Lan Li

Liri Fang, Lan Li, Yiren Liu et al.

Entity resolution has been an essential and well-studied task in data cleaning research for decades. Existing work has discussed the feasibility of utilizing pre-trained language models to perform entity resolution and achieved promising results. However, few works have discussed injecting domain knowledge to improve the performance of pre-trained language models on entity resolution tasks. In this study, we propose Knowledge Augmented Entity Resolution (KAER), a novel framework named for augmenting pre-trained language models with external knowledge for entity resolution. We discuss the results of utilizing different knowledge augmentation and prompting methods to improve entity resolution performance. Our model improves on Ditto, the existing state-of-the-art entity resolution method. In particular, 1) KAER performs more robustly and achieves better results on "dirty data", and 2) with more general knowledge injection, KAER outperforms the existing baseline models on the textual dataset and dataset from the online product domain. 3) KAER achieves competitive results on highly domain-specific datasets, such as citation datasets, requiring the injection of expert knowledge in future work.

Jingqun Tang, Wenming Qian, Luchuan Song et al.

Text detection and recognition are essential components of a modern OCR system. Most OCR approaches attempt to obtain accurate bounding boxes of text at the detection stage, which is used as the input of the text recognition stage. We observe that when using tight text bounding boxes as input, a text recognizer frequently fails to achieve optimal performance due to the inconsistency between bounding boxes and deep representations of text recognition. In this paper, we propose Box Adjuster, a reinforcement learning-based method for adjusting the shape of each text bounding box to make it more compatible with text recognition models. Additionally, when dealing with cross-domain problems such as synthetic-to-real, the proposed method significantly reduces mismatches in domain distribution between the source and target domains. Experiments demonstrate that the performance of end-to-end text recognition systems can be improved when using the adjusted bounding boxes as the ground truths for training. Specifically, on several benchmark datasets for scene text understanding, the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art text spotters by an average of 2.0% F-Score on end-to-end text recognition tasks and 4.6% F-Score on domain adaptation tasks.

Lan Li, Tao Hu, Da-Wei Zhou et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continually learn new categories without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Vision-language models such as CLIP offer strong transferable representations via multi-modal supervision, making them promising for CIL. However, applying CLIP to CIL poses two major challenges: (1) adapting to downstream tasks often requires additional learnable modules, increasing model complexity and susceptibility to forgetting; and (2) while multi-modal representations offer complementary strengths, existing methods have yet to fully realize their potential in effectively integrating visual and textual modalities. To address these issues, we propose BOFA (Bridge-layer Orthogonal Fusion for Adaptation), a novel framework for CIL. BOFA confines all model adaptation exclusively to CLIP's existing cross-modal bridge-layer, thereby adding no extra parameters or inference cost. To prevent forgetting within this layer, it leverages Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion, a mechanism that constrains parameter updates to a low-rank ``safe subspace" mathematically constructed to be orthogonal to past task features. This ensures stable knowledge accumulation without data replay. Furthermore, BOFA employs a cross-modal hybrid prototype that synergizes stable textual prototypes with visual counterparts derived from our stably adapted bridge-layer, enhancing classification performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that BOFA achieves superior accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods.

Lan Li, Liri Fang, Yiren Liu et al.

Entity resolution (ER) is the process of determining whether two representations refer to the same real-world entity and plays a crucial role in data curation and data cleaning. Recent studies have introduced the KAER framework, aiming to improve pre-trained language models by augmenting external knowledge. However, identifying and documenting the external knowledge that is being augmented and understanding its contribution to the model's predictions have received little to no attention in the research community. This paper addresses this gap by introducing T-KAER, the Transparency-enhanced Knowledge-Augmented Entity Resolution framework. To enhance transparency, three Transparency-related Questions (T-Qs) have been proposed: T-Q(1): What is the experimental process for matching results based on data inputs? T-Q(2): Which semantic information does KAER augment in the raw data inputs? T-Q(3): Which semantic information of the augmented data inputs influences the predictions? To address the T-Qs, T-KAER is designed to improve transparency by documenting the entity resolution processes in log files. In experiments, a citation dataset is used to demonstrate the transparency components of T-KAER. This demonstration showcases how T-KAER facilitates error analysis from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, providing evidence on "what" semantic information is augmented and "why" the augmented knowledge influences predictions differently.

Zeping Yi, Yongjun Wang, Baoshan Wang et al.

In this paper, we present an improved numerical algorithm for computing the intersection area of multiple circles and a complex polygon efficiently. This geometric problem is fundamental to applications such as wireless sensor networks and base station deployment. The key idea is a curvature-multiplicity-guided adaptive sampling strategy that dynamically concentrates sampling points in geometrically complex boundary regions. The algorithm integrates three components: (i) adaptive quadtree partitioning, (ii) analytical integration via Green's theorem for cells intersecting a single circle, and (iii) curvature-multiplicity-guided Monte Carlo subsampling for cells intersecting multiple circles, where a minimum sample count and a constant factor are introduced into the sampling size. Theoretical analysis shows that the algorithm achieves O(1/ε3/2) computational complexity while maintaining an O(ε) error bound, improving upon the O(1/ε2) complexity of classical Monte Carlo and uniform grid methods for the same error tolerance ε. Numerical experiments on complex polygons, including synthetic data and real-world scenarios, demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms five classical methods in terms of relative error. Furthermore, parameter sensitivity analysis confirms that the algorithm is robust and could make it suited for practical applications such as wireless sensor network coverage estimation.

Yuxi Cai, Lan Li, Feiqing Huang et al.

The proliferation of large-scale and structurally complex data has spurred the integration of machine learning methods into statistical modeling. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), a foundational class of models for time-dependent data, can be viewed as nonlinear extensions of classical autoregressive moving average models. Despite their flexibility and empirical success in machine learning, RNNs often suffer from limited interpretability and slow training, which hinders their use in statistics. This paper proposes the Parallelized RNN (ParaRNN), a novel model composed of multiple small recurrent units. ParaRNN admits an additive representation that decouples recurrent dynamics into interpretable components, whose behavior can be characterized through recurrence features. This interpretability enables its applications in nonparametric regression for time-dependent data, while the design also allows efficient parallelization. The approximation capacity and non-asymptotic prediction error bounds in a nonparametric regression setting are established for ParaRNN. Empirical results on three sequential modeling tasks further demonstrate that ParaRNN achieves performance comparable to vanilla RNNs while offering improved interpretability and efficiency.

Sharib Ali, Yamid Espinel, Yueming Jin et al.

Augmented reality for laparoscopic liver resection is a visualisation mode that allows a surgeon to localise tumours and vessels embedded within the liver by projecting them on top of a laparoscopic image. Preoperative 3D models extracted from CT or MRI data are registered to the intraoperative laparoscopic images during this process. In terms of 3D-2D fusion, most of the algorithms make use of anatomical landmarks to guide registration. These landmarks include the liver's inferior ridge, the falciform ligament, and the occluding contours. They are usually marked by hand in both the laparoscopic image and the 3D model, which is time-consuming and may contain errors if done by a non-experienced user. Therefore, there is a need to automate this process so that augmented reality can be used effectively in the operating room. We present the Preoperative-to-Intraoperative Laparoscopic Fusion Challenge (P2ILF), held during the Medical Imaging and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI 2022) conference, which investigates the possibilities of detecting these landmarks automatically and using them in registration. The challenge was divided into two tasks: 1) A 2D and 3D landmark detection task and 2) a 3D-2D registration task. The teams were provided with training data consisting of 167 laparoscopic images and 9 preoperative 3D models from 9 patients, with the corresponding 2D and 3D landmark annotations. A total of 6 teams from 4 countries participated, whose proposed methods were evaluated on 16 images and two preoperative 3D models from two patients. All the teams proposed deep learning-based methods for the 2D and 3D landmark segmentation tasks and differentiable rendering-based methods for the registration task. Based on the experimental outcomes, we propose three key hypotheses that determine current limitations and future directions for research in this domain.

Lan Li, Liri Fang, Bertram Ludäscher et al.

Data cleaning is a time-consuming and error-prone manual process, even with modern workflow tools such as OpenRefine. We present AutoDCWorkflow, an LLM-based pipeline for automatically generating data-cleaning workflows. The pipeline takes a raw table and a data analysis purpose, and generates a sequence of OpenRefine operations designed to produce a minimal, clean table sufficient to address the purpose. Six operations correspond to common data quality issues, including format inconsistencies, type errors, and duplicates. To evaluate AutoDCWorkflow, we create a benchmark with metrics assessing answers, data, and workflow quality for 142 purposes using 96 tables across six topics. The evaluation covers three key dimensions: (1) Purpose Answer: can the cleaned table produce a correct answer? (2) Column (Value): how closely does it match the ground truth table? (3) Workflow (Operations): to what extent does the generated workflow resemble the human-curated ground truth? Experiments show that Llama 3.1, Mistral, and Gemma 2 significantly enhance data quality, outperforming the baseline across all metrics. Gemma 2-27B consistently generates high-quality tables and answers, while Gemma 2-9B excels in producing workflows that closely resemble human-annotated versions.

Lan Li, Bowen Tao, Lu Han et al.

Differing from traditional semi-supervised learning, class-imbalanced semi-supervised learning presents two distinct challenges: (1) The imbalanced distribution of training samples leads to model bias towards certain classes, and (2) the distribution of unlabeled samples is unknown and potentially distinct from that of labeled samples, which further contributes to class bias in the pseudo-labels during training. To address these dual challenges, we introduce a novel approach called \textbf{T}wice \textbf{C}lass \textbf{B}ias \textbf{C}orrection (\textbf{TCBC}). We begin by utilizing an estimate of the class distribution from the participating training samples to correct the model, enabling it to learn the posterior probabilities of samples under a class-balanced prior. This correction serves to alleviate the inherent class bias of the model. Building upon this foundation, we further estimate the class bias of the current model parameters during the training process. We apply a secondary correction to the model's pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, aiming to make the assignment of pseudo-labels across different classes of unlabeled samples as equitable as possible. Through extensive experimentation on CIFAR10/100-LT, STL10-LT, and the sizable long-tailed dataset SUN397, we provide conclusive evidence that our proposed TCBC method reliably enhances the performance of class-imbalanced semi-supervised learning.

Lan Li, Da-Wei Zhou, Han-Jia Ye et al.

Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) focuses on continual learning in non-stationary environments, requiring models to adjust to evolving domains while preserving historical knowledge. DIL faces two critical challenges in the context of imbalanced data: intra-domain class imbalance and cross-domain class distribution shifts. These challenges significantly hinder model performance, as intra-domain imbalance leads to underfitting of few-shot classes, while cross-domain shifts require maintaining well-learned many-shot classes and transferring knowledge to improve few-shot class performance in old domains. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Dual-Balance Collaborative Experts (DCE) framework. DCE employs a frequency-aware expert group, where each expert is guided by specialized loss functions to learn features for specific frequency groups, effectively addressing intra-domain class imbalance. Subsequently, a dynamic expert selector is learned by synthesizing pseudo-features through balanced Gaussian sampling from historical class statistics. This mechanism navigates the trade-off between preserving many-shot knowledge of previous domains and leveraging new data to improve few-shot class performance in earlier tasks. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate DCE's state-of-the-art performance.

Yichu Xu, Xin-Chun Li, Lan Li et al.

The loss landscape of deep neural networks (DNNs) is commonly considered complex and wildly fluctuated. However, an interesting observation is that the loss surfaces plotted along Gaussian noise directions are almost v-basin ones with the perturbed model lying on the basin. This motivates us to rethink whether the 1D or 2D subspace could cover more complex local geometry structures, and how to mine the corresponding perturbation directions. This paper systematically and gradually categorizes the 1D curves from simple to complex, including v-basin, v-side, w-basin, w-peak, and vvv-basin curves. Notably, the latter two types are already hard to obtain via the intuitive construction of specific perturbation directions, and we need to propose proper mining algorithms to plot the corresponding 1D curves. Combining these 1D directions, various types of 2D surfaces are visualized such as the saddle surfaces and the bottom of a bottle of wine that are only shown by demo functions in previous works. Finally, we propose theoretical insights from the lens of the Hessian matrix to explain the observed several interesting phenomena.

Xin-Chun Li, Jin-Lin Tang, Bo Zhang et al.

Exploring the loss landscape offers insights into the inherent principles of deep neural networks (DNNs). Recent work suggests an additional asymmetry of the valley beyond the flat and sharp ones, yet without thoroughly examining its causes or implications. Our study methodically explores the factors affecting the symmetry of DNN valleys, encompassing (1) the dataset, network architecture, initialization, and hyperparameters that influence the convergence point; and (2) the magnitude and direction of the noise for 1D visualization. Our major observation shows that the {\it degree of sign consistency} between the noise and the convergence point is a critical indicator of valley symmetry. Theoretical insights from the aspects of ReLU activation and softmax function could explain the interesting phenomenon. Our discovery propels novel understanding and applications in the scenario of Model Fusion: (1) the efficacy of interpolating separate models significantly correlates with their sign consistency ratio, and (2) imposing sign alignment during federated learning emerges as an innovative approach for model parameter alignment.

Lan Li, Jinpeng Lv

Semantic search, a process aimed at delivering highly relevant search results by comprehending the searcher's intent and the contextual meaning of terms within a searchable dataspace, plays a pivotal role in information retrieval. In this paper, we investigate the application of large language models to enhance semantic search capabilities, specifically tailored for the domain of Jupyter Notebooks. Our objective is to retrieve generated outputs, such as figures or tables, associated functions and methods, and other pertinent information. We demonstrate a semantic search framework that achieves a comprehensive semantic understanding of the entire notebook's contents, enabling it to effectively handle various types of user queries. Key components of this framework include: 1). A data preprocessor is designed to handle diverse types of cells within Jupyter Notebooks, encompassing both markdown and code cells. 2). An innovative methodology is devised to address token size limitations that arise with code-type cells. We implement a finer-grained approach to data input, transitioning from the cell level to the function level, effectively resolving these issues.

Tao Hu, Lan Li, Zhen-Hao Xie et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables models to learn new classes continually while preserving past knowledge. Recently, vision-language models like CLIP offer transferable features via multi-modal pre-training, making them well-suited for CIL. However, real-world visual and linguistic concepts are inherently hierarchical: a textual concept like "dog" subsumes fine-grained categories such as "Labrador" and "Golden Retriever," and each category entails its images. But existing CLIP-based CIL methods fail to explicitly capture this inherent hierarchy, leading to fine-grained class features drift during incremental updates and ultimately to catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose HASTEN (Hierarchical Semantic Tree Anchoring) that anchors hierarchical information into CIL to reduce catastrophic forgetting. First, we employ an external knowledge graph as supervision to embed visual and textual features in hyperbolic space, effectively preserving hierarchical structure as data evolves. Second, to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, we project gradients onto the null space of the shared hyperbolic mapper, preventing interference with prior tasks. These two steps work synergistically to enable the model to resist forgetting by maintaining hierarchical relationships. Extensive experiments show that HASTEN consistently outperforms existing methods while providing a unified structured representation.

Guo-Hua Wang, Liangfu Cao, Tianyu Cui et al.

We introduce $\textbf{Ovis-Image}$, a 7B text-to-image model specifically optimized for high-quality text rendering, designed to operate efficiently under stringent computational constraints. Built upon our previous Ovis-U1 framework, Ovis-Image integrates a diffusion-based visual decoder with the stronger Ovis 2.5 multimodal backbone, leveraging a text-centric training pipeline that combines large-scale pre-training with carefully tailored post-training refinements. Despite its compact architecture, Ovis-Image achieves text rendering performance on par with significantly larger open models such as Qwen-Image and approaches closed-source systems like Seedream and GPT4o. Crucially, the model remains deployable on a single high-end GPU with moderate memory, narrowing the gap between frontier-level text rendering and practical deployment. Our results indicate that combining a strong multimodal backbone with a carefully designed, text-focused training recipe is sufficient to achieve reliable bilingual text rendering without resorting to oversized or proprietary models.

Shiyang Zhang, Fanfei Meng, Xi Wang et al.

Electronic dictionaries have largely replaced paper dictionaries and become central tools for L2 learners seeking to expand their vocabulary. Users often assume these resources are reliable and rarely question the validity of the definitions provided. The accuracy of major E-dictionaries is seldom scrutinized, and little attention has been paid to how their corpora are constructed. Research on dictionary use, particularly the limitations of electronic dictionaries, remains scarce. This study adopts a combined method of experimentation, user survey, and dictionary critique to examine Youdao, one of the most widely used E-dictionaries in China. The experiment involved a translation task paired with retrospective reflection. Participants were asked to translate sentences containing words that are insufficiently or inaccurately defined in Youdao. Their consultation behavior was recorded to analyze how faulty definitions influenced comprehension. Results show that incomplete or misleading definitions can cause serious misunderstandings. Additionally, students exhibited problematic consultation habits. The study further explores how such flawed definitions originate, highlighting issues in data processing and the integration of AI and machine learning technologies in dictionary construction. The findings suggest a need for better training in dictionary literacy for users, as well as improvements in the underlying AI models used to build E-dictionaries.

Bowen Tao, Lan Li, Xin-Chun Li et al.

Due to the advantages of leveraging unlabeled data and learning meaningful representations, semi-supervised learning and contrastive learning have been progressively combined to achieve better performances in popular applications with few labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. One common manner is assigning pseudo-labels to unlabeled samples and selecting positive and negative samples from pseudo-labeled samples to apply contrastive learning. However, the real-world data may be imbalanced, causing pseudo-labels to be biased toward the majority classes and further undermining the effectiveness of contrastive learning. To address the challenge, we propose Contrastive Learning with Augmented Features (CLAF). We design a class-dependent feature augmentation module to alleviate the scarcity of minority class samples in contrastive learning. For each pseudo-labeled sample, we select positive and negative samples from labeled data instead of unlabeled data to compute contrastive loss. Comprehensive experiments on imbalanced image classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CLAF in the context of imbalanced semi-supervised learning.

Xin-Chun Li, Lan Li, De-Chuan Zhan et al.

Automatically mining sentiment tendency contained in natural language is a fundamental research to some artificial intelligent applications, where solutions alternate with challenges. Transfer learning and multi-task learning techniques have been leveraged to mitigate the supervision sparsity and collaborate multiple heterogeneous domains correspondingly. Recent years, the sensitive nature of users' private data raises another challenge for sentiment classification, i.e., data privacy protection. In this paper, we resort to federated learning for multiple domain sentiment classification under the constraint that the corpora must be stored on decentralized devices. In view of the heterogeneous semantics across multiple parties and the peculiarities of word embedding, we pertinently provide corresponding solutions. First, we propose a Knowledge Transfer Enhanced Private-Shared (KTEPS) framework for better model aggregation and personalization in federated sentiment classification. Second, we propose KTEPS$^\star$ with the consideration of the rich semantic and huge embedding size properties of word vectors, utilizing Projection-based Dimension Reduction (PDR) methods for privacy protection and efficient transmission simultaneously. We propose two federated sentiment classification scenes based on public benchmarks, and verify the superiorities of our proposed methods with abundant experimental investigations.

Hyoungwook Nam, Seung Byum Seo, Vikram Sharma Mailthody et al.

Self-attention has emerged as a vital component of state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence models for natural language processing in recent years, brought to the forefront by pre-trained bi-directional Transformer models. Its effectiveness is partly due to its non-sequential architecture, which promotes scalability and parallelism but limits the model to inputs of a bounded length. In particular, such architectures perform poorly on algorithmic tasks, where the model must learn a procedure which generalizes to input lengths unseen in training, a capability we refer to as inductive generalization. Identifying the computational limits of existing self-attention mechanisms, we propose I-BERT, a bi-directional Transformer that replaces positional encodings with a recurrent layer. The model inductively generalizes on a variety of algorithmic tasks where state-of-the-art Transformer models fail to do so. We also test our method on masked language modeling tasks where training and validation sets are partitioned to verify inductive generalization. Out of three algorithmic and two natural language inductive generalization tasks, I-BERT achieves state-of-the-art results on four tasks.