Adaptive Backdoor Attacks with Reasonable Constraints on Graph Neural Networks

Recent studies show that graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks against GNNs use fixed-pattern triggers and lack reasonable trigger constraints, overlooking individual graph characteristics and rendering insufficient evasiveness. To tackle the above issues, we propose ABARC, the first Adaptive Backdoor Attack with Reasonable Constraints, applying to both graph-level and node-level tasks in GNNs. For graph-level tasks, we propose a subgraph backdoor attack independent of the graph's topology. It dynamically selects trigger nodes for each target graph and modifies node features with constraints based on graph similarity, feature range, and feature type. For node-level tasks, our attack begins with an analysis of node features, followed by selecting and modifying trigger features, which are then constrained by node similarity, feature range, and feature type. Furthermore, an adaptive edge-pruning mechanism is designed to reduce the impact of neighbors on target nodes, ensuring a high attack success rate (ASR). Experimental results show that even with reasonable constraints for attack evasiveness, our attack achieves a high ASR while incurring a marginal clean accuracy drop (CAD). When combined with the state-of-the-art defense randomized smoothing (RS) method, our attack maintains an ASR over 94%, surpassing existing attacks by more than 7%.

LLM-EvRep: Learning an LLM-Compatible Event Representation Using a Self-Supervised Framework

Recent advancements in event-based recognition have demonstrated significant promise, yet most existing approaches rely on extensive training, limiting their adaptability for efficient processing of event-driven visual content. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable zero-shot capabilities across diverse domains, but their application to event-based visual recognition remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{LLM-EvGen}, an event representation generator that produces LLM-compatible event representations \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, thereby enhancing the performance of LLMs on event recognition tasks. The generator is trained using a self-supervised framework, aligning the generated representations with semantic consistency and structural fidelity. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on three datasets: N-ImageNet, N-Caltech101, and N-MNIST. The results demonstrate that our method, \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, outperforms the event-to-video method, E2VID, by 15.93\%, 0.82\%, and 50.21\%, respectively, in recognition tasks when evaluated using GPT-4o.

AutoCBT: An Autonomous Multi-agent Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychological Counseling

Traditional in-person psychological counseling remains primarily niche, often chosen by individuals with psychological issues, while online automated counseling offers a potential solution for those hesitant to seek help due to feelings of shame. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an essential and widely used approach in psychological counseling. The advent of large language models (LLMs) and agent technology enables automatic CBT diagnosis and treatment. However, current LLM-based CBT systems use agents with a fixed structure, limiting their self-optimization capabilities, or providing hollow, unhelpful suggestions due to redundant response patterns. In this work, we utilize Quora-like and YiXinLi single-round consultation models to build a general agent framework that generates high-quality responses for single-turn psychological consultation scenarios. We use a bilingual dataset to evaluate the quality of single-response consultations generated by each framework. Then, we incorporate dynamic routing and supervisory mechanisms inspired by real psychological counseling to construct a CBT-oriented autonomous multi-agent framework, demonstrating its general applicability. Experimental results indicate that AutoCBT can provide higher-quality automated psychological counseling services.

NVS-SQA: Exploring Self-Supervised Quality Representation Learning for Neurally Synthesized Scenes without References

Neural View Synthesis (NVS), such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting, effectively creates photorealistic scenes from sparse viewpoints, typically evaluated by quality assessment methods like PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. However, these full-reference methods, which compare synthesized views to reference views, may not fully capture the perceptual quality of neurally synthesized scenes (NSS), particularly due to the limited availability of dense reference views. Furthermore, the challenges in acquiring human perceptual labels hinder the creation of extensive labeled datasets, risking model overfitting and reduced generalizability. To address these issues, we propose NVS-SQA, a NSS quality assessment method to learn no-reference quality representations through self-supervision without reliance on human labels. Traditional self-supervised learning predominantly relies on the "same instance, similar representation" assumption and extensive datasets. However, given that these conditions do not apply in NSS quality assessment, we employ heuristic cues and quality scores as learning objectives, along with a specialized contrastive pair preparation process to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of learning. The results show that NVS-SQA outperforms 17 no-reference methods by a large margin (i.e., on average 109.5% in SRCC, 98.6% in PLCC, and 91.5% in KRCC over the second best) and even exceeds 16 full-reference methods across all evaluation metrics (i.e., 22.9% in SRCC, 19.1% in PLCC, and 18.6% in KRCC over the second best).

Small Language Model as Data Prospector for Large Language Model

The quality of instruction data directly affects the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs). Previously, \cite{li2023one} proposed \texttt{NUGGETS}, which identifies and selects high-quality quality data from a large dataset by identifying those individual instruction examples that can significantly improve the performance of different tasks after being learnt as one-shot instances. In this work, we propose \texttt{SuperNUGGETS}, an improved variant of \texttt{NUGGETS} optimised for efficiency and performance. Our \texttt{SuperNUGGETS} uses a small language model (SLM) instead of a large language model (LLM) to filter the data for outstanding one-shot instances and refines the predefined set of tests. The experimental results show that the performance of \texttt{SuperNUGGETS} only decreases by 1-2% compared to \texttt{NUGGETS}, but the efficiency can be increased by a factor of 58. Compared to the original \texttt{NUGGETS}, our \texttt{SuperNUGGETS} has a higher utility value due to the significantly lower resource consumption.

AutoPatent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automatic Patent Generation

As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, the field of patent processing has garnered increased attention within the natural language processing community. However, the majority of research has been concentrated on classification tasks, such as patent categorization and examination, or on short text generation tasks like patent summarization and patent quizzes. In this paper, we introduce a novel and practical task known as Draft2Patent, along with its corresponding D2P benchmark, which challenges LLMs to generate full-length patents averaging 17K tokens based on initial drafts. Patents present a significant challenge to LLMs due to their specialized nature, standardized terminology, and extensive length. We propose a multi-agent framework called AutoPatent which leverages the LLM-based planner agent, writer agents, and examiner agent with PGTree and RRAG to generate lengthy, intricate, and high-quality complete patent documents. The experimental results demonstrate that our AutoPatent framework significantly enhances the ability to generate comprehensive patents across various LLMs. Furthermore, we have discovered that patents generated solely with the AutoPatent framework based on the Qwen2.5-7B model outperform those produced by larger and more powerful LLMs, such as GPT-4o, Qwen2.5-72B, and LLAMA3.1-70B, in both objective metrics and human evaluations. We will make the data and code available upon acceptance at \url{https://github.com/QiYao-Wang/AutoPatent}.

NeRF-NQA: No-Reference Quality Assessment for Scenes Generated by NeRF and Neural View Synthesis Methods

Neural View Synthesis (NVS) has demonstrated efficacy in generating high-fidelity dense viewpoint videos using a image set with sparse views. However, existing quality assessment methods like PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS are not tailored for the scenes with dense viewpoints synthesized by NVS and NeRF variants, thus, they often fall short in capturing the perceptual quality, including spatial and angular aspects of NVS-synthesized scenes. Furthermore, the lack of dense ground truth views makes the full reference quality assessment on NVS-synthesized scenes challenging. For instance, datasets such as LLFF provide only sparse images, insufficient for complete full-reference assessments. To address the issues above, we propose NeRF-NQA, the first no-reference quality assessment method for densely-observed scenes synthesized from the NVS and NeRF variants. NeRF-NQA employs a joint quality assessment strategy, integrating both viewwise and pointwise approaches, to evaluate the quality of NVS-generated scenes. The viewwise approach assesses the spatial quality of each individual synthesized view and the overall inter-views consistency, while the pointwise approach focuses on the angular qualities of scene surface points and their compound inter-point quality. Extensive evaluations are conducted to compare NeRF-NQA with 23 mainstream visual quality assessment methods (from fields of image, video, and light-field assessment). The results demonstrate NeRF-NQA outperforms the existing assessment methods significantly and it shows substantial superiority on assessing NVS-synthesized scenes without references. An implementation of this paper are available at https://github.com/VincentQQu/NeRF-NQA.

Light Field Image Quality Assessment With Auxiliary Learning Based on Depthwise and Anglewise Separable Convolutions

In multimedia broadcasting, no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is used to indicate the user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) and to support intelligent data transmission while optimizing user experience. This paper proposes an improved no-reference light field image quality assessment (NR-LFIQA) metric for future immersive media broadcasting services. First, we extend the concept of depthwise separable convolution (DSC) to the spatial domain of light field image (LFI) and introduce "light field depthwise separable convolution (LF-DSC)", which can extract the LFI's spatial features efficiently. Second, we further theoretically extend the LF-DSC to the angular space of LFI and introduce the novel concept of "light field anglewise separable convolution (LF-ASC)", which is capable of extracting both the spatial and angular features for comprehensive quality assessment with low complexity. Third, we define the spatial and angular feature estimations as auxiliary tasks in aiding the primary NR-LFIQA task by providing spatial and angular quality features as hints. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first exploration of deep auxiliary learning with spatial-angular hints on NR-LFIQA. Experiments were conducted in mainstream LFI datasets such as Win5-LID and SMART with comparisons to the mainstream full reference IQA metrics as well as the state-of-the-art NR-LFIQA methods. The experimental results show that the proposed metric yields overall 42.86% and 45.95% smaller prediction errors than the second-best benchmarking metric in Win5-LID and SMART, respectively. In some challenging cases with particular distortion types, the proposed metric can reduce the errors significantly by more than 60%.

EvRepSL: Event-Stream Representation via Self-Supervised Learning for Event-Based Vision

Event-stream representation is the first step for many computer vision tasks using event cameras. It converts the asynchronous event-streams into a formatted structure so that conventional machine learning models can be applied easily. However, most of the state-of-the-art event-stream representations are manually designed and the quality of these representations cannot be guaranteed due to the noisy nature of event-streams. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven approach aiming at enhancing the quality of event-stream representations. Our approach commences with the introduction of a new event-stream representation based on spatial-temporal statistics, denoted as EvRep. Subsequently, we theoretically derive the intrinsic relationship between asynchronous event-streams and synchronous video frames. Building upon this theoretical relationship, we train a representation generator, RepGen, in a self-supervised learning manner accepting EvRep as input. Finally, the event-streams are converted to high-quality representations, termed as EvRepSL, by going through the learned RepGen (without the need of fine-tuning or retraining). Our methodology is rigorously validated through extensive evaluations on a variety of mainstream event-based classification and optical flow datasets (captured with various types of event cameras). The experimental results highlight not only our approach's superior performance over existing event-stream representations but also its versatility, being agnostic to different event cameras and tasks.

Beyond Gaussians: Fast and High-Fidelity 3D Splatting with Linear Kernels

Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have substantially improved novel view synthesis, enabling high-quality reconstruction and real-time rendering. However, blurring artifacts, such as floating primitives and over-reconstruction, remain challenging. Current methods address these issues by refining scene structure, enhancing geometric representations, addressing blur in training images, improving rendering consistency, and optimizing density control, yet the role of kernel design remains underexplored. We identify the soft boundaries of Gaussian ellipsoids as one of the causes of these artifacts, limiting detail capture in high-frequency regions. To bridge this gap, we introduce 3D Linear Splatting (3DLS), which replaces Gaussian kernels with linear kernels to achieve sharper and more precise results, particularly in high-frequency regions. Through evaluations on three datasets, 3DLS demonstrates state-of-the-art fidelity and accuracy, along with a 30% FPS improvement over baseline 3DGS. The implementation will be made publicly available upon acceptance.