arXiv subjects

Yan Qiao

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Qiao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

STaT: Resolving Shape Distortion in Non-Stationary Time Series via Tri-Modal Synergy

Recent research in time series forecasting frequently investigates the integration of textual and visual modalities with numerical models to better navigate non-stationary environments. Despite delivering solid numerical results, existing multi-modal approaches usually encounter a dilemma: prioritizing the minimization of average errors can result in excessively smooth forecasts that overlook essential fluctuations. To resolve this limitation, we introduce STaT, an innovative multimodal architecture for Symbolic-Temporal-Textual Alignment, which seamlessly unites three synergistic modalities. Specifically, the symbolic modality converts continuous time series into discrete tokens, facilitating the accurate identification of structural patterns and turning points; the temporal modality extracts inherent sequential dependencies; and the textual modality leverages domain semantics to steer the macroscopic forecasting trends. Comprehensive evaluations on eight real-world benchmarks indicate that STaT delivers exceptional performance, enhancing conventional magnitude indicators by up to 8.9% while simultaneously decreasing shape distortion by up to 8.5%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

L2IR: Revealing Latent Intent in Graph Fraud Detection

Graph fraud detection has long depended on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to propagate and aggregate information across relational data. A critical obstacle in practice, however, is that fraudsters frequently disguise themselves by forging numerous connections with benign users, causing fraud signals to be progressively diluted during neighborhood aggregation and undermining detection reliability. While recent efforts have used Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide rich semantic cues for fraud detection, the underlying intent behind suspicious connections remains insufficiently explored. Compounding this issue, the scarcity of annotated fraud samples makes it difficult to train detectors that remain robust under heavy camouflage. To address these gaps, we propose L2IR, an LLM-driven Latent Intent Revealing framework for graph fraud detection. By uncovering latent intent from both user behaviors and suspicious connections, L2IR extracts intent-aware representations from raw behavioral traces and reasons about the true purpose behind individual connections, effectively distinguishing supportive links from misleading ones. It further incorporates adaptive self-training to enhance robustness under limited supervision. Evaluations on two real-world datasets characterized by pervasive camouflage demonstrate that L2IR surpasses strong baselines and can function as a plug-in enhancement for a range of GNN-based detectors, improving AUPRC by up to 8.27%.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

NORM-Nav: Zero-Shot Mobile Robot Navigation with Natural Language Behavioral Constraints

Mobile robots operating in human-centered environments must generate not only collision-free paths but also trajectories that follow local behavioral conventions. Conventional costmap-based navigation emphasizes geometric feasibility and often overlooks such requirements, which can result in socially inappropriate behaviors. This paper presents NORM-Nav, a zero-shot framework that integrates natural language behavioral constraints into costmap-based planning. An LLM parses each instruction into structured constraints and grounds them using real-time vision--LiDAR perception. These constraints are encoded as multi-layer costmaps that represent geometric, semantic, directional, and velocity cues and are directly compatible with standard grid-based planners. Simulation and real-world experiments indicate that NORM-Nav improves task success rates and produces trajectories closer to human references than representative baselines. The project website is available at https://ei-nav.github.io/NORM-Nav.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Edge-AI-Driven Learning-to-Rank for Decentralized Task Allocation in Circular Smart Manufacturing

Task allocation in smart manufacturing systems must operate under decentralized decision-making, dynamic workloads, and shared-resource constraints. In circular manufacturing settings, these challenges are further intensified because tasks compete for reusable, capacity-constrained assets, and machine selection also might affect processing energy. Although learning-based approaches have been explored for task allocation, improvements in predictive modeling do not necessarily translate into better allocation outcomes under decentralized negotiation. This work proposes an Edge-AI-driven decentralized task-allocation framework. We develop lightweight decision intelligence deployed at the machine level. It is developed progressively: first, a resource-aware heuristic establishes the decentralized bidding structure; a regression-based Edge-AI formulation then examines learned local bid approximation, and a compact autoencoder-regularized pairwise ranking model finally provides a learned correction to the analytical bid ordering. Each machine evaluates incoming tasks by using its processing capability, queue state, energy characteristics, and a compact signal representing contention over the reusable shared production asset. The framework is assessed using discrete-event simulation in scenarios characterized by high load and dependence on shared resources. Compared to the heuristic, the proposed ranking method increases completed tasks, reduces average tardiness, and lowers the deadline-miss rate, with statistically significant paired differences. Mean energy per completed task is also reduced. The results indicate that effective learning-assisted allocation depends not only on approximating local decision quantities, but also on shaping the relative preferences that determine negotiation outcomes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

RABC-Net: Reliability-Aware Annotation-Free Skin Lesion Segmentation for Low-Resource Dermoscopy

Pixel-level annotation is costly in low-resource dermoscopy. We present RABC-Net, a reliability-aware annotation-free segmentation system that combines pseudo-label reliability learning, restricted target-domain adaptation, and Reliability-Adaptive Boundary Calibration (RABC). The system decouples reliability learning from deployment: uncertainty-aware pseudo-label interaction shapes robust representations during training, while the image-only inference path is preserved and RABC performs local logit-space calibration from boundary confidence, uncertainty, and foreground probability. No manual masks are used for training or target-domain adaptation; validation labels, when available, are used only for final operating-point selection. Across ISIC-2017, ISIC-2018, and PH2, RABC-Net achieves macro-average DICE/JAC of 86.58\%/79.47\% and consistent matched-protocol results. Controlled within-study analyses show that RABC provides localized gains over nonlearned boundary correction, while the overall result comes from the full reliability-aware system. Adaptation updates only 3.50\% of model parameters, image-only inference runs at 87.4 FPS, and the selected operating points use $\sigma=0$ on all three datasets, indicating that learned calibration avoids extra smoothing at deployment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

On the (Generative) Linear Sketching Problem

Sketch techniques have been extensively studied in recent years and are especially well-suited to data streaming scenarios, where the sketch summary is updated quickly and compactly. However, it is challenging to recover the current state from these summaries in a way that is accurate, fast, and real. In this paper, we seek a solution that reconciles this tension, aiming for near-perfect recovery with lightweight computational procedures. Focusing on linear sketching problems of the form $\boldsymbol{\Phi}f \rightarrow f$, our study proceeds in three stages. First, we dissect existing techniques and show the root cause of the sketching dilemma: an orthogonal information loss. Second, we examine how generative priors can be leveraged to bridge the information gap. Third, we propose FLORE, a novel generative sketching framework that embraces these analyses to achieve the best of all worlds. More importantly, FLORE can be trained without access to ground-truth data. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate FLORE's ability to provide high-quality recovery, and support summary with low computing overhead, outperforming previous methods by up to 1000 times in error reduction and 100 times in processing speed compared to learning-based solutions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Divide, Harmonize, Then Conquer It: Shooting Multi-Commodity Flow Problems with Multimodal Language Models

The multi-commodity flow (MCF) problem is a fundamental topic in network flow and combinatorial optimization, with broad applications in transportation, communication, and logistics, etc. Nowadays, the rapid expansion of allocation systems has posed challenges for existing optimization engines in balancing optimality and tractability. In this paper, we present Pram, the first ML-based method that leverages the reasoning power of multimodal language models (MLMs) for addressing the trade-off dilemma -- a great need of service providers. As part of our proposal, Pram (i) quickly computes high-quality allocations by dividing the original problem into local subproblems, which are then resolved by an MLM-powered "agent", and (ii) ensures global consistency by harmonizing these subproblems via a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm. Theoretically, we show that Pram, which learns to perform gradient descent in context, provably converges to the optimum within the family of MCF problems. Empirically, on real-world datasets and public topologies, Pram achieves performance comparable to, and in some cases even surpassing, linear programming solvers (very close to the optimal solution), and substantially lower runtimes (1 to 2 orders of magnitude faster). Moreover, Pram exhibits strong robustness (<10\% performance degradation under link failures or flow bursts), demonstrating MLM's generalization ability to unforeseen events. Pram is objective-agnostic and seamlessly integrates with mainstream allocation systems, providing a practical and scalable solution for future networks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

LMTE: Putting the "Reasoning" into WAN Traffic Engineering with Language Models

The rapid expansion of modern wide-area networks (WANs) has made traffic engineering (TE) increasingly challenging, as traditional solvers struggle to keep pace. Although existing offline ML-driven approaches accelerate TE optimization with deep neural networks (DNNs), they often lack sufficient expressiveness and generalization on unseen traffic patterns or topologies, limiting their practicality. Inspired by the success of large language models (LMs), for the first time, this paper investigates their potential as general-purpose traffic planners. Our contributions are two-fold: (i) Theoretically, we show that pre-trained LMs can simulate the sequential decision processes underlying TE and, crucially, exhibit parallel reasoning capabilities, making them well-suited for the task; (ii) Practically, we present LMTE, a novel LM-driven TE framework that embraces these insights through efficient multimodal alignment and lightweight configuration generation, all while preserving the model's original abilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fold matches top-tier performance on five datasets, achieving up to 15\% better maximum link utilization (MLU) and consistently lower performance degradation across diverse scenarios, e.g., less than 5\% with high traffic dynamics and link failures. Moreover, it achieves 10 to 100 times speedups over traditional TE solvers. To aid future works, our codebase is available at https://github.com/Y-debug-sys/LMTE.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

A Multi-objective Optimization Approach for Feature Selection in Gentelligent Systems

The integration of advanced technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), into manufacturing processes is attracting significant attention, paving the way for the development of intelligent systems that enhance efficiency and automation. This paper uses the term "Gentelligent system" to refer to systems that incorporate inherent component information (akin to genes in bioinformatics-where manufacturing operations are likened to chromosomes in this study) and automated mechanisms. By implementing reliable fault detection methods, manufacturers can achieve several benefits, including improved product quality, increased yield, and reduced production costs. To support these objectives, we propose a hybrid framework with a dominance-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. This mechanism enables simultaneous optimization of feature selection and classification performance by exploring Pareto-optimal solutions in a single run. This solution helps monitor various manufacturing operations, addressing a range of conflicting objectives that need to be minimized together. Manufacturers can leverage such predictive methods and better adapt to emerging trends. To strengthen the validation of our model, we incorporate two real-world datasets from different industrial domains. The results on both datasets demonstrate the generalizability and effectiveness of our approach.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2025

Joint Optimization-based Targetless Extrinsic Calibration for Multiple LiDARs and GNSS-Aided INS of Ground Vehicles

Accurate extrinsic calibration between multiple LiDAR sensors and a GNSS-aided inertial navigation system (GINS) is essential for achieving reliable sensor fusion in intelligent mining environments. Such calibration enables vehicle-road collaboration by aligning perception data from vehicle-mounted sensors to a unified global reference frame. However, existing methods often depend on artificial targets, overlapping fields of view, or precise trajectory estimation, which are assumptions that may not hold in practice. Moreover, the planar motion of mining vehicles leads to observability issues that degrade calibration performance. This paper presents a targetless extrinsic calibration method that aligns multiple onboard LiDAR sensors to the GINS coordinate system without requiring overlapping sensor views or external targets. The proposed approach introduces an observation model based on the known installation height of the GINS unit to constrain unobservable calibration parameters under planar motion. A joint optimization framework is developed to refine both the extrinsic parameters and GINS trajectory by integrating multiple constraints derived from geometric correspondences and motion consistency. The proposed method is applicable to heterogeneous LiDAR configurations, including both mechanical and solid-state sensors. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and practical applicability of the approach under diverse sensor setups.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

OpenBench: A New Benchmark and Baseline for Semantic Navigation in Smart Logistics

The increasing demand for efficient last-mile delivery in smart logistics underscores the role of autonomous robots in enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs. Traditional navigation methods, which depend on high-precision maps, are resource-intensive, while learning-based approaches often struggle with generalization in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, this work proposes the Openstreetmap-enhanced oPen-air sEmantic Navigation (OPEN) system that combines foundation models with classic algorithms for scalable outdoor navigation. The system uses off-the-shelf OpenStreetMap (OSM) for flexible map representation, thereby eliminating the need for extensive pre-mapping efforts. It also employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend delivery instructions and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for global localization, map updates, and house number recognition. To compensate the limitations of existing benchmarks that are inadequate for assessing last-mile delivery, this work introduces a new benchmark specifically designed for outdoor navigation in residential areas, reflecting the real-world challenges faced by autonomous delivery systems. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate the proposed system's efficacy in enhancing navigation efficiency and reliability. To facilitate further research, our code and benchmark are publicly available.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Learning-based Sketches for Frequency Estimation in Data Streams without Ground Truth

Estimating the frequency of items on the high-volume, fast data stream has been extensively studied in many areas, such as database and network measurement. Traditional sketches provide only coarse estimates under strict memory constraints. Although some learning-augmented methods have emerged recently, they typically rely on offline training with real frequencies or/and labels, which are often unavailable. Moreover, these methods suffer from slow update speeds, limiting their suitability for real-time processing despite offering only marginal accuracy improvements. To overcome these challenges, we propose UCL-sketch, a practical learning-based paradigm for per-key frequency estimation. Our design introduces two key innovations: (i) an online training mechanism based on equivalent learning that requires no ground truth (GT), and (ii) a highly scalable architecture leveraging logically structured estimation buckets to scale to real-world data stream. The UCL-sketch, which utilizes compressive sensing (CS), converges to an estimator that provably yields a error bound far lower than that of prior works, without sacrificing the speed of processing. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previously proposed approaches regarding per-key accuracy and distribution. Notably, under extremely tight memory budgets, its quality almost matches that of an (infeasible) omniscient oracle. Moreover, compared to the existing equation-based sketch, UCL-sketch achieves an average decoding speedup of nearly 500 times. To help further research and development, our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Y-debug-sys/UCL-sketch.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Diffusion Models Meet Network Management: Improving Traffic Matrix Analysis with Diffusion-based Approach

Due to network operation and maintenance relying heavily on network traffic monitoring, traffic matrix analysis has been one of the most crucial issues for network management related tasks. However, it is challenging to reliably obtain the precise measurement in computer networks because of the high measurement cost, and the unavoidable transmission loss. Although some methods proposed in recent years allowed estimating network traffic from partial flow-level or link-level measurements, they often perform poorly for traffic matrix estimation nowadays. Despite strong assumptions like low-rank structure and the prior distribution, existing techniques are usually task-specific and tend to be significantly worse as modern network communication is extremely complicated and dynamic. To address the dilemma, this paper proposed a diffusion-based traffic matrix analysis framework named Diffusion-TM, which leverages problem-agnostic diffusion to notably elevate the estimation performance in both traffic distribution and accuracy. The novel framework not only takes advantage of the powerful generative ability of diffusion models to produce realistic network traffic, but also leverages the denoising process to unbiasedly estimate all end-to-end traffic in a plug-and-play manner under theoretical guarantee. Moreover, taking into account that compiling an intact traffic dataset is usually infeasible, we also propose a two-stage training scheme to make our framework be insensitive to missing values in the dataset. With extensive experiments with real-world datasets, we illustrate the effectiveness of Diffusion-TM on several tasks. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that our method can obtain promising results even with $5\%$ known values left in the datasets.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Traffic Matrix Estimation based on Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model

The traffic matrix estimation (TME) problem has been widely researched for decades of years. Recent progresses in deep generative models offer new opportunities to tackle TME problems in a more advanced way. In this paper, we leverage the powerful ability of denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) on distribution learning, and for the first time adopt DDPM to address the TME problem. To ensure a good performance of DDPM on learning the distributions of TMs, we design a preprocessing module to reduce the dimensions of TMs while keeping the data variety of each OD flow. To improve the estimation accuracy, we parameterize the noise factors in DDPM and transform the TME problem into a gradient-descent optimization problem. Finally, we compared our method with the state-of-the-art TME methods using two real-world TM datasets, the experimental results strongly demonstrate the superiority of our method on both TM synthesis and TM estimation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Diffusion-TS: Interpretable Diffusion for General Time Series Generation

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) are becoming the leading paradigm for generative models. It has recently shown breakthroughs in audio synthesis, time series imputation and forecasting. In this paper, we propose Diffusion-TS, a novel diffusion-based framework that generates multivariate time series samples of high quality by using an encoder-decoder transformer with disentangled temporal representations, in which the decomposition technique guides Diffusion-TS to capture the semantic meaning of time series while transformers mine detailed sequential information from the noisy model input. Different from existing diffusion-based approaches, we train the model to directly reconstruct the sample instead of the noise in each diffusion step, combining a Fourier-based loss term. Diffusion-TS is expected to generate time series satisfying both interpretablity and realness. In addition, it is shown that the proposed Diffusion-TS can be easily extended to conditional generation tasks, such as forecasting and imputation, without any model changes. This also motivates us to further explore the performance of Diffusion-TS under irregular settings. Finally, through qualitative and quantitative experiments, results show that Diffusion-TS achieves the state-of-the-art results on various realistic analyses of time series.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

AI-based Modeling and Data-driven Evaluation for Smart Manufacturing Processes

Smart Manufacturing refers to optimization techniques that are implemented in production operations by utilizing advanced analytics approaches. With the widespread increase in deploying Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors in manufacturing processes, there is a progressive need for optimal and effective approaches to data management. Embracing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to take advantage of manufacturing data can lead to efficient and intelligent automation. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis based on Evolutionary Computing and Deep Learning algorithms toward making semiconductor manufacturing smart. We propose a dynamic algorithm for gaining useful insights about semiconductor manufacturing processes and to address various challenges. We elaborate on the utilization of a Genetic Algorithm and Neural Network to propose an intelligent feature selection algorithm. Our objective is to provide an advanced solution for controlling manufacturing processes and to gain perspective on various dimensions that enable manufacturers to access effective predictive technologies.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

A security steganography scheme based on hdr image

It is widely recognized that the image format is crucial to steganography for that each individual format has its unique properities. Nowadays, the most famous approach of digital image steganography is to combine a well-defined distortion function with efficient practical codes such as STC. And numerous researches are concentrated on spatial domain and jpeg domain. However, whether in spatial domain or jpeg domain, high payload (e.g., 0.5 bit per pixel) is not secure enough. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive steganography scheme based on 32-bit HDR (High dynamic range) format and Norm IEEE 754. Experiments show that the steganographic method can achieve satisfactory security under payload from 0.3bpp to 0.5bpp.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Nucleation, growth, and dissolution of Ag nanostructures formed in nanotubular J-aggregates of amphiphilic cyanine dyes

The synthesis of silver nanowires in solution phase is of great interest because of their applicability for fabrication of plasmonic devices. Silver nanowires with diameters of 6.5 nm and length exceeding microns are synthesized in aqueous solution by reduction of silver ions within the nanotubular J-aggregates of an amphiphilic cyanine dye. The time scale of the growth of the nanowires is of the order of hours and days which provides the unique possibility to investigate the nucleation, growth, and dissolution of the nanowires by direct imaging using transmission electron microscopy. It is found that the initial nucleation and formation of seeds of silver nanostructures occurs randomly at the outer surface of the aggregates or within the hollow tube. The growth of the seeds within the inner void of the tubular structures to nanowires indicates transport of silver atoms, ions, or clusters through the bilayer wall of the molecular aggregates. This permeability of the aggregates for silver can be utilized to dissolve the preformed silver wires by oxidative etching using Cl- ions from dissolved NaCl. Although the nanosystem presented here is a conceptual rather simple organic-inorganic hybrid, it exhibits growth and dissolution phenomena not expected for a macroscopic system. These mechanisms are of general importance for both, the growth and the usage of such metal nanowires, e.g. for plasmonic applications.

physics.chem-ph↗