Xiaoke Wang

Lei Zhang, Xiaoke Wang, Michael Rawson et al.

Purpose To develop and evaluate a deep learning-based method (MC-Net) to suppress motion artifacts in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Methods MC-Net was derived from a UNet combined with a two-stage multi-loss function. T1-weighted axial brain images contaminated with synthetic motions were used to train the network. Evaluation used simulated T1 and T2-weighted axial, coronal, and sagittal images unseen during training, as well as T1-weighted images with motion artifacts from real scans. Performance indices included the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and visual reading scores. Two clinical readers scored the images. Results The MC-Net outperformed other methods implemented in terms of PSNR and SSIM on the T1 axial test set. The MC-Net significantly improved the quality of all T1-weighted images (for all directions and for simulated as well as real motion artifacts), both on quantitative measures and visual scores. However, the MC-Net performed poorly on images of untrained contrast (T2-weighted). Conclusion The proposed two-stage multi-loss MC-Net can effectively suppress motion artifacts in brain MRI without compromising image context. Given the efficiency of the MC-Net (single image processing time ~40ms), it can potentially be used in real clinical settings. To facilitate further research, the code and trained model are available at https://github.com/MRIMoCo/DL_Motion_Correction.

Kun Zhou, Yuanhang Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao et al.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. To develop an effective CRS, the support of high-quality datasets is essential. Existing CRS datasets mainly focus on immediate requests from users, while lack proactive guidance to the recommendation scenario. In this paper, we contribute a new CRS dataset named \textbf{TG-ReDial} (\textbf{Re}commendation through \textbf{T}opic-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{Dial}og). Our dataset has two major features. First, it incorporates topic threads to enforce natural semantic transitions towards the recommendation scenario. Second, it is created in a semi-automatic way, hence human annotation is more reasonable and controllable. Based on TG-ReDial, we present the task of topic-guided conversational recommendation, and propose an effective approach to this task. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on three sub-tasks, namely topic prediction, item recommendation and response generation. TG-ReDial is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TG-ReDial.

Daoyu Lin, Guangluan Xu, Xiaoke Wang et al.

Cloud-based overlays are often present in optical remote sensing images, thus limiting the application of acquired data. Removing clouds is an indispensable pre-processing step in remote sensing image analysis. Deep learning has achieved great success in the field of remote sensing in recent years, including scene classification and change detection. However, deep learning is rarely applied in remote sensing image removal clouds. The reason is the lack of data sets for training neural networks. In order to solve this problem, this paper first proposed the Remote sensing Image Cloud rEmoving dataset (RICE). The proposed dataset consists of two parts: RICE1 contains 500 pairs of images, each pair has images with cloud and cloudless size of 512*512; RICE2 contains 450 sets of images, each set contains three 512*512 size images. , respectively, the reference picture without clouds, the picture of the cloud and the mask of its cloud. The dataset is freely available at \url{https://github.com/BUPTLdy/RICE_DATASET}.

Zirui Zhao, Junchao Xia, Si Wu et al.

In recent years, researchers have increasingly sought batteries as an efficient and cost-effective solution for energy storage and supply, owing to their high energy density, low cost, and environmental resilience. However, the issue of dendrite growth has emerged as a significant obstacle in battery development. Excessive dendrite growth during charging and discharging processes can lead to battery short-circuiting, degradation of electrochemical performance, reduced cycle life, and abnormal exothermic events. Consequently, understanding the dendrite growth process has become a key challenge for researchers. In this study, we investigated dendrite growth mechanisms in batteries using a combined machine learning approach, specifically a two-dimensional artificial convolutional neural network (CNN) model, along with computational methods. We developed two distinct computer models to predict dendrite growth in batteries. The CNN-1 model employs standard convolutional neural network techniques for dendritic growth prediction, while CNN-2 integrates additional physical parameters to enhance model robustness. Our results demonstrate that CNN-2 significantly enhances prediction accuracy, offering deeper insights into the impact of physical factors on dendritic growth. This improved model effectively captures the dynamic nature of dendrite formation, exhibiting high accuracy and sensitivity. These findings contribute to the advancement of safer and more reliable energy storage systems.

Xiaoke Wang, Raveena Raikar, Markus Rein et al.

Multi-die FPGAs enable device scaling beyond reticle limits but introduce severe interconnect overhead across die boundaries. Inter-die connections, commonly referred to as super-long lines (SLLs), incur high delay and consume scarce interposer interconnect resources, often dominating critical paths and complicating physical design. To address this, this work proposes an interconnect-aware logic resynthesis method that restructures the LUT-level netlist to reduce the number of SLLs. The resynthesis engine uses die partitioning information to apply logic resubstitutions, which simplifies local circuit structures and eliminates SLLs. By reducing the number of SLLs early in the design flow, prior to physical implementation, the proposed method shortens critical paths, alleviates pressure on scarce interposer interconnect resources, and improves overall physical design flexibility. We further build a tool flow for multi-die FPGAs by integrating the proposed resynthesis method with packing and placement. Experimental results on the EPFL benchmarks show that, compared with a state-of-the-art framework, the proposed method reduces the number of SLLs by up to 24.8% for a 2-die FPGA and up to 27.38% for a 3-die FPGA. On MCNC benchmarks, our tool flow achieves an average SLL reduction of 1.65% while preserving placement quality. On Koios benchmarks, where fewer removable SLLs exist, several designs still exhibit considerable inter-die edge reductions. Overall, the results confirm that reducing inter-die connections at the logic level is an effective approach for multi-die FPGAs.

Xiaoke Wang, Batuhan Altundas, Zhaoxin Li et al.

Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILPs) are essential tools for solving planning and scheduling problems across critical industries such as construction, manufacturing, and logistics. However, their widespread adoption is limited by long computational times, especially in large-scale, real-time scenarios. To address this, we present a learning-based framework that leverages Behavior Cloning (BC) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), producing high-quality initial solutions for warm-starting MILP solvers in Multi-Agent Task Allocation and Scheduling Problems. Experimental results demonstrate that our method reduces optimization time and variance compared to traditional techniques while maintaining solution quality and feasibility.

Yiru Zhao, Xiaoke Wang, Lei Zhao et al.

Coverage-based greybox fuzzing (CGF) has been approved to be effective in finding security vulnerabilities. Seed scheduling, the process of selecting an input as the seed from the seed pool for the next fuzzing iteration, plays a central role in CGF. Although numerous seed scheduling strategies have been proposed, most of them treat these seeds independently and do not explicitly consider the relationships among the seeds. In this study, we make a key observation that the relationships among seeds are valuable for seed scheduling. We design and propose a "seed mutation tree" by investigating and leveraging the mutation relationships among seeds. With the "seed mutation tree", we further model the seed scheduling problem as a Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) problem. That is, we select the next seed for fuzzing by walking this "seed mutation tree" through an optimal path, based on the estimation of MCTS. We implement two prototypes, AlphaFuzz on top of AFL and AlphaFuzz++ on top of AFL++. The evaluation results on three datasets (the UniFuzz dataset, the CGC binaries, and 12 real-world binaries) show that AlphaFuzz and AlphaFuzz++ outperform state-of-the-art fuzzers with higher code coverage and more discovered vulnerabilities. In particular, AlphaFuzz discovers 3 new vulnerabilities with CVEs.

Yixin Bao, Xiaoke Wang, Zhi Wang et al.

Social networks have been popular platforms for information propagation. An important use case is viral marketing: given a promotion budget, an advertiser can choose some influential users as the seed set and provide them free or discounted sample products; in this way, the advertiser hopes to increase the popularity of the product in the users' friend circles by the world-of-mouth effect, and thus maximizes the number of users that information of the production can reach. There has been a body of literature studying the influence maximization problem. Nevertheless, the existing studies mostly investigate the problem on a one-off basis, assuming fixed known influence probabilities among users, or the knowledge of the exact social network topology. In practice, the social network topology and the influence probabilities are typically unknown to the advertiser, which can be varying over time, i.e., in cases of newly established, strengthened or weakened social ties. In this paper, we focus on a dynamic non-stationary social network and design a randomized algorithm, RSB, based on multi-armed bandit optimization, to maximize influence propagation over time. The algorithm produces a sequence of online decisions and calibrates its explore-exploit strategy utilizing outcomes of previous decisions. It is rigorously proven to achieve an upper-bounded regret in reward and applicable to large-scale social networks. Practical effectiveness of the algorithm is evaluated using both synthetic and real-world datasets, which demonstrates that our algorithm outperforms previous stationary methods under non-stationary conditions.