Ziheng Zhang

Ling Yue, Yongqi Zhang, Quanming Yao et al. · tencent-ai

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding is a fundamental task in natural language processing, and various methods have been proposed to explore semantic patterns in distinctive ways. In this paper, we propose to learn an ensemble by leveraging existing methods in a relation-aware manner. However, exploring these semantics using relation-aware ensemble leads to a much larger search space than general ensemble methods. To address this issue, we propose a divide-search-combine algorithm RelEns-DSC that searches the relation-wise ensemble weights independently. This algorithm has the same computation cost as general ensemble methods but with much better performance. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in efficiently searching relation-aware ensemble weights and achieving state-of-the-art embedding performance. The code is public at https://github.com/LARS-research/RelEns.

Yufei Jia, Zhanxiang Cao, Mingrui Yu et al.

Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, SAC, FlashSAC, TD3, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://github.com/unilabsim/UniLab.

Zhenxi Lin, Ziheng Zhang, Meng Wang et al. · tencent-ai

Multi-modal entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entities between two different multi-modal knowledge graphs, which consist of structural triples and images associated with entities. Most previous works focus on how to utilize and encode information from different modalities, while it is not trivial to leverage multi-modal knowledge in entity alignment because of the modality heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose MCLEA, a Multi-modal Contrastive Learning based Entity Alignment model, to obtain effective joint representations for multi-modal entity alignment. Different from previous works, MCLEA considers task-oriented modality and models the inter-modal relationships for each entity representation. In particular, MCLEA firstly learns multiple individual representations from multiple modalities, and then performs contrastive learning to jointly model intra-modal and inter-modal interactions. Extensive experimental results show that MCLEA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on public datasets under both supervised and unsupervised settings.

Haochun Wang, Chi Liu, Nuwa Xi et al. · tencent-ai

Prompt-based fine-tuning for pre-trained models has proven effective for many natural language processing tasks under few-shot settings in general domain. However, tuning with prompt in biomedical domain has not been investigated thoroughly. Biomedical words are often rare in general domain, but quite ubiquitous in biomedical contexts, which dramatically deteriorates the performance of pre-trained models on downstream biomedical applications even after fine-tuning, especially in low-resource scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective approach to helping models learn rare biomedical words during tuning with prompt. Experimental results show that our method can achieve up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings.

Yongqi Zhang, Quanming Yao, Ling Yue et al. · tencent-ai

Accurately predicting drug-drug interactions (DDI) for emerging drugs, which offer possibilities for treating and alleviating diseases, with computational methods can improve patient care and contribute to efficient drug development. However, many existing computational methods require large amounts of known DDI information, which is scarce for emerging drugs. In this paper, we propose EmerGNN, a graph neural network (GNN) that can effectively predict interactions for emerging drugs by leveraging the rich information in biomedical networks. EmerGNN learns pairwise representations of drugs by extracting the paths between drug pairs, propagating information from one drug to the other, and incorporating the relevant biomedical concepts on the paths. The different edges on the biomedical network are weighted to indicate the relevance for the target DDI prediction. Overall, EmerGNN has higher accuracy than existing approaches in predicting interactions for emerging drugs and can identify the most relevant information on the biomedical network.

Muhammad Hassan, Haifei Guan, Aikaterini Melliou et al.

Neural networks have been rapidly expanding in recent years, with novel strategies and applications. However, challenges such as interpretability, explainability, robustness, safety, trust, and sensibility remain unsolved in neural network technologies, despite the fact that they will unavoidably be addressed for critical applications. Attempts have been made to overcome the challenges in neural network computing by representing and embedding domain knowledge in terms of symbolic representations. Thus, the neuro-symbolic learning (NeSyL) notion emerged, which incorporates aspects of symbolic representation and bringing common sense into neural networks (NeSyL). In domains where interpretability, reasoning, and explainability are crucial, such as video and image captioning, question-answering and reasoning, health informatics, and genomics, NeSyL has shown promising outcomes. This review presents a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art NeSyL approaches, their principles, advances in machine and deep learning algorithms, applications such as opthalmology, and most importantly, future perspectives of this emerging field.

Zhicheng Du, Changyue Liu, Wenji Xi et al.

Reported retrieval scores for training-free shape descriptors conflate local signal design, normalization, aggregation, codebook fitting, and metric choices, making isolated component evaluation difficult. This paper reframes descriptor evaluation as a {\em protocol audit}. We introduce Diffused Geodesic Moments (DGM), a seed-conditioned descriptor that computes sparse implicit heat responses, converts them to distance-like fields, and summarizes each vertex by low-order moments across seeds and scales. DGM is used both as a practical non-spectral baseline and as an instrument for isolating protocol effects. On the registered FAUST benchmark split (FAUST-Reg) and the TOSCA shape collection, aggregation-matched experiments show that an independent Geometric Moment Shape Descriptor baseline built on Heat Kernel Signature features (GMSD-HKS) obtains the highest scores in this implementation ($0.621/0.820$ and $0.865/0.963$ mean average precision (mAP)/top-1), Wave Kernel Signature (WKS) remains a strong classical signal, and DGM is useful mainly when sparse solves, non-spectral deployment, or symmetry-informative seed frames are priorities. The broader finding is methodological: the input field and aggregation protocol can dominate the moment formula. The paper contributes a reproducible protocol-cascade analysis, a cross-shape alignment diagnostic for functional-map compatibility, and concrete recommendations for designing and reporting training-free shape descriptors.

Ziheng Zhang, Yunzhong Hou, Naijing Liu et al.

This paper introduces WARDEN, an early language model system capable of transcribing and translating Wardaman, an endangered Australian indigenous language into English. The significant challenge we face is the lack of large-scale training data: in fact, we only have 6 hours of annotated audio. Therefore, while it is common practice to train a single model for transcription and translation using large datasets (like English to French), this practice is no longer viable in the Wardaman to English context. To tackle the low-resource challenge, we design WARDEN to have separate transcription and translation models: WARDEN first turns a Wardaman audio input into phonemic transcription, and then the transcription into English translation. Further, we propose two useful techniques to enhance performance. For transcription, we initialize the Wardaman token from Sundanese, a language that shares similar phonemes with Wardaman, to accelerate fine-tuning of the transcription model. For translation, we compile a Wardaman-English dictionary from expert annotations, and provide this domain-specific knowledge to a large language model (LLM) to reason and decide the final output. We empirically demonstrate that this two-stage design works better than data-hungry unified approaches in extremely low data settings. Using a mere 6 hours of annotated data, WARDEN outperforms larger open-source and proprietary models and establishes a strong baseline. Data and code are available.

Yufei Jia, Heng Zhang, Ziheng Zhang et al.

Embodied AI research is undergoing a shift toward vision-centric perceptual paradigms. While massively parallel simulators have catalyzed breakthroughs in proprioception-based locomotion, their potential remains largely untapped for vision-informed tasks due to the prohibitive computational overhead of large-scale photorealistic rendering. Furthermore, the creation of simulation-ready 3D assets heavily relies on labor-intensive manual modeling, while the significant sim-to-real physical gap hinders the transfer of contact-rich manipulation policies. To address these bottlenecks, we propose GS-Playground, a multi-modal simulation framework designed to accelerate end-to-end perceptual learning. We develop a novel high-performance parallel physics engine, specifically designed to integrate with a batch 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering pipeline to ensure high-fidelity synchronization. Our system achieves a breakthrough throughput of 10^4 FPS at 640x480 resolution, significantly lowering the barrier for large-scale visual RL. Additionally, we introduce an automated Real2Sim workflow that reconstructs photorealistic, physically consistent, and memory-efficient environments, streamlining the generation of complex simulation-ready scenes. Extensive experiments on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation demonstrate that GS-Playground effectively bridges the perceptual and physical gaps across diverse embodied tasks. Project homepage: https://gsplayground.github.io.

Ziheng Zhang, Jianyang Gu, Arpita Chowdhury et al. · microsoft-research

Class activation map (CAM) has been widely used to highlight image regions that contribute to class predictions. Despite its simplicity and computational efficiency, CAM often struggles to identify discriminative regions that distinguish visually similar fine-grained classes. Prior efforts address this limitation by introducing more sophisticated explanation processes, but at the cost of extra complexity. In this paper, we propose Finer-CAM, a method that retains CAM's efficiency while achieving precise localization of discriminative regions. Our key insight is that the deficiency of CAM lies not in "how" it explains, but in "what" it explains. Specifically, previous methods attempt to identify all cues contributing to the target class's logit value, which inadvertently also activates regions predictive of visually similar classes. By explicitly comparing the target class with similar classes and spotting their differences, Finer-CAM suppresses features shared with other classes and emphasizes the unique, discriminative details of the target class. Finer-CAM is easy to implement, compatible with various CAM methods, and can be extended to multi-modal models for accurate localization of specific concepts. Additionally, Finer-CAM allows adjustable comparison strength, enabling users to selectively highlight coarse object contours or fine discriminative details. Quantitatively, we show that masking out the top 5% of activated pixels by Finer-CAM results in a larger relative confidence drop compared to baselines. The source code and demo are available at https://github.com/Imageomics/Finer-CAM.

Arpita Chowdhury, Dipanjyoti Paul, Zheda Mai et al. · microsoft-research

We present a simple approach to make pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) interpretable for fine-grained analysis, aiming to identify and localize the traits that distinguish visually similar categories, such as bird species. Pre-trained ViTs, such as DINO, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in extracting localized, discriminative features. However, saliency maps like Grad-CAM often fail to identify these traits, producing blurred, coarse heatmaps that highlight entire objects instead. We propose a novel approach, Prompt Class Attention Map (Prompt-CAM), to address this limitation. Prompt-CAM learns class-specific prompts for a pre-trained ViT and uses the corresponding outputs for classification. To correctly classify an image, the true-class prompt must attend to unique image patches not present in other classes' images (i.e., traits). As a result, the true class's multi-head attention maps reveal traits and their locations. Implementation-wise, Prompt-CAM is almost a ``free lunch,'' requiring only a modification to the prediction head of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT). This makes Prompt-CAM easy to train and apply, in stark contrast to other interpretable methods that require designing specific models and training processes. Extensive empirical studies on a dozen datasets from various domains (e.g., birds, fishes, insects, fungi, flowers, food, and cars) validate the superior interpretation capability of Prompt-CAM. The source code and demo are available at https://github.com/Imageomics/Prompt_CAM.

Hui Shen, Xin Wang, Ping Zhang et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to large model sizes and long multimodal contexts. Speculative decoding has recently emerged as an effective acceleration technique, yet its behavior in VLMs remains insufficiently understood. We introduce MMSpec, the first benchmark for evaluating speculative decoding in vision-language models. MMSpec contains 600 multimodal samples across six task categories and integrates ten representative speculative decoding algorithms under a unified evaluation framework. Our study reveals three key findings: (1) methods designed for text-only LLMs degrade in multimodal scenarios, (2) vision awareness becomes increasingly important at larger batch sizes, and (3) throughput speedup alone does not reliably reflect latency performance. Motivated by these findings, we propose ViSkip, a plug-and-play speculative decoding method that dynamically adapts speculation to vision tokens and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Fangxun Liu, S M Rayeed, Samuel Stevens et al.

In entomology and ecology research, biologists often need to collect a large number of insects, among which beetles are the most common species. A common practice for biologists to organize beetles is to place them on trays and take a picture of each tray. Given the images of thousands of such trays, it is important to have an automated pipeline to process the large-scale data for further research. Therefore, we develop a 3-stage pipeline to detect all the beetles on each tray, sort and crop the image of each beetle, and do morphological segmentation on the cropped beetles. For detection, we design an iterative process utilizing a transformer-based open-vocabulary object detector and a vision-language model. For segmentation, we manually labeled 670 beetle images and fine-tuned two variants of a transformer-based segmentation model to achieve fine-grained segmentation of beetles with relatively high accuracy. The pipeline integrates multiple deep learning methods and is specialized for beetle image processing, which can greatly improve the efficiency to process large-scale beetle data and accelerate biological research.

Yuqi Zhu, Yi Zhong, Jintian Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in automating data analysis tasks, yet open-source models face significant limitations in these kinds of reasoning-intensive scenarios. In this work, we investigate strategies to enhance the data analysis capabilities of open-source LLMs. By curating a seed dataset of diverse, realistic scenarios, we evaluate model behavior across three core dimensions: data understanding, code generation, and strategic planning. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (1) Strategic planning quality serves as the primary determinant of model performance; (2) Interaction design and task complexity significantly influence reasoning capabilities; (3) Data quality demonstrates a greater impact than diversity in achieving optimal performance. We leverage these insights to develop a data synthesis methodology, demonstrating significant improvements in open-source LLMs' analytical reasoning capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataMind.

Ziheng Zhang, Zhengxin Li, Ning Bi et al.

In this paper, we present a novel framework to detect line segments in man-made environments. Specifically, we propose to describe junctions, line segments and relationships between them with a simple graph, which is more structured and informative than end-point representation used in existing line segment detection methods. In order to extract a line segment graph from an image, we further introduce the PPGNet, a convolutional neural network that directly infers a graph from an image. We evaluate our method on published benchmarks including York Urban and Wireframe datasets. The results demonstrate that our method achieves satisfactory performance and generalizes well on all the benchmarks. The source code of our work is available at \url{https://github.com/svip-lab/PPGNet}.

Xinhai Li, Jialin Li, Ziheng Zhang et al.

Efficient acquisition of real-world embodied data has been increasingly critical. However, large-scale demonstrations captured by remote operation tend to take extremely high costs and fail to scale up the data size in an efficient manner. Sampling the episodes under a simulated environment is a promising way for large-scale collection while existing simulators fail to high-fidelity modeling on texture and physics. To address these limitations, we introduce the RoboGSim, a real2sim2real robotic simulator, powered by 3D Gaussian Splatting and the physics engine. RoboGSim mainly includes four parts: Gaussian Reconstructor, Digital Twins Builder, Scene Composer, and Interactive Engine. It can synthesize the simulated data with novel views, objects, trajectories, and scenes. RoboGSim also provides an online, reproducible, and safe evaluation for different manipulation policies. The real2sim and sim2real transfer experiments show a high consistency in the texture and physics. We compared the test results of RoboGSim data and real robot data on both RoboGSim and real robot platforms. The experimental results show that the RoboGSim data model can achieve zero-shot performance on the real robot, with results comparable to real robot data. Additionally, in experiments with novel perspectives and novel scenes, the RoboGSim data model performed even better on the real robot than the real robot data model. This not only helps reduce the sim2real gap but also addresses the limitations of real robot data collection, such as its single-source and high cost. We hope RoboGSim serves as a closed-loop simulator for fair comparison on policy learning. More information can be found on our project page https://robogsim.github.io/.

Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhenxi Lin et al. · tencent-ai

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) is a widely used method to tackle incompleteness in knowledge graphs (KGs) by making predictions for missing links. Description-based KGC leverages pre-trained language models to learn entity and relation representations with their names or descriptions, which shows promising results. However, the performance of description-based KGC is still limited by the quality of text and the incomplete structure, as it lacks sufficient entity descriptions and relies solely on relation names, leading to sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we propose MPIKGC, a general framework to compensate for the deficiency of contextualized knowledge and improve KGC by querying large language models (LLMs) from various perspectives, which involves leveraging the reasoning, explanation, and summarization capabilities of LLMs to expand entity descriptions, understand relations, and extract structures, respectively. We conducted extensive evaluation of the effectiveness and improvement of our framework based on four description-based KGC models and four datasets, for both link prediction and triplet classification tasks.

Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu et al. · tencent-ai

Model editing aims to precisely alter the behaviors of large language models (LLMs) in relation to specific knowledge, while leaving unrelated knowledge intact. This approach has proven effective in addressing issues of hallucination and outdated information in LLMs. However, the potential of using model editing to modify knowledge in the medical field remains largely unexplored, even though resolving hallucination is a pressing need in this area. Our observations indicate that current methods face significant challenges in dealing with specialized and complex knowledge in medical domain. Therefore, we propose MedLaSA, a novel Layer-wise Scalable Adapter strategy for medical model editing. MedLaSA harnesses the strengths of both adding extra parameters and locate-then-edit methods for medical model editing. We utilize causal tracing to identify the association of knowledge in neurons across different layers, and generate a corresponding scale set from the association value for each piece of knowledge. Subsequently, we incorporate scalable adapters into the dense layers of LLMs. These adapters are assigned scaling values based on the corresponding specific knowledge, which allows for the adjustment of the adapter's weight and rank. The more similar the content, the more consistent the scale between them. This ensures precise editing of semantically identical knowledge while avoiding impact on unrelated knowledge. To evaluate the editing impact on the behaviours of LLMs, we propose two model editing studies for medical domain: (1) editing factual knowledge for medical specialization and (2) editing the explanatory ability for complex knowledge. We build two novel medical benchmarking datasets and introduce a series of challenging and comprehensive metrics. Extensive experiments on medical LLMs demonstrate the editing efficiency of MedLaSA, without affecting unrelated knowledge.

Derong Xu, Xinhang Li, Ziheng Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, yet struggle with hallucination and outdated knowledge when tasked with complex knowledge reasoning, resulting in factually incorrect outputs. Previous studies have attempted to mitigate it by retrieving factual knowledge from large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) to assist LLMs in logical reasoning and prediction of answers. However, this kind of approach often introduces noise and irrelevant data, especially in situations with extensive context from multiple knowledge aspects. In this way, LLM attention can be potentially mislead from question and relevant information. In our study, we introduce an Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-augmented over KGs (Amar) framework. This method retrieves knowledge including entities, relations, and subgraphs, and converts each piece of retrieved text into prompt embeddings. The Amar framework comprises two key sub-components: 1) a self-alignment module that aligns commonalities among entities, relations, and subgraphs to enhance retrieved text, thereby reducing noise interference; 2) a relevance gating module that employs a soft gate to learn the relevance score between question and multi-aspect retrieved data, to determine which information should be used to enhance LLMs' output, or even filtered altogether. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on two common datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, showing a 1.9\% improvement in accuracy over its best competitor and a 6.6\% improvement in logical form generation over a method that directly uses retrieved text as context prompts. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Amar in improving the reasoning of LLMs.

Su Li, Wang Liang, Jianye Wang et al.

Estimating abnormal posture based on 3D pose is vital in human pose analysis, yet it presents challenges, especially when reconstructing 3D human poses from monocular datasets with occlusions. Accurate reconstructions enable the restoration of 3D movements, which assist in the extraction of semantic details necessary for analyzing abnormal behaviors. However, most existing methods depend on predefined key points as a basis for estimating the coordinates of occluded joints, where variations in data quality have adversely affected the performance of these models. In this paper, we present OAD2D, which discriminates against motion abnormalities based on reconstructing 3D coordinates of mesh vertices and human joints from monocular videos. The OAD2D employs optical flow to capture motion prior information in video streams, enriching the information on occluded human movements and ensuring temporal-spatial alignment of poses. Moreover, we reformulate the abnormal posture estimation by coupling it with Motion to Text (M2T) model in which, the VQVAE is employed to quantize motion features. This approach maps motion tokens to text tokens, allowing for a semantically interpretable analysis of motion, and enhancing the generalization of abnormal posture detection boosted by Language model. Our approach demonstrates the robustness of abnormal behavior detection against severe and self-occlusions, as it reconstructs human motion trajectories in global coordinates to effectively mitigate occlusion issues. Our method, validated using the Human3.6M, 3DPW, and NTU RGB+D datasets, achieves a high $F_1-$Score of 0.94 on the NTU RGB+D dataset for medical condition detection. And we will release all of our code and data.

Jialiang Wu, Yi Shen, Ziheng Zhang et al.

Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) involves extracting clause pairs representing emotions and their causes in a document. Existing methods tend to overfit spurious correlations, such as positional bias in existing benchmark datasets, rather than capturing semantic features. Inspired by recent work, we explore leveraging large language model (LLM) to address ECPE task without additional training. Despite strong capabilities, LLMs suffer from uncontrollable outputs, resulting in mediocre performance. To address this, we introduce chain-of-thought to mimic human cognitive process and propose the Decomposed Emotion-Cause Chain (DECC) framework. Combining inducing inference and logical pruning, DECC guides LLMs to tackle ECPE task. We further enhance the framework by incorporating in-context learning. Experiment results demonstrate the strength of DECC compared to state-of-the-art supervised fine-tuning methods. Finally, we analyze the effectiveness of each component and the robustness of the method in various scenarios, including different LLM bases, rebalanced datasets, and multi-pair extraction.

Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu et al. · tencent-ai

The impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have attracted extensive interests of applying LLMs to medical field. However, the complex nature of clinical environments presents significant hallucination challenges for LLMs, hindering their widespread adoption. In this paper, we address these hallucination issues in the context of Medical Information Extraction (MIE) tasks by introducing ALternate Contrastive Decoding (ALCD). We begin by redefining MIE tasks as an identify-and-classify process. We then separate the identification and classification functions of LLMs by selectively masking the optimization of tokens during fine-tuning. During the inference stage, we alternately contrast output distributions derived from sub-task models. This approach aims to selectively enhance the identification and classification capabilities while minimizing the influence of other inherent abilities in LLMs. Additionally, we propose an alternate adaptive constraint strategy to more effectively adjust the scale and scope of contrastive tokens. Through comprehensive experiments on two different backbones and six diverse medical information extraction tasks, ALCD demonstrates significant improvements in resolving hallucination issues compared to conventional decoding methods.

Elizabeth G. Campolongo, Yuan-Tang Chou, Ekaterina Govorkova et al.

Scientific discoveries are often made by finding a pattern or object that was not predicted by the known rules of science. Oftentimes, these anomalous events or objects that do not conform to the norms are an indication that the rules of science governing the data are incomplete, and something new needs to be present to explain these unexpected outliers. The challenge of finding anomalies can be confounding since it requires codifying a complete knowledge of the known scientific behaviors and then projecting these known behaviors on the data to look for deviations. When utilizing machine learning, this presents a particular challenge since we require that the model not only understands scientific data perfectly but also recognizes when the data is inconsistent and out of the scope of its trained behavior. In this paper, we present three datasets aimed at developing machine learning-based anomaly detection for disparate scientific domains covering astrophysics, genomics, and polar science. We present the different datasets along with a scheme to make machine learning challenges around the three datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Furthermore, we present an approach that generalizes to future machine learning challenges, enabling the possibility of large, more compute-intensive challenges that can ultimately lead to scientific discovery.

Zheng-Peng Duan, Jiawei Zhang, Xin Jin et al.

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models are becoming increasingly popular in solving the Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) problem because of their rich generative priors. The recent development of diffusion transformer (DiT) has witnessed overwhelming performance over the traditional UNet-based architecture in image generation, which also raises the question: Can we adopt the advanced DiT-based diffusion model for Real-ISR? To this end, we propose our DiT4SR, one of the pioneering works to tame the large-scale DiT model for Real-ISR. Instead of directly injecting embeddings extracted from low-resolution (LR) images like ControlNet, we integrate the LR embeddings into the original attention mechanism of DiT, allowing for the bidirectional flow of information between the LR latent and the generated latent. The sufficient interaction of these two streams allows the LR stream to evolve with the diffusion process, producing progressively refined guidance that better aligns with the generated latent at each diffusion step. Additionally, the LR guidance is injected into the generated latent via a cross-stream convolution layer, compensating for DiT's limited ability to capture local information. These simple but effective designs endow the DiT model with superior performance in Real-ISR, which is demonstrated by extensive experiments. Project Page: https://adam-duan.github.io/projects/dit4sr/.

Lei Wang, Senmao Li, Fei Yang et al.

The diffusion models, in early stages focus on constructing basic image structures, while the refined details, including local features and textures, are generated in later stages. Thus the same network layers are forced to learn both structural and textural information simultaneously, significantly differing from the traditional deep learning architectures (e.g., ResNet or GANs) which captures or generates the image semantic information at different layers. This difference inspires us to explore the time-wise diffusion models. We initially investigate the key contributions of the U-Net parameters to the denoising process and identify that properly zeroing out certain parameters (including large parameters) contributes to denoising, substantially improving the generation quality on the fly. Capitalizing on this discovery, we propose a simple yet effective method-termed ``MaskUNet''- that enhances generation quality with negligible parameter numbers. Our method fully leverages timestep- and sample-dependent effective U-Net parameters. To optimize MaskUNet, we offer two fine-tuning strategies: a training-based approach and a training-free approach, including tailored networks and optimization functions. In zero-shot inference on the COCO dataset, MaskUNet achieves the best FID score and further demonstrates its effectiveness in downstream task evaluations. Project page: https://gudaochangsheng.github.io/MaskUnet-Page/

Li Sun, Ziheng Zhang, Zixi Wang et al.

Dynamic interacting system modeling is important for understanding and simulating real world systems. The system is typically described as a graph, where multiple objects dynamically interact with each other and evolve over time. In recent years, graph Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) receive increasing research attentions. While achieving encouraging results, existing solutions prioritize the traditional Euclidean space, and neglect the intrinsic geometry of the system and physics laws, e.g., the principle of entropy increasing. The limitations above motivate us to rethink the system dynamics from a fresh perspective of Riemannian geometry, and pose a more realistic problem of physics-informed dynamic system modeling, considering the underlying geometry and physics law for the first time. In this paper, we present a novel physics-informed Riemannian graph ODE for a wide range of entropy-increasing dynamic systems (termed as Pioneer). In particular, we formulate a differential system on the Riemannian manifold, where a manifold-valued graph ODE is governed by the proposed constrained Ricci flow, and a manifold preserving Gyro-transform aware of system geometry. Theoretically, we report the provable entropy non-decreasing of our formulation, obeying the physics laws. Empirical results show the superiority of Pioneer on real datasets.

Ziheng Zhang, Zihan Li, Dandan Shan et al.

Enhancing the precision of segmenting coronary atherosclerotic plaques from CT Angiography (CTA) images is pivotal for advanced Coronary Atherosclerosis Analysis (CAA), which distinctively relies on the analysis of vessel cross-section images reconstructed via Curved Planar Reformation. This task presents significant challenges due to the indistinct boundaries and structures of plaques and blood vessels, leading to the inadequate performance of current deep learning models, compounded by the inherent difficulty in annotating such complex data. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-consistency semi-supervised framework that integrates Intra-frame Topological Consistency (ITC) and Cross-frame Topological Consistency (CTC) to leverage labeled and unlabeled data. ITC employs a dual-task network for simultaneous segmentation mask and Skeleton-aware Distance Transform (SDT) prediction, achieving similar prediction of topology structure through consistency constraint without additional annotations. Meanwhile, CTC utilizes an unsupervised estimator for analyzing pixel flow between skeletons and boundaries of adjacent frames, ensuring spatial continuity. Experiments on two CTA datasets show that our method surpasses existing semi-supervised methods and approaches the performance of supervised methods on CAA. In addition, our method also performs better than other methods on the ACDC dataset, demonstrating its generalization.

Zhenxi Lin, Ziheng Zhang, Xian Wu et al. · tencent-ai

Although biomedical entity linking (BioEL) has made significant progress with pre-trained language models, challenges still exist for fine-grained and long-tailed entities. To address these challenges, we present BioELQA, a novel model that treats Biomedical Entity Linking as Multiple Choice Question Answering. BioELQA first obtains candidate entities with a fast retriever, jointly presents the mention and candidate entities to a generator, and then outputs the predicted symbol associated with its chosen entity. This formulation enables explicit comparison of different candidate entities, thus capturing fine-grained interactions between mentions and entities, as well as among entities themselves. To improve generalization for long-tailed entities, we retrieve similar labeled training instances as clues and concatenate the input with retrieved instances for the generator. Extensive experimental results show that BioELQA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on several datasets.

Zhenxi Lin, Ziheng Zhang, Xian Wu et al. · tencent-ai

Biomedical entity linking (BioEL) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing BioEL methods usually struggle to handle rare and difficult entities due to long-tailed distribution. To address this limitation, we introduce a new scheme $k$NN-BioEL, which provides a BioEL model with the ability to reference similar instances from the entire training corpus as clues for prediction, thus improving the generalization capabilities. Moreover, we design a contrastive learning objective with dynamic hard negative sampling (DHNS) that improves the quality of the retrieved neighbors during inference. Extensive experimental results show that $k$NN-BioEL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on several datasets.

Genghua Kou, Fan Jia, Weixin Mao et al.

In this paper, we propose PADriver, a novel closed-loop framework for personalized autonomous driving (PAD). Built upon Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM), PADriver takes streaming frames and personalized textual prompts as inputs. It autoaggressively performs scene understanding, danger level estimation and action decision. The predicted danger level reflects the risk of the potential action and provides an explicit reference for the final action, which corresponds to the preset personalized prompt. Moreover, we construct a closed-loop benchmark named PAD-Highway based on Highway-Env simulator to comprehensively evaluate the decision performance under traffic rules. The dataset contains 250 hours videos with high-quality annotation to facilitate the development of PAD behavior analysis. Experimental results on the constructed benchmark show that PADriver outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on different evaluation metrics, and enables various driving modes.

Linyao Chen, Bo Huang, Qinlao Zhao et al.

Agentic Web, as a new paradigm that redefines the internet through autonomous, goal-driven interactions, plays an important role in group intelligence. As the foundational semantic primitives of the Agentic Web, digital assets encapsulate interactive web elements into agents, which expand the capacities and coverage of agents in agentic web. The lack of automated methodologies for agent generation limits the wider usage of digital assets and the advancement of the Agentic Web. In this paper, we first formalize these challenges by strictly defining the A2A-Agentization process, decomposing it into critical stages and identifying key technical hurdles on top of the A2A protocol. Based on this framework, we develop an Agentization Agent to agentize digital assets for the Agentic Web. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we propose A2A-Agentization Bench, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agentization quality in terms of fidelity and interoperability. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively activates the functional capabilities of digital assets and enables interoperable A2A multi-agent collaboration. We believe this work will further facilitate scalable and standardized integration of digital assets into the Agentic Web ecosystem.

Ziheng Zhang, Xinyue Ma, Arpita Chowdhury et al.

This work investigates descriptive captions as an additional source of supervision for biological multimodal foundation models. Images and captions can be viewed as complementary samples from the latent morphospace of a species, each capturing certain biological traits. Incorporating captions during training encourages alignment with this shared latent structure, emphasizing potentially diagnostic characters while suppressing spurious correlations. The main challenge, however, lies in obtaining faithful, instance-specific captions at scale. This requirement has limited the utilization of natural language supervision in organismal biology compared with many other scientific domains. We complement this gap by generating synthetic captions with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), guided by Wikipedia-derived visual information and taxon-tailored format examples. These domain-specific contexts help reduce hallucination and yield accurate, instance-based descriptive captions. Using these captions, we train BioCAP (i.e., BioCLIP with Captions), a biological foundation model that captures rich semantics and achieves strong performance in species classification and text-image retrieval. These results demonstrate the value of descriptive captions beyond labels in bridging biological images with multimodal foundation models.

Hengyi Zheng, Rui Wen, Xi Chen et al.

Joint extraction of entities and relations from unstructured texts is a crucial task in information extraction. Recent methods achieve considerable performance but still suffer from some inherent limitations, such as redundancy of relation prediction, poor generalization of span-based extraction and inefficiency. In this paper, we decompose this task into three subtasks, Relation Judgement, Entity Extraction and Subject-object Alignment from a novel perspective and then propose a joint relational triple extraction framework based on Potential Relation and Global Correspondence (PRGC). Specifically, we design a component to predict potential relations, which constrains the following entity extraction to the predicted relation subset rather than all relations; then a relation-specific sequence tagging component is applied to handle the overlapping problem between subjects and objects; finally, a global correspondence component is designed to align the subject and object into a triple with low-complexity. Extensive experiments show that PRGC achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks with higher efficiency and delivers consistent performance gain on complex scenarios of overlapping triples.

Zhiyuan Qi, Ziheng Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen et al.

Knowledge Graph (KG) alignment aims at finding equivalent entities and relations (i.e., mappings) between two KGs. The existing approaches utilize either reasoning-based or semantic embedding-based techniques, but few studies explore their combination. In this demonstration, we present PRASEMap, an unsupervised KG alignment system that iteratively computes the Mappings with both Probabilistic Reasoning (PR) And Semantic Embedding (SE) techniques. PRASEMap can support various embedding-based KG alignment approaches as the SE module, and enables easy human computer interaction that additionally provides an option for users to feed the mapping annotations back to the system for better results. The demonstration showcases these features via a stand-alone Web application with user friendly interfaces. The demo is available at https://prasemap.qizhy.com.

Yuejia Xiang, Ziheng Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen et al.

Semantic embedding has been widely investigated for aligning knowledge graph (KG) entities. Current methods have explored and utilized the graph structure, the entity names and attributes, but ignore the ontology (or ontological schema) which contains critical meta information such as classes and their membership relationships with entities. In this paper, we propose an ontology-guided entity alignment method named OntoEA, where both KGs and their ontologies are jointly embedded, and the class hierarchy and the class disjointness are utilized to avoid false mappings. Extensive experiments on seven public and industrial benchmarks have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of OntoEA and the effectiveness of the ontologies.

Zhiyuan Qi, Ziheng Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen et al.

Knowledge Graph (KG) alignment is to discover the mappings (i.e., equivalent entities, relations, and others) between two KGs. The existing methods can be divided into the embedding-based models, and the conventional reasoning and lexical matching based systems. The former compute the similarity of entities via their cross-KG embeddings, but they usually rely on an ideal supervised learning setting for good performance and lack appropriate reasoning to avoid logically wrong mappings; while the latter address the reasoning issue but are poor at utilizing the KG graph structures and the entity contexts. In this study, we aim at combining the above two solutions and thus propose an iterative framework named PRASE which is based on probabilistic reasoning and semantic embedding. It learns the KG embeddings via entity mappings from a probabilistic reasoning system named PARIS, and feeds the resultant entity mappings and embeddings back into PARIS for augmentation. The PRASE framework is compatible with different embedding-based models, and our experiments on multiple datasets have demonstrated its state-of-the-art performance.

Ziheng Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen, Xi Chen et al.

Embedding-based entity alignment has been widely investigated in recent years, but most proposed methods still rely on an ideal supervised learning setting with a large number of unbiased seed mappings for training and validation, which significantly limits their usage. In this study, we evaluate those state-of-the-art methods in an industrial context, where the impact of seed mappings with different sizes and different biases is explored. Besides the popular benchmarks from DBpedia and Wikidata, we contribute and evaluate a new industrial benchmark that is extracted from two heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs) under deployment for medical applications. The experimental results enable the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of these alignment methods and the further discussion of suitable strategies for their industrial deployment.

Ziheng Zhang, Anpei Chen, Ling Xie et al.

In this work, we demonstrate yet another approach to tackle the amodal segmentation problem. Specifically, we first introduce a new representation, namely a semantics-aware distance map (sem-dist map), to serve as our target for amodal segmentation instead of the commonly used masks and heatmaps. The sem-dist map is a kind of level-set representation, of which the different regions of an object are placed into different levels on the map according to their visibility. It is a natural extension of masks and heatmaps, where modal, amodal segmentation, as well as depth order information, are all well-described. Then we also introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, which we refer to as semantic layering network, to estimate sem-dist maps layer by layer, from the global-level to the instance-level, for all objects in an image. Extensive experiments on the COCOA and D2SA datasets have demonstrated that our framework can predict amodal segmentation, occlusion and depth order with state-of-the-art performance.

Anpei Chen, Zhang Chen, Guli Zhang et al.

We present a single-image 3D face synthesis technique that can handle challenging facial expressions while recovering fine geometric details. Our technique employs expression analysis for proxy face geometry generation and combines supervised and unsupervised learning for facial detail synthesis. On proxy generation, we conduct emotion prediction to determine a new expression-informed proxy. On detail synthesis, we present a Deep Facial Detail Net (DFDN) based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Net (CGAN) that employs both geometry and appearance loss functions. For geometry, we capture 366 high-quality 3D scans from 122 different subjects under 3 facial expressions. For appearance, we use additional 20K in-the-wild face images and apply image-based rendering to accommodate lighting variations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can produce high-quality 3D faces with realistic details under challenging facial expressions.