGFS-Tractometry to detect subtle or spatially localized WM group-level differences. The created tract profiling template and related code are available at: https://github.com/ZhengRuixi/AGFS-Tractometry.git.

Kai Wei, Raymond Li, Xi Zhu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a foundational paradigm for grounding large language models in external knowledge. While adaptive retrieval mechanisms have improved retrieval efficiency, existing approaches treat post-retrieval failure as a signal to retry rather than to diagnose -- leaving the structural causes of query-evidence misalignment unaddressed. We observe that a significant portion of persistent retrieval failures stem not from the absence of relevant evidence but from an alignment gap between the query and the evidence space. We propose Skill-RAG, a failure-aware RAG framework that couples a lightweight hidden-state prober with a prompt-based skill router. The prober gates retrieval at two pipeline stages; upon detecting a failure state, the skill router diagnoses the underlying cause and selects among four retrieval skills -- query rewriting, question decomposition, evidence focusing, and an exit skill for truly irreducible cases -- to correct misalignment before the next generation attempt. Experiments across multiple open-domain QA and complex reasoning benchmarks show that Skill-RAG substantially improves accuracy on hard cases persisting after multi-turn retrieval, with particularly strong gains on out-of-distribution datasets. Representation-space analyses further reveal that the proposed skills occupy structured, separable regions of the failure state space, supporting the view that query-evidence misalignment is a typed rather than monolithic phenomenon.

Yucheng Li, Xiaofan Wang, Junyi Wang et al.

Whole-brain parcellation from MRI is a critical yet challenging task due to the complexity of subdividing the brain into numerous small, irregular shaped regions. Traditionally, template-registration methods were used, but recent advances have shifted to deep learning for faster workflows. While large models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offer transferable feature representations, they are not tailored for the high precision required in brain parcellation. To address this, we propose BrainSegNet, a novel framework that adapts SAM for accurate whole-brain parcellation into 95 regions. We enhance SAM by integrating U-Net skip connections and specialized modules into its encoder and decoder, enabling fine-grained anatomical precision. Key components include a hybrid encoder combining U-Net skip connections with SAM's transformer blocks, a multi-scale attention decoder with pyramid pooling for varying-sized structures, and a boundary refinement module to sharpen edges. Experimental results on the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset demonstrate that BrainSegNet outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher accuracy and robustness in complex, multi-label parcellation.

Yinghao Zhu, Changyu Ren, Shiyun Xie et al.

The integration of multimodal Electronic Health Records (EHR) data has significantly improved clinical predictive capabilities. Leveraging clinical notes and multivariate time-series EHR, existing models often lack the medical context relevent to clinical tasks, prompting the incorporation of external knowledge, particularly from the knowledge graph (KG). Previous approaches with KG knowledge have primarily focused on structured knowledge extraction, neglecting unstructured data modalities and semantic high dimensional medical knowledge. In response, we propose REALM, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) driven framework to enhance multimodal EHR representations that address these limitations. Firstly, we apply Large Language Model (LLM) to encode long context clinical notes and GRU model to encode time-series EHR data. Secondly, we prompt LLM to extract task-relevant medical entities and match entities in professionally labeled external knowledge graph (PrimeKG) with corresponding medical knowledge. By matching and aligning with clinical standards, our framework eliminates hallucinations and ensures consistency. Lastly, we propose an adaptive multimodal fusion network to integrate extracted knowledge with multimodal EHR data. Our extensive experiments on MIMIC-III mortality and readmission tasks showcase the superior performance of our REALM framework over baselines, emphasizing the effectiveness of each module. REALM framework contributes to refining the use of multimodal EHR data in healthcare and bridging the gap with nuanced medical context essential for informed clinical predictions.

Ziwei Zhao, Fake Lin, Xi Zhu et al.

Last year has witnessed the considerable interest of Large Language Models (LLMs) for their potential applications in recommender systems, which may mitigate the persistent issue of data sparsity. Though large efforts have been made for user-item graph augmentation with better graph-based recommendation performance, they may fail to deal with the dynamic graph recommendation task, which involves both structural and temporal graph dynamics with inherent complexity in processing time-evolving data. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel framework, called DynLLM, to deal with the dynamic graph recommendation task with LLMs. Specifically, DynLLM harnesses the power of LLMs to generate multi-faceted user profiles based on the rich textual features of historical purchase records, including crowd segments, personal interests, preferred categories, and favored brands, which in turn supplement and enrich the underlying relationships between users and items. Along this line, to fuse the multi-faceted profiles with temporal graph embedding, we engage LLMs to derive corresponding profile embeddings, and further employ a distilled attention mechanism to refine the LLM-generated profile embeddings for alleviating noisy signals, while also assessing and adjusting the relevance of each distilled facet embedding for seamless integration with temporal graph embedding from continuous time dynamic graphs (CTDGs). Extensive experiments on two real e-commerce datasets have validated the superior improvements of DynLLM over a wide range of state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Zhiwei Dong, Xi Zhu, Xiya Cao et al.

Lane detection has made significant progress in recent years, but there is not a unified architecture for its two sub-tasks: 2D lane detection and 3D lane detection. To fill this gap, we introduce BézierFormer, a unified 2D and 3D lane detection architecture based on Bézier curve lane representation. BézierFormer formulate queries as Bézier control points and incorporate a novel Bézier curve attention mechanism. This attention mechanism enables comprehensive and accurate feature extraction for slender lane curves via sampling and fusing multiple reference points on each curve. In addition, we propose a novel Chamfer IoU-based loss which is more suitable for the Bézier control points regression. The state-of-the-art performance of BézierFormer on widely-used 2D and 3D lane detection benchmarks verifies its effectiveness and suggests the worthiness of further exploration.

Minghao Guo, Xi Zhu, Haochen Xue et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in graph-based learning by propagating information among neighbor nodes via predefined aggregation mechanisms. However, such fixed schemes often suffer from two key limitations. First, they cannot handle the imbalance in node informativeness -- some nodes are rich in information, while others remain sparse. Second, predefined message passing primarily leverages local structural similarity while ignoring global semantic relationships across the graph, limiting the model's ability to capture distant but relevant information. We propose Retrieval-augmented Graph Agentic Network (ReaGAN), an agent-based framework that empowers each node with autonomous, node-level decision-making. Each node acts as an agent that independently plans its next action based on its internal memory, enabling node-level planning and adaptive message propagation. Additionally, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows nodes to access semantically relevant content and build global relationships in the graph. ReaGAN achieves competitive performance under few-shot in-context settings using a frozen LLM backbone without fine-tuning, showcasing the potential of agentic planning and local-global retrieval in graph learning.

Wujiang Xu, Yunxiao Shi, Zujie Liang et al.

Traditional recommender systems usually take the user-platform paradigm, where users are directly exposed under the control of the platform's recommendation algorithms. However, the defect of recommendation algorithms may put users in very vulnerable positions under this paradigm. First, many sophisticated models are often designed with commercial objectives in mind, focusing on the platform's benefits, which may hinder their ability to protect and capture users' true interests. Second, these models are typically optimized using data from all users, which may overlook individual user's preferences. Due to these shortcomings, users may experience several disadvantages under the traditional user-platform direct exposure paradigm, such as lack of control over the recommender system, potential manipulation by the platform, echo chamber effects, or lack of personalization for less active users due to the dominance of active users during collaborative learning. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a new paradigm to protect user interests and alleviate these issues. Recently, some researchers have introduced LLM agents to simulate user behaviors, these approaches primarily aim to optimize platform-side performance, leaving core issues in recommender systems unresolved. To address these limitations, we propose a new user-agent-platform paradigm, where agent serves as the protective shield between user and recommender system that enables indirect exposure.

Kai Mei, Xi Zhu, Hang Gao et al.

We present AIOS 1.0, a novel platform designed to advance computer-use agent (CUA) capabilities through environmental contextualization. While existing approaches primarily focus on building more powerful agent frameworks or enhancing agent models, we identify a fundamental limitation: the semantic disconnect between how language models understand the world and how computer interfaces are structured. AIOS 1.0 addresses this challenge by transforming computers into contextual environments that language models can natively comprehend, implementing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server architecture to abstract computer states and actions. This approach effectively decouples interface complexity from decision complexity, enabling agents to reason more effectively about computing environments. To demonstrate our platform's effectiveness, we introduce LiteCUA, a lightweight computer-use agent built on AIOS 1.0 that achieves a 14.66% success rate on the OSWorld benchmark, outperforming several specialized agent frameworks despite its simple architecture. Our results suggest that contextualizing computer environments for language models represents a promising direction for developing more capable computer-use agents and advancing toward AI that can interact with digital systems.

Fake Lin, Xi Zhu, Ziwei Zhao et al.

Recent years have witnessed the prosperity of knowledge graph based recommendation system (KGRS), which enriches the representation of users, items, and entities by structural knowledge with striking improvement. Nevertheless, its unaffordable computational cost still limits researchers from exploring more sophisticated models. We observe that the bottleneck for training efficiency arises from the knowledge graph, which is plagued by the well-known issue of knowledge explosion. Recently, some works have attempted to slim the inflated KG via summarization techniques. However, these summarized nodes may ignore the collaborative signals and deviate from the facts that nodes in knowledge graph represent symbolic abstractions of entities from the real-world. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel approach called KGTrimmer for knowledge graph pruning tailored for recommendation, to remove the unessential nodes while minimizing performance degradation. Specifically, we design an importance evaluator from a dual-view perspective. For the collective view, we embrace the idea of collective intelligence by extracting community consensus based on abundant collaborative signals, i.e. nodes are considered important if they attract attention of numerous users. For the holistic view, we learn a global mask to identify the valueless nodes from their inherent properties or overall popularity. Next, we build an end-to-end importance-aware graph neural network, which injects filtered knowledge to enhance the distillation of valuable user-item collaborative signals. Ultimately, we generate a pruned knowledge graph with lightweight, stable, and robust properties to facilitate the following-up recommendation task. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets to prove the effectiveness and generalization ability of KGTrimmer.

Bangde Du, Minghao Guo, Songming He et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are exhibiting emergent human-like abilities and are increasingly envisioned as the foundation for simulating an individual's communication style, behavioral tendencies, and personality traits. However, current evaluations of LLM-based persona simulation remain limited: most rely on synthetic dialogues, lack systematic frameworks, and lack analysis of the capability requirement. To address these limitations, we introduce TwinVoice, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing persona simulation across diverse real-world contexts. TwinVoice encompasses three dimensions: Social Persona (public social interactions), Interpersonal Persona (private dialogues), and Narrative Persona (role-based expression). It further decomposes the evaluation of LLM performance into six fundamental capabilities, including opinion consistency, memory recall, logical reasoning, lexical fidelity, persona tone, and syntactic style. Experimental results reveal that while advanced models achieve moderate accuracy in persona simulation, they still fall short of capabilities such as syntactic style and memory recall. Consequently, the average performance achieved by LLMs remains considerably below the human baseline.

Lasse Hansen, Wiebke Heyer, Christoph Großbröhmer et al.

Medical image registration is critical for clinical applications, and fair benchmarking of different methods is essential for monitoring ongoing progress. To date, the Learn2Reg 2020-2023 challenges have released several complementary datasets and established metrics for evaluations. However, these editions did not capture all aspects of the registration problem, particularly in terms of modality diversity and task complexity. To address these limitations, the 2024 edition introduces three new tasks, including large-scale multi-modal registration and unsupervised inter-subject brain registration, as well as the first microscopy-focused benchmark within Learn2Reg. The new datasets also inspired new method developments, including invertibility constraints, pyramid features, keypoints alignment and instance optimisation.

Junyi Wang, Xi Zhu, Yikun Guo et al.

We developed a pipeline for registering pre-surgery Magnetic Resonance (MR) images and post-resection Ultrasound (US) images. Our approach leverages unpaired style transfer using 3D CycleGAN to generate synthetic T1 images, thereby enhancing registration performance. Additionally, our registration process employs both affine and local deformable transformations for a coarse-to-fine registration. The results demonstrate that our approach improves the consistency between MR and US image pairs in most cases.

Fake Lin, Ziwei Zhao, Xi Zhu et al.

Last year has witnessed the re-flourishment of tag-aware recommender systems supported by the LLM-enriched tags. Unfortunately, though large efforts have been made, current solutions may fail to describe the diversity and uncertainty inherent in user preferences with only tag-driven profiles. Recently, with the development of geometry-based techniques, e.g., box embedding, diversity of user preferences now could be fully modeled as the range within a box in high dimension space. However, defect still exists as these approaches are incapable of capturing high-order neighbor signals, i.e., semantic-rich multi-hop relations within the user-tag-item tripartite graph, which severely limits the effectiveness of user modeling. To deal with this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, called BoxGNN, to perform the message aggregation via combination of logical operations, thereby incorporating high-order signals. Specifically, we first embed users, items, and tags as hyper-boxes rather than simple points in the representation space, and define two logical operations to facilitate the subsequent process. Next, we perform the message aggregation mechanism via the combination of logical operations, to obtain the corresponding high-order box representations. Finally, we adopt a volume-based learning objective with Gumbel smoothing techniques to refine the representation of boxes. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets and one LLM-enhanced e-commerce dataset have validated the superiority of BoxGNN compared with various state-of-the-art baselines. The code is released online

Haoxiang Lin, Shuqian Ye, Xi Zhu

The large variation of datasets is a huge barrier for image classification tasks. In this paper, we embraced this observation and introduce the finite temperature tensor network (FTTN), which imports the thermal perturbation into the matrix product states framework by placing all images in an environment with constant temperature, in analog to energy-based learning. Tensor network is chosen since it is the best platform to introduce thermal fluctuation. Different from traditional network structure which directly takes the summation of individual losses as its loss function, FTTN regards it as thermal average loss computed from the entanglement with the environment. The temperature-like parameter can be automatically optimized, which gives each database an individual temperature. FTTN obtains improvement in both test accuracy and convergence speed in several datasets. The non-zero temperature automatically separates similar features, avoiding the wrong classification in previous architecture. The thermal fluctuation may give a better improvement in other frameworks, and we may also implement the temperature of database to improve the training effect.

Xi Zhu, Zhendong Mao, Chunxiao Liu et al.

Most Visual Question Answering (VQA) models suffer from the language prior problem, which is caused by inherent data biases. Specifically, VQA models tend to answer questions (e.g., what color is the banana?) based on the high-frequency answers (e.g., yellow) ignoring image contents. Existing approaches tackle this problem by creating delicate models or introducing additional visual annotations to reduce question dependency while strengthening image dependency. However, they are still subject to the language prior problem since the data biases have not been even alleviated. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework to solve this problem. Concretely, we first automatically generate labeled data to balance the biased data, and propose a self-supervised auxiliary task to utilize the balanced data to assist the base VQA model to overcome language priors. Our method can compensate for the data biases by generating balanced data without introducing external annotations. Experimental results show that our method can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art, improving the overall accuracy from 49.50% to 57.59% on the most commonly used benchmark VQA-CP v2. In other words, we can increase the performance of annotation-based methods by 16% without using external annotations.

Xi Zhu, Mingbin Xu, Hui Jiang

In this paper, we present our method of using fixed-size ordinally forgetting encoding (FOFE) to solve the word sense disambiguation (WSD) problem. FOFE enables us to encode variable-length sequence of words into a theoretically unique fixed-size representation that can be fed into a feed forward neural network (FFNN), while keeping the positional information between words. In our method, a FOFE-based FFNN is used to train a pseudo language model over unlabelled corpus, then the pre-trained language model is capable of abstracting the surrounding context of polyseme instances in labelled corpus into context embeddings. Next, we take advantage of these context embeddings towards WSD classification. We conducted experiments on several WSD data sets, which demonstrates that our proposed method can achieve comparable performance to that of the state-of-the-art approach at the expense of much lower computational cost.

Junqing Qiu, Guoren Zhong, Yihua Lu et al.

We introduce a neural network (NN) strictly governed by Newton's Law, with the nature required basis functions derived from the fundamental classic mechanics. Then, by classifying the training model as a quick procedure of 'force pattern' recognition, we developed the Newton physics-based NS scheme. Once the force pattern is confirmed, the neuro network simply does the checking of the 'pattern stability' instead of the continuous fitting by computational resource consuming big data-driven processing. In the given physics's law system, once the field is confirmed, the mathematics bases for the force field description actually are not diverged but denumerable, which can save the function representations from the exhaustible available mathematics bases. In this work, we endorsed Newton's Law into the deep learning technology and proposed Newton Scheme (NS). Under NS, the user first identifies the path pattern, like the constant acceleration movement.The object recognition technology first loads mass information, then, the NS finds the matched physical pattern and describe and predict the trajectory of the movements with nearly zero error. We compare the major contribution of this NS with the TCN, GRU and other physics inspired 'FIND-PDE' methods to demonstrate fundamental and extended applications of how the NS works for the free-falling, pendulum and curve soccer balls.The NS methodology provides more opportunity for the future deep learning advances.