VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Qingxing Cao
dblp:149/7615
· DBLP profile ↗
16ranked-venue papers
6as first author
11since 2021 · last 2024
0000-0001-7042-6726ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 15 · 6 first-author · 11 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 5 · 3 first-author · 2 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | VisDiaHalBench: A Visual Dialogue Benchmark For Diagnosing Hallucination in Large Vision-Language ModelsabstractDespite the significant success of large visionlanguage models (LVLMs), some studies have revealed that LVLMs suffer from the hallucination problem, where the LVLMs' response contains descriptions of non-existent objects.Although various benchmarks have been proposed to investigate this problem, they mostly focus on single-turn evaluation and overlook the hallucination raised by textual inputs.To investigate the hallucination problem of LVLMs when given long-term misleading textual history, we propose a novel visual dialogue hallucination evaluation benchmark VisDiaHalBench.The benchmark consists of samples with five-turn questions about an edited image and its original version.Vis-DiaHalBench differs from previous hallucination benchmarks in the following three points: 1) The questions and answers are unambiguously grounded by annotated scene graphs.2) The images are uncommonly edited to inspect the visual model and common-object hallucination in LLMs.3) The carefully designed dialogue refers a same object in different turns to assess the image consistency and influence of history for LVLMs.The detailed analysis of several state-of-the-art LVLMs across image consistency, visual understanding, history influence, and other dimensions reveals their substantial performance gap with single-turn VQA tasks.The benchmark is released in: https://github.com/ qingxingcao/VisDiaHalBench Qingxing Cao, Xiaodan Liang |
ACL (1) | 1 |
| 2024 | MUSTARD: Mastering Uniform Synthesis of Theorem and Proof DataabstractRecent large language models (LLMs) have witnessed significant advancement in various tasks, including mathematical reasoning and theorem proving. As these two tasks require strict and formal multi-step inference, they are appealing domains for exploring the reasoning ability of LLMs but still face important challenges. Previous studies such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have revealed the effectiveness of intermediate steps guidance. However, such step-wise annotation requires heavy labor, leading to insufficient training steps for current benchmarks. To fill this gap, this work introduces MUSTARD, a data generation framework that masters uniform synthesis of theorem and proof data of high quality and diversity. MUSTARD synthesizes data in three stages: (1) It samples a few mathematical concept seeds as the problem category. (2) Then, it prompts a generative language model with the sampled concepts to obtain both the problems and their step-wise formal solutions. (3) Lastly, the framework utilizes a proof assistant (e.g., Lean Prover) to filter the valid proofs. With the proposed MUSTARD, we present a theorem-and-proof benchmark MUSTARDSAUCE with 5,866 valid data points. Each data point contains an informal statement, an informal proof, and a translated formal proof that passes the prover validation. We perform extensive analysis and demonstrate that MUSTARD generates validated high-quality step-by-step data. We further apply the MUSTARDSAUCE for fine-tuning smaller language models. The fine-tuned Llama 2-7B achieves a 15.41% average relative performance gain in automated theorem proving, and 8.18% in math word problems. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/MUSTARD. Yinya Huang, Xiaohan Lin, Zhengying Liu, Qingxing Cao, Huajian Xin, Zhenguo Li, Linqi Song, Xiaodan Liang |
ICLR | 4 |
| 2024 | LEGO-Prover: Neural Theorem Proving with Growing LibrariesabstractDespite the success of large language models (LLMs), the task of theorem proving still remains one of the hardest reasoning tasks that is far from being fully solved. Prior methods using language models have demonstrated promising results, but they still struggle to prove even middle school level theorems. One common limitation of these methods is that they assume a fixed theorem library during the whole theorem proving process. However, as we all know, creating new useful theorems or even new theories is not only helpful but crucial and necessary for advancing mathematics and proving harder and deeper results. In this work, we present LEGO-Prover, which employs a growing skill library containing verified lemmas as skills to augment the capability of LLMs used in theorem proving. By constructing the proof modularly, LEGO-Prover enables LLMs to utilize existing skills retrieved from the library and to create new skills during the proving process. These skills are further evolved (by prompting an LLM) to enrich the library on another scale. Modular and reusable skills are constantly added to the library to enable tackling increasingly intricate mathematical problems. Moreover, the learned library further bridges the gap between human proofs and formal proofs by making it easier to impute missing steps. LEGO-Prover advances the state-of-the-art pass rate on miniF2F-valid (48.0\% to 57.0\%) and miniF2F-test (45.5\% to 50.0\%). During the proving process, LEGO-Prover also generates over 20,000 skills (theorems/lemmas) and adds them to the growing library. Our ablation study indicates that these newly added skills are indeed helpful for proving theorems, resulting in a 4.9\% improvement in success rate Huajian Xin, Chuanyang Zheng, Zhengying Liu, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Enze Xie, Jian Yin 0001, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang |
ICLR | 5 |
| 2024 | DQ-LoRe: Dual Queries with Low Rank Approximation Re-ranking for In-Context LearningabstractRecent advances in natural language processing, primarily propelled by Large Language Models (LLMs), have showcased their remarkable capabilities grounded in in-context learning. A promising avenue for guiding LLMs in intricate reasoning tasks involves the utilization of intermediate reasoning steps within the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm. Nevertheless, the central challenge lies in the effective selection of exemplars for facilitating in-context learning. In this study, we introduce a framework that leverages Dual Queries and Low-rank approximation Re-ranking (DQ-LoRe) to automatically select exemplars for in-context learning. Dual Queries first query LLM to obtain LLM-generated knowledge such as CoT, then query the retriever to obtain the final exemplars via both question and the knowledge. Moreover, for the second query, LoRe employs dimensionality reduction techniques to refine exemplar selection, ensuring close alignment with the input question's knowledge. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DQ-LoRe significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in the automatic selection of exemplars for GPT-4, enhancing performance from 92.5\% to 94.2\%. Our comprehensive analysis further reveals that DQ-LoRe consistently outperforms retrieval-based approaches in terms of both performance and adaptability, especially in scenarios characterized by distribution shifts. DQ-LoRe pushes the boundaries of in-context learning and opens up new avenues for addressing complex reasoning challenges. Chuanyang Zheng, Zhijiang Guo, Yichun Yin, Enze Xie, Qingxing Cao, Xiongwei Han, Jing Tang 0004, Xiaodan Liang |
ICLR | 8 |
| 2024 | FVEL: Interactive Formal Verification Environment with Large Language Models via Theorem ProvingabstractFormal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,304 lemmas, and 201,498 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3-8B solves 17.39% (69→81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75→84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/. Xiaohan Lin, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Jianqiao Lu, Zhengying Liu, Linqi Song, Xiaodan Liang |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2023 | TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language ModelsabstractJing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023. Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan 0016, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang 0004, Qun Liu 0001 |
EMNLP | 9 |
| 2022 | PathReasoner: Explainable reasoning paths for commonsense question answering
Xunlin Zhan, Yinya Huang, Qingxing Cao, Xiaodan Liang |
Knowl. Based Syst. | 4 |
| 2022 | Knowledge-Routed Visual Question Reasoning: Challenges for Deep Representation EmbeddingabstractThough beneficial for encouraging the visual question answering (VQA) models to discover the underlying knowledge by exploiting the input-output correlation beyond image and text contexts, the existing knowledge VQA data sets are mostly annotated in a crowdsource way, e.g., collecting questions and external reasons from different users via the Internet. In addition to the challenge of knowledge reasoning, how to deal with the annotator bias also remains unsolved, which often leads to superficial overfitted correlations between questions and answers. To address this issue, we propose a novel data set named knowledge-routed visual question reasoning for VQA model evaluation. Considering that a desirable VQA model should correctly perceive the image context, understand the question, and incorporate its learned knowledge, our proposed data set aims to cut off the shortcut learning exploited by the current deep embedding models and push the research boundary of the knowledge-based visual question reasoning. Specifically, we generate the question-answer pair based on both the visual genome scene graph and an external knowledge base with controlled programs to disentangle the knowledge from other biases. The programs can select one or two triplets from the scene graph or knowledge base to push multistep reasoning, avoid answer ambiguity, and balance the answer distribution. In contrast to the existing VQA data sets, we further imply the following two major constraints on the programs to incorporate knowledge reasoning. First, multiple knowledge triplets can be related to the question, but only one knowledge relates to the image object. This can enforce the VQA model to correctly perceive the image instead of guessing the knowledge based on the given question solely. Second, all questions are based on different knowledge, but the candidate answers are the same for both the training and test sets. We make the testing knowledge unused during training to evaluate whether a model can understand question words and handle unseen combinations. Extensive experiments with various baselines and state-of-the-art VQA models are conducted to demonstrate that there still exists a big gap between the model with and without groundtruth supporting triplets when given the embedded knowledge base. This reveals the weakness of the current deep embedding models on the knowledge reasoning problem. Qingxing Cao, Bailin Li, Xiaodan Liang, Keze Wang, Liang Lin 0004 |
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. | 1 |
| 2021 | REM-Net: Recursive Erasure Memory Network for Commonsense Evidence RefinementabstractWhen answering a question, people often draw upon their rich world knowledge in addition to the particular context. While recent works retrieve supporting facts/evidence from commonsense knowledge bases to supply additional information to each question, there is still ample opportunity to advance it on the quality of the evidence. It is crucial since the quality of the evidence is the key to answering common- sense questions, and even determines the upper bound on the QA systems’ performance. In this paper, we propose a recursive erasure memory network (REM-Net) to cope with the quality improvement of evidence. To address this, REM-Net is equipped with a module to refine the evidence by recursively erasing the low-quality evidence that does not explain the question answering. Besides, instead of retrieving evidence from existing knowledge bases, REM-Net leverages a pre-trained generative model to generate candidate evidence customized for the question. We conduct experiments on two commonsense question answering datasets, WIQA and CosmosQA. The results demonstrate the performance of REM- Net and show that the refined evidence is explainable. Yinya Huang, Xunlin Zhan, Qingxing Cao, Xiaodan Liang |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2021 | Linguistically Routing Capsule Network for Out-of-distribution Visual Question AnsweringabstractGeneralization on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data is an essential but underexplored topic in visual question answering. Current state-of-the-art VQA models often exploit the biased correlation between data and labels, which results in a large performance drop when the test and training data have different distributions. Inspired by the fact that humans can recognize novel concepts by composing existed concepts and capsule network’s ability of representing part-whole hierarchies, we propose to use capsules to represent parts and introduce "Linguistically Routing" to merge parts with human-prior hierarchies. Specifically, we first fuse visual features with a single question word as atomic parts. Then we introduce the "Linguistically Routing" to reweight the capsule connections between two layers such that: 1) the lower layer capsules can transfer their outputs to the most compatible higher capsules, and 2) two capsules can be merged if their corresponding words are merged in the question parse tree. The routing process maximizes the above unary and binary potentials across multiple layers and finally carves a tree structure inside the capsule network. We evaluate our proposed routing method on the CLEVR compositional generation test, the VQA-CP2 dataset and the VQAv2 dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed method can improve current VQA models on OOD split without losing performance on the in-domain test data. Qingxing Cao, Wentao Wan 0001, Keze Wang, Xiaodan Liang, Liang Lin 0004 |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2021 | Interpretable Visual Question Answering by Reasoning on Dependency TreesabstractCollaborative reasoning for understanding image-question pairs is a very critical but underexplored topic in interpretable visual question answering systems. Although very recent studies have attempted to use explicit compositional processes to assemble multiple subtasks embedded in questions, their models heavily rely on annotations or handcrafted rules to obtain valid reasoning processes, which leads to either heavy workloads or poor performance on compositional reasoning. In this paper, to better align image and language domains in diverse and unrestricted cases, we propose a novel neural network model that performs global reasoning on a dependency tree parsed from the question; thus, our model is called a parse-tree-guided reasoning network (PTGRN). This network consists of three collaborative modules: i) an attention module that exploits the local visual evidence of each word parsed from the question, ii) a gated residual composition module that composes the previously mined evidence, and iii) a parse-tree-guided propagation module that passes the mined evidence along the parse tree. Thus, PTGRN is capable of building an interpretable visual question answering (VQA) system that gradually derives image cues following question-driven parse-tree reasoning. Experiments on relational datasets demonstrate the superiority of PTGRN over current state-of-the-art VQA methods, and the visualization results highlight the explainable capability of our reasoning system. Qingxing Cao, Xiaodan Liang, Bailin Li, Liang Lin 0004 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 1 |
| 2020 | Face Hallucination by Attentive Sequence Optimization with Reinforcement LearningabstractFace hallucination is a domain-specific super-resolution problem that aims to generate a high-resolution (HR) face image from a low-resolution (LR) input. In contrast to the existing patch-wise super-resolution models that divide a face image into regular patches and independently apply LR to HR mapping to each patch, we implement deep reinforcement learning and develop a novel attention-aware face hallucination (Attention-FH) framework, which recurrently learns to attend a sequence of patches and performs facial part enhancement by fully exploiting the global interdependency of the image. Specifically, our proposed framework incorporates two components: a recurrent policy network for dynamically specifying a new attended region at each time step based on the status of the super-resolved image and the past attended region sequence, and a local enhancement network for selected patch hallucination and global state updating. The Attention-FH model jointly learns the recurrent policy network and local enhancement network through maximizing a long-term reward that reflects the hallucination result with respect to the whole HR image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Attention-FH significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on in-the-wild face images with large pose and illumination variations. Yukai Shi, Guanbin Li, Qingxing Cao, Keze Wang, Liang Lin 0004 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 3 |
| 2018 | Visual Question Reasoning on General Dependency TreeabstractThe collaborative reasoning for understanding each image-question pair is very critical but under-explored for an interpretable Visual Question Answering (VQA) system. Although very recent works also tried the explicit compositional processes to assemble multiple sub-tasks embedded in the questions, their models heavily rely on the annotations or hand-crafted rules to obtain valid reasoning layout, leading to either heavy labor or poor performance on composition reasoning. In this paper, to enable global context reasoning for better aligning image and language domains in diverse and unrestricted cases, we propose a novel reasoning network called Adversarial Composition Modular Network (ACMN). This network comprises of two collaborative modules: i) an adversarial attention module to exploit the local visual evidence for each word parsed from the question; ii) a residual composition module to compose the previously mined evidence. Given a dependency parse tree for each question, the adversarial attention module progressively discovers salient regions of one word by densely combining regions of child word nodes in an adversarial manner. Then residual composition module merges the hidden representations of an arbitrary number of children through sum pooling and residual connection. Our ACMN is thus capable of building an interpretable VQA system that gradually dives the image cues following a question-driven reasoning route and makes global reasoning by incorporating the learned knowledge of all attention modules in a principled manner. Experiments on relational datasets demonstrate the superiority of our ACMN and visualization results show the explainable capability of our reasoning system. Qingxing Cao, Xiaodan Liang, Bailin Li, Guanbin Li, Liang Lin 0004 |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2018 | Interpretable Video Captioning via Trajectory Structured LocalizationabstractAutomatically describing open-domain videos with natural language are attracting increasing interest in the field of artificial intelligence. Most existing methods simply borrow ideas from image captioning and obtain a compact video representation from an ensemble of global image feature before feeding to an RNN decoder which outputs a sentence of variable length. However, it is not only arduous for the generator to focus on specific salient objects at different time given the global video representation, it is more formidable to capture the fine-grained motion information and the relation between moving instances for more subtle linguistic descriptions. In this paper, we propose a Trajectory Structured Attentional Encoder-Decoder (TSA-ED) neural network framework for more elaborate video captioning which works by integrating local spatial-temporal representation at trajectory level through structured attention mechanism. Our proposed method is based on a LSTM-based encoder-decoder framework, which incorporates an attention modeling scheme to adaptively learn the correlation between sentence structure and the moving objects in videos, and consequently generates more accurate and meticulous statement description in the decoding stage. Experimental results demonstrate that the feature representation and structured attention mechanism based on the trajectory cluster can efficiently obtain the local motion information in the video to help generate a more fine-grained video description, and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the well-known Charades and MSVD datasets. Xian Wu 0007, Guanbin Li, Qingxing Cao, Qingge Ji, Liang Lin 0004 |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2017 | Attention-Aware Face Hallucination via Deep Reinforcement LearningabstractFace hallucination is a domain-specific super-resolution problem with the goal to generate high-resolution (HR) faces from low-resolution (LR) input images. In contrast to existing methods that often learn a single patch-to-patch mapping from LR to HR images and are regardless of the contextual interdependency between patches, we propose a novel Attention-aware Face Hallucination (Attention-FH) framework which resorts to deep reinforcement learning for sequentially discovering attended patches and then performing the facial part enhancement by fully exploiting the global interdependency of the image. Specifically, in each time step, the recurrent policy network is proposed to dynamically specify a new attended region by incorporating what happened in the past. The state (i.e., face hallucination result for the whole image) can thus be exploited and updated by the local enhancement network on the selected region. The Attention-FH approach jointly learns the recurrent policy network and local enhancement network through maximizing the long-term reward that reflects the hallucination performance over the whole image. Therefore, our proposed Attention-FH is capable of adaptively personalizing an optimal searching path for each face image according to its own characteristic. Extensive experiments show our approach significantly surpasses the state-of-the-arts on in-the-wild faces with large pose and illumination variations. The state (i.e., face hallucination result for the whole image) can thus be exploited and updated by the local enhancement network on the selected region. The Attention-FH approach jointly learns the recurrent policy network and local enhancement network through maximizing the long-term reward that reflects the hallucination performance over the whole image. Therefore, our proposed Attention-FH is capable of adaptively personalizing an optimal searching path for each face image according to its own characteristic. Extensive experiments show our approach significantly surpasses the state-of-the-arts on in-the-wild faces with large pose and illumination variations. Qingxing Cao, Liang Lin 0004, Yukai Shi, Xiaodan Liang, Guanbin Li |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2016 | Recognizing Focal Liver Lesions in CEUS With Dynamically Trained Latent Structured ModelsabstractThis work investigates how to automatically classify Focal Liver Lesions (FLLs) into three specific benign or malignant types in Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS) videos, and aims at providing a computational framework to assist clinicians in FLL diagnosis. The main challenge for this task is that FLLs in CEUS videos often show diverse enhancement patterns at different temporal phases. To handle these diverse patterns, we propose a novel structured model, which detects a number of discriminative Regions of Interest (ROIs) for the FLL and recognize the FLL based on these ROIs. Our model incorporates an ensemble of local classifiers in the attempt to identify different enhancement patterns of ROIs, and in particular, we make the model reconfigurable by introducing switch variables to adaptively select appropriate classifiers during inference. We formulate the model learning as a non-convex optimization problem, and present a principled optimization method to solve it in a dynamic manner: the latent structures (e.g. the selections of local classifiers, and the sizes and locations of ROIs) are iteratively determined along with the parameter learning. Given the updated model parameters in each step, the data-driven inference is also proposed to efficiently determine the latent structures by using the sequential pruning and dynamic programming method. In the experiments, we demonstrate superior performances over the state-of-the-art approaches. We also release hundreds of CEUS FLLs videos used to quantitatively evaluate this work, which to the best of our knowledge forms the largest dataset in the literature. Please find more information at "http://vision.sysu.edu.cn/projects/fllrecog/". Xiaodan Liang, Liang Lin 0004, Qingxing Cao, Rui Huang 0001, Yongtian Wang |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 3 |