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Cheng Shi

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11 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Discovering Compositional Hallucinations in LVLMs

Sibei Yang
Ge Zheng
Jiajin Tang
Jiaye Qian
Hanzhuo Huang
Cheng Shi

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (LVLMs) have driven the paradigm shift towards general-purpose foundation models. However, both of them are prone to hallucinations, which compromise their factual accuracy and reliability. While existing research primarily focuses on isolated textual- or visual-centric errors, a critical yet underexplored phenomenon persists in LVLMs: Even neither of textual- or visual centric errors occur, LVLMs often struggle with a new and subtle hallucination mode that arising from composition of them. In this paper, we define this issue as Simple Compositional Hallucination (SCHall). Through an preliminary analysis, we present two key findings: (1) visual abstraction fails under compositional questioning, and (2) visual inputs induce degradation in language processing, leading to hallucinations. To facilitate future research on this phenomenon, we introduce a custom benchmark, SCBench, and propose a novel VLR-distillation method, which serves as the first baseline to effectively mitigate SCHall. Furthermore, experiment results on publicly available benchmarks, including both hallucination-specific and general-purpose ones, demonstrate the effectiveness of our VLR-distillation method.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Eyes Wide Open: Ego Proactive Video-LLM for Streaming Video

Xueyang Yu
Cheng Shi
Yang Wang
Sibei Yang

Envision an AI capable of functioning in human-like settings, moving beyond mere observation to actively understand, anticipate, and proactively respond to unfolding events. Towards this vision, we focus on the innovative task where, given ego-streaming video input, an assistant proactively answers diverse, evolving questions at the opportune moment, while maintaining synchronized perception and reasoning. This task embodies three key properties: (1) Proactive Coherence, (2) Just-in-Time Responsiveness, and (3) Synchronized Efficiency. To evaluate and address these properties, we first introduce ESTP-Bench (Ego Streaming Proactive Benchmark) alongside the ESTP-F1 metric—a novel framework designed for their rigorous assessment. Secondly, we propose a comprehensive technical pipeline to enable models to tackle this challenging task. This pipeline comprises: (1) a data engine, (2) a multi-stage training strategy, and (3) a proactive dynamic compression technique. Our proposed model effectively addresses these critical properties while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the standard COIN benchmark.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Joint Graph Rewiring and Feature Denoising via Spectral Resonance

Jonas Linkerhägner
Cheng Shi
Ivan Dokmanic

When learning from graph data, the graph and the node features both give noisy information about the node labels. In this paper we propose an algorithm to **j**ointly **d**enoise the features and **r**ewire the graph (JDR), which improves the performance of downstream node classification graph neural nets (GNNs). JDR works by aligning the leading spectral spaces of graph and feature matrices. It approximately solves the associated non-convex optimization problem in a way that handles graphs with multiple classes and different levels of homophily or heterophily. We theoretically justify JDR in a stylized setting and show that it consistently outperforms existing rewiring methods on a wide range of synthetic and real-world node classification tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Vision Function Layer in Multimodal LLMs

Cheng Shi
Yizhou Yu
Sibei Yang

This study identifies that visual-related functional decoding is distributed across different decoder layers in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Typically, each function, such as counting, grounding, or OCR recognition, narrows down to two or three layers, which we define as Vision Function Layers (VFL). Additionally, the depth and its order of different VFLs exhibits a consistent pattern across different MLLMs, which is well-aligned with human behaviors (e. g. , recognition occurs first, followed by counting, and then grounding). These findings are derived from Visual Token Swapping, our novel analytical framework that modifies targeted KV cache entries to precisely elucidate layer-specific functions during decoding. Furthermore, these insights offer substantial utility in tailoring MLLMs for real-world downstream applications. For instance, when LoRA training is selectively applied to VFLs whose functions align with the training data, VFL-LoRA not only outperform full-LoRA but also prevent out-of-domain function forgetting. Moreover, by analyzing the performance differential on training data when particular VFLs are ablated, VFL-select automatically classifies data by function, enabling highly efficient data selection to directly bolster corresponding capabilities. Consequently, VFL-select surpasses human experts in data selection, and achieves 98% of full-data performance with only 20% of the original dataset. This study delivers deeper comprehension of MLLM visual processing, fostering the creation of more efficient, interpretable, and robust models.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

A Graph Dynamics Prior for Relational Inference

Liming Pan
Cheng Shi
Ivan Dokmanic

Relational inference aims to identify interactions between parts of a dynamical system from the observed dynamics. Current state-of-the-art methods fit the dynamics with a graph neural network (GNN) on a learnable graph. They use one-step message-passing GNNs---intuitively the right choice since non-locality of multi-step or spectral GNNs may confuse direct and indirect interactions. But the effective interaction graph depends on the sampling rate and it is rarely localized to direct neighbors, leading to poor local optima for the one-step model. In this work, we propose a graph dynamics prior (GDP) for relational inference. GDP constructively uses error amplification in non-local polynomial filters to steer the solution to the ground-truth graph. To deal with non-uniqueness, GDP simultaneously fits a ``shallow'' one-step model and a polynomial multi-step model with shared graph topology. Experiments show that GDP reconstructs graphs far more accurately than earlier methods, with remarkable robustness to under-sampling. Since appropriate sampling rates for unknown dynamical systems are not known a priori, this robustness makes GDP suitable for real applications in scientific machine learning. Reproducible code is available at https://github.com/DaDaCheng/GDP.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Free-Bloom: Zero-Shot Text-to-Video Generator with LLM Director and LDM Animator

Hanzhuo Huang
Yufan Feng
Cheng Shi
Lan Xu
Jingyi Yu
Sibei Yang

Text-to-video is a rapidly growing research area that aims to generate a semantic, identical, and temporal coherence sequence of frames that accurately align with the input text prompt. This study focuses on zero-shot text-to-video generation considering the data- and cost-efficient. To generate a semantic-coherent video, exhibiting a rich portrayal of temporal semantics such as the whole process of flower blooming rather than a set of ``moving images'', we propose a novel Free-Bloom pipeline that harnesses large language models (LLMs) as the director to generate a semantic-coherence prompt sequence, while pre-trained latent diffusion models (LDMs) as the animator to generate the high fidelity frames. Furthermore, to ensure temporal and identical coherence while maintaining semantic coherence, we propose a series of annotative modifications to adapting LDMs in the reverse process, including joint noise sampling, step-aware attention shift, and dual-path interpolation. Without any video data and training requirements, Free-Bloom generates vivid and high-quality videos, awe-inspiring in generating complex scenes with semantic meaningful frame sequences. In addition, Free-Bloom is naturally compatible with LDMs-based extensions.

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ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Neural Link Prediction with Walk Pooling

Liming Pan
Cheng Shi
Ivan Dokmanic

Graph neural networks achieve high accuracy in link prediction by jointly leveraging graph topology and node attributes. Topology, however, is represented indirectly; state-of-the-art methods based on subgraph classification label nodes with distance to the target link, so that, although topological information is present, it is tempered by pooling. This makes it challenging to leverage features like loops and motifs associated with network formation mechanisms. We propose a link prediction algorithm based on a new pooling scheme called WalkPool. WalkPool combines the expressivity of topological heuristics with the feature-learning ability of neural networks. It summarizes a putative link by random walk probabilities of adjacent paths. Instead of extracting transition probabilities from the original graph, it computes the transition matrix of a ``predictive'' latent graph by applying attention to learned features; this may be interpreted as feature-sensitive topology fingerprinting. WalkPool can leverage unsupervised node features or be combined with GNNs and trained end-to-end. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all common link prediction benchmarks, both homophilic and heterophilic, with and without node attributes. Applying WalkPool to a set of unsupervised GNNs significantly improves prediction accuracy, suggesting that it may be used as a general-purpose graph pooling scheme.

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IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Feature Augmented Memory with Global Attention Network for VideoQA

Jiayin Cai
Chun Yuan
Cheng Shi
Lei Li
Yangyang Cheng
Ying Shan

Recently, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods and Self-Attention (SA) based methods have achieved promising performance in Video Question Answering (VideoQA). Despite the success of these works, RNN-based methods tend to forget the global semantic contents due to the inherent drawbacks of the recurrent units themselves, while SA-based methods cannot precisely capture the dependencies of the local neighborhood, leading to insufficient modeling for temporal order. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel VideoQA framework which progressively refines the representations of videos and questions from fine to coarse grain in a sequence-sensitive manner. Specifically, our model improves the feature representations via the following two steps: (1) introducing two fine-grained feature-augmented memories to strengthen the information augmentation of video and text which can improve memory capacity by memorizing more relevant and targeted information. (2) appending the self-attention and co-attention module to the memory output thus the module is able to capture global interaction between high-level semantic informations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on VideoQA benchmark datasets.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Robust Reinforcement Learning via Adversarial training with Langevin Dynamics

Parameswaran Kamalaruban
Yu-Ting Huang
Ya-Ping Hsieh
Paul Rolland
Cheng Shi
Volkan Cevher

We introduce a \emph{sampling} perspective to tackle the challenging task of training robust Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Leveraging the powerful Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics, we present a novel, scalable two-player RL algorithm, which is a sampling variant of the two-player policy gradient method. Our algorithm consistently outperforms existing baselines, in terms of generalization across different training and testing conditions, on several MuJoCo environments. Our experiments also show that, even for objective functions that entirely ignore potential environmental shifts, our sampling approach remains highly robust in comparison to standard RL algorithms.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Towards Ghost-Free Shadow Removal via Dual Hierarchical Aggregation Network and Shadow Matting GAN

Xiaodong Cun
Chi-Man Pun
Cheng Shi

Shadow removal is an essential task for scene understanding. Many studies consider only matching the image contents, which often causes two types of ghosts: color in-consistencies in shadow regions or artifacts on shadow boundaries (as shown in Figure. 1). In this paper, we tackle these issues in two ways. First, to carefully learn the border artifacts-free image, we propose a novel network structure named the dual hierarchically aggregation network (DHAN). It contains a series of growth dilated convolutions as the backbone without any down-samplings, and we hierarchically aggregate multicontext features for attention and prediction, respectively. Second, we argue that training on a limited dataset restricts the textural understanding of the network, which leads to the shadow region color in-consistencies. Currently, the largest dataset contains 2k+ shadow/shadow-free image pairs. However, it has only 0. 1k+ unique scenes since many samples share exactly the same background with different shadow positions. Thus, we design a shadow matting generative adversarial network (SMGAN) to synthesize realistic shadow mattings from a given shadow mask and shadow-free image. With the help of novel masks or scenes, we enhance the current datasets using synthesized shadow images. Experiments show that our DHAN can erase the shadows and produce high-quality ghost-free images. After training on the synthesized and real datasets, our network outperforms other stateof-the-art methods by a large margin. The code is available: http: //github. com/vinthony/ghost-free-shadow-removal/

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Self-Supervised Mixture-of-Experts by Uncertainty Estimation

Zhuobin Zheng
Chun Yuan
Xinrui Zhu
Zhihui Lin
Yangyang Cheng
Cheng Shi
Jiahui Ye

Learning related tasks in various domains and transferring exploited knowledge to new situations is a significant challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, most RL algorithms are data inefficient and fail to generalize in complex environments, limiting their adaptability and applicability in multi-task scenarios. In this paper, we propose Self- Supervised Mixture-of-Experts (SUM), an effective algorithm driven by predictive uncertainty estimation for multitask RL. SUM utilizes a multi-head agent with shared parameters as experts to learn a series of related tasks simultaneously by Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Each expert is extended by predictive uncertainty estimation on known and unknown states to enhance the Q-value evaluation capacity against overfitting and the overall generalization ability. These enable the agent to capture and diffuse the common knowledge across different tasks improving sample efficiency in each task and the effectiveness of expert scheduling across multiple tasks. Instead of task-specific design as common MoEs, a self-supervised gating network is adopted to determine a potential expert to handle each interaction from unseen environments and calibrated completely by the uncertainty feedback from the experts without explicit supervision. To alleviate the imbalanced expert utilization as the crux of MoE, optimization is accomplished via decayedmasked experience replay, which encourages both diversification and specialization of experts during different periods. We demonstrate that our approach learns faster and achieves better performance by efficient transfer and robust generalization, outperforming several related methods on extended OpenAI Gym’s MuJoCo multi-task environments.

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