arXiv subjects

Zhouqiang Jiang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhouqiang Jiang.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Multimodal Fusion via Self-Consistent Task-Gradient Fields

Multimodal learning aims to preserve as much task-related information as possible from different inputs. However, current fusion designs often distort the feedback loop to feature extractors. Aggressively merging modalities entangles their representations, making the feature extractors fragile to incomplete inputs. Meanwhile, attempting to separate features via auxiliary losses frequently introduces optimization conflicts that distract from the primary task. We propose the Self-Consistent Field Autoencoder (SCFAE) to provide a better path for task gradients. Our method follows the self-consistent field principle to balance task learning with feature organization, thereby minimizing mutual information. We use small autoencoders for each modality to keep information intact. The task loss acts as a driving force to select predictive features. The reconstruction loss acts as a constraint to separate these features into independent subspaces. These dual objectives operate through complementary feature subspaces, thereby mitigating optimization interference. We evaluate SCFAE on audio-visual-text, audio-visual, and image-video benchmarks. Results show that SCFAE handles missing data and unequal input sizes more robustly via a simple structure. Gradient analysis confirms that SCFAE avoids conflicts and maintains stable training dynamics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Taming the Untamed: Graph-Based Knowledge Retrieval and Reasoning for MLLMs to Conquer the Unknown

The real value of knowledge lies not just in its accumulation, but in its potential to be harnessed effectively to conquer the unknown. Although recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit impressing multimodal capabilities, they often fail in rarely encountered domain-specific tasks due to limited relevant knowledge. To explore this, we adopt visual game cognition as a testbed and select Monster Hunter: World as the target to construct a multimodal knowledge graph (MH-MMKG), which incorporates multi-modalities and intricate entity relations. We also design a series of challenging queries based on MH-MMKG to evaluate the models' ability for complex knowledge retrieval and reasoning. Furthermore, we propose a multi-agent retriever that enables a model to autonomously search relevant knowledge without additional training. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances the performance of MLLMs, providing a new perspective on multimodal knowledge-augmented reasoning and laying a solid foundation for future research.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

DiReCT: Diagnostic Reasoning for Clinical Notes via Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have recently showcased remarkable capabilities, spanning a wide range of tasks and applications, including those in the medical domain. Models like GPT-4 excel in medical question answering but may face challenges in the lack of interpretability when handling complex tasks in real clinical settings. We thus introduce the diagnostic reasoning dataset for clinical notes (DiReCT), aiming at evaluating the reasoning ability and interpretability of LLMs compared to human doctors. It contains 511 clinical notes, each meticulously annotated by physicians, detailing the diagnostic reasoning process from observations in a clinical note to the final diagnosis. Additionally, a diagnostic knowledge graph is provided to offer essential knowledge for reasoning, which may not be covered in the training data of existing LLMs. Evaluations of leading LLMs on DiReCT bring out a significant gap between their reasoning ability and that of human doctors, highlighting the critical need for models that can reason effectively in real-world clinical scenarios.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Exploring Visual Prompting: Robustness Inheritance and Beyond

Visual Prompting (VP), an efficient method for transfer learning, has shown its potential in vision tasks. However, previous works focus exclusively on VP from standard source models, it is still unknown how it performs under the scenario of a robust source model: Can the robustness of the source model be successfully inherited? Does VP also encounter the same trade-off between robustness and generalization ability as the source model during this process? If such a trade-off exists, is there a strategy specifically tailored to VP to mitigate this limitation? In this paper, we thoroughly explore these three questions for the first time and provide affirmative answers to them. To mitigate the trade-off faced by VP, we propose a strategy called Prompt Boundary Loosening (PBL). As a lightweight, plug-and-play strategy naturally compatible with VP, PBL effectively ensures the successful inheritance of robustness when the source model is a robust model, while significantly enhancing VP's generalization ability across various downstream datasets. Extensive experiments across various datasets show that our findings are universal and demonstrate the significant benefits of the proposed strategy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Putting People in LLMs' Shoes: Generating Better Answers via Question Rewriter

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities, particularly in the domain of question answering (QA). However, their effectiveness in QA is often undermined by the vagueness of user questions. To address this issue, we introduce single-round instance-level prompt optimization, referred to as question rewriter. By enhancing the intelligibility of human questions for black-box LLMs, our question rewriter improves the quality of generated answers. The rewriter is optimized using direct preference optimization based on feedback collected from automatic criteria for evaluating generated answers; therefore, its training does not require costly human annotations. The experiments across multiple black-box LLMs and long-form question answering (LFQA) datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our method. This paper provides a practical framework for training question rewriters and sets a precedent for future explorations in prompt optimization within LFQA tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/3244we/Question-Rewriter.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ReLayout: Towards Real-World Document Understanding via Layout-enhanced Pre-training

Recent approaches for visually-rich document understanding (VrDU) uses manually annotated semantic groups, where a semantic group encompasses all semantically relevant but not obviously grouped words. As OCR tools are unable to automatically identify such grouping, we argue that current VrDU approaches are unrealistic. We thus introduce a new variant of the VrDU task, real-world visually-rich document understanding (ReVrDU), that does not allow for using manually annotated semantic groups. We also propose a new method, ReLayout, compliant with the ReVrDU scenario, which learns to capture semantic grouping through arranging words and bringing the representations of words that belong to the potential same semantic group closer together. Our experimental results demonstrate the performance of existing methods is deteriorated with the ReVrDU task, while ReLayout shows superiour performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Concatenated Masked Autoencoders as Spatial-Temporal Learner

Learning representations from videos requires understanding continuous motion and visual correspondences between frames. In this paper, we introduce the Concatenated Masked Autoencoders (CatMAE) as a spatial-temporal learner for self-supervised video representation learning. For the input sequence of video frames, CatMAE keeps the initial frame unchanged while applying substantial masking (95%) to subsequent frames. The encoder in CatMAE is responsible for encoding visible patches for each frame individually; subsequently, for each masked frame, the decoder leverages visible patches from both previous and current frames to reconstruct the original image. Our proposed method enables the model to estimate the motion information between visible patches, match the correspondences between preceding and succeeding frames, and ultimately learn the evolution of scenes. Furthermore, we propose a new data augmentation strategy, Video-Reverse (ViRe), which uses reversed video frames as the model's reconstruction targets. This further encourages the model to utilize continuous motion details and correspondences to complete the reconstruction, thereby enhancing the model's capabilities. Compared to the most advanced pre-training methods, CatMAE achieves a leading level in video segmentation tasks and action recognition tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Prompting

Visual prompting, an efficient method for transfer learning, has shown its potential in vision tasks. However, previous works focus exclusively on VP from standard source models, it is still unknown how it performs under the scenario of a robust source model: Whether a visual prompt derived from a robust model can inherit the robustness while suffering from the generalization performance decline, albeit for a downstream dataset that is different from the source dataset? In this work, we get an affirmative answer of the above question and give an explanation on the visual representation level. Moreover, we introduce a novel technique named Prompt Boundary Loose (PBL) to effectively mitigates the suboptimal results of visual prompt on standard accuracy without losing (or even significantly improving) its adversarial robustness when using a robust model as source model. Extensive experiments across various datasets show that our findings are universal and demonstrate the significant benefits of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

IncreLoRA: Incremental Parameter Allocation Method for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

With the increasing size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), fine-tuning all the parameters in the model is not efficient, especially when there are a large number of downstream tasks, which incur significant training and storage costs. Many parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches have been proposed, among which, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a representative approach that injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into every target module. Yet LoRA ignores the importance of parameters in different modules. To address this problem, many works have been proposed to prune the parameters of LoRA. However, under limited training conditions, the upper bound of the rank of the pruned parameter matrix is still affected by the preset values. We, therefore, propose IncreLoRA, an incremental parameter allocation method that adaptively adds trainable parameters during training based on the importance scores of each module. This approach is different from the pruning method as it is not limited by the initial number of training parameters, and each parameter matrix has a higher rank upper bound for the same training overhead. We conduct extensive experiments on GLUE to demonstrate the effectiveness of IncreLoRA. The results show that our method owns higher parameter efficiency, especially when under the low-resource settings where our method significantly outperforms the baselines. Our code is publicly available.

cs.CL↗