Yipeng Zhang

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Cross-Scale Collaboration between LLMs and Lightweight Sequential Recommenders with Domain-Specific Latent Reasoning

• Yipeng Zhang
• Xin Wang
• Hong Chen
• Junwei Pan
• Qian Li
• Jun Zhang
• Jie Jiang
• Hong Mei

Sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item based on historical interactions. To further enhance the reasoning capability in sequential recommendation, LLMs are employed to predict the next item or generate semantic IDs for item representation, given LLMs' extensive domain knowledge and reasoning ability. However, existing LLM-based methods suffer from two limitations. (i) The scarcity of recommendation data with reasoning paths makes it challenging to design suitable chain-of-thought prompting templates, and the full potential of LLMs' reasoning abilities remains underutilized. (ii) Upon obtaining semantic IDs, the LLMs and their representations are excluded from the subsequent recommendation model training, preventing downstream models from fully utilizing the rich semantic information encoded within these IDs. To address these issues, we propose a novel CoderRec framework, which is capable of fully exploiting the information encoded in semantic IDs to guide the recommendation process. Specifically, to address the problem of scarcity in reasoning path-augmented data, we introduce latent reasoning into sequential recommendation and treat the representation captured by the downstream model as domain-specific latent thought, enabling implicit logical inference without requiring explicit CoT annotations. To ensure that the downstream recommendation models are able to deeply leverage the semantic information within IDs, we propose a novel cross-scale model collaboration strategy, which employs cross-scale IDs and a two-phase approach to align LLM-derived semantics with recommendation objectives. Extensive experiments have shown the effectiveness of our proposed CoderRec framework.

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

LLaVA-UHD v2: Exploiting Hierarchical Vision Granularity in MLLMs via Inverse Semantic Pyramid

• Yipeng Zhang
• Yifan Liu
• Zonghao Guo
• Yidan Zhang
• Xuesong Yang
• Xiaoying Zhang
• Chi Chen
• Jun Song

Vision transformers (ViTs) are widely employed in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for visual encoding. However, they exhibit inferior performance on tasks regarding fine-grained visual perception. We attribute this to the inner limitations of ViTs in capturing diverse visual semantic levels. To address this, we present Hierarchical window (Hiwin) transformer as a plug-and-play solution for MLLMs, centered around our inverse semantic pyramid (ISP). Hiwin transformer comprises two key modules: (i) a visual detail injection module, which progressively injects low-level visual details into high-level language-aligned semantics features, thereby constructing an ISP, and (ii) a hierarchical window attention module, which leverages cross-scale windows to condense multi-level semantics from the ISP. Notably, our design achieves an average boost of 3.7% across 14 benchmarks compared with the baseline method, 9.3% on DocVQA for instance.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Modular-Cam: Modular Dynamic Camera-view Video Generation with LLM

• Zirui Pan
• Xin Wang
• Yipeng Zhang
• Hong Chen
• Kwan Man Cheng
• Yaofei Wu
• Wenwu Zhu

Text-to-Video generation, which utilizes the provided text prompt to generate high-quality videos, has drawn increasing attention and achieved great success due to the development of diffusion models recently. Existing methods mainly rely on a pre-trained text encoder to capture the semantic information and perform cross attention with the encoded text prompt to guide the generation of video. However, when it comes to complex prompts that contain dynamic scenes and multiple camera-view transformations, these methods can not decompose the overall information into separate scenes, as well as fail to smoothly change scenes based on the corresponding camera-views. To solve these problems, we propose a novel method, i.e., Modular-Cam. Specifically, to better understand a given complex prompt, we utilize a large language model to analyze user instructions and decouple them into multiple scenes together with transition actions. To generate a video containing dynamic scenes that match the given camera-views, we incorporate the widely-used temporal transformer into the diffusion model to ensure continuity within a single scene and propose CamOperator, a modular network based module that well controls the camera movements. Moreover, we propose AdaControlNet, which utilizes ControlNet to ensure consistency across scenes and adaptively adjusts the color tone of the generated video. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments prove our proposed Modular-Cam's strong capability of generating multi-scene videos together with its ability to achieve fine-grained control of camera movements. Generated results are available at https://modular-cam.github.io.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Rhomboid Tiling for Geometric Graph Deep Learning

• Yipeng Zhang
• Longlong Li
• Kelin Xia

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven effective for learning from graph-structured data through their neighborhood-based message passing framework. Many hierarchical graph clustering pooling methods modify this framework by introducing clustering-based strategies, enabling the construction of more expressive and powerful models. However, all of these message passing framework heavily rely on the connectivity structure of graphs, limiting their ability to capture the rich geometric features inherent in geometric graphs. To address this, we propose Rhomboid Tiling (RT) clustering, a novel clustering method based on the rhomboid tiling structure, which performs clustering by leveraging the complex geometric information of the data and effectively extracts its higher-order geometric structures. Moreover, we design RTPool, a hierarchical graph clustering pooling model based on RT clustering for graph classification tasks. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance, outperforming 21 state-of-the-art competitors on all the 7 benchmark datasets.

IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Coarse-to-Fine Detection of Multiple Seams for Robotic Welding

• Pengkun Wei
• Shuo Cheng
• Dayou Li
• Ran Song 0001
• Yipeng Zhang
• Wei Zhang 0021

Efficiently detecting target weld seams while ensuring sub-millimeter accuracy has always been an important challenge in autonomous welding, which has significant application in industrial practice. Previous works mostly focused on recognizing and localizing welding seams one by one, leading to inferior efficiency in modeling the workpiece. This paper proposes a novel framework capable of multiple weld seams extraction using both RGB images and 3D point clouds. The RGB image is used to obtain the region of interest by approximately localizing the weld seams, and the point cloud is used to achieve the fine-edge extraction of the weld seams within the region of interest using region growth. Our method is further accelerated by using a pre-trained deep learning model to ensure both efficiency and generalization ability. The proposed method was comprehensively tested on various workpieces featuring both linear and curved weld seams, as well as in physical experiment systems. The results showcase considerable potential for real-world industrial applications, emphasizing the method’s efficiency and effectiveness. Videos of the real-world experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/pq162HSP2D4.

IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

E3SN: Efficient End-to-End Siamese Network for Video Object Segmentation

• Meng Lan
• Yipeng Zhang
• Qinning Xu
• Lefei Zhang

In the semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) field, SiamMask has achieved competitive accuracy and the fastest running speed. However, the two-stage training procedure requires additional manual intervention, and using only single-level features does not maximize the rich hierarchical feature information. This paper proposes an efficient end-to-end Siamese network for VOS. In particular, a supervised sampling strategy is designed to optimize the training procedure. Such an optimization facilitates the training of the entire model in an end-to-end manner. Moreover, a multilevel feature aggregation module is developed to enhance feature representability and improve segmentation accuracy. Experimental results on DAVIS2016 and DAVIS2017 datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the SiamMask in accuracy with similar FPS. Moreover, this approach also achieves good accuracy-speed trade-off compared with that of other state-of-the-art VOS algorithms.

AIJ Journal 2020 Journal Article

Robust learning with imperfect privileged information

• Xue Li
• Bo Du
• Chang Xu
• Yipeng Zhang
• Lefei Zhang
• Dacheng Tao

IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Accelerated Inference Framework of Sparse Neural Network Based on Nested Bitmask Structure

• Yipeng Zhang
• Bo Du
• Lefei Zhang
• Rongchun Li
• Yong Dou

In order to satisfy the ever-growing demand for high-performance processors for neural networks, the state-of-the-art processing units tend to use application-oriented circuits to replace Processing Engine (PE) on the GPU under circumstances where low-power solutions are required. The application-oriented PE is fully optimized in terms of the circuit architecture and eliminates incorrect data dependency and instructional redundancy. In this paper, we propose a novel encoding approach on a sparse neural network after pruning. We partition the weight matrix into numerous blocks and use a low-rank binary map to represent the validation of these blocks. Furthermore, the elements in each nonzero block are also encoded into two submatrices: one is the binary stream discriminating the zero/nonzero position, while the other is the pure nonzero elements stored in the FIFO. In the experimental part, we implement a well pre-trained sparse neural network on the Xilinx FPGA VC707. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the other benchmarks. Our approach has successfully optimized the throughput and the energy efficiency to deal with a single frame. Accordingly, we contend that Nested Bitmask Neural Network (NBNN), is an efficient neural network structure with only minor accuracy loss on the SoC system.

IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Pseudo Supervised Matrix Factorization in Discriminative Subspace

• Jiaqi Ma
• Yipeng Zhang
• Lefei Zhang
• Bo Du
• Dapeng Tao

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and spectral clustering have been proved to be efficient and effective for data clustering tasks and have been applied to various real-world scenes. However, there are still some drawbacks in traditional methods: (1) most existing algorithms only consider high-dimensional data directly while neglect the intrinsic data structure in the low-dimensional subspace; (2) the pseudo-information got in the optimization process is not relevant to most spectral clustering and manifold regularization methods. In this paper, a novel unsupervised matrix factorization method, Pseudo Supervised Matrix Factorization (PSMF), is proposed for data clustering. The main contributions are threefold: (1) to cluster in the discriminant subspace, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) combines with NMF to become a unified framework; (2) we propose a pseudo supervised manifold regularization term which utilizes the pseudo-information to instruct the regularization term in order to find subspace that discriminates different classes; (3) an efficient optimization algorithm is designed to solve the proposed problem with proved convergence. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art clustering algorithms.

IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

R-SVM+: Robust Learning with Privileged Information

• Xue Li
• Bo Du
• Chang Xu
• Yipeng Zhang
• Lefei Zhang
• Dacheng Tao

In practice, the circumstance that training and test data are clean is not always satisfied. The performance of existing methods in the learning using privileged information (LUPI) paradigm may be seriously challenged, due to the lack of clear strategies to address potential noises in the data. This paper proposes a novel Robust SVM+ (RSVM+) algorithm based on a rigorous theoretical analysis. Under the SVM+ framework in the LUPI paradigm, we study the lower bound of perturbations of both example feature data and privileged feature data, which will mislead the model to make wrong decisions. By maximizing the lower bound, tolerance of the learned model over perturbations will be increased. Accordingly, a novel regularization function is introduced to upgrade a variant form of SVM+. The objective function of RSVM+ is transformed into a quadratic programming problem, which can be efficiently optimized using off-the-shelf solvers. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the necessity of studying robust SVM+ and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Self-Representative Manifold Concept Factorization with Adaptive Neighbors for Clustering

• Sihan Ma
• Lefei Zhang
• Wenbin Hu
• Yipeng Zhang
• Jia Wu
• Xuelong Li

Matrix Factorization based methods, e. g. , the Concept Factorization (CF) and Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF), have been proved to be efficient and effective for data clustering tasks. In recent years, various graph extensions of CF and NMF have been proposed to explore intrinsic geometrical structure of data for the purpose of better clustering performance. However, many methods build the affinity matrix used in the manifold structure directly based on the input data. Therefore, the clustering results are highly sensitive to the input data. To further improve the clustering performance, we propose a novel manifold concept factorization model with adaptive neighbor structure to learn a better affinity matrix and clustering indicator matrix at the same time. Technically, the proposed model constructs the affinity matrix by assigning the adaptive and optimal neighbors to each point based on the local distance of the learned new representation of the original data with itself as a dictionary. Our experimental results present superior performance over the state-of-the-art alternatives on numerous datasets.