Peng Zhang

Chathura Gamage, Vimukthini Pinto, Cheng Xue et al.

Due to the emergence of AI systems that interact with the physical environment, there is an increased interest in incorporating physical reasoning capabilities into those AI systems. But is it enough to only have physical reasoning capabilities to operate in a real physical environment? In the real world, we constantly face novel situations we have not encountered before. As humans, we are competent at successfully adapting to those situations. Similarly, an agent needs to have the ability to function under the impact of novelties in order to properly operate in an open-world physical environment. To facilitate the development of such AI systems, we propose a new testbed, NovPhy, that requires an agent to reason about physical scenarios in the presence of novelties and take actions accordingly. The testbed consists of tasks that require agents to detect and adapt to novelties in physical scenarios. To create tasks in the testbed, we develop eight novelties representing a diverse novelty space and apply them to five commonly encountered scenarios in a physical environment. According to our testbed design, we evaluate two capabilities of an agent: the performance on a novelty when it is applied to different physical scenarios and the performance on a physical scenario when different novelties are applied to it. We conduct a thorough evaluation with human players, learning agents, and heuristic agents. Our evaluation shows that humans' performance is far beyond the agents' performance. Some agents, even with good normal task performance, perform significantly worse when there is a novelty, and the agents that can adapt to novelties typically adapt slower than humans. We promote the development of intelligent agents capable of performing at the human level or above when operating in open-world physical environments. Testbed website: https://github.com/phy-q/novphy

Maksim Smirnov, Aleksandr Gushchin, Anastasia Antsiferova et al.

Video quality assessment (VQA) is a crucial task in the development of video compression standards, as it directly impacts the viewer experience. This paper presents the results of the Compressed Video Quality Assessment challenge, held in conjunction with the Advances in Image Manipulation (AIM) workshop at ECCV 2024. The challenge aimed to evaluate the performance of VQA methods on a diverse dataset of 459 videos, encoded with 14 codecs of various compression standards (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, AV1, and VVC/H.266) and containing a comprehensive collection of compression artifacts. To measure the methods performance, we employed traditional correlation coefficients between their predictions and subjective scores, which were collected via large-scale crowdsourced pairwise human comparisons. For training purposes, participants were provided with the Compressed Video Quality Assessment Dataset (CVQAD), a previously developed dataset of 1022 videos. Up to 30 participating teams registered for the challenge, while we report the results of 6 teams, which submitted valid final solutions and code for reproducing the results. Moreover, we calculated and present the performance of state-of-the-art VQA methods on the developed dataset, providing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. The dataset, results, and online leaderboard are publicly available at https://challenges.videoprocessing.ai/challenges/compressedvideo-quality-assessment.html.

Daiheng Gao, Yuliang Xiu, Kailin Li et al.

Hand, the bearer of human productivity and intelligence, is receiving much attention due to the recent fever of digital twins. Among different hand morphable models, MANO has been widely used in vision and graphics community. However, MANO disregards textures and accessories, which largely limits its power to synthesize photorealistic hand data. In this paper, we extend MANO with Diverse Accessories and Rich Textures, namely DART. DART is composed of 50 daily 3D accessories which varies in appearance and shape, and 325 hand-crafted 2D texture maps covers different kinds of blemishes or make-ups. Unity GUI is also provided to generate synthetic hand data with user-defined settings, e.g., pose, camera, background, lighting, textures, and accessories. Finally, we release DARTset, which contains large-scale (800K), high-fidelity synthetic hand images, paired with perfect-aligned 3D labels. Experiments demonstrate its superiority in diversity. As a complement to existing hand datasets, DARTset boosts the generalization in both hand pose estimation and mesh recovery tasks. Raw ingredients (textures, accessories), Unity GUI, source code and DARTset are publicly available at dart2022.github.io

Yicong Zhu, Changnian Han, Peng Zhang et al.

We have developed an AI-aided multiple time stepping (AI-MTS) algorithm and multiscale modeling framework (AI-MSM) and implemented them on the Summit-like supercomputer, AIMOS. AI-MSM is the first of its kind to integrate multi-physics, including intra-platelet, inter-platelet, and fluid-platelet interactions, into one system. It has simulated a record-setting multiscale blood clotting model of 102 million particles, of which 70 flowing and 180 aggregating platelets, under dissipative particle dynamics to coarse-grained molecular dynamics. By adaptively adjusting timestep sizes to match the characteristic time scales of the underlying dynamics, AI-MTS optimally balances speeds and accuracies of the simulations.

Fei Feng, Yifan Zhou, Peng Zhang

We devise neuro-dynamic state estimation (Neuro-DSE), a learning-based dynamic state estimation (DSE) algorithm for networked microgrids (NMs) under unknown subsystems. Our contributions include: 1) a data-driven Neuro-DSE algorithm for NMs DSE with partially unidentified dynamic models, which incorporates the neural-ordinary-differential-equations (ODE-Net) into Kalman filters; 2) a self-refining Neuro-DSE algorithm (Neuro-DSE+) which enables data-driven DSE under limited and noisy measurements by establishing an automatic filtering, augmenting and correcting framework; 3) a Neuro-KalmanNet-DSE algorithm which further integrates KalmanNet with Neuro-DSE to relieve the model mismatch of both neural- and physics-based dynamic models; and 4) an augmented Neuro-DSE for joint estimation of NMs states and unknown parameters (e.g., inertia). Extensive case studies demonstrate the efficacy of Neuro-DSE and its variants under different noise levels, control modes, power sources, observabilities and model knowledge, respectively.

Qingya Li, Xiangzhi Liu, Fuqiang Wang et al.

Due to the dynamics and uncertainty of the dynamic multi-objective optimization problems (DMOPs), it is difficult for algorithms to find a satisfactory solution set before the next environmental change, especially for some complex environments. One reason may be that the information in the environmental static stage can not be used well in the traditional framework. In this paper, a novel framework based on generational and environmental response strategies (FGERS) is proposed, in which response strategies are run both in the environmental change stage and the environmental static stage to obtain population evolution information of those both stages. Unlike in the traditional framework, response strategies are only run in the environmental change stage. For simplicity, the feed-forward center point strategy was chosen to be the response strategy in the novel dynamic framework (FGERS-CPS). FGERS-CPS is not only to predict change trend of the optimum solution set in the environmental change stage, but to predict the evolution trend of the population after several generations in the environmental static stage. Together with the feed-forward center point strategy, a simple memory strategy and adaptive diversity maintenance strategy were used to form the complete FGERS-CPS. On 13 DMOPs with various characteristics, FGERS-CPS was compared with four classical response strategies in the traditional framework. Experimental results show that FGERS-CPS is effective for DMOPs.

Cheng Xue, Vimukthini Pinto, Chathura Gamage et al.

Humans are well-versed in reasoning about the behaviors of physical objects and choosing actions accordingly to accomplish tasks, while it remains a major challenge for AI. To facilitate research addressing this problem, we propose a new testbed that requires an agent to reason about physical scenarios and take an action appropriately. Inspired by the physical knowledge acquired in infancy and the capabilities required for robots to operate in real-world environments, we identify 15 essential physical scenarios. We create a wide variety of distinct task templates, and we ensure all the task templates within the same scenario can be solved by using one specific strategic physical rule. By having such a design, we evaluate two distinct levels of generalization, namely the local generalization and the broad generalization. We conduct an extensive evaluation with human players, learning agents with varying input types and architectures, and heuristic agents with different strategies. Inspired by how human IQ is calculated, we define the physical reasoning quotient (Phy-Q score) that reflects the physical reasoning intelligence of an agent using the physical scenarios we considered. Our evaluation shows that 1) all agents are far below human performance, and 2) learning agents, even with good local generalization ability, struggle to learn the underlying physical reasoning rules and fail to generalize broadly. We encourage the development of intelligent agents that can reach the human level Phy-Q score. Website: https://github.com/phy-q/benchmark

Benyou Wang, Donghao Zhao, Christina Lioma et al.

Sequential word order is important when processing text. Currently, neural networks (NNs) address this by modeling word position using position embeddings. The problem is that position embeddings capture the position of individual words, but not the ordered relationship (e.g., adjacency or precedence) between individual word positions. We present a novel and principled solution for modeling both the global absolute positions of words and their order relationships. Our solution generalizes word embeddings, previously defined as independent vectors, to continuous word functions over a variable (position). The benefit of continuous functions over variable positions is that word representations shift smoothly with increasing positions. Hence, word representations in different positions can correlate with each other in a continuous function. The general solution of these functions is extended to complex-valued domain due to richer representations. We extend CNN, RNN and Transformer NNs to complex-valued versions to incorporate our complex embedding (we make all code available). Experiments on text classification, machine translation and language modeling show gains over both classical word embeddings and position-enriched word embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first work in NLP to link imaginary numbers in complex-valued representations to concrete meanings (i.e., word order).

Mingyang Huang, Peng Zhang, Bang Zhang

Generating long-term, coherent, and realistic music-conditioned dance sequences remains a challenging task in human motion synthesis. Existing approaches exhibit critical limitations: motion graph methods rely on fixed template libraries, restricting creative generation; diffusion models, while capable of producing novel motions, often lack temporal coherence and musical alignment. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{MotionRAG-Diff}$, a hybrid framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with diffusion-based refinement to enable high-quality, musically coherent dance generation for arbitrary long-term music inputs. Our method introduces three core innovations: (1) A cross-modal contrastive learning architecture that aligns heterogeneous music and dance representations in a shared latent space, establishing unsupervised semantic correspondence without paired data; (2) An optimized motion graph system for efficient retrieval and seamless concatenation of motion segments, ensuring realism and temporal coherence across long sequences; (3) A multi-condition diffusion model that jointly conditions on raw music signals and contrastive features to enhance motion quality and global synchronization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionRAG-Diff achieves state-of-the-art performance in motion quality, diversity, and music-motion synchronization accuracy. This work establishes a new paradigm for music-driven dance generation by synergizing retrieval-based template fidelity with diffusion-based creative enhancement.

Jing Zhang, Shuzhen Sun, Peng Zhang et al.

Transformer-based large language models exhibit groundbreaking capabilities, but their storage and computational costs are prohibitively high, limiting their application in resource-constrained scenarios. An effective approach is to eliminate redundant model parameters and computational costs while incorporating efficient expert-derived knowledge structures to achieve a balance between compression and performance. Therefore, we propose the \textit{Sememe Entanglement Encoding (SEE)} algorithm. Guided by expert prior knowledge, the model is compressed through the low-rank approximation idea. In Entanglement Embedding, basic semantic units such as sememes are represented as low-dimensional vectors, and then reconstructed into high-dimensional word embeddings through the combination of generalized quantum entanglement. We adapt the Sememe Entanglement Encoding algorithm to transformer-based models of different magnitudes. Experimental results indicate that our approach achieves stable performance while compressing model parameters and computational costs.

Yifan Zhou, Peng Zhang

Transient stability assessment (TSA) is a cornerstone for resilient operations of today's interconnected power grids. This paper is a confluence of quantum computing, data science and machine learning to potentially address the power system TSA challenge. We devise a quantum TSA (qTSA) method to enable scalable and efficient data-driven transient stability prediction for bulk power systems, which is the first attempt to tackle the TSA issue with quantum computing. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) A low-depth, high expressibility quantum neural network for accurate and noise-resilient TSA; 2) A quantum natural gradient descent algorithm for efficient qTSA training; 3) A systematical analysis on qTSA's performance under various quantum factors. qTSA underpins a foundation of quantum-enabled and data-driven power grid stability analytics. It renders the intractable TSA straightforward and effortless in the Hilbert space, and therefore provides stability information for power system operations. Extensive experiments on quantum simulators and real quantum computers verify the accuracy, noise-resilience, scalability and universality of qTSA.

Yifan Zhou, Peng Zhang

A neural ordinary differential equations network (ODE-Net)-enabled reachability method (Neuro-Reachability) is devised for the dynamic verification of networked microgrids (NMs) with unidentified subsystems and heterogeneous uncertainties. Three new contributions are presented: 1) An ODENet-enabled dynamic model discovery approach is devised to construct the data-driven state-space model which preserves the nonlinear and differential structure of the NMs system; 2) A physics-data-integrated (PDI) NMs model is established, which empowers various NM analytics; and 3) A conformance-empowered reachability analysis is developed to enhance the reliability of the PDI-driven dynamic verification. Extensive case studies demonstrate the efficacy of the ODE-Net-enabled method in microgrid dynamic model discovery, and the effectiveness of the Neuro-Reachability approach in verifying the NMs dynamics under multiple uncertainties and various operational scenarios.

Peng Zhang, Jinlong Li, Tengfei Li et al.

To handle different types of Many-Objective Optimization Problems (MaOPs), Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MaOEAs) need to simultaneously maintain convergence and population diversity in the high-dimensional objective space. In order to balance the relationship between diversity and convergence, we introduce a Kernel Matrix and probability model called Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs). Our Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm with Determinantal Point Processes (MaOEADPPs) is presented and compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms on various types of MaOPs \textcolor{blue}{with different numbers of objectives}. The experimental results demonstrate that MaOEADPPs is competitive.

Zefan Tang, Yanyuan Qin, Zimin Jiang et al.

Existing microgrid communication relies on classical public key systems, which are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers. This paper uses quantum key distribution (QKD) to solve these quantum-era microgrid challenges. Specifically, this paper makes the following novel contributions: 1) it offers a QKD-based microgrid communication architecture for microgrids; 2) it shows how to build a quantum-secure microgrid testbed in an RTDS environment; 3) it develops a key pool sharing (KPS) strategy to improve the cyberattack resilience of the QKD-based microgrid; and 4) it analyzes the impacts of critical QKD parameters with the testbed. Test results provide insightful resources for building a quantum-secure microgrid.

Arshit Gupta, Peng Zhang, Garima Lalwani et al.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a core component of dialog systems. It typically involves two tasks - intent classification (IC) and slot labeling (SL), which are then followed by a dialogue management (DM) component. Such NLU systems cater to utterances in isolation, thus pushing the problem of context management to DM. However, contextual information is critical to the correct prediction of intents and slots in a conversation. Prior work on contextual NLU has been limited in terms of the types of contextual signals used and the understanding of their impact on the model. In this work, we propose a context-aware self-attentive NLU (CASA-NLU) model that uses multiple signals, such as previous intents, slots, dialog acts and utterances over a variable context window, in addition to the current user utterance. CASA-NLU outperforms a recurrent contextual NLU baseline on two conversational datasets, yielding a gain of up to 7% on the IC task for one of the datasets. Moreover, a non-contextual variant of CASA-NLU achieves state-of-the-art performance for IC task on standard public datasets - Snips and ATIS.