Agent Journey Beyond RGB: Unveiling Hybrid Semantic-Spatial Environmental Representations for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Navigating unseen environments based on natural language instructions remains difficult for egocentric agents in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). While recent advancements have yielded promising outcomes, they primarily rely on RGB images for environmental representation, often overlooking the underlying semantic knowledge and spatial cues. Intuitively, humans inherently ground textual semantics within the spatial layout during indoor navigation. Inspired by this, we propose a versatile Semantic Understanding and Spatial Awareness (SUSA) architecture to facilitate navigation. SUSA includes a Textual Semantic Understanding (TSU) module, which narrows the modality gap between instructions and environments by generating and associating the descriptions of environmental landmarks in the agent's immediate surroundings. Additionally, a Depth-based Spatial Perception (DSP) module incrementally constructs a depth exploration map, enabling a more nuanced comprehension of environmental layouts. Experimental results demonstrate that SUSA hybrid semantic-spatial representations effectively enhance navigation performance, setting new state-of-the-art performance across three VLN benchmarks (REVERIE, R2R, and SOON). The source code will be publicly available.

How to Use Diffusion Priors under Sparse Views?

Novel view synthesis under sparse views has been a long-term important challenge in 3D reconstruction. Existing works mainly rely on introducing external semantic or depth priors to supervise the optimization of 3D representations. However, the diffusion model, as an external prior that can directly provide visual supervision, has always underperformed in sparse-view 3D reconstruction using Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) due to the low information entropy of sparse views compared to text, leading to optimization challenges caused by mode deviation. To this end, we present a thorough analysis of SDS from the mode-seeking perspective and propose Inline Prior Guided Score Matching (IPSM), which leverages visual inline priors provided by pose relationships between viewpoints to rectify the rendered image distribution and decomposes the original optimization objective of SDS, thereby offering effective diffusion visual guidance without any fine-tuning or pre-training. Furthermore, we propose the IPSM-Gaussian pipeline, which adopts 3D Gaussian Splatting as the backbone and supplements depth and geometry consistency regularization based on IPSM to further improve inline priors and rectified distribution. Experimental results on different public datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. The code is released at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/IPSM.

A Tunable Despeckling Neural Network Stabilized via Diffusion Equation

Multiplicative Gamma noise remove is a critical research area in the application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, where neural networks serve as a potent tool. However, real-world data often diverges from theoretical models, exhibiting various disturbances, which makes the neural network less effective. Adversarial attacks work by finding perturbations that significantly disrupt functionality of neural networks, as the inherent instability of neural networks makes them highly susceptible. A network designed to withstand such extreme cases can more effectively mitigate general disturbances in real SAR data. In this work, the dissipative nature of diffusion equations is employed to underpin a novel approach for countering adversarial attacks and improve the resistance of real noise disturbance. We propose a tunable, regularized neural network that unrolls a denoising unit and a regularization unit into a single network for end-to-end training. In the network, the denoising unit and the regularization unit are composed of the denoising network and the simplest linear diffusion equation respectively. The regularization unit enhances network stability, allowing post-training time step adjustments to effectively mitigate the adverse impacts of adversarial attacks. The stability and convergence of our model are theoretically proven, and in the experiments, we compare our model with several state-of-the-art denoising methods on simulated images, adversarial samples, and real SAR images, yielding superior results in both quantitative and visual evaluations.

Heterophilic Graph Neural Networks Optimization with Causal Message-passing

In this work, we discover that causal inference provides a promising approach to capture heterophilic message-passing in Graph Neural Network (GNN). By leveraging cause-effect analysis, we can discern heterophilic edges based on asymmetric node dependency. The learned causal structure offers more accurate relationships among nodes. To reduce the computational complexity, we introduce intervention-based causal inference in graph learning. We first simplify causal analysis on graphs by formulating it as a structural learning model and define the optimization problem within the Bayesian scheme. We then present an analysis of decomposing the optimization target into a consistency penalty and a structure modification based on cause-effect relations. We then estimate this target by conditional entropy and present insights into how conditional entropy quantifies the heterophily. Accordingly, we propose CausalMP, a causal message-passing discovery network for heterophilic graph learning, that iteratively learns the explicit causal structure of input graphs. We conduct extensive experiments in both heterophilic and homophilic graph settings. The result demonstrates that the our model achieves superior link prediction performance. Training on causal structure can also enhance node representation in classification task across different base models.

UniGAD: Unifying Multi-level Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to identify uncommon, deviated, or suspicious objects within graph-structured data. Existing methods generally focus on a single graph object type (node, edge, graph, etc.) and often overlook the inherent connections among different object types of graph anomalies. For instance, a money laundering transaction might involve an abnormal account and the broader community it interacts with. To address this, we present UniGAD, the first unified framework for detecting anomalies at node, edge, and graph levels jointly. Specifically, we develop the Maximum Rayleigh Quotient Subgraph Sampler (MRQSampler) that unifies multi-level formats by transferring objects at each level into graph-level tasks on subgraphs. We theoretically prove that MRQSampler maximizes the accumulated spectral energy of subgraphs (i.e., the Rayleigh quotient) to preserve the most significant anomaly information. To further unify multi-level training, we introduce a novel GraphStitch Network to integrate information across different levels, adjust the amount of sharing required at each level, and harmonize conflicting training goals. Comprehensive experiments show that UniGAD outperforms both existing GAD methods specialized for a single task and graph prompt-based approaches for multiple tasks, while also providing robust zero-shot task transferability. All codes can be found at https://github.com/lllyyq1121/UniGAD.

Golden Touchstone: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models

As large language models become increasingly prevalent in the financial sector, there is a pressing need for a standardized method to comprehensively assess their performance. However, existing finance benchmarks often suffer from limited language and task coverage, as well as challenges such as low-quality datasets and inadequate adaptability for LLM evaluation. To address these limitations, we propose "Golden Touchstone", the first comprehensive bilingual benchmark for financial LLMs, which incorporates representative datasets from both Chinese and English across eight core financial NLP tasks. Developed from extensive open source data collection and industry-specific demands, this benchmark includes a variety of financial tasks aimed at thoroughly assessing models' language understanding and generation capabilities. Through comparative analysis of major models on the benchmark, such as GPT-4o Llama3, FinGPT and FinMA, we reveal their strengths and limitations in processing complex financial information. Additionally, we open-sourced Touchstone-GPT, a financial LLM trained through continual pre-training and financial instruction tuning, which demonstrates strong performance on the bilingual benchmark but still has limitations in specific tasks.This research not only provides the financial large language models with a practical evaluation tool but also guides the development and optimization of future research. The source code for Golden Touchstone and model weight of Touchstone-GPT have been made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-FinAI/Golden-Touchstone}, contributing to the ongoing evolution of FinLLMs and fostering further research in this critical area.

ElasTST: Towards Robust Varied-Horizon Forecasting with Elastic Time-Series Transformer

Numerous industrial sectors necessitate models capable of providing robust forecasts across various horizons. Despite the recent strides in crafting specific architectures for time-series forecasting and developing pre-trained universal models, a comprehensive examination of their capability in accommodating varied-horizon forecasting during inference is still lacking. This paper bridges this gap through the design and evaluation of the Elastic Time-Series Transformer (ElasTST). The ElasTST model incorporates a non-autoregressive design with placeholders and structured self-attention masks, warranting future outputs that are invariant to adjustments in inference horizons. A tunable version of rotary position embedding is also integrated into ElasTST to capture time-series-specific periods and enhance adaptability to different horizons. Additionally, ElasTST employs a multi-scale patch design, effectively integrating both fine-grained and coarse-grained information. During the training phase, ElasTST uses a horizon reweighting strategy that approximates the effect of random sampling across multiple horizons with a single fixed horizon setting. Through comprehensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art time-series architectures and contemporary foundation models, we demonstrate the efficacy of ElasTST's unique design elements. Our findings position ElasTST as a robust solution for the practical necessity of varied-horizon forecasting.

ProGen: Revisiting Probabilistic Spatial-Temporal Time Series Forecasting from a Continuous Generative Perspective Using Stochastic Differential Equations

Accurate forecasting of spatiotemporal data remains challenging due to complex spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics. The inherent uncertainty and variability in such data often render deterministic models insufficient, prompting a shift towards probabilistic approaches, where diffusion-based generative models have emerged as effective solutions. In this paper, we present ProGen, a novel framework for probabilistic spatiotemporal time series forecasting that leverages Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) and diffusion-based generative modeling techniques in the continuous domain. By integrating a novel denoising score model, graph neural networks, and a tailored SDE, ProGen provides a robust solution that effectively captures spatiotemporal dependencies while managing uncertainty. Our extensive experiments on four benchmark traffic datasets demonstrate that ProGen outperforms state-of-the-art deterministic and probabilistic models. This work contributes a continuous, diffusion-based generative approach to spatiotemporal forecasting, paving the way for future research in probabilistic modeling and stochastic processes.

Graph Pre-Training Models Are Strong Anomaly Detectors

Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) is a challenging and practical research topic where Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently shown promising results. The effectiveness of existing GNNs in GAD has been mainly attributed to the simultaneous learning of node representations and the classifier in an end-to-end manner. Meanwhile, graph pre-training, the two-stage learning paradigm such as DGI and GraphMAE, has shown potential in leveraging unlabeled graph data to enhance downstream tasks, yet its impact on GAD remains under-explored. In this work, we show that graph pre-training models are strong graph anomaly detectors. Specifically, we demonstrate that pre-training is highly competitive, markedly outperforming the state-of-the-art end-to-end training models when faced with limited supervision. To understand this phenomenon, we further uncover pre-training enhances the detection of distant, under-represented, unlabeled anomalies that go beyond 2-hop neighborhoods of known anomalies, shedding light on its superior performance against end-to-end models. Moreover, we extend our examination to the potential of pre-training in graph-level anomaly detection. We envision this work to stimulate a re-evaluation of pre-training's role in GAD and offer valuable insights for future research.

GCoder: Improving Large Language Model for Generalized Graph Problem Solving

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities, making them suitable for complex tasks such as graph computation. Traditional reasoning steps paradigm for graph problems is hindered by unverifiable steps, limited long-term reasoning, and poor generalization to graph variations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GCoder, a code-based LLM designed to enhance problem-solving in generalized graph computation problems. Our method involves constructing an extensive training dataset, GraphWild, featuring diverse graph formats and algorithms. We employ a multi-stage training process, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (RLCF), to refine model capabilities. For unseen tasks, a hybrid retrieval technique is used to augment performance. Experiments demonstrate that GCoder outperforms GPT-4o, with an average accuracy improvement of 16.42% across various graph computational problems. Furthermore, GCoder efficiently manages large-scale graphs with millions of nodes and diverse input formats, overcoming the limitations of previous models focused on the reasoning steps paradigm. This advancement paves the way for more intuitive and effective graph problem-solving using LLMs. Code and data are available at here: https://github.com/Bklight999/WWW25-GCoder/tree/master.