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Peibo Duan

Publications and source records attributed to Peibo Duan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Not All Timesteps Matter Equally: Selective Alignment Knowledge Distillation for Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), which are brain-inspired and spike-driven, achieve high energy efficiency. However, a performance gap between SNNs and artificial neural networks (ANNs) still remains. Knowledge distillation (KD) is commonly adopted to improve SNN performance, but existing methods typically enforce uniform alignment across all timesteps, either from a teacher network or through inter-temporal self-distillation, implicitly assuming that per-timestep predictions should be treated equally. In practice, SNN predictions vary and evolve over time, and intermediate timesteps need not all be individually correct even when the final aggregated output is correct. Under such conditions, effective distillation should not force every timestep toward the same supervision target, but instead provide corrective guidance to erroneous timesteps while preserving useful temporal dynamics. To address this issue, we propose Selective Alignment Knowledge Distillation (SeAl-KD), which selectively aligns class-level and temporal knowledge by equalizing competing logits at erroneous timesteps and reweighting temporal alignment based on confidence and inter-timestep similarity. Extensive experiments on static image and neuromorphic event-based datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing distillation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/KaiSUN1/SeAl

cs.LG

MorphSNN: Adaptive Graph Diffusion and Structural Plasticity for Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) currently face a critical bottleneck: while individual neurons exhibit dynamic biological properties, their macro-scopic architectures remain confined within conventional connectivity patterns that are static and hierarchical. This discrepancy between neuron-level dynamics and network-level fixed connectivity eliminates critical brain-like lateral interactions, limiting adaptability in changing environments. To address this, we propose MorphSNN, a backbone framework inspired by biological non-synaptic diffusion and structural plasticity. Specifically, we introduce a Graph Diffusion (GD)mechanism to facilitate efficient undirected signal propagation, complementing the feedforward hierarchy. Furthermore, it incorporates a Spatio-Temporal Structural Plasticity (STSP) mechanism, endowing the network with the capability for instance-specific, dynamic topological reorganization, thereby overcoming the limitations of fixed topologies. Experiments demonstrate that MorphSNN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on static and neuromorphic datasets; for instance, it reaches 83.35% accuracy on N-Caltech101 with only 5 timesteps. More importantly, its self-evolving topology functions as an intrinsic distribution fingerprint, enabling superior Out-of- Distribution (OOD) detection without auxiliary training. The code is available at anonymous.4open.science/r/MorphSNN-B0BC.

cs.NE

We Need a More Robust Classifier: Dual Causal Learning Empowers Domain-Incremental Time Series Classification

The World Wide Web thrives on intelligent services that rely on accurate time series classification, which has recently witnessed significant progress driven by advances in deep learning. However, existing studies face challenges in domain incremental learning. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and robust dual-causal disentanglement framework (DualCD) to enhance the robustness of models under domain incremental scenarios, which can be seamlessly integrated into time series classification models. Specifically, DualCD first introduces a temporal feature disentanglement module to capture class-causal features and spurious features. The causal features can offer sufficient predictive power to support the classifier in domain incremental learning settings. To accurately capture these causal features, we further design a dual-causal intervention mechanism to eliminate the influence of both intra-class and inter-class confounding features. This mechanism constructs variant samples by combining the current class's causal features with intra-class spurious features and with causal features from other classes. The causal intervention loss encourages the model to accurately predict the labels of these variant samples based solely on the causal features. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models demonstrate that DualCD effectively improves performance in domain incremental scenarios. We summarize our rich experiments into a comprehensive benchmark to facilitate research in domain incremental time series classification.

cs.LG

CogniSNN: An Exploration to Random Graph Architecture based Spiking Neural Networks with Enhanced Depth-Scalability and Path-Plasticity

Currently, most spiking neural networks (SNNs) still mimic the chain-like hierarchical architecture in traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). This method significantly differs from random connections between neurons found in biological brains, limiting the ability to model the evolving mechanisms of neural pathways in biological neural systems, particularly in terms of dynamic depth-scalability and adaptive path-plasticity. This paper develops a new modeling paradigm for SNNs with random graph architecture (RGA), termed Cognition-aware SNN (CogniSNN). Furthermore, we model the depth-scalability and path-plasticity in CogniSNN by introducing a modified spiking residual neural node (ResNode) to counteract network degradation in deeper graph pathways, as well as a critical path-based algorithm that enables CogniSNN to perform path reusability on new tasks leveraging the features of the data and the RGA learned in old tasks. Experiments show that the performance of CogniSNN with redesigned ResNode is comparable, even superior, to current state-of-the-art SNNs on neuromorphic datasets. The critical path-based approach effectively achieves path reuse capability while maintaining expected performance in learning new tasks that are similar to or distinct from the old ones. This study showcases the potential of RGA-based SNNs and paves a new path for modeling the fusion of computational neuroscience and deep intelligent agents. The code is available at github.com/Yongsheng124/CogniSNN.

cs.NE

CogniSNN: Enabling Neuron-Expandability, Pathway-Reusability, and Dynamic-Configurability with Random Graph Architectures in Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), regarded as the third generation of artificial neural networks, are expected to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience. However, most mainstream SNN research directly adopts the rigid, chain-like hierarchical architecture of traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), ignoring key structural characteristics of the brain. Biological neurons are stochastically interconnected, forming complex neural pathways that exhibit Neuron-Expandability, Pathway-Reusability, and Dynamic-Configurability. In this paper, we introduce a new SNN paradigm, named Cognition-aware SNN (CogniSNN), by incorporating Random Graph Architecture (RGA). Furthermore, we address the issues of network degradation and dimensional mismatch in deep pathways by introducing an improved pure spiking residual mechanism alongside an adaptive pooling strategy. Then, we design a Key Pathway-based Learning without Forgetting (KP-LwF) approach, which selectively reuses critical neural pathways while retaining historical knowledge, enabling efficient multi-task transfer. Finally, we propose a Dynamic Growth Learning (DGL) algorithm that allows neurons and synapses to grow dynamically along the internal temporal dimension. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CogniSNN achieves performance comparable to, or even surpassing, current state-of-the-art SNNs on neuromorphic datasets and Tiny-ImageNet. The Pathway-Reusability enhances the network's continuous learning capability across different scenarios, while the dynamic growth algorithm improves robustness against interference and mitigates the fixed-timestep constraints during neuromorphic chip deployment. This work demonstrates the potential of SNNs with random graph structures in advancing brain-inspired intelligence and lays the foundation for their practical application on neuromorphic hardware.

cs.NE

Gated Fusion Enhanced Multi-Scale Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network for Stock Movement Prediction

Accurately predicting stock market movements remains a formidable challenge due to the inherent volatility and complex interdependencies among stocks. Although multi-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) hold potential for modeling these relationships, they frequently neglect two key points: the subtle intra-attribute patterns within each stock affecting inter-stock correlation, and the biased attention to coarse- and fine-grained features during multi-scale sampling. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MS-HGFN (Multi-Scale Hierarchical Graph Fusion Network). The model features a hierarchical GNN module that forms dynamic graphs by learning patterns from intra-attributes and features from inter-attributes over different time scales, thus comprehensively capturing spatio-temporal dependencies. Additionally, a top-down gating approach facilitates the integration of multi-scale spatio-temporal features, preserving critical coarse- and fine-grained features without too much interference. Experiments utilizing real-world datasets from U.S. and Chinese stock markets demonstrate that MS-HGFN outperforms both traditional and advanced models, yielding up to a 1.4% improvement in prediction accuracy and enhanced stability in return simulations. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MS-HGFN.

cs.LG

High-Precision Climbing Robot Localization Using Planar Array UWB/GPS/IMU/Barometer Integration

To address the need for high-precision localization of climbing robots in complex high-altitude environments, this paper proposes a multi-sensor fusion system that overcomes the limitations of single-sensor approaches. Firstly, the localization scenarios and the problem model are analyzed. An integrated architecture of Attention Mechanism-based Fusion Algorithm (AMFA) incorporating planar array Ultra-Wideband (UWB), GPS, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and barometer is designed to handle challenges such as GPS occlusion and UWB Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) problem. Then, End-to-end neural network inference models for UWB and barometer are developed, along with a multimodal attention mechanism for adaptive data fusion. An Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is applied to refine the trajectory, improving accuracy and robustness. Finally, real-world experiments show that the method achieves 0.48 m localization accuracy and lower MAX error of 1.50 m, outperforming baseline algorithms such as GPS/INS-EKF and demonstrating stronger robustness.

cs.RO

TimeFormer: Transformer with Attention Modulation Empowered by Temporal Characteristics for Time Series Forecasting

Although Transformers excel in natural language processing, their extension to time series forecasting remains challenging due to insufficient consideration of the differences between textual and temporal modalities. In this paper, we develop a novel Transformer architecture designed for time series data, aiming to maximize its representational capacity. We identify two key but often overlooked characteristics of time series: (1) unidirectional influence from the past to the future, and (2) the phenomenon of decaying influence over time. These characteristics are introduced to enhance the attention mechanism of Transformers. We propose TimeFormer, whose core innovation is a self-attention mechanism with two modulation terms (MoSA), designed to capture these temporal priors of time series under the constraints of the Hawkes process and causal masking. Additionally, TimeFormer introduces a framework based on multi-scale and subsequence analysis to capture semantic dependencies at different temporal scales, enriching the temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets show that TimeFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 7.45% reduction in MSE compared to the best baseline and setting new benchmarks on 94.04\% of evaluation metrics. Moreover, we demonstrate that the MoSA mechanism can be broadly applied to enhance the performance of other Transformer-based models.

cs.LG

EvolveSignal: A Large Language Model Powered Coding Agent for Discovering Traffic Signal Control Strategies

In traffic engineering, fixed-time traffic signal control remains widely used for its low cost, stability, and interpretability. However, its design relies on hand-crafted formulas (e.g., Webster) and manual re-timing by engineers to adapt to demand changes, which is labor-intensive and often yields suboptimal results under heterogeneous or congested conditions. This paper introduces EvolveSignal, an LLM-powered coding agent for automatically discovering interpretable heuristic strategies for fixed-time traffic signal control. Rather than deriving entirely new analytical formulations, the proposed framework focuses on exploring code-level variations of existing control logic and identifying effective combinations of heuristic modifications. We formulate the problem as program synthesis, where candidate strategies are represented as Python functions with fixed input-output structures and iteratively optimized through external evaluations (e.g., a traffic simulator) and evolutionary search. Experiments on a signalized intersection demonstrate that the discovered strategies outperform a classical baseline (Webster's method), reducing average delay by 20.1\% and average stops by 47.1\%. Beyond performance, ablation and incremental analyses reveal that EvolveSignal can identify meaningful modifications, such as adjusting cycle length bounds, incorporating right-turn demand, and rescaling green allocations, that provide useful insights for traffic engineers. This work highlights the potential of LLM-driven program synthesis for supporting interpretable and automated heuristic design in traffic signal control.

cs.LG

DisMS-TS: Eliminating Redundant Multi-Scale Features for Time Series Classification

Real-world time series typically exhibit complex temporal variations, making the time series classification task notably challenging. Recent advancements have demonstrated the potential of multi-scale analysis approaches, which provide an effective solution for capturing these complex temporal patterns. However, existing multi-scale analysis-based time series prediction methods fail to eliminate redundant scale-shared features across multi-scale time series, resulting in the model over- or under-focusing on scale-shared features. To address this issue, we propose a novel end-to-end Disentangled Multi-Scale framework for Time Series classification (DisMS-TS). The core idea of DisMS-TS is to eliminate redundant shared features in multi-scale time series, thereby improving prediction performance. Specifically, we propose a temporal disentanglement module to capture scale-shared and scale-specific temporal representations, respectively. Subsequently, to effectively learn both scale-shared and scale-specific temporal representations, we introduce two regularization terms that ensure the consistency of scale-shared representations and the disparity of scale-specific representations across all temporal scales. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets validate the superiority of DisMS-TS over its competitive baselines, with the accuracy improvement up to 9.71%.

cs.AI

Scalable and Reliable Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Assignment

The evolution of metropolitan cities and the increase in travel demands impose stringent requirements on traffic assignment methods. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approaches outperform traditional methods in modeling adaptive routing behavior without requiring explicit system dynamics, which is beneficial for real-world deployment. However, MARL frameworks face challenges in scalability and reliability when managing extensive networks with substantial travel demand, which limiting their practical applicability in solving large-scale traffic assignment problems. To address these challenges, this study introduces MARL-OD-DA, a new MARL framework for the traffic assignment problem, which redefines agents as origin-destination (OD) pair routers rather than individual travelers, significantly enhancing scalability. Additionally, a Dirichlet-based action space with action pruning and a reward function based on the local relative gap are designed to enhance solution reliability and improve convergence efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed MARL framework effectively handles medium-sized networks with extensive and varied city-level OD demand, surpassing existing MARL methods. When implemented in the SiouxFalls network, MARL-OD-DA achieves better assignment solutions in 10 steps, with a relative gap that is 94.99% lower than that of conventional methods.

cs.LG

Reinforcement Learning-based Sequential Route Recommendation for System-Optimal Traffic Assignment

Modern navigation systems and shared mobility platforms increasingly rely on personalized route recommendations to improve individual travel experience and operational efficiency. However, a key question remains: can such sequential, personalized routing decisions collectively lead to system-optimal (SO) traffic assignment? This paper addresses this question by proposing a learning-based framework that reformulates the static SO traffic assignment problem as a single-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) task. A central agent sequentially recommends routes to travelers as origin-destination (OD) demands arrive, to minimize total system travel time. To enhance learning efficiency and solution quality, we develop an MSA-guided deep Q-learning algorithm that integrates the iterative structure of traditional traffic assignment methods into the RL training process. The proposed approach is evaluated on both the Braess and Ortuzar-Willumsen (OW) networks. Results show that the RL agent converges to the theoretical SO solution in the Braess network and achieves only a 0.35% deviation in the OW network. Further ablation studies demonstrate that the route action set's design significantly impacts convergence speed and final performance, with SO-informed route sets leading to faster learning and better outcomes. This work provides a theoretically grounded and practically relevant approach to bridging individual routing behavior with system-level efficiency through learning-based sequential assignment.

cs.AI

ILIF: Temporal Inhibitory Leaky Integrate-and-Fire Neuron for Overactivation in Spiking Neural Networks

The Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has drawn increasing attention for its energy-efficient, event-driven processing and biological plausibility. To train SNNs via backpropagation, surrogate gradients are used to approximate the non-differentiable spike function, but they only maintain nonzero derivatives within a narrow range of membrane potentials near the firing threshold, referred to as the surrogate gradient support width gamma. We identify a major challenge, termed the dilemma of gamma: a relatively large gamma leads to overactivation, characterized by excessive neuron firing, which in turn increases energy consumption, whereas a small gamma causes vanishing gradients and weakens temporal dependencies. To address this, we propose a temporal Inhibitory Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (ILIF) neuron model, inspired by biological inhibitory mechanisms. This model incorporates interconnected inhibitory units for membrane potential and current, effectively mitigating overactivation while preserving gradient propagation. Theoretical analysis demonstrates ILIF effectiveness in overcoming the gamma dilemma, and extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that ILIF improves energy efficiency by reducing firing rates, stabilizes training, and enhances accuracy. The code is available at github.com/kaisun1/ILIF.

cs.NE

A Distillation-based Future-aware Graph Neural Network for Stock Trend Prediction

Stock trend prediction involves forecasting the future price movements by analyzing historical data and various market indicators. With the advancement of machine learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been extensively employed in stock prediction due to their powerful capability to capture spatiotemporal dependencies of stocks. However, despite the efforts of various GNN stock predictors to enhance predictive performance, the improvements remain limited, as they focus solely on analyzing historical spatiotemporal dependencies, overlooking the correlation between historical and future patterns. In this study, we propose a novel distillation-based future-aware GNN framework (DishFT-GNN) for stock trend prediction. Specifically, DishFT-GNN trains a teacher model and a student model, iteratively. The teacher model learns to capture the correlation between distribution shifts of historical and future data, which is then utilized as intermediate supervision to guide the student model to learn future-aware spatiotemporal embeddings for accurate prediction. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, we verify the state-of-the-art performance of DishFT-GNN.

cs.LG

AI-Driven Day-to-Day Route Choice

Understanding travelers' route choices can help policymakers devise optimal operational and planning strategies for both normal and abnormal circumstances. However, existing choice modeling methods often rely on predefined assumptions and struggle to capture the dynamic and adaptive nature of travel behavior. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative, demonstrating remarkable ability to replicate human-like behaviors across various fields. Despite this potential, their capacity to accurately simulate human route choice behavior in transportation contexts remains doubtful. To satisfy this curiosity, this paper investigates the potential of LLMs for route choice modeling by introducing an LLM-empowered agent, "LLMTraveler." This agent integrates an LLM as its core, equipped with a memory system that learns from past experiences and makes decisions by balancing retrieved data and personality traits. The study systematically evaluates the LLMTraveler's ability to replicate human-like decision-making through two stages of day-to-day (DTD) congestion games: (1) analyzing its route-switching behavior in single origin-destination (OD) pair scenarios, where it demonstrates patterns that align with laboratory data but cannot be fully explained by traditional models, and (2) testing its capacity to model adaptive learning behaviors in multi-OD scenarios on the Ortuzar and Willumsen (OW) network, producing results comparable to Multinomial Logit (MNL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) models. These experiments demonstrate that the framework can partially replicate human-like decision-making in route choice while providing natural language explanations for its decisions. This capability offers valuable insights for transportation policymaking, such as simulating traveler responses to new policies or changes in the network.

cs.LG

HGCLIP: Exploring Vision-Language Models with Graph Representations for Hierarchical Understanding

Object categories are typically organized into a multi-granularity taxonomic hierarchy. When classifying categories at different hierarchy levels, traditional uni-modal approaches focus primarily on image features, revealing limitations in complex scenarios. Recent studies integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with class hierarchies have shown promise, yet they fall short of fully exploiting the hierarchical relationships. These efforts are constrained by their inability to perform effectively across varied granularity of categories. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel framework (HGCLIP) that effectively combines CLIP with a deeper exploitation of the Hierarchical class structure via Graph representation learning. We explore constructing the class hierarchy into a graph, with its nodes representing the textual or image features of each category. After passing through a graph encoder, the textual features incorporate hierarchical structure information, while the image features emphasize class-aware features derived from prototypes through the attention mechanism. Our approach demonstrates significant improvements on 11 diverse visual recognition benchmarks. Our codes are fully available at https://github.com/richard-peng-xia/HGCLIP.

cs.CV

MONICA: Benchmarking on Long-tailed Medical Image Classification

Long-tailed learning is considered to be an extremely challenging problem in data imbalance learning. It aims to train well-generalized models from a large number of images that follow a long-tailed class distribution. In the medical field, many diagnostic imaging exams such as dermoscopy and chest radiography yield a long-tailed distribution of complex clinical findings. Recently, long-tailed learning in medical image analysis has garnered significant attention. However, the field currently lacks a unified, strictly formulated, and comprehensive benchmark, which often leads to unfair comparisons and inconclusive results. To help the community improve the evaluation and advance, we build a unified, well-structured codebase called Medical OpeN-source Long-taIled ClassifiCAtion (MONICA), which implements over 30 methods developed in relevant fields and evaluated on 12 long-tailed medical datasets covering 6 medical domains. Our work provides valuable practical guidance and insights for the field, offering detailed analysis and discussion on the effectiveness of individual components within the inbuilt state-of-the-art methodologies. We hope this codebase serves as a comprehensive and reproducible benchmark, encouraging further advancements in long-tailed medical image learning. The codebase is publicly available on https://github.com/PyJulie/MONICA.

eess.IV

Generalizing to Unseen Domains in Diabetic Retinopathy with Disentangled Representations

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), induced by diabetes, poses a significant risk of visual impairment. Accurate and effective grading of DR aids in the treatment of this condition. Yet existing models experience notable performance degradation on unseen domains due to domain shifts. Previous methods address this issue by simulating domain style through simple visual transformation and mitigating domain noise via learning robust representations. However, domain shifts encompass more than image styles. They overlook biases caused by implicit factors such as ethnicity, age, and diagnostic criteria. In our work, we propose a novel framework where representations of paired data from different domains are decoupled into semantic features and domain noise. The resulting augmented representation comprises original retinal semantics and domain noise from other domains, aiming to generate enhanced representations aligned with real-world clinical needs, incorporating rich information from diverse domains. Subsequently, to improve the robustness of the decoupled representations, class and domain prototypes are employed to interpolate the disentangled representations while data-aware weights are designed to focus on rare classes and domains. Finally, we devise a robust pixel-level semantic alignment loss to align retinal semantics decoupled from features, maintaining a balance between intra-class diversity and dense class features. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on unseen domains. The code implementations are accessible on https://github.com/richard-peng-xia/DECO.

cs.CV