arXiv subjects

Rong Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Rong Zheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Human-Centered Ambient and Wearable Sensing for Automated Monitoring in Dementia Care: A Scoping Review

We conducted a scoping review to map the rapidly evolving landscape of wearable and ambient sensing technologies for monitoring people with dementia across home and institutional settings. We analyzed empirical sensing studies (2015-2025) to identify and inform future technical and human-centered design requirements. Five key implementation principles emerge: (1) human-centered design involving all stakeholders to augment rather than replace caregivers; (2) personalized, adaptable solutions that support autonomy across settings and severity levels instead of standardized approaches; (3) integration with existing workflows with adequate training and support; (4) proactive privacy and consent considerations, especially for ambient monitoring of residents and caregivers; and (5) cost-effective, ethical, equitable, scalable solutions with quantifiable outcomes. This paper identifies gaps, trends and opportunities for developing sensing systems that address the complex challenges, while enhancing automation and autonomy, in dementia care.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Interpreting Transformers Through Attention Head Intervention

Neural networks are growing more capable on their own, but we do not understand their neural mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms' decision-making processes, or mechanistic interpretability, enables (1) accountability and control in high-stakes domains, (2) the study of digital brains and the emergence of cognition, and (3) discovery of new knowledge when AI systems outperform humans. This paper traces how attention head intervention emerged as a key method for causal interpretability of transformers. The evolution from visualization to intervention represents a paradigm shift from observing correlations to causally validating mechanistic hypotheses through direct intervention. Head intervention studies revealed robust empirical findings while also highlighting limitations that complicate interpretation. Recent work demonstrates that mechanistic understanding now enables targeted control of model behaviour, successfully suppressing toxic outputs and manipulating semantic content through selective attention head intervention, validating the practical utility of interpretability research for AI safety.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

RealPDEBench: A Benchmark for Complex Physical Systems with Real-World Data

Predicting the evolution of complex physical systems remains a central problem in science and engineering. Despite rapid progress in scientific Machine Learning (ML) models, a critical bottleneck is the lack of expensive real-world data, resulting in most current models being trained and validated on simulated data. Beyond limiting the development and evaluation of scientific ML, this gap also hinders research into essential tasks such as sim-to-real transfer. We introduce RealPDEBench, the first benchmark for scientific ML that integrates real-world measurements with paired numerical simulations. RealPDEBench consists of five datasets, three tasks, eight metrics, and ten baselines. We first present five real-world measured datasets with paired simulated datasets across different complex physical systems. We further define three tasks, which allow comparisons between real-world and simulated data, and facilitate the development of methods to bridge the two. Moreover, we design eight evaluation metrics, spanning data-oriented and physics-oriented metrics, and finally benchmark ten representative baselines, including state-of-the-art models, pretrained PDE foundation models, and a traditional method. Experiments reveal significant discrepancies between simulated and real-world data, while showing that pretraining with simulated data consistently improves both accuracy and convergence. In this work, we hope to provide insights from real-world data, advancing scientific ML toward bridging the sim-to-real gap and real-world deployment. Our benchmark, datasets, and instructions are available at https://realpdebench.github.io/.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

LangPose: Language-Aligned Motion for Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation

2D-to-3D human pose lifting is an ill-posed problem due to depth ambiguity and occlusion. Existing methods relying on spatial and temporal consistency alone are insufficient to resolve these problems especially in the presence of significant occlusions or high dynamic actions. Semantic information, however, offers a complementary signal that can help disambiguate such cases. To this end, we propose LangPose, a framework that leverages action knowledge by aligning motion embeddings with text embeddings of fine-grained action labels. LangPose operates in two stages: pretraining and fine-tuning. In the pretraining stage, the model simultaneously learns to recognize actions and reconstruct 3D poses from masked and noisy 2D poses. During the fine-tuning stage, the model is further refined using real-world 3D human pose estimation datasets without action labels. Additionally, our framework incorporates masked body parts and masked time windows in motion modeling, encouraging the model to leverage semantic information when spatial and temporal consistency is unreliable. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LangPose, achieving SOTA level performance in 3D pose estimation on public datasets, including Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Specifically, LangPose achieves an MPJPE of 36.7mm on Human3.6M with detected 2D poses as input and 15.5mm on MPI-INF-3DHP with ground-truth 2D poses as input.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Understanding the Representation of Older Adults in Motion Capture Locomotion Datasets

The Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have been widely employed to capture human locomotions to enable applications such as activity recognition, human pose estimation, and fall detection. Motion capture (MoCap) systems are frequently used to generate ground truth annotations for human poses when training models with data from wearable or ambient sensors, and have been shown to be effective to synthesize data in these modalities. However, the representation of older adults, an increasingly important demographic in healthcare, in existing MoCap locomotion datasets has not been thoroughly examined. This work surveyed 41 publicly available datasets, identifying eight that include older adult motions and four that contain motions performed by younger actors annotated as old style. Older adults represent a small portion of participants overall, and few datasets provide full-body motion data for this group. To assess the fidelity of old-style walking motions, quantitative metrics are introduced, defining high fidelity as the ability to capture age-related differences relative to normative walking. Using gait parameters that are age-sensitive, robust to noise, and resilient to data scarcity, we found that old-style walking motions often exhibit overly controlled patterns and fail to faithfully characterize aging. These findings highlight the need for improved representation of older adults in motion datasets and establish a method to quantitatively evaluate the quality of old-style walking motions.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Personality-Enhanced Multimodal Depression Detection in the Elderly

This paper presents our solution to the Multimodal Personality-aware Depression Detection (MPDD) challenge at ACM MM 2025. We propose a multimodal depression detection model in the Elderly that incorporates personality characteristics. We introduce a multi-feature fusion approach based on a co-attention mechanism to effectively integrate LLDs, MFCCs, and Wav2Vec features in the audio modality. For the video modality, we combine representations extracted from OpenFace, ResNet, and DenseNet to construct a comprehensive visual feature set. Recognizing the critical role of personality in depression detection, we design an interaction module that captures the relationships between personality traits and multimodal features. Experimental results from the MPDD Elderly Depression Detection track demonstrate that our method significantly enhances performance, providing valuable insights for future research in multimodal depression detection among elderly populations.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition with Multi-Task Learning and Dynamic Feature Fusion

This study investigates fine-tuning self-supervised learn ing (SSL) models using multi-task learning (MTL) to enhance speech emotion recognition (SER). The framework simultane ously handles four related tasks: emotion recognition, gender recognition, speaker verification, and automatic speech recog nition. An innovative co-attention module is introduced to dy namically capture the interactions between features from the primary emotion classification task and auxiliary tasks, en abling context-aware fusion. Moreover, We introduce the Sam ple Weighted Focal Contrastive (SWFC) loss function to ad dress class imbalance and semantic confusion by adjusting sam ple weights for difficult and minority samples. The method is validated on the Categorical Emotion Recognition task of the Speech Emotion Recognition in Naturalistic Conditions Chal lenge, showing significant performance improvements.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Mitigating Category Imbalance: Fosafer System for the Multimodal Emotion and Intent Joint Understanding Challenge

This paper presents Fosafer approach to the Track 2 Mandarin in the Multimodal Emotion and Intent Joint Understandingchallenge, which focuses on achieving joint recognition of emotion and intent in Mandarin, despite the issue of category imbalance. To alleviate this issue, we use a variety of data augmentation techniques across text, video, and audio modalities. Additionally, we introduce the SampleWeighted Focal Contrastive loss, designed to address the challenges of recognizing minority class samples and those that are semantically similar but difficult to distinguish. Moreover, we fine-tune the Hubert model to adapt the emotion and intent joint recognition. To mitigate modal competition, we introduce a modal dropout strategy. For the final predictions, a plurality voting approach is used to determine the results. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves the second-best performance in the Track 2 Mandarin challenge.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Speech Emotion Recognition Using Fine-Tuned DWFormer:A Study on Track 1 of the IERPChallenge 2024

The field of artificial intelligence has a strong interest in the topic of emotion recognition. The majority of extant emotion recognition models are oriented towards enhancing the precision of discrete emotion label prediction. Given the direct relationship between human personality and emotion, as well as the significant inter-individual differences in subjective emotional expression, the IERP Challenge 2024 incorporates personality traits into emotion recognition research. This paper presents the Fosafer submissions to the Track 1 of the IERP Challenge 2024. This task primarily concerns the recognition of emotions in audio, while also providing text and audio features. In Track 1, we utilized exclusively audio-based features and fine-tuned a pre-trained speech emotion recognition model, DWFormer, through the integration of data augmentation and score fusion strategies, thereby achieving the first place among the participating teams.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Leveraging LLM for Stuttering Speech: A Unified Architecture Bridging Recognition and Event Detection

The performance bottleneck of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in stuttering speech scenarios has limited its applicability in domains such as speech rehabilitation. This paper proposed an LLM-driven ASR-SED multi-task learning framework that jointly optimized the ASR and Stuttering Event Detection (SED) tasks. We proposed a dynamic interaction mechanism where the ASR branch leveraged CTC-generated soft prompts to assist LLM context modeling, while the SED branch output stutter embeddings to enhance LLM comprehension of stuttered speech. We incorporated contrastive learning to strengthen the discriminative power of stuttering acoustic features and applied Focal Loss to mitigate the long-tailed distribution in stuttering event categories. Evaluations on the AS-70 Mandarin stuttering dataset demonstrated that our framework reduced the ASR character error rate (CER) to 5.45% (-37.71% relative reduction) and achieved an average SED F1-score of 73.63% (+46.58% relative improvement).

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Overlap-Adaptive Hybrid Speaker Diarization and ASR-Aware Observation Addition for MISP 2025 Challenge

This paper presents the system developed to address the MISP 2025 Challenge. For the diarization system, we proposed a hybrid approach combining a WavLM end-to-end segmentation method with a traditional multi-module clustering technique to adaptively select the appropriate model for handling varying degrees of overlapping speech. For the automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, we proposed an ASR-aware observation addition method that compensates for the performance limitations of Guided Source Separation (GSS) under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. Finally, we integrated the speaker diarization and ASR systems in a cascaded architecture to address Track 3. Our system achieved character error rates (CER) of 9.48% on Track 2 and concatenated minimum permutation character error rate (cpCER) of 11.56% on Track 3, ultimately securing first place in both tracks and thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed methods in real-world meeting scenarios.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

SUPER: Seated Upper Body Pose Estimation using mmWave Radars

In industrial countries, adults spend a considerable amount of time sedentary each day at work, driving and during activities of daily living. Characterizing the seated upper body human poses using mmWave radars is an important, yet under-studied topic with many applications in human-machine interaction, transportation and road safety. In this work, we devise SUPER, a framework for seated upper body human pose estimation that utilizes dual-mmWave radars in close proximity. A novel masking algorithm is proposed to coherently fuse data from the radars to generate intensity and Doppler point clouds with complementary information for high-motion but small radar cross section areas (e.g., upper extremities) and low-motion but large RCS areas (e.g. torso). A lightweight neural network extracts both global and local features of upper body and output pose parameters for the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model. Extensive leave-one-subject-out experiments on various motion sequences from multiple subjects show that SUPER outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 30 -- 184%. We also demonstrate its utility in a simple downstream task for hand-object interaction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

MirrorCalib: Utilizing Human Pose Information for Mirror-based Virtual Camera Calibration

In this paper, we present the novel task of estimating the extrinsic parameters of a virtual camera relative to a real camera in exercise videos with a mirror. This task poses a significant challenge in scenarios where the views from the real and mirrored cameras have no overlap or share salient features. To address this issue, prior knowledge of a human body and 2D joint locations are utilized to estimate the camera extrinsic parameters when a person is in front of a mirror. We devise a modified eight-point algorithm to obtain an initial estimation from 2D joint locations. The 2D joint locations are then refined subject to human body constraints. Finally, a RANSAC algorithm is employed to remove outliers by comparing their epipolar distances to a predetermined threshold. MirrorCalib achieves a rotation error of 1.82° and a translation error of 69.51 mm on a collected real-world dataset, which outperforms the state-of-art method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Learning Online Policies for Person Tracking in Multi-View Environments

In this paper, we introduce MVSparse, a novel and efficient framework for cooperative multi-person tracking across multiple synchronized cameras. The MVSparse system is comprised of a carefully orchestrated pipeline, combining edge server-based models with distributed lightweight Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents operating on individual cameras. These RL agents intelligently select informative blocks within each frame based on historical camera data and detection outcomes from neighboring cameras, significantly reducing computational load and communication overhead. The edge server aggregates multiple camera views to perform detection tasks and provides feedback to the individual agents. By projecting inputs from various perspectives onto a common ground plane and applying deep detection models, MVSparse optimally leverages temporal and spatial redundancy in multi-view videos. Notably, our contributions include an empirical analysis of multi-camera pedestrian tracking datasets, the development of a multi-camera, multi-person detection pipeline, and the implementation of MVSparse, yielding impressive results on both open datasets and real-world scenarios. Experimentally, MVSparse accelerates overall inference time by 1.88X and 1.60X compared to a baseline approach while only marginally compromising tracking accuracy by 2.27% and 3.17%, respectively, showcasing its promising potential for efficient multi-camera tracking applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Edge Video Analytics: A Survey on Applications, Systems and Enabling Techniques

Video, as a key driver in the global explosion of digital information, can create tremendous benefits for human society. Governments and enterprises are deploying innumerable cameras for a variety of applications, e.g., law enforcement, emergency management, traffic control, and security surveillance, all facilitated by video analytics (VA). This trend is spurred by the rapid advancement of deep learning (DL), which enables more precise models for object classification, detection, and tracking. Meanwhile, with the proliferation of Internet-connected devices, massive amounts of data are generated daily, overwhelming the cloud. Edge computing, an emerging paradigm that moves workloads and services from the network core to the network edge, has been widely recognized as a promising solution. The resulting new intersection, edge video analytics (EVA), begins to attract widespread attention. Nevertheless, only a few loosely-related surveys exist on this topic. The basic concepts of EVA (e.g., definition, architectures) were not fully elucidated due to the rapid development of this domain. To fill these gaps, we provide a comprehensive survey of the recent efforts on EVA. In this paper, we first review the fundamentals of edge computing, followed by an overview of VA. EVA systems and their enabling techniques are discussed next. In addition, we introduce prevalent frameworks and datasets to aid future researchers in the development of EVA systems. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and foresee future research directions. We believe this survey will help readers comprehend the relationship between VA and edge computing, and spark new ideas on EVA.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Efficient Rotating Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging via Robust Sparse Array Synthesis

Rotating Synthetic Aperture Radar (ROSAR) can generate a 360$^\circ$ image of its surrounding environment using the collected data from a single moving track. Due to its non-linear track, the Back-Projection Algorithm (BPA) is commonly used to generate SAR images in ROSAR. Despite its superior imaging performance, BPA suffers from high computation complexity, restricting its application in real-time systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient imaging method based on robust sparse array synthesis. It first conducts range-dimension matched filtering, followed by azimuth-dimension matched filtering using a selected sparse aperture and filtering weights. The aperture and weights are computed offline in advance to ensure robustness to array manifold errors induced by the imperfect radar rotation. We introduce robust constraints on the main-lobe and sidelobe levels of filter design. The resultant robust sparse array synthesis problem is a non-convex optimization problem with quadratic constraints. An algorithm based on feasible point pursuit and successive convex approximation is devised to solve the optimization problem. Extensive simulation study and experimental evaluations using a real-world hardware platform demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve image quality comparable to that of BPA, but with a substantial reduction in computational time up to 90%.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

Pi-ViMo: Physiology-inspired Robust Vital Sign Monitoring using mmWave Radars

Continuous monitoring of human vital signs using non-contact mmWave radars is attractive due to their ability to penetrate garments and operate under different lighting conditions. Unfortunately, most prior research requires subjects to stay at a fixed distance from radar sensors and to remain still during monitoring. These restrictions limit the applications of radar vital sign monitoring in real life scenarios. In this paper, we address these limitations and present "Pi-ViMo", a non-contact Physiology-inspired Robust Vital Sign Monitoring system, using mmWave radars. We first derive a multi-scattering point model for the human body, and introduce a coherent combining of multiple scatterings to enhance the quality of estimated chest-wall movements. It enables vital sign estimations of subjects at any location in a radar's field of view. We then propose a template matching method to extract human vital signs by adopting physical models of respiration and cardiac activities. The proposed method is capable to separate respiration and heartbeat in the presence of micro-level random body movements (RBM) when a subject is at any location within the field of view of a radar. Experiments in a radar testbed show average respiration rate errors of 6% and heart rate errors of 11.9% for the stationary subjects and average errors of 13.5% for respiration rate and 13.6% for heart rate for subjects under different RBMs.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

VALERIAN: Invariant Feature Learning for IMU Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition in the Wild

Deep neural network models for IMU sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) that are trained from controlled, well-curated datasets suffer from poor generalizability in practical deployments. However, data collected from naturalistic settings often contains significant label noise. In this work, we examine two in-the-wild HAR datasets and DivideMix, a state-of-the-art learning with noise labels (LNL) method to understand the extent and impacts of noisy labels in training data. Our empirical analysis reveals that the substantial domain gaps among diverse subjects cause LNL methods to violate a key underlying assumption, namely, neural networks tend to fit simpler (and thus clean) data in early training epochs. Motivated by the insights, we design VALERIAN, an invariant feature learning method for in-the-wild wearable sensor-based HAR. By training a multi-task model with separate task-specific layers for each subject, VALERIAN allows noisy labels to be dealt with individually while benefiting from shared feature representation across subjects. We evaluated VALERIAN on four datasets, two collected in a controlled environment and two in the wild.

eess.SP↗