Chenglin Li

Liyao Jiang, Chenglin Li, Haolan Chen et al.

Online advertisements are important elements in e-commerce sites, social media platforms, and search engines. With the increasing popularity of mobile browsing, many online ads are displayed with visual information in the form of a cover image in addition to text descriptions to grab the attention of users. Various recent studies have focused on predicting the click rates of online advertisements aware of visual features or composing optimal advertisement elements to enhance visibility. In this paper, we propose Advertisement Style Editing and Attractiveness Enhancement (AdSEE), which explores whether semantic editing to ads images can affect or alter the popularity of online advertisements. We introduce StyleGAN-based facial semantic editing and inversion to ads images and train a click rate predictor attributing GAN-based face latent representations in addition to traditional visual and textual features to click rates. Through a large collected dataset named QQ-AD, containing 20,527 online ads, we perform extensive offline tests to study how different semantic directions and their edit coefficients may impact click rates. We further design a Genetic Advertisement Editor to efficiently search for the optimal edit directions and intensity given an input ad cover image to enhance its projected click rates. Online A/B tests performed over a period of 5 days have verified the increased click-through rates of AdSEE-edited samples as compared to a control group of original ads, verifying the relation between image styles and ad popularity. We open source the code for AdSEE research at https://github.com/LiyaoJiang1998/adsee.

Chenglin Li, Qianglong Chen, Zhi Li et al.

Recent advancements in Large Video-Language Models (LVLMs) have led to promising results in multimodal video understanding. However, it remains unclear whether these models possess the cognitive capabilities required for high-level tasks, particularly those involving symbolic and abstract perception. Existing benchmarks typically rely on real-world, annotated videos, which lack control over video content and inherent difficulty, limiting their diagnostic power. To bridge this gap, we propose VideoCogQA, a scalable and fully controllable benchmark inspired by game-world environments, designed to evaluate the cognitive abilities of LVLMs. By generating synthetic videos via a programmatic engine, VideoCogQA allows fine-grained control over visual elements, temporal dynamics, and task difficulty. This approach enables a focused evaluation of video cognitive abilities, independent of prior knowledge from visual scene semantics. The dataset includes 800 videos and 3,280 question-answer pairs, featuring tasks related to abstract concepts, symbolic elements, and multimodal integration, with varying levels of difficulty. Experimental results show that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, such as GPT-4o, achieve an average performance of 48.8% on tasks involving abstract concepts. Additionally, performance drops by 15% as task complexity increases, highlighting the challenges LVLMs face in maintaining consistent performance. Through this work, we hope to show the limitations of current LVLMs and offer insights into how they can more effectively emulate human cognitive processes in the future.

Chenglin Li, Yuanzhen Xie, Chenyun Yu et al.

Inductive representation learning on temporal heterogeneous graphs is crucial for scalable deep learning on heterogeneous information networks (HINs) which are time-varying, such as citation networks. However, most existing approaches are not inductive and thus cannot handle new nodes or edges. Moreover, previous temporal graph embedding methods are often trained with the temporal link prediction task to simulate the link formation process of temporal graphs, while ignoring the evolution of high-order topological structures on temporal graphs. To fill these gaps, we propose a Continuous-Time Representation Learning (CTRL) model on temporal HINs. To preserve heterogeneous node features and temporal structures, CTRL integrates three parts in a single layer, they are 1) a \emph{heterogeneous attention} unit that measures the semantic correlation between nodes, 2) a \emph{edge-based Hawkes process} to capture temporal influence between heterogeneous nodes, and 3) \emph{dynamic centrality} that indicates the dynamic importance of a node. We train the CTRL model with a future event (a subgraph) prediction task to capture the evolution of the high-order network structure. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that our model significantly boosts performance and outperforms various state-of-the-art approaches. Ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model design.

Chenglin Li, Mingjun Zhao, Huanming Zhang et al.

Cross-domain recommendation can help alleviate the data sparsity issue in traditional sequential recommender systems. In this paper, we propose the RecGURU algorithm framework to generate a Generalized User Representation (GUR) incorporating user information across domains in sequential recommendation, even when there is minimum or no common users in the two domains. We propose a self-attentive autoencoder to derive latent user representations, and a domain discriminator, which aims to predict the origin domain of a generated latent representation. We propose a novel adversarial learning method to train the two modules to unify user embeddings generated from different domains into a single global GUR for each user. The learned GUR captures the overall preferences and characteristics of a user and thus can be used to augment the behavior data and improve recommendations in any single domain in which the user is involved. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two public cross-domain recommendation datasets as well as a large dataset collected from real-world applications. The results demonstrate that RecGURU boosts performance and outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential recommendation and cross-domain recommendation methods. The collected data will be released to facilitate future research.

Chenglin Li, Carrie Lu Tong, Di Niu et al.

Deep learning models for human activity recognition (HAR) based on sensor data have been heavily studied recently. However, the generalization ability of deep models on complex real-world HAR data is limited by the availability of high-quality labeled activity data, which are hard to obtain. In this paper, we design a similarity embedding neural network that maps input sensor signals onto real vectors through carefully designed convolutional and LSTM layers. The embedding network is trained with a pairwise similarity loss, encouraging the clustering of samples from the same class in the embedded real space, and can be effectively trained on a small dataset and even on a noisy dataset with mislabeled samples. Based on the learned embeddings, we further propose both nonparametric and parametric approaches for activity recognition. Extensive evaluation based on two public datasets has shown that the proposed similarity embedding network significantly outperforms state-of-the-art deep models on HAR classification tasks, is robust to mislabeled samples in the training set, and can also be used to effectively denoise a noisy dataset.

Rui Zhu, Chenglin Li, Di Niu et al.

With the growth of mobile devices and applications, the number of malicious software, or malware, is rapidly increasing in recent years, which calls for the development of advanced and effective malware detection approaches. Traditional methods such as signature-based ones cannot defend users from an increasing number of new types of malware or rapid malware behavior changes. In this paper, we propose a new Android malware detection approach based on deep learning and static analysis. Instead of using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) only, we further analyze the source code of Android applications and create their higher-level graphical semantics, which makes it harder for attackers to evade detection. In particular, we use a call graph from method invocations in an Android application to represent the application, and further analyze method attributes to form a structured Program Representation Graph (PRG) with node attributes. Then, we use a graph convolutional network (GCN) to yield a graph representation of the application by embedding the entire graph into a dense vector, and classify whether it is a malware or not. To efficiently train such a graph convolutional network, we propose a batch training scheme that allows multiple heterogeneous graphs to be input as a batch. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use graph representation learning for malware detection. We conduct extensive experiments from real-world sample collections and demonstrate that our developed system outperforms multiple other existing malware detection techniques.

Chenglin Li, Keith Mills, Rui Zhu et al.

As the popularity of Android smart phones has increased in recent years, so too has the number of malicious applications. Due to the potential for data theft mobile phone users face, the detection of malware on Android devices has become an increasingly important issue in cyber security. Traditional methods like signature-based routines are unable to protect users from the ever-increasing sophistication and rapid behavior changes in new types of Android malware. Therefore, a great deal of effort has been made recently to use machine learning models and methods to characterize and generalize the malicious behavior patterns of mobile apps for malware detection. In this paper, we propose a novel and highly reliable classifier for Android Malware detection based on a Factorization Machine architecture and the extraction of Android app features from manifest files and source code. Our results indicate that the numerical feature representation of an app typically results in a long and highly sparse vector and that the interactions among different features are critical to revealing malicious behavior patterns. After performing an extensive performance evaluation, our proposed method achieved a test result of 100.00% precision score on the DREBIN dataset and 99.22% precision score with only 1.10% false positive rate on the AMD dataset. These metrics match the performance of state-of-the-art machine-learning-based Android malware detection methods and several commercial antivirus engines with the benefit of training up to 50 times faster.