Yue Xie

Jinsheng Wei, Haoyu Chen, Guanming Lu et al.

Micro-expression recognition (MER) draws intensive research interest as micro-expressions (MEs) can infer genuine emotions. Prior information can guide the model to learn discriminative ME features effectively. However, most works focus on researching the general models with a stronger representation ability to adaptively aggregate ME movement information in a holistic way, which may ignore the prior information and properties of MEs. To solve this issue, driven by the prior information that the category of ME can be inferred by the relationship between the actions of facial different components, this work designs a novel model that can conform to this prior information and learn ME movement features in an interpretable way. Specifically, this paper proposes a Decomposition and Reconstruction-based Graph Representation Learning (DeRe-GRL) model to effectively learn high-level ME features. DeRe-GRL includes two modules: Action Decomposition Module (ADM) and Relation Reconstruction Module (RRM), where ADM learns action features of facial key components and RRM explores the relationship between these action features. Based on facial key components, ADM divides the geometric movement features extracted by the graph model-based backbone into several sub-features, and learns the map matrix to map these sub-features into multiple action features; then, RRM learns weights to weight all action features to build the relationship between action features. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules, and the proposed method achieves competitive performance.

Yue Xie, Xing Wang, Fumiya Iida et al.

Computational design can excite the full potential of soft robotics that has the drawbacks of being highly nonlinear from material, structure, and contact. Up to date, enthusiastic research interests have been demonstrated for individual soft fingers, but the frame design space (how each soft finger is assembled) remains largely unexplored. Computationally design remains challenging for the finger-based soft gripper to grip across multiple geometrical-distinct object types successfully. Including the design space for the gripper frame can bring huge difficulties for conventional optimisation algorithms and fitness calculation methods due to the exponential growth of high-dimensional design space. This work proposes an automated computational design optimisation framework that generates gripper diversity to individually grasp geometrically distinct object types based on a quality-diversity approach. This work first discusses a significantly large design space (28 design parameters) for a finger-based soft gripper, including the rarely-explored design space of finger arrangement that is converted to various configurations to arrange individual soft fingers. Then, a contact-based Finite Element Modelling (FEM) is proposed in SOFA to output high-fidelity grasping data for fitness evaluation and feature measurements. Finally, diverse gripper designs are obtained from the framework while considering features such as the volume and workspace of grippers. This work bridges the gap of computationally exploring the vast design space of finger-based soft grippers while grasping large geometrically distinct object types with a simple control scheme.

Jiahao Zhou, Chen Long, Yue Xie et al.

End-to-end models capable of handling multiple sub-tasks in parallel have become a new trend, thereby presenting significant challenges and opportunities for the integration of multiple tasks within the domain of 3D vision. The limitations of 3D data acquisition conditions have not only restricted the exploration of many innovative research problems but have also caused existing 3D datasets to predominantly focus on single tasks. This has resulted in a lack of systematic approaches and theoretical frameworks for 3D multi-task learning, with most efforts merely serving as auxiliary support to the primary task. In this paper, we introduce WHU-Synthetic, a large-scale 3D synthetic perception dataset designed for multi-task learning, from the initial data augmentation (upsampling and depth completion), through scene understanding (segmentation), to macro-level tasks (place recognition and 3D reconstruction). Collected in the same environmental domain, we ensure inherent alignment across sub-tasks to construct multi-task models without separate training methods. Besides, we implement several novel settings, making it possible to realize certain ideas that are difficult to achieve in real-world scenarios. This supports more adaptive and robust multi-task perception tasks, such as sampling on city-level models, providing point clouds with different densities, and simulating temporal changes. Using our dataset, we conduct several experiments to investigate mutual benefits between sub-tasks, revealing new observations, challenges, and opportunities for future research. The dataset is accessible at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/WHU-Synthetic.

Jianqiang Wang, Shuaiqun Pan, Alvaro Serra-Gomez et al.

The intelligent behavior of robots does not emerge solely from control systems, but from the tight coupling between body and brain, a principle known as embodied intelligence. Designing soft robots that leverage this interaction remains a significant challenge, particularly when morphology and control require simultaneous optimization. A significant obstacle in this co-design process is that morphological evolution can disrupt learned control strategies, making it difficult to reuse or adapt existing knowledge. We address this by develop a Graph Neural Network-based approach for the co-design of morphology and controller. Each robot is represented as a graph, with a graph attention network (GAT) encoding node features and a pooled representation passed through a multilayer perceptron (MLP) head to produce actuator commands or value estimates. During evolution, inheritance follows a topology-consistent mapping: shared GAT layers are reused, MLP hidden layers are transferred intact, matched actuator outputs are copied, and unmatched ones are randomly initialized and fine-tuned. This morphology-aware policy class lets the controller adapt when the body mutates. On the benchmark, our GAT-based approach achieves higher final fitness and stronger adaptability to morphological variations compared to traditional MLP-only co-design methods. These results indicate that graph-structured policies provide a more effective interface between evolving morphologies and control for embodied intelligence.

Peter Chen, Yue Xie, Qingpeng Zhang

Optimal transport (OT) aims to find a map $T$ that transports mass from one probability measure to another while minimizing a cost function. Recently, neural OT solvers have gained popularity in high dimensional biological applications such as drug perturbation, due to their superior computational and memory efficiency compared to traditional exact Sinkhorn solvers. However, the overly complex high dimensional maps learned by neural OT solvers often suffer from poor interpretability. Prior work addressed this issue in the context of exact OT solvers by introducing \emph{displacement-sparse maps} via designed elastic cost, but such method failed to be applied to neural OT settings. In this work, we propose an intuitive and theoretically grounded approach to learning \emph{displacement-sparse maps} within neural OT solvers. Building on our new formulation, we introduce a novel smoothed $\ell_0$ regularizer that outperforms the $\ell_1$ based alternative from prior work. Leveraging Input Convex Neural Network's flexibility, we further develop a heuristic framework for adaptively controlling sparsity intensity, an approach uniquely enabled by the neural OT paradigm. We demonstrate the necessity of this adaptive framework in large-scale, high-dimensional training, showing not only improved accuracy but also practical ease of use for downstream applications.

Siyu Zhu, Mouxiao Bian, Yue Xie et al.

With the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) in medicine, a key question is whether they can function as competent pediatricians in real-world clinical settings. We developed PEDIASBench, a systematic evaluation framework centered on a knowledge-system framework and tailored to realistic clinical environments. PEDIASBench assesses LLMs across three dimensions: application of basic knowledge, dynamic diagnosis and treatment capability, and pediatric medical safety and medical ethics. We evaluated 12 representative models released over the past two years, including GPT-4o, Qwen3-235B-A22B, and DeepSeek-V3, covering 19 pediatric subspecialties and 211 prototypical diseases. State-of-the-art models performed well on foundational knowledge, with Qwen3-235B-A22B achieving over 90% accuracy on licensing-level questions, but performance declined ~15% as task complexity increased, revealing limitations in complex reasoning. Multiple-choice assessments highlighted weaknesses in integrative reasoning and knowledge recall. In dynamic diagnosis and treatment scenarios, DeepSeek-R1 scored highest in case reasoning (mean 0.58), yet most models struggled to adapt to real-time patient changes. On pediatric medical ethics and safety tasks, Qwen2.5-72B performed best (accuracy 92.05%), though humanistic sensitivity remained limited. These findings indicate that pediatric LLMs are constrained by limited dynamic decision-making and underdeveloped humanistic care. Future development should focus on multimodal integration and a clinical feedback-model iteration loop to enhance safety, interpretability, and human-AI collaboration. While current LLMs cannot independently perform pediatric care, they hold promise for decision support, medical education, and patient communication, laying the groundwork for a safe, trustworthy, and collaborative intelligent pediatric healthcare system.

Yue Xie, Jiawen Bi, Hongcheng Liu

When the nonconvex problem is complicated by stochasticity, the sample complexity of stochastic first-order methods may depend linearly on the problem dimension, which is undesirable for large-scale problems. In this work, we propose dimension-insensitive stochastic first-order methods (DISFOMs) to address nonconvex optimization with expected-valued objective function. Our algorithms allow for non-Euclidean and non-smooth distance functions as the proximal terms. Under mild assumptions, we show that DISFOM using minibatches to estimate the gradient enjoys sample complexity of $ \mathcal{O} ( (\log d) / ε^4 ) $ to obtain an $ε$-stationary point. Furthermore, we prove that DISFOM employing variance reduction can sharpen this bound to $\mathcal{O} ( (\log d)^{2/3}/ε^{10/3} )$, which perhaps leads to the best-known sample complexity result in terms of $d$. We provide two choices of the non-smooth distance functions, both of which allow for closed-form solutions to the proximal step. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the dimension insensitive property of the proposed frameworks.

Yue Xie, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann

The Stockpile blending problem is an important component of mine production scheduling, where stockpiles are used to store and blend raw material. The goal of blending material from stockpiles is to create parcels of concentrate which contain optimal metal grades based on the material available. The volume of material that each stockpile provides to a given parcel is dependent on a set of mine schedule conditions and customer demands. Therefore, the problem can be formulated as a continuous optimization problem. In the real-world application, there are several constraints required to guarantee parcels that meet the demand of downstream customers. It is a challenge in solving the stockpile blending problems since its scale can be very large. We introduce two repaired operators for the problems to convert the infeasible solutions into the solutions without violating the two tight constraints. Besides, we introduce a multi-component fitness function for solving the large-scale stockpile blending problem which can maximize the volume of metal over the plan and maintain the balance between stockpiles according to the usage of metal. Furthermore, we investigate the well-known approach in this paper, which is used to solve optimization problems over continuous space, namely the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. The experimental results show that the DE algorithm combined with two proposed duration repair methods is significantly better in terms of the values of results than the results on real-world instances for both one-month problems and large-scale problems.

Yue Xie, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann et al.

Addressing a complex real-world optimization problem is a challenging task. The chance-constrained knapsack problem with correlated uniform weights plays an important role in the case where dependent stochastic components are considered. We perform runtime analysis of a randomized search algorithm (RSA) and a basic evolutionary algorithm (EA) for the chance-constrained knapsack problem with correlated uniform weights. We prove bounds for both algorithms for producing a feasible solution. Furthermore, we investigate the behavior of the algorithms and carry out analyses on two settings: uniform profit value and the setting in which every group shares an arbitrary profit profile. We provide insight into the structure of these problems and show how the weight correlations and the different types of profit profiles influence the runtime behavior of both algorithms in the chance-constrained setting.

Yue Xie, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann

Heuristic algorithms have shown a good ability to solve a variety of optimization problems. Stockpile blending problem as an important component of the mine scheduling problem is an optimization problem with continuous search space containing uncertainty in the geologic input data. The objective of the optimization process is to maximize the total volume of materials of the operation and subject to resource capacities, chemical processes, and customer requirements. In this paper, we consider the uncertainty in material grades and introduce chance constraints that are used to ensure the constraints with high confidence. To address the stockpile blending problem with chance constraints, we propose a differential evolution algorithm combining two repair operators that are used to tackle the two complex constraints. In the experiment section, we compare the performance of the approach with the deterministic model and stochastic models by considering different chance constraints and evaluate the effectiveness of different chance constraints.

Yue Xie, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann

The chance-constrained knapsack problem is a variant of the classical knapsack problem where each item has a weight distribution instead of a deterministic weight. The objective is to maximize the total profit of the selected items under the condition that the weight of the selected items only exceeds the given weight bound with a small probability of $α$. In this paper, consider problem-specific single-objective and multi-objective approaches for the problem. We examine the use of heavy-tail mutations and introduce a problem-specific crossover operator to deal with the chance-constrained knapsack problem. Empirical results for single-objective evolutionary algorithms show the effectiveness of our operators compared to the use of classical operators. Moreover, we introduce a new effective multi-objective model for the chance-constrained knapsack problem. We use this model in combination with the problem-specific crossover operator in multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to solve the problem. Our experimental results show that this leads to significant performance improvements when using the approach in evolutionary multi-objective algorithms such as GSEMO and NSGA-II.

Hirad Assimi, Oscar Harper, Yue Xie et al.

Real-world combinatorial optimization problems are often stochastic and dynamic. Therefore, it is essential to make optimal and reliable decisions with a holistic approach. In this paper, we consider the dynamic chance-constrained knapsack problem where the weight of each item is stochastic, the capacity constraint changes dynamically over time, and the objective is to maximize the total profit subject to the probability that total weight exceeds the capacity. We make use of prominent tail inequalities such as Chebyshev's inequality, and Chernoff bound to approximate the probabilistic constraint. Our key contribution is to introduce an additional objective which estimates the minimal capacity bound for a given stochastic solution that still meets the chance constraint. This objective helps to cater for dynamic changes to the stochastic problem. We apply single- and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to the problem and show how bi-objective optimization can help to deal with dynamic chance-constrained problems.

Jingjing Li, Mengmeng Jing, Yue Xie et al.

Domain adaptation investigates the problem of leveraging knowledge from a well-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, where the two domains are drawn from different data distributions. Because of the distribution shifts, different target samples have distinct degrees of difficulty in adaptation. However, existing domain adaptation approaches overwhelmingly neglect the degrees of difficulty and deploy exactly the same framework for all of the target samples. Generally, a simple or shadow framework is fast but rough. A sophisticated or deep framework, on the contrary, is accurate but slow. In this paper, we aim to challenge the fundamental contradiction between the accuracy and speed in domain adaptation tasks. We propose a novel approach, named {\it agile domain adaptation}, which agilely applies optimal frameworks to different target samples and classifies the target samples according to their adaptation difficulties. Specifically, we propose a paradigm which performs several early detections before the final classification. If a sample can be classified at one of the early stage with enough confidence, the sample would exit without the subsequent processes. Notably, the proposed method can significantly reduce the running cost of domain adaptation approaches, which can extend the application scenarios of domain adaptation to even mobile devices and real-time systems. Extensive experiments on two open benchmarks verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Yue Xie, Oscar Harper, Hirad Assimi et al.

Evolutionary algorithms have been applied to a wide range of stochastic problems. Motivated by real-world problems where constraint violations have disruptive effects, this paper considers the chance-constrained knapsack problem (CCKP) which is a variance of the binary knapsack problem. The problem aims to maximize the profit of selected items under a constraint that the knapsack capacity bound is violated with a small probability. To tackle the chance constraint, we introduce how to construct surrogate functions by applying well-known deviation inequalities such as Chebyshev's inequality and Chernoff bounds. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of several deterministic approaches and introduce a single- and multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to solve the CCKP. In the experiment section, we evaluate and compare the deterministic approaches and evolutionary algorithms on a wide range of instances. Our experimental results show that a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm outperforms its single-objective formulation for all instances and performance better than deterministic approaches according to the computation time. Furthermore, our investigation points out in which circumstances to favour Chebyshev's inequality or the Chernoff bound when dealing with the CCKP.