Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant potential for enhancing healthcare applications, yet their deployment is hindered by high computational and memory demands. Model compression techniques offer solutions to reduce these demands, but their impact on medical LLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce CMedBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating compressed LLMs in medical contexts. CMedBench assesses five core dimensions: Medical Knowledge Ability, Medical Application Ability, Trustworthiness Maintenance, Compression Cross Combination, and Computational Efficiency. Through extensive empirical studies, we analyze the trade-offs between model efficiency and clinical performance across diverse models, datasets, and compression strategies. Our findings highlight critical limitations in current evaluation practices and provide a robust framework for aligning compression strategies with medical requirements. CMedBench serves as a vital resource for researchers and practitioners, guiding the development of efficient, trustworthy, and clinically effective LLMs for healthcare applications.

Recently, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, highlighting the urgent need for further research to comprehensively identify and mitigate these threats. Unfortunately, existing jailbreak studies primarily focus on coarse-grained input manipulation to elicit specific responses, overlooking the exploitation of internal representations, i.e., intermediate activations, which constrains their ability to penetrate alignment safeguards and generate harmful responses. To tackle this issue, we propose the Activation Manipulation (ActMan) Attack framework, which performs fine-grained activation manipulations inspired by the perception and cognition stages of human decision-making, enhancing both the penetration capability and harmfulness of attacks. To improve penetration capability, we introduce a Deceptive Visual Camouflage module inspired by the masking effect in human perception. This module uses a benign activation-guided attention redirection strategy to conceal abnormal activation patterns, thereby suppressing LVLM's defense detection during early-stage decoding. To enhance harmfulness, we design a Malicious Semantic Induction module drawing from the framing effect in human cognition, which reconstructs jailbreak instructions using malicious activation guidance to change LVLM’s risk assessment during late-stage decoding, thereby amplifying the harmfulness of model responses. Extensive experiments on six mainstream LVLMs demonstrate that our method remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average relative ASR improvement of 12.06%.

Hallucination has emerged as a pivotal challenge of Large Language Models (LLMs) that generate plausible yet non‑factual content, significantly impeding the trustworthy AI applications in real-world scenarios like medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. Editing the internal activations of LLMs during inference has shown promising effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations with minimal cost. However, previous editing approaches neglect the query‑specific inference pathways that require tailored truthful steering vectors, resulting in suboptimal hallucination mitigation. To address these issues, we propose the Query-Routed Activation Editing (QRAE) framework, which comprises Divergence-sensitive Head Routing (DHR) and Truth-hierarchical Preference Steering (TPS), to fully leverage query-specific semantics for adaptive activation editing. Specifically, DHR is proposed to establish a query-aware head selection criterion, thereby dynamically routing to truth-critical attention heads. Subsequently, TPS introduces a query-specific steering vector calibration policy with the guidance of progressive truth-preferred optimization, enabling precise and adaptive editing for each distinct query. Extensive experiments on the widely recognized TruthfulQA benchmark demonstrate that QRAE outperforms SOTA methods by up to 13.2% in MC1. Meanwhile, QRAE demonstrates strong generalization to out-of-distribution TriviaQA and Natural Questions benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) inevitably encounter factual hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence, necessitating lifelong knowledge editing to sustain reliability and factual advancement. While mainstream lifelong editing paradigms aim to alleviate knowledge forgetting through allocating and updating isolated parameter subspaces, they often overlook conflict assessment among distinct editing processes, leading to unjustified subspace allocation and indiscriminate neuron tuning. To address these issues, we propose the Conflict-Assessed Sensitive Editing (CASE) framework, which integrates a Conflict-Assessed Editing Allocation (CAA) module and a Knowledge-sensitive Neuron Tuning (KNT) strategy. The CAA module quantitatively assesses editing conflicts to enable justified subspace allocation, thereby reducing globally significant conflicts and routing errors. The KNT strategy adaptively identifies and tunes knowledge-sensitive neurons through a calibrated sensitivity threshold, effectively eliminating local conflicts and enhancing subspace stability. Extensive experiments on standard lifelong editing benchmarks demonstrate that CASE achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving average editing accuracy by nearly 10% after 1,000 sequential edits. Overall, CASE substantially mitigates editing conflicts and enhances knowledge retention, offering a scalable and conflict-resilient solution for lifelong model editing.

Physical adversarial examples (PAEs) are regarded as “whistle-blowers” of real-world risks in deep-learning applications, thus worth further investigation. However, current PAE generation studies show limited adaptive attacking ability to diverse and varying scenes, revealing the urgent requirement of dynamic PAEs that are generated in real time and conditioned on the observation from the attacker. The key challenge in generating dynamic PAEs is learning the sparse relation between PAEs and the observation of attackers under the noisy feedback of attack training. To address the challenge, we present DynamicPAE, the first generative framework that enables scene-aware real-time physical attacks. Specifically, to address the noisy feedback problem that obfuscates the exploration of scene-related PAEs, we introduce the residual-guided adversarial pattern exploration technique. We first introduce the limited feedback information restriction to model the training degeneracy problem under noisy feedback. Then, residual-guided training, which relaxes the attack training with a reconstruction task, is proposed to enrich the feedback information, thereby achieving a more comprehensive exploration of PAEs. To address the alignment problem between the trained generator, which represents the learned relation, and the real-world scenario, we introduce the distribution-matched attack scenario alignment, consisting of the conditional-uncertainty-aligned data module and the skewness-aligned objective re-weighting module. The former aligns the training environment with the incomplete observation of the real-world attacker. The latter facilitates consistent stealth control across different attack targets by balancing the objectives with the skewness indicator. Extensive digital and physical evaluations demonstrate the superior attack performance of DynamicPAE, attaining a 2.07× boost ( 58.8% average AP drop under attack) on representative object detectors (e.g., DETR) over state-of-the-art static PAE generating methods. Overall, our work opens the door to end-to-end modeling of dynamic PAEs.

Zhange Zhang, Yuqing Ma, Yulong Wang, Shan He, Tianbo Wang, Siqi He, Jiakai Wang, Xianglong Liu. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Intervening the internal activations of large language models (LLMs) provides an effective inference-time alignment approach to mitigate undesirable behaviors, such as generating erroneous or harmful content, thereby ensuring safe and reliable applications of LLMs.However, previous methods neglect the misalignment discrepancy among varied tokens, resulting in deviant alignment direction and inflexible editing strength.To address these issues, we propose a token-aware editing (TAE) approach to fully utilize token-level alignment information in the activation space, therefore realizing superior post-intervention performance.Specifically, a Mutual Information-guided Graph Aggregation (MIG) module first develops an MI-guided graph to exploit the tokens' informative interaction for activation enrichment, thus improving alignment probing and facilitating intervention.Subsequently, Misalignment-aware Adaptive Intervention (MAI) comprehensively perceives the token-level misalignment degree from token representation and prediction to guide the adaptive adjustment of editing strength, thereby enhancing final alignment performance.Extensive experiments on three alignment capabilities demonstrate the efficacy of TAE, notably surpassing baseline by 25.8% on the primary metric of truthfulness with minimal cost. 1 MHSA

Multi-station weather prediction provides weather forecasts for specific geographical locations, playing an important role in various aspects of daily life. Existing methods consider the relationships between individual stations discretely, making it difficult to model the continuous spatiotemporal processes of atmospheric motion, which results in suboptimal prediction outcomes. This paper proposes the Continuous Diffusive Prediction Network (CDPNet) to model the real-world continuous weather change process from discrete station observation data. CDPNet consists of two core modules: the Continuous Calibrated Initialization (CCI) and the Diffusive Difference Estimation (DDE). The CCI module interpolates data between observation stations to construct a spatially continuous physical field and ensures temporal continuity by integrating directional information from a global perspective. It accurately represents the current physical state and provides a foundation for future weather prediction. Moreover, the DDE module explicitly captures the spatial diffusion process and estimates the diffusive differences between consecutive time steps, effectively modeling spatio-temporally continuous atmospheric motion. Likewise, directional information on weather changes is introduced from the entire historical series to mitigate estimation uncertainty and improve the performance of weather prediction. Extensive experiments on the Weather2K and Global Wind/Temp datasets demonstrate that CDPNet outperforms state-of-the-art models.

Continual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Co-MARL) requires agents to address catastrophic forgetting issues while learning new coordination policies with the dynamics team. In this paper, we delve into the core of Co-MARL, namely Relation Patterns, which refer to agents’ general understanding of interactions. In addition to generality, relation patterns exhibit task-specificity when mapped to different action spaces. To this end, we propose a novel method called General Relation Patterns-Guided Task-specific Decision-Maker (RPG). In RPG, agents extract relation patterns from dynamic observation spaces using a relation capturer. These task-agnostic relation patterns are then mapped to different action spaces via a task-specific decision-maker generated by a conditional hypernetwork. To combat forgetting, we further introduce regularization items on both the relation capturer and the conditional hypernetwork. Results on SMAC and LBF demonstrate that RPG effectively prevents catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks and achieves zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks.

In cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), it is a common practice to tune hyperparameters in ideal simulated environments to maximize cooperative performance. However, policies tuned for cooperation often fail to maintain robustness and resilience under real-world uncertainties. Building trustworthy MARL systems requires a deep understanding of \emph{robustness}, which ensures stability under uncertainties, and \emph{resilience}, the ability to recover from disruptions—a concept extensively studied in control systems but largely overlooked in MARL. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study comprising over 82,620 experiments to evaluate cooperation, robustness, and resilience in MARL across 4 real-world environments, 13 uncertainty types, and 15 hyperparameters. Our key findings are: (1) Under mild uncertainty, optimizing cooperation improves robustness and resilience, but this link weakens as perturbations intensify. Robustness and resilience also varies by algorithm and uncertainty type. (2) Robustness and resilience do not generalize across uncertainty modalities or agent scopes: policies robust to action noise for all agents may fail under observation noise on a single agent. (3) Hyperparameter tuning is critical for trustworthy MARL: surprisingly, standard practices like parameter sharing, GAE, and PopArt can hurt robustness, while early stopping, high critic learning rates, and Leaky ReLU consistently help. By optimizing hyperparameters only, we observe substantial improvement in cooperation, robustness and resilience across all MARL backbones, with the phenomenon also generalizing to robust MARL methods across these backbones.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated broad applications but suffer from issues like hallucinations, erroneous outputs and outdated knowledge. Model editing emerges as an effective solution to refine knowledge in LLMs, yet existing methods typically depend on structured knowledge representations. However, real-world knowledge is primarily embedded within complex, unstructured text. Existing structured knowledge editing approaches face significant challenges when handling the entangled and intricate knowledge present in unstructured text, resulting in issues such as representation ambiguity and editing conflicts. To address these challenges, we propose a Conflict-Aware Knowledge Editing in the Wild (CAKE) framework, the first framework explicitly designed for editing knowledge extracted from wild unstructured text. CAKE comprises two core components: a Semantic-augmented Graph Representation module and a Conflict-aware Knowledge Editing strategy. The Semantic-augmented Graph Representation module enhances knowledge encoding through structural disambiguation, relational enrichment, and semantic diversification. Meanwhile, the Conflict-aware Knowledge Editing strategy utilizes a graph-theoretic coloring algorithm to disentangle conflicted edits by allocating them to orthogonal parameter subspaces, thereby effectively mitigating editing conflicts. Experimental results on the AKEW benchmark demonstrate that CAKE significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a 15.43\% improvement in accuracy on llama3 editing tasks. Our framework successfully bridges the gap between unstructured textual knowledge and reliable model editing, enabling more robust and scalable updates for practical LLM applications.

Recently, the jailbreak attack, which generates adversarial prompts to bypass safety measures and mislead large language models (LLMs) to output harmful answers, has attracted extensive interest due to its potential to reveal the vulnerabilities of LLMs. However, ignoring the exploitation of the characteristics in intention understanding, existing studies could only generate prompts with weak attacking ability, failing to evade defenses (e.g., sensitive word detect) and causing malice(e.g., harmful outputs). Motivated by the mechanism in the psychology of human misjudgment, we propose a dual intention escape (DIE) jailbreak attack framework to generate more stealthy and toxic prompts to deceive LLMs to output harmful content. For stealthiness, inspired by the anchoring effect, we designed the Intention-anchored Malicious Concealment(IMC) module that hides the harmful intention behind a generated anchor intention by the recursive decomposition block and contrary intention nesting block. Since the anchor intention will be received first, the LLMs might pay less attention to the harmful intention and enter response status. For toxicity, we propose the Intention-reinforced Malicious Inducement (IMI) module based on the availability bias mechanism in a progressive malicious prompting approach. Due to the ongoing emergence of statements correlated to harmful intentions, the output content of LLMs will be closer to these more accessible intentions, i.e., more toxic. We conducted extensive experiments under black-box settings, supporting that DIE could achieve 100% ASR-R and 92.9% ASR-G against GPT3.5-turbo.

Open world object detection (OWOD) aims to identify both known instances of trained classes and unknown ones. Despite recent advancements, existing methods exhibit a detection bias towards known classes, as detectors are exclusively trained under the supervision of known classes. To address this problem, we construct a causal graph to scrutinize OWOD from a causal perspective, revealing that the bias problem primarily arises due to the confounding effect of known classes, and the causality between unknown objects and their predictions learned by the detector is weak. Therefore, we propose a causality-inspired debiasing framework for OWOD, aiming to bolster the performance of OWOD models by eliminating confounders and encouraging appropriate features. Specifically, a semantic causal intervention module is proposed to remove the confounding effect from known classes to unknown features, which introduces the known semantics to interact fairly with all unknown features through backdoor adjustment. Moreover, an unknown causality enhancement module is employed to enhance the causality of unknown objects and their predictions acquired by the model, which imposes constraints for different unknown classes in feature space with the contrastive learning paradigm from the perspective of intervention effect. Extensive experiments conducted on the commonly-used OWOD benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently yields superior results on unknown classes compared with state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (+25.0% UD-Pre, +10.2% Recall on unknown classes) and even better on known classes (+1.4% mAP on known classes).

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), ensuring robustness against cooperative agents making unpredictable or worst-case adversarial actions is crucial for real-world deployment. In multi-agent settings, each agent may be perturbed or unperturbed, leading to an exponential increase in potential threat scenarios as the number of agents grows. Existing robust MARL methods either enumerate, or approximate all possible threat scenarios, leading to intense computation and insufficient robustness. In contrast, humans develop robust behaviors by maintaining a general level of caution rather than preparing for every possible threat. Inspired by human decision making, we frame robust MARL as a control-as-inference problem, and optimize worst-case robustness across all threat scenarios implicitly optimized through off-policy evaluation. Specifically, we introduce mutual information regularization as robust regularization (MIR3), which maximizes a lower bound on robustness during routine training, serving as a kind of caution for MARL without adversarial inputs. Further insights show that MIR3 acts as an information bottleneck, preventing agents from over-reacting to others and aligning policies with robust action priors. In the presence of worst-case adversaries, our MIR3 significantly surpasses baseline methods in robustness and training efficiency, and maintaining cooperative performance in StarCraft II, quadrotor swarm control, and robot swarm control. When deploying the robot swarm control algorithm in the real world, our method also outperforms the best baseline by 14.29% in reward. See code and demo videos at https://github.com/DIG-Beihang/MIR3.

Lane detection (LD) plays a crucial role in enhancing the L2+ capabilities of autonomous driving, capturing widespread attention. The Post-Processing Quantization (PTQ) could facilitate the practical application of LD models, enabling fast speeds and limited memories without labeled data. However, prior PTQ methods do not consider the complex LD outputs that contain physical semantics, such as offsets, locations, etc., and thus cannot be directly applied to LD models. In this paper, we pioneeringly investigate semantic sensitivity to post-processing for lane detection with a novel Lane Distortion Score. Moreover, we identify two main factors impacting the LD performance after quantization, namely intra-head sensitivity and inter-head sensitivity, where a small quantization error in specific semantics can cause significant lane distortion. Thus, we propose a Selective Focus framework deployed with Semantic Guided Focus and Sensitivity Aware Selection modules, to incorporate post-processing information into PTQ reconstruction. Based on the observed intra-head sensitivity, Semantic Guided Focus is introduced to prioritize foreground-related semantics using a practical proxy. For inter-head sensitivity, we present Sensitivity Aware Selection, efficiently recognizing influential prediction heads and refining the optimization objectives at runtime. Extensive experiments have been done on a wide variety of models including keypoint-, anchor-, curve-, and segmentation-based ones. Our method produces quantized models in minutes on a single GPU and can achieve 6.4\% F1 Score improvement on the CULane dataset. Code and supplementary statement can be found at https://github.com/PannenetsF/SelectiveFocus.

Neural network sparsity has attracted many research interests due to its similarity to biological schemes and high energy efficiency. However, existing methods depend on long-time training or fine-tuning, which prevents large-scale applications. Recently, some works focusing on post-training sparsity (PTS) have emerged. They get rid of the high training cost but usually suffer from distinct accuracy degradation due to neglect of the reasonable sparsity rate at each layer. Previous methods for finding sparsity rates mainly focus on the training-aware scenario, which usually fails to converge stably under the PTS setting with limited data and much less training cost. In this paper, we propose a fast and controllable post-training sparsity (FCPTS) framework. By incorporating a differentiable bridge function and a controllable optimization objective, our method allows for rapid and accurate sparsity allocation learning in minutes, with the added assurance of convergence to a predetermined global sparsity rate. Equipped with these techniques, we can surpass the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, e.g., over 30\% improvement for ResNet-50 on ImageNet under the sparsity rate of 80\%. Our plug-and-play code and supplementary materials are open-sourced at https://github.com/ModelTC/FCPTS.

Abstract Dental caries, a common oral disease, poses serious risks if untreated, necessitating effective preventive measures like pit and fissure sealing. However, the reliance on experienced dentists for pit and fissures or caries detection limits accessibility, potentially leading to missed treatment opportunities, especially among children. To bridge this gap, we leverage deep learning in object detection to develop a method for autonomously identifying caries and determining pit and fissure sealing requirements using smartphone oral photos. We test several detection models and adopt a tiling strategy to reduce information loss during image pre‐processing. Our implementation achieves 72.3 mAP.5 with the YOLOXs model and tiling strategy. We enhance accessibility by deploying the pre‐trained network as a WeChat applet on mobile devices, enabling in‐home detection by parents or guardians. In addition, our data set of children's first permanent molars will also aid in the broader study of pediatric oral disease.

Open World Object Detection (OWOD), simulating the real dynamic world where knowledge grows continuously, attempts to detect both known and unknown classes and incrementally learn the identified unknown ones. Recently a few studies have introduced and explored the OWOD problem, however, the main challenges in the OWOD task that distinguishing unknown classes from the background (Unknown Objectness) or known classes (Unknown Discrimination) have not been well solved, and there is lacking systematic analysis of benchmark and metrics for evaluating the OWOD task. In this paper, we revisit the OWOD problem and rethink it from benchmark, metrics, and algorithm perspectives. First, we propose five fundamental benchmark principles in line with the OWOD definition and construct two OWOD benchmarks according to the principles for a fair evaluation. Second, we point out that existing metrics neglect the detection performance of unknown classes and further design two additional metrics specific to the OWOD problem, filling the void of evaluating from the perspective of unknown classes. Finally, we introduce a novel and effective OWOD framework with an auxiliary Proposal ADvisor (PAD) and a Class-specific Expelling Classifier (CEC). The non-parametric PAD improves Unknown Objectness by assisting RPN in identifying more accurate unknown proposals based on the class-agnostic property of the object and aggregation through spatial and appearance similarity, while CEC enhances the Unknown Discrimination by calibrating the over-confident activation boundary and suppressing confusing predictions through a class-specific expelling function. Comprehensive experiments conducted on both fair benchmarks based on our OWOD benchmark principles and the original benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art object detection methods in terms of both existing and our new metrics.

Open world object detection (OWOD) has attracted extensive attention due to its practicability in the real world. Previous OWOD works manually designed unknown-discover strategies to select unknown proposals from the background, suffering from uncertainties without appropriate priors. In this paper, we claim the learning of object detection could be seen as an object-level feature-entanglement process, where unknown traits are propagated to the known proposals through convolutional operations and could be distilled to benefit unknown recognition without manual selection. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective Annealing-based Label-Transfer framework, which sufficiently explores the known proposals to alleviate the uncertainties. Specifically, a Label-Transfer Learning paradigm is introduced to decouple the known and unknown features, while a Sawtooth Annealing Scheduling strategy is further employed to rebuild the decision boundaries of the known and unknown classes, thus promoting both known and unknown recognition. Moreover, previous OWOD works neglected the trade-off of known and unknown performance, and we thus introduce a metric called Equilibrium Index to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of the OWOD models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first OWOD work without manual unknown selection. Extensive experiments conducted on the common-used benchmark validate that our model achieves superior detection performance (200% unknown mAP improvement with the even higher known detection performance) compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/DIG-Beihang/ALLOW.git.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of applications, while they are vulnerable to adversarial examples , which motivates the evaluation and benchmark of model robustness. However, current evaluations usually use simple metrics to study the performance of defenses, which are far from understanding the limitation and weaknesses of these defense methods. Thus, most proposed defenses are quickly shown to be attacked successfully, which results in the “arm race” phenomenon between attack and defense. To mitigate this problem, we establish a model robustness evaluation framework containing 23 comprehensive and rigorous metrics, which consider two key perspectives of adversarial learning (i.e., data and model). Through neuron coverage and data imperceptibility , we use data-oriented metrics to measure the integrity of test examples; by delving into model structure and behavior, we exploit model-oriented metrics to further evaluate robustness in the adversarial setting . To fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we conduct large-scale experiments on multiple datasets including CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet using different models and defenses with our open-source platform. Overall, our paper provides a comprehensive evaluation framework, where researchers could conduct comprehensive and fast evaluations using the open-source toolkit, and the analytical results could inspire deeper understanding and further improvement to the model robustness.

Action Recognition is a fundamental task in computer vision field, with a wide range of applications in autonomous driving, security monitoring, etc. However, previous action recognition approaches usually suffer from the inappropriate spatio-temporal modeling or high computational consumption (e.g., 3D CNN). In this paper, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Network (STANet) with bidirectional temporal difference, consisting of a Temporal Adaptive module (TA) and a Spatial Adaptive (SA) module, to sufficiently extract the crucial motion information and model the spatial pivotal appearance information from both forward and backward perspectives, respectively. Specifically, the Temporal Adaptive module uses bidirectional temporal differences to learn valuable motion trends and balance the static semantics and dynamic motion for a certain action during information fusion; while the Spatial Adaptive module uses the bidirectional temporal difference to obtain the spatio-channel attention to stress the discriminative position-relevant and semantic-relevant appearance features. Extensive experiments conducted on widely-used action recognition benchmarks UCF-101, HMDB-51, Something-Something V1, and Kinetics-400 prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.

Recently, deep neural networks have achieved promising performance for in-filling large missing regions in image inpainting tasks. They have usually adopted the standard convolutional architecture over the corrupted image, leading to meaningless contents, such as color discrepancy, blur, and other artifacts. Moreover, most inpainting approaches cannot handle well the case of a large contiguous missing area. To address these problems, we propose a generic inpainting framework capable of handling incomplete images with both contiguous and discontiguous large missing areas. We pose this in an adversarial manner, deploying regionwise operations in both the generator and discriminator to separately handle the different types of regions, namely, existing regions and missing ones. Moreover, a correlation loss is introduced to capture the nonlocal correlations between different patches, and thus, guide the generator to obtain more information during inference. With the help of regionwise generative adversarial mechanism, our framework can restore semantically reasonable and visually realistic images for both discontiguous and contiguous large missing areas. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets for image inpainting task have been conducted, and both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, on the large contiguous and discontiguous missing areas.

Recently, few-shot object detection (FSOD) has become an increasing research focus, which can largely alleviate the heavy dependency on expensive annotations in the traditional object detection task. However, existing FSOD approaches fail to generate sufficient high-quality positive region proposals which are the key to detection performance, due to the lack of informative knowledge from base classes and non-specific alteration for novel classes. To address the problem, this paper presents a simple yet effective few-shot object detection framework referred to as Temporal Speciation Network (TeSNet) with an evolving training, which improves the diversity and rationality of positive proposal generation. Our TeSNet, imitating the natural evolution which relies on inheritation and mutation, correspondingly consists of two key components: a Selective Recombination Module (SRM) for effectively inheriting from base classes and a Mutational Region Proposal Network (MRPN) for flexibly mutating according to the unique traits of novel samples. Specifically, SRM selects and reorganizes relevant base categories, and further instantiates diverse individuals to ensure the diversity of positive proposals. MRPN adapts the parameters trained on base classes aiming for accurately locating positive proposals. Extensive experiments are conducted on several commonly-used datasets, in which our TeSNet achieves state-of-the-art results and outperforms baselines by large margin.

Few-shot learning, aiming to learn novel concepts from one or a few labeled examples, is an interesting and very challenging problem with many practical advantages. Existing few-shot methods usually utilize data of the same classes to train the feature embedding module and in a row, which is unable to learn adapting to new tasks. Besides, traditional few-shot models fail to take advantage of the valuable relations of the support-query pairs, leading to performance degradation. In this article, we propose a transductive relation-propagation graph neural network (GNN) with a decoupling training strategy (TRPN-D) to explicitly model and propagate such relations across support-query pairs, and empower the few-shot module the ability of transferring past knowledge to new tasks via the decoupling training. Our few-shot module, namely TRPN, treats the relation of each support-query pair as a graph node, named relational node, and resorts to the known relations between support samples, including both intraclass commonality and interclass uniqueness. Through relation propagation, the model could generate the discriminative relation embeddings for support-query pairs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that decouples the training of the embedding network and the few-shot graph module with different tasks, which might offer a new way to solve the few-shot learning problem. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform a variety of state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods.

Abstract reasoning refers to the ability to analyze information, discover rules at an intangible level, and solve problems in innovative ways. Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) test is typically used to examine the capability of abstract reasoning. The subject is asked to identify the correct choice from the answer set to fill the missing panel at the bottom right of RPM (e.g., a 3×3 matrix), following the underlying rules inside the matrix. Recent studies, taking advantage of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have achieved encouraging progress to accomplish the RPM test. However, they partly ignore necessary inductive biases of RPM solver, such as order sensitivity within each row/column and incremental rule induction. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a Stratified Rule-Aware Network (SRAN) to generate the rule embeddings for two input sequences. Our SRAN learns multiple granularity rule embeddings at different levels, and incrementally integrates the stratified embedding flows through a gated fusion module. With the help of embeddings, a rule similarity metric is applied to guarantee that SRAN can not only be trained using a tuplet loss but also infer the best answer efficiently. We further point out the severe defects existing in the popular RAVEN dataset for RPM test, which prevent from the fair evaluation of the abstract reasoning ability. To fix the defects, we propose an answer set generation algorithm called Attribute Bisection Tree (ABT), forming an improved dataset named Impartial-RAVEN (I-RAVEN for short). Extensive experiments are conducted on both PGM and I-RAVEN datasets, showing that our SRAN outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin.

Prohibited items detection in X-ray images often plays an important role in protecting public safety, which often deals with color-monotonous and luster-insufficient objects, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. Till now, there have been rare studies touching this topic due to the lack of specialized high-quality datasets. In this work, we first present a High-quality X-ray (HiXray) security inspection image dataset, which contains 102,928 common prohibited items of 8 categories. It is the largest dataset of high quality for prohibited items detection, gathered from the real-world airport security inspection and annotated by professional security inspectors. Besides, for accurate prohibited item detection, we further propose the Lateral Inhibition Module (LIM) inspired by the fact that humans recognize these items by ignoring irrelevant information and focusing on identifiable characteristics, especially when objects are overlapped with each other. Specifically, LIM, the elaborately designed flexible additional module, suppresses the noisy information flowing maximumly by the Bidirectional Propagation (BP) module and activates the most identifiable charismatic, boundary, from four directions by Boundary Activation (BA) module. We evaluate our method extensively on HiXray and OPIXray and the results demonstrate that it outperforms SOTA detection methods.1

Recently, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have achieved promising performance for single image super-resolution (SISR). However, they usually extract features on a single scale and lack sufficient supervision information, leading to undesired artifacts and unpleasant noise in super-resolution (SR) images. To address this problem, we first propose a hierarchical feature extraction module (HFEM) to extract the features in multiple scales, which helps concentrate on both local textures and global semantics. Then, a hierarchical guided reconstruction module (HGRM) is introduced to reconstruct more natural structural textures in SR images via intermediate supervisions in a progressive manner. Finally, we integrate HFEM and HGRM in a simple yet efficient end-to-end framework named hierarchical generative adversarial networks (HSR-GAN) to recover consistent details, and thus obtain the semantically reasonable and visually realistic results. Extensive experiments on five common datasets demonstrate that our method shows favorable visual quality and superior quantitative performance compared to state-of-the-art methods for SISR.

Abstract Previous deep learning methods usually required large‐scale annotated data, which is computationally exhaustive and unrealistic in certain scenarios. Therefore, few‐shot learning, where only a few annotated training images are available for training, has attracted increasing attention these days, showing huge potential in practical applications, such as portable equipment or security inspection, and so on. However, current few‐shot learning methods usually neglect the valuable semantic correlations between samples, thereby failing in extracting discriminating relations to achieve accurate predictive results. In this work, extending on a recent state‐of‐the‐art few‐shot learning method, transductive relation‐propagation network (TRPN), which considers the correlations between training samples, a constrained relation‐propagation network is proposed to further regularise the distilled correlations and thus achieve favourable few‐shot classification performance. The proposed framework contains three main components, namely preprocess module, relational propagation module, and relation constraint module. First, sample features are extracted and a relation graph node is constructed by treating the relation of each support–query pair as a graph node in the preprocess module. After that, in the relation propagation module (RPM), the valuable information of support–query pairs is modelled and propagated to directly generate the relational representations for further prediction. Then, a relation constraint module is introduced to regularise the relational representations and make it consistent with the ground‐truth relations as much as possible. With the guidance of the effective RPM and relation constraint module, the relational representations of the support–query pairs are distinguishable and thus can achieve accurate predictive results. Comprehensive experiments conducted on widely used benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method compared to state‐of‐the‐art few‐shot classification approaches.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples where inputs with imperceptible perturbations mislead DNNs to incorrect results. Despite the potential risk they bring, adversarial examples are also valuable for providing insights into the weakness and blind-spots of DNNs. Thus, the interpretability of a DNN in the adversarial setting aims to explain the rationale behind its decision-making process and makes deeper understanding which results in better practical applications. To address this issue, we try to explain adversarial robustness for deep models from a new perspective of neuron sensitivity which is measured by neuron behavior variation intensity against benign and adversarial examples. In this paper, we first draw the close connection between adversarial robustness and neuron sensitivities, as sensitive neurons make the most non-trivial contributions to model predictions in the adversarial setting. Based on that, we further propose to improve adversarial robustness by stabilizing the behaviors of sensitive neurons. Moreover, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art adversarial training methods improve model robustness by reducing neuron sensitivities, which in turn confirms the strong connections between adversarial robustness and neuron sensitivity. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our algorithm effectively achieves excellent results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study adversarial robustness using neuron sensitivities.

In recent years, there has been an explosive increase in the amount of existing visual data. Hashing techniques have been successfully applied to deal with the large-scale nearest neighbor search problem among data on this massive scale. However, existing hashing methods usually learn a single hash code for each data point, and only by taking the content correlations among them into account. In practice, however, when handling complex visual data such as video, strong temporal relations exist among the successive frames. Moreover, if the preferred performance for large-scale video search is to be delivered, multiple hash codes are required for each data point in order to build multiple hash table indices. To address these problems, in this paper, we first study the multi-table learning problem for video search and attempt to learn binary codes by capturing the intrinsic video similarities from both the visual and the temporal aspects. By regarding the search over multiple tables as an ensemble prediction, the whole multi-table learning problem can be solved in a boosting learning manner to complementarily cover the nearest neighbors. For each table, a temporal binary coding solution is devised that thinks over the intrinsic relations among the visual content and the temporal consistency among the successive frames simultaneously. More specifically, we approximate the intrinsic visual similarities using a low-rank matrix based on sparse, non-negative feature expression. Furthermore, to essentially preserve the temporal consistency, we introduce a subspace rotation to model the variation among the successive frames. Under the boosting learning framework, the binary codes, hash functions and temporal variation of each table can be efficiently and jointly optimized. Extensive experiments on three large video datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms a number of state-of-the-art hashing methods.

Few-shot learning, aiming to learn novel concepts from few labeled examples, is an interesting and very challenging problem with many practical advantages. To accomplish this task, one should concentrate on revealing the accurate relations of the support-query pairs. We propose a transductive relation-propagation graph neural network (TRPN) to explicitly model and propagate such relations across support-query pairs. Our TRPN treats the relation of each support-query pair as a graph node, named relational node, and resorts to the known relations between support samples, including both intra-class commonality and inter-class uniqueness, to guide the relation propagation in the graph, generating the discriminative relation embeddings for support-query pairs. A pseudo relational node is further introduced to propagate the query characteristics, and a fast, yet effective transductive learning strategy is devised to fully exploit the relation information among different queries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly takes the relations of support-query pairs into consideration in few-shot learning, which might offer a new way to solve the few-shot learning problem. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform a variety of state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods.

Few-shot learning aims to learn a model that can be readily adapted to new unseen classes (concepts) by accessing one or few examples. Despite the successful progress, most of the few-shot learning approaches, concentrating on either global or local characteristics of examples, still suffer from weak generalization abilities. Inspired by the inverted pyramid theory, to address this problem, we propose an inverted pyramid network (IPN) that intimates the human's coarse-to-fine cognition paradigm. The proposed IPN consists of two consecutive stages, namely global stage and local stage. At the global stage, a class-sensitive contextual memory network (CCMNet) is introduced to learn discriminative support-query relation embeddings and predict the query-to-class similarity based on the contextual memory. Then at the local stage, a fine-grained calibration is further appended to complement the coarse relation embeddings, targeting more precise query-to-class similarity evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, IPN is the first work that simultaneously integrates both global and local characteristics in few-shot learning, approximately imitating the human cognition mechanism. Our extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of IPN, compared to a number of state-of-the-art approaches.

Security inspection often deals with a piece of baggage or suitcase where objects are heavily overlapped with each other, resulting in an unsatisfactory performance for prohibited items detection in X-ray images. In the literature, there have been rare studies and datasets touching this important topic. In this work, we contribute the first high-quality object detection dataset for security inspection, named Occluded Prohibited Items X-ray (OPIXray) image benchmark. OPIXray focused on the widely-occurred prohibited item "cutter", annotated manually by professional inspectors from the international airport. The test set is further divided into three occlusion levels to better understand the performance of detectors. Furthermore, to deal with the occlusion in X-ray images detection, we propose the De-occlusion Attention Module (DOAM), a plug-and-play module that can be easily inserted into and thus promote most popular detectors. Despite the heavy occlusion in X-ray imaging, shape appearance of objects can be preserved well, and meanwhile different materials visually appear with different colors and textures. Motivated by these observations, our DOAM simultaneously leverages the different appearance information of the prohibited item to generate the attention map, which helps refine feature maps for the general detectors. We comprehensively evaluate our module on the OPIXray dataset, and demonstrate that our module can consistently improve the performance of the state-of-the-art detection methods such as SSD, FCOS, etc, and significantly outperforms several widely-used attention mechanisms. In particular, the advantages of DOAM are more significant in the scenarios with higher levels of occlusion, which demonstrates its potential application in real-world inspections. The OPIXray benchmark and our model are released at https://github.com/OPIXray-author/OPIXray.

Abstract Due to cluster instability, not in the cluster monitoring system. This paper focuses on the missing data imputation processing for the cluster monitoring application and proposes a new hybrid multiple imputation framework. This new imputation approach is different from the conventional multiple imputation technologies in the fact that it attempts to impute the missing data for an arbitrary missing pattern with a model-based and data-driven combination architecture. Essentially, the deep neural network, as the data model, extracts deep features from the data and deep features are further calculated then by a regression or data-driven strategies and used to create the estimation of missing data with the arbitrary missing pattern. This paper gives evidence that if we can train a deep neural network to construct the deep features of the data, imputation based on deep features is better than that directly on the original data. In the experiments, we compare the proposed method with other conventional multiple imputation approaches for varying missing data patterns, missing ratios, and different datasets including real cluster data. The result illustrates that when data encounters larger missing ratio and various missing patterns, the proposed algorithm has the ability to achieve more accurate and stable imputation performance.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples where inputs with imperceptible perturbations mislead DNNs to incorrect results. Recently, adversarial patch, with noise confined to a small and localized patch, emerged for its easy accessibility in real-world. However, existing attack strategies are still far from generating visually natural patches with strong attacking ability, since they often ignore the perceptual sensitivity of the attacked network to the adversarial patch, including both the correlations with the image context and the visual attention. To address this problem, this paper proposes a perceptual-sensitive generative adversarial network (PS-GAN) that can simultaneously enhance the visual fidelity and the attacking ability for the adversarial patch. To improve the visual fidelity, we treat the patch generation as a patch-to-patch translation via an adversarial process, feeding any types of seed patch and outputting the similar adversarial patch with high perceptual correlation with the attacked image. To further enhance the attacking ability, an attention mechanism coupled with adversarial generation is introduced to predict the critical attacking areas for placing the patches, which can help producing more realistic and aggressive patches. Extensive experiments under semi-whitebox and black-box settings on two large-scale datasets GTSRB and ImageNet demonstrate that the proposed PS-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial patch attack methods.

Recently deep neural networks have achieved promising performance for filling large missing regions in image inpainting tasks. They usually adopted the standard convolutional architecture over the corrupted image, where the same convolution filters try to restore the diverse information on both existing and missing regions, and meanwhile ignores the long-distance correlation among the regions. Only relying on the surrounding areas inevitably leads to meaningless contents and artifacts, such as color discrepancy and blur. To address these problems, we first propose region-wise convolutions to locally deal with the different types of regions, which can help exactly reconstruct existing regions and roughly infer the missing ones from existing regions at the same time. Then, a non-local operation is introduced to globally model the correlation among different regions, promising visual consistency between missing and existing regions. Finally, we integrate the region-wise convolutions and non-local correlation in a coarse-to-fine framework to restore semantically reasonable and visually realistic images. Extensive experiments on three widely-used datasets for image inpainting tasks have been conducted, and both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, especially for the large irregular missing regions.

Recent years have witnessed the success of the emerging hashing techniques in large-scale image retrieval. Owing to the great learning capacity, deep hashing has become one of the most promising solutions, and achieved attractive performance in practice. However, without semantic label information, the unsupervised deep hashing still remains an open question. In this paper, we propose a novel progressive generative hashing (PGH) framework to help learn a discriminative hashing network in an unsupervised way. Very different from existing studies, it first treats the hash codes as a kind of semantic condition for the similar image generation, and simultaneously feeds the original image and its codes into the generative adversarial networks (GANs). The real images together with the synthetic ones can further help train a discriminative hashing network based on a triplet loss. By iteratively inputting the learnt codes into the hash conditioned GANs, we can progressively enable the hashing network to discover the semantic relations. Extensive experiments on the widely-used image datasets demonstrate that PGH can significantly outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing methods.

Recent years have witnessed the success of the emerging hash-based approximate nearest neighbor search techniques in large-scale image retrieval. However, for large-scale video search, most of the existing hashing methods mainly focus on the visual content contained in the still frames, without considering their temporal relations. Therefore, they usually suffer greatly from the insufficient capability of capturing the intrinsic video similarities, from both the visual and the temporal aspects. To address the problem, we propose a temporal binary coding solution in an unsupervised manner, which simultaneously considers the intrinsic relations among the visual content and the temporal consistency among the successive frames. To capture the inherent data similarities among videos, we adopt the sparse, nonnegative feature to characterize the common local visual content and approximate their intrinsic similarities using a low-rank matrix. Then a standard graph-based loss is adopted to guarantee that the learnt hash codes can well preserve the similarities. Furthermore, we introduce a subspace rotation to model the small variation among the successive frames, and thus essentially preserve the temporal consistency in Hamming space. Finally, we formulate the video hashing problem as a joint learning of the binary codes, the hash functions and the temporal variation, and devise an alternating optimization algorithm that enjoys fast training and discriminative hash functions. Extensive experiments on three large video datasets demonstrate the proposed method significantly outperforms a number of state-of-the-art hashing methods.