Yu Yin

Yu Yin, Shuai Wang, Bevan Koopman et al.

Recent generative engine optimisation (GEO) research has shown that prompt-injection attacks can push a target product to the top of an LLM's recommendation list, with the strongest attacks reporting around $80\%$ success and raising serious security concerns about RAG-based recommendation. However, these results assume the attacked document is always fed directly to the generator, bypassing the retriever and reranker. This is unrealistic: in deployed RAG systems, the attack modifies the document content, which can in turn change whether the document is retrieved and reranked highly enough to reach the generator at all. In this paper, we re-evaluate seven GEO attacks under a realistic three-stage pipeline (retriever\,$\to$\,LLM reranker\,$\to$\,LLM generator). We find that prior protocols substantially overstate attack effectiveness: gradient-based and instruction override attacks largely collapse before reaching the generator, and only LLM-driven prompt injections remain effective end-to-end. Our analysis further reveals that current GEO attacks are easily detectable: a lightweight prompt-injection guard finetuned on a small attack dataset already detects every attack. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/geo_injection_rag_survival_anonymizations-8C12.

Yu Yin, Kamran Ghasedi, HsiangTao Wu et al.

Nerf-based Generative models have shown impressive capacity in generating high-quality images with consistent 3D geometry. Despite successful synthesis of fake identity images randomly sampled from latent space, adopting these models for generating face images of real subjects is still a challenging task due to its so-called inversion issue. In this paper, we propose a universal method to surgically fine-tune these NeRF-GAN models in order to achieve high-fidelity animation of real subjects only by a single image. Given the optimized latent code for an out-of-domain real image, we employ 2D loss functions on the rendered image to reduce the identity gap. Furthermore, our method leverages explicit and implicit 3D regularizations using the in-domain neighborhood samples around the optimized latent code to remove geometrical and visual artifacts. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method in realistic, high-fidelity, and 3D consistent animation of real faces on multiple NeRF-GAN models across different datasets.

Zhe Hu, Tuo Liang, Jing Li et al.

Recent advancements in large multimodal language models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across a wide range of tasks. Yet, these models still struggle with understanding the nuances of human humor through juxtaposition, particularly when it involves nonlinear narratives that underpin many jokes and humor cues. This paper investigates this challenge by focusing on comics with contradictory narratives, where each comic consists of two panels that create a humorous contradiction. We introduce the YesBut benchmark, which comprises tasks of varying difficulty aimed at assessing AI's capabilities in recognizing and interpreting these comics, ranging from literal content comprehension to deep narrative reasoning. Through extensive experimentation and analysis of recent commercial or open-sourced large (vision) language models, we assess their capability to comprehend the complex interplay of the narrative humor inherent in these comics. Our results show that even state-of-the-art models still lag behind human performance on this task. Our findings offer insights into the current limitations and potential improvements for AI in understanding human creative expressions.

Yiran Qiao, Yiren Lu, Yunlai Zhou et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is increasingly recognized as a powerful paradigm for real-time, high-fidelity 3D reconstruction. However, its per-scene optimization pipeline limits scalability and generalization, and prevents efficient inference. Recently emerged feed-forward 3DGS models address these limitations by enabling fast reconstruction from a few input views after large-scale pretraining, without scene-specific optimization. Despite their advantages and strong potential for commercial deployment, the use of neural networks as the backbone also amplifies the risk of adversarial manipulation. In this paper, we introduce AdvSplat, the first systematic study of adversarial attacks on feed-forward 3DGS. We first employ white-box attacks to reveal fundamental vulnerabilities of this model family. We then develop two improved, practically relevant, query-efficient black-box algorithms that optimize pixel-space perturbations via a frequency-domain parameterization: one based on gradient estimation and the other gradient-free, without requiring any access to model internals. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that AdvSplat can significantly disrupt reconstruction results by injecting imperceptible perturbations into the input images. Our findings surface an overlooked yet urgent problem in this domain, and we hope to draw the community's attention to this emerging security and robustness challenge.

Anran Li, Yuanyuan Chen, Wenjun Long et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on medical benchmarks, including question answering and diagnosis. To enable their use in clinical settings, LLMs are typically further adapted through continued pretraining or post-training using clinical data. However, most medical LLMs are trained on data from a single institution, which faces limitations in generalizability and safety in heterogeneous systems. Federated learning (FL) is a promising solution for enabling collaborative model development across healthcare institutions. Yet applying FL to LLMs in medicine remains fundamentally limited. First, conventional FL requires transmitting the full model during each communication round, which becomes impractical for multi-billion-parameter LLMs given the limited computational resources. Second, many FL algorithms implicitly assume data homogeneity, whereas real-world clinical data are highly heterogeneous across patients, diseases, and institutional practices. We introduce the model-agnostic and parameter-efficient federated learning framework for adapting LLMs to medical applications. Fed-MedLoRA transmits only low-rank adapter parameters, reducing communication and computation overhead, while Fed-MedLoRA+ further incorporates adaptive, data-aware aggregation to improve convergence under cross-site heterogeneity. We apply the framework to clinical information extraction (IE), which transforms patient narratives into structured medical entities and relations. Accuracy was assessed across five patient cohorts through comparisons with BERT models, and LLaMA-3 and DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o models. Evaluation settings included (1) in-domain training and testing, (2) external validation on independent cohorts, and (3) a low-resource new-site adaptation scenario using real-world clinical notes from the Yale New Haven Health System.

Haichao Zhang, Can Qin, Yu Yin et al.

Camouflaged objects that blend into natural scenes pose significant challenges for deep-learning models to detect and synthesize. While camouflaged object detection is a crucial task in computer vision with diverse real-world applications, this research topic has been constrained by limited data availability. We propose a framework for synthesizing camouflage data to enhance the detection of camouflaged objects in natural scenes. Our approach employs a generative model to produce realistic camouflage images, which can be used to train existing object detection models. Specifically, we use a camouflage environment generator supervised by a camouflage distribution classifier to synthesize the camouflage images, which are then fed into our generator to expand the dataset. Our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art method on three datasets (COD10k, CAMO, and CHAMELEON), demonstrating its effectiveness in improving camouflaged object detection. This approach can serve as a plug-and-play data generation and augmentation module for existing camouflaged object detection tasks and provides a novel way to introduce more diversity and distributions into current camouflage datasets.

Yiran Qiao, Yu Yin, Chen Chen et al.

While machine learning models have proven effective across various scenarios, it is widely acknowledged that many models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Recently, there have emerged numerous efforts in adversarial defense. Among them, certified defense is well known for its theoretical guarantees against arbitrary adversarial perturbations on input within a certain range (e.g., $l_2$ ball). However, most existing works in this line struggle to generalize their certified robustness in other data domains with distribution shifts. This issue is rooted in the difficulty of eliminating the negative impact of spurious correlations on robustness in different domains. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a novel certified defense framework GLEAN, which incorporates a causal perspective into the generalization problem in certified defense. More specifically, our framework integrates a certifiable causal factor learning component to disentangle the causal relations and spurious correlations between input and label, and thereby exclude the negative effect of spurious correlations on defense. On top of that, we design a causally certified defense strategy to handle adversarial attacks on latent causal factors. In this way, our framework is not only robust against malicious noises on data in the training distribution but also can generalize its robustness across domains with distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the superiority of our framework in certified robustness generalization in different data domains. Code is available in the supplementary materials.

Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, Yu Yin

Argument generation is a challenging task in natural language processing, which requires rigorous reasoning and proper content organization. Inspired by recent chain-of-thought prompting that breaks down a complex task into intermediate steps, we propose Americano, a novel framework with agent interaction for argument generation. Our approach decomposes the generation process into sequential actions grounded on argumentation theory, which first executes actions sequentially to generate argumentative discourse components, and then produces a final argument conditioned on the components. To further mimic the human writing process and improve the left-to-right generation paradigm of current autoregressive language models, we introduce an argument refinement module which automatically evaluates and refines argument drafts based on feedback received. We evaluate our framework on the task of counterargument generation using a subset of Reddit/CMV dataset. The results show that our method outperforms both end-to-end and chain-of-thought prompting methods and can generate more coherent and persuasive arguments with diverse and rich contents.

Yiren Lu, Xin Ye, Burhaneddin Yaman et al.

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception serves as a cornerstone for autonomous driving, offering a unified spatial representation that fuses surrounding-view images to enable reasoning for various downstream tasks, such as semantic segmentation, 3D object detection, and motion prediction. However, most existing BEV perception frameworks adopt an end-to-end training paradigm, where image features are directly transformed into the BEV space and optimized solely through downstream task supervision. This formulation treats the entire perception process as a black box, often lacking explicit 3D geometric understanding and interpretability, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we claim that an explicit 3D representation matters for accurate BEV perception, and we propose Splat2BEV, a Gaussian Splatting-assisted framework for BEV tasks. Splat2BEV aims to learn BEV feature representations that are both semantically rich and geometrically precise. We first pre-train a Gaussian generator that explicitly reconstructs 3D scenes from multi-view inputs, enabling the generation of geometry-aligned feature representations. These representations are then projected into the BEV space to serve as inputs for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and argoverse dataset demonstrate that Splat2BEV achieves state-of-the-art performance and validate the effectiveness of incorporating explicit 3D reconstruction into BEV perception.

Yiran Qiao, Yiren Lu, Yunlai Zhou et al.

3D asset generation plays a pivotal role in fields such as gaming and virtual reality, enabling the rapid synthesis of high-fidelity 3D objects from a single or multiple images. Building on this capability, enabling style-controllable generation naturally emerges as an important and desirable direction. However, existing approaches typically rely on style images that lie within or are similar to the training distribution of 3D generation models. When presented with out-of-distribution (OOD) styles, their performance degrades significantly or even fails. To address this limitation, we introduce $\textbf{DiLAST}$: 2D Diffusion-based Latent Awakening for 3D Style Transfer. Specifically, we leverage a pretrained 2D diffusion model as a teacher to provide rich and generalizable style priors. By aligning rendered views with the target style under diffusion-based guidance, our method optimizes the structured 3D latent representation for stylization. We observe that this limitation stems not from insufficient model capacity, but from the underutilization of structured 3D latents, which are inherently expressive. Despite being trained on comparatively limited data, 3D generation models can leverage 2D diffusion guidance to steer denoising toward specific directions in latent space, thereby producing diverse, OOD styles. Extensive experiments across diverse data and multiple 3D generation backbones demonstrate the effectiveness and plug-and-play nature of our approach.

Yiren Lu, Jing Ma, Yu Yin

Radiance Fields (RFs) have emerged as a crucial technology for 3D scene representation, enabling the synthesis of novel views with remarkable realism. However, as RFs become more widely used, the need for effective editing techniques that maintain coherence across different perspectives becomes evident. Current methods primarily depend on per-frame 2D image inpainting, which often fails to maintain consistency across views, thus compromising the realism of edited RF scenes. In this work, we introduce a novel RF editing pipeline that significantly enhances consistency by requiring the inpainting of only a single reference image. This image is then projected across multiple views using a depth-based approach, effectively reducing the inconsistencies observed with per-frame inpainting. However, projections typically assume photometric consistency across views, which is often impractical in real-world settings. To accommodate realistic variations in lighting and viewpoint, our pipeline adjusts the appearance of the projected views by generating multiple directional variants of the inpainted image, thereby adapting to different photometric conditions. Additionally, we present an effective and robust multi-view object segmentation approach as a valuable byproduct of our pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses existing frameworks in maintaining content consistency across views and enhancing visual quality. More results are available at https://vulab-ai.github.io/View-consistent_Object_Removal_in_Radiance_Fields.

Zhe Hu, Yixiao Ren, Jing Li et al.

Large vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for integration into daily life, making it crucial for them to incorporate human values when making decisions in real-world situations. This paper introduces VIVA, a benchmark for VIsion-grounded decision-making driven by human VAlues. While most large VLMs focus on physical-level skills, our work is the first to examine their multimodal capabilities in leveraging human values to make decisions under a vision-depicted situation. VIVA contains 1,240 images depicting diverse real-world situations and the manually annotated decisions grounded in them. Given an image there, the model should select the most appropriate action to address the situation and provide the relevant human values and reason underlying the decision. Extensive experiments based on VIVA show the limitation of VLMs in using human values to make multimodal decisions. Further analyses indicate the potential benefits of exploiting action consequences and predicted human values.

Yao Fu, Xianxuan Long, Runchao Li et al.

Quantization enables efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments by significantly reducing memory and computation costs. While quantized LLMs often maintain performance on perplexity and zero-shot tasks, their impact on truthfulness-whether generating truthful or deceptive responses-remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce TruthfulnessEval, a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the truthfulness of quantized LLMs across three dimensions: (1) Truthfulness on Logical Reasoning; (2) Truthfulness on Common Sense; and (3) Truthfulness on Imitative Falsehoods. Using this framework, we examine mainstream quantization techniques (ranging from 4-bit to extreme 2-bit) across several open-source LLMs. Surprisingly, we find that while quantized models retain internally truthful representations, they are more susceptible to producing false outputs under misleading prompts. To probe this vulnerability, we test 15 rephrased variants of "honest", "neutral" and "deceptive" prompts and observe that "deceptive" prompts can override truth-consistent behavior, whereas "honest" and "neutral" prompts maintain stable outputs. Further, we reveal that quantized models "know" the truth internally yet still produce false outputs when guided by "deceptive" prompts via layer-wise probing and PCA visualizations. Our findings provide insights into future designs of quantization-aware alignment and truthfulness interventions.

Yizhou Wang, Lingzhi Zhang, Yue Bai et al.

Next token prediction paradigm has been prevailing for autoregressive models in the era of LLMs. The current default sampling choice for popular LLMs is temperature scaling together with nucleus sampling to balance diversity and coherence. Nevertheless, such approach leads to inferior performance in various NLP tasks when the model is not certain about testing questions. To this end, we propose a brand new training-free decoding strategy, dubbed as Cautious Next Token Prediction (CNTP). In the decoding process, if the model has comparatively high prediction entropy at a certain step, we sample multiple trials starting from the step independently and stop when encountering any punctuation. Then we select the trial with the lowest perplexity score viewed as the most probable and reliable trial path given the model's capacity. The trial number is negatively correlated with the prediction confidence, i.e., the less confident the model is, the more trials it should sample. This is consistent with human beings' behaviour: when feeling uncertain or unconfident, one tends to think more creatively, exploring multiple thinking paths, to cautiously select the path one feels most confident about. Extensive experiments on both LLMs and MLLMs show that our proposed CNTP approach outperforms existing standard decoding strategies consistently by a clear margin. Moreover, the integration of CNTP with self consistency can further improve over vanilla self consistency. We believe our proposed CNTP has the potential to become one of the default choices for LLM decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/CNTP.

Yiren Lu, Yi Du, Disheng Liu et al.

Effective embodied exploration requires agents to accumulate and retain spatial knowledge over time. However, existing scene representations, such as discrete scene graphs or static view-based snapshots, lack \textit{post-hoc re-observability}. If an initial observation misses a target, the resulting memory omission is often irrecoverable. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{GSMem}, a zero-shot embodied exploration and reasoning framework built upon 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). By explicitly parameterizing continuous geometry and dense appearance, 3DGS serves as a persistent spatial memory that endows the agent with \textit{Spatial Recollection}: the ability to render photorealistic novel views from optimal, previously unoccupied viewpoints. To operationalize this, GSMem employs a retrieval mechanism that simultaneously leverages parallel object-level scene graphs and semantic-level language fields. This complementary design robustly localizes target regions, enabling the agent to ``hallucinate'' optimal views for high-fidelity Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning. Furthermore, we introduce a hybrid exploration strategy that combines VLM-driven semantic scoring with a 3DGS-based coverage objective, balancing task-aware exploration with geometric coverage. Extensive experiments on embodied question answering and lifelong navigation demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our framework

Haolei Bai, Siyong Jian, Tuo Liang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of downstream natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, their considerable sizes and memory demands hinder practical deployment, underscoring the importance of developing efficient compression strategies. Singular value decomposition (SVD) decomposes a matrix into orthogonal components, enabling efficient low-rank approximation. This is particularly suitable for LLM compression, where weight matrices often exhibit significant redundancy. However, current SVD-based methods neglect the residual matrix from truncation, resulting in significant truncation loss. Additionally, compressing all layers of the model results in severe error propagation. To overcome these limitations, we propose ERC-SVD, a new post-training SVD-based LLM compression method from an error-controlled perspective. Specifically, we leverage the residual matrix generated during the truncation process to reduce truncation loss. Moreover, under a fixed overall compression ratio, we selectively compress the last few layers of the model, which mitigates error propagation and improves compressed model performance. Comprehensive evaluations on diverse LLM families and multiple benchmark datasets indicate that ERC-SVD consistently achieves superior performance over existing counterpart methods, demonstrating its practical effectiveness.

Yanyan Zhang, Chaoda Song, Vikash Singh et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve remarkable flexibility and generalization beyond classical control paradigms. However, most prevailing VLAs are trained under a single-frame observation paradigm, which leaves them structurally blind to temporal dynamics. Consequently, these models degrade severely in non-stationary scenarios, even when trained or finetuned on dynamic datasets. Existing approaches either require expensive retraining or suffer from latency bottlenecks and poor temporal consistency across action chunks. We propose Pace-and-Path Correction, a training-free, closed-form inference-time operator that wraps any chunked-action VLA. From a single quadratic cost, joint minimization yields a unified solution that decomposes orthogonally into two distinct channels. The pace channel compresses execution along the planned direction, while the path channel applies an orthogonal spatial offset, jointly absorbing the perceived dynamics within the chunk window. We evaluate our approach on a comprehensive diagnostic benchmark MoveBench designed to isolate motion as the sole controlled variable. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free wrappers and dynamic-adaptive methods and improves success rates by up to 28.8% and 25.9% in absolute terms over foundational VLA models in dynamic-only and static-dynamic mixed environments, respectively.

Zhe Hu, Yixiao Ren, Guanzhong Liu et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results for embodied agents in operating meaningfully in complex, human-centered environments. Yet, evaluating their capacity for nuanced, human-like reasoning and decision-making remains challenging. In this work, we introduce VIVA+, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating the reasoning and decision-making of MLLMs in human-centered situations. VIVA+ consists of 1,317 real-world situations paired with 6,373 multiple-choice questions, targeting three core abilities for decision-making: (1) Foundational Situation Comprehension, (2) Context-Driven Action Justification, and (3) Reflective Reasoning. Together, these dimensions provide a systematic framework for assessing a model's ability to perceive, reason, and act in socially meaningful ways. We evaluate the latest commercial and open-source models on VIVA+, where we reveal distinct performance patterns and highlight significant challenges. We further explore targeted training and multi-step reasoning strategies, which yield consistent performance improvements. Finally, our in-depth analysis highlights current model limitations and provides actionable insights for advancing MLLMs toward more robust, context-aware, and socially adept decision-making in real-world settings.

Yiran Qiao, Yiren Lu, Yunlai Zhou et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for real-time and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction from posed images. However, recent studies reveal its vulnerability to adversarial corruptions in input views, where imperceptible yet consistent perturbations can drastically degrade rendering quality, increase training and rendering time, and inflate memory usage, even leading to server denial-of-service. In our work, to mitigate this issue, we begin by analyzing the distinct behaviors of adversarial perturbations in the low- and high-frequency components of input images using wavelet transforms. Based on this observation, we design a simple yet effective frequency-aware defense strategy that reconstructs training views by filtering high-frequency noise while preserving low-frequency content. This approach effectively suppresses adversarial artifacts while maintaining the authenticity of the original scene. Notably, it does not significantly impair training on clean data, achieving a desirable trade-off between robustness and performance on clean inputs. Through extensive experiments under a wide range of attack intensities on multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that our method substantially enhances the robustness of 3DGS without access to clean ground-truth supervision. By highlighting and addressing the overlooked vulnerabilities of 3D Gaussian Splatting, our work paves the way for more robust and secure 3D reconstructions.

Yiren Lu, Yunlai Zhou, Disheng Liu et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown remarkable potential for static scene reconstruction, and recent advancements have extended its application to dynamic scenes. However, the quality of reconstructions depends heavily on high-quality input images and precise camera poses, which are not that trivial to fulfill in real-world scenarios. Capturing dynamic scenes with handheld monocular cameras, for instance, typically involves simultaneous movement of both the camera and objects within a single exposure. This combined motion frequently results in image blur that existing methods cannot adequately handle. To address these challenges, we introduce BARD-GS, a novel approach for robust dynamic scene reconstruction that effectively handles blurry inputs and imprecise camera poses. Our method comprises two main components: 1) camera motion deblurring and 2) object motion deblurring. By explicitly decomposing motion blur into camera motion blur and object motion blur and modeling them separately, we achieve significantly improved rendering results in dynamic regions. In addition, we collect a real-world motion blur dataset of dynamic scenes to evaluate our approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BARD-GS effectively reconstructs high-quality dynamic scenes under realistic conditions, significantly outperforming existing methods.

Yao Fu, Runchao Li, Xianxuan Long et al.

Neural network pruning has emerged as a promising approach for deploying LLMs in low-resource scenarios while preserving downstream task performance. However, for the first time, we reveal that such pruning disrupts LLMs' internal activation features crucial for lie detection, where probing classifiers (typically small logistic regression models) trained on these features assess the truthfulness of LLM-generated statements. This discovery raises a crucial open question: how can we prune LLMs without sacrificing these critical lie detection capabilities? Our investigation further reveals that naively adjusting layer-wise pruning sparsity based on importance inadvertently removes crucial weights, failing to improve lie detection performance despite its reliance on the most crucial LLM layer. To address this issue, we propose Truthful Pruning aligned by Layer-wise Outliers (TPLO), which places greater emphasis on layers with more activation outliers and stronger discriminative features simultaneously. This preserves LLMs' original performance while retaining critical features of inner states needed for robust lie detection. Moreover, we introduce a prompting rule to enrich the TruthfulQA benchmark for better calibrating LLM pruning. Empirical results show that our approach improves the hallucination detection for pruned LLMs (achieving 88% accuracy at 50% sparsity) and enhances their performance on TruthfulQA.

Disheng Liu, Yiran Qiao, Wuche Liu et al.

True intelligence hinges on the ability to uncover and leverage hidden causal relations. Despite significant progress in AI and computer vision (CV), there remains a lack of benchmarks for assessing models' abilities to infer latent causality from complex visual data. In this paper, we introduce \textsc{\textbf{Causal3D}}, a novel and comprehensive benchmark that integrates structured data (tables) with corresponding visual representations (images) to evaluate causal reasoning. Designed within a systematic framework, Causal3D comprises 19 3D-scene datasets capturing diverse causal relations, views, and backgrounds, enabling evaluations across scenes of varying complexity. We assess multiple state-of-the-art methods, including classical causal discovery, causal representation learning, and large/vision-language models (LLMs/VLMs). Our experiments show that as causal structures grow more complex without prior knowledge, performance declines significantly, highlighting the challenges even advanced methods face in complex causal scenarios. Causal3D serves as a vital resource for advancing causal reasoning in CV and fostering trustworthy AI in critical domains.

Wenhan Han, Meng Fang, Zihan Zhang et al.

The integration of large language model (LLM) techniques in the field of medical analysis has brought about significant advancements, yet the scarcity of large, diverse, and well-annotated datasets remains a major challenge. Medical data and tasks, which vary in format, size, and other parameters, require extensive preprocessing and standardization for effective use in training LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce MedINST, the Meta Dataset of Biomedical Instructions, a novel multi-domain, multi-task instructional meta-dataset. MedINST comprises 133 biomedical NLP tasks and over 7 million training samples, making it the most comprehensive biomedical instruction dataset to date. Using MedINST as the meta dataset, we curate MedINST32, a challenging benchmark with different task difficulties aiming to evaluate LLMs' generalization ability. We fine-tune several LLMs on MedINST and evaluate on MedINST32, showcasing enhanced cross-task generalization.

Zhe Hu, Jing Li, Zhongzhu Pu et al.

Vision Language Models exhibit impressive performance for various tasks, yet they often lack the sophisticated situational reasoning required for complex decision-making. This paper shows that VLMs can achieve surprisingly strong decision-making performance when visual scenes are replaced by textual descriptions, suggesting foundational reasoning can be effectively learned from language. Motivated by this insight, we propose Praxis-VLM, a reasoning VLM for vision-grounded decision-making. Praxis-VLM employs the GRPO algorithm on textual scenarios to instill robust reasoning capabilities, where models learn to evaluate actions and their consequences. These reasoning skills, acquired purely from text, successfully transfer to multimodal inference with visual inputs, significantly reducing reliance on scarce paired image-text training data. Experiments across diverse decision-making benchmarks demonstrate that Praxis-VLM substantially outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning, exhibiting superior performance and generalizability. Further analysis confirms that our models engage in explicit and effective reasoning, underpinning their enhanced performance and adaptability.

Tuo Liang, Zhe Hu, Jing Li et al.

Understanding humor-particularly when it involves complex, contradictory narratives that require comparative reasoning-remains a significant challenge for large vision-language models (VLMs). This limitation hinders AI's ability to engage in human-like reasoning and cultural expression. In this paper, we investigate this challenge through an in-depth analysis of comics that juxtapose panels to create humor through contradictions. We introduce the YesBut (V2), a novel benchmark with 1,262 comic images from diverse multilingual and multicultural contexts, featuring comprehensive annotations that capture various aspects of narrative understanding. Using this benchmark, we systematically evaluate a wide range of VLMs through four complementary tasks spanning from surface content comprehension to deep narrative reasoning, with particular emphasis on comparative reasoning between contradictory elements. Our extensive experiments reveal that even the most advanced models significantly underperform compared to humans, with common failures in visual perception, key element identification, comparative analysis and hallucinations. We further investigate text-based training strategies and social knowledge augmentation methods to enhance model performance. Our findings not only highlight critical weaknesses in VLMs' understanding of cultural and creative expressions but also provide pathways toward developing context-aware models capable of deeper narrative understanding though comparative reasoning.

Mengying Wang, Chenhui Ma, Ao Jiao et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), yet existing systems are typically optimized for returning highly relevant but predictable answers. A missing yet desired capacity is to exploit LLMs to suggest surprise and novel ("serendipitious") answers. In this paper, we formally define the serendipity-aware KGQA task and propose the SerenQA framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to uncover unexpected insights in scientific KGQA tasks. SerenQA includes a rigorous serendipity metric based on relevance, novelty, and surprise, along with an expert-annotated benchmark derived from the Clinical Knowledge Graph, focused on drug repurposing. Additionally, it features a structured evaluation pipeline encompassing three subtasks: knowledge retrieval, subgraph reasoning, and serendipity exploration. Our experiments reveal that while state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on retrieval, they still struggle to identify genuinely surprising and valuable discoveries, underscoring a significant room for future improvements. Our curated resources and extended version are released at: https://cwru-db-group.github.io/serenQA.

Jierui Peng, Yanyan Zhang, Yicheng Duan et al.

The evaluation of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) agents is hindered by the coarse, end-task success metric that fails to provide precise skill diagnosis or measure robustness to real-world perturbations. This challenge is exacerbated by a fragmented data landscape that impedes reproducible research and the development of generalist models. To address these limitations, we introduce NEBULA, a unified ecosystem for single-arm manipulation that enables diagnostic and reproducible evaluation. NEBULA features a novel dual-axis evaluation protocol that combines fine-grained capability tests for precise skill diagnosis with systematic stress tests that measure robustness. A standardized API and a large-scale, aggregated dataset are provided to reduce fragmentation and support cross-dataset training and fair comparison. Using NEBULA, we demonstrate that top-performing VLAs struggle with key capabilities such as spatial reasoning and dynamic adaptation, which are consistently obscured by conventional end-task success metrics. By measuring both what an agent can do and when it does so reliably, NEBULA provides a practical foundation for robust, general-purpose embodied agents.

Aly El Hakie, Yiren Lu, Yu Yin et al.

Opaque objects reconstructed by 3DGS often exhibit a falsely transparent surface, leading to inconsistent background and internal patterns under camera motion in interactive viewing. This issue stems from the ill-posed optimization in 3DGS. During training, background and foreground Gaussians are blended via alpha-compositing and optimized solely against the input RGB images using a photometric loss. As this process lacks an explicit constraint on surface opacity, the optimization may incorrectly assign transparency to opaque regions, resulting in view-inconsistent and falsely transparent. This issue is difficult to detect in standard evaluation settings but becomes particularly evident in object-centric reconstructions under interactive viewing. Although other causes of view-inconsistency have been explored recently, false transparency has not been explicitly identified. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to identify, characterize, and develop solutions for this artifact, an underreported artifact in 3DGS. Our strategy, NGS, encourages surface Gaussians to adopt higher opacity by injecting opaque noise Gaussians in the object volume during training, requiring only minimal modifications to the existing splatting process. To quantitatively evaluate false transparency in static renderings, we propose a transmittance-based metric that measures the severity of this artifact. In addition, we introduce a customized, high-quality object-centric scan dataset exhibiting pronounced transparency issues, and we augment popular existing datasets with complementary infill noise specifically designed to assess the robustness of 3D reconstruction methods to false transparency. Experiments across multiple datasets show that NGS substantially reduces false transparency while maintaining competitive performance on standard rendering metrics, demonstrating its overall effectiveness.

Zhenyue Qin, Yang Liu, Yu Yin et al.

Vision-threatening eye diseases pose a major global health burden, with timely diagnosis limited by workforce shortages and restricted access to specialized care. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise for medical image interpretation, advancing MLLMs for ophthalmology is hindered by the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets suitable for evaluating generative models. We present a large-scale multimodal ophthalmology benchmark comprising 32,633 instances with multi-granular annotations across 12 common ophthalmic conditions and 5 imaging modalities. The dataset integrates imaging, anatomical structures, demographics, and free-text annotations, supporting anatomical structure recognition, disease screening, disease staging, and demographic prediction for bias evaluation. This work extends our preliminary LMOD benchmark with three major enhancements: (1) nearly 50% dataset expansion with substantial enlargement of color fundus photography; (2) broadened task coverage including binary disease diagnosis, multi-class diagnosis, severity classification with international grading standards, and demographic prediction; and (3) systematic evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our evaluations reveal both promise and limitations. Top-performing models achieved ~58% accuracy in disease screening under zero-shot settings, and performance remained suboptimal for challenging tasks like disease staging. We will publicly release the dataset, curation pipeline, and leaderboard to potentially advance ophthalmic AI applications and reduce the global burden of vision-threatening diseases.

Anran Li, Lingfei Qian, Mengmeng Du et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medicine. To date, LLMs have been widely applied to tasks such as diagnostic assistance, medical question answering, and clinical information synthesis. However, a key open question remains: to what extent do LLMs memorize medical training data. In this study, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of memorization of LLMs in medicine, assessing its prevalence (how frequently it occurs), characteristics (what is memorized), volume (how much content is memorized), and potential downstream impacts (how memorization may affect medical applications). We systematically analyze common adaptation scenarios: (1) continued pretraining on medical corpora, (2) fine-tuning on standard medical benchmarks, and (3) fine-tuning on real-world clinical data, including over 13,000 unique inpatient records from Yale New Haven Health System. The results demonstrate that memorization is prevalent across all adaptation scenarios and significantly higher than reported in the general domain. Memorization affects both the development and adoption of LLMs in medicine and can be categorized into three types: beneficial (e.g., accurate recall of clinical guidelines and biomedical references), uninformative (e.g., repeated disclaimers or templated medical document language), and harmful (e.g., regeneration of dataset-specific or sensitive clinical content). Based on these findings, we offer practical recommendations to facilitate beneficial memorization that enhances domain-specific reasoning and factual accuracy, minimize uninformative memorization to promote deeper learning beyond surface-level patterns, and mitigate harmful memorization to prevent the leakage of sensitive or identifiable patient information.

Yiran Qiao, Disheng Liu, Yiren Lu et al.

Recent work on counterfactual visual explanations has contributed to making artificial intelligence models more explainable by providing visual perturbation to flip the prediction. However, these approaches neglect the causal relationships and the spurious correlations behind the image generation process, which often leads to unintended alterations in the counterfactual images and renders the explanations with limited quality. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel framework CECAS, which first leverages a causally-guided adversarial method to generate counterfactual explanations. It innovatively integrates a causal perspective to avoid unwanted perturbations on spurious factors in the counterfactuals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches across multiple benchmark datasets and ultimately achieves a balanced trade-off among various aspects of validity, sparsity, proximity, and realism.

Yiren Lu, Yunlai Zhou, Yiran Qiao et al.

Open-vocabulary querying in 3D space is crucial for enabling more intelligent perception in applications such as robotics, autonomous systems, and augmented reality. However, most existing methods rely on 2D pixel-level parsing, leading to multi-view inconsistencies and poor 3D object retrieval. Moreover, they are limited to static scenes and struggle with dynamic scenes due to the complexities of motion modeling. In this paper, we propose Segment then Splat, a 3D-aware open vocabulary segmentation approach for both static and dynamic scenes based on Gaussian Splatting. Segment then Splat reverses the long established approach of "segmentation after reconstruction" by dividing Gaussians into distinct object sets before reconstruction. Once reconstruction is complete, the scene is naturally segmented into individual objects, achieving true 3D segmentation. This design eliminates both geometric and semantic ambiguities, as well as Gaussian-object misalignment issues in dynamic scenes. It also accelerates the optimization process, as it eliminates the need for learning a separate language field. After optimization, a CLIP embedding is assigned to each object to enable open-vocabulary querying. Extensive experiments one various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in both static and dynamic scenarios.

Zhe Hu, Hou Pong Chan, Jing Li et al.

Writing persuasive arguments is a challenging task for both humans and machines. It entails incorporating high-level beliefs from various perspectives on the topic, along with deliberate reasoning and planning to construct a coherent narrative. Current language models often generate surface tokens autoregressively, lacking explicit integration of these underlying controls, resulting in limited output diversity and coherence. In this work, we propose a persona-based multi-agent framework for argument writing. Inspired by the human debate, we first assign each agent a persona representing its high-level beliefs from a unique perspective, and then design an agent interaction process so that the agents can collaboratively debate and discuss the idea to form an overall plan for argument writing. Such debate process enables fluid and nonlinear development of ideas. We evaluate our framework on argumentative essay writing. The results show that our framework can generate more diverse and persuasive arguments through both automatic and human evaluations.

Yu Yin, Hyunjae Kim, Xiao Xiao et al.

Training a neural network-based biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) model usually requires extensive and costly human annotations. While several studies have employed multi-task learning with multiple BioNER datasets to reduce human effort, this approach does not consistently yield performance improvements and may introduce label ambiguity in different biomedical corpora. We aim to tackle those challenges through transfer learning from easily accessible resources with fewer concept overlaps with biomedical datasets. We proposed GERBERA, a simple-yet-effective method that utilized general-domain NER datasets for training. We performed multi-task learning to train a pre-trained biomedical language model with both the target BioNER dataset and the general-domain dataset. Subsequently, we fine-tuned the models specifically for the BioNER dataset. We systematically evaluated GERBERA on five datasets of eight entity types, collectively consisting of 81,410 instances. Despite using fewer biomedical resources, our models demonstrated superior performance compared to baseline models trained with additional BioNER datasets. Specifically, our models consistently outperformed the baseline models in six out of eight entity types, achieving an average improvement of 0.9% over the best baseline performance across eight entities. Our method was especially effective in amplifying performance on BioNER datasets characterized by limited data, with a 4.7% improvement in F1 scores on the JNLPBA-RNA dataset. This study introduces a new training method that leverages cost-effective general-domain NER datasets to augment BioNER models. This approach significantly improves BioNER model performance, making it a valuable asset for scenarios with scarce or costly biomedical datasets.

Can Qin, Lichen Wang, Qianqian Ma et al.

Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) is quite a challenging problem requiring methods to overcome both 1) overfitting towards poorly annotated data and 2) distribution shift across domains. Unfortunately, a simple combination of domain adaptation (DA) and semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods often fail to address such two objects because of training data bias towards labeled samples. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive structure learning method to regularize the cooperation of SSL and DA. Inspired by the multi-views learning, our proposed framework is composed of a shared feature encoder network and two classifier networks, trained for contradictory purposes. Among them, one of the classifiers is applied to group target features to improve intra-class density, enlarging the gap of categorical clusters for robust representation learning. Meanwhile, the other classifier, serviced as a regularizer, attempts to scatter the source features to enhance the smoothness of the decision boundary. The iterations of target clustering and source expansion make the target features being well-enclosed inside the dilated boundary of the corresponding source points. For the joint address of cross-domain features alignment and partially labeled data learning, we apply the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) distance minimization and self-training (ST) to project the contradictory structures into a shared view to make the reliable final decision. The experimental results over the standard SSDA benchmarks, including DomainNet and Office-home, demonstrate both the accuracy and robustness of our method over the state-of-the-art approaches.

Zhe Hu, Zuohui Fu, Yu Yin et al.

Impressive milestones have been achieved in text matching by adopting a cross-attention mechanism to capture pertinent semantic connections between two sentence representations. However, regular cross-attention focuses on word-level links between the two input sequences, neglecting the importance of contextual information. We propose a context-aware interaction network (COIN) to properly align two sequences and infer their semantic relationship. Specifically, each interaction block includes (1) a context-aware cross-attention mechanism to effectively integrate contextual information when aligning two sequences, and (2) a gate fusion layer to flexibly interpolate aligned representations. We apply multiple stacked interaction blocks to produce alignments at different levels and gradually refine the attention results. Experiments on two question matching datasets and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Haoyang Bi, Haiping Ma, Zhenya Huang et al.

Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) is emerging as a promising testing application in many scenarios, such as education, game and recruitment, which targets at diagnosing the knowledge mastery levels of examinees on required concepts. It shows the advantage of tailoring a personalized testing procedure for each examinee, which selects questions step by step, depending on her performance. While there are many efforts on developing CAT systems, existing solutions generally follow an inflexible model-specific fashion. That is, they need to observe a specific cognitive model which can estimate examinee's knowledge levels and design the selection strategy according to the model estimation. In this paper, we study a novel model-agnostic CAT problem, where we aim to propose a flexible framework that can adapt to different cognitive models. Meanwhile, this work also figures out CAT solution with addressing the problem of how to generate both high-quality and diverse questions simultaneously, which can give a comprehensive knowledge diagnosis for each examinee. Inspired by Active Learning, we propose a novel framework, namely Model-Agnostic Adaptive Testing (MAAT) for CAT solution, where we design three sophisticated modules including Quality Module, Diversity Module and Importance Module. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate that our MAAT can support CAT with guaranteeing both quality and diversity perspectives.

Yu Yin, Joseph P. Robinson, Yun Fu

Humans spend vast hours in bed -- about one-third of the lifetime on average. Besides, a human at rest is vital in many healthcare applications. Typically, humans are covered by a blanket when resting, for which we propose a multimodal approach to uncover the subjects so their bodies at rest can be viewed without the occlusion of the blankets above. We propose a pyramid scheme to effectively fuse the different modalities in a way that best leverages the knowledge captured by the multimodal sensors. Specifically, the two most informative modalities (i.e., depth and infrared images) are first fused to generate good initial pose and shape estimation. Then pressure map and RGB images are further fused one by one to refine the result by providing occlusion-invariant information for the covered part, and accurate shape information for the uncovered part, respectively. However, even with multimodal data, the task of detecting human bodies at rest is still very challenging due to the extreme occlusion of bodies. To further reduce the negative effects of the occlusion from blankets, we employ an attention-based reconstruction module to generate uncovered modalities, which are further fused to update current estimation via a cyclic fashion. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed model over others.

Yu Yin, Joseph P. Robinson, Songyao Jiang et al.

Advances in face rotation, along with other face-based generative tasks, are more frequent as we advance further in topics of deep learning. Even as impressive milestones are achieved in synthesizing faces, the importance of preserving identity is needed in practice and should not be overlooked. Also, the difficulty should not be more for data with obscured faces, heavier poses, and lower quality. Existing methods tend to focus on samples with variation in pose, but with the assumption data is high in quality. We propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) -based model to generate high-quality, identity preserving frontal faces from one or multiple low-resolution (LR) faces with extreme poses. Specifically, we propose SuperFront-GAN (SF-GAN) to synthesize a high-resolution (HR), frontal face from one-to-many LR faces with various poses and with the identity-preserved. We integrate a super-resolution (SR) side-view module into SF-GAN to preserve identity information and fine details of the side-views in HR space, which helps model reconstruct high-frequency information of faces (i.e., periocular, nose, and mouth regions). Moreover, SF-GAN accepts multiple LR faces as input, and improves each added sample. We squeeze additional gain in performance with an orthogonal constraint in the generator to penalize redundant latent representations and, hence, diversify the learned features space. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superiority of SF-GAN over others.

Yue Bai, Zhiqiang Tao, Lichen Wang et al.

Multi-view action recognition (MVAR) leverages complementary temporal information from different views to improve the learning performance. Obtaining informative view-specific representation plays an essential role in MVAR. Attention has been widely adopted as an effective strategy for discovering discriminative cues underlying temporal data. However, most existing MVAR methods only utilize attention to extract representation for each view individually, ignoring the potential to dig latent patterns based on mutual-support information in attention space. To this end, we propose a collaborative attention mechanism (CAM) for solving the MVAR problem in this paper. The proposed CAM detects the attention differences among multi-view, and adaptively integrates frame-level information to benefit each other. Specifically, we extend the long short-term memory (LSTM) to a Mutual-Aid RNN (MAR) to achieve the multi-view collaboration process. CAM takes advantages of view-specific attention pattern to guide another view and discover potential information which is hard to be explored by itself. It paves a novel way to leverage attention information and enhances the multi-view representation learning. Extensive experiments on four action datasets illustrate the proposed CAM achieves better results for each view and also boosts multi-view performance.

Joseph P. Robinson, Zaid Khan, Yu Yin et al.

Kinship, a soft biometric detectable in media, is fundamental for a myriad of use-cases. Despite the difficulty of detecting kinship, annual data challenges using still-images have consistently improved performances and attracted new researchers. Now, systems reach performance levels unforeseeable a decade ago, closing in on performances acceptable to deploy in practice. Like other biometric tasks, we expect systems can receive help from other modalities. We hypothesize that adding modalities to FIW, which has only still-images, will improve performance. Thus, to narrow the gap between research and reality and enhance the power of kinship recognition systems, we extend FIW with multimedia (MM) data (i.e., video, audio, and text captions). Specifically, we introduce the first publicly available multi-task MM kinship dataset. To build FIW MM, we developed machinery to automatically collect, annotate, and prepare the data, requiring minimal human input and no financial cost. The proposed MM corpus allows the problem statements to be more realistic template-based protocols. We show significant improvements in all benchmarks with the added modalities. The results highlight edge cases to inspire future research with different areas of improvement. FIW MM supplies the data needed to increase the potential of automated systems to detect kinship in MM. It also allows experts from diverse fields to collaborate in novel ways.

Yu Yin, Songyao Jiang, Joseph P. Robinson et al.

Face frontalization provides an effective and efficient way for face data augmentation and further improves the face recognition performance in extreme pose scenario. Despite recent advances in deep learning-based face synthesis approaches, this problem is still challenging due to significant pose and illumination discrepancy. In this paper, we present a novel Dual-Attention Generative Adversarial Network (DA-GAN) for photo-realistic face frontalization by capturing both contextual dependencies and local consistency during GAN training. Specifically, a self-attention-based generator is introduced to integrate local features with their long-range dependencies yielding better feature representations, and hence generate faces that preserve identities better, especially for larger pose angles. Moreover, a novel face-attention-based discriminator is applied to emphasize local features of face regions, and hence reinforce the realism of synthetic frontal faces. Guided by semantic segmentation, four independent discriminators are used to distinguish between different aspects of a face (\ie skin, keypoints, hairline, and frontalized face). By introducing these two complementary attention mechanisms in generator and discriminator separately, we can learn a richer feature representation and generate identity preserving inference of frontal views with much finer details (i.e., more accurate facial appearance and textures) comparing to the state-of-the-art. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our DA-GAN approach.

Joseph P. Robinson, Yu Yin, Zaid Khan et al.

Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW): an annual large-scale, multi-track automatic kinship recognition evaluation that supports various visual kin-based problems on scales much higher than ever before. Organized in conjunction with the 15th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) as a Challenge, RFIW provides a platform for publishing original work and the gathering of experts for a discussion of the next steps. This paper summarizes the supported tasks (i.e., kinship verification, tri-subject verification, and search & retrieval of missing children) in the evaluation protocols, which include the practical motivation, technical background, data splits, metrics, and benchmark results. Furthermore, top submissions (i.e., leader-board stats) are listed and reviewed as a high-level analysis on the state of the problem. In the end, the purpose of this paper is to describe the 2020 RFIW challenge, end-to-end, along with forecasts in promising future directions.

Can Qin, Lichen Wang, Qianqian Ma et al.

Current adversarial adaptation methods attempt to align the cross-domain features, whereas two challenges remain unsolved: 1) the conditional distribution mismatch and 2) the bias of the decision boundary towards the source domain. To solve these challenges, we propose a novel framework for semi-supervised domain adaptation by unifying the learning of opposite structures (UODA). UODA consists of a generator and two classifiers (i.e., the source-scattering classifier and the target-clustering classifier), which are trained for contradictory purposes. The target-clustering classifier attempts to cluster the target features to improve intra-class density and enlarge inter-class divergence. Meanwhile, the source-scattering classifier is designed to scatter the source features to enhance the decision boundary's smoothness. Through the alternation of source-feature expansion and target-feature clustering procedures, the target features are well-enclosed within the dilated boundary of the corresponding source features. This strategy can make the cross-domain features to be precisely aligned against the source bias simultaneously. Moreover, to overcome the model collapse through training, we progressively update the measurement of feature's distance and their representation via an adversarial training paradigm. Extensive experiments on the benchmarks of DomainNet and Office-home datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods.

Yu Yin, Joseph P. Robinson, Yulun Zhang et al.

Super-resolution (SR) and landmark localization of tiny faces are highly correlated tasks. On the one hand, landmark localization could obtain higher accuracy with faces of high-resolution (HR). On the other hand, face SR would benefit from prior knowledge of facial attributes such as landmarks. Thus, we propose a joint alignment and SR network to simultaneously detect facial landmarks and super-resolve tiny faces. More specifically, a shared deep encoder is applied to extract features for both tasks by leveraging complementary information. To exploit the representative power of the hierarchical encoder, intermediate layers of a shared feature extraction module are fused to form efficient feature representations. The fused features are then fed to task-specific modules to detect landmarks and super-resolve face images in parallel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in both landmark localization and SR of faces. We show a large improvement for landmark localization of tiny faces (i.e., 16*16). Furthermore, the proposed framework yields comparable results for landmark localization on low-resolution (LR) faces (i.e., 64*64) to existing methods on HR (i.e., 256*256). As for SR, the proposed method recovers sharper edges and more details from LR face images than other state-of-the-art methods, which we demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively.

Fei Wang, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen et al.

Cognitive diagnosis is a fundamental issue in intelligent education, which aims to discover the proficiency level of students on specific knowledge concepts. Existing approaches usually mine linear interactions of student exercising process by manual-designed function (e.g., logistic function), which is not sufficient for capturing complex relations between students and exercises. In this paper, we propose a general Neural Cognitive Diagnosis (NeuralCD) framework, which incorporates neural networks to learn the complex exercising interactions, for getting both accurate and interpretable diagnosis results. Specifically, we project students and exercises to factor vectors and leverage multi neural layers for modeling their interactions, where the monotonicity assumption is applied to ensure the interpretability of both factors. Furthermore, we propose two implementations of NeuralCD by specializing the required concepts of each exercise, i.e., the NeuralCDM with traditional Q-matrix and the improved NeuralCDM+ exploring the rich text content. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of NeuralCD framework with both accuracy and interpretability.

Qi Liu, Zhenya Huang, Yu Yin et al.

For offering proactive services to students in intelligent education, one of the fundamental tasks is predicting their performance (e.g., scores) on future exercises, where it is necessary to track each student's knowledge acquisition during her exercising activities. However, existing approaches can only exploit the exercising records of students, and the problem of extracting rich information existed in the exercise's materials (e.g., knowledge concepts, exercise content) to achieve both precise predictions of student performance and interpretable analysis of knowledge acquisition remains underexplored. In this paper, we present a holistic study of student performance prediction. To directly achieve the primary goal of prediction, we first propose a general Exercise-Enhanced Recurrent Neural Network (EERNN) framework by exploring both student's records and the exercise contents. In EERNN, we simply summarize each student's state into an integrated vector and trace it with a recurrent neural network, where we design a bidirectional LSTM to learn the encoding of each exercise's content. For making predictions, we propose two implementations under EERNN with different strategies, i.e., EERNNM with Markov property and EERNNA with Attention mechanism. Then, to explicitly track student's knowledge acquisition on multiple knowledge concepts, we extend EERNN to an explainable Exercise-aware Knowledge Tracing (EKT) by incorporating the knowledge concept effects, where the student's integrated state vector is extended to a knowledge state matrix. In EKT, we further develop a memory network for quantifying how much each exercise can affect the mastery of students on concepts during the exercising process. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on large-scale real-world data. The results demonstrate the prediction effectiveness of two frameworks as well as the superior interpretability of EKT.

Yu Yin, Zhenya Huang, Enhong Chen et al.

Transcribing content from structural images, e.g., writing notes from music scores, is a challenging task as not only the content objects should be recognized, but the internal structure should also be preserved. Existing image recognition methods mainly work on images with simple content (e.g., text lines with characters), but are not capable to identify ones with more complex content (e.g., structured symbols), which often follow a fine-grained grammar. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical Spotlight Transcribing Network (STN) framework followed by a two-stage "where-to-what" solution. Specifically, we first decide "where-to-look" through a novel spotlight mechanism to focus on different areas of the original image following its structure. Then, we decide "what-to-write" by developing a GRU based network with the spotlight areas for transcribing the content accordingly. Moreover, we propose two implementations on the basis of STN, i.e., STNM and STNR, where the spotlight movement follows the Markov property and Recurrent modeling, respectively. We also design a reinforcement method to refine the framework by self-improving the spotlight mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on many structural image datasets, where the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of STN framework.

Yu Yin, Qi Liu, Zhenya Huang et al.

Understanding learning materials (e.g. test questions) is a crucial issue in online learning systems, which can promote many applications in education domain. Unfortunately, many supervised approaches suffer from the problem of scarce human labeled data, whereas abundant unlabeled resources are highly underutilized. To alleviate this problem, an effective solution is to use pre-trained representations for question understanding. However, existing pre-training methods in NLP area are infeasible to learn test question representations due to several domain-specific characteristics in education. First, questions usually comprise of heterogeneous data including content text, images and side information. Second, there exists both basic linguistic information as well as domain logic and knowledge. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method, namely QuesNet, for comprehensively learning question representations. Specifically, we first design a unified framework to aggregate question information with its heterogeneous inputs into a comprehensive vector. Then we propose a two-level hierarchical pre-training algorithm to learn better understanding of test questions in an unsupervised way. Here, a novel holed language model objective is developed to extract low-level linguistic features, and a domain-oriented objective is proposed to learn high-level logic and knowledge. Moreover, we show that QuesNet has good capability of being fine-tuned in many question-based tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale real-world question data, where the experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of QuesNet for question understanding as well as its superior applicability.

Yu Yin, Mohsen Nabian, Miolin Fan et al.

In this paper, we present a multimodal approach to simultaneously analyze facial movements and several peripheral physiological signals to decode individualized affective experiences under positive and negative emotional contexts, while considering their personalized resting dynamics. We propose a person-specific recurrence network to quantify the dynamics present in the person's facial movements and physiological data. Facial movement is represented using a robust head vs. 3D face landmark localization and tracking approach, and physiological data are processed by extracting known attributes related to the underlying affective experience. The dynamical coupling between different input modalities is then assessed through the extraction of several complex recurrent network metrics. Inference models are then trained using these metrics as features to predict individual's affective experience in a given context, after their resting dynamics are excluded from their response. We validated our approach using a multimodal dataset consists of (i) facial videos and (ii) several peripheral physiological signals, synchronously recorded from 12 participants while watching 4 emotion-eliciting video-based stimuli. The affective experience prediction results signified that our multimodal fusion method improves the prediction accuracy up to 19% when compared to the prediction using only one or a subset of the input modalities. Furthermore, we gained prediction improvement for affective experience by considering the effect of individualized resting dynamics.