Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Haiyang Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Haiyang Zhang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations

Psychological defenses are strategies, often automatic, that people use to manage distress. Rigid or overuse of defenses is negatively linked to mental health and shapes what speakers disclose and how they accept or resist help. However, defenses are complex and difficult to reliably measure, particularly in clinical dialogues. We introduce PsyDefConv, a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level, and DMRS Co-Pilot, a four-stage pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. The corpus contains 200 dialogues and 4709 utterances, including 2336 help seeker turns, with labeling and Cohen's kappa 0.639. In a counterbalanced study, the co-pilot reduced average annotation time by 22.4%. In expert review, it averaged 4.62 for evidence, 4.44 for clinical plausibility, and 4.40 for insight on a seven-point scale. Benchmarks with strong language models in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate clear headroom, with the best macro F1-score around 30% and a tendency to overpredict mature defenses. Corpus analyses confirm that mature defenses are most common and reveal emotion-specific deviations. We will release the corpus, annotations, code, and prompts to support research on defensive functioning in language.

cs.CL↗

FinDebate: Multi-Agent Collaborative Intelligence for Financial Analysis

We introduce FinDebate, a multi-agent framework for financial analysis, integrating collaborative debate with domain-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Five specialized agents, covering earnings, market, sentiment, valuation, and risk, run in parallel to synthesize evidence into multi-dimensional insights. To mitigate overconfidence and improve reliability, we introduce a safe debate protocol that enables agents to challenge and refine initial conclusions while preserving coherent recommendations. Experimental results, based on both LLM-based and human evaluations, demonstrate the framework's efficacy in producing high-quality analysis with calibrated confidence levels and actionable investment strategies across multiple time horizons.

cs.CL↗

Benchmarking and Improving LVLMs on Event Extraction from Multimedia Documents

The proliferation of multimedia content necessitates the development of effective Multimedia Event Extraction (M2E2) systems. Though Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong cross-modal capabilities, their utility in the M2E2 task remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic evaluation of representative LVLMs, including DeepSeek-VL2 and the Qwen-VL series, on the M2E2 dataset. Our evaluations cover text-only, image-only, and cross-media subtasks, assessed under both few-shot prompting and fine-tuning settings. Our key findings highlight the following valuable insights: (1) Few-shot LVLMs perform notably better on visual tasks but struggle significantly with textual tasks; (2) Fine-tuning LVLMs with LoRA substantially enhances model performance; and (3) LVLMs exhibit strong synergy when combining modalities, achieving superior performance in cross-modal settings. We further provide a detailed error analysis to reveal persistent challenges in areas such as semantic precision, localization, and cross-modal grounding, which remain critical obstacles for advancing M2E2 capabilities.

cs.CL↗

Extremely Large-Scale Dynamic Metasurface Antennas for 6G Near-Field Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

6G networks will need to support higher data rates, high-precision localization, and imaging capabilities. Near-field technologies, enabled by extremely large-scale (XL)-arrays, are expected to be essential physical-layer solutions to meet these ambitious requirements. However, implementing XL-array systems using traditional fully-digital or hybrid analog/digital architectures poses significant challenges due to high power consumption and implementation costs. Emerging XL-dynamic metasurface antennas (XL-DMAs) provide a promising alternative, enabling ultra-low power and cost-efficient solutions, making them ideal candidates for 6G near-field networks. In this article, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of XL-DMAs employed in 6G near-field networks. We first outline the fundamental principles of XL-DMAs and present the specifics of the near-field model of XL-DMAs. We then highlight several promising applications that might benefit from XL-DMAs, including near-field communication, localization, and imaging. Finally, we discuss several open problems and potential future directions that should be addressed to fully exploit the capabilities of XL-DMAs in the next 6G near-field networks.

eess.SP↗

Attribute Guidance With Inherent Pseudo-label For Occluded Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to match person images across different camera views, with occluded Re-ID addressing scenarios where pedestrians are partially visible. While pre-trained vision-language models have shown effectiveness in Re-ID tasks, they face significant challenges in occluded scenarios by focusing on holistic image semantics while neglecting fine-grained attribute information. This limitation becomes particularly evident when dealing with partially occluded pedestrians or when distinguishing between individuals with subtle appearance differences. To address this limitation, we propose Attribute-Guide ReID (AG-ReID), a novel framework that leverages pre-trained models' inherent capabilities to extract fine-grained semantic attributes without additional data or annotations. Our framework operates through a two-stage process: first generating attribute pseudo-labels that capture subtle visual characteristics, then introducing a dual-guidance mechanism that combines holistic and fine-grained attribute information to enhance image feature extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AG-ReID achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple widely-used Re-ID datasets, showing significant improvements in handling occlusions and subtle attribute differences while maintaining competitive performance on standard Re-ID scenarios.

cs.CV↗

Hybrid RISs for Simultaneous Tunable Reflections and Sensing

The concept of smart wireless environments envisions dynamic programmable propagation of information-bearing signals through the deployment of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs). Typical RIS implementations include metasurfaces with passive unit elements capable to reflect their incident waves in controllable ways. However, this solely reflective operation induces significant challenges in the RIS orchestration from the wireless network. For example, channel estimation, which is essential for coherent RIS-empowered wireless communications, is quite challenging with the available solely reflecting RIS designs. This chapter reviews the emerging concept of Hybrid Reflecting and Sensing RISs (HRISs), which enables metasurfaces to reflect the impinging signal in a controllable manner, while simultaneously sensing a portion of it. The sensing capability of HRISs facilitates various network management functionalities, including channel parameter estimation and localization, while, most importantly, giving rise to computationally autonomous and self-configuring RISs. The implementation details of HRISs are first presented, which are then followed by a convenient mathematical model for characterizing their dual functionality. Then, two indicative applications of HRISs are discussed, one for simultaneous communications and sensing and another that showcases their usefulness for estimating the individual channels in the uplink of a multi-user HRIS-empowered communication system. For both of these applications, performance evaluation results are included validating the role of HRISs for sensing as well as integrated sensing and communications.

eess.SP↗

Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement

Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR), defined as the deliberate use of homophonic or near-homophonic variants to hide toxic intent, has become a major obstacle to Chinese content moderation. While this problem is well-recognized, existing evaluations predominantly rely on rule-based, synthetic perturbations that ignore the creativity of real users. We organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile \ours, a dataset of 500 naturally occurring, phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset exposes a serious weakness: the best model reaches only an F1-score of 0.672, and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower. Guided by error analysis, we revisit a Pinyin-based prompting strategy that earlier studies judged ineffective and show that it recovers much of the lost accuracy. This study offers the first comprehensive taxonomy of Chinese PCR, a realistic benchmark that reveals current detectors' limits, and a lightweight mitigation technique that advances research on robust toxicity detection.

cs.CL↗

EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association

Goal-oriented script planning, or the ability to devise coherent sequences of actions toward specific goals, is commonly employed by humans to plan for typical activities. In e-commerce, customers increasingly seek LLM-based assistants to generate scripts and recommend products at each step, thereby facilitating convenient and efficient shopping experiences. However, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges, including the inability of LLMs to simultaneously conduct script planning and product retrieval, difficulties in matching products caused by semantic discrepancies between planned actions and search queries, and a lack of methods and benchmark data for evaluation. In this paper, we step forward by formally defining the task of E-commerce Script Planning (EcomScript) as three sequential subtasks. We propose a novel framework that enables the scalable generation of product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. By applying our framework to real-world e-commerce data, we construct the very first large-scale EcomScript dataset, EcomScriptBench, which includes 605,229 scripts sourced from 2.4 million products. Human annotations are then conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset, forming an evaluation benchmark. Extensive experiments reveal that current (L)LMs face significant challenges with EcomScript tasks, even after fine-tuning, while injecting product purchase intentions improves their performance.

cs.CL↗

RDSA: A Robust Deep Graph Clustering Framework via Dual Soft Assignment

Graph clustering is an essential aspect of network analysis that involves grouping nodes into separate clusters. Recent developments in deep learning have resulted in graph clustering, which has proven effective in many applications. Nonetheless, these methods often encounter difficulties when dealing with real-world graphs, particularly in the presence of noisy edges. Additionally, many denoising graph clustering methods tend to suffer from lower performance, training instability, and challenges in scaling to large datasets compared to non-denoised models. To tackle these issues, we introduce a new framework called the Robust Deep Graph Clustering Framework via Dual Soft Assignment (RDSA). RDSA consists of three key components: (i) a node embedding module that effectively integrates the graph's topological features and node attributes; (ii) a structure-based soft assignment module that improves graph modularity by utilizing an affinity matrix for node assignments; and (iii) a node-based soft assignment module that identifies community landmarks and refines node assignments to enhance the model's robustness. We assess RDSA on various real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior performance relative to existing state-of-the-art methods. Our findings indicate that RDSA provides robust clustering across different graph types, excelling in clustering effectiveness and robustness, including adaptability to noise, stability, and scalability.

cs.LG↗

Language-based Audio Retrieval with Co-Attention Networks

In recent years, user-generated audio content has proliferated across various media platforms, creating a growing need for efficient retrieval methods that allow users to search for audio clips using natural language queries. This task, known as language-based audio retrieval, presents significant challenges due to the complexity of learning semantic representations from heterogeneous data across both text and audio modalities. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for the language-based audio retrieval task that leverages co-attention mechanismto jointly learn meaningful representations from both modalities. To enhance the model's ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal interactions, we propose a cascaded co-attention architecture, where co-attention modules are stacked or iterated to progressively refine the semantic alignment between text and audio. Experiments conducted on two public datasets show that the proposed method can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art method. Specifically, our best performed co-attention model achieves a 16.6% improvement in mean Average Precision on Clotho dataset, and a 15.1% improvement on AudioCaps.

cs.SD↗

Domain-specific Guided Summarization for Mental Health Posts

In domain-specific contexts, particularly mental health, abstractive summarization requires advanced techniques adept at handling specialized content to generate domain-relevant and faithful summaries. In response to this, we introduce a guided summarizer equipped with a dual-encoder and an adapted decoder that utilizes novel domain-specific guidance signals, i.e., mental health terminologies and contextually rich sentences from the source document, to enhance its capacity to align closely with the content and context of guidance, thereby generating a domain-relevant summary. Additionally, we present a post-editing correction model to rectify errors in the generated summary, thus enhancing its consistency with the original content in detail. Evaluation on the MentSum dataset reveals that our model outperforms existing baseline models in terms of both ROUGE and FactCC scores. Although the experiments are specifically designed for mental health posts, the methodology we've developed offers broad applicability, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness in producing high-quality domain-specific summaries.

cs.CL↗

Text-Guided Attention is All You Need for Zero-Shot Robustness in Vision-Language Models

Due to the impressive zero-shot capabilities, pre-trained vision-language models (e.g. CLIP), have attracted widespread attention and adoption across various domains. Nonetheless, CLIP has been observed to be susceptible to adversarial examples. Through experimental analysis, we have observed a phenomenon wherein adversarial perturbations induce shifts in text-guided attention. Building upon this observation, we propose a simple yet effective strategy: Text-Guided Attention for Zero-Shot Robustness (TGA-ZSR). This framework incorporates two components: the Attention Refinement module and the Attention-based Model Constraint module. Our goal is to maintain the generalization of the CLIP model and enhance its adversarial robustness: The Attention Refinement module aligns the text-guided attention obtained from the target model via adversarial examples with the text-guided attention acquired from the original model via clean examples. This alignment enhances the model's robustness. Additionally, the Attention-based Model Constraint module acquires text-guided attention from both the target and original models using clean examples. Its objective is to maintain model performance on clean samples while enhancing overall robustness. The experiments validate that our method yields a 9.58% enhancement in zero-shot robust accuracy over the current state-of-the-art techniques across 16 datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhyblue424/TGA-ZSR.

cs.CV↗

Identifying Influential nodes in Brain Networks via Self-Supervised Graph-Transformer

Studying influential nodes (I-nodes) in brain networks is of great significance in the field of brain imaging. Most existing studies consider brain connectivity hubs as I-nodes. However, this approach relies heavily on prior knowledge from graph theory, which may overlook the intrinsic characteristics of the brain network, especially when its architecture is not fully understood. In contrast, self-supervised deep learning can learn meaningful representations directly from the data. This approach enables the exploration of I-nodes for brain networks, which is also lacking in current studies. This paper proposes a Self-Supervised Graph Reconstruction framework based on Graph-Transformer (SSGR-GT) to identify I-nodes, which has three main characteristics. First, as a self-supervised model, SSGR-GT extracts the importance of brain nodes to the reconstruction. Second, SSGR-GT uses Graph-Transformer, which is well-suited for extracting features from brain graphs, combining both local and global characteristics. Third, multimodal analysis of I-nodes uses graph-based fusion technology, combining functional and structural brain information. The I-nodes we obtained are distributed in critical areas such as the superior frontal lobe, lateral parietal lobe, and lateral occipital lobe, with a total of 56 identified across different experiments. These I-nodes are involved in more brain networks than other regions, have longer fiber connections, and occupy more central positions in structural connectivity. They also exhibit strong connectivity and high node efficiency in both functional and structural networks. Furthermore, there is a significant overlap between the I-nodes and both the structural and functional rich-club. These findings enhance our understanding of the I-nodes within the brain network, and provide new insights for future research in further understanding the brain working mechanisms.

q-bio.NC↗

Exploring Query Understanding for Amazon Product Search

Online shopping platforms, such as Amazon, offer services to billions of people worldwide. Unlike web search or other search engines, product search engines have their unique characteristics, primarily featuring short queries which are mostly a combination of product attributes and structured product search space. The uniqueness of product search underscores the crucial importance of the query understanding component. However, there are limited studies focusing on exploring this impact within real-world product search engines. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive study and sharing our year-long journey investigating how the query understanding service impacts Amazon Product Search. Firstly, we explore how query understanding-based ranking features influence the ranking process. Next, we delve into how the query understanding system contributes to understanding the performance of a ranking model. Building on the insights gained from our study on the evaluation of the query understanding-based ranking model, we propose a query understanding-based multi-task learning framework for ranking. We present our studies and investigations using the real-world system on Amazon Search.

cs.IR↗

Illumination Design for Joint Imaging and Wireless Power Transfer Systems

This paper presents a novel concept termed Integrated Imaging and Wireless Power Transfer (IWPT), wherein the integration of imaging and wireless power transfer functionalities is achieved on a unified hardware platform. IWPT leverages a transmitting array to efficiently illuminate a specific Region of Interest (ROI), enabling the extraction of ROI's scattering coefficients while concurrently providing wireless power to nearby users. The integration of IWPT offers compelling advantages, including notable reductions in power consumption and spectrum utilization, pivotal for the optimization of future 6G wireless networks. As an initial investigation, we explore two antenna architectures: a fully digital array and a digital/analog hybrid array. Our goal is to characterize the fundamental trade-off between imaging and wireless power transfer by optimizing the illumination signal. With imaging operating in the near-field, we formulate the illumination signal design as an optimization problem that minimizes the condition number of the equivalent channel. To address this optimization problem, we propose an semi-definite relaxation-based approach for the fully digital array and an alternating optimization algorithm for the hybrid array. Finally, numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed solutions and demonstrate the trade-off between imaging and wireless power transfer.

eess.SP↗

Beam Focusing for Near-Field Multi-User Localization

Extremely large-scale antenna arrays are poised to play a pivotal role in sixth-generation (6G) networks. Utilizing such arrays often results in a near-field spherical wave transmission environment, enabling the generation of focused beams, which introduces new degrees of freedom for wireless localization. In this paper, we consider a beam-focusing design for localizing multiple sources in the radiating near-field. Our formulation accommodates various expected types of implementations of large antenna arrays, including hybrid analog/digital architectures and dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs). We consider a direct localization estimation method exploiting curvature-of-arrival of impinging spherical wavefront to obtain user positions. In this regard, we adopt a two-stage approach configuring the array to optimize near-field positioning. In the first step, we focus only on adjusting the array coefficients to minimize the estimation error. We obtain a closed-form approximate solution based on projection and the better one based on the Riemann gradient algorithm. We then extend this approach to simultaneously localize and focus the beams via a sub-optimal iterative approach that does not rely on such knowledge. The simulation results show that near-field localization accuracy based on a hybrid array or DMA can achieve performance close to that of fully digital arrays at a lower cost, and DMAs can attain better performance than hybrid solutions with the same aperture.

eess.SP↗

Holographic Imaging with XL-MIMO and RIS: Illumination and Reflection Design

This paper addresses a near-field imaging problem utilizing extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) antennas and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) already in place for wireless communications. To this end, we consider a system with a fixed transmitting antenna array illuminating a region of interest (ROI) and a fixed receiving antenna array inferring the ROI's scattering coefficients. Leveraging XL-MIMO and high frequencies, the ROI is situated in the radiative near-field region of both antenna arrays, thus enhancing the degrees of freedom (DoF) (i.e., the channel matrix rank) of the illuminating and sensing channels available for imaging, here referred to as holographic imaging. To further boost the imaging performance, we optimize the illuminating waveform by solving a min-max optimization problem having the upper bound of the mean squared error (MSE) of the image estimate as the objective function. Additionally, we address the challenge of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios by considering the presence of a RIS and deriving its optimal reflection coefficients. Numerical results investigate the interplay between illumination optimization, geometric configuration (monostatic and bistatic), the DoF of the illuminating and sensing channels, image estimation accuracy, and image complexity.

eess.SP↗

Adaptive Intra-Class Variation Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

The memory dictionary-based contrastive learning method has achieved remarkable results in the field of unsupervised person Re-ID. However, The method of updating memory based on all samples does not fully utilize the hardest sample to improve the generalization ability of the model, and the method based on hardest sample mining will inevitably introduce false-positive samples that are incorrectly clustered in the early stages of the model. Clustering-based methods usually discard a significant number of outliers, leading to the loss of valuable information. In order to address the issues mentioned before, we propose an adaptive intra-class variation contrastive learning algorithm for unsupervised Re-ID, called AdaInCV. And the algorithm quantitatively evaluates the learning ability of the model for each class by considering the intra-class variations after clustering, which helps in selecting appropriate samples during the training process of the model. To be more specific, two new strategies are proposed: Adaptive Sample Mining (AdaSaM) and Adaptive Outlier Filter (AdaOF). The first one gradually creates more reliable clusters to dynamically refine the memory, while the second can identify and filter out valuable outliers as negative samples.

cs.CV↗