Huan Chen

Peifu Liu, Tingfa Xu, Jie Wang et al.

Hyperspectral image classification, a task that assigns pre-defined classes to each pixel in a hyperspectral image of remote sensing scenes, often faces challenges due to the neglect of correlations between spectrally similar pixels. This oversight can lead to inaccurate edge definitions and difficulties in managing minor spectral variations in contiguous areas. To address these issues, we introduce the novel Dual-stage Spectral Supertoken Classifier (DSTC), inspired by superpixel concepts. DSTC employs spectrum-derivative-based pixel clustering to group pixels with similar spectral characteristics into spectral supertokens. By projecting the classification of these tokens onto the image space, we achieve pixel-level results that maintain regional classification consistency and precise boundary. Moreover, recognizing the diversity within tokens, we propose a class-proportion-based soft label. This label adaptively assigns weights to different categories based on their prevalence, effectively managing data distribution imbalances and enhancing classification performance. Comprehensive experiments on WHU-OHS, IP, KSC, and UP datasets corroborate the robust classification capabilities of DSTC and the effectiveness of its individual components. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/laprf/DSTC.

Qi He, Huan Chen, Ya Guo et al.

Policy loss estimation remains a fundamental and long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for diffusion language models (dLLMs). We introduce Reinforcement Learning from Denoising Feedback (RLDF), a novel training paradigm that leverages feedback obtained from rollout and training processes to facilitate accurate and efficient policy loss estimation. To balance the trade-off between computational efficiency and estimation effectiveness, RLDF optimizes the model toward the clipped clean state $\hat{x}_0$ from intermediate noisy states $x_t$, combined with weighted timestep sampling over $t$. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RLDF achieves consistent and substantial improvements in both performance and generalizability across two representative dLLM architectures, LLaDA and Dream, on multiple reasoning benchmarks. Our work lays a principled foundation for scalable reinforcement learning in diffusion language models. We build Drift, a training framework for dLLMs, available at https://github.com/ant-research/Drift.

Chong Zhang, Ya Guo, Yi Tu et al.

Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.

Xinpeng Lv, Chunyuan Zheng, Yunxin Mao et al.

Strategic machine learning investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to receive favorable decisions from predictive models. To address fairness concerns intrinsic to strategic classification, recent work has introduced group-specific fairness constraints. However, current fairness-aware approaches face a fundamental dilemma in the issue of fairness exposure: making these constraints public enables strategic manipulation and can lead to fairness reversal, while keeping them hidden may reduce social welfare and discourage genuine improvement. To fill this gap, we subsequently propose the problem of partial fairness awareness (PFA), as our theoretical analysis informs that such a dilemma can be mitigated by releasing the candidate set of fairness constraints and concealing the grounding constraint. To be specific, we introduce a belief-guided strategic mechanism, wherein agents iteratively interact with the decision system and maintain a belief distribution over the candidate set of fairness constraints. This belief-guided process enables agents, through iterative interaction and feedback, to update their belief distribution over the candidate set, thereby gradually aligning their belief with the grounding fairness constraint employed by the system. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that PFA achieves lower group fairness gaps, higher acceptance of truly qualified individuals, and more stable outcomes compared to fully public or private fairness regimes.

Chong Zhang, Yi Tu, Yixi Zhao et al.

Modeling and leveraging layout reading order in visually-rich documents (VrDs) is critical in document intelligence as it captures the rich structure semantics within documents. Previous works typically formulated layout reading order as a permutation of layout elements, i.e. a sequence containing all the layout elements. However, we argue that this formulation does not adequately convey the complete reading order information in the layout, which may potentially lead to performance decline in downstream VrD tasks. To address this issue, we propose to model the layout reading order as ordering relations over the set of layout elements, which have sufficient expressive capability for the complete reading order information. To enable empirical evaluation on methods towards the improved form of reading order prediction (ROP), we establish a comprehensive benchmark dataset including the reading order annotation as relations over layout elements, together with a relation-extraction-based method that outperforms previous methods. Moreover, to highlight the practical benefits of introducing the improved form of layout reading order, we propose a reading-order-relation-enhancing pipeline to improve model performance on any arbitrary VrD task by introducing additional reading order relation inputs. Comprehensive results demonstrate that the pipeline generally benefits downstream VrD tasks: (1) with utilizing the reading order relation information, the enhanced downstream models achieve SOTA results on both two task settings of the targeted dataset; (2) with utilizing the pseudo reading order information generated by the proposed ROP model, the performance of the enhanced models has improved across all three models and eight cross-domain VrD-IE/QA task settings without targeted optimization.

Raed Alharbi, Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, Huan Chen et al.

Understanding the COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as who and why, is very crucial since a large-scale vaccine adoption remains as one of the most efficient methods of controlling the pandemic. Such an understanding also provides insights into designing successful vaccination campaigns for future pandemics. Unfortunately, there are many factors involving in deciding whether to take the vaccine, especially from the cultural point of view. To obtain these goals, we design a novel culture-aware machine learning (ML) model, based on our new data collection, for predicting vaccination willingness. We further analyze the most important features which contribute to the ML model's predictions using advanced AI explainers such as the Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP). These analyses reveal the key factors that most likely impact the vaccine adoption decisions. Our findings show that Hispanic and African American are most likely impacted by cultural characteristics such as religions and ethnic affiliation, whereas the vaccine trust and approval influence the Asian communities the most. Our results also show that cultural characteristics, rumors, and political affiliation are associated with increased vaccine rejection.

Haifeng Wang, Hua Wu, Tian Wu et al.

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Ghanshyam Verma, Shovon Sengupta, Simon Simanta et al.

Personalized recommender systems play a crucial role in direct marketing, particularly in financial services, where delivering relevant content can enhance customer engagement and promote informed decision-making. This study explores interpretable knowledge graph (KG)-based recommender systems by proposing two distinct approaches for personalized article recommendations within a multinational financial services firm. The first approach leverages Reinforcement Learning (RL) to traverse a KG constructed from both structured (tabular) and unstructured (textual) data, enabling interpretability through Path Directed Reasoning (PDR). The second approach employs the XGBoost algorithm, with post-hoc explainability techniques such as SHAP and ELI5 to enhance transparency. By integrating machine learning with automatically generated KGs, our methods not only improve recommendation accuracy but also provide interpretable insights, facilitating more informed decision-making in customer relationship management.

Huiyan Bai, Tingfa Xu, Huan Chen et al.

Extracting discriminative information from complex spectral details in hyperspectral image (HSI) for HSI classification is pivotal. While current prevailing methods rely on spectral magnitude features, they could cause confusion in certain classes, resulting in misclassification and decreased accuracy. We find that the derivative spectrum proves more adept at capturing concealed information, thereby offering a distinct advantage in separating these confusion classes. Leveraging the complementarity between spectral magnitude and derivative features, we propose a Content-driven Spectrum Complementary Network based on Magnitude-Derivative Dual Encoder, employing these two features as combined inputs. To fully utilize their complementary information, we raise a Content-adaptive Point-wise Fusion Module, enabling adaptive fusion of dual-encoder features in a point-wise selective manner, contingent upon feature representation. To preserve a rich source of complementary information while extracting more distinguishable features, we introduce a Hybrid Disparity-enhancing Loss that enhances the differential expression of the features from the two branches and increases the inter-class distance. As a result, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the extensive WHU-OHS dataset and eight other benchmark datasets.

Xinpeng Lv, Yunxin Mao, Haoxuan Li et al.

Strategic classification~(SC) explores how individuals or entities modify their features strategically to achieve favorable classification outcomes. However, existing SC methods, which are largely based on linear models or shallow neural networks, face significant limitations in terms of scalability and capacity when applied to real-world datasets with significantly increasing scale, especially in financial services and the internet sector. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage large language models to design a more scalable and efficient SC framework, especially in the case of growing individuals engaged with decision-making processes. Specifically, we introduce GLIM, a gradient-free SC method grounded in in-context learning. During the feed-forward process of self-attention, GLIM implicitly simulates the typical bi-level optimization process of SC, including both the feature manipulation and decision rule optimization. Without fine-tuning the LLMs, our proposed GLIM enjoys the advantage of cost-effective adaptation in dynamic strategic environments. Theoretically, we prove GLIM can support pre-trained LLMs to adapt to a broad range of strategic manipulations. We validate our approach through experiments with a collection of pre-trained LLMs on real-world and synthetic datasets in financial and internet domains, demonstrating that our GLIM exhibits both robustness and efficiency, and offering an effective solution for large-scale SC tasks.

Shuyan Bai, Tingfa Xu, Peifu Liu et al.

RGB-based camouflaged object detection struggles in real-world scenarios where color and texture cues are ambiguous. While hyperspectral image offers a powerful alternative by capturing fine-grained spectral signatures, progress in hyperspectral camouflaged object detection (HCOD) has been critically hampered by the absence of a dedicated, large-scale benchmark. To spur innovation, we introduce HyperCOD, the first challenging benchmark for HCOD. Comprising 350 high-resolution hyperspectral images, It features complex real-world scenarios with minimal objects, intricate shapes, severe occlusions, and dynamic lighting to challenge current models. The advent of foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) presents a compelling opportunity. To adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for HCOD, we propose HyperSpectral Camouflage-aware SAM (HSC-SAM). HSC-SAM ingeniously reformulates the hyperspectral image by decoupling it into a spatial map fed to SAM's image encoder and a spectral saliency map that serves as an adaptive prompt. This translation effectively bridges the modality gap. Extensive experiments show that HSC-SAM sets a new state-of-the-art on HyperCOD and generalizes robustly to other public HSI datasets. The HyperCOD dataset and our HSC-SAM baseline provide a robust foundation to foster future research in this emerging area.

Peifu Liu, Tingfa Xu, Jie Wang et al.

Hyperspectral image classification demands spatially coherent predictions and precise boundary delineation. Yet prevailing superpixel-based methods face an inherent contradiction: clustering aggregates similar pixels into regions, but the subsequent classifier operates pixel-wise, undermining regional consistency. Consequently, existing approaches do not guarantee region-level, boundary-aligned classification. To address this limitation, we propose the Dual-stage Spectrum-Constrained Clustering-based Classifier (DSCC), an end-to-end framework that explicitly decouples clustering from classification by first grouping spectral similar and spatially proximate pixels into spectral supertokens and then performing token-level prediction. At its core, DSCC computes an image-level multi-criteria feature distance between pixels and centers, followed by a locality-aware assignment regularization, enabling the generation of boundary-preserving spectral supertokens. A density-isolation based center selection further yields representative, well-separated centers, reducing redundancy and improving robustness to scale variation. To accommodate mixed land-cover compositions within each token, we introduce a soft-label scheme that encodes class proportions and improves robustness for mixed-class tokens. DSCC attains a CF1 of 0.728 at 197.75 FPS on the WHU-OHS dataset, offering a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared with state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments further validate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed dual-stage paradigm for hyperspectral image classification. The source code is available at https://github.com/laprf/DSCC.

Yi Tu, Chong Zhang, Ya Guo et al.

The recognition of named entities in visually-rich documents (VrD-NER) plays a critical role in various real-world scenarios and applications. However, the research in VrD-NER faces three major challenges: complex document layouts, incorrect reading orders, and unsuitable task formulations. To address these challenges, we propose a query-aware entity extraction head, namely UNER, to collaborate with existing multi-modal document transformers to develop more robust VrD-NER models. The UNER head considers the VrD-NER task as a combination of sequence labeling and reading order prediction, effectively addressing the issues of discontinuous entities in documents. Experimental evaluations on diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UNER in improving entity extraction performance. Moreover, the UNER head enables a supervised pre-training stage on various VrD-NER datasets to enhance the document transformer backbones and exhibits substantial knowledge transfer from the pre-training stage to the fine-tuning stage. By incorporating universal layout understanding, a pre-trained UNER-based model demonstrates significant advantages in few-shot and cross-linguistic scenarios and exhibits zero-shot entity extraction abilities.

Ruifeng Qian, Shijie Li, Mengjiao Bao et al.

With the growth of the economy and society, enterprises, especially in the FinTech industry, have increasing demands of outbound calls for customers such as debt collection, marketing, anti-fraud calls, and so on. But a large amount of repetitive and mechanical work occupies most of the time of human agents, so the cost of equipment and labor for enterprises is increasing accordingly. At the same time, with the development of artificial intelligence technology in the past few decades, it has become quite common for companies to use new technologies such as Big Data and artificial intelligence to empower outbound call businesses. The intelligent outbound robot is a typical application of the artificial intelligence technology in the field of outbound call businesses. It is mainly used to communicate with customers in order to accomplish a certain target. It has the characteristics of low cost, high reuse, and easy compliance, which has attracted more attention from the industry. At present, there are two kinds of intelligent outbound robots in the industry but both of them still leave large room for improvement. One kind of them is based on a finite state machine relying on the configuration of jump conditions and corresponding nodes based on manual experience. This kind of intelligent outbound robot is also called a flow-based robot. For example, the schematic diagram of the working model of a flow-based robot for debt collection is shown in Fig.\ref{fig:label}. In each round, the robot will reply to the user with the words corresponding to each node.

Jianan Li, Huan Chen, Wangcai Zhao et al.

Hyperspectral Images (HSIs) are crucial across numerous fields but are hindered by the long acquisition times associated with traditional spectrometers. The Coded Aperture Snapshot Spectral Imaging (CASSI) system mitigates this issue through a compression technique that accelerates the acquisition process. However, reconstructing HSIs from compressed data presents challenges due to fixed spatial and spectral resolution constraints. This study introduces a novel method using implicit neural representation for continuous hyperspectral image reconstruction. We propose the Mixed Granularity Implicit Representation (MGIR) framework, which includes a Hierarchical Spectral-Spatial Implicit Encoder for efficient multi-scale implicit feature extraction. This is complemented by a Mixed-Granularity Local Feature Aggregator that adaptively integrates local features across scales, combined with a decoder that merges coordinate information for precise reconstruction. By leveraging implicit neural representations, the MGIR framework enables reconstruction at any desired spatial-spectral resolution, significantly enhancing the flexibility and adaptability of the CASSI system. Extensive experimental evaluations confirm that our model produces reconstructed images at arbitrary resolutions and matches state-of-the-art methods across varying spectral-spatial compression ratios. The code will be released at https://github.com/chh11/MGIR.

Peifu Liu, Huiyan Bai, Tingfa Xu et al.

The objective of hyperspectral remote sensing image salient object detection (HRSI-SOD) is to identify objects or regions that exhibit distinct spectrum contrasts with the background. This area holds significant promise for practical applications; however, progress has been limited by a notable scarcity of dedicated datasets and methodologies. To bridge this gap and stimulate further research, we introduce the first HRSI-SOD dataset, termed HRSSD, which includes 704 hyperspectral images and 5327 pixel-level annotated salient objects. The HRSSD dataset poses substantial challenges for salient object detection algorithms due to large scale variation, diverse foreground-background relations, and multi-salient objects. Additionally, we propose an innovative and efficient baseline model for HRSI-SOD, termed the Deep Spectral Saliency Network (DSSN). The core of DSSN is the Cross-level Saliency Assessment Block, which performs pixel-wise attention and evaluates the contributions of multi-scale similarity maps at each spatial location, effectively reducing erroneous responses in cluttered regions and emphasizes salient regions across scales. Additionally, the High-resolution Fusion Module combines bottom-up fusion strategy and learned spatial upsampling to leverage the strengths of multi-scale saliency maps, ensuring accurate localization of small objects. Experiments on the HRSSD dataset robustly validate the superiority of DSSN, underscoring the critical need for specialized datasets and methodologies in this domain. Further evaluations on the HSOD-BIT and HS-SOD datasets demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed method. The dataset and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/laprf/HRSSD.

Xinzhong Wang, Ya Guo, Jing Li et al.

Key Information Extraction (KIE) from visually-rich documents (VrDs) is a critical task, for which recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong potential. However, their reliance on autoregressive inference, which generates outputs sequentially, creates a significant efficiency bottleneck, especially as KIE tasks often involve extracting multiple, semantically independent fields. To overcome this limitation, we introduce PIP: a Parallel Inference Paradigm for KIE. Our approach reformulates the problem by using "[mask]" tokens as placeholders for all target values, enabling their simultaneous generation in a single forward pass. To facilitate this paradigm, we develop a tailored mask pre-training strategy and construct large-scale supervised datasets. Experimental results show that our PIP-models achieve a 5-36x inference speedup with negligible performance degradation compared to traditional autoregressive base models. By substantially improving efficiency while maintaining high accuracy, PIP paves the way for scalable and practical real-world KIE solutions.

Kexin Ma, Ruochun Jin, Xi Wang et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALMs) have made significant strides in enhancing the accuracy of generated responses.However, existing research often overlooks the data quality issues within retrieval results, often caused by inaccurate existing vector-distance-based retrieval methods.We propose to boost the precision of RALMs' answers from a data quality perspective through the Context-Driven Index Trimming (CDIT) framework, where Context Matching Dependencies (CMDs) are employed as logical data quality rules to capture and regulate the consistency between retrieved contexts.Based on the semantic comprehension capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), CDIT can effectively identify and discard retrieval results that are inconsistent with the query context and further modify indexes in the database, thereby improving answer quality.Experiments demonstrate on challenging question-answering tasks.Also, the flexibility of CDIT is verified through its compatibility with various language models and indexing methods, which offers a promising approach to bolster RALMs' data quality and retrieval precision jointly.

Peifu Liu, Tingfa Xu, Guokai Shi et al.

Hyperspectral salient object detection (HSOD) aims to extract targets or regions with significantly different spectra from hyperspectral images. While existing deep learning-based methods can achieve good detection results, they generally necessitate pixel-level annotations, which are notably challenging to acquire for hyperspectral images. To address this issue, we introduce point supervision into HSOD, and incorporate Spectral Saliency, derived from conventional HSOD methods, as a pivotal spectral representation within the framework. This integration leads to the development of a novel Spectrum-oriented Point-supervised Saliency Detector (SPSD). Specifically, we propose a novel pipeline, specifically designed for HSIs, to generate pseudo-labels, effectively mitigating the performance decline associated with point supervision strategy. Additionally, Spectral Saliency is employed to counteract information loss during model supervision and saliency refinement, thereby maintaining the structural integrity and edge accuracy of the detected objects. Furthermore, we introduce a Spectrum-transformed Spatial Gate to focus more precisely on salient regions while reducing feature redundancy. We have carried out comprehensive experiments on both HSOD-BIT and HS-SOD datasets to validate the efficacy of our proposed method, using mean absolute error (MAE), E-measure, F-measure, Area Under Curve, and Cross Correlation as evaluation metrics. For instance, on the HSOD-BIT dataset, our SPSD achieves a MAE of 0.031 and an F-measure of 0.878. Thorough ablation studies have substantiated the effectiveness of each individual module and provided insights into the model's working mechanism. Further evaluations on RGB-thermal salient object detection datasets highlight the versatility of our approach.

Fuwei Zhang, Xiaoyu Liu, Dongbo Xi et al.

Generative Recommendation (GR) has emerged as a new paradigm in recommender systems. This approach relies on quantized representations to discretize item features, modeling users' historical interactions as sequences of discrete tokens. Based on these tokenized sequences, GR predicts the next item by employing next-token prediction methods. The challenges of GR lie in constructing high-quality semantic identifiers (IDs) that are hierarchically organized, minimally conflicting, and conducive to effective generative model training. However, current approaches remain limited in their ability to harness multimodal information and to capture the deep and intricate interactions among diverse modalities, both of which are essential for learning high-quality semantic IDs and for effectively training GR models. To address this, we propose Multi-Aspect Cross-modal quantization for generative Recommendation (MACRec), which introduces multimodal information and incorporates it into both semantic ID learning and generative model training from different aspects. Specifically, we first introduce cross-modal quantization during the ID learning process, which effectively reduces conflict rates and thus improves codebook usability through the complementary integration of multimodal information. In addition, to further enhance the generative ability of our GR model, we incorporate multi-aspect cross-modal alignments, including the implicit and explicit alignments. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three well-known recommendation datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Ruijie Fan, Junyan Ye, Huan Chen et al.

Existing satellite video tracking methods often struggle with generalization, requiring scenario-specific training to achieve satisfactory performance, and are prone to track loss in the presence of occlusion. To address these challenges, we propose SatSAM2, a zero-shot satellite video tracker built on SAM2, designed to adapt foundation models to the remote sensing domain. SatSAM2 introduces two core modules: a Kalman Filter-based Constrained Motion Module (KFCMM) to exploit temporal motion cues and suppress drift, and a Motion-Constrained State Machine (MCSM) to regulate tracking states based on motion dynamics and reliability. To support large-scale evaluation, we propose MatrixCity Video Object Tracking (MVOT), a synthetic benchmark containing 1,500+ sequences and 157K annotated frames with diverse viewpoints, illumination, and occlusion conditions. Extensive experiments on two satellite tracking benchmarks and MVOT show that SatSAM2 outperforms both traditional and foundation model-based trackers, including SAM2 and its variants. Notably, on the OOTB dataset, SatSAM2 achieves a 5.84% AUC improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset will be publicly released to encourage further research.

Huan Chen, Ting Han, Siyu Chen et al.

Street-view imagery (SVI) offers a fine-grained lens on traffic risk, yet two fundamental challenges persist: (1) how to construct street-level indicators that capture accident-related features, and (2) how to quantify their causal impacts across different accident types. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic4Safety, a framework that applies zero-shot semantic segmentation to SVIs to derive 11 interpretable streetscape indicators, and integrates road type as contextual information to analyze approximately 30,000 accident records in Austin. Specifically, we train an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) multi-class classifier and use Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) to interpret both global and local feature contributions, and then apply Generalized Propensity Score (GPS) weighting and Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimation to control confounding and quantify causal effects. Results uncover heterogeneous, accident-type-specific causal patterns: features capturing scene complexity, exposure, and roadway geometry dominate predictive power; larger drivable area and emergency space reduce risk, whereas excessive visual openness can increase it. By bridging predictive modeling with causal inference, Semantic4Safety supports targeted interventions and high-risk corridor diagnosis, offering a scalable, data-informed tool for urban road safety planning.

Yi Tu, Ya Guo, Huan Chen et al.

Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU) has attracted much research attention over the past years. Pre-trained models on a large number of document images with transformer-based backbones have led to significant performance gains in this field. The major challenge is how to fusion the different modalities (text, layout, and image) of the documents in a unified model with different pre-training tasks. This paper focuses on improving text-layout interactions and proposes a novel multi-modal pre-training model, LayoutMask. LayoutMask uses local 1D position, instead of global 1D position, as layout input and has two pre-training objectives: (1) Masked Language Modeling: predicting masked tokens with two novel masking strategies; (2) Masked Position Modeling: predicting masked 2D positions to improve layout representation learning. LayoutMask can enhance the interactions between text and layout modalities in a unified model and produce adaptive and robust multi-modal representations for downstream tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of VrDU problems, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document image classification.

Ganesh Subramaniam, Huan Chen, Ravi Varadhan et al.

Cybersecurity, security monitoring of malicious events in IP traffic, is an important field largely unexplored by statisticians. Computer scientists have made significant contributions in this area using statistical anomaly detection and other supervised learning methods to detect specific malicious events. In this research, we investigate the detection of botnet command and control (C&C) hosts in massive IP traffic. We use the NetFlow data, the industry standard for monitoring of IP traffic for exploratory analysis and extracting new features. Using statistical as well as deep learning models, we develop a statistical intrusion detection system (SIDS) to predict traffic traces identified with malicious attacks. Employing interpretative machine learning techniques, botnet traffic signatures are derived. These models successfully detected botnet C&C hosts and compromised devices. The results were validated by matching predictions to existing blacklists of published malicious IP addresses.

Chi-Man Wong, Fan Feng, Wen Zhang et al.

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) in E-commerce platforms aim to recommend items to users via multiple conversational interactions. Click-through rate (CTR) prediction models are commonly used for ranking candidate items. However, most CRSs are suffer from the problem of data scarcity and sparseness. To address this issue, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced deep cross network (K-DCN), a two-step (pretrain and fine-tune) CTR prediction model to recommend items. We first construct a billion-scale conversation knowledge graph (CKG) from information about users, items and conversations, and then pretrain CKG by introducing knowledge graph embedding method and graph convolution network to encode semantic and structural information respectively.To make the CTR prediction model sensible of current state of users and the relationship between dialogues and items, we introduce user-state and dialogue-interaction representations based on pre-trained CKG and propose K-DCN.In K-DCN, we fuse the user-state representation, dialogue-interaction representation and other normal feature representations via deep cross network, which will give the rank of candidate items to be recommended.We experimentally prove that our proposal significantly outperforms baselines and show it's real application in Alime.

Shuangyong Song, Kexin Wang, Chao Wang et al.

In response generation task, proper sentimental expressions can obviously improve the human-like level of the responses. However, for real application in online systems, high QPS (queries per second, an indicator of the flow capacity of on-line systems) is required, and a dynamic vocabulary mechanism has been proved available in improving speed of generative models. In this paper, we proposed an emotion-controlled dialog response generation model based on the dynamic vocabulary mechanism, and the experimental results show the benefit of this model.

Shuangyong Song, Chao Wang, Qianqian Xie et al.

Conversational context understanding aims to recognize the real intention of user from the conversation history, which is critical for building the dialogue system. However, the multi-turn conversation understanding in open domain is still quite challenging, which requires the system extracting the important information and resolving the dependencies in contexts among a variety of open topics. In this paper, we propose the conversational query rewriting model - MLR, which is a Multi-task model on sequence Labeling and query Rewriting. MLR reformulates the multi-turn conversational queries into a single turn query, which conveys the true intention of users concisely and alleviates the difficulty of the multi-turn dialogue modeling. In the model, we formulate the query rewriting as a sequence generation problem and introduce word category information via the auxiliary word category label predicting task. To train our model, we construct a new Chinese query rewriting dataset and conduct experiments on it. The experimental results show that our model outperforms compared models, and prove the effectiveness of the word category information in improving the rewriting performance.

Ji Zhao, Meiyu Yu, Huan Chen et al.

When using the electronic map, POI retrieval is the initial and important step, whose quality directly affects the user experience. Similarity between user query and POI information is the most critical feature in POI retrieval. An accurate similarity calculation is challenging since the mismatch between a query and a retrieval text may exist in the case of a mistyped query or an alias inquiry. In this paper, we propose a POI latent semantic model based on deep networks, which can effectively extract query features and POI information features for the similarity calculation. Our model describes the semantic information of complex texts at multiple layers, and achieves multi-field matches by modeling POI's name and detailed address respectively. Our model is evaluated by the POI retrieval ranking datasets, including the labeled data of relevance and real-world user click data in POI retrieval. Results show that our model significantly outperforms our competitors in POI retrieval ranking tasks. The proposed algorithm has become a critical component of an online system serving millions of people everyday.

Christopher Streiffer, Huan Chen, Theophilus Benson et al.

In recent years, many techniques have been developed to improve the performance and efficiency of data center networks. While these techniques provide high accuracy, they are often designed using heuristics that leverage domain-specific properties of the workload or hardware. In this vision paper, we argue that many data center networking techniques, e.g., routing, topology augmentation, energy savings, with diverse goals actually share design and architectural similarity. We present a design for developing general intermediate representations of network topologies using deep learning that is amenable to solving classes of data center problems. We develop a framework, DeepConfig, that simplifies the processing of configuring and training deep learning agents that use the intermediate representation to learns different tasks. To illustrate the strength of our approach, we configured, implemented, and evaluated a DeepConfig-Agent that tackles the data center topology augmentation problem. Our initial results are promising --- DeepConfig performs comparably to the optimal.