Exact and Asymptotically Complete Robust Verifications of Neural Networks via Quantum Optimization

Deep neural networks (DNNs) enable high performance across domains but remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, limiting their use in safety-critical settings. Here, we introduce two quantum-optimization-based models for robust verification that reduce the combinatorial burden of certification under bounded input perturbations. For piecewise-linear activations (e.g., ReLU and hardtanh), our first model yields an exact formulation that is sound and complete, enabling precise identification of adversarial examples. For general activations (including sigmoid and tanh), our second model constructs scalable over-approximations via piecewise-constant bounds and is asymptotically complete, with approximation error vanishing as the segmentation is refined. We further integrate Quantum Benders Decomposition with interval arithmetic to accelerate solving, and propose certificate-transfer bounds that relate robustness guarantees of pruned networks to those of the original model. Finally, a layerwise partitioning strategy supports a quantum--classical hybrid workflow by coupling subproblems across depth. Experiments on robustness benchmarks show high certification accuracy, indicating that quantum optimization can serve as a principled primitive for robustness guarantees in neural networks with complex activations.

ReaSeq: Unleashing World Knowledge via Reasoning for Sequential Modeling

Industrial recommender systems face two fundamental limitations under the log-driven paradigm: (1) knowledge poverty in ID-based item representations that causes brittle interest modeling under data sparsity, and (2) systemic blindness to beyond-log user interests that constrains model performance within platform boundaries. These limitations stem from an over-reliance on shallow interaction statistics and close-looped feedback while neglecting the rich world knowledge about product semantics and cross-domain behavioral patterns that Large Language Models have learned from vast corpora. To address these challenges, we introduce ReaSeq, a reasoning-enhanced framework that leverages world knowledge in Large Language Models to address both limitations through explicit and implicit reasoning. Specifically, ReaSeq employs explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning via multi-agent collaboration to distill structured product knowledge into semantically enriched item representations, and latent reasoning via Diffusion Large Language Models to infer plausible beyond-log behaviors. Deployed on Taobao's ranking system serving hundreds of millions of users, ReaSeq achieves substantial gains: >6.0% in IPV and CTR, >2.9% in Orders, and >2.5% in GMV, validating the effectiveness of world-knowledge-enhanced reasoning over purely log-driven approaches.

KwaiChat: A Large-Scale Video-Driven Multilingual Mixed-Type Dialogue Corpus

Video-based dialogue systems, such as education assistants, have compelling application value, thereby garnering growing interest. However, the current video-based dialogue systems are limited by their reliance on a single dialogue type, which hinders their versatility in practical applications across a range of scenarios, including question-answering, emotional dialog, etc. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to generate video-driven multilingual mixed-type dialogues. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a novel task and create a human-to-human video-driven multilingual mixed-type dialogue corpus, termed KwaiChat, containing a total of 93,209 videos and 246,080 dialogues, across 4 dialogue types, 30 domains, 4 languages, and 13 topics. Additionally, we establish baseline models on KwaiChat. An extensive analysis of 7 distinct LLMs on KwaiChat reveals that GPT-4o achieves the best performance but still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and fine-tuning, which indicates that the task is not trivial and needs further research.

STAMPsy: Towards SpatioTemporal-Aware Mixed-Type Dialogues for Psychological Counseling

Online psychological counseling dialogue systems are trending, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional in-person therapy. However, existing psychological counseling dialogue systems mainly focus on basic empathetic dialogue or QA with minimal professional knowledge and without goal guidance. In many real-world counseling scenarios, clients often seek multi-type help, such as diagnosis, consultation, therapy, console, and common questions, but existing dialogue systems struggle to combine different dialogue types naturally. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct mixed-type dialogue systems for psychological counseling that enable clients to clarify their goals before proceeding with counseling. To mitigate the challenge, we collect a mixed-type counseling dialogues corpus termed STAMPsy, covering five dialogue types, task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, knowledge-grounded dialogue, conversational recommendation, empathetic dialogue, and question answering, over 5,000 conversations. Moreover, spatiotemporal-aware knowledge enables systems to have world awareness and has been proven to affect one's mental health. Therefore, we link dialogues in STAMPsy to spatiotemporal state and propose a spatiotemporal-aware mixed-type psychological counseling dataset. Additionally, we build baselines on STAMPsy and develop an iterative self-feedback psychological dialogue generation framework, named Self-STAMPsy. Results indicate that clarifying dialogue goals in advance and utilizing spatiotemporal states are effective.

2M-NER: Contrastive Learning for Multilingual and Multimodal NER with Language and Modal Fusion

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing that involves identifying and classifying entities in sentences into pre-defined types. It plays a crucial role in various research fields, including entity linking, question answering, and online product recommendation. Recent studies have shown that incorporating multilingual and multimodal datasets can enhance the effectiveness of NER. This is due to language transfer learning and the presence of shared implicit features across different modalities. However, the lack of a dataset that combines multilingualism and multimodality has hindered research exploring the combination of these two aspects, as multimodality can help NER in multiple languages simultaneously. In this paper, we aim to address a more challenging task: multilingual and multimodal named entity recognition (MMNER), considering its potential value and influence. Specifically, we construct a large-scale MMNER dataset with four languages (English, French, German and Spanish) and two modalities (text and image). To tackle this challenging MMNER task on the dataset, we introduce a new model called 2M-NER, which aligns the text and image representations using contrastive learning and integrates a multimodal collaboration module to effectively depict the interactions between the two modalities. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the highest F1 score in multilingual and multimodal NER tasks compared to some comparative and representative baselines. Additionally, in a challenging analysis, we discovered that sentence-level alignment interferes a lot with NER models, indicating the higher level of difficulty in our dataset.

SwG-former: Sliding-window Graph Convolutional Network Integrated with Conformer for Sound Event Localization and Detection

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) is a joint task of sound event detection (SED) and direction of arrival (DoA) estimation. SED mainly relies on temporal dependencies to distinguish different sound classes, while DoA estimation depends on spatial correlations to estimate source directions. To jointly optimize two subtasks, the SELD system should extract spatial correlations and model temporal dependencies simultaneously. However, numerous models mainly extract spatial correlations and model temporal dependencies separately. In this paper, the interdependence of spatial-temporal information in audio signals is exploited for simultaneous extraction to enhance the model performance. In response, a novel graph representation leveraging graph convolutional network (GCN) in non-Euclidean space is developed to extract spatial-temporal information concurrently. A sliding-window graph (SwG) module is designed based on the graph representation. It exploits sliding-windows with different sizes to learn temporal context information and dynamically constructs graph vertices in the frequency-channel (F-C) domain to capture spatial correlations. Furthermore, as the cornerstone of message passing, a robust Conv2dAgg function is proposed and embedded into the SwG module to aggregate the features of neighbor vertices. To improve the performance of SELD in a natural spatial acoustic environment, a general and efficient SwG-former model is proposed by integrating the SwG module with the Conformer. It exhibits superior performance in comparison to recent advanced SELD models. To further validate the generality and efficiency of the SwG-former, it is seamlessly integrated into the event-independent network version 2 (EINV2) called SwG-EINV2. The SwG-EINV2 surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods under the same acoustic environment.

MEFLUT: Unsupervised 1D Lookup Tables for Multi-exposure Image Fusion

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for high-quality multi-exposure image fusion (MEF). We show that the fusion weights of an exposure can be encoded into a 1D lookup table (LUT), which takes pixel intensity value as input and produces fusion weight as output. We learn one 1D LUT for each exposure, then all the pixels from different exposures can query 1D LUT of that exposure independently for high-quality and efficient fusion. Specifically, to learn these 1D LUTs, we involve attention mechanism in various dimensions including frame, channel and spatial ones into the MEF task so as to bring us significant quality improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA). In addition, we collect a new MEF dataset consisting of 960 samples, 155 of which are manually tuned by professionals as ground-truth for evaluation. Our network is trained by this dataset in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of all the newly proposed components, and results show that our approach outperforms the SOTA in our and another representative dataset SICE, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, our 1D LUT approach takes less than 4ms to run a 4K image on a PC GPU. Given its high quality, efficiency and robustness, our method has been shipped into millions of Android mobiles across multiple brands world-wide. Code is available at: https://github.com/Hedlen/MEFLUT.

Application of Zone Method based Machine Learning and Physics-Informed Neural Networks in Reheating Furnaces

Despite the high economic relevance of Foundation Industries, certain components like Reheating furnaces within their manufacturing chain are energy-intensive. Notable energy consumption reduction could be obtained by reducing the overall heating time in furnaces. Computer-integrated Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered control systems in furnaces could be enablers in achieving the Net-Zero goals in Foundation Industries for sustainable manufacturing. In this work, due to the infeasibility of achieving good quality data in scenarios like reheating furnaces, classical Hottel's zone method based computational model has been used to generate data for ML and Deep Learning (DL) based model training via regression. It should be noted that the zone method provides an elegant way to model the physical phenomenon of Radiative Heat Transfer (RHT), the dominating heat transfer mechanism in high-temperature processes inside heating furnaces. Using this data, an extensive comparison among a wide range of state-of-the-art, representative ML and DL methods has been made against their temperature prediction performances in varying furnace environments. Owing to their holistic balance among inference times and model performance, DL stands out among its counterparts. To further enhance the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization capability of the trained DL models, we propose a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) by incorporating prior physical knowledge using a set of novel Energy-Balance regularizers. Our setup is a generic framework, is geometry-agnostic of the 3D structure of the underlying furnace, and as such could accommodate any standard ML regression model, to serve as a Digital Twin of the underlying physical processes, for transitioning Foundation Industries towards Industry 4.0.

MidMed: Towards Mixed-Type Dialogues for Medical Consultation

Most medical dialogue systems assume that patients have clear goals (medicine querying, surgical operation querying, etc.) before medical consultation. However, in many real scenarios, due to the lack of medical knowledge, it is usually difficult for patients to determine clear goals with all necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct medical consultation dialogue systems to help patients clarify their goals. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a novel task and create a human-to-human mixed-type medical consultation dialogue corpus, termed MidMed, covering five dialogue types: task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, recommendation, knowledge-grounded dialogue, QA, and chitchat. MidMed covers four departments (otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, skin, and digestive system), with 8,175 dialogues. Furthermore, we build baselines on MidMed and propose an instruction-guiding medical dialogue generation framework, termed InsMed, to address this task. Experimental results show the effectiveness of InsMed.

LSGNN: Towards General Graph Neural Network in Node Classification by Local Similarity

Heterophily has been considered as an issue that hurts the performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). To address this issue, some existing work uses a graph-level weighted fusion of the information of multi-hop neighbors to include more nodes with homophily. However, the heterophily might differ among nodes, which requires to consider the local topology. Motivated by it, we propose to use the local similarity (LocalSim) to learn node-level weighted fusion, which can also serve as a plug-and-play module. For better fusion, we propose a novel and efficient Initial Residual Difference Connection (IRDC) to extract more informative multi-hop information. Moreover, we provide theoretical analysis on the effectiveness of LocalSim representing node homophily on synthetic graphs. Extensive evaluations over real benchmark datasets show that our proposed method, namely Local Similarity Graph Neural Network (LSGNN), can offer comparable or superior state-of-the-art performance on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Meanwhile, the plug-and-play model can significantly boost the performance of existing GNNs. Our code is provided at https://github.com/draym28/LSGNN.