Jianyuan Ni

Jianyuan Ni, Anne H. H. Ngu, Yan Yan

Wearable sensor-based Human Action Recognition (HAR) has achieved remarkable success recently. However, the accuracy performance of wearable sensor-based HAR is still far behind the ones from the visual modalities-based system (i.e., RGB video, skeleton, and depth). Diverse input modalities can provide complementary cues and thus improve the accuracy performance of HAR, but how to take advantage of multi-modal data on wearable sensor-based HAR has rarely been explored. Currently, wearable devices, i.e., smartwatches, can only capture limited kinds of non-visual modality data. This hinders the multi-modal HAR association as it is unable to simultaneously use both visual and non-visual modality data. Another major challenge lies in how to efficiently utilize multimodal data on wearable devices with their limited computation resources. In this work, we propose a novel Progressive Skeleton-to-sensor Knowledge Distillation (PSKD) model which utilizes only time-series data, i.e., accelerometer data, from a smartwatch for solving the wearable sensor-based HAR problem. Specifically, we construct multiple teacher models using data from both teacher (human skeleton sequence) and student (time-series accelerometer data) modalities. In addition, we propose an effective progressive learning scheme to eliminate the performance gap between teacher and student models. We also designed a novel loss function called Adaptive-Confidence Semantic (ACS), to allow the student model to adaptively select either one of the teacher models or the ground-truth label it needs to mimic. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PSKD method, we conduct extensive experiments on Berkeley-MHAD, UTD-MHAD, and MMAct datasets. The results confirm that the proposed PSKD method has competitive performance compared to the previous mono sensor-based HAR methods.

Rong Fu, Jiekai Wu, Haiyun Wei et al.

Rapid, large-scale 3D reconstruction from multi-date satellite imagery is vital for environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster response, yet remains difficult due to illumination changes, sensor heterogeneity, and the cost of per-scene optimization. We introduce SwiftGS, a meta-learned system that reconstructs 3D surfaces in a single forward pass by predicting geometry-radiation-decoupled Gaussian primitives together with a lightweight SDF, replacing expensive per-scene fitting with episodic training that captures transferable priors. The model couples a differentiable physics graph for projection, illumination, and sensor response with spatial gating that blends sparse Gaussian detail and global SDF structure, and incorporates semantic-geometric fusion, conditional lightweight task heads, and multi-view supervision from a frozen geometric teacher under an uncertainty-aware multi-task loss. At inference, SwiftGS operates zero-shot with optional compact calibration and achieves accurate DSM reconstruction and view-consistent rendering at significantly reduced computational cost, with ablations highlighting the benefits of the hybrid representation, physics-aware rendering, and episodic meta-training.

Yulin Xu, Chunqi Guo, Yuanzhen Shuai et al.

In this study, we tackle Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) via a Relational Retrieval perspective, explicitly coupling labeled and unlabeled data through bidirectional knowledge transfer. While existing methods treat these sources separately, missing valuable interaction opportunities, we propose Relational Pattern Consistency (RPC) that enables mutual enhancement. RPC employs One-vs-All classifiers for soft ID/OOD decomposition, then introduces two mechanisms: (i) for known-class preservation, we transfer semantic behavioral alignment; (ii) for category discovery, we leverage the insight that samples from the same category maintain invariant relationships with known-class prototypes, transforming unreliable pseudo-labeling into well-defined relational pattern matching. This bidirectional design allows labeled data to guide unlabeled learning while discovering novel categories through their collective relational signatures. Extensive experiments demonstrate RPC achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained benchmarks.

Tailong Luo, Hao Li, Rong Fu et al.

With the growing prevalence of multimodal news content, effective news topic classification demands models capable of jointly understanding and reasoning over heterogeneous data such as text and images. Existing methods often process modalities independently or employ simplistic fusion strategies, limiting their ability to capture complex cross-modal interactions and leverage external knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose MultiPress, a novel three-stage multi-agent framework for multimodal news classification. MultiPress integrates specialized agents for multimodal perception, retrieval-augmented reasoning, and gated fusion scoring, followed by a reward-driven iterative optimization mechanism. We validate MultiPress on a newly constructed large-scale multimodal news dataset, demonstrating significant improvements over strong baselines and highlighting the effectiveness of modular multi-agent collaboration and retrieval-augmented reasoning in enhancing classification accuracy and interpretability.

Qiang Yi, Yangfan He, Jianhui Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate creative and engaging narratives from user-specified input, but maintaining coherence and emotional depth throughout these AI-generated stories remains a challenge. In this work, we propose SCORE, a framework for Story Coherence and Retrieval Enhancement, designed to detect and resolve narrative inconsistencies. By tracking key item statuses and generating episode summaries, SCORE uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach to identify related episodes and enhance the overall story structure. Experimental results from testing multiple LLM-generated stories demonstrate that SCORE significantly improves the consistency and stability of narrative coherence compared to baseline GPT models, providing a more robust method for evaluating and refining AI-generated narratives.

Jianyuan Ni, Hao Tang, Syed Tousiful Haque et al.

The combination of increased life expectancy and falling birth rates is resulting in an aging population. Wearable Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (WSHAR) emerges as a promising assistive technology to support the daily lives of older individuals, unlocking vast potential for human-centric applications. However, recent surveys in WSHAR have been limited, focusing either solely on deep learning approaches or on a single sensor modality. In real life, our human interact with the world in a multi-sensory way, where diverse information sources are intricately processed and interpreted to accomplish a complex and unified sensing system. To give machines similar intelligence, multimodal machine learning, which merges data from various sources, has become a popular research area with recent advancements. In this study, we present a comprehensive survey from a novel perspective on how to leverage multimodal learning to WSHAR domain for newcomers and researchers. We begin by presenting the recent sensor modalities as well as deep learning approaches in HAR. Subsequently, we explore the techniques used in present multimodal systems for WSHAR. This includes inter-multimodal systems which utilize sensor modalities from both visual and non-visual systems and intra-multimodal systems that simply take modalities from non-visual systems. After that, we focus on current multimodal learning approaches that have applied to solve some of the challenges existing in WSHAR. Specifically, we make extra efforts by connecting the existing multimodal literature from other domains, such as computer vision and natural language processing, with current WSHAR area. Finally, we identify the corresponding challenges and potential research direction in current WSHAR area for further improvement.

Yangfan He, Jianhui Wang, Yijin Wang et al.

Current image generation systems produce high-quality images but struggle with ambiguous user prompts, making interpretation of actual user intentions difficult. Many users must modify their prompts several times to ensure the generated images meet their expectations. While some methods focus on enhancing prompts to make the generated images fit user needs, the model is still hard to understand users' real needs, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the visual parameter-tuning process, making the model user-friendly for individuals without specialized knowledge and better understand user needs. We propose a human-machine co-adaption strategy using mutual information between the user's prompts and the pictures under modification as the optimizing target to make the system better adapt to user needs. We find that an improved model can reduce the necessity for multiple rounds of adjustments. We also collect multi-round dialogue datasets with prompts and images pairs and user intent. Various experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in our proposed dataset. Our dataset and annotation tools will be available.

Yingjie He, Zhaolu Kang, Kehan Jiang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at semantic understanding, yet their ability to reconstruct internal structure from scrambled inputs remains underexplored. Sentence-level restoration is ill-posed for automated evaluation because multiple valid word orders often exist. We introduce OrderProbe, a deterministic benchmark for structural reconstruction using fixed four-character expressions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have a unique canonical order and thus support exact-match scoring. We further propose a diagnostic framework that evaluates models beyond recovery accuracy, including semantic fidelity, logical validity, consistency, robustness sensitivity, and information density. Experiments on twelve widely used LLMs show that structural reconstruction remains difficult even for frontier systems: zero-shot recovery frequently falls below 35%. We also observe a consistent dissociation between semantic recall and structural planning, suggesting that structural robustness is not an automatic byproduct of semantic competence.

Jiekai Wu, Rong Fu, Chuangqi Li et al.

Remote sensing segmentation in real deployment is inherently continual: new semantic categories emerge, and acquisition conditions shift across seasons, cities, and sensors. Despite recent progress, many incremental approaches still treat training steps as isolated updates, which leaves representation drift and forgetting insufficiently controlled. We present ProtoFlow, a time-aware prototype dynamics framework that models class prototypes as trajectories and learns their evolution with an explicit temporal vector field. By jointly enforcing low-curvature motion and inter-class separation, ProtoFlow stabilizes prototype geometry throughout incremental learning. Experiments on standard class- and domain-incremental remote sensing benchmarks show consistent gains over strong baselines, including up to 1.5-2.0 points improvement in mIoUall, together with reduced forgetting. These results suggest that explicitly modeling temporal prototype evolution is a practical and interpretable strategy for robust continual remote sensing segmentation.

Yanxiang Huang, Guohua Gao, Zhaoyang Wei et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) face a fundamental dilemma in video reasoning: they are caught between the prohibitive computational costs of verbose reasoning and the hallucination risks of efficient, ungrounded approaches. To resolve this, we introduce the Chain of Evidence (CoE), a novel framework that architecturally decouples and co-optimizes perceptual grounding and reasoning efficiency. CoE incorporates two core innovations: (1) A lightweight Evidence Grounding Module (EGM) that acts as a query-guided filter, dynamically identifying and extracting a compact set of high-fidelity visual evidence; and (2) An Evidence-Anchoring Protocol optimized via Reinforcement Learning. Crucially, we design a composite reward mechanism that enforces process alignment, compelling the model to strictly reference identified temporal anchors during deduction, thereby mitigating hallucinations. To enable this, we construct CoE-Instruct, a large-scale dataset (164k samples) featuring a novel dual-annotation schema for separate perception and reasoning supervision. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks, including Video-MME, MVBench, and VSI-Bench, demonstrate that CoE-enhanced models establish a new state-of-the-art. They significantly outperform existing methods in accuracy, proving CoE to be a powerful and practical paradigm for reliable video understanding.

Zhenkai Qin, Baozhong Wei, Caifeng Gao et al.

Time series forecasting is a critical task in domains such as energy, finance, and meteorology, where accurate long-term predictions are essential. While Transformer-based models have shown promise in capturing temporal dependencies, their application to extended sequences is limited by computational inefficiencies and limited generalization. In this study, we propose KEDformer, a knowledge extraction-driven framework that integrates seasonal-trend decomposition to address these challenges. KEDformer leverages knowledge extraction methods that focus on the most informative weights within the self-attention mechanism to reduce computational overhead. Additionally, the proposed KEDformer framework decouples time series into seasonal and trend components. This decomposition enhances the model's ability to capture both short-term fluctuations and long-term patterns. Extensive experiments on five public datasets from energy, transportation, and weather domains demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of KEDformer, providing an efficient solution for long-term time series forecasting.

Jianyuan Ni, Raunak Sarbajna, Yang Liu et al.

Human activity recognition (HAR) based on multi-modal approach has been recently shown to improve the accuracy performance of HAR. However, restricted computational resources associated with wearable devices, i.e., smartwatch, failed to directly support such advanced methods. To tackle this issue, this study introduces an end-to-end Vision-to-Sensor Knowledge Distillation (VSKD) framework. In this VSKD framework, only time-series data, i.e., accelerometer data, is needed from wearable devices during the testing phase. Therefore, this framework will not only reduce the computational demands on edge devices, but also produce a learning model that closely matches the performance of the computational expensive multi-modal approach. In order to retain the local temporal relationship and facilitate visual deep learning models, we first convert time-series data to two-dimensional images by applying the Gramian Angular Field ( GAF) based encoding method. We adopted ResNet18 and multi-scale TRN with BN-Inception as teacher and student network in this study, respectively. A novel loss function, named Distance and Angle-wised Semantic Knowledge loss (DASK), is proposed to mitigate the modality variations between the vision and the sensor domain. Extensive experimental results on UTD-MHAD, MMAct, and Berkeley-MHAD datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed VSKD model which can deployed on wearable sensors.