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Yanyan Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yanyan Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

SpikeDet: Better Firing Patterns for Accurate and Energy-Efficient Object Detection with Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are the third generation of neural networks. They have gained widespread attention in object detection due to their low energy consumption and biological interpretability. However, existing SNN-based object detection methods suffer from local firing saturation, where adjacent neurons concurrently reach maximum firing rates, especially in object-centric regions. This abnormal neuron firing pattern reduces the feature discrimination capability and detection accuracy, while also increasing the firing rates that prevent SNNs from achieving their potential energy efficiency. To address this problem, we propose SpikeDet, a novel spiking object detector that optimizes firing patterns for accurate and energy-efficient detection. Specifically, we design a spiking backbone network, MDSNet, which effectively adjusts the membrane synaptic input distribution at each layer, achieving better neuron firing patterns during spiking feature extraction. For the neck, to better utilize and preserve these high-quality backbone features, we introduce the Spiking Multi-direction Fusion Module (SMFM), which realizes multi-direction fusion of spiking features, enhancing the multi-scale detection capability of the model. Furthermore, we propose the Local Firing Saturation Index (LFSI) to quantitatively measure local firing saturation. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our method. On the COCO 2017 dataset, it achieves 52.2% AP, outperforming previous SNN-based methods by 3.3% AP while requiring only half the energy consumption. On object detection sub-tasks, including event-based GEN1, underwater URPC 2019, low-light ExDARK, and dense scene CrowdHuman datasets, SpikeDet also achieves the best performance.

cs.CV

Gradual Domain Adaptation for Graph Learning

Existing machine learning literature lacks graph-based domain adaptation techniques capable of handling large distribution shifts, primarily due to the difficulty in simulating a coherent evolutionary path from source to target graph. To meet this challenge, we present a graph gradual domain adaptation (GGDA) framework, which constructs a compact domain sequence that minimizes information loss during adaptation. Our approach starts with an efficient generation of knowledge-preserving intermediate graphs over the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) metric. A GGDA domain sequence is then constructed upon this bridging data pool through a novel vertex-based progression, which involves selecting "close" vertices and performing adaptive domain advancement to enhance inter-domain transferability. Theoretically, our framework provides implementable upper and lower bounds for the intractable inter-domain Wasserstein distance, $W_p(μ_t,μ_{t+1})$, enabling its flexible adjustment for optimal domain formation. Extensive experiments across diverse transfer scenarios demonstrate the superior performance of our GGDA framework.

cs.LG

Adversarial Pre-Padding: Generating Evasive Network Traffic Against Transformer-Based Classifiers

To date, traffic obfuscation techniques have been widely adopted to protect network data privacy and security by obscuring the true patterns of traffic. Nevertheless, as the pre-trained models emerge, especially transformer-based classifiers, existing traffic obfuscation methods become increasingly vulnerable, as witnessed by current studies reporting the traffic classification accuracy up to 99\% or higher. To counter such high-performance transformer-based classification models, we in this paper propose a novel and effective \underline{adv}ersarial \underline{traffic}-generating approach (AdvTraffic\footnote{The code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrafficD-C461}). Our approach has two key innovations: (i) a pre-padding strategy is proposed to modify packets, which effectively overcomes the limitations of existing research against transformer-based models for network traffic classification; and (ii) a reinforcement learning model is employed to optimize network traffic perturbations, aiming to maximize adversarial effectiveness against transformer-based classification models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply adversarial perturbation techniques to defend against transformer-based traffic classifiers. Furthermore, our method can be easily deployed into practical network environments. Finally, multi-faceted experiments are conducted across several real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively undermine transformer-based classifiers, significantly reducing classification accuracy from 99\% to as low as 25.68\%.

cs.CR

Towards A Tri-View Diffusion Framework for Recommendation

Diffusion models (DMs) have recently gained significant interest for their exceptional potential in recommendation tasks. This stems primarily from their prominent capability in distilling, modeling, and generating comprehensive user preferences. However, previous work fails to examine DMs in recommendation tasks through a rigorous lens. In this paper, we first experimentally investigate the completeness of recommender models from a thermodynamic view. We reveal that existing DM-based recommender models operate by maximizing the energy, while classic recommender models operate by reducing the entropy. Based on this finding, we propose a minimalistic diffusion framework that incorporates both factors via the maximization of Helmholtz free energy. Meanwhile, to foster the optimization, our reverse process is armed with a well-designed denoiser to maintain the inherent anisotropy, which measures the user-item cross-correlation in the context of bipartite graphs. Finally, we adopt an Acceptance-Rejection Gumbel Sampling Process (AR-GSP) to prioritize the far-outnumbered unobserved interactions for model robustness. AR-GSP integrates an acceptance-rejection sampling to ensure high-quality hard negative samples for general recommendation tasks, and a timestep-dependent Gumbel Softmax to handle an adaptive sampling strategy for diffusion models. Theoretical analyses and extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework has distinct superiority over baselines in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

cs.IR

MS2Edge: Towards Energy-Efficient and Crisp Edge Detection with Multi-Scale Residual Learning in SNNs

Edge detection with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has achieved remarkable prog\-ress but faces two major challenges. First, it requires pre-training on large-scale extra data and complex designs for prior knowledge, leading to high energy consumption. Second, the predicted edges perform poorly in crispness and heavily rely on post-processing. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as third generation neural networks, feature quantization and spike-driven computation mechanisms. They inherently provide a strong prior for edge detection in an energy-efficient manner, while its quantization mechanism helps suppress texture artifact interference around true edges, improving prediction crispness. However, the resulting quantization error inevitably introduces sparse edge discontinuities, compromising further enhancement of crispness. To address these challenges, we propose MS2Edge, the first SNN-based model for edge detection. At its core, we build a novel spiking backbone named MS2ResNet that integrates multi-scale residual learning to recover missing boundary lines and generate crisp edges, while combining I-LIF neurons with Membrane-based Deformed Shortcut (MDS) to mitigate quantization errors. The model is complemented by a Spiking Multi-Scale Upsample Block (SMSUB) for detail reconstruction during upsampling and a Membrane Average Decoding (MAD) method for effective integration of edge maps across multiple time steps. Experimental results demonstrate that MS2Edge outperforms ANN-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BSDS500, NYUDv2, BIPED, PLDU, and PLDM datasets without pre-trained backbones, while maintaining ultralow energy consumption and generating crisp edge maps without post-processing.

cs.NE

Image-Plane Geometric Decoding for View-Invariant Indoor Scene Reconstruction

Volume-based indoor scene reconstruction methods offer superior generalization capability and real-time deployment potential. However, existing methods rely on multi-view pixel back-projection ray intersections as weak geometric constraints to determine spatial positions. This dependence results in reconstruction quality being heavily influenced by input view density. Performance degrades in overlapping regions and unobserved areas.To address these limitations, we reduce dependency on inter-view geometric constraints by exploiting spatial information within individual views. We propose an image-plane decoding framework with three core components: Pixel-level Confidence Encoder, Affine Compensation Module, and Image-Plane Spatial Decoder. These modules decode three-dimensional structural information encoded in images through physical imaging processes. The framework effectively preserves spatial geometric features including edges, hollow structures, and complex textures. It significantly enhances view-invariant reconstruction.Experiments on indoor scene reconstruction datasets confirm superior reconstruction stability. Our method maintains nearly identical quality when view count reduces by 40%. It achieves a coefficient of variation of 0.24%, performance retention rate of 99.7%, and maximum performance drop of 0.42%. These results demonstrate that exploiting intra-view spatial information provides a robust solution for view-limited scenarios in practical applications.

cs.CV

Denoising GER: A Noise-Robust Generative Error Correction with LLM for Speech Recognition

In recent years, large language models (LLM) have made significant progress in the task of generation error correction (GER) for automatic speech recognition (ASR) post-processing. However, in complex noisy environments, they still face challenges such as poor adaptability and low information utilization, resulting in limited effectiveness of GER. To address these issues, this paper proposes a noise-robust multi-modal GER framework (Denoising GER). The framework enhances the model's adaptability to different noisy scenarios through a noise-adaptive acoustic encoder and optimizes the integration of multi-modal information via a heterogeneous feature compensation dynamic fusion (HFCDF) mechanism, improving the LLM's utilization of multi-modal information. Additionally, reinforcement learning (RL) training strategies are introduced to enhance the model's predictive capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that Denoising GER significantly improves accuracy and robustness in noisy environments and exhibits good generalization abilities in unseen noise scenarios.

cs.SD

The Homework Wars: Exploring Emotions, Behaviours, and Conflicts in Parent-Child Homework Interactions

Parental involvement in homework is a crucial aspect of family education, but it often triggers emotional strain and conflicts. Despite growing concern over its impact on family well-being, prior research has lacked access to fine-grained, real-time dynamics of these interactions. To bridge this gap, we present a framework that leverages naturalistic parent-child interaction data and large language models (LLMs) to analyse homework conversations at scale. In a four-week in situ study with 78 Chinese families, we collected 475 hours of audio recordings and accompanying daily surveys, capturing 602 homework sessions in everyday home settings. Our LLM-based pipeline reliably extracted and categorised parental behaviours and conflict patterns from transcribed conversations, achieving high agreement with expert annotations. The analysis revealed significant emotional shifts in parents before and after homework, 18 recurring parental behaviours and seven common conflict types, with Knowledge Conflict being the most frequent. Notably, even well-intentioned behaviours were significantly positively correlated with specific conflicts. This work advances ubiquitous computing methods for studying complex family dynamics and offers empirical insights to enrich family education theory and inform more effective parenting strategies and interventions in the future.

cs.HC

Learning to utilize image second-order derivative information for crisp edge detection

Edge detection is a fundamental task in computer vision. It has made great progress under the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), some of which have achieved a beyond human-level performance. However, recent top-performing edge detection methods tend to generate thick and noisy edge lines. In this work, we solve this problem from two aspects: (1) the lack of prior knowledge regarding image edges, and (2) the issue of imbalanced pixel distribution. We propose a second-order derivative-based multi-scale contextual enhancement module (SDMCM) to help the model locate true edge pixels accurately by introducing the edge prior knowledge. We also construct a hybrid focal loss function (HFL) to alleviate the imbalanced distribution issue. In addition, we employ the conditionally parameterized convolution (CondConv) to develop a novel boundary refinement module (BRM), which can further refine the final output edge maps. In the end, we propose a U-shape network named LUS-Net which is based on the SDMCM and BRM for crisp edge detection. We perform extensive experiments on three standard benchmarks, and the experiment results illustrate that our method can predict crisp and clean edge maps and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BSDS500 dataset (ODS=0.829), NYUD-V2 dataset (ODS=0.768), and BIPED dataset (ODS=0.903).

cs.CV

Integrative Analysis of High-dimensional RCT and RWD Subject to Censoring and Hidden Confounding

In this study, we focus on estimating the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) for survival outcome. The outcome is subject to censoring and the number of covariates is high-dimensional. We utilize data from both the randomized controlled trial (RCT), considered as the gold standard, and real-world data (RWD), possibly affected by hidden confounding factors. To achieve a more efficient HTE estimate, such integrative analysis requires great insight into the data generation mechanism, particularly the accurate characterization of unmeasured confounding effects/bias. With this aim, we propose a penalized-regression-based integrative approach that allows for the simultaneous estimation of parameters, selection of variables, and identification of the existence of unmeasured confounding effects. The consistency, asymptotic normality, and efficiency gains are rigorously established for the proposed estimate. Finally, we apply the proposed method to estimate the HTE of lobar/sublobar resection on the survival of lung cancer patients. The RCT is a multicenter non-inferiority randomized phase 3 trial, and the RWD comes from a clinical oncology cancer registry in the United States. The analysis reveals that the unmeasured confounding exists and the integrative approach does enhance the efficiency for the HTE estimation.

stat.ME

Solving Energy-Independent Density for CT Metal Artifact Reduction via Neural Representation

X-ray CT often suffers from shadowing and streaking artifacts in the presence of metallic materials, which severely degrade imaging quality. Physically, the linear attenuation coefficients (LACs) of metals vary significantly with X-ray energy, causing a nonlinear beam hardening effect (BHE) in CT measurements. Reconstructing CT images from metal-corrupted measurements consequently becomes a challenging nonlinear inverse problem. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) metal artifact reduction (MAR) algorithms rely on supervised learning with numerous paired CT samples. While promising, these supervised methods often assume that the unknown LACs are energy-independent, ignoring the energy-induced BHE, which results in limited generalization. Moreover, the requirement for large datasets also limits their applications in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose Density neural representation (Diner), a novel unsupervised MAR method. Our key innovation lies in formulating MAR as an energy-independent density reconstruction problem that strictly adheres to the photon-tissue absorption physical model. This model is inherently nonlinear and complex, making it a rarely considered approach in inverse imaging problems. By introducing the water-equivalent tissues approximation and a new polychromatic model to characterize the nonlinear CT acquisition process, we directly learn the neural representation of the density map from raw measurements without using external training data. This energy-independent density reconstruction framework fundamentally resolves the nonlinear BHE, enabling superior MAR performance across a wide range of scanning scenarios. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our unsupervised Diner over popular supervised methods in terms of MAR performance and robustness.

cs.CV

Cycle Pixel Difference Network for Crisp Edge Detection

Edge detection, as a fundamental task in computer vision, has garnered increasing attention. The advent of deep learning has significantly advanced this field. However, recent deep learning-based methods generally face two significant issues: 1) reliance on large-scale pre-trained weights, and 2) generation of thick edges. We construct a U-shape encoder-decoder model named CPD-Net that successfully addresses these two issues simultaneously. In response to issue 1), we propose a novel cycle pixel difference convolution (CPDC), which effectively integrates edge prior knowledge with modern convolution operations, consequently successfully eliminating the dependence on large-scale pre-trained weights. As for issue 2), we construct a multi-scale information enhancement module (MSEM) and a dual residual connection-based (DRC) decoder to enhance the edge location ability of the model, thereby generating crisp and clean contour maps. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance on the BSDS500 dataset (ODS=0.813 and AC=0.352), NYUD-V2 (ODS=0.760 and AC=0.223), BIPED dataset (ODS=0.898 and AC=0.426), and CID (ODS=0.59). Our approach provides a novel perspective for addressing these challenges in edge detection.

cs.CV

WiNNbeta: Batch and drift correction method by white noise normalization for metabolomic studies

We developed a method called batch and drift correction method by White Noise Normalization (WiNNbeta) to correct individual metabolites for batch effects and drifts. This method tests for white noise properties to identify metabolites in need of correction and corrects them by using fine-tuned splines. To test the method performance we applied WiNNbeta to LC-MS data from our metabolomic studies and computed CVs before and after WiNNbeta correction in quality control samples.

stat.ME

An Efficient Construction Method Based on Partial Distance of Polar Codes with Reed-Solomon Kernel

Polar codes with Reed-Solomon (RS) kernel have great potential in next-generation communication systems due to their high polarization rate. In this paper, we study the polarization characteristics of RS polar codes and propose two types of partial orders (POs) for the synthesized channels, which are supported by validity proofs. By combining these partial orders, a Partial Distance-based Polarization Weight (PDPW) construction method is presented. The proposed method achieves comparable performance to Monte-Carlo simulations while requiring lower complexity. Additionally, a Minimum Polarization Weight Puncturing (MPWP) scheme for rate-matching is proposed to enhance its practical applicability in communication systems. Simulation results demonstrate that the RS polar codes based on the proposed PDPW construction outperform the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) NR polar codes in terms of standard code performance and rate-matching performance.

cs.IT

On Newton Screening

Screening and working set techniques are important approaches to reducing the size of an optimization problem. They have been widely used in accelerating first-order methods for solving large-scale sparse learning problems. In this paper, we develop a new screening method called Newton screening (NS) which is a generalized Newton method with a built-in screening mechanism. We derive an equivalent KKT system for the Lasso and utilize a generalized Newton method to solve the KKT equations. Based on this KKT system, a built-in working set with a relatively small size is first determined using the sum of primal and dual variables generated from the previous iteration, then the primal variable is updated by solving a least-squares problem on the working set and the dual variable updated based on a closed-form expression. Moreover, we consider a sequential version of Newton screening (SNS) with a warm-start strategy. We show that NS possesses an optimal convergence property in the sense that it achieves one-step local convergence. Under certain regularity conditions on the feature matrix, we show that SNS hits a solution with the same signs as the underlying true target and achieves a sharp estimation error bound with high probability. Simulation studies and real data analysis support our theoretical results and demonstrate that SNS is faster and more accurate than several state-of-the-art methods in our comparative studies.

stat.ML

Model-free screening procedure for ultrahigh-dimensional survival data based on Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion

How to select the active variables which have significant impact on the event of interest is a very important and meaningful problem in the statistical analysis of ultrahigh-dimensional data. Sure independent screening procedure has been demonstrated to be an effective method to reduce the dimensionality of data from a large scale to a relatively moderate scale. For censored survival data, the existing screening methods mainly adopt the Kaplan--Meier estimator to handle censoring, which may not perform well for scenarios which have heavy censoring rate. In this article, we propose a model-free screening procedure based on the Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC). The proposed method avoids the complication to specify an actual model from a large number of covariates. Compared with existing screening procedures, this new approach has several advantages. First, it does not involve the Kaplan--Meier estimator, thus its performance is much more robust for the cases with a heavy censoring rate. Second, the empirical estimate of HSIC is very simple as it just depends on the trace of a product of Gram matrices. In addition, the proposed procedure does not require any complicated numerical optimization, so the corresponding calculation is very simple and fast. Finally, the proposed procedure which employs the kernel method is substantially more resistant to outliers. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method has favorable exhibition over the existing methods. As an illustration, we apply the proposed method to analyze the diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) data and the ovarian cancer data.

stat.ME

Delta interferometer: A polarization sensitive interferometer

A new type of polarization sensitive interferometer is proposed, which is named as Delta interferometer due to the geometry of the simplest interferometer looks like Greek letter, Delta. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that this type of interferometer is proposed. The main difference between Delta interferometer and other existed interferometer, such as Michelson interferometer, Mach-Zehnder interferometer, Young\rq{}s double-slit interferometer, is that the two interfering paths are asymmetrical in Delta interferometer, which makes it polarization sensitive. The visibility of the first-order interference pattern observed in Delta interferometer is dependent on the polarization of the incidental light. Optical coherence theory is employed to interpret the phenomenon and a single-mode continuous-wave laser is employed to verify the theoretical predictions. The theoretical and experimental results are consistent. Delta interferometer provides a perfect tool to study the reflection of electric field in different polarizations and may find applications in polarization sensitive scenarios.

physics.optics

An efficient real-time target tracking algorithm using adaptive feature fusion

Visual-based target tracking is easily influenced by multiple factors, such as background clutter, targets fast-moving, illumination variation, object shape change, occlusion, etc. These factors influence the tracking accuracy of a target tracking task. To address this issue, an efficient real-time target tracking method based on a low-dimension adaptive feature fusion is proposed to allow us the simultaneous implementation of the high-accuracy and real-time target tracking. First, the adaptive fusion of a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) feature and color feature is utilized to improve the tracking accuracy. Second, a convolution dimension reduction method applies to the fusion between the HOG feature and color feature to reduce the over-fitting caused by their high-dimension fusions. Third, an average correlation energy estimation method is used to extract the relative confidence adaptive coefficients to ensure tracking accuracy. We experimentally confirm the proposed method on an OTB100 data set. Compared with nine popular target tracking algorithms, the proposed algorithm gains the highest tracking accuracy and success tracking rate. Compared with the traditional Sum of Template and Pixel-wise LEarners (STAPLE) algorithm, the proposed algorithm can obtain a higher success rate and accuracy, improving by 0.023 and 0.019, respectively. The experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can reach the real-time target tracking with 50 fps. The proposed method paves a more promising way for real-time target tracking tasks under a complex environment, such as appearance deformation, illumination change, motion blur, background, similarity, scale change, and occlusion.

cs.CV