Jing Ren

Yicheng Luo, Jing Ren, Xuefei Zhe et al.

Line clouds, though under-investigated in the previous work, potentially encode more compact structural information of buildings than point clouds extracted from multi-view images. In this work, we propose the first network to process line clouds for building wireframe abstraction. The network takes a line cloud as input , i.e., a nonstructural and unordered set of 3D line segments extracted from multi-view images, and outputs a 3D wireframe of the underlying building, which consists of a sparse set of 3D junctions connected by line segments. We observe that a line patch, i.e., a group of neighboring line segments, encodes sufficient contour information to predict the existence and even the 3D position of a potential junction, as well as the likelihood of connectivity between two query junctions. We therefore introduce a two-layer Line-Patch Transformer to extract junctions and connectivities from sampled line patches to form a 3D building wireframe model. We also introduce a synthetic dataset of multi-view images with ground-truth 3D wireframe. We extensively justify that our reconstructed 3D wireframe models significantly improve upon multiple baseline building reconstruction methods. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/Luo1Cheng/LC2WF.

Jing Ren, Feng Xia, Azadeh Noori Hoshyar et al.

Anomaly analytics is a popular and vital task in various research contexts, which has been studied for several decades. At the same time, deep learning has shown its capacity in solving many graph-based tasks like, node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. Recently, many studies are extending graph learning models for solving anomaly analytics problems, resulting in beneficial advances in graph-based anomaly analytics techniques. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of graph learning methods for anomaly analytics tasks. We classify them into four categories based on their model architectures, namely graph convolutional network (GCN), graph attention network (GAT), graph autoencoder (GAE), and other graph learning models. The differences between these methods are also compared in a systematic manner. Furthermore, we outline several graph-based anomaly analytics applications across various domains in the real world. Finally, we discuss five potential future research directions in this rapidly growing field.

Robin Magnet, Jing Ren, Olga Sorkine-Hornung et al.

We introduce pointwise map smoothness via the Dirichlet energy into the functional map pipeline, and propose an algorithm for optimizing it efficiently, which leads to high-quality results in challenging settings. Specifically, we first formulate the Dirichlet energy of the pulled-back shape coordinates, as a way to evaluate smoothness of a pointwise map across discrete surfaces. We then extend the recently proposed discrete solver and show how a strategy based on auxiliary variable reformulation allows us to optimize pointwise map smoothness alongside desirable functional map properties such as bijectivity. This leads to an efficient map refinement strategy that simultaneously improves functional and point-to-point correspondences, obtaining smooth maps even on non-isometric shape pairs. Moreover, we demonstrate that several previously proposed methods for computing smooth maps can be reformulated as variants of our approach, which allows us to compare different formulations in a consistent framework. Finally, we compare these methods both on existing benchmarks and on a new rich dataset that we introduce, which contains non-rigid, non-isometric shape pairs with inter-category and cross-category correspondences. Our work leads to a general framework for optimizing and analyzing map smoothness both conceptually and in challenging practical settings.

Abdalla G. M. Ahmed, Jing Ren, Peter Wonka

Among the various approaches for producing point distributions with blue noise spectrum, we argue for an optimization framework using Gaussian kernels. We show that with a wise selection of optimization parameters, this approach attains unprecedented quality, provably surpassing the current state of the art attained by the optimal transport (BNOT) approach. Further, we show that our algorithm scales smoothly and feasibly to high dimensions while maintaining the same quality, realizing unprecedented high-quality high-dimensional blue noise sets. Finally, we show an extension to adaptive sampling.

Zenghao Chai, Haoxian Zhang, Jing Ren et al.

The evaluation of 3D face reconstruction results typically relies on a rigid shape alignment between the estimated 3D model and the ground-truth scan. We observe that aligning two shapes with different reference points can largely affect the evaluation results. This poses difficulties for precisely diagnosing and improving a 3D face reconstruction method. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation approach with a new benchmark REALY, consists of 100 globally aligned face scans with accurate facial keypoints, high-quality region masks, and topology-consistent meshes. Our approach performs region-wise shape alignment and leads to more accurate, bidirectional correspondences during computing the shape errors. The fine-grained, region-wise evaluation results provide us detailed understandings about the performance of state-of-the-art 3D face reconstruction methods. For example, our experiments on single-image based reconstruction methods reveal that DECA performs the best on nose regions, while GANFit performs better on cheek regions. Besides, a new and high-quality 3DMM basis, HIFI3D++, is further derived using the same procedure as we construct REALY to align and retopologize several 3D face datasets. We will release REALY, HIFI3D++, and our new evaluation pipeline at https://realy3dface.com.

Renqiang Luo, Huafei Huang, Tao Tang et al.

Graph Transformers (GTs) are increasingly applied to social network analysis, yet their deployment is often constrained by fairness concerns. This issue is particularly critical in incomplete social networks, where sensitive attributes are frequently missing due to privacy and ethical restrictions. Existing solutions commonly generate these incomplete attributes, which may introduce additional biases and further compromise user privacy. To address this challenge, FairGE (Fair Graph Encoding) is introduced as a fairness-aware framework for GTs in incomplete social networks. Instead of generating sensitive attributes, FairGE encodes fairness directly through spectral graph theory. By leveraging the principal eigenvector to represent structural information and padding incomplete sensitive attributes with zeros to maintain independence, FairGE ensures fairness without data reconstruction. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the method suppresses the influence of non-principal spectral components, thereby enhancing fairness. Extensive experiments on seven real-world social network datasets confirm that FairGE achieves at least a 16% improvement in both statistical parity and equality of opportunity compared with state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is shown in https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/FairGE.

Peilin Zhou, Bruce Leon, Xiang Ying et al.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into tool-using agents, the ability to browse the web in real-time has become a critical yardstick for measuring their reasoning and retrieval competence. Existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp concentrate on English and overlook the linguistic, infrastructural, and censorship-related complexities of other major information ecosystems -- most notably Chinese. To address this gap, we introduce BrowseComp-ZH, a high-difficulty benchmark purpose-built to comprehensively evaluate LLM agents on the Chinese web. BrowseComp-ZH consists of 289 multi-hop questions spanning 11 diverse domains. Each question is reverse-engineered from a short, objective, and easily verifiable answer (e.g., a date, number, or proper noun). A two-stage quality control protocol is applied to strive for high question difficulty and answer uniqueness. We benchmark over 20 state-of-the-art language models and agentic search systems on our proposed BrowseComp-ZH. Despite their strong conversational and retrieval capabilities, most models struggle severely: a large number achieve accuracy rates below 10%, and only a handful exceed 20%. Even the best-performing system, OpenAI's DeepResearch, reaches just 42.9%. These results demonstrate the considerable difficulty of BrowseComp-ZH, where success demands not only effective retrieval strategies, but also sophisticated reasoning and information reconciliation -- capabilities that current models still struggle to master. Our dataset, construction guidelines, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://github.com/PALIN2018/BrowseComp-ZH.

Siyu Sun, Jing Ren, Zhaohe Liao et al.

Adapting decoder-only multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for unified multimodal retrieval faces two structural gaps. First, existing methods rely on implicit pooling, which overloads the hidden state of a standard vocabulary token (e.g., <EOS>) as the sequence-level representation, a mechanism never designed for information aggregation. Second, contrastive fine-tuning specifies what the embedding should match but provides no token-level guidance on how information should be compressed into it. We address both gaps with two complementary components. Architecturally, we introduce Bottleneck Tokens (BToks), a small set of learnable tokens that serve as a fixed-capacity explicit pooling mechanism. For training, we propose Generative Information Condensation: a next-token prediction objective coupled with a Condensation Mask that severs the direct attention path from target tokens to query tokens. All predictive signals are thereby forced through the BToks, converting the generative loss into dense, token-level supervision for semantic compression. At inference time, only the input and BToks are processed in a single forward pass with negligible overhead over conventional last-token pooling. On MMEB-V2 (78 datasets, 3 modalities, 9 meta-tasks), our approach achieves state-of-the-art among 2B-scale methods under comparable data conditions, attaining an Overall score of 59.0 (+3.6 over VLM2Vec-V2) with substantial gains on semantically demanding tasks (e.g., +12.6 on Video-QA).

Jing Ren, Feng Xia

Current artificial intelligence (AI) models often focus on enhancing performance through meticulous parameter tuning and optimization techniques. However, the fundamental design principles behind these models receive comparatively less attention, which can limit our understanding of their potential and constraints. This comprehensive review explores the diverse design inspirations that have shaped modern AI models, i.e., brain-inspired artificial intelligence (BIAI). We present a classification framework that categorizes BIAI approaches into physical structure-inspired and human behavior-inspired models. We also examine the real-world applications where different BIAI models excel, highlighting their practical benefits and deployment challenges. By delving into these areas, we provide new insights and propose future research directions to drive innovation and address current gaps in the field. This review offers researchers and practitioners a comprehensive overview of the BIAI landscape, helping them harness its potential and expedite advancements in AI development.

Jing Ren, Wenhao Zhou, Bowen Li et al.

Implicit Sentiment Analysis (ISA) aims to infer sentiment that is implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring models to perform deeper reasoning over subtle contextual cues. While recent prompting-based methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in ISA, they often rely on majority voting over chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning paths without evaluating their causal validity, making them susceptible to internal biases and spurious correlations. To address this challenge, we propose CAPITAL, a causal prompting framework that incorporates front-door adjustment into CoT reasoning. CAPITAL decomposes the overall causal effect into two components: the influence of the input prompt on the reasoning chains, and the impact of those chains on the final output. These components are estimated using encoder-based clustering and the NWGM approximation, with a contrastive learning objective used to better align the encoder's representation with the LLM's reasoning space. Experiments on benchmark ISA datasets with three LLMs demonstrate that CAPITAL consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines in both accuracy and robustness, particularly under adversarial conditions. This work offers a principled approach to integrating causal inference into LLM prompting and highlights its benefits for bias-aware sentiment reasoning. The source code and case study are available at: https://github.com/whZ62/CAPITAL.

Senqi Yang, Dongyu Zhang, Jing Ren et al.

Metaphors are pervasive in communication, making them crucial for natural language processing (NLP). Previous research on automatic metaphor processing predominantly relies on training data consisting of English samples, which often reflect Western European or North American biases. This cultural skew can lead to an overestimation of model performance and contributions to NLP progress. However, the impact of cultural bias on metaphor processing, particularly in multimodal contexts, remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce MultiMM, a Multicultural Multimodal Metaphor dataset designed for cross-cultural studies of metaphor in Chinese and English. MultiMM consists of 8,461 text-image advertisement pairs, each accompanied by fine-grained annotations, providing a deeper understanding of multimodal metaphors beyond a single cultural domain. Additionally, we propose Sentiment-Enriched Metaphor Detection (SEMD), a baseline model that integrates sentiment embeddings to enhance metaphor comprehension across cultural backgrounds. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of SEMD on metaphor detection and sentiment analysis tasks. We hope this work increases awareness of cultural bias in NLP research and contributes to the development of fairer and more inclusive language models. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DUTIR-YSQ/MultiMM.

Xingyuan Lu, Yuxi Liu, Dongyu Zhang et al.

Metaphors play a pivotal role in expressing emotions, making them crucial for emotional intelligence. The advent of multimodal data and widespread communication has led to a proliferation of multimodal metaphors, amplifying the complexity of emotion classification compared to single-mode scenarios. However, the scarcity of research on constructing multimodal metaphorical fine-grained emotion datasets hampers progress in this domain. Moreover, existing studies predominantly focus on English, overlooking potential variations in emotional nuances across languages. To address these gaps, we introduce a multimodal dataset in Chinese comprising 5,000 text-image pairs of metaphorical advertisements. Each entry is meticulously annotated for metaphor occurrence, domain relations and fine-grained emotion classification encompassing joy, love, trust, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise, anticipation, and neutral. Our dataset is publicly accessible (https://github.com/DUTIR-YSQ/EmoMeta), facilitating further advancements in this burgeoning field.

Jing Ren, Bowen Li, Ziqi Xu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for toxicity assessment in online moderation systems, where fairness across demographic groups is essential for equitable treatment. However, LLMs often produce inconsistent toxicity judgements for subtle expressions, particularly those involving implicit hate speech, revealing underlying biases that are difficult to correct through standard training. This raises a key question that existing approaches often overlook: when should corrective mechanisms be invoked to ensure fair and reliable assessments? To address this, we propose FairToT, an inference-time framework that enhances LLM fairness through prompt-guided toxicity assessment. FairToT identifies cases where demographic-related variation is likely to occur and determines when additional assessment should be applied. In addition, we introduce two interpretable fairness indicators that detect such cases and improve inference consistency without modifying model parameters. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that FairToT reduces group-level disparities while maintaining stable and reliable toxicity predictions, demonstrating that inference-time refinement offers an effective and practical approach for fairness improvement in LLM-based toxicity assessment systems. The source code can be found at https://aisuko.github.io/fair-tot/.

Jing Ren, Bowen Li, Ziqi Xu et al.

Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) extends the RAG paradigm by incorporating structured knowledge from knowledge graphs, enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform more precise and explainable reasoning. While KG-RAG improves factual accuracy in complex tasks, existing KG-RAG models are often severely overconfident, producing high-confidence predictions even when retrieved sub-graphs are incomplete or unreliable, which raises concerns for deployment in high-stakes domains. To address this issue, we propose Ca2KG, a Causality-aware Calibration framework for KG-RAG. Ca2KG integrates counterfactual prompting, which exposes retrieval-dependent uncertainties in knowledge quality and reasoning reliability, with a panel-based re-scoring mechanism that stabilises predictions across interventions. Extensive experiments on two complex QA datasets demonstrate that Ca2KG consistently improves calibration while maintaining or even enhancing predictive accuracy.

Feng Ding, Tingting Wang, Yupeng Gao et al.

Outdated facts in temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) result from exceeding the expiration date of facts, which negatively impact reasoning performance on TKGs. However, existing reasoning methods primarily focus on positive importance of historical facts, neglecting adverse effects of outdated facts. Besides, training on these outdated facts yields extra computational cost. To address these challenges, we propose an outdated fact filtering framework named HALO, which quantifies the temporal validity of historical facts by exploring the half-life theory to filter outdated facts in TKGs. HALO consists of three modules: the temporal fact attention module, the dynamic relation-aware encoder module, and the outdated fact filtering module. Firstly, the temporal fact attention module captures the evolution of historical facts over time to identify relevant facts. Secondly, the dynamic relation-aware encoder module is designed for efficiently predicting the half life of each fact. Finally, we construct a time decay function based on the half-life theory to quantify the temporal validity of facts and filter outdated facts. Experimental results show that HALO outperforms the state-of-the-art TKG reasoning methods on three public datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting and filtering outdated facts (Codes are available at https://github.com/yushuowiki/K-Half/tree/main ).

Bowen Li, Ziqi Xu, Jing Ren et al.

Despite notable advancements in prompting methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), existing strategies still suffer from excessive token usage and limited generalisability across diverse reasoning tasks. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought (ACPS) framework, which leverages structural causal models to infer the causal effect of a query on its answer and adaptively select an appropriate intervention (i.e., standard front-door and conditional front-door adjustments). This design enables generalisable causal reasoning across heterogeneous tasks without task-specific retraining. By replacing verbose CoT with concise Sketch-of-Thought, ACPS enables efficient reasoning that significantly reduces token usage and inference cost. Extensive experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks and LLMs demonstrate that ACPS consistently outperforms existing prompting baselines in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency.

Kexin Ma, Ruochun Jin, Xi Wang et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALMs) have made significant strides in enhancing the accuracy of generated responses.However, existing research often overlooks the data quality issues within retrieval results, often caused by inaccurate existing vector-distance-based retrieval methods.We propose to boost the precision of RALMs' answers from a data quality perspective through the Context-Driven Index Trimming (CDIT) framework, where Context Matching Dependencies (CMDs) are employed as logical data quality rules to capture and regulate the consistency between retrieved contexts.Based on the semantic comprehension capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), CDIT can effectively identify and discard retrieval results that are inconsistent with the query context and further modify indexes in the database, thereby improving answer quality.Experiments demonstrate on challenging question-answering tasks.Also, the flexibility of CDIT is verified through its compatibility with various language models and indexing methods, which offers a promising approach to bolster RALMs' data quality and retrieval precision jointly.

Jing Ren, Jiapeng Du, Bowen Li et al.

Graphs provide a powerful basis for modeling Web-based relational data, with expressive GNNs to support the effective learning in dynamic web environments. However, real-world deployment is hindered by pervasive out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts, where evolving user activity and changing content semantics alter feature distributions and labeling criteria. These shifts often lead to unstable or overconfident predictions, undermining the trustworthiness required for Web4Good applications. Achieving reliable OOD generalization demands principled and interpretable uncertainty estimation; however, existing methods are largely post-hoc, insensitive to distribution shifts, and unable to explain where uncertainty arises especially in high-stakes settings. To address these limitations, we introduce SpIking GrapH predicTive coding (SIGHT), an uncertainty-aware plug-in graph learning module for reliable OOD Generalization. SIGHT performs iterative, error-driven correction over spiking graph states, enabling models to expose internal mismatch signals that reveal where predictions become unreliable. Across multiple graph benchmarks and diverse OOD scenarios, SIGHT consistently enhances predictive accuracy, uncertainty estimation, and interpretability when integrated with GNNs.

Yemeng Liu, Jing Ren, Jianshuo Xu et al.

The spread of the Coronavirus disease-2019 epidemic has caused many courses and exams to be conducted online. The cheating behavior detection model in examination invigilation systems plays a pivotal role in guaranteeing the equality of long-distance examinations. However, cheating behavior is rare, and most researchers do not comprehensively take into account features such as head posture, gaze angle, body posture, and background information in the task of cheating behavior detection. In this paper, we develop and present CHEESE, a CHEating detection framework via multiplE inStancE learning. The framework consists of a label generator that implements weak supervision and a feature encoder to learn discriminative features. In addition, the framework combines body posture and background features extracted by 3D convolution with eye gaze, head posture and facial features captured by OpenFace 2.0. These features are fed into the spatio-temporal graph module by stitching to analyze the spatio-temporal changes in video clips to detect the cheating behaviors. Our experiments on three datasets, UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech and Online Exam Proctoring (OEP), prove the effectiveness of our method as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, and obtain the frame-level AUC score of 87.58% on the OEP dataset.

Nguyen Linh Dan Le, Jing Ren, Ciyuan Peng et al.

Recent years have seen a surge in research focused on leveraging graph learning techniques to detect neurodegenerative diseases. However, existing graph-based approaches typically lack the ability to localize and extract the specific brain regions driving neurodegenerative pathology within the full connectome. Additionally, recent works on multimodal brain graph models often suffer from high computational complexity, limiting their practical use in resource-constrained devices. In this study, we present BrainMAP, a novel multimodal graph learning framework designed for precise and computationally efficient identification of brain regions affected by neurodegenerative diseases. First, BrainMAP utilizes an atlas-driven filtering approach guided by the AAL atlas to pinpoint and extract critical brain subgraphs. Unlike recent state-of-the-art methods, which model the entire brain network, BrainMAP achieves more than 50% reduction in computational overhead by concentrating on disease-relevant subgraphs. Second, we employ an advanced multimodal fusion process comprising cross-node attention to align functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data, coupled with an adaptive gating mechanism to blend and integrate these modalities dynamically. Experimental results demonstrate that BrainMAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in computational efficiency, without compromising predictive accuracy.

Jing Ren, Tao Tang, Hong Jia et al.

As data continues to grow in volume and complexity across domains such as finance, manufacturing, and healthcare, effective anomaly detection is essential for identifying irregular patterns that may signal critical issues. Recently, foundation models (FMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for advancing anomaly detection. They have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in enhancing anomaly identification, generating detailed data descriptions, and providing visual explanations. This survey presents the first comprehensive review of recent advancements in FM-based anomaly detection. We propose a novel taxonomy that classifies FMs into three categories based on their roles in anomaly detection tasks, i.e., as encoders, detectors, or interpreters. We provide a systematic analysis of state-of-the-art methods and discuss key challenges in leveraging FMs for improved anomaly detection. We also outline future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.

Jing Ren, Mingliang Hou, Zhixuan Liu et al.

Graph anomaly detection is a popular and vital task in various real-world scenarios, which has been studied for several decades. Recently, many studies extending deep learning-based methods have shown preferable performance on graph anomaly detection. However, existing methods are lack of efficiency that is definitely necessary for embedded devices. Towards this end, we propose an Efficient Anomaly detection model on heterogeneous Graphs via contrastive LEarning (EAGLE) by contrasting abnormal nodes with normal ones in terms of their distances to the local context. The proposed method first samples instance pairs on meta path-level for contrastive learning. Then, a graph autoencoder-based model is applied to learn informative node embeddings in an unsupervised way, which will be further combined with the discriminator to predict the anomaly scores of nodes. Experimental results show that EAGLE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three heterogeneous network datasets.

Tianqi Guo, Liping Chen, Ciyuan Peng et al.

Understanding the evolution of brain functional networks over time is of great significance for the analysis of cognitive mechanisms and the diagnosis of neurological diseases. Existing methods often have difficulty in capturing the temporal evolution characteristics of connections between specific functional communities. To this end, this paper proposes a new path-level trajectory modeling framework (NeuroPathNet) to characterize the dynamic behavior of connection pathways between brain functional partitions. Based on medically supported static partitioning schemes (such as Yeo and Smith ICA), we extract the time series of connection strengths between each pair of functional partitions and model them using a temporal neural network. We validate the model performance on three public functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) datasets, and the results show that it outperforms existing mainstream methods in multiple indicators. This study can promote the development of dynamic graph learning methods for brain network analysis, and provide possible clinical applications for the diagnosis of neurological diseases.

Guixian Zhang, Guan Yuan, Ziqi Xu et al.

Cognitive diagnostics in the Web-based Intelligent Education System (WIES) aims to assess students' mastery of knowledge concepts from heterogeneous, noisy interactions. Recent work has tried to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for cognitive diagnosis, yet LLMs struggle with structured data and are prone to noise-induced misjudgments. Specially, WIES's open environment continuously attracts new students and produces vast amounts of response logs, exacerbating the data imbalance and noise issues inherent in traditional educational systems. To address these challenges, we propose DLLM, a Diffusion-based LLM framework for noise-robust cognitive diagnosis. DLLM first constructs independent subgraphs based on response correctness, then applies relation augmentation alignment module to mitigate data imbalance. The two subgraph representations are then fused and aligned with LLM-derived, semantically augmented representations. Importantly, before each alignment step, DLLM employs a two-stage denoising diffusion module to eliminate intrinsic noise while assisting structural representation alignment. Specifically, unconditional denoising diffusion first removes erroneous information, followed by conditional denoising diffusion based on graph-guided to eliminate misleading information. Finally, the noise-robust representation that integrates semantic knowledge and structural information is fed into existing cognitive diagnosis models for prediction. Experimental results on three publicly available web-based educational platform datasets demonstrate that our DLLM achieves optimal predictive performance across varying noise levels, which demonstrates that DLLM achieves noise robustness while effectively leveraging semantic knowledge from LLM.

Niharika Tewari, Nguyen Linh Dan Le, Mujie Liu et al.

Dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder with multiple etiologies, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal dementia, and vascular dementia. Its clinical and biological heterogeneity makes diagnosis and subtype differentiation highly challenging. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently shown strong potential in modeling brain connectivity, but their limited robustness, data scarcity, and lack of interpretability constrain clinical adoption. Explainable Graph Neural Networks (XGNNs) have emerged to address these barriers by combining graph-based learning with interpretability, enabling the identification of disease-relevant biomarkers, analysis of brain network disruptions, and provision of transparent insights for clinicians. This paper presents the first comprehensive review dedicated to XGNNs in dementia research. We examine their applications across Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and multi-disease diagnosis. A taxonomy of explainability methods tailored for dementia-related tasks is introduced, alongside comparisons of existing models in clinical scenarios. We also highlight challenges such as limited generalizability, underexplored domains, and the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) for early detection. By outlining both progress and open problems, this review aims to guide future work toward trustworthy, clinically meaningful, and scalable use of XGNNs in dementia research.

Xiaohan Chen, Hongrui Gu, Cunshi Wang et al.

With the rapid increase in the number of artificial satellites, astronomical imaging is experiencing growing interference. When these satellites reflect sunlight, they produce streak-like artifacts in photometry images. Such satellite trails can introduce false sources and cause significant photometric errors. As a result, accurately identifying the positions of satellite trails in observational data has become essential. In this work, we propose a satellite trail detection model that combines the U-Net deep neural network for image segmentation with the Line Segment Detector (LSD) algorithm. The model is trained on 375 simulated images of satellite trails, generated using data from the Mini-SiTian Array. Experimental results show that for trails with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) greater than 3, the detection rate exceeds 99. Additionally, when applied to real observational data from the Mini-SiTian Array, the model achieves a recall of 79.57 and a precision of 74.56.

Jing Ren, Weiqi Wang

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are increasingly used in academic writing, yet issues such as incorrect or fabricated references raise ethical concerns. Moreover, current content quality evaluations often rely on subjective human judgment, which is labor-intensive and lacks objectivity, potentially compromising the consistency and reliability. In this study, to provide a quantitative evaluation and enhance research proposal writing capabilities of LLMs, we propose two key evaluation metrics--content quality and reference validity--and an iterative prompting method based on the scores derived from these two metrics. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed metrics provide an objective, quantitative framework for assessing ChatGPT's writing performance. Additionally, iterative prompting significantly enhances content quality while reducing reference inaccuracies and fabrications, addressing critical ethical challenges in academic contexts.

Mujie Liu, Mengchu Zhu, Qichao Dong et al.

Psychiatric disorders involve complex neural activity changes, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data serving as key diagnostic evidence. However, data scarcity and the diverse nature of fMRI information pose significant challenges. While graph-based self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have shown promise in brain network analysis, they primarily focus on time-domain representations, often overlooking the rich information embedded in the frequency domain. To overcome these limitations, we propose Frequency-Enhanced Network (FENet), a novel SSL framework specially designed for fMRI data that integrates time-domain and frequency-domain information to improve psychiatric disorder detection in small-sample datasets. FENet constructs multi-view brain networks based on the inherent properties of fMRI data, explicitly incorporating frequency information into the learning process of representation. Additionally, it employs domain-specific encoders to capture temporal-spectral characteristics, including an efficient frequency-domain encoder that highlights disease-relevant frequency features. Finally, FENet introduces a domain consistency-guided learning objective, which balances the utilization of diverse information and generates frequency-enhanced brain graph representations. Experiments on two real-world medical datasets demonstrate that FENet outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining strong performance in minimal data conditions. Furthermore, we analyze the correlation between various frequency-domain features and psychiatric disorders, emphasizing the critical role of high-frequency information in disorder detection.

Ruiqi Wang, Wenjun Li, Jing Ren et al.

The deployment of large-scale LoRaWAN networks requires jointly optimizing conflicting metrics like Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and Energy Efficiency (EE) by dynamically allocating transmission parameters, including Carrier Frequency, Spreading Factor, and Transmission Power. Existing methods often oversimplify this challenge, focusing on a single metric or lacking the adaptability needed for dynamic channel environments, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose two online learning-based resource allocation frameworks that intelligently navigate the PDR-EE trade-off. Our foundational proposal, D-LoRa, is a fully distributed framework that models the problem as a Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit. By decomposing the joint parameter selection and employing specialized, disaggregated reward functions, D-LoRa dramatically reduces learning complexity and enables nodes to autonomously adapt to network dynamics. To further enhance performance in LoRaWAN networks, we introduce CD-LoRa, a hybrid framework that integrates a lightweight, centralized initialization phase to perform a one-time, quasi-optimal channel assignment and action space pruning, thereby accelerating subsequent distributed learning. Extensive simulations and real-world field experiments demonstrate the superiority of our frameworks, showing that D-LoRa excels in non-stationary environments while CD-LoRa achieves the fastest convergence in stationary conditions. In physical deployments, our methods outperform state-of-the-art baselines, improving PDR by up to 10.8% and EE by 26.1%, confirming their practical effectiveness for scalable and efficient LoRaWAN networks.

Jing Ren, Suyu Ma, Hong Jia et al.

Detecting driver fatigue is critical for road safety, as drowsy driving remains a leading cause of traffic accidents. Many existing solutions rely on computationally demanding deep learning models, which result in high latency and are unsuitable for embedded robotic devices with limited resources (such as intelligent vehicles/cars) where rapid detection is necessary to prevent accidents. This paper introduces LiteFat, a lightweight spatio-temporal graph learning model designed to detect driver fatigue efficiently while maintaining high accuracy and low computational demands. LiteFat involves converting streaming video data into spatio-temporal graphs (STG) using facial landmark detection, which focuses on key motion patterns and reduces unnecessary data processing. LiteFat uses MobileNet to extract facial features and create a feature matrix for the STG. A lightweight spatio-temporal graph neural network is then employed to identify signs of fatigue with minimal processing and low latency. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that LiteFat performs competitively while significantly decreasing computational complexity and latency as compared to current state-of-the-art methods. This work enables the development of real-time, resource-efficient human fatigue detection systems that can be implemented upon embedded robotic devices.

Feng Xia, Ciyuan Peng, Jing Ren et al.

Graph learning has rapidly evolved into a critical subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Its development began with early graph-theoretic methods, gaining significant momentum with the advent of graph neural networks (GNNs). Over the past decade, progress in scalable architectures, dynamic graph modeling, multimodal learning, generative AI, explainable AI (XAI), and responsible AI has broadened the applicability of graph learning to various challenging environments. Graph learning is significant due to its ability to model complex, non-Euclidean relationships that traditional machine learning struggles to capture, thus better supporting real-world applications ranging from drug discovery and fraud detection to recommender systems and scientific reasoning. However, challenges like scalability, generalization, heterogeneity, interpretability, and trustworthiness must be addressed to unlock its full potential. This survey provides a comprehensive introduction to graph learning, focusing on key dimensions including scalable, temporal, multimodal, generative, explainable, and responsible graph learning. We review state-of-the-art techniques for efficiently handling large-scale graphs, capturing dynamic temporal dependencies, integrating heterogeneous data modalities, generating novel graph samples, and enhancing interpretability to foster trust and transparency. We also explore ethical considerations, such as privacy and fairness, to ensure responsible deployment of graph learning models. Additionally, we identify and discuss emerging topics, highlighting recent integration of graph learning and other AI paradigms and offering insights into future directions. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of graph learning.

Biao Zhang, Jing Ren, Peter Wonka

Neural representations of 3D data have been widely adopted across various applications, particularly in recent work leveraging coordinate-based networks to model scalar or vector fields. However, these approaches face inherent challenges, such as handling thin structures and non-watertight geometries, which limit their flexibility and accuracy. In contrast, we propose a novel geometric data representation that models geometry as distributions-a powerful representation that makes no assumptions about surface genus, connectivity, or boundary conditions. Our approach uses diffusion models with a novel network architecture to learn surface point distributions, capturing fine-grained geometric details. We evaluate our representation qualitatively and quantitatively across various object types, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving high geometric fidelity. Additionally, we explore applications using our representation, such as textured mesh representation, neural surface compression, dynamic object modeling, and rendering, highlighting its potential to advance 3D geometric learning.

Jing Ren, Pei Wang, Hanlong Li et al.

In recent years, terrestrial laser scanning technology has been widely used to collect tree point cloud data, aiding in measurements of diameter at breast height, biomass, and other forestry survey data. Since a single scan from terrestrial laser systems captures data from only one angle, multiple scans must be registered and fused to obtain complete tree point cloud data. This paper proposes a marker-free automatic registration method for single-tree point clouds based on similar tetrahedras. First, two point clouds from two scans of the same tree are used to generate tree skeletons, and key point sets are constructed from these skeletons. Tetrahedra are then filtered and matched according to similarity principles, with the vertices of these two matched tetrahedras selected as matching point pairs, thus completing the coarse registration of the point clouds from the two scans. Subsequently, the ICP method is applied to the coarse-registered leaf point clouds to obtain fine registration parameters, completing the precise registration of the two tree point clouds. Experiments were conducted using terrestrial laser scanning data from eight trees, each from different species and with varying shapes. The proposed method was evaluated using RMSE and Hausdorff distance, compared against the traditional ICP and NDT methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms both ICP and NDT in registration accuracy, achieving speeds up to 593 times and 113 times faster than ICP and NDT, respectively. In summary, the proposed method shows good robustness in single-tree point cloud registration, with significant advantages in accuracy and speed compared to traditional ICP and NDT methods, indicating excellent application prospects in practical registration scenarios.

Jiaying Liu, Feng Xia, Xu Feng et al.

Anomaly detection is one of the most active research areas in various critical domains, such as healthcare, fintech, and public security. However, little attention has been paid to scholarly data, i.e., anomaly detection in a citation network. Citation is considered as one of the most crucial metrics to evaluate the impact of scientific research, which may be gamed in multiple ways. Therefore, anomaly detection in citation networks is of significant importance to identify manipulation and inflation of citations. To address this open issue, we propose a novel deep graph learning model, namely GLAD (Graph Learning for Anomaly Detection), to identify anomalies in citation networks. GLAD incorporates text semantic mining to network representation learning by adding both node attributes and link attributes via graph neural networks. It exploits not only the relevance of citation contents but also hidden relationships between papers. Within the GLAD framework, we propose an algorithm called CPU (Citation PUrpose) to discover the purpose of citation based on citation texts. The performance of GLAD is validated through a simulated anomalous citation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAD on the anomalous citation detection task.

Jiaying Liu, Jing Ren, Wenqing Zheng et al.

In this work, we demonstrate a novel system, namely Web of Scholars, which integrates state-of-the-art mining techniques to search, mine, and visualize complex networks behind scholars in the field of Computer Science. Relying on the knowledge graph, it provides services for fast, accurate, and intelligent semantic querying as well as powerful recommendations. In addition, in order to realize information sharing, it provides an open API to be served as the underlying architecture for advanced functions. Web of Scholars takes advantage of knowledge graph, which means that it will be able to access more knowledge if more search exist. It can be served as a useful and interoperable tool for scholars to conduct in-depth analysis within Science of Science.

Xiangtai Chen, Tao Tang, Jing Ren et al.

With the explosive growth of new graduates with research degrees every year, unprecedented challenges arise for early-career researchers to find a job at a suitable institution. This study aims to understand the behavior of academic job transition and hence recommend suitable institutions for PhD graduates. Specifically, we design a deep learning model to predict the career move of early-career researchers and provide suggestions. The design is built on top of scholarly/academic networks, which contains abundant information about scientific collaboration among scholars and institutions. We construct a heterogeneous scholarly network to facilitate the exploring of the behavior of career moves and the recommendation of institutions for scholars. We devise an unsupervised learning model called HAI (Heterogeneous graph Attention InfoMax) which aggregates attention mechanism and mutual information for institution recommendation. Moreover, we propose scholar attention and meta-path attention to discover the hidden relationships between several meta-paths. With these mechanisms, HAI provides ordered recommendations with explainability. We evaluate HAI upon a real-world dataset against baseline methods. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Jing Ren, Feng Xia, Yemeng Liu et al.

Anomaly detection is a popular and vital task in various research contexts, which has been studied for several decades. To ensure the safety of people's lives and assets, video surveillance has been widely deployed in various public spaces, such as crossroads, elevators, hospitals, banks, and even in private homes. Deep learning has shown its capacity in a number of domains, ranging from acoustics, images, to natural language processing. However, it is non-trivial to devise intelligent video anomaly detection systems cause anomalies significantly differ from each other in different application scenarios. There are numerous advantages if such intelligent systems could be realised in our daily lives, such as saving human resources in a large degree, reducing financial burden on the government, and identifying the anomalous behaviours timely and accurately. Recently, many studies on extending deep learning models for solving anomaly detection problems have emerged, resulting in beneficial advances in deep video anomaly detection techniques. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of deep learning-based methods to detect the video anomalies from a new perspective. Specifically, we summarise the opportunities and challenges of deep learning models on video anomaly detection tasks, respectively. We put forth several potential future research directions of intelligent video anomaly detection system in various application domains. Moreover, we summarise the characteristics and technical problems in current deep learning methods for video anomaly detection.

Damai Dai, Jing Ren, Shuang Zeng et al.

Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) requires extracting relations expressed within and across sentences. Recent works show that graph-based methods, usually constructing a document-level graph that captures document-aware interactions, can obtain useful entity representations thus helping tackle document-level RE. These methods either focus more on the entire graph, or pay more attention to a part of the graph, e.g., paths between the target entity pair. However, we find that document-level RE may benefit from focusing on both of them simultaneously. Therefore, to obtain more comprehensive entity representations, we propose the Coarse-to-Fine Entity Representation model (CFER) that adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy involving two phases. First, CFER uses graph neural networks to integrate global information in the entire graph at a coarse level. Next, CFER utilizes the global information as a guidance to selectively aggregate path information between the target entity pair at a fine level. In classification, we combine the entity representations from both two levels into more comprehensive representations for relation extraction. Experimental results on two document-level RE datasets, DocRED and CDR, show that CFER outperforms existing models and is robust to the uneven label distribution.

Jin Xu, Shuo Yu, Ke Sun et al.

Multivariate relations are general in various types of networks, such as biological networks, social networks, transportation networks, and academic networks. Due to the principle of ternary closures and the trend of group formation, the multivariate relationships in social networks are complex and rich. Therefore, in graph learning tasks of social networks, the identification and utilization of multivariate relationship information are more important. Existing graph learning methods are based on the neighborhood information diffusion mechanism, which often leads to partial omission or even lack of multivariate relationship information, and ultimately affects the accuracy and execution efficiency of the task. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the multivariate relationship aggregation learning (MORE) method, which can effectively capture the multivariate relationship information in the network environment. By aggregating node attribute features and structural features, MORE achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence speed. We conducted experiments on one citation network and five social networks. The experimental results show that the MORE model has higher accuracy than the GCN (Graph Convolutional Network) model in node classification tasks, and can significantly reduce time cost.

Lei Wang, Jing Ren, Bo Xu et al.

Link prediction plays an important role in network analysis and applications. Recently, approaches for link prediction have evolved from traditional similarity-based algorithms into embedding-based algorithms. However, most existing approaches fail to exploit the fact that real-world networks are different from random networks. In particular, real-world networks are known to contain motifs, natural network building blocks reflecting the underlying network-generating processes. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding algorithm that incorporates network motifs to capture higher-order structures in the network. To evaluate its effectiveness for link prediction, experiments were conducted on three types of networks: social networks, biological networks, and academic networks. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms both the traditional similarity-based algorithms by 20% and the state-of-the-art embedding-based algorithms by 19%.

Yiqun Wang, Jing Ren, Dong-Ming Yan et al.

We propose a novel framework for computing descriptors for characterizing points on three-dimensional surfaces. First, we present a new non-learned feature that uses graph wavelets to decompose the Dirichlet energy on a surface. We call this new feature wavelet energy decomposition signature (WEDS). Second, we propose a new multiscale graph convolutional network (MGCN) to transform a non-learned feature to a more discriminative descriptor. Our results show that the new descriptor WEDS is more discriminative than the current state-of-the-art non-learned descriptors and that the combination of WEDS and MGCN is better than the state-of-the-art learned descriptors. An important design criterion for our descriptor is the robustness to different surface discretizations including triangulations with varying numbers of vertices. Our results demonstrate that previous graph convolutional networks significantly overfit to a particular resolution or even a particular triangulation, but MGCN generalizes well to different surface discretizations. In addition, MGCN is compatible with previous descriptors and it can also be used to improve the performance of other descriptors, such as the heat kernel signature, the wave kernel signature, or the local point signature.

Quan Yu, Jing Ren, Jiyan Zhang et al.

The coming 5G networks have been enabling the creation of a wide variety of new services and applications which demand a new network security architecture. Immunology is the study of the immune system in vertebrates (including humans) which protects us from infection through various lines of defence. By studying the resemblance between the immune system and network security system, we acquire some inspirations from immunology and distill some guidelines for the design of network security architecture. We present a philosophical design principle, that is maintaining the balance between security and availability. Then, we derive two methodological principles: 1) achieving situation-awareness and fast response through community cooperation among heterogeneous nodes, and 2) Enhancing defense capability through consistently contesting with invaders in a real environment and actively mutating/evolving attack strategies. We also present a reference architecture designed based on the principles.

Danny Ho, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Xishi Huang et al.

Accurate estimation such as cost estimation, quality estimation and risk analysis is a major issue in management. We propose a patent pending soft computing framework to tackle this challenging problem. Our generic framework is independent of the nature and type of estimation. It consists of neural network, fuzzy logic, and an algorithmic estimation model. We made use of the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and Function Point Analysis as the algorithmic models and validated the accuracy of the Neuro-Fuzzy Algorithmic (NFA) Model in software cost estimation using industrial project data. Our model produces more accurate estimation than using an algorithmic model alone. We also discuss the prototypes of our tools that implement the NFA Model. We conclude with our roadmap and direction to enrich the model in tackling different estimation challenges.

Xishi Huang, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho et al.

Good software cost prediction is important for effective project management such as budgeting, project planning and control. In this paper, we present an intelligent approach to software cost prediction. By integrating the neuro-fuzzy technique with the well-accepted COCOMO model, our approach can make the best use of both expert knowledge and historical project data. Its major advantages include learning ability, good interpretability, and robustness to imprecise and uncertain inputs. The validation using industry project data shows that the model greatly improves prediction accuracy in comparison with the COCOMO model.