Jun Zhou

Wei Song, Jun Zhou, Mingjie Wang et al.

This paper focuses on the recently popular task of point cloud completion guided by multimodal information. Although existing methods have achieved excellent performance by fusing auxiliary images, there are still some deficiencies, including the poor generalization ability of the model and insufficient fine-grained semantic information for extracted features. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal fusion network for point cloud completion, which can simultaneously fuse visual and textual information to predict the semantic and geometric characteristics of incomplete shapes effectively. Specifically, to overcome the lack of prior information caused by the small-scale dataset, we employ a pre-trained vision-language model that is trained with a large amount of image-text pairs. Therefore, the textual and visual encoders of this large-scale model have stronger generalization ability. Then, we propose a multi-stage feature fusion strategy to fuse the textual and visual features into the backbone network progressively. Meanwhile, to further explore the effectiveness of fine-grained text descriptions for point cloud completion, we also build a text corpus with fine-grained descriptions, which can provide richer geometric details for 3D shapes. The rich text descriptions can be used for training and evaluating our network. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art point cloud completion networks.

Zhaoxin Huan, Ke Ding, Ang Li et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial issue in recommendation systems. There has been an emergence of various public CTR datasets. However, existing datasets primarily suffer from the following limitations. Firstly, users generally click different types of items from multiple scenarios, and modeling from multiple scenarios can provide a more comprehensive understanding of users. Existing datasets only include data for the same type of items from a single scenario. Secondly, multi-modal features are essential in multi-scenario prediction as they address the issue of inconsistent ID encoding between different scenarios. The existing datasets are based on ID features and lack multi-modal features. Third, a large-scale dataset can provide a more reliable evaluation of models, fully reflecting the performance differences between models. The scale of existing datasets is around 100 million, which is relatively small compared to the real-world CTR prediction. To address these limitations, we propose AntM$^{2}$C, a Multi-Scenario Multi-Modal CTR dataset based on industrial data from Alipay. Specifically, AntM$^{2}$C provides the following advantages: 1) It covers CTR data of 5 different types of items, providing insights into the preferences of users for different items, including advertisements, vouchers, mini-programs, contents, and videos. 2) Apart from ID-based features, AntM$^{2}$C also provides 2 multi-modal features, raw text and image features, which can effectively establish connections between items with different IDs. 3) AntM$^{2}$C provides 1 billion CTR data with 200 features, including 200 million users and 6 million items. It is currently the largest-scale CTR dataset available. Based on AntM$^{2}$C, we construct several typical CTR tasks and provide comparisons with baseline methods. The dataset homepage is available at https://www.atecup.cn/home.

Fan Liu, Wenwen Cai, Jian Huo et al.

Few-shot classification (FSC) is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision that involves recognizing novel classes from limited data. While previous methods have focused on enhancing visual features or incorporating additional modalities, Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) offer a promising alternative due to their rich knowledge and strong visual perception. However, LVLMs risk learning specific response formats rather than effectively extracting useful information from support data in FSC tasks. In this paper, we investigate LVLMs' performance in FSC and identify key issues such as insufficient learning and the presence of severe positional biases. To tackle the above challenges, we adopt the meta-learning strategy to teach models "learn to learn". By constructing a rich set of meta-tasks for instruction fine-tuning, LVLMs enhance the ability to extract information from few-shot support data for classification. Additionally, we further boost LVLM's few-shot learning capabilities through label augmentation and candidate selection in the fine-tuning and inference stage, respectively. Label augmentation is implemented via a character perturbation strategy to ensure the model focuses on support information. Candidate selection leverages attribute descriptions to filter out unreliable candidates and simplify the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance on both general and fine-grained datasets. Furthermore, our candidate selection strategy has been proven beneficial for training-free LVLMs.

Judy X Yang, Jing Wang, Zekun Long et al.

Classifying hyperspectral images (HSIs) is a complex task in remote sensing due to the high-dimensional nature and volume of data involved. To address these challenges, we propose the Spectral-Spatial non-Linear Model, a novel framework that significantly reduces data volume while enhancing classification accuracy. Our model employs a bidirectional reversed convolutional neural network (CNN) to efficiently extract spectral features, complemented by a specialized block for spatial feature analysis. This hybrid approach leverages the operational efficiency of CNNs and incorporates dynamic feature extraction inspired by attention mechanisms, optimizing performance without the high computational demands typically associated with transformer-based models. The SS non-Linear Model is designed to process hyperspectral data bidirectionally, achieving notable classification and efficiency improvements by fusing spectral and spatial features effectively. This approach yields superior classification accuracy compared to existing benchmarks while maintaining computational efficiency, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments. We validate the SS non-Linear Model on three widely recognized datasets, Houston 2013, Indian Pines, and Pavia University, demonstrating its ability to outperform current state-of-the-art models in HSI classification and efficiency. This work highlights the innovative methodology of the SS non-Linear Model and its practical benefits for remote sensing applications, where both data efficiency and classification accuracy are critical. For further details, please refer to our code repository on GitHub: HSILinearModel.

Li Jiang, Yusen Wu, Junwu Xiong et al.

Preference datasets are essential for incorporating human preferences into pre-trained language models, playing a key role in the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. However, these datasets often demonstrate conflicting alignment objectives, leading to increased vulnerability to jailbreak attacks and challenges in adapting downstream tasks to prioritize specific alignment objectives without negatively impacting others. In this work, we introduce a novel statistical metric, Alignment Dimension Conflict, to quantify the degree of conflict within preference datasets. We then present \texttt{Hummer} and its fine-grained variant, \texttt{Hummer-F}, as innovative pairwise preference datasets with reduced-conflict alignment objectives. \texttt{Hummer} is built based on UltraFeedback and is enhanced by AI feedback from GPT-4, marking as the first preference dataset aimed at reducing the competition between alignment objectives. Furthermore, we develop reward models, HummerRM and HummerRM-F, which employ a hybrid sampling approach to balance diverse alignment objectives effectively. This sampling method positions HummerRM as an ideal model for domain-specific further fine-tuning and reducing vulnerabilities to attacks.

Zheng Han, Jun Zhou, Jialun Pei et al.

In augmented reality (AR)-guided surgical navigation, preoperative organ models are superimposed onto the patient's intraoperative anatomy to visualize critical structures such as vessels and tumors. Accurate deformation modeling is essential to maintain the reliability of AR overlays by ensuring alignment between preoperative models and the dynamically changing anatomy. Although the finite element method (FEM) offers physically plausible modeling, its high computational cost limits intraoperative applicability. Moreover, existing algorithms often fail to handle large anatomical changes, such as those induced by pneumoperitoneum or ligament dissection, leading to inaccurate anatomical correspondences and compromised AR guidance. To address these challenges, we propose a data-driven biomechanics algorithm that preserves FEM-level accuracy while improving computational efficiency. In addition, we introduce a novel human-in-the-loop mechanism into the deformation modeling process. This enables surgeons to interactively provide prompts to correct anatomical misalignments, thereby incorporating clinical expertise and allowing the model to adapt dynamically to complex surgical scenarios. Experiments on a publicly available dataset demonstrate that our algorithm achieves a mean target registration error of 3.42 mm. Incorporating surgeon prompts through the interactive framework further reduces the error to 2.78 mm, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in volumetric accuracy. These results highlight the ability of our framework to deliver efficient and accurate deformation modeling while enhancing surgeon-algorithm collaboration, paving the way for safer and more reliable computer-assisted surgeries.

Fan Liu, Chenwei Dong, Chuanyi Zhang et al.

Many researchers collect data from the internet through crowd-sourcing or web crawling to alleviate the data-hungry challenge associated with cross-modal matching. Although such practice does not require expensive annotations, it inevitably introduces mismatched pairs and results in a noisy correspondence problem. Current approaches leverage the memorization effect of deep neural networks to distinguish noise and perform re-weighting. However, briefly lowering the weight of noisy pairs cannot eliminate the negative impact of noisy correspondence in the training process. In this paper, we propose a novel self-drop and dual-weight approach, which achieves elaborate data processing by qua-partitioning the data. Specifically, our approach partitions all data into four types: clean and significant, clean yet insignificant, vague, and noisy. We analyze the effect of noisy and clean data pairs and find that for vision-language pre-training models, a small number of clean samples is more valuable than a majority of noisy ones. Based on this observation, we employ self-drop to discard noisy samples to effectively mitigate the impact of noise. In addition, we adopt a dual-weight strategy to ensure that the model focuses more on significant samples while appropriately leveraging vague samples. Compared to the prior works, our approach is more robust and demonstrates relatively more stable performance on noisy datasets, especially under a high noise ratio. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets, including Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and Conceptual Captions, validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Judy X Yang, Jun Zhou, Jing Wang et al.

Band selection in hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is critical for optimising data processing and enhancing analytical accuracy. Traditional approaches have predominantly concentrated on analysing spectral and pixel characteristics within individual bands independently. These approaches overlook the potential benefits of integrating multiple data sources, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), and is further challenged by the limited availability of labeled data in HSI processing, which represents a significant obstacle. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel unsupervised band selection framework that incorporates attention mechanisms and an Autoencoder for reconstruction-based band selection. Our methodology distinctively integrates HSI with LiDAR data through an attention score, using a convolutional Autoencoder to process the combined feature mask. This fusion effectively captures essential spatial and spectral features and reduces redundancy in hyperspectral datasets. A comprehensive comparative analysis of our innovative fused band selection approach is performed against existing unsupervised band selection and fusion models. We used data sets such as Houston 2013, Trento, and MUUFLE for our experiments. The results demonstrate that our method achieves superior classification accuracy and significantly outperforms existing models. This enhancement in HSI band selection, facilitated by the incorporation of LiDAR features, underscores the considerable advantages of integrating features from different sources.

Mingjie Wang, Jun Zhou, Yong Dai et al.

Recently, Class-Agnostic Counting (CAC) problem has garnered increasing attention owing to its intriguing generality and superior efficiency compared to Category-Specific Counting (CSC). This paper proposes a novel ExpressCount to enhance zero-shot object counting by delving deeply into language-guided exemplar learning. Specifically, the ExpressCount is comprised of an innovative Language-oriented Exemplar Perceptron and a downstream visual Zero-shot Counting pipeline. Thereinto, the perceptron hammers at exploiting accurate exemplar cues from collaborative language-vision signals by inheriting rich semantic priors from the prevailing pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), whereas the counting pipeline excels in mining fine-grained features through dual-branch and cross-attention schemes, contributing to the high-quality similarity learning. Apart from building a bridge between the LLM in vogue and the visual counting tasks, expression-guided exemplar estimation significantly advances zero-shot learning capabilities for counting instances with arbitrary classes. Moreover, devising a FSC-147-Express with annotations of meticulous linguistic expressions pioneers a new venue for developing and validating language-based counting models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our ExpressCount, even showcasing the accuracy on par with partial CSC models.

Feng Zhu, Yan Wang, Jun Zhou et al.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) and Cross-System Recommendation (CSR) have been proposed to improve the recommendation accuracy in a target dataset (domain/system) with the help of a source one with relatively richer information. However, most existing CDR and CSR approaches are single-target, namely, there is a single target dataset, which can only help the target dataset and thus cannot benefit the source dataset. In this paper, we focus on three new scenarios, i.e., Dual-Target CDR (DTCDR), Multi-Target CDR (MTCDR), and CDR+CSR, and aim to improve the recommendation accuracy in all datasets simultaneously for all scenarios. To do this, we propose a unified framework, called GA (based on Graph embedding and Attention techniques), for all three scenarios. In GA, we first construct separate heterogeneous graphs to generate more representative user and item embeddings. Then, we propose an element-wise attention mechanism to effectively combine the embeddings of common entities (users/items) learned from different datasets. Moreover, to avoid negative transfer, we further propose a Personalized training strategy to minimize the embedding difference of common entities between a richer dataset and a sparser dataset, deriving three new models, i.e., GA-DTCDR-P, GA-MTCDR-P, and GA-CDR+CSR-P, for the three scenarios respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed GA models significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.

Zihao Xiao, Xianfeng Gao, Chilin Fu et al.

Face recognition is greatly improved by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Recently, these face recognition models have been used for identity authentication in security sensitive applications. However, deep CNNs are vulnerable to adversarial patches, which are physically realizable and stealthy, raising new security concerns on the real-world applications of these models. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of face recognition models using adversarial patches based on transferability, where the attacker has limited accessibility to the target models. First, we extend the existing transfer-based attack techniques to generate transferable adversarial patches. However, we observe that the transferability is sensitive to initialization and degrades when the perturbation magnitude is large, indicating the overfitting to the substitute models. Second, we propose to regularize the adversarial patches on the low dimensional data manifold. The manifold is represented by generative models pre-trained on legitimate human face images. Using face-like features as adversarial perturbations through optimization on the manifold, we show that the gaps between the responses of substitute models and the target models dramatically decrease, exhibiting a better transferability. Extensive digital world experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in the black-box setting. We apply the proposed method in the physical world as well.

Yuanpeng Liu, Jun Zhou, Yuqi Zhang et al.

In this paper, we focus on estimating the 6D pose of objects in point clouds. Although the topic has been widely studied, pose estimation in point clouds remains a challenging problem due to the noise and occlusion. To address the problem, a novel 3DPVNet is presented in this work, which utilizes 3D local patches to vote for the object 6D poses. 3DPVNet is comprised of three modules. In particular, a Patch Unification (\textbf{PU}) module is first introduced to normalize the input patch, and also create a standard local coordinate frame on it to generate a reliable vote. We then devise a Weight-guided Neighboring Feature Fusion (\textbf{WNFF}) module in the network, which fuses the neighboring features to yield a semi-global feature for the center patch. WNFF module mines the neighboring information of a local patch, such that the representation capability to local geometric characteristics is significantly enhanced, making the method robust to a certain level of noise. Moreover, we present a Patch-level Voting (\textbf{PV}) module to regress transformations and generates pose votes. After the aggregation of all votes from patches and a refinement step, the final pose of the object can be obtained. Compared to recent voting-based methods, 3DPVNet is patch-level, and directly carried out on point clouds. Therefore, 3DPVNet achieves less computation than point/pixel-level voting scheme, and has robustness to partial data. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that 3DPVNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and is also robust against noise and occlusions.

Cen Chen, Bingzhe Wu, Minghui Qiu et al.

Transfer learning is widely used for transferring knowledge from a source domain to the target domain where the labeled data is scarce. Recently, deep transfer learning has achieved remarkable progress in various applications. However, the source and target datasets usually belong to two different organizations in many real-world scenarios, potential privacy issues in deep transfer learning are posed. In this study, to thoroughly analyze the potential privacy leakage in deep transfer learning, we first divide previous methods into three categories. Based on that, we demonstrate specific threats that lead to unintentional privacy leakage in each category. Additionally, we also provide some solutions to prevent these threats. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to provide a thorough analysis of the information leakage issues in deep transfer learning methods and provide potential solutions to the issue. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and an industry dataset are conducted to show the privacy leakage under different deep transfer learning settings and defense solution effectiveness.

Wenjing Fang, Derun Zhao, Jin Tan et al.

Privacy-preserving machine learning has drawn increasingly attention recently, especially with kinds of privacy regulations come into force. Under such situation, Federated Learning (FL) appears to facilitate privacy-preserving joint modeling among multiple parties. Although many federated algorithms have been extensively studied, there is still a lack of secure and practical gradient tree boosting models (e.g., XGB) in literature. In this paper, we aim to build large-scale secure XGB under vertically federated learning setting. We guarantee data privacy from three aspects. Specifically, (i) we employ secure multi-party computation techniques to avoid leaking intermediate information during training, (ii) we store the output model in a distributed manner in order to minimize information release, and (iii) we provide a novel algorithm for secure XGB predict with the distributed model. Furthermore, by proposing secure permutation protocols, we can improve the training efficiency and make the framework scale to large dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on both public datasets and real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed XGB models provide not only competitive accuracy but also practical performance.

Bingzhe Wu, Chaochao Chen, Shiwan Zhao et al.

Bayesian deep learning is recently regarded as an intrinsic way to characterize the weight uncertainty of deep neural networks~(DNNs). Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics~(SGLD) is an effective method to enable Bayesian deep learning on large-scale datasets. Previous theoretical studies have shown various appealing properties of SGLD, ranging from the convergence properties to the generalization bounds. In this paper, we study the properties of SGLD from a novel perspective of membership privacy protection (i.e., preventing the membership attack). The membership attack, which aims to determine whether a specific sample is used for training a given DNN model, has emerged as a common threat against deep learning algorithms. To this end, we build a theoretical framework to analyze the information leakage (w.r.t. the training dataset) of a model trained using SGLD. Based on this framework, we demonstrate that SGLD can prevent the information leakage of the training dataset to a certain extent. Moreover, our theoretical analysis can be naturally extended to other types of Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods. Empirical results on different datasets and models verify our theoretical findings and suggest that the SGLD algorithm can not only reduce the information leakage but also improve the generalization ability of the DNN models in real-world applications.

Yulong Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Lingxi Xie et al.

Network pruning is an important research field aiming at reducing computational costs of neural networks. Conventional approaches follow a fixed paradigm which first trains a large and redundant network, and then determines which units (e.g., channels) are less important and thus can be removed. In this work, we find that pre-training an over-parameterized model is not necessary for obtaining the target pruned structure. In fact, a fully-trained over-parameterized model will reduce the search space for the pruned structure. We empirically show that more diverse pruned structures can be directly pruned from randomly initialized weights, including potential models with better performance. Therefore, we propose a novel network pruning pipeline which allows pruning from scratch. In the experiments for compressing classification models on CIFAR10 and ImageNet datasets, our approach not only greatly reduces the pre-training burden of traditional pruning methods, but also achieves similar or even higher accuracy under the same computation budgets. Our results facilitate the community to rethink the effectiveness of existing techniques used for network pruning.

Longfei Li, Peilin Zhao, Jun Zhou et al.

Recently, Factorization Machines (FM) has become more and more popular for recommendation systems, due to its effectiveness in finding informative interactions between features. Usually, the weights for the interactions is learnt as a low rank weight matrix, which is formulated as an inner product of two low rank matrices. This low rank can help improve the generalization ability of Factorization Machines. However, to choose the rank properly, it usually needs to run the algorithm for many times using different ranks, which clearly is inefficient for some large-scale datasets. To alleviate this issue, we propose an Adaptive Boosting framework of Factorization Machines (AdaFM), which can adaptively search for proper ranks for different datasets without re-training. Instead of using a fixed rank for FM, the proposed algorithm will adaptively gradually increases its rank according to its performance until the performance does not grow, using boosting strategy. To verify the performance of our proposed framework, we conduct an extensive set of experiments on many real-world datasets. Encouraging empirical results shows that the proposed algorithms are generally more effective than state-of-the-art other Factorization Machines.

Zhiming Wang, Xiaolong Li, Jun Zhou

Mainly for the sake of solving the lack of keyword-specific data, we propose one Keyword Spotting (KWS) system using Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Connectionist Temporal Classifier (CTC) on power-constrained small-footprint mobile devices, taking full advantage of general corpus from continuous speech recognition which is of great amount. DNN is to directly predict the posterior of phoneme units of any personally customized key-phrase, and CTC to produce a confidence score of the given phoneme sequence as responsive decision-making mechanism. The CTC-KWS has competitive performance in comparison with purely DNN based keyword specific KWS, but not increasing any computational complexity.