Hao Guo

Luping Wang, Hao Guo, Bin Liu

This technical report presents our solution to Ball Action Spotting in videos. Our method reached second place in the CVPR'23 SoccerNet Challenge. Details of this challenge can be found at https://www.soccer-net.org/tasks/ball-action-spotting. Our approach is developed based on a baseline model termed E2E-Spot, which was provided by the organizer of this competition. We first generated several variants of the E2E-Spot model, resulting in a candidate model set. We then proposed a strategy for selecting appropriate model members from this set and assigning an appropriate weight to each model. The aim of this strategy is to boost the performance of the resulting model ensemble. Therefore, we call our approach Boosted Model Ensembling (BME). Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/E2E-Spot-MBS.

Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Vladimir Somers et al. · pku

The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.

Vasudev Gohil, Hao Guo, Satwik Patnaik et al.

Stealthy hardware Trojans (HTs) inserted during the fabrication of integrated circuits can bypass the security of critical infrastructures. Although researchers have proposed many techniques to detect HTs, several limitations exist, including: (i) a low success rate, (ii) high algorithmic complexity, and (iii) a large number of test patterns. Furthermore, the most pertinent drawback of prior detection techniques stems from an incorrect evaluation methodology, i.e., they assume that an adversary inserts HTs randomly. Such inappropriate adversarial assumptions enable detection techniques to claim high HT detection accuracy, leading to a "false sense of security." Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, despite more than a decade of research on detecting HTs inserted during fabrication, there have been no concerted efforts to perform a systematic evaluation of HT detection techniques. In this paper, we play the role of a realistic adversary and question the efficacy of HT detection techniques by developing an automated, scalable, and practical attack framework, ATTRITION, using reinforcement learning (RL). ATTRITION evades eight detection techniques across two HT detection categories, showcasing its agnostic behavior. ATTRITION achieves average attack success rates of $47\times$ and $211\times$ compared to randomly inserted HTs against state-of-the-art HT detection techniques. We demonstrate ATTRITION's ability to evade detection techniques by evaluating designs ranging from the widely-used academic suites to larger designs such as the open-source MIPS and mor1kx processors to AES and a GPS module. Additionally, we showcase the impact of ATTRITION-generated HTs through two case studies (privilege escalation and kill switch) on the mor1kx processor. We envision that our work, along with our released HT benchmarks and models, fosters the development of better HT detection techniques.

Yi R. Fung, Tuhin Chakraborty, Hao Guo et al.

Norm discovery is important for understanding and reasoning about the acceptable behaviors and potential violations in human communication and interactions. We introduce NormSage, a framework for addressing the novel task of conversation-grounded multi-lingual, multi-cultural norm discovery, based on language model prompting and self-verification. NormSAGE leverages the expressiveness and implicit knowledge of the pretrained GPT-3 language model backbone, to elicit knowledge about norms through directed questions representing the norm discovery task and conversation context. It further addresses the risk of language model hallucination with a self-verification mechanism ensuring that the norms discovered are correct and are substantially grounded to their source conversations. Evaluation results show that our approach discovers significantly more relevant and insightful norms for conversations on-the-fly compared to baselines (>10+% in Likert scale rating). The norms discovered from Chinese conversation are also comparable to the norms discovered from English conversation in terms of insightfulness and correctness (<3% difference). In addition, the culture-specific norms are promising quality, allowing for 80% accuracy in culture pair human identification. Finally, our grounding process in norm discovery self-verification can be extended for instantiating the adherence and violation of any norm for a given conversation on-the-fly, with explainability and transparency. NormSAGE achieves an AUC of 95.4% in grounding, with natural language explanation matching human-written quality.

Tao Li, Haozhe Lei, Hao Guo et al.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is a vital component of future generations of mobile networks, offering not only high data rates but also precise beams, making it ideal for indoor navigation in complex environments. However, the challenges of multipath propagation and noisy signal measurements in indoor spaces complicate the use of mmWave signals for navigation tasks. Traditional physics-based methods, such as following the angle of arrival (AoA), often fall short in complex scenarios, highlighting the need for more sophisticated approaches. Digital twins, as virtual replicas of physical environments, offer a powerful tool for simulating and optimizing mmWave signal propagation in such settings. By creating detailed, physics-based models of real-world spaces, digital twins enable the training of machine learning algorithms in virtual environments, reducing the costs and limitations of physical testing. Despite their advantages, current machine learning models trained in digital twins often overfit specific virtual environments and require costly retraining when applied to new scenarios. In this paper, we propose a Physics-Informed Reinforcement Learning (PIRL) approach that leverages the physical insights provided by digital twins to shape the reinforcement learning (RL) reward function. By integrating physics-based metrics such as signal strength, AoA, and path reflections into the learning process, PIRL enables efficient learning and improved generalization to new environments without retraining. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed PIRL, supported by digital twin simulations, outperforms traditional heuristics and standard RL models, achieving zero-shot generalization in unseen environments and offering a cost-effective, scalable solution for wireless indoor navigation.

Hao Guo, Kaixiang Xv, Ziwu Ge et al.

Collaborative edge computing uses edge nodes in different locations to execute tasks, necessitating dynamic task offloading decisions to maintain low latency and high reliability, especially under unpredictable node failures. Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for task offloading, DRL often suffers from high sample inefficiency and local optima, whereas LLMs struggle with real-time decision-making. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{LeDRL}, a hybrid decision framework that couples a \emph{lightweight LLM} with self-attention-enhanced DRL for real-time task offloading. LeDRL constructs structured, context-aware prompts capturing node status, task semantics, and link dynamics to derive high-level strategy priors. These are selectively processed by a self-attention-based alignment module for context-aware policy optimization. A reflective evaluator distills semantic feedback from past trajectories to guide future prompts, enabling more informative and temporally generalizable LLM queries. Extensive experiments show that LeDRL outperforms baselines in task success rate, convergence speed, and real-time responsiveness across diverse network scales, achieving over 17\% improvement in success rate. Furthermore, we deploy LeDRL on Jetson-based edge devices using our prototype system \textit{CoEdgeSys}, demonstrating its robustness and feasibility under resource constraints. Our code is available at:https://github.com/GalleyG5/LeDRL.git.

Charitha Madapatha, Behrooz Makki, Hao Guo et al.

Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) is one of the promising techniques for 5G networks and beyond (6G), in which the same node/hardware is used to provide both backhaul and cellular services in a multi-hop fashion. Due to the sensitivity of the backhaul links with high rate/reliability demands, proper network planning is needed to make the IAB network performing appropriately and as good as possible. In this paper, we study the effect of deployment optimization on the coverage of IAB networks. We concentrate on the cases where, due to either geographical or interference management limitations, unconstrained IAB node placement is not feasible in some areas. To that end, we propose various millimeter wave (mmWave) blocking-aware constrained deployment optimization approaches. Our results indicate that, even with limitations on deployment optimization, network planning boosts the coverage of IAB networks considerably.

Hao Guo, Jiwu Shu, Youyou Lu

We propose PipeANN-Filter, an efficient filtered vector search system on SSD. Unlike existing systems that explore only valid vectors (i.e., those satisfying the attribute constraints) during search, PipeANN-Filter explores a superset of valid vectors, and performs attribute verification after getting the top-k closest result vectors. This allows PipeANN-Filter to leverage probabilistic data structures (e.g., Bloom filters) to identify the superset, trading off a small number of false-positive vector explorations for a massive reduction in SSD I/O for attribute reading. Evaluations show that PipeANN-Filter improves search latency and throughput compared to state-of-the-art systems. PipeANN-Filter is open-source at https://github.com/thustorage/PipeANN

Zhiwen Jing, Ziliang Zhao, Yang Feng et al.

Supply Chain Platforms (SCPs) provide downstream industries with numerous raw materials. Compared with traditional e-commerce platforms, data in SCPs is more sparse due to limited user interests. To tackle the data sparsity problem, one can apply Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) which improves the recommendation performance of the target domain with the source domain information. However, applying CDR to SCPs directly ignores the hierarchical structure of commodities in SCPs, which reduce the recommendation performance. To leverage this feature, in this paper, we take the catering platform as an example and propose GReS, a graphical cross-domain recommendation model. The model first constructs a tree-shaped graph to represent the hierarchy of different nodes of dishes and ingredients, and then applies our proposed Tree2vec method combining GCN and BERT models to embed the graph for recommendations. Experimental results on a commercial dataset show that GReS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in Cross-Domain Recommendation for Supply Chain Platforms.

Vasudev Gohil, Satwik Patnaik, Hao Guo et al.

Insertion of hardware Trojans (HTs) in integrated circuits is a pernicious threat. Since HTs are activated under rare trigger conditions, detecting them using random logic simulations is infeasible. In this work, we design a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that circumvents the exponential search space and returns a minimal set of patterns that is most likely to detect HTs. Experimental results on a variety of benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of our RL agent, which obtains a significant reduction ($169\times$) in the number of test patterns required while maintaining or improving coverage ($95.75\%$) compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.

Hao Guo, Xugong Qin, Jun Jie Ou Yang et al.

Document image retrieval (DIR) aims to retrieve document images from a gallery according to a given query. Existing DIR methods are primarily based on image queries that retrieve documents within the same coarse semantic category, e.g., newspapers or receipts. However, these methods struggle to effectively retrieve document images in real-world scenarios where textual queries with fine-grained semantics are usually provided. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new Natural Language-based Document Image Retrieval (NL-DIR) benchmark with corresponding evaluation metrics. In this work, natural language descriptions serve as semantically rich queries for the DIR task. The NL-DIR dataset contains 41K authentic document images, each paired with five high-quality, fine-grained semantic queries generated and evaluated through large language models in conjunction with manual verification. We perform zero-shot and fine-tuning evaluations of existing mainstream contrastive vision-language models and OCR-free visual document understanding (VDU) models. A two-stage retrieval method is further investigated for performance improvement while achieving both time and space efficiency. We hope the proposed NL-DIR benchmark can bring new opportunities and facilitate research for the VDU community. Datasets and codes will be publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/nianbing/NL-DIR.

Satwik Patnaik, Vasudev Gohil, Hao Guo et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm where an autonomous agent learns to make an optimal sequence of decisions by interacting with the underlying environment. The promise demonstrated by RL-guided workflows in unraveling electronic design automation problems has encouraged hardware security researchers to utilize autonomous RL agents in solving domain-specific problems. From the perspective of hardware security, such autonomous agents are appealing as they can generate optimal actions in an unknown adversarial environment. On the other hand, the continued globalization of the integrated circuit supply chain has forced chip fabrication to off-shore, untrustworthy entities, leading to increased concerns about the security of the hardware. Furthermore, the unknown adversarial environment and increasing design complexity make it challenging for defenders to detect subtle modifications made by attackers (a.k.a. hardware Trojans). In this brief, we outline the development of RL agents in detecting hardware Trojans, one of the most challenging hardware security problems. Additionally, we outline potential opportunities and enlist the challenges of applying RL to solve hardware security problems.

Hao Guo, Collin Meese, Wanxin Li et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) technology that enables collaborative training and learning of a global ML model based on aggregating distributed local model updates. However, security and privacy guarantees could be compromised due to malicious participants and the centralized FL server. This article proposed a bi-level blockchained architecture for secure federated learning-based traffic prediction. The bottom and top layer blockchain store the local model and global aggregated parameters accordingly, and the distributed homomorphic-encrypted federated averaging (DHFA) scheme addresses the secure computation problems. We propose the partial private key distribution protocol and a partially homomorphic encryption/decryption scheme to achieve the distributed privacy-preserving federated averaging model. We conduct extensive experiments to measure the running time of DHFA operations, quantify the read and write performance of the blockchain network, and elucidate the impacts of varying regional group sizes and model complexities on the resulting prediction accuracy for the online traffic flow prediction task. The results indicate that the proposed system can facilitate secure and decentralized federated learning for real-world traffic prediction tasks.

Yidi Li, Jiahao Wen, Bin Ren et al.

The integration of point and voxel representations is becoming more common in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. However, this combination often struggles with capturing semantic information effectively. Moreover, relying solely on point features within regions of interest can lead to information loss and limitations in local feature representation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage 3D object detector, called Point-Voxel Attention Fusion Network (PVAFN). PVAFN leverages an attention mechanism to improve multi-modal feature fusion during the feature extraction phase. In the refinement stage, it utilizes a multi-pooling strategy to integrate both multi-scale and region-specific information effectively. The point-voxel attention mechanism adaptively combines point cloud and voxel-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, resulting in richer object representations that help to reduce false detections. Additionally, a multi-pooling enhancement module is introduced to boost the model's perception capabilities. This module employs cluster pooling and pyramid pooling techniques to efficiently capture key geometric details and fine-grained shape structures, thereby enhancing the integration of local and global features. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that the proposed PVAFN achieves competitive performance. The code and models will be available.

Hao Guo, Andre Python, Yu Liu

In spatial regression models, spatial heterogeneity may be considered with either continuous or discrete specifications. The latter is related to delineation of spatially connected regions with homogeneous relationships between variables (spatial regimes). Although various regionalization algorithms have been proposed and studied in the field of spatial analytics, methods to optimize spatial regimes have been largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose two new algorithms for spatial regime delineation, two-stage K-Models and Regional-K-Models. We also extend the classic Automatic Zoning Procedure to spatial regression context. The proposed algorithms are applied to a series of synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets. Results indicate that all three algorithms achieve superior or comparable performance to existing approaches, while the two-stage K-Models algorithm largely outperforms existing approaches on model fitting, region reconstruction, and coefficient estimation. Our work enriches the spatial analytics toolbox to explore spatial heterogeneous processes.

Simon Dennis, Kevin Shabahang, Hao Guo et al.

Major LLM platforms deploy models in an inference-only configuration: the model serves requests but never updates per-user weights. Users must repeatedly re-teach preferences, corrections, and project context, and context-based workarounds consume context-window space and degrade under cascading compaction. We evaluate an alternative: nightly consolidation of interaction knowledge into model weights via reflection, synthesis, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning on a single consumer GPU. Across ten realistic software development conversations (n = 10, 1,146 test questions across three memory types), three cycles of cascading compaction retain 36.8 +/- 3.0% of knowledge (between an 11.8% no-context floor and a 90.1% full-context ceiling), while consolidation retains 80.4 +/- 1.3% -- a 43.6 pp gain (paired t(9) = 14.8, p < 0.001) that more than doubles what compaction preserves, with the largest gains on procedural corrections (36.3% -> 74.6%) and episodic project facts (31.5% -> 78.2%). As a methodological aside, mean per-token validation cross-entropy is negatively correlated with LLM-judged accuracy (r = -0.51) while median per-token validation cross-entropy tracks accuracy almost exactly (r = +0.99): under evaluators that tolerate surface-form variation, the mean is misleading and a heavy-tail-robust statistic is the faithful signal. Persistent personalization requires moving beyond inference-only deployment toward architectures that consolidate knowledge into weights.

Hao Guo, Simon Dennis, Rivaan Patil et al.

Mean cross-entropy is the standard validation metric for language models, but it can fail to track model quality during training. We examine this in two common scenarios. First, in Qwen2.5-1.5B SFT on synthetic fact-learning, we find that mean CE rises substantially after the initial learning phase while held-out fact-recall accuracy remains near its peak. Second, we find that in top-K distillation on TinyStories, decreasing K improves median CE while worsening mean CE; the Top-5 student attains the highest LLM-judge score and crosses below its teacher on median CE, despite having the worst mean CE. In both cases, median CE correlates much more closely with task performance than does mean CE. Analyzing how bulk and tail percentile CE move during training reveals that training reshapes the empirical per-token CE distribution. In top-K distillation, smaller K yields a distribution with more mass at both extremes, decreasing the median and increasing the mean. In Qwen SFT, the bulk saturates quickly while the tail extends in the latter half of training. In both, the task-evaluation metric appears more sensitive to the bulk than to the tail. Practically, we recommend reporting a small set of percentile CE summaries alongside the mean, and using concordance among them as a tool to keep track of distribution reshaping, as well as a low-cost diagnostic for when mean and median CE disagree on model selection.

Sneha Madhusudan, Charitha Madapatha, Behrooz Makki et al.

Increased capacity in the access network poses capacity challenges on the transport network due to the aggregated traffic. However, there are spatial and time correlation in the user data demands that could potentially be utilized. To that end, we investigate a wireless transport network architecture that integrates beamforming and coded-caching strategies. Especially, our proposed design entails a server with multiple antennas that broadcasts content to cache nodes responsible for serving users. Traditional caching methods face the limitation of relying on the individual memory with additional overhead. Hence, we develop an efficient genetic algorithm-based scheme for beam optimization in the coded-caching system. By exploiting the advantages of beamforming and coded-caching, the architecture achieves gains in terms of multicast opportunities, interference mitigation, and reduced peak backhaul traffic. A comparative analysis of this joint design with traditional, un-coded caching schemes is also conducted to assess the benefits of the proposed approach. Additionally, we examine the impact of various buffering and decoding methods on the performance of the coded-caching scheme. Our findings suggest that proper beamforming is useful in enhancing the effectiveness of the coded-caching technique, resulting in significant reduction in peak backhaul traffic.

Ahan Gupta, Hao Guo, Yueming Yuan et al.

Many efficient $\textit{approximate}$ self-attention techniques have become prevalent since the inception of the transformer architecture. Two popular classes of these techniques are low-rank and kernel methods. Each of these methods has its strengths. We observe these strengths synergistically complement each other and exploit them to fuse low-rank and kernel methods, producing a new class of transformers: FLuRKA ($\textbf{F}$ast $\textbf{L}$ow-$\textbf{R}$ank & $\textbf{K}$ernel$ \textbf{A}$ttention). FLuRKA are highly $\textit{training-efficient}$ with faster model speeds $\textit{and}$ similar model qualities compared to constituent low-rank and kernel methods. We theoretically and empirically evaluate the speed and quality of FLuRKA. Our model speed analysis posits a variety of parameter configurations where FLuRKA exhibit speedups over low-rank and kernel approximations and our model quality analysis bounds the error of FLuRKA with respect to full-attention. Empirically, we instantiate three FLuRKA variants which experience speedups of up to 3.3x and 1.7x over low-rank and kernel methods respectively. This translates to speedups of up to 20x over models with flash-attention. Across a diverse set of tasks spanning language modeling, language understanding, long sequence modeling, machine translation, and image classification, FLuRKA achieve comparable accuracy with underlying low-rank and kernel approximations, occasionally surpassing both.

Yidi Li, Yihan Li, Yixin Guo et al.

In speaker tracking research, integrating and complementing multi-modal data is a crucial strategy for improving the accuracy and robustness of tracking systems. However, tracking with incomplete modalities remains a challenging issue due to noisy observations caused by occlusion, acoustic noise, and sensor failures. Especially when there is missing data in multiple modalities, the performance of existing multi-modal fusion methods tends to decrease. To this end, we propose a Global-Local Distillation-based Tracker (GLDTracker) for robust audio-visual speaker tracking. GLDTracker is driven by a teacher-student distillation model, enabling the flexible fusion of incomplete information from each modality. The teacher network processes global signals captured by camera and microphone arrays, and the student network handles local information subject to visual occlusion and missing audio channels. By transferring knowledge from teacher to student, the student network can better adapt to complex dynamic scenes with incomplete observations. In the student network, a global feature reconstruction module based on the generative adversarial network is constructed to reconstruct global features from feature embedding with missing local information. Furthermore, a multi-modal multi-level fusion attention is introduced to integrate the incomplete feature and the reconstructed feature, leveraging the complementarity and consistency of audio-visual and global-local features. Experimental results on the AV16.3 dataset demonstrate that the proposed GLDTracker outperforms existing state-of-the-art audio-visual trackers and achieves leading performance on both standard and incomplete modalities datasets, highlighting its superiority and robustness in complex conditions. The code and models will be available.

Simon Dennis, Rivaan Patil, Kevin Shabahang et al.

Agent orchestration frameworks have proliferated, collectively exceeding 290,000 GitHub stars across LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Semantic Kernel, Strands, and LlamaIndex. All follow the same pattern: an external orchestrator above the LLM, injecting instructions and routing decisions every turn. Recent work has shown this architecture is dominated for procedural tasks by simply providing the procedure in a frontier model's system prompt [Dennis et al., 2026a], at the cost of consuming the context window, requiring a frontier model for every conversation, and exposing proprietary procedures to third-party providers. Compiling the procedure into the weights of a small fine-tuned model -- creating a subterranean agent -- should resolve all of these concerns, and prior work (SimpleTOD, FireAct, SynTOD, WorkflowLLM, Agent Lumos) has shown the technique works. Yet developer adoption has overwhelmingly favored orchestration. We identify three perceived barriers and address each empirically across travel booking (14 nodes), Zoom support (14 nodes, product-specific knowledge), and insurance claims (55 nodes, 6 decision hubs).

Chunjiang Mu, Ya Zeng, Qiaosheng Zhang et al.

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about others' mental states, and higher-order ToM involves considering that others also possess their own ToM. Equipping large language model (LLM)-driven agents with ToM has long been considered to improve their coordination in multiagent collaborative tasks. However, we find that misaligned ToM orders-mismatches in the depth of ToM reasoning between agents-can lead to insufficient or excessive reasoning about others, thereby impairing their coordination. To address this issue, we design an adaptive ToM (A-ToM) agent, which can align in ToM orders with its partner. Based on prior interactions, the agent estimates the partner's likely ToM order and leverages this estimation to predict the partner's action, thereby facilitating behavioral coordination. We conduct empirical evaluations on four multi-agent coordination tasks: a repeated matrix game, two grid navigation tasks and an Overcooked task. The results validate our findings on ToM alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our A-ToM agent. Furthermore, we discuss the generalizability of our A-ToM to non-LLM-based agents, as well as what would diminish the importance of ToM alignment.

Xingcheng Zhou, Hao Guo, Rui Song et al.

Safety-critical traffic reasoning requires contrastive consistency: models must detect true hazards when an accident occurs, and reliably reject plausible-but-false hypotheses under near-identical counterfactual scenes. We present CCTVBench, a Contrastive Consistency Traffic VideoQA Benchmark built on paired real accident videos and world-model-generated counterfactual counterparts, together with minimally different, mutually exclusive hypothesis questions. CCTVBench enforces a single structured decision pattern over each video question quadruple and provides actionable diagnostics that decompose failures into positive omission, positive swap, negative hallucination, and mutual-exclusivity violation, while separating video versus question consistency. Experiments across open-source and proprietary video LLMs reveal a large and persistent gap between standard per-instance QA metrics and quadruple-level contrastive consistency, with unreliable none-of-the-above rejection as a key bottleneck. Finally, we introduce C-TCD, a contrastive decoding approach leveraging a semantically exclusive counterpart video as the contrast input at inference time, improving both instance-level QA and contrastive consistency.

Hao Guo, Erpeng Xue, Lei Huang et al.

Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) often rely on extensive manual feature engineering to improve accuracy and user experience, which increases system complexity and limits scalability of model performance with respect to computational resources. Recently, Meta introduced a generative ranking paradigm based on HSTU block that enables end-to-end learning from raw user behavior sequences and demonstrates scaling law on large datasets that can be regarded as the state-of-the-art (SOTA). However, splitting user behaviors into interleaved item and action information significantly increases the input sequence length, which adversely affects both training and inference efficiency. To address this issue, we propose the Dual-Flow Generative Ranking Network (DFGR), that employs a dual-flow mechanism to optimize interaction modeling, ensuring efficient training and inference through end-to-end token processing. DFGR duplicates the original user behavior sequence into a real flow and a fake flow based on the authenticity of the action information, and then defines a novel interaction method between the real flow and the fake flow within the QKV module of the self-attention mechanism. This design reduces computational overhead and improves both training efficiency and inference performance compared to Meta's HSTU-based model. Experiments on both open-source and real industrial datasets show that DFGR outperforms DLRM, which serves as the industrial online baseline with extensive feature engineering, as well as Meta's HSTU and other common recommendation models such as DIN, DCN, DIEN, and DeepFM. Furthermore, we investigate optimal parameter allocation strategies under computational constraints, establishing DFGR as an efficient and effective next-generation generative ranking paradigm.

Siying Liu, Zikai Wang, Hanle Zheng et al.

RGB-Event tracking has become a promising trend in visual object tracking to leverage the complementary strengths of both RGB images and dynamic spike events for improved performance. However, existing artificial neural networks (ANNs) struggle to fully exploit the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams. Recent efforts toward hybrid architectures combining ANNs and spiking neural networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising solution in RGB-Event perception, yet effectively fusing features across heterogeneous paradigms remains a challenge. In this work, we propose ISTASTrack, the first transformer-based \textbf{A}NN-\textbf{S}NN hybrid \textbf{Track}er equipped with \textbf{ISTA} adapters for RGB-Event tracking. The two-branch model employs a vision transformer to extract spatial context from RGB inputs and a spiking transformer to capture spatio-temporal dynamics from event streams. To bridge the modality and paradigm gap between ANN and SNN features, we systematically design a model-based ISTA adapter for bidirectional feature interaction between the two branches, derived from sparse representation theory by unfolding the iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm. Additionally, we incorporate a temporal downsampling attention module within the adapter to align multi-step SNN features with single-step ANN features in the latent space, improving temporal fusion. Experimental results on RGB-Event tracking benchmarks, such as FE240hz, VisEvent, COESOT, and FELT, have demonstrated that ISTASTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high energy efficiency, highlighting the effectiveness and practicality of hybrid ANN-SNN designs for robust visual tracking. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lsying009/ISTASTrack.git.

Hao Guo, Jiyong Jin, Bin Liu

Ensemble methods are commonly used to enhance the generalization performance of machine learning models. However, they present a challenge in deep learning systems due to the high computational overhead required to train an ensemble of deep neural networks (DNNs). Recent advancements such as fast geometric ensembling (FGE) and snapshot ensembles have addressed this issue by training model ensembles in the same time as a single model. Nonetheless, these techniques still require additional memory for test-time inference compared to single-model-based methods. In this paper, we propose a new method called parsimonious FGE (PFGE), which employs a lightweight ensemble of higher-performing DNNs generated through successive stochastic weight averaging procedures. Our experimental results on CIFAR-{10,100} and ImageNet datasets across various modern DNN architectures demonstrate that PFGE achieves 5x memory efficiency compared to previous methods, without compromising on generalization performance. For those interested, our code is available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/PFGE.

Hao Guo, Jiyong Jin, Bin Liu

Averaging neural network weights sampled by a backbone stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple yet effective approach to assist the backbone SGD in finding better optima, in terms of generalization. From a statistical perspective, weight averaging (WA) contributes to variance reduction. Recently, a well-established stochastic weight averaging (SWA) method is proposed, which is featured by the application of a cyclical or high constant (CHC) learning rate schedule (LRS) in generating weight samples for WA. Then a new insight on WA appears, which states that WA helps to discover wider optima and then leads to better generalization. We conduct extensive experimental studies for SWA, involving a dozen modern DNN model structures and a dozen benchmark open-source image, graph, and text datasets. We disentangle contributions of the WA operation and the CHC LRS for SWA, showing that the WA operation in SWA still contributes to variance reduction but does not always lead to wide optima. The experimental results indicate that there are global scale geometric structures in the DNN loss landscape. We then present an algorithm termed periodic SWA (PSWA) which makes use of a series of WA operations to discover the global geometric structures. PSWA outperforms its backbone SGD remarkably, providing experimental evidences for the existence of global geometric structures. Codes for reproducing the experimental results are available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/PSWA.

Jiahao Li, Yunpeng Bai, Yongkang Dai et al.

Previous representation and generation approaches for the B-rep relied on graph-based representations that disentangle geometric and topological features through decoupled computational pipelines, thereby precluding the application of sequence-based generative frameworks, such as transformer architectures that have demonstrated remarkable performance. In this paper, we propose BrepARG, the first attempt to encode B-rep's geometry and topology into a holistic token sequence representation, enabling sequence-based B-rep generation with an autoregressive architecture. Specifically, BrepARG encodes B-rep into 3 types of tokens: geometry and position tokens representing geometric features, and face index tokens representing topology. Then the holistic token sequence is constructed hierarchically, starting with constructing the geometry blocks (i.e., faces and edges) using the above tokens, followed by geometry block sequencing. Finally, we assemble the holistic sequence representation for the entire B-rep. We also construct a transformer-based autoregressive model that learns the distribution over holistic token sequences via next-token prediction, using a multi-layer decoder-only architecture with causal masking. Experiments demonstrate that BrepARG achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. BrepARG validates the feasibility of representing B-rep as holistic token sequences, opening new directions for B-rep generation.

Hao Guo, Hongbiao Si, Guilin Jiang et al.

Semantic segmentation is a vital problem in computer vision. Recently, a common solution to semantic segmentation is the end-to-end convolution neural network, which is much more accurate than traditional methods.Recently, the decoders based on attention achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various datasets. But these networks always are compared with the mIoU of previous SOTA networks to prove their superiority and ignore their characteristics without considering the computation complexity and precision in various categories, which is essential for engineering applications. Besides, the methods to analyze the FLOPs and memory are not consistent between different networks, which makes the comparison hard to be utilized. What's more, various methods utilize attention in semantic segmentation, but the conclusion of these methods is lacking. This paper first conducts experiments to analyze their computation complexity and compare their performance. Then it summarizes suitable scenes for these networks and concludes key points that should be concerned when constructing an attention network. Last it points out some future directions of the attention network.

Liyuan Deng, Hao Guo, Yunpeng Bai et al.

Current token-sequence-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are not well-suited for directly processing 3D Boundary Representation (Brep) models that contain complex geometric and topological information. We propose BrepLLM, the first framework that enables LLMs to parse and reason over raw Brep data, bridging the modality gap between structured 3D geometry and natural language. BrepLLM employs a two-stage training pipeline: Cross-modal Alignment Pre-training and Multi-stage LLM Fine-tuning. In the first stage, an adaptive UV sampling strategy converts Breps into graphs representation with geometric and topological information. We then design a hierarchical BrepEncoder to extract features from geometry (i.e., faces and edges) and topology, producing both a single global token and a sequence of node tokens. Then we align the global token with text embeddings from a frozen CLIP text encoder (ViT-L/14) via contrastive learning. In the second stage, we integrate the pretrained BrepEncoder into an LLM. We then align its sequence of node tokens using a three-stage progressive training strategy: (1) training an MLP-based semantic mapping from Brep representation to 2D with 2D-LLM priors. (2) performing fine-tuning of the LLM. (3) designing a Mixture-of-Query Experts (MQE) to enhance geometric diversity modeling. We also construct Brep2Text, a dataset comprising 269,444 Brep-text question-answer pairs. Experiments show that BrepLLM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on 3D object classification and captioning tasks.

Simon Dennis, Michael Diamond, Rivaan Patil et al.

Agent orchestration frameworks -- LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, and others -- place an external orchestrator above the LLM, tracking state and injecting routing instructions at every turn. We present a controlled comparison showing that for procedural tasks, this architecture is dominated by a simpler alternative: putting the entire procedure in the system prompt and letting the model self-orchestrate. Across three domains -- travel booking (14 nodes), Zoom technical support (14 nodes), and insurance claims processing (55 nodes) -- we evaluate 200 conversations per condition using LLM-as-judge scoring on five quality criteria. The in-context approach scores 4.53--5.00 on a 5-point scale while a LangGraph orchestrator using the same model scores 4.17--4.84. The orchestrated system fails on 24% of travel, 9% of Zoom, and 17% of insurance conversations, compared to 11.5%, 0.5%, and 5% for the in-context baseline. While external orchestration may have been necessary for earlier models, advances in frontier model capabilities have made it unnecessary for multi-turn conversations following a defined procedure.

Hao Guo, Weiyu Zhang, Junjie Yang et al.

Human mobility is a fundamental aspect of social behavior, with broad applications in transportation, urban planning, and epidemic modeling. Represented by the gravity model and the radiation model, established analytical models for mobility phenomena are often discovered by analogy to physical processes. Such discoveries can be challenging and rely on intuition, while the potential of emerging social observation data in model discovery is largely unexploited. Here, we propose a systematic approach that leverages symbolic regression to automatically discover interpretable models from human mobility data. Our approach finds several well-known formulas, such as the distance decay effect and classical gravity models, as well as previously unknown ones, such as an exponential-power-law decay that can be explained by the maximum entropy principle. By relaxing the constraints on the complexity of model expressions, we further show how key variables of human mobility are progressively incorporated into the model, making this framework a powerful tool for revealing the underlying mathematical structures of complex social phenomena directly from observational data.

Chunjiang Mu, Hao Guo, Yang Chen et al.

The study of cooperation within social dilemmas has long been a fundamental topic across various disciplines, including computer science and social science. Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have significantly reshaped this field, offering fresh insights into understanding and enhancing cooperation. This survey examines three key areas at the intersection of AI and cooperation in social dilemmas. First, focusing on multi-agent cooperation, we review the intrinsic and external motivations that support cooperation among rational agents, and the methods employed to develop effective strategies against diverse opponents. Second, looking into human-agent cooperation, we discuss the current AI algorithms for cooperating with humans and the human biases towards AI agents. Third, we review the emergent field of leveraging AI agents to enhance cooperation among humans. We conclude by discussing future research avenues, such as using large language models, establishing unified theoretical frameworks, revisiting existing theories of human cooperation, and exploring multiple real-world applications.

Hao Guo, Fei Wang, Junjie Chen et al.

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in general visual tasks, their perceptual robustness remains remarkably brittle when confronted with optical illusions. These failures are often attributed to shortcut heuristics, where models prioritize linguistic priors and memorized prototypes over direct visual evidence. In this work, we propose Structured Qualitative Inference (SQI), a training-free, data-centric framework designed to fortify visual grounding in frozen VLMs. SQI addresses perceptual anomalies through three systematic modules: (1) Axiomatic Constraint Injection, which suppresses erroneous metric estimations and quantitative hallucinations; (2) Hierarchical Scene Decomposition, which decouples target visual manifolds from complex background distractors; and (3) Counterfactual Self-Verification, an adversarial reasoning step that mitigates confirmation bias. By orchestrating these qualitative constraints at inference time, SQI effectively aligns high-level linguistic reasoning with low-level visual perception. Our framework was evaluated on the DataCV 2026 Challenge (Task I: Classic Illusion Understanding), where it ranked 2nd place overall. Experimental results demonstrate that SQI not only significantly enhances accuracy across diverse illusion categories but also provides superior diagnostic interpretability without any model fine-tuning. Our success underscores the potential of structured qualitative grounding as a robust paradigm for developing next-generation, illusion-resistant vision-language systems.

Xingcheng Zhou, Konstantinos Larintzakis, Hao Guo et al.

We present TUMTraffic-VideoQA, a novel dataset and benchmark designed for spatio-temporal video understanding in complex roadside traffic scenarios. The dataset comprises 1,000 videos, featuring 85,000 multiple-choice QA pairs, 2,300 object captioning, and 5,700 object grounding annotations, encompassing diverse real-world conditions such as adverse weather and traffic anomalies. By incorporating tuple-based spatio-temporal object expressions, TUMTraffic-VideoQA unifies three essential tasks-multiple-choice video question answering, referred object captioning, and spatio-temporal object grounding-within a cohesive evaluation framework. We further introduce the TUMTraffic-Qwen baseline model, enhanced with visual token sampling strategies, providing valuable insights into the challenges of fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the dataset's complexity, highlight the limitations of existing models, and position TUMTraffic-VideoQA as a robust foundation for advancing research in intelligent transportation systems. The dataset and benchmark are publicly available to facilitate further exploration.

Hao Guo, Zihan Ma, Zhi Zeng et al.

Social platforms, while facilitating access to information, have also become saturated with a plethora of fake news, resulting in negative consequences. Automatic multimodal fake news detection is a worthwhile pursuit. Existing multimodal fake news datasets only provide binary labels of real or fake. However, real news is alike, while each fake news is fake in its own way. These datasets fail to reflect the mixed nature of various types of multimodal fake news. To bridge the gap, we construct an attributing multi-granularity multimodal fake news detection dataset \amg, revealing the inherent fake pattern. Furthermore, we propose a multi-granularity clue alignment model \our to achieve multimodal fake news detection and attribution. Experimental results demonstrate that \amg is a challenging dataset, and its attribution setting opens up new avenues for future research.

Yaqi Hu, Mingsheng Yin, Marco Mezzavilla et al.

The upper mid-band (FR3) has been recently attracting interest for new generation of mobile networks, as it provides a promising balance between spectrum availability and coverage, which are inherent limitations of the sub 6GHz and millimeter wave bands, respectively. In order to efficiently design and optimize the network, channel modeling plays a key role since FR3 systems are expected to operate at multiple frequency bands. Data-driven methods, especially generative adversarial networks (GANs), can capture the intricate relationships among data samples, and provide an appropriate tool for FR3 channel modeling. In this work, we present the architecture, link state model, and path generative network of GAN-based FR3 channel modeling. The comparison of our model greatly matches the ray-tracing simulated data.

Jiahao Lou, Shufeng Gong, Quan Yu et al.

On-disk graph-based indexes are favored for billion-scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) due to their high performance and cost-efficiency. However, existing systems typically rely on a coupled storage architecture that co-locates vectors and graph topology, which introduces substantial redundant I/O during index updates, thereby degrading usability in dynamic workloads. In this paper, we propose a decoupled storage architecture that physically separates heavy vectors from the lightweight graph topology. This design substantially improves update performance by reducing redundant I/O during updates. However, it introduces I/O amplification during ANNS, leading to degraded query efficiency.To improve query performance within the update-friendly architecture, we propose two techniques co-designed with the decoupled storage. We develop a similarity-aware dynamic layout that optimizes data placement online so that redundantly fetched data can be reused in subsequent search steps, effectively turning read amplification into useful prefetching. In addition, we propose a two-stage query mechanism enhanced by hierarchical PQ, which uses hierarchical PQ to rapidly and accurately identify promising candidates and performs exact refinement on raw vectors for only a small number of candidates. This design significantly reduces both the I/O and computational cost of the refinement stage. Overall, DGAI achieves resource-efficient updates and low-latency queries simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that \oursys improves update speed by 8.17x for insertions and 8.16x for deletions, while reducing peak query latency under mixed workloads by 67\% compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Ruibin Chen, Haozhe Lei, Hao Guo et al.

Cellular wireless systems are witnessing the proliferation of frequency bands over a wide spectrum, particularly with the expansion of new bands in FR3. These bands must be supported in user equipment (UE) handsets with multiple antennas in a constrained form factor. Rapid variations in channel quality across the bands from motion and hand blockage, limited field-of-view of antennas, and hardware and power-constrained measurement sparsity pose significant challenges to reliable multi-band channel tracking. This paper formulates the problem of predicting achievable rates across multiple antenna arrays and bands with sparse historical measurements. We propose a transformer-based neural architecture that takes asynchronous rate histories as input and outputs per-array rate predictions. Evaluated on ray-traced simulations in a dense urban micro-cellular setting with FR1 and FR3 arrays, our method demonstrates superior performance over baseline predictors, enabling more informed band selection under realistic mobility and hardware constraints.

Lei Huang, Hao Guo, Linzhi Peng et al.

We introduce SessionRec, a novel next-session prediction paradigm (NSPP) for generative sequential recommendation, addressing the fundamental misalignment between conventional next-item prediction paradigm (NIPP) and real-world recommendation scenarios. Unlike NIPP's item-level autoregressive generation that contradicts actual session-based user interactions, our framework introduces a session-aware representation learning through hierarchical sequence aggregation (intra/inter-session), reducing attention computation complexity while enabling implicit modeling of massive negative interactions, and a session-based prediction objective that better captures users' diverse interests through multi-item recommendation in next sessions. Moreover, we found that incorporating a rank loss for items within the session under the next session prediction paradigm can significantly improve the ranking effectiveness of generative sequence recommendation models. We also verified that SessionRec exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs. Extensive experiments conducted on public datasets and online A/B test in Meituan App demonstrate the effectiveness of SessionRec. The proposed paradigm establishes new foundations for developing industrial-scale generative recommendation systems through its model-agnostic architecture and computational efficiency.

Yongkang Dai, Xiaoshui Huang, Yunpeng Bai et al.

Recognizing geometric features on B-rep models is a cornerstone technique for multimedia content-based retrieval and has been widely applied in intelligent manufacturing. However, previous research often merely focused on Machining Feature Recognition (MFR), falling short in effectively capturing the intricate topological and geometric characteristics of complex geometry features. In this paper, we propose BRepFormer, a novel transformer-based model to recognize both machining feature and complex CAD models' features. BRepFormer encodes and fuses the geometric and topological features of the models. Afterwards, BRepFormer utilizes a transformer architecture for feature propagation and a recognition head to identify geometry features. During each iteration of the transformer, we incorporate a bias that combines edge features and topology features to reinforce geometric constraints on each face. In addition, we also proposed a dataset named Complex B-rep Feature Dataset (CBF), comprising 20,000 B-rep models. By covering more complex B-rep models, it is better aligned with industrial applications. The experimental results demonstrate that BRepFormer achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the MFInstSeg, MFTRCAD, and our CBF datasets.

Zhaoyu Hu, Jianyang Wang, Hao Guo et al.

In the context of the booming digital economy, recommendation systems, as a key link connecting users and numerous services, face challenges in modeling user behavior sequences on local-life service platforms, including the sparsity of long sequences and strong spatio-temporal dependence. Such challenges can be addressed by drawing an analogy to the forgetting process in human memory. This is because users' responses to recommended content follow the recency effect and the cyclicality of memory. By exploring this, this paper introduces the forgetting curve and proposes Spatio-Temporal periodic Interest Modeling (STIM) with long sequences for local-life service recommendation. STIM integrates three key components: a dynamic masking module based on the forgetting curve, which is used to extract both recent spatiotemporal features and periodic spatiotemporal features; a query-based mixture of experts (MoE) approach that can adaptively activate expert networks under different dynamic masks, enabling the collaborative modeling of time, location, and items; and a hierarchical multi-interest network unit, which captures multi-interest representations by modeling the hierarchical interactions between the shallow and deep semantics of users' recent behaviors. By introducing the STIM method, we conducted online A/B tests and achieved a 1.54\% improvement in gross transaction volume (GTV). In addition, extended offline experiments also showed improvements. STIM has been deployed in a large-scale local-life service recommendation system, serving hundreds of millions of daily active users in core application scenarios.

Hanle Zheng, Xujie Han, Zegang Peng et al.

Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision, particularly under conditions involving large motion, occlusion, and lighting variation. Recent advancements in event cameras have opened up new opportunities for addressing these challenges. While existing event-based VFI methods have succeeded in recovering large and complex motions by leveraging handcrafted intermediate representations such as optical flow, these designs often compromise high-fidelity image reconstruction under subtle motion scenarios due to their reliance on explicit motion modeling. Meanwhile, diffusion models provide a promising alternative for VFI by reconstructing frames through a denoising process, eliminating the need for explicit motion estimation or warping operations. In this work, we propose EventDiff, a unified and efficient event-based diffusion model framework for VFI. EventDiff features a novel Event-Frame Hybrid AutoEncoder (HAE) equipped with a lightweight Spatial-Temporal Cross Attention (STCA) module that effectively fuses dynamic event streams with static frames. Unlike previous event-based VFI methods, EventDiff performs interpolation directly in the latent space via a denoising diffusion process, making it more robust across diverse and challenging VFI scenarios. Through a two-stage training strategy that first pretrains the HAE and then jointly optimizes it with the diffusion model, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple synthetic and real-world event VFI datasets. The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art event-based VFI methods by up to 1.98dB in PSNR on Vimeo90K-Triplet and shows superior performance in SNU-FILM tasks with multiple difficulty levels. Compared to the emerging diffusion-based VFI approach, our method achieves up to 5.72dB PSNR gain on Vimeo90K-Triplet and 4.24X faster inference.

Hao Guo, Han Wang, Di Zhu et al.

Modeling spatial heterogeneity in the data generation process is essential for understanding and predicting geographical phenomena. Despite their prevalence in geospatial tasks, neural network models usually assume spatial stationarity, which could limit their performance in the presence of spatial process heterogeneity. By allowing model parameters to vary over space, several approaches have been proposed to incorporate spatial heterogeneity into neural networks. However, current geographically weighting approaches are ineffective on graph neural networks, yielding no significant improvement in prediction accuracy. We assume the crux lies in the over-fitting risk brought by a large number of local parameters. Accordingly, we propose to model spatial process heterogeneity at the regional level rather than at the individual level, which largely reduces the number of spatially varying parameters. We further develop a heuristic optimization procedure to learn the region partition adaptively in the process of model training. Our proposed spatial-heterogeneity-aware graph convolutional network, named RegionGCN, is applied to the spatial prediction of county-level vote share in the 2016 US presidential election based on socioeconomic attributes. Results show that RegionGCN achieves significant improvement over the basic and geographically weighted GCNs. We also offer an exploratory analysis tool for the spatial variation of non-linear relationships through ensemble learning of regional partitions from RegionGCN. Our work contributes to the practice of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in tackling spatial heterogeneity.

Bin Mu, Yuxuan Chen, Shijin Yuan et al.

Accurate subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) prediction of extreme events is critical for resource planning and disaster mitigation under accelerating climate change. However, such predictions remain challenging due to complex multi-sphere interactions and intrinsic atmospheric uncertainty. Here we present TianXing-S2S, a multi-sphere coupled probabilistic model for global S2S daily ensemble forecast. TianXing-S2S first encodes diverse multi-sphere predictors into a compact latent space, then employs a diffusion model to generate daily ensemble forecasts. A novel coupling module based on optimal transport (OT) is incorporated in the denoiser to optimize the interactions between atmospheric and multi-sphere boundary conditions. Across key atmospheric variables, TianXing-S2S outperforms both the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) S2S system and FuXi-S2S in 45-day daily-mean ensemble forecasts at 1.5 resolution. Our model achieves skillful subseasonal prediction of extreme events including heat waves and anomalous precipitation, identifying soil moisture as a critical precursor signal. Furthermore, we demonstrate that TianXing-S2S can generate stable rollout forecasts up to 180 days, establishing a robust framework for S2S research in a warming world.

Haozhe Lei, Hao Guo, Tommy Svensson et al.

Modern wireless systems require not only position estimates, but also quantified uncertainty to support planning, control, and radio resource management. We formulate localization as posterior inference of an unknown transmitter location from receiver measurements. We propose Monte Carlo Candidate-Likelihood Estimation (MC-CLE), which trains a neural scoring network using Monte Carlo sampling to compare true and candidate transmitter locations. We show that in line-of-sight simulations with a multi-antenna receiver, MC-CLE learns critical properties including angular ambiguity and front-to-back antenna patterns. MC-CLE also achieves lower cross-entropy loss relative to a uniform baseline and Gaussian posteriors. alternatives under a uniform-loss metric.

Hongxiang Lin, Hao Guo, Zeshun Li et al.

Traditional recommendation systems tend to trap users in strong feedback loops by excessively pushing content aligned with their historical preferences, thereby limiting exploration opportunities and causing content fatigue. Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate potential with their diverse content generation capabilities, existing LLM-enhanced dual-model frameworks face two major limitations: first, they overlook long-term preferences driven by group identity, leading to biased interest modeling; second, they suffer from static optimization flaws, as a one-time alignment process fails to leverage incremental user data for closed-loop optimization. To address these challenges, we propose the Co-Evolutionary Alignment (CoEA) method. For interest modeling bias, we introduce Dual-Stable Interest Exploration (DSIE) module, jointly modeling long-term group identity and short-term individual interests through parallel processing of behavioral sequences. For static optimization limitations, we design a Periodic Collaborative Optimization (PCO) mechanism. This mechanism regularly conducts preference verification on incremental data using the Relevance LLM, then guides the Novelty LLM to perform fine-tuning based on the verification results, and subsequently feeds back the output of the incrementally fine-tuned Novelty LLM to the Relevance LLM for re-evaluation, thereby achieving a dynamic closed-loop optimization. Extensive online and offline experiments verify the effectiveness of the CoEA model in exploratory recommendation.

Hao Guo, Jianfei Zhu, Wei Fan et al.

Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims at achieving object localization based on natural language descriptions. However, existing REC approaches are constrained by object category descriptions and single-attribute intention descriptions, hindering their application in real-world scenarios. In natural human-robot interactions, users often express their desires through individual states and intentions, accompanied by guiding gestures, rather than detailed object descriptions. To address this challenge, we propose Multi-ref EC, a novel task framework that integrates state descriptions, derived intentions, and embodied gestures to locate target objects. We introduce the State-Intention-Gesture Attributes Reference (SIGAR) dataset, which combines state and intention expressions with embodied references. Through extensive experiments with various baseline models on SIGAR, we demonstrate that properly ordered multi-attribute references contribute to improved localization performance, revealing that single-attribute reference is insufficient for natural human-robot interaction scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of multi-attribute reference expressions in advancing visual-language understanding.

Charitha Madapatha, Behrooz Makki, Hao Guo et al.

In this paper, we study the impact of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) on the coverage extension of integrated access and backhaul (IAB) networks. Particularly, using a finite stochastic geometry model, with random distributions of user equipments (UEs) in a finite region, and planned hierachical architecture for IAB, we study the service coverage probability defined as the probability of the event that the UEs' minimum rate requirements are satisfied. We present comparisons between different cases including IAB-only, IAB assisted with RIS for backhaul as well as IAB assisted by network controlled repeaters (NCRs). Our investigations focus on wide-area IAB assisted with RIS through the lens of different design architectures and deployments, revealing both conflicts and synergies for minimizing the effect of tree foliage over seasonal changes. Our simulation results reveal both opportunities and challenges towards the implementation of RIS in IAB.

Hao Guo, Wei Fan, Baichun Wei et al.

Embodied reference understanding is crucial for intelligent agents to predict referents based on human intention through gesture signals and language descriptions. This paper introduces the Attention-Dynamic DINO, a novel framework designed to mitigate misinterpretations of pointing gestures across various interaction contexts. Our approach integrates visual and textual features to simultaneously predict the target object's bounding box and the attention source in pointing gestures. Leveraging the distance-aware nature of nonverbal communication in visual perspective taking, we extend the virtual touch line mechanism and propose an attention-dynamic touch line to represent referring gesture based on interactive distances. The combination of this distance-aware approach and independent prediction of the attention source, enhances the alignment between objects and the gesture represented line. Extensive experiments on the YouRefIt dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our gesture information understanding method in significantly improving task performance. Our model achieves 76.4% accuracy at the 0.25 IoU threshold and, notably, surpasses human performance at the 0.75 IoU threshold, marking a first in this domain. Comparative experiments with distance-unaware understanding methods from previous research further validate the superiority of the Attention-Dynamic Touch Line across diverse contexts.