Xiaotian Lin

Nankai Lin, Yingwen Fu, Xiaotian Lin et al.

As an extensive research in the field of natural language processing (NLP), aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is the task of predicting the sentiment expressed in a text relative to the corresponding aspect. Unfortunately, most languages lack sufficient annotation resources, thus more and more recent researchers focus on cross-lingual aspect-based sentiment analysis (XABSA). However, most recent researches only concentrate on cross-lingual data alignment instead of model alignment. To this end, we propose a novel framework, CL-XABSA: Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. Based on contrastive learning, we close the distance between samples with the same label in different semantic spaces, thus achieving a convergence of semantic spaces of different languages. Specifically, we design two contrastive strategies, token level contrastive learning of token embeddings (TL-CTE) and sentiment level contrastive learning of token embeddings (SL-CTE), to regularize the semantic space of source and target language to be more uniform. Since our framework can receive datasets in multiple languages during training, our framework can be adapted not only for XABSA task but also for multilingual aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA). To further improve the performance of our model, we perform knowledge distillation technology leveraging data from unlabeled target language. In the distillation XABSA task, we further explore the comparative effectiveness of different data (source dataset, translated dataset, and code-switched dataset). The results demonstrate that the proposed method has a certain improvement in the three tasks of XABSA, distillation XABSA and MABSA. For reproducibility, our code for this paper is available at https://github.com/GKLMIP/CL-XABSA.

Li Liu, Lufei Gao, Wentao Lei et al.

Body language (BL) refers to the non-verbal communication expressed through physical movements, gestures, facial expressions, and postures. It is a form of communication that conveys information, emotions, attitudes, and intentions without the use of spoken or written words. It plays a crucial role in interpersonal interactions and can complement or even override verbal communication. Deep multi-modal learning techniques have shown promise in understanding and analyzing these diverse aspects of BL. The survey emphasizes their applications to BL generation and recognition. Several common BLs are considered i.e., Sign Language (SL), Cued Speech (CS), Co-speech (CoS), and Talking Head (TH), and we have conducted an analysis and established the connections among these four BL for the first time. Their generation and recognition often involve multi-modal approaches. Benchmark datasets for BL research are well collected and organized, along with the evaluation of SOTA methods on these datasets. The survey highlights challenges such as limited labeled data, multi-modal learning, and the need for domain adaptation to generalize models to unseen speakers or languages. Future research directions are presented, including exploring self-supervised learning techniques, integrating contextual information from other modalities, and exploiting large-scale pre-trained multi-modal models. In summary, this survey paper provides a comprehensive understanding of deep multi-modal learning for various BL generations and recognitions for the first time. By analyzing advancements, challenges, and future directions, it serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in advancing this field. n addition, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for deep multi-modal learning for BL recognition and generation: https://github.com/wentaoL86/awesome-body-language.

Leiyang Xu, Qiang Wang, Xiaotian Lin et al.

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) aims to classify and locate actions in the long untrimmed action sequence. With the success of deep learning, many deep models for action segmentation have emerged. However, few-shot TAS is still a challenging problem. This study proposes an efficient framework for the few-shot skeleton-based TAS, including a data augmentation method and an improved model. The data augmentation approach based on motion interpolation is presented here to solve the problem of insufficient data, and can increase the number of samples significantly by synthesizing action sequences. Besides, we concatenate a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) layer with a network designed for skeleton-based TAS to obtain an optimized model. Leveraging CTC can enhance the temporal alignment between prediction and ground truth and further improve the segment-wise metrics of segmentation results. Extensive experiments on both public and self-constructed datasets, including two small-scale datasets and one large-scale dataset, show the effectiveness of two proposed methods in improving the performance of the few-shot skeleton-based TAS task.

Zhuowen Liang, Xiaotian Lin, Zhengxuan Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely applied to data analytics over documents, yet direct reasoning over long, noisy documents remains brittle and error-prone. Hence, we study document question answering (QA) that consolidates dispersed evidence into a structured output (e.g., a table, graph, or chunks) to support reliable, verifiable QA. We propose a two-pillar framework, LiteCoST, to achieve both high accuracy and low latency with small language models (SLMs). Pillar 1: Chain-of-Structured-Thought (CoST). We introduce a CoST template, a schema-aware instruction that guides a strong LLM to produce both a step-wise CoST trace and the corresponding structured output. The process induces a minimal structure, normalizes entities/units, aligns records, serializes the output, and verifies/refines it, yielding auditable supervision. Pillar 2: SLM fine-tuning. The compact models are trained on LLM-generated CoST data in two stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning for structural alignment, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) incorporating triple rewards for answer/format quality and process consistency. By distilling structure-first behavior into SLMs, this approach achieves LLM-comparable quality on multi-domain long-document QA using 3B/7B SLMs, while delivering 2-4x lower latency than GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1 (671B). The code is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/LiteCoST.

Xiaotian Lin, Leiyang Xu, Qiang Wang

In the past decade, object detection tasks are defined mostly by large public datasets. However, building object detection datasets is not scalable due to inefficient image collecting and labeling. Furthermore, most labels are still in the form of bounding boxes, which provide much less information than the real human visual system. In this paper, we present a method to synthesize object-in-scene images, which can preserve the objects' detailed features without bringing irrelevant information. In brief, given a set of images containing a target object, our algorithm first trains a model to find an approximate center of the object as an anchor, then makes an outline regression to estimate its boundary, and finally blends the object into a new scene. Our result shows that in the synthesized image, the boundaries of objects blend very well with the background. Experiments also show that SOTA segmentation models work well with our synthesized data.

Dongxu Lei, Xiaotian Lin, Xinghu Yu et al.

In a multitude of industrial fields, a key objective entails optimising resource management whilst satisfying user requirements. Resource management by industrial practitioners can result in a passive transfer of user loads across resource providers, a phenomenon whose accurate characterisation is both challenging and crucial. This research reveals the existence of user clusters, which capture macro-level user transfer patterns amid resource variation. We then propose CLUSTER, an interpretable hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric model capable of automating cluster identification, and thereby predicting user transfer in response to resource variation. Furthermore, CLUSTER facilitates uncertainty quantification for further reliable decision-making. Our method enables privacy protection by functioning independently of personally identifiable information. Experiments with simulated and real-world data from the communications industry reveal a pronounced alignment between prediction results and empirical observations across a spectrum of resource management scenarios. This research establishes a solid groundwork for advancing resource management strategy development.

Xiaotian Lin, Nankai Lin, Yingwen Fu et al.

Deep learning-based text classification models need abundant labeled data to obtain competitive performance. Unfortunately, annotating large-size corpus is time-consuming and laborious. To tackle this, multiple researches try to use data augmentation to expand the corpus size. However, data augmentation may potentially produce some noisy augmented samples. There are currently no works exploring sample selection for augmented samples in nature language processing field. In this paper, we propose a novel self-training selection framework with two selectors to select the high-quality samples from data augmentation. Specifically, we firstly use an entropy-based strategy and the model prediction to select augmented samples. Considering some samples with high quality at the above step may be wrongly filtered, we propose to recall them from two perspectives of word overlap and semantic similarity. Experimental results show the effectiveness and simplicity of our framework.

Nankai Lin, Nankai Lin, Xiaotian Lin et al.

As a fundamental task in natural language processing, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) has gradually received widespread attention and become a research hotspot. However, one obvious deficiency for the existing CGEC evaluation system is that the evaluation values are significantly influenced by the Chinese word segmentation results or different language models. The evaluation values of the same error correction model can vary considerably under different word segmentation systems or different language models. However, it is expected that these metrics should be independent of the word segmentation results and language models, as they may lead to a lack of uniqueness and comparability in the evaluation of different methods. To this end, we propose three novel evaluation metrics for CGEC in two dimensions: reference-based and reference-less. In terms of the reference-based metric, we introduce sentence-level accuracy and char-level BLEU to evaluate the corrected sentences. Besides, in terms of the reference-less metric, we adopt char-level meaning preservation to measure the semantic preservation degree of the corrected sentences. We deeply evaluate and analyze the reasonableness and validity of the three proposed metrics, and we expect them to become a new standard for CGEC.

Zhuowei Li, Miao Zhang, Xiaotian Lin et al.

This paper introduces GAgent: an Gripping Agent designed for open-world environments that provides advanced cognitive abilities via VLM agents and flexible grasping abilities with variable stiffness soft grippers. GAgent comprises three primary components - Prompt Engineer module, Visual-Language Model (VLM) core and Workflow module. These three modules enhance gripper success rates by recognizing objects and materials and accurately estimating grasp area even under challenging lighting conditions. As part of creativity, researchers also created a bionic hybrid soft gripper with variable stiffness capable of gripping heavy loads while still gently engaging objects. This intelligent agent, featuring VLM-based cognitive processing with bionic design, shows promise as it could potentially benefit UAVs in various scenarios.

Xiaotian Lin, Yanlin Qi, Yizhang Zhu et al.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a critical paradigm for improving the capabilities and alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, existing iterative model-aware data selection methods incur significant computational overhead, as they rely on repeatedly performing full-dataset model inference to estimate sample utility for subsequent training iterations, creating a fundamental efficiency bottleneck. In this paper, we propose LEAD, an efficient iterative data selection framework that accurately estimates sample utility entirely within the standard training loop, eliminating the need for costly additional model inference. At its core, LEAD introduces Instance-Level Dynamic Uncertainty (IDU), a theoretically grounded utility function combining instantaneous training loss, gradient-based approximation of loss changes, and exponential smoothing of historical loss signals. To further scale efficiently to large datasets, LEAD employs a two-stage, coarse-to-fine selection strategy, adaptively prioritizing informative clusters through a multi-armed bandit mechanism, followed by precise fine-grained selection of high-utility samples using IDU. Extensive experiments across four diverse benchmarks show that LEAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving average model performance by 6.1%-10.8% while using only 2.5% of the training data and reducing overall training time by 5-10x.

Yizhang Zhu, Liangwei Wang, Chenyu Yang et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has spurred the emergence of data agents--autonomous systems designed to orchestrate Data + AI ecosystems for tackling complex data-related tasks. However, the term "data agent" currently suffers from terminological ambiguity and inconsistent adoption, conflating simple query responders with sophisticated autonomous architectures. This terminological ambiguity fosters mismatched user expectations, accountability challenges, and barriers to industry growth. Inspired by the SAE J3016 standard for driving automation, this survey introduces the first systematic hierarchical taxonomy for data agents, comprising six levels that delineate and trace progressive shifts in autonomy, from manual operations (L0) to a vision of generative, fully autonomous data agents (L5), thereby clarifying capability boundaries and responsibility allocation. Through this lens, we offer a structured review of existing research arranged by increasing autonomy, encompassing specialized data agents for data management, preparation, and analysis, alongside emerging efforts toward versatile, comprehensive systems with enhanced autonomy. We further analyze critical evolutionary leaps and technical gaps for advancing data agents, especially the ongoing L2-to-L3 transition, where data agents evolve from procedural execution to autonomous orchestration. Finally, we conclude with a forward-looking roadmap, envisioning the advent of proactive, generative data agents.

Yun Luo, Xiaotian Lin, Zhen Yang et al.

Task-incremental continual learning refers to continually training a model in a sequence of tasks while overcoming the problem of catastrophic forgetting (CF). The issue arrives for the reason that the learned representations are forgotten for learning new tasks, and the decision boundary is destructed. Previous studies mostly consider how to recover the representations of learned tasks. It is seldom considered to adapt the decision boundary for new representations and in this paper we propose a Supervised Contrastive learning framework with adaptive classification criterion for Continual Learning (SCCL), In our method, a contrastive loss is used to directly learn representations for different tasks and a limited number of data samples are saved as the classification criterion. During inference, the saved data samples are fed into the current model to obtain updated representations, and a k Nearest Neighbour module is used for classification. In this way, the extensible model can solve the learned tasks with adaptive criteria of saved samples. To mitigate CF, we further use an instance-wise relation distillation regularization term and a memory replay module to maintain the information of previous tasks. Experiments show that SCCL achieves state-of-the-art performance and has a stronger ability to overcome CF compared with the classification baselines.

Xiaotian Lin, Nankai Lin, Kanoksak Wattanachote et al.

As the fourth largest language family in the world, the Dravidian languages have become a research hotspot in natural language processing (NLP). Although the Dravidian languages contain a large number of languages, there are relatively few public available resources. Besides, text classification task, as a basic task of natural language processing, how to combine it to multiple languages in the Dravidian languages, is still a major difficulty in Dravidian Natural Language Processing. Hence, to address these problems, we proposed a multilingual text classification framework for the Dravidian languages. On the one hand, the framework used the LaBSE pre-trained model as the base model. Aiming at the problem of text information bias in multi-task learning, we propose to use the MLM strategy to select language-specific words, and used adversarial training to perturb them. On the other hand, in view of the problem that the model cannot well recognize and utilize the correlation among languages, we further proposed a language-specific representation module to enrich semantic information for the model. The experimental results demonstrated that the framework we proposed has a significant performance in multilingual text classification tasks with each strategy achieving certain improvements.