Jun Zhou

Fan Liu, Delong Chen, Zhangqingyun Guan et al.

General-purpose foundation models have led to recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. In remote sensing, self-supervised learning (SSL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM) have been adopted to build foundation models. However, these models primarily learn low-level features and require annotated data for fine-tuning. Moreover, they are inapplicable for retrieval and zero-shot applications due to the lack of language understanding. To address these limitations, we propose RemoteCLIP, the first vision-language foundation model for remote sensing that aims to learn robust visual features with rich semantics and aligned text embeddings for seamless downstream application. To address the scarcity of pre-training data, we leverage data scaling which converts heterogeneous annotations into a unified image-caption data format based on Box-to-Caption (B2C) and Mask-to-Box (M2B) conversion. By further incorporating UAV imagery, we produce a 12 $\times$ larger pretraining dataset than the combination of all available datasets. RemoteCLIP can be applied to a variety of downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification, linear probing, $\textit{k}$-NN classification, few-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and object counting in remote sensing images. Evaluation on 16 datasets, including a newly introduced RemoteCount benchmark to test the object counting ability, shows that RemoteCLIP consistently outperforms baseline foundation models across different model scales. Impressively, RemoteCLIP beats the state-of-the-art method by 9.14% mean recall on the RSITMD dataset and 8.92% on the RSICD dataset. For zero-shot classification, our RemoteCLIP outperforms the CLIP baseline by up to 6.39% average accuracy on 12 downstream datasets. Project website: https://github.com/ChenDelong1999/RemoteCLIP

Haocheng Luo, Jiahui Liu, Ruicheng Zhang et al.

While vision-language models excel at general multimodal understanding, they still struggle with visual spatial planning. We attribute this to a perception-reasoning modality gap: visual planning requires models to infer latent state structures from pixels and then reason over the recovered structure to produce valid actions, whereas symbolic planning directly leverages explicit objects and constraints. This creates dual bottlenecks in visual state recovery and multi-step planning. To address this, we propose MGSD, a two-stage modality-gap-aware self-distillation framework. First, a cold-start grounding stage equips the visual student with reliable state representations, minimizing early perception noise. Second, a privileged teacher transfers planning capabilities via on-policy distillation, using explicit symbolic states to supervise the student's own visual rollout prefixes. Crucially, symbolic data is used strictly during training, leaving inference purely visual. Experiments on visual planning benchmarks show that MGSD consistently improves visual planning across both 4B and 8B backbones, raising the macro average by 19.3% and 18.4%, respectively. The resulting models narrow the gap to symbolic-input upper bounds, while ablations and diagnostics confirm that the improvement comes from both visual state recovery and optimal-path reasoning. These results suggest that modality-gap-aware self-distillation improves not only how models perceive actionable states, but also how they plan over the inferred structure. Code is available at https://github.com/Oranger-l/MGSD.

Yongduo Sui, Qitian Wu, Jiancan Wu et al.

The issue of distribution shifts is emerging as a critical concern in graph representation learning. From the perspective of invariant learning and stable learning, a recently well-established paradigm for out-of-distribution generalization, stable features of the graph are assumed to causally determine labels, while environmental features tend to be unstable and can lead to the two primary types of distribution shifts. The correlation shift is often caused by the spurious correlation between environmental features and labels that differs between the training and test data; the covariate shift often stems from the presence of new environmental features in test data. However, most strategies, such as invariant learning or graph augmentation, typically struggle with limited training environments or perturbed stable features, thus exposing limitations in handling the problem of covariate shift. To address this challenge, we propose a simple-yet-effective data augmentation strategy, Adversarial Invariant Augmentation (AIA), to handle the covariate shift on graphs. Specifically, given the training data, AIA aims to extrapolate and generate new environments, while concurrently preserving the original stable features during the augmentation process. Such a design equips the graph classification model with an enhanced capability to identify stable features in new environments, thereby effectively tackling the covariate shift in data. Extensive experiments with in-depth empirical analysis demonstrate the superiority of our approach. The implementation codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yongduosui/AIA.

Lei Chen, Le Wu, Kun Zhang et al.

Collaborative filtering based recommendation learns users' preferences from all users' historical behavior data, and has been popular to facilitate decision making. R Recently, the fairness issue of recommendation has become more and more essential. A recommender system is considered unfair when it does not perform equally well for different user groups according to users' sensitive attributes~(e.g., gender, race). Plenty of methods have been proposed to alleviate unfairness by optimizing a predefined fairness goal or changing the distribution of unbalanced training data. However, they either suffered from the specific fairness optimization metrics or relied on redesigning the current recommendation architecture. In this paper, we study how to improve recommendation fairness from the data augmentation perspective. The recommendation model amplifies the inherent unfairness of imbalanced training data. We augment imbalanced training data towards balanced data distribution to improve fairness. The proposed framework is generally applicable to any embedding-based recommendation, and does not need to pre-define a fairness metric. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework. We publish the source code at https://github.com/newlei/FDA.

Xinyu Lu, Tianshu Wang, Pengbo Wang et al.

Current AI benchmarks evaluate agents on task execution within human-designed workflows. These evaluations fundamentally fail to measure a critical next-level capability: whether models can autonomously develop agent systems. We introduce the Meta-Agent Challenge (MAC), an evaluation framework designed to test the capacity of frontier models for autonomous agent development. Specifically, a code agent (the meta-agent) is given a sandboxed environment, an evaluation API, and a time limitation to iteratively program an agent artifact that maximizes performance on a held-out test set across five domains. To ensure evaluation integrity, this framework is secured by multi-layer defenses against reward hacking. Leveraging this framework, we demonstrate that meta-agents rarely match human-engineered baseline policies, and the few that do are dominated by proprietary frontier models. Moreover, the design process exhibits high variance, and high optimization pressure surfaces emergent adversarial behaviors like ground-truth exfiltration-highlighting critical deficits in both robustness and model alignment. Ultimately, MAC provides a rigorous, open-source benchmark for autonomous AI research and development, offering an empirical proxy for evaluating recursive self-improvement. Benchmark is publicly available at: https://github.com/ant-research/meta-agent-challenge.

Siqiao Xue, Xiaoming Shi, Zhixuan Chu et al.

Continuous-time event sequences play a vital role in real-world domains such as healthcare, finance, online shopping, social networks, and so on. To model such data, temporal point processes (TPPs) have emerged as the most natural and competitive models, making a significant impact in both academic and application communities. Despite the emergence of many powerful models in recent years, there hasn't been a central benchmark for these models and future research endeavors. This lack of standardization impedes researchers and practitioners from comparing methods and reproducing results, potentially slowing down progress in this field. In this paper, we present EasyTPP, the first central repository of research assets (e.g., data, models, evaluation programs, documentations) in the area of event sequence modeling. Our EasyTPP makes several unique contributions to this area: a unified interface of using existing datasets and adding new datasets; a wide range of evaluation programs that are easy to use and extend as well as facilitate reproducible research; implementations of popular neural TPPs, together with a rich library of modules by composing which one could quickly build complex models. All the data and implementation can be found at https://github.com/ant-research/EasyTemporalPointProcess. We will actively maintain this benchmark and welcome contributions from other researchers and practitioners. Our benchmark will help promote reproducible research in this field, thus accelerating research progress as well as making more significant real-world impacts.

Dongwei Sun, Jing Yao, Kan Wei et al.

Rapid situational awareness is critical in post-disaster response. While remote sensing damage assessment is evolving from pixel-level change detection to high-level semantic analysis, existing vision-language methodologies still struggle to provide actionable intelligence for complex strategic queries. They remain severely constrained by unimodal optical dependence, a prevailing bias towards natural disasters, and a fundamental lack of grounded interactivity. To address these limitations, we present ChangeQuery, a unified multimodal framework designed for comprehensive, all-weather disaster situation awareness. To overcome modality constraints and scenario biases, we construct the Disaster-Induced Change Query (DICQ) dataset, a large-scale benchmark coupling pre-event optical semantics with post-event SAR structural features across a balanced distribution of natural catastrophes and armed conflicts. Furthermore, to provide the high-quality supervision required for interactive reasoning, we propose a novel Automated Semantic Annotation Pipeline. Adhering to a ``statistics-first, generation-later'' paradigm, this engine automatically transforms raw segmentation masks into grounded, hierarchical instruction sets, effectively equipping the model with fine-grained spatial and quantitative awareness. Trained on this structured data, the ChangeQuery architecture operates as an interactive disaster analyst. It supports multi-task reasoning driven by diverse user queries, delivering precise damage quantification, region-specific descriptions, and holistic post-disaster summaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChangeQuery establishes a new state-of-the-art, providing a robust and interpretable solution for complex disaster monitoring. The code is available at \href{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}{https://sundongwei.github.io/changequery/}.

Yupeng Hou, Binbin Hu, Wayne Xin Zhao et al.

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown powerful capacity at modeling structural data. However, when adapted to downstream tasks, it usually requires abundant task-specific labeled data, which can be extremely scarce in practice. A promising solution to data scarcity is to pre-train a transferable and expressive GNN model on large amounts of unlabeled graphs or coarse-grained labeled graphs. Then the pre-trained GNN is fine-tuned on downstream datasets with task-specific fine-grained labels. In this paper, we present a novel Graph Matching based GNN Pre-Training framework, called GMPT. Focusing on a pair of graphs, we propose to learn structural correspondences between them via neural graph matching, consisting of both intra-graph message passing and inter-graph message passing. In this way, we can learn adaptive representations for a given graph when paired with different graphs, and both node- and graph-level characteristics are naturally considered in a single pre-training task. The proposed method can be applied to fully self-supervised pre-training and coarse-grained supervised pre-training. We further propose an approximate contrastive training strategy to significantly reduce time/memory consumption. Extensive experiments on multi-domain, out-of-distribution benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/GMPT.

Chenxia Li, Ruoyu Guo, Jun Zhou et al.

A large amount of document data exists in unstructured form such as raw images without any text information. Designing a practical document image analysis system is a meaningful but challenging task. In previous work, we proposed an intelligent document analysis system PP-Structure. In order to further upgrade the function and performance of PP-Structure, we propose PP-StructureV2 in this work, which contains two subsystems: Layout Information Extraction and Key Information Extraction. Firstly, we integrate Image Direction Correction module and Layout Restoration module to enhance the functionality of the system. Secondly, 8 practical strategies are utilized in PP-StructureV2 for better performance. For Layout Analysis model, we introduce ultra light-weight detector PP-PicoDet and knowledge distillation algorithm FGD for model lightweighting, which increased the inference speed by 11 times with comparable mAP. For Table Recognition model, we utilize PP-LCNet, CSP-PAN and SLAHead to optimize the backbone module, feature fusion module and decoding module, respectively, which improved the table structure accuracy by 6\% with comparable inference speed. For Key Information Extraction model, we introduce VI-LayoutXLM which is a visual-feature independent LayoutXLM architecture, TB-YX sorting algorithm and U-DML knowledge distillation algorithm, which brought 2.8\% and 9.1\% improvement respectively on the Hmean of Semantic Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction tasks. All the above mentioned models and code are open-sourced in the GitHub repository PaddleOCR.

Mingyuan Fan, Weiguang Han, Daixin Wang et al.

We introduce a multi-turn interactive framework for reasoning evaluation that treats reasoning as active evidence acquisition and belief updating. Wherein, LLMs receive only the task rules, must issue targeted queries to a hidden environment, integrate partial observations over time, and decide when to submit a final answer. Beyond standard success rate and interaction efficiency, we evaluate contextual robustness under controlled contextual perturbations, and metacognitive adaptation through counterfactual revision and necessity judgment. We instantiate the framework as a benchmark of 474 executable games, each evaluated under five fixed configuration search spaces corresponding to five difficulty levels, and evaluate a broad set of frontier LLMs. Results show that the benchmark is highly discriminative, exposing large differences not only in success rate but also in interaction efficiency. Moreover, we empirically show that contextual perturbations cause moderate but consistent declines, whereas counterfactual revision and necessity judgment lead to much larger drops.

Fake Lin, Binbin Hu, Xi Zhu et al.

Code Agents have achieved remarkable advances in recent years, exhibiting strong capabilities across a wide range of software engineering tasks. However, their misuse often produces bloated and disorganized code that impairing readability, extensibility, and robustness. Despite this risk, existing benchmarks largely evaluate functional correctness rather than long-term maintainability of code agents. In this paper, we propose SmellBench, an extensible code refactoring benchmark that proactively injects code smells into clean code snippets from real-world repositories. This design enables the generation of controlled, high-quality, and diverse refactoring cases with human-written ground truth. Specifically, it contains 294 cases spanning 7 popular smell types, 3 difficulty levels, 2 instruction settings across 7 real-world repositories. We further design 3 evaluation aspects covering functional correctness, localization ability, and refactoring quality assessment. Experiments with 2 popular agents and 6 large langauge models (LLMs) show that the best combination - Qwen Code + Claude Sonnet 4.5 - achieved only a 50.34 score of smell elimination. Further analysis reveals that this gap arises from a focus on local code smells and a lack of cross-file understanding, which hinders comprehensive smell elimination.

Gexin Huang, Yanting Yang, Myeongkyun Kang et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel on visual question answering and multimodal reasoning benchmarks. Yet their capability on ultra-resolution images - where critical evidence is tiny, subtle, spatially distant, or distributed - remains unclear. Existing evaluations largely report final-answer accuracy, offering limited insight into whether models acquire and integrate the necessary visual evidence. We introduce UltraVR, a diagnostic benchmark for evidence-grounded visual reasoning over ultra-resolution images. UltraVR spans four high-value scenarios: CCTV surveillance, remote sensing (RS), whole-slide image (WSI) pathology, and industrial anomaly detection (AD). These domains pose complementary challenges: fine-grained object grounding in crowded CCTV scenes, long-range spatial comparison in RS, multi-scale evidence navigation in WSI, and subtle irregularity detection in repetitive industrial layouts. Beyond standard QA triples, each instance includes a structured ground-truth chain of thought with step-level questions, intermediate answers, and reasoning labels. These labels decompose reasoning into evidence grounding, local perception, quantification, evidence integration, and decision inference, enabling process-level diagnosis over black-box scoring. Using UltraVR, we evaluate frontier VLMs and show that current models remain far from reliable on ultra-resolution reasoning. Importantly, the structured annotations allow us to localize failures across the visual-to-decision pipeline: errors concentrate in evidence grounding and local perception, while downstream inference often recovers when intermediate visual facts are supplied. These findings demonstrate UltraVR as a diagnostic testbed for measuring not only whether VLMs answer correctly, but where their ultra-resolution reasoning process breaks.

Xinshun Feng, Herun Wan, Shangbin Feng et al.

Current Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suffer from the over-smoothing problem, which results in indistinguishable node representations and low model performance with more GNN layers. Many methods have been put forward to tackle this problem in recent years. However, existing tackling over-smoothing methods emphasize model performance and neglect the over-smoothness of node representations. Additional, different approaches are applied one at a time, while there lacks an overall framework to jointly leverage multiple solutions to the over-smoothing challenge. To solve these problems, we propose GraTO, a framework based on neural architecture search to automatically search for GNNs architecture. GraTO adopts a novel loss function to facilitate striking a balance between model performance and representation smoothness. In addition to existing methods, our search space also includes DropAttribute, a novel scheme for alleviating the over-smoothing challenge, to fully leverage diverse solutions. We conduct extensive experiments on six real-world datasets to evaluate GraTo, which demonstrates that GraTo outperforms baselines in the over-smoothing metrics and achieves competitive performance in accuracy. GraTO is especially effective and robust with increasing numbers of GNN layers. Further experiments bear out the quality of node representations learned with GraTO and the effectiveness of model architecture. We make cide of GraTo available at Github (\url{https://github.com/fxsxjtu/GraTO}).

Jun Zhou, Bingwen Hu, Yaxiong Wang et al.

Multimodal manipulation detection aims to simultaneously identify forged image--text pairs and localize tampered regions, yet existing methods typically rely on memorizing isolated artifacts and struggle with imperceptible manipulation traces or domain shifts. Inspired by human comparative reasoning, we reformulate this task as a reference-grounded verification problem, where authenticity is assessed by comparing a query against retrieved authentic evidence. We propose REVEAL Reference-Enabled Verification for Evidence Analysis and Localization), a framework explicitly designed for this comparative paradigm. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale reference library comprising 170K authentic news image--text pairs featuring over 40K public figures. Technically, REVEAL employs a difference-aware fusion mechanism to capture fine-grained discrepancies between the query and retrieved evidence. Furthermore, we introduce a task-decoupled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to jointly execute instance-level detection and fine-grained grounding, effectively mitigating optimization conflicts between these heterogeneous objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REVEAL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and notably enables \emph{training-free domain adaptation} by simply updating the reference library, offering a robust and practical solution for detecting evolving misinformation. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/REVEAL-Reference-A006.

Siqiao Xue, Yan Wang, Zhixuan Chu et al.

Neural Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) are the prevalent paradigm for modeling continuous-time event sequences, such as user activities on the web and financial transactions. In real-world applications, event data is typically received in a \emph{streaming} manner, where the distribution of patterns may shift over time. Additionally, \emph{privacy and memory constraints} are commonly observed in practical scenarios, further compounding the challenges. Therefore, the continuous monitoring of a TPP to learn the streaming event sequence is an important yet under-explored problem. Our work paper addresses this challenge by adopting Continual Learning (CL), which makes the model capable of continuously learning a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting under realistic constraints. Correspondingly, we propose a simple yet effective framework, PromptTPP\footnote{Our code is available at {\small \url{ https://github.com/yanyanSann/PromptTPP}}}, by integrating the base TPP with a continuous-time retrieval prompt pool. The prompts, small learnable parameters, are stored in a memory space and jointly optimized with the base TPP, ensuring that the model learns event streams sequentially without buffering past examples or task-specific attributes. We present a novel and realistic experimental setup for modeling event streams, where PromptTPP consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across three real user behavior datasets.

Qian Zhao, Zhengwei Wu, Zhiqiang Zhang et al.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has demonstrated promising results for recommender systems, as they can effectively leverage high-order relationship. However, these methods usually encounter data sparsity issue in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, GCN-based recommendation methods employ contrastive learning to introduce self-supervised signals. Despite their effectiveness, these methods lack consideration of the significant degree disparity between head and tail nodes. This can lead to non-uniform representation distribution, which is a crucial factor for the performance of contrastive learning methods. To tackle the above issue, we propose a novel Long-tail Augmented Graph Contrastive Learning (LAGCL) method for recommendation. Specifically, we introduce a learnable long-tail augmentation approach to enhance tail nodes by supplementing predicted neighbor information, and generate contrastive views based on the resulting augmented graph. To make the data augmentation schema learnable, we design an auto drop module to generate pseudo-tail nodes from head nodes and a knowledge transfer module to reconstruct the head nodes from pseudo-tail nodes. Additionally, we employ generative adversarial networks to ensure that the distribution of the generated tail/head nodes matches that of the original tail/head nodes. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant improvement in performance of our model over the state-of-the-arts. Further analyses demonstrate the uniformity of learned representations and the superiority of LAGCL on long-tail performance. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/im0qianqian/LAGCL

Jiawei Zhang, Xiang Wang, Xiao Bai et al.

Despite recent stereo matching networks achieving impressive performance given sufficient training data, they suffer from domain shifts and generalize poorly to unseen domains. We argue that maintaining feature consistency between matching pixels is a vital factor for promoting the generalization capability of stereo matching networks, which has not been adequately considered. Here we address this issue by proposing a simple pixel-wise contrastive learning across the viewpoints. The stereo contrastive feature loss function explicitly constrains the consistency between learned features of matching pixel pairs which are observations of the same 3D points. A stereo selective whitening loss is further introduced to better preserve the stereo feature consistency across domains, which decorrelates stereo features from stereo viewpoint-specific style information. Counter-intuitively, the generalization of feature consistency between two viewpoints in the same scene translates to the generalization of stereo matching performance to unseen domains. Our method is generic in nature as it can be easily embedded into existing stereo networks and does not require access to the samples in the target domain. When trained on synthetic data and generalized to four real-world testing sets, our method achieves superior performance over several state-of-the-art networks.

Shih-Han Chan, Yinpeng Dong, Jun Zhu et al.

Deep learning models have been deployed in numerous real-world applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance. However, these models are vulnerable in adversarial environments. Backdoor attack is emerging as a severe security threat which injects a backdoor trigger into a small portion of training data such that the trained model behaves normally on benign inputs but gives incorrect predictions when the specific trigger appears. While most research in backdoor attacks focuses on image classification, backdoor attacks on object detection have not been explored but are of equal importance. Object detection has been adopted as an important module in various security-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving. Therefore, backdoor attacks on object detection could pose severe threats to human lives and properties. We propose four kinds of backdoor attacks for object detection task: 1) Object Generation Attack: a trigger can falsely generate an object of the target class; 2) Regional Misclassification Attack: a trigger can change the prediction of a surrounding object to the target class; 3) Global Misclassification Attack: a single trigger can change the predictions of all objects in an image to the target class; and 4) Object Disappearance Attack: a trigger can make the detector fail to detect the object of the target class. We develop appropriate metrics to evaluate the four backdoor attacks on object detection. We perform experiments using two typical object detection models -- Faster-RCNN and YOLOv3 on different datasets. More crucially, we demonstrate that even fine-tuning on another benign dataset cannot remove the backdoor hidden in the object detection model. To defend against these backdoor attacks, we propose Detector Cleanse, an entropy-based run-time detection framework to identify poisoned testing samples for any deployed object detector.

Yuhao Mao, Chong Fu, Saizhuo Wang et al.

One intriguing property of adversarial attacks is their "transferability" -- an adversarial example crafted with respect to one deep neural network (DNN) model is often found effective against other DNNs as well. Intensive research has been conducted on this phenomenon under simplistic controlled conditions. Yet, thus far, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding about transferability-based attacks ("transfer attacks") in real-world environments. To bridge this critical gap, we conduct the first large-scale systematic empirical study of transfer attacks against major cloud-based MLaaS platforms, taking the components of a real transfer attack into account. The study leads to a number of interesting findings which are inconsistent to the existing ones, including: (1) Simple surrogates do not necessarily improve real transfer attacks. (2) No dominant surrogate architecture is found in real transfer attacks. (3) It is the gap between posterior (output of the softmax layer) rather than the gap between logit (so-called $κ$ value) that increases transferability. Moreover, by comparing with prior works, we demonstrate that transfer attacks possess many previously unknown properties in real-world environments, such as (1) Model similarity is not a well-defined concept. (2) $L_2$ norm of perturbation can generate high transferability without usage of gradient and is a more powerful source than $L_\infty$ norm. We believe this work sheds light on the vulnerabilities of popular MLaaS platforms and points to a few promising research directions.

Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Xiao Bai et al.

This paper presents ER-NeRF, a novel conditional Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based architecture for talking portrait synthesis that can concurrently achieve fast convergence, real-time rendering, and state-of-the-art performance with small model size. Our idea is to explicitly exploit the unequal contribution of spatial regions to guide talking portrait modeling. Specifically, to improve the accuracy of dynamic head reconstruction, a compact and expressive NeRF-based Tri-Plane Hash Representation is introduced by pruning empty spatial regions with three planar hash encoders. For speech audio, we propose a Region Attention Module to generate region-aware condition feature via an attention mechanism. Different from existing methods that utilize an MLP-based encoder to learn the cross-modal relation implicitly, the attention mechanism builds an explicit connection between audio features and spatial regions to capture the priors of local motions. Moreover, a direct and fast Adaptive Pose Encoding is introduced to optimize the head-torso separation problem by mapping the complex transformation of the head pose into spatial coordinates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method renders better high-fidelity and audio-lips synchronized talking portrait videos, with realistic details and high efficiency compared to previous methods.

Yang Zhou, Zhenting Sheng, Mingrui Tan et al.

Effective clinical history taking is a foundational yet underexplored component of clinical reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on static benchmarks, they often fall short in dynamic, multi-turn diagnostic settings that require iterative questioning and hypothesis refinement. To address this gap, we propose \method{}, a note-driven framework that trains LLMs to conduct structured history taking and diagnosis by learning from widely available medical notes. Instead of relying on scarce and sensitive dialogue data, we convert real-world medical notes into high-quality doctor-patient dialogues using a decision tree-guided generation and refinement pipeline. We then propose a three-stage fine-tuning strategy combining supervised learning, simulated data augmentation, and preference learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel single-turn reasoning paradigm that reframes history taking as a sequence of single-turn reasoning problems. This design enhances interpretability and enables local supervision, dynamic adaptation, and greater sample efficiency. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves clinical reasoning, achieving gains of +16.9 F1 and +21.0 Top-1 diagnostic accuracy over GPT-4o. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/zhentingsheng/Note2Chat.

Ye Shen, Dun Pei, Yiqiu Guo et al.

Despite recent advances in understanding and leveraging long-range conversational memory, existing benchmarks still lack systematic evaluation of large language models(LLMs) across diverse memory dimensions, particularly in multi-session settings. In this work, we propose EvolMem, a new benchmark for assessing multi-session memory capabilities of LLMs and agent systems. EvolMem is grounded in cognitive psychology and encompasses both declarative and non-declarative memory, further decomposed into multiple fine-grained abilities. To construct the benchmark, we introduce a hybrid data synthesis framework that consists of topic-initiated generation and narrative-inspired transformations. This framework enables scalable generation of multi-session conversations with controllable complexity, accompanied by sample-specific evaluation guidelines. Extensive evaluation reveals that no LLM consistently outperforms others across all memory dimensions. Moreover, agent memory mechanisms do not necessarily enhance LLMs' capabilities and often exhibit notable efficiency limitations. Data and code will be released at https://github.com/shenye7436/EvolMem.

Wei Zhou, Jun Zhou, Haoyu Wang et al. · mit

Data preparation aims to denoise raw datasets, uncover cross-dataset relationships, and extract valuable insights from them, which is essential for a wide range of data-centric applications. Driven by (i) rising demands for application-ready data (e.g., for analytics, visualization, decision-making), (ii) increasingly powerful LLM techniques, and (iii) the emergence of infrastructures that facilitate flexible agent construction (e.g., using Databricks Unity Catalog), LLM-enhanced methods are rapidly becoming a transformative and potentially dominant paradigm for data preparation. By investigating hundreds of recent literature works, this paper presents a systematic review of this evolving landscape, focusing on the use of LLM techniques to prepare data for diverse downstream tasks. First, we characterize the fundamental paradigm shift, from rule-based, model-specific pipelines to prompt-driven, context-aware, and agentic preparation workflows. Next, we introduce a task-centric taxonomy that organizes the field into three major tasks: data cleaning (e.g., standardization, error processing, imputation), data integration (e.g., entity matching, schema matching), and data enrichment (e.g., data annotation, profiling). For each task, we survey representative techniques, and highlight their respective strengths (e.g., improved generalization, semantic understanding) and limitations (e.g., the prohibitive cost of scaling LLMs, persistent hallucinations even in advanced agents, the mismatch between advanced methods and weak evaluation). Moreover, we analyze commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics (the empirical part). Finally, we discuss open research challenges and outline a forward-looking roadmap that emphasizes scalable LLM-data systems, principled designs for reliable agentic workflows, and robust evaluation protocols.

Mingjie Wang, Yande Li, Jun Zhou et al.

The class-agnostic counting (CAC) problem has caught increasing attention recently due to its wide societal applications and arduous challenges. To count objects of different categories, existing approaches rely on user-provided exemplars, which is hard-to-obtain and limits their generality. In this paper, we aim to empower the framework to recognize adaptive exemplars within the whole images. A zero-shot Generalized Counting Network (GCNet) is developed, which uses a pseudo-Siamese structure to automatically and effectively learn pseudo exemplar clues from inherent repetition patterns. In addition, a weakly-supervised scheme is presented to reduce the burden of laborious density maps required by all contemporary CAC models, allowing GCNet to be trained using count-level supervisory signals in an end-to-end manner. Without providing any spatial location hints, GCNet is capable of adaptively capturing them through a carefully-designed self-similarity learning strategy. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the prevailing benchmark FSC147 for zero-shot CAC demonstrate the superiority of our GCNet. It performs on par with existing exemplar-dependent methods and shows stunning cross-dataset generality on crowd-specific datasets, e.g., ShanghaiTech Part A, Part B and UCF_QNRF.

Yuntao Shou, Jun Zhou, Tao Meng et al.

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) aims to predict speakers' emotional states in multi-turn dialogues through text, audio, and visual cues. In real-world settings, conversation scenarios differ significantly in speakers, topics, styles, and noise levels. Existing MERC methods generally neglect these cross-scenario variations, limiting their ability to transfer models trained on a source domain to unseen target domains. To address this issue, we propose a Dual-branch Graph Domain Adaptation framework (DGDA) for multimodal emotion recognition under cross-scenario conditions. We first construct an emotion interaction graph to characterize complex emotional dependencies among utterances. A dual-branch encoder, consisting of a hypergraph neural network (HGNN) and a path neural network (PathNN), is then designed to explicitly model multivariate relationships and implicitly capture global dependencies. To enable out-of-domain generalization, a domain adversarial discriminator is introduced to learn invariant representations across domains. Furthermore, a regularization loss is incorporated to suppress the negative influence of noisy labels. To the best of our knowledge, DGDA is the first MERC framework that jointly addresses domain shift and label noise. Theoretical analysis provides tighter generalization bounds, and extensive experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD demonstrate that DGDA consistently outperforms strong baselines and better adapts to cross-scenario conversations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xudmm1239439/DGDA-Net.

Mohammad Aminul Islam, Wangzhi Xing, Jun Zhou et al.

Hyperspectral object tracking has recently emerged as a topic of great interest in the remote sensing community. The hyperspectral image, with its many bands, provides a rich source of material information of an object that can be effectively used for object tracking. While most hyperspectral trackers are based on detection-based techniques, no one has yet attempted to employ YOLO for detecting and tracking the object. This is due to the presence of multiple spectral bands, the scarcity of annotated hyperspectral videos, and YOLO's performance limitation in managing occlusions, and distinguishing object in cluttered backgrounds. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework called Hy-Tracker, which aims to bridge the gap between hyperspectral data and state-of-the-art object detection methods to leverage the strengths of YOLOv7 for object tracking in hyperspectral videos. Hy-Tracker not only introduces YOLOv7 but also innovatively incorporates a refined tracking module on top of YOLOv7. The tracker refines the initial detections produced by YOLOv7, leading to improved object-tracking performance. Furthermore, we incorporate Kalman-Filter into the tracker, which addresses the challenges posed by scale variation and occlusion. The experimental results on hyperspectral benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hy-Tracker in accurately tracking objects across frames.

Zhixuan Chu, Huaiyu Guo, Xinyuan Zhou et al.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise for natural language tasks but struggle when applied directly to complex domains like finance. LLMs have difficulty reasoning about and integrating all relevant information. We propose a data-centric approach to enable LLMs to better handle financial tasks. Our key insight is that rather than overloading the LLM with everything at once, it is more effective to preprocess and pre-understand the data. We create a financial LLM (FLLM) using multitask prompt-based finetuning to achieve data pre-processing and pre-understanding. However, labeled data is scarce for each task. To overcome manual annotation costs, we employ abductive augmentation reasoning (AAR) to automatically generate training data by modifying the pseudo labels from FLLM's own outputs. Experiments show our data-centric FLLM with AAR substantially outperforms baseline financial LLMs designed for raw text, achieving state-of-the-art on financial analysis and interpretation tasks. We also open source a new benchmark for financial analysis and interpretation. Our methodology provides a promising path to unlock LLMs' potential for complex real-world domains.

Qian Zhao, Shuo Yang, Binbin Hu et al.

Temporal link prediction, as one of the most crucial work in temporal graphs, has attracted lots of attention from the research area. The WSDM Cup 2022 seeks for solutions that predict the existence probabilities of edges within time spans over temporal graph. This paper introduces the solution of AntGraph, which wins the 1st place in the competition. We first analysis the theoretical upper-bound of the performance by removing temporal information, which implies that only structure and attribute information on the graph could achieve great performance. Based on this hypothesis, then we introduce several well-designed features. Finally, experiments conducted on the competition datasets show the superiority of our proposal, which achieved AUC score of 0.666 on dataset A and 0.902 on dataset B, the ablation studies also prove the efficiency of each feature. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/im0qianqian/WSDM2022TGP-AntGraph.

Chaochao Chen, Xiaohua Feng, Yuyuan Li et al.

As the parameter size of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to expand, there is an urgent need to address the scarcity of high-quality data. In response, existing research has attempted to make a breakthrough by incorporating Federated Learning (FL) into LLMs. Conversely, considering the outstanding performance of LLMs in task generalization, researchers have also tried applying LLMs within FL to tackle challenges in relevant domains. The complementarity between LLMs and FL has already ignited widespread research interest. In this paper, we aim to deeply explore the integration of LLMs and FL. We propose a research framework, dividing the fusion of LLMs and FL into three parts: the combination of LLM sub-technologies with FL, the integration of FL sub-technologies with LLMs, and the overall merger of LLMs and FL. We first provide a comprehensive review of the current state of research in the domain of LLMs combined with FL, including their typical applications, integration advantages, challenges faced, and future directions for resolution. Subsequently, we discuss the practical applications of the combination of LLMs and FL in critical scenarios such as healthcare, finance, and education, and provide new perspectives and insights into future research directions for LLMs and FL.

Ling Zhao, Yunpeng Ma, Shanxiong Chen et al.

Deep subspace clustering based on auto-encoder has received wide attention. However, most subspace clustering based on auto-encoder does not utilize the structural information in the self-expressive coefficient matrix, which limits the clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a double self-expressive subspace clustering algorithm. The key idea of our solution is to view the self-expressive coefficient as a feature representation of the example to get another coefficient matrix. Then, we use the two coefficient matrices to construct the affinity matrix for spectral clustering. We find that it can reduce the subspace-preserving representation error and improve connectivity. To further enhance the clustering performance, we proposed a self-supervised module based on contrastive learning, which can further improve the performance of the trained network. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better clustering than state-of-the-art methods.

Jun Zhou, Kai Chen, Linlin Xu et al.

One critical challenge in 6D object pose estimation from a single RGBD image is efficient integration of two different modalities, i.e., color and depth. In this work, we tackle this problem by a novel Deep Fusion Transformer~(DFTr) block that can aggregate cross-modality features for improving pose estimation. Unlike existing fusion methods, the proposed DFTr can better model cross-modality semantic correlation by leveraging their semantic similarity, such that globally enhanced features from different modalities can be better integrated for improved information extraction. Moreover, to further improve robustness and efficiency, we introduce a novel weighted vector-wise voting algorithm that employs a non-iterative global optimization strategy for precise 3D keypoint localization while achieving near real-time inference. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and strong generalization capability of our proposed 3D keypoint voting algorithm. Results on four widely used benchmarks also demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by large margins.

Kun Zhang, Le Wu, Guangyi Lv et al.

Text Classification is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing, which requires an agent to determine the most appropriate category for input sentences. Recently, deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance in this area, especially Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Usually, these methods concentrate on input sentences and corresponding semantic embedding generation. However, for another essential component: labels, most existing works either treat them as meaningless one-hot vectors or use vanilla embedding methods to learn label representations along with model training, underestimating the semantic information and guidance that these labels reveal. To alleviate this problem and better exploit label information, in this paper, we employ Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) in model learning process and design a novel self-supervised Relation of Relation (R2) classification task for label utilization from a one-hot manner perspective. Then, we propose a novel Relation of Relation Learning Network (R2-Net) for text classification, in which text classification and R2 classification are treated as optimization targets. Meanwhile, triplet loss is employed to enhance the analysis of differences and connections among labels. Moreover, considering that one-hot usage is still short of exploiting label information, we incorporate external knowledge from WordNet to obtain multi-aspect descriptions for label semantic learning and extend R2-Net to a novel Description-Enhanced Label Embedding network (DELE) from a label embedding perspective. ...

Xu Han, Mohammad Aminul Islam, Lei Wang et al.

Hyperspectral imagery encodes rich material properties that can improve tracking robustness under appearance ambiguity, illumination change, and background clutter. However, due to the limited availability of hyperspectral video data, many existing methods adapt pretrained RGB trackers via spatial or channel fusion strategies, largely neglecting the intrinsic material information in hyperspectral imagery. Moreover, the few material-aware approaches typically rely on external spectral unmixing pipelines that are decoupled from the tracking objective, limiting effective optimization of material representations for target localization. To address these limitations, we formulate hyperspectral object tracking as a joint optimization problem of material decomposition and target localization, coupling the two tasks via a weighted target-oriented unmixing loss that explicitly aligns material representations with localization accuracy. Specifically, we propose a material representation decomposition module for deep learning-based spectral unmixing with adaptive frequency decomposition. Building on the decomposed material representations, we further introduce a dual-branch wavelet-enhanced material prompt module that learns low- and high-frequency material prompts through efficient spatial-material interactions in the frequency domain. The framework is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly generalized to different unmixing backbones. Extensive experiments on standard hyperspectral tracking benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and validate the effectiveness of the proposed end-to-end material-aware tracking framework. Code is available at https://github.com/han030927/E2EMPT.

Zhanglu Yan, Jun Zhou, Weng-Fai Wong

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are well suited for resource-constrained applications as they do not need expensive multipliers. In a typical rate-encoded SNN, a series of binary spikes within a globally fixed time window is used to fire the neurons. The maximum number of spikes in this time window is also the latency of the network in performing a single inference, as well as determines the overall energy efficiency of the model. The aim of this paper is to reduce this while maintaining accuracy when converting ANNs to their equivalent SNNs. The state-of-the-art conversion schemes yield SNNs with accuracies comparable with ANNs only for large window sizes. In this paper, we start with understanding the information loss when converting from pre-existing ANN models to standard rate-encoded SNN models. From these insights, we propose a suite of novel techniques that together mitigate the information lost in the conversion, and achieve state-of-art SNN accuracies along with very low latency. Our method achieved a Top-1 SNN accuracy of 98.73% (1 time step) on the MNIST dataset, 76.38% (8 time steps) on the CIFAR-100 dataset, and 93.71% (8 time steps) on the CIFAR-10 dataset. On ImageNet, an SNN accuracy of 75.35%/79.16% was achieved with 100/200 time steps.

Ningyu Zhang, Zekun Xi, Yujie Luo et al.

Knowledge representation has been a central aim of AI since its inception. Symbolic Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and neural Large Language Models (LLMs) can both represent knowledge. KGs provide highly accurate and explicit knowledge representation, but face scalability issue; while LLMs offer expansive coverage of knowledge, but incur significant training costs and struggle with precise and reliable knowledge manipulation. To this end, we introduce OneEdit, a neural-symbolic prototype system for collaborative knowledge editing using natural language, which facilitates easy-to-use knowledge management with KG and LLM. OneEdit consists of three modules: 1) The Interpreter serves for user interaction with natural language; 2) The Controller manages editing requests from various users, leveraging the KG with rollbacks to handle knowledge conflicts and prevent toxic knowledge attacks; 3) The Editor utilizes the knowledge from the Controller to edit KG and LLM. We conduct experiments on two new datasets with KGs which demonstrate that OneEdit can achieve superior performance.

Zebin You, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou et al.

We present \textbf{LLaDA-o}, an effective and length-adaptive omni diffusion model for multimodal understanding and generation. LLaDA-o is built on a Mixture of Diffusion (MoD) framework that decouples discrete masked diffusion for text understanding and continuous diffusion for visual generation, while coupling them through a shared, simple, and efficient attention backbone that reduces redundant computation for fixed conditions. Building on MoD, we further introduce a data-centric length adaptation strategy that enables flexible-length decoding in multimodal settings without architectural changes. Extensive experiments show that LLaDA-o achieves state-of-the-art performance among omni-diffusion models on multimodal understanding and generation benchmarks, and reaches 87.04 on DPG-Bench for text-to-image generation, supporting the effectiveness of unified omni diffusion modeling. Code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/LLaDA-o.

Jintian Zhang, Cheng Peng, Mengshu Sun et al.

Despite the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), which have significantly enhanced the generative capabilities for various NLP tasks, LLMs still face limitations in directly handling retrieval tasks. However, many practical applications demand the seamless integration of both retrieval and generation. This paper introduces a novel and efficient One-pass Generation and retrieval framework (OneGen), designed to improve LLMs' performance on tasks that require both generation and retrieval. The proposed framework bridges the traditionally separate training approaches for generation and retrieval by incorporating retrieval tokens generated autoregressively. This enables a single LLM to handle both tasks simultaneously in a unified forward pass. We conduct experiments on two distinct types of composite tasks, RAG and Entity Linking, to validate the pluggability, effectiveness, and efficiency of OneGen in training and inference. Furthermore, our results show that integrating generation and retrieval within the same context preserves the generative capabilities of LLMs while improving retrieval performance. To the best of our knowledge, OneGen is the first to enable LLMs to conduct vector retrieval during the generation.

Haoran Pan, Jun Zhou, Yuanpeng Liu et al.

6D pose estimation of rigid objects from RGB-D images is crucial for object grasping and manipulation in robotics. Although RGB channels and the depth (D) channel are often complementary, providing respectively the appearance and geometry information, it is still non-trivial how to fully benefit from the two cross-modal data. From the simple yet new observation, when an object rotates, its semantic label is invariant to the pose while its keypoint offset direction is variant to the pose. To this end, we present SO(3)-Pose, a new representation learning network to explore SO(3)-equivariant and SO(3)-invariant features from the depth channel for pose estimation. The SO(3)-invariant features facilitate to learn more distinctive representations for segmenting objects with similar appearance from RGB channels. The SO(3)-equivariant features communicate with RGB features to deduce the (missed) geometry for detecting keypoints of an object with the reflective surface from the depth channel. Unlike most of existing pose estimation methods, our SO(3)-Pose not only implements the information communication between the RGB and depth channels, but also naturally absorbs the SO(3)-equivariance geometry knowledge from depth images, leading to better appearance and geometry representation learning. Comprehensive experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks.

Ruize Cui, Jialun Pei, Haiqiao Wang et al.

In laparoscopic liver surgery, augmented reality technology enhances intraoperative anatomical guidance by overlaying 3D liver models from preoperative CT/MRI onto laparoscopic 2D views. However, existing registration methods lack explicit modeling of reliable 2D-3D geometric correspondences supported by latent evidence, leading to limited interpretability and potentially unstable alignment in clinical scenarios. In this work, we introduce Land-Reg, a correspondence-driven deformable registration framework that explicitly learns latent-grounded 2D-3D landmark correspondences as an interpretable intermediate representation to bridge cross-modal alignment. For rigid registration, Land-Reg embraces a Cross-modal Latent Alignment module to map multi-modal features into a unified latent space. Further, an Uncertainty-enhanced Overlap Landmark Detector with similarity matching is proposed to robustly estimate explicit 2D-3D landmark correspondences. For non-rigid registration, we design a novel shape-constrained supervision strategy that anchors shape deformation to matched landmarks through reprojection consistency and incorporates local-isometric regularization to alleviate inherent 2D-3D depth ambiguity, while a rendered-mask alignment enforces global shape consistency. Experimental results on the P2ILF dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method on both rigid pose estimation and non-rigid deformation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/cuiruize/Land-Reg.

Sai Yang, Bin Hu, Bojun Zhou et al.

Power Line Autonomous Inspection (PLAI) plays a crucial role in the construction of smart grids due to its great advantages of low cost, high efficiency, and safe operation. PLAI is completed by accurately detecting the electrical components and defects in the aerial images captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, the visible quality of aerial images is inevitably degraded by adverse weather like haze, rain, or snow, which are found to drastically decrease the detection accuracy in our research. To circumvent this problem, we propose a new task of Power Line Aerial Image Restoration under Adverse Weather (PLAIR-AW), which aims to recover clean and high-quality images from degraded images with bad weather thus improving detection performance for PLAI. In this context, we are the first to release numerous corresponding datasets, namely, HazeCPLID, HazeTTPLA, HazeInsPLAD for power line aerial image dehazing, RainCPLID, RainTTPLA, RainInsPLAD for power line aerial image deraining, SnowCPLID, SnowInsPLAD for power line aerial image desnowing, which are synthesized upon the public power line aerial image datasets of CPLID, TTPLA, InsPLAD following the mathematical models. Meanwhile, we select numerous state-of-the-art methods from image restoration community as the baseline methods for PLAIR-AW. At last, we conduct large-scale empirical experiments to evaluate the performance of baseline methods on the proposed datasets. The proposed datasets and trained models are available at https://github.com/ntuhubin/PLAIR-AW.

Zeli Su, Ziyin Zhang, Zewei Pan et al.

Low-resource target-language generation is often limited by scarce parallel data, while high-resource source-language monolingual data is abundant but difficult to use with standard supervised fine-tuning. We propose Source-Grounded Semantic Reinforcement Learning (SG-SRL), a resource-utilization framework that converts source-language monolingual data into cross-lingual semantic supervision for target-language generation. SG-SRL performs reference-free reinforcement learning (RL) on source-language data using a cross-lingual semantic reward model, instantiated by a cross-lingual reranker that scores the semantic relevance between the source input and the target-language generation. While this induces severe verbosity-based reward hacking, a lightweight recovery stage using a small parallel corpus restores fluency, conciseness, and task format while preserving the semantic gains. Experiments on Chinese-to-Thai generation show that SG-SRL improves semantic grounding and factual coverage over cold-start SFT. Additional analyses on long-form transfer and Tibetan embedding-based rewards clarify the generalization behavior of SG-SRL and show that an encoder-based semantic reward can substitute for an LLM-based reranker in a realistic low-resource language setting.

Zeli Su, Zhankai Xu, Tianlei Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, where they must execute user-specified tasks over externally provided reference text. In practice, such context is often unstructured and contaminated with benign but instruction-like semantic noise, such as editorial comments and system traces, which should be treated strictly as data. We introduce DistractionIF, a benchmark designed to evaluate robustness against such distractor instructions in reference text. Across a broad range of models, we observe a consistent inverse scaling phenomenon: larger models are often less robust, with performance dropping by up to 30 points as scale increases. Mechanistically, our perplexity analysis reveals that scaling erodes the probabilistic boundary between robust and distracted behaviors, making models increasingly prone to over-interpreting noise as instructions. To address this, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), can restore this boundary, improving robustness by up to 15.5% without compromising general instruction-following capability. Our findings highlight a critical instruction-following robustness gap in reference-grounded tasks and establish reinforcement learning as a promising path for enforcing strict data-instruction separation at scale.

Guanyiman Fu, Jingtao Li, Zihang Cheng et al.

While hyperspectral imaging provides rich spatial-spectral information across hundreds of narrow wavelength bands for precise material identification, ground-based hyperspectral pre-trained backbones remain absent, constrained by varying spectral configurations across sensors, the scarcity and inconsistency of labels, and the limited scale and scene diversity of existing datasets. To address these challenges and enable universal perception, we propose HyperVision, the first ground-based hyperspectral pre-trained backbone. First, to handle varying spectral configurations, HyperVision adopts a channel-adaptive dynamic embedding mechanism to map heterogeneous inputs into a unified token space. Second, to address the scarcity and inconsistency of labels, we introduce a multi-source pseudo-labeling method that fuses semantic representations from both spatial structures generated by SAM2 and fine-grained spectral material information extracted by HyperFree. Third, to compensate for limited dataset scale and enrich scene diversity, a cross-modal knowledge distillation mechanism is utilized to transfer rich semantic representations from a pre-trained RGB vision model to our hyperspectral backbone. Pre-trained on a collection of 15k images from 26 diverse ground-based datasets, HyperVision demonstrates exceptional generalization. Requiring only efficient head-only adaptation without adjusting backbone parameters, it achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to task-specific methods across three downstream tasks under varying sensor configurations, yielding up to a 16.3% relative improvement in hyperspectral semantic segmentation $\mathrm{Acc}_{\mathrm{M}}$, a 2.1% relative gain in object tracking AUC, and a 35.5% reduction in salient object detection MAE. The source code and pre-trained model will be publicly available at https://github.com/lronkitty/HyperVision .

Xinyu Li, Yilin Li, Qing Cui et al. · pku

In the era of big data, the explosive growth of multi-source heterogeneous data offers many exciting challenges and opportunities for improving the inference of conditional average treatment effects. In this paper, we investigate homogeneous and heterogeneous causal data fusion problems under a general setting that allows for the presence of source-specific covariates. We provide a direct learning framework for integrating multi-source data that separates the treatment effect from other nuisance functions, and achieves double robustness against certain misspecification. To improve estimation precision and stability, we propose a causal information-aware weighting function motivated by theoretical insights from the semiparametric efficiency theory; it assigns larger weights to samples containing more causal information with high interpretability. We introduce a two-step algorithm, the weighted multi-source direct learner, based on constructing a pseudo-outcome and regressing it on covariates under a weighted least square criterion; it offers us a powerful tool for causal data fusion, enjoying the advantages of easy implementation, double robustness and model flexibility. In simulation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in both homogeneous and heterogeneous causal data fusion scenarios.

Mingjie Wang, Jun Zhou, Hao Cai et al.

Existing state-of-the-art crowd counting algorithms rely excessively on location-level annotations, which are burdensome to acquire. When only count-level (weak) supervisory signals are available, it is arduous and error-prone to regress total counts due to the lack of explicit spatial constraints. To address this issue, a novel and efficient counter (referred to as CrowdMLP) is presented, which probes into modelling global dependencies of embeddings and regressing total counts by devising a multi-granularity MLP regressor. In specific, a locally-focused pre-trained frontend is cascaded to extract crude feature maps with intrinsic spatial cues, which prevent the model from collapsing into trivial outcomes. The crude embeddings, along with raw crowd scenes, are tokenized at different granularity levels. The multi-granularity MLP then proceeds to mix tokens at the dimensions of cardinality, channel, and spatial for mining global information. An effective proxy task, namely Split-Counting, is also proposed to evade the barrier of limited samples and the shortage of spatial hints in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CrowdMLP significantly outperforms existing weakly-supervised counting algorithms and performs on par with state-of-the-art location-level supervised approaches.

Shujie Yang, Binchi Zhang, Shangbin Feng et al.

Graph anomaly detection on attributed networks has become a prevalent research topic due to its broad applications in many influential domains. In real-world scenarios, nodes and edges in attributed networks usually display distinct heterogeneity, i.e. attributes of different types of nodes show great variety, different types of relations represent diverse meanings. Anomalies usually perform differently from the majority in various perspectives of heterogeneity in these networks. However, existing graph anomaly detection approaches do not leverage heterogeneity in attributed networks, which is highly related to anomaly detection. In light of this problem, we propose AHEAD: a heterogeneity-aware unsupervised graph anomaly detection approach based on the encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, for the encoder, we design three levels of attention, i.e. attribute level, node type level, and edge level attentions to capture the heterogeneity of network structure, node properties and information of a single node, respectively. In the decoder, we exploit structure, attribute, and node type reconstruction terms to obtain an anomaly score for each node. Extensive experiments show the superiority of AHEAD on several real-world heterogeneous information networks compared with the state-of-arts in the unsupervised setting. Further experiments verify the effectiveness and robustness of our triple attention, model backbone, and decoder in general.

Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li, Xiaolu Zhang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) for temporal graphs have recently attracted increasing attentions, where a common assumption is that the class set for nodes is closed. However, in real-world scenarios, it often faces the open set problem with the dynamically increased class set as the time passes by. This will bring two big challenges to the existing dynamic GNN methods: (i) How to dynamically propagate appropriate information in an open temporal graph, where new class nodes are often linked to old class nodes. This case will lead to a sharp contradiction. This is because typical GNNs are prone to make the embeddings of connected nodes become similar, while we expect the embeddings of these two interactive nodes to be distinguishable since they belong to different classes. (ii) How to avoid catastrophic knowledge forgetting over old classes when learning new classes occurred in temporal graphs. In this paper, we propose a general and principled learning approach for open temporal graphs, called OTGNet, with the goal of addressing the above two challenges. We assume the knowledge of a node can be disentangled into class-relevant and class-agnostic one, and thus explore a new message passing mechanism by extending the information bottleneck principle to only propagate class-agnostic knowledge between nodes of different classes, avoiding aggregating conflictive information. Moreover, we devise a strategy to select both important and diverse triad sub-graph structures for effective class-incremental learning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets of different domains demonstrate the superiority of our method, compared to the baselines.

Lei Liang, Mengshu Sun, Zhengke Gui et al.

The recently developed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology has enabled the efficient construction of domain-specific applications. However, it also has limitations, including the gap between vector similarity and the relevance of knowledge reasoning, as well as insensitivity to knowledge logic, such as numerical values, temporal relations, expert rules, and others, which hinder the effectiveness of professional knowledge services. In this work, we introduce a professional domain knowledge service framework called Knowledge Augmented Generation (KAG). KAG is designed to address the aforementioned challenges with the motivation of making full use of the advantages of knowledge graph(KG) and vector retrieval, and to improve generation and reasoning performance by bidirectionally enhancing large language models (LLMs) and KGs through five key aspects: (1) LLM-friendly knowledge representation, (2) mutual-indexing between knowledge graphs and original chunks, (3) logical-form-guided hybrid reasoning engine, (4) knowledge alignment with semantic reasoning, and (5) model capability enhancement for KAG. We compared KAG with existing RAG methods in multihop question answering and found that it significantly outperforms state-of-theart methods, achieving a relative improvement of 19.6% on 2wiki and 33.5% on hotpotQA in terms of F1 score. We have successfully applied KAG to two professional knowledge Q&A tasks of Ant Group, including E-Government Q&A and E-Health Q&A, achieving significant improvement in professionalism compared to RAG methods.

Peijie Jiang, Yuqi Feng, Cunyin Peng et al.

In contemporary large language models (LLMs), the swish-gated linear unit (SwiGLU) activation function is widely adopted to regulate the information flow and introduce non-linearity. For large positive inputs, SwiGLU approximates the quadratic function $x^2$, providing strong nonlinearity and expressive capacity. However, this property also causes numerical instability as the input or model scale increases, particularly in low-precision LLM training. The main reason is its approximate quadratic amplification, which enlarges the output range and exacerbates outliers. To address this issue, we propose a stable activation function, Power Linear Unit (PowLU), for large-scale LLM pre-training. Specifically, PowLU employs a rational power function to achieve adaptive nonlinearity, thereby improving representation ability and enabling stable training in spike regions. Moreover, we provide theoretical justification for several key properties of PowLU. Scaling law experiments confirm that the performance is consistent across model sizes, and further experimental results with the Ling architecture (7.9B and 124B total parameters) demonstrate that PowLU achieves competitive results against SwiGLU and SwiGLU-Clip in large-scale training of LLMs. In addition, the experimental results also show that PowLU effectively improves the scalability of the large-scale training of LLMs.

Wei Song, Jun Zhou, Mingjie Wang et al.

This paper focuses on the recently popular task of point cloud completion guided by multimodal information. Although existing methods have achieved excellent performance by fusing auxiliary images, there are still some deficiencies, including the poor generalization ability of the model and insufficient fine-grained semantic information for extracted features. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal fusion network for point cloud completion, which can simultaneously fuse visual and textual information to predict the semantic and geometric characteristics of incomplete shapes effectively. Specifically, to overcome the lack of prior information caused by the small-scale dataset, we employ a pre-trained vision-language model that is trained with a large amount of image-text pairs. Therefore, the textual and visual encoders of this large-scale model have stronger generalization ability. Then, we propose a multi-stage feature fusion strategy to fuse the textual and visual features into the backbone network progressively. Meanwhile, to further explore the effectiveness of fine-grained text descriptions for point cloud completion, we also build a text corpus with fine-grained descriptions, which can provide richer geometric details for 3D shapes. The rich text descriptions can be used for training and evaluating our network. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art point cloud completion networks.