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Xiaoling Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaoling Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

DVAGen: Dynamic Vocabulary Augmented Generation

Language models trained with a fixed vocabulary struggle to generalize to novel or out-of-vocabulary words, limiting their flexibility in handling diverse token combinations. Existing dynamic vocabulary approaches attempt to address this limitation but face challenges such as fragmented codebases, lack of support for modern LLMs, and limited inference scalability. To overcome these issues, we introduce DVAGen, a fully open-source, unified framework designed for training, evaluation, and visualization of dynamic vocabulary-augmented language models. Our framework modularizes the pipeline for ease of customization, integrates seamlessly with open-source LLMs, and is the first to provide both CLI and WebUI tools for real-time result inspection. We validate the effectiveness of dynamic vocabulary methods on modern LLMs and demonstrate support for batch inference, significantly improving inference throughput.

cs.CL↗

HSACNet: Hierarchical Scale-Aware Consistency Regularized Semi-Supervised Change Detection

Semi-supervised change detection (SSCD) aims to detect changes between bi-temporal remote sensing images by utilizing limited labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. Existing methods struggle in complex scenarios, exhibiting poor performance when confronted with noisy data. They typically neglect intra-layer multi-scale features while emphasizing inter-layer fusion, harming the integrity of change objects with different scales. In this paper, we propose HSACNet, a Hierarchical Scale-Aware Consistency regularized Network for SSCD. Specifically, we integrate Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), using its Hiera backbone as the encoder to extract inter-layer multi-scale features and applying adapters for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Moreover, we design a Scale-Aware Differential Attention Module (SADAM) that can precisely capture intra-layer multi-scale change features and suppress noise. Additionally, a dual-augmentation consistency regularization strategy is adopted to effectively utilize the unlabeled data. Extensive experiments across four CD benchmarks demonstrate that our HSACNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, with reduced parameters and computational cost.

cs.CV↗

TS-P$^2$CL: Plug-and-Play Dual Contrastive Learning for Vision-Guided Medical Time Series Classification

Medical time series (MedTS) classification is pivotal for intelligent healthcare, yet its efficacy is severely limited by poor cross-subject generation due to the profound cross-individual heterogeneity. Despite advances in architectural innovations and transfer learning techniques, current methods remain constrained by modality-specific inductive biases that limit their ability to learn universally invariant representations. To overcome this, we propose TS-P$^2$CL, a novel plug-and-play framework that leverages the universal pattern recognition capabilities of pre-trained vision models. We introduce a vision-guided paradigm that transforms 1D physiological signals into 2D pseudo-images, establishing a bridge to the visual domain. This transformation enables implicit access to rich semantic priors learned from natural images. Within this unified space, we employ a dual-contrastive learning strategy: intra-modal consistency enforces temporal coherence, while cross-modal alignment aligns time-series dynamics with visual semantics, thereby mitigating individual-specific biases and learning robust, domain-invariant features. Extensive experiments on six MedTS datasets demonstrate that TS-P$^2$CL consistently outperforms fourteen methods in both subject-dependent and subject-independent settings.

cs.CV↗

$^{51}$V NMR evidence for interlayer-modulated charge order and a first-order low-temperature transition in CsV$_3$Sb$_5$

Charge order in the kagome superconductor CsV$_3$Sb$_5$ exhibits a complex three-dimensional organization and intermediate-temperature anomalies whose bulk character has remained unsettled. We use orientation-dependent $^{51}$V NMR as a site-selective probe to determine the stacking of the charge density wave (CDW) state and its thermal evolution. Below $T_{\mathrm{CDW}}\!\approx\!94$~K, the field-linear splitting of the $^{51}$V central transition together with the anisotropy of the Knight-shift tensor identify an interlayer-modulated $3\mathbf{q}$ CDW whose local environments are consistent with a four-layer $2\times2\times4$ stacking with mixed trihexagonal/Star-of-David distortions, in agreement with synchrotron x-ray determinations. For comparison, RbV$_3$Sb$_5$ serves as a reference exhibiting a uniform trihexagonal $2\times2\times2$ stacking, allowing us to isolate features unique to the $2\times2\times4$ state in CsV$_3$Sb$_5$. With $\mathbf{H}_0\!\parallel\!c$, the $^{51}$V quadrupolar satellites through the intermediate temperature scale near $T_{\mathrm{CO}}\!\approx\!65$ K reorganize into two well-resolved electric-field-gradient manifolds that coexist over a finite interval; their relative spectral weights interchange on cooling while the total integrated satellite intensity remains conserved and $ν_Q$ within each manifold is nearly temperature independent. The coexistence without critical broadening, together with conserved intensity, provides bulk evidence consistent with a first-order charge-order transition near $T_{\mathrm{CO}}$. Our measurements do not resolve whether this lower-temperature transition corresponds to a distinct in-plane order or a reorganization of the $3\mathbf{q}$ state; rather, they delimit this window and provide bulk, site-resolved constraints that connect prior reported anomalies to a thermodynamic first-order transition.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Unified attacks to large language model watermarks: spoofing and scrubbing in unauthorized knowledge distillation

Watermarking has emerged as a critical technique for combating misinformation and protecting intellectual property in large language models (LLMs). A recent discovery, termed watermark radioactivity, reveals that watermarks embedded in teacher models can be inherited by student models through knowledge distillation. On the positive side, this inheritance allows for the detection of unauthorized knowledge distillation by identifying watermark traces in student models. However, the robustness of watermarks against scrubbing attacks and their unforgeability in the face of spoofing attacks under unauthorized knowledge distillation remain largely unexplored. Existing watermark attack methods either assume access to model internals or fail to simultaneously support both scrubbing and spoofing attacks. In this work, we propose Contrastive Decoding-Guided Knowledge Distillation (CDG-KD), a unified framework that enables bidirectional attacks under unauthorized knowledge distillation. Our approach employs contrastive decoding to extract corrupted or amplified watermark texts via comparing outputs from the student model and weakly watermarked references, followed by bidirectional distillation to train new student models capable of watermark removal and watermark forgery, respectively. Extensive experiments show that CDG-KD effectively performs attacks while preserving the general performance of the distilled model. Our findings underscore critical need for developing watermarking schemes that are robust and unforgeable.

cs.CL↗

Hierarchical Safety Realignment: Lightweight Restoration of Safety in Pruned Large Vision-Language Models

With the increasing size of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), network pruning techniques aimed at compressing models for deployment in resource-constrained environments have garnered significant attention. However, we observe that pruning often leads to a degradation in safety performance. To address this issue, we present a novel and lightweight approach, termed Hierarchical Safety Realignment (HSR). HSR operates by first quantifying the contribution of each attention head to safety, identifying the most critical ones, and then selectively restoring neurons directly within these attention heads that play a pivotal role in maintaining safety. This process hierarchically realigns the safety of pruned LVLMs, progressing from the attention head level to the neuron level. We validate HSR across various models and pruning strategies, consistently achieving notable improvements in safety performance. To our knowledge, this is the first work explicitly focused on restoring safety in LVLMs post-pruning.

cs.CL↗

Latent-space adversarial training with post-aware calibration for defending large language models against jailbreak attacks

Ensuring safety alignment is a critical requirement for large language models (LLMs), particularly given increasing deployment in real-world applications. Despite considerable advancements, LLMs remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks, which exploit system vulnerabilities to circumvent safety measures and elicit harmful or inappropriate outputs. Furthermore, while adversarial training-based defense methods have shown promise, a prevalent issue is the unintended over-defense behavior, wherein models excessively reject benign queries, significantly undermining their practical utility. To address these limitations, we introduce LATPC, a Latent-space Adversarial Training with Post-aware Calibration framework. LATPC dynamically identifies safety-critical latent dimensions by contrasting harmful and benign inputs, enabling the adaptive construction of targeted refusal feature removal attacks. This mechanism allows adversarial training to concentrate on real-world jailbreak tactics that disguise harmful queries as benign ones. During inference, LATPC employs an efficient embedding-level calibration mechanism to minimize over-defense behaviors with negligible computational overhead. Experimental results across five types of disguise-based jailbreak attacks demonstrate that LATPC achieves a superior balance between safety and utility compared to existing defense frameworks. Further analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of leveraging safety-critical dimensions in developing robust defense methods against jailbreak attacks.

cs.CR↗

AutoMedEval: Harnessing Language Models for Automatic Medical Capability Evaluation

With the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in the medical domain, there is increasing demand for improved evaluation techniques to assess their capabilities. However, traditional metrics like F1 and ROUGE, which rely on token overlaps to measure quality, significantly overlook the importance of medical terminology. While human evaluation tends to be more reliable, it can be very costly and may as well suffer from inaccuracies due to limits in human expertise and motivation. Although there are some evaluation methods based on LLMs, their usability in the medical field is limited due to their proprietary nature or lack of expertise. To tackle these challenges, we present AutoMedEval, an open-sourced automatic evaluation model with 13B parameters specifically engineered to measure the question-answering proficiency of medical LLMs. The overarching objective of AutoMedEval is to assess the quality of responses produced by diverse models, aspiring to significantly reduce the dependence on human evaluation. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical training method involving curriculum instruction tuning and an iterative knowledge introspection mechanism, enabling AutoMedEval to acquire professional medical assessment capabilities with limited instructional data. Human evaluations indicate that AutoMedEval surpasses other baselines in terms of correlation with human judgments.

cs.CL↗

Hierarchical Divide-and-Conquer for Fine-Grained Alignment in LLM-Based Medical Evaluation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs) for medical applications, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of these models in clinical settings is paramount. Existing benchmarks often focus on fixed-format tasks like multiple-choice QA, which fail to capture the complexity of real-world clinical diagnostics. Moreover, traditional evaluation metrics and LLM-based evaluators struggle with misalignment, often providing oversimplified assessments that do not adequately reflect human judgment. To address these challenges, we introduce HDCEval, a Hierarchical Divide-and-Conquer Evaluation framework tailored for fine-grained alignment in medical evaluation. HDCEval is built on a set of fine-grained medical evaluation guidelines developed in collaboration with professional doctors, encompassing Patient Question Relevance, Medical Knowledge Correctness, and Expression. The framework decomposes complex evaluation tasks into specialized subtasks, each evaluated by expert models trained through Attribute-Driven Token Optimization (ADTO) on a meticulously curated preference dataset. This hierarchical approach ensures that each aspect of the evaluation is handled with expert precision, leading to a significant improvement in alignment with human evaluators.

cs.CL↗

TS-HTFA: Advancing Time Series Forecasting via Hierarchical Text-Free Alignment with Large Language Models

Given the significant potential of large language models (LLMs) in sequence modeling, emerging studies have begun applying them to time-series forecasting. Despite notable progress, existing methods still face two critical challenges: 1) their reliance on large amounts of paired text data, limiting the model applicability, and 2) a substantial modality gap between text and time series, leading to insufficient alignment and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{H}ierarchical \textbf{T}ext-\textbf{F}ree \textbf{A}lignment (\textbf{TS-HTFA}), a novel method that leverages hierarchical alignment to fully exploit the representation capacity of LLMs while eliminating the dependence on text data. Specifically, we replace paired text data with adaptive virtual text based on QR decomposition word embeddings and learnable prompt. Furthermore, we establish comprehensive cross-modal alignment at three levels: input, feature, and output. Extensive experiments on multiple time-series benchmarks demonstrate that HTFA achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly improving prediction accuracy and generalization.

cs.AI↗

NLSR: Neuron-Level Safety Realignment of Large Language Models Against Harmful Fine-Tuning

The emergence of finetuning-as-a-service has revealed a new vulnerability in large language models (LLMs). A mere handful of malicious data uploaded by users can subtly manipulate the finetuning process, resulting in an alignment-broken model. Existing methods to counteract fine-tuning attacks typically require substantial computational resources. Even with parameter-efficient techniques like LoRA, gradient updates remain essential. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{N}euron-\textbf{L}evel \textbf{S}afety \textbf{R}ealignment (\textbf{NLSR}), a training-free framework that restores the safety of LLMs based on the similarity difference of safety-critical neurons before and after fine-tuning. The core of our framework is first to construct a safety reference model from an initially aligned model to amplify safety-related features in neurons. We then utilize this reference model to identify safety-critical neurons, which we prepare as patches. Finally, we selectively restore only those neurons that exhibit significant similarity differences by transplanting these prepared patches, thereby minimally altering the fine-tuned model. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant safety enhancements in fine-tuned models across multiple downstream tasks, while greatly maintaining task-level accuracy. Our findings suggest regions of some safety-critical neurons show noticeable differences after fine-tuning, which can be effectively corrected by transplanting neurons from the reference model without requiring additional training. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/xinykou/NLSR}

cs.CL↗

ACE-$M^3$: Automatic Capability Evaluator for Multimodal Medical Models

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) gain prominence in the medical field, the need for precise evaluation methods to assess their effectiveness has become critical. While benchmarks provide a reliable means to evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs, traditional metrics like ROUGE and BLEU employed for open domain evaluation only focus on token overlap and may not align with human judgment. Although human evaluation is more reliable, it is labor-intensive, costly, and not scalable. LLM-based evaluation methods have proven promising, but to date, there is still an urgent need for open-source multimodal LLM-based evaluators in the medical field. To address this issue, we introduce ACE-$M^3$, an open-sourced \textbf{A}utomatic \textbf{C}apability \textbf{E}valuator for \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{M}edical \textbf{M}odels specifically designed to assess the question answering abilities of medical MLLMs. It first utilizes a branch-merge architecture to provide both detailed analysis and a concise final score based on standard medical evaluation criteria. Subsequently, a reward token-based direct preference optimization (RTDPO) strategy is incorporated to save training time without compromising performance of our model. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our ACE-$M^3$ model\footnote{\url{https://huggingface.co/collections/AIUSRTMP/ace-m3-67593297ff391b93e3e5d068}} in evaluating the capabilities of medical MLLMs.

cs.CL↗

Typicalness-Aware Learning for Failure Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often suffer from the overconfidence issue, where incorrect predictions are made with high confidence scores, hindering the applications in critical systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Typicalness-Aware Learning (TAL) to address this issue and improve failure detection performance. We observe that, with the cross-entropy loss, model predictions are optimized to align with the corresponding labels via increasing logit magnitude or refining logit direction. However, regarding atypical samples, the image content and their labels may exhibit disparities. This discrepancy can lead to overfitting on atypical samples, ultimately resulting in the overconfidence issue that we aim to address. To tackle the problem, we have devised a metric that quantifies the typicalness of each sample, enabling the dynamic adjustment of the logit magnitude during the training process. By allowing atypical samples to be adequately fitted while preserving reliable logit direction, the problem of overconfidence can be mitigated. TAL has been extensively evaluated on benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority over existing failure detection methods. Specifically, TAL achieves a more than 5% improvement on CIFAR100 in terms of the Area Under the Risk-Coverage Curve (AURC) compared to the state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/liuyijungoon/TAL.

cs.CV↗

Generation with Dynamic Vocabulary

We introduce a new dynamic vocabulary for language models. It can involve arbitrary text spans during generation. These text spans act as basic generation bricks, akin to tokens in the traditional static vocabularies. We show that, the ability to generate multi-tokens atomically improve both generation quality and efficiency (compared to the standard language model, the MAUVE metric is increased by 25%, the latency is decreased by 20%). The dynamic vocabulary can be deployed in a plug-and-play way, thus is attractive for various downstream applications. For example, we demonstrate that dynamic vocabulary can be applied to different domains in a training-free manner. It also helps to generate reliable citations in question answering tasks (substantially enhancing citation results without compromising answer accuracy).

cs.CL↗

A Survey of Spatio-Temporal EEG data Analysis: from Models to Applications

In recent years, the field of electroencephalography (EEG) analysis has witnessed remarkable advancements, driven by the integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This survey aims to encapsulate the latest developments, focusing on emerging methods and technologies that are poised to transform our comprehension and interpretation of brain activity. We delve into self-supervised learning methods that enable the robust representation of brain signals, which are fundamental for a variety of downstream applications. We also explore emerging discriminative methods, including graph neural networks (GNN), foundation models, and large language models (LLMs)-based approaches. Furthermore, we examine generative technologies that harness EEG data to produce images or text, offering novel perspectives on brain activity visualization and interpretation. The survey provides an extensive overview of these cutting-edge techniques, their current applications, and the profound implications they hold for future research and clinical practice. The relevant literature and open-source materials have been compiled and are consistently being refreshed at \url{https://github.com/wpf535236337/LLMs4TS}

eess.SP↗

Online Mixed Discrete and Continuous Optimization: Algorithms, Regret Analysis and Applications

We study an online mixed discrete and continuous optimization problem where a decision maker interacts with an unknown environment for a number of $T$ rounds. At each round, the decision maker needs to first jointly choose a discrete and a continuous actions and then receives a reward associated with the chosen actions. The goal for the decision maker is to maximize the accumulative reward after $T$ rounds. We propose algorithms to solve the online mixed discrete and continuous optimization problem and prove that the algorithms yield sublinear regret in $T$. We show that a wide range of applications in practice fit into the framework of the online mixed discrete and continuous optimization problem, and apply the proposed algorithms to solve these applications with regret guarantees. We validate our theoretical results with numerical experiments.

math.OC↗

Complementary Information Mutual Learning for Multimodality Medical Image Segmentation

Radiologists must utilize multiple modal images for tumor segmentation and diagnosis due to the limitations of medical imaging and the diversity of tumor signals. This leads to the development of multimodal learning in segmentation. However, the redundancy among modalities creates challenges for existing subtraction-based joint learning methods, such as misjudging the importance of modalities, ignoring specific modal information, and increasing cognitive load. These thorny issues ultimately decrease segmentation accuracy and increase the risk of overfitting. This paper presents the complementary information mutual learning (CIML) framework, which can mathematically model and address the negative impact of inter-modal redundant information. CIML adopts the idea of addition and removes inter-modal redundant information through inductive bias-driven task decomposition and message passing-based redundancy filtering. CIML first decomposes the multimodal segmentation task into multiple subtasks based on expert prior knowledge, minimizing the information dependence between modalities. Furthermore, CIML introduces a scheme in which each modality can extract information from other modalities additively through message passing. To achieve non-redundancy of extracted information, the redundant filtering is transformed into complementary information learning inspired by the variational information bottleneck. The complementary information learning procedure can be efficiently solved by variational inference and cross-modal spatial attention. Numerical results from the verification task and standard benchmarks indicate that CIML efficiently removes redundant information between modalities, outperforming SOTA methods regarding validation accuracy and segmentation effect.

cs.CV↗

IAPT: Instruction-Aware Prompt Tuning for Large Language Models

Soft prompt tuning is a widely studied parameter-efficient fine-tuning method. However, it has a clear drawback: many soft tokens must be inserted into the input sequences to guarantee downstream performance. As a result, soft prompt tuning is less considered than Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) in the large language modeling (LLM) era. In this work, we propose a novel prompt tuning method, Instruction-Aware Prompt Tuning (IAPT), that requires only four soft tokens. First, we install a parameter-efficient soft prompt generator at each Transformer layer to generate idiosyncratic soft prompts for each input instruction. The generated soft prompts can be seen as a semantic summary of the input instructions and can effectively guide the output generation. Second, the soft prompt generators are modules with a bottleneck architecture consisting of a self-attention pooling operation, two linear projections, and an activation function. Pilot experiments show that prompt generators at different Transformer layers require different activation functions. Thus, we propose to learn the idiosyncratic activation functions for prompt generators automatically with the help of rational functions. We have conducted experiments on various tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that (a) our IAPT method can outperform the recent baselines with comparable tunable parameters. (b) Our IAPT method is more efficient than LoRA under the single-backbone multi-tenant setting.

cs.CL↗