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Rui Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Rui Zhang.

At least 433 records · Page 24Linked to original sources

BFANet: Revisiting 3D Semantic Segmentation with Boundary Feature Analysis

3D semantic segmentation plays a fundamental and crucial role to understand 3D scenes. While contemporary state-of-the-art techniques predominantly concentrate on elevating the overall performance of 3D semantic segmentation based on general metrics (e.g. mIoU, mAcc, and oAcc), they unfortunately leave the exploration of challenging regions for segmentation mostly neglected. In this paper, we revisit 3D semantic segmentation through a more granular lens, shedding light on subtle complexities that are typically overshadowed by broader performance metrics. Concretely, we have delineated 3D semantic segmentation errors into four comprehensive categories as well as corresponding evaluation metrics tailored to each. Building upon this categorical framework, we introduce an innovative 3D semantic segmentation network called BFANet that incorporates detailed analysis of semantic boundary features. First, we design the boundary-semantic module to decouple point cloud features into semantic and boundary features, and fuse their query queue to enhance semantic features with attention. Second, we introduce a more concise and accelerated boundary pseudo-label calculation algorithm, which is 3.9 times faster than the state-of-the-art, offering compatibility with data augmentation and enabling efficient computation in training. Extensive experiments on benchmark data indicate the superiority of our BFANet model, confirming the significance of emphasizing the four uniquely designed metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/weiguangzhao/BFANet.

cs.CV↗

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Factor Disentanglement for Recommendation in Various Context Scenarios

In recommender systems, the patterns of user behaviors (e.g., purchase, click) may vary greatly in different contexts (e.g., time and location). This is because user behavior is jointly determined by two types of factors: intrinsic factors, which reflect consistent user preference, and extrinsic factors, which reflect external incentives that may vary in different contexts. Differentiating between intrinsic and extrinsic factors helps learn user behaviors better. However, existing studies have only considered differentiating them from a single, pre-defined context (e.g., time or location), ignoring the fact that a user's extrinsic factors may be influenced by the interplay of various contexts at the same time. In this paper, we propose the Intrinsic-Extrinsic Disentangled Recommendation (IEDR) model, a generic framework that differentiates intrinsic from extrinsic factors considering various contexts simultaneously, enabling more accurate differentiation of factors and hence the improvement of recommendation accuracy. IEDR contains a context-invariant contrastive learning component to capture intrinsic factors, and a disentanglement component to extract extrinsic factors under the interplay of various contexts. The two components work together to achieve effective factor learning. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate IEDR's effectiveness in learning disentangled factors and significantly improving recommendation accuracy by up to 4% in NDCG.

cs.IR↗

Rotatable Antennas for Integrated Sensing and Communications

In this letter, we propose to deploy rotatable antennas (RAs) at the base station (BS) to enhance both communication and sensing (C&S) performances, by exploiting a new spatial degree-of-freedom (DoF) offered by array rotation. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to simultaneously maximize the sum-rate of multiple communication users and minimize the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for target angle estimation, by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming vectors and the array rotation angle at the BS. To solve this problem, we first equivalently decompose it into two subproblems, corresponding to an inner problem for beamforming optimization and an outer problem for array rotation optimization. Although these two subproblems are non-convex, we obtain their high-quality solutions by applying the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique and one-dimensional exhaustive search, respectively. Moreover, we show that for the communication-only case, RAs provide an additional rotation gain to improve communication performance; while for the sensing-only case, the equivalent spatial aperture can be enlarged by RAs for achieving higher sensing accuracy. Finally, numerical results are presented to showcase the performance gains of RAs over fixed-rotation antennas in integrated sensing and communications (ISAC).

eess.SP↗

Monte Carlo Neural PDE Solver for Learning PDEs via Probabilistic Representation

In scenarios with limited available data, training the function-to-function neural PDE solver in an unsupervised manner is essential. However, the efficiency and accuracy of existing methods are constrained by the properties of numerical algorithms, such as finite difference and pseudo-spectral methods, integrated during the training stage. These methods necessitate careful spatiotemporal discretization to achieve reasonable accuracy, leading to significant computational challenges and inaccurate simulations, particularly in cases with substantial spatiotemporal variations. To address these limitations, we propose the Monte Carlo Neural PDE Solver (MCNP Solver) for training unsupervised neural solvers via the PDEs' probabilistic representation, which regards macroscopic phenomena as ensembles of random particles. Compared to other unsupervised methods, MCNP Solver naturally inherits the advantages of the Monte Carlo method, which is robust against spatiotemporal variations and can tolerate coarse step size. In simulating the trajectories of particles, we employ Heun's method for the convection process and calculate the expectation via the probability density function of neighbouring grid points during the diffusion process. These techniques enhance accuracy and circumvent the computational issues associated with Monte Carlo sampling. Our numerical experiments on convection-diffusion, Allen-Cahn, and Navier-Stokes equations demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and efficiency compared to other unsupervised baselines. The source code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/optray/MCNP.

cs.LG↗

Policy Constraint by Only Support Constraint for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy by using pre-collected datasets, to maximize cumulative rewards. However, offline reinforcement learning suffers challenges due to the distributional shift between the learned and behavior policies, leading to errors when computing Q-values for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To mitigate this issue, policy constraint methods aim to constrain the learned policy's distribution with the distribution of the behavior policy or confine action selection within the support of the behavior policy. However, current policy constraint methods tend to exhibit excessive conservatism, hindering the policy from further surpassing the behavior policy's performance. In this work, we present Only Support Constraint (OSC) which is derived from maximizing the total probability of learned policy in the support of behavior policy, to address the conservatism of policy constraint. OSC presents a regularization term that only restricts policies to the support without imposing extra constraints on actions within the support. Additionally, to fully harness the performance of the new policy constraints, OSC utilizes a diffusion model to effectively characterize the support of behavior policies. Experimental evaluations across a variety of offline RL benchmarks demonstrate that OSC significantly enhances performance, alleviating the challenges associated with distributional shifts and mitigating conservatism of policy constraints. Code is available at https://github.com/MoreanP/OSC.

cs.LG↗

Wireless Communication with Flexible Reflector: Joint Placement and Rotation Optimization for Coverage Enhancement

Passive metal reflectors for communication enhancement have appealing advantages such as ultra low cost, zero energy expenditure, maintenance-free operation, long life span, and full compatibility with legacy wireless systems. To unleash the full potential of passive reflectors for wireless communications, this paper proposes a new passive reflector architecture, termed flexible reflector (FR), for enabling the flexible adjustment of beamforming direction via the FR placement and rotation optimization. We consider the multi-FR aided area coverage enhancement and aim to maximize the minimum expected receive power over all locations within the target coverage area, by jointly optimizing the placement positions and rotation angles of multiple FRs. To gain useful insights, the special case of movable reflector (MR) with fixed rotation is first studied to maximize the expected receive power at a target location, where the optimal single-MR placement positions for electrically large and small reflectors are derived in closed-form, respectively. It is shown that the reflector should be placed at the specular reflection point for electrically large reflector. While for area coverage enhancement, the optimal placement is obtained for the single-MR case and a sequential placement algorithm is proposed for the multi-MR case. Moreover, for the general case of FR, joint placement and rotation design is considered for the single-/multi-FR aided coverage enhancement, respectively. Numerical results are presented which demonstrate significant performance gains of FRs over various benchmark schemes under different practical setups in terms of receive power enhancement.

cs.IT↗

A General Optimization Framework for Tackling Distance Constraints in Movable Antenna-Aided Systems

The recently emerged movable antenna (MA) shows great promise in leveraging spatial degrees of freedom to enhance the performance of wireless systems. However, resource allocation in MA-aided systems faces challenges due to the nonconvex and coupled constraints on antenna positions. This paper systematically reveals the challenges posed by the minimum antenna separation distance constraints. Furthermore, we propose a penalty optimization framework for resource allocation under such new constraints for MA-aided systems. Specifically, the proposed framework separates the non-convex and coupled antenna distance constraints from the movable region constraints by introducing auxiliary variables. Subsequently, the resulting problem is efficiently solved by alternating optimization, where the optimization of the original variables resembles that in conventional resource allocation problem while the optimization with respect to the auxiliary variables is achieved in closedform solutions. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we present three case studies: capacity maximization, latency minimization, and regularized zero-forcing precoding. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed optimization framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art schemes.

eess.SP↗

Hierarchically Tunable 6DMA for Wireless Communication and Sensing: Modeling and Performance Optimization

This paper proposes a new hierarchically tunable six-dimensional movable antenna (HT-6DMA) architecture for base station (BS) in future wireless networks. The HT-6DMA BS consists of multiple antenna arrays that can flexibly move on a spherical surface, with their three-dimensional (3D) positions and 3D rotations/orientations efficiently characterized in the global spherical coordinate system (SCS) and their individual local SCSs, respectively. As a result, the 6DMA system is hierarchically tunable in the sense that each array's global position and local rotation can be separately adjusted in a sequential manner with the other being fixed, thus greatly reducing their design complexity and improving the achievable performance. In particular, we consider an HT-6DMA BS serving multiple single-antenna users in the uplink communication or sensing potential unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)/drones in a given airway area. Specifically, for the communication scenario, we aim to maximize the average sum rate of communication users in the long term by optimizing the positions and rotations of all 6DMA arrays at the BS. While for the airway sensing scenario, we maximize the minimum received sensing signal power along the airway by optimizing the 6DMA arrays' positions and rotations along with the BS's transmit covariance matrix. Despite that the formulated problems are both non-convex, we propose efficient solutions to them by exploiting the hierarchical tunability of positions/rotations of 6DMA arrays in our proposed model. Numerical results show that the proposed HT-6DMA design significantly outperforms not only the traditional BS with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), but also the existing 6DMA scheme. Furthermore, it is unveiled that the performance gains of HT-6DMA mostly come from the arrays' global position adjustments on the spherical surface, rather than their local rotation adjustments.

eess.SP↗

EPEE: Towards Efficient and Effective Foundation Models in Biomedicine

Foundation models, including language models, e.g., GPT, and vision models, e.g., CLIP, have significantly advanced numerous biomedical tasks. Despite these advancements, the high inference latency and the "overthinking" issues in model inference impair the efficiency and effectiveness of foundation models, thus limiting their application in real-time clinical settings. To address these challenges, we proposed EPEE (Entropy- and Patience-based Early Exiting), a novel hybrid strategy designed to improve the inference efficiency of foundation models. The core idea was to leverage the strengths of entropy-based and patience-based early exiting methods to overcome their respective weaknesses. To evaluate EPEE, we conducted experiments on three core biomedical tasks-classification, relation extraction, and event extraction-using four foundation models (BERT, ALBERT, GPT-2, and ViT) across twelve datasets, including clinical notes and medical images. The results showed that EPEE significantly reduced inference time while maintaining or improving accuracy, demonstrating its adaptability to diverse datasets and tasks. EPEE addressed critical barriers to deploying foundation models in healthcare by balancing efficiency and effectiveness. It potentially provided a practical solution for real-time clinical decision-making with foundation models, supporting reliable and efficient workflows.

cs.AI↗

SPDiffusion: Semantic Protection Diffusion Models for Multi-concept Text-to-image Generation

Recent text-to-image models have achieved impressive results in generating high-quality images. However, when tasked with multi-concept generation creating images that contain multiple characters or objects, existing methods often suffer from semantic entanglement, including concept entanglement and improper attribute binding, leading to significant text-image inconsistency. We identify that semantic entanglement arises when certain regions of the latent features attend to incorrect concept and attribute tokens. In this work, we propose the Semantic Protection Diffusion Model (SPDiffusion) to address both concept entanglement and improper attribute binding using only a text prompt as input. The SPDiffusion framework introduces a novel concept region extraction method SP-Extraction to resolve region entanglement in cross-attention, along with SP-Attn, which protects concept regions from the influence of irrelevant attributes and concepts. To evaluate our method, we test it on existing benchmarks, where SPDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its effectiveness.

cs.CV↗

An evaluation of DeepSeek Models in Biomedical Natural Language Processing

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted biomedical Natural Language Processing (NLP), enhancing tasks such as named entity recognition, relation extraction, event extraction, and text classification. In this context, the DeepSeek series of models have shown promising potential in general NLP tasks, yet their capabilities in the biomedical domain remain underexplored. This study evaluates multiple DeepSeek models (Distilled-DeepSeek-R1 series and Deepseek-LLMs) across four key biomedical NLP tasks using 12 datasets, benchmarking them against state-of-the-art alternatives (Llama3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B, Phi-4-14B, Gemma-2-9B). Our results reveal that while DeepSeek models perform competitively in named entity recognition and text classification, challenges persist in event and relation extraction due to precision-recall trade-offs. We provide task-specific model recommendations and highlight future research directions. This evaluation underscores the strengths and limitations of DeepSeek models in biomedical NLP, guiding their future deployment and optimization.

cs.CL↗

Movable Antenna Aided Multiuser Communications: Antenna Position Optimization Based on Statistical Channel Information

The movable antenna (MA) technology has attracted great attention recently due to its promising capability in improving wireless channel conditions by flexibly adjusting antenna positions. To reap maximal performance gains of MA systems, existing works mainly focus on MA position optimization to cater to the instantaneous channel state information (CSI). However, the resulting real-time antenna movement may face challenges in practical implementation due to the additional time overhead and energy consumption required, especially in fast time-varying channel scenarios. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new approach to optimize the MA positions based on the users' statistical CSI over a large timescale. In particular, we propose a general field response based statistical channel model to characterize the random channel variations caused by the local movement of users. Based on this model, a two-timescale optimization problem is formulated to maximize the ergodic sum rate of multiple users, where the precoding matrix and the positions of MAs at the base station (BS) are optimized based on the instantaneous and statistical CSI, respectively. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, a log-barrier penalized gradient ascent algorithm is developed to optimize the MA positions, where two methods are proposed to approximate the ergodic sum rate and its gradients with different complexities. Finally, we present simulation results to evaluate the performance of the proposed design and algorithms based on practical channels generated by ray-tracing. The results verify the performance advantages of MA systems compared to their fixed-position antenna (FPA) counterparts in terms of long-term rate improvement, especially for scenarios with more diverse channel power distributions in the angular domain.

eess.SP↗

Effects of threshold resummation for large-$x$ PDF in large momentum effective theory

Parton distribution functions (PDFs) at large $x$ are challenging to extract from experimental data, yet they are essential for understanding hadron structure and searching for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Within the framework of the large momentum $P^z$ expansion of lattice quasi-PDFs, we investigate large $x$ PDFs, where the matching coefficient is factorized into the hard kernel, related to the active quark momentum $x P^z$, and the threshold soft function, associated with the spectator momentum $(1-x) P^z$. The renormalization group equation of the soft function enables the resummation of the threshold double logarithms $α^{k} \ln^{2k}(1-x)$, which is crucial for a reliable and controllable calculation of large $x$ PDFs. Our analysis with pion valence PDFs indicates that perturbative matching breaks down when the spectator momentum $(1-x)P^z$ approaches $Λ_{\rm QCD}$, but remains valid when both $x P^z$ and $(1-x)P^z$ are much larger than $Λ_{\rm QCD}$. Additionally, we incorporate leading renormalon resummation within the threshold framework, demonstrating good perturbative convergence in the region where both spectator and active quark momenta are perturbative scales.

hep-ph↗

Modeling and Optimization for Rotatable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communication

Fluid antenna system (FAS)/movable antenna (MA) has emerged as a promising technology to fully exploit the spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs). In this paper, we propose a new rotatable antenna (RA) model, as a simplified implementation of six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA), to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. Different from conventional fixed antenna, the proposed RA system can independently and flexibly change the three-dimensional (3D) orientation/boresight of each antenna by adjusting its deflection angles to achieve desired channel realizations. Specifically, we study an RA-enabled uplink communication system, where the receive beamforming and the deflection angles of all RAs are jointly optimized to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all the users. In the special single-user and free-space propagation setup, the optimal deflection angles are derived in closed form with the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) beamformer applied at the base station (BS). In the general multi-user and multi-path setup, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to alternately optimize the receive beamforming and the deflection angles in an iterative manner. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed RA-enabled system can significantly outperform other benchmark schemes.

cs.IT↗

FederBoost: Private Federated Learning for GBDT

Federated Learning (FL) has been an emerging trend in machine learning and artificial intelligence. It allows multiple participants to collaboratively train a better global model and offers a privacy-aware paradigm for model training since it does not require participants to release their original training data. However, existing FL solutions for vertically partitioned data or decision trees require heavy cryptographic operations. In this paper, we propose a framework named FederBoost for private federated learning of gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT). It supports running GBDT over both vertically and horizontally partitioned data. Vertical FederBoost does not require any cryptographic operation and horizontal FederBoost only requires lightweight secure aggregation. The key observation is that the whole training process of GBDT relies on the ordering of the data instead of the values. We fully implement FederBoost and evaluate its utility and efficiency through extensive experiments performed on three public datasets. Our experimental results show that both vertical and horizontal FederBoost achieve the same level of accuracy with centralized training where all data are collected in a central server, and they are 4-5 orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art solutions for federated decision tree training; hence offering practical solutions for industrial applications.

cs.CR↗

Espresso: Robust Concept Filtering in Text-to-Image Models

Diffusion based text-to-image models are trained on large datasets scraped from the Internet, potentially containing unacceptable concepts (e.g., copyright-infringing or unsafe). We need concept removal techniques (CRTs) which are i) effective in preventing the generation of images with unacceptable concepts, ii) utility-preserving on acceptable concepts, and, iii) robust against evasion with adversarial prompts. No prior CRT satisfies all these requirements simultaneously. We introduce Espresso, the first robust concept filter based on Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP). We identify unacceptable concepts by using the distance between the embedding of a generated image to the text embeddings of both unacceptable and acceptable concepts. This lets us fine-tune for robustness by separating the text embeddings of unacceptable and acceptable concepts while preserving utility. We present a pipeline to evaluate various CRTs to show that Espresso is more effective and robust than prior CRTs, while retaining utility.

cs.CV↗

A Tutorial on Movable Antennas for Wireless Networks

Movable antenna (MA) has been recognized as a promising technology to enhance the performance of wireless communication and sensing by enabling antenna movement. Such a significant paradigm shift from conventional fixed antennas (FAs) to MAs offers tremendous new opportunities towards realizing more versatile, adaptive and efficient next-generation wireless networks such as 6G. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive tutorial on the fundamentals and advancements in the area of MA-empowered wireless networks. First, we overview the historical development and contemporary applications of MA technologies. Next, to characterize the continuous variation in wireless channels with respect to antenna position and/or orientation, we present new field-response channel models tailored for MAs, which are applicable to narrowband and wideband systems as well as far-field and near-field propagation conditions. Subsequently, we review the state-of-the-art architectures for implementing MAs and discuss their practical constraints. A general optimization framework is then formulated to fully exploit the spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) in antenna movement for performance enhancement in wireless systems. In particular, we delve into two major design issues for MA systems. First, we address the intricate antenna movement optimization problem for various communication and/or sensing systems to maximize the performance gains achievable by MAs. Second, we deal with the challenging channel acquisition issue in MA systems for reconstructing the channel mapping between arbitrary antenna positions inside the transmitter and receiver regions. Moreover, we show existing prototypes developed for MA-aided communication/sensing and the experimental results based on them. Finally, the extension of MA design to other wireless systems and its synergy with other emerging wireless technologies are discussed.

cs.IT↗

MMRAG: Multi-Mode Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Large Language Models for Biomedical In-Context Learning

Objective: To optimize in-context learning in biomedical natural language processing by improving example selection. Methods: We introduce a novel multi-mode retrieval-augmented generation (MMRAG) framework, which integrates four retrieval strategies: (1) Random Mode, selecting examples arbitrarily; (2) Top Mode, retrieving the most relevant examples based on similarity; (3) Diversity Mode, ensuring variation in selected examples; and (4) Class Mode, selecting category-representative examples. This study evaluates MMRAG on three core biomedical NLP tasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Text Classification (TC). The datasets used include BC2GM for gene and protein mention recognition (NER), DDI for drug-drug interaction extraction (RE), GIT for general biomedical information extraction (RE), and HealthAdvice for health-related text classification (TC). The framework is tested with two large language models (Llama2-7B, Llama3-8B) and three retrievers (Contriever, MedCPT, BGE-Large) to assess performance across different retrieval strategies. Results: The results from the Random mode indicate that providing more examples in the prompt improves the model's generation performance. Meanwhile, Top mode and Diversity mode significantly outperform Random mode on the RE (DDI) task, achieving an F1 score of 0.9669, a 26.4% improvement. Among the three retrievers tested, Contriever outperformed the other two in a greater number of experiments. Additionally, Llama 2 and Llama 3 demonstrated varying capabilities across different tasks, with Llama 3 showing a clear advantage in handling NER tasks. Conclusion: MMRAG effectively enhances biomedical in-context learning by refining example selection, mitigating data scarcity issues, and demonstrating superior adaptability for NLP-driven healthcare applications.

cs.CL↗