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Jiye Liang

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37 papers
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37

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Point Cloud Semantic Scene Completion with Prototype-Guided Transformer

  • Chenghao Fang
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Jiye Liang
  • Zijin Du
  • Feilong Cao

Semantic scene completion simultaneously reconstructs the shapes of missing regions and predicts semantic labels for the entire 3D scene. Although point cloud-based methods are more efficient than voxel-based methods, existing point cloud-based approaches largely fail to fully leverage semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose a Prototype-Guided Transformer (ProtoFormer) that encodes semantic information into a set of semantic prototypes to guide the underlying Transformer for semantic scene completion. Specifically, we leverage semantic prototypes to enhance information from both geometric and semantic perspectives, and integrate the top-K attention mechanisms to guide scene completion and semantic awareness. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that ProtoFormer outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with low complexity.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network for Point Cloud Completion

  • Zhensheng Zhou
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Jiye Liang
  • Zijin Du
  • Chenghao Fang

The primary goal of 3D point cloud completion is to reconstruct complete and high-resolution point clouds from incomplete and low-resolution inputs. While some recent approaches have achieved satisfactory completion performance by incorporating additional images, there remains room for improvement in fully exploiting and utilizing the rich geometric relation information contained in parts. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network (SGPRNet) for Point Cloud Completion. Its core innovation lies in establishing part semantic relations to guide the reconstruction of structurally consistent local geometries. Specifically, we utilize Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) to automatically generate the specific text of 3D shape, which provides detailed geometric part relations descriptions. Building upon this, we design an Orthogonal Semantic Part Transfer (OSPT) module that learns transferable semantic relations between geometric parts. Subsequently, we develop a Semantic Geometric Relation-aware Transformer (SGRFormer) to progressively refine these semantic features, enhancing point cloud representation and guiding the generation of fine local structures. In addition, we establish a point-text pairs corpus, OmniObject3D-212/34 and Text-ViPC datasets based on existing OmniObject3D and ShapeNet-ViPC datasets, incorporating the specific text. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art completion methods.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Automatic Visual Instrumental Variable Learning for Confounding-Resistant Domain Generalization

  • Fuyuan Cao
  • Shichang Qiao
  • Kui Yu
  • Jiye Liang

Many confounding-resistant domain generalization methods for image classification have been developed based on causal interventions. However, their reliance on strong assumptions limits their effectiveness in handling unobserved confounders. Although recent work introduces instrumental variables (IVs) to overcome this limitation, the reliance on manually predefined instruments, particularly in the context of visual data, may result in severe bias or invalidity when IV conditions are violated. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach to automatically learning Visual Instrumental Variables for confounding-resistant Domain Generalization (VIV-DG). We observe that certain non-causal visual attributes in image data naturally satisfy the basic conditions required for valid IVs. Motivated by this insight, we propose the visual instrumental variable, a novel concept that extends classical IV theory to the visual domain. Furthermore, we develop an automatic visual instrumental variable learner that enforces IV conditions on learned representations, enabling the automatic learning of valid visual instrumental variables from image data. Ultimately, VIV-DG inherits the strengths of classical IVs to mitigate unobserved confounding and avoids the significant bias caused by violations of IV conditions in predefined IVs. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks verify that VIV-DG achieves superior generalization ability.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CMoB: Modality Valuation via Causal Effect for Balanced Multimodal Learning

  • Jun Wang
  • Fuyuan Cao
  • Zhixin Xue
  • Xingwang Zhao
  • Jiye Liang

Existing early and late fusion frameworks in multimodal learning are confronted with the fundamental challenge of modality imbalance, wherein disparities in representational capacities induce inter-modal competition during training. Current research methodologies primarily rely on modality-level contribution assessments to measure gaps in representational capabilities and enhance poorly learned modalities, overlooking the dynamic variations of modality contributions across individual samples. To address this, we propose a Causal-aware Modality valuation approach for Balanced multimodal learning (CMoB). We define a benefit function based on Shannon's theory of informational uncertainty to evaluate the changes in the importance of samples across different stages of multimodal training. Inspired by human cognitive science, we propose a causal-aware modality contribution quantification method from a causal perspective to capture fine-grained changes in modality contribution degrees within samples. In the iterative training of multimodal learning, we develop targeted modal enhancement strategies that dynamically select and optimize modalities based on real-time evaluation of their contribution variations across training samples. Our method enhances the discriminative ability of key modalities and the learning capacity of weak modalities while achieving fine-grained balance in multimodal learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark multimodal datasets and multimodal frameworks demonstrate the superiority of our CMoB approach for balanced multimodal learning.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Counterfactual Contrastive Learning with Normalizing Flows for Robust Treatment Effect Estimation

  • Jiaxuan Zhang
  • Emadeldeen Eldele
  • Fuyuan Cao
  • Yang Wang
  • Xiaoli Li 0001
  • Jiye Liang

Estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) from observational data is challenging due to covariate shift and counterfactual absence. While existing methods attempt to balance distributions globally, they often lack fine-grained sample-level alignment, especially in scenarios with significant individual heterogeneity. To address these issues, we reconsider counterfactual as a proxy to emulate balanced randomization. Furthermore, we derive a theoretical bound that links the expected ITE estimation error to both factual prediction errors and representation distances between factuals and counterfactuals. Building on this theoretical foundation, we propose FCCL, a novel method designed to effectively capture the nuances of potential outcomes under different treatments by (i) generating diffeomorphic counterfactuals that adhere to the data manifold while maintaining high semantic similarity to their factual counterparts, and (ii) mitigating distribution shift via sample-level alignment grounded in our derived generalization-error bound, which considers factual-counterfactual similarity and category consistency. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that FCCL outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods, particularly in capturing individual-level heterogeneity and handling sparse boundary samples.

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ECAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Cross-Channel Graph Attention Mechanism for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

  • Kaixuan Yao
  • Mingxu Zhang
  • Jiao Zhao
  • Junbiao Cui
  • Jiye Liang

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel at learning spatial patterns through local receptive fields, while channel attention mechanisms enhance feature discrimination by emphasizing informative channels. Traditional approaches like SENet generate channel weights through global pooling and bottlenecked MLPs, but fundamentally ignore cross-channel dependencies—a critical limitation that discards contextual relationships between features. To address this, we propose the Cross-Channel Graph Attention mechanism (CCA), which explicitly models channel interactions via graph neural networks. Specifically, CCA represents channels as graph nodes, constructs sparse KNN graphs to capture inter-channel dependencies, and performs attention-based feature aggregation. Theoretically, we prove that CCA strictly expands the expressive power of conventional channel attention through full-rank attention matrices, while maintaining superior generalization via sparsity-induced Rademacher complexity bounds. Furthermore, we establish that CCA can universally approximate any continuous channel mixing function with controlled neighbor size (Theorem 3). Extensive experiments on image classification (CIFAR-10/100, mini-ImageNet) and super-resolution (Set5/14) validate that CCA-equipped networks achieve state-of-the-art performance—improving ResNet34 by 2. 16% TOP-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 and boosting VDSR’s PSNR by 0. 43dB on ×3 scaling. Both theoretical and empirical analyses demonstrate that CCA achieves an optimal balance between feature interaction capacity and computational efficiency through its graph-structured attention paradigm. The code is available at https: //github. com/openreview-pro/CCA

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

EduLLM: Leveraging Large Language Models and Framelet-Based Signed Hypergraph Neural Networks for Student Performance Prediction

  • Ming Li 0065
  • Yukang Cheng
  • Lu Bai 0001
  • Feilong Cao
  • Ke Lv 0002
  • Jiye Liang
  • Pietro Liò

The growing demand for personalized learning underscores the importance of accurately predicting students’ future performance to support tailored education and optimize instructional strategies. Traditional approaches predominantly focus on temporal modeling using historical response records and learning trajectories. While effective, these methods often fall short in capturing the intricate interactions between students and learning content, as well as the subtle semantics of these interactions. To address these gaps, we present EduLLM, the first framework to leverage large language models in combination with hypergraph learning for student performance prediction. The framework incorporates FraS-HNN ($\underline{\mbox{Fra}}$melet-based $\underline{\mbox{S}}$igned $\underline{\mbox{H}}$ypergraph $\underline{\mbox{N}}$eural $\underline{\mbox{N}}$etworks), a novel spectral-based model for signed hypergraph learning, designed to model interactions between students and multiple-choice questions. In this setup, students and questions are represented as nodes, while response records are encoded as positive and negative signed hyperedges, effectively capturing both structural and semantic intricacies of personalized learning behaviors. FraS-HNN employs framelet-based low-pass and high-pass filters to extract multi-frequency features. EduLLM integrates fine-grained semantic features derived from LLMs, synergizing with signed hypergraph representations to enhance prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple educational datasets demonstrate that EduLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating the novel integration of LLMs with FraS-HNN for signed hypergraph learning.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FANS: A Flatness-Aware Network Structure for Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning

  • Da Wang
  • Yi Ma
  • Ting Guo
  • Hongyao Tang
  • Wei Wei
  • Jiye Liang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from static datasets while enhancing generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To mitigate overfitting to suboptimal behaviors in offline datasets, existing methods often relax constraints on policy and data or extract informative patterns through data-driven techniques. However, there has been limited exploration into structurally guiding the optimization process toward flatter regions of the solution space that offer better generalization. Motivated by this observation, we present \textit{FANS}, a generalization-oriented structured network framework that promotes flatter and robust policy learning by guiding the optimization trajectory through modular architectural design. FANS comprises four key components: (1) Residual Blocks, which facilitate compact and expressive representations; (2) Gaussian Activation, which promotes smoother gradients; (3) Layer Normalization, which mitigates overfitting; and (4) Ensemble Modeling, which reduces estimation variance. By integrating FANS into a standard actor-critic framework, we highlight that this remarkably simple architecture achieves superior performance across various tasks compared to many existing advanced methods. Moreover, we validate the effectiveness of FANS in mitigating overestimation and promoting generalization, demonstrating the promising potential of architectural design in advancing offline RL.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Federated Causal Structure Learning with Non-identical Variable Sets

  • Yunxia Wang
  • Fuyuan Cao
  • Kui Yu
  • Jiye Liang

Federated causal structure learning aims to infer causal relationships from data stored on individual clients, with privacy concerns. Most existing methods assume identical variable sets across clients and present federated strategies for aggregating local updates. However, in practice, clients often observe overlapping but non-identical variable sets, and non-overlapping variables may introduce spurious dependencies. Moreover, existing strategies typically reflect only the overall quality of local graphs, ignoring the varying importance of relationships within each graph. In this paper, we study federated causal structure learning with non-identical variable sets, aiming to design an effective strategy for aggregating “correct” and “good” (non-)causal relationships across distributed datasets. Specifically, we first develop theories for detecting spurious dependencies, examining whether the learned relationships are “correct” or not. Furthermore, we define stable relationships as those that are both “correct” and “good” across multiple graphs, and finally design a two-level priority selection strategy for aggregating local updates, obtaining a global causal graph over the integrated variables. Experimental results on synthetic, benchmark and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

GNN-Transformer Cooperative Architecture for Trustworthy Graph Contrastive Learning

  • Jianqing Liang
  • Xinkai Wei
  • Min Chen
  • Zhiqiang Wang
  • Jiye Liang

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has become a hot topic in the field of graph representaion learning. In contrast to traditional supervised learning relying on a large number of labels, GCL exploits augmentation techniques to generate multiple views and positive/negative pairs, both of which greatly influence the performance. Unfortunately, commonly used random augmentations may disturb the underlying semantics of graphs. Moreover, traditional GNNs, a type of widely employed encoders in GCL, are inevitably confronted with over-smoothing and over-squashing problems. To address these issues, we propose GNN-Transformer Cooperative Architecture for Trustworthy Graph Contrastive Learning (GTCA), which inherits the advantages of both GNN and Transformer, incorporating graph topology to obtain comprehensive graph representations. Theoretical analysis verifies the trustworthiness of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art empirical performance.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Graph Segmentation and Contrastive Enhanced Explainer for Graph Neural Networks

  • Zhiqiang Wang
  • Jiayu Guo
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Jiye Liang
  • Shiying Cheng
  • Jiarong Zhang

Graph Neural Networks are powerful tools for modeling graph-structured data but their interpretability remains a significant challenge. Existing model-agnostic GNN explainers aim to identify critical subgraphs or node features relevant to task predictions but often rely on GNN predictions for supervision, lacking ground-truth explanations. This limitation can introduce biases, causing explanations to fail in accurately reflecting the GNN's decision-making processes. To address this, we propose a novel explainer for GNNs with graph segmentation and contrastive learning. Our model introduces a graph segmentation learning module to divide the input graph into explanatory and redundant subgraphs. Next, we implement edge perturbation to augment these subgraphs, generating multiple positive and negative pairs for contrastive learning between explanatory and redundant subgraphs. Finally, we develop a contrastive learning module to guide the learning of explanatory and redundant subgraphs by pulling positive pairs with the same explanatory subgraphs closer while pushing negative pairs with different explanatory subgraphs far away. This approach allows for a clearer distinction of critical subgraphs, enhancing the fidelity of the explanations. We conducted extensive experiments on graph classification and node classification tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Human Cognition-Inspired Hierarchical Fuzzy Learning Machine

  • Junbiao Cui
  • Qin Yue 0002
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Jiye Liang

Classification is a cornerstone of machine learning research. Most of the existing classifiers assume that the concepts corresponding to classes can be precisely defined. This notion diverges from the widely accepted understanding in cognitive science, which posits that real-world concepts are often inherently ambiguous. To bridge this big gap, we propose a Human Cognition-Inspired Hierarchical Fuzzy Learning Machine (HC-HFLM), which leverages a novel hierarchical alignment loss to integrate rich class knowledge from human knowledge system into learning process. We further theoretically prove that minimizing this loss can align the hierarchical structure derived from data with those contained in class knowledge, resulting in clear semantics and high interpretability. Systematic experiments verify that the proposed method can achieve significant gains in interpretability and generalization performance.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

HyperMixup: Hypergraph-Augmented with Higher-order Information Mixup

  • Kaixuan Yao
  • Zhuo Li
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Jiye Liang
  • Ming Li
  • Feilong Cao

Hypergraphs offer a natural paradigm for modeling complex systems with multi-way interactions. Hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in learning from such higher-order relational data. While such higher-order modeling enhances relational reasoning, the effectiveness of hypergraph learning remains bottlenecked by two persistent challenges: the scarcity of labeled data inherent to complex systems, and the vulnerability to structural noise in real-world interaction patterns. Traditional data augmentation methods, though successful in Euclidean and graph-structured domains, struggle to preserve the intricate balance between node features and hyperedge semantics, often disrupting the very group-wise interactions that define hypergraph value. To bridge this gap, we present HyperMixup, a hypergraph-aware augmentation framework that preserves higher-order interaction patterns through structure-guided feature mixing. Specifically, HyperMixup contains three critical components: 1) Structure-aware node pairing guided by joint feature-hyperedge similarity metrics, 2) Context-enhanced hierarchical mixing that preserves hyperedge semantics through dual-level feature fusion, and 3) Adaptive topology reconstruction mechanisms that maintain hypergraph consistency while enabling controlled diversity expansion. Theoretically, we establish that our method induces hypergraph-specific regularization effects through gradient alignment with hyperedge covariance structures, while providing robustness guarantees against combined node-hyperedge perturbations. Comprehensive experiments across diverse hypergraph learning tasks demonstrate consistent performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, with particular effectiveness in low-label regimes. The proposed framework advances hypergraph representation learning by unifying data augmentation with higher-order topological constraints, offering both practical utility and theoretical insights for relational machine learning.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Improving Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Latent Distribution Representation Learning

  • Da Wang
  • Lin Li
  • Wei Wei
  • Qixian Yu
  • Jianye Hao
  • Jiye Liang

Dealing with the distribution shift is a significant challenge when building offline reinforcement learning (RL) models that can generalize from a static dataset to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Previous approaches have employed pessimism or conservatism strategies. More recently, data-driven work has taken a distributional perspective, treating offline data as a domain adaptation problem. However, these methods use heuristic techniques to simulate distribution shifts, resulting in a limited diversity of artificially created distribution gaps. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective: offline datasets inherently contain multiple latent distributions, with behavior data from diverse policies potentially following different distributions and data from the same policy across various time phases also exhibiting distribution variance. We introduce the Latent Distribution Representation Learning (LAD) framework, which aims to characterize the multiple latent distributions within offline data and reduce the distribution gaps between any pair of them. LAD consists of a min-max adversarial process: it first identifies the "worst-case" distributions to enlarge the diversity of distribution gaps and then reduces these gaps to learn invariant representations for generalization. We derive a generalization error bound to support LAD theoretically and verify its effectiveness through extensive experiments.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Label Noise Correction via Fuzzy Learning Machine

  • Jiye Liang
  • Yixiao Li
  • Junbiao Cui

The ubiquitous and unavoidable label noise brings great challenges to the generalization performance of learning methods.Label noise correction aims to detect and correct label noise in the data, which is one of the most potential methods to address this challenge.Current methods for label noise filtering that utilize primitive features primarily concentrate on identifying noise, which often limits their capacity to adaptively learn features crucial for specific tasks, thereby resulting in a higher rate of noise identification within the noise recognition process. On the other hand, deep neural networks, endowed with robust feature extraction capabilities, typically exhibit lower noise identification, as they are prone to fitting noise patterns during the recognition process, potentially undermining their overall efficacy. Moreover, Fuzzy Learning Machine (FLM) excels not only in feature extraction but also in noise tolerance, adeptly navigating data uncertainties. FLM enhances the accuracy of the labels by calculating the membership degrees of samples across categories and determining their fuzzy memberships. The introduction of a two-stage FLM-based framework, which employs a secondary learning mechanism for precise noise filtering and correction, has shown substantial improvements in noise correction across various large-scale noisy datasets, thereby significantly enhancing samples' quality and boosting the generalization capabilities of classifiers.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MATCH: Modality-Calibrated Hypergraph Fusion Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition

  • Jiandong Shi
  • Ming Li
  • Lu Bai
  • Feilong Cao
  • Ke Lu
  • Jiye Liang

Multimodal emotion recognition aims to identify emotions by integrating multimodal features derived from spoken utterances. However, existing work often neglects the calibration of conversational entities, focusing mainly on extracting potential intra- or cross-modal information. This leads to the underutilization of utterance information that is essential for accurately characterizing emotion. Additionally, the lack of effective modeling of conversational patterns limits the ability to capture emotional pathways across contexts, modalities and speakers, impacting the overall emotional understanding. In this study, we propose the modality-calibrated hypergraph fusion network (MATCH), which leverages multimodal fusion and hypergraph learning techniques to address these challenges. In particular, we introduce an entity calibration strategy that refines the representations of conversational entities both at the modality and context levels, allowing for deeper insights into emotion-related cues. Furthermore, we present an emotion-aligned hypergraph fusion method that incorporates a line graph to explore conversational patterns, facilitating flexible knowledge transfer across modalities through hyperedge-level and graph-level alignments. Experiments demonstrate that MATCH outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on two benchmark datasets.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Multi-Modal Point Cloud Completion with Interleaved Attention Enhanced Transformer

  • Chenghao Fang
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Jiye Liang
  • Hangkun Wang
  • Kaixuan Yao
  • Feilong Cao

Multi-modal point cloud completion, which utilizes a complete image and a partial point cloud as input, is a crucial task in 3D computer vision. Previous methods commonly employ a cross-attention mechanism to fuse point clouds and images. However, these approaches often fail to fully leverage image information and overlook the intrinsic geometric details of point clouds that could complement the image modality. To address these challenges, we propose an interleaved attention enhanced Transformer (IAET) with three main components, i. e. , token embedding, bidirectional token supplement, and coarse-to-fine decoding. IAET incorporates a novel interleaved attention mechanism to enable bidirectional information supplementation between the point cloud and image modalities. Additionally, to maximize the use of the supplemented image information, we introduce a view-guided upsampling module that leverages image tokens as queries to guide the generation of detailed point cloud structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of IAET, highlighting its state-of-the-art performance on multi-modal point cloud completion benchmarks in various scenarios. The source code is freely accessible at https: //github. com/doldolOuO/IAET.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning with Class Semantic Correlations

  • Yuxin Fan
  • Junbiao Cui
  • Jiye Liang
  • Jianqing Liang

Open-world semi-supervised learning (OWSSL) aims to recognize both known and unknown classes, but the labeled samples only cover the known classes. Existing OWSSL methods primarily represent classes as symbolic variables, which ignore the rich internal semantic information associated with the classes and thus hampers their ability to recognize unknown classes. Recent studies incorporate textual descriptions of classes to facilitate training, but these methods overlook the class semantic correlations, which constrains their effectiveness in recognizing unknown classes. To address these issues, we propose a novel OWSSL method. Our method fine-tunes only the image encoder during training while keeping the text encoder frozen, thereby preserving the rich semantic correlations learned during the pre-training phase. Furthermore, we employ a semantic margin to extract class semantic correlations from textual descriptions, which are then utilized in enhancing image representation discriminability. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms representative OWSSL methods in the recognition of both known and unknown classes.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Uncertainty-guided Graph Contrastive Learning from a Unified Perspective

  • Zhiqiang Li
  • Jie Wang
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Junbiao Cui
  • Xingwang Zhao
  • Jiye Liang

The success of current graph contrastive learning methods largely relies on the choice of data augmentation and contrastive objectives. However, most existing methods tend to optimize these two components independently, neglecting their potential interplay, which leads to suboptimal quality of the learned embeddings. To address this issue, we propose Uncertainty-guided Graph Contrastive Learning (UGCL) from a unified perspective. The core of our method is the introduction of sample uncertainty, a critical metric that quantifies the degree of class ambiguity within individual samples. On this basis, we design a novel multi-scale data augmentation strategy and a weighted graph contrastive loss function, both of which significantly enhance the quality of embeddings. Theoretically, we demonstrate that UGCL can coordinate overall optimization objectives through uncertainty, and through experiments, we show that it improves the performance of tasks such as node classification, node clustering, and link prediction, thereby verifying the effectiveness of our method.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Graph External Attention Enhanced Transformer

  • Jianqing Liang
  • Min Chen
  • Jiye Liang

The Transformer architecture has recently gained considerable attention in the field of graph representation learning, as it naturally overcomes several limitations of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with customized attention mechanisms or positional and structural encodings. Despite making some progress, existing works tend to overlook external information of graphs, specifically the correlation between graphs. Intuitively, graphs with similar structures should have similar representations. Therefore, we propose Graph External Attention (GEA) — a novel attention mechanism that leverages multiple external node/edge key-value units to capture inter-graph correlations implicitly. On this basis, we design an effective architecture called Graph External Attention Enhanced Transformer (GEAET), which integrates local structure and global interaction information for more comprehensive graph representations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that GEAET achieves state-of-the-art empirical performance. The source code is available for reproducibility at: https: //github. com/icm1018/GEAET.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Improving Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Adversarial Data Splitting

  • Da Wang
  • Lin Li 0090
  • Wei Wei 0018
  • Qixian Yu
  • Jianye Hao
  • Jiye Liang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) commonly suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) overestimation issue due to the distribution shift. Prior work gradually shifts their focus from suppressing OOD overestimation to avoiding overly conservative learning from suboptimal behavior policies to improve generalization. However, most approaches explicitly delimit boundaries for OOD actions based on the support in the dataset, which can potentially impede the data near these boundaries from acquiring realistic estimates. This paper investigates how to loosen the rigid demarcation of OOD boundaries, adaptively extracting knowledge from empirical data to implicitly improve the model’s generalization to nearby unseen data. We introduce an adversarial data splitting (ADS) framework that enforces the model to generalize the distribution shifts simulated from the train/validation subsets splitting of the dataset. Specifically, ADS is modeled as a min-max optimization problem inspired by meta-learning and solved by iterating over the following two steps. First, we train the model on the train-subset to minimize its loss on the validation-subset. Then, we adversarially generate the "hardest" train/validation subsets with the maximum distribution shift, making the model incapable of generalization at that splitting. We derive a generalization error bound for theoretically understanding ADS and verify the effectiveness with extensive experiments. Code is available at https: //github. com/DkING-lv6/ADS.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Scalable Constrained Policy Optimization for Safe Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

  • Lijun Zhang
  • Lin Li
  • Wei Wei
  • Huizhong Song
  • Yaodong Yang
  • Jiye Liang

A challenging problem in seeking to bring multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques into real-world applications, such as autonomous driving and drone swarms, is how to control multiple agents safely and cooperatively to accomplish tasks. Most existing safe MARL methods learn the centralized value function by introducing a global state to guide safety cooperation. However, the global coupling arising from agents’ safety constraints and the exponential growth of the state-action space size limit their applicability in instant communication or computing resource-constrained systems and larger multi-agent systems. In this paper, we develop a novel scalable and theoretically-justified multi-agent constrained policy optimization method. This method utilizes the rigorous bounds of the trust region method and the bounds of the truncated advantage function to provide a new local policy optimization objective for each agent. Also, we prove that the safety constraints and the joint policy improvement can be met when each agent adopts a sequential update scheme to optimize a $\kappa$-hop policy. Then, we propose a practical algorithm called Scalable MAPPO-Lagrangian (Scal-MAPPO-L). The proposed method’s effectiveness is verified on a collection of benchmark tasks, and the results support our theory that decentralized training with local interactions can still improve reward performance and satisfy safe constraints.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

SpeAr: A Spectral Approach for Zero-Shot Node Classification

  • Ting Guo
  • Da Wang
  • Jiye Liang
  • Kaihan Zhang
  • Jianchao Zeng

Zero-shot node classification is a vital task in the field of graph data processing, aiming to identify nodes of classes unseen during the training process. Prediction bias is one of the primary challenges in zero-shot node classification, referring to the model's propensity to misclassify nodes of unseen classes as seen classes. However, most methods introduce external knowledge to mitigate the bias, inadequately leveraging the inherent cluster information within the unlabeled nodes. To address this issue, we employ spectral analysis coupled with learnable class prototypes to discover the implicit cluster structures within the graph, providing a more comprehensive understanding of classes. In this paper, we propose a spectral approach for zero-shot node classification (SpeAr). Specifically, we establish an approximate relationship between minimizing the spectral contrastive loss and performing spectral decomposition on the graph, thereby enabling effective node characterization through loss minimization. Subsequently, the class prototypes are iteratively refined based on the learned node representations, initialized with the semantic vectors. Finally, extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the SpeAr, which can further alleviate the bias problem.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A General Representation Learning Framework with Generalization Performance Guarantees

  • Junbiao Cui
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Qin Yue 0002
  • Jiye Liang

The generalization performance of machine learning methods depends heavily on the quality of data representation. However, existing researches rarely consider representation learning from the perspective of generalization error. In this paper, we prove that generalization error of representation learning function can be estimated effectively by solving two convex optimization problems. Based on it, we propose a general representation learning framework. And then, we apply the proposed framework to two most commonly used nonlinear mapping methods, i. e. , kernel based method and deep neural network (DNN), and thus design a kernel selection method and a DNN boosting framework, correspondingly. Finally, extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

How Powerful are Shallow Neural Networks with Bandlimited Random Weights?

  • Ming Li 0065
  • Sho Sonoda
  • Feilong Cao
  • Yu Guang Wang 0001
  • Jiye Liang

We investigate the expressive power of depth-2 bandlimited random neural networks. A random net is a neural network where the hidden layer parameters are frozen with random assignment, and only the output layer parameters are trained by loss minimization. Using random weights for a hidden layer is an effective method to avoid non-convex optimization in standard gradient descent learning. It has also been adopted in recent deep learning theories. Despite the well-known fact that a neural network is a universal approximator, in this study, we mathematically show that when hidden parameters are distributed in a bounded domain, the network may not achieve zero approximation error. In particular, we derive a new nontrivial approximation error lower bound. The proof utilizes the technique of ridgelet analysis, a harmonic analysis method designed for neural networks. This method is inspired by fundamental principles in classical signal processing, specifically the idea that signals with limited bandwidth may not always be able to perfectly reconstruct the original signal. We corroborate our theoretical results with various simulation studies, and generally, two main take-home messages are offered: (i) Not any distribution for selecting random weights is feasible to build a universal approximator; (ii) A suitable assignment of random weights exists but to some degree is associated with the complexity of the target function.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Set-membership Belief State-based Reinforcement Learning for POMDPs

  • Wei Wei 0018
  • Lijun Zhang
  • Lin Li 0090
  • Huizhong Song
  • Jiye Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant progress in areas such as Atari games and robotic control, where the agents have perfect sensing capabilities. However, in many real-world sequential decision-making tasks, the observation data could be noisy or incomplete due to the intrinsic low quality of the sensors or unexpected malfunctions; that is, the agent’s perceptions are rarely perfect. The current POMDP RL methods, such as particle-based and Gaussian-based, can only provide a probability estimate of hidden states rather than certain belief regions, which may lead to inefficient and even wrong decision-making. This paper proposes a novel algorithm called Set-membership Belief state-based Reinforcement Learning (SBRL), which consists of two parts: a Set-membership Belief state learning Model (SBM) for learning bounded belief state sets and an RL controller for making decisions based on SBM. We prove that our belief estimation method can provide a series of belief state sets that always contain the true states under the unknown-but-bounded (UBB) noise. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on a collection of benchmark tasks, and the results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

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AIJ Journal 2023 Journal Article

Spectral clustering with robust self-learning constraints

  • Liang Bai
  • Minxue Qi
  • Jiye Liang

Spectral clustering is a leading unsupervised classification algorithm widely used to capture complex clusters in unlabeled data. Additional prior information can further enhance the quality of spectral clustering results to satisfy users' expectations. However, it is challenging for users to find the prior information under unsupervised scenes. To get rid of the deficiency, we propose a spectral clustering model with robust self-learning constraints. In this model, we first extend the optimization problem of spectral clustering by seeing label constraints as variables to learn the constraints and the clustering result simultaneously. Furthermore, we add a robust term to the proposed model so that we can learn multiple groups of label constraints to guide the clustering process and find a robust self-constrained spectral clustering result. The robust term can reduce the impact of uncertainty in the quality of a single set of label constraints on the performance of the proposed model. An iterative strategy with update formulas for variables is proposed to solve the self-constrained spectral clustering problem. We provide the theoretical analysis to explain the importance of the learned constraints in spectral clustering. Furthermore, we analyze the convergence of our optimization scheme. Finally, we have done many experiments on benchmark data sets to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Controlling Underestimation Bias in Reinforcement Learning via Quasi-median Operation

  • Wei Wei
  • Yujia Zhang
  • Jiye Liang
  • Lin Li
  • Yyuze Li

How to get a good value estimation is one of the key problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Current off-policy methods, such as Maxmin Q-learning, TD3, and TADD, suffer from the underestimation problem when solving the overestimation problem. In this paper, we propose the Quasi-Median Operation, a novel way to mitigate the underestimation bias by selecting the quasi-median from multiple state-action values. Based on the quasi-median operation, we propose Quasi- Median Q-learning (QMQ) for the discrete action tasks and Quasi-Median Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (QMD3) for the continuous action tasks. Theoretically, the underestimation bias of our method is improved while the estimation variance is significantly reduced compared to Maxmin Q-learning, TD3, and TADD. We conduct extensive experiments on the discrete and continuous action tasks, and results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Efficient Causal Structure Learning from Multiple Interventional Datasets with Unknown Targets

  • Yunxia Wang
  • Fuyuan Cao
  • Kui Yu
  • Jiye Liang

We consider the problem of reducing the false discovery rate in multiple high-dimensional interventional datasets under unknown targets. Traditional algorithms merged directly multiple causal graphs learned, which ignores the contradictions of different datasets, leading to lots of inconsistent directions of edges. For reducing the contradictory information, we propose a new algorithm, which first learns an interventional Markov equivalence class (I-MEC) before merging multiple graphs. It utilizes the full power of the constraints available in interventional data and combines ideas from local learning, intervention, and search-and-score techniques in a principled and effective way in different intervention experiments. Specifically, local learning on multiple datasets is used to build a causal skeleton. Perfect intervention destroys some possible triangles, leading to the identification of more possible V-structures. And then a theoretically correct I-MEC is learned. Search and scoring techniques based on the learned I-MEC further identify the remaining unoriented edges. Both theoretical analysis and experiments on benchmark Bayesian networks with the number of variables from 20 to 724 validate that the effectiveness of our algorithm in reducing the false discovery rate in high-dimensional interventional data.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Fuzzy Learning Machine

  • Junbiao Cui
  • Jiye Liang

Classification is one of the most important problems in machine learning and the nature of it is concept cognition. So far, dozens of different classifiers have been designed. Although their working mechanisms vary widely, few of them fully consider concept cognition. In this paper, a new learning machine, fuzzy learning machine (FLM), is proposed from the perspective of concept cognition. Inspired by cognitive science, its working mechanism is of strong interpretability. At the same time, FLM roots in set theory and fuzzy set theory, so FLM has a solid mathematical foundation. The systematic experimental results on a large number of data sets show that FLM can achieve excellent performance, even with the simple implementation.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Instance Selection: A Bayesian Decision Theory Perspective

  • Qingqiang Chen
  • Fuyuan Cao
  • Ying Xing
  • Jiye Liang

In this paper, we consider the problem of lacking theoretical foundation and low execution efficiency of the instance selection methods based on the k-nearest neighbour rule when processing large-scale data. We point out that the core idea of these methods can be explained from the perspective of Bayesian decision theory, that is, to find which instances are reducible, irreducible, and deleterious. Then, based on the percolation theory, we establish the relationship between these three types of instances and local homogeneous cluster (i. e. , a set of instances with the same labels). Finally, we propose a method based on an accelerated k-means algorithm to construct local homogeneous clusters and remove the superfluous instances. The performance of our method is studied on extensive synthetic and benchmark data sets. Our proposed method can handle large-scale data more effectively than the state-of-the-art instance selection methods All code and data results are available at https: //github. com/CQQXY161120/Instance-Selection.

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AIJ Journal 2022 Journal Article

Multi-view graph convolutional networks with attention mechanism

  • Kaixuan Yao
  • Jiye Liang
  • Jianqing Liang
  • Ming Li
  • Feilong Cao

Recent advances in graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which mainly focus on how to exploit information from different hops of neighbors in an efficient way, have brought substantial improvement to many graph data modeling tasks. Most of the existing GCN-based models however are built on the basis of a fixed adjacency matrix, i. e. , a single view topology of the underlying graph. That inherently limits the expressive power of the developed models especially when the raw graphs are often noisy or even incomplete due to the inevitably error-prone data measurement or collection. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, termed Multi-View Graph Convolutional Networks with Attention Mechanism (MAGCN), by incorporating multiple views of topology and an attention-based feature aggregation strategy into the computation of graph convolution. As an advanced variant of GCNs, MAGCN is fed with multiple “trustable” topologies, which already exist for a given task or are empirically generated by some classical graph construction methods, which has good potential to produce a better learning representation for downstream tasks. Furthermore, we present some theoretical analysis about the expressive power and flexibility of MAGCN, which provides a general explanation as to why multi-view based methods can potentially outperform those relying on a single view. Our experimental study demonstrates the state-of-the-art accuracies of MAGCN on Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed datasets. Robustness analysis is also undertaken to show the advantage of MAGCN in handling some uncertainty issues in node classification tasks.

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JMLR Journal 2021 Journal Article

A Unified Sample Selection Framework for Output Noise Filtering: An Error-Bound Perspective

  • Gaoxia Jiang
  • Wenjian Wang
  • Yuhua Qian
  • Jiye Liang

The existence of output noise will bring difficulties to supervised learning. Noise filtering, aiming to detect and remove polluted samples, is one of the main ways to deal with the noise on outputs. However, most of the filters are heuristic and could not explain the filtering influence on the generalization error (GE) bound. The hyper-parameters in various filters are specified manually or empirically, and they are usually unable to adapt to the data environment. The filter with an improper hyper-parameter may overclean, leading to a weak generalization ability. This paper proposes a unified framework of optimal sample selection (OSS) for the output noise filtering from the perspective of error bound. The covering distance filter (CDF) under the framework is presented to deal with noisy outputs in regression and ordinal classification problems. Firstly, two necessary and sufficient conditions for a fixed goodness of fit in regression are deduced from the perspective of GE bound. They provide the unified theoretical framework for determining the filtering effectiveness and optimizing the size of removed samples. The optimal sample size has the adaptability to the environmental changes in the sample size, the noise ratio, and noise variance. It offers a choice of tuning the hyper-parameter and could prevent filters from overcleansing. Meanwhile, the OSS framework can be integrated with any noise estimator and produces a new filter. Then the covering interval is proposed to separate low-noise and high-noise samples, and the effectiveness is proved in regression. The covering distance is introduced as an unbiased estimator of high noises. Further, the CDF algorithm is designed by integrating the cover distance with the OSS framework. Finally, it is verified that the CDF not only recognizes noise labels correctly but also brings down the prediction errors on real apparent age data set. Experimental results on benchmark regression and ordinal classification data sets demonstrate that the CDF outperforms the state-of-the-art filters in terms of prediction ability, noise recognition, and efficiency. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2021. ( edit, beta )

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

A Cluster-Weighted Kernel K-Means Method for Multi-View Clustering

  • Jing Liu
  • Fuyuan Cao
  • Xiao-Zhi Gao
  • Liqin Yu
  • Jiye Liang

Clustering by jointly exploiting information from multiple views can yield better performance than clustering on one single view. Some existing multi-view clustering methods aim at learning a weight for each view to determine its contribution to the final solution. However, the view-weighted scheme can only indicate the overall importance of a view, which fails to recognize the importance of each inner cluster of a view. A view with higher weight cannot guarantee all clusters in this view have higher importance than them in other views. In this paper, we propose a cluster-weighted kernel k-means method for multi-view clustering. Each inner cluster of each view is assigned a weight, which is learned based on the intra-cluster similarity of the cluster compared with all its corresponding clusters in different views, to make the cluster with higher intra-cluster similarity have a higher weight among the corresponding clusters. The cluster labels are learned simultaneously with the cluster weights in an alternative updating way, by minimizing the weighted sum-of-squared errors of the kernel k-means. Compared with the view-weighted scheme, the cluster-weighted scheme enhances the interpretability for the clustering results. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

A Three-Level Optimization Model for Nonlinearly Separable Clustering

  • Liang Bai
  • Jiye Liang

Due to the complex structure of the real-world data, nonlinearly separable clustering is one of popular and widely studied clustering problems. Currently, various types of algorithms, such as kernel k-means, spectral clustering and density clustering, have been developed to solve this problem. However, it is difficult for them to balance the efficiency and effectiveness of clustering, which limits their real applications. To get rid of the deficiency, we propose a three-level optimization model for nonlinearly separable clustering which divides the clustering problem into three sub-problems: a linearly separable clustering on the object set, a nonlinearly separable clustering on the cluster set and an ensemble clustering on the partition set. An iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem. The proposed algorithm can use low computational cost to effectively recognize nonlinearly separable clusters. The performance of this algorithm has been studied on synthetical and real data sets. Comparisons with other nonlinearly separable clustering algorithms illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Sparse Subspace Clustering with Entropy-Norm

  • Liang Bai 0001
  • Jiye Liang

In this paper, we provide an explicit theoretical connection between Sparse subspace clustering (SSC) and spectral clustering (SC) from the perspective of learning a data similarity matrix. We show that spectral clustering with Gaussian kernel can be viewed as sparse subspace clustering with entropy-norm (SSC+E). Compared to SSC, SSC+E can obtain an analytical, symmetrical, nonnegative and nonlinearly-representational similarity matrix. Besides, SSC+E makes use of Gaussian kernel to compute the sparse similarity matrix of objects, which can avoid the complex computation of the sparse optimization program of SSC. Finally, we provide the experimental analysis to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of sparse subspace clustering and spectral clustering on ten benchmark data sets. The theoretical and experimental analysis can well help users for the selection of high-dimensional data clustering algorithms.

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AIJ Journal 2010 Journal Article

Positive approximation: An accelerator for attribute reduction in rough set theory

  • Yuhua Qian
  • Jiye Liang
  • Witold Pedrycz
  • Chuangyin Dang

Feature selection is a challenging problem in areas such as pattern recognition, machine learning and data mining. Considering a consistency measure introduced in rough set theory, the problem of feature selection, also called attribute reduction, aims to retain the discriminatory power of original features. Many heuristic attribute reduction algorithms have been proposed however, quite often, these methods are computationally time-consuming. To overcome this shortcoming, we introduce a theoretic framework based on rough set theory, called positive approximation, which can be used to accelerate a heuristic process of attribute reduction. Based on the proposed accelerator, a general attribute reduction algorithm is designed. Through the use of the accelerator, several representative heuristic attribute reduction algorithms in rough set theory have been enhanced. Note that each of the modified algorithms can choose the same attribute reduct as its original version, and hence possesses the same classification accuracy. Experiments show that these modified algorithms outperform their original counterparts. It is worth noting that the performance of the modified algorithms becomes more visible when dealing with larger data sets.

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v2026.09.13