Wenli Zhang

Seth Karten, Jake Grigsby, Tersoo Upaa et al.

We present the PokeAgent Challenge, a large-scale benchmark for decision-making research built on Pokemon's multi-agent battle system and expansive role-playing game (RPG) environment. Partial observability, game-theoretic reasoning, and long-horizon planning remain open problems for frontier AI, yet few benchmarks stress all three simultaneously under realistic conditions. PokeAgent targets these limitations at scale through two complementary tracks: our Battling Track, which calls for strategic reasoning and generalization under partial observability in competitive Pokemon battles, and our Speedrunning Track, which requires long-horizon planning and sequential decision-making in the Pokemon RPG. Our Battling Track supplies a dataset of 20M+ battle trajectories alongside a suite of heuristic, RL, and LLM-based baselines capable of high-level competitive play. Our Speedrunning Track provides the first standardized evaluation framework for RPG speedrunning, including an open-source multi-agent orchestration system for modular, reproducible comparisons of harness-based LLM approaches. Our NeurIPS 2025 competition validates both the quality of our resources and the research community's interest in Pokemon, with over 100 teams competing across both tracks and winning solutions detailed in our paper. Participant submissions and our baselines reveal considerable gaps between generalist (LLM), specialist (RL), and elite human performance. Analysis against the BenchPress evaluation matrix shows that Pokemon battling is nearly orthogonal to standard LLM benchmarks, measuring capabilities not captured by existing suites and positioning Pokemon as an unsolved benchmark that can drive RL and LLM research forward. We transition to a living benchmark with a live leaderboard for Battling and self-contained evaluation for Speedrunning at https://pokeagentchallenge.com.

Wenli Zhang, Jiaheng Xie, Zhu Zhang et al.

Depression is a common disease worldwide. It is difficult to diagnose and continues to be underdiagnosed. Because depressed patients constantly share their symptoms, major life events, and treatments on social media, researchers are turning to user-generated digital traces on social media for depression detection. Such methods have distinct advantages in combating depression because they can facilitate innovative approaches to fight depression and alleviate its social and economic burden. However, most existing studies lack effective means to incorporate established medical domain knowledge in depression detection or suffer from feature extraction difficulties that impede greater performance. Following the design science research paradigm, we propose a Deep Knowledge-aware Depression Detection (DKDD) framework to accurately detect social media users at risk of depression and explain the critical factors that contribute to such detection. Extensive empirical studies with real-world data demonstrate that, by incorporating domain knowledge, our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work has significant implications for IS research in knowledge-aware machine learning, digital traces utilization, and NLP research in IS. Practically, by providing early detection and explaining the critical factors, DKDD can supplement clinical depression screening and enable large-scale evaluations of a population's mental health status.

Shuang Geng, Wenli Zhang, Jiaheng Xie et al.

Online healthcare consultations have transformed how patients seek medical advice, offering convenience while introducing new challenges for ensuring consultation success. Predicting whether an online consultation will be successful is critical for improving patient experiences and sustaining platform competitiveness. Yet, such prediction is inherently difficult due to the fragmented nature of patients' care journeys and the lack of integration between virtual and traditional healthcare systems. Furthermore, the data collected from online platforms, including textual conversations, interaction sequences, and behavioral traces, are often sparse and incomplete. This study develops a predictive modeling approach that fuses multimodal data and dynamically constructed knowledge networks to capture latent relationships among patients, physicians, and consultation contexts. By integrating heterogeneous information sources and uncovering the evolving structure of digital interactions, the model enhances the accuracy and interpretability of consultation success prediction. The findings offer implications for designing hybrid healthcare ecosystems that combine online and offline services through data-driven intelligence.

Wenli Zhang, Xianglong Shi, Sirui Zhao et al.

Diffusion-based audio-driven talking-head generation enables realistic portrait animation, but also introduces risks of misuse, such as fraud and misinformation. Existing protection methods are largely limited to a single modality, and neither image-only nor audio-only attacks can effectively suppress speech-driven facial dynamics. To address this gap, we propose SyncBreaker, a stage-aware multimodal protection framework that jointly perturbs portrait and audio inputs under modality-specific perceptual constraints. Our key contributions are twofold. First, for the image stream, we introduce nullifying supervision with Multi-Interval Sampling (MIS) across diffusion stages to steer the generation toward the static reference portrait by aggregating guidance from multiple denoising intervals. Second, for the audio stream, we propose Cross-Attention Fooling (CAF), which suppresses interval-specific audio-conditioned cross-attention responses. Both streams are optimized independently and combined at inference time to enable flexible deployment. We evaluate SyncBreaker in a white-box proactive protection setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SyncBreaker more effectively degrades lip synchronization and facial dynamics than strong single-modality baselines, while preserving input perceptual quality and remaining robust under purification. Code: https://github.com/kitty384/SyncBreaker.

Shaodong Wang, Qing Li, Wenli Zhang

Effectively representing medical concepts and patients is important for healthcare analytical applications. Representing medical concepts for healthcare analytical tasks requires incorporating medical domain knowledge and prior information from patient description data. Current methods, such as feature engineering and mapping medical concepts to standardized terminologies, have limitations in capturing the dynamic patterns from patient description data. Other embedding-based methods have difficulties in incorporating important medical domain knowledge and often require a large amount of training data, which may not be feasible for most healthcare systems. Our proposed framework, MD-Manifold, introduces a novel approach to medical concept and patient representation. It includes a new data augmentation approach, concept distance metric, and patient-patient network to incorporate crucial medical domain knowledge and prior data information. It then adapts manifold learning methods to generate medical concept-level representations that accurately reflect medical knowledge and patient-level representations that clearly identify heterogeneous patient cohorts. MD-Manifold also outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques in various downstream healthcare analytical tasks. Our work has significant implications in information systems research in representation learning, knowledge-driven machine learning, and using design science as middle-ground frameworks for downstream explorative and predictive analyses. Practically, MD-Manifold has the potential to create effective and generalizable representations of medical concepts and patients by incorporating medical domain knowledge and prior data information. It enables deeper insights into medical data and facilitates the development of new analytical applications for better healthcare outcomes.

Haoran Li, Haolin Shi, Wenli Zhang et al.

Text-to-3D scene generation holds immense potential for the gaming, film, and architecture sectors. Despite significant progress, existing methods struggle with maintaining high quality, consistency, and editing flexibility. In this paper, we propose DreamScene, a 3D Gaussian-based novel text-to-3D scene generation framework, to tackle the aforementioned three challenges mainly via two strategies. First, DreamScene employs Formation Pattern Sampling (FPS), a multi-timestep sampling strategy guided by the formation patterns of 3D objects, to form fast, semantically rich, and high-quality representations. FPS uses 3D Gaussian filtering for optimization stability, and leverages reconstruction techniques to generate plausible textures. Second, DreamScene employs a progressive three-stage camera sampling strategy, specifically designed for both indoor and outdoor settings, to effectively ensure object-environment integration and scene-wide 3D consistency. Last, DreamScene enhances scene editing flexibility by integrating objects and environments, enabling targeted adjustments. Extensive experiments validate DreamScene's superiority over current state-of-the-art techniques, heralding its wide-ranging potential for diverse applications. Code and demos will be released at https://dreamscene-project.github.io .

Shuang Geng, Wenli Zhang, Jiaheng Xie et al.

Social media user-generated content (UGC) provides real-time, self-reported indicators of mental health conditions such as depression, offering a valuable source for predictive analytics. While prior studies integrate medical knowledge to improve prediction accuracy, they overlook the opportunity to simultaneously expand such knowledge through predictive processes. We develop a Closed-Loop Large Language Model (LLM)-Knowledge Graph framework that integrates prediction and knowledge expansion in an iterative learning cycle. In the knowledge-aware depression detection phase, the LLM jointly performs depression detection and entity extraction, while the knowledge graph represents and weights these entities to refine prediction performance. In the knowledge refinement and expansion phase, new entities, relationships, and entity types extracted by the LLM are incorporated into the knowledge graph under expert supervision, enabling continual knowledge evolution. Using large-scale UGC, the framework enhances both predictive accuracy and medical understanding. Expert evaluations confirmed the discovery of clinically meaningful symptoms, comorbidities, and social triggers complementary to existing literature. We conceptualize and operationalize prediction-through-learning and learning-through-prediction as mutually reinforcing processes, advancing both methodological and theoretical understanding in predictive analytics. The framework demonstrates the co-evolution of computational models and domain knowledge, offering a foundation for adaptive, data-driven knowledge systems applicable to other dynamic risk monitoring contexts.

Dali Zhu, Wenli Zhang, Hualin Zeng et al.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) technique extracts blood volume pulse (BVP) signals from subtle pixel changes in video frames. This study introduces rFaceNet, an advanced rPPG method that enhances the extraction of facial BVP signals with a focus on facial contours. rFaceNet integrates identity-specific facial contour information and eliminates redundant data. It efficiently extracts facial contours from temporally normalized frame inputs through a Temporal Compressor Unit (TCU) and steers the model focus to relevant facial regions by using the Cross-Task Feature Combiner (CTFC). Through elaborate training, the quality and interpretability of facial physiological signals extracted by rFaceNet are greatly improved compared to previous methods. Moreover, our novel approach demonstrates superior performance than SOTA methods in various heart rate estimation benchmarks.

Haoxin Liu, Wenli Zhang, Jiaheng Xie et al.

This study harnesses state-of-the-art AI technology for detecting mental disorders through user-generated textual content. Existing studies typically rely on fully supervised machine learning, which presents challenges such as the labor-intensive manual process of annotating extensive training data for each research problem and the need to design specialized deep learning architectures for each task. We propose a novel method to address these challenges by leveraging large language models and continuous multi-prompt engineering, which offers two key advantages: (1) developing personalized prompts that capture each user's unique characteristics and (2) integrating structured medical knowledge into prompts to provide context for disease detection and facilitate predictive modeling. We evaluate our method using three widely prevalent mental disorders as research cases. Our method significantly outperforms existing methods, including feature engineering, architecture engineering, and discrete prompt engineering. Meanwhile, our approach demonstrates success in few-shot learning, i.e., requiring only a minimal number of training examples. Moreover, our method can be generalized to other rare mental disorder detection tasks with few positive labels. In addition to its technical contributions, our method has the potential to enhance the well-being of individuals with mental disorders and offer a cost-effective, accessible alternative for stakeholders beyond traditional mental disorder screening methods.