arXiv subjects

Bing Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Bing Zheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Counter-GEO-Bench: Evaluating Defenses Against Information-Distorting Generative Engine Optimization

Generative engine optimization (GEO) enables content producers to increase the visibility of their web pages in generative search engines, but the same techniques can deliver targeted misinformation when adversaries publish ordinary-looking GEO-optimized documents that victim large language models (LLMs) retrieve and synthesize into distorted answers. No existing benchmark evaluates defenses against this threat under controlled conditions. Therefore, we present Counter-GEO-Bench, a defense benchmark that pairs 247 human-verified, quality-gated queries with information-preserving and information-distorting GEO rewrites, and evaluates defenses on attack success rate (ASR), false positive rate, and answer quality across three victim LLMs. Under Counter-GEO-Bench, three off-the-shelf defenses (Granite Guardian, Llama Guard 3, and NeMo Self-Check Fact-Checking) reduce ASR by at most 5.7% relative, while Granite Guardian's reduction is not statistically significant. Safety-taxonomy guardrails target policy violations, while GEO misinformation passes through them as fluent informational content. To this end, a lightweight benchmark baseline, C-GEO Guard, is proposed, reducing ASR by 47.6% relative with near-zero utility loss, which proves threat tractable.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Robust Sparse Signal Recovery with Outliers: A Hard Thresholding Pursuit Approach Based on LAD

Recovering a sparse signal from outlier-contaminated measurements is a fundamental challenge in many applications. While existing algorithms predominantly address scenarios with bounded noise or assume known signal sparsity, few methods tackle the more practical problem of sparse recovery from gross outliers without prior knowledge of sparsity. To bridge this gap, we study the sparsity-constrained Least Absolute Deviations (LAD) minimization problem. This paper proposes the Graded Fast Hard Thresholding Pursuit (GFHTP$_1$) algorithm with a quantile-truncated step size for $\ell_1$-loss minimization. In contrast to most state-of-the-art methods, our GFHTP$_1$ requires no prior knowledge of the signal's sparsity level. We establish a theoretical convergence analysis under mild conditions and further prove that an $s$-sparse signal can be recovered exactly within at most $s$ iterations. To our knowledge, these results provide the first efficient recovery guarantees for sparse signal reconstruction from outlier-corrupted measurements without a sparsity prior. Numerical experiments demonstrate that GFHTP$_1$ consistently outperforms competing algorithms in robustness to varying signal sparsity and outlier support size, while also achieving less computational time.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

A novel non-convex minimax $p$-th order concave penalty function approach to low-rank tensor completion

The low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) problem aims to reconstruct a tensor from partial sample information, which has attracted significant interest in a wide range of practical applications such as image processing and computer vision. Among the various techniques employed for the LRTC problem, non-convex relaxation methods have been widely studied for their effectiveness in handling tensor singular values, which are crucial for accurate tensor recovery. While the minimax concave penalty (MCP) non-convex relaxation method has achieved promising results in tackling the LRTC problem and gained widely adopted, it exhibits a notable limitation: insufficient penalty on small singular values during the singular value handling process, resulting in inefficient tensor recovery. To address this issue and enhance recovery performance, a novel minimax $p$-th order concave penalty (MPCP) function is proposed. Based on this novel function, a tensor $p$-th order $τ$ norm is proposed as a non-convex relaxation for tensor rank approximation, thereby establishing an MPCP-based LRTC model. Furthermore, theoretical convergence guarantees are rigorously established for the proposed method. Extensive numerical experiments conducted on multiple real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Motion-aware Latent Diffusion Models for Video Frame Interpolation

With the advancement of AIGC, video frame interpolation (VFI) has become a crucial component in existing video generation frameworks, attracting widespread research interest. For the VFI task, the motion estimation between neighboring frames plays a crucial role in avoiding motion ambiguity. However, existing VFI methods always struggle to accurately predict the motion information between consecutive frames, and this imprecise estimation leads to blurred and visually incoherent interpolated frames. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion framework, motion-aware latent diffusion models (MADiff), which is specifically designed for the VFI task. By incorporating motion priors between the conditional neighboring frames with the target interpolated frame predicted throughout the diffusion sampling procedure, MADiff progressively refines the intermediate outcomes, culminating in generating both visually smooth and realistic results. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance significantly outperforming existing approaches, especially under challenging scenarios involving dynamic textures with complex motion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

UVEB: A Large-scale Benchmark and Baseline Towards Real-World Underwater Video Enhancement

Learning-based underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods have made great progress. However, the lack of large-scale and high-quality paired training samples has become the main bottleneck hindering the development of UIE. The inter-frame information in underwater videos can accelerate or optimize the UIE process. Thus, we constructed the first large-scale high-resolution underwater video enhancement benchmark (UVEB) to promote the development of underwater vision.It contains 1,308 pairs of video sequences and more than 453,000 high-resolution with 38\% Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) 4K frame pairs. UVEB comes from multiple countries, containing various scenes and video degradation types to adapt to diverse and complex underwater environments. We also propose the first supervised underwater video enhancement method, UVE-Net. UVE-Net converts the current frame information into convolutional kernels and passes them to adjacent frames for efficient inter-frame information exchange. By fully utilizing the redundant degraded information of underwater videos, UVE-Net completes video enhancement better. Experiments show the effective network design and good performance of UVE-Net.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

On global randomized block Kaczmarz algorithm for solving large-scale matrix equations

The randomized Kaczmarz algorithm is one of the most popular approaches for solving large-scale linear systems due to its simplicity and efficiency. In this paper, we propose two classes of global randomized Kaczmarz methods for solving large-scale linear matrix equations $AXB=C$, the global randomized block Kaczmarz algorithm and global randomized average block Kaczmarz algorithm. The feature of global randomized block Kaczmarz algorithm is the fact that the current iterate is projected onto the solution space of the sketched matrix equation at each iteration, while the global randomized average block Kaczmarz approach is pseudoinverse-free and therefore can be deployed on parallel computing units to achieve significant improvements in the computational time. We prove that these two methods linearly converge in the mean square to the minimum norm solution $X_*=A^†CB^†$ of a given linear matrix equation. The convergence rates depend on the geometric properties of the data matrices and their submatrices and on the size of the blocks. Numerical results reveal that our proposed algorithms are efficient and effective for solving large-scale matrix equations. In particular, they can also achieve satisfying performance when applied to image deblurring problems.

math.NA↗

arXiv2022

The low-entropy hydration shell at the binding site of spike RBD determines the contagiousness of SARS-CoV-2 variants

The infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 depends on the binding affinity of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein with the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor. The calculated RBD-ACE2 binding energies indicate that the difference in transmission efficiency of SARS-CoV-2 variants cannot be fully explained by electrostatic interactions, hydrogen-bond interactions, van der Waals interactions, internal energy, and nonpolar solvation energies. Here, we demonstrate that low-entropy regions of hydration shells around proteins drive hydrophobic attraction between shape-matched low-entropy regions of the hydration shells, which essentially coordinates protein-protein binding in rotational-configurational space of mutual orientations and determines the binding affinity. An innovative method was used to identify the low-entropy regions of the hydration shells of the RBDs of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants and the ACE2. We observed integral low-entropy regions of hydration shells covering the binding sites of the RBDs and matching in shape to the low-entropy region of hydration shell at the binding site of the ACE2. The RBD-ACE2 binding is thus found to be guided by hydrophobic collapse between the shape-matched low-entropy regions of the hydration shells. A measure of the low-entropy of the hydration shells can be obtained by counting the number of hydrophilic groups expressing hydrophilicity within the binding sites. The low-entropy level of hydration shells at the binding site of a spike protein is found to be an important indicator of the contagiousness of the coronavirus.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2022

Space Layout of Low-entropy Hydration Shells Guides Protein Binding

Protein-protein binding enables orderly and lawful biological self-organization, and is therefore considered a miracle of nature. Protein-protein binding is steered by electrostatic forces, hydrogen bonding, van der Waals force, and hydrophobic interactions. Among these physical forces, only the hydrophobic interactions can be considered as long-range intermolecular attractions between proteins in intracellular and extracellular fluid. Low-entropy regions of hydration shells around proteins drive hydrophobic attraction among them that essentially coordinate protein-protein docking in rotational-conformational space of mutual orientations at the guidance stage of the binding. Here, an innovative method was developed for identifying the low-entropy regions of hydration shells of given proteins, and we discovered that the largest low-entropy regions of hydration shells on proteins typically cover the binding sites. According to an analysis of determined protein complex structures, shape matching between the largest low-entropy hydration shell region of a protein and that of its partner at the binding sites is revealed as a regular pattern. Protein-protein binding is thus found to be mainly guided by hydrophobic collapse between the shape-matched low-entropy hydration shells that is verified by bioinformatics analyses of hundreds of structures of protein complexes. A simple algorithm is developed to precisely predict protein binding sites.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2021

Hydrophobic interaction determines docking affinity of SARS CoV 2 variants with antibodies

Preliminary epidemiologic, phylogenetic and clinical findings suggest that several novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants have increased transmissibility and decreased efficacy of several existing vaccines. Four mutations in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein that are reported to contribute to increased transmission. Understanding physical mechanism responsible for the affinity enhancement between the SARS-CoV-2 variants and ACE2 is the "urgent challenge" for developing blockers, vaccines and therapeutic antibodies against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Based on a hydrophobic-interaction-based protein docking mechanism, this study reveals that the mutation N501Y obviously increased the hydrophobic attraction and decrease hydrophilic repulsion between the RBD and ACE2 that most likely caused the transmissibility increment of the variants. By analyzing the mutation-induced hydrophobic surface changes in the attraction and repulsion at the binding site of the complexes of the SARS-CoV-2 variants and antibodies, we found out that all the mutations of N501Y, E484K, K417N and L452R can selectively decrease or increase their binding affinity with some antibodies.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2020

The role of hydrophobic interactions in folding of $β$-sheets

Exploring the protein-folding problem has been a long-standing challenge in molecular biology. Protein folding is highly dependent on folding of secondary structures as the way to pave a native folding pathway. Here, we demonstrate that a feature of a large hydrophobic surface area covering most side-chains on one side or the other side of adjacent $β$-strands of a $β$-sheet is prevail in almost all experimentally determined $β$-sheets, indicating that folding of $β$-sheets is most likely triggered by multistage hydrophobic interactions among neighbored side-chains of unfolded polypeptides, enable $β$-sheets fold reproducibly following explicit physical folding codes in aqueous environments. $β$-turns often contain five types of residues characterized with relatively small exposed hydrophobic proportions of their side-chains, that is explained as these residues can block hydrophobic effect among neighbored side-chains in sequence. Temperature dependence of the folding of $β$-sheet is thus attributed to temperature dependence of the strength of the hydrophobicity. The hydrophobic-effect-based mechanism responsible for $β$-sheets folding is verified by bioinformatics analyses of thousands of results available from experiments. The folding codes in amino acid sequence that dictate formation of a $β$-hairpin can be deciphered through evaluating hydrophobic interaction among side-chains of an unfolded polypeptide from a $β$-strand-like thermodynamic metastable state.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2020

A hydrophobic-interaction-based mechanism trigger docking between the SARS CoV 2 spike and angiotensin-converting enzyme 2

A recent experimental study found that the binding affinity between the cellular receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and receptor-binding domain (RBD) in spike (S) protein of novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is more than 10-fold higher than that of the original severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). However, main-chain structures of the SARS-CoV-2 RBD are almost the same with that of the SARS-CoV RBD. Understanding physical mechanism responsible for the outstanding affinity between the SARS-CoV-2 S and ACE2 is the "urgent challenge" for developing blockers, vaccines and therapeutic antibodies against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Considering the mechanisms of hydrophobic interaction, hydration shell, surface tension, and the shielding effect of water molecules, this study reveals a hydrophobic-interaction-based mechanism by means of which SARS-CoV-2 S and ACE2 bind together in an aqueous environment. The hydrophobic interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 S and ACE2 protein is found to be significantly greater than that between SARS-CoV S and ACE2. At the docking site, the hydrophobic portions of the hydrophilic side chains of SARS-CoV-2 S are found to be involved in the hydrophobic interaction between SARS-CoV-2 S and ACE2. We propose a method to design live attenuated viruses by mutating several key amino acid residues of the spike protein to decrease the hydrophobic surface areas at the docking site. Mutation of a small amount of residues can greatly reduce the hydrophobic binding of the coronavirus to the receptor, which may be significant reduce infectivity and transmissibility of the virus.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2019

A modified adaptive cubic regularization method for large-scale unconstrained optimization problem

In this paper, we modify the adaptive cubic regularization method for large-scale unconstrained optimization problem by using a real positive definite scalar matrix to approximate the exact Hessian. Combining with the nonmonotone technique, we also give a variant of the modified algorithm. Under some reasonable conditions, we analyze the global convergence of the proposed methods. Numerical experiments are performed and the obtained results show satisfactory performance when compared to the standard trust region method, adaptive regularization algorithm with cubics and the simple model trust-region method.

math.OC↗

arXiv2019

Generative Adversarial Network with Multi-Branch Discriminator for Cross-Species Image-to-Image Translation

Current approaches have made great progress on image-to-image translation tasks benefiting from the success of image synthesis methods especially generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, existing methods are limited to handling translation tasks between two species while keeping the content matching on the semantic level. A more challenging task would be the translation among more than two species. To explore this new area, we propose a simple yet effective structure of a multi-branch discriminator for enhancing an arbitrary generative adversarial architecture (GAN), named GAN-MBD. It takes advantage of the boosting strategy to break a common discriminator into several smaller ones with fewer parameters, which can enhance the generation and synthesis abilities of GANs efficiently and effectively. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed multi-branch discriminator can dramatically improve the performance of popular GANs on cross-species image-to-image translation tasks while reducing the number of parameters for computation. The code and some datasets are attached as supplementary materials for reference.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Gradient-based iterative algorithms for solving Sylvester tensor equations and the associated tensor nearness problems

In this paper, an iterative algorithm is presented for solving Sylvester tensor equation $\mathscr{A}*_M\mathscr{X}+\mathscr{X}*_N\mathscr{C}=\mathscr{D}$, where $\mathscr{A}$, $\mathscr{C}$ and $\mathscr{D}$ are given tensors with appropriate sizes, and the symbol $*_N$ denotes the Einstein product. By this algorithm, the solvability of this tensor equation can be determined automatically, and the solution of which (when it is solvable) can be derived within finite iteration steps for any initial iteration tensors in the absence of roundoff errors. Particularly, the least F-norm solution of the aforementioned equation can be derived by choosing special initial iteration tensors. As application, we apply the proposed algorithm to the tensor nearness problem related to the Sylvester tensor equation mentioned above. It is proved that the solution to this problem can also be obtained within finite iteration steps by solving another Sylvester tensor equation. The performed numerical experiments show that the algorithm we propose here is promising.

math.NA↗

arXiv2018

Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks for High-Quality Image-to-Image Translation

Image-to-image translation has been made much progress with embracing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, it's still very challenging for translation tasks that require high quality, especially at high-resolution and photorealism. In this paper, we present Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks (DRPAN) for high-quality image-to-image translation. We decompose the procedure of image-to-image translation task into three iterated steps, first is to generate an image with global structure but some local artifacts (via GAN), second is using our DRPnet to propose the most fake region from the generated image, and third is to implement "image inpainting" on the most fake region for more realistic result through a reviser, so that the system (DRPAN) can be gradually optimized to synthesize images with more attention on the most artifact local part. Experiments on a variety of image-to-image translation tasks and datasets validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-arts for producing high-quality translation results in terms of both human perceptual studies and automatic quantitative measures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Unpaired Photo-to-Caricature Translation on Faces in the Wild

Recently, image-to-image translation has been made much progress owing to the success of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs). And some unpaired methods based on cycle consistency loss such as DualGAN, CycleGAN and DiscoGAN are really popular. However, it's still very challenging for translation tasks with the requirement of high-level visual information conversion, such as photo-to-caricature translation that requires satire, exaggeration, lifelikeness and artistry. We present an approach for learning to translate faces in the wild from the source photo domain to the target caricature domain with different styles, which can also be used for other high-level image-to-image translation tasks. In order to capture global structure with local statistics while translation, we design a dual pathway model with one coarse discriminator and one fine discriminator. For generator, we provide one extra perceptual loss in association with adversarial loss and cycle consistency loss to achieve representation learning for two different domains. Also the style can be learned by the auxiliary noise input. Experiments on photo-to-caricature translation of faces in the wild show considerable performance gain of our proposed method over state-of-the-art translation methods as well as its potential real applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Peeking the Impact of Points of Interests on Didi

Recently, the online car-hailing service, Didi, has emerged as a leader in the sharing economy. Used by passengers and drivers extensive, it becomes increasingly important for the car-hailing service providers to minimize the waiting time of passengers and optimize the vehicle utilization, thus to improve the overall user experience. Therefore, the supply-demand estimation is an indispensable ingredient of an efficient online car-hailing service. To improve the accuracy of the estimation results, we analyze the implicit relationships between the points of Interest (POI) and the supply-demand gap in this paper. The different categories of POIs have positive or negative effects on the estimation, we propose a POI selection scheme and incorporate it into XGBoost [1] to achieve more accurate estimation results. Our experiment demonstrates our method provides more accurate estimation results and more stable estimation results than the existing methods.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Instance Map based Image Synthesis with a Denoising Generative Adversarial Network

Semantic layouts based Image synthesizing, which has benefited from the success of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), has drawn much attention in these days. How to enhance the synthesis image equality while keeping the stochasticity of the GAN is still a challenge. We propose a novel denoising framework to handle this problem. The overlapped objects generation is another challenging task when synthesizing images from a semantic layout to a realistic RGB photo. To overcome this deficiency, we include a one-hot semantic label map to force the generator paying more attention on the overlapped objects generation. Furthermore, we improve the loss function of the discriminator by considering perturb loss and cascade layer loss to guide the generation process. We applied our methods on the Cityscapes, Facades and NYU datasets and demonstrate the image generation ability of our model.

cs.CV↗