Wei Zhong

Jinyuan Liu, Zhu Liu, Guanyao Wu et al.

Multi-modality image fusion and segmentation play a vital role in autonomous driving and robotic operation. Early efforts focus on boosting the performance for only one task, \emph{e.g.,} fusion or segmentation, making it hard to reach~`Best of Both Worlds'. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{i}nteractive \textbf{F}eature learning architecture for image fusion and \textbf{Seg}mentation, namely SegMiF, and exploit dual-task correlation to promote the performance of both tasks. The SegMiF is of a cascade structure, containing a fusion sub-network and a commonly used segmentation sub-network. By slickly bridging intermediate features between two components, the knowledge learned from the segmentation task can effectively assist the fusion task. Also, the benefited fusion network supports the segmentation one to perform more pretentiously. Besides, a hierarchical interactive attention block is established to ensure fine-grained mapping of all the vital information between two tasks, so that the modality/semantic features can be fully mutual-interactive. In addition, a dynamic weight factor is introduced to automatically adjust the corresponding weights of each task, which can balance the interactive feature correspondence and break through the limitation of laborious tuning. Furthermore, we construct a smart multi-wave binocular imaging system and collect a full-time multi-modality benchmark with 15 annotated pixel-level categories for image fusion and segmentation. Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method outputs visually appealing fused images and perform averagely $7.66\%$ higher segmentation mIoU in the real-world scene than the state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and benchmark are available at \url{https://github.com/JinyuanLiu-CV/SegMiF}.

Jinyuan Liu, Guanyao Wu, Zhu Liu et al.

Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) is a critical task in computer vision, aimed at integrating the unique features of both infrared and visible spectra into a unified representation. Since 2018, the field has entered the deep learning era, with an increasing variety of approaches introducing a range of networks and loss functions to enhance visual performance. However, challenges such as data compatibility, perception accuracy, and efficiency remain. Unfortunately, there is a lack of recent comprehensive surveys that address this rapidly expanding domain. This paper fills that gap by providing a thorough survey covering a broad range of topics. We introduce a multi-dimensional framework to elucidate common learning-based IVIF methods, from visual enhancement strategies to data compatibility and task adaptability. We also present a detailed analysis of these approaches, accompanied by a lookup table clarifying their core ideas. Furthermore, we summarize performance comparisons, both quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing on registration, fusion, and subsequent high-level tasks. Beyond technical analysis, we discuss potential future directions and open issues in this area. For further details, visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/RollingPlain/IVIF_ZOO.

Bing Yu, Liu Shi, Haitao Wang et al.

Accurate three-dimensional (3D) tooth segmentation from Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is a prerequisite for digital dental workflows. However, achieving high-fidelity segmentation remains challenging due to adhesion artifacts in naturally occluded scans, which are caused by low contrast and indistinct inter-arch boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose the Anatomy Aware Cascade Network (AACNet), a coarse-to-fine framework designed to resolve boundary ambiguity while maintaining global structural consistency. Specifically, we introduce two mechanisms: the Ambiguity Gated Boundary Refiner (AGBR) and the Signed Distance Map guided Anatomical Attention (SDMAA). The AGBR employs an entropy based gating mechanism to perform targeted feature rectification in high uncertainty transition zones. Meanwhile, the SDMAA integrates implicit geometric constraints via signed distance map to enforce topological consistency, preventing the loss of spatial details associated with standard pooling. Experimental results on a dataset of 125 CBCT volumes demonstrate that AACNet achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 90.17 \% and a 95\% Hausdorff Distance of 3.63 mm, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong generalization on an external dataset with an HD95 of 2.19 mm, validating its reliability for downstream clinical applications such as surgical planning. Code for AACNet is available at https://github.com/shiliu0114/AACNet.

Haoyu Jiang, Boan Qu, Junjie Zhu et al.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is exponentially escalating computational demand, inflating data center energy use and carbon emissions, and spurring rapid deployment of green data centers to relieve resource and environmental stress. Achieving sub-minute orchestration of renewables, storage, and loads, while minimizing PUE and lifecycle carbon intensity, hinges on accurate load forecasting. However, existing methods struggle to address small-sample scenarios caused by cold start, load distortion, multi-source data fragmentation, and distribution shifts in green data centers. We introduce HyperLoad, a cross-modality framework that exploits pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to overcome data scarcity. In the Cross-Modality Knowledge Alignment phase, textual priors and time-series data are mapped to a common latent space, maximizing the utility of prior knowledge. In the Multi-Scale Feature Modeling phase, domain-aligned priors are injected through adaptive prefix-tuning, enabling rapid scenario adaptation, while an Enhanced Global Interaction Attention mechanism captures cross-device temporal dependencies. The public DCData dataset is released for benchmarking. Under both data sufficient and data scarce settings, HyperLoad consistently surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, demonstrating its practicality for sustainable green data center management.

Haoyu Jiang, Fanjie Zeng, Boan Qu et al.

In the global drive toward carbon neutrality, deeply coordinated smart energy systems underpin industrial transformation. However, the interdisciplinary, fragmented, and fast-evolving expertise in this domain prevents general-purpose LLMs, which lack domain knowledge and physical-constraint awareness, from delivering precise engineering-aligned inference and generation. To address these challenges, we introduce Helios, a large language model tailored to the smart energy domain, together with a comprehensive suite of resources to advance LLM research in this field. Specifically, we develop Enersys, a multi-agent collaborative framework for end-to-end dataset construction, through which we produce: (1) a smart energy knowledge base, EnerBase, to enrich the model's foundational expertise; (2) an instruction fine-tuning dataset, EnerInstruct, to strengthen performance on domain-specific downstream tasks; and (3) an RLHF dataset, EnerReinforce, to align the model with human preferences and industry standards. Leveraging these resources, Helios undergoes large-scale pretraining, SFT, and RLHF. We also release EnerBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs in smart energy scenarios, and demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances domain knowledge mastery, task execution accuracy, and alignment with human preferences.

Junyu Ren, Wensheng Gan, Guangyu Zhang et al.

Existing transfer fault diagnosis methods typically assume either clean data or sufficient domain similarity, which limits their effectiveness in industrial environments where severe noise interference and domain shifts coexist. To address this challenge, we propose an information separation global-focal adversarial network (ISGFAN), a robust framework for cross-domain fault diagnosis under noise conditions. ISGFAN is built on an information separation architecture that integrates adversarial learning with an improved orthogonal loss to decouple domain-invariant fault representation, thereby isolating noise interference and domain-specific characteristics. To further strengthen transfer robustness, ISGFAN employs a global-focal domain-adversarial scheme that constrains both the conditional and marginal distributions of the model. Specifically, the focal domain-adversarial component mitigates category-specific transfer obstacles caused by noise in unsupervised scenarios, while the global domain classifier ensures alignment of the overall distribution. Experiments conducted on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other prominent existing approaches, confirming the superiority of the ISGFAN framework. Data and code are available at https://github.com/JYREN-Source/ISGFAN

Pengfei Shi, Wei Zhong, Xinyu Zhang et al.

Estimating the conditional average treatment effects (CATE) is very important in causal inference and has a wide range of applications across many fields. In the estimation process of CATE, the unconfoundedness assumption is typically required to ensure the identifiability of the regression problems. When estimating CATE using high-dimensional data, there have been many variable selection methods and neural network approaches based on representation learning, while these methods do not provide a way to verify whether the subset of variables after dimensionality reduction or the learned representations still satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption during the estimation process, which can lead to ineffective estimates of the treatment effects. Additionally, these methods typically use data from only the treatment or control group when estimating the regression functions for each group. This paper proposes a novel neural network approach named \textbf{CrossNet} to learn a sufficient representation for the features, based on which we then estimate the CATE, where cross indicates that in estimating the regression functions, we used data from their own group as well as cross-utilized data from another group. Numerical simulations and empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms the competitive approaches.

Zhaoyu Xing, Yang Wan, Juan Wen et al.

It is important to identify the discriminative features for high dimensional clustering. However, due to the lack of cluster labels, the regularization methods developed for supervised feature selection can not be directly applied. To learn the pseudo labels and select the discriminative features simultaneously, we propose a new unsupervised feature selection method, named GlObal and Local information combined Feature Selection (GOLFS), for high dimensional clustering problems. The GOLFS algorithm combines both local geometric structure via manifold learning and global correlation structure of samples via regularized self-representation to select the discriminative features. The combination improves the accuracy of both feature selection and clustering by exploiting more comprehensive information. In addition, an iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem and the convergency is proved. Simulations and two real data applications demonstrate the excellent finite-sample performance of GOLFS on both feature selection and clustering.

Hao Zeng, Wei Zhong, Xingbai Xu

It is important to incorporate spatial geographic information into U.S. presidential election analysis, especially for swing states. The state-level analysis also faces significant challenges of limited spatial data availability. To address the challenges of spatial dependence and small sample sizes in predicting U.S. presidential election results using spatially dependent data, we propose a novel transfer learning framework within the SAR model, called as tranSAR. Classical SAR model estimation often loses accuracy with small target data samples. Our framework enhances estimation and prediction by leveraging information from similar source data. We introduce a two-stage algorithm, consisting of a transferring stage and a debiasing stage, to estimate parameters and establish theoretical convergence rates for the estimators. Additionally, if the informative source data are unknown, we propose a transferable source detection algorithm using spatial residual bootstrap to maintain spatial dependence and derive its detection consistency. Simulation studies show our algorithm substantially improves the classical two-stage least squares estimator. We demonstrate our method's effectiveness in predicting outcomes in U.S. presidential swing states, where it outperforms traditional methods. In addition, our tranSAR model predicts that the Democratic party will win the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Li Mao, Wei Du, Shuo Wen et al.

This study uses deep-learning models to predict city partition crime counts on specific days. It helps police enhance surveillance, gather intelligence, and proactively prevent crimes. We formulate crime count prediction as a spatiotemporal sequence challenge, where both input data and prediction targets are spatiotemporal sequences. In order to improve the accuracy of crime forecasting, we introduce a new model that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. We conducted a comparative analysis to access the effects of various data sequences, including raw and binned data, on the prediction errors of four deep learning forecasting models. Directly inputting raw crime data into the forecasting model causes high prediction errors, making the model unsuitable for real - world use. The findings indicate that the proposed CNN-LSTM model achieves optimal performance when crime data is categorized into 10 or 5 groups. Data binning can enhance forecasting model performance, but poorly defined intervals may reduce map granularity. Compared to dividing into 5 bins, binning into 10 intervals strikes an optimal balance, preserving data characteristics and surpassing raw data in predictive modelling efficacy.

Wei Zhong, Manasa Bharadwaj, Yixiao Wang et al.

Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely adopted approach for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), particularly when the draft and target models are well aligned. However, state-of-the-art SD methods typically rely on tightly coupled, self-attention-based Transformer decoders, often augmented with auxiliary pooling or fusion layers. This coupling makes them increasingly complex and harder to generalize across different models. We present Budget EAGLE (Beagle), the first, to our knowledge, cross-attention-based Transformer decoder SD model that achieves performance on par with leading self-attention SD models (EAGLE-v2) while eliminating the need for pooling or auxiliary components, simplifying the architecture, improving training efficiency, and maintaining stable memory usage during training-time simulation. To enable effective training of this novel architecture, we propose Two-Stage Block-Attention Training, a new method that achieves training stability and convergence efficiency in block-level attention scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and datasets show that Beagle achieves competitive inference speedups and higher training efficiency than EAGLE-v2, offering a strong alternative for architectures in speculative decoding.

Zenghui Huang, Ting Shu, Zhonglei Wang et al.

Accurate and timely forecasting of heavy rainfall remains a critical challenge for modern society. Precipitation exhibits a highly imbalanced distribution: most observations record no or light rain, while heavy rainfall events are rare. Such an imbalanced distribution obstructs deep learning models from effectively predicting heavy rainfall events. To address this challenge, we treat rainfall forecasting explicitly as a long-tailed learning problem, identifying the insufficient representation of heavy rainfall events as the primary barrier to forecasting accuracy. Therefore, we introduce DPSformer, a long-tail-aware model that enriches representation of heavy rainfall events through a high-resolution branch. For heavy rainfall events $ \geq $ 50 mm/6 h, DPSformer lifts the Critical Success Index (CSI) of a baseline Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model from 0.012 to 0.067. For the top 1% coverage of heavy rainfall events, its Fraction Skill Score (FSS) exceeds 0.45, surpassing existing methods. Our work establishes an effective long-tailed paradigm for heavy rainfall prediction, offering a practical tool to enhance early warning systems and mitigate the societal impacts of extreme weather events.

Qi Chen, Yinghao Cui, Guobin Hong et al.

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a prominent mode of interannual climate variability with far-reaching global impacts. Its evolution is governed by intricate air-sea interactions, posing significant challenges for long-term prediction. In this study, we introduce CTEFNet, a multivariate deep learning model that synergizes convolutional neural networks and transformers to enhance ENSO forecasting. By integrating multiple oceanic and atmospheric predictors, CTEFNet extends the effective forecast lead time to 20 months while mitigating the impact of the spring predictability barrier, outperforming both dynamical models and state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. Furthermore, CTEFNet offers physically meaningful and statistically significant insights through gradient-based sensitivity analysis, revealing the key precursor signals that govern ENSO dynamics, which align with well-established theories and reveal new insights about inter-basin interactions among the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. The CTEFNet's superior predictive skill and interpretable sensitivity assessments underscore its potential for advancing climate prediction. Our findings highlight the importance of multivariate coupling in ENSO evolution and demonstrate the promise of deep learning in capturing complex climate dynamics with enhanced interpretability.

Zhaoyu Xing, Wei Zhong

Reconstructing large-scale latent networks from observed dynamics is crucial for understanding complex systems. However, the existing methods based on compressive sensing are often rendered infeasible in practice by prohibitive computational and memory costs. To address this challenge, we introduce a new distributed computing framework for efficient large-scale network reconstruction with parallel computing, namely PALMS (Parallel Adaptive Lasso with Multi-directional Signals). The core idea of PALMS is to decompose the complex global problem by partitioning network nodes, enabling the parallel estimation of sub-networks across multiple computing units. This strategy substantially reduces the computational complexity and storage requirements of classic methods. By using the adaptive multi-directional regularization on each computing unit, we also establish the consistency of PALMS estimator theoretically. Extensive simulation studies and empirical analyses on several large-scale real-world networks validate the computational efficiency and robust reconstruction accuracy of our approach.

Jinyuan Liu, Xin Fan, Zhanbo Huang et al.

This study addresses the issue of fusing infrared and visible images that appear differently for object detection. Aiming at generating an image of high visual quality, previous approaches discover commons underlying the two modalities and fuse upon the common space either by iterative optimization or deep networks. These approaches neglect that modality differences implying the complementary information are extremely important for both fusion and subsequent detection task. This paper proposes a bilevel optimization formulation for the joint problem of fusion and detection, and then unrolls to a target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning (TarDAL) network for fusion and a commonly used detection network. The fusion network with one generator and dual discriminators seeks commons while learning from differences, which preserves structural information of targets from the infrared and textural details from the visible. Furthermore, we build a synchronized imaging system with calibrated infrared and optical sensors, and collect currently the most comprehensive benchmark covering a wide range of scenarios. Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate that our method outputs not only visually appealing fusion but also higher detection mAP than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Wei Zhou, Xin He, Wei Zhong et al.

Directed acyclic graph (DAG) models are widely used to represent causal relationships among random variables in many application domains. This paper studies a special class of non-Gaussian DAG models, where the conditional variance of each node given its parents is a quadratic function of its conditional mean. Such a class of non-Gaussian DAG models are fairly flexible and admit many popular distributions as special cases, including Poisson, Binomial, Geometric, Exponential, and Gamma. To facilitate learning, we introduce a novel concept of topological layers, and develop an efficient DAG learning algorithm. It first reconstructs the topological layers in a hierarchical fashion and then recoveries the directed edges between nodes in different layers, which requires much less computational cost than most existing algorithms in literature. Its advantage is also demonstrated in a number of simulated examples, as well as its applications to two real-life datasets, including an NBA player statistics data and a cosmetic sales data collected by Alibaba.

Haoyu Yang, Wei Zhong, Yuzhe Ma et al.

VLSI mask optimization is one of the most critical stages in manufacturability aware design, which is costly due to the complicated mask optimization and lithography simulation. Recent researches have shown prominent advantages of machine learning techniques dealing with complicated and big data problems, which bring potential of dedicated machine learning solution for DFM problems and facilitate the VLSI design cycle. In this paper, we focus on a heterogeneous OPC framework that assists mask layout optimization. Preliminary results show the efficiency and effectiveness of proposed frameworks that have the potential to be alternatives to existing EDA solutions.

Shaurya Rohatgi, Wei Zhong, Richard Zanibbi et al.

Query Auto Completion (QAC) is among the most appealing features of a web search engine. It helps users formulate queries quickly with less effort. Although there has been much effort in this area for text, to the best of our knowledge there is few work on mathematical formula auto completion. In this paper, we implement 5 existing QAC methods on mathematical formula and evaluate them on the NTCIR-12 MathIR task dataset. We report the efficiency of retrieved results using Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and Mean Average Precision(MAP). Our study indicates that the Finite State Transducer outperforms other QAC models with a MRR score of $0.642$.