VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Cui Zhao
dblp:210/6553
· DBLP profile ↗
19ranked-venue papers
7as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-4603-4914ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Computer networks · 16 · 6 first-author · 14 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | mmWave-Aided Unified Speech Enhancement and Separation without Speaker Count Prior
Dachao Han, Han Ding 0002, Cui Zhao, Fei Wang 0037, Ge Wang 0003, Wei Xi 0003 |
INFOCOM | 4 |
| 2026 | Zero-Effort Cross-Domain Wireless Respiration Monitoring Under Free Movements With Commercial UWB DevicesabstractRespiratory monitoring using wireless technologies has garnered significant attention for its potential in healthcare, smart cockpits, and various applications. Though extensively studied, existing systems face practical challenges in adapting to new data domains without substantial customization efforts. Current solutions attempt to address this limitation through domain-independent feature extraction or cross-domain feature translation, employing either knowledge-based sensing models or data-driven neural networks. However, these approaches typically require additional data collection or model retraining for new domains, significantly hindering their practical deployment. This paper proposes RF-Carer, a fully zero-effort cross-domain respiration monitoring system. Our key innovation lies in building an explainable propagation model to transform any heterogeneous signals under unknown domains into a unified form in the signal processing layer. To further address accidental irrelevant factors, we propose to align the feature spaces while suppressing the noisy ones with contrastive learning. On this basis, we develop a one-fits-all model that requires only one-time training but can adapt to 12 domains with 57 cases like unconstrained movements, unknown users, untrained environments, etc.. To the best of our knowledge, RF-Carer is the first zero-effort cross-domain respiration monitoring work with wireless RF signals and would be a fundamental step toward real-world deployments. Ge Wang 0003, Jiazheng Chen, Zhe Chen 0015, Fei Wang 0037, Cong Zhao 0006, Han Ding 0002, Cui Zhao, Wei Xi 0003, Jinsong Han |
SenSys | 8 |
| 2026 | Active Domain Adaptation for mmWave-Based HAR via R$\acute{e}$e'nyi Entropy-Based Uncertainty EstimationabstractHuman Activity Recognition (HAR) using mmWave radar provides a non-invasive alternative to traditional sensor-based methods but suffers from domain shift, where model performance declines in new users, positions, or environments. To address this, we propose mmADA, an Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) framework that efficiently adapts mmWave-based HAR models with minimal labeled data. mmADA enhances adaptation by introducing Rényi Entropy-based uncertainty estimation to identify and label the most informative target samples. Additionally, it leverages contrastive learning and pseudo-labeling to refine feature alignment using unlabeled data. Evaluations with a TI IWR1443BOOST radar across multiple users, positions, and environments show that mmADA achieves over 90% accuracy in various cross-domain settings. Comparisons with five baselines confirm its superior adaptation performance, while further tests on unseen users, environments, and two additional open-source datasets validate its robustness and generalization. Mingzhi Lin, Han Ding 0002, Cui Zhao, Fei Wang 0037, Ge Wang 0003, Wei Xi 0003 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 4 |
| 2025 | One Snapshot is All You Need: A Generalized Method for mmWave Signal Generation
Han Ding 0002, Wenxin Sun, Cui Zhao, Ge Wang 0003, Fei Wang 0037, Kun Zhao 0002, Zhi Wang 0002, Wei Xi 0003 |
INFOCOM | 4 |
| 2025 | Using Weak Light Sources to Power Sensor Nodes for Sustainable IoT
Cui Zhao |
INFOCOM | 3 |
| 2025 | mmYodar+: Robust Human Detection Using mmWave SignalsabstractThe detection of human objects can be crucial for various real-world applications, such as surveillance and autonomous driving. However, traditional vision-based approaches suffer from limitations such as low lighting conditions, occlusions, and privacy concerns. To address these challenges, we introduce mmYodar+, a novel mmWave-based automatic human detection system. Our system processes mmWave signals to generate a 3D point cloud, which is then transformed into a 2D radar image for easier visualization and analysis. To enhance human profiling, we filter the point cloud using biometric information and expand human-related points in the image based on radar angle resolution, incorporating color to improve the differentiation. Additionally, we employ a deep mutual learning (DML) framework, enabling efficient human detection using a lightweight DNN. Experimental results show that mmYodar+ achieves an average precision of 96.29% in various scenarios, including indoor and outdoor environments, various lighting conditions, and in the presence of occlusions. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of using mmWave radar signals for reliable and accurate human detection. Yuance Chang, Han Ding 0002, Cui Zhao, Fei Wang 0037, Ge Wang 0003, Zhi Wang 0002, Wei Xi 0003 |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 4 |
| 2025 | Federated Multi-Source Domain Adaptation for mmWave-Based Human Activity RecognitionabstractContactless mmWave-based human activity recognition (HAR) is essential for various applications, yet most existing approaches often assume consistent environments. Integrating domain adaptation offers a promising solution to this challenge. This prevailing paradigm works well when the source and target data are centralized on a single server while learning to adapt. However, in more universal and practical situations, such as personal health records, users’ biometric information, and financial issues, the raw data is typically protected by different privacy-preserving policies and is stored by multiple parties. Additionally, labeling RF signals in the target domain is a non-trivial and labor-intensive task for most end-users. To address these problems, this paper introduces FMDA, a federated multi-source domain adaptation framework for mmWave-based HAR. FMDA assesses the contribution of each source and performs weighted parameter aggregation for knowledge transfer. This facilitates unsupervised training of the target HAR model without requiring access to any source domain data. Moreover, the model is optimized by minimizing the generalization gaps between the source and target models, benefiting all participants during the learning process and enhancing overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FMDA. The results indicate that in the target domain, FMDA achieves comparable performance to supervised learning approaches, while also enhancing the efficacy of source domain models to varying degrees. Cui Zhao, Guotong Fang, Han Ding 0002, Fei Wang 0037, Ge Wang 0003, Kun Zhao 0002, Zhi Wang 0002, Wei Xi 0003 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 1 |
| 2025 | mm-Fall: Practical and Robust Fall Detection via mmWave SignalsabstractFalls pose a significant risk to the health and wellbeing of older adults, driving the development of various fall detection systems. Existing solutions have explored wearable and vision sensors, while non-invasive RF-based approaches have raised a growing interest due to their convenience and privacy considerations. Despite major advancements in RF-based passive estimation, current approaches still face challenges in handling complex real-world scenarios. They often lack the ability to generalize to new domains (i.e., people, position, environment), and struggle to accurately detect and localize a fallen person in the presence of unknown activities from nearby objects (e.g., pet animal and robot vacuum cleaner) or persons. To address these challenges, we present mm-Fall, a novel mmWave-based non-invasive fall detection system that utilizes Range-Angle (RA) energy maps to separate and localize multiple moving targets, and further accurately estimate their states. Unlike previous approaches, mm-Fall is capable of working with new domains and effectively distinguishing falls from non-fall motions that may appear similar. Additionally, it performs well in challenging conditions, such as poor lighting and occluded scenarios. Our design of mm-Fall is evaluated in 13 environments with over 16 individuals performing 24+ types of motions. The results demonstrate an impressive average recall of 0.969 and precision of 0.996 in detecting falls, whether involving single or multiple moving targets simultaneously. The code and dataset will be made publicly available. Cui Zhao, Qiumin Luo, Han Ding 0002, Ge Wang 0003, Kun Zhao 0002, Zhi Wang 0002, Wei Xi 0003, Jizhong Zhao |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 1 |
| 2024 | Genre Classification Empowered by Knowledge-Embedded Music RepresentationabstractThis paper introduces a pioneering framework for music representation learning, which harnesses knowledge graph embeddings to enrich genre classification. Leveraging metadata from publicly available datasets like FMA and OpenMIC-2018, the constructed knowledge graph delineates intricate relationships among genres, artists, and instruments, offering valuable insights for genre representation. Within this framework, we propose two models tailored for distinct genre classification scenarios: fixed-set genre classification and open-set genre classification. These models exploit the knowledge graph to unveil correlations among different genres and integrate this knowledge into the audio representation. Notably, our approach is the first to merge audio data with high-level knowledge for music genre classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average genre classification accuracy of 68.07% on the FMA-medium dataset and 42.4% for open-set classification on the FMA-large dataset. Han Ding 0002, Linwei Zhai, Cui Zhao, Fei Wang 0037, Ge Wang 0003, Wei Xi 0003, Zhi Wang 0002, Jizhong Zhao |
IEEE ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. | 3 |
| 2024 | Enabling Multi-Frequency and Wider-Band RFID Sensing Using COTS DeviceabstractRFID shows great potentials to build useful sensing applications. However, current RFID sensing can obtain mainly a single-dimensional sensing measurement from each reader-to-tag query, such as phase, RSS, etc. This is sufficient to fulfill the designs that are bound to the tag’s movement, e.g., the localization of tags. However, it imposes inevitable uncertainty on many sensing tasks relying on the features extracted from the RFID signals. These traditional sensing measurements limit the fidelity of RFID sensing fundamentally and prevent its broader usage in more sophisticated sensing scenarios. This paper presents RF-Wise to push the limit of RFID-based sensing, motivated by an insightful observation to customize RFID signals. RF-Wise can enrich the existing single-dimensional feature measure to a channel state information (CSI)-like measure with up to 150-dimensional samples across different frequencies concurrently. More importantly, RF-Wise is a software solution atop the standard EPC Gen2 protocol without using any extra hardware. It requires only one tag for sensing and works within the ISM band. RF-Wise, so far as we know, is the first system of such a kind. Extensive experiments show that RF-Wise does not impact underlying RFID communications, while by using the features extracted by RF-Wise, applications’ sensing performance can be improved remarkably. The source codes of RF-Wise are available at https://cui-zhao.github.io/RF-WISE/. Cui Zhao, Zhenjiang Li 0001, Han Ding 0002, Ge Wang 0003, Wei Xi 0003, Jizhong Zhao |
IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. | 1 |
| 2023 | Knowledge-Graph Augmented Music Representation for Genre ClassificationabstractIn this paper, we propose KGenre, a knowledge-embedded music representation learning framework for improved genre classification. We construct the knowledge graph from the metadata in the open-source FMA-medium and OpenMIC-2018 datasets, with no extra information/effort required. KGenre then mines the correlation between different genres from the knowledge graph and embeds such correlation in audio representation. To our knowledge, KGenre is the first method fusing the audio with high-level knowledge for music genre classification. Experimental results demonstrate the embedded knowledge can effectively enhance the audio feature representation, and the genre classification performance surpasses the state-of-the-art methods. Han Ding 0002, Wenjing Song, Cui Zhao, Fei Wang 0037, Ge Wang 0003, Wei Xi 0003, Jizhong Zhao |
ICASSP | 3 |
| 2023 | mmYodar: Lightweight and Robust Object Detection using mmWave SignalsabstractThe detection of human objects can be crucial for various real-world applications, such as surveillance and autonomous driving. However, traditional vision-based approaches suffer from limitations such as low lighting conditions, occlusions, and privacy concerns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel automatic object detection system, called mmYodar, which utilizes millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar signals. Our system collects mmWave signals and calculates a 3D point cloud, which is transformed into a radar image for easier visualization and analysis. To improve the system's human profiling capability, we expand the corresponding points in the image with color based on the radar angle resolution. Then, a designed deep mutual learning framework is employed to detect human objects from the expanded image. Experimental results show that mmYodar achieves nearly real-time detection with an average precision of 90.35% in various scenarios, including indoor and outdoor environments, various lighting conditions, and in the presence of occlusions. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of using mmWave radar signals for reliable and accurate human object detection. Our code and dataset are available at https:llgithub.comlbrave20005lmmYodar. Yuance Chang, Han Ding 0002, Dachao Han, Ge Wang 0003, Cui Zhao, Fei Wang 0037, Wei Xi 0003, Jizhong Zhao |
SECON | 6 |
| 2022 | UTIO: Universal, Targeted, Imperceptible and Over-the-air Audio Adversarial ExampleabstractThe audio adversarial example has been demonstrated to be an effective attack which leads to prediction errors of the intelligent voice control system (e.g., deep neural network based speech recognition service), despite resembling a valid input to our human beings. An ideal adversarial example attack should have four major advantages, including 1) utilizing a universal adversarial perturbation against arbitrary voice commands, 2) tricking a model to get an incorrect and targeted result, 3) imperceptible to users even in a silent place and 4) validating in an over-the-air (OTA) scenario as well. However, existing studies mainly involve several but not all of these criteria. In this paper, we propose UTIO, a universal, targeted, imperceptible and OTA audio adversarial example design, which leverages one perturbation to fool a speech recognition model in OTA scenarios. Moreover, a variety of speeches can be misled to a targeted threat command imperceptibly. To harvest such benefits, we leverage two targeted loss functions to generate adversarial perturbations, and employ the psychoacoustic principle to further conceal the attack. Finally, we actively embed additional distortions, occurred during the physical propagation, in the process of perturbation generation to make UTIO still valid in an OTA scenario. Extensive experiments show that UTIO can perform 94.15% success attack rate locally, i.e., without physical propagation, while retaining 93.44% attack rate in an OTA scenario. In addition, three types of defensive strategies are also introduced to resist against our attack. Cui Zhao, Zhenjiang Li 0001, Han Ding 0002, Wei Xi 0003 |
ICPADS | 1 |
| 2022 | RF-Wise: Pushing the Limit of RFID-based SensingabstractRFID shows great potentials to build useful sensing applications. However, current RFID sensing can obtain mainly a single-dimensional sensing measurement from each reader-to-tag query, such as phase, RSS, etc. This is sufficient to fulfill the designs that are bounded to the tag’s own movement, e.g., the localization of tags. However, it imposes inevitable uncertainty to many sensing tasks relying on the features extracted from the RFID signals, which limits the fidelity of RFID sensing fundamentally and prevents its broader usage in more sophisticated sensing scenarios. This paper presents RF-Wise to push the limit of the RFID-based sensing, motivated by an insightful observation to customize RFID signals. RF-Wise can enrich the existing single-dimensional feature measure to a channel state information (CSI)-like measure with up to 150 dimensional samples across different frequencies concurrently. More importantly, RF-Wise is a software solution atop the standard EPC Gen2 protocol without using any extra hardware, requires only one tag for sensing and works within the ISM band. RF-Wise, so far as we know, is the first system of such a kind. Extensive experiments show that RF-Wise does not impact underlying RFID communications, while by using the features extracted by RF-Wise, applications’ sensing performance can be improved remarkably. The source codes of RF-Wise are available at https://cui-zhao.github.io/RF-WISE/. Cui Zhao, Zhenjiang Li 0001, Han Ding 0002, Ge Wang 0003, Wei Xi 0003, Jizhong Zhao |
INFOCOM | 1 |
| 2022 | Utilizing Tag Interference for Refined Localization of Passive RFIDabstractWe study a new problem, refined localization, in this article. Refined localization calculates the location of an object in high precision, given that the object is in a relatively small region such as the surface of a table. Refined localization is useful in many cyber–physical systems such as industrial autonomous robots. Existing vision-based approaches suffer from several disadvantages, including good lighting conditions, line of sight, prelearning process, and high computation overhead. Also, vision-based approaches cannot differentiate objects with similar colors and shapes. This article presents a new refined localization system, called Trio, which uses passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for low cost and easy deployment. Trio utilizes RF interference for tag localization by modeling the equivalent circuits of coupled tags. We implement our prototype using commercial off-the-shelf RFID reader and tags. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that Trio effectively achieves high accuracy of refined localization, i.e., < 1 cm errors for several types of main stream tags. Han Ding 0002, Cui Zhao, Ge Wang 0003, Kun Zhao 0002, Wei Xi 0003, Jizhong Zhao |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 2 |
| 2022 | Arbitrator2.0: Preventing Unauthorized Access on Passive TagsabstractAs the ultra high frequency (UHF) passive radio frequency identification (RFID) technology becomes increasingly deployed, it faces an array of new security attacks. In this paper, we consider a type of attack in which a malicious RFID reader could arbitrarily access the tags, e.g., retrieve or modify IDs or other data in the memory, via standard commands. To deal with this type of attack, we propose a physical-layer tag protection framework, namely Arbitrator2.0, that involves two operating mode, i.e., one is to passively listen on RF channels and identify unauthorized readers, the other is working as normal reader to access tag information but resilient to one-antenna eavesdropper. Our solution does not need to modify RFID tags or the underlying communication standards. In this study, we have implemented a prototype Arbitrator2.0 over the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) platform, and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. The results show that Arbitrator2.0 can effectively diminish the unauthorized access attacks and prevent eavesdropping. Han Ding 0002, Jinsong Han, Cui Zhao, Ge Wang 0003, Wei Xi 0003, Zhiping Jiang, Jizhong Zhao |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 3 |
| 2022 | A Fingertip Profiled RF IdentifierabstractThis paper presents RF-Mehndi, a passive commercial RFID tag array formed identifier. The key RF-Mehndi novelty is that when the user’s fingertip touching on the tag array surface during the communication, the backscattered signals by the tag array become user-dependent and unique. Hence, if we enhance the communication modality of many personal cards nowadays by RF-Mehndi, in case that a card gets lost or stolen, it cannot be used illegally by the adversaries. To harvest such a benefit, we leverage two key observations in designing RF-Mehndi. The first one is when tags are nearby, their interrogated currents can change each other’s circuit characteristics, based on which unique phase features can be obtained from backscattered signals. The second observation is that when the user’s fingertip touches the tag array surface during communication, the phase feature can be further profiled by this user. Based on these observations, the card and its holder can be potentially authenticated at the same time. To transfer the RF-Mehndi idea to a practical system, we further address technical challenges. We implement a prototype system. Extensive evaluations show the effectiveness of RF-Mehndi, achieving excellent authentication performance. Cui Zhao, Zhenjiang Li 0001, Han Ding 0002, Wei Xi 0003, Ruowei Gui, Jinsong Han |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 1 |
| 2020 | RFnet: Automatic Gesture Recognition and Human Identification Using Time Series RFID Signals
Han Ding 0002, Cui Zhao, Fei Wang 0037, Ge Wang 0003, Zhiping Jiang, Wei Xi 0003, Jizhong Zhao |
Mob. Networks Appl. | 3 |
| 2019 | RF-Mehndi: A Fingertip Profiled RF IdentifierabstractThis paper presents RF-Mehndi, a passive commercial RFID tag array formed identifier. The key RF-Mehndi novelty is that when the user's fingertip touching on the tag array surface during the communication, the backscattered signals by the tag array become user-dependent and unique. Hence, if we enhance the communication modality of many personal cards nowadays by RF-Mehndi, in case that a card gets lost or stolen, it cannot be used illegally by the adversaries. To harvest such a benefit, we have two key observations in designing RF-Mehndi. The first observation is when tags are nearby, their interrogated currents can change each other's circuit characteristics, based on which unique phase features can be obtained from backscattered signals. The second observation is that when the user's fingertip touches the tag array surface during communication, the phase feature can be further profiled by this user. Based on these observations, the card and its holder can be potentially authenticated at the same time. To transfer the RF-Mehndi idea to a practical system, we further address technical challenges. We implement a prototype system. Extensive evaluations show the effectiveness of RF-Mehndi, achieving excellent authentication performance. Cui Zhao, Zhenjiang Li 0001, Han Ding 0002, Jinsong Han, Wei Xi 0003, Ruowei Gui |
INFOCOM | 1 |