Yan Huang

Zhengxiong Luo, Dayou Chen, Yingya Zhang et al.

A diffusion probabilistic model (DPM), which constructs a forward diffusion process by gradually adding noise to data points and learns the reverse denoising process to generate new samples, has been shown to handle complex data distribution. Despite its recent success in image synthesis, applying DPMs to video generation is still challenging due to high-dimensional data spaces. Previous methods usually adopt a standard diffusion process, where frames in the same video clip are destroyed with independent noises, ignoring the content redundancy and temporal correlation. This work presents a decomposed diffusion process via resolving the per-frame noise into a base noise that is shared among all frames and a residual noise that varies along the time axis. The denoising pipeline employs two jointly-learned networks to match the noise decomposition accordingly. Experiments on various datasets confirm that our approach, termed as VideoFusion, surpasses both GAN-based and diffusion-based alternatives in high-quality video generation. We further show that our decomposed formulation can benefit from pre-trained image diffusion models and well-support text-conditioned video creation.

Ke Han, Chenyang Si, Yan Huang et al.

In this paper, we investigate the generalization problem of person re-identification (re-id), whose major challenge is the distribution shift on an unseen domain. As an important tool of regularizing the distribution, batch normalization (BN) has been widely used in existing methods. However, they neglect that BN is severely biased to the training domain and inevitably suffers the performance drop if directly generalized without being updated. To tackle this issue, we propose Batch Norm Test-time Adaption (BNTA), a novel re-id framework that applies the self-supervised strategy to update BN parameters adaptively. Specifically, BNTA quickly explores the domain-aware information within unlabeled target data before inference, and accordingly modulates the feature distribution normalized by BN to adapt to the target domain. This is accomplished by two designed self-supervised auxiliary tasks, namely part positioning and part nearest neighbor matching, which help the model mine the domain-aware information with respect to the structure and identity of body parts, respectively. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on three re-id datasets and confirm the superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods.

Xinran Liu, Xiaoqiong Liu, Ziruo Yi et al.

Planar object tracking is a critical computer vision problem and has drawn increasing interest owing to its key roles in robotics, augmented reality, etc. Despite rapid progress, its further development, especially in the deep learning era, is largely hindered due to the lack of large-scale challenging benchmarks. Addressing this, we introduce PlanarTrack, a large-scale challenging planar tracking benchmark. Specifically, PlanarTrack consists of 1,000 videos with more than 490K images. All these videos are collected in complex unconstrained scenarios from the wild, which makes PlanarTrack, compared with existing benchmarks, more challenging but realistic for real-world applications. To ensure the high-quality annotation, each frame in PlanarTrack is manually labeled using four corners with multiple-round careful inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, PlanarTrack, to date, is the largest and most challenging dataset dedicated to planar object tracking. In order to analyze the proposed PlanarTrack, we evaluate 10 planar trackers and conduct comprehensive comparisons and in-depth analysis. Our results, not surprisingly, demonstrate that current top-performing planar trackers degenerate significantly on the challenging PlanarTrack and more efforts are needed to improve planar tracking in the future. In addition, we further derive a variant named PlanarTrack$_{\mathbf{BB}}$ for generic object tracking from PlanarTrack. Our evaluation of 10 excellent generic trackers on PlanarTrack$_{\mathrm{BB}}$ manifests that, surprisingly, PlanarTrack$_{\mathrm{BB}}$ is even more challenging than several popular generic tracking benchmarks and more attention should be paid to handle such planar objects, though they are rigid. All benchmarks and evaluations will be released at the project webpage.

Somayeh Ghanbarzadeh, Hamid Palangi, Yan Huang et al.

The reusability of state-of-the-art Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is often limited by their generalization problem, where their performance drastically decreases when evaluated on examples that differ from the training dataset, known as Out-of-Distribution (OOD)/unseen examples. This limitation arises from PLMs' reliance on spurious correlations, which work well for frequent example types but not for general examples. To address this issue, we propose a training approach called Mask-tuning, which integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) training objectives into the fine-tuning process to enhance PLMs' generalization. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Mask-tuning surpasses current state-of-the-art techniques and enhances PLMs' generalization on OOD datasets while improving their performance on in-distribution datasets. The findings suggest that Mask-tuning improves the reusability of PLMs on unseen data, making them more practical and effective for real-world applications.

Yan Huang, Jinming Xu, Jiming Chen et al.

In distributed and federated learning algorithms, communication overhead is often reduced by performing multiple local updates between communication rounds. However, due to data heterogeneity across nodes and the local gradient noise within each node, this strategy can lead to the drift of local models away from the global optimum. To address this issue, we revisit the well-known federated learning method Scaffold (Karimireddy et al., 2020) under a gradient tracking perspective, and propose a unified spatio-temporal gradient tracking algorithm, termed ST-GT, for distributed stochastic optimization over time-varying graphs. ST-GT tracks the global gradient across neighboring nodes to mitigate data heterogeneity, while maintaining a running average of local gradients to substantially suppress noise, with slightly more storage overhead. Without assuming bounded data heterogeneity, we prove that ST-GT attains a linear convergence rate for strongly convex problems and a sublinear rate for nonconvex cases. Notably, ST-GT achieves the first linear speed-up in communication complexity with respect to the number of local updates per round $τ$ for the strongly-convex setting. Compared to traditional gradient tracking methods, ST-GT reduces the topology-dependent noise term from $σ^2$ to $σ^2/τ$, where $σ^2$ denotes the noise level, thereby improving communication efficiency.

Xin Gu, Yaojie Shen, Chenxi Luo et al.

Transformer has attracted increasing interest in STVG, owing to its end-to-end pipeline and promising result. Existing Transformer-based STVG approaches often leverage a set of object queries, which are initialized simply using zeros and then gradually learn target position information via iterative interactions with multimodal features, for spatial and temporal localization. Despite simplicity, these zero object queries, due to lacking target-specific cues, are hard to learn discriminative target information from interactions with multimodal features in complicated scenarios (\e.g., with distractors or occlusion), resulting in degradation. Addressing this, we introduce a novel Target-Aware Transformer for STVG (TA-STVG), which seeks to adaptively generate object queries via exploring target-specific cues from the given video-text pair, for improving STVG. The key lies in two simple yet effective modules, comprising text-guided temporal sampling (TTS) and attribute-aware spatial activation (ASA), working in a cascade. The former focuses on selecting target-relevant temporal cues from a video utilizing holistic text information, while the latter aims at further exploiting the fine-grained visual attribute information of the object from previous target-aware temporal cues, which is applied for object query initialization. Compared to existing methods leveraging zero-initialized queries, object queries in our TA-STVG, directly generated from a given video-text pair, naturally carry target-specific cues, making them adaptive and better interact with multimodal features for learning more discriminative information to improve STVG. In our experiments on three benchmarks, TA-STVG achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforms the baseline, validating its efficacy.

Meiquan Dong, Haoran Liu, Yan Huang et al.

The organization of latent token representations plays a crucial role in determining the stability, generalization, and contextual consistency of language models, yet conventional approaches to embedding refinement often rely on parameter modifications that introduce additional computational overhead. A hierarchical alignment method was introduced to restructure token embeddings without altering core model weights, ensuring that representational distributions maintained coherence across different linguistic contexts. Experimental evaluations demonstrated improvements in rare token retrieval, adversarial robustness, and long-range dependency tracking, highlighting the advantages of hierarchical structuring in mitigating inconsistencies in latent space organization. The comparative analysis against conventional fine-tuning and embedding perturbation methods revealed that hierarchical restructuring maintained computational efficiency while achieving measurable gains in representation quality. Structural refinements introduced through the alignment process resulted in improved contextual stability across varied linguistic tasks, reducing inconsistencies in token proximity relationships and enhancing interpretability in language generation. A detailed computational assessment confirmed that the realignment process introduced minimal inference overhead, ensuring that representational improvements did not compromise model efficiency. The findings reinforced the broader significance of structured representation learning, illustrating that hierarchical embedding modifications could serve as an effective strategy for refining latent space distributions while preserving pre-learned semantic associations.

Xiyang Hu, Yan Huang, Beibei Li et al.

FinTech lending (e.g., micro-lending) has played a significant role in facilitating financial inclusion. It has reduced processing times and costs, enhanced the user experience, and made it possible for people to obtain loans who may not have qualified for credit from traditional lenders. However, there are concerns about the potentially biased algorithmic decision-making during loan screening. Machine learning algorithms used to evaluate credit quality can be influenced by representation bias in the training data, as we only have access to the default outcome labels of approved loan applications, for which the borrowers' socioeconomic characteristics are better than those of rejected ones. In this case, the model trained on the labeled data performs well on the historically approved population, but does not generalize well to borrowers of low socioeconomic background. In this paper, we investigate the problem of representation bias in loan screening for a real-world FinTech lending platform. We propose a new Transformer-based sequential loan screening model with self-supervised contrastive learning and domain adaptation to tackle this challenging issue. We use contrastive learning to train our feature extractor on unapproved (unlabeled) loan applications and use domain adaptation to generalize the performance of our label predictor. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model through extensive experimentation in the real-world micro-lending setting. Our results show that our model significantly promotes the inclusiveness of funding decisions, while also improving loan screening accuracy and profit by 7.10% and 8.95%, respectively. We also show that incorporating the test data into contrastive learning and domain adaptation and labeling a small ratio of test data can further boost model performance.

Hadi Mansourifar, Dana Alsagheer, Weidong Shi et al.

Hate speech detection has become a hot topic in recent years due to the exponential growth of offensive language in social media. It has proven that, state-of-the-art hate speech classifiers are efficient only when tested on the data with the same feature distribution as training data. As a consequence, model architecture plays the second role to improve the current results. In such a diverse data distribution relying on low level features is the main cause of deficiency due to natural bias in data. That's why we need to use high level features to avoid a biased judgement. In this paper, we statistically analyze the Perspective Scores and their impact on hate speech detection. We show that, different hate speech datasets are very similar when it comes to extract their Perspective Scores. Eventually, we prove that, over-sampling the Perspective Scores of a hate speech dataset can significantly improve the generalization performance when it comes to be tested on other hate speech datasets.

Jianhua Yang, Yan Huang, Kai Niu et al.

Text-based video segmentation aims to segment an actor in video sequences by specifying the actor and its performing action with a textual query. Previous methods fail to explicitly align the video content with the textual query in a fine-grained manner according to the actor and its action, due to the problem of \emph{semantic asymmetry}. The \emph{semantic asymmetry} implies that two modalities contain different amounts of semantic information during the multi-modal fusion process. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel actor and action modular network that individually localizes the actor and its action in two separate modules. Specifically, we first learn the actor-/action-related content from the video and textual query, and then match them in a symmetrical manner to localize the target tube. The target tube contains the desired actor and action which is then fed into a fully convolutional network to predict segmentation masks of the actor. Our method also establishes the association of objects cross multiple frames with the proposed temporal proposal aggregation mechanism. This enables our method to segment the video effectively and keep the temporal consistency of predictions. The whole model is allowed for joint learning of the actor-action matching and segmentation, as well as achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both single-frame segmentation and full video segmentation on A2D Sentences and J-HMDB Sentences datasets.

Zheng Zhang, Lizi Liao, Xiaoyan Zhu et al.

Most existing approaches for goal-oriented dialogue policy learning used reinforcement learning, which focuses on the target agent policy and simply treat the opposite agent policy as part of the environment. While in real-world scenarios, the behavior of an opposite agent often exhibits certain patterns or underlies hidden policies, which can be inferred and utilized by the target agent to facilitate its own decision making. This strategy is common in human mental simulation by first imaging a specific action and the probable results before really acting it. We therefore propose an opposite behavior aware framework for policy learning in goal-oriented dialogues. We estimate the opposite agent's policy from its behavior and use this estimation to improve the target agent by regarding it as part of the target policy. We evaluate our model on both cooperative and competitive dialogue tasks, showing superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines.

Zhi Liu, Yan Huang, Jing Gao et al.

Similar product recommendation is one of the most common scenes in e-commerce. Many recommendation algorithms such as item-to-item Collaborative Filtering are working on measuring item similarities. In this paper, we introduce our real-time personalized algorithm to model product similarity and real-time user interests. We also introduce several other baseline algorithms including an image-similarity-based method, item-to-item collaborative filtering, and item2vec, and compare them on our large-scale real-world e-commerce dataset. The algorithms which achieve good offline results are also tested on the online e-commerce website. Our personalized method achieves a 10% improvement on the add-cart number in the real-world e-commerce scenario.

Darion Cassel, Yan Huang, Limin Jia

Programmers of cryptographic applications written in C need to avoid common mistakes such as sending private data over public channels, modifying trusted data with untrusted functions, or improperly ordering protocol steps. These secrecy, integrity, and sequencing policies can be cumbersome to check with existing general-purpose tools. We have developed a novel means of specifying and uncovering violations of these policies that allows for a much lighter-weight approach than previous tools. We embed the policy annotations in C's type system via a source-to-source translation and leverage existing C compilers to check for policy violations, achieving high performance and scalability. We show through case studies of recent cryptographic libraries and applications that our work is able to express detailed policies for large bodies of C code and can find subtle policy violations. To gain formal understanding of our policy annotations, we show formal connections between the policy annotations and an information flow type system and prove a noninterference guarantee.

Yang Zhou, Yan Huang

Understanding and reasoning about places and their relationships are critical for many applications. Places are traditionally curated by a small group of people as place gazetteers and are represented by an ID with spatial extent, category, and other descriptions. However, a place context is described to a large extent by movements made from/to other places. Places are linked and related to each other by these movements. This important context is missing from the traditional representation. We present DeepMove, a novel approach for learning latent representations of places. DeepMove advances the current deep learning based place representations by directly model movements between places. We demonstrate DeepMove's latent representations on place categorization and clustering tasks on large place and movement datasets with respect to important parameters. Our results show that DeepMove outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. DeepMove's representations can provide up to 15% higher than competing methods in matching rate of place category and result in up to 39% higher silhouette coefficient value for place clusters. DeepMove is spatial and temporal context aware. It is scalable. It outperforms competing models using much smaller training dataset (a month or 1/12 of data). These qualities make it suitable for a broad class of real-world applications.

Wu Zheng, Lin Li, Zhaoxiang Zhang et al.

With the fast development of effective and low-cost human skeleton capture systems, skeleton-based action recognition has attracted much attention recently. Most existing methods use Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to extract spatio-temporal information embedded in the skeleton sequences for action recognition. However, these approaches are limited in the ability of relational modeling in a single skeleton, due to the loss of important structural information when converting the raw skeleton data to adapt to the input format of CNN or RNN. In this paper, we propose an Attentional Recurrent Relational Network-LSTM (ARRN-LSTM) to simultaneously model spatial configurations and temporal dynamics in skeletons for action recognition. We introduce the Recurrent Relational Network to learn the spatial features in a single skeleton, followed by a multi-layer LSTM to learn the temporal features in the skeleton sequences. Between the two modules, we design an adaptive attentional module to focus attention on the most discriminative parts in the single skeleton. To exploit the complementarity from different geometries in the skeleton for sufficient relational modeling, we design a two-stream architecture to learn the structural features among joints and lines simultaneously. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular skeleton datasets and the results show that the proposed approach achieves better results than most mainstream methods.

Qiang Cui, Shu Wu, Yan Huang et al.

Sequential recommendation is one of fundamental tasks for Web applications. Previous methods are mostly based on Markov chains with a strong Markov assumption. Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are getting more and more popular and has demonstrated its effectiveness in many tasks. The last hidden state is usually applied as the sequence's representation to make recommendation. Benefit from the natural characteristics of RNN, the hidden state is a combination of long-term dependency and short-term interest to some degrees. However, the monotonic temporal dependency of RNN impairs the user's short-term interest. Consequently, the hidden state is not sufficient to reflect the user's final interest. In this work, to deal with this problem, we propose a Hierarchical Contextual Attention-based GRU (HCA-GRU) network. The first level of HCA-GRU is conducted on the input. We construct a contextual input by using several recent inputs based on the attention mechanism. This can model the complicated correlations among recent items and strengthen the hidden state. The second level is executed on the hidden state. We fuse the current hidden state and a contextual hidden state built by the attention mechanism, which leads to a more suitable user's overall interest. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that HCA-GRU can effectively generate the personalized ranking list and achieve significant improvement.