Feng Liang

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

mmJEPA-ECG: Cross-Posture Robust Contactless Electrocardiogram Monitoring via Millimeter Wave Radar Sensing

• Ziyang Liu
• Siyuan He
• Feng Liang
• Chang Huang
• Shuxin Zhong
• Kaishun Wu

Continuous cardiac monitoring during sleep is vital for detecting silent arrhythmia and other nocturnal cardiac events. While electrocardiogram (ECG) is the clinical gold standard, its reliance on electrodes and physical contact makes it intrusive for daily long-term use. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar offers a compelling non-contact alternative by capturing cardiac-induced chest-wall micro-vibrations. Existing radar-to-ECG methods often rely on direct waveform regression, assuming posture-stable mappings that break under natural sleep movements and obscure true cardiac rhythms. Inspired by the modality-invariant perception observed in speech and vision, we introduce mmJEPA-ECG, a physiology-guided framework for reconstructing clinical ECGs by anchoring radar sensing to invariant cardiac dynamics. It addresses two fundamental challenges: (i) disentangling robust cardiac representations from posture-induced artifacts, and (ii) generalizing ECG reconstruction across individuals under signal ambiguity. To address these challenges, Physiology-Oriented Self-Supervised Pretraining builds on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) with domain-informed masking and heart rate consistency to extract posture-robust cardiac embeddings. Conditional Diffusion-based ECG Reconstruction then generates personalized ECG waveforms through a hierarchical conditional diffusion process by spectral fidelity and denoising constraints. Extensive experiments on both public and self-collected multi-subject datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art across waveform and rhythm metrics, halving R-R peak errors even under posture shifts and arrhythmic conditions.

JBHI Journal 2026 Journal Article

MoChat: Joints-Grouped Spatio-Temporal Grounding Multimodal Large Language Model for Multi-Turn Motion Comprehension and Description

• Jiawei Mo
• Yixuan Chen
• Rifen Lin
• Yongkang Ni
• Feng Liang
• Min Zeng
• Xiping Hu
• Min Li

Despite continuous advancements in deep learning for understanding human motion, existing models often struggle to accurately identify action timing and specific body parts, typically supporting only single-round interaction. This limitation is particularly pronounced in home exercise monitoring, neurological disorder assessment, and rehabilitation, where precise motion analysis is crucial for ensuring exercise efficacy, detecting early signs of neurological conditions, and guiding personalized recovery programs. In this paper, we propose MoChat, a multimodal large language model capable of spatio-temporal grounding of human motion and multi-turn dialogue understanding. To achieve this, we first group spatial features in skeleton frames according to human anatomical structures and process them through a Joints-Grouped Skeleton Encoder. The encoder’s outputs are fused with large language model embeddings to generate spatio-aware representations. A cross-attention-based Regression Head module is then designed to align hidden-layer embeddings and skeletal sequence embeddings, enabling precise temporal grounding. Furthermore, we develop a pipeline for temporal grounding task to extract timestamps from skeleton-text pairs and construct a multi-turn instruction dialogues for spatial grounding task. Finally, various task instructions are generated for jointly training. Experimental results demonstrate that MoChat achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics in motion understanding tasks, making it as the first model capable of fine-grained spatio-temporal grounding of human motion.

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

NeSTR: A Neuro-Symbolic Abductive Framework for Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models

• Feng Liang
• Weixin Zeng
• Runhao Zhao
• Xiang Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, temporal reasoning, particularly under complex temporal constraints, remains a major challenge. To this end, existing approaches have explored symbolic methods, which encode temporal structure explicitly, and reflective mechanisms, which revise reasoning errors through multi-step inference. Nonetheless, symbolic approaches often underutilize the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, while reflective methods typically lack structured temporal representations, which can result in inconsistent or hallucinated reasoning. As a result, even when the correct temporal context is available, LLMs may still misinterpret or misapply time-related information, leading to incomplete or inaccurate answers. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Temporal Reasoning (NeSTR), a novel framework that integrates structured symbolic representations with hybrid reflective reasoning to enhance the temporal sensitivity of LLM inference. NeSTR preserves explicit temporal relations through symbolic encoding, enforces logical consistency via verification, and corrects flawed inferences using abductive reflection. Extensive experiments on diverse temporal question answering benchmarks demonstrate that NeSTR achieves superior zero-shot performance and consistently improves temporal reasoning without any fine-tuning, showcasing the advantage of neuro-symbolic integration in enhancing temporal understanding in large language models.

JMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Extending Temperature Scaling with Homogenizing Maps

• Christopher Qian
• Feng Liang
• Jason Adams

As machine learning models continue to grow more complex, poor calibration significantly limits the reliability of their predictions. Temperature scaling learns a single temperature parameter to scale the output logits, and despite its simplicity, remains one of the most effective post-hoc recalibration methods. We identify one of temperature scaling's defining attributes, that it increases the uncertainty of the predictions in a manner that we term homogenization, and propose to learn the optimal recalibration mapping from a larger class of functions that satisfies this property. We demonstrate the advantage of our method over temperature scaling in both calibration and out-of-distribution detection. Additionally, we extend our methodology and experimental evaluation to recalibration in the Bayesian setting. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2025. ( edit, beta )

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Looking Backward: Streaming Video-to-Video Translation with Feature Banks

• Feng Liang
• Akio Kodaira
• Chenfeng Xu
• Masayoshi Tomizuka
• Kurt Keutzer
• Diana Marculescu

This paper introduces StreamV2V, a diffusion model that achieves real-time streaming video-to-video (V2V) translation with user prompts. Unlike prior V2V methods using batches to process limited frames, we opt to process frames in a streaming fashion, to support unlimited frames. At the heart of StreamV2V lies a backward-looking principle that relates the present to the past. This is realized by maintaining a feature bank, which archives information from past frames. For incoming frames, StreamV2V extends self-attention to include banked keys and values, and directly fuses similar past features into the output. The feature bank is continually updated by merging stored and new features, making it compact yet informative. StreamV2V stands out for its adaptability and efficiency, seamlessly integrating with image diffusion models without fine-tuning. It can run 20 FPS on one A100 GPU, being 15$\times$, 46$\times$, 108$\times$, and 158$\times$ faster than FlowVid, CoDeF, Rerender, and TokenFlow, respectively. Quantitative metrics and user studies confirm StreamV2V's exceptional ability to maintain temporal consistency.

JBHI Journal 2025 Journal Article

Robust Multi-Contrast MRI Medical Image Translation via Knowledge Distillation and Adversarial Attack

• Xujie Zhao
• Feng Liang
• Chengjiang Long
• Zhiyong Yuan
• Jianhui Zhao

Medical image translation is of great value but is very difficult due to the requirement with style change of noise pattern and anatomy invariance of image content. Various deep learning methods like the mainstream GAN, Transformer and Diffusion models have been developed to learn the multi-modal mapping to obtain the translated images, but the results from the generator are still far from being perfect for medical images. In this paper, we propose a robust multi-contrast translation framework for MRI medical images with knowledge distillation and adversarial attack, which can be integrated with any generator. The additional refinement network consists of teacher and student modules with similar structures but different inputs. Unlike the existing knowledge distillation works, our teacher module is designed as a registration network with more inputs to better learn the noise distribution well and further refine the translated results in the training stage. The knowledge is then well distilled to the student module to ensure that better translation results are generated. We also introduce an adversarial attack module before the generator. Such a black-box attacker can generate meaningful perturbations and adversarial examples throughout the training process. Our model has been tested on two public MRI medical image datasets considering different types and levels of perturbations, and each designed module is verified by the ablation study. The extensive experiments and comparison with SOTA methods have strongly demonstrated our model’s superiority of refinement and robustness.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Understanding Emotional Body Expressions via Large Language Models

• Haifeng Lu
• Jiuyi Chen
• Feng Liang
• Mingkui Tan
• Runhao Zeng
• Xiping Hu

Emotion recognition based on body movements is vital in human-computer interaction. However, existing emotion recognition methods predominantly focus on enhancing classification accuracy, often neglecting the provision of textual explanations to justify their classifications. In this paper, we propose an Emotion-Action Interpreter powered by LargeLanguage Model (EAI-LLM), which not only recognizes emotions but also generates textual explanations by treating 3D body movement data as unique input tokens within large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we propose a multi-granularity skeleton tokenizer designed for LLMs, which separately extracts spatio-temporal tokens and semantic tokens from the skeleton data. This approach allows LLMs to generate more nuanced classification descriptions while maintaining robust classification performance. Furthermore, we treat the skeleton sequence as a specific language and propose a unified skeleton token module. This module leverages the extensive background knowledge and language processing capabilities of LLMs to address the challenges of joint training on heterogeneous datasets, thereby significantly enhancing recognition accuracy on individual datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves recognition accuracy comparable to existing methods. More importantly, with the support of background knowledge from LLMs, our model can generate detailed emotion descriptions based on classification results, even when trained on a limited amount of labeled skeleton data.

TIST Journal 2024 Journal Article

Decentralized Federated Recommendation with Privacy-aware Structured Client-level Graph

• Zhitao Li
• Zhaohao Lin
• Feng Liang
• Weike Pan
• Qiang Yang
• Zhong Ming

Recommendation models are deployed in a variety of commercial applications to provide personalized services for users. However, most of them rely on the users’ original rating records that are often collected by a centralized server for model training, which may cause privacy issues. Recently, some centralized federated recommendation models are proposed for the protection of users’ privacy, which however requires a server for coordination in the whole process of model training. As a response, we propose a novel privacy-aware decentralized federated recommendation (DFedRec) model, which is lossless compared with the traditional model in recommendation performance and is thus more accurate than other models in this line. Specifically, we design a privacy-aware structured client-level graph for the sharing of the model parameters in the process of model training, which is a one-stone-two-bird strategy, i.e., it protects users’ privacy via some randomly sampled fake entries and reduces the communication cost by sharing the model parameters only with the related neighboring users. With the help of the privacy-aware structured client-level graph, we propose two novel collaborative training mechanisms in the setting without a server, including a batch algorithm DFedRec(b) and a stochastic one DFedRec(s), where the former requires the anonymity mechanism while the latter does not. They are both equivalent to probabilistic matrix factorization trained in a centralized server and are thus lossless. We then provide formal analysis of privacy guarantee of our methods and conduct extensive empirical studies on three public datasets with explicit feedback, which show the effectiveness of our DFedRec, i.e., it is privacy aware, communication efficient, and lossless.

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Minimax Optimality of Score-based Diffusion Models: Beyond the Density Lower Bound Assumptions

• Kaihong Zhang
• Heqi Yin
• Feng Liang
• Jingbo Liu

We study the asymptotic error of score-based diffusion model sampling in large-sample scenarios from a non-parametric statistics perspective. We show that a kernel-based score estimator achieves an optimal mean square error of $\widetilde{O}\left(n^{-1} t^{-\frac{d+2}{2}}(t^{\frac{d}{2}} \vee 1)\right)$ for the score function of $p_0*\mathcal{N}(0, t\boldsymbol{I}_d)$, where $n$ and $d$ represent the sample size and the dimension, $t$ is bounded above and below by polynomials of $n$, and $p_0$ is an arbitrary sub-Gaussian distribution. As a consequence, this yields an $\widetilde{O}\left(n^{-1/2} t^{-\frac{d}{4}}\right)$ upper bound for the total variation error of the distribution of the sample generated by the diffusion model under a mere sub-Gaussian assumption. If in addition, $p_0$ belongs to the nonparametric family of the $\beta$-Sobolev space with $\beta\le 2$, by adopting an early stopping strategy, we obtain that the diffusion model is nearly (up to log factors) minimax optimal. This removes the crucial lower bound assumption on $p_0$ in previous proofs of the minimax optimality of the diffusion model for nonparametric families.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

MobileTL: On-Device Transfer Learning with Inverted Residual Blocks

• Hung-Yueh Chiang
• Natalia Frumkin
• Feng Liang
• Diana Marculescu

Transfer learning on edge is challenging due to on-device limited resources. Existing work addresses this issue by training a subset of parameters or adding model patches. Developed with inference in mind, Inverted Residual Blocks (IRBs) split a convolutional layer into depthwise and pointwise convolutions, leading to more stacking layers, e.g., convolution, normalization, and activation layers. Though they are efficient for inference, IRBs require that additional activation maps are stored in memory for training weights for convolution layers and scales for normalization layers. As a result, their high memory cost prohibits training IRBs on resource-limited edge devices, and making them unsuitable in the context of transfer learning. To address this issue, we present MobileTL, a memory and computationally efficient on-device transfer learning method for models built with IRBs. MobileTL trains the shifts for internal normalization layers to avoid storing activation maps for the backward pass. Also, MobileTL approximates the backward computation of the activation layer (e.g., Hard-Swish and ReLU6) as a signed function which enables storing a binary mask instead of activation maps for the backward pass. MobileTL fine-tunes a few top blocks (close to output) rather than propagating the gradient through the whole network to reduce the computation cost. Our method reduces memory usage by 46% and 53% for MobileNetV2 and V3 IRBs, respectively. For MobileNetV3, we observe a 36% reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) when fine-tuning 5 blocks, while only incurring a 0.6% accuracy reduction on CIFAR10. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method is Pareto-optimal (best accuracy under given hardware constraints) compared to prior work in transfer learning for edge devices.

IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

RePre: Improving Self-Supervised Vision Transformer with Reconstructive Pre-training

• Luya Wang
• Feng Liang
• Yangguang Li
• Honggang Zhang
• Wanli Ouyang
• Jing Shao

Recently, self-supervised vision transformers have attracted unprecedented attention for their impressive representation learning ability. However, the dominant method, contrastive learning, mainly relies on an instance discrimination pretext task, which learns a global understanding of the image. This paper incorporates local feature learning into self-supervised vision transformers via Reconstructive Pre-training (RePre). Our RePre extends contrastive frameworks by adding a branch for reconstructing raw image pixels in parallel with the existing contrastive objective. RePre equips with a lightweight convolution-based decoder that fuses the multi-hierarchy features from the transformer encoder. The multi-hierarchy features provide rich supervisions from low to high semantic information, crucial for our RePre. Our RePre brings decent improvements on various contrastive frameworks with different vision transformer architectures. Transfer performance in downstream tasks outperforms supervised pre-training and state-of-the-art (SOTA) self-supervised counterparts.

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm

• Yangguang Li 0001
• Feng Liang
• Lichen Zhao
• Yufeng Cui
• Wanli Ouyang
• Jing Shao
• Fengwei Yu
• Junjie Yan

Recently, large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has attracted unprecedented attention for its impressive zero-shot recognition ability and excellent transferability to downstream tasks. However, CLIP is quite data-hungry and requires 400M image-text pairs for pre-training, thereby restricting its adoption. This work proposes a novel training paradigm, Data efficient CLIP (DeCLIP), to alleviate this limitation. We demonstrate that by carefully utilizing the widespread supervision among the image-text pairs, our De-CLIP can learn generic visual features more efficiently. Instead of using the single image-text contrastive supervision, we fully exploit data potential through the use of (1) self-supervision within each modality; (2) multi-view supervision across modalities; (3) nearest-neighbor supervision from other similar pairs. Benefiting from intrinsic supervision, our DeCLIP-ResNet50 can achieve 60.4% zero-shot top1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 0.8% above the CLIP-ResNet50 while using 7.1×fewer data. Our DeCLIP-ResNet50 outperforms its counterpart in 8 out of 11 visual datasets when transferred to downstream tasks. Moreover, Scaling up the model and computing also works well in our framework.

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

FedRec++: Lossless Federated Recommendation with Explicit Feedback

• Feng Liang
• Weike Pan
• Zhong Ming

With the marriage of federated machine learning and recommender systems for privacy-aware preference modeling and personalization, there comes a new research branch called federated recommender systems aiming to build a recommendation model in a distributed way, i. e. , each user is represented as a distributed client where his/her original rating data are not shared with the server or the other clients. Notice that, besides the sensitive information of a specific rating score assigned to a certain item by a user, the information of a user’s rated set of items shall also be well protected. Some very recent works propose to randomly sample some unrated items for each user and then assign some virtual ratings, so that the server can not identify the scores and the set of rated items easily during the server-client interactions. However, the virtual ratings assigned to the randomly sampled items will inevitably introduce some noise to the model training process, which will then cause loss in recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless federated recommendation method (FedRec++) by allocating some denoising clients (i. e. , users) to eliminate the noise in a privacy-aware manner. We further analyse our FedRec++ in terms of security and losslessness, and discuss its generality in the context of existing works. Extensive empirical studies clearly show the effectiveness of our FedRec++ in providing accurate and privacy-aware recommendation without much additional communication cost.

IS Journal 2021 Journal Article

FedRec: Federated Recommendation With Explicit Feedback

• Guanyu Lin
• Feng Liang
• Weike Pan
• Zhong Ming

Recommendation models have been widely embedded in various online services, while most of which are designed with the assumption that users’ original behaviors are available in a central server. This may cause the privacy issue. As a response, we follow a recent work called federated collaborative filtering (FCF) for item recommendation with implicit feedback and propose a novel and generic federated recommendation (FedRec) framework for rating prediction with explicit feedback. Specifically, we federate some basic and advanced factorization-based recommendation models both in batch style and in stochastic style. More importantly, in order to protect the private information of which items each user has rated, as well as not to significantly increase the computational and communication cost, we design two simple but effective strategies, i. e. , user averaging and hybrid filling, in which some (instead of all) unrated items are randomly sampled and assigned with some virtual ratings accordingly. Empirical studies on two public datasets show the effectiveness of our FedRec in terms of the closeness of a federated model and an unfederated one, and the usefulness of the two filling strategies.

JMLR Journal 2021 Journal Article

GemBag: Group Estimation of Multiple Bayesian Graphical Models

• Xinming Yang
• Lingrui Gan
• Naveen N. Narisetty
• Feng Liang

In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical Bayesian model and an efficient estimation method for the problem of joint estimation of multiple graphical models, which have similar but different sparsity structures and signal strength. Our proposed hierarchical Bayesian model is well suited for sharing of sparsity structures, and our procedure, called as GemBag, is shown to enjoy optimal theoretical properties in terms of sup-norm estimation accuracy and correct recovery of the graphical structure even when some of the signals are weak. Although optimization of the posterior distribution required for obtaining our proposed estimator is a non-convex optimization problem, we show that it turns out to be convex in a large constrained space facilitating the use of computationally efficient algorithms. Through extensive simulation studies and an application to a bike sharing data set, we demonstrate that the proposed GemBag procedure has strong empirical performance in comparison with alternative methods. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2021. ( edit, beta )

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

NASGEM: Neural Architecture Search via Graph Embedding Method

• Hsin-Pai Cheng
• Tunhou Zhang
• Yixing Zhang
• Shiyu Li
• Feng Liang
• Feng Yan
• Meng Li
• Vikas Chandra

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) automates and prospers the design of neural networks. Estimator-based NAS has been proposed recently to model the relationship between architectures and their performance to enable scalable and flexible search. However, existing estimator-based methods encode the architecture into a latent space without considering graph similarity. Ignoring graph similarity in node-based search space may induce a large inconsistency between similar graphs and their distance in the continuous encoding space, leading to inaccurate encoding representation and/or reduced representation capacity that can yield sub-optimal search results. To preserve graph correlation information in encoding, we propose NAS- GEM which stands for Neural Architecture Search via Graph Embedding Method. NASGEM is driven by a novel graph embedding method equipped with similarity measures to capture the graph topology information. By precisely estimating the graph distance and using an auxiliary Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel to guide the encoding, NASGEM can utilize additional structural information to get more accurate graph representation to improve the search efficiency. GEMNet, a set of networks discovered by NASGEM, consistently outperforms networks crafted by existing search methods in classification tasks, i. e. , with 0. 4%-3. 6% higher accuracy while having 11%- 21% fewer Multiply-Accumulates. We further transfer GEM- Net for COCO object detection. In both one-stage and twostage detectors, our GEMNet surpasses its manually-crafted and automatically-searched counterparts.

ICLR Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Computation Reallocation for Object Detection

• Feng Liang
• Chen Lin 0003
• Ronghao Guo
• Ming Sun 0008
• Wei Wu 0021
• Junjie Yan
• Wanli Ouyang

The allocation of computation resources in the backbone is a crucial issue in object detection. However, classification allocation pattern is usually adopted directly to object detector, which is proved to be sub-optimal. In order to reallocate the engaged computation resources in a more efficient way, we present CR-NAS (Computation Reallocation Neural Architecture Search) that can learn computation reallocation strategies across different feature resolution and spatial position diectly on the target detection dataset. A two-level reallocation space is proposed for both stage and spatial reallocation. A novel hierarchical search procedure is adopted to cope with the complex search space. We apply CR-NAS to multiple backbones and achieve consistent improvements. Our CR-ResNet50 and CR-MobileNetV2 outperforms the baseline by 1.9% and 1.7% COCO AP respectively without any additional computation budget. The models discovered by CR-NAS can be equiped to other powerful detection neck/head and be easily transferred to other dataset, e.g. PASCAL VOC, and other vision tasks, e.g. instance segmentation. Our CR-NAS can be used as a plugin to improve the performance of various networks, which is demanding.

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Bayesian Joint Estimation of Multiple Graphical Models

• Lingrui Gan
• Xinming Yang
• Naveen Narisetty
• Feng Liang

In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian group regularization method based on the spike and slab Lasso priors for jointly estimating multiple graphical models. The proposed method can be used to estimate the common sparsity structure underlying the graphical models while capturing potential heterogeneity of the precision matrices corresponding to those models. Our theoretical results show that the proposed method enjoys the optimal rate of convergence in $\ell_\infty$ norm for estimation consistency and has a strong structure recovery guarantee even when the signal strengths over different graphs are heterogeneous. Through simulation studies and an application to the capital bike-sharing network data, we demonstrate the competitive performance of our method compared to existing alternatives.

NeurIPS Conference 2014 Conference Paper

On a Theory of Nonparametric Pairwise Similarity for Clustering: Connecting Clustering to Classification

• Yingzhen Yang
• Feng Liang
• Shuicheng Yan
• Zhangyang Wang
• Thomas Huang

Pairwise clustering methods partition the data space into clusters by the pairwise similarity between data points. The success of pairwise clustering largely depends on the pairwise similarity function defined over the data points, where kernel similarity is broadly used. In this paper, we present a novel pairwise clustering framework by bridging the gap between clustering and multi-class classification. This pairwise clustering framework learns an unsupervised nonparametric classifier from each data partition, and search for the optimal partition of the data by minimizing the generalization error of the learned classifiers associated with the data partitions. We consider two nonparametric classifiers in this framework, i. e. the nearest neighbor classifier and the plug-in classifier. Modeling the underlying data distribution by nonparametric kernel density estimation, the generalization error bounds for both unsupervised nonparametric classifiers are the sum of nonparametric pairwise similarity terms between the data points for the purpose of clustering. Under uniform distribution, the nonparametric similarity terms induced by both unsupervised classifiers exhibit a well known form of kernel similarity. We also prove that the generalization error bound for the unsupervised plug-in classifier is asymptotically equal to the weighted volume of cluster boundary for Low Density Separation, a widely used criteria for semi-supervised learning and clustering. Based on the derived nonparametric pairwise similarity using the plug-in classifier, we propose a new nonparametric exemplar-based clustering method with enhanced discriminative capability, whose superiority is evidenced by the experimental results.

NeurIPS Conference 2014 Conference Paper

PAC-Bayesian AUC classification and scoring

• James Ridgway
• Pierre Alquier
• Nicolas Chopin
• Feng Liang

We develop a scoring and classification procedure based on the PAC-Bayesian approach and the AUC (Area Under Curve) criterion. We focus initially on the class of linear score functions. We derive PAC-Bayesian non-asymptotic bounds for two types of prior for the score parameters: a Gaussian prior, and a spike-and-slab prior; the latter makes it possible to perform feature selection. One important advantage of our approach is that it is amenable to powerful Bayesian computational tools. We derive in particular a Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, as an efficient method which may be used as a gold standard, and an Expectation-Propagation algorithm, as a much faster but approximate method. We also extend our method to a class of non-linear score functions, essentially leading to a nonparametric procedure, by considering a Gaussian process prior.

AAAI Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Pairwise Exemplar Clustering

• Yingzhen Yang
• Xinqi Chu
• Feng Liang
• Thomas Huang

Exemplar-based clustering methods have been extensively shown to be effective in many clustering problems. They adaptively determine the number of clusters and hold the appealing advantage of not requiring the estimation of latent parameters, which is otherwise difficult in case of complicated parametric model and high dimensionality of the data. However, modeling arbitrary underlying distribution of the data is still difficult for existing exemplar-based clustering methods. We present Pairwise Exemplar Clustering (PEC) to alleviate this problem by modeling the underlying cluster distributions more accurately with non-parametric kernel density estimation. Interpreting the clusters as classes from a supervised learning perspective, we search for an optimal partition of the data that balances two quantities: 1 the misclassification rate of the data partition for separating the clusters; 2 the sum of within-cluster dissimilarities for controlling the cluster size. The broadly used kernel form of cut turns out to be a special case of our formulation. Moreover, we optimize the corresponding objective function by a new efficient algorithm for message computation in a pairwise MRF. Experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

NeurIPS Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Graph-based Consensus Maximization among Multiple Supervised and Unsupervised Models

• Jing Gao
• Feng Liang
• Wei Fan
• Yizhou Sun
• Jiawei Han

Little work has been done to directly combine the outputs of multiple supervised and unsupervised models. However, it can increase the accuracy and applicability of ensemble methods. First, we can boost the diversity of classification ensemble by incorporating multiple clustering outputs, each of which provides grouping constraints for the joint label predictions of a set of related objects. Secondly, ensemble of supervised models is limited in applications which have no access to raw data but to the meta-level model outputs. In this paper, we aim at calculating a consolidated classification solution for a set of objects by maximizing the consensus among both supervised predictions and unsupervised grouping constraints. We seek a global optimal label assignment for the target objects, which is different from the result of traditional majority voting and model combination approaches. We cast the problem into an optimization problem on a bipartite graph, where the objective function favors smoothness in the conditional probability estimates over the graph, as well as penalizes deviation from initial labeling of supervised models. We solve the problem through iterative propagation of conditional probability estimates among neighboring nodes, and interpret the method as conducting a constrained embedding in a transformed space, as well as a ranking on the graph. Experimental results on three real applications demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method over existing alternatives.

YNIMG Journal 2009 Journal Article

Learning Hemodynamic Response Function with Neighborhood Cooperation in fMRI

• Jing Xia
• Feng Liang
• Y.M Wang

NeurIPS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Localized Sliced Inverse Regression

• Qiang Wu
• Sayan Mukherjee
• Feng Liang

We developed localized sliced inverse regression for supervised dimension reduction. It has the advantages of preventing degeneracy, increasing estimation accuracy, and automatic subclass discovery in classification problems. A semisupervised version is proposed for the use of unlabeled data. The utility is illustrated on simulated as well as real data sets.

JMLR Journal 2007 Journal Article

Characterizing the Function Space for Bayesian Kernel Models

• Natesh S. Pillai
• Qiang Wu
• Feng Liang
• Sayan Mukherjee
• Robert L. Wolpert

Kernel methods have been very popular in the machine learning literature in the last ten years, mainly in the context of Tikhonov regularization algorithms. In this paper we study a coherent Bayesian kernel model based on an integral operator defined as the convolution of a kernel with a signed measure. Priors on the random signed measures correspond to prior distributions on the functions mapped by the integral operator. We study several classes of signed measures and their image mapped by the integral operator. In particular, we identify a general class of measures whose image is dense in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) induced by the kernel. A consequence of this result is a function theoretic foundation for using non-parametric prior specifications in Bayesian modeling, such as Gaussian process and Dirichlet process prior distributions. We discuss the construction of priors on spaces of signed measures using Gaussian and Lévy processes, with the Dirichlet processes being a special case the latter. Computational issues involved with sampling from the posterior distribution are outlined for a univariate regression and a high dimensional classification problem. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2007. ( edit, beta )

IROS Conference 2006 Conference Paper

Research on the Walking Modes Shifting Based on the Variable ZMP and 3-D. O. F Inverted Pendulum Model for a Humanoid and Gorilla Robot

• Weiguo Wu
• Yu Wang
• Yunzhong Pan
• Feng Liang

The walking modes shifting of a gorilla robot is a kind of movements between biped standing state and quadruped landing state. In this paper, the robot mechanism is reduced to a 3-D. O. F inverted pendulum model with variable pendulum length, and the variable ZMP is defined reasonably as a function related to the inverted pendulum angle. Base on dynamic balance theory, the trajectory equation of robot's mass centre during the walking mode shifting is deduced. Furthermore, through inverse kinematics analysis for robot's mass center, the trajectories of joint are obtained. Thus method of trajectory generation about walking mode shifting for humanoid and gorilla robot is proposed. In order to verify the correctness of the method, a calculation example of trajectory generation is provided, and the continuing action simulation including biped walking and quadruped landing action, quadruped walking and standing up action is successfully realized. On the basis of above work, the continuing action experiment including biped walking and walking modes transitions for a humanoid and gorilla robot "GoRoBoT" developed by us is also finished