Showing 1–50 of 100 results for author: Bai, Q

The World is Your Canvas: Painting Promptable Events with Reference Images, Trajectories, and Text

Authors: Hanlin Wang, Hao Ouyang, Qiuyu Wang, Yue Yu, Yihao Meng, Wen Wang, Ka Leong Cheng, Shuailei Ma, Qingyan Bai, Yixuan Li, Cheng Chen, Yanhong Zeng, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen

Abstract: We present WorldCanvas, a framework for promptable world events that enables rich, user-directed simulation by combining text, trajectories, and reference images. Unlike text-only approaches and existing trajectory-controlled image-to-video methods, our multimodal approach combines trajectories -- encoding motion, timing, and visibility -- with natural language for semantic intent and reference im… ▽ More We present WorldCanvas, a framework for promptable world events that enables rich, user-directed simulation by combining text, trajectories, and reference images. Unlike text-only approaches and existing trajectory-controlled image-to-video methods, our multimodal approach combines trajectories -- encoding motion, timing, and visibility -- with natural language for semantic intent and reference images for visual grounding of object identity, enabling the generation of coherent, controllable events that include multi-agent interactions, object entry/exit, reference-guided appearance and counterintuitive events. The resulting videos demonstrate not only temporal coherence but also emergent consistency, preserving object identity and scene despite temporary disappearance. By supporting expressive world events generation, WorldCanvas advances world models from passive predictors to interactive, user-shaped simulators. Our project page is available at: https://worldcanvas.github.io/. △ Less

Submitted 18 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Project page and code: https://worldcanvas.github.io/

Everything is Context: Agentic File System Abstraction for Context Engineering

Authors: Xiwei Xu, Robert Mao, Quan Bai, Xuewu Gu, Yechao Li, Liming Zhu

Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) has reshaped software system design by introducing foundation models as pre-trained subsystems that redefine architectures and operations. The emerging challenge is no longer model fine-tuning but context engineering-how systems capture, structure, and govern external knowledge, memory, tools, and human input to enable trustworthy reasoning. Existing practices such as prompt… ▽ More Generative AI (GenAI) has reshaped software system design by introducing foundation models as pre-trained subsystems that redefine architectures and operations. The emerging challenge is no longer model fine-tuning but context engineering-how systems capture, structure, and govern external knowledge, memory, tools, and human input to enable trustworthy reasoning. Existing practices such as prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and tool integration remain fragmented, producing transient artefacts that limit traceability and accountability. This paper proposes a file-system abstraction for context engineering, inspired by the Unix notion that 'everything is a file'. The abstraction offers a persistent, governed infrastructure for managing heterogeneous context artefacts through uniform mounting, metadata, and access control. Implemented within the open-source AIGNE framework, the architecture realises a verifiable context-engineering pipeline, comprising the Context Constructor, Loader, and Evaluator, that assembles, delivers, and validates context under token constraints. As GenAI becomes an active collaborator in decision support, humans play a central role as curators, verifiers, and co-reasoners. The proposed architecture establishes a reusable foundation for accountable and human-centred AI co-work, demonstrated through two exemplars: an agent with memory and an MCP-based GitHub assistant. The implementation within the AIGNE framework demonstrates how the architecture can be operationalised in developer and industrial settings, supporting verifiable, maintainable, and industry-ready GenAI systems. △ Less

Submitted 5 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Submitted

MagicQuillV2: Precise and Interactive Image Editing with Layered Visual Cues

Authors: Zichen Liu, Yue Yu, Hao Ouyang, Qiuyu Wang, Shuailei Ma, Ka Leong Cheng, Wen Wang, Qingyan Bai, Yuxuan Zhang, Yanhong Zeng, Yixuan Li, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen

Abstract: We propose MagicQuill V2, a novel system that introduces a \textbf{layered composition} paradigm to generative image editing, bridging the gap between the semantic power of diffusion models and the granular control of traditional graphics software. While diffusion transformers excel at holistic generation, their use of singular, monolithic prompts fails to disentangle distinct user intentions for… ▽ More We propose MagicQuill V2, a novel system that introduces a \textbf{layered composition} paradigm to generative image editing, bridging the gap between the semantic power of diffusion models and the granular control of traditional graphics software. While diffusion transformers excel at holistic generation, their use of singular, monolithic prompts fails to disentangle distinct user intentions for content, position, and appearance. To overcome this, our method deconstructs creative intent into a stack of controllable visual cues: a content layer for what to create, a spatial layer for where to place it, a structural layer for how it is shaped, and a color layer for its palette. Our technical contributions include a specialized data generation pipeline for context-aware content integration, a unified control module to process all visual cues, and a fine-tuned spatial branch for precise local editing, including object removal. Extensive experiments validate that this layered approach effectively resolves the user intention gap, granting creators direct, intuitive control over the generative process. △ Less

Submitted 2 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Code and demo available at https://magicquill.art/v2/

Learning Compact Latent Space for Representing Neural Signed Distance Functions with High-fidelity Geometry Details

Authors: Qiang Bai, Bojian Wu, Xi Yang, Zhizhong Han

Abstract: Neural signed distance functions (SDFs) have been a vital representation to represent 3D shapes or scenes with neural networks. An SDF is an implicit function that can query signed distances at specific coordinates for recovering a 3D surface. Although implicit functions work well on a single shape or scene, they pose obstacles when analyzing multiple SDFs with high-fidelity geometry details, due… ▽ More Neural signed distance functions (SDFs) have been a vital representation to represent 3D shapes or scenes with neural networks. An SDF is an implicit function that can query signed distances at specific coordinates for recovering a 3D surface. Although implicit functions work well on a single shape or scene, they pose obstacles when analyzing multiple SDFs with high-fidelity geometry details, due to the limited information encoded in the latent space for SDFs and the loss of geometry details. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce a method to represent multiple SDFs in a common space, aiming to recover more high-fidelity geometry details with more compact latent representations. Our key idea is to take full advantage of the benefits of generalization-based and overfitting-based learning strategies, which manage to preserve high-fidelity geometry details with compact latent codes. Based on this framework, we also introduce a novel sampling strategy to sample training queries. The sampling can improve the training efficiency and eliminate artifacts caused by the influence of other SDFs. We report numerical and visual evaluations on widely used benchmarks to validate our designs and show advantages over the latest methods in terms of the representative ability and compactness. △ Less

Submitted 18 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: Accepted as an Poster paper at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26)

Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Dataset

Authors: Qingyan Bai, Qiuyu Wang, Hao Ouyang, Yue Yu, Hanlin Wang, Wen Wang, Ka Leong Cheng, Shuailei Ma, Yanhong Zeng, Zichen Liu, Yinghao Xu, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen

Abstract: Instruction-based video editing promises to democratize content creation, yet its progress is severely hampered by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality training data. We introduce Ditto, a holistic framework designed to tackle this fundamental challenge. At its heart, Ditto features a novel data generation pipeline that fuses the creative diversity of a leading image editor with an in-context… ▽ More Instruction-based video editing promises to democratize content creation, yet its progress is severely hampered by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality training data. We introduce Ditto, a holistic framework designed to tackle this fundamental challenge. At its heart, Ditto features a novel data generation pipeline that fuses the creative diversity of a leading image editor with an in-context video generator, overcoming the limited scope of existing models. To make this process viable, our framework resolves the prohibitive cost-quality trade-off by employing an efficient, distilled model architecture augmented by a temporal enhancer, which simultaneously reduces computational overhead and improves temporal coherence. Finally, to achieve full scalability, this entire pipeline is driven by an intelligent agent that crafts diverse instructions and rigorously filters the output, ensuring quality control at scale. Using this framework, we invested over 12,000 GPU-days to build Ditto-1M, a new dataset of one million high-fidelity video editing examples. We trained our model, Editto, on Ditto-1M with a curriculum learning strategy. The results demonstrate superior instruction-following ability and establish a new state-of-the-art in instruction-based video editing. △ Less

Submitted 16 December, 2025; v1 submitted 17 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: Project page: https://ezioby.github.io/Ditto_page Code: https://github.com/EzioBy/Ditto

Functional Critic Modeling for Provably Convergent Off-Policy Actor-Critic

Authors: Qinxun Bai, Yuxuan Han, Wei Xu, Zhengyuan Zhou

Abstract: Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation offers an effective way to improve sample efficiency by reusing past experience. Within this setting, the actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success. However, both the critic and actor learning is challenging for the off-policy AC methods: first of all, in addition to the classic "deadly triad" instability of… ▽ More Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation offers an effective way to improve sample efficiency by reusing past experience. Within this setting, the actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success. However, both the critic and actor learning is challenging for the off-policy AC methods: first of all, in addition to the classic "deadly triad" instability of off-policy evaluation, it also suffers from a "moving target" problem, where the policy being evaluated changes continually; secondly, actor learning becomes less efficient due to the difficulty of estimating the exact off-policy policy gradient. The first challenge essentially reduces the problem to repeatedly performing off-policy evaluation for changing policies. For the second challenge, the off-policy policy gradient theorem requires a complex and often impractical algorithm to estimate an additional emphasis critic, which is typically neglected in practice, thereby reducing to the on-policy policy gradient as an approximation. In this work, we introduce a novel concept of functional critic modeling, which leads to a new AC framework that addresses both challenges for actor-critic learning under the deadly triad setting. We provide a theoretical analysis in the linear function setting, establishing the provable convergence of our framework, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first convergent off-policy target-based AC algorithm. From a practical perspective, we further propose a carefully designed neural network architecture for the functional critic modeling and demonstrate its effectiveness through preliminary experiments on widely used RL tasks from the DeepMind Control Benchmark. △ Less

Submitted 14 October, 2025; v1 submitted 26 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

Learning Multi-Stage Pick-and-Place with a Legged Mobile Manipulator

Authors: Haichao Zhang, Haonan Yu, Le Zhao, Andrew Choi, Qinxun Bai, Yiqing Yang, Wei Xu

Abstract: Quadruped-based mobile manipulation presents significant challenges in robotics due to the diversity of required skills, the extended task horizon, and partial observability. After presenting a multi-stage pick-and-place task as a succinct yet sufficiently rich setup that captures key desiderata for quadruped-based mobile manipulation, we propose an approach that can train a visuo-motor policy ent… ▽ More Quadruped-based mobile manipulation presents significant challenges in robotics due to the diversity of required skills, the extended task horizon, and partial observability. After presenting a multi-stage pick-and-place task as a succinct yet sufficiently rich setup that captures key desiderata for quadruped-based mobile manipulation, we propose an approach that can train a visuo-motor policy entirely in simulation, and achieve nearly 80\% success in the real world. The policy efficiently performs search, approach, grasp, transport, and drop into actions, with emerged behaviors such as re-grasping and task chaining. We conduct an extensive set of real-world experiments with ablation studies highlighting key techniques for efficient training and effective sim-to-real transfer. Additional experiments demonstrate deployment across a variety of indoor and outdoor environments. Demo videos and additional resources are available on the project page: https://horizonrobotics.github.io/gail/SLIM. △ Less

Submitted 8 September, 2025; v1 submitted 3 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

Comments: Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Tech Report: arXiv:2501.09905

A Brain-Inspired Gating Mechanism Unlocks Robust Computation in Spiking Neural Networks

Authors: Qianyi Bai, Haiteng Wang, Qiang Yu

Abstract: While spiking neural networks (SNNs) provide a biologically inspired and energy-efficient computational framework, their robustness and the dynamic advantages inherent to biological neurons remain significantly underutilized owing to oversimplified neuron models. In particular, conventional leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons often omit the dynamic conductance mechanisms inherent in biological… ▽ More While spiking neural networks (SNNs) provide a biologically inspired and energy-efficient computational framework, their robustness and the dynamic advantages inherent to biological neurons remain significantly underutilized owing to oversimplified neuron models. In particular, conventional leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons often omit the dynamic conductance mechanisms inherent in biological neurons, thereby limiting their capacity to cope with noise and temporal variability. In this work, we revisit dynamic conductance from a functional perspective and uncover its intrinsic role as a biologically plausible gating mechanism that modulates information flow. Building on this insight, we introduce the Dynamic Gated Neuron~(DGN), a novel spiking unit in which membrane conductance evolves in response to neuronal activity, enabling selective input filtering and adaptive noise suppression. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that DGN possess enhanced stochastic stability compared to standard LIF models, with dynamic conductance intriguingly acting as a disturbance rejection mechanism. DGN-based SNNs demonstrate superior performance across extensive evaluations on anti-noise tasks and temporal-related benchmarks such as TIDIGITS and SHD, consistently exhibiting excellent robustness. Our results highlight, for the first time, a biologically plausible dynamic gating as a key mechanism for robust spike-based computation, providing not only theoretical guarantees but also strong empirical validations. This work thus paves the way for more resilient, efficient, and biologically inspired spiking neural networks. △ Less

Submitted 3 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

Accent Normalization Using Self-Supervised Discrete Tokens with Non-Parallel Data

Authors: Qibing Bai, Sho Inoue, Shuai Wang, Zhongjie Jiang, Yannan Wang, Haizhou Li

Abstract: Accent normalization converts foreign-accented speech into native-like speech while preserving speaker identity. We propose a novel pipeline using self-supervised discrete tokens and non-parallel training data. The system extracts tokens from source speech, converts them through a dedicated model, and synthesizes the output using flow matching. Our method demonstrates superior performance over a f… ▽ More Accent normalization converts foreign-accented speech into native-like speech while preserving speaker identity. We propose a novel pipeline using self-supervised discrete tokens and non-parallel training data. The system extracts tokens from source speech, converts them through a dedicated model, and synthesizes the output using flow matching. Our method demonstrates superior performance over a frame-to-frame baseline in naturalness, accentedness reduction, and timbre preservation across multiple English accents. Through token-level phonetic analysis, we validate the effectiveness of our token-based approach. We also develop two duration preservation methods, suitable for applications such as dubbing. △ Less

Submitted 23 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

Comments: Accepted to INTERSPEECH 2025

Calligrapher: Freestyle Text Image Customization

Authors: Yue Ma, Qingyan Bai, Hao Ouyang, Ka Leong Cheng, Qiuyu Wang, Hongyu Liu, Zichen Liu, Haofan Wang, Jingye Chen, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen

Abstract: We introduce Calligrapher, a novel diffusion-based framework that innovatively integrates advanced text customization with artistic typography for digital calligraphy and design applications. Addressing the challenges of precise style control and data dependency in typographic customization, our framework incorporates three key technical contributions. First, we develop a self-distillation mechani… ▽ More We introduce Calligrapher, a novel diffusion-based framework that innovatively integrates advanced text customization with artistic typography for digital calligraphy and design applications. Addressing the challenges of precise style control and data dependency in typographic customization, our framework incorporates three key technical contributions. First, we develop a self-distillation mechanism that leverages the pre-trained text-to-image generative model itself alongside the large language model to automatically construct a style-centric typography benchmark. Second, we introduce a localized style injection framework via a trainable style encoder, which comprises both Qformer and linear layers, to extract robust style features from reference images. An in-context generation mechanism is also employed to directly embed reference images into the denoising process, further enhancing the refined alignment of target styles. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across diverse fonts and design contexts confirm Calligrapher's accurate reproduction of intricate stylistic details and precise glyph positioning. By automating high-quality, visually consistent typography, Calligrapher surpasses traditional models, empowering creative practitioners in digital art, branding, and contextual typographic design. △ Less

Submitted 30 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: Project page: https://calligrapher2025.github.io/Calligrapher Code: https://github.com/Calligrapher2025/Calligrapher

ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning

Authors: Yu Sun, Xingyu Qian, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Chenghao Xiao, Long Li, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang, Tingyang Xu, Qifeng Bai, Yu Rong

Abstract: Reasoning-based large language models have excelled in mathematics and programming, yet their potential in knowledge-intensive medical question answering remains underexplored and insufficiently validated in clinical contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReasonMed, the largest medical reasoning dataset to date, comprising 370k high-quality examples distilled from 1.75 million initial reasonin… ▽ More Reasoning-based large language models have excelled in mathematics and programming, yet their potential in knowledge-intensive medical question answering remains underexplored and insufficiently validated in clinical contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReasonMed, the largest medical reasoning dataset to date, comprising 370k high-quality examples distilled from 1.75 million initial reasoning paths generated by complementary LLMs and curated through a cost-efficient easy-medium-difficult (EMD) pipeline. ReasonMed is built through a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement process, in which an Error Refiner improves reasoning paths by correcting error-prone steps identified by a verifier. Using ReasonMed, we investigate effective strategies for training medical reasoning models and find that integrating detailed CoT reasoning with concise answer summaries yields the most robust fine-tuning results. Models trained on ReasonMed set a new benchmark: ReasonMed-7B surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. When scaled to ReasonMed-14B, it remains highly competitive, underscoring consistent scaling potential. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/YuSun-Work/ReasonMed. △ Less

Submitted 9 October, 2025; v1 submitted 11 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: 28 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables

Global Convergence for Average Reward Constrained MDPs with Primal-Dual Actor Critic Algorithm

Authors: Yang Xu, Swetha Ganesh, Washim Uddin Mondal, Qinbo Bai, Vaneet Aggarwal

Abstract: This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a high convergence rate. In particular, our algorithm achieves global convergence and constraint violation rates of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\sqrt{T})$ over a horizon… ▽ More This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a high convergence rate. In particular, our algorithm achieves global convergence and constraint violation rates of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\sqrt{T})$ over a horizon of length $T$ when the mixing time, $τ_{\mathrm{mix}}$, is known to the learner. In absence of knowledge of $τ_{\mathrm{mix}}$, the achievable rates change to $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/T^{0.5-ε})$ provided that $T \geq \tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^{2/ε}\right)$. Our results match the theoretical lower bound for Markov Decision Processes and establish a new benchmark in the theoretical exploration of average reward CMDPs. △ Less

Submitted 9 December, 2025; v1 submitted 21 May, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

Comments: NeurIPS 2025

Towards Superior Quantization Accuracy: A Layer-sensitive Approach

Authors: Feng Zhang, Yanbin Liu, Weihua Li, Jie Lv, Xiaodan Wang, Quan Bai

Abstract: Large Vision and Language Models have exhibited remarkable human-like intelligence in tasks such as natural language comprehension, problem-solving, logical reasoning, and knowledge retrieval. However, training and serving these models require substantial computational resources, posing a significant barrier to their widespread application and further research. To mitigate this challenge, various… ▽ More Large Vision and Language Models have exhibited remarkable human-like intelligence in tasks such as natural language comprehension, problem-solving, logical reasoning, and knowledge retrieval. However, training and serving these models require substantial computational resources, posing a significant barrier to their widespread application and further research. To mitigate this challenge, various model compression techniques have been developed to reduce computational requirements. Nevertheless, existing methods often employ uniform quantization configurations, failing to account for the varying difficulties across different layers in quantizing large neural network models. This paper tackles this issue by leveraging layer-sensitivity features, such as activation sensitivity and weight distribution Kurtosis, to identify layers that are challenging to quantize accurately and allocate additional memory budget. The proposed methods, named SensiBoost and KurtBoost, respectively, demonstrate notable improvement in quantization accuracy, achieving up to 9% lower perplexity with only a 2% increase in memory budget on LLama models compared to the baseline. △ Less

Submitted 9 March, 2025; originally announced March 2025.

CL-MoE: Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Model with Dual Momentum Mixture-of-Experts for Continual Visual Question Answering

Authors: Tianyu Huai, Jie Zhou, Xingjiao Wu, Qin Chen, Qingchun Bai, Ze Zhou, Liang He

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention from researchers due to their remarkable understanding and generation capabilities in visual language tasks (e.g., visual question answering). However, the rapid pace of knowledge updates in the real world makes offline training of MLLMs costly, and when faced with non-stationary data streams, MLLMs suffer from catastrophi… ▽ More Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention from researchers due to their remarkable understanding and generation capabilities in visual language tasks (e.g., visual question answering). However, the rapid pace of knowledge updates in the real world makes offline training of MLLMs costly, and when faced with non-stationary data streams, MLLMs suffer from catastrophic forgetting during learning. In this paper, we propose an MLLMs-based dual momentum Mixture-of-Experts (CL-MoE) framework for continual visual question answering (VQA). We integrate MLLMs with continual learning to utilize the rich commonsense knowledge in LLMs. We introduce a Dual-Router MoE (RMoE) strategy to select the global and local experts using task-level and instance-level routers, to robustly assign weights to the experts most appropriate for the task. Then, we design a dynamic Momentum MoE (MMoE) to update the parameters of experts dynamically based on the relationships between the experts and tasks/instances, so that the model can absorb new knowledge while maintaining existing knowledge. The extensive experimental results indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 VQA tasks, proving the effectiveness of our approach. △ Less

Submitted 1 March, 2025; originally announced March 2025.

Comments: 10 pages,4 figures,accepted by CVPR2025

LLM-KT: Aligning Large Language Models with Knowledge Tracing using a Plug-and-Play Instruction

Authors: Ziwei Wang, Jie Zhou, Qin Chen, Min Zhang, Bo Jiang, Aimin Zhou, Qinchun Bai, Liang He

Abstract: The knowledge tracing (KT) problem is an extremely important topic in personalized education, which aims to predict whether students can correctly answer the next question based on their past question-answer records. Prior work on this task mainly focused on learning the sequence of behaviors based on the IDs or textual information. However, these studies usually fail to capture students' sufficie… ▽ More The knowledge tracing (KT) problem is an extremely important topic in personalized education, which aims to predict whether students can correctly answer the next question based on their past question-answer records. Prior work on this task mainly focused on learning the sequence of behaviors based on the IDs or textual information. However, these studies usually fail to capture students' sufficient behavioral patterns without reasoning with rich world knowledge about questions. In this paper, we propose a large language models (LLMs)-based framework for KT, named \texttt{\textbf{LLM-KT}}, to integrate the strengths of LLMs and traditional sequence interaction models. For task-level alignment, we design Plug-and-Play instruction to align LLMs with KT, leveraging LLMs' rich knowledge and powerful reasoning capacity. For modality-level alignment, we design the plug-in context and sequence to integrate multiple modalities learned by traditional methods. To capture the long context of history records, we present a plug-in context to flexibly insert the compressed context embedding into LLMs using question-specific and concept-specific tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a plug-in sequence to enhance LLMs with sequence interaction behavior representation learned by traditional sequence models using a sequence adapter. Extensive experiments show that \texttt{\textbf{LLM-KT}} obtains state-of-the-art performance on four typical datasets by comparing it with approximately 20 strong baselines. △ Less

Submitted 5 February, 2025; originally announced February 2025.

Concurrent Learning with Aggregated States via Randomized Least Squares Value Iteration

Authors: Yan Chen, Qinxun Bai, Yiteng Zhang, Shi Dong, Maria Dimakopoulou, Qi Sun, Zhengyuan Zhou

Abstract: Designing learning agents that explore efficiently in a complex environment has been widely recognized as a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. While a number of works have demonstrated the effectiveness of techniques based on randomized value functions on a single agent, it remains unclear, from a theoretical point of view, whether injecting randomization can help a society of agents… ▽ More Designing learning agents that explore efficiently in a complex environment has been widely recognized as a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. While a number of works have demonstrated the effectiveness of techniques based on randomized value functions on a single agent, it remains unclear, from a theoretical point of view, whether injecting randomization can help a society of agents {\it concurently} explore an environment. The theoretical results %that we established in this work tender an affirmative answer to this question. We adapt the concurrent learning framework to \textit{randomized least-squares value iteration} (RLSVI) with \textit{aggregated state representation}. We demonstrate polynomial worst-case regret bounds in both finite- and infinite-horizon environments. In both setups the per-agent regret decreases at an optimal rate of $Θ\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\right)$, highlighting the advantage of concurent learning. Our algorithm exhibits significantly lower space complexity compared to \cite{russo2019worst} and \cite{agrawal2021improved}. We reduce the space complexity by a factor of $K$ while incurring only a $\sqrt{K}$ increase in the worst-case regret bound, compared to \citep{agrawal2021improved,russo2019worst}. Additionally, we conduct numerical experiments to demonstrate our theoretical findings. △ Less

Submitted 15 June, 2025; v1 submitted 23 January, 2025; originally announced January 2025.

SLIM: Sim-to-Real Legged Instructive Manipulation via Long-Horizon Visuomotor Learning

Authors: Haichao Zhang, Haonan Yu, Le Zhao, Andrew Choi, Qinxun Bai, Break Yang, Wei Xu

Abstract: We present a low-cost legged mobile manipulation system that solves long-horizon real-world tasks, trained by reinforcement learning purely in simulation. This system is made possible by 1) a hierarchical design of a high-level policy for visual-mobile manipulation following task instructions, and a low-level quadruped locomotion policy, 2) a teacher and student training pipeline for the high leve… ▽ More We present a low-cost legged mobile manipulation system that solves long-horizon real-world tasks, trained by reinforcement learning purely in simulation. This system is made possible by 1) a hierarchical design of a high-level policy for visual-mobile manipulation following task instructions, and a low-level quadruped locomotion policy, 2) a teacher and student training pipeline for the high level, which trains a teacher to tackle long-horizon tasks using privileged task decomposition and target object information, and further trains a student for visual-mobile manipulation via RL guided by the teacher's behavior, and 3) a suite of techniques for minimizing the sim-to-real gap. In contrast to many previous works that use high-end equipments, our system demonstrates effective performance with more accessible hardware -- specifically, a Unitree Go1 quadruped, a WidowX-250S arm, and a single wrist-mounted RGB camera -- despite the increased challenges of sim-to-real transfer. Trained fully in simulation, a single policy autonomously solves long-horizon tasks involving search, move to, grasp, transport, and drop into, achieving nearly 80% real-world success. This performance is comparable to that of expert human teleoperation on the same tasks while the robot is more efficient, operating at about 1.5x the speed of the teleoperation. Finally, we perform extensive ablations on key techniques for efficient RL training and effective sim-to-real transfer, and demonstrate effective deployment across diverse indoor and outdoor scenes under various lighting conditions. △ Less

Submitted 29 January, 2025; v1 submitted 16 January, 2025; originally announced January 2025.

Edicho: Consistent Image Editing in the Wild

Authors: Qingyan Bai, Hao Ouyang, Yinghao Xu, Qiuyu Wang, Ceyuan Yang, Ka Leong Cheng, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen

Abstract: As a verified need, consistent editing across in-the-wild images remains a technical challenge arising from various unmanageable factors, like object poses, lighting conditions, and photography environments. Edicho steps in with a training-free solution based on diffusion models, featuring a fundamental design principle of using explicit image correspondence to direct editing. Specifically, the ke… ▽ More As a verified need, consistent editing across in-the-wild images remains a technical challenge arising from various unmanageable factors, like object poses, lighting conditions, and photography environments. Edicho steps in with a training-free solution based on diffusion models, featuring a fundamental design principle of using explicit image correspondence to direct editing. Specifically, the key components include an attention manipulation module and a carefully refined classifier-free guidance (CFG) denoising strategy, both of which take into account the pre-estimated correspondence. Such an inference-time algorithm enjoys a plug-and-play nature and is compatible to most diffusion-based editing methods, such as ControlNet and BrushNet. Extensive results demonstrate the efficacy of Edicho in consistent cross-image editing under diverse settings. We will release the code to facilitate future studies. △ Less

Submitted 14 January, 2025; v1 submitted 30 December, 2024; originally announced December 2024.

Comments: Project page: https://ant-research.github.io/edicho/

PerceiverS: A Multi-Scale Perceiver with Effective Segmentation for Long-Term Expressive Symbolic Music Generation

Authors: Yungang Yi, Weihua Li, Matthew Kuo, Quan Bai

Abstract: AI-based music generation has made significant progress in recent years. However, generating symbolic music that is both long-structured and expressive remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose PerceiverS (Segmentation and Scale), a novel architecture designed to address this issue by leveraging both Effective Segmentation and Multi-Scale attention mechanisms. Our approach enhance… ▽ More AI-based music generation has made significant progress in recent years. However, generating symbolic music that is both long-structured and expressive remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose PerceiverS (Segmentation and Scale), a novel architecture designed to address this issue by leveraging both Effective Segmentation and Multi-Scale attention mechanisms. Our approach enhances symbolic music generation by simultaneously learning long-term structural dependencies and short-term expressive details. By combining cross-attention and self-attention in a Multi-Scale setting, PerceiverS captures long-range musical structure while preserving performance nuances. The proposed model has been evaluated using the Maestro dataset and has demonstrated improvements in generating coherent and diverse music, characterized by both structural consistency and expressive variation. The project demos and the generated music samples can be accessed through the link: https://perceivers.github.io. △ Less

Submitted 21 September, 2025; v1 submitted 12 November, 2024; originally announced November 2024.

ACM Class: I.2.7; H.5.5

Journal ref: IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 2025

Enhancing Diversity in Bayesian Deep Learning via Hyperspherical Energy Minimization of CKA

Authors: David Smerkous, Qinxun Bai, Fuxin Li

Abstract: Particle-based Bayesian deep learning often requires a similarity metric to compare two networks. However, naive similarity metrics lack permutation invariance and are inappropriate for comparing networks. Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) on feature kernels has been proposed to compare deep networks but has not been used as an optimization objective in Bayesian deep learning. In this paper, we expl… ▽ More Particle-based Bayesian deep learning often requires a similarity metric to compare two networks. However, naive similarity metrics lack permutation invariance and are inappropriate for comparing networks. Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) on feature kernels has been proposed to compare deep networks but has not been used as an optimization objective in Bayesian deep learning. In this paper, we explore the use of CKA in Bayesian deep learning to generate diverse ensembles and hypernetworks that output a network posterior. Noting that CKA projects kernels onto a unit hypersphere and that directly optimizing the CKA objective leads to diminishing gradients when two networks are very similar. We propose adopting the approach of hyperspherical energy (HE) on top of CKA kernels to address this drawback and improve training stability. Additionally, by leveraging CKA-based feature kernels, we derive feature repulsive terms applied to synthetically generated outlier examples. Experiments on both diverse ensembles and hypernetworks show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines in terms of uncertainty quantification in both synthetic and realistic outlier detection tasks. △ Less

Submitted 31 October, 2024; originally announced November 2024.

Comments: NeurIPS 2024

Large Legislative Models: Towards Efficient AI Policymaking in Economic Simulations

Authors: Henry Gasztowtt, Benjamin Smith, Vincent Zhu, Qinxun Bai, Edwin Zhang

Abstract: The improvement of economic policymaking presents an opportunity for broad societal benefit, a notion that has inspired research towards AI-driven policymaking tools. AI policymaking holds the potential to surpass human performance through the ability to process data quickly at scale. However, existing RL-based methods exhibit sample inefficiency, and are further limited by an inability to flexibl… ▽ More The improvement of economic policymaking presents an opportunity for broad societal benefit, a notion that has inspired research towards AI-driven policymaking tools. AI policymaking holds the potential to surpass human performance through the ability to process data quickly at scale. However, existing RL-based methods exhibit sample inefficiency, and are further limited by an inability to flexibly incorporate nuanced information into their decision-making processes. Thus, we propose a novel method in which we instead utilize pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), as sample-efficient policymakers in socially complex multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) scenarios. We demonstrate significant efficiency gains, outperforming existing methods across three environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/hegasz/large-legislative-models. △ Less

Submitted 10 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Latent Feature and Attention Dual Erasure Attack against Multi-View Diffusion Models for 3D Assets Protection

Authors: Jingwei Sun, Xuchong Zhang, Changfeng Sun, Qicheng Bai, Hongbin Sun

Abstract: Multi-View Diffusion Models (MVDMs) enable remarkable improvements in the field of 3D geometric reconstruction, but the issue regarding intellectual property has received increasing attention due to unauthorized imitation. Recently, some works have utilized adversarial attacks to protect copyright. However, all these works focus on single-image generation tasks which only need to consider the inne… ▽ More Multi-View Diffusion Models (MVDMs) enable remarkable improvements in the field of 3D geometric reconstruction, but the issue regarding intellectual property has received increasing attention due to unauthorized imitation. Recently, some works have utilized adversarial attacks to protect copyright. However, all these works focus on single-image generation tasks which only need to consider the inner feature of images. Previous methods are inefficient in attacking MVDMs because they lack the consideration of disrupting the geometric and visual consistency among the generated multi-view images. This paper is the first to address the intellectual property infringement issue arising from MVDMs. Accordingly, we propose a novel latent feature and attention dual erasure attack to disrupt the distribution of latent feature and the consistency across the generated images from multi-view and multi-domain simultaneously. The experiments conducted on SOTA MVDMs indicate that our approach achieves superior performances in terms of attack effectiveness, transferability, and robustness against defense methods. Therefore, this paper provides an efficient solution to protect 3D assets from MVDMs-based 3D geometry reconstruction. △ Less

Submitted 7 April, 2025; v1 submitted 21 August, 2024; originally announced August 2024.

Comments: This paper has been accepted by ICME 2025

LLaST: Improved End-to-end Speech Translation System Leveraged by Large Language Models

Authors: Xi Chen, Songyang Zhang, Qibing Bai, Kai Chen, Satoshi Nakamura

Abstract: We introduces LLaST, a framework for building high-performance Large Language model based Speech-to-text Translation systems. We address the limitations of end-to-end speech translation(E2E ST) models by exploring model architecture design and optimization techniques tailored for LLMs. Our approach includes LLM-based speech translation architecture design, ASR-augmented training, multilingual data… ▽ More We introduces LLaST, a framework for building high-performance Large Language model based Speech-to-text Translation systems. We address the limitations of end-to-end speech translation(E2E ST) models by exploring model architecture design and optimization techniques tailored for LLMs. Our approach includes LLM-based speech translation architecture design, ASR-augmented training, multilingual data augmentation, and dual-LoRA optimization. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on the CoVoST-2 benchmark and showcases exceptional scaling capabilities powered by LLMs. We believe this effective method will serve as a strong baseline for speech translation and provide insights for future improvements of the LLM-based speech translation framework. We release the data, code and models in https://github.com/openaudiolab/LLaST. △ Less

Submitted 22 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

LayoutDiT: Exploring Content-Graphic Balance in Layout Generation with Diffusion Transformer

Authors: Yu Li, Yifan Chen, Gongye Liu, Fei Yin, Qingyan Bai, Jie Wu, Hongfa Wang, Ruihang Chu, Yujiu Yang

Abstract: Layout generation is a foundation task of graphic design, which requires the integration of visual aesthetics and harmonious expression of content delivery. However, existing methods still face challenges in generating precise and visually appealing layouts, including blocking, overlapping, small-sized, or spatial misalignment. We found that these methods overlook the crucial balance between learn… ▽ More Layout generation is a foundation task of graphic design, which requires the integration of visual aesthetics and harmonious expression of content delivery. However, existing methods still face challenges in generating precise and visually appealing layouts, including blocking, overlapping, small-sized, or spatial misalignment. We found that these methods overlook the crucial balance between learning content-aware and graphic-aware features. This oversight results in their limited ability to model the graphic structure of layouts and generate reasonable layout arrangements. To address these challenges, we introduce LayoutDiT, an effective framework that balances content and graphic features to generate high-quality, visually appealing layouts. Specifically, we first design an adaptive factor that optimizes the model's awareness of the layout generation space, balancing the model's performance in both content and graphic aspects. Secondly, we introduce a graphic condition, the saliency bounding box, to bridge the modality difference between images in the visual domain and layouts in the geometric parameter domain. In addition, we adapt a diffusion transformer model as the backbone, whose powerful generative capability ensures the quality of layout generation. Benefiting from the properties of diffusion models, our method excels in constrained settings without introducing additional constraint modules. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in both constrained and unconstrained settings, significantly outperforming existing methods. △ Less

Submitted 22 November, 2024; v1 submitted 21 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

Imbalanced Graph-Level Anomaly Detection via Counterfactual Augmentation and Feature Learning

Authors: Zitong Wang, Xuexiong Luo, Enfeng Song, Qiuqing Bai, Fu Lin

Abstract: Graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD) has already gained significant importance and has become a popular field of study, attracting considerable attention across numerous downstream works. The core focus of this domain is to capture and highlight the anomalous information within given graph datasets. In most existing studies, anomalies are often the instances of few. The stark imbalance misleads cu… ▽ More Graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD) has already gained significant importance and has become a popular field of study, attracting considerable attention across numerous downstream works. The core focus of this domain is to capture and highlight the anomalous information within given graph datasets. In most existing studies, anomalies are often the instances of few. The stark imbalance misleads current GLAD methods to focus on learning the patterns of normal graphs more, further impacting anomaly detection performance. Moreover, existing methods predominantly utilize the inherent features of nodes to identify anomalous graph patterns which is approved suboptimal according to our experiments. In this work, we propose an imbalanced GLAD method via counterfactual augmentation and feature learning. Specifically, we first construct anomalous samples based on counterfactual learning, aiming to expand and balance the datasets. Additionally, we construct a module based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which allows us to utilize degree attributes to complement the inherent attribute features of nodes. Then, we design an adaptive weight learning module to integrate features tailored to different datasets effectively to avoid indiscriminately treating all features as equivalent. Furthermore, extensive baseline experiments conducted on public datasets substantiate the robustness and effectiveness. Besides, we apply the model to brain disease datasets, which can prove the generalization capability of our work. The source code of our work is available online. △ Less

Submitted 13 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

Comments: 12 pages, 4 figures, SSDBM2024

Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Average Reward Objective: Model-Based and Model-Free Algorithms

Authors: Vaneet Aggarwal, Washim Uddin Mondal, Qinbo Bai

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology, mechanics, and finance. The primary objective in these applications is to maximize the average reward. Real-world scenarios often necessitate adherence to specific co… ▽ More Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology, mechanics, and finance. The primary objective in these applications is to maximize the average reward. Real-world scenarios often necessitate adherence to specific constraints during the learning process. This monograph focuses on the exploration of various model-based and model-free approaches for Constrained RL within the context of average reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). The investigation commences with an examination of model-based strategies, delving into two foundational methods - optimism in the face of uncertainty and posterior sampling. Subsequently, the discussion transitions to parametrized model-free approaches, where the primal-dual policy gradient-based algorithm is explored as a solution for constrained MDPs. The monograph provides regret guarantees and analyzes constraint violation for each of the discussed setups. For the above exploration, we assume the underlying MDP to be ergodic. Further, this monograph extends its discussion to encompass results tailored for weakly communicating MDPs, thereby broadening the scope of its findings and their relevance to a wider range of practical scenarios. △ Less

Submitted 17 July, 2024; v1 submitted 17 June, 2024; originally announced June 2024.

Comments: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2402.02042

Journal ref: Foundations and Trends in Optimization: Vol. 6: No. 4, pp 193-298, 2024

Disentangled Hyperbolic Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Graphs

Authors: Qijie Bai, Changli Nie, Haiwei Zhang, Zhicheng Dou, Xiaojie Yuan

Abstract: Heterogeneous graphs have attracted a lot of research interests recently due to the success for representing complex real-world systems. However, existing methods have two pain points in embedding them into low-dimensional spaces: the mixing of structural and semantic information, and the distributional mismatch between data and embedding spaces. These two challenges require representation methods… ▽ More Heterogeneous graphs have attracted a lot of research interests recently due to the success for representing complex real-world systems. However, existing methods have two pain points in embedding them into low-dimensional spaces: the mixing of structural and semantic information, and the distributional mismatch between data and embedding spaces. These two challenges require representation methods to consider the global and partial data distributions while unmixing the information. Therefore, in this paper, we propose $\text{Dis-H}^2\text{GCN}$, a Disentangled Hyperbolic Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network. On the one hand, we leverage the mutual information minimization and discrimination maximization constraints to disentangle the semantic features from comprehensively learned representations by independent message propagation for each edge type, away from the pure structural features. On the other hand, the entire model is constructed upon the hyperbolic geometry to narrow the gap between data distributions and representing spaces. We evaluate our proposed $\text{Dis-H}^2\text{GCN}$ on five real-world heterogeneous graph datasets across two downstream tasks: node classification and link prediction. The results demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods, showcasing the effectiveness of our method in disentangling and representing heterogeneous graph data in hyperbolic spaces. △ Less

Submitted 14 June, 2024; originally announced June 2024.

Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer for Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Authors: Zhijun Liu, Shuai Wang, Sho Inoue, Qibing Bai, Haizhou Li

Abstract: Audio language models have recently emerged as a promising approach for various audio generation tasks, relying on audio tokenizers to encode waveforms into sequences of discrete symbols. Audio tokenization often poses a necessary compromise between code bitrate and reconstruction accuracy. When dealing with low-bitrate audio codes, language models are constrained to process only a subset of the i… ▽ More Audio language models have recently emerged as a promising approach for various audio generation tasks, relying on audio tokenizers to encode waveforms into sequences of discrete symbols. Audio tokenization often poses a necessary compromise between code bitrate and reconstruction accuracy. When dealing with low-bitrate audio codes, language models are constrained to process only a subset of the information embedded in the audio, which in turn restricts their generative capabilities. To circumvent these issues, we propose encoding audio as vector sequences in continuous space $\mathbb R^d$ and autoregressively generating these sequences using a decoder-only diffusion transformer (ARDiT). Our findings indicate that ARDiT excels in zero-shot text-to-speech and exhibits performance that compares to or even surpasses that of state-of-the-art models. High-bitrate continuous speech representation enables almost flawless reconstruction, allowing our model to achieve nearly perfect speech editing. Our experiments reveal that employing Integral Kullback-Leibler (IKL) divergence for distillation at each autoregressive step significantly boosts the perceived quality of the samples. Simultaneously, it condenses the iterative sampling process of the diffusion model into a single step. Furthermore, ARDiT can be trained to predict several continuous vectors in one step, significantly reducing latency during sampling. Impressively, one of our models can generate $170$ ms of $24$ kHz speech per evaluation step with minimal degradation in performance. Audio samples are available at http://ardit-tts.github.io/ . △ Less

Submitted 8 June, 2024; originally announced June 2024.

XctDiff: Reconstruction of CT Images with Consistent Anatomical Structures from a Single Radiographic Projection Image

Authors: Qingze Bai, Tiange Liu, Zhi Liu, Yubing Tong, Drew Torigian, Jayaram Udupa

Abstract: In this paper, we present XctDiff, an algorithm framework for reconstructing CT from a single radiograph, which decomposes the reconstruction process into two easily controllable tasks: feature extraction and CT reconstruction. Specifically, we first design a progressive feature extraction strategy that is able to extract robust 3D priors from radiographs. Then, we use the extracted prior informat… ▽ More In this paper, we present XctDiff, an algorithm framework for reconstructing CT from a single radiograph, which decomposes the reconstruction process into two easily controllable tasks: feature extraction and CT reconstruction. Specifically, we first design a progressive feature extraction strategy that is able to extract robust 3D priors from radiographs. Then, we use the extracted prior information to guide the CT reconstruction in the latent space. Moreover, we design a homogeneous spatial codebook to improve the reconstruction quality further. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and overcomes the blurring issue. We also apply XctDiff on self-supervised pre-training task. The effectiveness indicates that it has promising additional applications in medical image analysis. The code is available at:https://github.com/qingze-bai/XctDiff △ Less

Submitted 13 June, 2024; v1 submitted 7 June, 2024; originally announced June 2024.

An Efficient Loop and Clique Coarsening Algorithm for Graph Classification

Authors: Xiaorui Qi, Qijie Bai, Yanlong Wen, Haiwei Zhang, Xiaojie Yuan

Abstract: Graph Transformers (GTs) have made remarkable achievements in graph-level tasks. However, most existing works regard graph structures as a form of guidance or bias for enhancing node representations, which focuses on node-central perspectives and lacks explicit representations of edges and structures. One natural question arises as to whether we can leverage a hypernode to represent some structure… ▽ More Graph Transformers (GTs) have made remarkable achievements in graph-level tasks. However, most existing works regard graph structures as a form of guidance or bias for enhancing node representations, which focuses on node-central perspectives and lacks explicit representations of edges and structures. One natural question arises as to whether we can leverage a hypernode to represent some structures. Through experimental analysis, we explore the feasibility of this assumption. Based on our findings, we propose an efficient Loop and Clique Coarsening algorithm with linear complexity for Graph Classification (LCC4GC) on GT architecture. Specifically, we build three unique views, original, coarsening, and conversion, to learn a thorough structural representation. We compress loops and cliques via hierarchical heuristic graph coarsening and restrict them with well-designed constraints, which builds the coarsening view to learn high-level interactions between structures. We also introduce line graphs for edge embeddings and switch to edge-central perspective to alleviate the impact of coarsening reduction. Experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the improvements of LCC4GC over 31 baselines from various architectures. △ Less

Submitted 9 December, 2024; v1 submitted 17 April, 2024; originally announced April 2024.

Balancing Information Perception with Yin-Yang: Agent-Based Information Neutrality Model for Recommendation Systems

Authors: Mengyan Wang, Yuxuan Hu, Shiqing Wu, Weihua Li, Quan Bai, Verica Rupar

Abstract: While preference-based recommendation algorithms effectively enhance user engagement by recommending personalized content, they often result in the creation of ``filter bubbles''. These bubbles restrict the range of information users interact with, inadvertently reinforcing their existing viewpoints. Previous research has focused on modifying these underlying algorithms to tackle this issue. Yet,… ▽ More While preference-based recommendation algorithms effectively enhance user engagement by recommending personalized content, they often result in the creation of ``filter bubbles''. These bubbles restrict the range of information users interact with, inadvertently reinforcing their existing viewpoints. Previous research has focused on modifying these underlying algorithms to tackle this issue. Yet, approaches that maintain the integrity of the original algorithms remain largely unexplored. This paper introduces an Agent-based Information Neutrality model grounded in the Yin-Yang theory, namely, AbIN. This innovative approach targets the imbalance in information perception within existing recommendation systems. It is designed to integrate with these preference-based systems, ensuring the delivery of recommendations with neutral information. Our empirical evaluation of this model proved its efficacy, showcasing its capacity to expand information diversity while respecting user preferences. Consequently, AbIN emerges as an instrumental tool in mitigating the negative impact of filter bubbles on information consumption. △ Less

Submitted 7 April, 2024; originally announced April 2024.

Detecting misinformation through Framing Theory: the Frame Element-based Model

Authors: Guan Wang, Rebecca Frederick, Jinglong Duan, William Wong, Verica Rupar, Weihua Li, Quan Bai

Abstract: In this paper, we delve into the rapidly evolving challenge of misinformation detection, with a specific focus on the nuanced manipulation of narrative frames - an under-explored area within the AI community. The potential for Generative AI models to generate misleading narratives underscores the urgency of this problem. Drawing from communication and framing theories, we posit that the presentati… ▽ More In this paper, we delve into the rapidly evolving challenge of misinformation detection, with a specific focus on the nuanced manipulation of narrative frames - an under-explored area within the AI community. The potential for Generative AI models to generate misleading narratives underscores the urgency of this problem. Drawing from communication and framing theories, we posit that the presentation or 'framing' of accurate information can dramatically alter its interpretation, potentially leading to misinformation. We highlight this issue through real-world examples, demonstrating how shifts in narrative frames can transmute fact-based information into misinformation. To tackle this challenge, we propose an innovative approach leveraging the power of pre-trained Large Language Models and deep neural networks to detect misinformation originating from accurate facts portrayed under different frames. These advanced AI techniques offer unprecedented capabilities in identifying complex patterns within unstructured data critical for examining the subtleties of narrative frames. The objective of this paper is to bridge a significant research gap in the AI domain, providing valuable insights and methodologies for tackling framing-induced misinformation, thus contributing to the advancement of responsible and trustworthy AI technologies. Several experiments are intensively conducted and experimental results explicitly demonstrate the various impact of elements of framing theory proving the rationale of applying framing theory to increase the performance in misinformation detection. △ Less

Submitted 19 February, 2024; originally announced February 2024.

Comments: 17 pages, 9 figures, 7 tables

Let's Rectify Step by Step: Improving Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Diffusion Models

Authors: Shunyu Liu, Jie Zhou, Qunxi Zhu, Qin Chen, Qingchun Bai, Jun Xiao, Liang He

Abstract: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) stands as a crucial task in predicting the sentiment polarity associated with identified aspects within text. However, a notable challenge in ABSA lies in precisely determining the aspects' boundaries (start and end indices), especially for long ones, due to users' colloquial expressions. We propose DiffusionABSA, a novel diffusion model tailored for ABSA, wh… ▽ More Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) stands as a crucial task in predicting the sentiment polarity associated with identified aspects within text. However, a notable challenge in ABSA lies in precisely determining the aspects' boundaries (start and end indices), especially for long ones, due to users' colloquial expressions. We propose DiffusionABSA, a novel diffusion model tailored for ABSA, which extracts the aspects progressively step by step. Particularly, DiffusionABSA gradually adds noise to the aspect terms in the training process, subsequently learning a denoising process that progressively restores these terms in a reverse manner. To estimate the boundaries, we design a denoising neural network enhanced by a syntax-aware temporal attention mechanism to chronologically capture the interplay between aspects and surrounding text. Empirical evaluations conducted on eight benchmark datasets underscore the compelling advantages offered by DiffusionABSA when compared against robust baseline models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Qlb6x/DiffusionABSA. △ Less

Submitted 23 February, 2024; originally announced February 2024.

Comments: Accepted to LREC-COLING 2024, submission version

Real-time 3D-aware Portrait Editing from a Single Image

Authors: Qingyan Bai, Zifan Shi, Yinghao Xu, Hao Ouyang, Qiuyu Wang, Ceyuan Yang, Xuan Wang, Gordon Wetzstein, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen

Abstract: This work presents 3DPE, a practical method that can efficiently edit a face image following given prompts, like reference images or text descriptions, in a 3D-aware manner. To this end, a lightweight module is distilled from a 3D portrait generator and a text-to-image model, which provide prior knowledge of face geometry and superior editing capability, respectively. Such a design brings two comp… ▽ More This work presents 3DPE, a practical method that can efficiently edit a face image following given prompts, like reference images or text descriptions, in a 3D-aware manner. To this end, a lightweight module is distilled from a 3D portrait generator and a text-to-image model, which provide prior knowledge of face geometry and superior editing capability, respectively. Such a design brings two compelling advantages over existing approaches. First, our method achieves real-time editing with a feedforward network (i.e., ~0.04s per image), over 100x faster than the second competitor. Second, thanks to the powerful priors, our module could focus on the learning of editing-related variations, such that it manages to handle various types of editing simultaneously in the training phase and further supports fast adaptation to user-specified customized types of editing during inference (e.g., with ~5min fine-tuning per style). △ Less

Submitted 18 July, 2024; v1 submitted 21 February, 2024; originally announced February 2024.

Comments: ECCV 2024 camera-ready version. Project page: https://github.com/EzioBy/3dpe

Learning General Parameterized Policies for Infinite Horizon Average Reward Constrained MDPs via Primal-Dual Policy Gradient Algorithm

Authors: Qinbo Bai, Washim Uddin Mondal, Vaneet Aggarwal

Abstract: This paper explores the realm of infinite horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to delve into the regret and constraint violation analysis of average reward CMDPs with a general policy parametrization. To address this challenge, we propose a primal dual-based policy gradient algorithm that adeptly manages the cons… ▽ More This paper explores the realm of infinite horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to delve into the regret and constraint violation analysis of average reward CMDPs with a general policy parametrization. To address this challenge, we propose a primal dual-based policy gradient algorithm that adeptly manages the constraints while ensuring a low regret guarantee toward achieving a global optimal policy. In particular, our proposed algorithm achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}({T}^{4/5})$ objective regret and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}({T}^{4/5})$ constraint violation bounds. △ Less

Submitted 30 October, 2024; v1 submitted 3 February, 2024; originally announced February 2024.

Journal ref: NeurIPS 2024

DIPR: Efficient Point Cloud Registration via Dynamic Iteration

Authors: Yang Ai, Qiang Bai, Jindong Li, Xi Yang

Abstract: Point cloud registration (PCR) is an essential task in 3D vision. Existing methods achieve increasingly higher accuracy. However, a large proportion of non-overlapping points in point cloud registration consume a lot of computational resources while negatively affecting registration accuracy. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel Efficient Point Cloud Registration via Dynamic Iteration… ▽ More Point cloud registration (PCR) is an essential task in 3D vision. Existing methods achieve increasingly higher accuracy. However, a large proportion of non-overlapping points in point cloud registration consume a lot of computational resources while negatively affecting registration accuracy. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel Efficient Point Cloud Registration via Dynamic Iteration framework, DIPR, that makes the neural network interactively focus on overlapping points based on sparser input points. We design global and local registration stages to achieve efficient course-tofine processing. Beyond basic matching modules, we propose the Refined Nodes to narrow down the scope of overlapping points by using adopted density-based clustering to significantly reduce the computation amount. And our SC Classifier serves as an early-exit mechanism to terminate the registration process in time according to matching accuracy. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our proposed approach achieves superior registration accuracy while significantly reducing computational time and GPU memory consumption compared to state-of-the-art methods. △ Less

Submitted 24 August, 2024; v1 submitted 5 December, 2023; originally announced December 2023.

Minerva: Decentralized Collaborative Query Processing over InterPlanetary File System

Authors: Zhiyi Yao, Bowen Ding, Qianlan Bai, Yuedong Xu

Abstract: Data silos create barriers in accessing and utilizing data dispersed over networks. Directly sharing data easily suffers from the long downloading time, the single point failure and the untraceable data usage. In this paper, we present Minerva, a peer-to-peer cross-cluster data query system based on InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Minerva makes use of the distributed Hash table (DHT) lookup to… ▽ More Data silos create barriers in accessing and utilizing data dispersed over networks. Directly sharing data easily suffers from the long downloading time, the single point failure and the untraceable data usage. In this paper, we present Minerva, a peer-to-peer cross-cluster data query system based on InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Minerva makes use of the distributed Hash table (DHT) lookup to pinpoint the locations that store content chunks. We theoretically model the DHT query delay and introduce the fat Merkle tree structure as well as the DHT caching to reduce it. We design the query plan for read and write operations on top of Apache Drill that enables the collaborative query with decentralized workers. We conduct comprehensive experiments on Minerva, and the results show that Minerva achieves up to $2.08 \times$ query performance acceleration compared to the original IPFS data query, and could complete data analysis queries on the Internet-like environments within an average latency of $0.615$ second. With collaborative query, Minerva could perform up to $1.39 \times$ performance acceleration than centralized query with raw data shipment. △ Less

Submitted 8 October, 2023; v1 submitted 6 October, 2023; originally announced October 2023.

Leveraging In-the-Wild Data for Effective Self-Supervised Pretraining in Speaker Recognition

Authors: Shuai Wang, Qibing Bai, Qi Liu, Jianwei Yu, Zhengyang Chen, Bing Han, Yanmin Qian, Haizhou Li

Abstract: Current speaker recognition systems primarily rely on supervised approaches, constrained by the scale of labeled datasets. To boost the system performance, researchers leverage large pretrained models such as WavLM to transfer learned high-level features to the downstream speaker recognition task. However, this approach introduces extra parameters as the pretrained model remains in the inference s… ▽ More Current speaker recognition systems primarily rely on supervised approaches, constrained by the scale of labeled datasets. To boost the system performance, researchers leverage large pretrained models such as WavLM to transfer learned high-level features to the downstream speaker recognition task. However, this approach introduces extra parameters as the pretrained model remains in the inference stage. Another group of researchers directly apply self-supervised methods such as DINO to speaker embedding learning, yet they have not explored its potential on large-scale in-the-wild datasets. In this paper, we present the effectiveness of DINO training on the large-scale WenetSpeech dataset and its transferability in enhancing the supervised system performance on the CNCeleb dataset. Additionally, we introduce a confidence-based data filtering algorithm to remove unreliable data from the pretraining dataset, leading to better performance with less training data. The associated pretrained models, confidence files, pretraining and finetuning scripts will be made available in the Wespeaker toolkit. △ Less

Submitted 26 September, 2023; v1 submitted 20 September, 2023; originally announced September 2023.

Comments: submitted to ICASSP 2024

Regret Analysis of Policy Gradient Algorithm for Infinite Horizon Average Reward Markov Decision Processes

Authors: Qinbo Bai, Washim Uddin Mondal, Vaneet Aggarwal

Abstract: In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Distinguishing itself from existing works within this context, our approach harnesses the power of the general policy gradient-based algorithm, liberating it from the constraints of assuming a linear MDP structure. We propose a policy gradient-based algorithm and show its global convergence property. We th… ▽ More In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Distinguishing itself from existing works within this context, our approach harnesses the power of the general policy gradient-based algorithm, liberating it from the constraints of assuming a linear MDP structure. We propose a policy gradient-based algorithm and show its global convergence property. We then prove that the proposed algorithm has $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}({T}^{3/4})$ regret. Remarkably, this paper marks a pioneering effort by presenting the first exploration into regret-bound computation for the general parameterized policy gradient algorithm in the context of average reward scenarios. △ Less

Submitted 2 February, 2024; v1 submitted 4 September, 2023; originally announced September 2023.

Journal ref: AAAI 2024

CoDeF: Content Deformation Fields for Temporally Consistent Video Processing

Authors: Hao Ouyang, Qiuyu Wang, Yuxi Xiao, Qingyan Bai, Juntao Zhang, Kecheng Zheng, Xiaowei Zhou, Qifeng Chen, Yujun Shen

Abstract: We present the content deformation field CoDeF as a new type of video representation, which consists of a canonical content field aggregating the static contents in the entire video and a temporal deformation field recording the transformations from the canonical image (i.e., rendered from the canonical content field) to each individual frame along the time axis. Given a target video, these two fi… ▽ More We present the content deformation field CoDeF as a new type of video representation, which consists of a canonical content field aggregating the static contents in the entire video and a temporal deformation field recording the transformations from the canonical image (i.e., rendered from the canonical content field) to each individual frame along the time axis. Given a target video, these two fields are jointly optimized to reconstruct it through a carefully tailored rendering pipeline. We advisedly introduce some regularizations into the optimization process, urging the canonical content field to inherit semantics (e.g., the object shape) from the video. With such a design, CoDeF naturally supports lifting image algorithms for video processing, in the sense that one can apply an image algorithm to the canonical image and effortlessly propagate the outcomes to the entire video with the aid of the temporal deformation field. We experimentally show that CoDeF is able to lift image-to-image translation to video-to-video translation and lift keypoint detection to keypoint tracking without any training. More importantly, thanks to our lifting strategy that deploys the algorithms on only one image, we achieve superior cross-frame consistency in processed videos compared to existing video-to-video translation approaches, and even manage to track non-rigid objects like water and smog. Project page can be found at https://qiuyu96.github.io/CoDeF/. △ Less

Submitted 12 December, 2024; v1 submitted 15 August, 2023; originally announced August 2023.

Comments: Project Webpage: https://qiuyu96.github.io/CoDeF/, Code: https://github.com/qiuyu96/CoDeF

BHEISR: Nudging from Bias to Balance -- Promoting Belief Harmony by Eliminating Ideological Segregation in Knowledge-based Recommendations

Authors: Mengyan Wang, Yuxuan Hu, Zihan Yuan, Chenting Jiang, Weihua Li, Shiqing Wu, Quan Bai

Abstract: In the realm of personalized recommendation systems, the increasing concern is the amplification of belief imbalance and user biases, a phenomenon primarily attributed to the filter bubble. Addressing this critical issue, we introduce an innovative intermediate agency (BHEISR) between users and existing recommendation systems to attenuate the negative repercussions of the filter bubble effect in e… ▽ More In the realm of personalized recommendation systems, the increasing concern is the amplification of belief imbalance and user biases, a phenomenon primarily attributed to the filter bubble. Addressing this critical issue, we introduce an innovative intermediate agency (BHEISR) between users and existing recommendation systems to attenuate the negative repercussions of the filter bubble effect in extant recommendation systems. The main objective is to strike a belief balance for users while minimizing the detrimental influence caused by filter bubbles. The BHEISR model amalgamates principles from nudge theory while upholding democratic and transparent principles. It harnesses user-specific category information to stimulate curiosity, even in areas users might initially deem uninteresting. By progressively stimulating interest in novel categories, the model encourages users to broaden their belief horizons and explore the information they typically overlook. Our model is time-sensitive and operates on a user feedback loop. It utilizes the existing recommendation algorithm of the model and incorporates user feedback from the prior time frame. This approach endeavors to transcend the constraints of the filter bubble, enrich recommendation diversity, and strike a belief balance among users while also catering to user preferences and system-specific business requirements. To validate the effectiveness and reliability of the BHEISR model, we conducted a series of comprehensive experiments with real-world datasets. These experiments compared the performance of the BHEISR model against several baseline models using nearly 200 filter bubble-impacted users as test subjects. Our experimental results conclusively illustrate the superior performance of the BHEISR model in mitigating filter bubbles and balancing user perspectives. △ Less

Submitted 6 July, 2023; originally announced July 2023.

Comments: 26 pages

MSC Class: 68T07 ACM Class: I.2.6; I.2.7

AaKOS: Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization

Authors: Guan Wang, Weihua Li, Edmund M-K. Lai, Quan Bai

Abstract: The rapid growth of information on the Internet has led to an overwhelming amount of opinions and comments on various activities, products, and services. This makes it difficult and time-consuming for users to process all the available information when making decisions. Text summarization, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, has been widely explored to help users quickly retrieve relevant in… ▽ More The rapid growth of information on the Internet has led to an overwhelming amount of opinions and comments on various activities, products, and services. This makes it difficult and time-consuming for users to process all the available information when making decisions. Text summarization, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, has been widely explored to help users quickly retrieve relevant information by generating short and salient content from long or multiple documents. Recent advances in pre-trained language models, such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text generation. However, LLMs require massive amounts of data and resources and are challenging to implement as offline applications. Furthermore, existing text summarization approaches often lack the ``adaptive" nature required to capture diverse aspects in opinion summarization, which is particularly detrimental to users with specific requirements or preferences. In this paper, we propose an Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization model for product reviews, which effectively captures the adaptive nature required for opinion summarization. The model generates aspect-oriented summaries given a set of reviews for a particular product, efficiently providing users with useful information on specific aspects they are interested in, ensuring the generated summaries are more personalized and informative. Extensive experiments have been conducted using real-world datasets to evaluate the proposed model. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and is adaptive and efficient in generating summaries that focus on particular aspects, enabling users to make well-informed decisions and catering to their diverse interests and preferences. △ Less

Submitted 25 May, 2023; originally announced June 2023.

Comments: 21 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables

QueryBooster: Improving SQL Performance Using Middleware Services for Human-Centered Query Rewriting

Authors: Qiushi Bai, Sadeem Alsudais, Chen Li

Abstract: SQL query performance is critical in database applications, and query rewriting is a technique that transforms an original query into an equivalent query with a better performance. In a wide range of database-supported systems, there is a unique problem where both the application and database layer are black boxes, and the developers need to use their knowledge about the data and domain to rewrite… ▽ More SQL query performance is critical in database applications, and query rewriting is a technique that transforms an original query into an equivalent query with a better performance. In a wide range of database-supported systems, there is a unique problem where both the application and database layer are black boxes, and the developers need to use their knowledge about the data and domain to rewrite queries sent from the application to the database for better performance. Unfortunately, existing solutions do not give the users enough freedom to express their rewriting needs. To address this problem, we propose QueryBooster, a novel middleware-based service architecture for human-centered query rewriting, where users can use its expressive and easy-to-use rule language (called VarSQL) to formulate rewriting rules based on their needs. It also allows users to express rewriting intentions by providing examples of the original query and its rewritten query. QueryBooster automatically generalizes them to rewriting rules and suggests high-quality ones. We conduct a user study to show the benefits of VarSQL to formulate rewriting rules. Our experiments on real and synthetic workloads show the effectiveness of the rule-suggesting framework and the significant advantages of using QueryBooster for human-centered query rewriting to improve the end-to-end query performance. △ Less

Submitted 14 May, 2023; originally announced May 2023.

HGWaveNet: A Hyperbolic Graph Neural Network for Temporal Link Prediction

Authors: Qijie Bai, Changli Nie, Haiwei Zhang, Dongming Zhao, Xiaojie Yuan

Abstract: Temporal link prediction, aiming to predict future edges between paired nodes in a dynamic graph, is of vital importance in diverse applications. However, existing methods are mainly built upon uniform Euclidean space, which has been found to be conflict with the power-law distributions of real-world graphs and unable to represent the hierarchical connections between nodes effectively. With respec… ▽ More Temporal link prediction, aiming to predict future edges between paired nodes in a dynamic graph, is of vital importance in diverse applications. However, existing methods are mainly built upon uniform Euclidean space, which has been found to be conflict with the power-law distributions of real-world graphs and unable to represent the hierarchical connections between nodes effectively. With respect to the special data characteristic, hyperbolic geometry offers an ideal alternative due to its exponential expansion property. In this paper, we propose HGWaveNet, a novel hyperbolic graph neural network that fully exploits the fitness between hyperbolic spaces and data distributions for temporal link prediction. Specifically, we design two key modules to learn the spatial topological structures and temporal evolutionary information separately. On the one hand, a hyperbolic diffusion graph convolution (HDGC) module effectively aggregates information from a wider range of neighbors. On the other hand, the internal order of causal correlation between historical states is captured by hyperbolic dilated causal convolution (HDCC) modules. The whole model is built upon the hyperbolic spaces to preserve the hierarchical structural information in the entire data flow. To prove the superiority of HGWaveNet, extensive experiments are conducted on six real-world graph datasets and the results show a relative improvement by up to 6.67% on AUC for temporal link prediction over SOTA methods. △ Less

Submitted 3 May, 2023; v1 submitted 14 April, 2023; originally announced April 2023.

Comments: Accepted by Web Conference (WWW) 2023

Journal ref: WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (523-532)

$\text{H}^2\text{TNE}$: Temporal Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding in Hyperbolic Spaces

Authors: Qijie Bai, Jiawen Guo, Haiwei Zhang, Changli Nie, Lin Zhang, Xiaojie Yuan

Abstract: Temporal heterogeneous information network (temporal HIN) embedding, aiming to represent various types of nodes of different timestamps into low dimensional spaces while preserving structural and semantic information, is of vital importance in diverse real-life tasks. Researchers have made great efforts on temporal HIN embedding in Euclidean spaces and got some considerable achievements. However,… ▽ More Temporal heterogeneous information network (temporal HIN) embedding, aiming to represent various types of nodes of different timestamps into low dimensional spaces while preserving structural and semantic information, is of vital importance in diverse real-life tasks. Researchers have made great efforts on temporal HIN embedding in Euclidean spaces and got some considerable achievements. However, there is always a fundamental conflict that many real-world networks show hierarchical property and power-law distribution, and are not isometric of Euclidean spaces. Recently, representation learning in hyperbolic spaces has been proved to be valid for data with hierarchical and power-law structure. Inspired by this character, we propose a hyperbolic heterogeneous temporal network embedding ($\text{H}^2\text{TNE}$) model for temporal HINs. Specifically, we leverage a temporally and heterogeneously double-constrained random walk strategy to capture the structural and semantic information, and then calculate the embedding by exploiting hyperbolic distance in proximity measurement. Experimental results show that our method has superior performance on temporal link prediction and node classification compared with SOTA models. △ Less

Submitted 14 June, 2024; v1 submitted 14 April, 2023; originally announced April 2023.

Journal ref: The Semantic Web-ISWC 2022: 21st International Semantic Web Conference, Virtual Event, October 23-27, 2022, Proceedings (pp. 179-195)

Revisiting the Evaluation of Image Synthesis with GANs

Authors: Mengping Yang, Ceyuan Yang, Yichi Zhang, Qingyan Bai, Yujun Shen, Bo Dai

Abstract: A good metric, which promises a reliable comparison between solutions, is essential for any well-defined task. Unlike most vision tasks that have per-sample ground-truth, image synthesis tasks target generating unseen data and hence are usually evaluated through a distributional distance between one set of real samples and another set of generated samples. This study presents an empirical investig… ▽ More A good metric, which promises a reliable comparison between solutions, is essential for any well-defined task. Unlike most vision tasks that have per-sample ground-truth, image synthesis tasks target generating unseen data and hence are usually evaluated through a distributional distance between one set of real samples and another set of generated samples. This study presents an empirical investigation into the evaluation of synthesis performance, with generative adversarial networks (GANs) as a representative of generative models. In particular, we make in-depth analyses of various factors, including how to represent a data point in the representation space, how to calculate a fair distance using selected samples, and how many instances to use from each set. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets and settings reveal several important findings. Firstly, a group of models that include both CNN-based and ViT-based architectures serve as reliable and robust feature extractors for measurement evaluation. Secondly, Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) provides a better comparison across various extractors and hierarchical layers in one model. Finally, CKA is more sample-efficient and enjoys better agreement with human judgment in characterizing the similarity between two internal data correlations. These findings contribute to the development of a new measurement system, which enables a consistent and reliable re-evaluation of current state-of-the-art generative models. △ Less

Submitted 23 October, 2023; v1 submitted 4 April, 2023; originally announced April 2023.

Comments: NeurIPS 2023 datasets and benchmarks track

Soft Prompt Guided Joint Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

Authors: Jingli Shi, Weihua Li, Quan Bai, Yi Yang, Jianhua Jiang

Abstract: Aspect term extraction is a fundamental task in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims at detecting customer's opinion targets from reviews on product or service. The traditional supervised models can achieve promising results with annotated datasets, however, the performance dramatically decreases when they are applied to the task of cross-domain aspect term extraction. Existing cross-domain… ▽ More Aspect term extraction is a fundamental task in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims at detecting customer's opinion targets from reviews on product or service. The traditional supervised models can achieve promising results with annotated datasets, however, the performance dramatically decreases when they are applied to the task of cross-domain aspect term extraction. Existing cross-domain transfer learning methods either directly inject linguistic features into Language models, making it difficult to transfer linguistic knowledge to target domain, or rely on the fixed predefined prompts, which is time-consuming to construct the prompts over all potential aspect term spans. To resolve the limitations, we propose a soft prompt-based joint learning method for cross domain aspect term extraction in this paper. Specifically, by incorporating external linguistic features, the proposed method learn domain-invariant representations between source and target domains via multiple objectives, which bridges the gap between domains with varied distributions of aspect terms. Further, the proposed method interpolates a set of transferable soft prompts consisted of multiple learnable vectors that are beneficial to detect aspect terms in target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for cross-domain aspect terms extraction. △ Less

Submitted 1 March, 2023; originally announced March 2023.

Comments: 22 pages

Rapid-Motion-Track: Markerless Tracking of Fast Human Motion with Deeper Learning

Authors: Renjie Li, Chun Yu Lao, Rebecca St. George, Katherine Lawler, Saurabh Garg, Son N. Tran, Quan Bai, Jane Alty

Abstract: Objective The coordination of human movement directly reflects function of the central nervous system. Small deficits in movement are often the first sign of an underlying neurological problem. The objective of this research is to develop a new end-to-end, deep learning-based system, Rapid-Motion-Track (RMT) that can track the fastest human movement accurately when webcams or laptop cameras are us… ▽ More Objective The coordination of human movement directly reflects function of the central nervous system. Small deficits in movement are often the first sign of an underlying neurological problem. The objective of this research is to develop a new end-to-end, deep learning-based system, Rapid-Motion-Track (RMT) that can track the fastest human movement accurately when webcams or laptop cameras are used. Materials and Methods We applied RMT to finger tapping, a well-validated test of motor control that is one of the most challenging human motions to track with computer vision due to the small keypoints of digits and the high velocities that are generated. We recorded 160 finger tapping assessments simultaneously with a standard 2D laptop camera (30 frames/sec) and a high-speed wearable sensor-based 3D motion tracking system (250 frames/sec). RMT and a range of DLC models were applied to the video data with tapping frequencies up to 8Hz to extract movement features. Results The movement features (e.g. speed, rhythm, variance) identified with the new RMT system exhibited very high concurrent validity with the gold-standard measurements (97.3\% of RMT measures were within +/-0.5Hz of the Optotrak measures), and outperformed DLC and other advanced computer vision tools (around 88.2\% of DLC measures were within +/-0.5Hz of the Optotrak measures). RMT also accurately tracked a range of other rapid human movements such as foot tapping, head turning and sit-to -stand movements. Conclusion: With the ubiquity of video technology in smart devices, the RMT method holds potential to transform access and accuracy of human movement assessment. △ Less

Submitted 18 January, 2023; originally announced February 2023.

DOR: A Novel Dual-Observation-Based Approach for News Recommendation Systems

Authors: Mengyan Wang, Weihua Li, Jingli Shi, Shiqing Wu, Quan Bai

Abstract: Online social media platforms offer access to a vast amount of information, but sifting through the abundance of news can be overwhelming and tiring for readers. personalised recommendation algorithms can help users find information that interests them. However, most existing models rely solely on observations of user behaviour, such as viewing history, ignoring the connections between the news an… ▽ More Online social media platforms offer access to a vast amount of information, but sifting through the abundance of news can be overwhelming and tiring for readers. personalised recommendation algorithms can help users find information that interests them. However, most existing models rely solely on observations of user behaviour, such as viewing history, ignoring the connections between the news and a user's prior knowledge. This can result in a lack of diverse recommendations for individuals. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address the complex problem of news recommendation. Our approach is based on the idea of dual observation, which involves using a deep neural network with observation mechanisms to identify the main focus of a news article as well as the focus of the user on the article. This is achieved by taking into account the user's belief network, which reflects their personal interests and biases. By considering both the content of the news and the user's perspective, our approach is able to provide more personalised and accurate recommendations. We evaluate the performance of our model on real-world datasets and show that our proposed method outperforms several popular baselines. △ Less

Submitted 2 February, 2023; originally announced February 2023.

MSC Class: 68T07

GLeaD: Improving GANs with A Generator-Leading Task

Authors: Qingyan Bai, Ceyuan Yang, Yinghao Xu, Xihui Liu, Yujiu Yang, Yujun Shen

Abstract: Generative adversarial network (GAN) is formulated as a two-player game between a generator (G) and a discriminator (D), where D is asked to differentiate whether an image comes from real data or is produced by G. Under such a formulation, D plays as the rule maker and hence tends to dominate the competition. Towards a fairer game in GANs, we propose a new paradigm for adversarial training, which… ▽ More Generative adversarial network (GAN) is formulated as a two-player game between a generator (G) and a discriminator (D), where D is asked to differentiate whether an image comes from real data or is produced by G. Under such a formulation, D plays as the rule maker and hence tends to dominate the competition. Towards a fairer game in GANs, we propose a new paradigm for adversarial training, which makes G assign a task to D as well. Specifically, given an image, we expect D to extract representative features that can be adequately decoded by G to reconstruct the input. That way, instead of learning freely, D is urged to align with the view of G for domain classification. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the substantial superiority of our approach over the baselines. For instance, we improve the FID of StyleGAN2 from 4.30 to 2.55 on LSUN Bedroom and from 4.04 to 2.82 on LSUN Church. We believe that the pioneering attempt present in this work could inspire the community with better designed generator-leading tasks for GAN improvement. △ Less

Submitted 6 June, 2023; v1 submitted 7 December, 2022; originally announced December 2022.

Comments: CVPR2023. Project page: https://ezioby.github.io/glead/ Code: https://github.com/EzioBy/glead/