Hanyi Zhang

Tomáš Chobola, Yu Liu, Hanyi Zhang et al.

Current deep learning-based low-light image enhancement methods often struggle with high-resolution images, and fail to meet the practical demands of visual perception across diverse and unseen scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach termed CoLIE, which redefines the enhancement process through mapping the 2D coordinates of an underexposed image to its illumination component, conditioned on local context. We propose a reconstruction of enhanced-light images within the HSV space utilizing an implicit neural function combined with an embedded guided filter, thereby significantly reducing computational overhead. Moreover, we introduce a single image-based training loss function to enhance the model's adaptability to various scenes, further enhancing its practical applicability. Through rigorous evaluations, we analyze the properties of our proposed framework, demonstrating its superiority in both image quality and scene adaptability. Furthermore, our evaluation extends to applications in downstream tasks within low-light scenarios, underscoring the practical utility of CoLIE. The source code is available at https://github.com/ctom2/colie.

Meng Liu, Kong Aik Lee, Longbiao Wang et al.

Visual speech (i.e., lip motion) is highly related to auditory speech due to the co-occurrence and synchronization in speech production. This paper investigates this correlation and proposes a cross-modal speech co-learning paradigm. The primary motivation of our cross-modal co-learning method is modeling one modality aided by exploiting knowledge from another modality. Specifically, two cross-modal boosters are introduced based on an audio-visual pseudo-siamese structure to learn the modality-transformed correlation. Inside each booster, a max-feature-map embedded Transformer variant is proposed for modality alignment and enhanced feature generation. The network is co-learned both from scratch and with pretrained models. Experimental results on the LRSLip3, GridLip, LomGridLip, and VoxLip datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves 60% and 20% average relative performance improvement over independently trained audio-only/visual-only and baseline fusion systems, respectively.

Yinghui Pan, Hanyi Zhang, Yifeng Zeng et al.

Modelling other agents' behaviors plays an important role in decision models for interactions among multiple agents. To optimise its own decisions, a subject agent needs to model what other agents act simultaneously in an uncertain environment. However, modelling insufficiency occurs when the agents are competitive and the subject agent can not get full knowledge about other agents. Even when the agents are collaborative, they may not share their true behaviors due to their privacy concerns. In this article, we investigate into diversifying behaviors of other agents in the subject agent's decision model prior to their interactions. Starting with prior knowledge about other agents' behaviors, we use a linear reduction technique to extract representative behavioral features from the known behaviors. We subsequently generate their new behaviors by expanding the features and propose two diversity measurements to select top-K behaviors. We demonstrate the performance of the new techniques in two well-studied problem domains. This research will contribute to intelligent systems dealing with unknown unknowns in an open artificial intelligence world.

Minghao Lv, Lu Chen, Enchang Zhang et al.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into emotionally sensitive domains, the structural integrity of their emotional intelligence (EI) becomes a critical frontier for safety and alignment. Current benchmarks often conflate superficial politeness with deep affective reasoning, failing to distinguish between perceptual accuracy and interactive efficacy. Here, we introduce FACET (Functional Affective Competence and Empathy Test), a psychometrically grounded framework comprising 480 expert-crafted items. Unlike previous metrics, FACET is theoretically anchored in the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso four-branch ability model, operationalizing EI through perception, facilitation, understanding, and management of emotions. Through an evaluation of nine frontier models (including GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4), we demonstrate that emotional intelligence is not a monolithic capability but is fragmented across cognitive and interactive dimensions. While frontier models demonstrate robust proficiency in objective emotion recognition and social reasoning, this does not consistently translate to interactive success. We categorize these discrepancies into three distinct performance profiles: cognitive-dominant, interactive-dominant, and context-dependent. These typologies indicate that emotional skills do not scale uniformly with general intelligence or model size; rather, they are shaped by specific alignment paradigms. Notably, we identify hidden emotion recognition as a universal performance bottleneck across all architectures. Our results suggest that current RLHF processes may optimize for "stochastic empathy", a statistical mimicry of emotional syntax, at the expense of integrated affective reasoning. These findings challenge the assumption of linear emotional scaling and provide a rigorous roadmap for developing socially aware agents capable of genuine clinical resonance.

Xiaogang Jia, Atalay Donat, Xi Huang et al.

Designing modern imitation learning (IL) policies requires making numerous decisions, including the selection of feature encoding, architecture, policy representation, and more. As the field rapidly advances, the range of available options continues to grow, creating a vast and largely unexplored design space for IL policies. In this work, we present X-IL, an accessible open-source framework designed to systematically explore this design space. The framework's modular design enables seamless swapping of policy components, such as backbones (e.g., Transformer, Mamba, xLSTM) and policy optimization techniques (e.g., Score-matching, Flow-matching). This flexibility facilitates comprehensive experimentation and has led to the discovery of novel policy configurations that outperform existing methods on recent robot learning benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate not only significant performance gains but also provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of various design choices. This study serves as both a practical reference for practitioners and a foundation for guiding future research in imitation learning.

Alessandro Palma, Till Richter, Hanyi Zhang et al.

Generative modeling of single-cell RNA-seq data is crucial for tasks like trajectory inference, batch effect removal, and simulation of realistic cellular data. However, recent deep generative models simulating synthetic single cells from noise operate on pre-processed continuous gene expression approximations, overlooking the discrete nature of single-cell data, which limits their effectiveness and hinders the incorporation of robust noise models. Additionally, aspects like controllable multi-modal and multi-label generation of cellular data remain underexplored. This work introduces CellFlow for Generation (CFGen), a flow-based conditional generative model that preserves the inherent discreteness of single-cell data. CFGen generates whole-genome multi-modal single-cell data reliably, improving the recovery of crucial biological data characteristics while tackling relevant generative tasks such as rare cell type augmentation and batch correction. We also introduce a novel framework for compositional data generation using Flow Matching. By showcasing CFGen on a diverse set of biological datasets and settings, we provide evidence of its value to the fields of computational biology and deep generative models.

Atalay Donat, Xiaogang Jia, Xi Huang et al.

Learning for manipulation requires using policies that have access to rich sensory information such as point clouds or RGB images. Point clouds efficiently capture geometric structures, making them essential for manipulation tasks in imitation learning. In contrast, RGB images provide rich texture and semantic information that can be crucial for certain tasks. Existing approaches for fusing both modalities assign 2D image features to point clouds. However, such approaches often lose global contextual information from the original images. In this work, we propose FPV-Net, a novel imitation learning method that effectively combines the strengths of both point cloud and RGB modalities. Our method conditions the point-cloud encoder on global and local image tokens using adaptive layer norm conditioning, leveraging the beneficial properties of both modalities. Through extensive experiments on the challenging RoboCasa benchmark, we demonstrate the limitations of relying on either modality alone and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks.

RunQing Wu, KaiHui Huang, HanYi Zhang et al.

Continuously acquiring new knowledge from a dynamic environment is a fundamental capability for animals, facilitating their survival and ability to address various challenges. This capability is referred to as continual learning, which focuses on the ability to learn a sequence of tasks without the detriment of previous knowledge. A prevalent strategy to tackle continual learning involves selecting and storing numerous essential data samples from prior tasks within a fixed-size memory buffer. However, the majority of current memory-based techniques typically utilize a single memory buffer, which poses challenges in concurrently managing newly acquired and previously learned samples. Drawing inspiration from the Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory, which defines rapid and gradual learning mechanisms for processing information, we propose an innovative dual memory system called the Information-Theoretic Dual Memory System (ITDMS). This system comprises a fast memory buffer designed to retain temporary and novel samples, alongside a slow memory buffer dedicated to preserving critical and informative samples. The fast memory buffer is optimized employing an efficient reservoir sampling process. Furthermore, we introduce a novel information-theoretic memory optimization strategy that selectively identifies and retains diverse and informative data samples for the slow memory buffer. Additionally, we propose a novel balanced sample selection procedure that automatically identifies and eliminates redundant memorized samples, thus freeing up memory capacity for new data acquisitions, which can deal with a growing array of tasks. Our methodology is rigorously assessed through a series of continual learning experiments, with empirical results underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Runqing Wu, Kaihui Huang, Hanyi Zhang et al.

Continual Learning (CL) epitomizes an advanced training paradigm wherein prior data samples remain inaccessible during the acquisition of new tasks. Numerous investigations have delved into leveraging a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) to enhance model efficacy in continual learning. Nonetheless, these approaches typically utilize a singular, static backbone, which inadequately adapts to novel tasks, particularly when engaging with diverse data domains, due to a substantial number of inactive parameters. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing an innovative Self-Controlled Dynamic Expansion Model (SCDEM), which orchestrates multiple distinct trainable pre-trained ViT backbones to furnish diverse and semantically enriched representations. Specifically, by employing the multi-backbone architecture as a shared module, the proposed SCDEM dynamically generates a new expert with minimal parameters to accommodate a new task. A novel Collaborative Optimization Mechanism (COM) is introduced to synergistically optimize multiple backbones by harnessing prediction signals from historical experts, thereby facilitating new task learning without erasing previously acquired knowledge. Additionally, a novel Feature Distribution Consistency (FDC) approach is proposed to align semantic similarity between previously and currently learned representations through an optimal transport distance-based mechanism, effectively mitigating negative knowledge transfer effects. Furthermore, to alleviate over-regularization challenges, this paper presents a novel Dynamic Layer-Wise Feature Attention Mechanism (DLWFAM) to autonomously determine the penalization intensity on each trainable representation layer. An extensive series of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed methodology's efficacy, with empirical results corroborating that the approach attains state-of-the-art performance.

KaiHui Huang, RunQing Wu, JinHui Shen et al.

Continual learning has emerged as a pivotal area of research, primarily due to its advantageous characteristic that allows models to persistently acquire and retain information. However, catastrophic forgetting can severely impair model performance. In this study, we address network forgetting by introducing a novel framework termed Optimally-Weighted Maximum Mean Discrepancy (OWMMD), which imposes penalties on representation alterations via a Multi-Level Feature Matching Mechanism (MLFMM). Furthermore, we propose an Adaptive Regularization Optimization (ARO) strategy to refine the adaptive weight vectors, which autonomously assess the significance of each feature layer throughout the optimization process, The proposed ARO approach can relieve the over-regularization problem and promote the future task learning. We conduct a comprehensive series of experiments, benchmarking our proposed method against several established baselines. The empirical findings indicate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Meng Liu, Longbiao Wang, Kong Aik Lee et al.

Audio-visual (AV) lip biometrics is a promising authentication technique that leverages the benefits of both the audio and visual modalities in speech communication. Previous works have demonstrated the usefulness of AV lip biometrics. However, the lack of a sizeable AV database hinders the exploration of deep-learning-based audio-visual lip biometrics. To address this problem, we compile a moderate-size database using existing public databases. Meanwhile, we establish the DeepLip AV lip biometrics system realized with a convolutional neural network (CNN) based video module, a time-delay neural network (TDNN) based audio module, and a multimodal fusion module. Our experiments show that DeepLip outperforms traditional speaker recognition models in context modeling and achieves over 50% relative improvements compared with our best single modality baseline, with an equal error rate of 0.75% and 1.11% on the test datasets, respectively.