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Yao-Xiang Ding

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8 papers

1 author row

TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Autonomous Imagination: Closed-Loop Decomposition of Visual-to-Textual Conversion in Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Jingming Liu
Yumeng Li
Boyuan Xiao
Yichang Jian
Ziang Qin
Tianjia Shao
Yao-Xiang Ding
Kun Zhou

Under pure textual modality, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler sub-problems. However, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with some seemingly straightforward visual tasks, such as counting and solving jigsaw puzzles. We argue that these tasks challenge the ability of {\it visual-to-textual conversion}, where MLLMs convert visual information perceived from the input scene, to textual information for further reasoning and generating the answer. If the complexity of the visual input is beyond the perceptual capability of the MLLMs, without decomposing this conversion process, simply scaling inference-time reasoning cannot solve the task because it repeatedly encounters the same perceptual bottleneck. We propose an approach, {\it autonomous imagination}, to enable MLLMs to iteratively modify visual inputs (e.g. isolating objects, rearranging puzzle pieces) into intermediate visual states, decomposing visual-to-textual conversion into closed-loop visual modification steps. We show that, without any retraining, MLLMs can now solve tasks initially beyond their perceptual capability, highlighting that closed-loop visual modification can be an effective way of decomposing the visual reasoning task into solvable substeps. Our code and data are released at https://future-item.github.io/autoimagine-site/.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Enhancing Identity-Deformation Disentanglement in StyleGAN for One-Shot Face Video Re-Enactment

Qing Chang
Yao-Xiang Ding
Kun Zhou

The task of one-shot face video re-enactment aims at generating target video of faces with the same identity of one source frame and facial deformation of the driving video. To achieve high quality generation, it is essential to precisely disentangle identity-related and identity-independent characteristics, meanwhile build expressive features keeping high-frequency facial details, which still remain unaddressed for existing approaches. To deal with these two challenges, we propose a two-stage generation model based on StyleGAN, whose key novel techniques lie in better disentangling identity and deformation codes in the latent space through an identity-based modeling and manipulating intermediate StyleGAN features at the second stage for augmenting facial details of the generating targets. To further improve identity consistency, a data augmentation method is introduced during training for enhancing the key features affecting identity such as hair and wrinkles. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Reinforcement Learning from Bagged Reward

Yuting Tang
Xin-Qiang Cai
Yao-Xiang Ding
Qiyu Wu
Guoqing Liu
Masashi Sugiyama

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world scenarios, designing immediate reward signals is difficult; instead, agents receive a single reward that is contingent upon a partial sequence or a complete trajectory. In this work, we define this challenging problem as RL from Bagged Reward (RLBR), where sequences of data are treated as bags with non-Markovian bagged rewards, leading to the formulation of Bagged Reward Markov Decision Processes (BRMDPs). Theoretically, we demonstrate that RLBR can be addressed by solving a standard MDP with properly redistributed bagged rewards allocated to each instance within a bag. Empirically, we find that reward redistribution becomes more challenging as the bag length increases, due to reduced informational granularity. Existing reward redistribution methods are insufficient to address these challenges. Therefore, we propose a novel reward redistribution method equipped with a bidirectional attention mechanism, enabling the accurate interpretation of contextual nuances and temporal dependencies within each bag. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing approaches.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Learning Only When It Matters: Cost-Aware Long-Tailed Classification

Yu-Cheng He
Yao-Xiang Ding
Han-Jia Ye
Zhi-Hua Zhou

Most current long-tailed classification approaches assume the cost-agnostic scenario, where the training distribution of classes is long-tailed while the testing distribution of classes is balanced. Meanwhile, the misclassification costs of all instances are the same. On the other hand, in many real-world applications, it is more proper to assume that the training and testing distributions of classes are the same, while the misclassification cost of tail-class instances is varied. In this work, we model such a scenario as cost-aware long-tailed classification, in which the identification of high-cost tail instances and focusing learning on them thereafter is essential. In consequence, we propose the learning strategy of augmenting new instances based on adaptive region partition in the feature space. We conduct theoretical analysis to show that under the assumption that the feature-space distance and the misclassification cost are correlated, the identification of high-cost tail instances can be realized by building region partitions with a low variance of risk within each region. The resulting AugARP approach could significantly outperform baseline approaches on both benchmark datasets and real-world product sales datasets.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Model Spider: Learning to Rank Pre-Trained Models Efficiently

Yi-Kai Zhang
Ting-Ji Huang
Yao-Xiang Ding
De-Chuan Zhan
Han-Jia Ye

Figuring out which Pre-Trained Model (PTM) from a model zoo fits the target task is essential to take advantage of plentiful model resources. With the availability of numerous heterogeneous PTMs from diverse fields, efficiently selecting the most suitable one is challenging due to the time-consuming costs of carrying out forward or backward passes over all PTMs. In this paper, we propose Model Spider, which tokenizes both PTMs and tasks by summarizing their characteristics into vectors to enable efficient PTM selection. By leveraging the approximated performance of PTMs on a separate set of training tasks, Model Spider learns to construct representation and measure the fitness score between a model-task pair via their representation. The ability to rank relevant PTMs higher than others generalizes to new tasks. With the top-ranked PTM candidates, we further learn to enrich task repr. with their PTM-specific semantics to re-rank the PTMs for better selection. Model Spider balances efficiency and selection ability, making PTM selection like a spider preying on a web. Model Spider exhibits promising performance across diverse model zoos, including visual models and Large Language Models (LLMs). Code is available at https: //github. com/zhangyikaii/Model-Spider.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Pre-Trained Model Reusability Evaluation for Small-Data Transfer Learning

Yao-Xiang Ding
Xi-Zhu Wu
Kun Zhou
Zhi-Hua Zhou

We study {\it model reusability evaluation} (MRE) for source pre-trained models: evaluating their transfer learning performance to new target tasks. In special, we focus on the setting under which the target training datasets are small, making it difficult to produce reliable MRE scores using them. Under this situation, we propose {\it synergistic learning} for building the task-model metric, which can be realized by collecting a set of pre-trained models and asking a group of data providers to participate. We provide theoretical guarantees to show that the learned task-model metric distances can serve as trustworthy MRE scores, and propose synergistic learning algorithms and models for general learning tasks. Experiments show that the MRE models learned by synergistic learning can generate significantly more reliable MRE scores than existing approaches for small-data transfer learning.

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AAMAS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Imitation Learning from Pixel-Level Demonstrations by HashReward

Xin-Qiang Cai
Yao-Xiang Ding
Yuan Jiang
Zhi-Hua Zhou

One of the key issues for imitation learning lies in making policy learned from limited samples to generalize well in the whole stateaction space. This problem is much more severe in high-dimensional state environments, such as game playing with raw pixel inputs. Under this situation, even state-of-the-art adversary-based imitation learning algorithms fail. Through empirical studies, we find that the main cause lies in the failure of training a powerful discriminator to generate meaningful rewards in high-dimensional environments. Although it seems that dimensionality reduction can help, a straightforward application of off-the-shelf methods cannot achieve good performance. In this work, we show in theory that the balance between dimensionality reduction and discriminative training is essential for effective learning. To achieve this target, we propose HashReward, which utilizes the idea of supervised hashing to realize such an ideal balance. Experimental results show that HashReward could outperform state-of-the-art methods for a large gap under the challenging high-dimensional environments.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Preference Based Adaptation for Learning Objectives

Yao-Xiang Ding
Zhi-Hua Zhou

In many real-world learning tasks, it is hard to directly optimize the true performance measures, meanwhile choosing the right surrogate objectives is also difficult. Under this situation, it is desirable to incorporate an optimization of objective process into the learning loop based on weak modeling of the relationship between the true measure and the objective. In this work, we discuss the task of objective adaptation, in which the learner iteratively adapts the learning objective to the underlying true objective based on the preference feedback from an oracle. We show that when the objective can be linearly parameterized, this preference based learning problem can be solved by utilizing the dueling bandit model. A novel sampling based algorithm DL^2M is proposed to learn the optimal parameter, which enjoys strong theoretical guarantees and efficient empirical performance. To avoid learning a hypothesis from scratch after each objective function update, a boosting based hypothesis adaptation approach is proposed to efficiently adapt any pre-learned element hypothesis to the current objective. We apply the overall approach to multi-label learning, and show that the proposed approach achieves significant performance under various multi-label performance measures.

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