Jianyi Liu

Yihao Wang, Ruiqi Song, Lingxiao Li et al.

Linguistic steganalysis (LS) tasks aim to detect whether a text contains secret information. Existing LS methods focus on the deep-learning model design and they achieve excellent results in ideal data. However, they overlook the unique user characteristics, leading to weak performance in social networks. And a few stegos here that further complicate detection. We propose the UP4LS, a framework with the User Profile for enhancing LS in realistic scenarios. Three kinds of user attributes like writing habits are explored to build the profile. For each attribute, the specific feature extraction module is designed. The extracted features are mapped to high-dimensional user features via the deep-learning model of the method to be improved. The content feature is extracted by the language model. Then user and content features are integrated. Existing methods can improve LS results by adding the UP4LS framework without changing their deep-learning models. Experiments show that UP4LS can significantly enhance the performance of LS-task baselines in realistic scenarios, with the overall Acc increased by 25%, F1 increased by 51%, and SOTA results. The improvement is especially pronounced in fewer stegos. Additionally, UP4LS also sets the stage for the related-task SOTA methods to efficient LS.

Zhen Yang, Wenhui Wang, Tao Qi et al.

Accurately recommending candidate news articles to users has always been the core challenge of news recommendation system. News recommendations often require modeling of user interest to match candidate news. Recent efforts have primarily focused on extracting local subgraph information in a global click graph constructed by the clicked news sequence of all users. Howerer, the computational complexity of extracting global click graph information has hindered the ability to utilize far-reaching linkage which is hidden between two distant nodes in global click graph collaboratively among similar users. To overcome the problem above, we propose a Global-view Long Chain Interests Modeling for news recommendation (GLoCIM), which combines neighbor interest with long chain interest distilled from a global click graph, leveraging the collaboration among similar users to enhance news recommendation. We therefore design a long chain selection algorithm and long chain interest encoder to obtain global-view long chain interest from the global click graph. We design a gated network to integrate long chain interest with neighbor interest to achieve the collaborative interest among similar users. Subsequently we aggregate it with local news category-enhanced representation to generate final user representation. Then candidate news representation can be formed to match user representation to achieve news recommendation. Experimental results on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our method to improve the performance of news recommendation.

Yihao Wang, Ru Zhang, Yifan Tang et al.

With the evolution of generative linguistic steganography techniques, conventional steganalysis falls short in robustly quantifying the alterations induced by steganography, thereby complicating detection. Consequently, the research paradigm has pivoted towards deep-learning-based linguistic steganalysis. This study offers a comprehensive review of existing contributions and evaluates prevailing developmental trajectories. Specifically, we first provided a formalized exposition of the general formulas for linguistic steganalysis, while comparing the differences between this field and the domain of text classification. Subsequently, we classified the existing work into two levels based on vector space mapping and feature extraction models, thereby comparing the research motivations, model advantages, and other details. A comparative analysis of the experiments is conducted to assess the performances. Finally, the challenges faced by this field are discussed, and several directions for future development and key issues that urgently need to be addressed are proposed.

Yihong Lu, Jianyi Liu, Ru Zhang

Image anti-forensics is a critical topic in the field of image privacy and security research. With the increasing ease of manipulating or generating human faces in images, the potential misuse of such forged images is a growing concern. This study aims to comprehensively review the knowledge structure and research hotspots related to image anti-forensics by analyzing publications in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database. The bibliometric analysis conducted using VOSViewer software has revealed the research trends, major research institutions, most influential publications, top publishing venues, and most active contributors in this field. This is the first comprehensive bibliometric study summarizing research trends and developments in image anti-forensics. The information highlights recent and primary research directions, serving as a reference for future research in image anti-forensics.

Kangyi Wu, Pengna Li, Kailin Lyu et al.

Vision-Language Navigation(VLN) requires an agent to navigate through 3D environments by following natural language instructions. While recent Video Large Language Models(Video-LLMs) have largely advanced VLN, they remain highly susceptible to State Drift in long scenarios. In these cases, the agent's internal state drifts away from the true task execution state, leading to aimless wandering and failure to execute essential maneuvers in the instruction. We attribute this failure to two distinct cognitive deficits: Progress Drift, where the agent fails to distinguish completed sub-goals from remaining ones, and Memory Drift, where the agent's history representations degrade, making it lose track of visited landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Anchoring Framework that explicitly anchors the instruction progress and history representations. First, to address progress drift, we introduce Instruction Progress Anchoring, which supervises the agent to generate structured text tokens that delineate completed versus remaining sub-goals. Second, to mitigate memory drift, we propose Memory Landmark Anchoring, which utilizes a Landmark-Centric World Model to retrospectively predict object-centric embeddings extracted by the Segment Anything Model, compelling the agent to explicitly verify past observations and preserve distinct representations of visited landmarks. Facilitating this framework, we curate two extensive datasets: 3.6 million samples with explicit progress descriptions, and 937k grounded landmark data for retrospective verification. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a 15.2% improvement in Success Rate and a remarkable 24.7% gain on long-horizon trajectories. To facilitate further research, we will release our code, data generation pipelines, and the collected datasets.

Zhen Liu, Yuhan Liu, Jinjun Wang et al.

Vision-and-Language Navigation requires agents to follow natural-language instructions in visually changing environments. A central challenge is the dynamic entanglement between language and observations: the meaning of instruction shifts as the agent's field of view and spatial context evolve. However, many existing models encode the instruction as a static global representation, limiting their ability to adapt instruction meaning to the current visual context. We therefore model instruction understanding as an Instruction-as-State variable: a decision-relevant, token-level instruction state that evolves step by step conditioned on the agent's perceptual state, where the perceptual state denotes the observation-grounded navigation context at each step. To realize this principle, we introduce State-Entangled Environment-Guided Instruction Understanding (S-EGIU), a coarse-to-fine framework for state-conditioned segment activation and token-level semantic refinement. At the coarse level, S-EGIU activates the instruction segment whose semantics align with the current observation. At the fine level, it refines the activated segment through observation-guided token grounding and contextual modeling, sharpening its internal semantics under the current observation. Together, these stages maintain an instruction state that is continuously updated according to the agent's perceptual state during navigation. S-EGIU delivers strong performance on several key metrics, including a +2.68% SPL gain on REVERIE Test Unseen, and demonstrates consistent efficiency gains across multiple VLN benchmarks, underscoring the value of dynamic instruction--perception entanglement.

Yihao Li, Ru Zhang, Jianyi Liu

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in a multitude of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, they encounter challenges in practical applications, including issues with hallucinations, inadequate knowledge updating, and limited transparency in the reasoning process. To overcome these limitations, this study innovatively proposes a collaborative training-free reasoning scheme involving tight cooperation between Knowledge Graph (KG) and LLMs. This scheme first involves using LLMs to iteratively explore KG, selectively retrieving a task-relevant knowledge subgraph to support reasoning. The LLMs are then guided to further combine inherent implicit knowledge to reason on the subgraph while explicitly elucidating the reasoning process. Through such a cooperative approach, our scheme achieves more reliable knowledge-based reasoning and facilitates the tracing of the reasoning results. Experimental results show that our scheme significantly progressed across multiple datasets, notably achieving over a 10% improvement on the QALD10 dataset compared to the best baseline and the fine-tuned state-of-the-art (SOTA) work. Building on this success, this study hopes to offer a valuable reference for future research in the fusion of KG and LLMs, thereby enhancing LLMs' proficiency in solving complex issues.

Zhen Liu, Yuhan Liu, Jinjun Wang et al.

In vision-and-language navigation (VLN), self-improvement from policy-induced experience, using only standard VLN action supervision, critically depends on balancing behavioral diversity and learning stability, which governs whether the agent can extract a reliable learning signal for improvement. Increasing behavioral diversity is necessary to expose alternative action hypotheses but can destabilize policy-induced learning signals, whereas overly conservative stability constraints suppress exploration and induce early commitment, making reliable self-improvement difficult. To address this challenge, we propose Stability-Diversity Balance (SDB), a plug-and-play mechanism for balanced self-improvement in VLN. SDB expands each decision step into multiple latent behavioral hypotheses by applying controlled shifts in the instruction-conditioned hidden states, and then performs reliability-aware soft evaluation and aggregation to retain diverse yet instruction-consistent alternatives during learning. An explicit regularizer further constrains hypothesis interactions, preventing excessive drift or premature collapse of hypothesis diversity and stabilizing self-improvement without discarding training signals. Experiments on R2R, SOON, and REVERIE show consistent improvements; for example, on REVERIE val-unseen, SDB improves SPL from 33.73 to 35.93 and OSR from 51.07 to 54.25.

Yihao Wang, Lingxiao Li, Yifan Tang et al.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) use advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to significantly improve traffic flow management efficiency, and promote the intelligent development of the transportation industry. However, if the data in ITS is attacked, such as tampering or forgery, it will endanger public safety and cause social losses. Therefore, this paper proposes a watermarking that can verify the integrity of copyright in response to the needs of ITS, termed ITSmark. ITSmark focuses on functions such as extracting watermarks, verifying permission, and tracing tampered locations. The scheme uses the copyright information to build the multi-bit space and divides this space into multiple segments. These segments will be assigned to tokens. Thus, the next token is determined by its segment which contains the copyright. In this way, the obtained data contains the custom watermark. To ensure the authorization, key parameters are encrypted during copyright embedding to obtain cipher data. Only by possessing the correct cipher data and private key, can the user entirely extract the watermark. Experiments show that ITSmark surpasses baseline performances in data quality, extraction accuracy, and unforgeability. It also shows unique capabilities of permission verification and tampered location tracing, which ensures the security of extraction and the reliability of copyright verification. Furthermore, ITSmark can also customize the watermark embedding position and proportion according to user needs, making embedding more flexible.

Yihao Wang, Ruiqi Song, Lingxiao Li et al.

Existing linguistic steganography schemes often overlook the conditional probability (CP) of tokens in the candidate pool, allocating the one coding to all tokens, which results in identical selection likelihoods. This approach leads to the selection of low-CP tokens, degrading the quality of stegos and making them more detectable. This paper proposes a scheme based on the interval allocated, called DAIRstega. DAIRstega first uses a portion of the read secret to build the roulette area. Then, this scheme uses the idea of the roulette wheel and takes the CPs of tokens as the main basis for allocating the roulette area (i.e., the interval length). Thus, tokens with larger CPs are allocated more area. The secret will have an increased likelihood of selecting a token with a higher CP. During allocation, we designed some allocation functions and three constraints to optimize the process. Additionally, DAIRstega supports prompt-based controllable generation of stegos. Rich experiments show that the proposed embedding way and DAIRstega perform better than the existing ways and baselines, which shows strong perceptual, statistical, and semantic concealment, as well as anti-steganalysis ability. It can also generate high-quality longer stegos, addressing the deficiencies in this task. DAIRstega is confirmed to have potential as a secure watermarking, offering insights for its development.

Jiaxin Song, Xinyu Wang, Yihao Wang et al.

With the widespread use of social media, user-generated content has surged on online platforms. When such content includes hateful, abusive, offensive, or cyberbullying behavior, it is classified as toxic speech, posing a significant threat to the online ecosystem's integrity and safety. While manual content moderation is still prevalent, the overwhelming volume of content and the psychological strain on human moderators underscore the need for automated toxic speech detection. Previously proposed detection methods often rely on large annotated datasets; however, acquiring such datasets is both costly and challenging in practice. To address this issue, we propose an uncertainty-guided firewall for toxic speech in few-shot scenarios, U-GIFT, that utilizes self-training to enhance detection performance even when labeled data is limited. Specifically, U-GIFT combines active learning with Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to automatically identify high-quality samples from unlabeled data, prioritizing the selection of pseudo-labels with higher confidence for training based on uncertainty estimates derived from model predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U-GIFT significantly outperforms competitive baselines in few-shot detection scenarios. In the 5-shot setting, it achieves a 14.92\% performance improvement over the basic model. Importantly, U-GIFT is user-friendly and adaptable to various pre-trained language models (PLMs). It also exhibits robust performance in scenarios with sample imbalance and cross-domain settings, while showcasing strong generalization across various language applications. We believe that U-GIFT provides an efficient solution for few-shot toxic speech detection, offering substantial support for automated content moderation in cyberspace, thereby acting as a firewall to promote advancements in cybersecurity.

Tong Zhang, Ru Zhang, Jianyi Liu et al.

Existing concept erasure methods for text-to-image diffusion models commonly rely on fixed anchor strategies, which often lead to critical issues such as concept re-emergence and erosion. To address this, we conduct causal tracing to reveal the inherent sensitivity of erasure to anchor selection and define Sibling Exclusive Concepts as a superior class of anchors. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{SELECT} (Sibling-Exclusive Evaluation for Contextual Targeting), a dynamic anchor selection framework designed to overcome the limitations of fixed anchors. Our framework introduces a novel two-stage evaluation mechanism that automatically discovers optimal anchors for precise erasure while identifying critical boundary anchors to preserve related concepts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SELECT, as a universal anchor solution, not only efficiently adapts to multiple erasure frameworks but also consistently outperforms existing baselines across key performance metrics, averaging only 4 seconds for anchor mining of a single concept.

Yifan Tang, Yihao Wang, Ru Zhang et al.

To detect stego (steganographic text) in complex scenarios, linguistic steganalysis (LS) with various motivations has been proposed and achieved excellent performance. However, with the development of generative steganography, some stegos have strong concealment, especially after the emergence of LLMs-based steganography, the existing LS has low detection or cannot detect them. We designed a novel LS with two modes called LSGC. In the generation mode, we created an LS-task "description" and used the generation ability of LLM to explain whether texts to be detected are stegos. On this basis, we rethought the principle of LS and LLMs, and proposed the classification mode. In this mode, LSGC deleted the LS-task "description" and used the "causalLM" LLMs to extract steganographic features. The LS features can be extracted by only one pass of the model, and a linear layer with initialization weights is added to obtain the classification probability. Experiments on strongly concealed stegos show that LSGC significantly improves detection and reaches SOTA performance. Additionally, LSGC in classification mode greatly reduces training time while maintaining high performance.

Yufei Luo, Zhen Yang, Ru Zhang et al.

Currently, most methods for text steganalysis are based on deep neural networks (DNNs). However, in real-life scenarios, obtaining a sufficient amount of labeled stego-text for correctly training networks using a large number of parameters is often challenging and costly. Additionally, due to a phenomenon known as dataset bias or domain shift, recognition models trained on a large dataset exhibit poor generalization performance on novel datasets and tasks. Therefore, to address the issues of missing labeled data and inadequate model generalization in text steganalysis, this paper proposes a cross-domain stego-text analysis method (PDTS) based on pseudo-labeling and domain adaptation (unsupervised learning). Specifically, we propose a model architecture combining pre-trained BERT with a single-layer Bi-LSTM to learn and extract generic features across tasks and generate task-specific representations. Considering the differential contributions of different features to steganalysis, we further design a feature filtering mechanism to achieve selective feature propagation, thereby enhancing classification performance. We train the model using labeled source domain data and adapt it to target domain data distribution using pseudo-labels for unlabeled target domain data through self-training. In the label estimation step, instead of using a static sampling strategy, we propose a progressive sampling strategy to gradually increase the number of selected pseudo-label candidates. Experimental results demonstrate that our method performs well in zero-shot text steganalysis tasks, achieving high detection accuracy even in the absence of labeled data in the target domain, and outperforms current zero-shot text steganalysis methods.

Ru Zhang, Wenxin Sun, Jianyi Liu et al.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attack, also known as directed threat attack, refers to the continuous and effective attack activities carried out by an organization on a specific object. They are covert, persistent and targeted, which are difficult to capture by traditional intrusion detection system(IDS). The traffic generated by the APT organization, which is the organization that launch the APT attack, has a high similarity, especially in the Command and Control(C2) stage. The addition of features for APT organizations can effectively improve the accuracy of traffic detection for APT attacks. This paper analyzes the DNS and TCP traffic of the APT attack, and constructs two new features, C2Load_fluct (response packet load fluctuation) and Bad_rate (bad packet rate). The analysis showed APT attacks have obvious statistical laws in these two features. This article combines two new features with common features to classify APT attack traffic. Aiming at the problem of data loss and boundary samples, we improve the Adaptive Synthetic(ADASYN) Sampling Approach and propose the PADASYN algorithm to achieve data balance. A traffic classification scheme is designed based on the AdaBoost algorithm. Experiments show that the classification accuracy of APT attack traffic is improved after adding new features to the two datasets so that 10 DNS features, 11 TCP and HTTP/HTTPS features are used to construct a Features set. On the two datasets, F1-score can reach above 0.98 and 0.94 respectively, which proves that the two new features in this paper are effective for APT traffic detection.

Ru Zhang, Sheng Zou, Jianyi Liu et al.

Traditional steganalysis methods generally include two steps: feature extraction and classification.A variety of steganalysis algorithms based on CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) have appeared in recent years. Among them, the convolutional layer of the CNN model is usually used to extract steganographic features, and the fully connected layer is used for classification. Because the effectiveness of feature extraction seriously influences the accuracy of classification, designers generally improve the accuracy of steganographic detection by improving the convolutional layer. For example, common optimizing methods in convolutional layer include the improvement of convolution kernel, activation functions, pooling functions, network structures, etc. However, due to the complexity and unexplainability of convolutional layers, it is difficult to quantitatively analyze and compare the effectiveness of feature extraction. Therefore, this paper proposes the variation coefficient to evaluate the feature learning ability of convolutional layers. We select four typical image steganalysis models based CNN in spatial domain, such as Ye-Net, Yedroudj-Net, Zhu-Net, and SR-Net as use cases, and verify the validity of the variation coefficient through experiments. Moreover, according to the variation coefficient , a features modification layer is used to optimize the features before the fully connected layer of the CNN model , and the experimental results show that the detection accuracy of the four algorithms were improved differently.

Zhentan Zheng, Jianyi Liu

Style transfer is a useful image synthesis technique that can re-render given image into another artistic style while preserving its content information. Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a widely adopted framework toward this task for its better representation ability on local style patterns than the traditional Gram-matrix based methods. However, most previous methods rely on sufficient amount of pre-collected style images to train the model. In this paper, a novel Patch Permutation GAN (P$^2$-GAN) network that can efficiently learn the stroke style from a single style image is proposed. We use patch permutation to generate multiple training samples from the given style image. A patch discriminator that can simultaneously process patch-wise images and natural images seamlessly is designed. We also propose a local texture descriptor based criterion to quantitatively evaluate the style transfer quality. Experimental results showed that our method can produce finer quality re-renderings from single style image with improved computational efficiency compared with many state-of-the-arts methods.

Ru Zhang, Feng Zhu, Jianyi Liu et al.

For steganalysis, many studies showed that convolutional neural network has better performances than the two-part structure of traditional machine learning methods. However, there are still two problems to be resolved: cutting down signal to noise ratio of the steganalysis feature map and steganalyzing images of arbitrary size. Some algorithms required fixed size images as the input and had low accuracy due to the underutilization of the noise residuals obtained by various types of filters. In this paper, we focus on designing an improved network structure based on CNN to resolve the above problems. First, we use 3x3 kernels instead of the traditional 5x5 kernels and optimize convolution kernels in the preprocessing layer. The smaller convolution kernels are used to reduce the number of parameters and model the features in a small local region. Next, we use separable convolutions to utilize channel correlation of the residuals, compress the image content and increase the signal-to-noise ratio (between the stego signal and the image signal). Then, we use spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) to aggregate the local features, enhance the representation ability of features, and steganalyze arbitrary size image. Finally, data augmentation is adopted to further improve network performance. The experimental results show that the proposed CNN structure is significantly better than other four methods such as SRM, Ye-Net, Xu-Net, and Yedroudj-Net, when it is used to detect two spatial algorithms such as WOW and S-UNIWARAD with a wide variety of datasets and payloads.

Ru Zhang, Shiqi Dong, Jianyi Liu

Nowadays, there are plenty of works introducing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the steganalysis and exceeding conventional steganalysis algorithms. These works have shown the improving potential of deep learning in information hiding domain. There are also several works based on deep learning to do image steganography, but these works still have problems in capacity, invisibility and security. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN architecture named as \isgan to conceal a secret gray image into a color cover image on the sender side and exactly extract the secret image out on the receiver side. There are three contributions in our work: (i) we improve the invisibility by hiding the secret image only in the Y channel of the cover image; (ii) We introduce the generative adversarial networks to strengthen the security by minimizing the divergence between the empirical probability distributions of stego images and natural images. (iii) In order to associate with the human visual system better, we construct a mixed loss function which is more appropriate for steganography to generate more realistic stego images and reveal out more better secret images. Experiment results show that ISGAN can achieve start-of-art performances on LFW, Pascal VOC2012 and ImageNet datasets.