Juntao Zhang

Hao Ouyang, Qiuyu Wang, Yuxi Xiao et al.

We present the content deformation field CoDeF as a new type of video representation, which consists of a canonical content field aggregating the static contents in the entire video and a temporal deformation field recording the transformations from the canonical image (i.e., rendered from the canonical content field) to each individual frame along the time axis. Given a target video, these two fields are jointly optimized to reconstruct it through a carefully tailored rendering pipeline. We advisedly introduce some regularizations into the optimization process, urging the canonical content field to inherit semantics (e.g., the object shape) from the video. With such a design, CoDeF naturally supports lifting image algorithms for video processing, in the sense that one can apply an image algorithm to the canonical image and effortlessly propagate the outcomes to the entire video with the aid of the temporal deformation field. We experimentally show that CoDeF is able to lift image-to-image translation to video-to-video translation and lift keypoint detection to keypoint tracking without any training. More importantly, thanks to our lifting strategy that deploys the algorithms on only one image, we achieve superior cross-frame consistency in processed videos compared to existing video-to-video translation approaches, and even manage to track non-rigid objects like water and smog. Project page can be found at https://qiuyu96.github.io/CoDeF/.

Juntao Zhang, Yuehuai Liu, Yu-Wing Tai et al.

We present Compound Conditioned ControlNet, C3Net, a novel generative neural architecture taking conditions from multiple modalities and synthesizing multimodal contents simultaneously (e.g., image, text, audio). C3Net adapts the ControlNet architecture to jointly train and make inferences on a production-ready diffusion model and its trainable copies. Specifically, C3Net first aligns the conditions from multi-modalities to the same semantic latent space using modality-specific encoders based on contrastive training. Then, it generates multimodal outputs based on the aligned latent space, whose semantic information is combined using a ControlNet-like architecture called Control C3-UNet. Correspondingly, with this system design, our model offers an improved solution for joint-modality generation through learning and explaining multimodal conditions instead of simply taking linear interpolations on the latent space. Meanwhile, as we align conditions to a unified latent space, C3Net only requires one trainable Control C3-UNet to work on multimodal semantic information. Furthermore, our model employs unimodal pretraining on the condition alignment stage, outperforming the non-pretrained alignment even on relatively scarce training data and thus demonstrating high-quality compound condition generation. We contribute the first high-quality tri-modal validation set to validate quantitatively that C3Net outperforms or is on par with first and contemporary state-of-the-art multimodal generation. Our codes and tri-modal dataset will be released.

Yingjian Chen, Haoran Liu, Yinhong Liu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning ability in open-domain question answering, yet their reasoning processes are typically linear and often logically inconsistent. In contrast, real-world reasoning requires integrating multiple premises and solving subproblems in parallel. Existing methods, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), express reasoning in a linear textual form, which may appear coherent but frequently leads to inconsistent conclusions. Recent approaches rely on externally provided graphs and do not explore how LLMs can construct and use their own graph-structured reasoning, particularly in open-domain QA. To fill this gap, we novelly explore graph-structured reasoning of LLMs in general-domain question answering. We propose Self-Graph Reasoning (SGR), a framework that enables LLMs to explicitly represent their reasoning process as a structured graph before producing the final answer. We further construct a graph-structured reasoning dataset that merges multiple candidate reasoning graphs into refined graph structures for model training. Experiments on five QA benchmarks across both general and specialized domains show that SGR consistently improves reasoning consistency and yields a 17.74% gain over the base model. The LLaMA-3.3-70B model fine-tuned with SGR performs comparably to GPT-4o and surpasses Claude-3.5-Haiku, demonstrating the effectiveness of graph-structured reasoning.

Peng Lan, Donglai Chen, Chong Xie et al.

Federated learning is an approach to collaboratively training machine learning models for multiple parties that prohibit data sharing. One of the challenges in federated learning is non-IID data between clients, as a single model can not fit the data distribution for all clients. Meta-learning, such as Per-FedAvg, is introduced to cope with the challenge. Meta-learning learns shared initial parameters for all clients. Each client employs gradient descent to adapt the initialization to local data distributions quickly to realize model personalization. However, due to non-convex loss function and randomness of sampling update, meta-learning approaches have unstable goals in local adaptation for the same client. This fluctuation in different adaptation directions hinders the convergence in meta-learning. To overcome this challenge, we use the historical local adapted model to restrict the direction of the inner loop and propose an elastic-constrained method. As a result, the current round inner loop keeps historical goals and adapts to better solutions. Experiments show our method boosts meta-learning convergence and improves personalization without additional calculation and communication. Our method achieved SOTA on all metrics in three public datasets.

Juntao Zhang, Shaogeng Liu, Kun Bian et al.

Mamba is an efficient State Space Model (SSM) with linear computational complexity. Although SSMs are not suitable for handling non-causal data, Vision Mamba (ViM) methods still demonstrate good performance in tasks such as image classification and object detection. Recent studies have shown that there is a rich theoretical connection between state space models and attention variants. We propose a novel separable self attention method, for the first time introducing some excellent design concepts of Mamba into separable self-attention. To ensure a fair comparison with ViMs, we introduce VMINet, a simple yet powerful prototype architecture, constructed solely by stacking our novel attention modules with the most basic down-sampling layers. Notably, VMINet differs significantly from the conventional Transformer architecture. Our experiments demonstrate that VMINet has achieved competitive results on image classification and high-resolution dense prediction tasks.Code is available at: https://github.com/yws-wxs/VMINet.

Xinjie Zhao, Moritz Blum, Rui Yang et al.

Large Language Models~(LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities across various applications but face challenges such as hallucination, limited reasoning abilities, and factual inconsistencies, especially when tackling complex, domain-specific tasks like question answering~(QA). While Knowledge Graphs~(KGs) have been shown to help mitigate these issues, research on the integration of LLMs with background KGs remains limited. In particular, user accessibility and the flexibility of the underlying KG have not been thoroughly explored. We introduce AGENTiGraph (Adaptive Generative ENgine for Task-based Interaction and Graphical Representation), a platform for knowledge management through natural language interaction. It integrates knowledge extraction, integration, and real-time visualization. AGENTiGraph employs a multi-agent architecture to dynamically interpret user intents, manage tasks, and integrate new knowledge, ensuring adaptability to evolving user requirements and data contexts. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in knowledge graph interactions, particularly for complex domain-specific tasks. Experimental results on a dataset of 3,500 test cases show AGENTiGraph significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines, achieving 95.12\% accuracy in task classification and 90.45\% success rate in task execution. User studies corroborate its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To showcase versatility, we extended AGENTiGraph to legislation and healthcare domains, constructing specialized KGs capable of answering complex queries in legal and medical contexts.

Juntao Zhang, Angona Biswas, Jaydeep Rade et al.

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) enables high-resolution surface imaging at the nanoscale, yet the output is often degraded by artifacts introduced by environmental noise, scanning imperfections, and tip-sample interactions. To address this challenge, a lightweight and fully automated framework for artifact detection and restoration in AFM image analysis is presented. The pipeline begins with a classification model that determines whether an AFM image contains artifacts. If necessary, a lightweight semantic segmentation network, custom-designed and trained on AFM data, is applied to generate precise artifact masks. These masks are adaptively expanded based on their structural orientation and then inpainted using a directional neighbor-based interpolation strategy to preserve 3D surface continuity. A localized Gaussian smoothing operation is then applied for seamless restoration. The system is integrated into a user-friendly GUI that supports real-time parameter adjustments and batch processing. Experimental results demonstrate the effective artifact removal while preserving nanoscale structural details, providing a robust, geometry-aware solution for high-fidelity AFM data interpretation.

Yihao Luo, Xiang Cao, Juntao Zhang et al.

With the continuous improvement of the performance of object detectors via advanced model architectures, imbalance problems in the training process have received more attention. It is a common paradigm in object detection frameworks to perform multi-scale detection. However, each scale is treated equally during training. In this paper, we carefully study the objective imbalance of multi-scale detector training. We argue that the loss in each scale level is neither equally important nor independent. Different from the existing solutions of setting multi-task weights, we dynamically optimize the loss weight of each scale level in the training process. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Variance Weighting (AVW) to balance multi-scale loss according to the statistical variance. Then we develop a novel Reinforcement Learning Optimization (RLO) to decide the weighting scheme probabilistically during training. The proposed dynamic methods make better utilization of multi-scale training loss without extra computational complexity and learnable parameters for backpropagation. Experiments show that our approaches can consistently boost the performance over various baseline detectors on Pascal VOC and MS COCO benchmark.

Yihao Luo, Xiang Cao, Juntao Zhang et al.

Feature pyramid network (FPN) has been an effective framework to extract multi-scale features in object detection. However, current FPN-based methods mostly suffer from the intrinsic flaw of channel reduction, which brings about the loss of semantical information. And the miscellaneous fused feature maps may cause serious aliasing effects. In this paper, we present a novel channel enhancement feature pyramid network (CE-FPN) with three simple yet effective modules to alleviate these problems. Specifically, inspired by sub-pixel convolution, we propose a sub-pixel skip fusion method to perform both channel enhancement and upsampling. Instead of the original 1x1 convolution and linear upsampling, it mitigates the information loss due to channel reduction. Then we propose a sub-pixel context enhancement module for extracting more feature representations, which is superior to other context methods due to the utilization of rich channel information by sub-pixel convolution. Furthermore, a channel attention guided module is introduced to optimize the final integrated features on each level, which alleviates the aliasing effect only with a few computational burdens. Our experiments show that CE-FPN achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art FPN-based detectors on MS COCO benchmark.

Haiqin Weng, Juntao Zhang, Xingjun Ma et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving learning paradigm that allows multiple parities to jointly train a powerful machine learning model without sharing their private data. According to the form of collaboration, FL can be further divided into horizontal federated learning (HFL) and vertical federated learning (VFL). In HFL, participants share the same feature space and collaborate on data samples, while in VFL, participants share the same sample IDs and collaborate on features. VFL has a broader scope of applications and is arguably more suitable for joint model training between large enterprises. In this paper, we focus on VFL and investigate potential privacy leakage in real-world VFL frameworks. We design and implement two practical privacy attacks: reverse multiplication attack for the logistic regression VFL protocol; and reverse sum attack for the XGBoost VFL protocol. We empirically show that the two attacks are (1) effective - the adversary can successfully steal the private training data, even when the intermediate outputs are encrypted to protect data privacy; (2) evasive - the attacks do not deviate from the protocol specification nor deteriorate the accuracy of the target model; and (3) easy - the adversary needs little prior knowledge about the data distribution of the target participant. We also show the leaked information is as effective as the raw training data in training an alternative classifier. We further discuss potential countermeasures and their challenges, which we hope can lead to several promising research directions.