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Lan Du

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12 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

IdentityStory: Taming Your Identity-Preserving Generator for Human-Centric Story Generation

Donghao Zhou
Jingyu Lin
Guibao Shen
Quande Liu
Jialin Gao
Lihao Liu
Lan Du
Cunjian Chen

Recent visual generative models enable story generation with consistent characters from text, but human-centric story generation faces additional challenges, such as maintaining detailed and diverse human face consistency and coordinating multiple characters across different images. This paper presents IdentityStory, a framework for human-centric story generation that ensures consistent character identity across multiple sequential images. By taming identity-preserving generators, the framework features two key components: Iterative Identity Discovery, which extracts cohesive character identities, and Re-denoising Identity Injection, which re-denoises images to inject identities while preserving desired context. Experiments on the ConsiStory-Human benchmark demonstrate that IdentityStory outperforms existing methods, particularly in face consistency, and supports multi-character combinations. The framework also shows strong potential for applications such as infinite-length story generation and dynamic character composition.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Next Generation Active Learning: Mixture of LLMs in the Loop

Yuanyuan Qi
Xiaohao Yang
Jueqing Lu
Guoxiang Guo
Joanne Enticott
Gang Liu
Lan Du

With the rapid advancement and strong generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs), they have been increasingly incorporated into the active learning pipelines as annotators to reduce annotation costs. However, considering the annotation quality, labels generated by LLMs often fall short of real-world applicability. To address this, we propose a novel active learning framework, Mixture of LLMs in the Loop Active Learning, replacing human annotators with labels generated through a Mixture-of-LLMs-based annotation model, aimed at enhancing LLM-based annotation robustness by aggregating the strengths of multiple LLMs. To further mitigate the impact of the noisy labels, we introduce annotation discrepancy and negative learning to identify the unreliable annotations and enhance learning effectiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves performance comparable to human annotation and consistently outperforms single-LLM baselines and other LLM-ensemble-based approaches. Moreover, our framework is built on lightweight LLMs, enabling it to operate fully on local machines in real-world applications.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Harnessing the Power of Beta Scoring in Deep Active Learning for Multi-Label Text Classification

Wei Tan
Ngoc Dang Nguyen
Lan Du
Wray Buntine

Within the scope of natural language processing, the domain of multi-label text classification is uniquely challenging due to its expansive and uneven label distribution. The complexity deepens due to the demand for an extensive set of annotated data for training an advanced deep learning model, especially in specialized fields where the labeling task can be labor-intensive and often requires domain-specific knowledge. Addressing these challenges, our study introduces a novel deep active learning strategy, capitalizing on the Beta family of proper scoring rules within the Expected Loss Reduction framework. It computes the expected increase in scores using the Beta Scoring Rules, which are then transformed into sample vector representations. These vector representations guide the diverse selection of informative sample, directly linking this process to the model's expected proper score. Comprehensive evaluations across both synthetic and real datasets reveal our method's capability to often outperform established acquisition techniques in multi-label text classification, presenting encouraging outcomes across various architectural and dataset scenarios.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

AUC Maximization for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition

Ngoc Dang Nguyen
Wei Tan
Lan Du
Wray Buntine
Richard Beare
Changyou Chen

Current work in named entity recognition (NER) uses either cross entropy (CE) or conditional random fields (CRF) as the objective/loss functions to optimize the underlying NER model. Both of these traditional objective functions for the NER problem generally produce adequate performance when the data distribution is balanced and there are sufficient annotated training examples. But since NER is inherently an imbalanced tagging problem, the model performance under the low-resource settings could suffer using these standard objective functions. Based on recent advances in area under the ROC curve (AUC) maximization, we propose to optimize the NER model by maximizing the AUC score. We give evidence that by simply combining two binary-classifiers that maximize the AUC score, significant performance improvement over traditional loss functions is achieved under low-resource NER settings. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of our method under the low-resource and highly-imbalanced data distribution settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that brings AUC maximization to the NER setting. Furthermore, we show that our method is agnostic to different types of NER embeddings, models and domains. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/dngu0061/NER-AUC-2T.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Beyond Unimodal: Generalising Neural Processes for Multimodal Uncertainty Estimation

Myong Chol Jung
He Zhao
Joanna Dipnall
Lan Du

Uncertainty estimation is an important research area to make deep neural networks (DNNs) more trustworthy. While extensive research on uncertainty estimation has been conducted with unimodal data, uncertainty estimation for multimodal data remains a challenge. Neural processes (NPs) have been demonstrated to be an effective uncertainty estimation method for unimodal data by providing the reliability of Gaussian processes with efficient and powerful DNNs. While NPs hold significant potential for multimodal uncertainty estimation, the adaptation of NPs for multimodal data has not been carefully studied. To bridge this gap, we propose Multimodal Neural Processes (MNPs) by generalising NPs for multimodal uncertainty estimation. Based on the framework of NPs, MNPs consist of several novel and principled mechanisms tailored to the characteristics of multimodal data. In extensive empirical evaluation, our method achieves state-of-the-art multimodal uncertainty estimation performance, showing its appealing robustness against noisy samples and reliability in out-of-distribution detection with faster computation time compared to the current state-of-the-art multimodal uncertainty estimation method.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Uncertainty Estimation for Multi-view Data: The Power of Seeing the Whole Picture

Myong Chol Jung
He Zhao
Joanna Dipnall
Belinda Gabbe
Lan Du

Uncertainty estimation is essential to make neural networks trustworthy in real-world applications. Extensive research efforts have been made to quantify and reduce predictive uncertainty. However, most existing works are designed for unimodal data, whereas multi-view uncertainty estimation has not been sufficiently investigated. Therefore, we propose a new multi-view classification framework for better uncertainty estimation and out-of-domain sample detection, where we associate each view with an uncertainty-aware classifier and combine the predictions of all the views in a principled way. The experimental results with real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach is an accurate, reliable, and well-calibrated classifier, which predominantly outperforms the multi-view baselines tested in terms of expected calibration error, robustness to noise, and accuracy for the in-domain sample classification and the out-of-domain sample detection tasks

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Diversity Enhanced Active Learning with Strictly Proper Scoring Rules

Wei Tan
Lan Du
Wray Buntine

We study acquisition functions for active learning (AL) for text classification. The Expected Loss Reduction (ELR) method focuses on a Bayesian estimate of the reduction in classification error, recently updated with Mean Objective Cost of Uncertainty (MOCU). We convert the ELR framework to estimate the increase in (strictly proper) scores like log probability or negative mean square error, which we call Bayesian Estimate of Mean Proper Scores (BEMPS). We also prove convergence results borrowing techniques used with MOCU. In order to allow better experimentation with the new acquisition functions, we develop a complementary batch AL algorithm, which encourages diversity in the vector of expected changes in scores for unlabelled data. To allow high performance text classifiers, we combine ensembling and dynamic validation set construction on pretrained language models. Extensive experimental evaluation then explores how these different acquisition functions perform. The results show that the use of mean square error and log probability with BEMPS yields robust acquisition functions, which consistently outperform the others tested.

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IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Topic Modelling Meets Deep Neural Networks: A Survey

He Zhao
Dinh Phung
Viet Huynh
Yuan Jin
Lan Du
Wray Buntine

Topic modelling has been a successful technique for text analysis for almost twenty years. When topic modelling met deep neural networks, there emerged a new and increasingly popular research area, neural topic models, with nearly a hundred models developed and a wide range of applications in neural language understanding such as text generation, summarisation and language models. There is a need to summarise research developments and discuss open problems and future directions. In this paper, we provide a focused yet comprehensive overview of neural topic models for interested researchers in the AI community, so as to facilitate them to navigate and innovate in this fast-growing research area. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first review on this specific topic.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Dirichlet belief networks for topic structure learning

He Zhao
Lan Du
Wray Buntine
Mingyuan Zhou

Recently, considerable research effort has been devoted to developing deep architectures for topic models to learn topic structures. Although several deep models have been proposed to learn better topic proportions of documents, how to leverage the benefits of deep structures for learning word distributions of topics has not yet been rigorously studied. Here we propose a new multi-layer generative process on word distributions of topics, where each layer consists of a set of topics and each topic is drawn from a mixture of the topics of the layer above. As the topics in all layers can be directly interpreted by words, the proposed model is able to discover interpretable topic hierarchies. As a self-contained module, our model can be flexibly adapted to different kinds of topic models to improve their modelling accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments on text corpora demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model.

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AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Topic Segmentation with an Ordering-Based Topic Model

Lan Du
John Pate
Mark Johnson

Documents from the same domain usually discuss similar topics in a similar order. However, the number of topics and the exact topics discussed in each individual document can vary. In this paper we present a simple topic model that uses generalised Mallows models and incomplete topic orderings to incorporate this ordering regularity into the probabilistic generative process of the new model. We show how to reparameterise the new model so that a point-wise sampling algorithm from the Bayesian word segmentation literature can be used for inference. This algorithm jointly samples not only the topic orders and the topic assignments but also topic segmentations of documents. Experimental results show that our model performs significantly better than the other ordering-based topic models on nearly all the corpora that we used, and competitively with other state-of-the-art topic segmentation models on corpora that have a strong ordering regularity.

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JMLR Journal 2011 Journal Article

Logistic Stick-Breaking Process

Lu Ren
Lan Du
Lawrence Carin
David Dunson

A logistic stick-breaking process (LSBP) is proposed for non-parametric clustering of general spatially- or temporally-dependent data, imposing the belief that proximate data are more likely to be clustered together. The sticks in the LSBP are realized via multiple logistic regression functions, with shrinkage priors employed to favor contiguous and spatially localized segments. The LSBP is also extended for the simultaneous processing of multiple data sets, yielding a hierarchical logistic stick-breaking process (H-LSBP). The model parameters (atoms) within the H-LSBP are shared across the multiple learning tasks. Efficient variational Bayesian inference is derived, and comparisons are made to related techniques in the literature. Experimental analysis is performed for audio waveforms and images, and it is demonstrated that for segmentation applications the LSBP yields generally homogeneous segments with sharp boundaries. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2011. ( edit, beta )

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NeurIPS Conference 2009 Conference Paper

A Bayesian Model for Simultaneous Image Clustering, Annotation and Object Segmentation

Lan Du
Lu Ren
Lawrence Carin
David Dunson

A non-parametric Bayesian model is proposed for processing multiple images. The analysis employs image features and, when present, the words associated with accompanying annotations. The model clusters the images into classes, and each image is segmented into a set of objects, also allowing the opportunity to assign a word to each object (localized labeling). Each object is assumed to be represented as a heterogeneous mix of components, with this realized via mixture models linking image features to object types. The number of image classes, number of object types, and the characteristics of the object-feature mixture models are inferred non-parametrically. To constitute spatially contiguous objects, a new logistic stick-breaking process is developed. Inference is performed efficiently via variational Bayesian analysis, with example results presented on two image databases.

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