Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Jiawei Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Jiawei Zhang.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

Design-Based Causal Inference with Missing Outcomes: Missingness Mechanisms, Imputation-Assisted Randomization Tests, and Covariate Adjustment

Design-based causal inference, also known as randomization-based or finite-population causal inference, is one of the most widely used causal inference frameworks, largely due to the merit that its validity can be guaranteed by study design (e.g., randomized experiments) and does not require assuming specific outcome-generating distributions or super-population models. Despite its advantages, design-based causal inference can still suffer from other issues, among which outcome missingness is a prevalent and significant challenge. This work systematically studies the outcome missingness problem in design-based causal inference. First, we propose a general and flexible outcome missingness mechanism that can facilitate finite-population-exact randomization tests of no treatment effect. Second, under this general missingness mechanism, we propose a general framework called ``imputation and re-imputation" for conducting randomization tests in design-based causal inference with missing outcomes. We prove that our framework can still ensure finite-population-exact type-I error rate control even when the imputation model was misspecified or when unobserved covariates or interference exist in the missingness mechanism. Third, we extend our framework to conduct covariate adjustment in randomization tests and construct finite-population-valid confidence regions with missing outcomes. Our framework is evaluated via extensive simulation studies and applied to a large-scale randomized experiment.

stat.ME↗

MLEP: Multi-granularity Local Entropy Patterns for Universal AI-generated Image Detection

Advancements in image generation technologies have raised significant concerns about their potential misuse, such as producing misinformation and deepfakes. Therefore, there is an urgent need for effective methods to detect AI-generated images (AIGI). Despite progress in AIGI detection, achieving reliable performance across diverse generation models and scenes remains challenging due to the lack of source-invariant features and limited generalization capabilities in existing methods. In this work, we explore the potential of using image entropy as a cue for AIGI detection and propose Multi-granularity Local Entropy Patterns (MLEP), a set of entropy feature maps computed across shuffled small patches over multiple image scaled. MLEP comprehensively captures pixel relationships across dimensions and scales while significantly disrupting image semantics, reducing potential content bias. Leveraging MLEP, a robust CNN-based classifier for AIGI detection can be trained. Extensive experiments conducted in an open-world scenario, evaluating images synthesized by 32 distinct generative models, demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and generalization.

cs.CV↗

Rethinking Time Encoding via Learnable Transformation Functions

Effectively modeling time information and incorporating it into applications or models involving chronologically occurring events is crucial. Real-world scenarios often involve diverse and complex time patterns, which pose significant challenges for time encoding methods. While previous methods focus on capturing time patterns, many rely on specific inductive biases, such as using trigonometric functions to model periodicity. This narrow focus on single-pattern modeling makes them less effective in handling the diversity and complexities of real-world time patterns. In this paper, we investigate to improve the existing commonly used time encoding methods and introduce Learnable Transformation-based Generalized Time Encoding (LeTE). We propose using deep function learning techniques to parameterize non-linear transformations in time encoding, making them learnable and capable of modeling generalized time patterns, including diverse and complex temporal dynamics. By enabling learnable transformations, LeTE encompasses previous methods as specific cases and allows seamless integration into a wide range of tasks. Through extensive experiments across diverse domains, we demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of LeTE.

cs.LG↗

An Arbitrary-Modal Fusion Network for Volumetric Cranial Nerves Tract Segmentation

The segmentation of cranial nerves (CNs) tract provides a valuable quantitative tool for the analysis of the morphology and trajectory of individual CNs. Multimodal CNs tract segmentation networks, e.g., CNTSeg, which combine structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and diffusion MRI, have achieved promising segmentation performance. However, it is laborious or even infeasible to collect complete multimodal data in clinical practice due to limitations in equipment, user privacy, and working conditions. In this work, we propose a novel arbitrary-modal fusion network for volumetric CNs tract segmentation, called CNTSeg-v2, which trains one model to handle different combinations of available modalities. Instead of directly combining all the modalities, we select T1-weighted (T1w) images as the primary modality due to its simplicity in data acquisition and contribution most to the results, which supervises the information selection of other auxiliary modalities. Our model encompasses an Arbitrary-Modal Collaboration Module (ACM) designed to effectively extract informative features from other auxiliary modalities, guided by the supervision of T1w images. Meanwhile, we construct a Deep Distance-guided Multi-stage (DDM) decoder to correct small errors and discontinuities through signed distance maps to improve segmentation accuracy. We evaluate our CNTSeg-v2 on the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset and the clinical Multi-shell Diffusion MRI (MDM) dataset. Extensive experimental results show that our CNTSeg-v2 achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance, outperforming all competing methods.

eess.IV↗

A Low-Noise and High-Stability DC Source for Superconducting Quantum Circuits

With the rapid scaling of superconducting quantum processors, electronic control systems relying on commercial off-the-shelf instruments face critical bottlenecks in signal density, power consumption, and crosstalk mitigation. Here we present a custom dual-channel direct current (DC) source module (QPower) dedicated for large-scale superconducting quantum processors. The module delivers a voltage range of $\pm$7 V with 200 mA maximum current per channel, while achieving the following key performance benchmarks: noise spectral density of 20 nV/$\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ at 10 kHz, output ripple $<$500 $μ$V$_{\mathrm{pp}}$ within 20 MHz bandwidth, and long-term voltage drift $<$5 $μ$V$_{\mathrm{pp}}$ over 12 hours. Integrated into the control electronics of a 66-qubit quantum processor, QPower enables qubit coherence times of $T_1 = 87.6~μ\mathrm{s}$ and Ramsey $T_2 = 5.1~μ\mathrm{s}$, with qubit resonance frequency drift constrained to $\pm$40 kHz during 12-hour operation. This modular design is compact in size and efficient in energy consumption, providing a scalable DC source solution for intermediate-scale quantum processors with stringent noise and stability requirements, with potential extensions to other quantum hardware platforms and precision measurement.

quant-ph↗

Frequency-domain Learning with Kernel Prior for Blind Image Deblurring

While achieving excellent results on various datasets, many deep learning methods for image deblurring suffer from limited generalization capabilities with out-of-domain data. This limitation is likely caused by their dependence on certain domain-specific datasets. To address this challenge, we argue that it is necessary to introduce the kernel prior into deep learning methods, as the kernel prior remains independent of the image context. For effective fusion of kernel prior information, we adopt a rational implementation method inspired by traditional deblurring algorithms that perform deconvolution in the frequency domain. We propose a module called Frequency Integration Module (FIM) for fusing the kernel prior and combine it with a frequency-based deblurring Transfomer network. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple blind image deblurring tasks, showcasing robust generalization abilities. Source code will be available soon.

cs.CV↗

Enhanced Battery Capacity Estimation in Data-Limited Scenarios through Swarm Learning

Data-driven methods have shown potential in electric-vehicle battery management tasks such as capacity estimation, but their deployment is bottlenecked by poor performance in data-limited scenarios. Sharing battery data among algorithm developers can enable accurate and generalizable data-driven models. However, an effective battery management framework that simultaneously ensures data privacy and fault tolerance is still lacking. This paper proposes a swarm battery management system that unites a decentralized swarm learning (SL) framework and credibility weight-based model merging mechanism to enhance battery capacity estimation in data-limited scenarios while ensuring data privacy and security. The effectiveness of the SL framework is validated on a dataset comprising 66 commercial LiNiCoAlO2 cells cycled under various operating conditions. Specifically, the capacity estimation performance is validated in four cases, including data-balanced, volume-biased, feature-biased, and quality-biased scenarios. Our results show that SL can enhance the estimation accuracy in all data-limited cases and achieve a similar level of accuracy with central learning where large amounts of data are available.

eess.SY↗

Logical multi-qubit entanglement with dual-rail superconducting qubits

Recent advances in quantum error correction (QEC) across hardware platforms have demonstrated operation near and beyond the fault-tolerance threshold, yet achieving exponential suppression of logical errors through code scaling remains a critical challenge. Erasure qubits, which enable hardware-level detection of dominant error types, offer a promising path toward resource-efficient QEC by exploiting error bias. Single erasure qubits with dual-rail encoding in superconducting cavities and transmons have demonstrated high coherence and low single-qubit gate errors with mid-circuit erasure detection, but the generation of multi-qubit entanglement--a fundamental requirement for quantum computation and error correction--has remained an outstanding milestone. Here, we demonstrate a superconducting processor integrating four dual-rail erasure qubits that achieves the logical multi-qubit entanglement with error-biased protection. Each dual-rail qubit, encoded in pairs of tunable transmons, preserves millisecond-scale coherence times and single-qubit gate errors at the level of $10^{-5}$. By engineering tunable couplings between logical qubits, we generate high-fidelity entangled states resilient to physical qubit noise, including logical Bell states (98.8% fidelity) and a three-logical-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state (93.5% fidelity). A universal gate set is realized through a calibrated logical controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate with 96.2% process fidelity, enabled by coupler-activated $XX$ interactions in the protected logical subspace. This work advances dual-rail architectures beyond single-qubit demonstrations, providing a blueprint for concatenated quantum error correction with erasure qubits.

quant-ph↗

FaceSpeak: Expressive and High-Quality Speech Synthesis from Human Portraits of Different Styles

Humans can perceive speakers' characteristics (e.g., identity, gender, personality and emotion) by their appearance, which are generally aligned to their voice style. Recently, vision-driven Text-to-speech (TTS) scholars grounded their investigations on real-person faces, thereby restricting effective speech synthesis from applying to vast potential usage scenarios with diverse characters and image styles. To solve this issue, we introduce a novel FaceSpeak approach. It extracts salient identity characteristics and emotional representations from a wide variety of image styles. Meanwhile, it mitigates the extraneous information (e.g., background, clothing, and hair color, etc.), resulting in synthesized speech closely aligned with a character's persona. Furthermore, to overcome the scarcity of multi-modal TTS data, we have devised an innovative dataset, namely Expressive Multi-Modal TTS, which is diligently curated and annotated to facilitate research in this domain. The experimental results demonstrate our proposed FaceSpeak can generate portrait-aligned voice with satisfactory naturalness and quality.

cs.SD↗

Stochastic Smoothed Primal-Dual Algorithms for Nonconvex Optimization with Linear Inequality Constraints

We propose smoothed primal-dual algorithms for solving stochastic and smooth nonconvex optimization problems with linear inequality constraints. Our algorithms are single-loop and only require a single stochastic gradient based on one sample at each iteration. A distinguishing feature of our algorithm is that it is based on an inexact gradient descent framework for the Moreau envelope, where the gradient of the Moreau envelope is estimated using one step of a stochastic primal-dual augmented Lagrangian method. To handle inequality constraints and stochasticity, we combine the recently established global error bounds in constrained optimization with a Moreau envelope-based analysis of stochastic proximal algorithms. For obtaining $\varepsilon$-stationary points, we establish the optimal $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity guarantee for our algorithms and provide extensions to stochastic linear constraints. We also show how to improve this complexity to $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ by using variance reduction and the expected smoothness assumption. Unlike existing methods, the iterations of our algorithms are free of subproblems, large batch sizes or increasing penalty parameters and use dual variable updates to ensure feasibility.

math.OC↗

Addressing misspecification in contextual optimization

We study a linear contextual optimization problem where a decision maker has access to historical data and contextual features to learn a cost prediction model aimed at minimizing decision error. We adopt the predict-then-optimize framework for this analysis. Given that perfect model alignment with reality is often unrealistic in practice, we focus on scenarios where the chosen hypothesis set is misspecified. In this context, it remains unclear whether current contextual optimization approaches can effectively address such model misspecification. In this paper, we present a novel integrated learning and optimization approach designed to tackle model misspecification in contextual optimization. This approach offers theoretical generalizability, tractability, and optimality guarantees, along with strong practical performance. Our method involves minimizing a tractable surrogate loss that aligns with the performance value from cost vector predictions, regardless of whether the model is misspecified, and can be optimized in reasonable time. To our knowledge, no previous work has provided an approach with such guarantees in the context of model misspecification.

math.OC↗

A Diffusion-Based Framework for Occluded Object Movement

Seamlessly moving objects within a scene is a common requirement for image editing, but it is still a challenge for existing editing methods. Especially for real-world images, the occlusion situation further increases the difficulty. The main difficulty is that the occluded portion needs to be completed before movement can proceed. To leverage the real-world knowledge embedded in the pre-trained diffusion models, we propose a Diffusion-based framework specifically designed for Occluded Object Movement, named DiffOOM. The proposed DiffOOM consists of two parallel branches that perform object de-occlusion and movement simultaneously. The de-occlusion branch utilizes a background color-fill strategy and a continuously updated object mask to focus the diffusion process on completing the obscured portion of the target object. Concurrently, the movement branch employs latent optimization to place the completed object in the target location and adopts local text-conditioned guidance to integrate the object into new surroundings appropriately. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our method, which is further validated by a comprehensive user study.

cs.CV↗

M$^2$CD: A Unified MultiModal Framework for Optical-SAR Change Detection with Mixture of Experts and Self-Distillation

Most existing change detection (CD) methods focus on optical images captured at different times, and deep learning (DL) has achieved remarkable success in this domain. However, in extreme scenarios such as disaster response, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), with its active imaging capability, is more suitable for providing post-event data. This introduces new challenges for CD methods, as existing weight-sharing Siamese networks struggle to effectively learn the cross-modal data distribution between optical and SAR images. To address this challenge, we propose a unified MultiModal CD framework, M$^2$CD. We integrate Mixture of Experts (MoE) modules into the backbone to explicitly handle diverse modalities, thereby enhancing the model's ability to learn multimodal data distributions. Additionally, we innovatively propose an Optical-to-SAR guided path (O2SP) and implement self-distillation during training to reduce the feature space discrepancy between different modalities, further alleviating the model's learning burden. We design multiple variants of M$^2$CD based on both CNN and Transformer backbones. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, with the MiT-b1 version of M$^2$CD outperforming all state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in optical-SAR CD tasks.

cs.CV↗

Towards Robust Time-of-Flight Depth Denoising with Confidence-Aware Diffusion Model

Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors efficiently capture scene depth, but the nonlinear depth construction procedure often results in extremely large noise variance or even invalid areas. Recent methods based on deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve enhanced ToF denoising accuracy but tend to struggle when presented with severe noise corruption due to limited prior knowledge of ToF data distribution. In this paper, we propose DepthCAD, a novel ToF denoising approach that ensures global structural smoothness by leveraging the rich prior knowledge in Stable Diffusion and maintains local metric accuracy by steering the diffusion process with confidence guidance. To adopt the pretrained image diffusion model to ToF depth denoising, we apply the diffusion on raw ToF correlation measurements with dynamic range normalization before converting to depth maps. Experimental results validate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed scheme, and the evaluation on real data further verifies its robustness against real-world ToF noise.

cs.CV↗

FATE: Full-head Gaussian Avatar with Textural Editing from Monocular Video

Reconstructing high-fidelity, animatable 3D head avatars from effortlessly captured monocular videos is a pivotal yet formidable challenge. Although significant progress has been made in rendering performance and manipulation capabilities, notable challenges remain, including incomplete reconstruction and inefficient Gaussian representation. To address these challenges, we introduce FATE, a novel method for reconstructing an editable full-head avatar from a single monocular video. FATE integrates a sampling-based densification strategy to ensure optimal positional distribution of points, improving rendering efficiency. A neural baking technique is introduced to convert discrete Gaussian representations into continuous attribute maps, facilitating intuitive appearance editing. Furthermore, we propose a universal completion framework to recover non-frontal appearance, culminating in a 360$^\circ$-renderable 3D head avatar. FATE outperforms previous approaches in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, achieving state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, FATE is the first animatable and 360$^\circ$ full-head monocular reconstruction method for a 3D head avatar.

cs.CV↗

A Single-Loop Smoothed Gradient Descent-Ascent Algorithm for Nonconvex-Concave Min-Max Problems

Nonconvex-concave min-max problem arises in many machine learning applications including minimizing a pointwise maximum of a set of nonconvex functions and robust adversarial training of neural networks. A popular approach to solve this problem is the gradient descent-ascent (GDA) algorithm which unfortunately can exhibit oscillation in case of nonconvexity. In this paper, we introduce a "smoothing" scheme which can be combined with GDA to stabilize the oscillation and ensure convergence to a stationary solution. We prove that the stabilized GDA algorithm can achieve an $O(1/ε^2)$ iteration complexity for minimizing the pointwise maximum of a finite collection of nonconvex functions. Moreover, the smoothed GDA algorithm achieves an $O(1/ε^4)$ iteration complexity for general nonconvex-concave problems. Extensions of this stabilized GDA algorithm to multi-block cases are presented. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm to achieve $O(1/ε^2)$ for a class of nonconvex-concave problem. We illustrate the practical efficiency of the stabilized GDA algorithm on robust training.

math.OC↗

MMDT: Decoding the Trustworthiness and Safety of Multimodal Foundation Models

Multimodal foundation models (MMFMs) play a crucial role in various applications, including autonomous driving, healthcare, and virtual assistants. However, several studies have revealed vulnerabilities in these models, such as generating unsafe content by text-to-image models. Existing benchmarks on multimodal models either predominantly assess the helpfulness of these models, or only focus on limited perspectives such as fairness and privacy. In this paper, we present the first unified platform, MMDT (Multimodal DecodingTrust), designed to provide a comprehensive safety and trustworthiness evaluation for MMFMs. Our platform assesses models from multiple perspectives, including safety, hallucination, fairness/bias, privacy, adversarial robustness, and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. We have designed various evaluation scenarios and red teaming algorithms under different tasks for each perspective to generate challenging data, forming a high-quality benchmark. We evaluate a range of multimodal models using MMDT, and our findings reveal a series of vulnerabilities and areas for improvement across these perspectives. This work introduces the first comprehensive and unique safety and trustworthiness evaluation platform for MMFMs, paving the way for developing safer and more reliable MMFMs and systems. Our platform and benchmark are available at https://mmdecodingtrust.github.io/.

cs.CL↗

AIGVE-Tool: AI-Generated Video Evaluation Toolkit with Multifaceted Benchmark

The rapid advancement in AI-generated video synthesis has led to a growth demand for standardized and effective evaluation metrics. Existing metrics lack a unified framework for systematically categorizing methodologies, limiting a holistic understanding of the evaluation landscape. Additionally, fragmented implementations and the absence of standardized interfaces lead to redundant processing overhead. Furthermore, many prior approaches are constrained by dataset-specific dependencies, limiting their applicability across diverse video domains. To address these challenges, we introduce AIGVE-Tool (AI-Generated Video Evaluation Toolkit), a unified framework that provides a structured and extensible evaluation pipeline for a comprehensive AI-generated video evaluation. Organized within a novel five-category taxonomy, AIGVE-Tool integrates multiple evaluation methodologies while allowing flexible customization through a modular configuration system. Additionally, we propose AIGVE-Bench, a large-scale benchmark dataset created with five SOTA video generation models based on hand-crafted instructions and prompts. This dataset systematically evaluates various video generation models across nine critical quality dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AIGVE-Tool in providing standardized and reliable evaluation results, highlighting specific strengths and limitations of current models and facilitating the advancements of next-generation AI-generated video techniques.

cs.CV↗