Juan Wang

Guanyi Qin, Jie Liang, Bingbing Zhang et al. · baidu

In this paper, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on the 3rd Restore Any Image Model in the Wild, specifically focusing on Track 1: Professional Image Quality Assessment. Conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) typically relies on scalar scores. By compressing complex visual characteristics into a single number, these methods fundamentally struggle to distinguish subtle differences among uniformly high-quality images. Furthermore, they fail to articulate why one image is superior, lacking the reasoning capabilities required to provide guidance for vision tasks. To bridge this gap, recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising paradigm. Inspired by this potential, our challenge establishes a novel benchmark exploring the ability of MLLMs to mimic human expert cognition in evaluating high-quality image pairs. Participants were tasked with overcoming critical bottlenecks in professional scenarios, centering on two primary objectives: (1) Comparative Quality Selection: reliably identifying the visually superior image within a high-quality pair; and (2) Interpretative Reasoning: generating grounded, expert-level explanations that detail the rationale behind the selection. In total, the challenge attracted nearly 200 registrations and over 2,500 submissions. The top-performing methods significantly advanced the state of the art in professional IQA. The challenge dataset is available at https://github.com/narthchin/RAIM-PIQA, and the official homepage is accessible at https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12789/.

Lishen Qu, Yao Liu, Jie Liang et al.

This paper presents NTIRE 2026, the 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) challenge on multi-exposure image fusion in dynamic scenes. We introduce a benchmark that targets a practical yet difficult HDR imaging setting, where exposure bracketing must be fused under scene motion, illumination variation, and handheld camera jitter. The challenge data contains 100 training sequences with 7 exposure levels and 100 test sequences with 5 exposure levels, reflecting real-world scenarios that frequently cause misalignment and ghosting artefacts. We evaluate submissions with a leaderboard score derived from PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS, while also considering perceptual quality, efficiency, and reproducibility during the final review. This track attracted 114 participating teams and received 987 submissions. The winning methods significantly improved the ability to remove artifacts from multi-exposure fusion and recover fine details. The dataset and the code of each team can be found at the repository: https://github.com/qulishen/RAIM-HDR.

Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Shuai Liu et al.

The role of mobile cameras increased dramatically over the past few years, leading to more and more research in automatic image quality enhancement and RAW photo processing. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline replacing the standard mobile ISPs that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Snapdragon's 8 Gen 1 GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. The proposed solutions are compatible with all recent mobile GPUs, being able to process Full HD photos in less than 20-50 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.

Juan Wang, Bin Xia

Weakly supervised image segmentation approaches in the literature usually achieve high segmentation performance using tight bounding box supervision and decrease the performance greatly when supervised by loose bounding boxes. However, compared with loose bounding box, it is much more difficult to acquire tight bounding box due to its strict requirements on the precise locations of the four sides of the box. To resolve this issue, this study investigates whether it is possible to maintain good segmentation performance when loose bounding boxes are used as supervision. For this purpose, this work extends our previous parallel transformation based multiple instance learning (MIL) for tight bounding box supervision by integrating an MIL strategy based on polar transformation to assist image segmentation. The proposed polar transformation based MIL formulation works for both tight and loose bounding boxes, in which a positive bag is defined as pixels in a polar line of a bounding box with one endpoint located inside the object enclosed by the box and the other endpoint located at one of the four sides of the box. Moreover, a weighted smooth maximum approximation is introduced to incorporate the observation that pixels closer to the origin of the polar transformation are more likely to belong to the object in the box. The proposed approach was evaluated on two public datasets using dice coefficient when bounding boxes at different precision levels were considered in the experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for bounding boxes at all precision levels and is robust to mild and moderate errors in the loose bounding box annotations. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/wangjuan313/wsis-beyond-tightBB}.

Juan Wang, Bin Xia

This study investigates weakly supervised image segmentation using loose bounding box supervision. It presents a multiple instance learning strategy based on polar transformation to assist image segmentation when loose bounding boxes are employed as supervision. In this strategy, weighted smooth maximum approximation is introduced to incorporate the observation that pixels closer to the origin of the polar transformation are more likely to belong to the object in the bounding box. The proposed approach was evaluated on a public medical dataset using Dice coefficient. The results demonstrate its superior performance. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/wangjuan313/wsis-polartransform}.

Zewen Chen, Sunhan Xu, Yun Zeng et al.

With the rising demand for high-resolution (HR) images, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) gains more attention, as it can ecaluate image quality in real-time on mobile devices and enhance user experience. However, existing NR-IQA methods often resize or crop the HR images into small resolution, which leads to a loss of important details. And most of them are of high computational complexity, which hinders their application on mobile devices due to limited computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose MobileIQA, a novel approach that utilizes lightweight backbones to efficiently assess image quality while preserving image details through high-resolution input. MobileIQA employs the proposed multi-view attention learning (MAL) module to capture diverse opinions, simulating subjective opinions provided by different annotators during the dataset annotation process. The model uses a teacher model to guide the learning of a student model through knowledge distillation. This method significantly reduces computational complexity while maintaining high performance. Experiments demonstrate that MobileIQA outperforms novel IQA methods on evaluation metrics and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/chencn2020/MobileIQA.

Mingyu Xiao, Runze Chen, Haiyong Luo et al.

Map-free relocalization technology is crucial for applications in autonomous navigation and augmented reality, but relying on pre-built maps is often impractical. It faces significant challenges due to limitations in matching methods and the inherent lack of scale in monocular images. These issues lead to substantial rotational and metric errors and even localization failures in real-world scenarios. Large matching errors significantly impact the overall relocalization process, affecting both rotational and translational accuracy. Due to the inherent limitations of the camera itself, recovering the metric scale from a single image is crucial, as this significantly impacts the translation error. To address these challenges, we propose a map-free relocalization method enhanced by instance knowledge and depth knowledge. By leveraging instance-based matching information to improve global matching results, our method significantly reduces the possibility of mismatching across different objects. The robustness of instance knowledge across the scene helps the feature point matching model focus on relevant regions and enhance matching accuracy. Additionally, we use estimated metric depth from a single image to reduce metric errors and improve scale recovery accuracy. By integrating methods dedicated to mitigating large translational and rotational errors, our approach demonstrates superior performance in map-free relocalization techniques.

Tian Zhang, Yiwei Xu, Juan Wang et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools and retrieval systems to autonomously complete complex tasks. However, this design exposes agents to indirect prompt injection (IPI), where attacker-controlled context embedded in tool outputs or retrieved content silently steers agent actions away from user intent. Unlike prompt-based attacks, IPI unfolds over multi-turn trajectories, making malicious control difficult to disentangle from legitimate task execution. Existing inference-time defenses primarily rely on heuristic detection and conservative blocking of high-risk actions, which can prematurely terminate workflows or broadly suppress tool usage under ambiguous multi-turn scenarios. We propose AgentSentry, a novel inference-time detection and mitigation framework for tool-augmented LLM agents. To the best of our knowledge, AgentSentry is the first inference-time defense to model multi-turn IPI as a temporal causal takeover. It localizes takeover points via controlled counterfactual re-executions at tool-return boundaries and enables safe continuation through causally guided context purification that removes attack-induced deviations while preserving task-relevant evidence. We evaluate AgentSentry on the \textsc{AgentDojo} benchmark across four task suites, three IPI attack families, and multiple black-box LLMs. AgentSentry eliminates successful attacks and maintains strong utility under attack, achieving an average Utility Under Attack (UA) of 74.55 %, improving UA by 20.8 to 33.6 percentage points over the strongest baselines without degrading benign performance.

Juan Wang, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Tomo Miyazaki et al.

3D instance segmentation is an important task for real-world applications. To avoid costly manual annotations, existing methods have explored generating pseudo labels by transferring 2D masks from foundation models to 3D. However, this approach is often suboptimal since the video frames are processed independently. This causes inconsistent segmentation granularity and conflicting 3D pseudo labels, which degrades the accuracy of final segmentation. To address this, we introduce a Granularity-Consistent automatic 2D Mask Tracking approach that maintains temporal correspondences across frames, eliminating conflicting pseudo labels. Combined with a three-stage curriculum learning framework, our approach progressively trains from fragmented single-view data to unified multi-view annotations, ultimately globally coherent full-scene supervision. This structured learning pipeline enables the model to progressively expose to pseudo-labels of increasing consistency. Thus, we can robustly distill a consistent 3D representation from initially fragmented and contradictory 2D priors. Experimental results demonstrated that our method effectively generated consistent and accurate 3D segmentations. Furthermore, the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks and open-vocabulary ability.

Yang Liu, Juan Wang, Zhengxing Chen et al.

Scheduled batch jobs have been widely used on the asynchronous computing platforms to execute various enterprise applications, including the scheduled notifications and the candidate pre-computation for the modern recommender systems. It is important to deliver or update the information to the users at the right time to maintain the user experience and the execution impact. However, it is challenging to provide a versatile execution time optimization solution for the user-basis scheduled jobs to satisfy various product scenarios while maintaining reasonable infrastructure resource consumption. In this paper, we describe how we apply a learning-to-rank approach plus a "best time policy" in the best time selection. In addition, we propose an ensemble learner to minimize the ranking loss by efficiently leveraging multiple streams of user activity signals in our scheduling decisions of the execution time. Especially, we observe the cannibalization cross use cases to compete the user's peak time slot and introduce a coordination system to mitigate the problem. Our optimization approach has been successfully tested with production traffic that serves billions of users per day, with statistically significant improvements in various product metrics, including the notifications and content candidate generation. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first ML-based multi-tenant solution of the execution time optimization problem for the scheduled jobs at a large industrial scale cross different product domains.

Zewen Chen, Juan Wang, Wen Wang et al.

Existing Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods achieve remarkable success in analyzing quality for overall image, but few works explore quality analysis for Regions of Interest (ROIs). The quality analysis of ROIs can provide fine-grained guidance for image quality improvement and is crucial for scenarios focusing on region-level quality. This paper proposes a novel network, SEAGULL, which can SEe and Assess ROIs quality with GUidance from a Large vision-Language model. SEAGULL incorporates a vision-language model (VLM), masks generated by Segment Anything Model (SAM) to specify ROIs, and a meticulously designed Mask-based Feature Extractor (MFE) to extract global and local tokens for specified ROIs, enabling accurate fine-grained IQA for ROIs. Moreover, this paper constructs two ROI-based IQA datasets, SEAGULL-100w and SEAGULL-3k, for training and evaluating ROI-based IQA. SEAGULL-100w comprises about 100w synthetic distortion images with 33 million ROIs for pre-training to improve the model's ability of regional quality perception, and SEAGULL-3k contains about 3k authentic distortion ROIs to enhance the model's ability to perceive real world distortions. After pre-training on SEAGULL-100w and fine-tuning on SEAGULL-3k, SEAGULL shows remarkable performance on fine-grained ROI quality assessment. Code and datasets are publicly available at the https://github.com/chencn2020/Seagull.

Yunhan Bu, Quan Zhang, Huaping Zhang et al.

Multi-Hop Fact Verification (MHFV) necessitates complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) which often suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), lack explicit modeling of the causal dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce a novel framework that grounds reasoning in a Structural Causal Model (SCM), treating verification as a constructive causal inference process. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity degrades performance. To address this, we propose a Rule-based Reinforcement Learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering a reliable and interpretable solution for complex fact verification.

Juan Wang, Xinyu Sun, Ke Zhang et al.

Current image quality assessment methods are heavily biased towards global distortions (e.g., noise, blur), neglecting local perceptual artifacts such as ghosting, lens flare, and moire effects. Although significant progress has been made in artifact removal, the fundamental problem of automatic artifact detection remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we formalize the Image Perceptual Artifact Detection (IPAD) task to address this gap. We contribute a benchmark dataset comprising 3,520 artifact images, including 520 real-captured and 3,000 synthetic samples, each paired with pixel-level masks across three representative artifact categories. The core challenge of IPAD lies in the localized, subtle, and semantically weak nature of these artifacts, which makes them prone to missed detection. To overcome this, we introduce IPAD-CLIP, a novel framework built upon CLIP that enhances artifact discrimination in both textual and visual spaces while preserving generalization capabilities. Our key insight is that local artifacts often exhibit strong correlations with specific semantic contexts. Accordingly, we learn artifact-aware text embeddings to explicitly model the object-artifact relationships, resulting in enhanced representations that clear differentiate between clean and artifact prompts. These text embeddings are then used as anchors to shift the visual encoder's attention from high-level semantics to subtle, low-level artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IPAD-CLIP offers a resource-efficient adaptation of CLIP for detection, significantly outperforming advanced image anomaly detection and manipulation detection methods on our benchmark. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study addressing multi-class local perceptual artifact detection in terms of both dataset and model.

Qifeng Liu, Dawei Zhao, Yabo Dong et al.

Recent advances in point cloud object detection have increasingly adopted Transformer-based and State Space Models (SSMs), demonstrating strong performance. However, voxelbased representations in these models require strict consistency in input and output dimensions due to their serialized processing, which limits the spatial diffusion capability typically offered by convolutional operations. This limitation significantly affects detection accuracy. Inspired by CNN-based object detection architectures, we propose a novel Voxel Diffusion Module (VDM) to enhance voxel-level representation and diffusion in point cloud data. VDM is composed of sparse 3D convolutions, submanifold sparse convolutions, and residual connections. To ensure computational efficiency, the output feature maps are downsampled to one-fourth of the original input resolution. VDM serves two primary functions: (1) diffusing foreground voxel features through sparse 3D convolutions to enrich spatial context, and (2) aggregating fine-grained spatial information to strengthen voxelwise feature representation. The enhanced voxel features produced by VDM can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream Transformer- or SSM-based detection models for accurate object classification and localization, highlighting the generalizability of our method. We evaluate VDM on several benchmark datasets by embedding it into both Transformerbased and SSM-based models. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves detection accuracy over baseline models. Specifically, VDM-SSMs achieve 74.7 mAPH (L2) on Waymo, 72.9 NDS on nuScenes, 42.3 mAP on Argoverse 2, and 67.6 mAP on ONCE, setting new stateof-the-art performance across all datasets. Our code will be made publicly available.

Juan Wang, Bin Xia

The cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) is one of the most significant indicator for glaucoma diagnosis. Different from the use of costly fully supervised learning formulation with pixel-wise annotations in the literature, this study investigates the feasibility of accurate CDR measurement in fundus images using only tight bounding box supervision. For this purpose, we develop a two-task network named as CDRNet for accurate CDR measurement, one for weakly supervised image segmentation, and the other for bounding-box regression. The weakly supervised image segmentation task is implemented based on generalized multiple instance learning formulation and smooth maximum approximation, and the bounding-box regression task outputs class-specific bounding box prediction in a single scale at the original image resolution. To get accurate bounding box prediction, a class-specific bounding-box normalizer and an expected intersection-over-union are proposed. In the experiments, the proposed approach was evaluated by a testing set with 1200 images using CDR error and $F_1$ score for CDR measurement and dice coefficient for image segmentation. A grader study was conducted to compare the performance of the proposed approach with those of individual graders. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art performance obtained from the fully supervised image segmentation (FSIS) approach using pixel-wise annotation for CDR measurement. Its performance is also better than those of individual graders. In addition, the proposed approach gets performance close to the state-of-the-art obtained from FSIS and the performance of individual graders for optic cup and disc segmentation. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/wangjuan313/CDRNet}.

Juan Wang, Bin Xia

This paper presents a weakly supervised image segmentation method that adopts tight bounding box annotations. It proposes generalized multiple instance learning (MIL) and smooth maximum approximation to integrate the bounding box tightness prior into the deep neural network in an end-to-end manner. In generalized MIL, positive bags are defined by parallel crossing lines with a set of different angles, and negative bags are defined as individual pixels outside of any bounding boxes. Two variants of smooth maximum approximation, i.e., $α$-softmax function and $α$-quasimax function, are exploited to conquer the numeral instability introduced by maximum function of bag prediction. The proposed approach was evaluated on two pubic medical datasets using Dice coefficient. The results demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/wangjuan313/wsis-boundingbox}.

Yaozu Ye, Kailun Yang, Kaite Xiang et al.

Semantic segmentation is a critical method in the field of autonomous driving. When performing semantic image segmentation, a wider field of view (FoV) helps to obtain more information about the surrounding environment, making automatic driving safer and more reliable, which could be offered by fisheye cameras. However, large public fisheye datasets are not available, and the fisheye images captured by the fisheye camera with large FoV comes with large distortion, so commonly-used semantic segmentation model cannot be directly utilized. In this paper, a seven degrees of freedom (DoF) augmentation method is proposed to transform rectilinear image to fisheye image in a more comprehensive way. In the training process, rectilinear images are transformed into fisheye images in seven DoF, which simulates the fisheye images taken by cameras of different positions, orientations and focal lengths. The result shows that training with the seven-DoF augmentation can improve the model's accuracy and robustness against different distorted fisheye data. This seven-DoF augmentation provides a universal semantic segmentation solution for fisheye cameras in different autonomous driving applications. Also, we provide specific parameter settings of the augmentation for autonomous driving. At last, we tested our universal semantic segmentation model on real fisheye images and obtained satisfactory results. The code and configurations are released at https://github.com/Yaozhuwa/FisheyeSeg.

Weiji Kong, Xun Gong, Juan Wang

Explaining the decisions of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for medical images has become increasingly important. Existing attribution methods have difficulty explaining the meaning of pixels while existing concept-based methods are limited by additional annotations or specific model structures that are difficult to apply to ultrasound images. In this paper, we propose the Lesion Concept Explainer (LCE) framework, which combines attribution methods with concept-based methods. We introduce the Segment Anything Model (SAM), fine-tuned on a large number of medical images, for concept discovery to enable a meaningful explanation of ultrasound image DNNs. The proposed framework is evaluated in terms of both faithfulness and understandability. We point out deficiencies in the popular faithfulness evaluation metrics and propose a new evaluation metric. Our evaluation of public and private breast ultrasound datasets (BUSI and FG-US-B) shows that LCE performs well compared to commonly-used explainability methods. Finally, we also validate that LCE can consistently provide reliable explanations for more meaningful fine-grained diagnostic tasks in breast ultrasound.

Shuhao Han, Haotian Fan, Fangyuan Kong et al.

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2025 challenge on Text to Image (T2I) generation model quality assessment, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2025. The aim of this challenge is to address the fine-grained quality assessment of text-to-image generation models. This challenge evaluates text-to-image models from two aspects: image-text alignment and image structural distortion detection, and is divided into the alignment track and the structural track. The alignment track uses the EvalMuse-40K, which contains around 40K AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) generated by 20 popular generative models. The alignment track has a total of 371 registered participants. A total of 1,883 submissions are received in the development phase, and 507 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 12 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. The structure track uses the EvalMuse-Structure, which contains 10,000 AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) with corresponding structural distortion mask. A total of 211 participants have registered in the structure track. A total of 1155 submissions are received in the development phase, and 487 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 8 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all methods have achieved better results than baseline methods, and the winning methods in both tracks have demonstrated superior prediction performance on T2I model quality assessment.

Zewen Chen, Haina Qin, Juan Wang et al.

Due to the diversity of assessment requirements in various application scenarios for the IQA task, existing IQA methods struggle to directly adapt to these varied requirements after training. Thus, when facing new requirements, a typical approach is fine-tuning these models on datasets specifically created for those requirements. However, it is time-consuming to establish IQA datasets. In this work, we propose a Prompt-based IQA (PromptIQA) that can directly adapt to new requirements without fine-tuning after training. On one hand, it utilizes a short sequence of Image-Score Pairs (ISP) as prompts for targeted predictions, which significantly reduces the dependency on the data requirements. On the other hand, PromptIQA is trained on a mixed dataset with two proposed data augmentation strategies to learn diverse requirements, thus enabling it to effectively adapt to new requirements. Experiments indicate that the PromptIQA outperforms SOTA methods with higher performance and better generalization. The code will be available.

Mengqi Lei, Yihong Wu, Siqi Li et al.

Visual recognition relies on understanding both the semantics of image tokens and the complex interactions among them. Mainstream self-attention methods, while effective at modeling global pair-wise relations, fail to capture high-order associations inherent in real-world scenes and often suffer from redundant computation. Hypergraphs extend conventional graphs by modeling high-order interactions and offer a promising framework for addressing these limitations. However, existing hypergraph neural networks typically rely on static and hard hyperedge assignments, leading to excessive and redundant hyperedges with hard binary vertex memberships that overlook the continuity of visual semantics. To overcome these issues, we present Soft Hypergraph Neural Networks (SoftHGNNs), which extend the methodology of hypergraph computation, to make it truly efficient and versatile in visual recognition tasks. Our framework introduces the concept of soft hyperedges, where each vertex is associated with hyperedges via continuous participation weights rather than hard binary assignments. This dynamic and differentiable association is achieved by using the learnable hyperedge prototype. Through similarity measurements between token features and the prototype, the model generates semantically rich soft hyperedges. SoftHGNN then aggregates messages over soft hyperedges to capture high-order semantics. To further enhance efficiency when scaling up the number of soft hyperedges, we incorporate a sparse hyperedge selection mechanism that activates only the top-k important hyperedges, along with a load-balancing regularizer to ensure balanced hyperedge utilization. Experimental results across three tasks on five datasets demonstrate that SoftHGNN efficiently captures high-order associations in visual scenes, achieving significant performance improvements.

Chen Xu, Zhenyu Lv, Tian Lan et al.

Although large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise in psychotherapy, their direct application in patient-facing scenarios raises ethical and safety concerns. Therefore, this work shifts towards developing an LLM as a supervisor to train real therapists. In addition to the privacy of clinical therapist training data, a fundamental contradiction complicates the training of therapeutic behaviors: clear feedback standards are necessary to ensure a controlled training system, yet there is no absolute "gold standard" for appropriate therapeutic behaviors in practice. In contrast, many common therapeutic mistakes are universal and identifiable, making them effective triggers for targeted feedback that can serve as clearer evidence. Motivated by this, we create a novel therapist-training paradigm: (1) guidelines for mistaken behaviors and targeted correction strategies are first established as standards; (2) a human-in-the-loop dialogue-feedback dataset is then constructed, where a mistake-prone agent intentionally makes standard mistakes during interviews naturally, and a supervisor agent locates and identifies mistakes and provides targeted feedback; (3) after fine-tuning on this dataset, the final supervisor model is provided for real therapist training. The detailed experimental results of automated, human and downstream assessments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on our dataset MATE, can provide high-quality feedback according to the clinical guideline, showing significant potential for the therapist training scenario.

Yang Liu, Xuejiao Kang, Sathya Iyer et al.

User attributes are essential in multiple stages of modern recommendation systems and are particularly important for mitigating the cold-start problem and improving the experience of new or infrequent users. We propose Behavior-based User Segmentation (BUS), a novel tree-based data structure that hierarchically segments the user universe with various users' categorical attributes based on the users' product-specific engagement behaviors. During the BUS tree construction, we use Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) as the objective function to maximize the behavioral representativeness of marginal users relative to active users in the same segment. The constructed BUS tree undergoes further processing and aggregation across the leaf nodes and internal nodes, allowing the generation of popular social content and behavioral patterns for each node in the tree. To further mitigate bias and improve fairness, we use the social graph to derive the user's connection-based BUS segments, enabling the combination of behavioral patterns extracted from both the user's own segment and connection-based segments as the connection aware BUS-based recommendation. Our offline analysis shows that the BUS-based retrieval significantly outperforms traditional user cohort-based aggregation on ranking quality. We have successfully deployed our data structure and machine learning algorithm and tested it with various production traffic serving billions of users daily, achieving statistically significant improvements in the online product metrics, including music ranking and email notifications. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first list-wise learning-to-rank framework for tree-based recommendation that effectively integrates diverse user categorical attributes while preserving real-world semantic interpretability at a large industrial scale.

Wen-Yu Xi, Juan Wang, Yu-Lin Zhang et al.

The emerging research shows that lncRNA has crucial research value in a series of complex human diseases. Therefore, the accurate identification of lncRNA-disease associations (LDAs) is very important for the warning and treatment of diseases. However, most of the existing methods have limitations in identifying nonlinear LDAs, and it remains a huge challenge to predict new LDAs. In this paper, a deep learning model based on a heterogeneous network and convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed for lncRNA-disease association prediction, named HCNNLDA. The heterogeneous network containing the lncRNA, disease, and miRNA nodes, is constructed firstly. The embedding matrix of a lncRNA-disease node pair is constructed according to various biological premises about lncRNAs, diseases, and miRNAs. Then, the low-dimensional feature representation is fully learned by the convolutional neural network. In the end, the XGBoot classifier model is trained to predict the potential LDAs. HCNNLDA obtains a high AUC value of 0.9752 and AUPR of 0.9740 under the 5-fold cross-validation. The experimental results show that the proposed model has better performance than that of several latest prediction models. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of HCNNLDA in identifying novel LDAs is further demonstrated by case studies of three diseases. To sum up, HCNNLDA is a feasible calculation model to predict LDAs.

Zewen Chen, Juan Wang, Bing Li et al.

Due to the subjective nature of image quality assessment (IQA), assessing which image has better quality among a sequence of images is more reliable than assigning an absolute mean opinion score for an image. Thus, IQA models are evaluated by global correlation consistency (GCC) metrics like PLCC and SROCC, rather than mean opinion consistency (MOC) metrics like MAE and MSE. However, most existing methods adopt MOC metrics to define their loss functions, due to the infeasible computation of GCC metrics during training. In this work, we construct a novel loss function and network to exploit Global-correlation and Mean-opinion Consistency, forming a GMC-IQA framework. Specifically, we propose a novel GCC loss by defining a pairwise preference-based rank estimation to solve the non-differentiable problem of SROCC and introducing a queue mechanism to reserve previous data to approximate the global results of the whole data. Moreover, we propose a mean-opinion network, which integrates diverse opinion features to alleviate the randomness of weight learning and enhance the model robustness. Experiments indicate that our method outperforms SOTA methods on multiple authentic datasets with higher accuracy and generalization. We also adapt the proposed loss to various networks, which brings better performance and more stable training.

Yang Liu, Zhengxing Chen, Kittipat Virochsiri et al.

Frequency control is an important problem in modern recommender systems. It dictates the delivery frequency of recommendations to maintain product quality and efficiency. For example, the frequency of delivering promotional notifications impacts daily metrics as well as the infrastructure resource consumption (e.g. CPU and memory usage). There remain open questions on what objective we should optimize to represent business values in the long term best, and how we should balance between daily metrics and resource consumption in a dynamically fluctuating environment. We propose a personalized methodology for the frequency control problem, which combines long-term value optimization using reinforcement learning (RL) with a robust volume control technique we termed "Effective Factor". We demonstrate statistically significant improvement in daily metrics and resource efficiency by our method in several notification applications at a scale of billions of users. To our best knowledge, our study represents the first deep RL application on the frequency control problem at such an industrial scale.

Juan Wang, Chengyang Fan, Jie Wang et al.

Virtual Trusted Platform Modules (vTPMs) have been widely used in commercial cloud platforms (e.g. Google Cloud, VMware Cloud, and Microsoft Azure) to provide virtual root-of-trust for virtual machines. Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art vTPM implementations are suffering from confidential data leakage and high performance overhead. In this paper, we present SvTPM, a secure and efficient software-based vTPM implementation based on hardware-rooted Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), providing a whole life cycle protection of vTPMs in the cloud. SvTPM offers strong isolation protection, so that cloud tenants or even cloud administrators cannot get vTPM's private keys or any other sensitive data. In SvTPM, we identify and solve a couple of critical security challenges for vTPM protection with SGX, such as NVRAM replacement attack, rollback attacks, trust establishment, and a fine-grained trusted clock. We implement a prototype of SvTPM on both QEMU and KVM. Performance evaluation results show that SvTPM achieves orders of magnitude of performance gains comparing to the vTPMs protected with physical TPM. The launch time of SvTPM is 2600$\times$ faster than vTPMs built upon hardware TPM. In the micro-benchmarks evaluation, we find that the command execution latency of SvTPM is smaller than or equal to the existing schemes.

Zhijing Xu, Juan Wang, Ying Zhang et al.

More than 90% of the Parkinson Disease (PD) patients suffer from vocal disorders. Speech impairment is already indicator of PD. This study focuses on PD diagnosis through voiceprint features. In this paper, a method based on Deep Neural Network (DNN) recognition and classification combined with Mini-Batch Gradient Descent (MBGD) is proposed to distinguish PD patients from healthy people using voiceprint features. In order to exact the voiceprint features from patients, Weighted Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (WMFCC) is applied. The proposed method is tested on experimental data obtained by the voice recordings of three sustained vowels /a/, /o/ and /u/ from participants (48 PD and 20 healthy people). The results show that the proposed method achieves a high accuracy of diagnosis of PD patients from healthy people, than the conventional methods like Support Vector Machine (SVM) and other mentioned in this paper. The accuracy achieved is 89.5%. WMFCC approach can solve the problem that the high-order cepstrum coefficients are small and the features component's representation ability to the audio is weak. MBGD reduces the computational loads of the loss function, and increases the training speed of the system. DNN classifier enhances the classification ability of voiceprint features. Therefore, the above approaches can provide a solid solution for the quick auxiliary diagnosis of PD in early stage.

Juan Wang, Feng Xiao, Jianwei Huang et al.

The static nature of current cyber systems has made them easy to be attacked and compromised. By constantly changing a system, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has provided a promising way to reduce or move the attack surface that is available for exploitation by an adversary. However, the current network- based MTD obfuscates networks indiscriminately that makes some networks key services, such as web and DNS services, unavailable, because many information of these services has to be opened to the outside and remain real without compromising their usability. Moreover, the indiscriminate obfuscation also severely reduces the performance of networks. In this paper, we propose CHAOS, an SDN (Software-defined networking)-based MTD system, which discriminately obfuscates hosts with different security levels in a network. In CHAOS, we introduce a Chaos Tower Obfuscation (CTO) method, which uses a Chaos Tower Structure (CTS) to depict the hierarchy of all the hosts in an intranet and provides a more unpredictable and flexible obfuscation method. We also present the design of CHAOS, which leverages SDN features to obfuscate the attack surface including IP obfuscation, ports obfuscation, and fingerprint obfuscation thereby enhancing the unpredictability of the networking environment. We develop fast CTO algorithms to achieve a different degree of obfuscation for the hosts in each layer. Our experimental results show that a network protected by CHAOS is capable of decreasing the percentage of information disclosure effectively to guarantee the normal flow of traffic.