arXiv subjects

Le Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Le Zhang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

A Comprehensive Survey of Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Talent Analytics

In today's competitive and fast-evolving business environment, it is a critical time for organizations to rethink how to make talent-related decisions in a quantitative manner. Indeed, the recent development of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have revolutionized human resource management. The availability of large-scale talent and management-related data provides unparalleled opportunities for business leaders to comprehend organizational behaviors and gain tangible knowledge from a data science perspective, which in turn delivers intelligence for real-time decision-making and effective talent management at work for their organizations. In the last decade, talent analytics has emerged as a promising field in applied data science for human resource management, garnering significant attention from AI communities and inspiring numerous research efforts. To this end, we present an up-to-date and comprehensive survey on AI technologies used for talent analytics in the field of human resource management. Specifically, we first provide the background knowledge of talent analytics and categorize various pertinent data. Subsequently, we offer a comprehensive taxonomy of relevant research efforts, categorized based on three distinct application-driven scenarios: talent management, organization management, and labor market analysis. In conclusion, we summarize the open challenges and potential prospects for future research directions in the domain of AI-driven talent analytics.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

REARANK: Reasoning Re-ranking Agent via Reinforcement Learning

We present REARANK, a large language model (LLM)-based listwise reasoning reranking agent. REARANK explicitly reasons before reranking, significantly improving both performance and interpretability. Leveraging reinforcement learning and data augmentation, REARANK achieves substantial improvements over baseline models across popular information retrieval benchmarks, notably requiring only 179 annotated samples. Built on top of Qwen2.5-7B, our REARANK-7B demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4 on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks and even surpasses GPT-4 on reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmarks. These results underscore the effectiveness of our approach and highlight how reinforcement learning can enhance LLM reasoning capabilities in reranking.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Semantically-Aware Game Image Quality Assessment

Assessing the visual quality of video game graphics presents unique challenges due to the absence of reference images and the distinct types of distortions, such as aliasing, texture blur, and geometry level of detail (LOD) issues, which differ from those in natural images or user-generated content. Existing no-reference image and video quality assessment (NR-IQA/VQA) methods fail to generalize to gaming environments as they are primarily designed for distortions like compression artifacts. This study introduces a semantically-aware NR-IQA model tailored to gaming. The model employs a knowledge-distilled Game distortion feature extractor (GDFE) to detect and quantify game-specific distortions, while integrating semantic gating via CLIP embeddings to dynamically weight feature importance based on scene content. Training on gameplay data recorded across graphical quality presets enables the model to produce quality scores that align with human perception. Our results demonstrate that the GDFE, trained through knowledge distillation from binary classifiers, generalizes effectively to intermediate distortion levels unseen during training. Semantic gating further improves contextual relevance and reduces prediction variance. In the absence of in-domain NR-IQA baselines, our model outperforms out-of-domain methods and exhibits robust, monotonic quality trends across unseen games in the same genre. This work establishes a foundation for automated graphical quality assessment in gaming, advancing NR-IQA methods in this domain.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Gameplay Highlights Generation

In this work, we enable gamers to share their gaming experience on social media by automatically generating eye-catching highlight reels from their gameplay session Our automation will save time for gamers while increasing audience engagement. We approach the highlight generation problem by first identifying intervals in the video where interesting events occur and then concatenate them. We developed an in-house gameplay event detection dataset containing interesting events annotated by humans using VIA video annotator. Traditional techniques for highlight detection such as game engine integration requires expensive collaboration with game developers. OCR techniques which detect patches of specific images or texts require expensive per game engineering and may not generalize across game UI and different language. We finetuned a multimodal general purpose video understanding model such as X-CLIP using our dataset which generalizes across multiple games in a genre without per game engineering. Prompt engineering was performed to improve the classification performance of this multimodal model. Our evaluation showed that such a finetuned model can detect interesting events in first person shooting games from unseen gameplay footage with more than 90% accuracy. Moreover, our model performed significantly better on low resource games (small dataset) when trained along with high resource games, showing signs of transfer learning. To make the model production ready, we used ONNX libraries to enable cross platform inference. These libraries also provide post training quantization tools to reduce model size and inference time for deployment. ONNX runtime libraries with DirectML backend were used to perform efficient inference on Windows OS. We show that natural language supervision in the X-CLIP model leads to data efficient and highly performant video recognition models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Design, fabrication and initial test of a novel 3D-Trench sensor utilizing 8-inch CMOS compatible technology

The 3D silicon sensor has demonstrated excellent performances (signal collection, detection efficiency, power consumption, etc.) comparable or even better with respect to the traditional planar sensor of the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), especially after the high irradiation fluence, mainly due to the shorter drift length of the generated carriers. These characteristics have made it the most attractive technology for the detection and track reconstruction of charged particles for the High Energy Physics (HEP). In addition, its application is also being explored in astronomy, microdosimetry and medical imaging. This paper will present the design and fabrication of a novel 3D-Trench sensor which features an enclosed deep trench surrounding the central columnar cathode. This novel sensor has been fabricated on the 8-inch COMS pilot line at the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMECAS) where ultra-narrow etch width of 0.5 μm and the ultra-high depth-to-width ratio (aspect ratio) (>70) have been achieved. Its preliminary simulation and characterization results including electrostatic potential, electric field, Current-Voltage (IV), Capacitance-Voltage (CV), Charge Collection Efficiency (CCE) and Timing Performance before irradiation will be presented in this paper.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2025

Sampled-Data Control using Hermite-Obreschkoff Methods with an IDA-PBC Example

The motivation for this paper is the implementation of nonlinear state feedback control, designed based on the continuous-time plant model, in a sampled control loop under relatively slow sampling. In previous work we have shown that using one-step predictions of the target dynamics with higher order integration schemes, together with possibly higher order input shaping, is a simple and effective way to increase the feasible sampling times until performance degradation and instability occur. In this contribution we present a unifying derivation for arbitrary orders of the previously used Lobatto IIIA collocation and Hermite interpolation schemes through the Hermite-Obreschkoff formula. We derive, moreover, an IDA-PBC controller for a magnetic levitation system, which requires a non-constant target interconnection matrix, and show experimental results.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Improving Acoustic Scene Classification in Low-Resource Conditions

Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) identifies an environment based on an audio signal. This paper explores ASC in low-resource conditions and proposes a novel model, DS-FlexiNet, which combines depthwise separable convolutions from MobileNetV2 with ResNet-inspired residual connections for a balance of efficiency and accuracy. To address hardware limitations and device heterogeneity, DS-FlexiNet employs Quantization Aware Training (QAT) for model compression and data augmentation methods like Auto Device Impulse Response (ADIR) and Freq-MixStyle (FMS) to improve cross-device generalization. Knowledge Distillation (KD) from twelve teacher models further enhances performance on unseen devices. The architecture includes a custom Residual Normalization layer to handle domain differences across devices, and depthwise separable convolutions reduce computational overhead without sacrificing feature representation. Experimental results show that DS-FlexiNet excels in both adaptability and performance under resource-constrained conditions.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

ThermalGaussian: Thermal 3D Gaussian Splatting

Thermography is especially valuable for the military and other users of surveillance cameras. Some recent methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are proposed to reconstruct the thermal scenes in 3D from a set of thermal and RGB images. However, unlike NeRF, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) prevails due to its rapid training and real-time rendering. In this work, we propose ThermalGaussian, the first thermal 3DGS approach capable of rendering high-quality images in RGB and thermal modalities. We first calibrate the RGB camera and the thermal camera to ensure that both modalities are accurately aligned. Subsequently, we use the registered images to learn the multimodal 3D Gaussians. To prevent the overfitting of any single modality, we introduce several multimodal regularization constraints. We also develop smoothing constraints tailored to the physical characteristics of the thermal modality. Besides, we contribute a real-world dataset named RGBT-Scenes, captured by a hand-hold thermal-infrared camera, facilitating future research on thermal scene reconstruction. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that ThermalGaussian achieves photorealistic rendering of thermal images and improves the rendering quality of RGB images. With the proposed multimodal regularization constraints, we also reduced the model's storage cost by 90%. Our project page is at https://thermalgaussian.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Assessing and Learning Alignment of Unimodal Vision and Language Models

How well are unimodal vision and language models aligned? Although prior work have approached answering this question, their assessment methods do not directly translate to how these models are used in practical vision-language tasks. In this paper, we propose a direct assessment method, inspired by linear probing, to assess vision-language alignment. We identify that the degree of alignment of the SSL vision models depends on their SSL training objective, and we find that the clustering quality of SSL representations has a stronger impact on alignment performance than their linear separability. Next, we introduce Swift Alignment of Image and Language (SAIL), a efficient transfer learning framework that aligns pretrained unimodal vision and language models for downstream vision-language tasks. Since SAIL leverages the strengths of pretrained unimodal models, it requires significantly fewer (6%) paired image-text data for the multimodal alignment compared to models like CLIP which are trained from scratch. SAIL training only requires a single A100 GPU, 5 hours of training and can accommodate a batch size up to 32,768. SAIL achieves 73.4% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet (vs. CLIP's 72.7%) and excels in zero-shot retrieval, complex reasoning, and semantic segmentation. Additionally, SAIL improves the language-compatibility of vision encoders that in turn enhance the performance of multimodal large language models. The entire codebase and model weights are open-source: https://lezhang7.github.io/sail.github.io/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Offload Rethinking by Cloud Assistance for Efficient Environmental Sound Recognition on LPWANs

Learning-based environmental sound recognition has emerged as a crucial method for ultra-low-power environmental monitoring in biological research and city-scale sensing systems. These systems usually operate under limited resources and are often powered by harvested energy in remote areas. Recent efforts in on-device sound recognition suffer from low accuracy due to resource constraints, whereas cloud offloading strategies are hindered by high communication costs. In this work, we introduce ORCA, a novel resource-efficient cloud-assisted environmental sound recognition system on batteryless devices operating over the Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs), targeting wide-area audio sensing applications. We propose a cloud assistance strategy that remedies the low accuracy of on-device inference while minimizing the communication costs for cloud offloading. By leveraging a self-attention-based cloud sub-spectral feature selection method to facilitate efficient on-device inference, ORCA resolves three key challenges for resource-constrained cloud offloading over LPWANs: 1) high communication costs and low data rates, 2) dynamic wireless channel conditions, and 3) unreliable offloading. We implement ORCA on an energy-harvesting batteryless microcontroller and evaluate it in a real world urban sound testbed. Our results show that ORCA outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to $80 \times$ in energy savings and $220 \times$ in latency reduction while maintaining comparable accuracy.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

TimeFound: A Foundation Model for Time Series Forecasting

We present TimeFound, an encoder-decoder transformer-based time series foundation model for out-of-the-box zero-shot forecasting. To handle time series data from various domains, TimeFound employs a multi-resolution patching strategy to capture complex temporal patterns at multiple scales. We pre-train our model with two sizes (200M and 710M parameters) on a large time-series corpus comprising both real-world and synthetic datasets. Over a collection of unseen datasets across diverse domains and forecasting horizons, our empirical evaluations suggest that TimeFound can achieve superior or competitive zero-shot forecasting performance, compared to state-of-the-art time series foundation models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Handling Spatial-Temporal Data Heterogeneity for Federated Continual Learning via Tail Anchor

Federated continual learning (FCL) allows each client to continually update its knowledge from task streams, enhancing the applicability of federated learning in real-world scenarios. However, FCL needs to address not only spatial data heterogeneity between clients but also temporal data heterogeneity between tasks. In this paper, empirical experiments demonstrate that such input-level heterogeneity significantly affects the model's internal parameters and outputs, leading to severe spatial-temporal catastrophic forgetting of local and previous knowledge. To this end, we propose Federated Tail Anchor (FedTA) to mix trainable Tail Anchor with the frozen output features to adjust their position in the feature space, thereby overcoming parameter-forgetting and output-forgetting. Three novel components are also included: Input Enhancement for improving the performance of pre-trained models on downstream tasks; Selective Input Knowledge Fusion for fusion of heterogeneous local knowledge on the server; and Best Global Prototype Selection for finding the best anchor point for each class in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedTA not only outperforms existing FCL methods but also effectively preserves the relative positions of features.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Learning Dual Transformers for All-In-One Image Restoration from a Frequency Perspective

This work aims to tackle the all-in-one image restoration task, which seeks to handle multiple types of degradation with a single model. The primary challenge is to extract degradation representations from the input degraded images and use them to guide the model's adaptation to specific degradation types. Building on the insight that various degradations affect image content differently across frequency bands, we propose a new dual-transformer approach comprising two components: a frequency-aware Degradation estimation transformer (Dformer) and a degradation-adaptive Restoration transformer (Rformer). The Dformer captures the essential characteristics of various degradations by decomposing the input into different frequency components. By understanding how degradations affect these frequency components, the Dformer learns robust priors that effectively guide the restoration process. The Rformer then employs a degradation-adaptive self-attention module to selectively focus on the most affected frequency components, guided by the learned degradation representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods in five representative restoration tasks, including denoising, deraining, dehazing, deblurring, and low-light enhancement. Additionally, our method offers benefits for handling, real-world degradations, spatially variant degradations, and unseen degradation levels.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

DiffKAN-Inpainting: KAN-based Diffusion model for brain tumor inpainting

Brain tumors delay the standard preprocessing workflow for further examination. Brain inpainting offers a viable, although difficult, solution for tumor tissue processing, which is necessary to improve the precision of the diagnosis and treatment. Most conventional U-Net-based generative models, however, often face challenges in capturing the complex, nonlinear latent representations inherent in brain imaging. In order to accomplish high-quality healthy brain tissue reconstruction, this work proposes DiffKAN-Inpainting, an innovative method that blends diffusion models with the Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks architecture. During the denoising process, we introduce the RePaint method and tumor information to generate images with a higher fidelity and smoother margin. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that as compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our proposed DiffKAN-Inpainting inpaints more detailed and realistic reconstructions on the BraTS dataset. The knowledge gained from ablation study provide insights for future research to balance performance with computing cost.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Strategic priorities for transformative progress in advancing biology with proteomics and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming scientific research, including proteomics. Advances in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics data quality, diversity, and scale, combined with groundbreaking AI techniques, are unlocking new challenges and opportunities in biological discovery. Here, we highlight key areas where AI is driving innovation, from data analysis to new biological insights. These include developing an AI-friendly ecosystem for proteomics data generation, sharing, and analysis; improving peptide and protein identification and quantification; characterizing protein-protein interactions and protein complexes; advancing spatial and perturbation proteomics; integrating multi-omics data; and ultimately enabling AI-empowered virtual cells.

q-bio.OT↗

arXiv2025

The chemisorption thermodynamics of O$_2$ and H$_2$O on AFM UO$_2$ surfaces unraveled by DFT+U-D3 study

Unraveling the adsorption mechanism and thermodynamics of O$_2$ and H$_2$O on uranium dioxide surfaces is critical for the nuclear fuel storage and uranium corrosion. Based on the first-principles DFT+U-D3 calculations, we carefully test the effect of antiferromagnetic order arrangements on the thermodynamic stability of UO$_2$ surfaces and propose the 1k AFM surface computational model. The chemisorption states of O$_2$ and H$_2$O on UO$_2$ (111) surface, suggested by previous experiments, are accurately calculated for the first time. The adsorption properties of O$_2$ and H$_2$O on UO$_2$(111) and (110) surfaces are discussed in detail to reveal the different interaction mechanisms. Combined with ab initio atomistic thermodynamics method, we systematically calculate the chemisorption phase diagram and isotherm of O$_2$ and H$_2$O on UO$_2$ surfaces. Due to the different intermolecular interactions, the monolayer and multilayer adsorption models are identified for O$_2$ and H$_2$O, respectively. This study has comprehensively revealed the different adsorption mechanisms of O$_2$ and H$_2$O on UO$_2$ surfaces, bridging the electronic structure calculations to the interpretation of experimental results and providing a solid foundation for future theoretical studies of uranium corrosion mechanism in humid air.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

KPIs 2024 Challenge: Advancing Glomerular Segmentation from Patch- to Slide-Level

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a major global health issue, affecting over 10% of the population and causing significant mortality. While kidney biopsy remains the gold standard for CKD diagnosis and treatment, the lack of comprehensive benchmarks for kidney pathology segmentation hinders progress in the field. To address this, we organized the Kidney Pathology Image Segmentation (KPIs) Challenge, introducing a dataset that incorporates preclinical rodent models of CKD with over 10,000 annotated glomeruli from 60+ Periodic Acid Schiff (PAS)-stained whole slide images. The challenge includes two tasks, patch-level segmentation and whole slide image segmentation and detection, evaluated using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and F1-score. By encouraging innovative segmentation methods that adapt to diverse CKD models and tissue conditions, the KPIs Challenge aims to advance kidney pathology analysis, establish new benchmarks, and enable precise, large-scale quantification for disease research and diagnosis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Investigating Prompting Techniques for Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we explore effective prompting techniques to enhance zero- and few-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) performance in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Central to our investigation is the role of question templates in guiding VLMs to generate accurate answers. We identify that specific templates significantly influence VQA outcomes, underscoring the need for strategic template selection. Another pivotal aspect of our study is augmenting VLMs with image captions, providing them with additional visual cues alongside direct image features in VQA tasks. Surprisingly, this augmentation significantly improves the VLMs' performance in many cases, even though VLMs "see" the image directly! We explore chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and find that while standard CoT reasoning causes drops in performance, advanced methods like self-consistency can help recover it. Furthermore, we find that text-only few-shot examples enhance VLMs' alignment with the task format, particularly benefiting models prone to verbose zero-shot answers. Lastly, to mitigate the challenges associated with evaluating free-form open-ended VQA responses using string-matching based VQA metrics, we introduce a straightforward LLM-guided pre-processing technique to adapt the model responses to the expected ground-truth answer distribution. In summary, our research sheds light on the intricacies of prompting strategies in VLMs for VQA, emphasizing the synergistic use of captions, templates, and pre-processing to enhance model efficacy.

cs.CV↗