Xiao Jin

Xiao Jin, Rahul K. Dass, Ashok K. Goel

Intelligent tutoring systems excel at generating explanations but rarely provide principled diagnosis of where and why a learner is wrong. We introduce a misstep-aware coaching capability for Ivy, a neurosymbolic AI coach, built on a two-model architecture that augments a Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) model with a new Pedagogical Model (PM) in the context of an online graduate AI course at Georgia Tech. The PM makes instructor diagnostic knowledge explicit and machine-readable by encoding, for each quiz question and incorrect response, the learner's underlying belief(a brief statement of the incorrect idea or missing knowledge), a TMK locus(the source of the misunderstanding), a misconception type and targeted scaffolding derived from the instructor's Q\&A key. Using quiz questions from the course, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept pipeline that detects and classifies learner errors and generates diagnosis-grounded scaffolding, moving Ivy beyond knowledge retrieval toward diagnostic misstep awareness, and enabling more precise, actionable feedback that supports conceptual change and advances adaptive learning systems in AI in education and the learning sciences.

Jiang Hao, Xiao Jin, Hu Xiaoguang et al.

Diffusion models (DMs) are regarded as one of the most advanced generative models today, yet recent studies suggest that they are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, which establish hidden associations between particular input patterns and model behaviors, compromising model integrity by causing undesirable actions with manipulated inputs. This vulnerability poses substantial risks, including reputational damage to model owners and the dissemination of harmful content. To mitigate the threat of backdoor attacks, there have been some investigations on backdoor detection and model repair. However, previous work fails to reliably purify the models backdoored by state-of-the-art attack methods, rendering the field much underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce Diff-Cleanse, a novel two-stage backdoor defense framework specifically designed for DMs. The first stage employs a novel trigger inversion technique to reconstruct the trigger and detect the backdoor, and the second stage utilizes a structural pruning method to eliminate the backdoor. We evaluate our framework on hundreds of DMs that are attacked by three existing backdoor attack methods with a wide range of hyperparameter settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Diff-Cleanse achieves nearly 100\% detection accuracy and effectively mitigates backdoor impacts, preserving the model's benign performance with minimal compromise. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/shymuel/diff-cleanse.

Xiao Jin, Yongxiong Wang, Haobo Liu et al.

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have been widely used for expensive black-box optimization problems. However, their reliance on rigid and manually designed components limits their flexibility and generalization across tasks. Meta-black-box optimization (MetaBBO) provides a promising paradigm for adaptively configuring algorithmic components. Nevertheless, existing MetaBBO methods usually control only a single component, and few studies have investigated the unified control of multi-component optimizers such as SAEAs. Moreover, the robustness-accuracy trade-off in surrogate modeling, which is crucial for stable early-stage exploration and accurate late-stage exploitation, has rarely been explicitly considered. To address these issues, we propose AdaE-SAEA, an adaptive ensemble surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithm for expensive multi-objective optimization. AdaE-SAEA embeds SAEA as the low-level optimizer within the MetaBBO framework and jointly controls the infill criterion and ensemble-based surrogate modeling. Specifically, bagging and boosting are designed as surrogate modeling modules to adaptively balance robustness and accuracy across different search phases, while the meta-policy simultaneously selects the infill criterion to enable adaptive sampling decisions. The meta-policy is trained through reinforcement learning with parallel sampling and centralized training, improving both training efficiency and transferability. Experiments on synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate that AdaE-SAEA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and MetaBBO-based methods. We further verify the effectiveness of TabPFN as the base surrogate model for ensemble learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to unify the control of surrogate modeling and infill criteria in SAEAs while explicitly addressing the robustness--accuracy trade-off.

Xiao Jin, Liang Diao, Qixin Xiao et al.

Anomaly detection holds considerable industrial significance, especially in scenarios with limited anomalous data. Currently, reconstruction-based and unsupervised representation-based approaches are the primary focus. However, unsupervised representation-based methods struggle to extract robust features under domain shift, whereas reconstruction-based methods often suffer from low training efficiency and performance degradation due to insufficient constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method named Compressed Global Feature Conditioned Anomaly Detection (CCAD). CCAD synergizes the strengths of both paradigms by adapting global features as a new modality condition for the reconstruction model. Furthermore, we design an adaptive compression mechanism to enhance both generalization and training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of AUC while achieving faster convergence. In addition, we contribute a reorganized and re-annotated version of the DAGM 2007 dataset with new annotations to further validate our method's effectiveness. The code for reproducing main results is available at https://github.com/chloeqxq/CCAD.

Wei-Yun Liang, Jing Xu, Xiao Jin

Image manipulation localization aims at distinguishing forged regions from the whole test image. Although many outstanding prior arts have been proposed for this task, there are still two issues that need to be further studied: 1) how to fuse diverse types of features with forgery clues; 2) how to progressively integrate multistage features for better localization performance. In this paper, we propose a tripartite progressive integration network (TriPINet) for end-to-end image manipulation localization. First, we extract both visual perception information, e.g., RGB input images, and visual imperceptible features, e.g., frequency and noise traces for forensic feature learning. Second, we develop a guided cross-modality dual-attention (gCMDA) module to fuse different types of forged clues. Third, we design a set of progressive integration squeeze-and-excitation (PI-SE) modules to improve localization performance by appropriately incorporating multiscale features in the decoder. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare our method with state-of-the-art image forensics approaches. The proposed TriPINet obtains competitive results on several benchmark datasets.

Kuo Liang, Yuhang Lu, Jianming Mao et al.

Large-scale optimization is a key backbone of modern business decision-making. However, building these models is often labor-intensive and time-consuming. We address this by proposing LEAN-LLM-OPT, a LightwEight AgeNtic workflow construction framework for LLM-assisted large-scale OPTimization auto-formulation. LEAN-LLM-OPT takes as input a problem description together with associated datasets and orchestrates a team of LLM agents to produce an optimization formulation. Specifically, upon receiving a query, two upstream LLM agents dynamically construct a workflow that specifies, step-by-step, how optimization models for similar problems can be formulated. A downstream LLM agent then follows this workflow to generate the final output. Leveraging LLMs' text-processing capabilities and common modeling practices, the workflow decomposes the modeling task into a sequence of structured sub-tasks and offloads mechanical data-handling operations to auxiliary tools. This design alleviates the downstream agent's burden related to planning and data handling, allowing it to focus on the most challenging components that cannot be readily standardized. Extensive simulations show that LEAN-LLM-OPT, instantiated with GPT-4.1 and the open source gpt-oss-20B, achieves strong performance on large-scale optimization modeling tasks and is competitive with state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, in a Singapore Airlines choice-based revenue management use case, LEAN-LLM-OPT demonstrates practical value by achieving leading performance across a range of scenarios. Along the way, we introduce Large-Scale-OR and Air-NRM, the first comprehensive benchmarks for large-scale optimization auto-formulation. The code and data of this work is available at https://github.com/CoraLiang01/lean-llm-opt.

Kang Yi, Jing Xu, Xiao Jin et al.

RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) aims to detect the prominent regions by jointly modeling RGB and depth information. Most RGB-D SOD methods apply the same type of backbones and fusion modules to identically learn the multimodality and multistage features. However, these features contribute differently to the final saliency results, which raises two issues: 1) how to model discrepant characteristics of RGB images and depth maps; 2) how to fuse these cross-modality features in different stages. In this paper, we propose a high-order discrepant interaction network (HODINet) for RGB-D SOD. Concretely, we first employ transformer-based and CNN-based architectures as backbones to encode RGB and depth features, respectively. Then, the high-order representations are delicately extracted and embedded into spatial and channel attentions for cross-modality feature fusion in different stages. Specifically, we design a high-order spatial fusion (HOSF) module and a high-order channel fusion (HOCF) module to fuse features of the first two and the last two stages, respectively. Besides, a cascaded pyramid reconstruction network is adopted to progressively decode the fused features in a top-down pathway. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven widely used datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We achieve competitive performance against 24 state-of-the-art methods under four evaluation metrics.

Tongkun Liu, Bing Li, Xiao Jin et al.

Industrial defect segmentation is critical for manufacturing quality control. Due to the scarcity of training defect samples, few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) holds significant value in this field. However, existing studies mostly apply FSS to tackle defects on simple textures, without considering more diverse scenarios. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring FSS in broader industrial products with various defect types. To this end, we contribute a new real-world dataset and reorganize some existing datasets to build a more comprehensive few-shot defect segmentation (FDS) benchmark. On this benchmark, we thoroughly investigate metric learning-based FSS methods, including those based on meta-learning and those based on Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). We observe that existing meta-learning-based methods are generally not well-suited for this task, while VFMs hold great potential. We further systematically study the applicability of various VFMs in this task, involving two paradigms: feature matching and the use of Segment Anything (SAM) models. We propose a novel efficient FDS method based on feature matching. Meanwhile, we find that SAM2 is particularly effective for addressing FDS through its video track mode. The contributed dataset and code will be available at: https://github.com/liutongkun/GFDS.

Xiao Jin, Xin-Yue Mu, Jing Xu

As the saying goes, "seeing is believing". However, with the development of digital face editing tools, we can no longer trust what we can see. Although face forgery detection has made promising progress, most current methods are designed manually by human experts, which is labor-consuming. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end framework based on neural architecture search (NAS) for deepfake detection, which can automatically design network architectures without human intervention. First, a forgery-oriented search space is created to choose appropriate operations for this task. Second, we propose a novel performance estimation metric, which guides the search process to select more general models. The cross-dataset search is also considered to develop more general architectures. Eventually, we connect the cells in a cascaded pyramid way for final forgery classification. Compared with state-of-the-art networks artificially designed, our method achieves competitive performance in both in-dataset and cross-dataset scenarios.

Rahul K. Dass, Shubham Puri, Arpit Khandelwal et al.

Scalable AI tutoring for procedural skill learning requires structured knowledge representations, yet constructing these representations remains a labor-intensive bottleneck. This paper presents a human-in-the-loop text-to-model pipeline that uses large language models to transform instructional materials into schema-complete Task-Method-Knowledge models of procedural skills through ontology-constrained prompting and template-based generation. The approach automates structural scaffolding while preserving expert oversight for validating causal transitions and failure conditions. We apply the pipeline to instructional materials from a graduate-level online AI course, constructing 23 procedural skill models. AI-assisted authoring reduced expert modeling time by 50-70% while producing structurally valid and highly reproducible models under fixed-input conditions. We evaluate structural validity, semantic alignment, reproducibility, and refinement effort to characterize authoring scalability. Results indicate that AI-assisted text-to-model methods can substantially lower the cost of constructing structured procedural representations, making course-wide deployment of structured AI coaching systems practically feasible.

Tongkun Liu, Bing Li, Xiao Du et al.

Industrial visual inspection aims at detecting surface defects in products during the manufacturing process. Although existing anomaly detection models have shown great performance on many public benchmarks, their limited adjustability and ability to detect logical anomalies hinder their broader use in real-world settings. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel component-aware anomaly detection framework (ComAD) which can simultaneously achieve adjustable and logical anomaly detection for industrial scenarios. Specifically, we propose to segment images into multiple components based on a lightweight and nearly training-free unsupervised semantic segmentation model. Then, we design an interpretable logical anomaly detection model through modeling the metrological features of each component and their relationships. Despite its simplicity, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on image-level logical anomaly detection. Meanwhile, segmenting a product image into multiple components provides a novel perspective for industrial visual inspection, demonstrating great potential in model customization, noise resistance, and anomaly classification. The code will be available at https://github.com/liutongkun/ComAD.

Xiao Jin, Pin-Yu Chen, Chia-Yi Hsu et al.

Recent studies show that private training data can be leaked through the gradients sharing mechanism deployed in distributed machine learning systems, such as federated learning (FL). Increasing batch size to complicate data recovery is often viewed as a promising defense strategy against data leakage. In this paper, we revisit this defense premise and propose an advanced data leakage attack with theoretical justification to efficiently recover batch data from the shared aggregated gradients. We name our proposed method as catastrophic data leakage in vertical federated learning (CAFE). Comparing to existing data leakage attacks, our extensive experimental results on vertical FL settings demonstrate the effectiveness of CAFE to perform large-batch data leakage attack with improved data recovery quality. We also propose a practical countermeasure to mitigate CAFE. Our results suggest that private data participated in standard FL, especially the vertical case, have a high risk of being leaked from the training gradients. Our analysis implies unprecedented and practical data leakage risks in those learning settings. The code of our work is available at https://github.com/DeRafael/CAFE.

Rahul Dass, Thomas Bowlin, Zebing Li et al.

In procedural skill learning, instructional explanations must convey not just steps, but the causal, goal-directed, and compositional logic behind them. Large language models (LLMs) often produce fluent yet shallow responses that miss this structure. We present Ivy, an AI coaching system that delivers structured, multi-step explanations by combining symbolic Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models with a generative interpretation layer-an LLM that constructs explanations while being constrained by TMK structure. TMK encodes causal transitions, goal hierarchies, and problem decompositions, and guides the LLM within explicit structural bounds. We evaluate Ivy against responses against GPT and retrieval-augmented GPT baselines using expert and independent annotations across three inferential dimensions. Results show that symbolic constraints consistently improve the structural quality of explanations for "how" and "why" questions. This study demonstrates a scalable AI for education approach that strengthens the pedagogical value of AI-generated explanations in intelligent coaching systems.

Chendong Wang, Donglin Bai, Yifan Yang et al.

We present \emph{Video-in-the-Loop} (ViTL), a two-stage long-video QA framework that preserves a fixed token budget by first \emph{localizing} question-relevant interval(s) with a low-fps skim and then \emph{answering} via span-aware reallocation of visual tokens at higher effective frame rate, emitting an interleaved output with both spans and the final option for direct attribution. We also introduce \dataname{}, which converts description based event graphs into \emph{span-grounded} multiple-choice QA by pairing each question with \emph{ground-truth} time span(s) and related reasoning. ViTL is trained end-to-end with an interleaved group-relative objective that couples temporal IoU for localization with answer correctness, allowing credit to flow from answers back to spans without increasing compute. Under fixed token budgets, ViTL attains up to 8.6% with 50% less frame input on long-video QA and temporal grounding (e.g., Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions) and ablations show that span-aware token reallocation consistently surpasses uniform sampling. Together, \dataname{} and ViTL provide an interpretable, compute-efficient recipe for scalable long-video QA.

Hanting Wang, Shengpeng Ji, Shulei Wang et al.

Image restoration under adverse weather conditions has been extensively explored, leading to numerous high-performance methods. In particular, recent advances in All-in-One approaches have shown impressive results by training on multi-task image restoration datasets. However, most of these methods rely on dedicated network modules or parameters for each specific degradation type, resulting in a significant parameter overhead. Moreover, the relatedness across different restoration tasks is often overlooked. In light of these issues, we propose a parameter-efficient All-in-One image restoration framework that leverages task-aware enhanced prompts to tackle various adverse weather degradations.Specifically, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm consisting of a pretraining phase and a prompt-tuning phase to mitigate parameter conflicts across tasks. We first employ supervised learning to acquire general restoration knowledge, and then adapt the model to handle specific degradation via trainable soft prompts. Crucially, we enhance these task-specific prompts in a task-aware manner. We apply low-rank decomposition to these prompts to capture both task-general and task-specific characteristics, and impose contrastive constraints to better align them with the actual inter-task relatedness. These enhanced prompts not only improve the parameter efficiency of the restoration model but also enable more accurate task modeling, as evidenced by t-SNE analysis. Experimental results on different restoration tasks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance with only 2.75M parameters.

Chenming Li, Chengxu Liu, Yuanting Fan et al.

Recently supervised learning rapidly develops in scene text segmentation. However, the lack of high-quality datasets and the high cost of pixel annotation greatly limit the development of them. Considering the well-performed few-shot learning methods for downstream tasks, we investigate the application of the few-shot learning method to scene text segmentation. We propose TSAL, which leverages CLIP's prior knowledge to learn text attributes for segmentation. To fully utilize the semantic and texture information in the image, a visual-guided branch is proposed to separately extract text and background features. To reduce data dependency and improve text detection accuracy, the adaptive prompt-guided branch employs effective adaptive prompt templates to capture various text attributes. To enable adaptive prompts capture distinctive text features and complex background distribution, we propose Adaptive Feature Alignment module(AFA). By aligning learnable tokens of different attributes with visual features and prompt prototypes, AFA enables adaptive prompts to capture both general and distinctive attribute information. TSAL can capture the unique attributes of text and achieve precise segmentation using only few images. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance on multiple text segmentation datasets under few-shot settings and show great potential in text-related domains.

Chulin Wang, Kyongmin Yeo, Xiao Jin et al.

We present a super-resolution model for an advection-diffusion process with limited information. While most of the super-resolution models assume high-resolution (HR) ground-truth data in the training, in many cases such HR dataset is not readily accessible. Here, we show that a Recurrent Convolutional Network trained with physics-based regularizations is able to reconstruct the HR information without having the HR ground-truth data. Moreover, considering the ill-posed nature of a super-resolution problem, we employ the Recurrent Wasserstein Autoencoder to model the uncertainty.

Yanfeng Wu, Chenkai Guo, Junan Zhao et al.

The convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches have shown great success for speaker verification (SV) tasks, where modeling long temporal context and reducing information loss of speaker characteristics are two important challenges significantly affecting the verification performance. Previous works have introduced dilated convolution and multi-scale aggregation methods to address above challenges. However, such methods are also hard to make full use of some valuable information, which make it difficult to substantially improve the verification performance. To address above issues, we construct a novel CNN-based architecture for SV, called RSKNet-MTSP, where a residual selective kernel block (RSKBlock) and a multiple time-scale statistics pooling (MTSP) module are first proposed. The RSKNet-MTSP can capture both long temporal context and neighbouring information, and gather more speaker-discriminative information from multi-scale features. In order to design a portable model for real applications with limited resources, we then present a lightweight version of RSKNet-MTSP, namely RSKNet-MTSP-L, which employs a combination technique associating the depthwise separable convolutions with low-rank factorization of weight matrices. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public SV datasets, VoxCeleb and Speaker in the Wild (SITW). The results demonstrate that 1) RSKNet-MTSP outperforms the state-of-the-art deep embedding architectures by at least 9%-26% in all test sets. 2) RSKNet-MTSP-L achieves competitive performance compared with baseline models with 17%-39% less network parameters. The ablation experiments further illustrate that our proposed approaches can achieve substantial improvement over prior methods.

Tianyi Chen, Xiao Jin, Yuejiao Sun et al.

Horizontal Federated learning (FL) handles multi-client data that share the same set of features, and vertical FL trains a better predictor that combine all the features from different clients. This paper targets solving vertical FL in an asynchronous fashion, and develops a simple FL method. The new method allows each client to run stochastic gradient algorithms without coordination with other clients, so it is suitable for intermittent connectivity of clients. This method further uses a new technique of perturbed local embedding to ensure data privacy and improve communication efficiency. Theoretically, we present the convergence rate and privacy level of our method for strongly convex, nonconvex and even nonsmooth objectives separately. Empirically, we apply our method to FL on various image and healthcare datasets. The results compare favorably to centralized and synchronous FL methods.

Xiao Jin, Baoyun Peng, Yichao Wu et al.

Distillation-based learning boosts the performance of the miniaturized neural network based on the hypothesis that the representation of a teacher model can be used as structured and relatively weak supervision, and thus would be easily learned by a miniaturized model. However, we find that the representation of a converged heavy model is still a strong constraint for training a small student model, which leads to a high lower bound of congruence loss. In this work, inspired by curriculum learning we consider the knowledge distillation from the perspective of curriculum learning by routing. Instead of supervising the student model with a converged teacher model, we supervised it with some anchor points selected from the route in parameter space that the teacher model passed by, as we called route constrained optimization (RCO). We experimentally demonstrate this simple operation greatly reduces the lower bound of congruence loss for knowledge distillation, hint and mimicking learning. On close-set classification tasks like CIFAR100 and ImageNet, RCO improves knowledge distillation by 2.14% and 1.5% respectively. For the sake of evaluating the generalization, we also test RCO on the open-set face recognition task MegaFace.

Baoyun Peng, Xiao Jin, Jiaheng Liu et al.

Most teacher-student frameworks based on knowledge distillation (KD) depend on a strong congruent constraint on instance level. However, they usually ignore the correlation between multiple instances, which is also valuable for knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a new framework named correlation congruence for knowledge distillation (CCKD), which transfers not only the instance-level information, but also the correlation between instances. Furthermore, a generalized kernel method based on Taylor series expansion is proposed to better capture the correlation between instances. Empirical experiments and ablation studies on image classification tasks (including CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1K) and metric learning tasks (including ReID and Face Recognition) show that the proposed CCKD substantially outperforms the original KD and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy compared with other SOTA KD-based methods. The CCKD can be easily deployed in the majority of the teacher-student framework such as KD and hint-based learning methods.