arXiv subjects

Kai Qiao

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Qiao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed -- particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks -- particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

POSIM: A Multi-Agent Simulation Framework for Social Media Public Opinion Evolution and Governance

Modeling social media public opinion evolution is essential for governance decision-making. Traditional epidemic models and rule-based agent-based models (ABMs) fail to capture the cognitive processes and adaptive behaviors of real users. Recent large language model (LLM)-based social simulations can reproduce group-level phenomena like polarization and conformity, yet remain unable to recreate the irrational interactions and multi-phase dynamics of real public opinion events. We present POSIM (Public Opinion Simulator), a multi-agent simulation framework for social media public opinion evolution and governance. POSIM integrates LLM-driven agents with a Belief--Desire--Intention (BDI) cognitive architecture that accounts for irrational factors, places them in a virtual social media environment with social networks and recommendation mechanisms, and drives temporal dynamics through a Hawkes point process engine that captures the co-evolution of agents and the environment across event phases. To validate the framework, we collect real-world public opinion datasets from the Weibo platform covering the full interaction chain of users. Experiments show that POSIM successfully reproduces key characteristics of public opinion evolution from individual mechanisms to collective phenomena, and its effectiveness is further supported by multiple statistical metrics. Building on POSIM, governance-oriented guidance and intervention experiments uncover a counterintuitive empathy paradox: empathetic guidance deepens negative sentiment instead of easing it under certain conditions, offering new insights for governance strategy design. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework can fully serve as a computational experimentation platform for proactive strategy evaluation and evidence-based governance. All source code is available at https://github.com/DeepCogLab/posim/.

cs.GL↗

arXiv2024

Efficient Pretraining Model based on Multi-Scale Local Visual Field Feature Reconstruction for PCB CT Image Element Segmentation

Element segmentation is a key step in nondestructive testing of Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) based on Computed Tomography (CT) technology. In recent years, the rapid development of self-supervised pretraining technology can obtain general image features without labeled samples, and then use a small amount of labeled samples to solve downstream tasks, which has a good potential in PCB element segmentation. At present, Masked Image Modeling (MIM) pretraining model has been initially applied in PCB CT image element segmentation. However, due to the small and regular size of PCB elements such as vias, wires, and pads, the global visual field has redundancy for a single element reconstruction, which may damage the performance of the model. Based on this issue, we propose an efficient pretraining model based on multi-scale local visual field feature reconstruction for PCB CT image element segmentation (EMLR-seg). In this model, the teacher-guided MIM pretraining model is introduced into PCB CT image element segmentation for the first time, and a multi-scale local visual field extraction (MVE) module is proposed to reduce redundancy by focusing on local visual fields. At the same time, a simple 4-Transformer-blocks decoder is used. Experiments show that EMLR-seg can achieve 88.6% mIoU on the PCB CT image dataset we proposed, which exceeds 1.2% by the baseline model, and the training time is reduced by 29.6 hours, a reduction of 17.4% under the same experimental condition, which reflects the advantage of EMLR-seg in terms of performance and efficiency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Over-Sampling Strategy in Feature Space for Graphs based Class-imbalanced Bot Detection

The presence of a large number of bots in Online Social Networks (OSN) leads to undesirable social effects. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are effective in detecting bots as they utilize user interactions. However, class-imbalanced issues can affect bot detection performance. To address this, we propose an over-sampling strategy for GNNs (OS-GNN) that generates samples for the minority class without edge synthesis. First, node features are mapped to a feature space through neighborhood aggregation. Then, we generate samples for the minority class in the feature space. Finally, the augmented features are used to train the classifiers. This framework is general and can be easily extended into different GNN architectures. The proposed framework is evaluated using three real-world bot detection benchmark datasets, and it consistently exhibits superiority over the baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Muti-scale Graph Neural Network with Signed-attention for Social Bot Detection: A Frequency Perspective

The presence of a large number of bots on social media has adverse effects. The graph neural network (GNN) can effectively leverage the social relationships between users and achieve excellent results in detecting bots. Recently, more and more GNN-based methods have been proposed for bot detection. However, the existing GNN-based bot detection methods only focus on low-frequency information and seldom consider high-frequency information, which limits the representation ability of the model. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Multi-scale with Signed-attention Graph Filter for social bot detection called MSGS. MSGS could effectively utilize both high and low-frequency information in the social graph. Specifically, MSGS utilizes a multi-scale structure to produce representation vectors at different scales. These representations are then combined using a signed-attention mechanism. Finally, multi-scale representations via MLP after polymerization to produce the final result. We analyze the frequency response and demonstrate that MSGS is a more flexible and expressive adaptive graph filter. MSGS can effectively utilize high-frequency information to alleviate the over-smoothing problem of deep GNNs. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves better performance compared with several state-of-the-art social bot detection methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

RF-GNN: Random Forest Boosted Graph Neural Network for Social Bot Detection

The presence of a large number of bots on social media leads to adverse effects. Although Random forest algorithm is widely used in bot detection and can significantly enhance the performance of weak classifiers, it cannot utilize the interaction between accounts. This paper proposes a Random Forest boosted Graph Neural Network for social bot detection, called RF-GNN, which employs graph neural networks (GNNs) as the base classifiers to construct a random forest, effectively combining the advantages of ensemble learning and GNNs to improve the accuracy and robustness of the model. Specifically, different subgraphs are constructed as different training sets through node sampling, feature selection, and edge dropout. Then, GNN base classifiers are trained using various subgraphs, and the remaining features are used for training Fully Connected Netural Network (FCN). The outputs of GNN and FCN are aligned in each branch. Finally, the outputs of all branches are aggregated to produce the final result. Moreover, RF-GNN is compatible with various widely-used GNNs for node classification. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

MGTAB: A Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Select and Calibrate the Low-confidence: Dual-Channel Consistency based Graph Convolutional Networks

The Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved excellent results in node classification tasks, but the model's performance at low label rates is still unsatisfactory. Previous studies in Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) for graph have focused on using network predictions to generate soft pseudo-labels or instructing message propagation, which inevitably contains the incorrect prediction due to the over-confident in the predictions. Our proposed Dual-Channel Consistency based Graph Convolutional Networks (DCC-GCN) uses dual-channel to extract embeddings from node features and topological structures, and then achieves reliable low-confidence and high-confidence samples selection based on dual-channel consistency. We further confirmed that the low-confidence samples obtained based on dual-channel consistency were low in accuracy, constraining the model's performance. Unlike previous studies ignoring low-confidence samples, we calibrate the feature embeddings of the low-confidence samples by using the neighborhood's high-confidence samples. Our experiments have shown that the DCC-GCN can more accurately distinguish between low-confidence and high-confidence samples, and can also significantly improve the accuracy of low-confidence samples. We conducted extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets and demonstrated that DCC-GCN is significantly better than state-of-the-art baselines at different label rates.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Boosting-GNN: Boosting Algorithm for Graph Networks on Imbalanced Node Classification

The Graph Neural Network (GNN) has been widely used for graph data representation. However, the existing researches only consider the ideal balanced dataset, and the imbalanced dataset is rarely considered. Traditional methods such as resampling, reweighting, and synthetic samples that deal with imbalanced datasets are no longer applicable in GNN. This paper proposes an ensemble model called Boosting-GNN, which uses GNNs as the base classifiers during boosting. In Boosting-GNN, higher weights are set for the training samples that are not correctly classified by the previous classifier, thus achieving higher classification accuracy and better reliability. Besides, transfer learning is used to reduce computational cost and increase fitting ability. Experimental results indicate that the proposed Boosting-GNN model achieves better performance than GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, SGC, N-GCN, and most advanced reweighting and resampling methods on synthetic imbalanced datasets, with an average performance improvement of 4.5%

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

HAD-GAN: A Human-perception Auxiliary Defense GAN to Defend Adversarial Examples

Adversarial examples reveal the vulnerability and unexplained nature of neural networks. Studying the defense of adversarial examples is of considerable practical importance. Most adversarial examples that misclassify networks are often undetectable by humans. In this paper, we propose a defense model to train the classifier into a human-perception classification model with shape preference. The proposed model comprising a texture transfer network (TTN) and an auxiliary defense generative adversarial networks (GAN) is called Human-perception Auxiliary Defense GAN (HAD-GAN). The TTN is used to extend the texture samples of a clean image and helps classifiers focus on its shape. GAN is utilized to form a training framework for the model and generate the necessary images. A series of experiments conducted on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR10 show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art defense methods for network robustness. The model also demonstrates a significant improvement on defense capability of adversarial examples.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Adaptive Multi-layer Contrastive Graph Neural Networks

We present Adaptive Multi-layer Contrastive Graph Neural Networks (AMC-GNN), a self-supervised learning framework for Graph Neural Network, which learns feature representations of sample data without data labels. AMC-GNN generates two graph views by data augmentation and compares different layers' output embeddings of Graph Neural Network encoders to obtain feature representations, which could be used for downstream tasks. AMC-GNN could learn the importance weights of embeddings in different layers adaptively through the attention mechanism, and an auxiliary encoder is introduced to train graph contrastive encoders better. The accuracy is improved by maximizing the representation's consistency of positive pairs in the early layers and the final embedding space. Our experiments show that the results can be consistently improved by using the AMC-GNN framework, across four established graph benchmarks: Cora, Citeseer, Pubmed, DBLP citation network datasets, as well as four newly proposed datasets: Co-author-CS, Co-author-Physics, Amazon-Computers, Amazon-Photo.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

ShapeEditer: a StyleGAN Encoder for Face Swapping

In this paper, we propose a novel encoder, called ShapeEditor, for high-resolution, realistic and high-fidelity face exchange. First of all, in order to ensure sufficient clarity and authenticity, our key idea is to use an advanced pretrained high-quality random face image generator, i.e. StyleGAN, as backbone. Secondly, we design ShapeEditor, a two-step encoder, to make the swapped face integrate the identity and attribute of the input faces. In the first step, we extract the identity vector of the source image and the attribute vector of the target image respectively; in the second step, we map the concatenation of identity vector and attribute vector into the $\mathcal{W+}$ potential space. In addition, for learning to map into the latent space of StyleGAN, we propose a set of self-supervised loss functions with which the training data do not need to be labeled manually. Extensive experiments on the test dataset show that the results of our method not only have a great advantage in clarity and authenticity than other state-of-the-art methods, but also reflect the sufficient integration of identity and attribute.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Examples with New Iteration Framework and Input Dropout

Deep neural networks(DNNs) is vulnerable to be attacked by adversarial examples. Black-box attack is the most threatening attack. At present, black-box attack methods mainly adopt gradient-based iterative attack methods, which usually limit the relationship between the iteration step size, the number of iterations, and the maximum perturbation. In this paper, we propose a new gradient iteration framework, which redefines the relationship between the above three. Under this framework, we easily improve the attack success rate of DI-TI-MIM. In addition, we propose a gradient iterative attack method based on input dropout, which can be well combined with our framework. We further propose a multi dropout rate version of this method. Experimental results show that our best method can achieve attack success rate of 96.2\% for defense model on average, which is higher than the state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Scannerless non-line-of-sight three dimensional imaging with a 32x32 SPAD array

We develop a scannerless non-line-of-sight three dimensional imaging system based on a commercial 32x32 SPAD camera combined with a 70 ps pulsed laser. In our experiment, 1024 time histograms can be achieved synchronously in 3s with an average time resolution of about 165 ps. The result with filtered back projection shows a discernable reconstruction while the result using virtual wave field demonstrates a better quality similar to the ones created by earlier scanning imaging systems with single pixel SPAD. Comparatively, our system has large potential advantages in frame frequency, power requirements, compactness and robustness. The research results will pave a path for scannerless non-line-of-sight three dimensional imaging application.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Defense-guided Transferable Adversarial Attacks

Though deep neural networks perform challenging tasks excellently, they are susceptible to adversarial examples, which mislead classifiers by applying human-imperceptible perturbations on clean inputs. Under the query-free black-box scenario, adversarial examples are hard to transfer to unknown models, and several methods have been proposed with the low transferability. To settle such issue, we design a max-min framework inspired by input transformations, which are benificial to both the adversarial attack and defense. Explicitly, we decrease loss values with inputs' affline transformations as a defense in the minimum procedure, and then increase loss values with the momentum iterative algorithm as an attack in the maximum procedure. To further promote transferability, we determine transformed values with the max-min theory. Extensive experiments on Imagenet demonstrate that our defense-guided transferable attacks achieve impressive increase on transferability. Experimentally, we show that our ASR of adversarial attack reaches to 58.38% on average, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 12.1% on the normally trained models and by 11.13% on the adversarially trained models. Additionally, we provide elucidative insights on the improvement of transferability, and our method is expected to be a benchmark for assessing the robustness of deep models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

AdvJND: Generating Adversarial Examples with Just Noticeable Difference

Compared with traditional machine learning models, deep neural networks perform better, especially in image classification tasks. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adding small perturbations on examples causes a good-performance model to misclassify the crafted examples, without category differences in the human eyes, and fools deep models successfully. There are two requirements for generating adversarial examples: the attack success rate and image fidelity metrics. Generally, perturbations are increased to ensure the adversarial examples' high attack success rate; however, the adversarial examples obtained have poor concealment. To alleviate the tradeoff between the attack success rate and image fidelity, we propose a method named AdvJND, adding visual model coefficients, just noticeable difference coefficients, in the constraint of a distortion function when generating adversarial examples. In fact, the visual subjective feeling of the human eyes is added as a priori information, which decides the distribution of perturbations, to improve the image quality of adversarial examples. We tested our method on the FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, and MiniImageNet datasets. Adversarial examples generated by our AdvJND algorithm yield gradient distributions that are similar to those of the original inputs. Hence, the crafted noise can be hidden in the original inputs, thus improving the attack concealment significantly.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Neural encoding and interpretation for high-level visual cortices based on fMRI using image caption features

On basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers are devoted to designing visual encoding models to predict the neuron activity of human in response to presented image stimuli and analyze inner mechanism of human visual cortices. Deep network structure composed of hierarchical processing layers forms deep network models by learning features of data on specific task through big dataset. Deep network models have powerful and hierarchical representation of data, and have brought about breakthroughs for visual encoding, while revealing hierarchical structural similarity with the manner of information processing in human visual cortices. However, previous studies almost used image features of those deep network models pre-trained on classification task to construct visual encoding models. Except for deep network structure, the task or corresponding big dataset is also important for deep network models, but neglected by previous studies. Because image classification is a relatively fundamental task, it is difficult to guide deep network models to master high-level semantic representations of data, which causes into that encoding performance for high-level visual cortices is limited. In this study, we introduced one higher-level vision task: image caption (IC) task and proposed the visual encoding model based on IC features (ICFVEM) to encode voxels of high-level visual cortices. Experiment demonstrated that ICFVEM obtained better encoding performance than previous deep network models pre-trained on classification task. In addition, the interpretation of voxels was realized to explore the detailed characteristics of voxels based on the visualization of semantic words, and comparative analysis implied that high-level visual cortices behaved the correlative representation of image content.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

BigGAN-based Bayesian reconstruction of natural images from human brain activity

In the visual decoding domain, visually reconstructing presented images given the corresponding human brain activity monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is difficult, especially when reconstructing viewed natural images. Visual reconstruction is a conditional image generation on fMRI data and thus generative adversarial network (GAN) for natural image generation is recently introduced for this task. Although GAN-based methods have greatly improved, the fidelity and naturalness of reconstruction are still unsatisfactory due to the small number of fMRI data samples and the instability of GAN training. In this study, we proposed a new GAN-based Bayesian visual reconstruction method (GAN-BVRM) that includes a classifier to decode categories from fMRI data, a pre-trained conditional generator to generate natural images of specified categories, and a set of encoding models and evaluator to evaluate generated images. GAN-BVRM employs the pre-trained generator of the prevailing BigGAN to generate masses of natural images, and selects the images that best matches with the corresponding brain activity through the encoding models as the reconstruction of the image stimuli. In this process, the semantic and detailed contents of reconstruction are controlled by decoded categories and encoding models, respectively. GAN-BVRM used the Bayesian manner to avoid contradiction between naturalness and fidelity from current GAN-based methods and thus can improve the advantages of GAN. Experimental results revealed that GAN-BVRM improves the fidelity and naturalness, that is, the reconstruction is natural and similar to the presented image stimuli.

cs.CV↗