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Zeyu Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Zeyu Zhang.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources

Enhancing Student Performance Prediction on Learnersourced Questions with SGNN-LLM Synergy

Learnersourcing offers great potential for scalable education through student content creation. However, predicting student performance on learnersourced questions, which is essential for personalizing the learning experience, is challenging due to the inherent noise in student-generated data. Moreover, while conventional graph-based methods can capture the complex network of student and question interactions, they often fall short under cold start conditions where limited student engagement with questions yields sparse data. To address both challenges, we introduce an innovative strategy that synergizes the potential of integrating Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) and Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings. Our methodology employs a signed bipartite graph to comprehensively model student answers, complemented by a contrastive learning framework that enhances noise resilience. Furthermore, LLM's contribution lies in generating foundational question embeddings, proving especially advantageous in addressing cold start scenarios characterized by limited graph data. Validation across five real-world datasets sourced from the PeerWise platform underscores our approach's effectiveness. Our method outperforms baselines, showcasing enhanced predictive accuracy and robustness.

cs.LG↗

On the Emergence of Symmetrical Reality

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized human cognitive abilities and facilitated the development of new AI entities capable of interacting with humans in both physical and virtual environments. Despite the existence of virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality for several years, integrating these technical fields remains a formidable challenge due to their disparate application directions. The advent of AI agents, capable of autonomous perception and action, further compounds this issue by exposing the limitations of traditional human-centered research approaches. It is imperative to establish a comprehensive framework that accommodates the dual perceptual centers of humans and AI agents in both physical and virtual worlds. In this paper, we introduce the symmetrical reality framework, which offers a unified representation encompassing various forms of physical-virtual amalgamations. This framework enables researchers to better comprehend how AI agents can collaborate with humans and how distinct technical pathways of physical-virtual integration can be consolidated from a broader perspective. We then delve into the coexistence of humans and AI, demonstrating a prototype system that exemplifies the operation of symmetrical reality systems for specific tasks, such as pouring water. Subsequently, we propose an instance of an AI-driven active assistance service that illustrates the potential applications of symmetrical reality. This paper aims to offer beneficial perspectives and guidance for researchers and practitioners in different fields, thus contributing to the ongoing research about human-AI coexistence in both physical and virtual environments.

cs.HC↗

PAD: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Patchwise-Scale Adapter for Infrared Images

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for RGB images has achieved significant success, yet there is still limited research on SSL for infrared images, primarily due to three prominent challenges: 1) the lack of a suitable large-scale infrared pre-training dataset, 2) the distinctiveness of non-iconic infrared images rendering common pre-training tasks like masked image modeling (MIM) less effective, and 3) the scarcity of fine-grained textures making it particularly challenging to learn general image features. To address these issues, we construct a Multi-Scene Infrared Pre-training (MSIP) dataset comprising 178,756 images, and introduce object-sensitive random RoI cropping, an image preprocessing method, to tackle the challenge posed by non-iconic images. To alleviate the impact of weak textures on feature learning, we propose a pre-training paradigm called Pre-training with ADapter (PAD), which uses adapters to learn domain-specific features while freezing parameters pre-trained on ImageNet to retain the general feature extraction capability. This new paradigm is applicable to any transformer-based SSL method. Furthermore, to achieve more flexible coordination between pre-trained and newly-learned features in different layers and patches, a patchwise-scale adapter with dynamically learnable scale factors is introduced. Extensive experiments on three downstream tasks show that PAD, with only 1.23M pre-trainable parameters, outperforms other baseline paradigms including continual full pre-training on MSIP. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/casiatao/PAD.

cs.CV↗

Unified Off-Policy Learning to Rank: a Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Off-policy Learning to Rank (LTR) aims to optimize a ranker from data collected by a deployed logging policy. However, existing off-policy learning to rank methods often make strong assumptions about how users generate the click data, i.e., the click model, and hence need to tailor their methods specifically under different click models. In this paper, we unified the ranking process under general stochastic click models as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and the optimal ranking could be learned with offline reinforcement learning (RL) directly. Building upon this, we leverage offline RL techniques for off-policy LTR and propose the Click Model-Agnostic Unified Off-policy Learning to Rank (CUOLR) method, which could be easily applied to a wide range of click models. Through a dedicated formulation of the MDP, we show that offline RL algorithms can adapt to various click models without complex debiasing techniques and prior knowledge of the model. Results on various large-scale datasets demonstrate that CUOLR consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art off-policy learning to rank algorithms while maintaining consistency and robustness under different click models.

cs.LG↗

SGA: A Graph Augmentation Method for Signed Graph Neural Networks

Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) are vital for analyzing complex patterns in real-world signed graphs containing positive and negative links. However, three key challenges hinder current SGNN-based signed graph representation learning: sparsity in signed graphs leaves latent structures undiscovered, unbalanced triangles pose representation difficulties for SGNN models, and real-world signed graph datasets often lack supplementary information like node labels and features. These constraints limit the potential of SGNN-based representation learning. We address these issues with data augmentation techniques. Despite many graph data augmentation methods existing for unsigned graphs, none are tailored for signed graphs. Our paper introduces the novel Signed Graph Augmentation framework (SGA), comprising three main components. First, we employ the SGNN model to encode the signed graph, extracting latent structural information for candidate augmentation structures. Second, we evaluate these candidate samples (edges) and select the most beneficial ones for modifying the original training set. Third, we propose a novel augmentation perspective that assigns varying training difficulty to training samples, enabling the design of a new training strategy. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets (Bitcoin-alpha, Bitcoin-otc, Epinions, Slashdot, Wiki-elec, and Wiki-RfA) demonstrate that SGA significantly improves performance across multiple benchmarks. Our method outperforms baselines by up to 22.2% in AUC for SGCN on Wiki-RfA, 33.3% in F1-binary, 48.8% in F1-micro, and 36.3% in F1-macro for GAT on Bitcoin-alpha in link sign prediction.

cs.LG↗

BHSD: A 3D Multi-Class Brain Hemorrhage Segmentation Dataset

Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) is a pathological condition characterized by bleeding inside the skull or brain, which can be attributed to various factors. Identifying, localizing and quantifying ICH has important clinical implications, in a bleed-dependent manner. While deep learning techniques are widely used in medical image segmentation and have been applied to the ICH segmentation task, existing public ICH datasets do not support the multi-class segmentation problem. To address this, we develop the Brain Hemorrhage Segmentation Dataset (BHSD), which provides a 3D multi-class ICH dataset containing 192 volumes with pixel-level annotations and 2200 volumes with slice-level annotations across five categories of ICH. To demonstrate the utility of the dataset, we formulate a series of supervised and semi-supervised ICH segmentation tasks. We provide experimental results with state-of-the-art models as reference benchmarks for further model developments and evaluations on this dataset.

cs.CV↗

SPPNet: A Single-Point Prompt Network for Nuclei Image Segmentation

Image segmentation plays an essential role in nuclei image analysis. Recently, the segment anything model has made a significant breakthrough in such tasks. However, the current model exists two major issues for cell segmentation: (1) the image encoder of the segment anything model involves a large number of parameters. Retraining or even fine-tuning the model still requires expensive computational resources. (2) in point prompt mode, points are sampled from the center of the ground truth and more than one set of points is expected to achieve reliable performance, which is not efficient for practical applications. In this paper, a single-point prompt network is proposed for nuclei image segmentation, called SPPNet. We replace the original image encoder with a lightweight vision transformer. Also, an effective convolutional block is added in parallel to extract the low-level semantic information from the image and compensate for the performance degradation due to the small image encoder. We propose a new point-sampling method based on the Gaussian kernel. The proposed model is evaluated on the MoNuSeg-2018 dataset. The result demonstrated that SPPNet outperforms existing U-shape architectures and shows faster convergence in training. Compared to the segment anything model, SPPNet shows roughly 20 times faster inference, with 1/70 parameters and computational cost. Particularly, only one set of points is required in both the training and inference phases, which is more reasonable for clinical applications. The code for our work and more technical details can be found at https://github.com/xq141839/SPPNet.

eess.IV↗

X-VoE: Measuring eXplanatory Violation of Expectation in Physical Events

Intuitive physics is pivotal for human understanding of the physical world, enabling prediction and interpretation of events even in infancy. Nonetheless, replicating this level of intuitive physics in artificial intelligence (AI) remains a formidable challenge. This study introduces X-VoE, a comprehensive benchmark dataset, to assess AI agents' grasp of intuitive physics. Built on the developmental psychology-rooted Violation of Expectation (VoE) paradigm, X-VoE establishes a higher bar for the explanatory capacities of intuitive physics models. Each VoE scenario within X-VoE encompasses three distinct settings, probing models' comprehension of events and their underlying explanations. Beyond model evaluation, we present an explanation-based learning system that captures physics dynamics and infers occluded object states solely from visual sequences, without explicit occlusion labels. Experimental outcomes highlight our model's alignment with human commonsense when tested against X-VoE. A remarkable feature is our model's ability to visually expound VoE events by reconstructing concealed scenes. Concluding, we discuss the findings' implications and outline future research directions. Through X-VoE, we catalyze the advancement of AI endowed with human-like intuitive physics capabilities.

cs.AI↗

Part-level Scene Reconstruction Affords Robot Interaction

Existing methods for reconstructing interactive scenes primarily focus on replacing reconstructed objects with CAD models retrieved from a limited database, resulting in significant discrepancies between the reconstructed and observed scenes. To address this issue, our work introduces a part-level reconstruction approach that reassembles objects using primitive shapes. This enables us to precisely replicate the observed physical scenes and simulate robot interactions with both rigid and articulated objects. By segmenting reconstructed objects into semantic parts and aligning primitive shapes to these parts, we assemble them as CAD models while estimating kinematic relations, including parent-child contact relations, joint types, and parameters. Specifically, we derive the optimal primitive alignment by solving a series of optimization problems, and estimate kinematic relations based on part semantics and geometry. Our experiments demonstrate that part-level scene reconstruction outperforms object-level reconstruction by accurately capturing finer details and improving precision. These reconstructed part-level interactive scenes provide valuable kinematic information for various robotic applications; we showcase the feasibility of certifying mobile manipulation planning in these interactive scenes before executing tasks in the physical world.

cs.RO↗

Direct Observation of Landau Levels in Silicon Photonic Crystals

We experimentally observe photonic Landau levels that arise due to a strain-induced pseudomagnetic field in a silicon photonic crystal slab. The Landau levels are dispersive (i.e., they are not flat bands) due to the distortion of the unit cell by the strain. We employ an additional strain which induces a pseudoelectric potential to flatten them.

physics.optics↗

Propagation of chaos for maxima of particle systems with mean-field drift interaction

We study the asymptotic behavior of the normalized maxima of real-valued diffusive particles with mean-field drift interaction. Our main result establishes propagation of chaos: in the large population limit, the normalized maxima behave as those arising in an i.i.d. system where each particle follows the associated McKean--Vlasov limiting dynamics. Because the maximum depends on all particles, our result does not follow from classical propagation of chaos, where convergence to an i.i.d. limit holds for any fixed number of particles but not all particles simultaneously. The proof uses a change of measure argument that depends on a delicate combinatorial analysis of the iterated stochastic integrals appearing in the chaos expansion of the Radon--Nikodym density.

math.PR↗

Improving Toponym Resolution with Better Candidate Generation, Transformer-based Reranking, and Two-Stage Resolution

Geocoding is the task of converting location mentions in text into structured data that encodes the geospatial semantics. We propose a new architecture for geocoding, GeoNorm. GeoNorm first uses information retrieval techniques to generate a list of candidate entries from the geospatial ontology. Then it reranks the candidate entries using a transformer-based neural network that incorporates information from the ontology such as the entry's population. This generate-and-rerank process is applied twice: first to resolve the less ambiguous countries, states, and counties, and second to resolve the remaining location mentions, using the identified countries, states, and counties as context. Our proposed toponym resolution framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/clulab/geonorm}.

cs.CL↗

Explainable Verbal Reasoner Plus (EVR+): A Natural Language Reasoning Framework that Supports Diverse Compositional Reasoning

Languages models have been successfully applied to a variety of reasoning tasks in NLP, yet the language models still suffer from compositional generalization. In this paper we present Explainable Verbal Reasoner Plus (EVR+), a reasoning framework that enhances language models' compositional reasoning ability by (1) allowing the model to explicitly generate and execute symbolic operators, and (2) allowing the model to decompose a complex task into several simpler ones in a flexible manner. Compared with its predecessor Explainable Verbal Reasoner (EVR) and other previous approaches adopting similar ideas, our framework supports more diverse types of reasoning such as nested loops and different types of recursion. To evaluate our reasoning framework, we build a synthetic dataset with five tasks that require compositional reasoning. Results show that our reasoning framework can enhance the language model's compositional generalization performance on the five tasks, using a fine-tuned language model. We also discussed the possibility and the challenges to combine our reasoning framework with a few-shot prompted language model.

cs.CL↗

Spectroscopic Evidence for Interfacial Charge Separation and Recombination in Graphene-MoS2 Vertical Heterostructures

Vertical van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures consisting of graphene (Gr) and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have created a fascinating platform for exploring optical and electronic properties in the two-dimensional limit. Previous study has revealed the ultrafast formation of interfacial excitons and the exciton dynamics in the Gr/MoS2 heterostructure. However, a fully understanding of interfacial charge separation and the subsequent dynamics in graphene-based heterostructures remains elusive. Here, we investigate the carrier dynamics of Gr-MoS2 (including Gr/MoS2 and MoS2/Gr stacking sequences) heterostructures under different photoexcitation energies and stacking sequences by comprehensive ultrafast means, including time-resolved terahertz spectroscopy (TRTS), terahertz emission spectroscopy (TES) and transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS). We demonstrate that the Gr/MoS2 heterostructure generates hot electron injection from graphene into the MoS2 layer with photoexcitation of sub-A-exciton of MoS2, while the interfacial charge separation in the MoS2/Gr could be partially blocked by the electric field of substrate. Charge transfer (CT) occurs in same directions for the Gr-MoS2 heterostructures with opposite stacking order, resulting in the opposite orientations of the interfacial photocurrent, as directly demonstrated by the terahertz (THz) emission. Moreover, we demonstrate that the recombination time of interfacial charges after CT is on a timescale of 18 ps to 1 ns, depending on the density of defect states in MoS2 layer. This work provides a comprehensive and unambiguous picture of the interfacial charge dynamics of graphene-based heterostructures, which is essential for developing Gr/TMDs based optoelectronic devices.

physics.optics↗

USER: Unsupervised Structural Entropy-based Robust Graph Neural Network

Unsupervised/self-supervised graph neural networks (GNN) are vulnerable to inherent randomness in the input graph data which greatly affects the performance of the model in downstream tasks. In this paper, we alleviate the interference of graph randomness and learn appropriate representations of nodes without label information. To this end, we propose USER, an unsupervised robust version of graph neural networks that is based on structural entropy. We analyze the property of intrinsic connectivity and define intrinsic connectivity graph. We also identify the rank of the adjacency matrix as a crucial factor in revealing a graph that provides the same embeddings as the intrinsic connectivity graph. We then introduce structural entropy in the objective function to capture such a graph. Extensive experiments conducted on clustering and link prediction tasks under random-noises and meta-attack over three datasets show USER outperforms benchmarks and is robust to heavier randomness.

cs.LG↗

A Reconfigurable Data Glove for Reconstructing Physical and Virtual Grasps

In this work, we present a reconfigurable data glove design to capture different modes of human hand-object interactions, which are critical in training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) agents for fine manipulation tasks. To achieve various downstream tasks with distinct features, our reconfigurable data glove operates in three modes sharing a unified backbone design that reconstructs hand gestures in real time. In the tactile-sensing mode, the glove system aggregates manipulation force via customized force sensors made from a soft and thin piezoresistive material; this design minimizes interference during complex hand movements. The virtual reality (VR) mode enables real-time interaction in a physically plausible fashion: A caging-based approach is devised to determine stable grasps by detecting collision events. Leveraging a state-of-the-art finite element method (FEM), the simulation mode collects data on fine-grained 4D manipulation events comprising hand and object motions in 3D space and how the object's physical properties (e.g., stress and energy) change in accordance with manipulation over time. Notably, the glove system presented here is the first to use high-fidelity simulation to investigate the unobservable physical and causal factors behind manipulation actions. In a series of experiments, we characterize our data glove in terms of individual sensors and the overall system. More specifically, we evaluate the system's three modes by (i) recording hand gestures and associated forces, (ii) improving manipulation fluency in VR, and (iii) producing realistic simulation effects of various tool uses, respectively. Based on these three modes, our reconfigurable data glove collects and reconstructs fine-grained human grasp data in both physical and virtual environments, thereby opening up new avenues for the learning of manipulation skills for embodied AI agents.

cs.RO↗

EC-MOF/Phase-I: A computationally ready database of electrically conductive metal-organic frameworks with high-throughput structural and electronic properties

The advent of pi-stacked layered metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) opened up new horizons for designing compact MOF-based devices as they offer unique electrical conductivity on top of permanent porosity and exceptionally high surface area. By taking advantage of the modular nature of these electrically conductive (EC) MOFs, an unlimited number of materials can be created for applications in electronic devices such as battery electrodes, supercapacitors, and spintronics. Permutation of structural building blocks including different metal nodes and organic linkers results in new systems with unprecedented and unexplored physical and chemical properties. With the ultimate goal of providing a platform for accelerated materials design and discovery, here, we lay the foundations towards creation of the first comprehensive database of EC-MOFs with an experimentally guided approach. The first phase of this database, coined EC-MOF/Phase-I, is comprised of 1,061 bulk and mono-layer structures built by all possible combinations of experimentally reported organic linkers, functional groups and metal nodes. A high-throughput screening (HTS) work flow is constructed to implement density functional theory calculations with periodic boundary conditions to optimize the structures and calculate some of their most significantly relevant properties. Since research and development in the area of EC-MOFs has long been suffering from the lack of appropriate initial crystal structures, all the geometries and property data have been made available for the use of the community through the online platform that is developed in the course of this work. This database provides comprehensive physical and chemical data of EC-MOFs as well as convenience of selecting appropriate materials for specific applications, thus, accelerating design and discovery of EC-MOF-based compact devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Sequential Manipulation Planning on Scene Graph

We devise a 3D scene graph representation, contact graph+ (cg+), for efficient sequential task planning. Augmented with predicate-like attributes, this contact graph-based representation abstracts scene layouts with succinct geometric information and valid robot-scene interactions. Goal configurations, naturally specified on contact graphs, can be produced by a genetic algorithm with a stochastic optimization method. A task plan is then initialized by computing the Graph Editing Distance (GED) between the initial contact graphs and the goal configurations, which generates graph edit operations corresponding to possible robot actions. We finalize the task plan by imposing constraints to regulate the temporal feasibility of graph edit operations, ensuring valid task and motion correspondences. In a series of simulations and experiments, robots successfully complete complex sequential object rearrangement tasks that are difficult to specify using conventional planning language like Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), demonstrating the high feasibility and potential of robot sequential task planning on contact graph.

cs.RO↗