Junhua Liu

Kaiyuan Hu, Yili Jin, Haowen Yang et al.

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of immersive multimedia which bridges the gap between the real world and virtual space. Volumetric videos, as an emerging representative 3D video paradigm that empowers extended reality, stand out to provide unprecedented immersive and interactive video watching experience. Despite the tremendous potential, the research towards 3D volumetric video is still in its infancy, relying on sufficient and complete datasets for further exploration. However, existing related volumetric video datasets mostly only include a single object, lacking details about the scene and the interaction between them. In this paper, we focus on the current most widely used data format, point cloud, and for the first time release a full-scene volumetric video dataset that includes multiple people and their daily activities interacting with the external environments. Comprehensive dataset description and analysis are conducted, with potential usage of this dataset. The dataset and additional tools can be accessed via the following website: https://cuhksz-inml.github.io/full_scene_volumetric_video_dataset/.

Dongrui Liu, Yu Li, Zhonghao Yang et al.

Modern open-world agents such as OpenClaw exhibit powerful cross-environment execution capabilities yet introduce broad new safety risk sources. Meanwhile, advanced frontier AI models drastically lower attack barriers, rendering current agent alignment frameworks inadequate for real-world deployment. To tackle these emerging threats, we propose a lightweight and scalable agent safety alignment framework. Specifically, we update the agent safety taxonomy to accommodate emergent risks from Codex and OpenClaw execution scenarios. We further build a taxonomy-guided data engine with influence-function purification to train lightweight AgentDoG 1.5 variants (0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 8B parameters) using only around 1k samples, achieving comparable performance with leading closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4). Based on AgentDoG 1.5, we construct a highly efficient agentic safety SFT and RL training environment, which reduces deployment overhead in Docker-level environments by two orders of magnitude. Finally, we deploy AgentDoG 1.5 as a training-free online guardrail for real-time safety moderation. Extensive experimental results indicate that AgentDoG 1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in diverse and complex interactive agentic scenarios. All models and datasets are openly released.

Menglin Li, Kwan Hui Lim, Teng Guo et al.

POI-level geo-information of social posts is critical to many location-based applications and services. However, the multi-modality, complexity and diverse nature of social media data and their platforms limit the performance of inferring such fine-grained locations and their subsequent applications. To address this issue, we present a transformer-based general framework, which builds upon pre-trained language models and considers non-textual data, for social post geolocation at the POI level. To this end, inputs are categorized to handle different social data, and an optimal combination strategy is provided for feature representations. Moreover, a uniform representation of hierarchy is proposed to learn temporal information, and a concatenated version of encodings is employed to capture feature-wise positions better. Experimental results on various social datasets demonstrate that three variants of our proposed framework outperform multiple state-of-art baselines by a large margin in terms of accuracy and distance error metrics.

Junhua Liu, Kwan Hui Lim, Kristin L. Wood et al.

Itinerary recommendation is a complex sequence prediction problem with numerous real-world applications. This task becomes even more challenging when considering the optimization of multiple user queuing times and crowd levels, as well as numerous involved parameters, such as attraction popularity, queuing time, walking time, and operating hours. Existing solutions typically focus on single-person perspectives and fail to address real-world issues resulting from natural crowd behavior, like the Selfish Routing problem. In this paper, we introduce the Strategic and Crowd-Aware Itinerary Recommendation (SCAIR) algorithm, which optimizes group utility in real-world settings. We model the route recommendation strategy as a Markov Decision Process and propose a State Encoding mechanism that enables real-time planning and allocation in linear time. We evaluate our algorithm against various competitive and realistic baselines using a theme park dataset, demonstrating that SCAIR outperforms these baselines in addressing the Selfish Routing problem across four theme parks.

Guotao Liang, Zhangcheng Wang, Chuang Wang et al.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) animation generation is pivotal for professional design due to their structural editability and resolution independence. However, this task remains challenging as it requires bridging discrete code representations with continuous visual dynamics. Existing optimization-based methods often destroy topological consistency, while general-purpose LLMs rely on rigid CSS/SMIL transformations, failing to model geometry-level non-rigid deformations. To address these limitations, we present VAnim, the first LLM-based framework for open-domain text-to-SVG animation. We reconceptualize animation not as sequence generation, but as Sparse State Updates (SSU) on a persistent SVG DOM tree. This paradigm compresses sequence length by over 9.8x while preserving the SVG DOM structure and non-participating elements by construction. To enable precise control, we propose an Identification-First Motion Planning mechanism that grounds textual instructions in explicit visual entities. Furthermore, to overcome the non-differentiable nature of SVG rendering, we employ Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By leveraging a hybrid reward from a state-of-the-art video perception encoder, we align discrete code updates with high-fidelity visual feedback. We also introduce SVGAnim-134k, the first benchmark for vector animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VAnim significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in semantic alignment and structural validity, with additional appendix metrics further validating motion quality and identity preservation.

Junhua Liu, Yong Keat Tan, Bin Fu et al.

In conversational AI systems, a critical challenge in training effective multi-turn intent classification models lies in the generation of large-scale, domain-specific, multilingual dialogue datasets. In this paper, we introduce Chain-of-Intent, a novel framework that integrates Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate intent-driven, context-aware dialogues through self-play. Our method first extracts domain-specific intent transition patterns from real-world e-commerce chat logs, which guide the modeling of turn-level dynamics and intent sequences. LLMs are then employed to parameterize the emission probabilities of HMMs, enabling the generation of natural, coherent utterances aligned with predicted intents and dialogue context. We also propose MINT-CL, a multi-task contrastive learning framework for multi-turn intent classification, which improves performance while reducing dependence on large-scale annotated datasets. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms competitive baselines in dialogue generation quality and classification accuracy, particularly in multilingual settings. To facilitate future research, we release MINT-E, a comprehensive, multilingual, intent-aware multi-turn dialogue corpus derived from the e-commerce domain\footnote{The reproduced source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/junhua/chain-of-intent.

Langzhou He, Junyou Zhu, Yue Zhou et al.

Agentic reinforcement learning trains large language models using multi-turn trajectories that interleave long reasoning traces with short environment-facing actions. Common policy-gradient methods, such as PPO and GRPO, treat each token in a trajectory equally, leading to uniform credit assignment. In this paper, we critically demonstrate that such uniform credit assignment largely misallocates token-level training signals. From an energy-based modeling perspective, we show that token-level training signals, quantified by their correlations with reward variance of different rollouts sampled from a given prompt, concentrate sharply on action tokens rather than reasoning tokens, even though action tokens account for only a small fraction of the trajectory. We refer to this phenomenon as the Action Bottleneck. Motivated by this observation, we propose an embarrassingly simple token reweighting approach, ActFocus, that downweights gradients on reasoning tokens, along with an additional energy-based redistribution mechanism that further increases the weights on action tokens with higher uncertainty. Across four environments and different model sizes, ActFocus consistently outperforms PPO and GRPO, yielding final-step gains of up to 65.2 and 63.7 percentage points, respectively, without any additional runtime or memory cost.

Zhicheng Liang, Haoyi Yu, Boyan Li et al.

Accurate 3D reconstruction of objects with reflective, transparent, or low-texture surfaces still remains notoriously challenging. Such materials often violate key assumptions in multi-view reconstruction pipelines, such as photometric consistency and the availability on distinct geometric texture cues. Existing datasets primarily focus on diffuse, textured objects, and therefore provide limited insight into performance under real-world material complexities. We introduce 3DReflecNet, a large-scale hybrid dataset exceeding 22 TB that is specifically designed to benchmark and advance 3D vision methods for these challenging materials. 3DReflecNet combines two types of data: over 120,000 synthetic instances generated via physically-based rendering of more than 12,000 shapes, and over 1,000 real-world objects captured using consumer devices. Together, these data consist of more than 7 million multi-view frames. The dataset spans diverse materials, complex lighting conditions, and a wide range of geometric forms, including shapes generated from both real and LLM-synthesized 2D images using diffusion-based pipelines. To support robust evaluation, we design benchmarks for five core tasks: image matching, structure-from-motion, novel view synthesis, reflection removal, and relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods struggle to maintain accuracy across these settings, highlighting the need for more resilient 3D vision models.

Junhua Liu, Zhangcheng Wang, Zhike Han et al.

Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing multimodal reasoning by integrating visual perception into intermediate reasoning steps. However, existing VCoT approaches are largely confined to static scenarios and struggle to capture the temporal dynamics essential for tasks such as instruction, prediction, and camera motion. To bridge this gap, we propose TwiFF-2.7M, the first large-scale, temporally grounded VCoT dataset derived from $2.7$ million video clips, explicitly designed for dynamic visual question and answer. Accompanying this, we introduce TwiFF-Bench, a high-quality evaluation benchmark of $1,078$ samples that assesses both the plausibility of reasoning trajectories and the correctness of final answers in open-ended dynamic settings. Building on these foundations, we propose the TwiFF model, a unified modal that synergistically leverages pre-trained video generation and image comprehension capabilities to produce temporally coherent visual reasoning cues-iteratively generating future action frames and textual reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TwiFF significantly outperforms existing VCoT methods and Textual Chain-of-Thought baselines on dynamic reasoning tasks, which fully validates the effectiveness for visual question answering in dynamic scenarios. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/LiuJunhua02/TwiFF.

Junhua Liu, Yang Jihao, Cheng Chang et al.

Proactive intent prediction is a critical capability in modern e-commerce chatbots, enabling "zero-query" recommendations by anticipating user needs from behavioral and contextual signals. However, existing industrial systems face two fundamental challenges: (1) the semantic gap between discrete user features and the semantic intents within the chatbot's Knowledge Base, and (2) the objective misalignment between general-purpose LLM outputs and task-specific ranking utilities. To address these issues, we propose RGAlign-Rec, a closed-loop alignment framework that integrates an LLM-based semantic reasoner with a Query-Enhanced (QE) ranking model. We also introduce Ranking-Guided Alignment (RGA), a multi-stage training paradigm that utilizes downstream ranking signals as feedback to refine the LLM's latent reasoning. Extensive experiments on a large-scale industrial dataset from Shopee demonstrate that RGAlign-Rec achieves a 0.12% gain in GAUC, leading to a significant 3.52% relative reduction in error rate, and a 0.56% improvement in Recall@3. Online A/B testing further validates the cumulative effectiveness of our framework: the Query-Enhanced model (QE-Rec) initially yields a 0.98% improvement in CTR, while the subsequent Ranking-Guided Alignment stage contributes an additional 0.13% gain. These results indicate that ranking-aware alignment effectively synchronizes semantic reasoning with ranking objectives, significantly enhancing both prediction accuracy and service quality in real-world proactive recommendation systems.

Junhua Liu, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Kwan Hui Lim

Human decision-making in high-stakes domains often relies on expertise and heuristics, but is vulnerable to hard-to-detect cognitive biases that threaten fairness and long-term outcomes. This work presents a novel approach to enhancing complex decision-making workflows through the integration of hierarchical learning alongside various enhancements. Focusing on university admissions as a representative high-stakes domain, we propose BGM-HAN, an enhanced Byte-Pair Encoded, Gated Multi-head Hierarchical Attention Network, designed to effectively model semi-structured applicant data. BGM-HAN captures multi-level representations that are crucial for nuanced assessment, improving both interpretability and predictive performance. Experimental results on real admissions data demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art baselines from traditional machine learning to large language models, offering a promising framework for augmenting decision-making in domains where structure, context, and fairness matter. Source code is available at: https://github.com/junhua/bgm-han.

Wenhao Shi, Zhiqiang Hu, Yi Bin et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, particularly in textual mathematical problem-solving. However, existing open-source image instruction fine-tuning datasets, containing limited question-answer pairs per image, do not fully exploit visual information to enhance the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). To bridge this gap, we address the lack of high-quality, diverse multimodal mathematical datasets by collecting 40K high-quality images with question-answer pairs from 24 existing datasets and synthesizing 320K new pairs, creating the MathV360K dataset, which enhances both the breadth and depth of multimodal mathematical questions. We introduce Math-LLaVA, a LLaVA-1.5-based model fine-tuned with MathV360K. This novel approach significantly improves the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLaVA-1.5, achieving a 19-point increase and comparable performance to GPT-4V on MathVista's minitest split, and yielding leading performance on Math-V and MathVerse. Furthermore, Math-LLaVA demonstrates enhanced generalizability, showing substantial improvements on the MMMU benchmark. Our research highlights the importance of dataset diversity and synthesis in advancing MLLMs' mathematical reasoning abilities. The code and data are available at: \url{https://github.com/HZQ950419/Math-LLaVA}.

Junhua Liu, Yung Chuen Ng, Kwan Hui Lim

There has been growing interest in utilizing occupational data mining and analysis. In today's job market, occupational data mining and analysis is growing in importance as it enables companies to predict employee turnover, model career trajectories, screen through resumes and perform other human resource tasks. A key requirement to facilitate these tasks is the need for an occupation-related dataset. However, most research use proprietary datasets or do not make their dataset publicly available, thus impeding development in this area. To solve this issue, we present the Industrial and Professional Occupation Dataset (IPOD), which comprises 192k job titles belonging to 56k LinkedIn users. In addition to making IPOD publicly available, we also: (i) manually annotate each job title with its associated level of seniority, domain of work and location; and (ii) provide embedding for job titles and discuss various use cases. This dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/junhua/ipod.

Junhua Liu, Yung Chuen Ng, Kristin L. Wood et al.

Occupational data mining and analysis is an important task in understanding today's industry and job market. Various machine learning techniques are proposed and gradually deployed to improve companies' operations for upstream tasks, such as employee churn prediction, career trajectory modelling and automated interview. Job titles analysis and embedding, as the fundamental building blocks, are crucial upstream tasks to address these occupational data mining and analysis problems. In this work, we present the Industrial and Professional Occupations Dataset (IPOD), which consists of over 190,000 job titles crawled from over 56,000 profiles from Linkedin. We also illustrate the usefulness of IPOD by addressing two challenging upstream tasks, including: (i) proposing Title2vec, a contextual job title vector representation using a bidirectional Language Model (biLM) approach; and (ii) addressing the important occupational Named Entity Recognition problem using Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with CRF (LSTM-CRF). Both CRF and LSTM-CRF outperform human and baselines in both exact-match accuracy and F1 scores. The dataset and pre-trained embeddings are available at https://www.github.com/junhua/ipod.

Junhua Liu, Yong Keat Tan, Bin Fu et al.

Multi-turn intent classification is notably challenging due to the complexity and evolving nature of conversational contexts. This paper introduces LARA, a Linguistic-Adaptive Retrieval-Augmentation framework to enhance accuracy in multi-turn classification tasks across six languages, accommodating a large number of intents in chatbot interactions. LARA combines a fine-tuned smaller model with a retrieval-augmented mechanism, integrated within the architecture of LLMs. The integration allows LARA to dynamically utilize past dialogues and relevant intents, thereby improving the understanding of the context. Furthermore, our adaptive retrieval techniques bolster the cross-lingual capabilities of LLMs without extensive retraining and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LARA achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-turn intent classification tasks, enhancing the average accuracy by 3.67\% from state-of-the-art single-turn intent classifiers.

Butian Xiong, Nanjun Zheng, Junhua Liu et al.

We introduce a novel, multimodal large-scale scene reconstruction benchmark that utilizes newly developed 3D representation approaches: Gaussian Splatting and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Our expansive U-Scene dataset surpasses any previously existing real large-scale outdoor LiDAR and image dataset in both area and point count. GauU-Scene encompasses over 6.5 square kilometers and features a comprehensive RGB dataset coupled with LiDAR ground truth. Additionally, we are the first to propose a LiDAR and image alignment method for a drone-based dataset. Our assessment of GauU-Scene includes a detailed analysis across various novel viewpoints, employing image-based metrics such as SSIM, LPIPS, and PSNR on NeRF and Gaussian Splatting based methods. This analysis reveals contradictory results when applying geometric-based metrics like Chamfer distance. The experimental results on our multimodal dataset highlight the unreliability of current image-based metrics and reveal significant drawbacks in geometric reconstruction using the current Gaussian Splatting-based method, further illustrating the necessity of our dataset for assessing geometry reconstruction tasks. We also provide detailed supplementary information on data collection protocols and make the dataset available on the following anonymous project page

Junhua Liu

Financial AI empowers sophisticated approaches to financial market forecasting, portfolio optimization, and automated trading. This survey provides a systematic analysis of these developments across three primary dimensions: predictive models that capture complex market dynamics, decision-making frameworks that optimize trading and investment strategies, and knowledge augmentation systems that leverage unstructured financial information. We examine significant innovations including foundation models for financial time series, graph-based architectures for market relationship modeling, and hierarchical frameworks for portfolio optimization. Analysis reveals crucial trade-offs between model sophistication and practical constraints, particularly in high-frequency trading applications. We identify critical gaps and open challenges between theoretical advances and industrial implementation, outlining open challenges and opportunities for improving both model performance and practical applicability.

Junhua Liu, Justin Albrethsen, Lincoln Goh et al.

Resource allocation in tactical ad-hoc networks presents unique challenges due to their dynamic and multi-hop nature. Accurate prediction of future network connectivity is essential for effective resource allocation in such environments. In this paper, we introduce the Spatial-Temporal Graph Encoder-Decoder (STGED) framework for Tactical Communication Networks that leverages both spatial and temporal features of network states to learn latent tactical behaviors effectively. STGED hierarchically utilizes graph-based attention mechanism to spatially encode a series of communication network states, leverages a recurrent neural network to temporally encode the evolution of states, and a fully-connected feed-forward network to decode the connectivity in the future state. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that STGED consistently outperforms baseline models by large margins across different time-steps input, achieving an accuracy of up to 99.2\% for the future state prediction task of tactical communication networks.

Junhua Liu, Yong Keat Tan, Bin Fu et al.

Accurate multi-turn intent classification is essential for advancing conversational AI systems. However, challenges such as the scarcity of comprehensive datasets and the complexity of contextual dependencies across dialogue turns hinder progress. This paper presents two novel approaches leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance scalability and reduce latency in production dialogue systems. First, we introduce Symbol Tuning, which simplifies intent labels to reduce task complexity and improve performance in multi-turn dialogues. Second, we propose C-LARA (Consistency-aware, Linguistics Adaptive Retrieval Augmentation), a framework that employs LLMs for data augmentation and pseudo-labeling to generate synthetic multi-turn dialogues. These enriched datasets are used to fine-tune a small, efficient model suitable for deployment. Experiments conducted on multilingual dialogue datasets demonstrate significant improvements in classification accuracy and resource efficiency. Our methods enhance multi-turn intent classification accuracy by 5.09%, reduce annotation costs by 40%, and enable scalable deployment in low-resource multilingual industrial systems, highlighting their practicality and impact.

Junhua Liu, Bin Fu

Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) represent a pivotal advancement in democratizing artificial intelligence across linguistic boundaries. While theoretical foundations are well-established, practical implementation guidelines remain scattered. This work bridges this gap by providing a comprehensive end-to-end framework for developing and deploying MLLMs in production environments. We make three distinctive contributions: First, we present an actionable pipeline from data pre-processing through deployment, integrating insights from academic research and industrial applications. Second, using Llama2 as a case study, we provide detailed optimization strategies for enhancing multilingual capabilities, including curriculum learning approaches for balancing high-resource and low-resource languages, tokenization strategies, and effective sampling methods. Third, we offer an interdisciplinary analysis that considers technical, linguistic, and cultural perspectives in MLLM development. Our findings reveal critical challenges in supporting linguistic diversity, with 88.38% of world languages categorized as low-resource, affecting over a billion speakers. We examine practical solutions through real-world applications in customer service, search engines, and machine translation. By synthesizing theoretical frameworks with production-ready implementation strategies, this survey provides essential guidance for practitioners and researchers working to develop more inclusive and effective multilingual AI systems.

Junhua Liu, Fanfan Lin, Xinze Li et al.

LLM-based autonomous agents have recently shown strong capabilities in solving complex industrial design tasks. However, in domains aiming for carbon neutrality and high-performance renewable energy systems, current AI-assisted design automation methods face critical challenges in explainability, scalability, and practical usability. To address these limitations, we introduce PHIA (Physics-Informed Autonomous Agent), an LLM-driven system that automates modulation design for power converters in Power Electronics Systems with minimal human intervention. In contrast to traditional pipeline-based methods, PHIA incorporates an LLM-based planning module that interactively acquires and verifies design requirements via a user-friendly chat interface. This planner collaborates with physics-informed simulation and optimization components to autonomously generate and iteratively refine modulation designs. The interactive interface also supports interpretability by providing textual explanations and visual outputs throughout the design process. Experimental results show that PHIA reduces standard mean absolute error by 63.2% compared to the second-best benchmark and accelerates the overall design process by over 33 times. A user study involving 20 domain experts further confirms PHIA's superior design efficiency and usability, highlighting its potential to transform industrial design workflows in power electronics.

Junhua Liu, Kwan Hui Lim, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

How objective and unbiased are we while making decisions? This work investigates cognitive bias identification in high-stake decision making process by human experts, questioning its effectiveness in real-world settings, such as candidates assessments for university admission. We begin with a statistical analysis assessing correlations among different decision points among in the current process, which discovers discrepancies that imply cognitive bias and inconsistency in decisions. This motivates our exploration of bias-aware AI-augmented workflow that surpass human judgment. We propose BGM-HAN, an enhanced Hierarchical Attention Network with Byte-Pair Encoding, Gated Residual Connections and Multi-Head Attention. Using it as a backbone model, we further propose a Shortlist-Analyse-Recommend (SAR) agentic workflow, which simulate real-world decision-making. In our experiments, both the proposed model and the agentic workflow significantly improves on both human judgment and alternative models, validated with real-world data.

Kaiyuan Hu, Yili Jin, Junhua Liu et al.

Volumetric video enables immersive and interactive visual experiences by supporting free viewpoint exploration and realistic motion parallax. However, existing volumetric representations from explicit point clouds to implicit neural fields, remain costly in capture, computation, and rendering, which limits their scalability for on-demand video and reduces their feasibility for real-time communication. To bridge this gap, we propose Content-Promoted Scene Layers (CPSL), a compact 2.5D video representation that brings the perceptual benefits of volumetric video to conventional 2D content. Guided by per-frame depth and content saliency, CPSL decomposes each frame into a small set of geometry-consistent layers equipped with soft alpha bands and an edge-depth cache that jointly preserve occlusion ordering and boundary continuity. These lightweight, 2D-encodable assets enable parallax-corrected novel-view synthesis via depth-weighted warping and front-to-back alpha compositing, bypassing expensive 3D reconstruction. Temporally, CPSL maintains inter-frame coherence using motion-guided propagation and per-layer encoding, supporting real-time playback with standard video codecs. Across multiple benchmarks, CPSL achieves superior perceptual quality and boundary fidelity compared with layer-based and neural-field baselines while reducing storage and rendering cost by several folds. Our approach offer a practical path from 2D video to scalable 2.5D immersive media.

Siyang Cheng, Gaotian Liu, Rui Mei et al.

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) has brought both transformative applications and new security risks, including jailbreak attacks that bypass alignment safeguards to elicit harmful outputs. Existing automated jailbreak generation approaches e.g. AutoDAN, suffer from limited mutation diversity, shallow fitness evaluation, and fragile keyword-based detection. To address these limitations, we propose ForgeDAN, a novel evolutionary framework for generating semantically coherent and highly effective adversarial prompts against aligned LLMs. First, ForgeDAN introduces multi-strategy textual perturbations across \textit{character, word, and sentence-level} operations to enhance attack diversity; then we employ interpretable semantic fitness evaluation based on a text similarity model to guide the evolutionary process toward semantically relevant and harmful outputs; finally, ForgeDAN integrates dual-dimensional jailbreak judgment, leveraging an LLM-based classifier to jointly assess model compliance and output harmfulness, thereby reducing false positives and improving detection effectiveness. Our evaluation demonstrates ForgeDAN achieves high jailbreaking success rates while maintaining naturalness and stealth, outperforming existing SOTA solutions.

Langzhou He, Junyou Zhu, Fangxin Wang et al.

Molecular foundation models are rapidly advancing scientific discovery, but their unreliability on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples severely limits their application in high-stakes domains such as drug discovery and protein design. A critical failure mode is chemical hallucination, where models make high-confidence yet entirely incorrect predictions for unknown molecules. To address this challenge, we introduce Molecular Preference-Aligned Instance Ranking (Mole-PAIR), a simple, plug-and-play module that can be flexibly integrated with existing foundation models to improve their reliability on OOD data through cost-effective post-training. Specifically, our method formulates the OOD detection problem as a preference optimization over the estimated OOD affinity between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples, achieving this goal through a pairwise learning objective. We show that this objective essentially optimizes AUROC, which measures how consistently ID and OOD samples are ranked by the model. Extensive experiments across five real-world molecular datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the OOD detection capabilities of existing molecular foundation models, achieving up to 45.8%, 43.9%, and 24.3% improvements in AUROC under distribution shifts of size, scaffold, and assay, respectively.

Junhua Liu, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Kwan Hui Lim

Fairness in both Machine Learning (ML) predictions and human decision-making is essential, yet both are susceptible to different forms of bias, such as algorithmic and data-driven in ML, and cognitive or subjective in humans. In this study, we examine fairness using a real-world university admissions dataset comprising 870 applicant profiles, leveraging three ML models: XGB, Bi-LSTM, and KNN, alongside BERT embeddings for textual features. To evaluate individual fairness, we introduce a consistency metric that quantifies agreement in decisions among ML models and human experts with diverse backgrounds. Our analysis reveals that ML models surpass human evaluators in fairness consistency by margins ranging from 14.08\% to 18.79\%. Our findings highlight the potential of using ML to enhance fairness in admissions while maintaining high accuracy, advocating a hybrid approach combining human judgement and ML models.

Trisha Singhal, Junhua Liu, Lucienne T. M. Blessing et al.

The scientific world is changing at a rapid pace, with new technology being developed and new trends being set at an increasing frequency. This paper presents a framework for conducting scientific analyses of academic publications, which is crucial to monitor research trends and identify potential innovations. This framework adopts and combines various techniques of Natural Language Processing, such as word embedding and topic modelling. Word embedding is used to capture semantic meanings of domain-specific words. We propose two novel scientific publication embedding, i.e., PUB-G and PUB-W, which are capable of learning semantic meanings of general as well as domain-specific words in various research fields. Thereafter, topic modelling is used to identify clusters of research topics within these larger research fields. We curated a publication dataset consisting of two conferences and two journals from 1995 to 2020 from two research domains. Experimental results show that our PUB-G and PUB-W embeddings are superior in comparison to other baseline embeddings by a margin of ~0.18-1.03 based on topic coherence.

Trisha Singhal, Junhua Liu, Lucienne T. M. Blessing et al.

The advent of social media platforms has been a catalyst for the development of digital photography that engendered a boom in vision applications. With this motivation, we introduce a large-scale dataset termed 'Photozilla', which includes over 990k images belonging to 10 different photographic styles. The dataset is then used to train 3 classification models to automatically classify the images into the relevant style which resulted in an accuracy of ~96%. With the rapid evolution of digital photography, we have seen new types of photography styles emerging at an exponential rate. On that account, we present a novel Siamese-based network that uses the trained classification models as the base architecture to adapt and classify unseen styles with only 25 training samples. We report an accuracy of over 68% for identifying 10 other distinct types of photography styles. This dataset can be found at https://trisha025.github.io/Photozilla/

Jerome Heng, Junhua Liu, Kwan Hui Lim

An important aspect of urban planning is understanding crowd levels at various locations, which typically require the use of physical sensors. Such sensors are potentially costly and time consuming to implement on a large scale. To address this issue, we utilize publicly available social media datasets and use them as the basis for two urban sensing problems, namely event detection and crowd level prediction. One main contribution of this work is our collected dataset from Twitter and Flickr, alongside ground truth events. We demonstrate the usefulness of this dataset with two preliminary supervised learning approaches: firstly, a series of neural network models to determine if a social media post is related to an event and secondly a regression model using social media post counts to predict actual crowd levels. We discuss preliminary results from these tasks and highlight some challenges.

Nachamma Sockalingam, Junhua Liu

Teaching is about constantly innovating strategies, ways and means to engage diverse students in active and meaningful learning. In line with this, SUTD adopts various student-centric teaching and learning teaching methods and approaches. This means that our graduate/undergraduate instructors have to be ready to teach using these student student-centric teaching and learning pedagogies. In this article, I share my experiences of redesigning this teaching course that is typically conducted face-to-face to a synchronous online course and also invite one of the participant in this course to reflect on his experience as a student.

Junhua Liu, Trisha Singhal, Lucienne T. M. Blessing et al.

Since the start of COVID-19, several relevant corpora from various sources are presented in the literature that contain millions of data points. While these corpora are valuable in supporting many analyses on this specific pandemic, researchers require additional benchmark corpora that contain other epidemics to facilitate cross-epidemic pattern recognition and trend analysis tasks. During our other efforts on COVID-19 related work, we discover very little disease related corpora in the literature that are sizable and rich enough to support such cross-epidemic analysis tasks. In this paper, we present EPIC30M, a large-scale epidemic corpus that contains 30 millions micro-blog posts, i.e., tweets crawled from Twitter, from year 2006 to 2020. EPIC30M contains a subset of 26.2 millions tweets related to three general diseases, namely Ebola, Cholera and Swine Flu, and another subset of 4.7 millions tweets of six global epidemic outbreaks, including 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu, 2010 Haiti Cholera, 2012 Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), 2013 West African Ebola, 2016 Yemen Cholera and 2018 Kivu Ebola. Furthermore, we explore and discuss the properties of the corpus with statistics of key terms and hashtags and trends analysis for each subset. Finally, we demonstrate the value and impact that EPIC30M could create through a discussion of multiple use cases of cross-epidemic research topics that attract growing interest in recent years. These use cases span multiple research areas, such as epidemiological modeling, pattern recognition, natural language understanding and economical modeling.

Junhua Liu, Trisha Singhal, Lucienne T. M. Blessing et al.

Classification of crisis events, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks and pandemics, is a crucial task to create early signals and inform relevant parties for spontaneous actions to reduce overall damage. Despite crisis such as natural disasters can be predicted by professional institutions, certain events are first signaled by civilians, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemics. Social media platforms such as Twitter often exposes firsthand signals on such crises through high volume information exchange over half a billion tweets posted daily. Prior works proposed various crisis embeddings and classification using conventional Machine Learning and Neural Network models. However, none of the works perform crisis embedding and classification using state of the art attention-based deep neural networks models, such as Transformers and document-level contextual embeddings. This work proposes CrisisBERT, an end-to-end transformer-based model for two crisis classification tasks, namely crisis detection and crisis recognition, which shows promising results across accuracy and f1 scores. The proposed model also demonstrates superior robustness over benchmark, as it shows marginal performance compromise while extending from 6 to 36 events with only 51.4% additional data points. We also proposed Crisis2Vec, an attention-based, document-level contextual embedding architecture for crisis embedding, which achieve better performance than conventional crisis embedding methods such as Word2Vec and GloVe. To the best of our knowledge, our works are first to propose using transformer-based crisis classification and document-level contextual crisis embedding in the literature.

Junhua Liu, Kristin L. Wood, Kwan Hui Lim

There is a rapidly growing demand for itinerary planning in tourism but this task remains complex and difficult, especially when considering the need to optimize for queuing time and crowd levels for multiple users. This difficulty is further complicated by the large amount of parameters involved, i.e., attraction popularity, queuing time, walking time, operating hours, etc. Many recent works propose solutions based on the single-person perspective, but otherwise do not address real-world problems resulting from natural crowd behavior, such as the Selfish Routing problem, which describes the consequence of ineffective network and sub-optimal social outcome by leaving agents to decide freely. In this work, we propose the Strategic and Crowd-Aware Itinerary Recommendation (SCAIR) algorithm which optimizes social welfare in real-world situations. We formulate the strategy of route recommendation as Markov chains which enables our simulations to be carried out in poly-time. We then evaluate our proposed algorithm against various competitive and realistic baselines using a theme park dataset. Our simulation results highlight the existence of the Selfish Routing problem and show that SCAIR outperforms the baselines in handling this issue.

Ya Li, Xinyu Liu, Dan Liu et al.

Recent years has witnessed dramatic progress of neural machine translation (NMT), however, the method of manually guiding the translation procedure remains to be better explored. Previous works proposed to handle such problem through lexcially-constrained beam search in the decoding phase. Unfortunately, these lexically-constrained beam search methods suffer two fatal disadvantages: high computational complexity and hard beam search which generates unexpected translations. In this paper, we propose to learn the ability of lexically-constrained translation with external memory, which can overcome the above mentioned disadvantages. For the training process, automatically extracted phrase pairs are extracted from alignment and sentence parsing, then further be encoded into an external memory. This memory is then used to provide lexically-constrained information for training through a memory-attention machanism. Various experiments are conducted on WMT Chinese to English and English to German tasks. All the results can demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Dan Liu, Junhua Liu, Wu Guo et al.

This paper describes the USTC-NEL system to the speech translation task of the IWSLT Evaluation 2018. The system is a conventional pipeline system which contains 3 modules: speech recognition, post-processing and machine translation. We train a group of hybrid-HMM models for our speech recognition, and for machine translation we train transformer based neural machine translation models with speech recognition output style text as input. Experiments conducted on the IWSLT 2018 task indicate that, compared to baseline system from KIT, our system achieved 14.9 BLEU improvement.