Lu Dai

Lu Dai, Bang Wang, Wei Xiang et al.

Recently, prompt-tuning has attracted growing interests in event argument extraction (EAE). However, the existing prompt-tuning methods have not achieved satisfactory performance due to the lack of consideration of entity information. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional iterative prompt-tuning method for EAE, where the EAE task is treated as a cloze-style task to take full advantage of entity information and pre-trained language models (PLMs). Furthermore, our method explores event argument interactions by introducing the argument roles of contextual entities into prompt construction. Since template and verbalizer are two crucial components in a cloze-style prompt, we propose to utilize the role label semantic knowledge to construct a semantic verbalizer and design three kinds of templates for the EAE task. Experiments on the ACE 2005 English dataset with standard and low-resource settings show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the peer state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/HustMinsLab/BIP.

Fanpu Cao, Lu Dai, Jindong Han et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) plays a vital role in numerous real-world applications, yet existing models remain constrained by their reliance on a limited historical context. This limitation prevents them from effectively capturing global periodic patterns that often span cycles significantly longer than the input horizon - despite such patterns carrying strong predictive signals. Naive solutions, such as extending the historical window, lead to severe drawbacks, including overfitting, prohibitive computational costs, and redundant information processing. To address these challenges, we introduce the Global Temporal Retriever (GTR), a lightweight and plug-and-play module designed to extend any forecasting model's temporal awareness beyond the immediate historical context. GTR maintains an adaptive global temporal embedding of the entire cycle and dynamically retrieves and aligns relevant global segments with the input sequence. By jointly modeling local and global dependencies through a 2D convolution and residual fusion, GTR effectively bridges short-term observations with long-term periodicity without altering the host model architecture. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that GTR consistently delivers state-of-the-art performance across both short-term and long-term forecasting scenarios, while incurring minimal parameter and computational overhead. These results highlight GTR as an efficient and general solution for enhancing global periodicity modeling in MTSF tasks. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/macovaseas/GTR.

Lu Dai, Liqian Ma, Shenhan Qian et al.

In this paper, we define and study a new Cloth2Body problem which has a goal of generating 3D human body meshes from a 2D clothing image. Unlike the existing human mesh recovery problem, Cloth2Body needs to address new and emerging challenges raised by the partial observation of the input and the high diversity of the output. Indeed, there are three specific challenges. First, how to locate and pose human bodies into the clothes. Second, how to effectively estimate body shapes out of various clothing types. Finally, how to generate diverse and plausible results from a 2D clothing image. To this end, we propose an end-to-end framework that can accurately estimate 3D body mesh parameterized by pose and shape from a 2D clothing image. Along this line, we first utilize Kinematics-aware Pose Estimation to estimate body pose parameters. 3D skeleton is employed as a proxy followed by an inverse kinematics module to boost the estimation accuracy. We additionally design an adaptive depth trick to align the re-projected 3D mesh better with 2D clothing image by disentangling the effects of object size and camera extrinsic. Next, we propose Physics-informed Shape Estimation to estimate body shape parameters. 3D shape parameters are predicted based on partial body measurements estimated from RGB image, which not only improves pixel-wise human-cloth alignment, but also enables flexible user editing. Finally, we design Evolution-based pose generation method, a skeleton transplanting method inspired by genetic algorithms to generate diverse reasonable poses during inference. As shown by experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data, the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and can effectively recover natural and diverse 3D body meshes from 2D images that align well with clothing.

Fan Liu, Jindong Han, Tengfei Lyu et al.

Foundation models (FMs), such as GPT-4 and AlphaFold, are reshaping the landscape of scientific research. Beyond accelerating tasks such as hypothesis generation, experimental design, and result interpretation, they prompt a more fundamental question: Are FMs merely enhancing existing scientific methodologies, or are they redefining the way science is conducted? In this paper, we argue that FMs are catalyzing a transition toward a new scientific paradigm. We introduce a three-stage framework to describe this evolution: (1) Meta-Scientific Integration, where FMs enhance workflows within traditional paradigms; (2) Hybrid Human-AI Co-Creation, where FMs become active collaborators in problem formulation, reasoning, and discovery; and (3) Autonomous Scientific Discovery, where FMs operate as independent agents capable of generating new scientific knowledge with minimal human intervention. Through this lens, we review current applications and emerging capabilities of FMs across existing scientific paradigms. We further identify risks and future directions for FM-enabled scientific discovery. This position paper aims to support the scientific community in understanding the transformative role of FMs and to foster reflection on the future of scientific discovery. Our project is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/Awesome-Foundation-Models-for-Scientific-Discovery.

Hanqing Wang, Mingyu Liu, Xiaoyu Chen et al.

3D affordance grounding aims to highlight the actionable regions on 3D objects, which is crucial for robotic manipulation. Previous research primarily focused on learning affordance knowledge from static cues such as language and images, which struggle to provide sufficient dynamic interaction context that can reveal temporal and causal cues. To alleviate this predicament, we collect a comprehensive video-based 3D affordance dataset, \textit{VIDA}, which contains 38K human-object-interaction videos covering 16 affordance types, 38 object categories, and 22K point clouds. Based on \textit{VIDA}, we propose a strong baseline: VideoAfford, which activates multimodal large language models with additional affordance segmentation capabilities, enabling both world knowledge reasoning and fine-grained affordance grounding within a unified framework. To enhance action understanding capability, we leverage a latent action encoder to extract dynamic interaction priors from HOI videos. Moreover, we introduce a \textit{spatial-aware} loss function to enable VideoAfford to obtain comprehensive 3D spatial knowledge. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms well-established methods and exhibits strong open-world generalization with affordance reasoning abilities. All datasets and code will be publicly released to advance research in this area.

Xiaoyu Chen, Lu Dai, Hanqing Wang et al.

Structured tables are essential for conveying high-density information in professional domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific research. Despite the progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), reasoning performance remains limited for complex tables with hierarchical layouts. In this paper, we identify a critical Perception Bottleneck through quantitative analysis. We find that as task complexity scales, the number of involved discrete visual regions increases disproportionately. This processing density leads to an internal "Perceptual Overload," where MLLMs struggle to maintain accurate spatial attention during implicit generation. To address this bottleneck, we introduce TableVision, a large-scale, trajectory-aware benchmark designed for spatially grounded reasoning. TableVision stratifies tabular tasks into three cognitive levels (Perception, Reasoning, and Analysis) across 13 sub-categories. By utilizing a rendering-based deterministic grounding pipeline, the dataset explicitly couples multi-step logical deductions with pixel-perfect spatial ground truths, comprising 6,799 high-fidelity reasoning trajectories. Our empirical results, supported by diagnostic probing, demonstrate that explicit spatial constraints significantly recover the reasoning potential of MLLMs. Furthermore, our two-stage decoupled framework achieves a robust 12.3% overall accuracy improvement on the test set. TableVision provides a rigorous testbed and a fresh perspective on the synergy between perception and logic in document understanding.

Wei-Chen Chang, Lu Dai, Ting Xu

This study proposes a risk prediction method based on a Multi-Scale Temporal Alignment Network (MSTAN) to address the challenges of temporal irregularity, sampling interval differences, and multi-scale dynamic dependencies in Electronic Health Records (EHR). The method focuses on temporal feature modeling by introducing a learnable temporal alignment mechanism and a multi-scale convolutional feature extraction structure to jointly model long-term trends and short-term fluctuations in EHR sequences. At the input level, the model maps multi-source clinical features into a unified high-dimensional semantic space and employs temporal embedding and alignment modules to dynamically weight irregularly sampled data, reducing the impact of temporal distribution differences on model performance. The multi-scale feature extraction module then captures key patterns across different temporal granularities through multi-layer convolution and hierarchical fusion, achieving a fine-grained representation of patient states. Finally, an attention-based aggregation mechanism integrates global temporal dependencies to generate individual-level risk representations for disease risk prediction and health status assessment. Experiments conducted on publicly available EHR datasets show that the proposed model outperforms mainstream baselines in accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-Score, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of multi-scale temporal alignment in complex medical time-series analysis. This study provides a new solution for intelligent representation of high-dimensional asynchronous medical sequences and offers important technical support for EHR-driven clinical risk prediction.

Lu Dai, Liang Sun, Fanpu Cao et al.

Modern information retrieval (IR) is no longer consumed primarily by humans but increasingly by large language models (LLMs) via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic search. Unlike human users, LLMs are constrained by limited attention budgets and are uniquely vulnerable to noise; misleading or irrelevant information is no longer just a nuisance, but a direct cause of hallucinations and reasoning failures. In this perspective paper, we argue that denoising-maximizing usable evidence density and verifiability within a context window-is becoming the primary bottleneck across the full information access pipeline. We conceptualize this paradigm shift through a four-stage framework of IR challenges: from inaccessible to undiscoverable, to misaligned, and finally to unverifiable. Furthermore, we provide a pipeline-organized taxonomy of signal-to-noise optimization techniques, spanning indexing, retrieval, context engineering, verification, and agentic workflow. We also present research works on information denoising in domains that rely heavily on retrieval such as lifelong assistant, coding agent, deep research, and multimodal understanding.

Yiwei Zhang, Jie Liu, Jiawei Wang et al.

This paper proposes a data privacy protection framework based on federated learning, which aims to realize effective cross-domain data collaboration under the premise of ensuring data privacy through distributed learning. Federated learning greatly reduces the risk of privacy breaches by training the model locally on each client and sharing only model parameters rather than raw data. The experiment verifies the high efficiency and privacy protection ability of federated learning under different data sources through the simulation of medical, financial, and user data. The results show that federated learning can not only maintain high model performance in a multi-domain data environment but also ensure effective protection of data privacy. The research in this paper provides a new technical path for cross-domain data collaboration and promotes the application of large-scale data analysis and machine learning while protecting privacy.

Ziyan Yao, Fei Lin, Sheng Chai et al.

In this paper, an innovative multi-modal deep learning model is proposed to deeply integrate heterogeneous information from medical images and clinical reports. First, for medical images, convolutional neural networks were used to extract high-dimensional features and capture key visual information such as focal details, texture and spatial distribution. Secondly, for clinical report text, a two-way long and short-term memory network combined with an attention mechanism is used for deep semantic understanding, and key statements related to the disease are accurately captured. The two features interact and integrate effectively through the designed multi-modal fusion layer to realize the joint representation learning of image and text. In the empirical study, we selected a large medical image database covering a variety of diseases, combined with corresponding clinical reports for model training and validation. The proposed multimodal deep learning model demonstrated substantial superiority in the realms of disease classification, lesion localization, and clinical description generation, as evidenced by the experimental results.

Yingbin Liang, Lu Dai, Shuo Shi et al.

Complex data mining has wide application value in many fields, especially in the feature extraction and classification tasks of unlabeled data. This paper proposes an algorithm based on self-supervised learning and verifies its effectiveness through experiments. The study found that in terms of the selection of optimizer and learning rate, the combination of AdamW optimizer and 0.002 learning rate performed best in all evaluation indicators, indicating that the adaptive optimization method can improve the performance of the model in complex data mining tasks. In addition, the ablation experiment further analyzed the contribution of each module. The results show that contrastive learning, variational modules, and data augmentation strategies play a key role in the generalization ability and robustness of the model. Through the convergence curve analysis of the loss function, the experiment verifies that the method can converge stably during the training process and effectively avoid serious overfitting. Further experimental results show that the model has strong adaptability on different data sets, can effectively extract high-quality features from unlabeled data, and improves classification accuracy. At the same time, under different data distribution conditions, the method can still maintain high detection accuracy, proving its applicability in complex data environments. This study analyzed the role of self-supervised learning methods in complex data mining through systematic experiments and verified its advantages in improving feature extraction quality, optimizing classification performance, and enhancing model stability

Lu Dai, Wenxuan Zhu, Xuehui Quan et al.

To improve the identification of potential anomaly patterns in complex user behavior, this paper proposes an anomaly detection method based on a deep mixture density network. The method constructs a Gaussian mixture model parameterized by a neural network, enabling conditional probability modeling of user behavior. It effectively captures the multimodal distribution characteristics commonly present in behavioral data. Unlike traditional classifiers that rely on fixed thresholds or a single decision boundary, this approach defines an anomaly scoring function based on probability density using negative log-likelihood. This significantly enhances the model's ability to detect rare and unstructured behaviors. Experiments are conducted on the real-world network user dataset UNSW-NB15. A series of performance comparisons and stability validation experiments are designed. These cover multiple evaluation aspects, including Accuracy, F1- score, AUC, and loss fluctuation. The results show that the proposed method outperforms several advanced neural network architectures in both performance and training stability. This study provides a more expressive and discriminative solution for user behavior modeling and anomaly detection. It strongly promotes the application of deep probabilistic modeling techniques in the fields of network security and intelligent risk control.

Lu Dai, Yijie Xu, Jinhui Ye et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated improved generation performance by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge, a process known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite the potential of this approach, existing studies evaluate RAG effectiveness by 1) assessing retrieval and generation components jointly, which obscures retrieval's distinct contribution, or 2) examining retrievers using traditional metrics such as NDCG, which creates a gap in understanding retrieval's true utility in the overall generation process. To address the above limitations, in this work, we introduce an automatic evaluation method that measures retrieval quality through the lens of information gain within the RAG framework. Specifically, we propose Semantic Perplexity (SePer), a metric that captures the LLM's internal belief about the correctness of the retrieved information. We quantify the utility of retrieval by the extent to which it reduces semantic perplexity post-retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SePer not only aligns closely with human preferences but also offers a more precise and efficient evaluation of retrieval utility across diverse RAG scenarios.

Lu Dai, Hao Liu, Hui Xiong

Retrieval module can be plugged into many downstream NLP tasks to improve their performance, such as open-domain question answering and retrieval-augmented generation. The key to a retrieval system is to calculate relevance scores to query and passage pairs. However, the definition of relevance is often ambiguous. We observed that a major class of relevance aligns with the concept of entailment in NLI tasks. Based on this observation, we designed a method called entailment tuning to improve the embedding of dense retrievers. Specifically, we unify the form of retrieval data and NLI data using existence claim as a bridge. Then, we train retrievers to predict the claims entailed in a passage with a variant task of masked prediction. Our method can be efficiently plugged into current dense retrieval methods, and experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

Ke Liu, Kaijing Ding, Lu Dai et al.

In this paper, we employ the long-short-term memory model (LSTM) to predict the real-time go-around probability as an arrival flight is approaching JFK airport and within 10 nm of the landing runway threshold. We further develop methods to examine the causes to go-around occurrences both from a global view and an individual flight perspective. According to our results, in-trail spacing, and simultaneous runway operation appear to be the top factors that contribute to overall go-around occurrences. We then integrate these pre-trained models and analyses with real-time data streaming, and finally develop a demo web-based user interface that integrates the different components designed previously into a real-time tool that can eventually be used by flight crews and other line personnel to identify situations in which there is a high risk of a go-around.

Junyong Lin, Lu Dai, Ruiqian Han et al.

Scientific researchers need intensive information about datasets to effectively evaluate and develop theories and methodologies. The information needs regarding datasets are implicitly embedded in particular research tasks, rather than explicitly expressed in search queries. However, existing scientific retrieval and question-answering (QA) datasets typically address straightforward questions, which do not align with the distribution of real-world research inquiries. To bridge this gap, we developed ScIRGen, a dataset generation framework for scientific QA \& retrieval that more accurately reflects the information needs of professional science researchers, and uses it to create a large-scale scientific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) dataset with realistic queries, datasets and papers. Technically, we designed a dataset-oriented information extraction method that leverages academic papers to augment the dataset representation. We then proposed a question generation framework by employing cognitive taxonomy to ensure the quality of synthesized questions. We also design a method to automatically filter synthetic answers based on the perplexity shift of LLMs, which is highly aligned with human judgment of answers' validity. Collectively, these methodologies culminated in the creation of the 61k QA dataset, ScIRGen-Geo. We benchmarked representative methods on the ScIRGen-Geo dataset for their question-answering and retrieval capabilities, finding out that current methods still suffer from reasoning from complex questions. This work advances the development of more sophisticated tools to support the intricate information needs of the scientific community.

Yuyang Wu, Jinhui Ye, Shuhao Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown growing potential in molecular sciences, but they often produce chemically inaccurate descriptions and struggle to recognize or justify potential errors. This raises important concerns about their robustness and reliability in scientific applications. To support more rigorous evaluation of LLMs in chemical reasoning, we present the MolErr2Fix benchmark, designed to assess LLMs on error detection and correction in molecular descriptions. Unlike existing benchmarks focused on molecule-to-text generation or property prediction, MolErr2Fix emphasizes fine-grained chemical understanding. It tasks LLMs with identifying, localizing, explaining, and revising potential structural and semantic errors in molecular descriptions. Specifically, MolErr2Fix consists of 1,193 fine-grained annotated error instances. Each instance contains quadruple annotations, i.e,. (error type, span location, the explanation, and the correction). These tasks are intended to reflect the types of reasoning and verification required in real-world chemical communication. Evaluations of current state-of-the-art LLMs reveal notable performance gaps, underscoring the need for more robust chemical reasoning capabilities. MolErr2Fix provides a focused benchmark for evaluating such capabilities and aims to support progress toward more reliable and chemically informed language models. All annotations and an accompanying evaluation API will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Yifan Xu, Lu Dai, Udaikaran Singh et al.

Neural inductive program synthesis is a task generating instructions that can produce desired outputs from given inputs. In this paper, we focus on the generation of a chunk of assembly code that can be executed to match a state change inside the CPU and RAM. We develop a neural program synthesis algorithm, AutoAssemblet, learned via self-learning reinforcement learning that explores the large code space efficiently. Policy networks and value networks are learned to reduce the breadth and depth of the Monte Carlo Tree Search, resulting in better synthesis performance. We also propose an effective multi-entropy policy sampling technique to alleviate online update correlations. We apply AutoAssemblet to basic programming tasks and show significant higher success rates compared to several competing baselines.