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Zhiwei Chen, Yupeng Hu, Zhiheng Fu, Zixu Li, Jiale Huang, Qinlei Huang, Yinwei Wei

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging image retrieval paradigm that enables to retrieve target images based on multimodal queries consisting of reference images and modification texts. Although substantial progress has been made in recent years, existing methods assume that all samples are correctly matched. However, in real-world scenarios, due to high triplet annotation costs, CIR datasets inevitably contain annotation errors, resulting in incorrectly matched triplets. To address this issue, the problem of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) has attracted growing attention. We argue that noise in CIR can be categorized into two types: cross-modal correspondence noise and modality-inherent noise. The former arises from mismatches across modalities, whereas the latter originates from intra-modal background interference or visual factors irrelevant to the coarse-grained modification annotations. However, modality-inherent noise is often overlooked, and research on cross-modal correspondence noise remains nascent. To tackle above issues, we propose the Invariance and discrimiNaTion-awarE Noise neTwork (INTENT), comprising two components: Visual Invariant Composition and Bi-Objective Discriminative Learning, specifically designed to handle the two-aspect noise. The former applies causal intervention on the visual side via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to generate intervened composed features, enforcing visual invariance and enabling the model to ignore modality-inherent noise during composition. The latter adopts collaborative optimization with both positive and negative samples, and constructs a scalable decision boundary that dynamically adjusts decisions based on the loyalty degree, enabling robust correspondence discrimination. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and robustness of INTENT.

Zhiqi Chen, Yuzhou Liu, Jiarui Liu, Wanfu Gao

Multi-view multi-label feature selection aims to identify informative features from heterogeneous views, where each sample is associated with multiple interdependent labels. This problem is particularly important in machine learning involving high-dimensional, multimodal data such as social media, bioinformatics or recommendation systems. Existing Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection (MVMLFS) methods mainly focus on analyzing statistical information of data, but seldom consider semantic information. In this paper, we aim to use these two types of information jointly and propose a method that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) semantic reasoning with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) structural modeling for MVMLFS. Specifically, the method consists of three main components. (1) LLM is first used as an evaluation agent to assess the latent semantic relevance among feature, view, and label descriptions. (2) A semantic-aware heterogeneous graph with two levels is designed to represent relations among features, views and labels: one is a semantic graph representing semantic relations, and the other is a statistical graph. (3) A lightweight Graph Attention Network (GAT) is applied to learn node embedding in the heterogeneous graph as feature saliency scores for ranking and selection. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines, and it is still effective when applied to small-scale datasets, showcasing its robustness, flexibility, and generalization ability.

Zhaoliang Chen, William K. Cheung, Hong-Ning Dai, Byron Choi, Jiming Liu

Multi-view clustering has been found useful to leverage diverse data sources for accurate and robust underlying data representations. It typically relies on effectively integrating the latent features from different views through allocating weights while simultaneously mining their specificity and consensus information. However, it remains open how to achieve a more fine-grained sample-level weight allocation for promoting view-specific information fusion and view-shared consensus. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-expert learning framework named Gated Variational Graph AutoEncoder with Competition and Consensus (GVGAE-C2). In particular, it employs multiple view-specific Variational Graph AutoEncoders (VGAEs) as experts to capture the latent features from their own views. Furthermore, we design a fine-grained structure-aware gating network, which dynamically computes sample-level weights based on the proposed structure-aware quality evaluation on each expert, thus facilitating competition among experts. Meanwhile, each expert is trained not only to study its assigned view's specificity features, but also explicitly encouraged to learn consensus-aware features across views. Extensive multi-view clustering experiments on benchmark datasets reveal that GVGAE-C2 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Zhangquan Chen, Ruihui Zhao, Chuwei Luo, Mingze Sun, Xinlei Yu, Yangyang Kang, Ruqi Huang

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still face significant challenges in complex visual tasks (e.g., spatial understanding, fine-grained perception). Prior methods have tried to incorporate visual reasoning, however, they fail to leverage attention correction with spatial cues to iteratively refine their focus on prompt-relevant regions. In this paper, we introduce SIFThinker, a spatially-aware “think-with-images” framework that mimics human visual perception. Specifically, SIFThinker enables attention correcting and image region focusing by interleaving depth-enhanced bounding boxes and natural language. Our contributions are twofold: First, we introduce a reverse-expansion-forward-inference strategy that facilitates the generation of interleaved image-text chains of thought for process-level supervision, which in turn leads to the construction of the SIF-50K dataset. Besides, we propose GRPO-SIF, a reinforced training paradigm that integrates depth-informed visual grounding into a unified reasoning pipeline, teaching the model to dynamically correct and focus on prompt-relevant regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIFThinker outperforms state-of-the-art methods in spatial understanding and fine-grained visual perception, while maintaining strong general capabilities, highlighting the effectiveness of our method.

Yuliang Chen, Xi Lin, Jun Wu, Xiangrui Cai, Qiaolun Zhang, Xichun Fan, Jiapeng Xu, Xiu Su

Federated Domain Generalization (FDG) aims to collaboratively train a global model across distributed clients that can generalize well on unseen domains. However, existing FDG methods typically struggle with cross-client data heterogeneity and incur significant communication and computation overhead. To address these challenges, this paper presents a new FDG framework, dubbed FaST-PT, which facilitates local feature augmentation and efficient unseen domain adaptation in a distributed manner. First, we propose a lightweight Multi-Modal Style Transfer (MST) method to transform image embedding under text supervision, which could expand the training data distribution and mitigate domain shift. We then design a dual-prompt module that decomposes the prompt into global and domain prompts. Specifically, global prompts capture general knowledge from augmented embedding across clients, while domain prompts capture domain-specific knowledge from local data. Besides, Domain-aware Prompt Generation (DPG) is introduced to adaptively generate suitable prompts for each sample, which facilitates unseen domain adaptation through knowledge fusion. Extensive experiments on four cross-domain benchmark datasets, e.g., PACS and DomainNet, demonstrate the superior performance of FaST-PT over SOTA FDG methods such as FedDG-GA and DiPrompt. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and efficiency of FaST-PT.

Yue Chen, Jianfeng Lu, Shuqin Cao, Wei Wang, Gang Li, Guanghui Wen

While semi-asynchronous federated learning (SAFL) combines the efficiency of synchronous training with the flexibility of asynchronous updates, it inherently suffers from participation bias, which is further exacerbated by non-IID data distributions. More importantly, hierarchical architecture shifts participation from individual clients to client groups, thereby further intensifying this issue. Despite notable advancements in SAFL research, most existing works still focus on conventional cloud-end architectures while largely overlooking the critical impact of non-IID data on scheduling across the cloud–edge–client hierarchy. To tackle these challenges, we propose FedCure, an innovative semiasynchronous Federated learning framework that leverages Coalition construction and participation-aware scheduling to mitigate participation bias with non-IID data. Specifically, FedCure operates through three key rules: (1) a preference rule that optimizes coalition formation by maximizing collective benefits and establishing theoretically stable partitions to reduce non-IID-induced performance degradation; (2) a scheduling rule that integrates the virtual queue technique with Bayesian-estimated coalition dynamics, mitigating efficiency loss while ensuring mean rate stability; and (3) a resource allocation rule that enhances computational efficiency by optimizing client CPU frequencies based on estimated coalition dynamics while satisfying delay requirements. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that FedCure improves accuracy by up to 5.1x compared with four state-of-the-art baselines, while significantly enhancing efficiency with the lowest coefficient of variation 0.0223 for per-round latency and maintaining long-term balance across diverse scenarios.

Yu Chen, Hongxu Zhu, Jiadong Wang, Kainan Chen, Xinyuan Qian

Audio-visual sound source localization (AV-SSL) estimates the position of sound sources by fusing auditory and visual cues. Current AV-SSL methodologies typically require spatially-paired audio-visual data and cannot selectively localize specific target sources. To address these limitations, we introduce Cross-Instance Audio-Visual Localization (CI-AVL), a novel task that localizes target sound sources using visual prompts from different instances of the same semantic class. CI-AVL enables selective localization without spatially paired data. To solve this task, we propose AV-SSAN, a semantic-spatial alignment framework centered on a Multi-Band Semantic-Spatial Alignment Network (MB-SSA Net). MB-SSA Net decomposes the audio spectrogram into multiple frequency bands, aligns each band with semantic visual prompts, and refines spatial cues to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DoA). To facilitate this research, we construct VGGSound-SSL, a large-scale dataset comprising 13,981 spatial audio clips across 296 categories, each paired with visual prompts. AV-SSAN achieves a mean absolute error of 16.59° and an accuracy of 71.29%, significantly outperforming existing AV-SSL methods.

Youming Chen, Zhaoqiang Liu

Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated to be powerful priors for signal recovery, but their application to 1-bit quantization tasks, such as 1-bit compressed sensing and logistic regression, remains a challenge. This difficulty stems from the inherent non-linear link function in these tasks, which is either non-differentiable or lacks an explicit characterization. To tackle this issue, we introduce Diff-OneBit, which is a fast and effective DM-based approach for signal recovery under 1-bit quantization. Diff-OneBit addresses the challenge posed by non-differentiable or implicit links functions via leveraging a differentiable surrogate likelihood function to model 1-bit quantization, thereby enabling gradient based iterations. This function is integrated into a flexible plug-and-play framework that decouples the data-fidelity term from the diffusion prior, allowing any pretrained DM to act as a denoiser within the iterative reconstruction process. Extensive experiments on the FFHQ, CelebA and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that Diff-OneBit gives high-fidelity reconstructed images, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction quality and computational efficiency across 1-bit compressed sensing and logistic regression tasks.

Yixi Chen, Weixuan Liang, Tianrui Liu, Jun-Jie Huang, Ao Li, Xueling Zhu, Xinwang Liu

Kernel power k-means (KPKM) leverages a family of means to mitigate local minima issues in kernel k-means. However, KPKM faces two key limitations: (1) the computational burden of the full kernel matrix restricts its use on extensive data, and (2) the lack of authentic centroid-sample assignment learning reduces its noise robustness. To overcome these challenges, we propose RFF-KPKM, introducing the first approximation theory for applying random Fourier features (RFF) to KPKM. RFF-KPKM employs RFF to generate efficient, low dimensional feature maps, bypassing the need for the whole kernel matrix. Crucially, we are the first to establish strong theoretical guarantees for this combination: (1) an excess risk bound of O( k^3/n), (2) strong consistency with membership values, and (3) a (1 + ε) relative error bound achievable using the RFF of dimension poly(ε^{−1} logk). Furthermore, to improve robustness and the ability to learn multiple kernels, we propose IP-RFF-MKPKM, an improved possibilistic RFF-based multiple kernel power k-means. IP-RFF-MKPKM ensures the scalability of MKPKM via RFF and refines cluster assignments by combining the merits of the possibilistic and fuzzy membership. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate the superior efficiency and clustering accuracy of the proposed methods compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives.

Yikai Chen, Yunxin Mao, Chunyuan Zheng, Hao Zou, Shanzhi Gu, Shixuan Liu, Yang Shi, Wenjing Yang, Kun Kuang, Haotian Wang

Detecting unobserved confounders is crucial for reliable causal inference in observational studies. Existing methods require either linearity assumptions or multiple heterogeneous environments, limiting applicability to nonlinear single-environment settings. To bridge this gap, we propose Kernel Regression Confounder Detection (KRCD), a novel method for detecting unobserved confounding in nonlinear observational data under single-environment conditions. KRCD leverages reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces to model complex dependencies. By comparing standard and higher-order kernel regressions, we derive a test statistic whose significant deviation from zero indicates unobserved confounding. Theoretically, we prove two key results: First, in infinite samples, regression coefficients coincide if and only if no unobserved confounders exist. Second, finite-sample differences converge to zero-mean Gaussian distributions with tractable variance. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and the Twins dataset demonstrate that KRCD not only outperforms existing baselines but also achieves superior computational efficiency.

Yihao Chen, Haobo Jiang, Liang Yu, Jianmin Zheng

Detecting Schelling Points—salient 3D mesh landmarks that serve as natural reference points for shape analysis—is a challenging problem in geometry processing. While existing CNN-based methods struggle with limited receptive fields and poor geometric context modeling, this paper proposes {\em SchellingFormer}, a novel Laplacian matrix-guided Geometric Transformer that effectively captures long-range dependencies and discriminative geometric features for robust Schelling point prediction. Our framework consists of two key components: (i) a hybrid geometric feature embedding module that integrates handcrafted descriptors (coordinates, Gaussian curvature, and curvature differences) to encode local geometry, and (ii) a Laplacian-driven vector attention mechanism, where spatial relationships encoded by the Laplacian matrix guide feature aggregation with the Transformer. This approach enables adaptive, geometry-aware message passing and contextual representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SchellingFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics. Our work bridges the gap between spectral mesh analysis and Transformer-based learning, offering a powerful tool for 3D shape understanding tasks such as shape matching and saliency detection.

Yanping Chen, Weijie Shi, Mengze Li, Yue Cui, Jiaming Li, Ruiyuan Zhang, Hao Chen, Hanghui Guo, Shimin Di, Ziyi Liu 等

Multimodal fake news detection plays a crucial role in combating online misinformation. The inherent domain diversity of news in the real world has driven the development of cross-domain detection methods. However, these detection methods either suffer from significant performance degradation due to semantic and deception pattern shifts between the training (source) and test (target) domains or heavily rely on annotated labels. To address the problems, we propose ADOSE, an active multi-source domain adaptation framework for multimodal fake news detection which actively annotates a small subset of target samples to improve detection performance. Specifically, for domain shifts, we design a multi-expert classifier network based on refined features to comprehensively capture and adapt to the semantic space and deception patterns of news across different domains. To maximize adaptation performance with limited annotation cost, we propose a least-disagree uncertainty selector equipped with a diversity calculator for selecting the most informative samples. The selector leverages the uncertainty of inconsistent predictions before and after perturbations by multiple classifiers as an indicator of unfamiliar samples. It further incorporates diversity scores derived from multi-view features to ensure the chosen samples achieve maximal coverage of target domain features. The extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that ADOSE outperforms existing domain adaptation methods by 2.45% ~ 9.1%, indicating the superiority of our model.

Yanan Chen, Tieliang Gong, Yunjiao Zhang, Wen Wen

Continual Learning (CL) aims to enable models to sequentially learn multiple tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. Recent studies have shown that optimizing towards flatter loss minima can improve model generalization. However, existing sharpness-aware methods for CL suffer from two key limitations: (1) they treat sharpness regularization as a unified signal without distinguishing the contributions of its components. and (2) they introduce substantial computational overhead that impedes practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose FLAD, a novel optimization framework that decomposes sharpness-aware perturbations into gradient-aligned and stochastic-noise components, and show that retaining only the noise component promotes generalization. We further introduce a lightweight scheduling scheme that enables FLAD to maintain significant performance gains even under constrained training time. FLAD can be seamlessly integrated into various CL paradigms and consistently outperforms standard and sharpness-aware optimizers in diverse experimental settings, demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality in CL.

Xueyi Chen, Bangjun Wang, Jiaqing Fan, Li Zhang, Fanzhang Li

Few-shot image classification (FSIC) aims to recognize novel categories from only a few labeled examples, making it inherently challenging under limited supervision. Existing approaches have attempted to alleviate this issue by incorporating explicit semantics like class names or knowledge graphs to guide learning. However, such methods often encounter semantic ambiguity due to their dependence on either overly simplistic semantic priors or resource-intensive external knowledge sources, which limits their potential. In this paper, we explore the frequency domain as an implicit and task-adaptive source of semantic information. We propose F2SST, a Frequency-to-Spatial Semantic Transfer framework that enhances feature learning by leveraging spectral signals as hidden semantics. Specifically, F2SST applies Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract phase-invariant global frequency descriptors, followed by a lightweight Gated Spectral Attention (GSA) module that selectively emphasizes class-relevant frequency components. These enhanced spectral cues are then integrated into the spatial stream through a class-guided fusion mechanism, enabling more robust and semantically aligned representations. Extensive experiments on four standard benchmarks (miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS and FC100) demonstrate that F2SST consistently improves performance, validating the effectiveness of frequency-domain semantics in FSIC.

Xuanyu Chen, Nan Yang, Shuai Wang, Dong Yuan

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a growing interest in training large-scale models. As the model size continues to scale, concerns are growing about the depletion of high-quality, well-curated training data. This has led practitioners to explore training approaches like Federated Learning (FL), which can leverage the abundant data on edge devices while maintaining privacy. However, the decentralization of training datasets in FL introduces challenges to scaling large models, a topic that remains under-explored. This paper fills this gap and provides qualitative insights on generalizing the previous model scaling experience to federated learning scenarios. Specifically, we derive a PAC-Bayes (Probably Approximately Correct Bayesian) upper bound for the generalization error of models trained with stochastic algorithms in federated settings and quantify the impact of distributed training data on the optimal model size by finding the analytic solution of model size that minimizes this bound. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the optimal model size has a negative power law relationship with the number of clients if the total training compute is unchanged. Besides, we also find that switching to FL with the same training compute will inevitably reduce the upper bound of generalization performance that the model can achieve through training, and that estimating the optimal model size in federated scenarios should depend on the average training compute across clients. Furthermore, we also empirically validate the correctness of our results with extensive training runs on different models, network settings, and datasets.

Xinyang Chen, Huidong Jin, Yu Huang, Zaiwen Feng

Despite the prevalent assumption of uniform variable importance in long-term time series forecasting models, real-world applications often exhibit asymmetric causal relationships and varying data acquisition costs. Specifically, cost‐effective exogenous data (e.g., local weather) can unilaterally influence dynamics of endogenous variables, such as lake surface temperature. Exploiting these links enables more effective forecasts when exogenous inputs are readily available. Transformer-based models capture long-range dependencies but incur high computation and suffer from permutation invariance. Patch-based variants improve efficiency yet can miss local temporal patterns. To efficiently exploit informative signals across both the temporal dimension and relevant exogenous variables, this study proposes XLinear, a lightweight time series forecasting model built upon Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). XLinear uses a global token derived from an endogenous variable as a pivotal hub for interacting with exogenous variables, and employs MLPs with sigmoid activation to extract both temporal patterns and variate-wise dependencies. Its prediction head then integrates these signals to forecast the endogenous series. We evaluate XLinear on seven standard benchmarks and five real-world datasets with exogenous inputs. Compared with state-of-the-art models, XLinear delivers superior accuracy and efficiency for both multivariate forecasts and univariate forecasts influenced by exogenous inputs.

Xinrui Chen, Hongxing Zhang, Fanyi Zeng, Yongxian Wei, Yizhi Wang, Xitong Ling, Guanghao Li, Chun Yuan

Layer pruning is a viable technique for compressing large language models while achieving acceleration proportional to the pruning ratio. In this work, we identify that removing any layer induces a magnitude gap in hidden states, and demonstrate that a simple compensation operation leads to superior performance in iterative layer pruning. This key observation motivates us to propose Prune&Comp, a novel, plug-and-play iterative layer pruning scheme that leverages magnitude compensation to mitigate such gaps in a training-free manner. Specifically, we first estimate the magnitude gap of layer removal and then eliminate it by rescaling the remaining weights offline. We further demonstrate the advantages of Prune&Comp in improving the stability of iterative pruning. When integrated with an iterative prune-and-compensate loop, Prune&Comp consistently enhances existing layer pruning metrics. For instance, when 5 layers of LLaMA-3-8B are pruned with the prevalent Taylor+ metric, Prune&Comp reduces PPL from 512.78 to 16.34 and retains 90.57% of the original performance across 9 question-answering tasks, outperforming the baseline by 24.72%.

Xin Chen, Qi Zhao, Wei Zeng, Zongben Xu

Images are generally represented by pixel intensities or color values, which are usually used as direct inputs for learning. This study innovatively proposes a geometric image representation method and refreshes the general learning model (e.g., autoencoder) in the diffeomorphic space. Based on the theory of geometric optimal transport and quasiconformal mapping, we equivalently transform the intensity representation into a shape representation. The image space becomes a diffeomorphic space, where any image can be uniquely represented as a Beltrami coefficient function defined on a uniform grid reference, and vice versa. This innovative geometric image representation (G-IR) captures the fine-grained structure inherent in the entire image, which is different from the traditional feature extraction that focuses on the internal geometric objects of the image (such as boundaries and axes). The diffeomorphic property preserves structure in the generation process, which is very necessary in the field of real physics. It can be assembled into existing pipelines as a plug-in, providing structure-preserving properties for the entire framework. Experiments on image restoration and interpolation validated the high efficiency, efficacy and applicability of the G-IR method, demonstrating its superior performance compared to common pixel-level image appearance representations.

Xiaohui Chen, Chuan-Xian Ren

Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, where the target label space is a subset of the source label space. In PDA scenario, existing methods typically achieve transferability through distribution alignment in a statistical framework, and discriminability through geometric modeling. These two aspects are often treated as separate frameworks, which severs the intrinsic connection between them. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified framework termed Geometry-aware Conditional Alignment (GCA), which is derived from theoretical insights of Maximum Coding Rate Reduction. GCA collaboratively achieves conditional alignment and orthogonal discriminability in a unified framework, making the learned features more interpretable in both statistical and geometric aspects. As a result, GCA effectively enhances both the transferability and discriminability of features. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of GCA.

Wenlan Chen, Lu Gao, Daoyuan Wang, Fei Guo, Cheng Liang

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) aims to group data into meaningful clusters when each sample is only partially observed across multiple views. Most existing methods either rely on imputation strategies that may introduce noise and distort the underlying data distribution, or adopt cross-view alignment techniques that focus on pairwise relationships, often resulting in suboptimal representations and unstable clustering performance. In this paper, we propose Geometry-Aware Variational Information Maximization for Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (GAVIM), a novel imputation-free variational framework that enables robust and coherent incomplete multi-view clustering. Specifically, GAVIM leverages mutual information maximization to preserve the high mutual information between the available multi-view data and the shared embedding. Moreover, we explicitly retain local geometric consistency within each view-specific latent space under the guidance of an adaptive global supervision signal. Lastly, GAVIM aligns all views simultaneously using a Gramian representation alignment measure, ensuring coherent structure across modalities and promoting unified, semantically meaningful representations. Extensive experiments on five benchmark IMVC datasets with varying levels of view incompleteness demonstrate that GAVIM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering accuracy and representation quality.