Guodong Du

Yisheng Yang, Guodong Du, Chean Khim Toa et al.

Neural architecture search (NAS) automates neural network design by using optimization algorithms to navigate architecture spaces, reducing the burden of manual architecture design. While NAS has achieved success, applying it to emerging domains, such as analyzing unstructured 3D point clouds, remains underexplored due to the data lying in non-Euclidean spaces, unlike images. This paper presents Success-History-based Self-adaptive Differential Evolution with a Joint Point Interaction Dimension Search (SHSADE-PIDS), an evolutionary NAS framework that encodes discrete deep neural network architectures to continuous spaces and performs searches in the continuous spaces for efficient point cloud neural architectures. Comprehensive experiments on challenging 3D segmentation and classification benchmarks demonstrate SHSADE-PIDS's capabilities. It discovered highly efficient architectures with higher accuracy, significantly advancing prior NAS techniques. For segmentation on SemanticKITTI, SHSADE-PIDS attained 64.51% mean IoU using only 0.55M parameters and 4.5GMACs, reducing overhead by over 22-26X versus other top methods. For ModelNet40 classification, it achieved 93.4% accuracy with just 1.31M parameters, surpassing larger models. SHSADE-PIDS provided valuable insights into bridging evolutionary algorithms with neural architecture optimization, particularly for emerging frontiers like point cloud learning.

Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li et al.

Foundation models and their checkpoints have significantly advanced deep learning, boosting performance across various applications. However, fine-tuned models often struggle outside their specific domains and exhibit considerable redundancy. Recent studies suggest that combining a pruned fine-tuned model with the original pre-trained model can mitigate forgetting, reduce interference when merging model parameters across tasks, and improve compression efficiency. In this context, developing an effective pruning strategy for fine-tuned models is crucial. Leveraging the advantages of the task vector mechanism, we preprocess fine-tuned models by calculating the differences between them and the original model. Recognizing that different task vector subspaces contribute variably to model performance, we introduce a novel method called Neural Parameter Search (NPS-Pruning) for slimming down fine-tuned models. This method enhances pruning efficiency by searching through neural parameters of task vectors within low-rank subspaces. Our method has three key applications: enhancing knowledge transfer through pairwise model interpolation, facilitating effective knowledge fusion via model merging, and enabling the deployment of compressed models that retain near-original performance while significantly reducing storage costs. Extensive experiments across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, resulting in substantial performance gains. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/duguodong7/NPS-Pruning.

Zitao Fang, Chenxuan Li, Hongting Zhou et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) has wide-ranging applications, from clinical diagnosis to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). With the increasing volume and variety of EEG data, there has been growing interest in establishing foundation models (FMs) to scale up and generalize neural decoding. Despite showing early potential, applying FMs to EEG remains challenging due to substantial inter-subject, inter-task, and inter-condition variability, as well as diverse electrode configurations across recording setups. To tackle these open challenges, we propose NeurIPT, a foundation model developed for diverse EEG-based Neural Interfaces with a Pre-trained Transformer by capturing both homogeneous and heterogeneous spatio-temporal characteristics inherent in EEG signals. Temporally, we introduce Amplitude-Aware Masked Pretraining (AAMP), masking based on signal amplitude rather than random intervals, to learn robust representations across varying signal intensities beyond local interpolation. Moreover, this temporal representation is enhanced by a Progressive Mixture-of-Experts (PMoE) architecture, where specialized expert subnetworks are progressively introduced at deeper layers, adapting effectively to the diverse temporal characteristics of EEG signals. Spatially, NeurIPT leverages the 3D physical coordinates of electrodes, enabling effective transfer of embedding across varying EEG settings, and develops Intra-Inter Lobe Pooling (IILP) during fine-tuning to efficiently exploit regional brain features. Empirical evaluations across eight downstream BCI datasets, via fine-tuning, demonstrated NeurIPT consistently achieved state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its broad applicability and robust generalization. Our work pushes forward the state of FMs in EEG and offers insights into scalable and generalizable neural information processing systems.

Xiaoguang Tu, Jian Zhao, Mei Xie et al.

Face anti-spoofing (a.k.a presentation attack detection) has drawn growing attention due to the high-security demand in face authentication systems. Existing CNN-based approaches usually well recognize the spoofing faces when training and testing spoofing samples display similar patterns, but their performance would drop drastically on testing spoofing faces of unseen scenes. In this paper, we try to boost the generalizability and applicability of these methods by designing a CNN model with two major novelties. First, we propose a simple yet effective Total Pairwise Confusion (TPC) loss for CNN training, which enhances the generalizability of the learned Presentation Attack (PA) representations. Secondly, we incorporate a Fast Domain Adaptation (FDA) component into the CNN model to alleviate negative effects brought by domain changes. Besides, our proposed model, which is named Generalizable Face Authentication CNN (GFA-CNN), works in a multi-task manner, performing face anti-spoofing and face recognition simultaneously. Experimental results show that GFA-CNN outperforms previous face anti-spoofing approaches and also well preserves the identity information of input face images.

Guodong Du, Liang Yuan, Kong Joo Shin et al.

The neighborhood effect is a key driving factor for the land-use change (LUC) process. This study applies convolutional neural networks (CNN) to capture neighborhood characteristics from satellite images and to enhance the performance of LUC modeling. We develop a hybrid CNN model (conv-net) to predict the LU transition probability by combining satellite images and geographical features. A spatial weight layer is designed to incorporate the distance-decay characteristics of neighborhood effect into conv-net. As an alternative model, we also develop a hybrid convolutional denoising autoencoder and multi-layer perceptron model (CDAE-net), which specifically learns latent representations from satellite images and denoises the image data. Finally, a DINAMICA-based cellular automata (CA) model simulates the LU pattern. The results show that the convolutional-based models improve the modeling performances compared with a model that accepts only the geographical features. Overall, conv-net outperforms CDAE-net in terms of LUC predictive performance. Nonetheless, CDAE-net performs better when the data are noisy.