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Fenglong Ma

44 accepted papers

2026

Dynamic Token Reweighting for Robust Vision-Language Models

CVPR 2026

Large vision-language models (VLMs) are highly vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks that exploit visual-textual interactions to bypass safety guardrails. In this paper, we present DTR, a novel inference-time defense that mitigates multimodal jailbreak attacks through optimizing the model's key

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

MedSIGHT: Towards Grounded Visual Comprehension in Medical Large Vision-Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Medical large vision-language models (Med-LVLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in vision–language comprehension and medical image segmentation. However, existing models still struggle to unify these two capabilities, which is essential for achieving clinically reasoning that connects vi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Multi-graph Fusion Cross-model Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

AAAI 2026technical

Knowledge Graph (KG)-supported Graph Neural Network models are becoming crucial in recommendation systems due to their ability to mitigate the data sparsity challenge. However, these models remain suboptimal because they overlook the representation differences between the inherent user-item Bipartit

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Self-Supervised Contrastive Re-Learning for Multi-Graph Multi-Label Classification

AAAI 2026technical

Multi-graph multi-label learning (MGML) represents each object as a bag-of-graphs with multiple labels, but demands large-scale labeled data whose acquisition is often difficult and costly. Self-supervised contrastive learning (SCL) mitigates label dependence by leveraging data augmentation to const

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Towards Robust Multimodal Large Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks

CVPR 2026

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in recent advancements, their susceptibility to jailbreak attacks has come to light. In such attacks, adversaries exploit carefully crafted prompts to coerce models into generating harmful or undesirable content. Existin

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AdaDHP: Fine-Grained Fine-Tuning via Dual Hadamard Product and Adaptive Parameter Selection

ACL 2025long

With the continuously expanding parameters, efficiently adapting large language models to downstream tasks is crucial in resource-limited conditions. Many parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods have emerged to address this challenge. However, they lack flexibility, like LoRA requires manually selec…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Coloring Learning for Heterophilic Graph Representation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Graph self-supervised learning aims to learn the intrinsic graph representations from unlabeled data, with broad applicability in areas such as computing networks. Although graph contrastive learning (GCL) has achieved remarkable progress by generating perturbed views via data augmentation and optim…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Enhancing Foundation Models with Federated Domain Knowledge Infusion

ICML 2025poster

Vision foundation models (FMs) like CLIP have exhibited exceptional capabilities in visual and linguistic understanding, particularly in zero-shot inference tasks. However, these models struggle with data that significantly deviates from their training samples, necessitating fine-tuning, which is of…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Focus on What Matters: Enhancing Medical Vision-Language Models with Automatic Attention Alignment Tuning

ACL 2025long

Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs) often exhibit suboptimal attention distribution on visual inputs, leading to hallucinated or inaccurate outputs. Existing methods primarily rely on inference-time interventions, which are limited in attention adaptation or require additional supervisi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

HQA-VLAttack: Towards High Quality Adversarial Attack on Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Black-box adversarial attack on vision-language pre-trained models is a practical and challenging task, as text and image perturbations need to be considered simultaneously, and only the predicted results are accessible. Research on this problem is in its infancy, and only a handful of methods are a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Multi-Label Few-Shot Image Classification via Pairwise Feature Augmentation and Flexible Prompt Learning

AAAI 2025technical

Multi-label few-shot image classification is a crucial and challenging task due to limited annotated data and elusive category specificity. However, research on this topic is still in the rudimentary stage and few methods are available. Existing methods either leverage data augmentation to alleviate…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

RAPID: Retrieval Augmented Training of Differentially Private Diffusion Models

ICLR 2025poster

Differentially private diffusion models (DPDMs) harness the remarkable generative capabilities of diffusion models while enforcing differential privacy (DP) for sensitive data. However, existing DPDM training approaches often suffer from significant utility loss, large memory footprint, and expensiv…

2025

Shadow-Activated Backdoor Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

This paper delves into a novel backdoor attack scenario, aiming to uncover potential security risks associated with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) during multi-round open-ended conversations with users. In the practical use of MLLMs, users have full control over the interaction process wit…

2024

BIPEFT: Budget-Guided Iterative Search for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Pretrained Language Models

EMNLP 2024finding

Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an efficient solution for fine-tuning large pretrained language models for downstream tasks. However, most PEFT strategies are manually designed, often resulting in suboptimal performance. Recent automatic PEFT approaches aim to address this but face cha…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Bridging Model Heterogeneity in Federated Learning via Uncertainty-based Asymmetrical Reciprocity Learning

ICML 2024poster

This paper presents FedType, a simple yet pioneering framework designed to fill research gaps in heterogeneous model aggregation within federated learning (FL). FedType introduces small identical proxy models for clients, serving as agents for information exchange, ensuring model security, and achie…

2024

CoRelation: Boosting Automatic ICD Coding through Contextualized Code Relation Learning

COLING 2024main

Automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding plays a crucial role in the extraction of relevant information from clinical notes for proper recording and billing. One of the most important directions for boosting the performance of automatic ICD coding is modeling ICD code relation…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

Depression Detection via Capsule Networks with Contrastive Learning

AAAI 2024technical

Depression detection is a challenging and crucial task in psychological illness diagnosis. Utilizing online user posts to predict whether a user suffers from depression seems an effective and promising direction. However, existing methods suffer from either poor interpretability brought by the black…

2024

FEDKIM: Adaptive Federated Knowledge Injection into Medical Foundation Models

EMNLP 2024main

Foundation models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling diverse modalities and tasks, outperforming conventional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches that are highly task-specific and modality-reliant. In the medical domain, however, the development of comprehensive foundation mod…

2024

FEDMEKI: A Benchmark for Scaling Medical Foundation Models via Federated Knowledge Injection

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

This study introduces the Federated Medical Knowledge Injection (FedMEKI) platform, a new benchmark designed to address the unique challenges of integrating medical knowledge into foundation models under privacy constraints. By leveraging a cross-silo federated learning approach, FedMEKI circumvents…

2024

Liberating Seen Classes: Boosting Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Text Classification via Anchor Generation and Classification Reframing

AAAI 2024technical

Few-shot and zero-shot text classification aim to recognize samples from novel classes with limited labeled samples or no labeled samples at all. While prevailing methods have shown promising performance via transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes, they are still limited by (1) In…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Personalized Steering of Large Language Models: Versatile Steering Vectors Through Bi-directional Preference Optimization

NeurIPS 2024poster

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial computational resources and may significantly affect the utility of…

2024

Recent Advances in Predictive Modeling with Electronic Health Records

IJCAI 2024poster

The development of electronic health records (EHR) systems has enabled the collection of a vast amount of digitized patient data. However, utilizing EHR data for predictive modeling presents several challenges due to its unique characteristics. With the advancements in machine learning techniques, d…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Towards Modeling Uncertainties of Self-Explaining Neural Networks via Conformal Prediction

AAAI 2024technical

Despite the recent progress in deep neural networks (DNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by DNNs. Existing explanation methods for DNNs mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations. The fact that post-hoc methods…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Unity in Diversity: Collaborative Pre-training Across Multimodal Medical Sources

ACL 2024long

Although pre-training has become a prevalent approach for addressing various biomedical tasks, the current efficacy of pre-trained models is hindered by their reliance on a limited scope of medical sources. This limitation results in data scarcity during pre-training and restricts the range of appli…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

VQAttack: Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Visual Question Answering via Pre-trained Models

AAAI 2024technical

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision and natural language process fields. Although the “pre-training & finetuning” learning paradigm significantly improves the VQA performance, the adversarial robustness of such a learning paradigm has not been explored. In this p…

2024

pFedClub: Controllable Heterogeneous Model Aggregation for Personalized Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Federated learning, a pioneering paradigm, enables collaborative model training without exposing users’ data to central servers. Most existing federated learning systems necessitate uniform model structures across all clients, restricting their practicality. Several methods have emerged to aggregate…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Boosting Decision-Based Black-Box Adversarial Attack with Gradient Priors

IJCAI 2023poster

Decision-based methods have shown to be effective in black-box adversarial attacks, as they can obtain satisfactory performance and only require to access the final model prediction. Gradient estimation is a critical step in black-box adversarial attacks, as it will directly affect the query efficie…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Boosting Few-Shot Text Classification via Distribution Estimation

AAAI 2023technical

Distribution estimation has been demonstrated as one of the most effective approaches in dealing with few-shot image classification, as the low-level patterns and underlying representations can be easily transferred across different tasks in computer vision domain. However, directly applying this ap…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

Defending Pre-trained Language Models as Few-shot Learners against Backdoor Attacks

NeurIPS 2023poster

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance as few-shot learners. However, their security risks under such settings are largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct a pilot study showing that PLMs as few-shot learners are highly vulnerable to backdoor attacks while ex…

2023

HQA-Attack: Toward High Quality Black-Box Hard-Label Adversarial Attack on Text

NeurIPS 2023poster

Black-box hard-label adversarial attack on text is a practical and challenging task, as the text data space is inherently discrete and non-differentiable, and only the predicted label is accessible. Research on this problem is still in the embryonic stage and only a few methods are available. Nevert…

2023

Hierarchical Pretraining on Multimodal Electronic Health Records

EMNLP 2023long main

Pretraining has proven to be a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP), exhibiting remarkable success in various NLP downstream tasks. However, in the medical domain, existing pretrained models on electronic health records (EHR) fail to capture the hierarchical nature of EHR data, li…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

SSPAttack: A Simple and Sweet Paradigm for Black-Box Hard-Label Textual Adversarial Attack

AAAI 2023technical

Hard-label textual adversarial attack is a challenging task, as only the predicted label information is available, and the text space is discrete and non-differentiable. Relevant research work is still in fancy and just a handful of methods are proposed. However, existing methods suffer from either…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

Towards Personalized Federated Learning via Heterogeneous Model Reassembly

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper focuses on addressing the practical yet challenging problem of model heterogeneity in federated learning, where clients possess models with different network structures. To track this problem, we propose a novel framework called pFedHR, which leverages heterogeneous model reassembly to ac…

Cited by 66SourcePDFScholar
2023

UniT: A Unified Look at Certified Robust Training against Text Adversarial Perturbation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent years have witnessed a surge of certified robust training pipelines against text adversarial perturbation constructed by synonym substitutions. Given a base model, existing pipelines provide prediction certificates either in the discrete word space or the continuous latent space. However, the…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

VLATTACK: Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Tasks via Pre-trained Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Vision-Language (VL) pre-trained models have shown their superiority on many multimodal tasks. However, the adversarial robustness of such models has not been fully explored. Existing approaches mainly focus on exploring the adversarial robustness under the white-box setting, which is unrealistic. I…

2022

Benchmarking Automated Clinical Language Simplification: Dataset, Algorithm, and Evaluation

COLING 2022main

Patients with low health literacy usually have difficulty understanding medical jargon and the complex structure of professional medical language. Although some studies are proposed to automatically translate expert language into layperson-understandable language, only a few of them focus on both ac…

2022

RealMedDial: A Real Telemedical Dialogue Dataset Collected from Online Chinese Short-Video Clips

COLING 2022main

Intelligent medical services have attracted great research interests for providing automated medical consultation. However, the lack of corpora becomes a main obstacle to related research, particularly data from real scenarios. In this paper, we construct RealMedDial, a Chinese medical dialogue data…

2022

TextHoaxer: Budgeted Hard-Label Adversarial Attacks on Text

AAAI 2022technical

This paper focuses on a newly challenging setting in hard-label adversarial attacks on text data by taking the budget information into account. Although existing approaches can successfully generate adversarial examples in the hard-label setting, they follow an ideal assumption that the victim model…

2021

SafeDrug: Dual Molecular Graph Encoders for Recommending Effective and Safe Drug Combinations

IJCAI 2021poster

Medication recommendation is an essential task of AI for healthcare. Existing works focused on recommending drug combinations for patients with complex health conditions solely based on their electronic health records. Thus, they have the following limitations: (1) some important data such as drug m…

2021

Writing by Memorizing: Hierarchical Retrieval-based Medical Report Generation

ACL 2021long

Medical report generation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis. Although existing approaches have achieved promising results, they either require a predefined template database in order to retrieve sentences or ignore the hierarchical nature of medical report generation. To…

Cited by 42SourcePDFScholar
2021

i-Algebra: Towards Interactive Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks

AAAI 2021technical

Providing explanations for deep neural networks (DNNs) is essential for their use in domains wherein the interpretability of decisions is a critical prerequisite. Despite the plethora of work on interpreting DNNs, most existing solutions offer interpretability in an ad hoc, one-shot, and static mann…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar