Kaizhu Huang

Zixian Su, Kai Yao, Xi Yang et al.

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is a challenging yet essential task as domain shifts are quite common among clinical image datasets. Previous attempts most conduct global-only/random augmentation. Their augmented samples are usually insufficient in diversity and informativeness, thus failing to cover the possible target domain distribution. In this paper, we rethink the data augmentation strategy for SDG in medical image segmentation. Motivated by the class-level representation invariance and style mutability of medical images, we hypothesize that unseen target data can be sampled from a linear combination of $C$ (the class number) random variables, where each variable follows a location-scale distribution at the class level. Accordingly, data augmented can be readily made by sampling the random variables through a general form. On the empirical front, we implement such strategy with constrained B$\acute{\rm e}$zier transformation on both global and local (i.e. class-level) regions, which can largely increase the augmentation diversity. A Saliency-balancing Fusion mechanism is further proposed to enrich the informativeness by engaging the gradient information, guiding augmentation with proper orientation and magnitude. As an important contribution, we prove theoretically that our proposed augmentation can lead to an upper bound of the generalization risk on the unseen target domain, thus confirming our hypothesis. Combining the two strategies, our Saliency-balancing Location-scale Augmentation (SLAug) exceeds the state-of-the-art works by a large margin in two challenging SDG tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Kaiseem/SLAug .

Weiguang Zhao, Chaolong Yang, Jianan Ye et al. · nvidia

While weakly supervised multi-view face reconstruction (MVR) is garnering increased attention, one critical issue still remains open: how to effectively interact and fuse multiple image information to reconstruct high-precision 3D models. In this regard, we propose a novel pipeline called Deep Fusion MVR (DF-MVR) to explore the feature correspondences between multi-view images and reconstruct high-precision 3D faces. Specifically, we present a novel multi-view feature fusion backbone that utilizes face masks to align features from multiple encoders and integrates one multi-layer attention mechanism to enhance feature interaction and fusion, resulting in one unified facial representation. Additionally, we develop one concise face mask mechanism that facilitates multi-view feature fusion and facial reconstruction by identifying common areas and guiding the network's focus on critical facial features (e.g., eyes, brows, nose, and mouth). Experiments on Pixel-Face and Bosphorus datasets indicate the superiority of our model. Without 3D annotation, DF-MVR achieves 5.2% and 3.0% RMSE improvement over the existing weakly supervised MVRs respectively on Pixel-Face and Bosphorus dataset. Code will be available publicly at https://github.com/weiguangzhao/DF_MVR.

Zihao Zhou, Maizhen Ning, Qiufeng Wang et al.

Solving math word problem (MWP) with AI techniques has recently made great progress with the success of deep neural networks (DNN), but it is far from being solved. We argue that the ability of learning by analogy is essential for an MWP solver to better understand same problems which may typically be formulated in diverse ways. However most existing works exploit the shortcut learning to train MWP solvers simply based on samples with a single question. In lack of diverse questions, these methods merely learn shallow heuristics. In this paper, we make a first attempt to solve MWPs by generating diverse yet consistent questions/equations. Given a typical MWP including the scenario description, question, and equation (i.e., answer), we first generate multiple consistent equations via a group of heuristic rules. We then feed them to a question generator together with the scenario to obtain the corresponding diverse questions, forming a new MWP with a variety of questions and equations. Finally we engage a data filter to remove those unreasonable MWPs, keeping the high-quality augmented ones. To evaluate the ability of learning by analogy for an MWP solver, we generate a new MWP dataset (called DiverseMath23K) with diverse questions by extending the current benchmark Math23K. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can generate high-quality diverse questions with corresponding equations, further leading to performance improvement on Diverse-Math23K. The code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/zhouzihao501/DiverseMWP

Weiguang Zhao, Yuyao Yan, Chaolong Yang et al.

Instance segmentation on point clouds is crucially important for 3D scene understanding. Most SOTAs adopt distance clustering, which is typically effective but does not perform well in segmenting adjacent objects with the same semantic label (especially when they share neighboring points). Due to the uneven distribution of offset points, these existing methods can hardly cluster all instance points. To this end, we design a novel divide-and-conquer strategy named PBNet that binarizes each point and clusters them separately to segment instances. Our binary clustering divides offset instance points into two categories: high and low density points (HPs vs. LPs). Adjacent objects can be clearly separated by removing LPs, and then be completed and refined by assigning LPs via a neighbor voting method. To suppress potential over-segmentation, we propose to construct local scenes with the weight mask for each instance. As a plug-in, the proposed binary clustering can replace traditional distance clustering and lead to consistent performance gains on many mainstream baselines. A series of experiments on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets indicate the superiority of our model. In particular, PBNet ranks first on the ScanNetV2 official benchmark challenge, achieving the highest mAP. Code will be available publicly at https://github.com/weiguangzhao/PBNet.

Zihan Ye, Guanyu Yang, Xiaobo Jin et al.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to identify unseen classes with zero samples during training. Broadly speaking, present ZSL methods usually adopt class-level semantic labels and compare them with instance-level semantic predictions to infer unseen classes. However, we find that such existing models mostly produce imbalanced semantic predictions, i.e. these models could perform precisely for some semantics, but may not for others. To address the drawback, we aim to introduce an imbalanced learning framework into ZSL. However, we find that imbalanced ZSL has two unique challenges: (1) Its imbalanced predictions are highly correlated with the value of semantic labels rather than the number of samples as typically considered in the traditional imbalanced learning; (2) Different semantics follow quite different error distributions between classes. To mitigate these issues, we first formalize ZSL as an imbalanced regression problem which offers empirical evidences to interpret how semantic labels lead to imbalanced semantic predictions. We then propose a re-weighted loss termed Re-balanced Mean-Squared Error (ReMSE), which tracks the mean and variance of error distributions, thus ensuring rebalanced learning across classes. As a major contribution, we conduct a series of analyses showing that ReMSE is theoretically well established. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively alleviates the imbalance in semantic prediction and outperforms many state-of-the-art ZSL methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/FouriYe/ReZSL-TIP23.

Shiran Yuan, Kaizhu Huang

Low-Rank Tensor Completion, a method which exploits the inherent structure of tensors, has been studied extensively as an effective approach to tensor completion. Whilst such methods attained great success, none have systematically considered exploiting the numerical priors of tensor elements. Ignoring numerical priors causes loss of important information regarding the data, and therefore prevents the algorithms from reaching optimal accuracy. Despite the existence of some individual works which consider ad hoc numerical priors for specific tasks, no generalizable frameworks for incorporating numerical priors have appeared. We present the Generalized CP Decomposition Tensor Completion (GCDTC) framework, the first generalizable framework for low-rank tensor completion that takes numerical priors of the data into account. We test GCDTC by further proposing the Smooth Poisson Tensor Completion (SPTC) algorithm, an instantiation of the GCDTC framework, whose performance exceeds current state-of-the-arts by considerable margins in the task of non-negative tensor completion, exemplifying GCDTC's effectiveness. Our code is open-source.

Haojie Yin, Chengcheng Feng, Tianyi Liu et al.

Mean Deviation (MD) is a critical metric for assessing visual field loss in ophthalmology. While previous work has focused solely on predicting MD from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), it is intuitive to assume that combining OCT with another imaging of fundus photography (FP) could improve performance, as two ophthalmic medical imaging provide complementary information. This is particularly expected when sophisticated multi-objective optimization is applied, as documented in common multimodal classification. Surprisingly, our investigations reveal that multimodal fusion in this medical imaging scenario performs worse than unimodal model. Through detailed analysis, we identify the root cause as a coupled imbalance between data distribution and modality learning conflict. This imbalance distorts the optimization landscape, leading to unstable training. To address this challenge, we propose the method of Rebalanced MultiModal Mean Deviation Regression (Re-M3Dr), a novel multimodal regression framework. We enhance unimodal representation through adaptive margin based supervised contrastive learning. Then, our framework stabilizes the joint optimization with the sharpness-aware gradient modulation. Experimental results on both public and private clinical datasets show average 29\% reduction in MSE compared to SOTA multimodal learning methods, demonstrating the superiority of Re-M3Dr. The code is available in the supplementary materials.

M. Tanveer, M. A. Ganaie, Iman Beheshti et al.

Over the years, Machine Learning models have been successfully employed on neuroimaging data for accurately predicting brain age. Deviations from the healthy brain aging pattern are associated to the accelerated brain aging and brain abnormalities. Hence, efficient and accurate diagnosis techniques are required for eliciting accurate brain age estimations. Several contributions have been reported in the past for this purpose, resorting to different data-driven modeling methods. Recently, deep neural networks (also referred to as deep learning) have become prevalent in manifold neuroimaging studies, including brain age estimation. In this review, we offer a comprehensive analysis of the literature related to the adoption of deep learning for brain age estimation with neuroimaging data. We detail and analyze different deep learning architectures used for this application, pausing at research works published to date quantitatively exploring their application. We also examine different brain age estimation frameworks, comparatively exposing their advantages and weaknesses. Finally, the review concludes with an outlook towards future directions that should be followed by prospective studies. The ultimate goal of this paper is to establish a common and informed reference for newcomers and experienced researchers willing to approach brain age estimation by using deep learning models

Zhuang Qian, Kaizhu Huang, Qiu-Feng Wang et al.

In the last a few decades, deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in machine learning, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Recent studies however show that neural networks (both shallow and deep) may be easily fooled by certain imperceptibly perturbed input samples called adversarial examples. Such security vulnerability has resulted in a large body of research in recent years because real-world threats could be introduced due to vast applications of neural networks. To address the robustness issue to adversarial examples particularly in pattern recognition, robust adversarial training has become one mainstream. Various ideas, methods, and applications have boomed in the field. Yet, a deep understanding of adversarial training including characteristics, interpretations, theories, and connections among different models has still remained elusive. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey trying to offer a systematic and structured investigation on robust adversarial training in pattern recognition. We start with fundamentals including definition, notations, and properties of adversarial examples. We then introduce a unified theoretical framework for defending against adversarial samples - robust adversarial training with visualizations and interpretations on why adversarial training can lead to model robustness. Connections will be also established between adversarial training and other traditional learning theories. After that, we summarize, review, and discuss various methodologies with adversarial attack and defense/training algorithms in a structured way. Finally, we present analysis, outlook, and remarks of adversarial training.

Jingwei Guo, Kaizhu Huang, Rui Zhang et al.

While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved enormous success in multiple graph analytical tasks, modern variants mostly rely on the strong inductive bias of homophily. However, real-world networks typically exhibit both homophilic and heterophilic linking patterns, wherein adjacent nodes may share dissimilar attributes and distinct labels. Therefore, GNNs smoothing node proximity holistically may aggregate both task-relevant and irrelevant (even harmful) information, limiting their ability to generalize to heterophilic graphs and potentially causing non-robustness. In this work, we propose a novel Edge Splitting GNN (ES-GNN) framework to adaptively distinguish between graph edges either relevant or irrelevant to learning tasks. This essentially transfers the original graph into two subgraphs with the same node set but complementary edge sets dynamically. Given that, information propagation separately on these subgraphs and edge splitting are alternatively conducted, thus disentangling the task-relevant and irrelevant features. Theoretically, we show that our ES-GNN can be regarded as a solution to a disentangled graph denoising problem, which further illustrates our motivations and interprets the improved generalization beyond homophily. Extensive experiments over 11 benchmark and 1 synthetic datasets not only demonstrate the effective performance of ES-GNN but also highlight its robustness to adversarial graphs and mitigation of the over-smoothing problem.

Kai Yao, Penglei Gao, Xi Yang et al.

Image outpainting, which is well studied with Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based framework, has recently drawn more attention in computer vision. However, CNNs rely on inherent inductive biases to achieve effective sample learning, which may degrade the performance ceiling. In this paper, motivated by the flexible self-attention mechanism with minimal inductive biases in transformer architecture, we reframe the generalised image outpainting problem as a patch-wise sequence-to-sequence autoregression problem, enabling query-based image outpainting. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid vision-transformer-based encoder-decoder framework, named \textbf{Query} \textbf{O}utpainting \textbf{TR}ansformer (\textbf{QueryOTR}), for extrapolating visual context all-side around a given image. Patch-wise mode's global modeling capacity allows us to extrapolate images from the attention mechanism's query standpoint. A novel Query Expansion Module (QEM) is designed to integrate information from the predicted queries based on the encoder's output, hence accelerating the convergence of the pure transformer even with a relatively small dataset. To further enhance connectivity between each patch, the proposed Patch Smoothing Module (PSM) re-allocates and averages the overlapped regions, thus providing seamless predicted images. We experimentally show that QueryOTR could generate visually appealing results smoothly and realistically against the state-of-the-art image outpainting approaches.

Zihao Zhou, Qiufeng Wang, Mingyu Jin et al.

With the boom of Large Language Models (LLMs), the research of solving Math Word Problem (MWP) has recently made great progress. However, there are few studies to examine the security of LLMs in math solving ability. Instead of attacking prompts in the use of LLMs, we propose a MathAttack model to attack MWP samples which are closer to the essence of security in solving math problems. Compared to traditional text adversarial attack, it is essential to preserve the mathematical logic of original MWPs during the attacking. To this end, we propose logical entity recognition to identify logical entries which are then frozen. Subsequently, the remaining text are attacked by adopting a word-level attacker. Furthermore, we propose a new dataset RobustMath to evaluate the robustness of LLMs in math solving ability. Extensive experiments on our RobustMath and two another math benchmark datasets GSM8K and MultiAirth show that MathAttack could effectively attack the math solving ability of LLMs. In the experiments, we observe that (1) Our adversarial samples from higher-accuracy LLMs are also effective for attacking LLMs with lower accuracy (e.g., transfer from larger to smaller-size LLMs, or from few-shot to zero-shot prompts); (2) Complex MWPs (such as more solving steps, longer text, more numbers) are more vulnerable to attack; (3) We can improve the robustness of LLMs by using our adversarial samples in few-shot prompts. Finally, we hope our practice and observation can serve as an important attempt towards enhancing the robustness of LLMs in math solving ability. We will release our code and dataset.

Penglei Gao, Xi Yang, Rui Zhang et al.

While exogenous variables have a major impact on performance improvement in time series analysis, inter-series correlation and time dependence among them are rarely considered in the present continuous methods. The dynamical systems of multivariate time series could be modelled with complex unknown partial differential equations (PDEs) which play a prominent role in many disciplines of science and engineering. In this paper, we propose a continuous-time model for arbitrary-step prediction to learn an unknown PDE system in multivariate time series whose governing equations are parameterised by self-attention and gated recurrent neural networks. The proposed model, \underline{E}xogenous-\underline{g}uided \underline{P}artial \underline{D}ifferential \underline{E}quation Network (EgPDE-Net), takes account of the relationships among the exogenous variables and their effects on the target series. Importantly, the model can be reduced into a regularised ordinary differential equation (ODE) problem with special designed regularisation guidance, which makes the PDE problem tractable to obtain numerical solutions and feasible to predict multiple future values of the target series at arbitrary time points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model could achieve competitive accuracy over strong baselines: on average, it outperforms the best baseline by reducing $9.85\%$ on RMSE and $13.98\%$ on MAE for arbitrary-step prediction.

Yiming Lin, Xiao-Bo Jin, Qiufeng Wang et al.

Panoramic Narrative Grounding (PNG) is an emerging visual grounding task that aims to segment visual objects in images based on dense narrative captions. The current state-of-the-art methods first refine the representation of phrase by aggregating the most similar $k$ image pixels, and then match the refined text representations with the pixels of the image feature map to generate segmentation results. However, simply aggregating sampled image features ignores the contextual information, which can lead to phrase-to-pixel mis-match. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework called Deformable Attention Refined Matching Network (DRMN), whose main idea is to bring deformable attention in the iterative process of feature learning to incorporate essential context information of different scales of pixels. DRMN iteratively re-encodes pixels with the deformable attention network after updating the feature representation of the top-$k$ most similar pixels. As such, DRMN can lead to accurate yet discriminative pixel representations, purify the top-$k$ most similar pixels, and consequently alleviate the phrase-to-pixel mis-match substantially.Experimental results show that our novel design significantly improves the matching results between text phrases and image pixels. Concretely, DRMN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the PNG benchmark with an average recall improvement 3.5%. The codes are available in: https://github.com/JaMesLiMers/DRMN.

Baoru Huang, Tuan Vo, Chayun Kongtongvattana et al.

Real-time visual feedback from catheterization analysis is crucial for enhancing surgical safety and efficiency during endovascular interventions. However, existing datasets are often limited to specific tasks, small scale, and lack the comprehensive annotations necessary for broader endovascular intervention understanding. To tackle these limitations, we introduce CathAction, a large-scale dataset for catheterization understanding. Our CathAction dataset encompasses approximately 500,000 annotated frames for catheterization action understanding and collision detection, and 25,000 ground truth masks for catheter and guidewire segmentation. For each task, we benchmark recent related works in the field. We further discuss the challenges of endovascular intentions compared to traditional computer vision tasks and point out open research questions. We hope that CathAction will facilitate the development of endovascular intervention understanding methods that can be applied to real-world applications. The dataset is available at https://airvlab.github.io/cathaction/.

Zixian Su, Kai Yao, Xi Yang et al.

Unsupervised cross-modality medical image adaptation aims to alleviate the severe domain gap between different imaging modalities without using the target domain label. A key in this campaign relies upon aligning the distributions of source and target domain. One common attempt is to enforce the global alignment between two domains, which, however, ignores the fatal local-imbalance domain gap problem, i.e., some local features with larger domain gap are harder to transfer. Recently, some methods conduct alignment focusing on local regions to improve the efficiency of model learning. While this operation may cause a deficiency of critical information from contexts. To tackle this limitation, we propose a novel strategy to alleviate the domain gap imbalance considering the characteristics of medical images, namely Global-Local Union Alignment. Specifically, a feature-disentanglement style-transfer module first synthesizes the target-like source-content images to reduce the global domain gap. Then, a local feature mask is integrated to reduce the 'inter-gap' for local features by prioritizing those discriminative features with larger domain gap. This combination of global and local alignment can precisely localize the crucial regions in segmentation target while preserving the overall semantic consistency. We conduct a series of experiments with two cross-modality adaptation tasks, i,e. cardiac substructure and abdominal multi-organ segmentation. Experimental results indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tasks.

Chaolong Yang, Yuyao Yan, Weiguang Zhao et al.

3D point clouds are rich in geometric structure information, while 2D images contain important and continuous texture information. Combining 2D information to achieve better 3D semantic segmentation has become mainstream in 3D scene understanding. Albeit the success, it still remains elusive how to fuse and process the cross-dimensional features from these two distinct spaces. Existing state-of-the-art usually exploit bidirectional projection methods to align the cross-dimensional features and realize both 2D & 3D semantic segmentation tasks. However, to enable bidirectional mapping, this framework often requires a symmetrical 2D-3D network structure, thus limiting the network's flexibility. Meanwhile, such dual-task settings may distract the network easily and lead to over-fitting in the 3D segmentation task. As limited by the network's inflexibility, fused features can only pass through a decoder network, which affects model performance due to insufficient depth. To alleviate these drawbacks, in this paper, we argue that despite its simplicity, projecting unidirectionally multi-view 2D deep semantic features into the 3D space aligned with 3D deep semantic features could lead to better feature fusion. On the one hand, the unidirectional projection enforces our model focused more on the core task, i.e., 3D segmentation; on the other hand, unlocking the bidirectional to unidirectional projection enables a deeper cross-domain semantic alignment and enjoys the flexibility to fuse better and complicated features from very different spaces. In joint 2D-3D approaches, our proposed method achieves superior performance on the ScanNetv2 benchmark for 3D semantic segmentation.

Zhaorui Tan, Xi Yang, Zihan Ye et al.

Generating consistent and high-quality images from given texts is essential for visual-language understanding. Although impressive results have been achieved in generating high-quality images, text-image consistency is still a major concern in existing GAN-based methods. Particularly, the most popular metric $R$-precision may not accurately reflect the text-image consistency, often resulting in very misleading semantics in the generated images. Albeit its significance, how to design a better text-image consistency metric surprisingly remains under-explored in the community. In this paper, we make a further step forward to develop a novel CLIP-based metric termed as Semantic Similarity Distance ($SSD$), which is both theoretically founded from a distributional viewpoint and empirically verified on benchmark datasets. Benefiting from the proposed metric, we further design the Parallel Deep Fusion Generative Adversarial Networks (PDF-GAN) that aims at improving text-image consistency by fusing semantic information at different granularities and capturing accurate semantics. Equipped with two novel plug-and-play components: Hard-Negative Sentence Constructor and Semantic Projection, the proposed PDF-GAN can mitigate inconsistent semantics and bridge the text-image semantic gap. A series of experiments show that, as opposed to current state-of-the-art methods, our PDF-GAN can lead to significantly better text-image consistency while maintaining decent image quality on the CUB and COCO datasets.

Zihao Zhou, Shudong Liu, Maizhen Ning et al.

Exceptional mathematical reasoning ability is one of the key features that demonstrate the power of large language models (LLMs). How to comprehensively define and evaluate the mathematical abilities of LLMs, and even reflect the user experience in real-world scenarios, has emerged as a critical issue. Current benchmarks predominantly concentrate on problem-solving capabilities, presenting a substantial risk of model overfitting and fails to accurately measure the genuine mathematical reasoning abilities. In this paper, we argue that if a model really understands a problem, it should be robustly applied across a diverse array of tasks. To this end, we introduce MathCheck, a well-designed checklist for testing task generalization and reasoning robustness, as well as an automatic tool to generate checklists efficiently. MathCheck includes multiple mathematical reasoning tasks and robustness tests to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of both mathematical reasoning ability and behavior testing. Utilizing MathCheck, we develop MathCheck-GSM and MathCheck-GEO to assess math textual reasoning and multi-modal reasoning abilities, respectively, serving as upgraded versions of benchmarks including GSM8k, GeoQA, UniGeo, and Geometry3K. We adopt MathCheck-GSM and MathCheck-GEO to evaluate 26 LLMs and 17 MLLMs. Our results demonstrate that while frontier LLMs like GPT-4o continue to excel in various abilities on the checklist, many other model families exhibit a significant decline. Further experiments indicate that, compared to traditional math benchmarks, MathCheck better reflects true mathematical abilities and represents mathematical intelligence more linearly, thereby supporting our design. Using MathCheck, we can efficiently conduct informative behavior analysis to deeply investigate models. Finally, we show that our checklist paradigm can easily extend to other reasoning tasks.

Jiezhu Cheng, Kaizhu Huang, Zibin Zheng

In the stock market, a successful investment requires a good balance between profits and risks. Based on the learning to rank paradigm, stock recommendation has been widely studied in quantitative finance to recommend stocks with higher return ratios for investors. Despite the efforts to make profits, many existing recommendation approaches still have some limitations in risk control, which may lead to intolerable paper losses in practical stock investing. To effectively reduce risks, we draw inspiration from adversarial learning and propose a novel Split Variational Adversarial Training (SVAT) method for risk-aware stock recommendation. Essentially, SVAT encourages the stock model to be sensitive to adversarial perturbations of risky stock examples and enhances the model's risk awareness by learning from perturbations. To generate representative adversarial examples as risk indicators, we devise a variational perturbation generator to model diverse risk factors. Particularly, the variational architecture enables our method to provide a rough risk quantification for investors, showing an additional advantage of interpretability. Experiments on several real-world stock market datasets demonstrate the superiority of our SVAT method. By lowering the volatility of the stock recommendation model, SVAT effectively reduces investment risks and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by more than 30% in terms of risk-adjusted profits. All the experimental data and source code are available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14AdM7WENEvIp5x5bV3zV_i4Aev21C9g6?usp=sharing.

Maizhen Ning, Qiu-Feng Wang, Kaizhu Huang et al.

AI has made significant progress in solving math problems, but geometry problems remain challenging due to their reliance on both text and diagrams. In the text description, symbolic characters such as "$\triangle$ABC" often serve as a bridge to connect the corresponding diagram. However, by simply tokenizing symbolic characters into individual letters (e.g., 'A', 'B' and 'C'), existing works fail to study them explicitly and thus lose the semantic relationship with the diagram. In this paper, we develop a symbolic character-aware model to fully explore the role of these characters in both text and diagram understanding and optimize the model under a multi-modal reasoning framework. In the text encoder, we propose merging individual symbolic characters to form one semantic unit along with geometric information from the corresponding diagram. For the diagram encoder, we pre-train it under a multi-label classification framework with the symbolic characters as labels. In addition, we enhance the geometry diagram understanding ability via a self-supervised learning method under the masked image modeling auxiliary task. By integrating the proposed model into a general encoder-decoder pipeline for solving geometry problems, we demonstrate its superiority on two benchmark datasets, including GeoQA and Geometry3K, with extensive experiments. Specifically, on GeoQA, the question-solving accuracy is increased from 60.0\% to 64.1\%, achieving a new state-of-the-art accuracy; on Geometry3K, we reduce the question average solving steps from 6.9 down to 6.0 with marginally higher solving accuracy.

Jianan Ye, Yijie Hu, Xi Yang et al.

Anomaly detection under open-set scenario is a challenging task that requires learning discriminative fine-grained features to detect anomalies that were even unseen during training. As a cheap yet effective approach, data augmentation has been widely used to create pseudo anomalies for better training of such models. Recent wisdom of augmentation methods focuses on generating random pseudo instances that may lead to a mixture of augmented instances with seen anomalies, or out of the typical range of anomalies. To address this issue, we propose a novel saliency-guided data augmentation method, SaliencyCut, to produce pseudo but more common anomalies which tend to stay in the plausible range of anomalies. Furthermore, we deploy a two-head learning strategy consisting of normal and anomaly learning heads, to learn the anomaly score of each sample. Theoretical analyses show that this mechanism offers a more tractable and tighter lower bound of the data log-likelihood. We then design a novel patch-wise residual module in the anomaly learning head to extract and assess the fine-grained anomaly features from each sample, facilitating the learning of discriminative representations of anomaly instances. Extensive experiments conducted on six real-world anomaly detection datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method to competing methods under various settings.

Tianyi Liu, Zhaorui Tan, Muyin Chen et al.

Brain tumor segmentation is often based on multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, in clinical practice, certain modalities of MRI may be missing, which presents a more difficult scenario. To cope with this challenge, Knowledge Distillation, Domain Adaption, and Shared Latent Space have emerged as commonly promising strategies. However, recent efforts typically overlook the modality gaps and thus fail to learn important invariant feature representations across different modalities. Such drawback consequently leads to limited performance for missing modality models. To ameliorate these problems, pre-trained models are used in natural visual segmentation tasks to minimize the gaps. However, promising pre-trained models are often unavailable in medical image segmentation tasks. Along this line, in this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that aligns latent features of involved modalities to a well-defined distribution anchor as the substitution of the pre-trained model}. As a major contribution, we prove that our novel training paradigm ensures a tight evidence lower bound, thus theoretically certifying its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on different backbones validate that the proposed paradigm can enable invariant feature representations and produce models with narrowed modality gaps. Models with our alignment paradigm show their superior performance on both BraTS2018 and BraTS2020 datasets.

Weiguang Zhao, Haoran Xu, Xingyu Miao et al.

Point tracking aims to follow visual points through complex motion, occlusion, and viewpoint changes, and has advanced rapidly with modern foundation models. Yet progress toward general point tracking remains constrained by limited high-quality data, as existing datasets often provide insufficient diversity and imperfect trajectory annotations. To this end, we introduce SynthVerse, a large-scale, diverse synthetic dataset specifically designed for point tracking. SynthVerse includes several new domains and object types missing from existing synthetic datasets, such as animated-film-style content, embodied manipulation, scene navigation, and articulated objects. SynthVerse substantially expands dataset diversity by covering a broader range of object categories and providing high-quality dynamic motions and interactions, enabling more robust training and evaluation for general point tracking. In addition, we establish a highly diverse point tracking benchmark to systematically evaluate state-of-the-art methods under broader domain shifts. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that training with SynthVerse yields consistent improvements in generalization and reveal limitations of existing trackers under diverse settings.

Jingwei Guo, Kaizhu Huang, Xinping Yi et al.

Spectral Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in graph machine learning, with polynomial filters applied for graph convolutions, where all nodes share the identical filter weights to mine their local contexts. Despite the success, existing spectral GNNs usually fail to deal with complex networks (e.g., WWW) due to such homogeneous spectral filtering setting that ignores the regional heterogeneity as typically seen in real-world networks. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel diverse spectral filtering (DSF) framework, which automatically learns node-specific filter weights to exploit the varying local structure properly. Particularly, the diverse filter weights consist of two components -- A global one shared among all nodes, and a local one that varies along network edges to reflect node difference arising from distinct graph parts -- to balance between local and global information. As such, not only can the global graph characteristics be captured, but also the diverse local patterns can be mined with awareness of different node positions. Interestingly, we formulate a novel optimization problem to assist in learning diverse filters, which also enables us to enhance any spectral GNNs with our DSF framework. We showcase the proposed framework on three state-of-the-arts including GPR-GNN, BernNet, and JacobiConv. Extensive experiments over 10 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework can consistently boost model performance by up to 4.92% in node classification tasks, producing diverse filters with enhanced interpretability. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/jingweio/DSF}.

Yuqi Wang, Zeqiang Wang, Wei Wang et al.

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), the retrieval of relevant medical information has become essential for efficient clinical decision-making. This paper introduces MedFusionRank, a novel approach to zero-shot medical information retrieval (MIR) that combines the strengths of pre-trained language models and statistical methods while addressing their limitations. The proposed approach leverages a pre-trained BERT-style model to extract compact yet informative keywords. These keywords are then enriched with domain knowledge by linking them to conceptual entities within a medical knowledge graph. Experimental evaluations on medical datasets demonstrate MedFusion Rank's superior performance over existing methods, with promising results with a variety of evaluation metrics. MedFusionRank demonstrates efficacy in retrieving relevant information, even from short or single-term queries.

Zixian Su, Jingwei Guo, Kai Yao et al.

While recent test-time adaptations exhibit efficacy by adjusting batch normalization to narrow domain disparities, their effectiveness diminishes with realistic mini-batches due to inaccurate target estimation. As previous attempts merely introduce source statistics to mitigate this issue, the fundamental problem of inaccurate target estimation still persists, leaving the intrinsic test-time domain shifts unresolved. This paper delves into the problem of mini-batch degradation. By unraveling batch normalization, we discover that the inexact target statistics largely stem from the substantially reduced class diversity in batch. Drawing upon this insight, we introduce a straightforward tool, Test-time Exponential Moving Average (TEMA), to bridge the class diversity gap between training and testing batches. Importantly, our TEMA adaptively extends the scope of typical methods beyond the current batch to incorporate a diverse set of class information, which in turn boosts an accurate target estimation. Built upon this foundation, we further design a novel layer-wise rectification strategy to consistently promote test-time performance. Our proposed method enjoys a unique advantage as it requires neither training nor tuning parameters, offering a truly hassle-free solution. It significantly enhances model robustness against shifted domains and maintains resilience in diverse real-world scenarios with various batch sizes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several major benchmarks. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/kiwi12138/RealisticTTA}.

Weiguang Zhao, Guanyu Yang, Rui Zhang et al.

With the explosive 3D data growth, the urgency of utilizing zero-shot learning to facilitate data labeling becomes evident. Recently, methods transferring language or language-image pre-training models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to 3D vision have made significant progress in the 3D zero-shot classification task. These methods primarily focus on 3D object classification with an aligned pose; such a setting is, however, rather restrictive, which overlooks the recognition of 3D objects with open poses typically encountered in real-world scenarios, such as an overturned chair or a lying teddy bear. To this end, we propose a more realistic and challenging scenario named open-pose 3D zero-shot classification, focusing on the recognition of 3D objects regardless of their orientation. First, we revisit the current research on 3D zero-shot classification, and propose two benchmark datasets specifically designed for the open-pose setting. We empirically validate many of the most popular methods in the proposed open-pose benchmark. Our investigations reveal that most current 3D zero-shot classification models suffer from poor performance, indicating a substantial exploration room towards the new direction. Furthermore, we study a concise pipeline with an iterative angle refinement mechanism that automatically optimizes one ideal angle to classify these open-pose 3D objects. In particular, to make validation more compelling and not just limited to existing CLIP-based methods, we also pioneer the exploration of knowledge transfer based on Diffusion models. While the proposed solutions can serve as a new benchmark for open-pose 3D zero-shot classification, we discuss the complexities and challenges of this scenario that remain for further research development. The code is available publicly at https://github.com/weiguangzhao/Diff-OP3D.

Weiguang Zhao, Rui Zhang, Qiufeng Wang et al.

3D semantic segmentation plays a fundamental and crucial role to understand 3D scenes. While contemporary state-of-the-art techniques predominantly concentrate on elevating the overall performance of 3D semantic segmentation based on general metrics (e.g. mIoU, mAcc, and oAcc), they unfortunately leave the exploration of challenging regions for segmentation mostly neglected. In this paper, we revisit 3D semantic segmentation through a more granular lens, shedding light on subtle complexities that are typically overshadowed by broader performance metrics. Concretely, we have delineated 3D semantic segmentation errors into four comprehensive categories as well as corresponding evaluation metrics tailored to each. Building upon this categorical framework, we introduce an innovative 3D semantic segmentation network called BFANet that incorporates detailed analysis of semantic boundary features. First, we design the boundary-semantic module to decouple point cloud features into semantic and boundary features, and fuse their query queue to enhance semantic features with attention. Second, we introduce a more concise and accelerated boundary pseudo-label calculation algorithm, which is 3.9 times faster than the state-of-the-art, offering compatibility with data augmentation and enabling efficient computation in training. Extensive experiments on benchmark data indicate the superiority of our BFANet model, confirming the significance of emphasizing the four uniquely designed metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/weiguangzhao/BFANet.

Weiguang Zhao, Xihao Guo, Tian Liang et al.

Robotic dexterous hands are central to contact-rich manipulation, with rapid progress driven by advances in hardware, sensing, control, simulation, and data generation. However, existing studies are often developed under different assumptions regarding hand embodiments, sensory configurations, task settings, training data, and evaluation protocols, making systematic comparison difficult and obscuring the developmental trajectory of the field. This survey provides a holistic review of dexterous hand research from four complementary aspects. First, we present a hardware-level analysis covering actuation, transmission, perception, and representative hand designs, highlighting the key trade-offs in force capability, compliance, bandwidth, integration, and system complexity. Furthermore, we review control and learning methods for dexterous manipulation from a methodological perspective, grouping representative works by major paradigms and tracing their evolution in chronological order. In addition, we consolidate datasets, modality design, and evaluation practices, which enables methodological progress to be interpreted together with the ways in which it is trained, benchmarked, and assessed. Finally, we discuss the major limitations of current dexterous hand research and summarize the corresponding future directions. By connecting hardware analysis, methodological development, data resources, and evaluation, this survey aims to provide a structured understanding of dexterous hand research and to clarify the most important open challenges for future study.

Jianan Ye, Zhaorui Tan, Yijie Hu et al.

Tabular anomaly detection under the one-class classification setting poses a significant challenge, as it involves accurately conceptualizing "normal" derived exclusively from a single category to discern anomalies from normal data variations. Capturing the intrinsic correlation among attributes within normal samples presents one promising method for learning the concept. To do so, the most recent effort relies on a learnable mask strategy with a reconstruction task. However, this wisdom may suffer from the risk of producing uniform masks, i.e., essentially nothing is masked, leading to less effective correlation learning. To address this issue, we presume that attributes related to others in normal samples can be divided into two non-overlapping and correlated subsets, defined as CorrSets, to capture the intrinsic correlation effectively. Accordingly, we introduce an innovative method that disentangles CorrSets from normal tabular data. To our knowledge, this is a pioneering effort to apply the concept of disentanglement for one-class anomaly detection on tabular data. Extensive experiments on 20 tabular datasets show that our method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and leads to an average performance improvement of 6.1% on AUC-PR and 2.1% on AUC-ROC. Codes are available at https://github.com/yjnanan/Disent-AD.

Jinming Zhang, Xi Yang, Youpeng Yang et al.

Uncertainty in medical image segmentation is inherently non-uniform, with boundary regions exhibiting substantially higher ambiguity than interior areas. Conventional training treats all pixels equally, leading to unstable optimization during early epochs when predictions are unreliable. We argue that this instability hinders convergence toward Pareto-optimal solutions and propose a region-wise curriculum strategy that prioritizes learning from certain regions and gradually incorporates uncertain ones, reducing gradient variance. Methodologically, we introduce a Pareto-consistent loss that balances trade-offs between regional uncertainties by adaptively reshaping the loss landscape and constraining convergence dynamics between interior and boundary regions; this guides the model toward Pareto-approximate solutions. To address boundary ambiguity, we further develop a fuzzy labeling mechanism that maintains binary confidence in non-boundary areas while enabling smooth transitions near boundaries, stabilizing gradients, and expanding flat regions in the loss surface. Experiments on brain metastasis and non-metastatic tumor segmentation show consistent improvements across multiple configurations, with our method outperforming traditional crisp-set approaches in all tumor subregions.

Chaolong Yang, Kai Yao, Yuyao Yan et al.

Audio-driven single-image talking portrait generation plays a crucial role in virtual reality, digital human creation, and filmmaking. Existing approaches are generally categorized into keypoint-based and image-based methods. Keypoint-based methods effectively preserve character identity but struggle to capture fine facial details due to the fixed points limitation of the 3D Morphable Model. Moreover, traditional generative networks face challenges in establishing causality between audio and keypoints on limited datasets, resulting in low pose diversity. In contrast, image-based approaches produce high-quality portraits with diverse details using the diffusion network but incur identity distortion and expensive computational costs. In this work, we propose KDTalker, the first framework to combine unsupervised implicit 3D keypoint with a spatiotemporal diffusion model. Leveraging unsupervised implicit 3D keypoints, KDTalker adapts facial information densities, allowing the diffusion process to model diverse head poses and capture fine facial details flexibly. The custom-designed spatiotemporal attention mechanism ensures accurate lip synchronization, producing temporally consistent, high-quality animations while enhancing computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that KDTalker achieves state-of-the-art performance regarding lip synchronization accuracy, head pose diversity, and execution efficiency.Our codes are available at https://github.com/chaolongy/KDTalker.

Zhipeng Ye, Feng Jiang, Qiufeng Wang et al.

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) has attained great success in pattern recognition and computer vision. Transferring CLIP to downstream tasks (e.g. zero- or few-shot classification) is a hot topic in multimodal learning. However, current studies primarily focus on either prompt learning for text or adapter tuning for vision, without fully exploiting the complementary information and correlations among image-text pairs. In this paper, we propose an Image Description Enhanced CLIP-Adapter (IDEA) method to adapt CLIP to few-shot image classification tasks. This method captures fine-grained features by leveraging both visual features and textual descriptions of images. IDEA is a training-free method for CLIP, and it can be comparable to or even exceeds state-of-the-art models on multiple tasks. Furthermore, we introduce Trainable-IDEA (T-IDEA), which extends IDEA by adding two lightweight learnable components (i.e., a projector and a learnable latent space), further enhancing the model's performance and achieving SOTA results on 11 datasets. As one important contribution, we employ the Llama model and design a comprehensive pipeline to generate textual descriptions for images of 11 datasets, resulting in a total of 1,637,795 image-text pairs, named "IMD-11". Our code and data are released at https://github.com/FourierAI/IDEA.

Zihan Ye, Xinyuan Ru, Shiming Chen et al.

Feature Generative Adversarial Networks have emerged as powerful generative models in producing high-quality representations of unseen classes within the scope of Zero-shot Learning (ZSL). This paper delves into the pivotal influence of unseen class priors within the framework of transductive ZSL (TZSL) and illuminates the finding that even a marginal prior bias can result in substantial accuracy declines. Our extensive analysis uncovers that this inefficacy fundamentally stems from the utilization of an unconditional unseen discriminator - a core component in existing TZSL. We further establish that the detrimental effects of this component are inevitable unless the generator perfectly fits class-specific distributions. Building on these insights, we introduce our Improved Feature Generation Framework, termed I-VAEGAN, which incorporates two novel components: Pseudo-conditional Feature Adversarial (PFA) learning and Variational Embedding Regression (VER). PFA circumvents the need for prior estimation by explicitly injecting the predicted semantics as pseudo conditions for unseen classes premised by precise semantic regression. Meanwhile, VER utilizes reconstructive pre-training to learn class statistics, obtaining better semantic regression. Our I-VAEGAN achieves state-of-the-art TZSL accuracy across various benchmarks and priors. Our code would be released upon acceptance.

Weiguang Zhao, Junting Dong, Rui Zhang et al.

Teleoperation is a key paradigm for transferring human dexterity to robots, yet most prior work targets objects that are initially static, such as grasping or manipulation. Dynamic object catch, where objects move before contact, remains underexplored. Pure teleoperation in this task often fails due to timing, pose, and force errors, highlighting the need for shared autonomy that combines human input with autonomous policies. To this end, we present Tele-Catch, a systematic framework for dexterous hand teleoperation in dynamic object catching. At its core, we design DAIM, a dynamics-aware adaptive integration mechanism that realizes shared autonomy by fusing glove-based teleoperation signals into the diffusion policy denoising process. It adaptively modulates control based on the interaction object state. To improve policy robustness, we introduce DP-U3R, which integrates unsupervised geometric representations from point cloud observations into diffusion policy learning, enabling geometry-aware decision making. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Tele-Catch significantly improves accuracy and robustness in dynamic catching tasks, while also exhibiting consistent gains across distinct dexterous hand embodiments and previously unseen object categories.

Chengcheng Feng, Haojie Yin, Yucheng Jin et al.

Comic understanding presents a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as the intended meaning of a comic often emerges from the joint interpretation of visual, textual, and social cues. This naturally motivates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, since explicit intermediate reasoning appears promising for integrating such heterogeneous signals. However, existing CoT methods are poorly matched to this structure: they tend to force interpretation into a single reasoning path before multiple cues have been jointly considered, often degrading performance, especially for small MLLMs. Our key idea is to explicitly preserve multi-cue interpretation during supervision construction, rather than collapsing comic understanding into a single reasoning chain. To this end, we propose a two-stage framework for faithful comic reasoning in small MLLMs. First, we introduce MoCoT, a modular supervision construction framework that preserves multi-cue interpretation and turns it into more faithful supervision. Second, we propose VERA, a structured reward mechanism that turns such supervision into faithful reasoning behavior by aligning optimization with both reasoning faithfulness and answer correctness. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks spanning comic understanding and broader humor-centric and abstract visual reasoning tasks demonstrate that our framework achieves strong results in the $\leq$ 4B regime, surpasses several 7B baselines, improves four small MLLMs by an average of $\mathbf{12.1%}$ as a plug-in, and consistently enhances reasoning faithfulness while preserving inference efficiency.

Weiguang Zhang, Huangcheng Lu, Maizhen Ning et al.

Document dewarping aims to rectify deformations in photographic document images, thus improving text readability, which has attracted much attention and made great progress, but it is still challenging to preserve document structures. Given recent advances in diffusion models, it is natural for us to consider their potential applicability to document dewarping. However, it is far from straightforward to adopt diffusion models in document dewarping due to their unfaithful control on highly complex document images (e.g., 2000$times$3000 resolution). In this paper, we propose DvD, the first generative model to tackle document Dewarping via a Diffusion framework. To be specific, DvD introduces a coordinate-level denoising instead of typical pixel-level denoising, generating a mapping for deformation rectification. In addition, we further propose a time-variant condition refinement mechanism to enhance the preservation of document structures. In experiments, we find that current document dewarping benchmarks can not evaluate dewarping models comprehensively. To this end, we present AnyPhotoDoc6300, a rigorously designed large-scale document dewarping benchmark comprising 6,300 real image pairs across three distinct domains, enabling fine-grained evaluation of dewarping models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DvD can achieve state-of-the-art performance with acceptable computational efficiency on multiple metrics across various benchmarks, including DocUNet, DIR300, and AnyPhotoDoc6300. The new benchmark and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/hanquansanren/DvD.

Zihan Ye, Shreyank N. Gowda, Xiaowei Huang et al.

Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) aims to enable classifiers to identify unseen classes. This is typically achieved by generating visual features for unseen classes based on learned visual-semantic correlations from seen classes. However, most current generative approaches heavily rely on having a sufficient number of samples from seen classes. Our study reveals that a scarcity of seen class samples results in a marked decrease in performance across many generative ZSL techniques. We argue, quantify, and empirically demonstrate that this decline is largely attributable to spurious visual-semantic correlations. To address this issue, we introduce ZeroDiff, an innovative generative framework for ZSL that incorporates diffusion mechanisms and contrastive representations to enhance visual-semantic correlations. ZeroDiff comprises three key components: (1) Diffusion augmentation, which naturally transforms limited data into an expanded set of noised data to mitigate generative model overfitting; (2) Supervised-contrastive (SC)-based representations that dynamically characterize each limited sample to support visual feature generation; and (3) Multiple feature discriminators employing a Wasserstein-distance-based mutual learning approach, evaluating generated features from various perspectives, including pre-defined semantics, SC-based representations, and the diffusion process. Extensive experiments on three popular ZSL benchmarks demonstrate that ZeroDiff not only achieves significant improvements over existing ZSL methods but also maintains robust performance even with scarce training data. Our codes are available at https://github.com/FouriYe/ZeroDiff_ICLR25.

Xiaoqiang Kang, Zimu Wang, Xiaobo Jin et al.

Solving tabular math word problems (TMWPs) has become a critical role in evaluating the mathematical reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), where large-scale TMWP samples are commonly required for LLM fine-tuning. Since the collection of high-quality TMWP datasets is costly and time-consuming, recent research has concentrated on automatic TMWP generation. However, current generated samples usually suffer from issues of either correctness or diversity. In this paper, we propose a Template-driven LLM-paraphrased (TeLL) framework for generating high-quality TMWP samples with diverse backgrounds and accurate tables, questions, answers, and solutions. To this end, we first extract templates from existing real samples to generate initial problems, ensuring correctness. Then, we adopt an LLM to extend templates and paraphrase problems, obtaining diverse TMWP samples. Furthermore, we find the reasoning annotation is important for solving TMWPs. Therefore, we propose to enrich each solution with illustrative reasoning steps. Through the proposed framework, we construct a high-quality dataset TabMWP-TeLL by adhering to the question types in the TabMWP dataset, and we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of LLMs to demonstrate the effectiveness of TabMWP-TeLL in improving TMWP solving performance. The code and data of this paper are available at: https://github.com/Jason8Kang/TELL.

Weiguang Zhao, Chenru Jiang, Chengrui Zhang et al.

Given the diversity of devices and the product upgrades, cross-device research has become an urgent issue that needs to be tackled. To this end, we pioneer in probing the cross-device (cameras & robotics) grasping policy in the 3D open world. Specifically, we construct two real-world grasping setups, employing robotic arms and cameras from completely different manufacturers. To minimize domain differences in point clouds from diverse cameras, we adopt clustering methods to generate 3D object proposals. However, existing clustering methods are limited to closed-set scenarios, which confines the robotic graspable object categories and ossifies the deployment scenarios. To extend these methods to open-world settings, we introduce the SSGC-Seg module that enables category-agnostic 3D object detection. The proposed module transforms the original multi-class semantic information into binary semantic cues-foreground and background by analyzing the SoftMax value of each point, and then clusters the foreground points based on geometric information to form initial object proposals. Furthermore, ScoreNet‡ is designed to score each detection result, and the robotic arm prioritizes grasping the object with the highest confidence score. Experiments on two different types of setups highlight the effectiveness and robustness of our policy for cross-device robotics grasping research. Our code is provided in the supplementary and will be released upon acceptance.

Liuqing Zhao, Fan Lyu, Fuyuan Hu et al.

Sentence-based Image Editing (SIE) aims to deploy natural language to edit an image. Offering potentials to reduce expensive manual editing, SIE has attracted much interest recently. However, existing methods can hardly produce accurate editing and even lead to failures in attribute editing when the query sentence is with multiple editable attributes. To cope with this problem, by focusing on enhancing the difference between attributes, this paper proposes a novel model called Contrastive Attention Generative Adversarial Network (CA-GAN), which is inspired from contrastive training. Specifically, we first design a novel contrastive attention module to enlarge the editing difference between random combinations of attributes which are formed during training. We then construct an attribute discriminator to ensure effective editing on each attribute. A series of experiments show that our method can generate very encouraging results in sentence-based image editing with multiple attributes on CUB and COCO dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zlq2021/CA-GAN

Zhuang Qian, Shufei Zhang, Kaizhu Huang et al.

In this work, we consider model robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks from a global manifold perspective. Leveraging both the local and global latent information, we propose a novel adversarial training method through robust optimization, and a tractable way to generate Latent Manifold Adversarial Examples (LMAEs) via an adversarial game between a discriminator and a classifier. The proposed adversarial training with latent distribution (ATLD) method defends against adversarial attacks by crafting LMAEs with the latent manifold in an unsupervised manner. ATLD preserves the local and global information of latent manifold and promises improved robustness against adversarial attacks. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments over different datasets (e.g., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN) with different adversarial attacks (e.g., PGD, CW), and show that our method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art (e.g., Feature Scattering) in adversarial robustness by a large accuracy margin. The source codes are available at https://github.com/LitterQ/ATLD-pytorch.

Zihan Ye, Fuyuan Hu, Fan Lyu et al.

Using generative models to synthesize visual features from semantic distribution is one of the most popular solutions to ZSL image classification in recent years. The triplet loss (TL) is popularly used to generate realistic visual distributions from semantics by automatically searching discriminative representations. However, the traditional TL cannot search reliable unseen disentangled representations due to the unavailability of unseen classes in ZSL. To alleviate this drawback, we propose in this work a multi-modal triplet loss (MMTL) which utilizes multimodal information to search a disentangled representation space. As such, all classes can interplay which can benefit learning disentangled class representations in the searched space. Furthermore, we develop a novel model called Disentangling Class Representation Generative Adversarial Network (DCR-GAN) focusing on exploiting the disentangled representations in training, feature synthesis, and final recognition stages. Benefiting from the disentangled representations, DCR-GAN could fit a more realistic distribution over both seen and unseen features. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model can lead to superior performance to the state-of-the-arts on four benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/FouriYe/DCRGAN-TMM.

Jingwei Guo, Kaizhu Huang, Xinping Yi et al.

Disentangled Graph Convolutional Network (DisenGCN) is an encouraging framework to disentangle the latent factors arising in a real-world graph. However, it relies on disentangling information heavily from a local range (i.e., a node and its 1-hop neighbors), while the local information in many cases can be uneven and incomplete, hindering the interpretabiliy power and model performance of DisenGCN. In this paper\footnote{This paper is a lighter version of \href{https://jingweio.github.io/assets/pdf/tnnls22.pdf}{"Learning Disentangled Graph Convolutional Networks Locally and Globally"} where the results and analysis have been reworked substantially. Digital Object Identifier \url{https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2022.3195336}.}, we introduce a novel Local and Global Disentangled Graph Convolutional Network (LGD-GCN) to capture both local and global information for graph disentanglement. LGD-GCN performs a statistical mixture modeling to derive a factor-aware latent continuous space, and then constructs different structures w.r.t. different factors from the revealed space. In this way, the global factor-specific information can be efficiently and selectively encoded via a message passing along these built structures, strengthening the intra-factor consistency. We also propose a novel diversity promoting regularizer employed with the latent space modeling, to encourage inter-factor diversity. Evaluations of the proposed LGD-GCN on the synthetic and real-world datasets show a better interpretability and improved performance in node classification over the existing competitive models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/jingweio/LGD-GCN}.

Chongwen Zhao, Zhihao Dou, Kaizhu Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly attracting attention in various applications. Nonetheless, there is a growing concern as some users attempt to exploit these models for malicious purposes, including the synthesis of controlled substances and the propagation of disinformation. In an effort to mitigate such risks, the concept of "Alignment" technology has been developed. However, recent studies indicate that this alignment can be undermined using sophisticated prompt engineering or adversarial suffixes, a technique known as "Jailbreak." Our research takes cues from the human-like generate process of LLMs. We identify that while jailbreaking prompts may yield output logits similar to benign prompts, their initial embeddings within the model's latent space tend to be more analogous to those of malicious prompts. Leveraging this finding, we propose utilizing the early transformer outputs of LLMs as a means to detect malicious inputs, and terminate the generation immediately. We introduce a simple yet significant defense approach called EEG-Defender for LLMs. We conduct comprehensive experiments on ten jailbreak methods across three models. Our results demonstrate that EEG-Defender is capable of reducing the Attack Success Rate (ASR) by a significant margin, roughly 85% in comparison with 50% for the present SOTAs, with minimal impact on the utility of LLMs.

Zhaorui Tan, Xi Yang, Kaizhu Huang

Multi-domain generalization (mDG) is universally aimed to minimize the discrepancy between training and testing distributions to enhance marginal-to-label distribution mapping. However, existing mDG literature lacks a general learning objective paradigm and often imposes constraints on static target marginal distributions. In this paper, we propose to leverage a $Y$-mapping to relax the constraint. We rethink the learning objective for mDG and design a new \textbf{general learning objective} to interpret and analyze most existing mDG wisdom. This general objective is bifurcated into two synergistic amis: learning domain-independent conditional features and maximizing a posterior. Explorations also extend to two effective regularization terms that incorporate prior information and suppress invalid causality, alleviating the issues that come with relaxed constraints. We theoretically contribute an upper bound for the domain alignment of domain-independent conditional features, disclosing that many previous mDG endeavors actually \textbf{optimize partially the objective} and thus lead to limited performance. As such, our study distills a general learning objective into four practical components, providing a general, robust, and flexible mechanism to handle complex domain shifts. Extensive empirical results indicate that the proposed objective with $Y$-mapping leads to substantially better mDG performance in various downstream tasks, including regression, segmentation, and classification.

Jianan Ye, Weiguang Zhao, Xi Yang et al.

Point cloud anomaly detection under the anomaly-free setting poses significant challenges as it requires accurately capturing the features of 3D normal data to identify deviations indicative of anomalies. Current efforts focus on devising reconstruction tasks, such as acquiring normal data representations by restoring normal samples from altered, pseudo-anomalous counterparts. Our findings reveal that distributing attention equally across normal and pseudo-anomalous data tends to dilute the model's focus on anomalous deviations. The challenge is further compounded by the inherently disordered and sparse nature of 3D point cloud data. In response to those predicaments, we introduce an innovative approach that emphasizes learning point offsets, targeting more informative pseudo-abnormal points, thus fostering more effective distillation of normal data representations. We also have crafted an augmentation technique that is steered by normal vectors, facilitating the creation of credible pseudo anomalies that enhance the efficiency of the training process. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation on the Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD datasets evidences that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average enhancement of 9.0% and 1.4% in the AUC-ROC detection metric across these datasets, respectively.

Jing Li, Xueke Chi, Qiufeng Wang et al.

Oracle character recognition-an analysis of ancient Chinese inscriptions found on oracle bones-has become a pivotal field intersecting archaeology, paleography, and historical cultural studies. Traditional methods of oracle character recognition have relied heavily on manual interpretation by experts, which is not only labor-intensive but also limits broader accessibility to the general public. With recent breakthroughs in pattern recognition and deep learning, there is a growing movement towards the automation of oracle character recognition (OrCR), showing considerable promise in tackling the challenges inherent to these ancient scripts. However, a comprehensive understanding of OrCR still remains elusive. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic and structured survey of the current landscape of OrCR research. We commence by identifying and analyzing the key challenges of OrCR. Then, we provide an overview of the primary benchmark datasets and digital resources available for OrCR. A review of contemporary research methodologies follows, in which their respective efficacies, limitations, and applicability to the complex nature of oracle characters are critically highlighted and examined. Additionally, our review extends to ancillary tasks associated with OrCR across diverse disciplines, providing a broad-spectrum analysis of its applications. We conclude with a forward-looking perspective, proposing potential avenues for future investigations that could yield significant advancements in the field.

Jingwei Guo, Kaizhu Huang, Xinping Yi et al.

Whilst spectral Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are theoretically well-founded in the spectral domain, their practical reliance on polynomial approximation implies a profound linkage to the spatial domain. As previous studies rarely examine spectral GNNs from the spatial perspective, their spatial-domain interpretability remains elusive, e.g., what information is essentially encoded by spectral GNNs in the spatial domain? In this paper, to answer this question, we establish a theoretical connection between spectral filtering and spatial aggregation, unveiling an intrinsic interaction that spectral filtering implicitly leads the original graph to an adapted new graph, explicitly computed for spatial aggregation. Both theoretical and empirical investigations reveal that the adapted new graph not only exhibits non-locality but also accommodates signed edge weights to reflect label consistency among nodes. These findings thus highlight the interpretable role of spectral GNNs in the spatial domain and inspire us to rethink graph spectral filters beyond the fixed-order polynomials, which neglect global information. Built upon the theoretical findings, we revisit the state-of-the-art spectral GNNs and propose a novel Spatially Adaptive Filtering (SAF) framework, which leverages the adapted new graph by spectral filtering for an auxiliary non-local aggregation. Notably, our proposed SAF comprehensively models both node similarity and dissimilarity from a global perspective, therefore alleviating persistent deficiencies of GNNs related to long-range dependencies and graph heterophily. Extensive experiments over 13 node classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework to the state-of-the-art models.