Xiang He

Cihan Xiao, Yiwen Shao, Chenxing Li et al.

Audio and omni-modal large language models exhibit impressive cross-modal reasoning capabilities. However, applying standard reinforcement learning post-training algorithms to these models exposes a critical structural vulnerability: methods like GRPO apply uniform policy gradients across all tokens, ignoring their unequal dependence on the non-text source modality. This exacerbates late-stage modality collapse during extended chain-of-thought generation, where models progressively abandon the primary source signal in favor of compressed textual priors, leading to confident but ungrounded hallucinations. To address this, we introduce Modality-Aware Policy Optimization (MAPO), a novel dual-branch reinforcement learning framework. First, MAPO dynamically concentrates the policy gradient on modality-critical tokens using a modality relevance mask, which is derived from the cross-modal differential entropy between an audio-ablated reference and the multimodal policy. Second, it integrates an auxiliary attention loss branch that applies a targeted, temporally scaled penalty to the model's internal attention distributions. This ensures the model actively sustains cross-modal grounding deep into the reasoning trace. Evaluations on complex audio reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MAPO substantially improves long-horizon reasoning fidelity and multimodal instruction following, achieving highly competitive performance and setting new state-of-the-art results on several key benchmarks among open-weight models. By relying strictly on native statistical signals rather than domain-specific inductive biases, MAPO offers a promising foundation for mitigating epistemic collapse across diverse multimodal systems.

Xiang He, Xiangxi Liu, Yang Li et al.

The audio-visual event localization task requires identifying concurrent visual and auditory events from unconstrained videos within a network model, locating them, and classifying their category. The efficient extraction and integration of audio and visual modal information have always been challenging in this field. In this paper, we introduce CACE-Net, which differs from most existing methods that solely use audio signals to guide visual information. We propose an audio-visual co-guidance attention mechanism that allows for adaptive bi-directional cross-modal attentional guidance between audio and visual information, thus reducing inconsistencies between modalities. Moreover, we have observed that existing methods have difficulty distinguishing between similar background and event and lack the fine-grained features for event classification. Consequently, we employ background-event contrast enhancement to increase the discrimination of fused feature and fine-tuned pre-trained model to extract more refined and discernible features from complex multimodal inputs. Specifically, we have enhanced the model's ability to discern subtle differences between event and background and improved the accuracy of event classification in our model. Experiments on the AVE dataset demonstrate that CACE-Net sets a new benchmark in the audio-visual event localization task, proving the effectiveness of our proposed methods in handling complex multimodal learning and event localization in unconstrained videos. Code is available at https://github.com/Brain-Cog-Lab/CACE-Net.

Xiang He, Dongcheng Zhao, Yang Li et al.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are rich in spatio-temporal dynamics and are suitable for processing event-based neuromorphic data. However, event-based datasets are usually less annotated than static datasets. This small data scale makes SNNs prone to overfitting and limits their performance. In order to improve the generalization ability of SNNs on event-based datasets, we use static images to assist SNN training on event data. In this paper, we first discuss the domain mismatch problem encountered when directly transferring networks trained on static datasets to event data. We argue that the inconsistency of feature distributions becomes a major factor hindering the effective transfer of knowledge from static images to event data. To address this problem, we propose solutions in terms of two aspects: feature distribution and training strategy. Firstly, we propose a knowledge transfer loss, which consists of domain alignment loss and spatio-temporal regularization. The domain alignment loss learns domain-invariant spatial features by reducing the marginal distribution distance between the static image and the event data. Spatio-temporal regularization provides dynamically learnable coefficients for domain alignment loss by using the output features of the event data at each time step as a regularization term. In addition, we propose a sliding training strategy, which gradually replaces static image inputs probabilistically with event data, resulting in a smoother and more stable training for the network. We validate our method on neuromorphic datasets, including N-Caltech101, CEP-DVS, and N-Omniglot. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves better performance on all datasets compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Brain-Cog-Lab/Transfer-for-DVS.

Yang Li, Xiang He, Yiting Dong et al.

Spiking neural network (SNN) has been attached to great importance due to the properties of high biological plausibility and low energy consumption on neuromorphic hardware. As an efficient method to obtain deep SNN, the conversion method has exhibited high performance on various large-scale datasets. However, it typically suffers from severe performance degradation and high time delays. In particular, most of the previous work focuses on simple classification tasks while ignoring the precise approximation to ANN output. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze the conversion errors and derive the harmful effects of time-varying extremes on synaptic currents. We propose the Spike Calibration (SpiCalib) to eliminate the damage of discrete spikes to the output distribution and modify the LIPooling to allow conversion of the arbitrary MaxPooling layer losslessly. Moreover, Bayesian optimization for optimal normalization parameters is proposed to avoid empirical settings. The experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance on classification, object detection, and segmentation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to obtain SNN comparable to ANN on these tasks simultaneously. Moreover, we only need 1/50 inference time of the previous work on the detection task and can achieve the same performance under 0.492$\times$ energy consumption of ANN on the segmentation task.

Xiang He, Yang Li, Dongcheng Zhao et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) can do inference with low power consumption due to their spike sparsity. ANN-SNN conversion is an efficient way to achieve deep SNNs by converting well-trained Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, the existing methods commonly use constant threshold for conversion, which prevents neurons from rapidly delivering spikes to deeper layers and causes high time delay. In addition, the same response for different inputs may result in information loss during the information transmission. Inspired by the biological model mechanism, we propose a multi-stage adaptive threshold (MSAT). Specifically, for each neuron, the dynamic threshold varies with firing history and input properties and is positively correlated with the average membrane potential and negatively correlated with the rate of depolarization. The self-adaptation to membrane potential and input allows a timely adjustment of the threshold to fire spike faster and transmit more information. Moreover, we analyze the Spikes of Inactivated Neurons error which is pervasive in early time steps and propose spike confidence accordingly as a measurement of confidence about the neurons that correctly deliver spikes. We use such spike confidence in early time steps to determine whether to elicit spike to alleviate this error. Combined with the proposed method, we examine the performance on non-trivial datasets CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. We also conduct sentiment classification and speech recognition experiments on the IDBM and Google speech commands datasets respectively. Experiments show near-lossless and lower latency ANN-SNN conversion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to build a biologically inspired multi-stage adaptive threshold for converted SNN, with comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while improving energy efficiency.

Guobin Shen, Dongcheng Zhao, Aorigele Bao et al.

Human beings often experience stress, which can significantly influence their performance. This study explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit stress responses similar to those of humans and whether their performance fluctuates under different stress-inducing prompts. To investigate this, we developed a novel set of prompts, termed StressPrompt, designed to induce varying levels of stress. These prompts were derived from established psychological frameworks and carefully calibrated based on ratings from human participants. We then applied these prompts to several LLMs to assess their responses across a range of tasks, including instruction-following, complex reasoning, and emotional intelligence. The findings suggest that LLMs, like humans, perform optimally under moderate stress, consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law. Notably, their performance declines under both low and high-stress conditions. Our analysis further revealed that these StressPrompts significantly alter the internal states of LLMs, leading to changes in their neural representations that mirror human responses to stress. This research provides critical insights into the operational robustness and flexibility of LLMs, demonstrating the importance of designing AI systems capable of maintaining high performance in real-world scenarios where stress is prevalent, such as in customer service, healthcare, and emergency response contexts. Moreover, this study contributes to the broader AI research community by offering a new perspective on how LLMs handle different scenarios and their similarities to human cognition.

Wenfu Wang, Chenxing Li, Liqiang Zhang et al.

In this work, we present Covo-Audio, a 7B-parameter end-to-end LALM that directly processes continuous audio inputs and generates audio outputs within a single unified architecture. Through large-scale curated pretraining and targeted post-training, Covo-Audio achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance among models of comparable scale across a broad spectrum of tasks, including speech-text modeling, spoken dialogue, speech understanding, audio understanding, and full-duplex voice interaction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the pretrained foundation model exhibits strong speech-text comprehension and semantic reasoning capabilities on multiple benchmarks, outperforming representative open-source models of comparable scale. Furthermore, Covo-Audio-Chat, the dialogue-oriented variant, demonstrates strong spoken conversational abilities, including understanding, contextual reasoning, instruction following, and generating contextually appropriate and empathetic responses, validating its applicability to real-world conversational assistant scenarios. Covo-Audio-Chat-FD, the evolved full-duplex model, achieves substantially superior performance on both spoken dialogue capabilities and full-duplex interaction behaviors, demonstrating its competence in practical robustness. To mitigate the high cost of deploying end-to-end LALMs for natural conversational systems, we propose an intelligence-speaker decoupling strategy that separates dialogue intelligence from voice rendering, enabling flexible voice customization with minimal text-to-speech (TTS) data while preserving dialogue performance. Overall, our results highlight the strong potential of 7B-scale models to integrate sophisticated audio intelligence with high-level semantic reasoning, and suggest a scalable path toward more capable and versatile LALMs.

Xiang He, Chenxing Li, Jinting Wang et al.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have made significant progress in audio understanding, yet they primarily operate as perception-and-answer systems without explicit reasoning processes. Existing methods for enhancing audio reasoning rely either on supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning, which is limited by training data quality, or on reinforcement learning (RL) with coarse rewards that do not directly evaluate reasoning quality. As a result, the generated reasoning chains often appear well-structured yet lack specific acoustic grounding. We propose Audio-DeepThinker, a framework built on two core ideas. First, we introduce a hybrid reasoning similarity reward that directly supervises the quality of generated reasoning chains by combining an LLM evaluator assessing logical path alignment, key step coverage, and analytical depth with an embedding similarity component enforcing semantic alignment with reference reasoning chains. Second, we propose a progressive two-stage curriculum that enables high-quality CoT reasoning to emerge through pure RL exploration, without any supervised reasoning fine-tuning, from an instruction-tuned model that possesses no prior chain-of-thought capability. Stage 1 trains on foundational audio QA with the hybrid reward to foster basic reasoning patterns, while Stage 2 shifts to acoustically challenging boundary cases with an LLM-only reward for greater reasoning diversity. Audio-DeepThinker achieves state-of-the-art results on MMAR (74.0%), MMAU-test-mini (78.5%), and MMSU (77.26%), winning 1st Place in the Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge (Single Model Track). Interpretability analyses further reveal that RL training primarily reshapes upper-layer MoE gating mechanisms and that reasoning tokens crystallize progressively in the upper transformer layers, offering mechanistic insights into how audio reasoning emerges through exploration.

Di Xu, Xiang He, Tonghua Su et al.

Deep neural network (DNN) partition is a research problem that involves splitting a DNN into multiple parts and offloading them to specific locations. Because of the recent advancement in multi-access edge computing and edge intelligence, DNN partition has been considered as a powerful tool for improving DNN inference performance when the computing resources of edge and end devices are limited and the remote transmission of data from these devices to clouds is costly. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the recent advances and challenges in DNN partition approaches over the cloud, edge, and end devices based on a detailed literature collection. We review how DNN partition works in various application scenarios, and provide a unified mathematical model of the DNN partition problem. We developed a five-dimensional classification framework for DNN partition approaches, consisting of deployment locations, partition granularity, partition constraints, optimization objectives, and optimization algorithms. Each existing DNN partition approache can be perfectly defined in this framework by instantiating each dimension into specific values. In addition, we suggest a set of metrics for comparing and evaluating the DNN partition approaches. Based on this, we identify and discuss research challenges that have not yet been investigated or fully addressed. We hope that this work helps DNN partition researchers by highlighting significant future research directions in this domain.

Xiaowei Song, Jv Zheng, Shiran Yuan et al.

In this paper, we present a Scale-adaptive method for Anti-aliasing Gaussian Splatting (SA-GS). While the state-of-the-art method Mip-Splatting needs modifying the training procedure of Gaussian splatting, our method functions at test-time and is training-free. Specifically, SA-GS can be applied to any pretrained Gaussian splatting field as a plugin to significantly improve the field's anti-alising performance. The core technique is to apply 2D scale-adaptive filters to each Gaussian during test time. As pointed out by Mip-Splatting, observing Gaussians at different frequencies leads to mismatches between the Gaussian scales during training and testing. Mip-Splatting resolves this issue using 3D smoothing and 2D Mip filters, which are unfortunately not aware of testing frequency. In this work, we show that a 2D scale-adaptive filter that is informed of testing frequency can effectively match the Gaussian scale, thus making the Gaussian primitive distribution remain consistent across different testing frequencies. When scale inconsistency is eliminated, sampling rates smaller than the scene frequency result in conventional jaggedness, and we propose to integrate the projected 2D Gaussian within each pixel during testing. This integration is actually a limiting case of super-sampling, which significantly improves anti-aliasing performance over vanilla Gaussian Splatting. Through extensive experiments using various settings and both bounded and unbounded scenes, we show SA-GS performs comparably with or better than Mip-Splatting. Note that super-sampling and integration are only effective when our scale-adaptive filtering is activated. Our codes, data and models are available at https://github.com/zsy1987/SA-GS.

Xiang He, Dongcheng Zhao, Yiting Dong et al.

Humans interpret and perceive the world by integrating sensory information from multiple modalities, such as vision and hearing. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as brain-inspired computational models, exhibit unique advantages in emulating the brain's information processing mechanisms. However, existing SNN models primarily focus on unimodal processing and lack efficient cross-modal information fusion, thereby limiting their effectiveness in real-world multimodal scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a semantic-alignment cross-modal residual learning (S-CMRL) framework, a Transformer-based multimodal SNN architecture designed for effective audio-visual integration. S-CMRL leverages a spatiotemporal spiking attention mechanism to extract complementary features across modalities, and incorporates a cross-modal residual learning strategy to enhance feature integration. Additionally, a semantic alignment optimization mechanism is introduced to align cross-modal features within a shared semantic space, improving their consistency and complementarity. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets CREMA-D, UrbanSound8K-AV, and MNISTDVS-NTIDIGITS demonstrate that S-CMRL significantly outperforms existing multimodal SNN methods, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Brain-Cog-Lab/S-CMRL.

Haochen Yuan, Yang Zhang, Xiang He et al.

With the rise of cloud-edge collaboration, recommendation services are increasingly trained in distributed environments. Federated Recommendation (FR) enables such multi-end collaborative training while preserving privacy by sharing model parameters instead of raw data. However, the large number of parameters, primarily due to the massive item embeddings, significantly hampers communication efficiency. While existing studies mainly focus on improving the efficiency of FR models, they largely overlook the issue of embedding parameter overhead. To address this gap, we propose a FR training framework with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) based embedding designed to reduce the volume of embedding parameters that need to be transmitted. Our approach offers a lightweight, plugin-style solution that can be seamlessly integrated into existing FR methods. In addition to incorporating common PEFT techniques such as LoRA and Hash-based encoding, we explore the use of Residual Quantized Variational Autoencoders (RQ-VAE) as a novel PEFT strategy within our framework. Extensive experiments across various FR model backbones and datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces communication overhead while improving accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/young1010/FedPEFT.

Xiang He, Peng Lin, Shaowei Cai

Integer Quadratic Programming (IQP) is an important problem in operations research. Local search is a powerful method for solving hard problems, but the research on local search algorithms for IQP solving is still on its early stage. This paper develops an efficient local search solver for solving general IQP, called LS-IQCQP. We propose four new local search operators for IQP that can handle quadratic terms in the objective function, constraints or both. Furthermore, a two-mode local search algorithm is introduced, utilizing newly designed scoring functions to enhance the search process. Experiments are conducted on standard IQP benchmarks QPLIB and MINLPLIB, comparing LS-IQCQP with several state-of-the-art IQP solvers. Experimental results demonstrate that LS-IQCQP is competitive with the most powerful commercial solver Gurobi and outperforms other state-of-the-art solvers. Moreover, LS-IQCQP has established 6 new records for QPLIB and MINLPLIB open instances.

Xiang He, Weiye Song, Yiming Wang et al.

Automatic retinal layer segmentation with medical images, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) images, serves as an important tool for diagnosing ophthalmic diseases. However, it is challenging to achieve accurate segmentation due to low contrast and blood flow noises presented in the images. In addition, the algorithm should be light-weight to be deployed for practical clinical applications. Therefore, it is desired to design a light-weight network with high performance for retinal layer segmentation. In this paper, we propose LightReSeg for retinal layer segmentation which can be applied to OCT images. Specifically, our approach follows an encoder-decoder structure, where the encoder part employs multi-scale feature extraction and a Transformer block for fully exploiting the semantic information of feature maps at all scales and making the features have better global reasoning capabilities, while the decoder part, we design a multi-scale asymmetric attention (MAA) module for preserving the semantic information at each encoder scale. The experiments show that our approach achieves a better segmentation performance compared to the current state-of-the-art method TransUnet with 105.7M parameters on both our collected dataset and two other public datasets, with only 3.3M parameters.

Alan Wake, Bei Chen, C. X. Lv et al. · tsinghua

This technical report presents Yi-Lightning, our latest flagship large language model (LLM). It achieves exceptional performance, ranking 6th overall on Chatbot Arena, with particularly strong results (2nd to 4th place) in specialized categories including Chinese, Math, Coding, and Hard Prompts. Yi-Lightning leverages an enhanced Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, featuring advanced expert segmentation and routing mechanisms coupled with optimized KV-caching techniques. Our development process encompasses comprehensive pre-training, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where we devise deliberate strategies for multi-stage training, synthetic data construction, and reward modeling. Furthermore, we implement RAISE (Responsible AI Safety Engine), a four-component framework to address safety issues across pre-training, post-training, and serving phases. Empowered by our scalable super-computing infrastructure, all these innovations substantially reduce training, deployment and inference costs while maintaining high-performance standards. With further evaluations on public academic benchmarks, Yi-Lightning demonstrates competitive performance against top-tier LLMs, while we observe a notable disparity between traditional, static benchmark results and real-world, dynamic human preferences. This observation prompts a critical reassessment of conventional benchmarks' utility in guiding the development of more intelligent and powerful AI systems for practical applications. Yi-Lightning is now available through our developer platform at https://platform.lingyiwanwu.com.

Yi Zeng, Feifei Zhao, Yuxuan Zhao et al.

The question "Can machines think?" and the Turing Test to assess whether machines could achieve human-level intelligence is one of the roots of AI. With the philosophical argument "I think, therefore I am", this paper challenge the idea of a "thinking machine" supported by current AIs since there is no sense of self in them. Current artificial intelligence is only seemingly intelligent information processing and does not truly understand or be subjectively aware of oneself and perceive the world with the self as human intelligence does. In this paper, we introduce a Brain-inspired and Self-based Artificial Intelligence (BriSe AI) paradigm. This BriSe AI paradigm is dedicated to coordinating various cognitive functions and learning strategies in a self-organized manner to build human-level AI models and robotic applications. Specifically, BriSe AI emphasizes the crucial role of the Self in shaping the future AI, rooted with a practical hierarchical Self framework, including Perception and Learning, Bodily Self, Autonomous Self, Social Self, and Conceptual Self. The hierarchical framework of the Self highlights self-based environment perception, self-bodily modeling, autonomous interaction with the environment, social interaction and collaboration with others, and even more abstract understanding of the Self. Furthermore, the positive mutual promotion and support among multiple levels of Self, as well as between Self and learning, enhance the BriSe AI's conscious understanding of information and flexible adaptation to complex environments, serving as a driving force propelling BriSe AI towards real Artificial General Intelligence.

Guobin Shen, Dongcheng Zhao, Linghao Feng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities but remain vulnerable to adversarial prompts known as jailbreaks, which can bypass safety alignment and elicit harmful outputs. Despite growing efforts in LLM safety research, existing evaluations are often fragmented, focused on isolated attack or defense techniques, and lack systematic, reproducible analysis. In this work, we introduce PandaGuard, a unified and modular framework that models LLM jailbreak safety as a multi-agent system comprising attackers, defenders, and judges. Our framework implements 19 attack methods and 12 defense mechanisms, along with multiple judgment strategies, all within a flexible plugin architecture supporting diverse LLM interfaces, multiple interaction modes, and configuration-driven experimentation that enhances reproducibility and practical deployment. Built on this framework, we develop PandaBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the interactions between these attack/defense methods across 49 LLMs and various judgment approaches, requiring over 3 billion tokens to execute. Our extensive evaluation reveals key insights into model vulnerabilities, defense cost-performance trade-offs, and judge consistency. We find that no single defense is optimal across all dimensions and that judge disagreement introduces nontrivial variance in safety assessments. We release the code, configurations, and evaluation results to support transparent and reproducible research in LLM safety.

Haibo Tong, Dongcheng Zhao, Guobin Shen et al.

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised significant safety concerns, particularly regarding "jailbreak" attacks that exploit adversarial prompts to bypass safety alignment mechanisms. Existing defense research primarily focuses on single-turn attacks, whereas multi-turn jailbreak attacks progressively break through safeguards through by concealing malicious intent and tactical manipulation, ultimately rendering conventional single-turn defenses ineffective. To address this critical challenge, we propose the Bidirectional Intention Inference Defense (BIID). The method integrates forward request-based intention inference with backward response-based intention retrospection, establishing a bidirectional synergy mechanism to detect risks concealed within seemingly benign inputs, thereby constructing a more robust guardrails that effectively prevents harmful content generation. The proposed method undergoes systematic evaluation compared with a no-defense baseline and seven representative defense methods across three LLMs and two safety benchmarks under 10 different attack methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) across both single-turn and multi-turn jailbreak attempts, outperforming all existing baseline methods while effectively maintaining practical utility. Notably, comparative experiments across three multi-turn safety datasets further validate the proposed model's significant advantages over other defense approaches.

Alex Reneau, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Zhongfang Zhuang et al.

In deep learning, processing multidimensional inputs (e.g., images, medical scans, and time series) is an important task that often requires flattening the inputs. We introduce $\mathit{NdLinear}$, a drop-in replacement for linear layers that operates directly on tensors, requiring no flattening. By applying transformations separately along each dimension, NdLinear preserves native data structure while achieving dramatic parameter reductions, often by orders of magnitude, with minimal memory overhead. We prove NdLinear maintains expressivity through structured Tucker decomposition while preserving VC-dimension scaling. Extensive experiments demonstrate NdLinear's capacity to achieve significant parameter reductions with substantial wall-clock efficiency gains and minimal memory overhead. For instance, our $\mathit{NdLinear-LoRA}$ matches or exceeds standard LoRA on language reasoning tasks using up to $9\times$ fewer parameters. Experiments across CNNs, RNNs, Transformers, and MLPs on vision, language, time-series, and tabular tasks consistently demonstrate NdLinear's efficiency gains. While excelling at axis-separable tasks, NdLinear has limitations with entangled spatial interactions. By processing data in its original N-dimensional form, NdLinear provides a theoretically grounded, practical component for building more efficient neural architectures.

Xuanli He, Iman Keivanloo, Yi Xu et al.

Pre-training and then fine-tuning large language models is commonly used to achieve state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, most pre-trained models suffer from low inference speed. Deploying such large models to applications with latency constraints is challenging. In this work, we focus on accelerating the inference via conditional computations. To achieve this, we propose a novel idea, Magic Pyramid (MP), to reduce both width-wise and depth-wise computation via token pruning and early exiting for Transformer-based models, particularly BERT. The former manages to save the computation via removing non-salient tokens, while the latter can fulfill the computation reduction by terminating the inference early before reaching the final layer, if the exiting condition is met. Our empirical studies demonstrate that compared to previous state of arts, MP is not only able to achieve a speed-adjustable inference but also to surpass token pruning and early exiting by reducing up to 70% giga floating point operations (GFLOPs) with less than 0.5% accuracy drop. Token pruning and early exiting express distinctive preferences to sequences with different lengths. However, MP is capable of achieving an average of 8.06x speedup on two popular text classification tasks, regardless of the sizes of the inputs.

Rongmei Lin, Xiang He, Jie Feng et al.

Understanding product attributes plays an important role in improving online shopping experience for customers and serves as an integral part for constructing a product knowledge graph. Most existing methods focus on attribute extraction from text description or utilize visual information from product images such as shape and color. Compared to the inputs considered in prior works, a product image in fact contains more information, represented by a rich mixture of words and visual clues with a layout carefully designed to impress customers. This work proposes a more inclusive framework that fully utilizes these different modalities for attribute extraction. Inspired by recent works in visual question answering, we use a transformer based sequence to sequence model to fuse representations of product text, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens and visual objects detected in the product image. The framework is further extended with the capability to extract attribute value across multiple product categories with a single model, by training the decoder to predict both product category and attribute value and conditioning its output on product category. The model provides a unified attribute extraction solution desirable at an e-commerce platform that offers numerous product categories with a diverse body of product attributes. We evaluated the model on two product attributes, one with many possible values and one with a small set of possible values, over 14 product categories and found the model could achieve 15% gain on the Recall and 10% gain on the F1 score compared to existing methods using text-only features.

Xin Luna Dong, Xiang He, Andrey Kan et al.

Can one build a knowledge graph (KG) for all products in the world? Knowledge graphs have firmly established themselves as valuable sources of information for search and question answering, and it is natural to wonder if a KG can contain information about products offered at online retail sites. There have been several successful examples of generic KGs, but organizing information about products poses many additional challenges, including sparsity and noise of structured data for products, complexity of the domain with millions of product types and thousands of attributes, heterogeneity across large number of categories, as well as large and constantly growing number of products. We describe AutoKnow, our automatic (self-driving) system that addresses these challenges. The system includes a suite of novel techniques for taxonomy construction, product property identification, knowledge extraction, anomaly detection, and synonym discovery. AutoKnow is (a) automatic, requiring little human intervention, (b) multi-scalable, scalable in multiple dimensions (many domains, many products, and many attributes), and (c) integrative, exploiting rich customer behavior logs. AutoKnow has been operational in collecting product knowledge for over 11K product types.

Xiang He, Sibei Yang, Guanbin Li? et al.

Recent progress in biomedical image segmentation based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has drawn much attention. However, its vulnerability towards adversarial samples cannot be overlooked. This paper is the first one that discovers that all the CNN-based state-of-the-art biomedical image segmentation models are sensitive to adversarial perturbations. This limits the deployment of these methods in safety-critical biomedical fields. In this paper, we discover that global spatial dependencies and global contextual information in a biomedical image can be exploited to defend against adversarial attacks. To this end, non-local context encoder (NLCE) is proposed to model short- and long range spatial dependencies and encode global contexts for strengthening feature activations by channel-wise attention. The NLCE modules enhance the robustness and accuracy of the non-local context encoding network (NLCEN), which learns robust enhanced pyramid feature representations with NLCE modules, and then integrates the information across different levels. Experiments on both lung and skin lesion segmentation datasets have demonstrated that NLCEN outperforms any other state-of-the-art biomedical image segmentation methods against adversarial attacks. In addition, NLCE modules can be applied to improve the robustness of other CNN-based biomedical image segmentation methods.

Guanbin Li, Xiang He, Wei Zhang et al.

Single image rain streaks removal has recently witnessed substantial progress due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks. However, existing deep learning based methods either focus on the entrance and exit of the network by decomposing the input image into high and low frequency information and employing residual learning to reduce the mapping range, or focus on the introduction of cascaded learning scheme to decompose the task of rain streaks removal into multi-stages. These methods treat the convolutional neural network as an encapsulated end-to-end mapping module without deepening into the rationality and superiority of neural network design. In this paper, we delve into an effective end-to-end neural network structure for stronger feature expression and spatial correlation learning. Specifically, we propose a non-locally enhanced encoder-decoder network framework, which consists of a pooling indices embedded encoder-decoder network to efficiently learn increasingly abstract feature representation for more accurate rain streaks modeling while perfectly preserving the image detail. The proposed encoder-decoder framework is composed of a series of non-locally enhanced dense blocks that are designed to not only fully exploit hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers but also well capture the long-distance dependencies and structural information. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively remove rain-streaks on rainy image of various densities while well preserving the image details, which achieves significant improvements over the recent state-of-the-art methods.