Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Bin Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Bin Liang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Observation of Coherent Perfect Acoustic Absorption at an Exceptional Point

Non-Hermitian systems have recently shown new possibilities to manipulate wave scattering by exploiting loss, yet coherent perfect absorption at an exceptional point (CPA EP) remains elusive in acoustics. Here we demonstrate it based on a two-channel waveguide with compact lossy resonators. We realize imbalanced losses crucial for CPA EP by using active components to independently modulate the non-Hermiticity. The CPA EP experimentally manifests as full absorption at a unique real frequency and shows high sensitivity to the incident phase variations.Our findings open an avenue to explore novel non-Hermitian physics for classical waves and develop innovative acoustic singularity-based devices.

physics.app-ph↗

Acoustic topological Jackiw-Rebbi states at symmetry broken interfaces

Topological insulators, a fundamental concept in modern condensed matter physics, support localized states at the interfaces between insulators exhibiting different topological phases, which conventionally rely on explicit symmetry breaking. Here, we propose a mechanism to induce a real-space topological phase transition by spontaneous symmetry breaking, thereby constructing an acoustic metagrating to generate nontrivial Jackiw-Rebbi states characterized by robust imaginary band degeneracy. Our experimental implementation verifies the acoustic delocalized interface state with a constant phase jump, demonstrating enhanced high-directivity topological radiation. We foresee that our findings may spark interest in engineering new acoustic topological devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Bounded and Uniform Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection for Graphs

Given the critical role of graphs in real-world applications and their high-security requirements, improving the ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data is an urgent research problem. The recent work GNNSAFE proposes a framework based on the aggregation of negative energy scores that significantly improves the performance of GNNs to detect node-level OOD data. However, our study finds that score aggregation among nodes is susceptible to extreme values due to the unboundedness of the negative energy scores and logit shifts, which severely limits the accuracy of GNNs in detecting node-level OOD data. In this paper, we propose NODESAFE: reducing the generation of extreme scores of nodes by adding two optimization terms that make the negative energy scores bounded and mitigate the logit shift. Experimental results show that our approach dramatically improves the ability of GNNs to detect OOD data at the node level, e.g., in detecting OOD data induced by Structure Manipulation, the metric of FPR95 (lower is better) in scenarios without (with) OOD data exposure are reduced from the current SOTA by 28.4% (22.7%).

cs.LG↗

WHERE and WHICH: Iterative Debate for Biomedical Synthetic Data Augmentation

In Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP) tasks, such as Relation Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, and Text Classification, the scarcity of high-quality data remains a significant challenge. This limitation poisons large language models to correctly understand relationships between biological entities, such as molecules and diseases, or drug interactions, and further results in potential misinterpretation of biomedical documents. To address this issue, current approaches generally adopt the Synthetic Data Augmentation method which involves similarity computation followed by word replacement, but counterfactual data are usually generated. As a result, these methods disrupt meaningful word sets or produce sentences with meanings that deviate substantially from the original context, rendering them ineffective in improving model performance. To this end, this paper proposes a biomedical-dedicated rationale-based synthetic data augmentation method. Beyond the naive lexicon similarity, specific bio-relation similarity is measured to hold the augmented instance having a strong correlation with bio-relation instead of simply increasing the diversity of augmented data. Moreover, a multi-agents-involved reflection mechanism helps the model iteratively distinguish different usage of similar entities to escape falling into the mis-replace trap. We evaluate our method on the BLURB and BigBIO benchmark, which includes 9 common datasets spanning four major BioNLP tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate consistent performance improvements across all tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in addressing the challenges associated with data scarcity and enhancing the overall performance of biomedical NLP models.

cs.CL↗

FReM: A Flexible Reasoning Mechanism for Balancing Quick and Slow Thinking in Long-Context Question Answering

Long-context question-answering (LCQA) systems have greatly benefited from the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), which can be categorized into slow and quick reasoning modes. However, both modes have their limitations. Slow thinking generally leans to explore every possible reasoning path, which leads to heavy overthinking and wastes time. Quick thinking usually relies on pattern matching rather than truly understanding the query logic, which misses proper understanding. To address these issues, we propose FReM: Flexible Reasoning Mechanism, a method that adjusts reasoning depth according to the complexity of each question. Specifically, FReM leverages synthetic reference QA examples to provide an explicit chain of thought, enabling efficient handling of simple queries while allowing deeper reasoning for more complex ones. By doing so, FReM helps quick-thinking models move beyond superficial pattern matching and narrows the reasoning space for slow-thinking models to avoid unnecessary exploration. Experiments on seven QA datasets show that FReM improves reasoning accuracy and scalability, particularly for complex multihop questions, indicating its potential to advance LCQA methodologies.

cs.CL↗

Multimodal Machine Learning for Real Estate Appraisal: A Comprehensive Survey

Real estate appraisal has undergone a significant transition from manual to automated valuation and is entering a new phase of evolution. Leveraging comprehensive attention to various data sources, a novel approach to automated valuation, multimodal machine learning, has taken shape. This approach integrates multimodal data to deeply explore the diverse factors influencing housing prices. Furthermore, multimodal machine learning significantly outperforms single-modality or fewer-modality approaches in terms of prediction accuracy, with enhanced interpretability. However, systematic and comprehensive survey work on the application in the real estate domain is still lacking. In this survey, we aim to bridge this gap by reviewing the research efforts. We begin by reviewing the background of real estate appraisal and propose two research questions from the perspecve of performance and fusion aimed at improving the accuracy of appraisal results. Subsequently, we explain the concept of multimodal machine learning and provide a comprehensive classification and definition of modalities used in real estate appraisal for the first time. To ensure clarity, we explore works related to data and techniques, along with their evaluation methods, under the framework of these two research questions. Furthermore, specific application domains are summarized. Finally, we present insights into future research directions including multimodal complementarity, technology and modality contribution.

cs.LG↗

Señorita-2M: A High-Quality Instruction-based Dataset for General Video Editing by Video Specialists

Recent advancements in video generation have spurred the development of video editing techniques, which can be divided into inversion-based and end-to-end methods. However, current video editing methods still suffer from several challenges. Inversion-based methods, though training-free and flexible, are time-consuming during inference, struggle with fine-grained editing instructions, and produce artifacts and jitter. On the other hand, end-to-end methods, which rely on edited video pairs for training, offer faster inference speeds but often produce poor editing results due to a lack of high-quality training video pairs. In this paper, to close the gap in end-to-end methods, we introduce Señorita-2M, a high-quality video editing dataset. Señorita-2M consists of approximately 2 millions of video editing pairs. It is built by crafting four high-quality, specialized video editing models, each crafted and trained by our team to achieve state-of-the-art editing results. We also propose a filtering pipeline to eliminate poorly edited video pairs. Furthermore, we explore common video editing architectures to identify the most effective structure based on current pre-trained generative model. Extensive experiments show that our dataset can help to yield remarkably high-quality video editing results. More details are available at https://senorita-2m-dataset.github.io.

cs.CV↗

Unity RL Playground: A Versatile Reinforcement Learning Framework for Mobile Robots

This paper introduces Unity RL Playground, an open-source reinforcement learning framework built on top of Unity ML-Agents. Unity RL Playground automates the process of training mobile robots to perform various locomotion tasks such as walking, running, and jumping in simulation, with the potential for seamless transfer to real hardware. Key features include one-click training for imported robot models, universal compatibility with diverse robot configurations, multi-mode motion learning capabilities, and extreme performance testing to aid in robot design optimization and morphological evolution. The attached video can be found at https://linqi-ye.github.io/video/iros25.mp4 and the code is coming soon.

cs.RO↗

NeuGrasp: Generalizable Neural Surface Reconstruction with Background Priors for Material-Agnostic Object Grasp Detection

Robotic grasping in scenes with transparent and specular objects presents great challenges for methods relying on accurate depth information. In this paper, we introduce NeuGrasp, a neural surface reconstruction method that leverages background priors for material-agnostic grasp detection. NeuGrasp integrates transformers and global prior volumes to aggregate multi-view features with spatial encoding, enabling robust surface reconstruction in narrow and sparse viewing conditions. By focusing on foreground objects through residual feature enhancement and refining spatial perception with an occupancy-prior volume, NeuGrasp excels in handling objects with transparent and specular surfaces. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world scenarios show that NeuGrasp outperforms state-of-the-art methods in grasping while maintaining comparable reconstruction quality. More details are available at https://neugrasp.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

CS-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Large Language Models towards Computer Science Mastery

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in advancing various fields of research and society. However, the current community of LLMs overly focuses on benchmarks for analyzing specific foundational skills (e.g. mathematics and code generation), neglecting an all-round evaluation of the computer science field. To bridge this gap, we introduce CS-Bench, the first multilingual (English, Chinese, French, German) benchmark dedicated to evaluating the performance of LLMs in computer science. CS-Bench comprises approximately 10K meticulously curated test samples, covering 26 subfields across 4 key areas of computer science, encompassing various task forms and divisions of knowledge and reasoning. Utilizing CS-Bench, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of over 30 mainstream LLMs, revealing the relationship between CS performance and model scales. We also quantitatively analyze the reasons for failures in existing LLMs and highlight directions for improvements, including knowledge supplementation and CS-specific reasoning. Further cross-capability experiments show a high correlation between LLMs' capabilities in computer science and their abilities in mathematics and coding. Moreover, expert LLMs specialized in mathematics and coding also demonstrate strong performances in several CS subfields. Looking ahead, we envision CS-Bench serving as a cornerstone for LLM applications in the CS field and paving new avenues in assessing LLMs' diverse reasoning capabilities. The CS-Bench data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/csbench/csbench.

cs.CL↗

PEARL: Towards Permutation-Resilient LLMs

The in-context learning (ICL) capability of large language models (LLMs) enables them to perform challenging tasks using provided demonstrations. However, ICL is highly sensitive to the ordering of demonstrations, leading to instability in predictions. This paper shows that this vulnerability can be exploited to design a natural attack - difficult for model providers to detect - that achieves nearly 80% success rate on LLaMA-3 by simply permuting the demonstrations. Existing mitigation methods primarily rely on post-processing and fail to enhance the model's inherent robustness to input permutations, raising concerns about safety and reliability of LLMs. To address this issue, we propose Permutation-resilient learning (PEARL), a novel framework based on distributionally robust optimization (DRO), which optimizes model performance against the worst-case input permutation. Specifically, PEARL consists of a permutation-proposal network (P-Net) and the LLM. The P-Net generates the most challenging permutations by treating it as an optimal transport problem, which is solved using an entropy-constrained Sinkhorn algorithm. Through minimax optimization, the P-Net and the LLM iteratively optimize against each other, progressively improving the LLM's robustness. Experiments on synthetic pre-training and real-world instruction tuning tasks demonstrate that PEARL effectively mitigates permutation attacks and enhances performance. Notably, despite being trained on fewer shots and shorter contexts, PEARL achieves performance gains of up to 40% when scaled to many-shot and long-context scenarios, highlighting its efficiency and generalization capabilities.

cs.LG↗

Mitigating Biases of Large Language Models in Stance Detection with Counterfactual Augmented Calibration

Stance detection is critical for understanding the underlying position or attitude expressed toward a topic. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements across various natural language processing tasks including stance detection, however, their performance in stance detection is limited by biases and spurious correlations inherent due to their data-driven nature. Our statistical experiment reveals that LLMs are prone to generate biased stances due to sentiment-stance spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a strong negative correlation between stance bias and stance detection performance, underscoring the importance of mitigating bias to enhance the utility of LLMs in stance detection. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network (FACTUAL), which a novel calibration network is devised to calibrate potential bias in the stance prediction of LLMs. Further, to address the challenge of effectively learning bias representations and the difficulty in the generalizability of debiasing, we construct counterfactual augmented data. This approach enhances the calibration network, facilitating the debiasing and out-of-domain generalization. Experimental results on in-target and zero-shot stance detection tasks show that the proposed FACTUAL can effectively mitigate biases of LLMs, achieving state-of-the-art results.

cs.CL↗

Geometric Structure and Polynomial-time Algorithm of Game Equilibria

Whether a PTAS (polynomial-time approximation scheme) exists for game equilibria has been an open question, and its absence has indications and consequences in three fields: the practicality of methods in algorithmic game theory, non-stationarity and curse of multiagency in MARL (multi-agent reinforcement learning), and the tractability of PPAD in computational complexity theory. In this paper, we formalize the game equilibrium problem as an optimization problem that splits into two subproblems with respect to policy and value function, which are solved respectively by interior point method and dynamic programming. Combining these two parts, we obtain an FPTAS (fully PTAS) for the weak approximation (approximating to an $ε$-equilibrium) of any perfect equilibrium of any dynamic game, implying PPAD=FP since the weak approximation problem is PPAD-complete. In addition, we introduce a geometric object called equilibrium bundle, regarding which, first, perfect equilibria of dynamic games are formalized as zero points of its canonical section, second, the hybrid iteration of dynamic programming and interior point method is formalized as a line search on it, third, it derives the existence and oddness theorems as an extension of those of Nash equilibria. In experiment, the line search process is animated, and the method is tested on 2000 randomly generated dynamic games where it converges to a perfect equilibrium in every single case.

cs.GT↗

Episodic Novelty Through Temporal Distance

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), where environments differ across episodes. Existing episodic intrinsic motivation methods for CMDPs primarily rely on count-based approaches, which are ineffective in large state spaces, or on similarity-based methods that lack appropriate metrics for state comparison. To address these shortcomings, we propose Episodic Novelty Through Temporal Distance (ETD), a novel approach that introduces temporal distance as a robust metric for state similarity and intrinsic reward computation. By employing contrastive learning, ETD accurately estimates temporal distances and derives intrinsic rewards based on the novelty of states within the current episode. Extensive experiments on various benchmark tasks demonstrate that ETD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing exploration in sparse reward CMDPs.

cs.LG↗

Highly Efficient Observation Process based on FFT Filtering for Robot Swarm Collaborative Navigation in Unknown Environments

Collaborative path planning for robot swarms in complex, unknown environments without external positioning is a challenging problem. This requires robots to find safe directions based on real-time environmental observations, and to efficiently transfer and fuse these observations within the swarm. This study presents a filtering method based on Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to address these two issues. We treat sensors' environmental observations as a digital sampling process. Then, we design two different types of filters for safe direction extraction, as well as for the compression and reconstruction of environmental data. The reconstructed data is mapped to probabilistic domain, achieving efficient fusion of swarm observations and planning decision. The computation time is only on the order of microseconds, and the transmission data in communication systems is in bit-level. The performance of our algorithm in sensor data processing was validated in real world experiments, and the effectiveness in swarm path optimization was demonstrated through extensive simulations.

cs.RO↗

DeepMF: Deep Motion Factorization for Closed-Loop Safety-Critical Driving Scenario Simulation

Safety-critical traffic scenarios are of great practical relevance to evaluating the robustness of autonomous driving (AD) systems. Given that these long-tail events are extremely rare in real-world traffic data, there is a growing body of work dedicated to the automatic traffic scenario generation. However, nearly all existing algorithms for generating safety-critical scenarios rely on snippets of previously recorded traffic events, transforming normal traffic flow into accident-prone situations directly. In other words, safety-critical traffic scenario generation is hindsight and not applicable to newly encountered and open-ended traffic events.In this paper, we propose the Deep Motion Factorization (DeepMF) framework, which extends static safety-critical driving scenario generation to closed-loop and interactive adversarial traffic simulation. DeepMF casts safety-critical traffic simulation as a Bayesian factorization that includes the assignment of hazardous traffic participants, the motion prediction of selected opponents, the reaction estimation of autonomous vehicle (AV) and the probability estimation of the accident occur. All the aforementioned terms are calculated using decoupled deep neural networks, with inputs limited to the current observation and historical states. Consequently, DeepMF can effectively and efficiently simulate safety-critical traffic scenarios at any triggered time and for any duration by maximizing the compounded posterior probability of traffic risk. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeepMF excels in terms of risk management, flexibility, and diversity, showcasing outstanding performance in simulating a wide range of realistic, high-risk traffic scenarios.

cs.AI↗

COPR: Continual Human Preference Learning via Optimal Policy Regularization

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is commonly utilized to improve the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Given the evolving nature of human preferences, continual alignment becomes more crucial and practical in comparison to traditional static alignment. Nevertheless, making RLHF compatible with Continual Learning (CL) is challenging due to its complex process. Meanwhile, directly learning new human preferences may lead to Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) of historical preferences, resulting in helpless or harmful outputs. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Continual Optimal Policy Regularization (COPR) method, which draws inspiration from the optimal policy theory. COPR utilizes a sampling distribution as a demonstration and regularization constraints for CL. It adopts the Lagrangian Duality (LD) method to dynamically regularize the current policy based on the historically optimal policy, which prevents CF and avoids over-emphasizing unbalanced objectives. We also provide formal proof for the learnability of COPR. The experimental results show that COPR outperforms strong CL baselines on our proposed benchmark, in terms of reward-based, GPT-4 evaluations and human assessment. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of COPR under various CL settings, including different backbones, replay memory sizes, and learning orders.

cs.LG↗

Correcting Large Language Model Behavior via Influence Function

Recent advancements in AI alignment techniques have significantly improved the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with static human preferences. However, the dynamic nature of human preferences can render some prior training data outdated or even erroneous, ultimately causing LLMs to deviate from contemporary human preferences and societal norms. Existing methodologies, whether they involve the curation of new data for continual alignment or the manual correction of outdated data for re-alignment, demand costly human resources. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, Large Language Model Behavior Correction with Influence Function Recall and Post-Training (LANCET), which requires no human involvement. LANCET consists of two phases: (1) using influence functions to identify the training data that significantly impact undesirable model outputs, and (2) applying an Influence function-driven Bregman Optimization (IBO) technique to adjust the model's behavior based on these influence distributions. Our experiments demonstrate that LANCET effectively and efficiently correct inappropriate behaviors of LLMs. Furthermore, LANCET can outperform methods that rely on collecting human preferences, and it enhances the interpretability of learning human preferences within LLMs.

cs.LG↗