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Liang Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Wang.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources

Beyond Filtering: Adaptive Image-Text Quality Enhancement for MLLM Pretraining

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides by integrating visual and textual modalities. A critical factor in training MLLMs is the quality of image-text pairs within multimodal pretraining datasets. However, $\textit {de facto}$ filter-based data quality enhancement paradigms often discard a substantial portion of high-quality image data due to inadequate semantic alignment between images and texts, leading to inefficiencies in data utilization and scalability. In this paper, we propose the Adaptive Image-Text Quality Enhancer (AITQE), a model that dynamically assesses and enhances the quality of image-text pairs. AITQE employs a text rewriting mechanism for low-quality pairs and incorporates a negative sample learning strategy to improve evaluative capabilities by integrating deliberately selected low-quality samples during training. Unlike prior approaches that significantly alter text distributions, our method minimally adjusts text to preserve data volume while enhancing quality. Experimental results demonstrate that AITQE surpasses existing methods on various benchmark, effectively leveraging raw data and scaling efficiently with increasing data volumes. We hope our work will inspire future works. The code and model are available at: https://github.com/hanhuang22/AITQE.

cs.CV↗

SLO-Aware Task Offloading within Collaborative Vehicle Platoons

In the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), offloading is essential for guaranteeing the execution of perception tasks, e.g., mobile mapping or object detection. While existing work focused extensively on minimizing inter-vehicle networking latency through offloading, other objectives become relevant in the case of vehicle platoons, e.g., energy efficiency or data quality for heavy-duty or public transport. Therefore, we aim to enforce these Service Level Objectives (SLOs) through intelligent task offloading within AV platoons. We present a collaborative framework for handling and offloading services in a purely Vehicle-to-Vehicle approach (V2V) based on Bayesian Networks (BNs). Each service aggregates local observations into a platoon-wide understanding of how to ensure SLOs for heterogeneous vehicle types. With the resulting models, services can proactively decide to offload if this promises to improve global SLO fulfillment. We evaluate the approach in a real-case setting, where vehicles in a platoon continuously (i.e., every 500 ms) interpret the SLOs of three actual perception services. Our probabilistic, predictive method shows promising results in handling large AV platoons; within seconds, it detects and resolves SLO violations through offloading.

cs.DC↗

Mimicking large spot-scanning radiation fields for proton FLASH preclinical studies with a robotic motion platform

Previously, a synchrotron-based horizontal proton beamline (87.2 MeV) was successfully commissioned to deliver radiation doses in FLASH and conventional dose rate modes to small fields and volumes. In this study, we developed a strategy to increase the effective radiation field size using a custom robotic motion platform to automatically shift the positions of biological samples. The beam was first broadened with a thin tungsten scatterer and shaped by customized brass collimators for irradiating cell/organoid cultures in 96-well plates (a 7-mm-diameter circle) or for irradiating mice (1-cm2 square). Motion patterns of the robotic platform were written in G-code, with 9-mm spot spacing used for the 96-well plates and 10.6-mm spacing for the mice. The accuracy of target positioning was verified with a self-leveling laser system. The dose delivered in the experimental conditions was validated with EBT-XD film attached to the 96-well plate or the back of the mouse. Our film-measured dose profiles matched Monte Carlo calculations well (1D gamma pass rate >95%). The FLASH dose rates were 113.7 Gy/s for cell/organoid irradiation and 191.3 Gy/s for mouse irradiation. These promising results indicate that this robotic platform can be used to effectively increase the field size for preclinical experiments with proton FLASH.

physics.med-ph↗

LogoRA: Local-Global Representation Alignment for Robust Time Series Classification

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) of time series aims to teach models to identify consistent patterns across various temporal scenarios, disregarding domain-specific differences, which can maintain their predictive accuracy and effectively adapt to new domains. However, existing UDA methods struggle to adequately extract and align both global and local features in time series data. To address this issue, we propose the Local-Global Representation Alignment framework (LogoRA), which employs a two-branch encoder, comprising a multi-scale convolutional branch and a patching transformer branch. The encoder enables the extraction of both local and global representations from time series. A fusion module is then introduced to integrate these representations, enhancing domain-invariant feature alignment from multi-scale perspectives. To achieve effective alignment, LogoRA employs strategies like invariant feature learning on the source domain, utilizing triplet loss for fine alignment and dynamic time warping-based feature alignment. Additionally, it reduces source-target domain gaps through adversarial training and per-class prototype alignment. Our evaluations on four time-series datasets demonstrate that LogoRA outperforms strong baselines by up to $12.52\%$, showcasing its superiority in time series UDA tasks.

cs.LG↗

Preserving Individuality while Following the Crowd: Understanding the Role of User Taste and Crowd Wisdom in Online Product Rating Prediction

Numerous algorithms have been developed for online product rating prediction, but the specific influence of user and product information in determining the final prediction score remains largely unexplored. Existing research often relies on narrowly defined data settings, which overlooks real-world challenges such as the cold-start problem, cross-category information utilization, and scalability and deployment issues. To delve deeper into these aspects, and particularly to uncover the roles of individual user taste and collective wisdom, we propose a unique and practical approach that emphasizes historical ratings at both the user and product levels, encapsulated using a continuously updated dynamic tree representation. This representation effectively captures the temporal dynamics of users and products, leverages user information across product categories, and provides a natural solution to the cold-start problem. Furthermore, we have developed an efficient data processing strategy that makes this approach highly scalable and easily deployable. Comprehensive experiments in real industry settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, our findings reveal that individual taste dominates over collective wisdom in online product rating prediction, a perspective that contrasts with the commonly observed wisdom of the crowd phenomenon in other domains. This dominance of individual user taste is consistent across various model types, including the boosting tree model, recurrent neural network (RNN), and transformer-based architectures. This observation holds true across the overall population, within individual product categories, and in cold-start scenarios. Our findings underscore the significance of individual user tastes in the context of online product rating prediction and the robustness of our approach across different model architectures.

cs.SI↗

Path-SAM2: Transfer SAM2 for digital pathology semantic segmentation

The semantic segmentation task in pathology plays an indispensable role in assisting physicians in determining the condition of tissue lesions. With the proposal of Segment Anything Model (SAM), more and more foundation models have seen rapid development in the field of image segmentation. Recently, SAM2 has garnered widespread attention in both natural image and medical image segmentation. Compared to SAM, it has significantly improved in terms of segmentation accuracy and generalization performance. We compared the foundational models based on SAM and found that their performance in semantic segmentation of pathological images was hardly satisfactory. In this paper, we propose Path-SAM2, which for the first time adapts the SAM2 model to cater to the task of pathological semantic segmentation. We integrate the largest pretrained vision encoder for histopathology (UNI) with the original SAM2 encoder, adding more pathology-based prior knowledge. Additionally, we introduce a learnable Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) classification module to replace the manual prompt process. In three adenoma pathological datasets, Path-SAM2 has achieved state-of-the-art performance.This study demonstrates the great potential of adapting SAM2 to pathology image segmentation tasks. We plan to release the code and model weights for this paper at: https://github.com/simzhangbest/SAM2PATH

eess.IV↗

Beyond Efficiency: Molecular Data Pruning for Enhanced Generalization

With the emergence of various molecular tasks and massive datasets, how to perform efficient training has become an urgent yet under-explored issue in the area. Data pruning (DP), as an oft-stated approach to saving training burdens, filters out less influential samples to form a coreset for training. However, the increasing reliance on pretrained models for molecular tasks renders traditional in-domain DP methods incompatible. Therefore, we propose a Molecular data Pruning framework for enhanced Generalization (MolPeg), which focuses on the source-free data pruning scenario, where data pruning is applied with pretrained models. By maintaining two models with different updating paces during training, we introduce a novel scoring function to measure the informativeness of samples based on the loss discrepancy. As a plug-and-play framework, MolPeg realizes the perception of both source and target domain and consistently outperforms existing DP methods across four downstream tasks. Remarkably, it can surpass the performance obtained from full-dataset training, even when pruning up to 60-70% of the data on HIV and PCBA dataset. Our work suggests that the discovery of effective data-pruning metrics could provide a viable path to both enhanced efficiency and superior generalization in transfer learning.

cs.LG↗

Enhancing Multi-hop Reasoning through Knowledge Erasure in Large Language Model Editing

Large language models (LLMs) face challenges with internal knowledge inaccuracies and outdated information. Knowledge editing has emerged as a pivotal approach to mitigate these issues. Although current knowledge editing techniques exhibit promising performance in single-hop reasoning tasks, they show limitations when applied to multi-hop reasoning. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience and the operational mechanisms of LLMs, we hypothesize that the residual single-hop knowledge after editing causes edited models to revert to their original answers when processing multi-hop questions, thereby undermining their performance in multihop reasoning tasks. To validate this hypothesis, we conduct a series of experiments that empirically confirm our assumptions. Building on the validated hypothesis, we propose a novel knowledge editing method that incorporates a Knowledge Erasure mechanism for Large language model Editing (KELE). Specifically, we design an erasure function for residual knowledge and an injection function for new knowledge. Through joint optimization, we derive the optimal recall vector, which is subsequently utilized within a rank-one editing framework to update the parameters of targeted model layers. Extensive experiments on GPT-J and GPT-2 XL demonstrate that KELE substantially enhances the multi-hop reasoning capability of edited LLMs.

cs.CL↗

SliceMamba with Neural Architecture Search for Medical Image Segmentation

Despite the progress made in Mamba-based medical image segmentation models, existing methods utilizing unidirectional or multi-directional feature scanning mechanisms struggle to effectively capture dependencies between neighboring positions, limiting the discriminant representation learning of local features. These local features are crucial for medical image segmentation as they provide critical structural information about lesions and organs. To address this limitation, we propose SliceMamba, a simple and effective locally sensitive Mamba-based medical image segmentation model. SliceMamba includes an efficient Bidirectional Slice Scan module (BSS), which performs bidirectional feature slicing and employs varied scanning mechanisms for sliced features with distinct shapes. This design ensures that spatially adjacent features remain close in the scanning sequence, thereby improving segmentation performance. Additionally, to fit the varying sizes and shapes of lesions and organs, we further introduce an Adaptive Slice Search method to automatically determine the optimal feature slice method based on the characteristics of the target data. Extensive experiments on two skin lesion datasets (ISIC2017 and ISIC2018), two polyp segmentation (Kvasir and ClinicDB) datasets, and one multi-organ segmentation dataset (Synapse) validate the effectiveness of our method.

eess.IV↗

A Systematic Evaluation of Generated Time Series and Their Effects in Self-Supervised Pretraining

Self-supervised Pretrained Models (PTMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in computer vision and natural language processing tasks. These successes have prompted researchers to design PTMs for time series data. In our experiments, most self-supervised time series PTMs were surpassed by simple supervised models. We hypothesize this undesired phenomenon may be caused by data scarcity. In response, we test six time series generation methods, use the generated data in pretraining in lieu of the real data, and examine the effects on classification performance. Our results indicate that replacing a real-data pretraining set with a greater volume of only generated samples produces noticeable improvement.

cs.LG↗

Optimal Frequency in Second Messenger Signaling Quantifying cAMP Information Transmission in Bacteria

Bacterial second messengers are crucial for transmitting environmental information to cellular responses. However, quantifying their information transmission capacity remains challenging. Here, we engineer an isolated cAMP signaling channel in Pseudomonas aeruginosa using targeted gene knockouts, optogenetics, and a fluorescent cAMP probe. This design allows precise optical control and real-time monitoring of cAMP dynamics. By integrating experimental data with information theory, we reveal an optimal frequency for light-mediated cAMP signaling that maximizes information transmission, reaching about 40 bits/h. This rate correlates strongly with cAMP degradation kinetics and employs a two-state encoding scheme. Our findings suggest a mechanism for fine-tuned regulation of multiple genes through temporal encoding of second messenger signals, providing new insights into bacterial adaptation strategies. This approach offers a framework for quantifying information processing in cellular signaling systems.

physics.bio-ph↗

DIVE: Subgraph Disagreement for Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization

This paper addresses the challenge of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in graph machine learning, a field rapidly advancing yet grappling with the discrepancy between source and target data distributions. Traditional graph learning algorithms, based on the assumption of uniform distribution between training and test data, falter in real-world scenarios where this assumption fails, resulting in suboptimal performance. A principal factor contributing to this suboptimal performance is the inherent simplicity bias of neural networks trained through Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), which prefer simpler features over more complex yet equally or more predictive ones. This bias leads to a reliance on spurious correlations, adversely affecting OOD performance in various tasks such as image recognition, natural language understanding, and graph classification. Current methodologies, including subgraph-mixup and information bottleneck approaches, have achieved partial success but struggle to overcome simplicity bias, often reinforcing spurious correlations. To tackle this, we propose DIVE, training a collection of models to focus on all label-predictive subgraphs by encouraging the models to foster divergence on the subgraph mask, which circumvents the limitation of a model solely focusing on the subgraph corresponding to simple structural patterns. Specifically, we employs a regularizer to punish overlap in extracted subgraphs across models, thereby encouraging different models to concentrate on distinct structural patterns. Model selection for robust OOD performance is achieved through validation accuracy. Tested across four datasets from GOOD benchmark and one dataset from DrugOOD benchmark, our approach demonstrates significant improvement over existing methods, effectively addressing the simplicity bias and enhancing generalization in graph machine learning.

cs.LG↗

Modality-Balanced Learning for Multimedia Recommendation

Many recommender models have been proposed to investigate how to incorporate multimodal content information into traditional collaborative filtering framework effectively. The use of multimodal information is expected to provide more comprehensive information and lead to superior performance. However, the integration of multiple modalities often encounters the modal imbalance problem: since the information in different modalities is unbalanced, optimizing the same objective across all modalities leads to the under-optimization problem of the weak modalities with a slower convergence rate or lower performance. Even worse, we find that in multimodal recommendation models, all modalities suffer from the problem of insufficient optimization. To address these issues, we propose a Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation method that could solve the imbalance problem and make the best use of all modalities. Through modality-specific knowledge distillation, it could guide the multimodal model to learn modality-specific knowledge from uni-modal teachers. We also design a novel generic-and-specific distillation loss to guide the multimodal student to learn wider-and-deeper knowledge from teachers. Additionally, to adaptively recalibrate the focus of the multimodal model towards weaker modalities during training, we estimate the causal effect of each modality on the training objective using counterfactual inference techniques, through which we could determine the weak modalities, quantify the imbalance degree and re-weight the distillation loss accordingly. Our method could serve as a plug-and-play module for both late-fusion and early-fusion backbones. Extensive experiments on six backbones show that our proposed method can improve the performance by a large margin. The source code will be released at \url{https://github.com/CRIPAC-DIG/Balanced-Multimodal-Rec}

cs.IR↗

Navigating the Noisy Crowd: Finding Key Information for Claim Verification

Claim verification is a task that involves assessing the truthfulness of a given claim based on multiple evidence pieces. Using large language models (LLMs) for claim verification is a promising way. However, simply feeding all the evidence pieces to an LLM and asking if the claim is factual does not yield good results. The challenge lies in the noisy nature of both the evidence and the claim: evidence passages typically contain irrelevant information, with the key facts hidden within the context, while claims often convey multiple aspects simultaneously. To navigate this "noisy crowd" of information, we propose EACon (Evidence Abstraction and Claim Deconstruction), a framework designed to find key information within evidence and verify each aspect of a claim separately. EACon first finds keywords from the claim and employs fuzzy matching to select relevant keywords for each raw evidence piece. These keywords serve as a guide to extract and summarize critical information into abstracted evidence. Subsequently, EACon deconstructs the original claim into subclaims, which are then verified against both abstracted and raw evidence individually. We evaluate EACon using two open-source LLMs on two challenging datasets. Results demonstrate that EACon consistently and substantially improve LLMs' performance in claim verification.

cs.CL↗

Less is More: Pseudo-Label Filtering for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt a pre-trained model to a sequence of target domains during the test phase without accessing the source data. To adapt to unlabeled data from unknown domains, existing methods rely on constructing pseudo-labels for all samples and updating the model through self-training. However, these pseudo-labels often involve noise, leading to insufficient adaptation. To improve the quality of pseudo-labels, we propose a pseudo-label selection method for CTTA, called Pseudo Labeling Filter (PLF). The key idea of PLF is to keep selecting appropriate thresholds for pseudo-labels and identify reliable ones for self-training. Specifically, we present three principles for setting thresholds during continuous domain learning, including initialization, growth and diversity. Based on these principles, we design Self-Adaptive Thresholding to filter pseudo-labels. Additionally, we introduce a Class Prior Alignment (CPA) method to encourage the model to make diverse predictions for unknown domain samples. Through extensive experiments, PLF outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, proving its effectiveness in CTTA.

cs.LG↗

The white-light superflares from cool stars in GWAC triggers

M-type stars are the ones that flare most frequently, but how big their maximum flare energy can reach is still unknown. We present 163 flares from 162 individual M2 through L1-type stars that triggered the GWAC, with flare energies ranging from $10^{32.2}$ to $10^{36.4}$ erg . The flare amplitudes range from $\triangle G = 0.84$ to $\sim 10$ mag. Flare energy increases with stellar surface temperature ($T_{\rm eff}$) but both $\triangle G$ and equivalent duration $\log_{10}(ED)$ seem to be independent of $T_{\rm eff}$. Combining periods detected from light curves of TESS and K2, spectra from LAMOST, SDSS and the 2.16 m Telescope, and the Gaia DR3 data, we found that these GWAC flare stars are young. For the stars that have spectra, we found that these stars are in or very near to the saturation region, and $\log_{10}(L_{\rm Hα}/L_{\rm bol})$ is lower for M7-L1 stars than for M2-M6 stars. We also studied the relation between GWAC flare bolometric energy $E_{\rm bol}$ and stellar hemispherical area $S$, and found that $\log_{10}E_{\rm bol}$ (in erg) increases with increasing $S$ (in cm$^2$), and the maximum flare energy $\log_{10}E_{\rm bol, max} \geqslant \log_{10}S + 14.25$. For M7-L1 stars, there seem to be other factors limiting their maximum flare energies in addition to stellar hemispherical area.

astro-ph.SR↗

Parametric Primitive Analysis of CAD Sketches with Vision Transformer

The design and analysis of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) sketches play a crucial role in industrial product design, primarily involving CAD primitives and their inter-primitive constraints. To address challenges related to error accumulation in autoregressive models and the complexities associated with self-supervised model design for this task, we propose a two-stage network framework. This framework consists of a primitive network and a constraint network, transforming the sketch analysis task into a set prediction problem to enhance the effective handling of primitives and constraints. By decoupling target types from parameters, the model gains increased flexibility and optimization while reducing complexity. Additionally, the constraint network incorporates a pointer module to explicitly indicate the relationship between constraint parameters and primitive indices, enhancing interpretability and performance. Qualitative and quantitative analyses on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of this method.

cs.CV↗