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Min Zhao

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18 papers
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18

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FlexWorld: Progressively Expanding 3D Scenes for Flexible-View Exploration

  • Luxi Chen
  • Zihan Zhou
  • Min Zhao
  • Yikai Wang
  • Ge Zhang
  • Wenhao Huang
  • Hao Sun
  • Ji-Rong Wen

Generating flexible-view 3D scenes, including 360° rotation and zooming, from single images is challenging due to a lack of 3D data. To this end, we introduce FlexWorld, a novel framework that progressively constructs a persistent 3D Gaussian splatting representation by synthesizing and integrating new 3D content. To handle novel view synthesis under large camera variations, we leverage an advanced pre-trained video model fine-tuned on accurate depth-estimated training pairs. By combining geometry-aware scene integration and optimization, FlexWorld refines the scene representation, producing visually consistent 3D scenes with flexible viewpoints. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FlexWorld in generating high-quality novel view videos and flexible-view 3D scenes from single images, achieving superior visual quality under multiple popular metrics and datasets compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, FlexWorld supports extrapolating from existing 3D scenes, further extending its applicability. Qualitatively, we highlight that FlexWorld can generate high-fidelity scenes that enable 360° rotations and zooming exploration. Our code is available at https: //github. com/ML-GSAI/FlexWorld.

YNIMG Journal 2025 Journal Article

Right inferior frontal cortex and preSMA in response inhibition: An investigation based on PTC model

  • Lili Wu
  • Mengjie Jiang
  • Min Zhao
  • Xin Hu
  • Jing Wang
  • Kaihua Zhang
  • Ke Jia
  • Fuxin Ren

Response inhibition is an essential component of cognitive function. A large body of literature has used neuroimaging data to uncover the neural architecture that regulates inhibitory control in general and movement cancelation. The presupplementary motor area (preSMA) and the right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC) are the key nodes in the inhibitory control network. However, how these two regions contribute to response inhibition remains controversial. Based on the Pause-then-Cancel Model (PTC), this study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the functional specificity of two regions in the stopping process. The Go/No-Go task (GNGT) and the Stop Signal Task (SST) were administered to the same group of participants. We used the GNGT to dissociate the pause process and both the GNGT and the SST to investigate the inhibition mechanism. Imaging data revealed that response inhibition produced by both tasks activated the preSMA and rIFC. Furthermore, an across-participants analysis showed that increased activation in the rIFC was associated with a delay in the go response in the GNGT. In contrast, increased activation in the preSMA was associated with good inhibition efficiency via the striatum in both GNGT and SST. These behavioral and imaging findings support the PTC model of the role of rIFC and preSMA, that the former is involved in a pause process to delay motor responses, whereas the preSMA is involved in the stopping of motor responses.

YNIMG Journal 2024 Journal Article

Brain extended and closed forms glutathione levels decrease with age and extended glutathione is associated with visuospatial memory

  • Xin Hu
  • Keyu Pan
  • Min Zhao
  • Jiali Lv
  • Jing Wang
  • Xiaofeng Zhang
  • Yuxi Liu
  • Yulu Song

During aging, the brain is subject to greater oxidative stress (OS), which is thought to play a critical role in cognitive impairment. Glutathione (GSH), as a major antioxidant in the brain, can be used to combat OS. However, how brain GSH levels vary with age and their associations with cognitive function is unclear. In this study, we combined point-resolved spectroscopy and edited spectroscopy sequences to investigate extended and closed forms GSH levels in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and occipital cortex (OC) of 276 healthy participants (extended form, 166 females, age range 20-70 years) and 15 healthy participants (closed form, 7 females, age range 26-56 years), and examined their relationships with age and cognitive function. The results revealed decreased extended form GSH levels with age in the PCC among 276 participants. Notably, the timecourse of extended form GSH level changes in the PCC and ACC differed between males and females. Additionally, positive correlations were observed between extended form GSH levels in the PCC and OC and visuospatial memory. Additionally, a decreased trend of closed form GSH levels with age was also observed in the PCC among 15 participants. Taken together, these findings enhance our understanding of the brain both closed and extended form GSH time course during normal aging and associations with sex and memory, which is an essential first step for understanding the neurochemical underpinnings of healthy aging.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Identifying and Solving Conditional Image Leakage in Image-to-Video Diffusion Model

  • Min Zhao
  • Hongzhou Zhu
  • Chendong Xiang
  • Kaiwen Zheng
  • Chongxuan Li
  • Jun Zhu

Diffusion models have obtained substantial progress in image-to-video generation. However, in this paper, we find that these models tend to generate videos with less motion than expected. We attribute this to the issue called conditional image leakage, where the image-to-video diffusion models (I2V-DMs) tend to over-rely on the conditional image at large time steps. We further address this challenge from both inference and training aspects. First, we propose to start the generation process from an earlier time step to avoid the unreliable large-time steps of I2V-DMs, as well as an initial noise distribution with optimal analytic expressions (Analytic-Init) by minimizing the KL divergence between it and the actual marginal distribution to bridge the training-inference gap. Second, we design a time-dependent noise distribution (TimeNoise) for the conditional image during training, applying higher noise levels at larger time steps to disrupt it and reduce the model's dependency on it. We validate these general strategies on various I2V-DMs on our collected open-domain image benchmark and the UCF101 dataset. Extensive results show that our methods outperform baselines by producing higher motion scores with lower errors while maintaining image alignment and temporal consistency, thereby yielding superior overall performance and enabling more accurate motion control. The project page: \url{https: //cond-image-leak. github. io/}.

EAAI Journal 2023 Journal Article

Generalized predictive control using improved recurrent fuzzy neural network for a boiler-turbine unit

  • Min Zhao
  • Jin Wan
  • Chen Peng

The ultra supercritical (USC) for the boiler-turbine unit has become an advanced power generation technology due to its high combustion efficiency and low-carbon emission. Considering the complex nonlinearity and uncertainty in USC boiler-turbine units, a novel recurrent fuzzy neural network (RFNN) is produced to model dynamic responses of nonlinear systems and improve the control performance of the outputs in the boiler-turbine unit. However, the number of fuzzy rules in previous networks is mostly predefined with experts’ experience, which contributes to the decline in the generalization and efficiency of system modeling. This challenge is tackled in this paper by a subtractive clustering (SC) algorithm, which can determine the optimal number of fuzzy sets in the proposed RFNN. Additionally, aiming at minimizing the tracking errors of the outputs in the boiler-turbine unit, a global generalized predictive control (GPC) strategy is further designed to control the fuel flow, the feedwater flow, and the steam governor valve in the boiler-turbine unit. With the real-time data generated in a 1000MW USC boiler-turbine unit, the proposed SC-RFNN-based GPC can achieve a testing root mean-square-error (RMSE) of 0. 0411 as well as the lower integral absolute error (IAE) values of system outputs.

YNIMG Journal 2023 Journal Article

Metabolic and functional substrates of impulsive decision-making in individuals with heroin addiction after prolonged methadone maintenance treatment

  • Qian Lv
  • Miao Zhang
  • Haifeng Jiang
  • Yilin Liu
  • Shaoling Zhao
  • Xiaomin Xu
  • Wenlei Zhang
  • Tianzhen Chen

F-FDG PET). Subjects receiving MMT exhibited significantly elevated self-reported impulsivity, and computational modeling revealed a marked impulsive decision bias manifested as switching more frequently without available evidence. Moreover, this impulsive decision bias was associated with the dose and duration of methadone use, irrelevant to the duration of heroin use. During the task, the switch-related hypoactivation in the left rostral middle frontal gyrus was correlated with the impulsive decision bias while the function of reward sensitivity was intact in subjects receiving MMT. Using prior brain-wide receptor density data, we found that the highest variance of regional metabolic abnormalities was explained by the spatial distribution of μ-opioid receptors among 10 types of neurotransmitter receptors. Heightened impulsivity in individuals receiving prolonged MMT is manifested as atypical choice bias and noise in decision-making processes, which is further driven by deficits in top-down cognitive control, other than reward sensitivity. Our findings uncover multifaceted mechanisms underlying elevated impulsivity in subjects receiving MMT, which might provide insights for developing complementary therapies to improve retention during MMT.

IROS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

AB-Mapper: Attention and BicNet based Multi-agent Path Planning for Dynamic Environment

  • Huifeng Guan
  • Yuan Gao 0024
  • Min Zhao
  • Yong Yang
  • Fuqin Deng
  • Tin Lun Lam

Multi-agent path finding in dynamic environments is of great academic and practical value for multi-robot systems in the real world. To improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the learning process during path planning in dynamic environments, we introduce an algorithm called Attention and BicNet based Multi-agent path planning with effective reinforcement (AB-Mapper) under the actor-critic reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, on one hand, we design an actor-network that can utilize the BicNet with communication function to achieve the intra-team coordination. On the other hand, we propose a critic network that can selectively allocate attention weights to surrounding agents. This attention mechanism allows an individual agent to automatically learn a better evaluation of actions by considering the behaviours of its surrounding agents. Compared with the SOTA method Mapper in crowded environments with dynamic obstacles, our AB-Mapper is more effective (90. 27±0. 06% vs. 61. 65±13. 90% in terms of mean success rate) in solving the general multi-agent path finding problem.

ICRA Conference 2022 Conference Paper

CCRobot-V: A Silkworm-Like Cooperative Cable-Climbing Robotic System for Cable Inspection and Maintenance

  • Zhenliang Zheng
  • Ning Ding 0003
  • Huaping Chen 0005
  • Xiaoli Hu
  • Zhihao Zhu
  • Xueqi Fu
  • Wenchao Zhang
  • Lin Zhang

This paper presents CCRobot-V, the fifth version of CCRobot, a cooperative serial multi-robot system for bridge cable inspection and maintenance that uses silkworm-like locomotion to climb the entire length of super-long stay cable at high speeds while carrying heavy inspection/maintenance equipment. CCRobot-V consists of one climbing precursor robot, one inspection/maintenance robot, several cable-carrying robots, and a power-tethered cable guiding system. The pre-cursor robot is the “head, ” which leads the affiliated sub-robots along the bridge cable. Every sub-robot possesses a pair of self-locking palms. When a sub-robot grips on the bridge cable with its palms, it becomes a fixed anchor point that allows the adjacent sub-robots in front and back to use winches and steel wires to pull themselves upward. With this cooperative multi-robot system, cable inspection/maintenance tasks can be divided into several functional units, with each inspection/maintenance equipment installed separately on a customized sub-robot. Thus, CCRobot-V provides a complete mobile inspection/maintenance work line for a bridge cable. The experimental and field tests demonstrate CCRobot-V's high climbing speed, high payload capacity, and full-length cable moving capability. It has the potential application value for the actual bridge cable inspection/maintenance.

YNICL Journal 2022 Journal Article

Common gray matter loss in the frontal cortex in patients with methamphetamine-associated psychosis and schizophrenia

  • Xiaojian Jia
  • Jianhong Wang
  • Wentao Jiang
  • Zhi Kong
  • Huan Deng
  • Wentao Lai
  • Caihong Ye
  • Fen Guan

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Methamphetamine (MA)-associated psychosis has become a public concern. However, its mechanism is not clear. Investigating similarities and differences between MA-associated psychosis and schizophrenia in brain alterations would be informative for neuropathology. STUDY DESIGN: This study compared gray matter volumes of the brain across four participant groups: healthy controls (HC, n = 53), MA users without psychosis (MA, n = 22), patients with MA-associated psychosis (MAP, n = 34) and patients with schizophrenia (SCZ, n = 33). Clinical predictors of brain alterations, as well as association of brain alterations with psychotic symptoms and attention impairment were further investigated. STUDY RESULTS: Compared with the HC, the MAP and the SCZ showed similar gray matter reductions in the frontal cortex, particularly in prefrontal areas. Moreover, a stepwise extension of gray matter reductions was exhibited across the MA - MAP - SCZ. Duration of abstinence was associated with regional volumetric recovery in the MAP, while this amendment in brain morphometry was not accompanied with symptom's remission. Illness duration of psychosis was among the predictive factors of regional gray matter reductions in both psychotic groups. Volume reductions were found to be associated with attention impairment in the SCZ, while this association was reversed in the MAP in frontal cortex. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggested MA-associated psychosis and schizophrenia had common neuropathology in cognitive-related frontal cortices. A continuum of neuropathology between MA use and schizophrenia was tentatively implicated. Illness progressions and glial repairments could both play roles in neuropathological changes in MA-associated psychosis.

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations

  • Min Zhao
  • Fan Bao
  • Chongxuan Li
  • Jun Zhu

Score-based diffusion models (SBDMs) have achieved the SOTA FID results in unpaired image-to-image translation (I2I). However, we notice that existing methods totally ignore the training data in the source domain, leading to sub-optimal solutions for unpaired I2I. To this end, we propose energy-guided stochastic differential equations (EGSDE) that employs an energy function pretrained on both the source and target domains to guide the inference process of a pretrained SDE for realistic and faithful unpaired I2I. Building upon two feature extractors, we carefully design the energy function such that it encourages the transferred image to preserve the domain-independent features and discard domain-specific ones. Further, we provide an alternative explanation of the EGSDE as a product of experts, where each of the three experts (corresponding to the SDE and two feature extractors) solely contributes to faithfulness or realism. Empirically, we compare EGSDE to a large family of baselines on three widely-adopted unpaired I2I tasks under four metrics. EGSDE not only consistently outperforms existing SBDMs-based methods in almost all settings but also achieves the SOTA realism results without harming the faithful performance. Furthermore, EGSDE allows for flexible trade-offs between realism and faithfulness and we improve the realism results further (e. g. , FID of 51. 04 in Cat $\to$ Dog and FID of 50. 43 in Wild $\to$ Dog on AFHQ) by tuning hyper-parameters. The code is available at https: //github. com/ML-GSAI/EGSDE.

IROS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

A General Framework for Lifelong Localization and Mapping in Changing Environment

  • Min Zhao
  • Xin Guo
  • Le Song
  • Baoxing Qin
  • Xuesong Shi
  • Gim Hee Lee
  • Guanghui Sun

The environment of most real-world scenarios such as malls and supermarkets changes at all times. A pre-built map that does not account for these changes becomes out-of-date easily. Therefore, it is necessary to have an up-to-date model of the environment to facilitate long-term operation of a robot. To this end, this paper presents a general lifelong simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework. Our framework uses a multiple session map representation, and exploits an efficient map updating strategy that includes map building, pose graph refinement and sparsification. To mitigate the unbounded increase of memory usage, we propose a map-trimming method based on the Chow-Liu maximum-mutual-information spanning tree. The proposed SLAM framework has been comprehensively validated by over a month of robot deployment in real supermarket environment. Furthermore, we release the dataset collected from the indoor and outdoor changing environment with the hope to accelerate lifelong SLAM research in the community. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/sanduan168/lifelong-SLAM-dataset.

IROS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

CCRobot-IV-F: A Ducted-Fan-Driven Flying-Type Bridge-Stay-Cable Climbing Robot

  • Wenchao Zhang
  • Zhenliang Zheng
  • Xueqi Fu
  • Sarsenbek Hazken
  • Huaping Chen 0005
  • Min Zhao
  • Ning Ding 0003

A Flying-type cable climbing robot, CCRobot-IV-F, is presented in this paper. It is a climbing precursor of the fourth version of CCRobot, designed to surpass the abilities of previous robots with high climbing speed and obstacle-crossing capability. CCRobot-IV-F weighs less than 10 kg and a no-load speed of up to 4. 5 m/s, which significantly exceeds that of other climbing robots. A dynamic model integrated with a cable-fixed coordinate system is developed, and a cascaded controller designed for stabilizing hover and climb with grippers, when a Global Positioning System and magnetometer are unavailable, is shown to work reliably in practice. Experimental results show that CCRobot-IV-F significantly improves the locomotive performance of CCRobot-IV, exhibiting fast speed, good payload capacity, and excellent obstacle-crossing capability. Moreover, CCRobot-IV-F is applied to a cable-stayed bridge in the field.

ICRA Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Proactive Interaction Framework for Intelligent Social Receptionist Robots

  • Yang Xue
  • Fan Wang 0021
  • Hao Tian 0005
  • Min Zhao
  • Jiangyong Li
  • Haiqing Pan
  • Yueqiang Dong

Proactive human-robot interaction (HRI) allows the receptionist robots to actively greet people and offer services based on vision, which has been found to improve acceptability and customer satisfaction. Existing approaches are either based on multi-stage decision processes or based on end-to-end decision models. However, the rule-based approaches require sedulous expert efforts and only handle minimal pre-defined scenarios. On the other hand, existing works with end-to-end models are limited to very general greetings or few behavior patterns (typically less than 10). To address those challenges, we propose a new end-to-end framework, the TransFormer with Visual Tokens for Human-Robot Interaction (TFVT-HRI) 1. The proposed framework extracts visual tokens of relative objects from an RGB camera first. To ensure the correct interpretation of the scenario, a transformer decision model is then employed to process the visual tokens, which is augmented with the temporal and spatial information. It predicts the appropriate action to take in each scenario and identifies the right target. Our data is collected from an in-service receptionist robot in an office building, which is then annotated by experts for appropriate proactive behavior. The action set includes 1000+ diverse patterns by combining language, emoji expression, and body motions. We compare our model with other SOTA end-to-end models on both offline test sets and online user experiments in realistic office building environments to validate this framework. It is demonstrated that the decision model achieves SOTA performance in action triggering and selection, resulting in more humanness and intelligence when compared with the previous reactive reception policies.

JBHI Journal 2017 Journal Article

The Reorganization of Human Brain Networks Modulated by Driving Mental Fatigue

  • Chunlin Zhao
  • Min Zhao
  • Yong Yang
  • Junfeng Gao
  • Nini Rao
  • Pan Lin

The organization of the brain functional network is associated with mental fatigue, but little is known about the brain network topology that is modulated by the mental fatigue. In this study, we used the graph theory approach to investigate reconfiguration changes in functional networks of different electroen-cephalography (EEG) bands from 16 subjects performing a simulated driving task. Behavior and brain functional networks were compared between the normal and driving mental fatigue states. The scores of subjective self-reports indicated that 90 min of simulated driving-induced mental fatigue. We observed that coherence was significantly increased in the frontal, central, and temporal brain regions. Furthermore, in the brain network topology metric, significant increases were observed in the clustering coefficient (Cp) for beta, alpha, and delta bands and the character path length (Lp) for all EEG bands. The normalized measures γ showed significant increases in beta, alpha, and delta bands, and λ showed similar patterns in beta and theta bands. These results indicate that functional network topology can shift the network topology structure toward a more economic but less efficient configuration, which suggests low wiring costs in functional networks and disruption of the effective interactions between and across cortical regions during mental fatigue states. Graph theory analysis might be a useful tool for further understanding the neural mechanisms of driving mental fatigue.

JBHI Journal 2014 Journal Article

Resource Optimized TTSH-URA for Multimedia Stream Authentication in Swallowable-Capsule-Based Wireless Body Sensor Networks

  • Wei Wang
  • Chunqiu Wang
  • Min Zhao

To ease the burdens on the hospitalization capacity, an emerging swallowable-capsule technology has evolved to serve as a remote gastrointestinal (GI) disease examination technique with the aid of the wireless body sensor network (WBSN). Secure multimedia transmission in such a swallowable-capsule-based WBSN faces critical challenges including energy efficiency and content quality guarantee. In this paper, we propose a joint resource allocation and stream authentication scheme to maintain the best possible video quality while ensuring security and energy efficiency in GI-WBSNs. The contribution of this research is twofold. First, we establish a unique signature-hash (S-H) diversity approach in the authentication domain to optimize video authentication robustness and the authentication bit rate overhead over a wireless channel. Based on the full exploration of S-H authentication diversity, we propose a new two-tier signature-hash (TTSH) stream authentication scheme to improve the video quality by reducing authentication dependence overhead while protecting its integrity. Second, we propose to combine this authentication scheme with a unique S-H oriented unequal resource allocation (URA) scheme to improve the energy-distortion-authentication performance of wireless video delivery in GI-WBSN. Our analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed TTSH with URA scheme achieves considerable gain in both authenticated video quality and energy efficiency.

TIST Journal 2013 Journal Article

Social temporal collaborative ranking for context aware movie recommendation

  • Nathan N. Liu
  • Luheng He
  • Min Zhao

Most existing collaborative filtering models only consider the use of user feedback (e.g., ratings) and meta data (e.g., content, demographics). However, in most real world recommender systems, context information, such as time and social networks, are also very important factors that could be considered in order to produce more accurate recommendations. In this work, we address several challenges for the context aware movie recommendation tasks in CAMRa 2010: (1) how to combine multiple heterogeneous forms of user feedback? (2) how to cope with dynamic user and item characteristics? (3) how to capture and utilize social connections among users? For the first challenge, we propose a novel ranking based matrix factorization model to aggregate explicit and implicit user feedback. For the second challenge, we extend this model to a sequential matrix factorization model to enable time-aware parametrization. Finally, we introduce a network regularization function to constrain user parameters based on social connections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the collective modeling of social and temporal dynamics. Experiments on the CAMRa 2010 dataset demonstrated clear improvements over many baselines.

TCS Journal 2006 Journal Article

Power domination in block graphs

  • Guangjun Xu
  • Liying Kang
  • Erfang Shan
  • Min Zhao

The problem of monitoring an electric power system by placing as few measurement devices in the system as possible is closely related to the well-known domination problem in graphs. In 2002, Haynes et al. considered the graph theoretical representation of this problem as a variation of the domination problem. They defined a set S to be a power dominating set of a graph if every vertex and every edge in the system is monitored by the set S (following a set of rules for power system monitoring). The power domination number γ p ( G ) of a graph G is the minimum cardinality of a power dominating set of G. This problem was proved NP-complete even when restricted to bipartite graphs and chordal graphs. In this paper, we present a linear time algorithm for solving the power domination problem in block graphs. As an application of the algorithm, we establish a sharp upper bound for power domination number in block graphs and characterize the extremal graphs.

v2026.09.13