Tengfei Liu

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

MARE: Multimodal Analogical Reasoning for Disease Evolution-Aware Radiology Report Generation

• Qingqing Gao
• Tengfei Liu
• Xiaoyan Li
• Xiaodan Zhang
• Zhongfan Sun
• Boyue Wang
• Baocai Yin
• Zhaohui Liu

Radiology report generation from longitudinal medical data is critical for assessing disease progression and automating diagnostic workflows. While recent methods incorporate longitudinal information, they primarily rely on multimodal feature fusion, with limited capacity for explicit disease evolution modeling and temporal reasoning. To address this, we propose MARE, an end-to-end framework that formulates longitudinal radiology report generation as a multimodal analogical reasoning task. Inspired by the Abduction–Mapping–Induction paradigm, MARE models latent relational structures underlying disease evolution by aligning lesion-level visual features across time and mapping them to the textual domain for temporally coherent and clinically meaningful report generation. To mitigate the spatial misalignment caused by patient positioning or imaging variation, we introduce an Adaptive Region Alignment (ARA) module for robust temporal correspondence. Additionally, we design Dual Evolution Consistency (DEC) losses to regularize analogical reasoning by enforcing temporal coherence in both visual and textual evolution paths. Extensive experiments on the Longitudinal-MIMIC dataset demonstrate that MARE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across both natural language generation and clinical effectiveness metrics, highlighting the value of structured analogical reasoning for disease evolution-aware report generation.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

HC-LLM: Historical-Constrained Large Language Models for Radiology Report Generation

• Tengfei Liu
• Jiapu Wang
• Yongli Hu
• Mingjie Li
• Junfei Yi
• Xiaojun Chang
• Junbin Gao
• Baocai Yin

Radiology report generation (RRG) models typically focus on individual exams, often overlooking the integration of historical visual or textual data, which is crucial for patient follow-ups. Traditional methods usually struggle with long sequence dependencies when incorporating historical information, but large language models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, making them well-suited for analyzing longitudinal medical data. In light of this, we propose a novel Historical-Constrained Large Language Models (HC-LLM) framework for RRG, empowering LLMs with longitudinal report generation capabilities by constraining the consistency and differences between longitudinal images and their corresponding reports. Specifically, our approach extracts both time-shared and time-specific features from longitudinal chest X-rays and diagnostic reports to capture disease progression. Then, we ensure consistent representation by applying intra-modality similarity constraints and aligning various features across modalities with multimodal contrastive and structural constraints. These combined constraints effectively guide the LLMs in generating diagnostic reports that accurately reflect the progression of the disease, achieving state-of-the-art results on the Longitudinal-MIMIC dataset. Notably, our approach performs well even without historical data during testing and can be easily adapted to other multimodal large models, enhancing its versatility.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Mixture-of-Queries Transformer: Camouflaged Instance Segmentation via Queries Cooperation and Frequency Enhancement

• Weiwei Feng
• Nanqing Xu
• Tengfei Liu
• Weiqiang Wang

Due to the high similarity between camouflaged instances and the surroundings and the widespread camouflage-like scenarios, the recently proposed camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS) is a challenging and relevant task. Previous approaches achieve some progress on CIS, while many overlook camouflaged objects’ color and contour nature and then decide on each candidate instinctively. In this paper, we contribute a Mixture-of-Queries Transformer (MoQT) in an end-to-end manner for CIS based on two key designs (a Frequency Enhancement Feature Extractor and a Mixture-of-Queries Decoder). First, the Frequency Enhancement Feature Extractor is responsible for capturing the camouflaged clues in the frequency domain. To expose camouflaged instances, the extractor enhances the effectiveness of contour, eliminates the interference color, and obtains suitable features simultaneously. Second, a Mixture-of-Queries Decoder utilizes multiple newly initialized experts of queries (a group of queries considered an expert) in each layer for spotting camouflaged characteristics with cooperation. These experts collaborate to generate outputs with the mixture-of-queries mechanism, refined hierarchically to a fine-grained level for more accurate instance masks. Coupling these two components enables MoQT to use multiple experts to integrate effective clues of camouflaged objects in both spatial and frequency domains. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our MoQT outperforms 19 state-of-the-art CIS approaches on both COD10K and NC4K datasets.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

On provable privacy vulnerabilities of graph representations

• Ruofan Wu
• Guanhua Fang
• Mingyang Zhang
• Qiying Pan
• Tengfei Liu
• Weiqiang Wang

Graph representation learning (GRL) is critical for extracting insights from complex network structures, but it also raises security concerns due to potential privacy vulnerabilities in these representations. This paper investigates the structural vulnerabilities in graph neural models where sensitive topological information can be inferred through edge reconstruction attacks. Our research primarily addresses the theoretical underpinnings of similarity-based edge reconstruction attacks (SERA), furnishing a non-asymptotic analysis of their reconstruction capacities. Moreover, we present empirical corroboration indicating that such attacks can perfectly reconstruct sparse graphs as graph size increases. Conversely, we establish that sparsity is a critical factor for SERA's effectiveness, as demonstrated through analysis and experiments on (dense) stochastic block models. Finally, we explore the resilience of private graph representations produced via noisy aggregation (NAG) mechanism against SERA. Through theoretical analysis and empirical assessments, we affirm the mitigation of SERA using NAG. In parallel, we also empirically delineate instances wherein SERA demonstrates both efficacy and deficiency in its capacity to function as an instrument for elucidating the trade-off between privacy and utility.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Resource-Aware Federated Self-Supervised Learning with Global Class Representations

• Mingyi Li
• Xiao Zhang
• Qi Wang
• Tengfei Liu
• Ruofan Wu
• Weiqiang Wang
• Fuzhen Zhuang
• Hui Xiong

Due to the heterogeneous architectures and class skew, the global representation models training in resource-adaptive federated self-supervised learning face with tricky challenges: $\textit{deviated representation abilities}$ and $\textit{inconsistent representation spaces}$. In this work, we are the first to propose a multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework, namely $\textit{FedMKD}$, to learn global representations with whole class knowledge from heterogeneous clients even under extreme class skew. Firstly, the adaptive knowledge integration mechanism is designed to learn better representations from all heterogeneous models with deviated representation abilities. Then the weighted combination of the self-supervised loss and the distillation loss can support the global model to encode all classes from clients into a unified space. Besides, the global knowledge anchored alignment module can make the local representation spaces close to the global spaces, which further improves the representation abilities of local ones. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of $\textit{FedMKD}$ which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines 4. 78\% under linear evaluation on average.

EAAI Journal 2024 Journal Article

Token-disentangling Mutual Transformer for multimodal emotion recognition

• Guanghao Yin
• Yuanyuan Liu
• Tengfei Liu
• Haoyu Zhang
• Fang Fang
• Chang Tang
• Liangxiao Jiang

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Neural Frailty Machine: Beyond proportional hazard assumption in neural survival regressions

• Ruofan Wu
• Jiawei Qiao
• Mingzhe Wu
• Wen Yu
• Ming Zheng
• Tengfei Liu
• Tianyi Zhang
• Weiqiang Wang

We present neural frailty machine (NFM), a powerful and flexible neural modeling framework for survival regressions. The NFM framework utilizes the classical idea of multiplicative frailty in survival analysis as a principled way of extending the proportional hazard assumption, at the same time being able to leverage the strong approximation power of neural architectures for handling nonlinear covariate dependence. Two concrete models are derived under the framework that extends neural proportional hazard models and nonparametric hazard regression models. Both models allow efficient training under the likelihood objective. Theoretically, for both proposed models, we establish statistical guarantees of neural function approximation with respect to nonparametric components via characterizing their rate of convergence. Empirically, we provide synthetic experiments that verify our theoretical statements. We also conduct experimental evaluations over $6$ benchmark datasets of different scales, showing that the proposed NFM models achieve predictive performance comparable to or sometimes surpassing state-of-the-art survival models. Our code is publicly availabel at https: //github. com/Rorschach1989/nfm

AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Coupled-View Deep Classifier Learning from Multiple Noisy Annotators

• Shikun Li
• Shiming Ge
• Yingying Hua
• Chunhui Zhang
• Hao Wen
• Tengfei Liu
• Weiqiang Wang

Typically, learning a deep classifier from massive cleanly annotated instances is effective but impractical in many realworld scenarios. An alternative is collecting and aggregating multiple noisy annotations for each instance to train the classifier. Inspired by that, this paper proposes to learn deep classifier from multiple noisy annotators via a coupled-view learning approach, where the learning view from data is represented by deep neural networks for data classification and the learning view from labels is described by a Naive Bayes classifier for label aggregation. Such coupled-view learning is converted to a supervised learning problem under the mutual supervision of the aggregated and predicted labels, and can be solved via alternate optimization to update labels and refine the classifiers. To alleviate the propagation of incorrect labels, small-loss metric is proposed to select reliable instances in both views. A co-teaching strategy with class-weighted loss is further leveraged in the deep classifier learning, which uses two networks with different learning abilities to teach each other, and the diverse errors introduced by noisy labels can be filtered out by peer networks. By these strategies, our approach can finally learn a robust data classifier which less overfits to label noise. Experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.

IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Online Positive and Unlabeled Learning

• Chuang Zhang
• Chen Gong
• Tengfei Liu
• Xun Lu
• Weiqiang Wang
• Jian Yang

Positive and Unlabeled learning (PU learning) aims to build a binary classifier where only positive and unlabeled data are available for classifier training. However, existing PU learning methods all work on a batch learning mode, which cannot deal with the online learning scenarios with sequential data. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel positive and unlabeled learning algorithm in an online training mode, which trains a classifier solely on the positive and unlabeled data arriving in a sequential order. Specifically, we adopt an unbiased estimate for the loss induced by the arriving positive or unlabeled examples at each time. Then we show that for any coming new single datum, the model can be updated independently and incrementally by gradient based online learning method. Furthermore, we extend our method to tackle the cases when more than one example is received at each time. Theoretically, we show that the proposed online PU learning method achieves low regret even though it receives sequential positive and unlabeled data. Empirically, we conduct intensive experiments on both benchmark and real-world datasets, and the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

AIJ Journal 2017 Journal Article

Latent tree models for hierarchical topic detection

• Peixian Chen
• Nevin L. Zhang
• Tengfei Liu
• Leonard K.M. Poon
• Zhourong Chen
• Farhan Khawar

UAI Conference 2012 Conference Paper

A Model-Based Approach to Rounding in Spectral Clustering

• Leonard K. M. Poon
• April H. Liu
• Tengfei Liu
• Nevin L. Zhang

In spectral clustering, one defines a similarity matrix for a collection of data points, transforms the matrix to get the Laplacian matrix, finds the eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix, and obtains a partition of the data using the leading eigenvectors. The last step is sometimes referred to as rounding, where one needs to decide how many leading eigenvectors to use, to determine the number of clusters, and to partition the data points. In this paper, we propose a novel method for rounding. The method differs from previous methods in three ways. First, we relax the assumption that the number of clusters equals the number of eigenvectors used. Second, when deciding the number of leading eigenvectors to use, we not only rely on information contained in the leading eigenvectors themselves, but also use subsequent eigenvectors. Third, our method is model-based and solves all the three subproblems of rounding using a class of graphical models called latent tree models. We evaluate our method on both synthetic and real-world data. The results show that our method works correctly in the ideal case where between-clusters similarity is 0, and degrades gracefully as one moves away from the ideal case.

AIJ Journal 2012 Journal Article

Model-based multidimensional clustering of categorical data

• Tao Chen
• Nevin L. Zhang
• Tengfei Liu
• Kin Man Poon
• Yi Wang