Xiaoming Li

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

RefSTAR: Blind Face Image Restoration with Reference Selection, Transfer, and Reconstruction

• Zhicun Yin
• Junjie Chen
• Ming Liu
• Zhixin Wang
• Fan Li
• Renjing Pei
• Xiaoming Li
• Rynson W. H. Lau

Introducing high-quality references can largely alleviate the uncertainty in blind face image restoration tasks, yet the equivocal utilization of reference priors makes it still a struggle to well preserve the human identity. We attribute the identity inconsistency to two deficiencies of existing reference-based face restoration methods, namely the inability to effectively determine which features need to be transferred, and the failure to preserve the structure and details of the selected features. This work mainly focuses on these two issues, and we present a novel blind face image restoration method that considers reference selection, transfer, and reconstruction (RefSTAR) to introduce proper features from reference images. Specifically, we construct a reference selection (RefSel) module, which can generate accurate masks to select reference features. For training the RefSel module, we construct a RefSel-HQ dataset through a mask generation pipeline, which contains annotated masks for 10,000 ground truth-reference pairs. To guarantee the exact introduction of selected reference features, a feature fusion paradigm is designed for reference feature transferring, and a Mask-Compatible Cycle-Consistency Loss is redesigned based on reference reconstruction to further ensure the presence of selected reference image features in the output image. Experiments on various backbone models demonstrate superior performance, showing better identity preservation ability and reference feature transfer quality.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

VQ-FONT: Few-Shot Font Generation with Structure-Aware Enhancement and Quantization

• Mingshuai Yao
• Yabo Zhang
• Xianhui Lin
• Xiaoming Li
• Wangmeng Zuo

Few-shot font generation is challenging, as it needs to capture the fine-grained stroke styles from a limited set of reference glyphs, and then transfer to other characters, which are expected to have similar styles. However, due to the diversity and complexity of Chinese font styles, the synthesized glyphs of existing methods usually exhibit visible artifacts, such as missing details and distorted strokes. In this paper, we propose a VQGAN-based framework (i.e., VQ-Font) to enhance glyph fidelity through token prior refinement and structure-aware enhancement. Specifically, we pre-train a VQGAN to encapsulate font token prior within a code-book. Subsequently, VQ-Font refines the synthesized glyphs with the codebook to eliminate the domain gap between synthesized and real-world strokes. Furthermore, our VQ-Font leverages the inherent design of Chinese characters, where structure components such as radicals and character components are combined in specific arrangements, to recalibrate fine-grained styles based on references. This process improves the matching and fusion of styles at the structure level. Both modules collaborate to enhance the fidelity of the generated fonts. Experiments on a collected font dataset show that our VQ-Font outperforms the competing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in generating challenging styles. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yaomingshuai/VQ-Font.

AIJ Journal 2022 Journal Article

Integrating social influence modeling and user modeling for trust prediction in signed networks

• Hui Fang
• Xiaoming Li
• Jie Zhang

AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Supervised User Ranking in Signed Social Networks

• Xiaoming Li
• Hui Fang
• Jie Zhang

The task of user ranking in signed networks, aiming to predict potential friends and enemies for each user, has attracted increasing attention in numerous applications. Existing approaches are mainly extended from heuristics of the traditional models in unsigned networks. They suffer from two limitations: (1) mainly focus on global rankings thus cannot provide effective personalized ranking results, and (2) have a relatively unrealistic assumption that each user treats her neighbors’ social strengths indifferently. To address these two issues, we propose a supervised method based on random walk to learn social strengths between each user and her neighbors, in which the random walk more likely visits “potential friends” and less likely visits “potential enemies”. We learn the personalized social strengths by optimizing on a particularly designed loss function oriented on ranking. We further present a fast ranking method based on the local structure among each seed node and a certain set of candidates. It much simplifies the proposed ranking model meanwhile maintains the performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art approaches.

TIST Journal 2019 Journal Article

Using Sparse Representation to Detect Anomalies in Complex WSNs

• Xiaoming Li
• Guangquan Xu
• Xi Zheng
• Kaitai Liang
• Emmanouil Panaousis
• Tao Li
• Wei Wang
• Chao Shen

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an active area of research for monitoring physical and environmental conditions. Due to the interdependence of sensors, a functional anomaly in one sensor can cause a functional anomaly in another sensor, which can further lead to the malfunctioning of the entire sensor network. Existing research work has analysed faulty sensor anomalies but fails to show the effectiveness throughout the entire interdependent network system. In this article, a dictionary learning algorithm based on a non-negative constraint is developed, and a sparse representation anomaly node detection method for sensor networks is proposed based on the dictionary learning. Through experiment on a specific thermal power plant in China, we verify the robustness of our proposed method in detecting abnormal nodes against four state of the art approaches and proved our method is more robust. Furthermore, the experiments are conducted on the obtained abnormal nodes to prove the interdependence of multi-layer sensor networks and reveal the conditions and causes of a system crash.

AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

FILE: A Novel Framework for Predicting Social Status in Signed Networks

• Xiaoming Li
• Hui Fang
• Jie Zhang

Link prediction in signed social networks is challenging because of the existence and imbalance of the three kinds of social status (positive, negative and no-relation). Furthermore, there are a variety types of no-relation status in reality, e. g. , strangers and frenemies, which cannot be well distinguished from the other linked status by existing approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel Framework of Integrating both Latent and Explicit features (FILE), to better deal with the norelation status and improve the overall link prediction performance in signed networks. In particular, we design two latent features from latent space and two explicit features by extending social theories, and learn these features for each user via matrix factorization with a specially designed rankingoriented loss function. Experimental results demonstrate the superior of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.

IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Towards Reading Comprehension for Long Documents

• Yuanxing Zhang
• Yangbin Zhang
• Kaigui Bian
• Xiaoming Li

Machine reading comprehension has gained attention from both industry and academia. It is a very challenging task that involves various domains such as language comprehension, knowledge inference, summarization, etc. Previous studies mainly focus on reading comprehension on short paragraphs, and these approaches fail to perform well on the documents. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical match attention model to instruct the machine to extract answers from a specific short span of passages for the long document reading comprehension (LDRC) task. The model takes advantages from hierarchical-LSTM to learn the paragraph-level representation, and implements the match mechanism (i. e. , quantifying the relationship between two contexts) to find the most appropriate paragraph that includes the hint of answers. Then the task can be decoupled into reading comprehension task for short paragraph, such that the answer can be produced. Experiments on the modified SQuAD dataset show that our proposed model outperforms existing reading comprehension models by at least 20% regarding exact match (EM), F1 and the proportion of identified paragraphs which are exactly the short paragraphs where the original answers locate.

YNIMG Journal 2017 Journal Article

Neural substrates of updating the prediction through prediction error during decision making

• Ying Wang
• Ning Ma
• Xiaosong He
• Nan Li
• Zhengde Wei
• Lizhuang Yang
• Rujing Zha
• Long Han

AAAI Conference 2017 Short Paper

Rethinking the Link Prediction Problem in Signed Social Networks

• Xiaoming Li
• Hui Fang
• Jie Zhang

We rethink the link prediction problem in signed social networks by also considering “no-relation” as a future status of a node pair, rather than simply distinguishing positive and negative links proposed in the literature. To understand the underlying mechanism of link formation in signed networks, we propose a feature framework on the basis of a thorough exploration of potential features for the newly identified problem. Grounded on the framework, we also design a trinary classification model, and experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

IJCAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Neural Generative Question Answering

• Jun Yin
• Xin Jiang
• Zhengdong Lu
• Lifeng Shang
• Hang Li
• Xiaoming Li

This paper presents an end-to-end neural network model, named Neural Generative Question Answering (GENQA), that can generate answers to simple factoid questions, based on the facts in a knowledge-base. More specifically, the model is built on the encoder-decoder framework for sequence-to-sequence learning, while equipped with the ability to enquire the knowledge-base, and is trained on a corpus of question-answer pairs, with their associated triples in the knowledge-base. Empirical study shows the proposed model can effectively deal with the variations of questions and answers, and generate right and natural answers by referring to the facts in the knowledge-base. The experiment on question answering demonstrates that the proposed model can outperform an embedding-based QA model as well as a neural dialogue model trained on the same data.

AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Mining User Intents in Twitter: A Semi-Supervised Approach to Inferring Intent Categories for Tweets

• Jinpeng Wang
• Gao Cong
• Xin Zhao
• Xiaoming Li

In this paper, we propose to study the problem of identifying and classifying tweets into intent categories. For example, a tweet “I wanna buy a new car” indicates the user’s intent for buying a car. Identifying such intent tweets will have great commercial value among others. In particular, it is important that we can distinguish different types of intent tweets. We propose to classify intent tweets into six categories, namely Food & Drink, Travel, Career & Education, Goods & Services, Event & Activities and Trifle. We propose a semi-supervised learning approach to categorizing intent tweets into the six categories. We construct a test collection by using a bootstrap method. Our experimental results show that our approach is effective in inferring intent categories for tweets.

TIST Journal 2014 Journal Article

Infer User Interests via Link Structure Regularization

• Jinpeng Wang
• Wayne Xin Zhao
• Yulan He
• Xiaoming Li

Learning user interests from online social networks helps to better understand user behaviors and provides useful guidance to design user-centric applications. Apart from analyzing users' online content, it is also important to consider users' social connections in the social Web. Graph regularization methods have been widely used in various text mining tasks, which can leverage the graph structure information extracted from data. Previously, graph regularization methods operate under the cluster assumption that nearby nodes are more similar and nodes on the same structure (typically referred to as a cluster or a manifold) are likely to be similar. We argue that learning user interests from complex, sparse, and dynamic social networks should be based on the link structure assumption under which node similarities are evaluated based on the local link structures instead of explicit links between two nodes. We propose a regularization framework based on the relation bipartite graph, which can be constructed from any type of relations. Using Twitter as our case study, we evaluate our proposed framework from social networks built from retweet relations. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our proposed method outperforms a few competitive baselines in learning user interests over a set of predefined topics. It also gives superior results compared to the baselines on retweet prediction and topical authority identification.

JBHI Journal 2014 Journal Article

System Light-Loading Technology for mHealth: Manifold-Learning-Based Medical Data Cleansing and Clinical Trials in WE-CARE Project

• Anpeng Huang
• Wenyao Xu
• Zhinan Li
• Linzhen Xie
• Majid Sarrafzadeh
• Xiaoming Li
• Jason Cong

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major issue to public health. It contributes 41% to the Chinese death rate each year. This huge loss encouraged us to develop a Wearable Efficient teleCARdiology systEm (WE-CARE) for early warning and prevention of CVD risks in real time. WE-CARE is expected to work 24/7 online for mobile health (mHealth) applications. Unfortunately, this purpose is often disrupted in system experiments and clinical trials, even if related enabling technologies work properly. This phenomenon is rooted in the overload issue of complex Electrocardiogram (ECG) data in terms of system integration. In this study, our main objective is to get a system light-loading technology to enable mHealth with a benchmarked ECG anomaly recognition rate. To achieve this objective, we propose an approach to purify clinical features from ECG raw data based on manifold learning, called the Manifold-based ECG-feature Purification algorithm. Our clinical trials verify that our proposal can detect anomalies with a recognition rate of up to 94% which is highly valuable in daily public health-risk alert applications based on clinical criteria. Most importantly, the experiment results demonstrate that the WE-CARE system enabled by our proposal can enhance system reliability by at least two times and reduce false negative rates to 0. 76%, and extend the battery life by 40. 54%, in the system integration level.

IJCAI Conference 2013 Conference Paper

i, Poet: Automatic Chinese Poetry Composition through a Generative Summarization Framework under Constrained Optimization

• Rui Yan
• Han Jiang
• Mirella Lapata
• Shou-De Lin
• Xueqiang Lv
• Xiaoming Li

Part of the long lasting cultural heritage of China is the classical ancient Chinese poems which follow strict formats and complicated linguistic rules. Automatic Chinese poetry composition by programs is considered as a challenging problem in computational linguistics and requires high Artificial Intelligence assistance, and has not been well addressed. In this paper, we formulate the poetry composition task as an optimization problem based on a generative summarization framework under several constraints. Given the user specified writing intents, the system retrieves candidate terms out of a large poem corpus, and then orders these terms to fit into poetry formats, satisfying tonal and rhythm requirements. The optimization process under constraints is conducted via iterative term substitutions till convergence, and outputs the subset with the highest utility as the generated poem. For experiments, we perform generation on large datasets of 61, 960 classic poems from Tang and Song Dynasty of China. A comprehensive evaluation, using both human judgments and ROUGE scores, has demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach.