Can Zhang

Tao Yang, Chuang Liu, Xiaofeng Ma et al.

Complex continuous or mixed joint distributions (e.g., P(Y | z_1, z_2, ..., z_N)) generally lack closed-form solutions, often necessitating approximations such as MCMC. This paper proposes Indeterminate Probability Theory (IPT), which makes the following contributions: (1) An observer-centered framework in which experimental outcomes are represented as distributions combining ground truth with observation error; (2) The introduction of three independence candidate axioms that enable a two-phase probabilistic inference framework; (3) The derivation of closed-form solutions for arbitrary complex joint distributions under this framework. Both the Indeterminate Probability Neural Network (IPNN) model and the non-neural multivariate time series forecasting application demonstrate IPT's effectiveness in modeling high-dimensional distributions, with successful validation up to 1000 dimensions. Importantly, IPT is consistent with classical probability theory and subsumes the frequentist equation in the limit of vanishing observation error.

Can Zhang, Gim Hee Lee

Recent works on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) focus on the selection of good pseudo-labels as surrogates for the missing labels in the target data. However, source domain bias that deteriorates the pseudo-labels can still exist since the shared network of the source and target domains are typically used for the pseudo-label selections. The suboptimal feature space source-to-target domain alignment can also result in unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose CA-UDA to improve the quality of the pseudo-labels and UDA results with optimal assignment, a pseudo-label refinement strategy and class-aware domain alignment. We use an auxiliary network to mitigate the source domain bias for pseudo-label refinement. Our intuition is that the underlying semantics in the target domain can be fully exploited to help refine the pseudo-labels that are inferred from the source features under domain shift. Furthermore, our optimal assignment can optimally align features in the source-to-target domains and our class-aware domain alignment can simultaneously close the domain gap while preserving the classification decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in the image classification task.

Hang Du, Sicheng Zhang, Binzhu Xie et al.

Video anomaly understanding (VAU) aims to automatically comprehend unusual occurrences in videos, thereby enabling various applications such as traffic surveillance and industrial manufacturing. While existing VAU benchmarks primarily concentrate on anomaly detection and localization, our focus is on more practicality, prompting us to raise the following crucial questions: "what anomaly occurred?", "why did it happen?", and "how severe is this abnormal event?". In pursuit of these answers, we present a comprehensive benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly (CUVA). Specifically, each instance of the proposed benchmark involves three sets of human annotations to indicate the "what", "why" and "how" of an anomaly, including 1) anomaly type, start and end times, and event descriptions, 2) natural language explanations for the cause of an anomaly, and 3) free text reflecting the effect of the abnormality. In addition, we also introduce MMEval, a novel evaluation metric designed to better align with human preferences for CUVA, facilitating the measurement of existing LLMs in comprehending the underlying cause and corresponding effect of video anomalies. Finally, we propose a novel prompt-based method that can serve as a baseline approach for the challenging CUVA. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of our evaluation metric and the prompt-based approach. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/fesvhtr/CUVA.

Yufei Zhan, Ziheng Wu, Yousong Zhu et al.

Despite notable advancements in multimodal reasoning, leading Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still underperform on vision-centric multimodal reasoning tasks in general scenarios. This shortfall stems from their predominant reliance on logic- and knowledge-based slow thinking strategies, while effective for domains like math and science, fail to integrate visual information effectively during reasoning. Consequently, these models often fail to adequately ground visual cues, resulting in suboptimal performance in tasks that require multiple plausible visual interpretations and inferences. To address this, we present GThinker (General Thinker), a novel reasoning MLLM excelling in multimodal reasoning across general scenarios, mathematics, and science. GThinker introduces Cue-Rethinking, a flexible reasoning pattern that grounds inferences in visual cues and iteratively reinterprets these cues to resolve inconsistencies. Building on this pattern, we further propose a two-stage training pipeline, including pattern-guided cold start and incentive reinforcement learning, designed to enable multimodal reasoning capabilities across domains. Furthermore, to support the training, we construct GThinker-11K, comprising 7K high-quality, iteratively-annotated reasoning paths and 4K curated reinforcement learning samples, filling the data gap toward general multimodal reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GThinker achieves 81.5% on the challenging comprehensive multimodal reasoning benchmark M$^3$CoT, surpassing the latest O4-mini model. It also shows an average improvement of 2.1% on general scenario multimodal reasoning benchmarks, while maintaining on-par performance in mathematical reasoning compared to counterpart advanced reasoning models. The code, model, and data will be released soon at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/GThinker.

Wei Guo, Can Zhang, Zhicheng He et al.

CTR prediction is essential for modern recommender systems. Ranging from early factorization machines to deep learning based models in recent years, existing CTR methods focus on capturing useful feature interactions or mining important behavior patterns. Despite the effectiveness, we argue that these methods suffer from the risk of label sparsity (i.e., the user-item interactions are highly sparse with respect to the feature space), label noise (i.e., the collected user-item interactions are usually noisy), and the underuse of domain knowledge (i.e., the pairwise correlations between samples). To address these challenging problems, we propose a novel Multi-Interest Self-Supervised learning (MISS) framework which enhances the feature embeddings with interest-level self-supervision signals. With the help of two novel CNN-based multi-interest extractors,self-supervision signals are discovered with full considerations of different interest representations (point-wise and union-wise), interest dependencies (short-range and long-range), and interest correlations (inter-item and intra-item). Based on that, contrastive learning losses are further applied to the augmented views of interest representations, which effectively improves the feature representation learning. Furthermore, our proposed MISS framework can be used as an plug-in component with existing CTR prediction models and further boost their performances. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets show that MISS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models, by up to 13.55% in AUC, and also enjoys good compatibility with representative deep CTR models.