Yi He

Yi He, Xi Yang, Chia-Ming Chang et al.

Attention guidance is an approach to addressing dataset bias in deep learning, where the model relies on incorrect features to make decisions. Focusing on image classification tasks, we propose an efficient human-in-the-loop system to interactively direct the attention of classifiers to the regions specified by users, thereby reducing the influence of co-occurrence bias and improving the transferability and interpretability of a DNN. Previous approaches for attention guidance require the preparation of pixel-level annotations and are not designed as interactive systems. We present a new interactive method to allow users to annotate images with simple clicks, and study a novel active learning strategy to significantly reduce the number of annotations. We conducted both a numerical evaluation and a user study to evaluate the proposed system on multiple datasets. Compared to the existing non-active-learning approach which usually relies on huge amounts of polygon-based segmentation masks to fine-tune or train the DNNs, our system can save lots of labor and money and obtain a fine-tuned network that works better even when the dataset is biased. The experiment results indicate that the proposed system is efficient, reasonable, and reliable.

Yi He, Xing-Biao Hu, Jian-Qing Sun et al.

The molecule solution of an equation related to the lattice Boussinesq equation is derived with the help of determinantal identities. It is shown that this equation can for certain sequences be used as a numerical convergence acceleration algorithm. Numerical examples with applications of this algorithm are presented.

Yizhou Peng, Yufei Liu, Jicheng Zhang et al.

Internal Language Model Estimation (ILME) based language model (LM) fusion has been shown significantly improved recognition results over conventional shallow fusion in both intra-domain and cross-domain speech recognition tasks. In this paper, we attempt to apply our ILME method to cross-domain code-switching speech recognition (CSSR) work. Specifically, our curiosity comes from several aspects. First, we are curious about how effective the ILME-based LM fusion is for both intra-domain and cross-domain CSSR tasks. We verify this with or without merging two code-switching domains. More importantly, we train an end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition model by means of merging two monolingual data sets and observe the efficacy of the proposed ILME-based LM fusion for CSSR. Experimental results on SEAME that is from Southeast Asian and another Chinese Mainland CS data set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ILME-based LM fusion method.

Heng Lian, John Scovil Atwood, Bojian Hou et al.

This paper investigates a new online learning problem with doubly-streaming data, where the data streams are described by feature spaces that constantly evolve, with new features emerging and old features fading away. The challenges of this problem are two folds: 1) Data samples ceaselessly flowing in may carry shifted patterns over time, requiring learners to update hence adapt on-the-fly. 2) Newly emerging features are described by very few samples, resulting in weak learners that tend to make error predictions. A plausible idea to overcome the challenges is to establish relationship between the pre-and-post evolving feature spaces, so that an online learner can leverage the knowledge learned from the old features to better the learning performance on the new features. Unfortunately, this idea does not scale up to high-dimensional media streams with complex feature interplay, which suffers an tradeoff between onlineness (biasing shallow learners) and expressiveness(requiring deep learners). Motivated by this, we propose a novel OLD^3S paradigm, where a shared latent subspace is discovered to summarize information from the old and new feature spaces, building intermediate feature mapping relationship. A key trait of OLD^3S is to treat the model capacity as a learnable semantics, yields optimal model depth and parameters jointly, in accordance with the complexity and non-linearity of the input data streams in an online fashion. Both theoretical analyses and empirical studies substantiate the viability and effectiveness of our proposal.

Feilong Chen, Di Wu, Jie Yang et al.

Online streaming feature selection (OSFS), which conducts feature selection in an online manner, plays an important role in dealing with high-dimensional data. In many real applications such as intelligent healthcare platform, streaming feature always has some missing data, which raises a crucial challenge in conducting OSFS, i.e., how to establish the uncertain relationship between sparse streaming features and labels. Unfortunately, existing OSFS algorithms never consider such uncertain relationship. To fill this gap, we in this paper propose an online sparse streaming feature selection with uncertainty (OS2FSU) algorithm. OS2FSU consists of two main parts: 1) latent factor analysis is utilized to pre-estimate the missing data in sparse streaming features before con-ducting feature selection, and 2) fuzzy logic and neighborhood rough set are employed to alleviate the uncertainty between estimated streaming features and labels during conducting feature selection. In the experiments, OS2FSU is compared with five state-of-the-art OSFS algorithms on six real datasets. The results demonstrate that OS2FSU outperforms its competitors when missing data are encountered in OSFS.

Claude Brezinski, Yi He, Xing-Biao Hu et al.

In this paper, we give a multistep extension of the epsilon-algorithm of Wynn, and we show that it implements a multistep extension of the Shanks' sequence transformation which is defined by ratios of determinants. Reciprocally, the quantities defined in this transformation can be recursively computed by the multistep epsilon-algorithm. The multistep epsilon-algorithm and the multistep Shanks' transformation are related to an extended discrete Lotka-Volterra system. These results are obtained by using the Hirota's bilinear method, a procedure quite useful in the solution of nonlinear partial differential and difference equations.

Di Wu, Peng Zhang, Yi He et al.

High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrices are omnipresent in a variety of big data-related applications. Latent factor analysis (LFA) is a typical representation learning method that extracts useful yet latent knowledge from HiDS matrices via low-rank approximation. Current LFA-based models mainly focus on a single-metric representation, where the representation strategy designed for the approximation Loss function, is fixed and exclusive. However, real-world HiDS matrices are commonly heterogeneous and inclusive and have diverse underlying patterns, such that a single-metric representation is most likely to yield inferior performance. Motivated by this, we in this paper propose a multi-metric latent factor (MMLF) model. Its main idea is two-fold: 1) two vector spaces and three Lp-norms are simultaneously employed to develop six variants of LFA model, each of which resides in a unique metric representation space, and 2) all the variants are ensembled with a tailored, self-adaptive weighting strategy. As such, our proposed MMLF enjoys the merits originated from a set of disparate metric spaces all at once, achieving the comprehensive and unbiased representation of HiDS matrices. Theoretical study guarantees that MMLF attains a performance gain. Extensive experiments on eight real-world HiDS datasets, spanning a wide range of industrial and science domains, verify that our MMLF significantly outperforms ten state-of-the-art, shallow and deep counterparts.

Yi He, Tao Wang, Yi Jin et al.

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled highly efficient and photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, segmenting objects accurately in 3DGS remains challenging due to the discrete nature of Gaussian representations, which often leads to aliasing and artifacts at object boundaries. In this paper, we introduce NG-GS, a novel framework for high-quality object segmentation in 3DGS that explicitly addresses boundary discretization. Our approach begins by automatically identifying ambiguous Gaussians at object boundaries using mask variance analysis. We then apply radial basis function (RBF) interpolation to construct a spatially continuous feature field, enhanced by multi-resolution hash encoding for efficient multi-scale representation. A joint optimization strategy aligns 3DGS with a lightweight NeRF module through alignment and spatial continuity losses, ensuring smooth and consistent segmentation boundaries. Extensive experiments on NVOS, LERF-OVS, and ScanNet benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant gains in boundary mIoU. Code is available at https://github.com/BJTU-KD3D/NG-GS.

Xiang-Ke Chang, Yi He, Xing-Biao Hu et al.

We construct new sequence transformations based on Wynn's epsilon and rho algorithms. The recursions of the new algorithms include the recursions of Wynn's epsilon and rho algorithm and of Osada's generalized rho algorithm as special cases. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms numerically by applying them to some linearly and logarithmically convergent sequences as well as some divergent series.

Kehinde Ajayi, Leizhen Zhang, Yi He et al.

Quantifying uncertainties for machine learning models is a critical step to reduce human verification effort by detecting predictions with low confidence. This paper proposes a method for uncertainty quantification (UQ) of table structure recognition (TSR). The proposed UQ method is built upon a mixture-of-expert approach termed Test-Time Augmentation (TTA). Our key idea is to enrich and diversify the table representations, to spotlight the cells with high recognition uncertainties. To evaluate the effectiveness, we proposed two heuristics to differentiate highly uncertain cells from normal cells, namely, masking and cell complexity quantification. Masking involves varying the pixel intensity to deem the detection uncertainty. Cell complexity quantification gauges the uncertainty of each cell by its topological relation with neighboring cells. The evaluation results based on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in quantifying uncertainty in TSR models. To our best knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to enable UQ in TSR tasks. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/lamps-lab/UQTTA.git.

Cheng Liang, Teng Huang, Yi He et al.

User behavior data produced during interaction with massive items in the significant data era are generally heterogeneous and sparse, leaving the recommender system (RS) a large diversity of underlying patterns to excavate. Deep neural network-based models have reached the state-of-the-art benchmark of the RS owing to their fitting capabilities. However, prior works mainly focus on designing an intricate architecture with fixed loss function and regulation. These single-metric models provide limited performance when facing heterogeneous and sparse user behavior data. Motivated by this finding, we propose a multi-metric AutoRec (MMA) based on the representative AutoRec. The idea of the proposed MMA is mainly two-fold: 1) apply different $L_p$-norm on loss function and regularization to form different variant models in different metric spaces, and 2) aggregate these variant models. Thus, the proposed MMA enjoys the multi-metric orientation from a set of dispersed metric spaces, achieving a comprehensive representation of user data. Theoretical studies proved that the proposed MMA could attain performance improvement. The extensive experiment on five real-world datasets proves that MMA can outperform seven other state-of-the-art models in predicting unobserved user behavior data.

Di Wu, Yi He, Xin Luo

A High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix is frequently encountered in a big data-related application like an e-commerce system or a social network services system. To perform highly accurate representation learning on it is of great significance owing to the great desire of extracting latent knowledge and patterns from it. Latent factor analysis (LFA), which represents an HiDS matrix by learning the low-rank embeddings based on its observed entries only, is one of the most effective and efficient approaches to this issue. However, most existing LFA-based models perform such embeddings on a HiDS matrix directly without exploiting its hidden graph structures, thereby resulting in accuracy loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a graph-incorporated latent factor analysis (GLFA) model. It adopts two-fold ideas: 1) a graph is constructed for identifying the hidden high-order interaction (HOI) among nodes described by an HiDS matrix, and 2) a recurrent LFA structure is carefully designed with the incorporation of HOI, thereby improving the representa-tion learning ability of a resultant model. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GLFA outperforms six state-of-the-art models in predicting the missing data of an HiDS matrix, which evidently supports its strong representation learning ability to HiDS data.

Xianzhao Chen, Yist Y. Lin, Kang Wang et al.

End-to-end (E2E) systems have shown comparable performance to hybrid systems for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Word timings, as a by-product of ASR, are essential in many applications, especially for subtitling and computer-aided pronunciation training. In this paper, we improve the frame-level classifier for word timings in E2E system by introducing label priors in connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss, which is adopted from prior works, and combining low-level Mel-scale filter banks with high-level ASR encoder output as input feature. On the internal Chinese corpus, the proposed method achieves 95.68%/94.18% compared to the hybrid system 93.0%/90.22% on the word timing accuracy metrics. It also surpass a previous E2E approach with an absolute increase of 4.80%/8.02% on the metrics on 7 languages. In addition, we further improve word timing accuracy by delaying CTC peaks with frame-wise knowledge distillation, though only experimenting on LibriSpeech.

Yist Y. Lin, Tao Han, Haihua Xu et al.

One of limitations in end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) framework is its performance would be compromised if train-test utterance lengths are mismatched. In this paper, we propose an on-the-fly random utterance concatenation (RUC) based data augmentation method to alleviate train-test utterance length mismatch issue for short-video ASR task. Specifically, we are motivated by observations that our human-transcribed training utterances tend to be much shorter for short-video spontaneous speech (~3 seconds on average), while our test utterance generated from voice activity detection front-end is much longer (~10 seconds on average). Such a mismatch can lead to suboptimal performance. Empirically, it's observed the proposed RUC method significantly improves long utterance recognition without performance drop on short one. Overall, it achieves 5.72% word error rate reduction on average for 15 languages and improved robustness to various utterance length.

Yi He, Haoran Xie, Kazunori Miyata

3D model reconstruction from a single image has achieved great progress with the recent deep generative models. However, the conventional reconstruction approaches with template mesh deformation and implicit fields have difficulty in reconstructing non-watertight 3D mesh models, such as garments. In contrast to image-based modeling, the sketch-based approach can help users generate 3D models to meet the design intentions from hand-drawn sketches. In this study, we propose Sketch2Cloth, a sketch-based 3D garment generation system using the unsigned distance fields from the user's sketch input. Sketch2Cloth first estimates the unsigned distance function of the target 3D model from the sketch input, and extracts the mesh from the estimated field with Marching Cubes. We also provide the model editing function to modify the generated mesh. We verified the proposed Sketch2Cloth with quantitative evaluations on garment generation and editing with a state-of-the-art approach.

Yi He, Yina Cao, Jixiu Zhai et al.

Accurate computational identification of DNA methylation is essential for understanding epigenetic regulation. Although deep learning excels in this binary classification task, its "black-box" nature impedes biological insight. We address this by introducing a high-performance model MEDNA-DFM, alongside mechanism-inspired signal purification algorithms. Our investigation demonstrates that MEDNA-DFM effectively captures conserved methylation patterns, achieving robust distinction across diverse species. Validation on external independent datasets confirms that the model's generalization is driven by conserved intrinsic motifs (e.g., GC content) rather than phylogenetic proximity. Furthermore, applying our developed algorithms extracted motifs with significantly higher reliability than prior studies. Finally, empirical evidence from a Drosophila 6mA case study prompted us to propose a "sequence-structure synergy" hypothesis, suggesting that the GAGG core motif and an upstream A-tract element function cooperatively. We further validated this hypothesis via in silico mutagenesis, confirming that the ablation of either or both elements significantly degrades the model's recognition capabilities. This work provides a powerful tool for methylation prediction and demonstrates how explainable deep learning can drive both methodological innovation and the generation of biological hypotheses.

Hetian Shi, Yi He, Shangru Song et al.

The proliferation of electric vehicles in recent years has significantly expanded the charging infrastructure while introducing new security risks to both vehicles and chargers. In this paper, we investigate the security of major charging protocols such as SAE J1772, CCS, IEC 61851, GB/T 20234, and NACS, uncovering new physical signal spoofing attacks in their authentication mechanisms. By inserting a compact malicious device into the charger connector, attackers can inject fraudulent signals to sabotage the charging process, leading to denial of service, vehicle-induced charger lockout, and damage to the chargers or the vehicle's charge management system. To demonstrate the feasibility of our attacks, we propose PORTulator, a proof-of-concept (PoC) attack hardware, including a charger gun plugin device for injecting physical signals and a wireless controller for remote manipulation. By evaluating PORTulator on multiple real-world chargers, we identify 7 charging standards used by 20 charger piles that are vulnerable to our attacks. The root cause is that chargers use simple physical signals for authentication and control, making them easily spoofed by attackers. To address this issue, we propose enhancing authentication circuits by integrating non-resistive memory components and utilizing dynamic high-frequency Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals to counter such physical signal spoofing attacks.

Junxiao Kong, Chupei Tang, Di Wang et al.

Accurate prediction of drug-target binding affinity accelerates drug discovery by prioritizing compounds for experimental validation. Current methods face three limitations: sequence-based approaches discard spatial geometric constraints, structure-based methods fail to exploit hydrogen bond features, and conventional loss functions neglect prediction-target correlation, a key factor for identifying high-affinity compounds in virtual screening. We developed HBGSA (Hydrogen Bond Graph with Self-Attention), a 3.06M-parameter model that encodes hydrogen bond spatial features. HBGSA uses graph neural networks to model hydrogen bond spatial topology with self-attention enhancement and Pearson correlation loss. Experimental results on PDBbind Core Set and CSAR-HiQ dataset demonstrate that HBGSA outperforms baseline methods with strong generalization capability. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of hydrogen bond modeling and Pearson correlation loss.

Yunpeng Hong, Chenyang Bu, Jie Zhang et al.

Multimodal Entity Alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities across different data modalities, enabling structural data integration that in turn improves the performance of various large language model applications. To lift the requirement of labeled seed pairs that are difficult to obtain, recent methods shifted to an unsupervised paradigm using pseudo-alignment seeds. However, unsupervised entity alignment in multimodal settings remains underexplored, mainly because the incorporation of multimodal information often results in imbalanced coverage of pseudo-seeds within the knowledge graph. To overcome this, we propose PSQE (Pseudo-Seed Quality Enhancement) to improve the precision and graph coverage balance of pseudo seeds via multimodal information and clustering-resampling. Theoretical analysis reveals the impact of pseudo seeds on existing contrastive learning-based MMEA models. In particular, pseudo seeds can influence the attraction and the repulsion terms in contrastive learning at once, whereas imbalanced graph coverage causes models to prioritize high-density regions, thereby weakening their learning capability for entities in sparse regions. Experimental results validate our theoretical findings and show that PSQE as a plug-and-play module can improve the performance of baselines by considerable margins.

Sotirios Kastanas, Shaomu Tan, Yi He

Document AI aims to automatically analyze documents by leveraging natural language processing and computer vision techniques. One of the major tasks of Document AI is document layout analysis, which structures document pages by interpreting the content and spatial relationships of layout, image, and text. This task can be image-centric, wherein the aim is to identify and label various regions such as authors and paragraphs, or text-centric, where the focus is on classifying individual words in a document. Although there are increasingly sophisticated methods for improving layout analysis, doubts remain about the extent to which their findings can be generalized to a broader context. Specifically, prior work developed systems based on very different architectures, such as transformer-based, graph-based, and CNNs. However, no work has mentioned the effectiveness of these models in a comparative analysis. Moreover, while language-independent Document AI models capable of knowledge transfer have been developed, it remains to be investigated to what degree they can effectively transfer knowledge. In this study, we aim to fill these gaps by conducting a comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art models in document layout analysis and investigating the potential of cross-lingual layout analysis by utilizing machine translation techniques.

Leizhen Zhang, Lusi Li, Di Wu et al.

Its crux lies in the optimization of a tradeoff between accuracy and fairness of resultant models on the selected feature subset. The technical challenge of our setting is twofold: 1) streaming feature inputs, such that an informative feature may become obsolete or redundant for prediction if its information has been covered by other similar features that arrived prior to it, and 2) non-associational feature correlation, such that bias may be leaked from those seemingly admissible, non-protected features. To overcome this, we propose Streaming Feature Selection with Causal Fairness (SFCF) that builds two causal graphs egocentric to prediction label and protected feature, respectively, striving to model the complex correlation structure among streaming features, labels, and protected information. As such, bias can be eradicated from predictive modeling by removing those features being causally correlated with the protected feature yet independent to the labels. We theorize that the originally redundant features for prediction can later become admissible, when the learning accuracy is compromised by the large number of removed features (non-protected but can be used to reconstruct bias information). We benchmark SFCF\ on five datasets widely used in streaming feature research, and the results substantiate its performance superiority over six rival models in terms of efficiency and sparsity of feature selection and equalized odds of the resultant predictive models.

Chenying Lin, Yichen Hai, Yi He et al.

Large language models deployed for MAPDL finite-element simulation face practical reliability challenges: without structured execution control, tool encapsulation, and fault recovery, outputs may be inconsistent and task failures are common. The Agent Harness paradigm addresses this by inserting domain-specific orchestration middleware that manages tool lifecycles, workflow state, and recovery escalation. This paper presents the architecture of CAX-Agent, a lightweight agent harness purpose-built for MAPDL automation, and empirically evaluates one of its core components -- the recovery policy.CAX-Agent organizes execution into three layers -- LLM service, agent harness, and solver backend -- with a recovery ladder that escalates from deterministic rule patching through model-driven regeneration to context enrichment and human intervention. We evaluate three recovery strategies (no_recovery, rule_only, and model_only) on 50 standard structural benchmarks with three repeated runs per strategy (450 case-runs total). Two independent human raters score task completion under blind conditions; inter-rater agreement is strong (quadratic weighted Cohen's kappa = 0.84, 96 percent of score pairs within one point). Model_only achieves the best completion rate (0.9267), task score (3.59/4), total score (9.16/10), and zero-intervention rate (0.84), outperforming rule_only (0.7733, 3.17/4, 7.03/10, 0.00) and no_recovery (0.6933, 2.74/4, 5.60/10, 0.00) with large effect sizes (Cliff's delta = 0.81-0.87). The benchmark uses deliberately simple geometries to isolate recovery-policy effects; we discuss the scope of these findings and directions for broader validation.

Manzong Huang, Chenyang Bu, Yi He et al.

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) mitigates hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding them in structured knowledge. However, current GraphRAG methods are constrained by a prevailing \textit{build-then-reason} paradigm, which relies on a static, pre-constructed Knowledge Graph (KG). This paradigm faces two critical challenges. First, the KG's inherent incompleteness often breaks reasoning paths. Second, the graph's low signal-to-noise ratio introduces distractor facts, presenting query-relevant but misleading knowledge that disrupts the reasoning process. To address these challenges, we argue for a \textit{reason-and-construct} paradigm and propose Relink, a framework that dynamically builds a query-specific evidence graph. To tackle incompleteness, \textbf{Relink} instantiates required facts from a latent relation pool derived from the original text corpus, repairing broken paths on the fly. To handle misleading or distractor facts, Relink employs a unified, query-aware evaluation strategy that jointly considers candidates from both the KG and latent relations, selecting those most useful for answering the query rather than relying on their pre-existence. This empowers Relink to actively discard distractor facts and construct the most faithful and precise evidence path for each query. Extensive experiments on five Open-Domain Question Answering benchmarks show that Relink achieves significant average improvements of 5.4\% in EM and 5.2\% in F1 over leading GraphRAG baselines, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed framework.

Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Yiming Yang et al.

The Koopman operator provides a powerful framework for modeling dynamical systems and has attracted growing interest from the machine learning community. However, its infinite-dimensional nature makes identifying suitable finite-dimensional subspaces challenging, especially for deep architectures. We argue that these difficulties come from suboptimal representation learning, where latent variables fail to balance expressivity and simplicity. This tension is closely related to the information bottleneck (IB) dilemma: constructing compressed representations that are both compact and predictive. Rethinking Koopman learning through this lens, we demonstrate that latent mutual information promotes simplicity, yet an overemphasis on simplicity may cause latent space to collapse onto a few dominant modes. In contrast, expressiveness is sustained by the von Neumann entropy, which prevents such collapse and encourages mode diversity. This insight leads us to propose an information-theoretic Lagrangian formulation that explicitly balances this tradeoff. Furthermore, we propose a new algorithm based on the Lagrangian formulation that encourages both simplicity and expressiveness, leading to a stable and interpretable Koopman representation. Beyond quantitative evaluations, we further visualize the learned manifolds under our representations, observing empirical results consistent with our theoretical predictions. Finally, we validate our approach across a diverse range of dynamical systems, demonstrating improved performance over existing Koopman learning methods. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Wenxuan52/InformationKoopman.

Jiajun Shen, Yufei Jin, Yi He et al.

Learning from large heterogeneous graphs presents significant challenges due to the scale of networks, heterogeneity in node and edge types, variations in nodal features, and complex local neighborhood structures. This paper advocates for ensemble learning as a natural solution to this problem, whereby training multiple graph learners under distinct sampling conditions, the ensemble inherently captures different aspects of graph heterogeneity. Yet, the crux lies in combining these learners to meet global optimization objective while maintaining computational efficiency on large-scale graphs. In response, we propose LHGEL, an ensemble framework that addresses these challenges through batch sampling with three key components, namely batch view aggregation, residual attention, and diversity regularization. Specifically, batch view aggregation samples subgraphs and forms multiple graph views, while residual attention adaptively weights the contributions of these views to guide node embeddings toward informative subgraphs, thereby improving the accuracy of base learners. Diversity regularization encourages representational disparity across embedding matrices derived from different views, promoting model diversity and ensemble robustness. Our theoretical study demonstrates that residual attention mitigates gradient vanishing issues commonly faced in ensemble learning. Empirical results on five real heterogeneous networks validate that our LHGEL approach consistently outperforms its state-of-the-art competitors by substantial margin. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Chrisshen12/LHGEL.

Jiancheng Yang, Yi He, Kaiming Kuang et al.

Modeling 3D context is essential for high-performance 3D medical image analysis. Although 2D networks benefit from large-scale 2D supervised pretraining, it is weak in capturing 3D context. 3D networks are strong in 3D context yet lack supervised pretraining. As an emerging technique, \emph{3D context fusion operator}, which enables conversion from 2D pretrained networks, leverages the advantages of both and has achieved great success. Existing 3D context fusion operators are designed to be spatially symmetric, i.e., performing identical operations on each 2D slice like convolutions. However, these operators are not truly equivariant to translation, especially when only a few 3D slices are used as inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric 3D context fusion operator (A3D), which uses different weights to fuse 3D context from different 2D slices. Notably, A3D is NOT translation-equivariant while it significantly outperforms existing symmetric context fusion operators without introducing large computational overhead. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by extensive experiments on DeepLesion benchmark, a large-scale public dataset for universal lesion detection from computed tomography (CT). The proposed A3D consistently outperforms symmetric context fusion operators by considerable margins, and establishes a new \emph{state of the art} on DeepLesion. To facilitate open research, our code and model in PyTorch are available at https://github.com/M3DV/AlignShift.

Jiancheng Yang, Yi He, Xiaoyang Huang et al.

This paper addresses a fundamental challenge in 3D medical image processing: how to deal with imaging thickness. For anisotropic medical volumes, there is a significant performance gap between thin-slice (mostly 1mm) and thick-slice (mostly 5mm) volumes. Prior arts tend to use 3D approaches for the thin-slice and 2D approaches for the thick-slice, respectively. We aim at a unified approach for both thin- and thick-slice medical volumes. Inspired by recent advances in video analysis, we propose AlignShift, a novel parameter-free operator to convert theoretically any 2D pretrained network into thickness-aware 3D network. Remarkably, the converted networks behave like 3D for the thin-slice, nevertheless degenerate to 2D for the thick-slice adaptively. The unified thickness-aware representation learning is achieved by shifting and fusing aligned "virtual slices" as per the input imaging thickness. Extensive experiments on public large-scale DeepLesion benchmark, consisting of 32K lesions for universal lesion detection, validate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms previous state of the art by considerable margins without whistles and bells. More importantly, to our knowledge, this is the first method that bridges the performance gap between thin- and thick-slice volumes by a unified framework. To improve research reproducibility, our code in PyTorch is open source at https://github.com/M3DV/AlignShift.

Dong Li, Zhengzhang Chen, Xujiang Zhao et al.

Uncovering causal structures from observational data is crucial for understanding complex systems and making informed decisions. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in identifying these structures in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), existing methods often lack efficiency, making them unsuitable for online applications. In this paper, we propose MARLIN, an efficient multi agent RL based approach for incremental DAG learning. MARLIN uses a DAG generation policy that maps a continuous real valued space to the DAG space as an intra batch strategy, then incorporates two RL agents state specific and state invariant to uncover causal relationships and integrates these agents into an incremental learning framework. Furthermore, the framework leverages a factored action space to enhance parallelization efficiency. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that MARLIN outperforms state of the art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.

Yi He, Xingyu Zhou

We present the first theoretical guarantees for differentially private online reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation, extending beyond prior work restricted to tabular and linear settings. Our approach combines a batched policy update scheme with the exponential mechanism, together with a novel regret analysis. We show that, even under general function approximation, the regret in the model-free setting under differential privacy matches the state of the art for the linear case, scaling as $\widetilde{O}(K^{3/5})$, where $K$ denotes the number of episodes. As an important by-product, we also establish the first regret bound for online RL with batch update that depends on the standard complexity measure of coverability, complementing existing results based on a newly introduced Eluder-Condition class. In addition, we uncover fundamental gaps in recent results for private RL with linear function approximation, thereby clarifying its landscape.

Yiming Yang, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Yi He et al.

Diffusion models have recently emerged as powerful learned priors for Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs). Diffusion-based solvers rely on a presumed likelihood for the observations in BIPs to guide the generation process. However, the link between likelihood and recovery quality for BIPs is unclear in previous works. We bridge this gap by characterizing the posterior approximation error and proving the \emph{stability} of the diffusion-based solvers. Meanwhile, an immediate result of our findings on stability demonstrates the lack of robustness in diffusion-based solvers, which remains unexplored. This can degrade performance when the presumed likelihood mismatches the unknown true data generation processes. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective solution, \emph{robust diffusion posterior sampling}, which is provably \emph{robust} and compatible with existing gradient-based posterior samplers. Empirical results on scientific inverse problems and natural image tasks validate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, showing consistent performance improvements under challenging likelihood misspecifications.

Wenqian Weng, Yi He, Xingyu Zhou

In this paper, we study the private and robust alignment of language models from a theoretical perspective by establishing upper bounds on the suboptimality gap in both offline and online settings. We consider preference labels subject to privacy constraints and/or adversarial corruption, and analyze two distinct interplays between them: privacy-first and corruption-first. For the privacy-only setting, we show that log loss with an MLE-style algorithm achieves near-optimal rates, in contrast to conventional wisdom. For the joint privacy-and-corruption setting, we first demonstrate that existing offline algorithms in fact provide stronger guarantees -- simultaneously in terms of corruption level and privacy parameters -- than previously known, which further yields improved bounds in the corruption-only regime. In addition, we also present the first set of results for private and robust online alignment. Our results are enabled by new uniform convergence guarantees for log loss and square loss under privacy and corruption, which we believe have broad applicability across learning theory and statistics.

Ziyang Yu, Yi He, Wenbing Huang et al.

Estimating free energy differences quantifies thermodynamic preferences in molecular interactions, which is central to chemistry and drug discovery. Despite fruitful progress, existing methods still face key limitations: classical computational approaches remain prohibitively expensive due to their reliance on extensive molecular dynamics simulations, while deep learning-based methods are constrained by either less-expressive generative models or input dimensions tied to a specific system, resulting in negligible generalization. To address these challenges, we propose CARD, a generative framework that employs a novel radix-based decomposition to bijectively convert 3D coordinates into mixed discrete-continuous sequences, enabling coarse-to-fine autoregressive modeling with enhanced expressiveness. Notably, the model corresponds to a distribution with zero free energy, serving as a proposal for absolute free energy computation of arbitrary systems without relying on alchemical pathways. Experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that CARD matches the accuracy of classical computational methods on unseen systems with diverse topologies, while achieving an approximately 40-fold speedup in inference.

Shengqi Dang, Jiaying Lei, Yi He et al.

Beyond conveying semantic information, an image can also manifest cognitive attributes that elicit specific cognitive processes from the viewer, such as memory encoding or emotional response. While modern text-to-image models excel at generating semantically coherent content, they remain limited in their ability to control such cognitive properties of images (e.g., valence, memorability), often failing to align with the specific psychological intent. To bridge this gap, we introduce CogBlender, a framework that enables continuous and multi-dimensional intervention of cognitive properties during text-to-image generation. Our approach is built upon a mapping between the Cognitive Space, representing the space of cognitive properties, and the Semantic Manifold, representing the manifold of the visual semantics. We define a set of Cognitive Anchors, serving as the boundary points for the cognitive space. Then we reformulate the velocity field within the flow-matching process by interpolating from the velocity field of different anchors. Consequently, the generative process is driven by the velocity field and dynamically steered by multi-dimensional cognitive scores, enabling precise, fine-grained, and continuous intervention. We validate the effectiveness of CogBlender across four representative cognitive dimensions: valence, arousal, dominance, and image memorability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves effective cognitive intervention. Our work provides an effective paradigm for cognition-driven creative design.

Lei Yang, Yi He, Fei Wu et al.

Chinese mandarin visual speech recognition (VSR) is a task that has advanced in recent years, yet still lags behind the performance on non-tonal languages such as English. One primary challenge arises from the tonal nature of Mandarin, which limits the effectiveness of conventional sequence-to-sequence modeling approaches. To alleviate this issue, existing Chinese VSR systems commonly incorporate intermediate representations, most notably pinyin, within cascade architectures to enhance recognition accuracy. While beneficial, in these cascaded designs, the subsequent stage during inference depends on the output of the preceding stage, leading to error accumulation and increased inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose a cascade-free architecture based on multitask learning that jointly integrates multiple intermediate representations, including phoneme and viseme, to better exploit contextual information. The proposed semantic-guided local contrastive loss temporally aligns the features, enabling on-demand activation during inference, thereby providing a trade-off between inference efficiency and performance while mitigating error accumulation caused by projection and re-embedding. Experiments conducted on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior recognition performance.

Siyi Zhou, Yiquan Zhou, Yi He et al.

Existing autoregressive large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have advantages in speech naturalness, but their token-by-token generation mechanism makes it difficult to precisely control the duration of synthesized speech. This becomes a significant limitation in applications requiring strict audio-visual synchronization, such as video dubbing. This paper introduces IndexTTS2, which proposes a novel, general, and autoregressive model-friendly method for speech duration control. The method supports two generation modes: one explicitly specifies the number of generated tokens to precisely control speech duration; the other freely generates speech in an autoregressive manner without specifying the number of tokens, while faithfully reproducing the prosodic features of the input prompt. Furthermore, IndexTTS2 achieves disentanglement between emotional expression and speaker identity, enabling independent control over timbre and emotion. In the zero-shot setting, the model can accurately reconstruct the target timbre (from the timbre prompt) while perfectly reproducing the specified emotional tone (from the style prompt). To enhance speech clarity in highly emotional expressions, we incorporate GPT latent representations and design a novel three-stage training paradigm to improve the stability of the generated speech. Additionally, to lower the barrier for emotional control, we designed a soft instruction mechanism based on text descriptions by fine-tuning Qwen3, effectively guiding the generation of speech with the desired emotional orientation. Finally, experimental results on multiple datasets show that IndexTTS2 outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS models in terms of word error rate, speaker similarity, and emotional fidelity. Audio samples are available at: https://index-tts.github.io/index-tts2.github.io/

Shengqi Dang, Yi He, Long Ling et al.

Recent research shows that emotions can enhance users' cognition and influence information communication. While research on visual emotion analysis is extensive, limited work has been done on helping users generate emotionally rich image content. Existing work on emotional image generation relies on discrete emotion categories, making it challenging to capture complex and subtle emotional nuances accurately. Additionally, these methods struggle to control the specific content of generated images based on text prompts. In this work, we introduce the new task of continuous emotional image content generation (C-EICG) and present EmotiCrafter, an emotional image generation model that generates images based on text prompts and Valence-Arousal values. Specifically, we propose a novel emotion-embedding mapping network that embeds Valence-Arousal values into textual features, enabling the capture of specific emotions in alignment with intended input prompts. Additionally, we introduce a loss function to enhance emotion expression. The experimental results show that our method effectively generates images representing specific emotions with the desired content and outperforms existing techniques.

Dong Li, Guihong Wan, Xintao Wu et al.

Foundation models have emerged as a powerful paradigm in computational pathology (CPath), enabling scalable and generalizable analysis of histopathological images. While early developments centered on uni-modal models trained solely on visual data, recent advances have highlighted the promise of multi-modal foundation models that integrate heterogeneous data sources such as textual reports, structured domain knowledge, and molecular profiles. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of multi-modal foundation models in CPath, with a particular focus on models built upon hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs) and tile-level representations. We categorize 32 state-of-the-art multi-modal foundation models into three major paradigms: vision-language, vision-knowledge graph, and vision-gene expression. We further divide vision-language models into non-LLM-based and LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we analyze 28 available multi-modal datasets tailored for pathology, grouped into image-text pairs, instruction datasets, and image-other modality pairs. Our survey also presents a taxonomy of downstream tasks, highlights training and evaluation strategies, and identifies key challenges and future directions. We aim for this survey to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of pathology and AI.

Yiming Yang, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Daniel Giles et al.

Variational data assimilation estimates the dynamical system states by minimizing a cost function that fits the numerical models with the observational data. Although four-dimensional variational assimilation (4D-Var) is widely used, it faces high computational costs in complex nonlinear systems and depends on imperfect state-observation mappings. Deep learning (DL) offers more expressive approximators, while integrating DL models into 4D-Var is challenging due to their nonlinearities and lack of theoretical guarantees in assimilation results. In this paper, we propose Tensor-Var, a novel framework that integrates kernel conditional mean embedding (CME) with 4D-Var to linearize nonlinear dynamics, achieving convex optimization in a learned feature space. Moreover, our method provides a new perspective for solving 4D-Var in a linear way, offering theoretical guarantees of consistent assimilation results between the original and feature spaces. To handle large-scale problems, we propose a method to learn deep features using neural networks within the Tensor-Var framework. Experiments on chaotic systems and global weather prediction with real-time observations show that Tensor-Var outperforms conventional and DL hybrid 4D-Var baselines in accuracy while achieving a 10- to 20-fold speed improvement.

Huaqing Yuan, Yi He, Peng Du et al.

Face images contain a wide variety of attribute information. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for joint estimation of ordinal and nominal attributes based on information sharing. We tackle the correlation problem between heterogeneous attributes using hard parameter sharing of shallow features, and trade-off multiple loss functions by considering homoskedastic uncertainty for each attribute estimation task. This leads to optimal estimation of multiple attributes of the face and reduces the training cost of multitask learning. Experimental results on benchmarks with multiple face attributes show that the proposed approach has superior performance compared to state of the art. Finally, we discuss the bias issues arising from the proposed approach in face attribute estimation and validate its feasibility on edge systems.

Jiajun Shen, Yufei Jin, Yi He et al.

This paper presents HGEN that pioneers ensemble learning for heterogeneous graphs. We argue that the heterogeneity in node types, nodal features, and local neighborhood topology poses significant challenges for ensemble learning, particularly in accommodating diverse graph learners. Our HGEN framework ensembles multiple learners through a meta-path and transformation-based optimization pipeline to uplift classification accuracy. Specifically, HGEN uses meta-path combined with random dropping to create Allele Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), whereby the base graph learners are trained and aligned for later ensembling. To ensure effective ensemble learning, HGEN presents two key components: 1) a residual-attention mechanism to calibrate allele GNNs of different meta-paths, thereby enforcing node embeddings to focus on more informative graphs to improve base learner accuracy, and 2) a correlation-regularization term to enlarge the disparity among embedding matrices generated from different meta-paths, thereby enriching base learner diversity. We analyze the convergence of HGEN and attest its higher regularization magnitude over simple voting. Experiments on five heterogeneous networks validate that HGEN consistently outperforms its state-of-the-art competitors by substantial margin.

Yi He, Ailun Wang, Zhi Wang et al.

Recent advances in generative models, particularly diffusion and auto-regressive models, have revolutionized fields like computer vision and natural language processing. However, their application to structure-based drug design (SBDD) remains limited due to critical data constraints. To address the limitation of training data for models targeting SBDD tasks, we propose an evolutionary framework named MEVO, which bridges the gap between billion-scale small molecule dataset and the scarce protein-ligand complex dataset, and effectively increase the abundance of training data for generative SBDD models. MEVO is composed of three key components: a high-fidelity VQ-VAE for molecule representation in latent space, a diffusion model for pharmacophore-guided molecule generation, and a pocket-aware evolutionary strategy for molecule optimization with physics-based scoring function. This framework efficiently generate high-affinity binders for various protein targets, validated with predicted binding affinities using free energy perturbation (FEP) methods. In addition, we showcase the capability of MEVO in designing potent inhibitors to KRAS$^{\textrm{G12D}}$, a challenging target in cancer therapeutics, with similar affinity to the known highly active inhibitor evaluated by FEP calculations. With high versatility and generalizability, MEVO offers an effective and data-efficient model for various tasks in structure-based ligand design.

Shengda Zhuo, Di Wu, Yi He et al.

Online learning, where feature spaces can change over time, offers a flexible learning paradigm that has attracted considerable attention. However, it still faces three significant challenges. First, the heterogeneity of real-world data streams with mixed feature types presents challenges for traditional parametric modeling. Second, data stream distributions can shift over time, causing an abrupt and substantial decline in model performance. Additionally, the time and cost constraints make it infeasible to label every data instance in a supervised setting. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new algorithm Online Learning from Mix-typed, Drifted, and Incomplete Streaming Features (OL-MDISF), which aims to relax restrictions on both feature types, data distribution, and supervision information. Our approach involves utilizing copula models to create a comprehensive latent space, employing an adaptive sliding window for detecting drift points to ensure model stability, and establishing label proximity information based on geometric structural relationships. To demonstrate the model's efficiency and effectiveness, we provide theoretical analysis and comprehensive experimental results. This extension serves as a standalone technical reference to the original OL-MDISF method. It provides (i) a contextual analysis of OL-MDISF within the broader landscape of online learning, covering recent advances in mixed-type feature modeling, concept drift adaptation, and weak supervision, and (ii) a comprehensive set of experiments across 14 real-world datasets under two types of drift scenarios. These include full CER trends, ablation studies, sensitivity analyses, and temporal ensemble dynamics. We hope this document can serve as a reproducible benchmark and technical resource for researchers working on nonstationary, heterogeneous, and weakly supervised data streams.

Ruoyu Zhang, Lulu Wang, Yi He et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the fluency and logical coherence of image captioning. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted to incorporate external knowledge into LLMs; however, existing RAG-based methods rely on separate retrieval banks, introducing computational overhead and limiting the utilization of LLMs' inherent zero-shot capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose TPCap, a novel trigger-augmented and multi-modal purification framework for zero-shot image captioning without external retrieval libraries. TPCap consists of two key components: trigger-augmented (TA) generation and multi-modal purification (MP). The TA module employs a trigger projector with frozen and learnable projections to activate LLMs' contextual reasoning, enhance visual-textual alignment, and mitigate data bias. The MP module further refines the generated entity-related information by filtering noise and enhancing feature quality, ensuring more precise and factually consistent captions. We evaluate TPCap on COCO, NoCaps, Flickr30k, and WHOOPS datasets. With only 0.82M trainable parameters and training on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, TPCap achieves competitive performance comparable to state-of-the-art models.

Manzong Huang, Chenyang Bu, Yi He et al.

Knowledge Graph (KG)-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently propelled significant advances in complex reasoning tasks, thanks to their broad domain knowledge and contextual awareness. Unfortunately, current methods often assume KGs to be complete, which is impractical given the inherent limitations of KG construction and the potential loss of contextual cues when converting unstructured text into entity-relation triples. In response, this paper proposes the Triple Context Restoration and Query-driven Feedback (TCR-QF) framework, which reconstructs the textual context underlying each triple to mitigate information loss, while dynamically refining the KG structure by iteratively incorporating query-relevant missing knowledge. Experiments on five benchmark question-answering datasets substantiate the effectiveness of TCR-QF in KG and LLM integration, where itachieves a 29.1% improvement in Exact Match and a 15.5% improvement in F1 over its state-of-the-art GraphRAG competitors.

Kaidi Wang, Yi He, Wenhao Guan et al.

Video dubbing aims to generate high-fidelity speech that is precisely temporally aligned with the visual content. Existing methods still suffer from limitations in speech naturalness and audio-visual synchronization, and are limited to monolingual settings. To address these challenges, we propose SyncVoice, a vision-augmented video dubbing framework built upon a pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) model. By fine-tuning the TTS model on audio-visual data, we achieve strong audiovisual consistency. We propose a Dual Speaker Encoder to effectively mitigate inter-language interference in cross-lingual speech synthesis and explore the application of video dubbing in video translation scenarios. Experimental results show that SyncVoice achieves high-fidelity speech generation with strong synchronization performance, demonstrating its potential in video dubbing tasks.

Fangbing Liu, Pengfei Duan, Wen Li et al.

Recent advancements have demonstrated the great potential of flow matching-based Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in image editing. However, state-of-the-art works like BAGEL face limitations, including detail degradation, content inconsistency, and inefficiency due to their reliance on random noise initialization. To address these issues, we propose LGCC, a novel framework with two key components: Local Gaussian Noise Coupling (LGNC) and Content Consistency Loss (CCL). LGNC preserves spatial details by modeling target image embeddings and their locally perturbed counterparts as coupled pairs, while CCL ensures semantic alignment between edit instructions and image modifications, preventing unintended content removal. By integrating LGCC with the BAGEL pre-trained model via curriculum learning, we significantly reduce inference steps, improving local detail scores on I2EBench by 1.60% and overall scores by 0.53%. LGCC achieves 3x -- 5x speedup for lightweight editing and 2x for universal editing, requiring only 40% -- 50% of the inference time of BAGEL or Flux. These results demonstrate LGCC's ability to preserve detail, maintain contextual integrity, and enhance inference speed, offering a cost-efficient solution without compromising editing quality.

Yi He, Xingyu Zhou

Policy optimization (PO) is a cornerstone of modern reinforcement learning (RL), with diverse applications spanning robotics, healthcare, and large language model training. The increasing deployment of PO in sensitive domains, however, raises significant privacy concerns. In this paper, we initiate a theoretical study of differentially private policy optimization, focusing explicitly on its sample complexity. We first formalize an appropriate definition of differential privacy (DP) tailored to PO, addressing the inherent challenges arising from on-policy learning dynamics and the subtlety involved in defining the unit of privacy. We then systematically analyze the sample complexity of widely-used PO algorithms, including policy gradient (PG), natural policy gradient (NPG) and more, under DP constraints and various settings, via a unified framework. Our theoretical results demonstrate that privacy costs can often manifest as lower-order terms in the sample complexity, while also highlighting subtle yet important observations in private PO settings. These offer valuable practical insights for privacy-preserving PO algorithms.

Fanding Huang, Guanbo Huang, Xiao Fan et al.

A prevailing view in Reinforcement Learning for Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) interprets recent progress through the lens of an exploration-exploitation trade-off, a perspective largely shaped by token-level metrics. We re-examine this perspective, proposing that this perceived trade-off may not be a fundamental constraint but rather an artifact of the measurement level. To investigate this, we shift the analysis to the semantically rich hidden-state space, adopting Effective Rank (ER) to quantify exploration and proposing its novel first- and second-order derivatives, named Effective Rank Velocity (ERV) and Effective Rank Acceleration (ERA), to capture exploitation dynamics. Our analysis reveals that at the hidden-state level, exploration and exploitation could be decoupled (Sec. 4). This finding reveals an opportunity to enhance both capacities simultaneously. This insight motivates our method, Velocity-Exploiting Rank-Learning (VERL), the first to operationalize the principle of synergistic exploration-exploitation enhancement by directly shaping the RL advantage function. The key innovation is leveraging the theoretically stable ERA as a predictive meta-controller to create a synergistic, dual-channel incentive structure. Instead of forcing a trade-off, VERL prospectively amplifies rewards for exploration to preempt overconfidence and reinforces exploitative gains to consolidate reasoning. Experiments across diverse LLMs and reasoning benchmarks show consistent gains, including up to 21.4% absolute accuracy improvement on the challenging Gaokao 2024 dataset.

Xiao Xue, Marco F. P. ten Eikelder, Mingyang Gao et al.

The lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE), rooted in kinetic theory, provides a powerful framework for capturing complex flow behaviour by describing the evolution of single-particle distribution functions (PDFs). Despite its success, solving the LBE numerically remains computationally intensive due to strict time-step restrictions imposed by collision kernels. Here, we introduce a physics-informed neural operator framework for the LBE that enables prediction over large time horizons without step-by-step integration, effectively bypassing the need to explicitly solve the collision kernel. We incorporate intrinsic moment-matching constraints of the LBE, along with global equivariance of the full distribution field, enabling the model to capture the complex dynamics of the underlying kinetic system. Our framework is discretization-invariant, enabling models trained on coarse lattices to generalise to finer ones (kinetic super-resolution). In addition, it is agnostic to the specific form of the underlying collision model, which makes it naturally applicable across different kinetic datasets regardless of the governing dynamics. Our results demonstrate robustness across complex flow scenarios, including von Karman vortex shedding, ligament breakup, and bubble adhesion. This establishes a new data-driven pathway for modelling kinetic systems.

Yuchen Deng, Xiuyang Wu, Hai-Tao Zheng et al.

Talking-head animation focuses on generating realistic facial videos from audio input. Following Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models have become the mainstream, owing to their robust generative capacities. However, inherent limitations of the diffusion process often lead to inter-frame flicker and slow inference, restricting their practical deployment. To address this, we introduce AvatarSync, an autoregressive framework on phoneme representations that generates realistic and controllable talking-head animations from a single reference image, driven directly by text or audio input. To mitigate flicker and ensure continuity, AvatarSync leverages an autoregressive pipeline that enhances temporal modeling. In addition, to ensure controllability, we introduce phonemes, which are the basic units of speech sounds, and construct a many-to-one mapping from text/audio to phonemes, enabling precise phoneme-to-visual alignment. Additionally, to further accelerate inference, we adopt a two-stage generation strategy that decouples semantic modeling from visual dynamics, and incorporate a customized Phoneme-Frame Causal Attention Mask to support multi-step parallel acceleration. Extensive experiments conducted on both Chinese (CMLR) and English (HDTF) datasets demonstrate that AvatarSync outperforms existing talking-head animation methods in visual fidelity, temporal consistency, and computational efficiency, providing a scalable and controllable solution.