arXiv subjects

Yifan Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Yifan Hu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Human-Data Interaction, Exploration, and Visualization in the AI Era: Challenges and Opportunities

The rapid advancement of AI is transforming human-centered systems, with profound implications for human-AI interaction, human-data interaction, and visual analytics. In the AI era, data analysis increasingly involves large-scale, heterogeneous, and multimodal data that is predominantly unstructured, as well as foundation models such as LLMs and VLMs, which introduce additional uncertainty into analytical processes. These shifts expose persistent challenges for human-data interactive systems, including perceptually misaligned latency, scalability constraints, limitations of existing interaction and exploration paradigms, and growing uncertainty regarding the reliability and interpretability of AI-generated insights. Responding to these challenges requires moving beyond conventional efficiency and scalability metrics, redefining the roles of humans and machines in analytical workflows, and incorporating cognitive, perceptual, and design principles into every level of the human-data interaction stack. This paper investigates the challenges introduced by recent advances in AI and examines how these developments are reshaping the ways users engage with data, while outlining limitations and open research directions for building human-centered AI systems for interactive data analysis in the AI era.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

Revisiting Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Missing Values

Missing values are common in real-world time series, and multivariate time series forecasting with missing values (MTSF-M) has become a crucial area of research for ensuring reliable predictions. To address the challenge of missing data, current approaches have developed an imputation-then-prediction framework that uses imputation modules to fill in missing values, followed by forecasting on the imputed data. However, this framework overlooks a critical issue: there is no ground truth for the missing values, making the imputation process susceptible to errors that can degrade prediction accuracy. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study and reveal that imputation without direct supervision can corrupt the underlying data distribution and actively degrade prediction accuracy. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift that moves away from imputation and directly predicts from the partially observed time series. We introduce Consistency-Regularized Information Bottleneck (CRIB), a novel framework built on the Information Bottleneck principle. CRIB combines a unified-variate attention mechanism with a consistency regularization scheme to learn robust representations that filter out noise introduced by missing values while preserving essential predictive signals. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CRIB, which predicts accurately even under high missing rates. Our code is available in https://github.com/Muyiiiii/CRIB.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Statistical Analysis of Conditional Group Distributionally Robust Optimization with Cross-Entropy Loss

In multi-source learning with discrete labels, distributional heterogeneity across domains poses a central challenge to developing predictive models that transfer reliably to unseen domains. We study multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation, where labeled data are available from multiple source domains and only unlabeled data are observed from the target domain. To address potential distribution shifts, we propose a novel Conditional Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (CG-DRO) framework that learns a classifier by minimizing the worst-case cross-entropy loss over the convex combinations of the conditional outcome distributions from sources domains. We develop an efficient Mirror Prox algorithm for solving the minimax problem and employ a double machine learning procedure to estimate the risk function, ensuring that errors in nuisance estimation contribute only at higher-order rates. We establish fast statistical convergence rates for the empirical CG-DRO estimator by constructing two surrogate minimax optimization problems that serve as theoretical bridges. A distinguishing challenge for CG-DRO is the emergence of nonstandard asymptotics: the empirical CG-DRO estimator may fail to converge to a standard limiting distribution due to boundary effects and system instability. To address this, we introduce a perturbation-based inference procedure that enables uniformly valid inference, including confidence interval construction and hypothesis testing.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

Erosion Attack for Adversarial Training to Enhance Semantic Segmentation Robustness

Existing segmentation models exhibit significant vulnerability to adversarial attacks.To improve robustness, adversarial training incorporates adversarial examples into model training. However, existing attack methods consider only global semantic information and ignore contextual semantic relationships within the samples, limiting the effectiveness of adversarial training. To address this issue, we propose EroSeg-AT, a vulnerability-aware adversarial training framework that leverages EroSeg to generate adversarial examples. EroSeg first selects sensitive pixels based on pixel-level confidence and then progressively propagates perturbations to higher-confidence pixels, effectively disrupting the semantic consistency of the samples. Experimental results show that, compared to existing methods, our approach significantly improves attack effectiveness and enhances model robustness under adversarial training.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Causal Invariance Learning via Efficient Nonconvex Optimization

Identifying the causal relationship among variables from observational data is an important yet challenging task. This work focuses on identifying the direct causes of an outcome and estimating their magnitude, i.e., learning the causal outcome model. Data from multiple environments provide valuable opportunities to uncover causality by exploiting the invariance principle that the causal outcome model holds across heterogeneous environments. Based on the invariance principle, we propose the Negative Weighted Distributionally Robust Optimization (NegDRO) framework to learn an invariant prediction model. NegDRO minimizes the worst-case combination of risks across multiple environments and enforces invariance by allowing potential negative weights. Under the additive interventions regime, we establish three major contributions: (i) On the statistical side, we provide sufficient and nearly necessary identification conditions under which the invariant prediction model coincides with the causal outcome model; (ii) On the optimization side, despite the nonconvexity of NegDRO, we establish its benign optimization landscape, where all stationary points lie close to the true causal outcome model; (iii) On the computational side, we develop a gradient-based algorithm that provably converges to the causal outcome model, with non-asymptotic convergence rates in both sample size and gradient-descent iterations. In particular, our method avoids exhaustive combinatorial searches over exponentially many subsets of covariates found in the literature, ensuring scalability even when the dimension of the covariates is large. To our knowledge, this is the first causal invariance learning method that finds the approximate global optimality for a nonconvex optimization problem efficiently.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

CCAD: Compressed Global Feature Conditioned Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection holds considerable industrial significance, especially in scenarios with limited anomalous data. Currently, reconstruction-based and unsupervised representation-based approaches are the primary focus. However, unsupervised representation-based methods struggle to extract robust features under domain shift, whereas reconstruction-based methods often suffer from low training efficiency and performance degradation due to insufficient constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method named Compressed Global Feature Conditioned Anomaly Detection (CCAD). CCAD synergizes the strengths of both paradigms by adapting global features as a new modality condition for the reconstruction model. Furthermore, we design an adaptive compression mechanism to enhance both generalization and training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of AUC while achieving faster convergence. In addition, we contribute a reorganized and re-annotated version of the DAGM 2007 dataset with new annotations to further validate our method's effectiveness. The code for reproducing main results is available at https://github.com/chloeqxq/CCAD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Large lepton asymmetry from axion inflation and helium abundance hinted by ACT

The generation of helical magnetic fields and the associated chiral asymmetry via the chiral anomaly is a generic feature in pseudoscalar inflation. In the presence of a Chern--Simons coupling between the inflaton and a U(1) gauge field, the homogeneous evolution of the inflaton induces a tachyonic instability in one circular polarization of the gauge field, resulting in the production of helical magnetic fields. In this work, we show that, in the case of a gauged lepton flavor symmetry, U(1)$_{L_i-L_j}$, this mechanism can lead to the generation of a sizable lepton asymmetry. In a simple setup, however, the resulting lepton asymmetry is typically too small to have an observational consequences, even setting aside constraints from baryon overproduction via sphaleron processes, due to the backreaction of the produced gauge fields and fermions on the inflationary dynamics. We demonstrate that this limitation can be overcome by implementing a mechanism to suppress fermion production during inflation. As a result, a much larger lepton asymmetry can be generated from the subsequent decay of magnetic helicity. Remarkably, for the gauged U(1)$_{L_μ-L_τ}$ symmetry, the generated asymmetry can be sufficiently large to suppress the primordial helium abundance, as may be inferred from recent cosmic microwave background observations by ACT.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Large language models require a new form of oversight: capability-based monitoring

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in healthcare has been accompanied by scrutiny of their oversight. Existing monitoring approaches, inherited from traditional machine learning (ML), are task-based and founded on assumed performance degradation arising from dataset drift. In contrast, with LLMs, inevitable model degradation due to changes in populations compared to the training dataset cannot be assumed, because LLMs were not trained for any specific task in any given population. We therefore propose a new organizing principle guiding generalist LLM monitoring that is scalable and grounded in how these models are developed and used in practice: capability-based monitoring. Capability-based monitoring is motivated by the fact that LLMs are generalist systems whose overlapping internal capabilities are reused across numerous downstream tasks. Instead of evaluating each downstream task independently, this approach organizes monitoring around shared model capabilities, such as summarization, reasoning, translation, or safety guardrails, in order to enable cross-task detection of systemic weaknesses, long-tail errors, and emergent behaviors that task-based monitoring may miss. We describe considerations for developers, organizational leaders, and professional societies for implementing a capability-based monitoring approach. Ultimately, capability-based monitoring will provide a scalable foundation for safe, adaptive, and collaborative monitoring of LLMs and future generalist artificial intelligence models in healthcare.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Hard X-ray Emission in AU Mic Flares: A Minor Contributor to Planetary Atmospheric Escape

Stellar flares are potent drivers of atmospheric evolution on orbiting exoplanets, primarily through extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and soft X-ray (XUV) irradiation. However, the contribution of hard X-rays (HXR; 3--20 keV)-which penetrate deeper into planetary atmospheres-to mass loss and particle acceleration has remained poorly understood. To quantify the HXR share of the total radiative budget, we conducted quasi-simultaneous observations of the active M-dwarf AU Mic using NuSTAR, Swift, and the Einstein Probe. Our analysis detected two major flares, and we performed an empirical check by deriving a quiescent-phase soft X-ray (SXR; 0.3--3 keV)-HXR relation and then applying it to the flares. By combining this with the quiescent coronal SXR-EUV relations conversion of J. Sanz-Forcada et al. (2011), we computed the total high-energy flux (EUV + SXR + HXR) and assessed the relative role of HXR in atmospheric escape. We find that HXR accounts for only a few percent of the total radiative energy budget during both quiescent and flaring states. While a high-energy spectral tail is detected in the second flare, time-resolved spectroscopy reveals a dominant chromospheric-evaporation signature, indicating that the flare energetics are primarily thermal.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

Vanish into Thin Air: Cross-prompt Universal Adversarial Attacks for SAM2

Recent studies reveal the vulnerability of the image segmentation foundation model SAM to adversarial examples. Its successor, SAM2, has attracted significant attention due to its strong generalization capability in video segmentation. However, its robustness remains unexplored, and it is unclear whether existing attacks on SAM can be directly transferred to SAM2. In this paper, we first analyze the performance gap of existing attacks between SAM and SAM2 and highlight two key challenges arising from their architectural differences: directional guidance from the prompt and semantic entanglement across consecutive frames. To address these issues, we propose UAP-SAM2, the first cross-prompt universal adversarial attack against SAM2 driven by dual semantic deviation. For cross-prompt transferability, we begin by designing a target-scanning strategy that divides each frame into k regions, each randomly assigned a prompt, to reduce prompt dependency during optimization. For effectiveness, we design a dual semantic deviation framework that optimizes a UAP by distorting the semantics within the current frame and disrupting the semantic consistency across consecutive frames. Extensive experiments on six datasets across two segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for SAM2. The comparative results show that UAP-SAM2 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) attacks by a large margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Amorphous sets and dual Dedekind finiteness

A set $A$ is dually Dedekind finite if every surjection from $A$ onto $A$ is injective; otherwise, $A$ is dually Dedekind infinite. An amorphous set is an infinite set that cannot be partitioned into two infinite subsets. A strictly amorphous set is an amorphous set in which every partition has only finitely many non-singleton blocks. It is proved consistent with $\mathsf{ZF}$ (i.e., the Zermelo--Fraenkel set theory without the axiom of choice) that there exists an amorphous set $A$ whose power set $\mathscr{P}(A)$ is dually Dedekind infinite, which gives a negative solution to a question proposed by Truss [J. Truss, Fund. Math. 84, 187--208 (1974)]. Nevertheless, we prove in $\mathsf{ZF}$ that, for all strictly amorphous sets $A$ and all natural numbers $n$, $\mathscr{P}(A)^n$ is dually Dedekind finite, which generalizes a result of Goldstern.

math.LO↗

arXiv2025

SegTrans: Transferable Adversarial Examples for Segmentation Models

Segmentation models exhibit significant vulnerability to adversarial examples in white-box settings, but existing adversarial attack methods often show poor transferability across different segmentation models. While some researchers have explored transfer-based adversarial attack (i.e., transfer attack) methods for segmentation models, the complex contextual dependencies within these models and the feature distribution gaps between surrogate and target models result in unsatisfactory transfer success rates. To address these issues, we propose SegTrans, a novel transfer attack framework that divides the input sample into multiple local regions and remaps their semantic information to generate diverse enhanced samples. These enhanced samples replace the original ones for perturbation optimization, thereby improving the transferability of adversarial examples across different segmentation models. Unlike existing methods, SegTrans only retains local semantic information from the original input, rather than using global semantic information to optimize perturbations. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, PASCAL VOC and Cityscapes, four different segmentation models, and three backbone networks show that SegTrans significantly improves adversarial transfer success rates without introducing additional computational overhead. Compared to the current state-of-the-art methods, SegTrans achieves an average increase of 8.55% in transfer attack success rate and improves computational efficiency by more than 100%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

IndexNet: Timestamp and Variable-Aware Modeling for Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) plays a vital role in a wide range of real-world applications, such as weather prediction and traffic flow forecasting. Although recent advances have significantly improved the modeling of temporal dynamics and inter-variable dependencies, most existing methods overlook index-related descriptive information, such as timestamps and variable indices, which carry rich contextual semantics. To unlock the potential of such information and take advantage of the lightweight and powerful periodic capture ability of MLP-based architectures, we propose IndexNet, an MLP-based framework augmented with an Index Embedding (IE) module. The IE module consists of two key components: Timestamp Embedding (TE) and Channel Embedding (CE). Specifically, TE transforms timestamps into embedding vectors and injects them into the input sequence, thereby improving the model's ability to capture long-term complex periodic patterns. In parallel, CE assigns each variable a unique and trainable identity embedding based on its index, allowing the model to explicitly distinguish between heterogeneous variables and avoid homogenized predictions when input sequences seem close. Extensive experiments on 12 diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that IndexNet achieves comparable performance across mainstream baselines, validating the effectiveness of our temporally and variably aware design. Moreover, plug-and-play experiments and visualization analyses further reveal that IndexNet exhibits strong generality and interpretability, two aspects that remain underexplored in current MTSF research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Unlocking the Essence of Beauty: Advanced Aesthetic Reasoning with Relative-Absolute Policy Optimization

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are well suited to image aesthetic assessment, as they can capture high-level aesthetic features leveraging their cross-modal understanding capacity. However, the scarcity of multimodal aesthetic reasoning data and the inherently subjective nature of aesthetic judgment make it difficult for MLLMs to generate accurate aesthetic judgments with interpretable rationales. To this end, we propose Aes-R1, a comprehensive aesthetic reasoning framework with reinforcement learning (RL). Concretely, Aes-R1 integrates a pipeline, AesCoT, to construct and filter high-quality chain-of-thought aesthetic reasoning data used for cold-start. After teaching the model to generate structured explanations prior to scoring, we then employ the Relative-Absolute Policy Optimization (RAPO), a novel RL algorithm that jointly optimizes absolute score regression and relative ranking order, improving both per-image accuracy and cross-image preference judgments. Aes-R1 enables MLLMs to generate grounded explanations alongside faithful scores, thereby enhancing aesthetic scoring and reasoning in a unified framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Aes-R1 improves the backbone's average PLCC/SRCC by 47.9%/34.8%, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines of similar size. More ablation studies validate Aes-R1's robust generalization under limited supervision and in out-of-distribution scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MCI-GRU: Stock Prediction Model Based on Multi-Head Cross-Attention and Improved GRU

As financial markets grow increasingly complex in the big data era, accurate stock prediction has become more critical. Traditional time series models, such as GRUs, have been widely used but often struggle to capture the intricate nonlinear dynamics of markets, particularly in the flexible selection and effective utilization of key historical information. Recently, methods like Graph Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning have shown promise in stock prediction but require high data quality and quantity, and they tend to exhibit instability when dealing with data sparsity and noise. Moreover, the training and inference processes for these models are typically complex and computationally expensive, limiting their broad deployment in practical applications. Existing approaches also generally struggle to capture unobservable latent market states effectively, such as market sentiment and expectations, microstructural factors, and participant behavior patterns, leading to an inadequate understanding of market dynamics and subsequently impact prediction accuracy. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a stock prediction model, MCI-GRU, based on a multi-head cross-attention mechanism and an improved GRU. First, we enhance the GRU model by replacing the reset gate with an attention mechanism, thereby increasing the model's flexibility in selecting and utilizing historical information. Second, we design a multi-head cross-attention mechanism for learning unobservable latent market state representations, which are further enriched through interactions with both temporal features and cross-sectional features. Finally, extensive experiments on four main stock markets show that the proposed method outperforms SOTA techniques across multiple metrics. Additionally, its successful application in real-world fund management operations confirms its effectiveness and practicality.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2025

UniTalker: Conversational Speech-Visual Synthesis

Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) is a key task in the user-agent interaction area, aiming to generate more expressive and empathetic speech for users. However, it is well-known that "listening" and "eye contact" play crucial roles in conveying emotions during real-world interpersonal communication. Existing CSS research is limited to perceiving only text and speech within the dialogue context, which restricts its effectiveness. Moreover, speech-only responses further constrain the interactive experience. To address these limitations, we introduce a Conversational Speech-Visual Synthesis (CSVS) task as an extension of traditional CSS. By leveraging multimodal dialogue context, it provides users with coherent audiovisual responses. To this end, we develop a CSVS system named UniTalker, which is a unified model that seamlessly integrates multimodal perception and multimodal rendering capabilities. Specifically, it leverages a large-scale language model to comprehensively understand multimodal cues in the dialogue context, including speaker, text, speech, and the talking-face animations. After that, it employs multi-task sequence prediction to first infer the target utterance's emotion and then generate empathetic speech and natural talking-face animations. To ensure that the generated speech-visual content remains consistent in terms of emotion, content, and duration, we introduce three key optimizations: 1) Designing a specialized neural landmark codec to tokenize and reconstruct facial expression sequences. 2) Proposing a bimodal speech-visual hard alignment decoding strategy. 3) Applying emotion-guided rendering during the generation stage. Comprehensive objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that our model synthesizes more empathetic speech and provides users with more natural and emotionally consistent talking-face animations.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

MPO: An Efficient Post-Processing Framework for Mixing Diverse Preference Alignment

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning large language models (LLMs). Yet its reliance on a singular reward model often overlooks the diversity of human preferences. Recent approaches address this limitation by leveraging multi-dimensional feedback to fine-tune corresponding reward models and train LLMs using reinforcement learning. However, the process is costly and unstable, especially given the competing and heterogeneous nature of human preferences. In this paper, we propose Mixing Preference Optimization (MPO), a post-processing framework for aggregating single-objective policies as an alternative to both multi-objective RLHF (MORLHF) and MaxMin-RLHF. MPO avoids alignment from scratch. Instead, it log-linearly combines existing policies into a unified one with the weight of each policy computed via a batch stochastic mirror descent. Empirical results demonstrate that MPO achieves balanced performance across diverse preferences, outperforming or matching existing models with significantly reduced computational costs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Efficiently Serving Large Multimodal Models Using EPD Disaggregation

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extend Large Language Models (LLMs) by handling diverse inputs such as images, audio, and video, but at the cost of adding a multimodal encoding stage that increases both computational and memory overhead. This step negatively affects key Service Level Objectives (SLOs), such as time to first token (TTFT) and time per output token (TPOT). We introduce Encode-Prefill-Decode (EPD) Disaggregation, a novel framework that separates the encoding, prefill, and decode stages onto dedicated resources. Unlike current systems, which bundle encoding and prefill together, our approach decouples these steps, unlocking new opportunities and optimizations. These include a mechanism to cache multimedia tokens for efficient transfer, a novel way to parallelize the encoding load within a request, a module for optimal resource allocation for disaggregated serving, and a novel role-switching method to handle changing workload characteristics. Experimental evaluations with popular LMMs show substantial gains in memory efficiency (up to 15x lower peak memory utilization), batch sizes (up to 22x larger), 10x more images per request, and 2.2x larger KV caches. Furthermore, it leads to significant improvements in SLO attainment (up to 90-100% improvement) and TTFT (up to 71% reduction), compared to systems that do not disaggregate. The code is available at https://github.com/vbdi/epdserve.

cs.DC↗