Jing Yao

Yuecheng Li, Zeyu Song, Jing Yao et al.

Scaling recommender systems via large language models (LLMs) has become a prominent trend in the industry. However, aligning the LLM's semantic space with the recommender's ID space via post-training (e.g., SFT and RL) remains challenging. Existing LLM4Rec paradigms are bottlenecked by two main issues: (1) the difficulty of measuring and improving chain-of-thought (CoT) quality in open-domain recommendation during SFT, and (2) the neglect of the trade-off between LLM semantic rewards and recommendation preference rewards during RL alignment. Inspired by these challenges, we present Taiji, a novel LLM-as-Enhancer framework designed for industrial recommender systems. To overcome the SFT bottleneck, we utilize reverse-engineered reasoning and open-ended rejection sampling to generate high-quality, domain-specific CoT data. To resolve the RL alignment issue, we propose Pareto Optimal Policy Optimization (POPO), which adaptively adjusts cross-domain reward weights. Theoretically, it achieves an optimal trade-off between the semantic world knowledge of LLMs and the collaborative ID features representing online user preferences. Extensive offline evaluations and online A/B tests validate the effectiveness of Taiji. Deployed on Kuaishou's advertising platform since May 2026, Taiji currently serves over 400 million users daily, yielding significant commercial revenue and demonstrating its robust scalability in web-scale environments.

Dongwei Sun, Jing Yao, Kan Wei et al.

Rapid situational awareness is critical in post-disaster response. While remote sensing damage assessment is evolving from pixel-level change detection to high-level semantic analysis, existing vision-language methodologies still struggle to provide actionable intelligence for complex strategic queries. They remain severely constrained by unimodal optical dependence, a prevailing bias towards natural disasters, and a fundamental lack of grounded interactivity. To address these limitations, we present ChangeQuery, a unified multimodal framework designed for comprehensive, all-weather disaster situation awareness. To overcome modality constraints and scenario biases, we construct the Disaster-Induced Change Query (DICQ) dataset, a large-scale benchmark coupling pre-event optical semantics with post-event SAR structural features across a balanced distribution of natural catastrophes and armed conflicts. Furthermore, to provide the high-quality supervision required for interactive reasoning, we propose a novel Automated Semantic Annotation Pipeline. Adhering to a ``statistics-first, generation-later'' paradigm, this engine automatically transforms raw segmentation masks into grounded, hierarchical instruction sets, effectively equipping the model with fine-grained spatial and quantitative awareness. Trained on this structured data, the ChangeQuery architecture operates as an interactive disaster analyst. It supports multi-task reasoning driven by diverse user queries, delivering precise damage quantification, region-specific descriptions, and holistic post-disaster summaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChangeQuery establishes a new state-of-the-art, providing a robust and interpretable solution for complex disaster monitoring. The code is available at \href{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}.

Danfeng Hong, Bing Zhang, Xuyang Li et al.

The foundation model has recently garnered significant attention due to its potential to revolutionize the field of visual representation learning in a self-supervised manner. While most foundation models are tailored to effectively process RGB images for various visual tasks, there is a noticeable gap in research focused on spectral data, which offers valuable information for scene understanding, especially in remote sensing (RS) applications. To fill this gap, we created for the first time a universal RS foundation model, named SpectralGPT, which is purpose-built to handle spectral RS images using a novel 3D generative pretrained transformer (GPT). Compared to existing foundation models, SpectralGPT 1) accommodates input images with varying sizes, resolutions, time series, and regions in a progressive training fashion, enabling full utilization of extensive RS big data; 2) leverages 3D token generation for spatial-spectral coupling; 3) captures spectrally sequential patterns via multi-target reconstruction; 4) trains on one million spectral RS images, yielding models with over 600 million parameters. Our evaluation highlights significant performance improvements with pretrained SpectralGPT models, signifying substantial potential in advancing spectral RS big data applications within the field of geoscience across four downstream tasks: single/multi-label scene classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection.

Jiaxin Li, Danfeng Hong, Lianru Gao et al.

With the extremely rapid advances in remote sensing (RS) technology, a great quantity of Earth observation (EO) data featuring considerable and complicated heterogeneity is readily available nowadays, which renders researchers an opportunity to tackle current geoscience applications in a fresh way. With the joint utilization of EO data, much research on multimodal RS data fusion has made tremendous progress in recent years, yet these developed traditional algorithms inevitably meet the performance bottleneck due to the lack of the ability to comprehensively analyse and interpret these strongly heterogeneous data. Hence, this non-negligible limitation further arouses an intense demand for an alternative tool with powerful processing competence. Deep learning (DL), as a cutting-edge technology, has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs in numerous computer vision tasks owing to its impressive ability in data representation and reconstruction. Naturally, it has been successfully applied to the field of multimodal RS data fusion, yielding great improvement compared with traditional methods. This survey aims to present a systematic overview in DL-based multimodal RS data fusion. More specifically, some essential knowledge about this topic is first given. Subsequently, a literature survey is conducted to analyse the trends of this field. Some prevalent sub-fields in the multimodal RS data fusion are then reviewed in terms of the to-be-fused data modalities, i.e., spatiospectral, spatiotemporal, light detection and ranging-optical, synthetic aperture radar-optical, and RS-Geospatial Big Data fusion. Furthermore, We collect and summarize some valuable resources for the sake of the development in multimodal RS data fusion. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential future directions are highlighted.

Danfeng Hong, Bing Zhang, Hao Li et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches nowadays have gained remarkable success in single-modality-dominated remote sensing (RS) applications, especially with an emphasis on individual urban environments (e.g., single cities or regions). Yet these AI models tend to meet the performance bottleneck in the case studies across cities or regions, due to the lack of diverse RS information and cutting-edge solutions with high generalization ability. To this end, we build a new set of multimodal remote sensing benchmark datasets (including hyperspectral, multispectral, SAR) for the study purpose of the cross-city semantic segmentation task (called C2Seg dataset), which consists of two cross-city scenes, i.e., Berlin-Augsburg (in Germany) and Beijing-Wuhan (in China). Beyond the single city, we propose a high-resolution domain adaptation network, HighDAN for short, to promote the AI model's generalization ability from the multi-city environments. HighDAN is capable of retaining the spatially topological structure of the studied urban scene well in a parallel high-to-low resolution fusion fashion but also closing the gap derived from enormous differences of RS image representations between different cities by means of adversarial learning. In addition, the Dice loss is considered in HighDAN to alleviate the class imbalance issue caused by factors across cities. Extensive experiments conducted on the C2Seg dataset show the superiority of our HighDAN in terms of segmentation performance and generalization ability, compared to state-of-the-art competitors. The C2Seg dataset and the semantic segmentation toolbox (involving the proposed HighDAN) will be available publicly at https://github.com/danfenghong.

Danfeng Hong, Jing Yao, Deyu Meng et al.

Enormous efforts have been recently made to super-resolve hyperspectral (HS) images with the aid of high spatial resolution multispectral (MS) images. Most prior works usually perform the fusion task by means of multifarious pixel-level priors. Yet the intrinsic effects of a large distribution gap between HS-MS data due to differences in the spatial and spectral resolution are less investigated. The gap might be caused by unknown sensor-specific properties or highly-mixed spectral information within one pixel (due to low spatial resolution). To this end, we propose a subpixel-level HS super-resolution framework by devising a novel decoupled-and-coupled network, called DC-Net, to progressively fuse HS-MS information from the pixel- to subpixel-level, from the image- to feature-level. As the name suggests, DC-Net first decouples the input into common (or cross-sensor) and sensor-specific components to eliminate the gap between HS-MS images before further fusion, and then fully blends them by a model-guided coupled spectral unmixing (CSU) net. More significantly, we append a self-supervised learning module behind the CSU net by guaranteeing the material consistency to enhance the detailed appearances of the restored HS product. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our method both visually and quantitatively and achieve a significant improvement in comparison with the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, the codes and datasets will be available at https://sites.google.com/view/danfeng-hong for the sake of reproducibility.

Yuxuan Lei, Jianxun Lian, Jing Yao et al.

Recommender systems are widely used in online services, with embedding-based models being particularly popular due to their expressiveness in representing complex signals. However, these models often function as a black box, making them less transparent and reliable for both users and developers. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable intelligence in understanding, reasoning, and instruction following. This paper presents the initial exploration of using LLMs as surrogate models to explaining black-box recommender models. The primary concept involves training LLMs to comprehend and emulate the behavior of target recommender models. By leveraging LLMs' own extensive world knowledge and multi-step reasoning abilities, these aligned LLMs can serve as advanced surrogates, capable of reasoning about observations. Moreover, employing natural language as an interface allows for the creation of customizable explanations that can be adapted to individual user preferences. To facilitate an effective alignment, we introduce three methods: behavior alignment, intention alignment, and hybrid alignment. Behavior alignment operates in the language space, representing user preferences and item information as text to mimic the target model's behavior; intention alignment works in the latent space of the recommendation model, using user and item representations to understand the model's behavior; hybrid alignment combines both language and latent spaces. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three public datasets show that our approach yields promising results in understanding and mimicking target models, producing high-quality, high-fidelity, and distinct explanations. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI.

Minghua Wang, Danfeng Hong, Zhu Han et al.

Owing to the rapid development of sensor technology, hyperspectral (HS) remote sensing (RS) imaging has provided a significant amount of spatial and spectral information for the observation and analysis of the Earth's surface at a distance of data acquisition devices, such as aircraft, spacecraft, and satellite. The recent advancement and even revolution of the HS RS technique offer opportunities to realize the full potential of various applications, while confronting new challenges for efficiently processing and analyzing the enormous HS acquisition data. Due to the maintenance of the 3-D HS inherent structure, tensor decomposition has aroused widespread concern and research in HS data processing tasks over the past decades. In this article, we aim at presenting a comprehensive overview of tensor decomposition, specifically contextualizing the five broad topics in HS data processing, and they are HS restoration, compressed sensing, anomaly detection, super-resolution, and spectral unmixing. For each topic, we elaborate on the remarkable achievements of tensor decomposition models for HS RS with a pivotal description of the existing methodologies and a representative exhibition on the experimental results. As a result, the remaining challenges of the follow-up research directions are outlined and discussed from the perspective of the real HS RS practices and tensor decomposition merged with advanced priors and even with deep neural networks. This article summarizes different tensor decomposition-based HS data processing methods and categorizes them into different classes from simple adoptions to complex combinations with other priors for the algorithm beginners. We also expect this survey can provide new investigations and development trends for the experienced researchers who understand tensor decomposition and HS RS to some extent.

Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xiting Wang et al. · tsinghua

Big models, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), are models typically pre-trained on massive data and comprised of enormous parameters, which not only obtain significantly improved performance across diverse tasks but also present emergent capabilities absent in smaller models. However, the growing intertwining of big models with everyday human lives poses potential risks and might cause serious social harm. Therefore, many efforts have been made to align LLMs with humans to make them better follow user instructions and satisfy human preferences. Nevertheless, `what to align with' has not been fully discussed, and inappropriate alignment goals might even backfire. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of different alignment goals in existing work and trace their evolution paths to help identify the most essential goal. Particularly, we investigate related works from two perspectives: the definition of alignment goals and alignment evaluation. Our analysis encompasses three distinct levels of alignment goals and reveals a goal transformation from fundamental abilities to value orientation, indicating the potential of intrinsic human values as the alignment goal for enhanced LLMs. Based on such results, we further discuss the challenges of achieving such intrinsic value alignment and provide a collection of available resources for future research on the alignment of big models.

Xu Huang, Jianxun Lian, Yuxuan Lei et al.

Recommender models excel at providing domain-specific item recommendations by leveraging extensive user behavior data. Despite their ability to act as lightweight domain experts, they struggle to perform versatile tasks such as providing explanations and engaging in conversations. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) represent a significant step towards artificial general intelligence, showcasing remarkable capabilities in instruction comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and human interaction. However, LLMs lack the knowledge of domain-specific item catalogs and behavioral patterns, particularly in areas that diverge from general world knowledge, such as online e-commerce. Finetuning LLMs for each domain is neither economic nor efficient. In this paper, we bridge the gap between recommender models and LLMs, combining their respective strengths to create a versatile and interactive recommender system. We introduce an efficient framework called \textbf{InteRecAgent}, which employs LLMs as the brain and recommender models as tools. We first outline a minimal set of essential tools required to transform LLMs into InteRecAgent. We then propose an efficient workflow within InteRecAgent for task execution, incorporating key components such as memory components, dynamic demonstration-augmented task planning, and reflection. InteRecAgent enables traditional recommender systems, such as those ID-based matrix factorization models, to become interactive systems with a natural language interface through the integration of LLMs. Experimental results on several public datasets show that InteRecAgent achieves satisfying performance as a conversational recommender system, outperforming general-purpose LLMs. The source code of InteRecAgent is released at https://aka.ms/recagent.

Peitian Zhang, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao et al.

Inverted file structure is a common technique for accelerating dense retrieval. It clusters documents based on their embeddings; during searching, it probes nearby clusters w.r.t. an input query and only evaluates documents within them by subsequent codecs, thus avoiding the expensive cost of exhaustive traversal. However, the clustering is always lossy, which results in the miss of relevant documents in the probed clusters and hence degrades retrieval quality. In contrast, lexical matching, such as overlaps of salient terms, tends to be strong feature for identifying relevant documents. In this work, we present the Hybrid Inverted Index (HI$^2$), where the embedding clusters and salient terms work collaboratively to accelerate dense retrieval. To make best of both effectiveness and efficiency, we devise a cluster selector and a term selector, to construct compact inverted lists and efficiently searching through them. Moreover, we leverage simple unsupervised algorithms as well as end-to-end knowledge distillation to learn these two modules, with the latter further boosting the effectiveness. Based on comprehensive experiments on popular retrieval benchmarks, we verify that clusters and terms indeed complement each other, enabling HI$^2$ to achieve lossless retrieval quality with competitive efficiency across various index settings. Our code and checkpoint are publicly available at https://github.com/namespace-Pt/Adon/tree/HI2.

Jing Yao, Wei Xu, Jianxun Lian et al.

The significant progress of large language models (LLMs) provides a promising opportunity to build human-like systems for various practical applications. However, when applied to specific task domains, an LLM pre-trained on a general-purpose corpus may exhibit a deficit or inadequacy in two types of domain-specific knowledge. One is a comprehensive set of domain data that is typically large-scale and continuously evolving. The other is specific working patterns of this domain reflected in the data. The absence or inadequacy of such knowledge impacts the performance of the LLM. In this paper, we propose a general paradigm that augments LLMs with DOmain-specific KnowledgE to enhance their performance on practical applications, namely DOKE. This paradigm relies on a domain knowledge extractor, working in three steps: 1) preparing effective knowledge for the task; 2) selecting the knowledge for each specific sample; and 3) expressing the knowledge in an LLM-understandable way. Then, the extracted knowledge is incorporated through prompts, without any computational cost of model fine-tuning. We instantiate the general paradigm on a widespread application, i.e. recommender systems, where critical item attributes and collaborative filtering signals are incorporated. Experimental results demonstrate that DOKE can substantially improve the performance of LLMs in specific domains.

Yuntao Du, Jianxun Lian, Jing Yao et al.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a widely used and effective technique for recommender systems. In recent decades, there have been significant advancements in latent embedding-based CF methods for improved accuracy, such as matrix factorization, neural collaborative filtering, and LightGCN. However, the explainability of these models has not been fully explored. Adding explainability to recommendation models can not only increase trust in the decisionmaking process, but also have multiple benefits such as providing persuasive explanations for item recommendations, creating explicit profiles for users and items, and assisting item producers in design improvements. In this paper, we propose a neat and effective Explainable Collaborative Filtering (ECF) model that leverages interpretable cluster learning to achieve the two most demanding objectives: (1) Precise - the model should not compromise accuracy in the pursuit of explainability; and (2) Self-explainable - the model's explanations should truly reflect its decision-making process, not generated from post-hoc methods. The core of ECF is mining taste clusters from user-item interactions and item profiles.We map each user and item to a sparse set of taste clusters, and taste clusters are distinguished by a few representative tags. The user-item preference, users/items' cluster affiliations, and the generation of taste clusters are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a forest mechanism to ensure the model's accuracy, explainability, and diversity. To comprehensively evaluate the explainability quality of taste clusters, we design several quantitative metrics, including in-cluster item coverage, tag utilization, silhouette, and informativeness. Our model's effectiveness is demonstrated through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets.

Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xiting Wang et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has attracted much attention to value alignment for their responsible development. However, how to define values in this context remains a largely unexplored question. Existing work mainly follows the Helpful, Honest, Harmless principle and specifies values as risk criteria formulated in the AI community, e.g., fairness and privacy protection, suffering from poor clarity, adaptability and transparency. Inspired by basic values in humanity and social science across cultures, this work proposes a novel basic value alignment paradigm and introduces a value space spanned by basic value dimensions. All LLMs' behaviors can be mapped into the space by identifying the underlying values, possessing the potential to address the three challenges. To foster future research, we apply the representative Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values as an initialized example and construct FULCRA, a dataset consisting of 5k (LLM output, value vector) pairs. Our extensive analysis of FULCRA reveals the underlying relation between basic values and LLMs' behaviors, demonstrating that our approach not only covers existing mainstream risks but also anticipates possibly unidentified ones. Additionally, we present an initial implementation of the basic value evaluation and alignment, paving the way for future research in this line.

Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie

The rapid progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) poses potential risks such as generating unethical content. Assessing LLMs' values can help expose their misalignment, but relies on reference-free evaluators, e.g., fine-tuned LLMs or close-source ones like GPT-4, to identify values reflected in generated responses. Nevertheless, these evaluators face two challenges in open-ended value evaluation: they should align with changing human value definitions with minimal annotation, against their own bias (adaptability), and detect varying value expressions and scenarios robustly (generalizability). To handle these challenges, we introduce CLAVE, a novel framework which integrates two complementary LLMs, a large one to extract high-level value concepts from a few human labels, leveraging its extensive knowledge and generalizability, and a smaller one fine-tuned on such concepts to better align with human value understanding. This dual-model approach enables calibration with any value systems using <100 human-labeled samples per value type. Then we present ValEval, a comprehensive dataset comprising 13k+ (text,value,label) tuples across diverse domains, covering three major value systems. We benchmark the capabilities of 12+ popular LLM evaluators and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Our findings reveal that combining fine-tuned small models and prompt-based large ones serves as a superior balance in value evaluation.

Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Xiting Wang et al.

Big models have greatly advanced AI's ability to understand, generate, and manipulate information and content, enabling numerous applications. However, as these models become increasingly integrated into everyday life, their inherent ethical values and potential biases pose unforeseen risks to society. This paper provides an overview of the risks and challenges associated with big models, surveys existing AI ethics guidelines, and examines the ethical implications arising from the limitations of these models. Taking a normative ethics perspective, we propose a reassessment of recent normative guidelines, highlighting the importance of collaborative efforts in academia to establish a unified and universal AI ethics framework. Furthermore, we investigate the moral inclinations of current mainstream LLMs using the Moral Foundation theory, analyze existing alignment algorithms, and outline the unique challenges encountered in aligning ethical values within them. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel conceptual paradigm for aligning the ethical values of big models and discuss promising research directions for alignment criteria, evaluation, and method, representing an initial step towards the interdisciplinary construction of the ethically aligned AI This paper is a modified English version of our Chinese paper https://crad.ict.ac.cn/cn/article/doi/10.7544/issn1000-1239.202330553, intended to help non-Chinese native speakers better understand our work.

Yan Liu, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xiaokang Chen et al.

The demand for regulating potentially risky behaviors of large language models (LLMs) has ignited research on alignment methods. Since LLM alignment heavily relies on reward models for optimization or evaluation, neglecting the quality of reward models may cause unreliable results or even misalignment. Despite the vital role reward models play in alignment, previous works have consistently overlooked their performance and used off-the-shelf reward models arbitrarily without verification, rendering the reward model ``\emph{an elephant in the room}''. To this end, this work first investigates the quality of the widely-used preference dataset, HH-RLHF, and curates a clean version, CHH-RLHF. Based on CHH-RLHF, we benchmark the accuracy of a broad range of reward models used in previous alignment works, unveiling the unreliability of using them both for optimization and evaluation. Furthermore, we systematically study the impact of reward model quality on alignment performance in three reward utilization paradigms. Extensive experiments reveal that better reward models perform as better human preference proxies. This work aims to awaken people to notice this huge elephant in alignment research. We call attention to the following issues: (1) The reward model needs to be rigorously evaluated, whether for alignment optimization or evaluation. (2) Considering the role of reward models, research efforts should not only concentrate on alignment algorithm, but also on developing more reliable human proxy.

Datao Tang, Xiangyong Cao, Xuan Wu et al.

Remote sensing image object detection (RSIOD) aims to identify and locate specific objects within satellite or aerial imagery. However, there is a scarcity of labeled data in current RSIOD datasets, which significantly limits the performance of current detection algorithms. Although existing techniques, e.g., data augmentation and semi-supervised learning, can mitigate this scarcity issue to some extent, they are heavily dependent on high-quality labeled data and perform worse in rare object classes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a layout-controllable diffusion generative model (i.e. AeroGen) tailored for RSIOD. To our knowledge, AeroGen is the first model to simultaneously support horizontal and rotated bounding box condition generation, thus enabling the generation of high-quality synthetic images that meet specific layout and object category requirements. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end data augmentation framework that integrates a diversity-conditioned generator and a filtering mechanism to enhance both the diversity and quality of generated data. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthetic data produced by our method are of high quality and diversity. Furthermore, the synthetic RSIOD data can significantly improve the detection performance of existing RSIOD models, i.e., the mAP metrics on DIOR, DIOR-R, and HRSC datasets are improved by 3.7%, 4.3%, and 2.43%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/Sonettoo/AeroGen.

Jaehyeok Lee, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao et al.

As LLMs are globally deployed, aligning their cultural value orientations is critical for safety and user engagement. However, existing benchmarks face the Construct-Composition-Context ($C^3$) challenge: relying on discriminative, multiple-choice formats that probe value knowledge rather than true orientations, overlook subcultural heterogeneity, and mismatch with real-world open-ended generation. We introduce DOVE, a distributional evaluation framework that directly compares human-written text distributions with LLM-generated outputs. DOVE utilizes a rate-distortion variational optimization objective to construct a compact value-codebook from 10K documents, mapping text into a structured value space to filter semantic noise. Alignment is measured using unbalanced optimal transport, capturing intra-cultural distributional structures and sub-group diversity. Experiments across 12 LLMs show that DOVE achieves superior predictive validity, attaining a 31.56% correlation with downstream tasks, while maintaining high reliability with as few as 500 samples per culture.

Jianxun Lian, Yuxuan Lei, Xu Huang et al.

This paper introduces RecAI, a practical toolkit designed to augment or even revolutionize recommender systems with the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). RecAI provides a suite of tools, including Recommender AI Agent, Recommendation-oriented Language Models, Knowledge Plugin, RecExplainer, and Evaluator, to facilitate the integration of LLMs into recommender systems from multifaceted perspectives. The new generation of recommender systems, empowered by LLMs, are expected to be more versatile, explainable, conversational, and controllable, paving the way for more intelligent and user-centric recommendation experiences. We hope the open-source of RecAI can help accelerate evolution of new advanced recommender systems. The source code of RecAI is available at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI}.

Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Zhengyuan Liu, Xiaoyuan Yi et al.

Despite their global prevalence, many Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to a monolithic, often Western-centric set of values. This paper investigates the more challenging task of fine-grained value alignment: examining whether LLMs can emulate the distinct cultural values of demographic subgroups. Using Singapore as a case study and the World Values Survey (WVS), we examine the value landscape and show that even state-of-the-art models like GPT-4.1 achieve only 57.4% accuracy in predicting subgroup modal preferences. We construct a dataset of over 20,000 samples to train and evaluate a range of models. We demonstrate that simple fine-tuning on structured numerical preferences yields substantial gains, improving accuracy on unseen, out-of-distribution subgroups by an average of 17.4%. These gains partially transfer to open-ended generation. However, we find significant pre-existing performance biases, where models better emulate young, male, Chinese, and Christian personas. Furthermore, while fine-tuning improves average performance, it widens the disparity between subgroups when measured by distance-aware metrics. Our work offers insights into the limits and fairness implications of subgroup-level cultural alignment.

Kaiyu Li, Zepeng Xin, Li Pang et al.

Remote sensing has become critical for understanding environmental dynamics, urban planning, and disaster management. However, traditional remote sensing workflows often rely on explicit segmentation or detection methods, which struggle to handle complex, implicit queries that require reasoning over spatial context, domain knowledge, and implicit user intent. Motivated by this, we introduce a new task, \ie, geospatial pixel reasoning, which allows implicit querying and reasoning and generates the mask of the target region. To advance this task, we construct and release the first large-scale benchmark dataset called EarthReason, which comprises 5,434 manually annotated image masks with over 30,000 implicit question-answer pairs. Moreover, we propose SegEarth-R1, a simple yet effective language-guided segmentation baseline that integrates a hierarchical visual encoder, a large language model (LLM) for instruction parsing, and a tailored mask generator for spatial correlation. The design of SegEarth-R1 incorporates domain-specific adaptations, including aggressive visual token compression to handle ultra-high-resolution remote sensing images, a description projection module to fuse language and multi-scale features, and a streamlined mask prediction pipeline that directly queries description embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SegEarth-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both reasoning and referring segmentation tasks, significantly outperforming traditional and LLM-based segmentation methods. Our data and code will be released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-R1.

Li Pang, Jing Yao, Kaiyu Li et al.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification aims at categorizing each pixel in an HSI into a specific land cover class, which is crucial for applications like remote sensing, environmental monitoring, and agriculture. Although deep learning-based HSI classification methods have achieved significant advancements, existing methods still rely on manually labeled data for training, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel zero-shot hyperspectral image classification framework based on CLIP (SPECIAL), aiming to eliminate the need for manual annotations. The SPECIAL framework consists of two main stages: (1) CLIP-based pseudo-label generation, and (2) noisy label learning. In the first stage, HSI is spectrally interpolated to produce RGB bands. These bands are subsequently classified using CLIP, resulting in noisy pseudo-labels that are accompanied by confidence scores. To improve the quality of these labels, we propose a scaling strategy that fuses predictions from multiple spatial scales. In the second stage, spectral information and a label refinement technique are incorporated to mitigate label noise and further enhance classification accuracy. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our SPECIAL outperforms existing methods in zero-shot HSI classification, showing its potential for more practical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/LiPang/SPECIAL.

Xiangxu Zhang, Jiamin Wang, Qinlin Zhao et al.

As LLMs become increasingly integrated into human society, evaluating their orientations on human values from social science has drawn growing attention. Nevertheless, it is still unclear why human values matter for LLMs, especially in LLM-based multi-agent systems, where group-level failures may accumulate from individually misaligned actions. We ask whether misalignment with human values alters the collective behavior of LLM agents and what changes it induces? In this work, we introduce CIVA, a controlled multi-agent environment grounded in social science theories, where LLM agents form a community and autonomously communicate, explore, and compete for resources, enabling systematic manipulation of value prevalence and behavioral analysis. Through comprehensive simulation experiments, we reveal three key findings. (1) We identify several structurally critical values that substantially shape the community's collective dynamics, including those diverging from LLMs' original orientations. Triggered by the misspecification of these values, we (2) detect system failure modes, e.g., catastrophic collapse, at the macro level, and (3) observe emergent behaviors like deception and power-seeking at the micro level. These results offer quantitative evidence that human values are essential for collective outcomes in LLMs and motivate future multi-agent value alignment.

Yiyang Sun, Xiaonian Wang, Yangyang Zhang et al.

Driving scene understanding is to obtain comprehensive scene information through the sensor data and provide a basis for downstream tasks, which is indispensable for the safety of self-driving vehicles. Specific perception tasks, such as object detection and scene graph generation, are commonly used. However, the results of these tasks are only equivalent to the characterization of sampling from high-dimensional scene features, which are not sufficient to represent the scenario. In addition, the goal of perception tasks is inconsistent with human driving that just focuses on what may affect the ego-trajectory. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end Interpretable Implicit Driving Scene Understanding (II-DSU) model to extract implicit high-dimensional scene features as scene understanding results guided by a planning module and to validate the plausibility of scene understanding using auxiliary perception tasks for visualization. Experimental results on CARLA benchmarks show that our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art and is able to obtain scene features that embody richer scene information relevant to driving, enabling superior performance of the downstream planning.

Pan Yin, Kaiyu Li, Xiangyong Cao et al.

Recently, road graph extraction has garnered increasing attention due to its crucial role in autonomous driving, navigation, etc. However, accurately and efficiently extracting road graphs remains a persistent challenge, primarily due to the severe scarcity of labeled data. To address this limitation, we collect a global-scale satellite road graph extraction dataset, i.e. Global-Scale dataset. Specifically, the Global-Scale dataset is $\sim20 \times$ larger than the largest existing public road extraction dataset and spans over 13,800 $km^2$ globally. Additionally, we develop a novel road graph extraction model, i.e. SAM-Road++, which adopts a node-guided resampling method to alleviate the mismatch issue between training and inference in SAM-Road, a pioneering state-of-the-art road graph extraction model. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective ``extended-line'' strategy in SAM-Road++ to mitigate the occlusion issue on the road. Extensive experiments demonstrate the validity of the collected Global-Scale dataset and the proposed SAM-Road++ method, particularly highlighting its superior predictive power in unseen regions. The dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/earth-insights/samroadplus}.

Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Shitong Duan et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable breakthroughs, aligning their values with humans has become imperative for their responsible development and customized applications. However, there still lack evaluations of LLMs values that fulfill three desirable goals. (1) Value Clarification: We expect to clarify the underlying values of LLMs precisely and comprehensively, while current evaluations focus narrowly on safety risks such as bias and toxicity. (2) Evaluation Validity: Existing static, open-source benchmarks are prone to data contamination and quickly become obsolete as LLMs evolve. Additionally, these discriminative evaluations uncover LLMs' knowledge about values, rather than valid assessments of LLMs' behavioral conformity to values. (3) Value Pluralism: The pluralistic nature of human values across individuals and cultures is largely ignored in measuring LLMs value alignment. To address these challenges, we presents the Value Compass Benchmarks, with three correspondingly designed modules. It (i) grounds the evaluation on motivationally distinct \textit{basic values to clarify LLMs' underlying values from a holistic view; (ii) applies a \textit{generative evolving evaluation framework with adaptive test items for evolving LLMs and direct value recognition from behaviors in realistic scenarios; (iii) propose a metric that quantifies LLMs alignment with a specific value as a weighted sum over multiple dimensions, with weights determined by pluralistic values.

Zhengchao Chen, Haoran Wang, Jing Yao et al.

The automated and intelligent processing of massive remote sensing (RS) datasets is critical in Earth observation (EO). Existing automated systems are normally task-specific, lacking a unified framework to manage diverse, end-to-end workflows--from data preprocessing to advanced interpretation--across diverse RS applications. To address this gap, this paper introduces CangLing-KnowFlow, a unified intelligent agent framework that integrates a Procedural Knowledge Base (PKB), Dynamic Workflow Adjustment, and an Evolutionary Memory Module. The PKB, comprising 1,008 expert-validated workflow cases across 162 practical RS tasks, guides planning and substantially reduces hallucinations common in general-purpose agents. During runtime failures, the Dynamic Workflow Adjustment autonomously diagnoses and replans recovery strategies, while the Evolutionary Memory Module continuously learns from these events, iteratively enhancing the agent's knowledge and performance. This synergy enables CangLing-KnowFlow to adapt, learn, and operate reliably across diverse, complex tasks. We evaluated CangLing-KnowFlow on the KnowFlow-Bench, a novel benchmark of 324 workflows inspired by real-world applications, testing its performance across 13 top Large Language Model (LLM) backbones, from open-source to commercial. Across all complex tasks, CangLing-KnowFlow surpassed the Reflexion baseline by at least 4% in Task Success Rate. As the first most comprehensive validation along this emerging field, this research demonstrates the great potential of CangLing-KnowFlow as a robust, efficient, and scalable automated solution for complex EO challenges by leveraging expert knowledge (Knowledge) into adaptive and verifiable procedures (Flow).

Zhongxiang Xie, Shuangxi Miao, Yuhan Jiang et al.

Change detection from high-resolution remote sensing images lies as a cornerstone of Earth observation applications, yet its efficacy is often compromised by two critical challenges. First, false alarms are prevalent as models misinterpret radiometric variations from temporal shifts (e.g., illumination, season) as genuine changes. Second, a non-negligible semantic gap between deep abstract features and shallow detail-rich features tends to obstruct their effective fusion, culminating in poorly delineated boundaries. To step further in addressing these issues, we propose the Frequency-Spatial Synergistic Gated Network (FSG-Net), a novel paradigm that aims to systematically disentangle semantic changes from nuisance variations. Specifically, FSG-Net first operates in the frequency domain, where a Discrepancy-Aware Wavelet Interaction Module (DAWIM) adaptively mitigates pseudo-changes by discerningly processing different frequency components. Subsequently, the refined features are enhanced in the spatial domain by a Synergistic Temporal-Spatial Attention Module (STSAM), which amplifies the saliency of genuine change regions. To finally bridge the semantic gap, a Lightweight Gated Fusion Unit (LGFU) leverages high-level semantics to selectively gate and integrate crucial details from shallow layers. Comprehensive experiments on the CDD, GZ-CD, and LEVIR-CD benchmarks validate the superiority of FSG-Net, establishing a new state-of-the-art with F1-scores of 94.16%, 89.51%, and 91.27%, respectively. The code will be made available at https://github.com/zxXie-Air/FSG-Net after a possible publication.

Yanxu Zhu, Shitong Duan, Xiangxu Zhang et al.

Recently Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved considerable advancements in vision-language tasks, yet produce potentially harmful or untrustworthy content. Despite substantial work investigating the trustworthiness of language models, MMLMs' capability to act honestly, especially when faced with visually unanswerable questions, remains largely underexplored. This work presents the first systematic assessment of honesty behaviors across various MLLMs. We ground honesty in models' response behaviors to unanswerable visual questions, define four representative types of such questions, and construct MoHoBench, a large-scale MMLM honest benchmark, consisting of 12k+ visual question samples, whose quality is guaranteed by multi-stage filtering and human verification. Using MoHoBench, we benchmarked the honesty of 28 popular MMLMs and conducted a comprehensive analysis. Our findings show that: (1) most models fail to appropriately refuse to answer when necessary, and (2) MMLMs' honesty is not solely a language modeling issue, but is deeply influenced by visual information, necessitating the development of dedicated methods for multimodal honesty alignment. Therefore, we implemented initial alignment methods using supervised and preference learning to improve honesty behavior, providing a foundation for future work on trustworthy MLLMs. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/yanxuzhu/MoHoBench.

Kai-Ni Wang, Xin Yang, Juzheng Miao et al.

Multi-sequence cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) provides essential pathology information (scar and edema) to diagnose myocardial infarction. However, automatic pathology segmentation can be challenging due to the difficulty of effectively exploring the underlying information from the multi-sequence CMR data. This paper aims to tackle the scar and edema segmentation from multi-sequence CMR with a novel auto-weighted supervision framework, where the interactions among different supervised layers are explored under a task-specific objective using reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we design a coarse-to-fine framework to boost the small myocardial pathology region segmentation with shape prior knowledge. The coarse segmentation model identifies the left ventricle myocardial structure as a shape prior, while the fine segmentation model integrates a pixel-wise attention strategy with an auto-weighted supervision model to learn and extract salient pathological structures from the multi-sequence CMR data. Extensive experimental results on a publicly available dataset from Myocardial pathology segmentation combining multi-sequence CMR (MyoPS 2020) demonstrate our method can achieve promising performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Our method is promising in advancing the myocardial pathology assessment on multi-sequence CMR data. To motivate the community, we have made our code publicly available via https://github.com/soleilssss/AWSnet/tree/master.

Danfeng Hong, Zhu Han, Jing Yao et al.

Hyperspectral (HS) images are characterized by approximately contiguous spectral information, enabling the fine identification of materials by capturing subtle spectral discrepancies. Owing to their excellent locally contextual modeling ability, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proven to be a powerful feature extractor in HS image classification. However, CNNs fail to mine and represent the sequence attributes of spectral signatures well due to the limitations of their inherent network backbone. To solve this issue, we rethink HS image classification from a sequential perspective with transformers, and propose a novel backbone network called \ul{SpectralFormer}. Beyond band-wise representations in classic transformers, SpectralFormer is capable of learning spectrally local sequence information from neighboring bands of HS images, yielding group-wise spectral embeddings. More significantly, to reduce the possibility of losing valuable information in the layer-wise propagation process, we devise a cross-layer skip connection to convey memory-like components from shallow to deep layers by adaptively learning to fuse "soft" residuals across layers. It is worth noting that the proposed SpectralFormer is a highly flexible backbone network, which can be applicable to both pixel- and patch-wise inputs. We evaluate the classification performance of the proposed SpectralFormer on three HS datasets by conducting extensive experiments, showing the superiority over classic transformers and achieving a significant improvement in comparison with state-of-the-art backbone networks. The codes of this work will be available at https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TGRS_SpectralFormer for the sake of reproducibility.

Danfeng Hong, Jingliang Hu, Jing Yao et al.

As remote sensing (RS) data obtained from different sensors become available largely and openly, multimodal data processing and analysis techniques have been garnering increasing interest in the RS and geoscience community. However, due to the gap between different modalities in terms of imaging sensors, resolutions, and contents, embedding their complementary information into a consistent, compact, accurate, and discriminative representation, to a great extent, remains challenging. To this end, we propose a shared and specific feature learning (S2FL) model. S2FL is capable of decomposing multimodal RS data into modality-shared and modality-specific components, enabling the information blending of multi-modalities more effectively, particularly for heterogeneous data sources. Moreover, to better assess multimodal baselines and the newly-proposed S2FL model, three multimodal RS benchmark datasets, i.e., Houston2013 -- hyperspectral and multispectral data, Berlin -- hyperspectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, Augsburg -- hyperspectral, SAR, and digital surface model (DSM) data, are released and used for land cover classification. Extensive experiments conducted on the three datasets demonstrate the superiority and advancement of our S2FL model in the task of land cover classification in comparison with previously-proposed state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, the baseline codes and datasets used in this paper will be made available freely at https://github.com/danfenghong/ISPRS_S2FL.

Danfeng Hong, Lianru Gao, Jing Yao et al.

Over the past decades, enormous efforts have been made to improve the performance of linear or nonlinear mixing models for hyperspectral unmixing, yet their ability to simultaneously generalize various spectral variabilities and extract physically meaningful endmembers still remains limited due to the poor ability in data fitting and reconstruction and the sensitivity to various spectral variabilities. Inspired by the powerful learning ability of deep learning, we attempt to develop a general deep learning approach for hyperspectral unmixing, by fully considering the properties of endmembers extracted from the hyperspectral imagery, called endmember-guided unmixing network (EGU-Net). Beyond the alone autoencoder-like architecture, EGU-Net is a two-stream Siamese deep network, which learns an additional network from the pure or nearly-pure endmembers to correct the weights of another unmixing network by sharing network parameters and adding spectrally meaningful constraints (e.g., non-negativity and sum-to-one) towards a more accurate and interpretable unmixing solution. Furthermore, the resulting general framework is not only limited to pixel-wise spectral unmixing but also applicable to spatial information modeling with convolutional operators for spatial-spectral unmixing. Experimental results conducted on three different datasets with the ground-truth of abundance maps corresponding to each material demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the EGU-Net over state-of-the-art unmixing algorithms. The codes will be available from the website: https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TNNLS_EGU-Net.

Danfeng Hong, Lianru Gao, Naoto Yokoya et al.

Classification and identification of the materials lying over or beneath the Earth's surface have long been a fundamental but challenging research topic in geoscience and remote sensing (RS) and have garnered a growing concern owing to the recent advancements of deep learning techniques. Although deep networks have been successfully applied in single-modality-dominated classification tasks, yet their performance inevitably meets the bottleneck in complex scenes that need to be finely classified, due to the limitation of information diversity. In this work, we provide a baseline solution to the aforementioned difficulty by developing a general multimodal deep learning (MDL) framework. In particular, we also investigate a special case of multi-modality learning (MML) -- cross-modality learning (CML) that exists widely in RS image classification applications. By focusing on "what", "where", and "how" to fuse, we show different fusion strategies as well as how to train deep networks and build the network architecture. Specifically, five fusion architectures are introduced and developed, further being unified in our MDL framework. More significantly, our framework is not only limited to pixel-wise classification tasks but also applicable to spatial information modeling with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To validate the effectiveness and superiority of the MDL framework, extensive experiments related to the settings of MML and CML are conducted on two different multimodal RS datasets. Furthermore, the codes and datasets will be available at https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TGRS_MDL-RS, contributing to the RS community.

Danfeng Hong, Lianru Gao, Jing Yao et al.

To read the final version please go to IEEE TGRS on IEEE Xplore. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been attracting increasing attention in hyperspectral (HS) image classification, owing to their ability to capture spatial-spectral feature representations. Nevertheless, their ability in modeling relations between samples remains limited. Beyond the limitations of grid sampling, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been recently proposed and successfully applied in irregular (or non-grid) data representation and analysis. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate CNNs and GCNs (qualitatively and quantitatively) in terms of HS image classification. Due to the construction of the adjacency matrix on all the data, traditional GCNs usually suffer from a huge computational cost, particularly in large-scale remote sensing (RS) problems. To this end, we develop a new mini-batch GCN (called miniGCN hereinafter) which allows to train large-scale GCNs in a mini-batch fashion. More significantly, our miniGCN is capable of inferring out-of-sample data without re-training networks and improving classification performance. Furthermore, as CNNs and GCNs can extract different types of HS features, an intuitive solution to break the performance bottleneck of a single model is to fuse them. Since miniGCNs can perform batch-wise network training (enabling the combination of CNNs and GCNs) we explore three fusion strategies: additive fusion, element-wise multiplicative fusion, and concatenation fusion to measure the obtained performance gain. Extensive experiments, conducted on three HS datasets, demonstrate the advantages of miniGCNs over GCNs and the superiority of the tested fusion strategies with regards to the single CNN or GCN models. The codes of this work will be available at https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TGRS_GCN for the sake of reproducibility.

Lianru Gao, Danfeng Hong, Jing Yao et al.

Extensive attention has been widely paid to enhance the spatial resolution of hyperspectral (HS) images with the aid of multispectral (MS) images in remote sensing. However, the ability in the fusion of HS and MS images remains to be improved, particularly in large-scale scenes, due to the limited acquisition of HS images. Alternatively, we super-resolve MS images in the spectral domain by the means of partially overlapped HS images, yielding a novel and promising topic: spectral superresolution (SSR) of MS imagery. This is challenging and less investigated task due to its high ill-posedness in inverse imaging. To this end, we develop a simple but effective method, called joint sparse and low-rank learning (J-SLoL), to spectrally enhance MS images by jointly learning low-rank HS-MS dictionary pairs from overlapped regions. J-SLoL infers and recovers the unknown hyperspectral signals over a larger coverage by sparse coding on the learned dictionary pair. Furthermore, we validate the SSR performance on three HS-MS datasets (two for classification and one for unmixing) in terms of reconstruction, classification, and unmixing by comparing with several existing state-of-the-art baselines, showing the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed J-SLoL algorithm. Furthermore, the codes and datasets will be available at: https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE\_TGRS\_J-SLoL, contributing to the RS community.

Jing Yao, Danfeng Hong, Jocelyn Chanussot et al.

The recent advancement of deep learning techniques has made great progress on hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSI-SR). Yet the development of unsupervised deep networks remains challenging for this task. To this end, we propose a novel coupled unmixing network with a cross-attention mechanism, CUCaNet for short, to enhance the spatial resolution of HSI by means of higher-spatial-resolution multispectral image (MSI). Inspired by coupled spectral unmixing, a two-stream convolutional autoencoder framework is taken as backbone to jointly decompose MS and HS data into a spectrally meaningful basis and corresponding coefficients. CUCaNet is capable of adaptively learning spectral and spatial response functions from HS-MS correspondences by enforcing reasonable consistency assumptions on the networks. Moreover, a cross-attention module is devised to yield more effective spatial-spectral information transfer in networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely-used HS-MS datasets in comparison with state-of-the-art HSI-SR models, demonstrating the superiority of the CUCaNet in the HSI-SR application. Furthermore, the codes and datasets will be available at: https://github.com/danfenghong/ECCV2020_CUCaNet.

Hongwei Zhang, Qiqiang Zhong, Jiangxia Cao et al.

Modeling ultra-long user sequences involves a difficult trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. While current paradigms rely on either item-specific search or item-agnostic compression, we propose UxSID, a framework exploring a third path: semantic-group shared interest memory. By utilizing Semantic IDs (SIDs) and a dual-level attention strategy, UxSID captures target-aware preferences without the heavy cost of item-specific models. This end-to-end architecture balances computational parsimony with semantic awareness, achieving state-of-the-art performance and a 0.337% revenue lift in large-scale advertising A/B test.

Jing Yao, Danfeng Hong, Chenyu Li et al.

Recurrent neural networks and Transformers have recently dominated most applications in hyperspectral (HS) imaging, owing to their capability to capture long-range dependencies from spectrum sequences. However, despite the success of these sequential architectures, the non-ignorable inefficiency caused by either difficulty in parallelization or computationally prohibitive attention still hinders their practicality, especially for large-scale observation in remote sensing scenarios. To address this issue, we herein propose SpectralMamba -- a novel state space model incorporated efficient deep learning framework for HS image classification. SpectralMamba features the simplified but adequate modeling of HS data dynamics at two levels. First, in spatial-spectral space, a dynamical mask is learned by efficient convolutions to simultaneously encode spatial regularity and spectral peculiarity, thus attenuating the spectral variability and confusion in discriminative representation learning. Second, the merged spectrum can then be efficiently operated in the hidden state space with all parameters learned input-dependent, yielding selectively focused responses without reliance on redundant attention or imparallelizable recurrence. To explore the room for further computational downsizing, a piece-wise scanning mechanism is employed in-between, transferring approximately continuous spectrum into sequences with squeezed length while maintaining short- and long-term contextual profiles among hundreds of bands. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark HS datasets acquired by satellite-, aircraft-, and UAV-borne imagers, SpectralMamba surprisingly creates promising win-wins from both performance and efficiency perspectives.

Yiwen Liu, Minghua Wang, Jing Yao et al.

Cross-scene hyperspectral image (HSI) classification stands as a fundamental research topic in remote sensing, with extensive applications spanning various fields. Owing to the inclusion of unknown categories in the target domain and the existence of domain shift across different scenes, open-set domain adaptation techniques are commonly employed to address cross-scene HSI classification. However, existing open-set cross-scene HSI classification methods still face two critical challenges: (1) domain shift issues arising from the direct alignment of mixed spectral-spatial features; (2) high computational costs caused by two-stage training strategies. To address these issues, this paper proposes a single-stage open-set domain adaptation method with decoupled alignment (SoDa$^2$) for cross-scene HSI classification. A contribution-aware dual-modality feature extraction is customized to disentangle the characteristics from spectral sequence signals and spatial details, selectively and adaptively enhancing discriminative features. The decoupled alignment module minimizes the Maximum Mean Discrepancy to independently reduce the spectral discrepancy and the spatial discrepancy between the source and target domains, extracting more fine-grained domain-invariant features. A cost-effective single-stage dual-branch framework is designed to learn MMD-constrainted aligned features and constraint-free intrinsic features for adaptive distinction between known and unknown classes. This framework employs a Gaussian Mixture Model to model the squared cosine similarity distribution between the two feature types, enabling open-set recognition without prior knowledge of unknown classes. Extensive experiments on three groups of HSI datasets demonstrate that SoDa$^2$ outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior classification accuracy and model transferability for open-set cross-scene tasks.

Xinpeng Wang, Shitong Duan, Xiaoyuan Yi et al.

Big models have achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in the field of AI, but they might also pose potential concerns. Addressing such concerns, alignment technologies were introduced to make these models conform to human preferences and values. Despite considerable advancements in the past year, various challenges lie in establishing the optimal alignment strategy, such as data cost and scalable oversight, and how to align remains an open question. In this survey paper, we comprehensively investigate value alignment approaches. We first unpack the historical context of alignment tracing back to the 1920s (where it comes from), then delve into the mathematical essence of alignment (what it is), shedding light on the inherent challenges. Following this foundation, we provide a detailed examination of existing alignment methods, which fall into three categories: Reinforcement Learning, Supervised Fine-Tuning, and In-context Learning, and demonstrate their intrinsic connections, strengths, and limitations, helping readers better understand this research area. In addition, two emerging topics, personal alignment, and multimodal alignment, are also discussed as novel frontiers in this field. Looking forward, we discuss potential alignment paradigms and how they could handle remaining challenges, prospecting where future alignment will go.

HyunJin Kim, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao et al.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked the possibility of about Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system surpassing human intelligence. However, existing alignment paradigms struggle to guide such advanced AI systems. Superalignment, the alignment of AI systems with human values and safety requirements at superhuman levels of capability aims to addresses two primary goals -- scalability in supervision to provide high-quality guidance signals and robust governance to ensure alignment with human values. In this survey, we examine scalable oversight methods and potential solutions for superalignment. Specifically, we explore the concept of ASI, the challenges it poses, and the limitations of current alignment paradigms in addressing the superalignment problem. Then we review scalable oversight methods for superalignment. Finally, we discuss the key challenges and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of ASI systems. By comprehensively reviewing the current literature, our goal is provide a systematical introduction of existing methods, analyze their strengths and limitations, and discuss potential future directions.

Dongwei Sun, Jing Yao, Wu Xue et al.

Remote sensing image change description represents an innovative multimodal task within the realm of remote sensing processing.This task not only facilitates the detection of alterations in surface conditions, but also provides comprehensive descriptions of these changes, thereby improving human interpretability and interactivity.Current deep learning methods typically adopt a three stage framework consisting of feature extraction, feature fusion, and change localization, followed by text generation. Most approaches focus heavily on designing complex network modules but lack solid theoretical guidance, relying instead on extensive empirical experimentation and iterative tuning of network components. This experience-driven design paradigm may lead to overfitting and design bottlenecks, thereby limiting the model's generalizability and adaptability.To address these limitations, this paper proposes a paradigm that shift towards data distribution learning using diffusion models, reinforced by frequency-domain noise filtering, to provide a theoretically motivated and practically effective solution to multimodal remote sensing change description.The proposed method primarily includes a simple multi-scale change detection module, whose output features are subsequently refined by a well-designed diffusion model.Furthermore, we introduce a frequency-guided complex filter module to boost the model performance by managing high-frequency noise throughout the diffusion process. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed method across several datasets for remote sensing change detection and description, showcasing its superior performance compared to existing techniques. The code will be available at \href{https://github.com/sundongwei}{MaskApproxNet}.

Yiyang Sun, Zhiyuan Xu, Xiaonian Wang et al.

Self-supervised multi-frame methods have currently achieved promising results in depth estimation. However, these methods often suffer from mismatch problems due to the moving objects, which break the static assumption. Additionally, unfairness can occur when calculating photometric errors in high-freq or low-texture regions of the images. To address these issues, existing approaches use additional semantic priori black-box networks to separate moving objects and improve the model only at the loss level. Therefore, we propose FlowDepth, where a Dynamic Motion Flow Module (DMFM) decouples the optical flow by a mechanism-based approach and warps the dynamic regions thus solving the mismatch problem. For the unfairness of photometric errors caused by high-freq and low-texture regions, we use Depth-Cue-Aware Blur (DCABlur) and Cost-Volume sparsity loss respectively at the input and the loss level to solve the problem. Experimental results on the KITTI and Cityscapes datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Chenyu Li, Bing Zhang, Danfeng Hong et al.

Current hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) benchmark datasets suffer from low resolution, simple background, and small size of the detection data. These factors also limit the performance of the well-known low-rank representation (LRR) models in terms of robustness on the separation of background and target features and the reliance on manual parameter selection. To this end, we build a new set of HAD benchmark datasets for improving the robustness of the HAD algorithm in complex scenarios, AIR-HAD for short. Accordingly, we propose a generalized and interpretable HAD network by deeply unfolding a dictionary-learnable LLR model, named LRR-Net$^+$, which is capable of spectrally decoupling the background structure and object properties in a more generalized fashion and eliminating the bias introduced by vital interference targets concurrently. In addition, LRR-Net$^+$ integrates the solution process of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) optimizer with the deep network, guiding its search process and imparting a level of interpretability to parameter optimization. Additionally, the integration of physical models with DL techniques eliminates the need for manual parameter tuning. The manually tuned parameters are seamlessly transformed into trainable parameters for deep neural networks, facilitating a more efficient and automated optimization process. Extensive experiments conducted on the AIR-HAD dataset show the superiority of our LRR-Net$^+$ in terms of detection performance and generalization ability, compared to top-performing rivals. Furthermore, the compilable codes and our AIR-HAD benchmark datasets in this paper will be made available freely and openly at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/danfeng-hong}.

Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jindong Wang et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) more deeply integrate into human life across various regions, aligning them with pluralistic cultures is crucial for improving user experience and mitigating cultural conflicts. Existing approaches develop culturally aligned LLMs primarily through fine-tuning with massive carefully curated culture-specific corpora. Nevertheless, inspired by culture theories, we identify two key challenges faced by these datasets: (1) Representativeness: These corpora fail to fully capture the target culture's core characteristics with redundancy, causing computation waste; (2) Distinctiveness: They struggle to distinguish the unique nuances of a given culture from shared patterns across other relevant ones, hindering precise cultural modeling. To handle these challenges, we introduce CAReDiO, a novel cultural data construction framework. Specifically, CAReDiO utilizes powerful LLMs to automatically generate cultural conversation data, where both the queries and responses are further optimized by maximizing representativeness and distinctiveness. Using CAReDiO, we construct a small yet effective dataset, covering five cultures, and compare it with several recent cultural corpora. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates more effective data and enables cultural alignment with as few as 100 training samples, enhancing both performance and efficiency.

Hanze Guo, Jing Yao, Xiao Zhou et al.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into applications serving users across diverse cultures, communities and demographics, it is critical to align LLMs with pluralistic human values beyond average principles (e.g., HHH). In psychological and social value theories such as Schwartz's Value Theory, pluralistic values are represented by multiple value dimensions paired with various priorities. However, existing methods encounter two challenges when aligning with such fine-grained value objectives: 1) they often treat multiple values as independent and equally important, ignoring their interdependence and relative priorities (value complexity); 2) they struggle to precisely control nuanced value priorities, especially those underrepresented ones (value steerability). To handle these challenges, we propose COUPLE, a COUnterfactual reasoning framework for PLuralistic valuE alignment. It introduces a structural causal model (SCM) to feature complex interdependency and prioritization among features, as well as the causal relationship between high-level value dimensions and behaviors. Moreover, it applies counterfactual reasoning to generate outputs aligned with any desired value objectives. Benefitting from explicit causal modeling, COUPLE also provides better interpretability. We evaluate COUPLE on two datasets with different value systems and demonstrate that COUPLE advances other baselines across diverse types of value objectives.

Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, Tanmoy Chakraborty et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are now used worldwide, yet their multimodal understanding and reasoning often degrade outside Western, high-resource settings. We propose MMA-ASIA, a comprehensive framework to evaluate LLMs' cultural awareness with a focus on Asian contexts. MMA-ASIA centers on a human-curated, multilingual, and multimodally aligned multiple-choice benchmark covering 8 Asian countries and 10 languages, comprising 27,000 questions; over 79 percent require multi-step reasoning grounded in cultural context, moving beyond simple memorization. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset aligned at the input level across three modalities: text, image (visual question answering), and speech. This enables direct tests of cross-modal transfer. Building on this benchmark, we propose a five-dimensional evaluation protocol that measures: (i) cultural-awareness disparities across countries, (ii) cross-lingual consistency, (iii) cross-modal consistency, (iv) cultural knowledge generalization, and (v) grounding validity. To ensure rigorous assessment, a Cultural Awareness Grounding Validation Module detects "shortcut learning" by checking whether the requisite cultural knowledge supports correct answers. Finally, through comparative model analysis, attention tracing, and an innovative Vision-ablated Prefix Replay (VPR) method, we probe why models diverge across languages and modalities, offering actionable insights for building culturally reliable multimodal LLMs.

Ziyu Chen, Junfei Sun, Chenxi Li et al.

Identifying human morals and values embedded in language is essential to empirical studies of communication. However, researchers often face substantial difficulty navigating the diversity of theoretical frameworks and data available for their analysis. Here, we contribute MoVa, a well-documented suite of resources for generalizable classification of human morals and values, consisting of (1) 16 labeled datasets and benchmarking results from four theoretically-grounded frameworks; (2) a lightweight LLM prompting strategy that outperforms fine-tuned models across multiple domains and frameworks; and (3) a new application that helps evaluate psychological surveys. In practice, we specifically recommend a classification strategy, all@once, that scores all related concepts simultaneously, resembling the well-known multi-label classifier chain. The data and methods in MoVa can facilitate many fine-grained interpretations of human and machine communication, with potential implications for the alignment of machine behavior.