Jian Zhao

Suorong Yang, Furao Shen, Jian Zhao

Data augmentation (DA) has been widely used to improve the generalization of deep neural networks. While existing DA methods have proven effective, they often rely on augmentation operations with random magnitudes to each sample. However, this approach can inadvertently introduce noise, induce distribution shifts, and increase the risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose EntAugment, a tuning-free and adaptive DA framework. Unlike previous work, EntAugment dynamically assesses and adjusts the augmentation magnitudes for each sample during training, leveraging insights into both the inherent complexities of training samples and the evolving status of deep models. Specifically, in EntAugment, the magnitudes are determined by the information entropy derived from the probability distribution obtained by applying the softmax function to the model's output. In addition, to further enhance the efficacy of EntAugment, we introduce a novel entropy regularization term, EntLoss, which complements the EntAugment approach. Theoretical analysis further demonstrates that EntLoss, compared to traditional cross-entropy loss, achieves closer alignment between the model distributions and underlying dataset distributions. Moreover, EntAugment and EntLoss can be utilized separately or jointly. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple image classification tasks and network architectures with thorough comparisons of existing DA methods. Importantly, the proposed methods outperform others without introducing any auxiliary models or noticeable extra computational costs, highlighting both effectiveness and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Jackbrocp/EntAugment.

Wei Cai, Shujuan Liu, Jian Zhao et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are susceptible to the implicit reasoning risk, wherein innocuous unimodal inputs synergistically assemble into risky multimodal data that produce harmful outputs. We attribute this vulnerability to the difficulty of MLLMs maintaining safety alignment through long-chain reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce Safe-Semantics-but-Unsafe-Interpretation (SSUI), the first dataset featuring interpretable reasoning paths tailored for such a cross-modal challenge. A novel training framework, Safety-aware Reasoning Path Optimization (SRPO), is also designed based on the SSUI dataset to align the MLLM's internal reasoning process with human safety values. Experimental results show that our SRPO-trained models achieve state-of-the-art results on key safety benchmarks, including the proposed Reasoning Path Benchmark (RSBench), significantly outperforming both open-source and top-tier commercial MLLMs.

LinFeng Li, Jian Zhao, Zepeng Yang et al.

We present a winning solution to RoboSense 2025 Track 4: Cross-Modal Drone Navigation. The task retrieves the most relevant geo-referenced image from a large multi-platform corpus (satellite/drone/ground) given a natural-language query. Two obstacles are severe inter-platform heterogeneity and a domain gap between generic training descriptions and platform-specific test queries. We mitigate these with a domain-aligned preprocessing pipeline and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework: (i) platform-wise partitioning, satellite augmentation, and removal of orientation words; (ii) an LLM-based caption refinement pipeline to align textual semantics with the distinct visual characteristics of each platform. Using BGE-M3 (text) and EVA-CLIP (image), we train three platform experts using a progressive two-stage, hard-negative mining strategy to enhance discriminative power, and fuse their scores at inference. The system tops the official leaderboard, demonstrating robust cross-modal geo-localization under heterogeneous viewpoints.

Suhan Guo, Zhenghao Xu, Furao Shen et al.

Accurate prediction of contagious disease outbreaks is vital for informed decision-making. Our study addresses the gap between machine learning algorithms and their epidemiological applications, noting that methods optimal for benchmark datasets often underperform with real-world data due to difficulties in incorporating mobility information. We adopt a two-phase approach: first, assessing the significance of mobility data through a pilot study, then evaluating the impact of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) on a transformer backbone. Our findings reveal that while mobility data and GCN modules do not significantly enhance forecasting performance, the inclusion of mortality and hospitalization data markedly improves model accuracy. Additionally, a comparative analysis between GCN-derived spatial maps and lockdown orders suggests a notable correlation, highlighting the potential of spatial maps as sensitive indicators for mobility. Our research offers a novel perspective on mobility representation in predictive modeling for contagious diseases, empowering decision-makers to better prepare for future outbreaks.

Dunwei Tu, Huiyu Yi, Tieyi Zhang et al.

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continually learn new classes from only a few samples without forgetting previous ones, requiring intelligent agents to adapt to dynamic environments. FSCIL combines the characteristics and challenges of class-incremental learning and few-shot learning: (i) Current classes occupy the entire feature space, which is detrimental to learning new classes. (ii) The small number of samples in incremental rounds is insufficient for fully training. In existing mainstream virtual class methods, for addressing the challenge (i), they attempt to use virtual classes as placeholders. However, new classes may not necessarily align with the virtual classes. For the challenge (ii), they replace trainable fully connected layers with Nearest Class Mean (NCM) classifiers based on cosine similarity, but NCM classifiers do not account for sample imbalance issues. To address these issues in previous methods, we propose the class-center guided embedding Space Allocation with Angle-Norm joint classifiers (SAAN) learning framework, which provides balanced space for all classes and leverages norm differences caused by sample imbalance to enhance classification criteria. Specifically, for challenge (i), SAAN divides the feature space into multiple subspaces and allocates a dedicated subspace for each session by guiding samples with the pre-set category centers. For challenge (ii), SAAN establishes a norm distribution for each class and generates angle-norm joint logits. Experiments demonstrate that SAAN can achieve state-of-the-art performance and it can be directly embedded into other SOTA methods as a plug-in, further enhancing their performance.

Hua Yan, Feng Han, Junyi An et al.

Subtext is a kind of deep semantics which can be acquired after one or more rounds of expression transformation. As a popular way of expressing one's intentions, it is well worth studying. In this paper, we try to make computers understand whether there is a subtext by means of machine learning. We build a Chinese dataset whose source data comes from the popular social media (e.g. Weibo, Netease Music, Zhihu, and Bilibili). In addition, we also build a baseline model called SASICM to deal with subtext recognition. The F1 score of SASICMg, whose pretrained model is GloVe, is as high as 64.37%, which is 3.97% higher than that of BERT based model, 12.7% higher than that of traditional methods on average, including support vector machine, logistic regression classifier, maximum entropy classifier, naive bayes classifier and decision tree and 2.39% higher than that of the state-of-the-art, including MARIN and BTM. The F1 score of SASICMBERT, whose pretrained model is BERT, is 65.12%, which is 0.75% higher than that of SASICMg. The accuracy rates of SASICMg and SASICMBERT are 71.16% and 70.76%, respectively, which can compete with those of other methods which are mentioned before.

Junyi An, Fengshan Liu, Jian Zhao et al.

As a popular machine learning method, neural networks can be used to solve many complex tasks. Their strong generalization ability comes from the representation ability of the basic neuron model. The most popular neuron is the MP neuron, which uses a linear transformation and a non-linear activation function to process the input successively. Inspired by the elastic collision model in physics, we propose a new neuron model that can represent more complex distributions. We term it Inter-layer collision (IC) neuron. The IC neuron divides the input space into multiple subspaces used to represent different linear transformations. This operation enhanced non-linear representation ability and emphasizes some useful input features for the given task. We build the IC networks by integrating the IC neurons into the fully-connected (FC), convolutional, and recurrent structures. The IC networks outperform the traditional networks in a wide range of experiments. We believe that the IC neuron can be a basic unit to build network structures.

Hongyan Hao, Yan Wang, Siqiao Xue et al.

With the development of feed-forward models, the default model for sequence modeling has gradually evolved to replace recurrent networks. Many powerful feed-forward models based on convolutional networks and attention mechanism were proposed and show more potential to handle sequence modeling tasks. We wonder that is there an architecture that can not only achieve an approximate substitution of recurrent network, but also absorb the advantages of feed-forward models. So we propose an exploratory architecture referred to Temporal Convolutional Attention-based Network (TCAN) which combines temporal convolutional network and attention mechanism. TCAN includes two parts, one is Temporal Attention (TA) which captures relevant features inside the sequence, the other is Enhanced Residual (ER) which extracts shallow layer's important information and transfers to deep layers. We improve the state-of-the-art results of bpc/perplexity to 30.28 on word-level PTB, 1.092 on character-level PTB, and 9.20 on WikiText-2.

Junyi An, Fengshan Liu, Jian Zhao et al.

Neural networks have been widely used, and most networks achieve excellent performance by stacking certain types of basic units. Compared to increasing the depth and width of the network, designing more effective basic units has become an important research topic. Inspired by the elastic collision model in physics, we present a universal structure that could be integrated into the existing network structures to speed up the training process and increase their generalization abilities. We term this structure the "Inter-layer Collision" (IC) structure. We built two kinds of basic computational units (IC layer and IC block) that compose the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by combining the IC structure with the convolution operation. Compared to traditional convolutions, both of the proposed computational units have a stronger non-linear representation ability and can filter features useful for a given task. Using these computational units to build networks, we bring significant improvements in performance for existing state-of-the-art CNNs. On the imagenet experiment, we integrate the IC block into ResNet-50 and reduce the top-1 error from 22.85% to 21.49%, which also exceeds the top-1 error of ResNet-100 (21.75%).

Yahui Liu, Furao Shen, Jian Zhao

Context-aware recommender systems (CARS), which consider rich side information to improve recommendation performance, have caught more and more attention in both academia and industry. How to predict user preferences from diverse contextual features is the core of CARS. Several recent models pay attention to user behaviors and use specifically designed structures to extract adaptive user interests from history behaviors. However, few works take item history interactions into consideration, which leads to the insufficiency of item feature representation and item attraction extraction. From these observations, we model the user-item interaction as a dynamic interaction graph (DIG) and proposed a GNN-based model called Pairwise Interactive Graph Attention Network (PIGAT) to capture dynamic user interests and item attractions simultaneously. PIGAT introduces the attention mechanism to consider the importance of each interacted user/item to both the user and the item, which captures user interests, item attractions and their influence on the recommendation context. Moreover, confidence embeddings are applied to interactions to distinguish the confidence of interactions occurring at different times. Then more expressive user/item representations and adaptive interaction features are generated, which benefits the recommendation performance especially when involving long-tail items. We conduct experiments on three real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of PIGAT.

Xu Zhang, Yang Yao, Baile Xu et al.

Class incremental learning refers to a special multi-class classification task, in which the number of classes is not fixed but is increasing with the continual arrival of new data. Existing researches mainly focused on solving catastrophic forgetting problem in class incremental learning. To this end, however, these models still require the old classes cached in the auxiliary data structure or models, which is inefficient in space or time. In this paper, it is the first time to discuss the difficulty without support of old classes in class incremental learning, which is called as softmax suppression problem. To address these challenges, we develop a new model named Label Mapping with Response Consolidation (LMRC), which need not access the old classes anymore. We propose the Label Mapping algorithm combined with the multi-head neural network for mitigating the softmax suppression problem, and propose the Response Consolidation method to overcome the catastrophic forgetting problem. Experimental results on the benchmark datasets show that our proposed method achieves much better performance compared to the related methods in different scenarios.

Yi Yang, Baile Xu, Furao Shen et al.

User response prediction makes a crucial contribution to the rapid development of online advertising system and recommendation system. The importance of learning feature interactions has been emphasized by many works. Many deep models are proposed to automatically learn high-order feature interactions. Since most features in advertising system and recommendation system are high-dimensional sparse features, deep models usually learn a low-dimensional distributed representation for each feature in the bottom layer. Besides traditional fully-connected architectures, some new operations, such as convolutional operations and product operations, are proposed to learn feature interactions better. In these models, the representation is shared among different operations. However, the best representation for different operations may be different. In this paper, we propose a new neural model named Operation-aware Neural Networks (ONN) which learns different representations for different operations. Our experimental results on two large-scale real-world ad click/conversion datasets demonstrate that ONN consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art models in both offline-training environment and online-training environment.