Jie Huang

CV
h-index62
119papers
11,448citations
Novelty52%
AI Score62

119 Papers

CVSep 5, 2023Code
Empowering Low-Light Image Enhancer through Customized Learnable Priors

Naishan Zheng, Man Zhou, Yanmeng Dong et al.

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable progress in enhancing low-light images by improving their brightness and eliminating noise. However, most existing methods construct end-to-end mapping networks heuristically, neglecting the intrinsic prior of image enhancement task and lacking transparency and interpretability. Although some unfolding solutions have been proposed to relieve these issues, they rely on proximal operator networks that deliver ambiguous and implicit priors. In this work, we propose a paradigm for low-light image enhancement that explores the potential of customized learnable priors to improve the transparency of the deep unfolding paradigm. Motivated by the powerful feature representation capability of Masked Autoencoder (MAE), we customize MAE-based illumination and noise priors and redevelop them from two perspectives: 1) \textbf{structure flow}: we train the MAE from a normal-light image to its illumination properties and then embed it into the proximal operator design of the unfolding architecture; and m2) \textbf{optimization flow}: we train MAE from a normal-light image to its gradient representation and then employ it as a regularization term to constrain noise in the model output. These designs improve the interpretability and representation capability of the model.Extensive experiments on multiple low-light image enhancement datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed paradigm over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zheng980629/CUE.

CLDec 20, 2022
Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey

Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.

CVAug 26, 2023Code
Generalized Lightness Adaptation with Channel Selective Normalization

Mingde Yao, Jie Huang, Xin Jin et al.

Lightness adaptation is vital to the success of image processing to avoid unexpected visual deterioration, which covers multiple aspects, e.g., low-light image enhancement, image retouching, and inverse tone mapping. Existing methods typically work well on their trained lightness conditions but perform poorly in unknown ones due to their limited generalization ability. To address this limitation, we propose a novel generalized lightness adaptation algorithm that extends conventional normalization techniques through a channel filtering design, dubbed Channel Selective Normalization (CSNorm). The proposed CSNorm purposely normalizes the statistics of lightness-relevant channels and keeps other channels unchanged, so as to improve feature generalization and discrimination. To optimize CSNorm, we propose an alternating training strategy that effectively identifies lightness-relevant channels. The model equipped with our CSNorm only needs to be trained on one lightness condition and can be well generalized to unknown lightness conditions. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CSNorm in enhancing the generalization ability for the existing lightness adaptation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mdyao/CSNorm.

CLApr 11, 2023
Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT

Haoran Li, Dadi Guo, Wei Fan et al.

With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), many downstream NLP tasks can be well solved given appropriate prompts. Though model developers and researchers work hard on dialog safety to avoid generating harmful content from LLMs, it is still challenging to steer AI-generated content (AIGC) for the human good. As powerful LLMs are devouring existing text data from various domains (e.g., GPT-3 is trained on 45TB texts), it is natural to doubt whether the private information is included in the training data and what privacy threats can these LLMs and their downstream applications bring. In this paper, we study the privacy threats from OpenAI's ChatGPT and the New Bing enhanced by ChatGPT and show that application-integrated LLMs may cause new privacy threats. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments to support our claims and discuss LLMs' privacy implications.

CVOct 11, 2022
Deep Fourier Up-Sampling

Man Zhou, Hu Yu, Jie Huang et al.

Existing convolutional neural networks widely adopt spatial down-/up-sampling for multi-scale modeling. However, spatial up-sampling operators (\emph{e.g.}, interpolation, transposed convolution, and un-pooling) heavily depend on local pixel attention, incapably exploring the global dependency. In contrast, the Fourier domain obeys the nature of global modeling according to the spectral convolution theorem. Unlike the spatial domain that performs up-sampling with the property of local similarity, up-sampling in the Fourier domain is more challenging as it does not follow such a local property. In this study, we propose a theoretically sound Deep Fourier Up-Sampling (FourierUp) to solve these issues. We revisit the relationships between spatial and Fourier domains and reveal the transform rules on the features of different resolutions in the Fourier domain, which provide key insights for FourierUp's designs. FourierUp as a generic operator consists of three key components: 2D discrete Fourier transform, Fourier dimension increase rules, and 2D inverse Fourier transform, which can be directly integrated with existing networks. Extensive experiments across multiple computer vision tasks, including object detection, image segmentation, image de-raining, image dehazing, and guided image super-resolution, demonstrate the consistent performance gains obtained by introducing our FourierUp.

CLMay 25, 2022
Are Large Pre-Trained Language Models Leaking Your Personal Information?

Jie Huang, Hanyin Shao, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Are Large Pre-Trained Language Models Leaking Your Personal Information? In this paper, we analyze whether Pre-Trained Language Models (PLMs) are prone to leaking personal information. Specifically, we query PLMs for email addresses with contexts of the email address or prompts containing the owner's name. We find that PLMs do leak personal information due to memorization. However, since the models are weak at association, the risk of specific personal information being extracted by attackers is low. We hope this work could help the community to better understand the privacy risk of PLMs and bring new insights to make PLMs safe.

CLOct 3, 2023
Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet

Jie Huang, Xinyun Chen, Swaroop Mishra et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a groundbreaking technology with their unparalleled text generation capabilities across various applications. Nevertheless, concerns persist regarding the accuracy and appropriateness of their generated content. A contemporary methodology, self-correction, has been proposed as a remedy to these issues. Building upon this premise, this paper critically examines the role and efficacy of self-correction within LLMs, shedding light on its true potential and limitations. Central to our investigation is the notion of intrinsic self-correction, whereby an LLM attempts to correct its initial responses based solely on its inherent capabilities, without the crutch of external feedback. In the context of reasoning, our research indicates that LLMs struggle to self-correct their responses without external feedback, and at times, their performance even degrades after self-correction. Drawing from these insights, we offer suggestions for future research and practical applications in this field.

82.6CVJun 3
M$^3$Eval: Multi-Modal Memory Evaluation through Cognitively-Grounded Video Tasks

Jie Huang, Ruixun Liu, Sirui Sun et al.

As multi-modal models advance towards long-form video understanding, memory emerges as a critical capability. Despite substantial efforts in developing video datasets and benchmarks, existing works primarily focus on perception and reasoning, without systematically evaluating memory: what models retain, how faithfully information is preserved, and how robust memory remains under interference. To address this gap, we introduce M$^3$Eval, the first comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmark for probing different memory dimensions in multi-modal models. Grounded in cognitive psychology, our design features carefully constructed tasks that isolate key aspects of memory. Leveraging M$^3$Eval, we conduct extensive experiments across representative multi-modal models, revealing consistent weaknesses and distinctive behaviors. We find that models struggle to maintain disentangled representations when processing parallel video streams, exhibit interference patterns differing substantially from those observed in human memory, ground memory sources more reliably in the spatial domain than the temporal domain, and demonstrate limited symbolic memory. Collectively, our benchmark provides a valuable resource for future research, while our findings highlight memory as a fundamental yet underexplored capability and offer insights for designing more effective memory mechanisms in multi-modal models. Our code and dataset are available at https://pku-value-lab.github.io/m3eval-homepage.

98.2MMJun 3
Echo-Infinity: Learning Evolving Memory for Real-Time Infinite Video Generation

Yuxuan Bian, Zeyue Xue, Songchun Zhang et al.

We present Echo Infinity, an autoregressive (AR) framework towards real-time infinite video generation that employs a learnable evolving memory to dynamically filter, abstract, and compress any-length history at constant cost. Existing methods mainly curate memory with predefined KV-cache schedules, fixed-ratio heuristic compression, or inference-time RoPE adaptation. These designs inevitably lose historical information and amplify compounding errors due to their limited cache window and ignorance of autoregressive generation noise. Inspired by human memory consolidation, Echo-Infinity replaces handcrafted memory curation with learnable Memory Query, which are updated by attention and a gating mechanism when past frames are evicted from the local window. The queries are optimized end-to-end with the video diffusion transformers (DiTs), forming an evolving memory that supports arbitrary compression ratios with constant computation independent of video length. They also act as a generalizable generation prior, improving quality even when only the optimized initial state is used. We further introduce Unified Relative RoPE Recipe, which anchors the sink frames to start from id 0 and lets the newest frame id grow at most to the DiTs' pretrained maximum temporal RoPE id throughout training and inference, freeing the model from the finite RoPE constraint and closing the train-test RoPE extrapolation gap. In long and short video generation, Echo-Infinity achieves state-of-the-art performance, and, to our knowledge, demonstrates promising 24-hour (>1.3 M frames) real-time rollouts for the first time, suggesting a practical path toward infinite video generation.

SYDec 4, 2018
Discrete-Time Distributed Observers over Jointly Connected Switching Networks and an Application

Tao Liu, Jie Huang

In this paper, we first establish an exponential stability result for a class of linear switched systems and then apply this result to show the existence of the distributed observer for a discrete-time leader system over jointly connected switching networks. A special case of this result leads to the solution of a leader-following consensus problem of multiple discrete-time double-integrator systems over jointly connected switching networks. Then, we further develop the adaptive distributed observer for the discrete-time leader system over jointly connected switching networks, which has the advantage over the distributed observer in that it does not require that every follower know the system matrix of the leader system. As an application of the discrete-time distributed observer, we will solve the cooperative output regulation problem of a discrete-time linear multi-agent system over jointly connected switching networks. A leader-following formation problem of mobile robots will be used to illustrate our design. This problem cannot be handled by any existing approach.

CLAug 15, 2023
RAVEN: In-Context Learning with Retrieval-Augmented Encoder-Decoder Language Models

Jie Huang, Wei Ping, Peng Xu et al.

In this paper, we investigate the in-context learning ability of retrieval-augmented encoder-decoder language models. We first conduct a comprehensive analysis of existing models and identify their limitations in in-context learning, primarily due to a mismatch between pretraining and inference, as well as a restricted context length. To address these issues, we propose RAVEN, a model that combines retrieval-augmented masked language modeling and prefix language modeling. We further introduce Fusion-in-Context Learning to enhance the few-shot performance by enabling the model to leverage more in-context examples without requiring additional training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our simple yet effective design significantly improves performance, achieving results comparable to the most advanced language models in certain scenarios, despite having substantially fewer parameters. Our work underscores the potential of retrieval-augmented encoder-decoder language models for in-context learning and encourages further research in this direction.

CVJul 15, 2022
Enhancement by Your Aesthetic: An Intelligible Unsupervised Personalized Enhancer for Low-Light Images

Naishan Zheng, Jie Huang, Qi Zhu et al.

Low-light image enhancement is an inherently subjective process whose targets vary with the user's aesthetic. Motivated by this, several personalized enhancement methods have been investigated. However, the enhancement process based on user preferences in these techniques is invisible, i.e., a "black box". In this work, we propose an intelligible unsupervised personalized enhancer (iUPEnhancer) for low-light images, which establishes the correlations between the low-light and the unpaired reference images with regard to three user-friendly attributions (brightness, chromaticity, and noise). The proposed iUP-Enhancer is trained with the guidance of these correlations and the corresponding unsupervised loss functions. Rather than a "black box" process, our iUP-Enhancer presents an intelligible enhancement process with the above attributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm produces competitive qualitative and quantitative results while maintaining excellent flexibility and scalability. This can be validated by personalization with single/multiple references, cross-attribution references, or merely adjusting parameters.

CVOct 15, 2022
Panchromatic and Multispectral Image Fusion via Alternating Reverse Filtering Network

Keyu Yan, Man Zhou, Jie Huang et al.

Panchromatic (PAN) and multi-spectral (MS) image fusion, named Pan-sharpening, refers to super-resolve the low-resolution (LR) multi-spectral (MS) images in the spatial domain to generate the expected high-resolution (HR) MS images, conditioning on the corresponding high-resolution PAN images. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective \textit{alternating reverse filtering network} for pan-sharpening. Inspired by the classical reverse filtering that reverses images to the status before filtering, we formulate pan-sharpening as an alternately iterative reverse filtering process, which fuses LR MS and HR MS in an interpretable manner. Different from existing model-driven methods that require well-designed priors and degradation assumptions, the reverse filtering process avoids the dependency on pre-defined exact priors. To guarantee the stability and convergence of the iterative process via contraction mapping on a metric space, we develop the learnable multi-scale Gaussian kernel module, instead of using specific filters. We demonstrate the theoretical feasibility of such formulations. Extensive experiments on diverse scenes to thoroughly verify the performance of our method, significantly outperforming the state of the arts.

CVJul 25, 2024Code
Segmentation by registration-enabled SAM prompt engineering using five reference images

Yaxi Chen, Aleksandra Ivanova, Shaheer U. Saeed et al.

The recently proposed Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a general tool for image segmentation, but it requires additional adaptation and careful fine-tuning for medical image segmentation, especially for small, irregularly-shaped, and boundary-ambiguous anatomical structures such as the knee cartilage that is of interest in this work. Repaired cartilage, after certain surgical procedures, exhibits imaging patterns unseen to pre-training, posing further challenges for using models like SAM with or without general-purpose fine-tuning. To address this, we propose a novel registration-based prompt engineering framework for medical image segmentation using SAM. This approach utilises established image registration algorithms to align the new image (to-be-segmented) and a small number of reference images, without requiring segmentation labels. The spatial transformations generated by registration align either the new image or pre-defined point-based prompts, before using them as input to SAM. This strategy, requiring as few as five reference images with defined point prompts, effectively prompts SAM for inference on new images, without needing any segmentation labels. Evaluation of MR images from patients who received cartilage stem cell therapy yielded Dice scores of 0.89, 0.87, 0.53, and 0.52 for segmenting femur, tibia, femoral- and tibial cartilages, respectively. This outperforms atlas-based label fusion and is comparable to supervised nnUNet, an upper-bound fair baseline in this application, both of which require full segmentation labels for reference samples. The codes are available at: https://github.com/chrissyinreallife/KneeSegmentWithSAM.git

CVOct 12, 2023Code
Unmasking Bias in Diffusion Model Training

Hu Yu, Li Shen, Jie Huang et al.

Denoising diffusion models have emerged as a dominant approach for image generation, however they still suffer from slow convergence in training and color shift issues in sampling. In this paper, we identify that these obstacles can be largely attributed to bias and suboptimality inherent in the default training paradigm of diffusion models. Specifically, we offer theoretical insights that the prevailing constant loss weight strategy in $ε$-prediction of diffusion models leads to biased estimation during the training phase, hindering accurate estimations of original images. To address the issue, we propose a simple but effective weighting strategy derived from the unlocked biased part. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic exploration, unraveling the inherent bias problem in terms of its existence, impact and underlying reasons. These analyses contribute to advancing the understanding of diffusion models. Empirical results demonstrate that our method remarkably elevates sample quality and displays improved efficiency in both training and sampling processes, by only adjusting loss weighting strategy. The code is released publicly at \url{https://github.com/yuhuUSTC/Debias}

CVAug 23, 2023
High-quality Image Dehazing with Diffusion Model

Hu Yu, Jie Huang, Kaiwen Zheng et al.

Image dehazing is quite challenging in dense-haze scenarios, where quite less original information remains in the hazy image. Though previous methods have made marvelous progress, they still suffer from information loss in content and color in dense-haze scenarios. The recently emerged Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) exhibits strong generation ability, showing potential for solving this problem. However, DDPM fails to consider the physics property of dehazing task, limiting its information completion capacity. In this work, we propose DehazeDDPM: A DDPM-based and physics-aware image dehazing framework that applies to complex hazy scenarios. Specifically, DehazeDDPM works in two stages. The former stage physically models the dehazing task with the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM), pulling the distribution closer to the clear data and endowing DehazeDDPM with fog-aware ability. The latter stage exploits the strong generation ability of DDPM to compensate for the haze-induced huge information loss, by working in conjunction with the physical modelling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world hazy datasets.

CLAug 27, 2023
Situated Natural Language Explanations

Zining Zhu, Haoming Jiang, Jingfeng Yang et al. · amazon-science, utoronto

Natural language is among the most accessible tools for explaining decisions to humans, and large pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities to generate coherent natural language explanations (NLE). The existing NLE research perspectives do not take the audience into account. An NLE can have high textual quality, but it might not accommodate audiences' needs and preference. To address this limitation, we propose an alternative perspective, \textit{situated} NLE. On the evaluation side, we set up automated evaluation scores. These scores describe the properties of NLEs in lexical, semantic, and pragmatic categories. On the generation side, we identify three prompt engineering techniques and assess their applicability on the situations. Situated NLE provides a perspective and facilitates further research on the generation and evaluation of explanations.

CLMay 21, 2022
DEER: Descriptive Knowledge Graph for Explaining Entity Relationships

Jie Huang, Kerui Zhu, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang et al.

We propose DEER (Descriptive Knowledge Graph for Explaining Entity Relationships) - an open and informative form of modeling entity relationships. In DEER, relationships between entities are represented by free-text relation descriptions. For instance, the relationship between entities of machine learning and algorithm can be represented as ``Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data.'' To construct DEER, we propose a self-supervised learning method to extract relation descriptions with the analysis of dependency patterns and generate relation descriptions with a transformer-based relation description synthesizing model, where no human labeling is required. Experiments demonstrate that our system can extract and generate high-quality relation descriptions for explaining entity relationships. The results suggest that we can build an open and informative knowledge graph without human annotation.

CLOct 11, 2022
Can Language Models Be Specific? How?

Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Jinjun Xiong et al.

"He is a person", "Paris is located on the earth". Both statements are correct but meaningless - due to lack of specificity. In this paper, we propose to measure how specific the language of pre-trained language models (PLMs) is. To achieve this, we introduce a novel approach to build a benchmark for specificity testing by forming masked token prediction tasks with prompts. For instance, given "Toronto is located in [MASK].", we want to test whether a more specific answer will be better filled in by PLMs, e.g., Ontario instead of Canada. From our evaluations, we show that existing PLMs have only a slight preference for more specific answers. We identify underlying factors affecting the specificity and design two prompt-based methods to improve the specificity. Results show that the specificity of the models can be improved by the proposed methods without additional training. We hope this work can bring to awareness the notion of specificity of language models and encourage the research community to further explore this important but understudied problem.

IVAug 13, 2023
Unsupervised Image Denoising in Real-World Scenarios via Self-Collaboration Parallel Generative Adversarial Branches

Xin Lin, Chao Ren, Xiao Liu et al.

Deep learning methods have shown remarkable performance in image denoising, particularly when trained on large-scale paired datasets. However, acquiring such paired datasets for real-world scenarios poses a significant challenge. Although unsupervised approaches based on generative adversarial networks offer a promising solution for denoising without paired datasets, they are difficult in surpassing the performance limitations of conventional GAN-based unsupervised frameworks without significantly modifying existing structures or increasing the computational complexity of denoisers. To address this problem, we propose a SC strategy for multiple denoisers. This strategy can achieve significant performance improvement without increasing the inference complexity of the GAN-based denoising framework. Its basic idea is to iteratively replace the previous less powerful denoiser in the filter-guided noise extraction module with the current powerful denoiser. This process generates better synthetic clean-noisy image pairs, leading to a more powerful denoiser for the next iteration. This baseline ensures the stability and effectiveness of the training network. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.

IVMar 2, 2022
CD-GAN: a robust fusion-based generative adversarial network for unsupervised remote sensing change detection with heterogeneous sensors

Jin-Ju Wang, Nicolas Dobigeon, Marie Chabert et al.

In the context of Earth observation, change detection boils down to comparing images acquired at different times by sensors of possibly different spatial and/or spectral resolutions or different modalities (e.g., optical or radar). Even when considering only optical images, this task has proven to be challenging as soon as the sensors differ by their spatial and/or spectral resolutions. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised change detection method dedicated to images acquired by such so-called heterogeneous optical sensors. It capitalizes on recent advances which formulate the change detection task into a robust fusion framework. Adopting this formulation, the work reported in this paper shows that any off-the-shelf network trained beforehand to fuse optical images of different spatial and/or spectral resolutions can be easily complemented with a network of the same architecture and embedded into an adversarial framework to perform change detection. A comparison with state-of-the-art change detection methods demonstrates the versatility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

CVJul 14, 2022
Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Real-world Image Dehazing

Hu Yu, Jie Huang, Yajing Liu et al.

Deep learning-based source dehazing methods trained on synthetic datasets have achieved remarkable performance but suffer from dramatic performance degradation on real hazy images due to domain shift. Although certain Domain Adaptation (DA) dehazing methods have been presented, they inevitably require access to the source dataset to reduce the gap between the source synthetic and target real domains. To address these issues, we present a novel Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA) image dehazing paradigm, in which only a well-trained source model and an unlabeled target real hazy dataset are available. Specifically, we devise the Domain Representation Normalization (DRN) module to make the representation of real hazy domain features match that of the synthetic domain to bridge the gaps. With our plug-and-play DRN module, unlabeled real hazy images can adapt existing well-trained source networks. Besides, the unsupervised losses are applied to guide the learning of the DRN module, which consists of frequency losses and physical prior losses. Frequency losses provide structure and style constraints, while the prior loss explores the inherent statistic property of haze-free images. Equipped with our DRN module and unsupervised loss, existing source dehazing models are able to dehaze unlabeled real hazy images. Extensive experiments on multiple baselines demonstrate the validity and superiority of our method visually and quantitatively.

CLDec 20, 2022
DimonGen: Diversified Generative Commonsense Reasoning for Explaining Concept Relationships

Chenzhengyi Liu, Jie Huang, Kerui Zhu et al.

In this paper, we propose DimonGen, which aims to generate diverse sentences describing concept relationships in various everyday scenarios. To support this, we first create a benchmark dataset for this task by adapting the existing CommonGen dataset. We then propose a two-stage model called MoREE to generate the target sentences. MoREE consists of a mixture of retrievers model that retrieves diverse context sentences related to the given concepts, and a mixture of generators model that generates diverse sentences based on the retrieved contexts. We conduct experiments on the DimonGen task and show that MoREE outperforms strong baselines in terms of both the quality and diversity of the generated sentences. Our results demonstrate that MoREE is able to generate diverse sentences that reflect different relationships between concepts, leading to a comprehensive understanding of concept relationships.

SEOct 15, 2023Code
Configuration Validation with Large Language Models

Xinyu Lian, Yinfang Chen, Runxiang Cheng et al.

Misconfigurations are major causes of software failures. Existing practices rely on developer-written rules or test cases to validate configurations, which are expensive. Machine learning (ML) for configuration validation is considered a promising direction, but has been facing challenges such as the need of large-scale field data and system-specific models. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in addressing some of the long-lasting limitations of ML-based configuration validation. We present a first analysis on the feasibility and effectiveness of using LLMs for configuration validation. We empirically evaluate LLMs as configuration validators by developing a generic LLM-based configuration validation framework, named Ciri. Ciri employs effective prompt engineering with few-shot learning based on both valid configuration and misconfiguration data. Ciri checks outputs from LLMs when producing results, addressing hallucination and nondeterminism of LLMs. We evaluate Ciri's validation effectiveness on eight popular LLMs using configuration data of ten widely deployed open-source systems. Our analysis (1) confirms the potential of using LLMs for configuration validation, (2) explores design space of LLMbased validators like Ciri, and (3) reveals open challenges such as ineffectiveness in detecting certain types of misconfigurations and biases towards popular configuration parameters.

92.3CVApr 28
A Systematic Post-Train Framework for Video Generation

Zeyue Xue, Siming Fu, Jie Huang et al.

While large-scale video diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-resolution and semantically rich content, a significant gap remains between their pretraining performance and real-world deployment requirements due to critical issues such as prompt sensitivity, temporal inconsistency, and prohibitive inference costs. To bridge this gap, we propose a comprehensive post-training framework that systematically aligns pretrained models with user intentions through four synergistic stages: we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to transform the base model into a stable instruction-following policy, followed by a Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) stage that utilizes a novel Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) method tailored for video diffusion to enhance perceptual quality and temporal coherence; subsequently, we integrate Prompt Enhancement via a specialized language model to refine user inputs, and finally address system efficiency through Inference Optimization. Together, these components provide a systematic approach to improving visual quality, temporal coherence, and instruction following, while preserving the controllability learned during pretraining. The result is a practical blueprint for building scalable post-training pipelines that are stable, adaptable, and effective in real-world deployment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this unified pipeline effectively mitigates common artifacts and significantly improves controllability and visual aesthetics while adhering to strict sampling cost constraints.

CVSep 6, 2022
CNSNet: A Cleanness-Navigated-Shadow Network for Shadow Removal

Qianhao Yu, Naishan Zheng, Jie Huang et al.

The key to shadow removal is recovering the contents of the shadow regions with the guidance of the non-shadow regions. Due to the inadequate long-range modeling, the CNN-based approaches cannot thoroughly investigate the information from the non-shadow regions. To solve this problem, we propose a novel cleanness-navigated-shadow network (CNSNet), with a shadow-oriented adaptive normalization (SOAN) module and a shadow-aware aggregation with transformer (SAAT) module based on the shadow mask. Under the guidance of the shadow mask, the SOAN module formulates the statistics from the non-shadow region and adaptively applies them to the shadow region for region-wise restoration. The SAAT module utilizes the shadow mask to precisely guide the restoration of each shadowed pixel by considering the highly relevant pixels from the shadow-free regions for global pixel-wise restoration. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD) show that our method achieves superior de-shadowing performance.

CVOct 19, 2023
Neural Degradation Representation Learning for All-In-One Image Restoration

Mingde Yao, Ruikang Xu, Yuanshen Guan et al.

Existing methods have demonstrated effective performance on a single degradation type. In practical applications, however, the degradation is often unknown, and the mismatch between the model and the degradation will result in a severe performance drop. In this paper, we propose an all-in-one image restoration network that tackles multiple degradations. Due to the heterogeneous nature of different types of degradations, it is difficult to process multiple degradations in a single network. To this end, we propose to learn a neural degradation representation (NDR) that captures the underlying characteristics of various degradations. The learned NDR decomposes different types of degradations adaptively, similar to a neural dictionary that represents basic degradation components. Subsequently, we develop a degradation query module and a degradation injection module to effectively recognize and utilize the specific degradation based on NDR, enabling the all-in-one restoration ability for multiple degradations. Moreover, we propose a bidirectional optimization strategy to effectively drive NDR to learn the degradation representation by optimizing the degradation and restoration processes alternately. Comprehensive experiments on representative types of degradations (including noise, haze, rain, and downsampling) demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capability of our method.

CVApr 8, 2023
Region-Aware Portrait Retouching with Sparse Interactive Guidance

Huimin Zeng, Jie Huang, Jiacheng Li et al.

Portrait retouching aims to improve the aesthetic quality of input portrait photos and especially requires human-region priority. The deep learning-based methods largely elevate the retouching efficiency and provide promising retouched results. However, existing portrait retouching methods focus on automatic retouching, which treats all human-regions equally and ignores users' preferences for specific individuals, thus suffering from limited flexibility in interactive scenarios. In this work, we emphasize the importance of users' intents and explore the interactive portrait retouching task. Specifically, we propose a region-aware retouching framework with two branches: an automatic branch and an interactive branch. The automatic branch involves an encoding-decoding process, which searches region candidates and performs automatic region-aware retouching without user guidance. The interactive branch encodes sparse user guidance into a priority condition vector and modulates latent features with a region selection module to further emphasize the user-specified regions. Experimental results show that our interactive branch effectively captures users' intents and generalizes well to unseen scenes with sparse user guidance, while our automatic branch also outperforms the state-of-the-art retouching methods due to improved region-awareness.

CLApr 20, 2023
Why Does ChatGPT Fall Short in Providing Truthful Answers?

Shen Zheng, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Recent advancements in large language models, such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated significant potential to impact various aspects of human life. However, ChatGPT still faces challenges in providing reliable and accurate answers to user questions. To better understand the model's particular weaknesses in providing truthful answers, we embark an in-depth exploration of open-domain question answering. Specifically, we undertake a detailed examination of ChatGPT's failures, categorized into: comprehension, factuality, specificity, and inference. We further pinpoint factuality as the most contributing failure and identify two critical abilities associated with factuality: knowledge memorization and knowledge recall. Through experiments focusing on factuality, we propose several potential enhancement strategies. Our findings suggest that augmenting the model with granular external knowledge and cues for knowledge recall can enhance the model's factuality in answering questions.

CVAug 30, 2023
Learned Image Reasoning Prior Penetrates Deep Unfolding Network for Panchromatic and Multi-Spectral Image Fusion

Man Zhou, Jie Huang, Naishan Zheng et al.

The success of deep neural networks for pan-sharpening is commonly in a form of black box, lacking transparency and interpretability. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel model-driven deep unfolding framework with image reasoning prior tailored for the pan-sharpening task. Different from existing unfolding solutions that deliver the proximal operator networks as the uncertain and vague priors, our framework is motivated by the content reasoning ability of masked autoencoders (MAE) with insightful designs. Specifically, the pre-trained MAE with spatial masking strategy, acting as intrinsic reasoning prior, is embedded into unfolding architecture. Meanwhile, the pre-trained MAE with spatial-spectral masking strategy is treated as the regularization term within loss function to constrain the spatial-spectral consistency. Such designs penetrate the image reasoning prior into deep unfolding networks while improving its interpretability and representation capability. The uniqueness of our framework is that the holistic learning process is explicitly integrated with the inherent physical mechanism underlying the pan-sharpening task. Extensive experiments on multiple satellite datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over the existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code will be released at \url{https://manman1995.github.io/}.

CLMar 19, 2022
Domain Representative Keywords Selection: A Probabilistic Approach

Pritom Saha Akash, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang et al.

We propose a probabilistic approach to select a subset of a \textit{target domain representative keywords} from a candidate set, contrasting with a context domain. Such a task is crucial for many downstream tasks in natural language processing. To contrast the target domain and the context domain, we adapt the \textit{two-component mixture model} concept to generate a distribution of candidate keywords. It provides more importance to the \textit{distinctive} keywords of the target domain than common keywords contrasting with the context domain. To support the \textit{representativeness} of the selected keywords towards the target domain, we introduce an \textit{optimization algorithm} for selecting the subset from the generated candidate distribution. We have shown that the optimization algorithm can be efficiently implemented with a near-optimal approximation guarantee. Finally, extensive experiments on multiple domains demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other baselines for the tasks of keyword summary generation and trending keywords selection.

CVMar 29, 2023
Random Weights Networks Work as Loss Prior Constraint for Image Restoration

Man Zhou, Naishan Zheng, Jie Huang et al.

In this paper, orthogonal to the existing data and model studies, we instead resort our efforts to investigate the potential of loss function in a new perspective and present our belief ``Random Weights Networks can Be Acted as Loss Prior Constraint for Image Restoration''. Inspired by Functional theory, we provide several alternative solutions to implement our belief in the strict mathematical manifolds including Taylor's Unfolding Network, Invertible Neural Network, Central Difference Convolution and Zero-order Filtering as ``random weights network prototype'' with respect of the following four levels: 1) the different random weights strategies; 2) the different network architectures, \emph{eg,} pure convolution layer or transformer; 3) the different network architecture depths; 4) the different numbers of random weights network combination. Furthermore, to enlarge the capability of the randomly initialized manifolds, we devise the manner of random weights in the following two variants: 1) the weights are randomly initialized only once during the whole training procedure; 2) the weights are randomly initialized at each training iteration epoch. Our propose belief can be directly inserted into existing networks without any training and testing computational cost. Extensive experiments across multiple image restoration tasks, including image de-noising, low-light image enhancement, guided image super-resolution demonstrate the consistent performance gains obtained by introducing our belief. To emphasize, our main focus is to spark the realms of loss function and save their current neglected status. Code will be publicly available.

CVJan 14Code
Radiomics-Integrated Deep Learning with Hierarchical Loss for Osteosarcoma Histology Classification

Yaxi Chen, Zi Ye, Shaheer U. Saeed et al.

Osteosarcoma (OS) is an aggressive primary bone malignancy. Accurate histopathological assessment of viable versus non-viable tumor regions after neoadjuvant chemotherapy is critical for prognosis and treatment planning, yet manual evaluation remains labor-intensive, subjective, and prone to inter-observer variability. Recent advances in digital pathology have enabled automated necrosis quantification. Evaluating on test data, independently sampled on patient-level, revealed that the deep learning model performance dropped significantly from the tile-level generalization ability reported in previous studies. First, this work proposes the use of radiomic features as additional input in model training. We show that, despite that they are derived from the images, such a multimodal input effectively improved the classification performance, in addition to its added benefits in interpretability. Second, this work proposes to optimize two binary classification tasks with hierarchical classes (i.e. tumor-vs-non-tumor and viable-vs-non-viable), as opposed to the alternative ``flat'' three-class classification task (i.e. non-tumor, non-viable tumor, viable tumor), thereby enabling a hierarchical loss. We show that such a hierarchical loss, with trainable weightings between the two tasks, the per-class performance can be improved significantly. Using the TCIA OS Tumor Assessment dataset, we experimentally demonstrate the benefits from each of the proposed new approaches and their combination, setting a what we consider new state-of-the-art performance on this open dataset for this application. Code and trained models: https://github.com/YaxiiC/RadiomicsOS.git.

CLOct 16, 2022
Coordinated Topic Modeling

Pritom Saha Akash, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

We propose a new problem called coordinated topic modeling that imitates human behavior while describing a text corpus. It considers a set of well-defined topics like the axes of a semantic space with a reference representation. It then uses the axes to model a corpus for easily understandable representation. This new task helps represent a corpus more interpretably by reusing existing knowledge and benefits the corpora comparison task. We design ECTM, an embedding-based coordinated topic model that effectively uses the reference representation to capture the target corpus-specific aspects while maintaining each topic's global semantics. In ECTM, we introduce the topic- and document-level supervision with a self-training mechanism to solve the problem. Finally, extensive experiments on multiple domains show the superiority of our model over other baselines.

CEDec 16, 2025
A Roadmap for Applying Graph Neural Networks to Numerical Data: Insights from Cementitious Materials

Mahmuda Sharmin, Taihao Han, Jie Huang et al.

Machine learning (ML) has been increasingly applied in concrete research to optimize performance and mixture design. However, one major challenge in applying ML to cementitious materials is the limited size and diversity of available databases. A promising solution is the development of multi-modal databases that integrate both numerical and graphical data. Conventional ML frameworks in cement research are typically restricted to a single data modality. Graph neural network (GNN) represents a new generation of neural architectures capable of learning from data structured as graphs, capturing relationships through irregular or topology-dependent connections rather than fixed spatial coordinates. While GNN is inherently designed for graphical data, they can be adapted to extract correlations from numerical datasets and potentially embed physical laws directly into their architecture, enabling explainable and physics-informed predictions. This work is among the first few studies to implement GNNs to design concrete, with a particular emphasis on establishing a clear and reproducible pathway for converting tabular data into graph representations using the k-nearest neighbor (K-NN) approach. Model hyperparameters and feature selection are systematically optimized to enhance prediction performance. The GNN shows performance comparable to the benchmark random forest, which has been demonstrated by many studies to yield reliable predictions for cementitious materials. Overall, this study provides a foundational roadmap for transitioning from traditional ML to advanced AI architectures. The proposed framework establishes a strong foundation for future multi-modal and physics-informed GNN models capable of capturing complex material behaviors and accelerating the design and optimization of cementitious materials.

CLNov 20, 2022
VER: Unifying Verbalizing Entities and Relations

Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Entities and relationships between entities are vital in the real world. Essentially, we understand the world by understanding entities and relations. For instance, to understand a field, e.g., computer science, we need to understand the relevant concepts, e.g., machine learning, and the relationships between concepts, e.g., machine learning and artificial intelligence. To understand a person, we should first know who he/she is and how he/she is related to others. To understand entities and relations, humans may refer to natural language descriptions. For instance, when learning a new scientific term, people usually start by reading its definition in dictionaries or encyclopedias. To know the relationship between two entities, humans tend to create a sentence to connect them. In this paper, we propose VER: a unified model for Verbalizing Entities and Relations. Specifically, we attempt to build a system that takes any entity or entity set as input and generates a sentence to represent entities and relations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model can generate high-quality sentences describing entities and entity relationships and facilitate various tasks on entities and relations, including definition modeling, relation modeling, and generative commonsense reasoning.

CLJul 5, 2023
Citation: A Key to Building Responsible and Accountable Large Language Models

Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Large Language Models (LLMs) bring transformative benefits alongside unique challenges, including intellectual property (IP) and ethical concerns. This position paper explores a novel angle to mitigate these risks, drawing parallels between LLMs and established web systems. We identify "citation" - the acknowledgement or reference to a source or evidence - as a crucial yet missing component in LLMs. Incorporating citation could enhance content transparency and verifiability, thereby confronting the IP and ethical issues in the deployment of LLMs. We further propose that a comprehensive citation mechanism for LLMs should account for both non-parametric and parametric content. Despite the complexity of implementing such a citation mechanism, along with the potential pitfalls, we advocate for its development. Building on this foundation, we outline several research problems in this area, aiming to guide future explorations towards building more responsible and accountable LLMs.

CVMar 29, 2023
Unlocking Masked Autoencoders as Loss Function for Image and Video Restoration

Man Zhou, Naishan Zheng, Jie Huang et al.

Image and video restoration has achieved a remarkable leap with the advent of deep learning. The success of deep learning paradigm lies in three key components: data, model, and loss. Currently, many efforts have been devoted to the first two while seldom study focuses on loss function. With the question ``are the de facto optimization functions e.g., $L_1$, $L_2$, and perceptual losses optimal?'', we explore the potential of loss and raise our belief ``learned loss function empowers the learning capability of neural networks for image and video restoration''. Concretely, we stand on the shoulders of the masked Autoencoders (MAE) and formulate it as a `learned loss function', owing to the fact the pre-trained MAE innately inherits the prior of image reasoning. We investigate the efficacy of our belief from three perspectives: 1) from task-customized MAE to native MAE, 2) from image task to video task, and 3) from transformer structure to convolution neural network structure. Extensive experiments across multiple image and video tasks, including image denoising, image super-resolution, image enhancement, guided image super-resolution, video denoising, and video enhancement, demonstrate the consistent performance improvements introduced by the learned loss function. Besides, the learned loss function is preferable as it can be directly plugged into existing networks during training without involving computations in the inference stage. Code will be publicly available.

98.3CVMar 30Code
Drift-AR: Single-Step Visual Autoregressive Generation via Anti-Symmetric Drifting

Zhen Zou, Xiaoxiao Ma, Mingde Yao et al.

Autoregressive (AR)-Diffusion hybrid paradigms combine AR's structured semantic modeling with diffusion's high-fidelity synthesis, yet suffer from a dual speed bottleneck: the sequential AR stage and the iterative multi-step denoising of the diffusion vision decode stage. Existing methods address each in isolation without a unified principle design. We observe that the per-position \emph{prediction entropy} of continuous-space AR models naturally encodes spatially varying generation uncertainty, which simultaneously governing draft prediction quality in the AR stage and reflecting the corrective effort required by vision decoding stage, which is not fully explored before. Since entropy is inherently tied to both bottlenecks, it serves as a natural unifying signal for joint acceleration. In this work, we propose \textbf{Drift-AR}, which leverages entropy signal to accelerate both stages: 1) for AR acceleration, we introduce Entropy-Informed Speculative Decoding that align draft--target entropy distributions via a causal-normalized entropy loss, resolving the entropy mismatch that causes excessive draft rejection; 2) for visual decoder acceleration, we reinterpret entropy as the \emph{physical variance} of the initial state for an anti-symmetric drifting field -- high-entropy positions activate stronger drift toward the data manifold while low-entropy positions yield vanishing drift -- enabling single-step (1-NFE) decoding without iterative denoising or distillation. Moreover, both stages share the same entropy signal, which is computed once with no extra cost. Experiments on MAR, TransDiff, and NextStep-1 demonstrate 3.8--5.5$\times$ speedup with genuine 1-NFE decoding, matching or surpassing original quality. Code will be available at https://github.com/aSleepyTree/Drift-AR.

CLOct 22, 2022
MetaASSIST: Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Meta Learning

Fanghua Ye, Xi Wang, Jie Huang et al.

Existing dialogue datasets contain lots of noise in their state annotations. Such noise can hurt model training and ultimately lead to poor generalization performance. A general framework named ASSIST has recently been proposed to train robust dialogue state tracking (DST) models. It introduces an auxiliary model to generate pseudo labels for the noisy training set. These pseudo labels are combined with vanilla labels by a common fixed weighting parameter to train the primary DST model. Notwithstanding the improvements of ASSIST on DST, tuning the weighting parameter is challenging. Moreover, a single parameter shared by all slots and all instances may be suboptimal. To overcome these limitations, we propose a meta learning-based framework MetaASSIST to adaptively learn the weighting parameter. Specifically, we propose three schemes with varying degrees of flexibility, ranging from slot-wise to both slot-wise and instance-wise, to convert the weighting parameter into learnable functions. These functions are trained in a meta-learning manner by taking the validation set as meta data. Experimental results demonstrate that all three schemes can achieve competitive performance. Most impressively, we achieve a state-of-the-art joint goal accuracy of 80.10% on MultiWOZ 2.4.

CVDec 9, 2025Code
Fast-ARDiff: An Entropy-informed Acceleration Framework for Continuous Space Autoregressive Generation

Zhen Zou, Xiaoxiao Ma, Jie Huang et al.

Autoregressive(AR)-diffusion hybrid paradigms combine AR's structured modeling with diffusion's photorealistic synthesis, yet suffer from high latency due to sequential AR generation and iterative denoising. In this work, we tackle this bottleneck and propose a unified AR-diffusion framework Fast-ARDiff that jointly optimizes both components, accelerating AR speculative decoding while simultaneously facilitating faster diffusion decoding. Specifically: (1) The entropy-informed speculative strategy encourages draft model to produce higher-entropy representations aligned with target model's entropy characteristics, mitigating entropy mismatch and high rejection rates caused by draft overconfidence. (2) For diffusion decoding, rather than treating it as an independent module, we integrate it into the same end-to-end framework using a dynamic scheduler that prioritizes AR optimization to guide the diffusion part in further steps. The diffusion part is optimized through a joint distillation framework combining trajectory and distribution matching, ensuring stable training and high-quality synthesis with extremely few steps. During inference, shallow feature entropy from AR module is used to pre-filter low-entropy drafts, avoiding redundant computation and improving latency. Fast-ARDiff achieves state-of-the-art acceleration across diverse models: on ImageNet 256$\times$256, TransDiff attains 4.3$\times$ lossless speedup, and NextStep-1 achieves 3$\times$ acceleration on text-conditioned generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/aSleepyTree/Fast-ARDiff.

CLMar 27, 2024Code
Long-form factuality in large language models

Jerry Wei, Chengrun Yang, Xinying Song et al.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate content that contains factual errors when responding to fact-seeking prompts on open-ended topics. To benchmark a model's long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT-4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE). SAFE utilizes an LLM to break down a long-form response into a set of individual facts and to evaluate the accuracy of each fact using a multi-step reasoning process comprising sending search queries to Google Search and determining whether a fact is supported by the search results. Furthermore, we propose extending F1 score as an aggregated metric for long-form factuality. To do so, we balance the percentage of supported facts in a response (precision) with the percentage of provided facts relative to a hyperparameter representing a user's preferred response length (recall). Empirically, we demonstrate that LLM agents can outperform crowdsourced human annotators - on a set of ~16k individual facts, SAFE agrees with crowdsourced human annotators 72% of the time, and on a random subset of 100 disagreement cases, SAFE wins 76% of the time. At the same time, SAFE is more than 20 times cheaper than human annotators. We also benchmark thirteen language models on LongFact across four model families (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and PaLM-2), finding that larger language models generally achieve better long-form factuality. LongFact, SAFE, and all experimental code are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/long-form-factuality.

CLOct 21, 2023
Ask To The Point: Open-Domain Entity-Centric Question Generation

Yuxiang Liu, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

We introduce a new task called *entity-centric question generation* (ECQG), motivated by real-world applications such as topic-specific learning, assisted reading, and fact-checking. The task aims to generate questions from an entity perspective. To solve ECQG, we propose a coherent PLM-based framework GenCONE with two novel modules: content focusing and question verification. The content focusing module first identifies a focus as "what to ask" to form draft questions, and the question verification module refines the questions afterwards by verifying the answerability. We also construct a large-scale open-domain dataset from SQuAD to support this task. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that GenCONE significantly and consistently outperforms various baselines, and two modules are effective and complementary in generating high-quality questions.

AIFeb 10Code
Chain of Mindset: Reasoning with Adaptive Cognitive Modes

Tianyi Jiang, Arctanx An, Hengyi Feng et al.

Human problem-solving is never the repetition of a single mindset, by which we mean a distinct mode of cognitive processing. When tackling a specific task, we do not rely on a single mindset; instead, we integrate multiple mindsets within the single solution process. However, existing LLM reasoning methods fall into a common trap: they apply the same fixed mindset across all steps, overlooking that different stages of solving the same problem require fundamentally different mindsets. This single-minded assumption prevents models from reaching the next level of intelligence. To address this limitation, we propose Chain of Mindset (CoM), a training-free agentic framework that enables step-level adaptive mindset orchestration. CoM decomposes reasoning into four functionally heterogeneous mindsets: Spatial, Convergent, Divergent, and Algorithmic. A Meta-Agent dynamically selects the optimal mindset based on the evolving reasoning state, while a bidirectional Context Gate filters cross-module information flow to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. Experiments across six challenging benchmarks spanning mathematics, code generation, scientific QA, and spatial reasoning demonstrate that CoM achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 4.96\% and 4.72\% in overall accuracy on Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct and Gemini-2.0-Flash, while balancing reasoning efficiency. Our code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}.

CLOct 18, 2023
Descriptive Knowledge Graph in Biomedical Domain

Kerui Zhu, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

We present a novel system that automatically extracts and generates informative and descriptive sentences from the biomedical corpus and facilitates the efficient search for relational knowledge. Unlike previous search engines or exploration systems that retrieve unconnected passages, our system organizes descriptive sentences as a relational graph, enabling researchers to explore closely related biomedical entities (e.g., diseases treated by a chemical) or indirectly connected entities (e.g., potential drugs for treating a disease). Our system also uses ChatGPT and a fine-tuned relation synthesis model to generate concise and reliable descriptive sentences from retrieved information, reducing the need for extensive human reading effort. With our system, researchers can easily obtain both high-level knowledge and detailed references and interactively steer to the information of interest. We spotlight the application of our system in COVID-19 research, illustrating its utility in areas such as drug repurposing and literature curation.

LGApr 20, 2022
An unsupervised approach for semantic place annotation of trajectories based on the prior probability

Junyi Cheng, Xianfeng Zhang, Peng Luo et al.

Semantic place annotation can provide individual semantics, which can be of great help in the field of trajectory data mining. Most existing methods rely on annotated or external data and require retraining following a change of region, thus preventing their large-scale applications. Herein, we propose an unsupervised method denoted as UPAPP for the semantic place annotation of trajectories using spatiotemporal information. The Bayesian Criterion is specifically employed to decompose the spatiotemporal probability of the candidate place into spatial probability, duration probability, and visiting time probability. Spatial information in ROI and POI data is subsequently adopted to calculate the spatial probability. In terms of the temporal probabilities, the Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency weighting algorithm is used to count the potential visits to different place types in the trajectories, and generates the prior probabilities of the visiting time and duration. The spatiotemporal probability of the candidate place is then combined with the importance of the place category to annotate the visited places. Validation with a trajectory dataset collected by 709 volunteers in Beijing showed that our method achieved an overall and average accuracy of 0.712 and 0.720, respectively, indicating that the visited places can be annotated accurately without any external data.

CLOct 24, 2023
Let the Pretrained Language Models "Imagine" for Short Texts Topic Modeling

Pritom Saha Akash, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Topic models are one of the compelling methods for discovering latent semantics in a document collection. However, it assumes that a document has sufficient co-occurrence information to be effective. However, in short texts, co-occurrence information is minimal, which results in feature sparsity in document representation. Therefore, existing topic models (probabilistic or neural) mostly fail to mine patterns from them to generate coherent topics. In this paper, we take a new approach to short-text topic modeling to address the data-sparsity issue by extending short text into longer sequences using existing pre-trained language models (PLMs). Besides, we provide a simple solution extending a neural topic model to reduce the effect of noisy out-of-topics text generation from PLMs. We observe that our model can substantially improve the performance of short-text topic modeling. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets under extreme data sparsity scenarios show that our models can generate high-quality topics outperforming state-of-the-art models.

CLOct 23, 2023
Text Fact Transfer

Nishant Balepur, Jie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Text style transfer is a prominent task that aims to control the style of text without inherently changing its factual content. To cover more text modification applications, such as adapting past news for current events and repurposing educational materials, we propose the task of text fact transfer, which seeks to transfer the factual content of a source text between topics without modifying its style. We find that existing language models struggle with text fact transfer, due to their inability to preserve the specificity and phrasing of the source text, and tendency to hallucinate errors. To address these issues, we design ModQGA, a framework that minimally modifies a source text with a novel combination of end-to-end question generation and specificity-aware question answering. Through experiments on four existing datasets adapted for text fact transfer, we show that ModQGA can accurately transfer factual content without sacrificing the style of the source text.

63.9AIApr 2
AeroTherm-GPT: A Verification-Centered LLM Framework for Thermal Protection System Engineering Workflows

Chuhan Qiao, Jinglai Zheng, Jie Huang et al.

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into hypersonic thermal protection system (TPS) design is bottlenecked by cascading constraint violations when generating executable simulation artifacts. General-purpose LLMs, treating generation as single-pass text completion, fail to satisfy the sequential, multi-gate constraints inherent in safety-critical engineering workflows. To address this, we propose AeroTherm-GPT, the first TPS-specialized LLM Agent, instantiated through a Constraint-Closed-Loop Generation (CCLG) framework. CCLG organizes TPS artifact generation as an iterative workflow comprising generation, validation, CDG-guided repair, execution, and audit. The Constraint Dependency Graph (CDG) encodes empirical co-resolution structure among constraint categories, directing repair toward upstream fault candidates based on lifecycle ordering priors and empirical co-resolution probabilities. This upstream-priority mechanism resolves multiple downstream violations per action, achieving a Root-Cause Fix Efficiency of 4.16 versus 1.76 for flat-checklist repair. Evaluated on HyTPS-Bench and validated against external benchmarks, AeroTherm-GPT achieves 88.7% End-to-End Success Rate (95% CI: 87.5-89.9), a gain of +12.5 pp over the matched non-CDG ablation baseline, without catastrophic forgetting on scientific reasoning and code generation tasks.

CLSep 11, 2024
SimulBench: Evaluating Language Models with Creative Simulation Tasks

Qi Jia, Xiang Yue, Tianyu Zheng et al.

We introduce SimulBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) across a diverse collection of creative simulation scenarios, such as acting as a Linux terminal or playing text games with users. While these simulation tasks serve as effective measures of an LLM's general intelligence, they are seldom incorporated into existing benchmarks. A major challenge is to develop an evaluation framework for testing different LLMs fairly while preserving the multi-round interactive nature of simulation tasks between users and AI. To tackle this issue, we suggest using a fixed LLM as a user agent to engage with an LLM to collect dialogues first under different tasks. Then, challenging dialogue scripts are extracted for evaluating different target LLMs. To facilitate automatic assessment on \DataName{}, GPT-4 is employed as the evaluator, tasked with reviewing the quality of the final response generated by the target LLMs given multi-turn dialogue scripts. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that these simulation tasks continue to pose a significant challenge with their unique natures and show the gap between proprietary models and the most advanced open LLMs. For example, GPT-4-turbo outperforms LLaMA-3-70b-Chat on 18.55\% more cases.