Zijie Zhang

Zixuan Dong, Jiafu Tang, Zhide Lei et al.

Long-video Omni assistants often fail not by inventing content, but by misbinding real evidence: they hear the right utterance and see the right event, yet attach it to the wrong speaker, moment, or modality. These \emph{almost-true} errors evade standard video QA because local evidence remains valid, so item-level scoring can reward both a supported claim and its near-counterfactual. We introduce a counterfactual event-binding protocol that constructs paired supported/counterfactual claims from the same audio-visual event evidence and evaluates them by strict-pair accuracy. We instantiate it as \bench, a benchmark for long-video Omni hallucination, with 3{,}600 single-claim QA items from 638 long-form videos averaging 24.16 minutes and covering 256.87 hours. Under this protocol, open-weight Omni models remain weak at pair-level binding: Qwen2.5-Omni-7B reaches 32.06\% and Qwen3-Omni-Instruct reaches 41.55\%, versus 76.54\% for a closed-source reference. To narrow this gap without updating the backbone, we propose \method, Modality-Perturbation Reliability Calibration, a frozen-backbone framework that selects audio-negative probes within video-level folds and fuses their response shifts with native audio-visual confidence into per-claim support estimates. \method lifts Qwen2.5-Omni-7B to 36.22\% and Qwen3 to 51.09\% on \bench, and improves target-adapted MCQ accuracy on OmniVideoBench ($+$2.20) and WorldSense ($+$1.51) with Qwen3.

Weixing Zhou, Qi Peng, Zijie Zhang et al.

Multinational enterprises conduct global business that has a demand for geo-distributed transactional databases. Existing state-of-the-art databases adopt a sharded master-follower replication architecture. However, the single-master serving mode incurs massive cross-region writes from clients, and the sharded architecture requires multiple round-trip acknowledgments (e.g., 2PC) to ensure atomicity for cross-shard transactions. These limitations drive us to seek yet another design choice. In this paper, we propose a strongly consistent OLTP database GeoGauss with full replica multi-master architecture. To efficiently merge the updates from different master nodes, we propose a multi-master OCC that unifies data replication and concurrent transaction processing. By leveraging an epoch-based delta state merge rule and the optimistic asynchronous execution, GeoGauss ensures strong consistency with light-coordinated protocol and allows more concurrency with weak isolation, which are sufficient to meet our needs. Our geo-distributed experimental results show that GeoGauss achieves 7.06X higher throughput and 17.41X lower latency than the state-of-the-art geo-distributed database CockroachDB on the TPC-C benchmark.

Yiheng Wang, Changhong Fu, Liangliang Yao et al.

Robust feature encoding constitutes the foundation of UAV tracking by enabling the nuanced perception of target appearance and motion, thereby playing a pivotal role in ensuring reliable tracking. However, existing feature encoding methods often overlook critical illumination and viewpoint cues, which are essential for robust perception under challenging nighttime conditions, leading to degraded tracking performance. To overcome the above limitation, this work proposes a dual prompt-driven feature encoding method that integrates prompt-conditioned feature adaptation and context-aware prompt evolution to promote domain-invariant feature encoding. Specifically, the pyramid illumination prompter is proposed to extract multi-scale frequency-aware illumination prompts. %The dynamic viewpoint prompter adapts the sampling to different viewpoints, enabling the tracker to learn view-invariant features. The dynamic viewpoint prompter modulates deformable convolution offsets to accommodate viewpoint variations, enabling the tracker to learn view-invariant features. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed dual prompt-driven tracker (DPTracker) in tackling nighttime UAV tracking. Ablation studies highlight the contribution of each component in DPTracker. Real-world tests under diverse nighttime UAV tracking scenarios further demonstrate the robustness and practical utility. The code and demo videos are available at https://github.com/yiheng-wang-duke/DPTracker.

Ji Liu, Jiaxiang Ren, Ruoming Jin et al.

As a promising paradigm to collaboratively train models with decentralized data, Federated Learning (FL) can be exploited to fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs correspond to huge size, the scale of the training data significantly increases, which leads to tremendous amounts of computation and communication costs. The training data is generally non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID), which requires adaptive data processing within each device. Although Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) can significantly reduce the scale of parameters to update in the fine-tuning process, it still takes unaffordable time to transfer the low-rank parameters of all the layers in LLMs. In this paper, we propose a Fisher Information-based Efficient Curriculum Federated Learning framework (FibecFed) with two novel methods, i.e., adaptive federated curriculum learning and efficient sparse parameter update. First, we propose a fisher information-based method to adaptively sample data within each device to improve the effectiveness of the FL fine-tuning process. Second, we dynamically select the proper layers for global aggregation and sparse parameters for local update with LoRA so as to improve the efficiency of the FL fine-tuning process. Extensive experimental results based on 10 datasets demonstrate that FibecFed yields excellent performance (up to 45.35% in terms of accuracy) and superb fine-tuning speed (up to 98.61% faster) compared with 17 baseline approaches).

Abu Noman Md Sakib, Merjulah Roby, Zijie Zhang et al.

Computed tomography image segmentation of complex abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) often fails because the models assign internal focus to irrelevant structures or do not focus on thin, low-contrast targets. Where the model looks is the primary training signal, and thus we propose an Explainable AI (XAI) guided encoder shaping framework. Our method computes a dense, attribution-based encoder focus map ("XAI field") from the final encoder block and uses it in two complementary ways: (i) we align the predicted probability mass to the XAI field to promote agreement between focus and output; and (ii) we route the field into a lightweight refinement pathway and a confidence prior that modulates logits at inference, suppressing distractors while preserving subtle structures. The objective terms serve only as control signals; the contribution is the integration of attribution guidance into representation and decoding. We evaluate clinically validated challenging cases curated for failure-prone scenarios. Compared to a base SAM setup, our implementation yields substantial improvements. The observed gains suggest that explicitly optimizing encoder focus via XAI guidance is a practical and effective principle for reliable segmentation in complex scenarios.

Abu Noman Md Sakib, OFM Riaz Rahman Aranya, Kevin Desai et al.

Attribution maps for semantic segmentation are almost always judged by visual plausibility. Yet looking convincing does not guarantee that the highlighted pixels actually drive the model's prediction, nor that attribution credit stays within the target region. These questions require a dedicated evaluation protocol. We introduce a reproducible benchmark that tests intervention-based faithfulness, off-target leakage, perturbation robustness, and runtime on Pascal VOC and SBD across three pretrained backbones. To further demonstrate the benchmark, we propose Dual-Evidence Attribution (DEA), a lightweight correction that fuses gradient evidence with region-level intervention signals through agreement-weighted fusion. DEA increases emphasis where both sources agree and retains causal support when gradient responses are unstable. Across all completed runs, DEA consistently improves deletion-based faithfulness over gradient-only baselines and preserves strong robustness, at the cost of additional compute from intervention passes. The benchmark exposes a faithfulness-stability tradeoff among attribution families that is entirely hidden under visual evaluation, providing a foundation for principled method selection in segmentation explainability. Code is available at https://github.com/anmspro/DEA.

Bohan Liu, Zijie Zhang, Peixiong He et al.

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) states that a dense neural network model contains a highly sparse subnetwork (i.e., winning tickets) that can achieve even better performance than the original model when trained in isolation. While LTH has been proved both empirically and theoretically in many works, there still are some open issues, such as efficiency and scalability, to be addressed. Also, the lack of open-source frameworks and consensual experimental setting poses a challenge to future research on LTH. We, for the first time, examine previous research and studies on LTH from different perspectives. We also discuss issues in existing works and list potential directions for further exploration. This survey aims to provide an in-depth look at the state of LTH and develop a duly maintained platform to conduct experiments and compare with the most updated baselines.

Qianqian Xie, Qingheng Xiong, He Zhu et al.

Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to solve complex, long-horizon research tasks involving planning, retrieval, multimodal understanding, and report generation, yet their evaluation remains challenging due to dynamic web environments and ambiguous task definitions. We propose DR$^{3}$-Eval, a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating deep research agents on multimodal, multi-file report generation. DR$^{3}$-Eval is constructed from authentic user-provided materials and paired with a per-task static research sandbox corpus that simulates open-web complexity while remaining fully verifiable, containing supportive documents, distractors, and noise. Moreover, we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework measuring Information Recall, Factual Accuracy, Citation Coverage, Instruction Following, and Depth Quality, and validate its alignment with human judgments. Experiments with our developed multi-agent system DR$^{3}$-Agent based on multiple state-of-the-art language models demonstrate that DR$^{3}$-Eval is highly challenging and reveals critical failure modes in retrieval robustness and hallucination control. Our code and data are publicly available.

Hitomi Jin Ling Tee, Chaoren Wang, Zijie Zhang et al.

The evaluation of intelligibility for TTS has reached a bottleneck, as existing assessments heavily rely on word-by-word accuracy metrics such as WER, which fail to capture the complexity of real-world speech or reflect human comprehension needs. To address this, we propose Spoken-Passage Multiple-Choice Question Answering, a novel subjective approach evaluating the accuracy of key information in synthesized speech, and release SP-MCQA-Eval, an 8.76-hour news-style benchmark dataset for SP-MCQA evaluation. Our experiments reveal that low WER does not necessarily guarantee high key-information accuracy, exposing a gap between traditional metrics and practical intelligibility. SP-MCQA shows that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models still lack robust text normalization and phonetic accuracy. This work underscores the urgent need for high-level, more life-like evaluation criteria now that many systems already excel at WER yet may fall short on real-world intelligibility.

Abu Noman Md Sakib, Zhensen Wang, Merjulah Roby et al.

Reliable pattern recognition systems should exhibit consistent behavior across similar inputs, and their explanations should remain stable. However, most Explainable AI evaluations remain instance centric and do not explicitly quantify whether attribution patterns are consistent across samples that share the same class or represent small variations of the same input. In this work, we propose a novel metric aimed at assessing the consistency of model explanations, ensuring that models consistently reflect the intended objectives and consistency under label-preserving perturbations. We implement this metric using a pre-trained BERT model on the SST-2 sentiment analysis dataset, with additional robustness tests on RoBERTa, DistilBERT, and IMDB, applying SHAP to compute feature importance for various test samples. The proposed metric quantifies the cosine similarity of SHAP values for inputs with the same label, aiming to detect inconsistent behaviors, such as biased reliance on certain features or failure to maintain consistent reasoning for similar predictions. Through a series of experiments, we evaluate the ability of this metric to identify misaligned predictions and inconsistencies in model explanations. These experiments are compared against standard fidelity metrics to assess whether the new metric can effectively identify when a model's behavior deviates from its intended objectives. The proposed framework provides a deeper understanding of model behavior by enabling more robust verification of rationale stability, which is critical for building trustworthy AI systems. By quantifying whether models rely on consistent attribution patterns for similar inputs, the proposed approach supports more robust evaluation of model behavior in practical pattern recognition pipelines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/anmspro/ESS-XAI-Stability.

Mengyuan Li, Changhong Fu, Ziyu Lu et al.

Thermal imaging can greatly enhance the application of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in challenging environments. However, the inherent low resolution of thermal sensors leads to insufficient details and blurred boundaries. Super-resolution (SR) offers a promising solution to address this issue, while most existing SR methods are designed for fixed-scale SR. They are computationally expensive and inflexible in practical applications. To address above issues, this work proposes a novel any-scale thermal SR method (AnyTSR) for UAV within a single model. Specifically, a new image encoder is proposed to explicitly assign specific feature code to enable more accurate and flexible representation. Additionally, by effectively embedding coordinate offset information into the local feature ensemble, an innovative any-scale upsampler is proposed to better understand spatial relationships and reduce artifacts. Moreover, a novel dataset (UAV-TSR), covering both land and water scenes, is constructed for thermal SR tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all scaling factors as well as generates more accurate and detailed high-resolution images. The code is located at https://github.com/vision4robotics/AnyTSR.

Abu Noman Md Sakib, Md. Main Oddin Chisty, Zijie Zhang

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to support patients in addressing medical questions is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, most of the measures currently used to evaluate the performance of these models in this context only measure how closely a model's answers match semantically, and therefore do not provide a true indication of the model's medical accuracy or of the health equity risks associated with it. To address these shortcomings, we present a new evaluation framework for medical question answering called VB-Score (Verification-Based Score) that provides a separate evaluation of the four components of entity recognition, semantic similarity, factual consistency, and structured information completeness for medical question-answering models. We perform rigorous reviews of the performance of three well-known and widely used LLMs on 48 public health-related topics taken from high-quality, authoritative information sources. Based on our analyses, we discover a major discrepancy between the models' semantic and entity accuracy. Our assessments of the performance of all three models show that each of them has almost uniformly severe performance failures when evaluated against our criteria. Our findings indicate alarming performance disparities across various public health topics, with most of the models exhibiting 13.8% lower performance (compared to an overall average) for all the public health topics that relate to chronic conditions that occur in older and minority populations, which indicates the existence of what's known as condition-based algorithmic discrimination. Our findings also demonstrate that prompt engineering alone does not compensate for basic architectural limitations on how these models perform in extracting medical entities and raise the question of whether semantic evaluation alone is a sufficient measure of medical AI safety.

Abu Noman Md Sakib, Protik Dey, Zijie Zhang et al.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is critical for ensuring trust and accountability, yet its development remains predominantly visual. For blind and low-vision (BLV) users, the lack of accessible explanations creates a fundamental barrier to the independent use of AI-driven assistive technologies. This problem intensifies as AI systems shift from single-query tools into autonomous agents that take multi-step actions and make consequential decisions across extended task horizons, where a single undetected error can propagate irreversibly before any feedback is available. This paper investigates the unique XAI requirements of the BLV community through a comprehensive analysis of user interviews and contemporary research. By examining usage patterns across environmental perception and decision support, we identify a significant modality gap. Empirical evidence suggests that while BLV users highly value conversational explanations, they frequently experience "self-blame" for AI failures. The paper concludes with a research agenda for accessible Explainable AI in agentic systems, advocating for multimodal interfaces, blame-aware explanation design, and participatory development.