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Chao GAO

45 accepted papers

2026

FreeAskWorld: An Interactive and Closed-Loop Simulator for Human-Centric Embodied AI

AAAI 2026technical

As embodied intelligence emerges as a core frontier in artificial intelligence research, simulation platforms must evolve beyond low-level physical interactions to capture complex, human-centered social behaviors. We introduce FreeAskWorld, an interactive simulation framework that integrates large l

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Mind the Generative Details: Direct Localized Detail Preference Optimization for Video Diffusion Models

CVPR 2026

Aligning text-to-video diffusion models with human preferences is crucial for generating high-quality videos. Existing Direct Preference Otimization (DPO) methods rely on multi-sample ranking and task-specific critic models, which is inefficient and often yields ambiguous global supervision. To addr

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Modeling Trend Dynamics with Variational Neural ODEs for Information Popularity Prediction

AAAI 2026technical

Predicting the future popularity of information in online social networks is a crucial yet challenging task, due to the complex spatiotemporal dynamics underlying information diffusion. Existing methods typically use structural or sequential patterns within the observation window as direct inputs fo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Principled Fast and Meta Knowledge Learners for Continual Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Inspired by the human learning and memory system, particularly the interplay between the hippocampus and cerebral cortex, this study proposes a dual-learner framework comprising a fast learner and a meta learner to address continual Reinforcement Learning~(RL) problems. These two learners are couple…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RAISE: Requirement-Adaptive Evolutionary Refinement for Training-Free Text-to-Image Alignment

CVPR 2026

Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieve remarkable realism, yet faithful prompt-image alignment remains challenging, particularly for complex prompts with multiple objects, relations, and fine-grained attributes. Existing training-free inference-time scaling methods rely on fixed iterati

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

RePack then Refine: Efficient Diffusion Transformers with Vision Foundation Models

ICML 2026poster

Semantic-rich features from Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have been leveraged to enhance Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). However, raw VFM features are typically high-dimensional and redundant, increasing the difficulty of learning and reducing training efficiency for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs).…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Generalized Diffusion Framework with Learnable Propagation Dynamics for Source Localization

IJCAI 2025

Source localization has been widely studied in recent years due to its crucial role in controlling the spread of harmful information. Existing methods only achieve satisfactory performance within a specific propagation model, which restricts their applicability and generalizability across different

2025

A Prior-based Discrete Diffusion Model for Social Graph Generation

IJCAI 2025

Graph generation is essential in social network analysis, particularly for modeling information flow and user interactions. However, existing probabilistic diffusion models face challenges when applied to social propagation graphs. The continuous noise does not apply to the discrete nature of graph

2025

Any Information Is Just Worth One Single Screenshot: Unifying Search With Visualized Information Retrieval

ACL 2025long

With the popularity of multimodal techniques, it receives growing interests to acquire useful information in visual forms. In this work, we formally define an emerging IR paradigm called Visualized Information Retrieval, or Vis-IR, where multimodal information, such as texts, images, tables and char…

2025

Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Introducing **MARK**, the **M**ulti-st**A**ge **R**easoning framewor**K** for cultural value survey response simulation, designed to enhance the accuracy, steerability, and interpretability of large language models in this task. The system is inspired by the type dynamics theory in the MBTI psycholo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Can Retelling Have Adequate Information for Reasoning? An Enhancement Method for Imperfect Video Understanding with Large Language Model

IJCAI 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in video understanding. However, it exhibits hallucinations and factual errors in video description. On the one hand, existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are primarily trained by combining language models and vision models, w

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Good Advisor for Source Localization: Using Large Language Model to Guide the Source Inference Process

IJCAI 2025

With the rapid development of AI large model technology, large language models (LLMs) provide a new solution for source localization tasks due to the deep linguistic understanding and generation capabilities. However, it is difficult to understand complex propagation patterns and network structures

2025

HawkBench: Investigating Resilience of RAG Methods on Stratified Information-Seeking Tasks

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

In real-world information-seeking scenarios, users have dynamic and diverse needs, requiring RAG systems to demonstrate adaptable resilience. To comprehensively evaluate the resilience of current RAG methods, we introduce HawkBench, a human-labeled, multi-domain benchmark designed to rigorously asse…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Hybrid Relational Graphs with Sentiment-laden Semantic Alignment for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

IJCAI 2025

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) focuses on detecting the emotions expressed by speakers in each utterance. Recent research has increasingly leveraged graph-based models to capture interactive relationships in conversations, enhancing the ability to extract emotional cues. Howev

2025

HyperDet: Source Detection in Hypergraphs via Interactive Relationship Construction and Feature-rich Attention Fusion

IJCAI 2025

Hypergraphs offer superior modeling capabilities for social networks, particularly in capturing group phenomena that extend beyond pairwise interactions in rumor propagation. Existing approaches in rumor source detection predominantly focus on dyadic interactions, which inadequately address the comp

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

HyperIDP: Customizing Temporal Hypergraph Neural Networks for Multi-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction

COLING 2025main

Information diffusion prediction is crucial for understanding how information spreads within social networks, addressing both macroscopic and microscopic prediction tasks. Macroscopic prediction assesses the overall impact of diffusion, while microscopic prediction focuses on identifying the next us…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Information-Computation Tradeoffs for Noiseless Linear Regression with Oblivious Contamination

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study the task of noiseless linear regression under Gaussian covariates in the presence of additive oblivious contamination. Specifically, we are given i.i.d.\ samples from a distribution $(x, y)$ on $\mathbb R^d \times \mathbb R$ with $x \sim \mathcal N(0,I_d)$ and $y = x^\top \beta + z$, wh…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning Complex Heterogeneous Multimodal Fake News via Social Latent Network Inference

AAAI 2025technical

With the diversification of online social platforms, news dissemination has become increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and multimodal, making the fake news detection task more challenging and crucial. Previous works mainly focus on obtaining social relationships of news via retweets, limiting the a…

2025

Learning Neural Jump Stochastic Differential Equations with Latent Graph for Multivariate Temporal Point Processes

IJCAI 2025

Multivariate Temporal Point Processes (MTPPs) play an important role in diverse domains such as social networks and finance for predicting event sequence data. In recent years, MTPPs based on Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) have demonstrated their

2025

OpenBench: A New Benchmark and Baseline for Semantic Navigation in Smart Logistics

ICRA 2025

The increasing demand for efficient last-mile delivery in smart logistics underscores the role of autonomous robots in enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs. Traditional navigation methods, which depend on highprecision maps, are resource-intensive, while learning-based approaches ofte

Cited by 5SourcecodeScholar
2025

Re-ttention: Ultra Sparse Visual Generation via Attention Statistical Reshape

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become the de-facto model for generating high-quality visual content like videos and images. A huge bottleneck is the attention mechanism where complexity scales quadratically with resolution and video length. One logical way to lessen this burden is sparse attentio…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

SDMG: Smoothing Your Diffusion Models for Powerful Graph Representation Learning

ICML 2025poster

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have recently demonstrated impressive generative capabilities. There is emerging evidence that their sample reconstruction ability can yield meaningful representations for recognition tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate that the objectives underlying generation…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SourceDetMamba: A Graph-aware State Space Model for Source Detection in Sequential Hypergraphs

IJCAI 2025

Source detection on graphs has demonstrated high efficacy in identifying rumor origins. Despite advances in machine learning-based methods, many fail to capture intrinsic dynamics of rumor propagation. In this work, we present SourceDetMamba: A Graph-aware State Space Model for Source Detection in S

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Volume Optimality in Conformal Prediction with Structured Prediction Sets

ICML 2025poster

Conformal Prediction is a widely studied technique to construct prediction sets of future observations. Most conformal prediction methods focus on achieving the necessary coverage guarantees, but do not provide formal guarantees on the size (volume) of the prediction sets. We first prove the impossi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A Multiscale Objective Function for Camera Color Correction

ICASSP 2024accepted

Color correction (CC) plays a pivotal role in camera imaging. Existing approaches usually conduct CC tuning by minimizing ∆E (e.g. ∆E2000), a standard metric proposed by CIE for representing color differences in LAB space. However, we observe that not all the colors with identical ∆E error to the ta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Cylindrical Thompson Sampling for High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization

AISTATS 2024poster

Many industrial and scientific applications require optimization of one or more objectives by tuning dozens or hundreds of input parameters. While Bayesian optimization has been a popular approach for the efficient optimization of blackbox functions, its performance decreases drastically as the dime…

2024

DAG-Aware Variational Autoencoder for Social Propagation Graph Generation

AAAI 2024technical

Propagation models in social networks are critical, with extensive applications across various fields and downstream tasks. However, existing propagation models are often oversimplified, scenario-specific, and lack real-world user social attributes. These limitations detaching from real-world analys…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Exploiting the Replay Memory Before Exploring the Environment: Enhancing Reinforcement Learning Through Empirical MDP Iteration

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are typically based on optimizing a Markov Decision Process (MDP) using the optimal Bellman equation. Recent studies have revealed that focusing the optimization of Bellman equations solely on in-sample actions tends to result in more stable optimization, espec…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

GAMC: An Unsupervised Method for Fake News Detection Using Graph Autoencoder with Masking

AAAI 2024technical

With the rise of social media, the spread of fake news has become a significant concern, potentially misleading public perceptions and impacting social stability. Although deep learning methods like CNNs, RNNs, and Transformer-based models like BERT have enhanced fake news detection. However, they p…

2024

GIN-SD: Source Detection in Graphs with Incomplete Nodes via Positional Encoding and Attentive Fusion

AAAI 2024technical

Source detection in graphs has demonstrated robust efficacy in the domain of rumor source identification. Although recent solutions have enhanced performance by leveraging deep neural networks, they often require complete user data. In this paper, we address a more challenging task, rumor source det…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

Joint Source Localization in Different Platforms via Implicit Propagation Characteristics of Similar Topics

IJCAI 2024poster

Different social media are widely used in our daily lives. Inspired by the fact that similar topics have similar propagation characteristics, we mine the implicit knowledge of cascades with similar topics from different platforms to enhance the localization performance for scenarios where limited pr…

2024

Monte Carlo Tree Search in the Presence of Transition Uncertainty

AAAI 2024technical

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an immensely popular search-based framework used for decision making. It is traditionally applied to domains where a perfect simulation model of the environment is available. We study and improve MCTS in the context where the environment model is given but imperfect…

2024

ResAD: A Simple Framework for Class Generalizable Anomaly Detection

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

This paper explores the problem of class-generalizable anomaly detection, where the objective is to train one unified AD model that can generalize to detect anomalies in diverse classes from different domains without any retraining or fine-tuning on the target data. Because normal feature representa…

2023

Sequential Attention Source Identification Based on Feature Representation

IJCAI 2023poster

Snapshot observation based source localization has been widely studied due to its accessibility and low cost. However, the interaction of users in existing methods does not be addressed in time-varying infection scenarios. So these methods have a decreased accuracy in heterogeneous interaction scena…

2022

Sample Average Approximation for Stochastic Optimization with Dependent Data: Performance Guarantees and Tractability

AAAI 2022technical

Sample average approximation (SAA), a popular method for tractably solving stochastic optimization problems, enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees in settings with independent training samples. However, these guarantees are not known to hold generally with dependent samples, such as in onl…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2021

SCC: an efficient deep reinforcement learning agent mastering the game of StarCraft II

ICML 2021spotlight

AlphaStar, the AI that reaches GrandMaster level in StarCraft II, is a remarkable milestone demonstrating what deep reinforcement learning can achieve in complex Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games. However, the complexities of the game, algorithms and systems, and especially the tremendous amount of com…

2019

BASNet: Boundary-Aware Salient Object Detection

CVPR 2019poster

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have been adopted for salient object detection and achieved the state-of-the-art performance. Most of the previous works however focus on region accuracy but not on the boundary quality. In this paper, we propose a predict-refine architecture, BASNet, and a new hyb…

Cited by 1782PDFcodeScholar