Yongbo Li

Yuhao Dan, Zhikai Lei, Yiyang Gu et al.

EduChat (https://www.educhat.top/) is a large-scale language model (LLM)-based chatbot system in the education domain. Its goal is to support personalized, fair, and compassionate intelligent education, serving teachers, students, and parents. Guided by theories from psychology and education, it further strengthens educational functions such as open question answering, essay assessment, Socratic teaching, and emotional support based on the existing basic LLMs. Particularly, we learn domain-specific knowledge by pre-training on the educational corpus and stimulate various skills with tool use by fine-tuning on designed system prompts and instructions. Currently, EduChat is available online as an open-source project, with its code, data, and model parameters available on platforms (e.g., GitHub https://github.com/icalk-nlp/EduChat, Hugging Face https://huggingface.co/ecnu-icalk ). We also prepare a demonstration of its capabilities online (https://vimeo.com/851004454). This initiative aims to promote research and applications of LLMs for intelligent education.

Ling Yue, Yongqi Zhang, Quanming Yao et al. · tencent-ai

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding is a fundamental task in natural language processing, and various methods have been proposed to explore semantic patterns in distinctive ways. In this paper, we propose to learn an ensemble by leveraging existing methods in a relation-aware manner. However, exploring these semantics using relation-aware ensemble leads to a much larger search space than general ensemble methods. To address this issue, we propose a divide-search-combine algorithm RelEns-DSC that searches the relation-wise ensemble weights independently. This algorithm has the same computation cost as general ensemble methods but with much better performance. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in efficiently searching relation-aware ensemble weights and achieving state-of-the-art embedding performance. The code is public at https://github.com/LARS-research/RelEns.

Ruikun Li, Huandong Wang, Qingmin Liao et al.

Energy landscapes play a crucial role in shaping dynamics of many real-world complex systems. System evolution is often modeled as particles moving on a landscape under the combined effect of energy-driven drift and noise-induced diffusion, where the energy governs the long-term motion of the particles. Estimating the energy landscape of a system has been a longstanding interdisciplinary challenge, hindered by the high operational costs or the difficulty of obtaining supervisory signals. Therefore, the question of how to infer the energy landscape in the absence of true energy values is critical. In this paper, we propose a physics-informed self-supervised learning method to learn the energy landscape from the evolution trajectories of the system. It first maps the system state from the observation space to a discrete landscape space by an adaptive codebook, and then explicitly integrates energy into the graph neural Fokker-Planck equation, enabling the joint learning of energy estimation and evolution prediction. Experimental results across interdisciplinary systems demonstrate that our estimated energy has a correlation coefficient above 0.9 with the ground truth, and evolution prediction accuracy exceeds the baseline by an average of 17.65\%. The code is available at github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/PESLA.

Shi-Feng Peng, Guolei Sun, Yong Li et al.

The primary challenge of cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) is the domain disparity between the training and inference phases, which can exist in either the input data or the target classes. Previous models struggle to learn feature representations that generalize to various unknown domains from limited training domain samples. In contrast, the large-scale visual model SAM, pre-trained on tens of millions of images from various domains and classes, possesses excellent generalizability. In this work, we propose a SAM-aware graph prompt reasoning network (GPRN) that fully leverages SAM to guide CD-FSS feature representation learning and improve prediction accuracy. Specifically, we propose a SAM-aware prompt initialization module (SPI) to transform the masks generated by SAM into visual prompts enriched with high-level semantic information. Since SAM tends to divide an object into many sub-regions, this may lead to visual prompts representing the same semantic object having inconsistent or fragmented features. We further propose a graph prompt reasoning (GPR) module that constructs a graph among visual prompts to reason about their interrelationships and enable each visual prompt to aggregate information from similar prompts, thus achieving global semantic consistency. Subsequently, each visual prompt embeds its semantic information into the corresponding mask region to assist in feature representation learning. To refine the segmentation mask during testing, we also design a non-parameter adaptive point selection module (APS) to select representative point prompts from query predictions and feed them back to SAM to refine inaccurate segmentation results. Experiments on four standard CD-FSS datasets demonstrate that our method establishes new state-of-the-art results. Code: https://github.com/CVL-hub/GPRN.

Yunshan Zhong, Yuyao Zhou, Yuxin Zhang et al.

Data-free quantization (DFQ) enables model quantization without accessing real data, addressing concerns regarding data security and privacy. With the growing adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs), DFQ for ViTs has garnered significant attention. However, existing DFQ methods exhibit two limitations: (1) semantic distortion, where the semantics of synthetic images deviate substantially from those of real images, and (2) semantic inadequacy, where synthetic images contain extensive regions with limited content and oversimplified textures, leading to suboptimal quantization performance. To address these limitations, we propose SARDFQ, a novel Semantics Alignment and Reinforcement Data-Free Quantization method for ViTs. To address semantic distortion, SARDFQ incorporates Attention Priors Alignment (APA), which optimizes synthetic images to follow randomly generated structure attention priors. To mitigate semantic inadequacy, SARDFQ introduces Multi-Semantic Reinforcement (MSR), leveraging localized patch optimization to enhance semantic richness across synthetic images. Furthermore, SARDFQ employs Soft-Label Learning (SL), wherein multiple semantic targets are adapted to facilitate the learning of multi-semantic images augmented by MSR. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SARDFQ, significantly surpassing existing methods. For example, SARDFQ improves top-1 accuracy on ImageNet by 15.52% for W4A4 ViT-B. The code is at https://github.com/zysxmu/SARDFQ.

Li Wang, Yongbo Li, Xiangyang Xue

Recent advances in crowd counting have achieved promising results with increasingly complex convolutional neural network designs. However, due to the unpredictable domain shift, generalizing trained model to unseen scenarios is often suboptimal. Inspired by the observation that density maps of different scenarios share similar local structures, we propose a novel adversarial learning approach in this paper, i.e., CODA (\emph{Counting Objects via scale-aware adversarial Density Adaption}). To deal with different object scales and density distributions, we perform adversarial training with pyramid patches of multi-scales from both source- and target-domain. Along with a ranking constraint across levels of the pyramid input, consistent object counts can be produced for different scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network produces much better results on unseen datasets compared with existing counting adaption models. Notably, the performance of our CODA is comparable with the state-of-the-art fully-supervised models that are trained on the target dataset. Further analysis indicates that our density adaption framework can effortlessly extend to scenarios with different objects. \emph{The code is available at https://github.com/Willy0919/CODA.}

Yu Liu, Shu Yang, Jingtao Ding et al.

By representing knowledge in a primary triple associated with additional attribute-value qualifiers, hyper-relational knowledge graph (HKG) that generalizes triple-based knowledge graph (KG) has been attracting research attention recently. Compared with KG, HKG is enriched with the semantic qualifiers as well as the hyper-relational graph structure. However, to model HKG, existing studies mainly focus on either semantic information or structural information therein, which however fail to capture both simultaneously. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we generalize the hyperedge expansion in hypergraph learning and propose an equivalent transformation for HKG modeling, referred to as TransEQ. Specifically, the equivalent transformation transforms a HKG to a KG, which considers both semantic and structural characteristics. Then an encoder-decoder framework is developed to bridge the modeling research between KG and HKG. In the encoder part, KG-based graph neural networks are leveraged for structural modeling; while in the decoder part, various HKG-based scoring functions are exploited for semantic modeling. Especially, we design the sharing embedding mechanism in the encoder-decoder framework with semantic relatedness captured. We further theoretically prove that TransEQ preserves complete information in the equivalent transformation, and also achieves full expressivity. Finally, extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TransEQ in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. On the largest benchmark WikiPeople, TransEQ significantly improves the state-of-the-art models by 15\% on MRR.

Han Yuan, Lican Kang, Yong Li

While deep learning has exhibited remarkable predictive capabilities in various medical image tasks, its inherent black-box nature has hindered its widespread implementation in real-world healthcare settings. Our objective is to unveil the decision-making processes of deep learning models in the context of glaucoma classification by employing several Class Activation Map (CAM) techniques to generate model focus regions and comparing them with clinical domain knowledge of the anatomical area (optic cup, optic disk, and blood vessels). Four deep neural networks, including VGG-11, ResNet-18, DeiT-Tiny, and Swin Transformer-Tiny, were developed using binary diagnostic labels of glaucoma and five CAM methods (Grad-CAM, XGrad-CAM, Score-CAM, Eigen-CAM, and Layer-CAM) were employed to highlight the model focus area. We applied the paired-sample t-test to compare the percentage of anatomies in the model focus area to the proportion of anatomies in the entire image. After that, Pearson's and Spearman's correlation tests were implemented to examine the relationship between model predictive ability and the percentage of anatomical structures in the model focus area. On five public glaucoma datasets, all deep learning models consistently displayed statistically significantly higher percentages of anatomical structures in the focus area than the proportions of anatomical structures in the entire image. Also, we validated the positive relationship between the percentage of anatomical structures in the focus area and model predictive performance. Our study provides evidence of the convergence of decision logic between deep neural networks and human clinicians through rigorous statistical tests. We anticipate that it can help alleviate clinicians' concerns regarding the trustworthiness of deep learning in healthcare. For reproducibility, the code and dataset have been released at GitHub.

Wanjin Feng, Yuan Yuan, Jingtao Ding et al.

In the era of increasingly complex AI models for time series forecasting, progress is often measured by marginal improvements on benchmark leaderboards. However, this approach suffers from a fundamental flaw: standard evaluation metrics conflate a model's performance with the data's intrinsic unpredictability. To address this pressing challenge, we introduce a novel, predictability-aligned diagnostic framework grounded in spectral coherence. Our framework makes two primary contributions: the Spectral Coherence Predictability (SCP), a computationally efficient ($O(N\log N)$) and task-aligned score that quantifies the inherent difficulty of a given forecasting instance, and the Linear Utilization Ratio (LUR), a frequency-resolved diagnostic tool that precisely measures how effectively a model exploits the linearly predictable information within the data. We validate our framework's effectiveness and leverage it to reveal two core insights. First, we provide the first systematic evidence of "predictability drift", demonstrating that a task's forecasting difficulty varies sharply over time. Second, our evaluation reveals a key architectural trade-off: complex models are superior for low-predictability data, whereas linear models are highly effective on more predictable tasks. We advocate for a paradigm shift, moving beyond simplistic aggregate scores toward a more insightful, predictability-aware evaluation that fosters fairer model comparisons and a deeper understanding of model behavior.

Hongyi Chen, Jingtao Ding, Jianhai Shu et al.

Complex nonlinear system control faces challenges in achieving sample-efficient, reliable performance. While diffusion-based methods have demonstrated advantages over classical and reinforcement learning approaches in long-term control performance, they are limited by sample efficiency. This paper presents SEDC (Sample-Efficient Diffusion-based Control), a novel diffusion-based control framework addressing three core challenges: high-dimensional state-action spaces, nonlinear system dynamics, and the gap between non-optimal training data and near-optimal control solutions. Through three innovations - Decoupled State Diffusion, Dual-Mode Decomposition, and Guided Self-finetuning - SEDC achieves 39.5\%-49.4\% better control accuracy than baselines while using only 10\% of the training samples, as validated across three complex nonlinear dynamic systems. Our approach represents a significant advancement in sample-efficient control of complex nonlinear systems. The implementation of the code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DIFOCON-C019.