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Hao Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Chen.

At least 703 records · Page 39Linked to original sources

Towards the efficacy of federated prediction for epidemics on networks

Epidemic prediction is of practical significance in public health, enabling early intervention, resource allocation, and strategic planning. However, privacy concerns often hinder the sharing of health data among institutions, limiting the development of accurate prediction models. In this paper, we develop a general privacy-preserving framework for node-level epidemic prediction on networks based on federated learning (FL). We frame the spatio-temporal spread of epidemics across multiple data-isolated subnetworks, where each node state represents the aggregate epidemic severity within a community. Then, both the pure temporal LSTM model and the spatio-temporal model i.e., Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network (STGAT) are proposed to address the federated epidemic prediction. Extensive experiments are conducted on various epidemic processes using a practical airline network, offering a comprehensive assessment of FL efficacy under diverse scenarios. By introducing the efficacy energy metric to measure system robustness under various client configurations, we systematically explore key factors influencing FL performance, including client numbers, aggregation strategies, graph partitioning, missing infectious reports. Numerical results manifest that STGAT excels in capturing spatio-temporal dependencies in dynamic processes whereas LSTM performs well in simpler pattern. Moreover, our findings highlight the importance of balancing feature consistency and volume uniformity among clients, as well as the prediction dilemma between information richness and intrinsic stochasticity of dynamic processes. This study offers practical insights into the efficacy of FL scenario in epidemic management, demonstrates the potential of FL to address broader collective dynamics.

cs.SI↗

XQ-GAN: An Open-source Image Tokenization Framework for Autoregressive Generation

Image tokenizers play a critical role in shaping the performance of subsequent generative models. Since the introduction of VQ-GAN, discrete image tokenization has undergone remarkable advancements. Improvements in architecture, quantization techniques, and training recipes have significantly enhanced both image reconstruction and the downstream generation quality. In this paper, we present XQ-GAN, an image tokenization framework designed for both image reconstruction and generation tasks. Our framework integrates state-of-the-art quantization techniques, including vector quantization (VQ), residual quantization (RQ), multi-scale residual quantization (MSVQ), product quantization (PQ), lookup-free quantization (LFQ), and binary spherical quantization (BSQ), within a highly flexible and customizable training environment. On the standard ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, our released model achieves an rFID of 0.64, significantly surpassing MAGVIT-v2 (0.9 rFID) and VAR (0.9 rFID). Furthermore, we demonstrate that using XQ-GAN as a tokenizer improves gFID metrics alongside rFID. For instance, with the same VAR architecture, XQ-GAN+VAR achieves a gFID of 2.6, outperforming VAR's 3.3 gFID by a notable margin. To support further research, we provide pre-trained weights of different image tokenizers for the community to directly train the subsequent generative models on it or fine-tune for specialized tasks.

cs.CV↗

What Matters When Repurposing Diffusion Models for General Dense Perception Tasks?

Extensive pre-training with large data is indispensable for downstream geometry and semantic visual perception tasks. Thanks to large-scale text-to-image (T2I) pretraining, recent works show promising results by simply fine-tuning T2I diffusion models for dense perception tasks. However, several crucial design decisions in this process still lack comprehensive justification, encompassing the necessity of the multi-step stochastic diffusion mechanism, training strategy, inference ensemble strategy, and fine-tuning data quality. In this work, we conduct a thorough investigation into critical factors that affect transfer efficiency and performance when using diffusion priors. Our key findings are: 1) High-quality fine-tuning data is paramount for both semantic and geometry perception tasks. 2) The stochastic nature of diffusion models has a slightly negative impact on deterministic visual perception tasks. 3) Apart from fine-tuning the diffusion model with only latent space supervision, task-specific image-level supervision is beneficial to enhance fine-grained details. These observations culminate in the development of GenPercept, an effective deterministic one-step fine-tuning paradigm tailed for dense visual perception tasks. Different from the previous multi-step methods, our paradigm has a much faster inference speed, and can be seamlessly integrated with customized perception decoders and loss functions for image-level supervision, which is critical to improving the fine-grained details of predictions. Comprehensive experiments on diverse dense visual perceptual tasks, including monocular depth estimation, surface normal estimation, image segmentation, and matting, are performed to demonstrate the remarkable adaptability and effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

Look a Group at Once: Multi-Slide Modeling for Survival Prediction

Survival prediction is a critical task in pathology. In clinical practice, pathologists often examine multiple cases, leveraging a broader spectrum of cancer phenotypes to enhance pathological assessment. Despite significant advancements in deep learning, current solutions typically model each slide as a sample, struggling to effectively capture comparable and slide-agnostic pathological features. In this paper, we introduce GroupMIL, a novel framework inspired by the clinical practice of collective analysis, which models multiple slides as a single sample and organizes groups of patches and slides sequentially to capture cross-slide prognostic features. We also present GPAMamba, a model designed to facilitate intra- and inter-slide feature interactions, effectively capturing local micro-environmental characteristics within slide-level graphs while uncovering essential prognostic patterns across an extended patch sequence within the group framework. Furthermore, we develop a dual-head predictor that delivers comprehensive survival risk and probability assessments for each patient. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across five datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas.

cs.CV↗

Chain of Attack: On the Robustness of Vision-Language Models Against Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have showcased remarkable performance in image and natural language understanding, such as image captioning and response generation. As the practical applications of vision-language models become increasingly widespread, their potential safety and robustness issues raise concerns that adversaries may evade the system and cause these models to generate toxic content through malicious attacks. Therefore, evaluating the robustness of open-source VLMs against adversarial attacks has garnered growing attention, with transfer-based attacks as a representative black-box attacking strategy. However, most existing transfer-based attacks neglect the importance of the semantic correlations between vision and text modalities, leading to sub-optimal adversarial example generation and attack performance. To address this issue, we present Chain of Attack (CoA), which iteratively enhances the generation of adversarial examples based on the multi-modal semantic update using a series of intermediate attacking steps, achieving superior adversarial transferability and efficiency. A unified attack success rate computing method is further proposed for automatic evasion evaluation. Extensive experiments conducted under the most realistic and high-stakes scenario, demonstrate that our attacking strategy can effectively mislead models to generate targeted responses using only black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim models. The comprehensive robustness evaluation in our paper provides insight into the vulnerabilities of VLMs and offers a reference for the safety considerations of future model developments.

cs.CV↗

Hide in Plain Sight: Clean-Label Backdoor for Auditing Membership Inference

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are critical tools for assessing privacy risks and ensuring compliance with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, their potential for auditing unauthorized use of data remains under explored. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel clean-label backdoor-based approach for MIAs, designed specifically for robust and stealthy data auditing. Unlike conventional methods that rely on detectable poisoned samples with altered labels, our approach retains natural labels, enhancing stealthiness even at low poisoning rates. Our approach employs an optimal trigger generated by a shadow model that mimics the target model's behavior. This design minimizes the feature-space distance between triggered samples and the source class while preserving the original data labels. The result is a powerful and undetectable auditing mechanism that overcomes limitations of existing approaches, such as label inconsistencies and visual artifacts in poisoned samples. The proposed method enables robust data auditing through black-box access, achieving high attack success rates across diverse datasets and model architectures. Additionally, it addresses challenges related to trigger stealthiness and poisoning durability, establishing itself as a practical and effective solution for data auditing. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy and generalizability of our approach, outperforming several baseline methods in both stealth and attack success metrics.

cs.CR↗

Retrieval-Enhanced Visual Prompt Learning for Few-shot Classification

The Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model has been widely used in various downstream vision tasks. The few-shot learning paradigm has been widely adopted to augment its capacity for these tasks. However, current paradigms may struggle with fine-grained classification, such as satellite image recognition, due to widening domain gaps. To address this limitation, we propose retrieval-enhanced visual prompt learning (RePrompt), which introduces retrieval mechanisms to cache and reuse the knowledge of downstream tasks. RePrompt constructs a retrieval database from either training examples or external data if available, and uses a retrieval mechanism to enhance multiple stages of a simple prompt learning baseline, thus narrowing the domain gap. During inference, our enhanced model can reference similar samples brought by retrieval to make more accurate predictions. A detailed analysis reveals that retrieval helps to improve the distribution of late features, thus, improving generalization for downstream tasks. Reprompt attains state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of vision datasets, including 11 image datasets, 3 video datasets, 1 multi-view dataset, and 4 domain generalization benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

LSSInst: Improving Geometric Modeling in LSS-Based BEV Perception with Instance Representation

With the attention gained by camera-only 3D object detection in autonomous driving, methods based on Bird-Eye-View (BEV) representation especially derived from the forward view transformation paradigm, i.e., lift-splat-shoot (LSS), have recently seen significant progress. The BEV representation formulated by the frustum based on depth distribution prediction is ideal for learning the road structure and scene layout from multi-view images. However, to retain computational efficiency, the compressed BEV representation such as in resolution and axis is inevitably weak in retaining the individual geometric details, undermining the methodological generality and applicability. With this in mind, to compensate for the missing details and utilize multi-view geometry constraints, we propose LSSInst, a two-stage object detector incorporating BEV and instance representations in tandem. The proposed detector exploits fine-grained pixel-level features that can be flexibly integrated into existing LSS-based BEV networks. Having said that, due to the inherent gap between two representation spaces, we design the instance adaptor for the BEV-to-instance semantic coherence rather than pass the proposal naively. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our proposed framework is of excellent generalization ability and performance, which boosts the performances of modern LSS-based BEV perception methods without bells and whistles and outperforms current LSS-based state-of-the-art works on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark.

cs.CV↗

Reference Signal-Based Waveform Design for Integrated Sensing and Communications System

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) as one of the key technologies is capable of supporting high-speed communication and high-precision sensing for the upcoming 6G. This paper studies a waveform strategy by designing the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based reference signal (RS) for sensing and communication in ISAC system. We derive the closed-form expressions of Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) for the distance and velocity estimations, and obtain the communication rate under the mean square error of channel estimation. Then, a weighted sum CRB minimization problem on the distance and velocity estimations is formulated by considering communication rate requirement and RS intervals constraints, which is a mixed-integer problem due to the discrete RS interval values. To solve this problem, some numerical methods are typically adopted to obtain the optimal solutions, whose computational complexity grow exponentially with the number of symbols and subcarriers of OFDM. Therefore, we propose a relaxation and approximation method to transform the original discrete problem into a continuous convex one and obtain the sub-optimal solutions. Finally, our proposed scheme is compared with the exhaustive search method in numerical simulations, which show slight gap between the obtained sub-optimal and optimal solutions, and this gap further decreases with large weight factor.

eess.SP↗

DiffSR: Learning Radar Reflectivity Synthesis via Diffusion Model from Satellite Observations

Weather radar data synthesis can fill in data for areas where ground observations are missing. Existing methods often employ reconstruction-based approaches with MSE loss to reconstruct radar data from satellite observation. However, such methods lead to over-smoothing, which hinders the generation of high-frequency details or high-value observation areas associated with convective weather. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage diffusion-based method called DiffSR. We first pre-train a reconstruction model on global-scale data to obtain radar estimation and then synthesize radar reflectivity by combining radar estimation results with satellite data as conditions for the diffusion model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, demonstrating the ability to generate high-frequency details and high-value areas.

eess.IV↗

Revealing hidden structures in the Zone of Avoidance -- a blind MeerKAT HI Survey of the Vela Supercluster

We conducted the MeerKAT Vela Supercluster survey, named Vela$-$HI, to bridge the gap between the Vela SARAO MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (Vela$-$SMGPS, $-2^{\circ} \leq b \leq 1^{\circ}$), and optical and near-infrared spectroscopic observations of the Vela Supercluster (hereafter Vela$-$OPT/NIR) at $|b| \gtrsim 7^{\circ}$. Covering coordinates from $263^{\circ} \leq \ell \leq 284^{\circ}$ and $1^{\circ} \leq b \leq 6.2^{\circ}$ above, and $-6.7^{\circ} \leq b \leq -2^{\circ}$ below the Galactic Plane (GP), we sampled 667 fields spread across an area of ${\sim} \rm 242 ~deg^2$. With a beam size of ${\sim} 38'' \times 31''$, Vela$-$HI achieved a sensitivity of $\langle \rm rms \rangle = 0.74$ mJy beam$^{-1}$ at 44.3 km s$^{-1}$ velocity resolution over ${\sim}$67 hours of observations. We cataloged 719 galaxies, with only 211 (29%) previously documented in the literature, primarily through the HIZOA, 2MASX, and WISE databases. Among these known galaxies, only 66 had optical spectroscopic redshift information. We found marginal differences of less than one channel resolution for all galaxies in common between HIZOA and Vela$-$SMGPS, and a mean difference of $70 \pm 15$ km s$^{-1}$ between optical and HI velocities. Combining data from Vela$-$SMGPS, Vela$-$HI, and Vela$-$OPT/NIR confirmed the connection of the Hydra/Antlia filament across the GP and revealed a previously unknown diagonal wall at a heliocentric velocity range of $6500-8000$ km s$^{-1}$. Vela$-$HI reinforces the connection between the first wall at $18500-20000$ km s$^{-1}$ and the inner ZOA. The second wall seems to traverse the GP at $270^{\circ} \leq \ell \leq 279^{\circ}$, where it appears that both walls intersect, jointly covering the velocity range $18500-21500$ km s$^{-1}$.

astro-ph.GA↗

Visual Mamba: A Survey and New Outlooks

Mamba, a recent selective structured state space model, excels in long sequence modeling, which is vital in the large model era. Long sequence modeling poses significant challenges, including capturing long-range dependencies within the data and handling the computational demands caused by their extensive length. Mamba addresses these challenges by overcoming the local perception limitations of convolutional neural networks and the quadratic computational complexity of Transformers. Given its advantages over these mainstream foundation architectures, Mamba exhibits great potential to be a visual foundation architecture. Since January 2024, Mamba has been actively applied to diverse computer vision tasks, yielding numerous contributions. To help keep pace with the rapid advancements, this paper reviews visual Mamba approaches, analyzing over 200 papers. This paper begins by delineating the formulation of the original Mamba model. Subsequently, it delves into representative backbone networks, and applications categorized using different modalities, including image, video, point cloud, and multi-modal data. Particularly, we identify scanning techniques as critical for adapting Mamba to vision tasks, and decouple these scanning techniques to clarify their functionality and enhance their flexibility across various applications. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future directions, providing insights into new outlooks in this fast evolving area. A comprehensive list of visual Mamba models reviewed in this work is available at https://github.com/Ruixxxx/Awesome-Vision-Mamba-Models.

cs.CV↗

TableGPT2: A Large Multimodal Model with Tabular Data Integration

The emergence of models like GPTs, Claude, LLaMA, and Qwen has reshaped AI applications, presenting vast new opportunities across industries. Yet, the integration of tabular data remains notably underdeveloped, despite its foundational role in numerous real-world domains. This gap is critical for three main reasons. First, database or data warehouse data integration is essential for advanced applications; second, the vast and largely untapped resource of tabular data offers immense potential for analysis; and third, the business intelligence domain specifically demands adaptable, precise solutions that many current LLMs may struggle to provide. In response, we introduce TableGPT2, a model rigorously pre-trained and fine-tuned with over 593.8K tables and 2.36M high-quality query-table-output tuples, a scale of table-related data unprecedented in prior research. This extensive training enables TableGPT2 to excel in table-centric tasks while maintaining strong general language and coding abilities. One of TableGPT2's key innovations is its novel table encoder, specifically designed to capture schema-level and cell-level information. This encoder strengthens the model's ability to handle ambiguous queries, missing column names, and irregular tables commonly encountered in real-world applications. Similar to visual language models, this pioneering approach integrates with the decoder to form a robust large multimodal model. We believe the results are compelling: over 23 benchmarking metrics, TableGPT2 achieves an average performance improvement of 35.20% in the 7B model and 49.32% in the 72B model over prior benchmark-neutral LLMs, with robust general-purpose capabilities intact.

cs.LG↗

Sentiment Analysis of Spanish Political Party Tweets Using Pre-trained Language Models

Title: Sentiment Analysis of Spanish Political Party Communications on Twitter Using Pre-trained Language Models Authors: Chuqiao Song, Shunzhang Chen, Xinyi Cai, Hao Chen Comments: 21 pages, 6 figures Abstract: This study investigates sentiment patterns within Spanish political party communications on Twitter by leveraging BETO and RoBERTuito, two pre-trained language models optimized for Spanish text. Using a dataset of tweets from major Spanish political parties: PSOE, PP, Vox, Podemos, and Ciudadanos, spanning 2019 to 2024, this research analyzes sentiment distributions and explores the relationship between sentiment expression and party ideology. The findings indicate that both models consistently identify a predominant Neutral sentiment across all parties, with significant variations in Negative and Positive sentiments that align with ideological distinctions. Specifically, Vox exhibits higher levels of Negative sentiment, while PSOE demonstrates relatively high Positive sentiment, supporting the hypothesis that emotional appeals in political messaging reflect ideological stances. This study underscores the potential of pre-trained language models for non-English sentiment analysis on social media, providing insights into sentiment dynamics that shape public discourse within Spain's multi-party political system. Keywords: Spanish politics, sentiment analysis, pre-trained language models, Twitter, BETO, RoBERTuito, political ideology, multi-party system

cs.CL↗

Concept-Attention Whitening for Interpretable Skin Lesion Diagnosis

The black-box nature of deep learning models has raised concerns about their interpretability for successful deployment in real-world clinical applications. To address the concerns, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide clear and understandable explanations of the decision-making process. In the medical domain, concepts such as attributes of lesions or abnormalities serve as key evidence for deriving diagnostic results. Existing concept-based models mainly depend on concepts that appear independently and require fine-grained concept annotations such as bounding boxes. However, a medical image usually contains multiple concepts, and the fine-grained concept annotations are difficult to acquire. In this paper, we aim to interpret representations in deep neural networks by aligning the axes of the latent space with known concepts of interest. We propose a novel Concept-Attention Whitening (CAW) framework for interpretable skin lesion diagnosis. CAW is comprised of a disease diagnosis branch and a concept alignment branch. In the former branch, we train a convolutional neural network (CNN) with an inserted CAW layer to perform skin lesion diagnosis. The CAW layer decorrelates features and aligns image features to conceptual meanings via an orthogonal matrix. In the latter branch, the orthogonal matrix is calculated under the guidance of the concept attention mask. We particularly introduce a weakly-supervised concept mask generator that only leverages coarse concept labels for filtering local regions that are relevant to certain concepts, improving the optimization of the orthogonal matrix. Extensive experiments on two public skin lesion diagnosis datasets demonstrated that CAW not only enhanced interpretability but also maintained a state-of-the-art diagnostic performance.

cs.CV↗

Self-Dual Cyclic Codes with Square-Root-Like Lower Bounds on Their Minimum Distances

Binary self-dual cyclic codes have been studied since the classical work of Sloane and Thompson published in IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 29, 1983. Twenty five years later, an infinite family of binary self-dual cyclic codes with lengths $n_i$ and minimum distances $d_i \geq \frac{1}{2} \sqrt{n_i+2}$ was presented in a paper of IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 55, 2009. However, no infinite family of Euclidean self-dual binary cyclic codes whose minimum distances have the square-root lower bound and no infinite family of Euclidean self-dual nonbinary cyclic codes whose minimum distances have a lower bound better than the square-root lower bound are known in the literature. In this paper, an infinite family of Euclidean self-dual cyclic codes over the fields ${\bf F}_{2^s}$ with a square-root-like lower bound is constructed. An infinite subfamily of this family consists of self-dual binary cyclic codes with the square-root lower bound. Another infinite subfamily of this family consists of self-dual cyclic codes over the fields ${\bf F}_{2^s}$ with a lower bound better than the square-root bound for $s \geq 2$. Consequently, two breakthroughs in coding theory are made in this paper. An infinite family of self-dual binary cyclic codes with a square-root-like lower bound is also presented in this paper. An infinite family of Hermitian self-dual cyclic codes over the fields ${\bf F}_{2^{2s}}$ with a square-root-like lower bound and an infinite family of Euclidean self-dual linear codes over ${\bf F}_{q}$ with $q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$ with a square-root-like lower bound are also constructed in this paper.

cs.IT↗

GSCo: Towards Generalizable AI in Medicine via Generalist-Specialist Collaboration

Generalist foundation models (GFMs) are renowned for their exceptional capability and flexibility in effectively generalizing across diverse tasks and modalities. In the field of medicine, while GFMs exhibit superior generalizability based on their extensive intrinsic knowledge as well as proficiency in instruction following and in-context learning, specialist models excel in precision due to their domain knowledge. In this work, for the first time, we explore the synergy between the GFM and specialist models, to enable precise medical image analysis on a broader scope. Specifically, we propose a cooperative framework, Generalist-Specialist Collaboration (GSCo), which consists of two stages, namely the construction of GFM and specialists, and collaborative inference on downstream tasks. In the construction stage, we develop MedDr, the largest open-source GFM tailored for medicine, showcasing exceptional instruction-following and in-context learning capabilities. Meanwhile, a series of lightweight specialists are crafted for downstream tasks with low computational cost. In the collaborative inference stage, we introduce two cooperative mechanisms, Mixture-of-Expert Diagnosis and Retrieval-Augmented Diagnosis, to harvest the generalist's in-context learning abilities alongside the specialists' domain expertise. For a comprehensive evaluation, we curate a large-scale benchmark featuring 28 datasets and about 250,000 images. Extensive results demonstrate that MedDr consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GFMs on downstream datasets. Furthermore, GSCo exceeds both GFMs and specialists across all out-of-domain disease diagnosis datasets. These findings indicate a significant paradigm shift in the application of GFMs, transitioning from separate models for specific tasks to a collaborative approach between GFMs and specialists, thereby advancing the frontiers of generalizable AI in medicine.

cs.CV↗