Isometric exercises appeal to individuals seeking convenience, privacy, and minimal dependence on equipments. However, such fitness training is often overdependent on unreliable digital media content instead of expert supervision, introducing serious risks, including incorrect posture, injury, and disengagement due to lack of corrective feedback. To address these challenges, we present a real-time feedback system for assessing isometric poses. Our contributions include the release of the largest multiclass isometric exercise video dataset to date, comprising over 3,600 clips across six poses with correct and incorrect variations. To support robust evaluation, we benchmark state-of-the-art models-including graph-based networks-on this dataset and introduce a novel three-part metric that captures classification accuracy, mistake localization, and model confidence. Our results enhance the feasibility of intelligent and personalized exercise training systems for home workouts. This expert-level diagnosis, delivered directly to the users, also expands the potential applications of these systems to rehabilitation, physiotherapy, and various other fitness disciplines that involve physical motion.

State estimation or filtering serves as a fundamental task to enable intelligent decision-making in applications such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, healthcare monitoring, smart grids, intelligent transportation, and predictive maintenance. Standard filtering assumes prior knowledge of noise statistics to extract latent system states from noisy sensor data. However, real-world scenarios involve abnormalities like outliers, biases, drifts, and missing observations with unknown or partially known statistics, limiting conventional approaches. This thesis presents novel robust nonlinear filtering methods to mitigate these challenges. Based on insights from our filtering proposals, we extend the formulations to offline estimation/learning setups and propose smoothing extensions. Our methods leverage Bayesian inference frameworks, employing both deterministic and stochastic approximation techniques including Variational Inference (VI) and Particle Filters/Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). We also study theoretical estimation limits using Bayesian Cramér-Rao bounds (BCRBs) in the context of measurement abnormalities. To validate the performance gains of the proposed methods, we perform simulations and experiments in scenarios including target tracking, indoor localization, 3D point cloud registration, mesh registration, and pose graph optimization. The fundamental nature of the work makes it useful in diverse applications, with possible future extensions toward developing outlier-robust machine learning pipelines, learning system dynamics from anomalous data, and addressing challenges in generative AI where standard diffusion models struggle with outliers, imbalanced datasets, and mode collapse.

Two-Tower Vision--Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various downstream VL tasks. While BridgeTower further enhances performance by building bridges between encoders, it \textit{(i)} suffers from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of unimodal representations, \textit{(ii)} restricts the flexible exploitation of different levels of unimodal semantic knowledge, and \textit{(iii)} is limited to the evaluation on traditional low-resolution datasets only with the Two-Tower VLM architecture. In this work, we propose Manager, a lightweight, efficient and effective plugin that adaptively aggregates insights from different levels of pre-trained unimodal experts to facilitate more comprehensive VL alignment and fusion. First, under the Two-Tower VLM architecture, we introduce ManagerTower, a novel VLM that introduces the manager in each cross-modal layer. Whether with or without VL pre-training, ManagerTower outperforms previous strong baselines and achieves superior performance on 4 downstream VL tasks. Moreover, we extend our exploration to the latest Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) architecture. We demonstrate that LLaVA-OV-Manager significantly boosts the zero-shot performance of LLaVA-OV across different categories of capabilities, images, and resolutions on 20 downstream datasets, whether the multi-grid algorithm is enabled or not. In-depth analysis reveals that both our manager and the multi-grid algorithm can be viewed as a plugin that improves the visual representation by capturing more diverse visual details from two orthogonal perspectives (depth and width). Their synergy can mitigate the semantic ambiguity caused by the multi-grid algorithm and further improve performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/LooperXX/ManagerTower.

Vesicoureteral reflux (VUR) is traditionally assessed using subjective grading systems, which introduces variability in diagnosis. This study investigates the use of machine learning to improve diagnostic consistency by analyzing voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG) images. A total of 113 VCUG images were reviewed, with expert grading of VUR severity. Nine image-based features were selected to train six predictive models: Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Gradient Boosting, Neural Network, and Stochastic Gradient Descent. The models were evaluated using leave-one-out cross-validation. Analysis identified deformation patterns in the renal calyces as key indicators of high-grade VUR. All models achieved accurate classifications with no false positives or negatives. High sensitivity to subtle image patterns characteristic of different VUR grades was confirmed by substantial Area Under the Curve (AUC) values. The results suggest that machine learning can offer an objective and standardized alternative to current subjective VUR assessments. These findings highlight renal calyceal deformation as a strong predictor of severe cases. Future research should aim to expand the dataset, refine imaging features, and improve model generalizability for broader clinical use.

Programming Knowledge Tracking (PKT) aims to dynamically diagnose learners' mastery levels of programming knowledge based on their coding activities, facilitating more effective and personalized programming education. However, current PKT studies primarily focus on the implicit relationship between code content and knowledge assessment, often overlooking two types of noise signals in long-term programming activities: unwanted signals from unrelated submissions and weak signals from minor modifications. This practical challenge significantly limits model performance and application. To address this issue, we propose Coda, a Code graph-based tuning adaptor designed to enhance existing PKT models by identifying and mitigating the impact of noise. Specifically, Coda first transforms the loose code sequences submitted by each learner into a compact code graph. By leveraging this code graph, unwanted signals can be identified from a semantic similarity perspective. We then apply a cluster-aware GCN to the code graph, which improves the discrimination of weak signals and enables their clustering for identification. Finally, a lightweight yet effective adaptor is incorporated into the PKT task through optimization with two noise feature-based constraints and a navigational regularization term, to correct knowledge states affected by noise. It is worth mentioning that the Coda framework is model-agnostic and can be adapted to most existing PKT solutions. Extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that Coda effectively performs the PKT task in the presence of noisy programming records, outperforming typical baselines.

Recent preference learning frameworks for large language models (LLMs) simplify human preferences with binary pairwise comparisons and scalar rewards. This simplification could make LLMs' responses biased to mostly preferred features, and would be exacerbated during the iterations of online preference learning steps. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework coined PFP (Preference Feature Preservation). The key idea of PFP is maintaining the distribution of human preference features and utilizing such rich signals throughout the online preference learning process. Specifically, PFP first extract preference features from offline pairwise human preference data and trains a feature classifier. Then, using trained classifier and the distribution preserving optimization, PFP maps appropriate preference features for a new input instruction during online learning. Lastly, PFP trains LLM using the existing preference learning method, by incorporating the preference feature into system prompts and enabling LLM to explicitly handle various human preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that PFP successfully mitigates the bias in preference features during online learning, and hence achieves superior performance compared to previous preference learning methods on standard benchmarks to evaluate LLM alignment.

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has ignited discussions regarding their potential to surpass human performance in multimodal tasks. In response, we introduce MANBench (Multimodal Ability Norms Benchmark), a bilingual benchmark (English and Chinese) comprising 1,314 questions across nine tasks, spanning knowledge-based and non-knowledge-based domains. MANBench emphasizes intuitive reasoning, seamless cross-modal integration, and real-world complexity, providing a rigorous evaluation framework. Through extensive human experiments involving diverse participants, we compared human performance against state-of-the-art MLLMs. The results indicate that while MLLMs excel in tasks like Knowledge and Text-Image Understanding, they struggle with deeper cross-modal reasoning tasks such as Transmorphic Understanding, Image Consistency, and Multi-image Understanding. Moreover, both humans and MLLMs face challenges in highly complex tasks like Puzzles and Spatial Imagination. MANBench highlights the strengths and limitations of MLLMs, revealing that even advanced models fall short of achieving human-level performance across many domains. We hope MANBench will inspire efforts to bridge the gap between MLLMs and human multimodal capabilities. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/micdz/MANBench.

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to modern software development, producing vast amounts of AI-generated source code. While these models boost programming productivity, their misuse introduces critical risks, including code plagiarism, license violations, and the propagation of insecure programs. As a result, robust detection of AI-generated code is essential. To support the development of such detectors, a comprehensive benchmark that reflects real-world conditions is crucial. However, existing benchmarks fall short -- most cover only a limited set of programming languages and rely on less capable generative models. In this paper, we present CodeMirage, a comprehensive benchmark that addresses these limitations through three major advancements: (1) it spans ten widely used programming languages, (2) includes both original and paraphrased code samples, and (3) incorporates outputs from ten state-of-the-art production-level LLMs, including both reasoning and non-reasoning models from six major providers. Using CodeMirage, we evaluate ten representative detectors across four methodological paradigms under four realistic evaluation configurations, reporting results using three complementary metrics. Our analysis reveals nine key findings that uncover the strengths and weaknesses of current detectors, and identify critical challenges for future work. We believe CodeMirage offers a rigorous and practical testbed to advance the development of robust and generalizable AI-generated code detectors.

Class-incremental learning (CIL) requires deep learning models to continuously acquire new knowledge from streaming data while preserving previously learned information. Recently, CIL based on pre-trained models (PTMs) has achieved remarkable success. However, prompt-based approaches suffer from prompt overwriting, while adapter-based methods face challenges such as dimensional misalignment between tasks. While the idea of expert fusion in Mixture of Experts (MoE) can help address dimensional inconsistency, both expert and routing parameters are prone to being overwritten in dynamic environments, making MoE challenging to apply directly in CIL. To tackle these issues, we propose a mixture of task-specific experts (MoTE) framework that effectively mitigates the miscalibration caused by inconsistent output dimensions across tasks. Inspired by the weighted feature fusion and sparse activation mechanisms in MoE, we introduce task-aware expert filtering and reliable expert joint inference during the inference phase, mimicking the behavior of routing layers without inducing catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method without requiring an exemplar set. Furthermore, the number of tasks in MoTE scales linearly with the number of adapters. Building on this, we further explore the trade-off between adapter expansion and model performance and propose the Adapter-Limited MoTE. The code is available at https://github.com/Franklilinjie/MoTE.

Thousands of university students in the UK have been caught misusing ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools in recent years, while traditional forms of plagiarism show a marked decline, a Guardian investigation can reveal. A survey of academic integrity violations found almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating using AI tools in 2023-24, equivalent to 5.1 for every 1,000 students. That was up from 1.6 cases per 1,000 in 2022-23. Figures up to May suggest that number will increase again this year to about 7.5 proven cases per 1,000 students – but recorded cases represent only the tip of the iceberg, according to experts. The data highlights a rapidly evolving challenge for universities: trying to adapt assessment methods to the advent of technologies such as ChatGPT and other AI-powered writing tools.