Bin Cao

Hanyu Gao, Bin Cao, Yunyue Su et al.

Multiphase powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) analysis remains a fundamental bottleneck in structure identification, as real-world synthesis often produces complex mixtures whose constituent phases (components) cannot be reliably disentangled. While recent advances in representation-based crystal retrieval and generation suggest the possibility of inferring structures directly from PXRD, existing approaches largely assume single-phase inputs and break down in multiphase settings. Here, we present XDecomposer, a prior-free framework for joint decomposition and identification of multiphase XRD patterns without requiring candidate phase lists, structural templates, or prior knowledge of phase number. We formulate multiphase diffraction analysis as a set prediction problem, where the model infers an unordered set of phase-resolved components, their mixture proportions, and corresponding structural representations within a unified architecture. A phase-query-driven decomposition mechanism, together with diffraction-consistent physical reconstruction, enables accurate source separation while preserving crystallographic fidelity. Extensive experiments on both simulated and experimental datasets show that XDecomposer substantially improves reconstruction accuracy and phase identification across diverse chemical systems, while maintaining strong generalization to unseen mixtures. These results provide a practical route toward data-driven, source-resolved multiphase XRD analysis and reduce long-standing dependence on prior-guided iteratively phase matching. The code is openly available at https://github.com/Licht0812/XDecomposer

Bin Cao, Sipeng Zheng, Hao Luo et al.

Text-to-motion (T2M) generation aims to create realistic human movements from text descriptions, with promising applications in animation and robotics. Despite recent progress, current T2M models perform poorly on unseen text descriptions due to the small scale and limited diversity of existing motion datasets. To address this problem, we introduce OpenT2M, a million-level, high-quality, and open-source motion dataset containing over 2800 hours of human motion. Each sequence undergoes rigorous quality control through physical feasibility validation and multi-granularity filtering, with detailed second-wise text annotations. We also develop an automated pipeline for creating long-horizon sequences, enabling complex motion generation. Building upon OpenT2M, we introduce MonoFrill, a pretrained motion model that achieves compelling T2M results without complicated designs or technique tricks as "frills". Its core component is 2D-PRQ, a novel motion tokenizer that captures spatiotemporal dependencies by dividing the human body into biology parts. Experiments show that OpenT2M significantly improves generalization of existing T2M models, while 2D-PRQ achieves superior reconstruction and strong zero-shot performance. We expect OpenT2M and MonoFrill will advance the T2M field by addressing longstanding data quality and benchmarking challenges.

Henghui Ding, Lingyi Hong, Chang Liu et al.

Despite the promising performance of current video segmentation models on existing benchmarks, these models still struggle with complex scenes. In this paper, we introduce the 6th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation (LSVOS) challenge in conjunction with ECCV 2024 workshop. This year's challenge includes two tasks: Video Object Segmentation (VOS) and Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS). In this year, we replace the classic YouTube-VOS and YouTube-RVOS benchmark with latest datasets MOSE, LVOS, and MeViS to assess VOS under more challenging complex environments. This year's challenge attracted 129 registered teams from more than 20 institutes across over 8 countries. This report include the challenge and dataset introduction, and the methods used by top 7 teams in two tracks. More details can be found in our homepage https://lsvos.github.io/.

Huaizhe Liu, Xinyi Zhuang, Jiaqi Wu et al.

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) powered by Generative Diffusion Models (GDMs) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for automated content creation. To satisfy the stringent latency requirements of AIGC services in many edge intelligence scenarios (e.g., smart cities), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) provides critical computational support by deploying GDMs at edge servers (ES) close to end users. This paper investigates an MEC-enabled AIGC network comprising multiple ES, wireless access points (APs), and mobile users (UEs) with heterogeneous latency and accuracy demands. We formulate a Joint Communication Association and Computation Offloading (JCACO) game, where each UE strategically selects its serving AP, ES, and inference steps to minimize the overall service completion time while meeting accuracy constraints. The problem is challenging due to the network dynamics and the incomplete information. We prove that the JCACO game is a potential game under both complete and stochastic information settings, ensuring the existence of Nash Equilibrium (NE) in both cases. To derive the NE efficiently, we develop a distributed Multi-Agent Stochastic Learning (MASL) algorithm that provably converges to the NE with strict performance guarantees. Unlike conventional best-response schemes, MASL requires neither the knowledge of other players' strategies nor global network information, making it fully distributed and adaptive to dynamic environments. We further provide a strict theoretical convergence analysis for MASL by using Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). Simulation results demonstrate that MASL significantly reduces service completion time compared with benchmark methods while satisfying accuracy constraints, confirming its effectiveness and practicality for real-world MEC-enabled AIGC networks.

Zhixun Li, Bin Cao, Rui Jiao et al.

Materials are the foundation of modern society, underpinning advancements in energy, electronics, healthcare, transportation, and infrastructure. The ability to discover and design new materials with tailored properties is critical to solving some of the most pressing global challenges. In recent years, the growing availability of high-quality materials data combined with rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has opened new opportunities for accelerating materials discovery. Data-driven generative models provide a powerful tool for materials design by directly create novel materials that satisfy predefined property requirements. Despite the proliferation of related work, there remains a notable lack of up-to-date and systematic surveys in this area. To fill this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in AI-driven materials generation. We first organize various types of materials and illustrate multiple representations of crystalline materials. We then provide a detailed summary and taxonomy of current AI-driven materials generation approaches. Furthermore, we discuss the common evaluation metrics and summarize open-source codes and benchmark datasets. Finally, we conclude with potential future directions and challenges in this fast-growing field. The related sources can be found at https://github.com/ZhixunLEE/Awesome-AI-for-Materials-Generation.

Bin Cao, Yisi Zhang, Hanyi Wang et al.

Referring Video Object Segmentation is an emerging multi-modal task that aims to segment objects in the video given a natural language expression. In this work, we build two instance-centric models and fuse predicted results from frame-level and instance-level. First, we introduce instance mask into the DETR-based model for query initialization to achieve temporal enhancement and employ SAM for spatial refinement. Secondly, we build an instance retrieval model conducting binary instance mask classification whether the instance is referred. Finally, we fuse predicted results and our method achieved a score of 52.67 J&F in the validation phase and 60.36 J&F in the test phase, securing the final ranking of 3rd place in the 6-th LSVOS Challenge RVOS Track.

Hangle Hu, Chenyu Hou, Bin Cao et al.

While Text-to-SQL remains the dominant approach for database interaction, real-world analytics increasingly require the flexibility of general-purpose programming languages such as Python or Pandas to manage file-based data and complex analytical workflows. Despite this growing need, the reliability of Text-to-Python in core data retrieval remains underexplored relative to the mature SQL ecosystem. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-Python, a benchmark designed for cross-paradigm evaluation. We systematically refined the original dataset to reduce annotation noise and align execution semantics, thereby establishing a consistent and standardized baseline for comparison. Our analysis reveals a fundamental paradigmatic divergence: whereas SQL leverages implicit DBMS behaviors through its declarative structure, Python requires explicit procedural logic, making it highly sensitive to underspecified user intent. To mitigate this challenge, we propose the Logic Completion Framework (LCF), which resolves ambiguity by incorporating latent domain knowledge into the generation process. Experimental results show that (1) performance differences primarily stem from missing domain context rather than inherent limitations in code generation, and (2) when these gaps are addressed, Text-to-Python achieves performance parity with Text-to-SQL. These findings establish Python as a viable foundation for analytical agents-provided that systems effectively ground ambiguous natural language inputs in executable logical specifications. Resources are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Bird-Python-43B7/.

Jiaxing Wang, Yifeng Yu, Jiahan Song et al.

Next activity prediction represents a fundamental challenge for optimizing business processes in service-oriented architectures such as microservices environments, distributed enterprise systems, and cloud-native platforms, which enables proactive resource allocation and dynamic service composition. Despite the prevalence of sequence-based methods, these approaches fail to capture non-sequential relationships that arise from parallel executions and conditional dependencies. Even though graph-based approaches address structural preservation, they suffer from homogeneous representations and static structures that apply uniform modeling strategies regardless of individual process complexity characteristics. To address these limitations, we introduce RLHGNN, a novel framework that transforms event logs into heterogeneous process graphs with three distinct edge types grounded in established process mining theory. Our approach creates four flexible graph structures by selectively combining these edges to accommodate different process complexities, and employs reinforcement learning formulated as a Markov Decision Process to automatically determine the optimal graph structure for each specific process instance. RLHGNN then applies heterogeneous graph convolution with relation-specific aggregation strategies to effectively predict the next activity. This adaptive methodology enables precise modeling of both sequential and non-sequential relationships in service interactions. Comprehensive evaluation on six real-world datasets demonstrates that RLHGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, it maintains an inference latency of approximately 1 ms per prediction, representing a highly practical solution suitable for real-time business process monitoring applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/Joker3993/RLHGNN.

Qianshan Wei, Jiaqi Li, Zihan You et al.

Differential Privacy (DP) is a widely adopted technique, valued for its effectiveness in protecting the privacy of task-specific datasets, making it a critical tool for large language models. However, its effectiveness in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains uncertain. Applying Differential Privacy (DP) inherently introduces substantial computation overhead, a concern particularly relevant for MLLMs which process extensive textual and visual data. Furthermore, a critical challenge of DP is that the injected noise, necessary for privacy, scales with parameter dimensionality, leading to pronounced model degradation; This trade-off between privacy and utility complicates the application of Differential Privacy (DP) to complex architectures like MLLMs. To address these, we propose Dual-Priv Pruning, a framework that employs two complementary pruning mechanisms for DP fine-tuning in MLLMs: (i) visual token pruning to reduce input dimensionality by removing redundant visual information, and (ii) gradient-update pruning during the DP optimization process. This second mechanism selectively prunes parameter updates based on the magnitude of noisy gradients, aiming to mitigate noise impact and improve utility. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results with minimal performance degradation. In terms of computational efficiency, our approach consistently utilizes less memory than standard DP-SGD. While requiring only 1.74% more memory than zeroth-order methods which suffer from severe performance issues on A100 GPUs, our method demonstrates leading memory efficiency on H20 GPUs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore DP fine-tuning in MLLMs. Our code is coming soon.

Bin Cao, Qian Zhang, Zhenjie Feng et al.

Artificial intelligence can rapidly propose candidate phases and structures from X-ray diffraction (XRD), but these hypotheses often fail in downstream refinement because peak intensities cannot be stably assigned under severe overlap and diffraction consistency is enforced only weakly. Here we introduce WPEM, a physics-constrained whole-pattern decomposition and refinement workflow that turns Bragg's law into an explicit constraint within a batch expectation--maximization framework. WPEM models the full profile as a probabilistic mixture density and iteratively infers component-resolved intensities while keeping peak centres Bragg-consistent, producing a continuous, physically admissible intensity representation that remains stable in heavily overlapped regions and in the presence of mixed radiation or multiple phases. We benchmark WPEM on standard reference patterns (\ce{PbSO4} and \ce{Tb2BaCoO5}), where it yields lower $R_{\mathrm{p}}$/$R_{\mathrm{wp}}$ than widely used packages (FullProf and TOPAS) under matched refinement conditions. We further demonstrate generality across realistic experimental scenarios, including phase-resolved decomposition of a multiphase Ti--15Nb thin film, quantitative recovery of \ce{NaCl}--\ce{Li2CO3} mixture compositions, separation of crystalline peaks from amorphous halos in semicrystalline polymers, high-throughput operando lattice tracking in layered cathodes, automated refinement of a compositionally disordered Ru--Mn oxide solid solution (CCDC 2530452), and quantitative phase-resolved deciphering of an ancient Egyptian make-up sample from synchrotron powder XRD. By providing Bragg-consistent, uncertainty-aware intensity partitioning as a refinement-ready interface, WPEM closes the gap between AI-generated hypotheses and diffraction-admissible structure refinement on challenging XRD data.

Bin Cao, Huixian Lu, Chenwen Ma et al.

Complex tables with multi-level headers, merged cells and heterogeneous layouts pose persistent challenges for LLMs in both understanding and reasoning. Existing approaches typically rely on table linearization or normalized grid modeling. However, these representations struggle to explicitly capture hierarchical structures and cross-dimensional dependencies, which can lead to misalignment between structural semantics and textual representations for non-standard tables. To address this issue, we propose an Orthogonal Hierarchical Decomposition (OHD) framework that constructs structure-preserving input representations of complex tables for LLMs. OHD introduces an Orthogonal Tree Induction (OTI) method based on spatial--semantic co-constraints, which decomposes irregular tables into a column tree and a row tree to capture vertical and horizontal hierarchical dependencies, respectively. Building on this representation, we design a dual-pathway association protocol to symmetrically reconstruct semantic lineage of each cell, and incorporate an LLM as a semantic arbitrator to align multi-level semantic information. We evaluate OHD framework on two complex table question answering benchmarks, AITQA and HiTab. Experimental results show that OHD consistently outperforms existing representation paradigms across multiple evaluation metrics.

Zhizhi Peng, Taotao Wang, Chonghe Zhao et al.

As machine learning technologies advance rapidly across various domains, concerns over data privacy and model security have grown significantly. These challenges are particularly pronounced when models are trained and deployed on cloud platforms or third-party servers due to the computational resource limitations of users' end devices. In response, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology has emerged as a promising solution, enabling effective validation of model performance and authenticity in both training and inference processes without disclosing sensitive data. Thus, ZKP ensures the verifiability and security of machine learning models, making it a valuable tool for privacy-preserving AI. Although some research has explored the verifiable machine learning solutions that exploit ZKP, a comprehensive survey and summary of these efforts remain absent. This survey paper aims to bridge this gap by reviewing and analyzing all the existing Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (ZKML) research from June 2017 to December 2024. We begin by introducing the concept of ZKML and outlining its ZKP algorithmic setups under three key categories: verifiable training, verifiable inference, and verifiable testing. Next, we provide a comprehensive categorization of existing ZKML research within these categories and analyze the works in detail. Furthermore, we explore the implementation challenges faced in this field and discuss the improvement works to address these obstacles. Additionally, we highlight several commercial applications of ZKML technology. Finally, we propose promising directions for future advancements in this domain.

Bin Cao, Jianhao Yuan, Yexin Liu et al.

In the rapidly evolving area of image synthesis, a serious challenge is the presence of complex artifacts that compromise perceptual realism of synthetic images. To alleviate artifacts and improve quality of synthetic images, we fine-tune Vision-Language Model (VLM) as artifact classifier to automatically identify and classify a wide range of artifacts and provide supervision for further optimizing generative models. Specifically, we develop a comprehensive artifact taxonomy and construct a dataset of synthetic images with artifact annotations for fine-tuning VLM, named SynArtifact-1K. The fine-tuned VLM exhibits superior ability of identifying artifacts and outperforms the baseline by 25.66%. To our knowledge, this is the first time such end-to-end artifact classification task and solution have been proposed. Finally, we leverage the output of VLM as feedback to refine the generative model for alleviating artifacts. Visualization results and user study demonstrate that the quality of images synthesized by the refined diffusion model has been obviously improved.

Chaojie Sun, Bin Cao, Tiantian Li et al.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), growing efforts have been made on LLM-based table retrieval. However, existing studies typically focus on single-table query, and implement it by similarity matching after encoding the entire table. These methods usually result in low accuracy due to their coarse-grained encoding which incorporates much query-irrelated data, and are also inefficient when dealing with large tables, failing to fully utilize the reasoning capabilities of LLM. Further, multi-table query is under-explored in retrieval tasks. To this end, we propose a hierarchical multi-table query method based on LLM: Fine-Grained Multi-Table Retrieval FGTR, a new retrieval paradigm that employs a human-like reasoning strategy. Through hierarchical reasoning, FGTR first identifies relevant schema elements and then retrieves the corresponding cell contents, ultimately constructing a concise and accurate sub-table that aligns with the given query. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of FGTR, we construct two new benchmark datasets based on Spider and BIRD . Experimental results show that FGTR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, improving the F_2 metric by 18% on Spider and 21% on BIRD, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing fine-grained retrieval and its potential to improve end-to-end performance on table-based downstream tasks.

Daniel Hollarek, Henrik Schopmans, Jona Östreicher et al.

Powder X-ray diffraction (pXRD) experiments are a cornerstone for materials structure characterization. Despite their widespread application, analyzing pXRD diffractograms still presents a significant challenge to automation and a bottleneck in high-throughput discovery in self-driving labs. Machine learning promises to resolve this bottleneck by enabling automated powder diffraction analysis. A notable difficulty in applying machine learning to this domain is the lack of sufficiently sized experimental datasets, which has constrained researchers to train primarily on simulated data. However, models trained on simulated pXRD patterns showed limited generalization to experimental patterns, particularly for low-quality experimental patterns with high noise levels and elevated backgrounds. With the Open Experimental Powder X-Ray Diffraction Database (opXRD), we provide an openly available and easily accessible dataset of labeled and unlabeled experimental powder diffractograms. Labeled opXRD data can be used to evaluate the performance of models on experimental data and unlabeled opXRD data can help improve the performance of models on experimental data, e.g. through transfer learning methods. We collected 92552 diffractograms, 2179 of them labeled, from a wide spectrum of materials classes. We hope this ongoing effort can guide machine learning research toward fully automated analysis of pXRD data and thus enable future self-driving materials labs.

Boyuan Li, Sipeng Zheng, Bin Cao et al.

Extracting human motion from large-scale web videos offers a scalable solution to the data scarcity issue in character animation. However, some human parts in many video frames cannot be seen due to off-screen captures or occlusions. It brings a dilemma: discarding the data missing any part limits scale and diversity, while retaining it compromises data quality and model performance. To address this problem, we propose leveraging credible part-level data extracted from videos to enhance motion generation via a robust part-aware masked autoregression model. First, we decompose a human body into five parts and detect the parts clearly seen in a video frame as "credible". Second, the credible parts are encoded into latent tokens by our proposed part-aware variational autoencoder. Third, we propose a robust part-level masked generation model to predict masked credible parts, while ignoring those noisy parts. In addition, we contribute K700-M, a challenging new benchmark comprising approximately 200k real-world motion sequences, for evaluation. Experimental results indicate that our method successfully outperforms baselines on both clean and noisy datasets in terms of motion quality, semantic consistency and diversity. Project page: https://boyuaner.github.io/ropar-main/

Bin Cao, Yang Liu, Longhan Zhang et al.

Crystal property prediction, governed by quantum mechanical principles, is computationally prohibitive to solve exactly for large many-body systems using traditional density functional theory. While machine learning models have emerged as efficient approximations for large-scale applications, their performance is strongly influenced by the choice of atomic representation. Although modern graph-based approaches have progressively incorporated more structural information, they often fail to capture long-term atomic interactions due to finite receptive fields and local encoding schemes. This limitation leads to distinct crystals being mapped to identical representations, hindering accurate property prediction. To address this, we introduce PRDNet that leverages unique reciprocal-space diffraction besides graph representations. To enhance sensitivity to elemental and environmental variations, we employ a data-driven pseudo-particle to generate a synthetic diffraction pattern. PRDNet ensures full invariance to crystallographic symmetries. Extensive experiments are conducted on Materials Project, JARVIS-DFT, and MatBench, demonstrating that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Bin Cao, Sipeng Zheng, Ye Wang et al.

Human motion generation has emerged as a critical technology with transformative potential for real-world applications. However, existing vision-language-motion models (VLMMs) face significant limitations that hinder their practical deployment. We identify controllability as a main bottleneck, manifesting in five key aspects: inadequate response to diverse human commands, limited pose initialization capabilities, poor performance on long-term sequences, insufficient handling of unseen scenarios, and lack of fine-grained control over individual body parts. To overcome these limitations, we present Being-M0.5, the first real-time, controllable VLMM that achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple motion generation tasks. Our approach is built upon HuMo100M, the largest and most comprehensive human motion dataset to date, comprising over 5 million self-collected motion sequences, 100 million multi-task instructional instances, and detailed part-level annotations that address a critical gap in existing datasets. We introduce a novel part-aware residual quantization technique for motion tokenization that enables precise, granular control over individual body parts during generation. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates Being-M0.5's superior performance across diverse motion benchmarks, while comprehensive efficiency analysis confirms its real-time capabilities. Our contributions include design insights and detailed computational analysis to guide future development of practical motion generators. We believe that HuMo100M and Being-M0.5 represent significant advances that will accelerate the adoption of motion generation technologies in real-world applications. The project page is available at https://beingbeyond.github.io/Being-M0.5.

Tianming Zhang, Renbo Zhang, Zhengyi Yang et al.

Temporal Betweenness Centrality (TBC) measures how often a node appears on optimal temporal paths, reflecting its importance in temporal networks. However, exact computation is highly expensive, and real-world TBC distributions are extremely imbalanced. The severe imbalance leads learning-based models to overfit to zero-centrality nodes, resulting in inaccurate TBC predictions and failure to identify truly central nodes. Existing graph neural network (GNN) methods either fail to handle such imbalance or ignore temporal dependencies altogether. To address these issues, we propose a scalable and inductive contrastive learning-based GNN (CLGNN) for accurate and efficient TBC prediction. CLGNN builds an instance graph to preserve path validity and temporal order, then encodes structural and temporal features using dual aggregation, i.e., mean and edge-to-node multi-head attention mechanisms, enhanced by temporal path count and time encodings. A stability-based clustering-guided contrastive module (KContrastNet) is introduced to separate high-, median-, and low-centrality nodes in representation space, mitigating class imbalance, while a regression module (ValueNet) estimates TBC values. CLGNN also supports multiple optimal path definitions to accommodate diverse temporal semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CLGNN across diverse benchmarks. CLGNN achieves up to a 663.7~$\times$ speedup compared to state-of-the-art exact TBC computation methods. It outperforms leading static GNN baselines with up to 31.4~$\times$ lower MAE and 16.7~$\times$ higher Spearman correlation, and surpasses state-of-the-art temporal GNNs with up to 5.7~$\times$ lower MAE and 3.9~$\times$ higher Spearman correlation.

Chen Yang, Ruping Xu, Ruizhe Li et al.

Process mining aims to discover, monitor and optimize the actual behaviors of real processes. While prior work has mainly focused on extracting procedural action flows from instructional texts, rule flows embedded in business documents remain underexplored. To this end, we introduce a novel annotated Chinese dataset, BPRF, which contains 50 business process documents with 326 explicitly labeled business rules across multiple domains. Each rule is represented as a <Condition, Action> pair, and we annotate logical dependencies between rules (sequential, conditional, or parallel). We also propose ExIde, a framework for automatic business rule extraction and dependency relationship identification using large language models (LLMs). We evaluate ExIde using 12 state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs on the BPRF dataset, benchmarking performance on both rule extraction and dependency classification tasks of current LLMs. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of ExIde in extracting structured business rules and analyzing their interdependencies for current SOTA LLMs, paving the way for more automated and interpretable business process automation.

Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Yunchao Wei et al.

Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild Challenge (PVUW) focus on complex video understanding. In this CVPR 2024 workshop, we add two new tracks, Complex Video Object Segmentation Track based on MOSE dataset and Motion Expression guided Video Segmentation track based on MeViS dataset. In the two new tracks, we provide additional videos and annotations that feature challenging elements, such as the disappearance and reappearance of objects, inconspicuous small objects, heavy occlusions, and crowded environments in MOSE. Moreover, we provide a new motion expression guided video segmentation dataset MeViS to study the natural language-guided video understanding in complex environments. These new videos, sentences, and annotations enable us to foster the development of a more comprehensive and robust pixel-level understanding of video scenes in complex environments and realistic scenarios. The MOSE challenge had 140 registered teams in total, 65 teams participated the validation phase and 12 teams made valid submissions in the final challenge phase. The MeViS challenge had 225 registered teams in total, 50 teams participated the validation phase and 5 teams made valid submissions in the final challenge phase.

Bin Cao, Yisi Zhang, Xuanxu Lin et al.

Motion Expression guided Video Segmentation is a challenging task that aims at segmenting objects in the video based on natural language expressions with motion descriptions. Unlike the previous referring video object segmentation (RVOS), this task focuses more on the motion in video content for language-guided video object segmentation, requiring an enhanced ability to model longer temporal, motion-oriented vision-language data. In this report, based on the RVOS methods, we successfully introduce mask information obtained from the video instance segmentation model as preliminary information for temporal enhancement and employ SAM for spatial refinement. Finally, our method achieved a score of 49.92 J &F in the validation phase and 54.20 J &F in the test phase, securing the final ranking of 2nd in the MeViS Track at the CVPR 2024 PVUW Challenge.

Bin Cao, Zixin Wang, Long Zhang et al.

In the past decade, blockchain has shown a promising vision greatly to build the trust without any powerful third party in a secure, decentralized and salable manner. However, due to the wide application and future development from cryptocurrency to Internet of Things, blockchain is an extremely complex system enabling integration with mathematics, finance, computer science, communication and network engineering, etc. As a result, it is a challenge for engineer, expert and researcher to fully understand the blockchain process in a systematic view from top to down. First, this article introduces how blockchain works, the research activity and challenge, and illustrates the roadmap involving the classic methodology with typical blockchain use cases and topics. Second, in blockchain system, how to adopt stochastic process, game theory, optimization, machine learning and cryptography to study blockchain running process and design blockchain protocol/algorithm are discussed in details. Moreover, the advantage and limitation using these methods are also summarized as the guide of future work to further considered. Finally, some remaining problems from technical, commercial and political views are discussed as the open issues. The main findings of this article will provide an overview in a methodology perspective to study theoretical model for blockchain fundamentals understanding, design network service for blockchain-based mechanisms and algorithms, as well as apply blockchain for Internet of Things, etc.

Shuo Yuan, Bin Cao, Yao Sun et al.

Introducing blockchain into Federated Learning (FL) to build a trusted edge computing environment for transmission and learning has attracted widespread attention as a new decentralized learning pattern. However, traditional consensus mechanisms and architectures of blockchain systems face significant challenges in handling large-scale FL tasks, especially on Internet of Things (IoT) devices, due to their substantial resource consumption, limited transaction throughput, and complex communication requirements. To address these challenges, this paper proposes ChainFL, a novel two-layer blockchain-driven FL system. It splits the IoT network into multiple shards within the subchain layer, effectively reducing the scale of information exchange, and employs a Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based mainchain as the mainchain layer, enabling parallel and asynchronous cross-shard validation. Furthermore, the FL procedure is customized to integrate deeply with blockchain technology, and a modified DAG consensus mechanism is designed to mitigate distortion caused by abnormal models. To provide a proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation, multiple subchains based on Hyperledger Fabric and a self-developed DAG-based mainchain are deployed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChainFL significantly surpasses conventional FL systems, showing up to a 14% improvement in training efficiency and a threefold increase in robustness.

Mingrui Cao, Long Zhang, Bin Cao

Due to the distributed characteristics of Federated Learning (FL), the vulnerability of global model and coordination of devices are the main obstacle. As a promising solution of decentralization, scalability and security, leveraging blockchain in FL has attracted much attention in recent years. However, the traditional consensus mechanisms designed for blockchain like Proof of Work (PoW) would cause extreme resource consumption, which reduces the efficiency of FL greatly, especially when the participating devices are wireless and resource-limited. In order to address device asynchrony and anomaly detection in FL while avoiding the extra resource consumption caused by blockchain, this paper introduces a framework for empowering FL using Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based blockchain systematically (DAG-FL). Accordingly, DAG-FL is first introduced from a three-layer architecture in details, and then two algorithms DAG-FL Controlling and DAG-FL Updating are designed running on different nodes to elaborate the operation of DAG-FL consensus mechanism. After that, a Poisson process model is formulated to discuss that how to set deployment parameters to maintain DAG-FL stably in different federated learning tasks. The extensive simulations and experiments show that DAG-FL can achieve better performance in terms of training efficiency and model accuracy compared with the typical existing on-device federated learning systems as the benchmarks.

Lei Zhang, Hao Xu, Oluwakayode Onireti et al.

Blockchain is built on a peer-to-peer network that relies on frequent communications among the distributively located nodes. In particular, the consensus mechanisms (CMs), which play a pivotal role in blockchain, are communication resource-demanding and largely determines blockchain security bound and other key performance metrics such as transaction throughput, latency and scalability. Most blockchain systems are designed in a stable wired communication network running in advanced devices under the assumption of sufficient communication resource provision. However, it is envisioned that the majority of the blockchain node peers will be connected through the wireless network in the future. Constrained by the highly dynamic wireless channel and scarce frequency spectrum, communication can significantly affect blockchain's key performance metrics. Hence, in this paper, we present wireless blockchain networks (WBN) under various commonly used CMs and we answer the question of how much communication resource is needed to run such a network. We first present the role of communication in the four stages of the blockchain procedure. We then discuss the relationship between the communication resource provision and the WBNs performance, for three of the most used blockchain CMs namely, Proof-of-Work (PoW), practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) and Raft. Finally, we provide analytical and simulated results to show the impact of the communication resource provision on blockchain performance.

Zheqian Chen, Rongqin Yang, Bin Cao et al.

Machine Comprehension (MC) is a challenging task in Natural Language Processing field, which aims to guide the machine to comprehend a passage and answer the given question. Many existing approaches on MC task are suffering the inefficiency in some bottlenecks, such as insufficient lexical understanding, complex question-passage interaction, incorrect answer extraction and so on. In this paper, we address these problems from the viewpoint of how humans deal with reading tests in a scientific way. Specifically, we first propose a novel lexical gating mechanism to dynamically combine the words and characters representations. We then guide the machines to read in an interactive way with attention mechanism and memory network. Finally we add a checking layer to refine the answer for insurance. The extensive experiments on two popular datasets SQuAD and TriviaQA show that our method exceeds considerable performance than most state-of-the-art solutions at the time of submission.

Boyuan Pan, Hao Li, Zhou Zhao et al.

Machine comprehension(MC) style question answering is a representative problem in natural language processing. Previous methods rarely spend time on the improvement of encoding layer, especially the embedding of syntactic information and name entity of the words, which are very crucial to the quality of encoding. Moreover, existing attention methods represent each query word as a vector or use a single vector to represent the whole query sentence, neither of them can handle the proper weight of the key words in query sentence. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural network architecture called Multi-layer Embedding with Memory Network(MEMEN) for machine reading task. In the encoding layer, we employ classic skip-gram model to the syntactic and semantic information of the words to train a new kind of embedding layer. We also propose a memory network of full-orientation matching of the query and passage to catch more pivotal information. Experiments show that our model has competitive results both from the perspectives of precision and efficiency in Stanford Question Answering Dataset(SQuAD) among all published results and achieves the state-of-the-art results on TriviaQA dataset.

Yu Zhang, Bin Cao, Dit-Yan Yeung

Collaborative filtering is an effective recommendation approach in which the preference of a user on an item is predicted based on the preferences of other users with similar interests. A big challenge in using collaborative filtering methods is the data sparsity problem which often arises because each user typically only rates very few items and hence the rating matrix is extremely sparse. In this paper, we address this problem by considering multiple collaborative filtering tasks in different domains simultaneously and exploiting the relationships between domains. We refer to it as a multi-domain collaborative filtering (MCF) problem. To solve the MCF problem, we propose a probabilistic framework which uses probabilistic matrix factorization to model the rating problem in each domain and allows the knowledge to be adaptively transferred across different domains by automatically learning the correlation between domains. We also introduce the link function for different domains to correct their biases. Experiments conducted on several real-world applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods when compared with some representative methods.