Statistical Learning
Taylor expansion-based Kolmogorov-Arnold network for blind image quality assessment
--Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) has attracted growing interest for its strong function approximation capability. In our previous work, KAN and its variants were explored in score regression for blind image quality assessment (BIQA). However, these models encounter challenges when processing high-dimensional features, leading to limited performance gains and increased computational cost. T o address these issues, we propose T aylorKAN that leverages the T aylor expansions as learnable activation functions to enhance local approximation capability. T o improve the computational efficiency, network depth reduction and feature dimensionality compression are integrated into the T aylorKAN-based score regression pipeline. On five databases (BID, CLIVE, KonIQ, SPAQ, and FLIVE) with authentic distortions, extensive experiments demonstrate that T aylorKAN consistently outperforms the other KAN-related models, indicating that the local approximation via T aylor expansions is more effective than global approximation using orthogonal functions. Its generalization capacity is validated through inter-database experiments. LIND Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is important in a wide range of industrial applications, including image compression, data transmission, and multimedia entertainment [1].
Concentration Distribution Learning from Label Distributions
Label distribution learning (LDL) is an effective method to predict the relative label description degree (a.k.a. label distribution) of a sample. However, the label distribution is not a complete representation of an instance because it overlooks the absolute intensity of each label. Specifically, it's impossible to obtain the total description degree of hidden labels that not in the label space, which leads to the loss of information and confusion in instances. To solve the above problem, we come up with a new concept named background concentration to serve as the absolute description degree term of the label distribution and introduce it into the LDL process, forming the improved paradigm of concentration distribution learning. Moreover, we propose a novel model by probabilistic methods and neural networks to learn label distributions and background concentrations from existing LDL datasets. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed approach is able to extract background concentrations from label distributions while producing more accurate prediction results than the state-of-the-art LDL methods. The code is available in https://github.com/seutjw/CDL-LD.
Fog Intelligence for Network Anomaly Detection
Yang, Kai, Ma, Hui, Dou, Shaoyu
--Anomalies are common in network system monitoring. When manifested as network threats to be mitigated, service outages to be prevented, and security risks to be ameliorated, detecting such anomalous network behaviors becomes of great importance. However, the growing scale and complexity of the mobile communication networks, as well as the ever-increasing amount and dimensionality of the network surveillance data, make it extremely difficult to monitor a mobile network and discover abnormal network behaviors. Recent advances in machine learning allow for obtaining near-optimal solutions to complicated decision-making problems with many sources of uncertainty that cannot be accurately characterized by traditional mathematical models. However, most machine learning algorithms are centralized, which renders them inapplicable to a large-scale distributed wireless networks with tens of millions of mobile devices. In this article, we present fog intelligence, a distributed machine learning architecture that enables intelligent wireless network management. It preserves the advantage of both edge processing and centralized cloud computing. In addition, the proposed architecture is scalable, privacy-preserving, and well suited for intelligent management of a distributed wireless network. With the rapid advancements of modern communication and signal processing technologies, wireless communications are becoming ubiquitous in our everyday life.
Image Tokens Matter: Mitigating Hallucination in Discrete Tokenizer-based Large Vision-Language Models via Latent Editing
Wang, Weixing, Ding, Zifeng, Gu, Jindong, Cao, Rui, Meinel, Christoph, de Melo, Gerard, Yang, Haojin
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with discrete image tokenizers unify multimodal representations by encoding visual inputs into a finite set of tokens. Despite their effectiveness, we find that these models still hallucinate non-existent objects. We hypothesize that this may be due to visual priors induced during training: When certain image tokens frequently co-occur in the same spatial regions and represent shared objects, they become strongly associated with the verbalizations of those objects. As a result, the model may hallucinate by evoking visually absent tokens that often co-occur with present ones. To test this assumption, we construct a co-occurrence graph of image tokens using a segmentation dataset and employ a Graph Neural Network (GNN) with contrastive learning followed by a clustering method to group tokens that frequently co-occur in similar visual contexts. We find that hallucinations predominantly correspond to clusters whose tokens dominate the input, and more specifically, that the visually absent tokens in those clusters show much higher correlation with hallucinated objects compared to tokens present in the image. Based on this observation, we propose a hallucination mitigation method that suppresses the influence of visually absent tokens by modifying latent image embeddings during generation. Experiments show our method reduces hallucinations while preserving expressivity. Code is available at https://github.com/weixingW/CGC-VTD/tree/main
Corruption-Aware Training of Latent Video Diffusion Models for Robust Text-to-Video Generation
Maduabuchi, Chika, Chen, Hao, Han, Yujin, Wang, Jindong
Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs) achieve high-quality generation but are sensitive to imperfect conditioning, which causes semantic drift and temporal incoherence on noisy, web-scale video-text datasets. We introduce CAT-LVDM, the first corruption-aware training framework for LVDMs that improves robustness through structured, data-aligned noise injection. Our method includes Batch-Centered Noise Injection (BCNI), which perturbs embeddings along intra-batch semantic directions to preserve temporal consistency. BCNI is especially effective on caption-rich datasets like WebVid-2M, MSR-VTT, and MSVD. We also propose Spectrum-Aware Contextual Noise (SACN), which injects noise along dominant spectral directions to improve low-frequency smoothness, showing strong results on UCF-101. On average, BCNI reduces FVD by 31.9% across WebVid-2M, MSR-VTT, and MSVD, while SACN yields a 12.3% improvement on UCF-101. Ablation studies confirm the benefit of low-rank, data-aligned noise. Our theoretical analysis further explains how such perturbations tighten entropy, Wasserstein, score-drift, mixing-time, and generalization bounds. CAT-LVDM establishes a principled, scalable training approach for robust video diffusion under multimodal noise. Code and models: https://github.com/chikap421/catlvdm
Self-Organizing Visual Prototypes for Non-Parametric Representation Learning
Silva, Thalles, Pedrini, Helio, Rivera, Adรญn Ramรญrez
We present Self-Organizing Visual Prototypes (SOP), a new training technique for unsupervised visual feature learning. Unlike existing prototypical self-supervised learning (SSL) methods that rely on a single prototype to encode all relevant features of a hidden cluster in the data, we propose the SOP strategy. In this strategy, a prototype is represented by many semantically similar representations, or support embeddings (SEs), each containing a complementary set of features that together better characterize their region in space and maximize training performance. We reaffirm the feasibility of non-parametric SSL by introducing novel non-parametric adaptations of two loss functions that implement the SOP strategy. Notably, we introduce the SOP Masked Image Modeling (SOP-MIM) task, where masked representations are reconstructed from the perspective of multiple non-parametric local SEs. We comprehensively evaluate the representations learned using the SOP strategy on a range of benchmarks, including retrieval, linear evaluation, fine-tuning, and object detection. Our pre-trained encoders achieve state-of-the-art performance on many retrieval benchmarks and demonstrate increasing performance gains with more complex encoders.
High-Fidelity Functional Ultrasound Reconstruction via A Visual Auto-Regressive Framework
Chen, Xuhang, Li, Zhuo, Shen, Yanyan, Mahmud, Mufti, Pham, Hieu, Pun, Chi-Man, Wang, Shuqiang
-- Functional ultrasound (fUS) imaging provides exceptional spatiotemporal resolution for neurovascular mapping, yet its practical application is significantly hampered by critical challenges. Foremost among these are data scarcity, arising from ethical considerations and signal degradation through the cranium, which collectively limit dataset diversity and compromise the fairness of downstream machine learning models. To address these limitations, we introduce UltraVAR (Ultrasound Visual Auto-Regressive model), the first data augmentation framework designed for fUS imaging that leverages a pre-trained visual auto-regressive generative model. UltraVAR is designed not only to mitigate data scarcity but also to enhance model fairness through the reconstruction of diverse and physiologically plausible fUS samples. The generated samples preserve essential neurovascular coupling features--specifically, the dynamic interplay between neural activity and microvascular hemodynamics. This capability distinguishes UltraVAR from conventional augmentation techniques, which often disrupt these vital physiological correlations and consequently fail to improve, or even degrade, downstream task performance. The proposed UltraVAR employs a scale-by-scale reconstruction mechanism that meticulously preserves the spatial topological relationships within vascular networks. The framework's fidelity is further enhanced by two integrated modules: the Smooth Scaling Layer, which ensures the preservation of critical image information during multi-scale feature propagation, and the Perception Enhancement Module, which actively suppresses artifact generation via a dynamic residual compensation mechanism. Comprehensive experimental validation demonstrates that datasets augmented with UltraVAR yield statistically significant improvements in downstream classification accuracy. This work estab-This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundations of China under Grant 62172403, 12326614.
Complexity counts: global and local perspectives on Indo-Aryan numeral systems
The numeral systems of Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali are highly unusual in that unlike most numeral systems (e.g., those of English, Chinese, etc.), forms referring to 1--99 are highly non-transparent and are cannot be constructed using straightforward rules. As an example, Hindi/Urdu *ikyฤnve* `91' is not decomposable into the composite elements *ek* `one' and *nave* `ninety' in the way that its English counterpart is. This paper situates Indo-Aryan languages within the typology of cross-linguistic numeral systems, and explores the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that may be responsible for the persistence of complex systems in these languages. Using cross-linguistic data from multiple databases, we develop and employ a number of cross-linguistically applicable metrics to quantifies the complexity of languages' numeral systems, and demonstrate that Indo-Aryan languages have decisively more complex numeral systems than the world's languages as a whole, though individual Indo-Aryan languages differ from each other in terms of the complexity of the patterns they display. We investigate the factors (e.g., religion, geographic isolation, etc.) that underlie complexity in numeral systems, with a focus on South Asia, in an attempt to develop an account of why complex numeral systems developed and persisted in certain Indo-Aryan languages but not elsewhere. Finally, we demonstrate that Indo-Aryan numeral systems adhere to certain general pressures toward efficient communication found cross-linguistically, despite their high complexity. We call for this somewhat overlooked dimension of complexity to be taken seriously when discussing general variation in cross-linguistic numeral systems.
Cooperation of Experts: Fusing Heterogeneous Information with Large Margin
Wang, Shuo, Huang, Shunyang, Yuan, Jinghui, Shen, Zhixiang, Kang, Zhao
Fusing heterogeneous information remains a persistent challenge in modern data analysis. While significant progress has been made, existing approaches often fail to account for the inherent heterogeneity of object patterns across different semantic spaces. To address this limitation, we propose the Cooperation of Experts (CoE) framework, which encodes multi-typed information into unified heterogeneous multiplex networks. By overcoming modality and connection differences, CoE provides a powerful and flexible model for capturing the intricate structures of real-world complex data. In our framework, dedicated encoders act as domain-specific experts, each specializing in learning distinct relational patterns in specific semantic spaces. To enhance robustness and extract complementary knowledge, these experts collaborate through a novel large margin mechanism supported by a tailored optimization strategy. Rigorous theoretical analyses guarantee the framework's feasibility and stability, while extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate its superior performance and broad applicability. Our code is available at https://github.com/strangeAlan/CoE.
Data-Distill-Net: A Data Distillation Approach Tailored for Reply-based Continual Learning
Liao, Wenyang, Wang, Quanziang, Wu, Yichen, Wang, Renzhen, Meng, Deyu
Replay-based continual learning (CL) methods assume that models trained on a small subset can also effectively minimize the empirical risk of the complete dataset. These methods maintain a memory buffer that stores a sampled subset of data from previous tasks to consolidate past knowledge. However, this assumption is not guaranteed in practice due to the limited capacity of the memory buffer and the heuristic criteria used for buffer data selection. To address this issue, we propose a new dataset distillation framework tailored for CL, which maintains a learnable memory buffer to distill the global information from the current task data and accumulated knowledge preserved in the previous memory buffer. Moreover, to avoid the computational overhead and overfitting risks associated with parameterizing the entire buffer during distillation, we introduce a lightweight distillation module that can achieve global information distillation solely by generating learnable soft labels for the memory buffer data. Extensive experiments show that, our method can achieve competitive results and effectively mitigates forgetting across various datasets. The source code will be publicly available.