Bo Dong

Bo Dong, Pichao Wang, Fan Wang

Existing semantic segmentation works have been mainly focused on designing effective decoders; however, the computational load introduced by the overall structure has long been ignored, which hinders their applications on resource-constrained hardwares. In this paper, we propose a head-free lightweight architecture specifically for semantic segmentation, named Adaptive Frequency Transformer. It adopts a parallel architecture to leverage prototype representations as specific learnable local descriptions which replaces the decoder and preserves the rich image semantics on high-resolution features. Although removing the decoder compresses most of the computation, the accuracy of the parallel structure is still limited by low computational resources. Therefore, we employ heterogeneous operators (CNN and Vision Transformer) for pixel embedding and prototype representations to further save computational costs. Moreover, it is very difficult to linearize the complexity of the vision Transformer from the perspective of spatial domain. Due to the fact that semantic segmentation is very sensitive to frequency information, we construct a lightweight prototype learning block with adaptive frequency filter of complexity $O(n)$ to replace standard self attention with $O(n^{2})$. Extensive experiments on widely adopted datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior accuracy while retaining only 3M parameters. On the ADE20K dataset, our model achieves 41.8 mIoU and 4.6 GFLOPs, which is 4.4 mIoU higher than Segformer, with 45% less GFLOPs. On the Cityscapes dataset, our model achieves 78.7 mIoU and 34.4 GFLOPs, which is 2.5 mIoU higher than Segformer with 72.5% less GFLOPs. Code is available at https://github.com/dongbo811/AFFormer.

Haihao Shen, Hengyu Meng, Bo Dong et al. · mit

In recent years, Transformer-based language models have become the standard approach for natural language processing tasks. However, stringent throughput and latency requirements in industrial applications are limiting their adoption. To mitigate the gap, model compression techniques such as structured pruning are being used to improve inference efficiency. However, most existing neural network inference runtimes lack adequate support for structured sparsity. In this paper, we propose an efficient sparse deep learning inference software stack for Transformer-based language models where the weights are pruned with constant block size. Our sparse software accelerator leverages Intel Deep Learning Boost to maximize the performance of sparse matrix - dense matrix multiplication (commonly abbreviated as SpMM) on CPUs. Our SpMM kernel outperforms the existing sparse libraries (oneMKL, TVM, and LIBXSMM) by an order of magnitude on a wide range of GEMM shapes under 5 representative sparsity ratios (70%, 75%, 80%, 85%, 90%). Moreover, our SpMM kernel shows up to 5x speedup over dense GEMM kernel of oneDNN, a well-optimized dense library widely used in industry. We apply our sparse accelerator on widely-used Transformer-based language models including Bert-Mini, DistilBERT, Bert-Base, and BERT-Large. Our sparse inference software shows up to 1.5x speedup over Neural Magic's Deepsparse under same configurations on Xeon on Amazon Web Services under proxy production latency constraints. We also compare our solution with two framework-based inference solutions, ONNX Runtime and PyTorch, and demonstrate up to 37x speedup over ONNX Runtime and 345x over PyTorch on Xeon under the latency constraints. All the source code is publicly available on Github: https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-transformers.

Haihao Shen, Ofir Zafrir, Bo Dong et al. · mit

Transformer-based language models have become the standard approach to solving natural language processing tasks. However, industry adoption usually requires the maximum throughput to comply with certain latency constraints that prevents Transformer models from being used in production. To address this gap, model compression techniques such as quantization and pruning may be used to improve inference efficiency. However, these compression techniques require specialized software to apply and deploy at scale. In this work, we propose a new pipeline for creating and running Fast Transformer models on CPUs, utilizing hardware-aware pruning, knowledge distillation, quantization, and our own Transformer inference runtime engine with optimized kernels for sparse and quantized operators. We demonstrate the efficiency of our pipeline by creating a Fast DistilBERT model showing minimal accuracy loss on the question-answering SQuADv1.1 benchmark, and throughput results under typical production constraints and environments. Our results outperform existing state-of-the-art Neural Magic's DeepSparse runtime performance by up to 50% and up to 4.1x performance speedup over ONNX Runtime. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-transformers.

Jialiang Yin, Zheng Zhao, Linsey Pang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a range of applications involving graph-structured data, particularly in high-stakes domains. However, the opaque nature of their decision-making processes limits their trustworthiness and broader adoption. Existing post-hoc explanation methods aim to improve explainability by identifying subgraphs that influence GNN predictions and adopt mixup strategies to alleviate the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue caused by using subgraphs for prediction. Yet, these approaches typically rely on soft masks, which are inherently unable to fully eliminate label-irrelevant information, allowing redundant structures to leak into the mixup process and hindering the resolution of the OOD problem, thereby degrading explanation fidelity. In this work, we propose HPME, a Hard-Perturbation Mixup Explanation framework grounded in a generalized Graph Information Bottleneck, which leverages graph pooling to extract discrete explanatory subgraphs and to yield an information-capacity bound to thoroughly compress label-irrelevant components. Furthermore, we introduce a novel mixup strategy built upon structure-level replacement, generating in-distribution explanations to effectively mitigate the distribution shift. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks demonstrate that HPME achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating robust and interpretable explanations across both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Yuntao Shou, Huan Liu, Xiangyong Cao et al.

Conversational emotion recognition (CER) is an important research topic in human-computer interactions. {Although recent advancements in transformer-based cross-modal fusion methods have shown promise in CER tasks, they tend to overlook the crucial intra-modal and inter-modal emotional interaction or suffer from high computational complexity. To address this, we introduce a novel and lightweight cross-modal feature fusion method called Low-Rank Matching Attention Method (LMAM). LMAM effectively captures contextual emotional semantic information in conversations while mitigating the quadratic complexity issue caused by the self-attention mechanism. Specifically, by setting a matching weight and calculating inter-modal features attention scores row by row, LMAM requires only one-third of the parameters of self-attention methods. We also employ the low-rank decomposition method on the weights to further reduce the number of parameters in LMAM. As a result, LMAM offers a lightweight model while avoiding overfitting problems caused by a large number of parameters. Moreover, LMAM is able to fully exploit the intra-modal emotional contextual information within each modality and integrates complementary emotional semantic information across modalities by computing and fusing similarities of intra-modal and inter-modal features simultaneously. Experimental results verify the superiority of LMAM compared with other popular cross-modal fusion methods on the premise of being more lightweight. Also, LMAM can be embedded into any existing state-of-the-art CER methods in a plug-and-play manner, and can be applied to other multi-modal recognition tasks, e.g., session recommendation and humour detection, demonstrating its remarkable generalization ability.

Bo Dong, Jialun Pei, Rongrong Gao et al.

Due to the high similarity between camouflaged instances and the background, the recently proposed camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS) faces challenges in accurate localization and instance segmentation. To this end, inspired by query-based transformers, we propose a unified query-based multi-task learning framework for camouflaged instance segmentation, termed UQFormer, which builds a set of mask queries and a set of boundary queries to learn a shared composed query representation and efficiently integrates global camouflaged object region and boundary cues, for simultaneous instance segmentation and instance boundary detection in camouflaged scenarios. Specifically, we design a composed query learning paradigm that learns a shared representation to capture object region and boundary features by the cross-attention interaction of mask queries and boundary queries in the designed multi-scale unified learning transformer decoder. Then, we present a transformer-based multi-task learning framework for simultaneous camouflaged instance segmentation and camouflaged instance boundary detection based on the learned composed query representation, which also forces the model to learn a strong instance-level query representation. Notably, our model views the instance segmentation as a query-based direct set prediction problem, without other post-processing such as non-maximal suppression. Compared with 14 state-of-the-art approaches, our UQFormer significantly improves the performance of camouflaged instance segmentation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/dongbo811/UQFormer.

Haihao Shen, Hanwen Chang, Bo Dong et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance and tremendous potential across a wide range of tasks. However, deploying these models has been challenging due to the astronomical amount of model parameters, which requires a demand for large memory capacity and high memory bandwidth. In this paper, we propose an effective approach that can make the deployment of LLMs more efficiently. We support an automatic INT4 weight-only quantization flow and design a special LLM runtime with highly-optimized kernels to accelerate the LLM inference on CPUs. We demonstrate the general applicability of our approach on popular LLMs including Llama2, Llama, GPT-NeoX, and showcase the extreme inference efficiency on CPUs. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-transformers.

Ailin Huang, Chengyuan Yao, Chunrui Han et al.

We present STEP3-VL-10B, a lightweight open-source foundation model designed to redefine the trade-off between compact efficiency and frontier-level multimodal intelligence. STEP3-VL-10B is realized through two strategic shifts: first, a unified, fully unfrozen pre-training strategy on 1.2T multimodal tokens that integrates a language-aligned Perception Encoder with a Qwen3-8B decoder to establish intrinsic vision-language synergy; and second, a scaled post-training pipeline featuring over 1k iterations of reinforcement learning. Crucially, we implement Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) to scale test-time compute, allocating resources to scalable perceptual reasoning that explores and synthesizes diverse visual hypotheses. Consequently, despite its compact 10B footprint, STEP3-VL-10B rivals or surpasses models 10$\times$-20$\times$ larger (e.g., GLM-4.6V-106B, Qwen3-VL-235B) and top-tier proprietary flagships like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Seed-1.5-VL. Delivering best-in-class performance, it records 92.2% on MMBench and 80.11% on MMMU, while excelling in complex reasoning with 94.43% on AIME2025 and 75.95% on MathVision. We release the full model suite to provide the community with a powerful, efficient, and reproducible baseline.

Haiwei Zhang, Jiqing Zhang, Bo Dong et al.

We introduce a wearable single-eye emotion recognition device and a real-time approach to recognizing emotions from partial observations of an emotion that is robust to changes in lighting conditions. At the heart of our method is a bio-inspired event-based camera setup and a newly designed lightweight Spiking Eye Emotion Network (SEEN). Compared to conventional cameras, event-based cameras offer a higher dynamic range (up to 140 dB vs. 80 dB) and a higher temporal resolution. Thus, the captured events can encode rich temporal cues under challenging lighting conditions. However, these events lack texture information, posing problems in decoding temporal information effectively. SEEN tackles this issue from two different perspectives. First, we adopt convolutional spiking layers to take advantage of the spiking neural network's ability to decode pertinent temporal information. Second, SEEN learns to extract essential spatial cues from corresponding intensity frames and leverages a novel weight-copy scheme to convey spatial attention to the convolutional spiking layers during training and inference. We extensively validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a specially collected Single-eye Event-based Emotion (SEE) dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first eye-based emotion recognition method that leverages event-based cameras and spiking neural network.

Bo Dong

We develop and analyze a new hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method for solving third-order Korteweg-de Vries type equations. The approximate solutions are defined by a discrete version of a characterization of the exact solution in terms of the solutions to local problems on each element which are patched together through transmission conditions on element interfaces. We prove that the semi-discrete scheme is stable with proper choices of stabilization function in the numerical traces. For the linearized equation, we carry out error analysis and show that the approximations to the exact solution and its derivatives have optimal convergence rates. In numerical experiments, we use an implicit scheme for time discretization and the Newton-Raphson method for solving systems of nonlinear equations, and observe optimal convergence rates for both the linear and the nonlinear third-order equations.

Zhaoxuan Zhang, Xiaoguang Han, Bo Dong et al.

We present a deep reinforcement learning method of progressive view inpainting for colored semantic point cloud scene completion under volume guidance, achieving high-quality scene reconstruction from only a single RGB-D image with severe occlusion. Our approach is end-to-end, consisting of three modules: 3D scene volume reconstruction, 2D RGB-D and segmentation image inpainting, and multi-view selection for completion. Given a single RGB-D image, our method first predicts its semantic segmentation map and goes through the 3D volume branch to obtain a volumetric scene reconstruction as a guide to the next view inpainting step, which attempts to make up the missing information; the third step involves projecting the volume under the same view of the input, concatenating them to complete the current view RGB-D and segmentation map, and integrating all RGB-D and segmentation maps into the point cloud. Since the occluded areas are unavailable, we resort to a A3C network to glance around and pick the next best view for large hole completion progressively until a scene is adequately reconstructed while guaranteeing validity. All steps are learned jointly to achieve robust and consistent results. We perform qualitative and quantitative evaluations with extensive experiments on the 3D-FUTURE data, obtaining better results than state-of-the-arts.

Yucheng Li, Bo Dong, Chenghua Lin et al.

Large language models (LLMs) achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they face challenges in managing long documents and extended conversations, due to significantly increased computational requirements, both in memory and inference time, and potential context truncation when the input exceeds the LLM's fixed context length. This paper proposes a method called Selective Context that enhances the inference efficiency of LLMs by identifying and pruning redundancy in the input context to make the input more compact. We test our approach using common data sources requiring long context processing: arXiv papers, news articles, and long conversations, on tasks of summarisation, question answering, and response generation. Experimental results show that Selective Context significantly reduces memory cost and decreases generation latency while maintaining comparable performance compared to that achieved when full context is used. Specifically, we achieve a 50\% reduction in context cost, resulting in a 36\% reduction in inference memory usage and a 32\% reduction in inference time, while observing only a minor drop of .023 in BERTscore and .038 in faithfulness on four downstream applications, indicating that our method strikes a good balance between efficiency and performance.

Yiming Xu, Zhen Peng, Bin Shi et al.

The rich information underlying graphs has inspired further investigation of unsupervised graph representation. Existing studies mainly depend on node features and topological properties within static graphs to create self-supervised signals, neglecting the temporal components carried by real-world graph data, such as timestamps of edges. To overcome this limitation, this paper explores how to model temporal evolution on dynamic graphs elegantly. Specifically, we introduce a new inductive bias, namely temporal translation invariance, which illustrates the tendency of the identical node to keep similar labels across different timespans. Based on this assumption, we develop a dynamic graph representation framework CLDG that encourages the node to maintain locally consistent temporal translation invariance through contrastive learning on different timespans. Except for standard CLDG which only considers explicit topological links, our further proposed CLDG++ additionally employs graph diffusion to uncover global contextual correlations between nodes, and designs a multi-scale contrastive learning objective composed of local-local, local-global, and global-global contrasts to enhance representation capabilities. Interestingly, by measuring the consistency between different timespans to shape anomaly indicators, CLDG and CLDG++ are seamlessly integrated with the task of spotting anomalies on dynamic graphs, which has broad applications in many high-impact domains, such as finance, cybersecurity, and healthcare. Experiments demonstrate that CLDG and CLDG++ both exhibit desirable performance in downstream tasks including node classification and dynamic graph anomaly detection. Moreover, CLDG significantly reduces time and space complexity by implicitly exploiting temporal cues instead of complicated sequence models.

Sunyi Chi, Bo Dong, Yiming Xu et al.

Practical natural language processing (NLP) tasks are commonly long-tailed with noisy labels. Those problems challenge the generalization and robustness of complex models such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Some commonly used resampling techniques, such as oversampling or undersampling, could easily lead to overfitting. It is growing popular to learn the data weights leveraging a small amount of metadata. Besides, recent studies have shown the advantages of self-supervised pre-training, particularly to the under-represented data. In this work, we propose a general framework to handle the problem of both long-tail and noisy labels. The model is adapted to the domain of problems in a contrastive learning manner. The re-weighting module is a feed-forward network that learns explicit weighting functions and adapts weights according to metadata. The framework further adapts weights of terms in the loss function through a combination of the polynomial expansion of cross-entropy loss and focal loss. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline methods. Lastly, our sensitive analysis emphasizes the capability of the proposed framework to handle the long-tailed problem and mitigate the negative impact of noisy labels.

Yang Wang, Bo Dong, Ke Xu et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used for computer vision tasks. However, it has been shown that deep models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, i.e., their performances drop when imperceptible perturbations are made to the original inputs, which may further degrade the following visual tasks or introduce new problems such as data and privacy security. Hence, metrics for evaluating the robustness of deep models against adversarial attacks are desired. However, previous metrics are mainly proposed for evaluating the adversarial robustness of shallow networks on the small-scale datasets. Although the Cross Lipschitz Extreme Value for nEtwork Robustness (CLEVER) metric has been proposed for large-scale datasets (e.g., the ImageNet dataset), it is computationally expensive and its performance relies on a tractable number of samples. In this paper, we propose the Adversarial Converging Time Score (ACTS), an attack-dependent metric that quantifies the adversarial robustness of a DNN on a specific input. Our key observation is that local neighborhoods on a DNN's output surface would have different shapes given different inputs. Hence, given different inputs, it requires different time for converging to an adversarial sample. Based on this geometry meaning, ACTS measures the converging time as an adversarial robustness metric. We validate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed ACTS metric against different adversarial attacks on the large-scale ImageNet dataset using state-of-the-art deep networks. Extensive experiments show that our ACTS metric is an efficient and effective adversarial metric over the previous CLEVER metric.

Yiming Xu, Bin Shi, Bo Dong et al.

Tax evasion causes severe losses of government revenues and disturbs the economic order of fair competition. To help alleviate this problem, the latest tax evasion detection solutions utilize expert knowledge to extract features and then train classifiers to determine whether a company is suspected of tax evasion. However, existing solutions mainly focus on the statistical features of the company, but fail to exploit the rich interactive information in tax scenarios, which affect the detection performance. In this paper, we first model the tax scenario as a heterogeneous graph and study the tax evasion detection problem under the heterogeneous graph model. To improve the performance of tax evasion detection, a novel graph neural network model is proposed to extract the comprehensive information of heterogeneous graphs. Specifically, we use heterogeneous and complex related party transaction groups to filter low-level noise information. Moreover, a hierarchical attention mechanism is designed to capture the deeper structure and semantic information hidden in the related party transaction group. We apply our method to the real risk management system of the tax bureau, and evaluate it on two human-labeled real-world tax datasets. The results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in the tax evasion detection task.

Ailin Huang, Ang Li, Aobo Kong et al.

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

Chuanfei Hu, Hang Shao, Bo Dong et al.

Representing the spatial properties of facial attributes is a vital challenge for facial attribute recognition (FAR). Recent advances have achieved the reliable performances for FAR, benefiting from the description of spatial properties via extra prior information. However, the extra prior information might not be always available, resulting in the restricted application scenario of the prior-based methods. Meanwhile, the spatial ambiguity of facial attributes caused by inherent spatial diversities of facial parts is ignored. To address these issues, we propose a prior-free method for attribute spatial decomposition (ASD), mitigating the spatial ambiguity of facial attributes without any extra prior information. Specifically, assignment-embedding module (AEM) is proposed to enable the procedure of ASD, which consists of two operations: attribute-to-location assignment and location-to-attribute embedding. The attribute-to-location assignment first decomposes the feature map based on latent factors, assigning the magnitude of attribute components on each spatial location. Then, the assigned attribute components from all locations to represent the global-level attribute embeddings. Furthermore, correlation matrix minimization (CMM) is introduced to enlarge the discriminability of attribute embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ASD compared with state-of-the-art prior-based methods, while the reliable performance of ASD for the case of limited training data is further validated.

Yiming Xu, Zihan Chen, Zhen Peng et al.

Driven by the pressing demand for graph anomaly detection (GAD) in high-stakes domains, the generalist GAD paradigm, which trains a single detector transferable across new graphs, has recently gained growing attention. However, existing methods often rely on scarce and costly annotations for training and sometimes even require few-shot support at inference, which limits their robustness to diverse and unseen anomaly patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce ProMoS, the first unsupervised generalist GAD framework, which detects anomalies by modeling the abundant normality in unlabeled data. ProMoS adopts a knowledge-distillation paradigm to distill normality priors from a frozen self-supervised graph neural network (GNN) teacher to a mixture-of-students model with shared global and lightweight personalized branches, enabling efficient and expressive normality modeling without learning from scratch. We further propose prototype-guided soft-label distillation to align teacher and student in a shared prototype space, enhancing cross-graph generalizability. During inference, ProMoS performs zero-shot anomaly detection on unseen graphs via distillation bias and prototype geometric deviation. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of ProMoS, charting a practical path toward label-free, zero-shot generalist GAD.

Bo Dong, Jiahua Jiang, Yanlai Chen

We develop and analyze the first hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method for solving fifth-order Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) type equations. We show that the semi-discrete scheme is stable with proper choices of the stabilization functions in the numerical traces. For the linearized fifth-order equations, we prove that the approximations to the exact solution and its four spatial derivatives as well as its time derivative all have optimal convergence rates. The numerical experiments, demonstrating optimal convergence rates for both the linear and nonlinear equations, validate our theoretical findings.

Ropeway Liu, Hangjie Yuan, Bo Dong et al.

Relighting is a crucial task with both practical demand and artistic value, and recent diffusion models have shown strong potential by enabling rich and controllable lighting effects. However, as they are typically optimized in semantic latent space, where proximity does not guarantee physical correctness in visual space, they often produce unrealistic results, such as overexposed highlights, misaligned shadows, and incorrect occlusions. We address this with UniLumos, a unified relighting framework for both images and videos that brings RGB-space geometry feedback into a flow matching backbone. By supervising the model with depth and normal maps extracted from its outputs, we explicitly align lighting effects with the scene structure, enhancing physical plausibility. Nevertheless, this feedback requires high-quality outputs for supervision in visual space, making standard multi-step denoising computationally expensive. To mitigate this, we employ path consistency learning, allowing supervision to remain effective even under few-step training regimes. To enable fine-grained relighting control and supervision, we design a structured six-dimensional annotation protocol capturing core illumination attributes. Building upon this, we propose LumosBench, a disentangled attribute-level benchmark that evaluates lighting controllability via large vision-language models, enabling automatic and interpretable assessment of relighting precision across individual dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniLumos achieves state-of-the-art relighting quality with significantly improved physical consistency, while delivering a 20x speedup for both image and video relighting. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/Lumos-Custom.

M. Shan Tariq, Yanlai Chen, Bo Dong

We develop new conservative discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for nonlinear wave problems, focusing on the generalized Korteweg-de Vries (gKdV) equation and the coupled Hirota-Satsuma KdV (HS-KdV) system. The proposed methods preserve mass through the single-valued structure of numerical traces, while energy and Hamiltonian conservation are enforced by implicitly determining penalty parameters in the numerical traces through auxiliary conservation constraints. In our previous work [11], we developed a conservative DG method for the gKdV equation; however, that formulation involves the time derivative of the jump of the approximate solution, which complicates extensions beyond second-order temporal accuracy. Our new formulation overcomes this limitation by introducing a redesigned trace configuration that eliminates the derivative-of-jump term. This novel enhancement seamlessly paves the way for higher-order time discretizations and requires solving fewer nonlinear systems per time step than the previous approach. For the coupled HS-KdV system, we present the first conservative DG method that preserves all three invariants of the exact solution. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy and expected convergence behavior of the proposed methods, as well as long-time stability and strong conservation properties for both the gKdV equation and HS-KdV system.

Hao Liu, Zhuoran Xu, Dan Wang et al.

3D object detection is a critical task in autonomous driving. Recently multi-modal fusion-based 3D object detection methods, which combine the complementary advantages of LiDAR and camera, have shown great performance improvements over mono-modal methods. However, so far, no methods have attempted to utilize the instance-level contextual image semantics to guide the 3D object detection. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective Painting Adaptive Instance-prior for 3D object detection (PAI3D) to fuse instance-level image semantics flexibly with point cloud features. PAI3D is a multi-modal sequential instance-level fusion framework. It first extracts instance-level semantic information from images, the extracted information, including objects categorical label, point-to-object membership and object position, are then used to augment each LiDAR point in the subsequent 3D detection network to guide and improve detection performance. PAI3D outperforms the state-of-the-art with a large margin on the nuScenes dataset, achieving 71.4 in mAP and 74.2 in NDS on the test split. Our comprehensive experiments show that instance-level image semantics contribute the most to the performance gain, and PAI3D works well with any good-quality instance segmentation models and any modern point cloud 3D encoders, making it a strong candidate for deployment on autonomous vehicles.

Zhijing Shao, Duotun Wang, Qing-Yao Tian et al.

Although neural rendering has made significant advances in creating lifelike, animatable full-body and head avatars, incorporating detailed expressions into full-body avatars remains largely unexplored. We present DEGAS, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based modeling method for full-body avatars with rich facial expressions. Trained on multiview videos of a given subject, our method learns a conditional variational autoencoder that takes both the body motion and facial expression as driving signals to generate Gaussian maps in the UV layout. To drive the facial expressions, instead of the commonly used 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) in 3D head avatars, we propose to adopt the expression latent space trained solely on 2D portrait images, bridging the gap between 2D talking faces and 3D avatars. Leveraging the rendering capability of 3DGS and the rich expressiveness of the expression latent space, the learned avatars can be reenacted to reproduce photorealistic rendering images with subtle and accurate facial expressions. Experiments on an existing dataset and our newly proposed dataset of full-body talking avatars demonstrate the efficacy of our method. We also propose an audio-driven extension of our method with the help of 2D talking faces, opening new possibilities for interactive AI agents.

Yuanyuan Liu, Haiyang Mei, Dongyang Zhan et al.

3D visual grounding (3DVG) identifies objects in 3D scenes from language descriptions. Existing zero-shot approaches leverage 2D vision-language models (VLMs) by converting 3D spatial information (SI) into forms amenable to VLM processing, typically as composite inputs such as specified view renderings or video sequences with overlaid object markers. However, this VLM + SI paradigm yields entangled visual representations that compel the VLM to process entire cluttered cues, making it hard to exploit spatial semantic relationships effectively. In this work, we propose a new VLM x SI paradigm that externalizes the 3D SI into a form enabling the VLM to incrementally retrieve only what it needs during reasoning. We instantiate this paradigm with a novel View-on-Graph (VoG) method, which organizes the scene into a multi-modal, multi-layer scene graph and allows the VLM to operate as an active agent that selectively accesses necessary cues as it traverses the scene. This design offers two intrinsic advantages: (i) by structuring 3D context into a spatially and semantically coherent scene graph rather than confounding the VLM with densely entangled visual inputs, it lowers the VLM's reasoning difficulty; and (ii) by actively exploring and reasoning over the scene graph, it naturally produces transparent, step-by-step traces for interpretable 3DVG. Extensive experiments show that VoG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, establishing structured scene exploration as a promising strategy for advancing zero-shot 3DVG.

Rui Zhao, Bin Shi, Kai Sun et al.

Partial label learning is a prominent weakly supervised classification task, where each training instance is ambiguously labeled with a set of candidate labels. In real-world scenarios, candidate labels are often influenced by instance features, leading to the emergence of instance-dependent PLL (ID-PLL), a setting that more accurately reflects this relationship. A significant challenge in ID-PLL is instance entanglement, where instances from similar classes share overlapping features and candidate labels, resulting in increased class confusion. To address this issue, we propose a novel Class-specific Augmentation based Disentanglement (CAD) framework, which tackles instance entanglement by both intra- and inter-class regulations. For intra-class regulation, CAD amplifies class-specific features to generate class-wise augmentations and aligns same-class augmentations across instances. For inter-class regulation, CAD introduces a weighted penalty loss function that applies stronger penalties to more ambiguous labels, encouraging larger inter-class distances. By jointly applying intra- and inter-class regulations, CAD improves the clarity of class boundaries and reduces class confusion caused by entanglement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CAD in mitigating the entanglement problem and enhancing ID-PLL performance. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanZhaoIc/CAD.git.

Hanning Yu, Wentao Liu, Chengjiang Long et al.

It is very challenging to reconstruct a high dynamic range (HDR) from a low dynamic range (LDR) image as an ill-posed problem. This paper proposes a luminance attentive network named LANet for HDR reconstruction from a single LDR image. Our method is based on two fundamental observations: (1) HDR images stored in relative luminance are scale-invariant, which means the HDR images will hold the same information when multiplied by any positive real number. Based on this observation, we propose a novel normalization method called " HDR calibration " for HDR images stored in relative luminance, calibrating HDR images into a similar luminance scale according to the LDR images. (2) The main difference between HDR images and LDR images is in under-/over-exposed areas, especially those highlighted. Following this observation, we propose a luminance attention module with a two-stream structure for LANet to pay more attention to the under-/over-exposed areas. In addition, we propose an extended network called panoLANet for HDR panorama reconstruction from an LDR panorama and build a dualnet structure for panoLANet to solve the distortion problem caused by the equirectangular panorama. Extensive experiments show that our proposed approach LANet can reconstruct visually convincing HDR images and demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art approaches in terms of all metrics in inverse tone mapping. The image-based lighting application with our proposed panoLANet also demonstrates that our method can simulate natural scene lighting using only LDR panorama. Our source code is available at https://github.com/LWT3437/LANet.

Bo Dong, Wenhai Wang, Deng-Ping Fan et al.

Most polyp segmentation methods use CNNs as their backbone, leading to two key issues when exchanging information between the encoder and decoder: 1) taking into account the differences in contribution between different-level features and 2) designing an effective mechanism for fusing these features. Unlike existing CNN-based methods, we adopt a transformer encoder, which learns more powerful and robust representations. In addition, considering the image acquisition influence and elusive properties of polyps, we introduce three standard modules, including a cascaded fusion module (CFM), a camouflage identification module (CIM), and a similarity aggregation module (SAM). Among these, the CFM is used to collect the semantic and location information of polyps from high-level features; the CIM is applied to capture polyp information disguised in low-level features, and the SAM extends the pixel features of the polyp area with high-level semantic position information to the entire polyp area, thereby effectively fusing cross-level features. The proposed model, named Polyp-PVT, effectively suppresses noises in the features and significantly improves their expressive capabilities. Extensive experiments on five widely adopted datasets show that the proposed model is more robust to various challenging situations (e.g., appearance changes, small objects, rotation) than existing representative methods. The proposed model is available at https://github.com/DengPingFan/Polyp-PVT.

Yanping Chen, Lefei Wu, Qinghua Zheng et al.

Recognizing named entities (NEs) is commonly conducted as a classification problem that predicts a class tag for a word or a NE candidate in a sentence. In shallow structures, categorized features are weighted to support the prediction. Recent developments in neural networks have adopted deep structures that map categorized features into continuous representations. This approach unfolds a dense space saturated with high-order abstract semantic information, where the prediction is based on distributed feature representations. In this paper, positions of NEs in a sentence are represented as continuous values. Then, a regression operation is introduced to regress boundaries of NEs in a sentence. Based on boundary regression, we design a boundary regression model to support nested NE recognition. It is a multiobjective learning framework, which simultaneously predicts the classification score of a NE candidate and refine its spatial location in a sentence. It has the advantage to resolve nested NEs and support boundary regression for locating NEs in a sntence. By sharing parameters for predicting and locating, this model enables more potent nonlinear function approximators to enhance model discriminability. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for nested NE recognition\footnote{Our codes to implement the BR model are available at: \url{https://github.com/wuyuefei3/BR}.}.

Yiming Xu, Bin Shi, Teng Ma et al.

The graph with complex annotations is the most potent data type, whose constantly evolving motivates further exploration of the unsupervised dynamic graph representation. One of the representative paradigms is graph contrastive learning. It constructs self-supervised signals by maximizing the mutual information between the statistic graph's augmentation views. However, the semantics and labels may change within the augmentation process, causing a significant performance drop in downstream tasks. This drawback becomes greatly magnified on dynamic graphs. To address this problem, we designed a simple yet effective framework named CLDG. Firstly, we elaborate that dynamic graphs have temporal translation invariance at different levels. Then, we proposed a sampling layer to extract the temporally-persistent signals. It will encourage the node to maintain consistent local and global representations, i.e., temporal translation invariance under the timespan views. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the method on seven datasets by outperforming eight unsupervised state-of-the-art baselines and showing competitiveness against four semi-supervised methods. Compared with the existing dynamic graph method, the number of model parameters and training time is reduced by an average of 2,001.86 times and 130.31 times on seven datasets, respectively.

Rui Zhao, Bin Shi, Jianfei Ruan et al.

In noisy label learning, estimating noisy class posteriors plays a fundamental role for developing consistent classifiers, as it forms the basis for estimating clean class posteriors and the transition matrix. Existing methods typically learn noisy class posteriors by training a classification model with noisy labels. However, when labels are incorrect, these models may be misled to overemphasize the feature parts that do not reflect the instance characteristics, resulting in significant errors in estimating noisy class posteriors. To address this issue, this paper proposes to augment the supervised information with part-level labels, encouraging the model to focus on and integrate richer information from various parts. Specifically, our method first partitions features into distinct parts by cropping instances, yielding part-level labels associated with these various parts. Subsequently, we introduce a novel single-to-multiple transition matrix to model the relationship between the noisy and part-level labels, which incorporates part-level labels into a classifier-consistent framework. Utilizing this framework with part-level labels, we can learn the noisy class posteriors more precisely by guiding the model to integrate information from various parts, ultimately improving the classification performance. Our method is theoretically sound, while experiments show that it is empirically effective in synthetic and real-world noisy benchmarks.

Wanghan Xu, Bin Shi, Ao Liu et al.

In recent years, with the rapid development of graph neural networks (GNN), more and more graph datasets have been published for GNN tasks. However, when an upstream data owner publishes graph data, there are often many privacy concerns, because many real-world graph data contain sensitive information like person's friend list. Differential privacy (DP) is a common method to protect privacy, but due to the complex topological structure of graph data, applying DP on graphs often affects the message passing and aggregation of GNN models, leading to a decrease in model accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel graph edge protection framework, graph publisher (GraphPub), which can protect graph topology while ensuring that the availability of data is basically unchanged. Through reverse learning and the encoder-decoder mechanism, we search for some false edges that do not have a large negative impact on the aggregation of node features, and use them to replace some real edges. The modified graph will be published, which is difficult to distinguish between real and false data. Sufficient experiments prove that our framework achieves model accuracy close to the original graph with an extremely low privacy budget.

Yiming Xu, Zhen Peng, Bin Shi et al.

The superiority of graph contrastive learning (GCL) has prompted its application to anomaly detection tasks for more powerful risk warning systems. Unfortunately, existing GCL-based models tend to excessively prioritize overall detection performance while neglecting robustness to structural imbalance, which can be problematic for many real-world networks following power-law degree distributions. Particularly, GCL-based methods may fail to capture tail anomalies (abnormal nodes with low degrees). This raises concerns about the security and robustness of current anomaly detection algorithms and therefore hinders their applicability in a variety of realistic high-risk scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, research on the robustness of graph anomaly detection to structural imbalance has received little scrutiny. To address the above issues, this paper presents a novel GCL-based framework named AD-GCL. It devises the neighbor pruning strategy to filter noisy edges for head nodes and facilitate the detection of genuine tail nodes by aligning from head nodes to forged tail nodes. Moreover, AD-GCL actively explores potential neighbors to enlarge the receptive field of tail nodes through anomaly-guided neighbor completion. We further introduce intra- and inter-view consistency loss of the original and augmentation graph for enhanced representation. The performance evaluation of the whole, head, and tail nodes on multiple datasets validates the comprehensive superiority of the proposed AD-GCL in detecting both head anomalies and tail anomalies.

Jingwei Wang, Zai Zhang, Hao Qian et al.

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to use tools is crucial for improving their problem-solving abilities and expanding their applications. However, effectively using tools is challenging because it requires a deep understanding of tool functionalities and user intentions. Previous methods relied mainly on LLMs to generate instruction data, but the quality of these data was often insufficient. In this paper, we propose a new method that uses knowledge graphs to generate high-quality instruction data for LLMs. Knowledge graphs are manually curated datasets rich in semantic information. We begin by extracting various query pathways from a given knowledge graph, which are transformed into a broad spectrum of user queries. We then translate the relationships between entities into actionable tools and parse the pathways of each query into detailed solution steps, thereby creating high-quality instruction data. Our experiments show that fine-tuning on just a small sample of this synthetic data can significantly improve the tool utilization and overall capabilities of LLMs.

Rui Zhao, Bin Shi, Zhiming Liang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely employed for semi-supervised node classification tasks on graphs. However, the performance of GNNs is significantly affected by label noise, that is, a small amount of incorrectly labeled nodes can substantially misguide model training. Mainstream solutions define node classification with label noise (NCLN) as a reliable labeling task, often introducing node similarity with quadratic computational complexity to more accurately assess label reliability. To this end, in this paper, we introduce the Label Ensemble Graph Neural Network (LEGNN), a lower complexity method for robust GNNs training against label noise. LEGNN reframes NCLN as a label ensemble task, gathering informative multiple labels instead of constructing a single reliable label, avoiding high-complexity computations for reliability assessment. Specifically, LEGNN conducts a two-step process: bootstrapping neighboring contexts and robust learning with gathered multiple labels. In the former step, we apply random neighbor masks for each node and gather the predicted labels as a high-probability label set. This mitigates the impact of inaccurately labeled neighbors and diversifies the label set. In the latter step, we utilize a partial label learning based strategy to aggregate the high-probability label information for model training. Additionally, we symmetrically gather a low-probability label set to counteract potential noise from the bootstrapped high-probability label set. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that LEGNN achieves outstanding performance while ensuring efficiency. Moreover, it exhibits good scalability on dataset with over one hundred thousand nodes and one million edges.

Jinshan Liu, Ken Li, Jiazhe Wei et al.

Federated Graph Learning (FedGL) is vulnerable to malicious attacks, yet developing a truly effective and stealthy attack method remains a significant challenge. Existing attack methods suffer from low attack success rates, high computational costs, and are easily identified and smoothed by defense algorithms. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{FedShift}, a novel two-stage "Hide and Find" distributed adversarial attack. In the first stage, before FedGL begins, we inject a learnable and hidden "shifter" into part of the training data, which subtly pushes poisoned graph representations toward a target class's decision boundary without crossing it, ensuring attack stealthiness during training. In the second stage, after FedGL is complete, we leverage the global model information and use the hidden shifter as an optimization starting point to efficiently find the adversarial perturbations. During the final attack, we aggregate these perturbations from multiple malicious clients to form the final effective adversarial sample and trigger the attack. Extensive experiments on six large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the highest attack effectiveness compared to existing advanced attack methods. In particular, our attack can effectively evade 3 mainstream robust federated learning defense algorithms and converges with a time cost reduction of over 90\%, highlighting its exceptional stealthiness, robustness, and efficiency.

Yiming Xu, Xu Hua, Zhen Peng et al.

The widespread application of graph data in various high-risk scenarios has increased attention to graph anomaly detection (GAD). Faced with real-world graphs that often carry node descriptions in the form of raw text sequences, termed text-attributed graphs (TAGs), existing graph anomaly detection pipelines typically involve shallow embedding techniques to encode such textual information into features, and then rely on complex self-supervised tasks within the graph domain to detect anomalies. However, this text encoding process is separated from the anomaly detection training objective in the graph domain, making it difficult to ensure that the extracted textual features focus on GAD-relevant information, seriously constraining the detection capability. How to seamlessly integrate raw text and graph topology to unleash the vast potential of cross-modal data in TAGs for anomaly detection poses a challenging issue. This paper presents a novel end-to-end paradigm for text-attributed graph anomaly detection, named CMUCL. We simultaneously model data from both text and graph structures, and jointly train text and graph encoders by leveraging cross-modal and uni-modal multi-scale consistency to uncover potential anomaly-related information. Accordingly, we design an anomaly score estimator based on inconsistency mining to derive node-specific anomaly scores. Considering the lack of benchmark datasets tailored for anomaly detection on TAGs, we release 8 datasets to facilitate future research. Extensive evaluations show that CMUCL significantly advances in text-attributed graph anomaly detection, delivering an 11.13% increase in average accuracy (AP) over the suboptimal.

Yiming Xu, Jiarun Chen, Zhen Peng et al.

The natural combination of intricate topological structures and rich textual information in text-attributed graphs (TAGs) opens up a novel perspective for graph anomaly detection (GAD). However, existing GAD methods primarily focus on designing complex optimization objectives within the graph domain, overlooking the complementary value of the textual modality, whose features are often encoded by shallow embedding techniques, such as bag-of-words or skip-gram, so that semantic context related to anomalies may be missed. To unleash the enormous potential of textual modality, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising alternatives due to their strong semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, their application to TAG anomaly detection remains nascent, and they struggle to encode high-order structural information inherent in graphs due to input length constraints. For high-quality anomaly detection in TAGs, we propose CoLL, a novel framework that combines LLMs and graph neural networks (GNNs) to leverage their complementary strengths. CoLL employs multi-LLM collaboration for evidence-augmented generation to capture anomaly-relevant contexts while delivering human-readable rationales for detected anomalies. Moreover, CoLL integrates a GNN equipped with a gating mechanism to adaptively fuse textual features with evidence while preserving high-order topological information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CoLL, achieving an average improvement of 13.37% in AP. This study opens a new avenue for incorporating LLMs in advancing GAD.

Yuhang Liu, Yuefei Wu, Bin Shi et al.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability of deep learning applications and has attracted significant attention in recent years. A rich body of literature has emerged to develop efficient score functions that assign high scores to in-distribution (ID) samples and low scores to OOD samples, thereby helping distinguish OOD samples. Among these methods, distance-based score functions are widely used because of their efficiency and ease of use. However, deep learning often leads to a biased distribution of data features, and extreme features are inevitable. These extreme features make the distance-based methods tend to assign too low scores to ID samples. This limits the OOD detection capabilities of such methods. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method, Feature Bank Enhancement (FBE), that uses statistical characteristics from dataset to identify and constrain extreme features to the separation boundaries, therapy making the distance between samples inside and outside the distribution farther. We conducted experiments on large-scale ImageNet-1k and CIFAR-10 respectively, and the results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both benchmark. Additionally, theoretical analysis and supplementary experiments are conducted to provide more insights into our method.

Yiming Xu, Bin Shi, Zhen Peng et al.

The development and evaluation of graph neural networks (GNNs) generally follow the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption. Yet this assumption is often untenable in practice due to the uncontrollable data generation mechanism. In particular, when the data distribution shows a significant shift, most GNNs would fail to produce reliable predictions and may even make decisions randomly. One of the most promising solutions to improve the model generalization is to pick out causal invariant parts in the input graph. Nonetheless, we observe a significant distribution gap between the causal parts learned by existing methods and the ground truth, leading to undesirable performance. In response to the above issues, this paper presents GPro, a model that learns graph causal invariance with progressive inference. Specifically, the complicated graph causal invariant learning is decomposed into multiple intermediate inference steps from easy to hard, and the perception of GPro is continuously strengthened through a progressive inference process to extract causal features that are stable to distribution shifts. We also enlarge the training distribution by creating counterfactual samples to enhance the capability of the GPro in capturing the causal invariant parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed GPro outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 4.91% on average. For datasets with more severe distribution shifts, the performance improvement can be up to 6.86%.

Yang Wang, Haiyang Mei, Qirui Bao et al.

We introduce a novel multimodality synergistic knowledge distillation scheme tailored for efficient single-eye motion recognition tasks. This method allows a lightweight, unimodal student spiking neural network (SNN) to extract rich knowledge from an event-frame multimodal teacher network. The core strength of this approach is its ability to utilize the ample, coarser temporal cues found in conventional frames for effective emotion recognition. Consequently, our method adeptly interprets both temporal and spatial information from the conventional frame domain, eliminating the need for specialized sensing devices, e.g., event-based camera. The effectiveness of our approach is thoroughly demonstrated using both existing and our compiled single-eye emotion recognition datasets, achieving unparalleled performance in accuracy and efficiency over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Tieliang Gong, Yuxin Dong, Shujian Yu et al.

The recently developed matrix based Renyi's entropy enables measurement of information in data simply using the eigenspectrum of symmetric positive semi definite (PSD) matrices in reproducing kernel Hilbert space, without estimation of the underlying data distribution. This intriguing property makes the new information measurement widely adopted in multiple statistical inference and learning tasks. However, the computation of such quantity involves the trace operator on a PSD matrix $G$ to power $α$(i.e., $tr(G^α)$), with a normal complexity of nearly $O(n^3)$, which severely hampers its practical usage when the number of samples (i.e., $n$) is large. In this work, we present computationally efficient approximations to this new entropy functional that can reduce its complexity to even significantly less than $O(n^2)$. To this end, we leverage the recent progress on Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra, developing Taylor, Chebyshev and Lanczos approximations to $tr(G^α)$ for arbitrary values of $α$ by converting it into matrix-vector multiplications problem. We also establish the connection between the matrix-based Renyi's entropy and PSD matrix approximation, which enables exploiting both clustering and block low-rank structure of $G$ to further reduce the computational cost. We theoretically provide approximation accuracy guarantees and illustrate the properties of different approximations. Large-scale experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real-world data corroborate our theoretical findings, showing promising speedup with negligible loss in accuracy.

Yuxuan Zhang, Bo Dong, Felix Heide

Existing neural networks for computer vision tasks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: adding imperceptible perturbations to the input images can fool these methods to make a false prediction on an image that was correctly predicted without the perturbation. Various defense methods have proposed image-to-image mapping methods, either including these perturbations in the training process or removing them in a preprocessing denoising step. In doing so, existing methods often ignore that the natural RGB images in today's datasets are not captured but, in fact, recovered from RAW color filter array captures that are subject to various degradations in the capture. In this work, we exploit this RAW data distribution as an empirical prior for adversarial defense. Specifically, we proposed a model-agnostic adversarial defensive method, which maps the input RGB images to Bayer RAW space and back to output RGB using a learned camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline to eliminate potential adversarial patterns. The proposed method acts as an off-the-shelf preprocessing module and, unlike model-specific adversarial training methods, does not require adversarial images to train. As a result, the method generalizes to unseen tasks without additional retraining. Experiments on large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet, COCO) for different vision tasks (e.g., classification, semantic segmentation, object detection) validate that the method significantly outperforms existing methods across task domains.

Tieliang Gong, Yuxin Dong, Hong Chen et al.

Subsampling is an important technique to tackle the computational challenges brought by big data. Many subsampling procedures fall within the framework of importance sampling, which assigns high sampling probabilities to the samples appearing to have big impacts. When the noise level is high, those sampling procedures tend to pick many outliers and thus often do not perform satisfactorily in practice. To tackle this issue, we design a new Markov subsampling strategy based on Huber criterion (HMS) to construct an informative subset from the noisy full data; the constructed subset then serves as a refined working data for efficient processing. HMS is built upon a Metropolis-Hasting procedure, where the inclusion probability of each sampling unit is determined using the Huber criterion to prevent over scoring the outliers. Under mild conditions, we show that the estimator based on the subsamples selected by HMS is statistically consistent with a sub-Gaussian deviation bound. The promising performance of HMS is demonstrated by extensive studies on large scale simulations and real data examples.

Tielang Gong, Yuxin Dong, Hong Chen et al.

Modal regression, a widely used regression protocol, has been extensively investigated in statistical and machine learning communities due to its robustness to outliers and heavy-tailed noises. Understanding modal regression's theoretical behavior can be fundamental in learning theory. Despite significant progress in characterizing its statistical property, the majority of the results are based on the assumption that samples are independent and identical distributed (i.i.d.), which is too restrictive for real-world applications. This paper concerns the statistical property of regularized modal regression (RMR) within an important dependence structure - Markov dependent. Specifically, we establish the upper bound for RMR estimator under moderate conditions and give an explicit learning rate. Our results show that the Markov dependence impacts on the generalization error in the way that sample size would be discounted by a multiplicative factor depending on the spectral gap of underlying Markov chain. This result shed a new light on characterizing the theoretical underpinning for robust regression.

Chuanfei Hu, Weijie Sheng, Bo Dong et al.

Recognizing the human emotion automatically from visual characteristics plays a vital role in many intelligent applications. Recently, gait-based emotion recognition, especially gait skeletons-based characteristic, has attracted much attention, while many available methods have been proposed gradually. The popular pipeline is to first extract affective features from joint skeletons, and then aggregate the skeleton joint and affective features as the feature vector for classifying the emotion. However, the aggregation procedure of these emerged methods might be rigid, resulting in insufficiently exploiting the complementary relationship between skeleton joint and affective features. Meanwhile, the long range dependencies in both spatial and temporal domains of the gait sequence are scarcely considered. To address these issues, we propose a novel two-stream network with transformer-based complementarity, termed as TNTC. Skeleton joint and affective features are encoded into two individual images as the inputs of two streams, respectively. A new transformer-based complementarity module (TCM) is proposed to bridge the complementarity between two streams hierarchically via capturing long range dependencies. Experimental results demonstrate TNTC outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the latest dataset in terms of accuracy.

Jiqing Zhang, Xin Yang, Yingkai Fu et al.

Inspired by the complementarity between conventional frame-based and bio-inspired event-based cameras, we propose a multi-modal based approach to fuse visual cues from the frame- and event-domain to enhance the single object tracking performance, especially in degraded conditions (e.g., scenes with high dynamic range, low light, and fast-motion objects). The proposed approach can effectively and adaptively combine meaningful information from both domains. Our approach's effectiveness is enforced by a novel designed cross-domain attention schemes, which can effectively enhance features based on self- and cross-domain attention schemes; The adaptiveness is guarded by a specially designed weighting scheme, which can adaptively balance the contribution of the two domains. To exploit event-based visual cues in single-object tracking, we construct a large-scale frame-event-based dataset, which we subsequently employ to train a novel frame-event fusion based model. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art frame-based tracking methods by at least 10.4% and 11.9% in terms of representative success rate and precision rate, respectively. Besides, the effectiveness of each key component of our approach is evidenced by our thorough ablation study.

Jiqing Zhang, Kai Zhao, Bo Dong et al.

Jointly exploiting multiple different yet complementary domain information has been proven to be an effective way to perform robust object tracking. This paper focuses on effectively representing and utilizing complementary features from the frame domain and event domain for boosting object tracking performance in challenge scenarios. Specifically, we propose Common Features Extractor (CFE) to learn potential common representations from the RGB domain and event domain. For learning the unique features of the two domains, we utilize a Unique Extractor for Event (UEE) based on Spiking Neural Networks to extract edge cues in the event domain which may be missed in RGB in some challenging conditions, and a Unique Extractor for RGB (UER) based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to extract texture and semantic information in RGB domain. Extensive experiments on standard RGB benchmark and real event tracking dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We show our approach outperforms all compared state-of-the-art tracking algorithms and verify event-based data is a powerful cue for tracking in challenging scenes.

Bo Dong, Hao Liu, Yu Bai et al.

Predicting future trajectories of surrounding obstacles is a crucial task for autonomous driving cars to achieve a high degree of road safety. There are several challenges in trajectory prediction in real-world traffic scenarios, including obeying traffic rules, dealing with social interactions, handling traffic of multi-class movement, and predicting multi-modal trajectories with probability. Inspired by people's natural habit of navigating traffic with attention to their goals and surroundings, this paper presents a unique dynamic graph attention network to solve all those challenges. The network is designed to model the dynamic social interactions among agents and conform to traffic rules with a semantic map. By extending the anchor-based method to multiple types of agents, the proposed method can predict multi-modal trajectories with probabilities for multi-class movements using a single model. We validate our approach on the proprietary autonomous driving dataset for the logistic delivery scenario and two publicly available datasets. The results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques and demonstrates the potential for trajectory prediction in real-world traffic.

Hong-Bo Bi, Zi-Qi Liu, Kang Wang et al.

Saliency detection based on the complementary information from RGB images and depth maps has recently gained great popularity. In this paper, we propose Complementary Attention and Adaptive Integration Network (CAAI-Net), a novel RGB-D saliency detection model that integrates complementary attention based feature concentration and adaptive cross-modal feature fusion into a unified framework for accurate saliency detection. Specifically, we propose a context-aware complementary attention (CCA) module, which consists of a feature interaction component, a complementary attention component, and a global-context component. The CCA module first utilizes the feature interaction component to extract rich local context features. The resulting features are then fed into the complementary attention component, which employs the complementary attention generated from adjacent levels to guide the attention at the current layer so that the mutual background disturbances are suppressed and the network focuses more on the areas with salient objects. Finally, we utilize a specially-designed adaptive feature integration (AFI) module, which sufficiently considers the low-quality issue of depth maps, to aggregate the RGB and depth features in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments on six challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that CAAI-Net is an effective saliency detection model and outperforms nine state-of-the-art models in terms of four widely-used metrics. In addition, extensive ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the proposed CCA and AFI modules.