Wang Chen

Zhili He, Wang Chen, Jian Zhang et al.

Cracks provide an essential indicator of infrastructure performance degradation, and achieving high-precision pixel-level crack segmentation is an issue of concern. Unlike the common research paradigms that adopt novel artificial intelligence (AI) methods directly, this paper examines the inherent characteristics of cracks so as to introduce boundary features into crack identification and then builds a boundary guidance crack segmentation model (BGCrack) with targeted structures and modules, including a high frequency module, global information modeling module, joint optimization module, etc. Extensive experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed designs and the effectiveness of the edge information in improving segmentation results. In addition, considering that notable open-source datasets mainly consist of asphalt pavement cracks because of ease of access, there is no standard and widely recognized dataset yet for steel structures, one of the primary structural forms in civil infrastructure. This paper provides a steel crack dataset that establishes a unified and fair benchmark for the identification of steel cracks.

Xiaolong Liu, Liangwei Yang, Zhiwei Liu et al. · salesforce

Personalized recommender systems aim to predict users' preferences for items. It has become an indispensable part of online services. Online social platforms enable users to form groups based on their common interests. The users' group participation on social platforms reveals their interests and can be utilized as side information to mitigate the data sparsity and cold-start problem in recommender systems. Users join different groups out of different interests. In this paper, we generate group representation from the user's interests and propose IGRec (Interest-based Group enhanced Recommendation) to utilize the group information accurately. It consists of four modules. (1) Interest disentangler via self-gating that disentangles users' interests from their initial embedding representation. (2) Interest aggregator that generates the interest-based group representation by Gumbel-Softmax aggregation on the group members' interests. (3) Interest-based group aggregation that fuses user's representation with the participated group representation. (4) A dual-trained rating prediction module to utilize both user-item and group-item interactions. We conduct extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets. Results show IGRec can effectively alleviate the data sparsity problem and enhance the recommender system with interest-based group representation. Experiments on the group recommendation task further show the informativeness of interest-based group representation.

Zhongyi Pei, Lin Liu, Chen Wang et al.

Today, many industrial processes are undergoing digital transformation, which often requires the integration of well-understood domain models and state-of-the-art machine learning technology in business processes. However, requirements elicitation and design decision making about when, where and how to embed various domain models and end-to-end machine learning techniques properly into a given business workflow requires further exploration. This paper aims to provide an overview of the requirements engineering process for machine learning applications in terms of cross domain collaborations. We first review the literature on requirements engineering for machine learning, and then go through the collaborative requirements analysis process step-by-step. An example case of industrial data-driven intelligence applications is also discussed in relation to the aforementioned steps.

Hongyu Sun, Yongcai Wang, Wang Chen et al.

This paper presents a parameter-efficient prompt tuning method, named PPT, to adapt a large multi-modal model for 3D point cloud understanding. Existing strategies are quite expensive in computation and storage, and depend on time-consuming prompt engineering. We address the problems from three aspects. Firstly, a PromptLearner module is devised to replace hand-crafted prompts with learnable contexts to automate the prompt tuning process. Then, we lock the pre-trained backbone instead of adopting the full fine-tuning paradigm to substantially improve the parameter efficiency. Finally, a lightweight PointAdapter module is arranged near target tasks to enhance prompt tuning for 3D point cloud understanding. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior parameter and data efficiency of the proposed method.Meanwhile, we obtain new records on 4 public datasets and multiple 3D tasks, i.e., point cloud recognition, few-shot learning, and part segmentation. The implementation is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/PPT.

Fang Zhengxin, Yuan Yi, Zhang Jingyu et al.

Google AlphaGos win has significantly motivated and sped up machine learning (ML) research and development, which led to tremendous ML technical advances and wider adoptions in various domains (e.g., Finance, Health, Defense, and Education). These advances have resulted in numerous new concepts and technologies, which are too many for people to catch up to and even make them confused, especially for newcomers to the ML area. This paper is aimed to present a clear picture of the state-of-the-art of the existing ML technologies with a comprehensive survey. We lay out this survey by viewing ML as a MLOps (ML Operations) process, where the key concepts and activities are collected and elaborated with representative works and surveys. We hope that this paper can serve as a quick reference manual (a survey of surveys) for newcomers (e.g., researchers, practitioners) of ML to get an overview of the MLOps process, as well as a good understanding of the key technologies used in each step of the ML process, and know where to find more details.

Chen Wang, Victoria Huang, Gang Chen et al.

The optimal placement of sensors for environmental monitoring and disaster management is a challenging problem due to its NP-hard nature. Traditional methods for sensor placement involve exact, approximation, or heuristic approaches, with the latter being the most widely used. However, heuristic methods are limited by expert intuition and experience. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a promising approach for generating heuristic algorithms automatically. In this paper, we introduce a novel sensor placement approach focused on learning improvement heuristics using deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Our approach leverages an RL formulation for learning improvement heuristics, driven by an actor-critic algorithm for training the policy network. We compare our method with several state-of-the-art approaches by conducting comprehensive experiments, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach in producing high-quality solutions. Our work presents a promising direction for applying advanced DL and RL techniques to challenging climate sensor placement problems.

Hongyu Sun, Qiuhong Ke, Yongcai Wang et al.

This paper investigates the 3D domain generalization (3DDG) ability of large 3D models based on prevalent prompt learning. Recent works demonstrate the performances of 3D point cloud recognition can be boosted remarkably by parameter-efficient prompt tuning. However, we observe that the improvement on downstream tasks comes at the expense of a severe drop in 3D domain generalization. To resolve this challenge, we present a comprehensive regulation framework that allows the learnable prompts to actively interact with the well-learned general knowledge in large 3D models to maintain good generalization. Specifically, the proposed framework imposes multiple explicit constraints on the prompt learning trajectory by maximizing the mutual agreement between task-specific predictions and task-agnostic knowledge. We design the regulation framework as a plug-and-play module to embed into existing representative large 3D models. Surprisingly, our method not only realizes consistently increasing generalization ability but also enhances task-specific 3D recognition performances across various 3DDG benchmarks by a clear margin. Considering the lack of study and evaluation on 3DDG, we also create three new benchmarks, namely base-to-new, cross-dataset and few-shot generalization benchmarks, to enrich the field and inspire future research. Code and benchmarks are available at \url{https://github.com/auniquesun/Point-PRC}.

Yueqing Liang, Liangwei Yang, Chen Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process--drafting, voting, and discussing--and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. This work contributes to the growing intersection of AI and political science, opening new avenues for research and practical applications in global governance. The UNBench Repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/UNBench.

Huimin Xu, Xin Mao, Feng-Lin Li et al.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) often struggles with long-chain mathematical reasoning. Existing approaches, such as Step-DPO, typically improve this by focusing on the first erroneous step in the reasoning chain. However, they overlook all other steps and rely heavily on humans or GPT-4 to identify erroneous steps. To address these issues, we propose Full-Step-DPO, a novel DPO framework tailored for mathematical reasoning. Instead of optimizing only the first erroneous step, it leverages step-wise rewards from the entire reasoning chain. This is achieved by training a self-supervised process reward model, which automatically scores each step, providing rewards while avoiding reliance on external signals. Furthermore, we introduce a novel step-wise DPO loss, which dynamically updates gradients based on these step-wise rewards. This endows stronger reasoning capabilities to language models. Extensive evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks across various base language models, demonstrate that Full-Step-DPO achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Yifan Guo, Zhongqiang Ren, Chen Wang

This paper considers a Min-Max Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (MTSP), where the goal is to find a set of tours, one for each agent, to collectively visit all the cities while minimizing the length of the longest tour. Though MTSP has been widely studied, obtaining near-optimal solutions for large-scale problems is still challenging due to its NP-hardness. Recent efforts in data-driven methods face challenges of the need for hard-to-obtain supervision and issues with high variance in gradient estimations, leading to slow convergence and highly suboptimal solutions. We address these issues by reformulating MTSP as a bilevel optimization problem, using the concept of imperative learning (IL). This involves introducing an allocation network that decomposes the MTSP into multiple single-agent traveling salesman problems (TSPs). The longest tour from these TSP solutions is then used to self-supervise the allocation network, resulting in a new self-supervised, bilevel, end-to-end learning framework, which we refer to as imperative MTSP (iMTSP). Additionally, to tackle the high-variance gradient issues during the optimization, we introduce a control variate-based gradient estimation algorithm. Our experiments showed that these innovative designs enable our gradient estimator to converge 20% faster than the advanced reinforcement learning baseline and find up to 80% shorter tour length compared with Google OR-Tools MTSP solver, especially in large-scale problems (e.g. 1000 cities and 15 agents).

Jaymari Chua, Chen Wang, Lina Yao

As artificial intelligence surpasses human performance in select tasks, disclosing superhuman capabilities poses distinct challenges for fairness, accountability, and trust. However, the impact of such disclosures on diverse user attitudes and behaviors remains unclear, particularly concerning potential negative reactions like discouragement or overreliance. This paper investigates these effects by utilizing Persona Cards: a validated, standardized set of synthetic personas designed to simulate diverse user reactions and fairness perspectives. We conducted an ethics board-approved study (N=32), utilizing these personas to investigate how capability disclosure influenced behaviors with a superhuman game AI in competitive StarCraft II scenarios. Our results reveal transparency is double-edged: while disclosure could alleviate suspicion, it also provoked frustration and strategic defeatism among novices in cooperative scenarios, as well as overreliance in competitive contexts. Experienced and competitive players interpreted disclosure as confirmation of an unbeatable opponent, shifting to suboptimal goals. We release the Persona Cards Dataset, including profiles, prompts, interaction logs, and protocols, to foster reproducible research into human alignment AI design. This work demonstrates that transparency is not a cure-all; successfully leveraging disclosure to enhance trust and accountability requires careful tailoring to user characteristics, domain norms, and specific fairness objectives.

Ruoyu Wang, Xinshu Li, Chen Wang et al.

Visual Navigation is a core task in Embodied AI, enabling agents to navigate complex environments toward given objectives. Across diverse settings within Navigation tasks, many necessitate the modelling of sequential data accumulated from preceding time steps. While existing methods perform well, they typically process all historical observations simultaneously, overlooking the internal association structure within the data, which may limit the potential for further improvements in task performance. We address this by examining the unique characteristics of Navigation tasks through the lens of causality, introducing a causal framework to highlight the limitations of conventional sequential methods. Leveraging this insight, we propose Causality-Aware Navigation (CAN), which incorporates a Causal Understanding Module to enhance the agent's environmental understanding capability. Empirical evaluations show that our approach consistently outperforms baselines across various tasks and simulation environments. Extensive ablations studies attribute these gains to the Causal Understanding Module, which generalizes effectively in both Reinforcement and Supervised Learning settings without computational overhead.

Zheng Hui, Xiaokai Wei, Yexi Jiang et al.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) have advanced with large language models, showing strong results in domains like movies. These domains typically involve fixed content and passive consumption, where user preferences can be matched by genre or theme. In contrast, games present distinct challenges: fast-evolving catalogs, interaction-driven preferences (e.g., skill level, mechanics, hardware), and increased risk of unsafe responses in open-ended conversation. We propose MATCHA, a multi-agent framework for CRS that assigns specialized agents for intent parsing, tool-augmented retrieval, multi-LLM ranking with reflection, explanation, and risk control which enabling finer personalization, long-tail coverage, and stronger safety. Evaluated on real user request dataset, MATCHA outperforms six baselines across eight metrics, improving Hit@5 by 20%, reducing popularity bias by 24%, and achieving 97.9% adversarial defense. Human and virtual-judge evaluations confirm improved explanation quality and user alignment.