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Jian Liang

69 accepted papers

2026

ALM-MTA: Front-Door Causal Multi-Touch Attribution Method for Creator-Ecosystem Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Consumption‑Drives‑Production (CDP) on social platforms aims to deliver interpretable incentive signals for creator‑ecosystem building and resource utilization improvement, which strongly relies on attributions. In large-scale and complex recommendation system, the absence of accurate labels togethe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Attend to the Active: Structure-Aware Dynamic Attention in LLMs for Compositional Instruction Following

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong instruction-following capabilities; however, they often struggle with compositional instructions involving multiple interleaved yet logically independent sub-tasks. These sub-tasks are typically organized in mutually exclusive structures, such as br…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FedPissa: Towards Federated Personalized Adaptation of Foundation Models via LoRA Subspace Mapping

ICML 2026spotlight

LoRA efficiently adapts large pre-trained models via low-rank updates, making it a strong parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method. When integrated with Federated Learning (FL), it enables collaborative fine-tuning across distributed clients, leveraging rich downstream data without exposing pri…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LEARNING FAIR DOMAIN ADAPTATION WITH VIRTUAL LABEL DISTRIBUTION

ICASSP 2026poster

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to mitigate performance degradation when training and testing data are sampled from different distributions. While significant progress has been made in enhancing overall accuracy, most existing methods overlook performance disparities across categories-an i…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Mitigating the Safety–Utility Trade-off in LLM Alignment via Adaptive Safe Context Learning

ICML 2026poster

While reasoning models have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, their increasing power necessitates stringent safety measures. For safety alignment, the core challenge lies in the inherent trade-off between safety and utility. However, prevailing alignment strategies typically co…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Modeling Long-Tail Relations in the Operating Room via In-Context Multimodal Learning

ICML 2026poster

Operating room (OR) scene graph generation (SGG) enables holistic modeling of OR domains by encoding interactions among medical staff, tools, and equipment as triplet-based structured scene graphs. Although existing OR SGG methods demonstrate satisfactory overall performance, they exhibit substantia…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reranker Helps, but Not Enough: Towards Strong Poisoning Attacks Against Retrieval-Augmented Generation

ICML 2026poster

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments large language models with external knowledge, which in turn exposes their retrieval corpora to data poisoning risks. However, existing poisoning attacks exhibit limited effectiveness against RAG equipped with a reranker to enhance retrieval quality. Rem…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Stop Tracking Me! Proactive Defense Against Attribute Inference Attack in LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can infer private user attributes (e.g., age, location, gender) from user-generated text shared online, enabling rapid and large-scale privacy breaches. Existing anonymization-based defenses are coarse-grained, lacking word-level precision…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Taming Momentum: Rethinking Optimizer States Through Low-Rank Approximation

ICLR 2026oral

Modern optimizers like Adam and Muon are central to training large language models, but their reliance on first- and second-order momenta introduces significant memory overhead, which constrains scalability and computational efficiency. In this work, we re-frame the exponential moving average (EMA)…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

WHU-MARS: A Multispectral Aerial-Ground Benchmark Towards Any-Scenario Person Re-Identification

CVPR 2026

Recent person re-identification (ReID) leverages heterogeneous sensing with multiple modalities and viewpoints to improve robustness across diverse conditions. However, most approaches target predefined scenario pairs (e.g., visible-infrared or aerial-ground) and train separate task-specific models.

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Backdoor Cleaning without External Guidance in MLLM Fine-tuning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in fine-tuning-as-a-service (FTaaS) settings, where user-submitted datasets adapt general-purpose models to downstream tasks. This flexibility, however, introduces serious security risks, as malicious fine-tuning can implant backdoor…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Be Confident: Uncovering Overfitting in MLLM Multi-Task Tuning

ICML 2025poster

Fine-tuning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in multi-task learning scenarios has emerged as an effective strategy for achieving cross-domain specialization. However, multi-task fine-tuning frequently induces performance degradation on open-response datasets. We posit that free-form answer g…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Catch Your Emotion: Sharpening Emotion Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

ICML 2025spotlight

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive progress in tasks such as visual question answering and visual understanding, but they still face significant challenges in emotional reasoning. Current methods to enhance emotional understanding typically rely on fine-tuning or manua…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Cooperative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Federated Classification

ICCV 2025poster

Unsupervised federated learning (UFL) aims to collaboratively train a global model across distributed clients without data sharing and label information. Previous UFL works have predominantly focused on representation learning and clustering tasks. Recently, vision language models (e.g., CLIP) have…

2025

Do We Really Need Curated Malicious Data for Safety Alignment in Multi-modal Large Language Models?

CVPR 2025poster

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful generations. However, the lack of safety measures specifically design…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Exploring Vacant Classes in Label-Skewed Federated Learning

AAAI 2025technical

Label skews, characterized by disparities in local label distribution across clients, pose a significant challenge in federated learning. As minority classes suffer from worse accuracy due to overfitting on local imbalanced data, prior methods often incorporate class-balanced learning techniques du…

2025

From Local Details to Global Context: Advancing Vision-Language Models with Attention-Based Selection

ICML 2025poster

Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, demonstrate impressive zero-shot capabilities on downstream tasks. Prior research highlights the crucial role of visual augmentation techniques, like random cropping, in alignment with fine-grained class descriptions generated by large language m…

2025

LEARN: Knowledge Adaptation from Large Language Model to Recommendation for Practical Industrial Application

AAAI 2025technical

Contemporary recommendation systems predominantly rely on ID embedding to capture latent associations among users and items. However, this approach overlooks the wealth of semantic information embedded within textual descriptions of items, leading to suboptimal performance and poor generalizations.…

2025

Learn from Downstream and Be Yourself in Multimodal Large Language Models Fine-Tuning

ICML 2025poster

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) has demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse distributions and tasks, largely due to extensive pre-training datasets. Fine-tuning MLLM has become a common practice to improve performance on specific downstream tasks. However, during fine-t…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning Time-Aware Causal Representation for Model Generalization in Evolving Domains

ICML 2025poster

Endowing deep models with the ability to generalize in dynamic scenarios is of vital significance for real-world deployment, given the continuous and complex changes in data distribution. Recently, evolving domain generalization (EDG) has emerged to address distribution shifts over time, aiming to c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LoRA-Pro: Are Low-Rank Adapters Properly Optimized?

ICLR 2025spotlight

Low-rank adaptation, also known as LoRA, has emerged as a prominent method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of foundation models. Despite its computational efficiency, LoRA still yields inferior performance compared to full fine-tuning. In this paper, we first uncover a fundamental connection bet…

2025

LoRASculpt: Sculpting LoRA for Harmonizing General and Specialized Knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Models

CVPR 2025poster

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at generalizing across modalities and tasks, effectively adapting them to specific downstream tasks while simultaneously retaining both general and specialized knowledge remains challenging. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used to ef…

2025

Protecting Model Adaptation from Trojans in the Unlabeled Data

AAAI 2025technical

Model adaptation tackles the distribution shift problem with a pre-trained model instead of raw data, which has become a popular paradigm due to its great privacy protection. Existing methods always assume adapting to a clean target domain, overlooking the security risks of unlabeled samples. This p…

2025

R-TPT: Improving Adversarial Robustness of Vision-Language Models through Test-Time Prompt Tuning

CVPR 2025poster

Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have gained significant popularity as foundation models, with numerous fine-tuning methods developed to enhance performance on downstream tasks. However, due to their inherent vulnerability and the common practice of selecting from a limited set of open-s…

2025

Splitting with Importance-aware Updating for Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Federated learning provides an efficient privacy-preserving distributed training framework for large language models, addressing the growing scarcity of publicly available training data while enabling the utilization of private datasets. While integrating large language model fine-tuning with federa…

2025

The Illusion of Progress? A Critical Look at Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Test-time adaptation (TTA) methods have gained significant attention for enhancing the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP during inference, without requiring additional labeled data. However, current TTA researches generally suffer from major limitations such as duplication of…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

A Hard-to-Beat Baseline for Training-free CLIP-based Adaptation

ICLR 2024poster

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has gained popularity for its remarkable zero-shot capacity. Recent research has focused on developing efficient fine-tuning methods, such as prompt learning and adapter, to enhance CLIP's performance in downstream tasks. However, these methods still req…

2024

CLAP: Collaborative Adaptation for Patchwork Learning

ICLR 2024spotlight

In this paper, we investigate a new practical learning scenario, where the data distributed in different sources/clients are typically generated with various modalities. Existing research on learning from multi-source data mostly assume that each client owns the data of all modalities, which may lar…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Connecting the Dots: Collaborative Fine-tuning for Black-Box Vision-Language Models

ICML 2024poster

With the emergence of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), considerable efforts have been devoted to fine-tuning them for downstream tasks. Despite the progress made in designing efficient fine-tuning methods, such methods require access to the model's parameters, which can be challenging as mo…

2024

Exploring Structured Semantic Priors Underlying Diffusion Score for Test-time Adaptation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Capitalizing on the complementary advantages of generative and discriminative models has always been a compelling vision in machine learning, backed by a growing body of research. This work discloses the hidden semantic structure within score-based generative models, unveiling their potential as eff…

2024

HORIZON: High-Resolution Semantically Controlled Panorama Synthesis

AAAI 2024technical

Panorama synthesis endeavors to craft captivating 360-degree visual landscapes, immersing users in the heart of virtual worlds. Nevertheless, contemporary panoramic synthesis techniques grapple with the challenge of semantically guiding the content generation process. Although recent breakthroughs i…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Pseudo-Calibration: Improving Predictive Uncertainty Estimation in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

ICML 2024poster

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has seen substantial efforts to improve model accuracy for an unlabeled target domain with the help of a labeled source domain. However, UDA models often exhibit poorly calibrated predictive uncertainty on target data, a problem that remains under-explored and po…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Realistic Unsupervised CLIP Fine-tuning with Universal Entropy Optimization

ICML 2024spotlight

The emergence of vision-language models, such as CLIP, has spurred a significant research effort towards their application for downstream supervised learning tasks. Although some previous studies have explored the unsupervised fine-tuning of CLIP, they often rely on prior knowledge in the form of cl…

2024

Subjective Topic meets LLMs: Unleashing Comprehensive, Reflective and Creative Thinking through the Negation of Negation

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capacity, as evidenced by prior studies focusing on objective topics that with unique standard answers such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning. However, the reasoning to definite answers emphasizes more on logical thinking, and falls short…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Towards Reliable Model Selection for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: An Empirical Study and A Certified Baseline

NeurIPS 2024poster

Selecting appropriate hyperparameters is crucial for unlocking the full potential of advanced unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods in unlabeled target domains. Although this challenge remains under-explored, it has recently garnered increasing attention with the proposals of various model se…

2024

Weight Diffusion for Future: Learn to Generalize in Non-Stationary Environments

NeurIPS 2024poster

Enabling deep models to generalize in non-stationary environments is vital for real-world machine learning, as data distributions are often found to continually change. Recently, evolving domain generalization (EDG) has emerged to tackle the domain generalization in a time-varying system, where the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Free Lunch for Domain Adversarial Training: Environment Label Smoothing

ICLR 2023poster

A fundamental challenge for machine learning models is how to generalize learned models for out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Among various approaches, exploiting invariant features by Domain Adversarial Training (DAT) received widespread attention. Despite its success, we observe training instability…

2023

Improving Generalization With Domain Convex Game

CVPR 2023poster

Domain generalization (DG) tends to alleviate the poor generalization capability of deep neural networks by learning model with multiple source domains. A classical solution to DG is domain augmentation, the common belief of which is that diversifying source domains will be conducive to the out-of-d…

2023

Informative Data Mining for One-Shot Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation

ICCV 2023poster

Contemporary domain adaptation offers a practical solution for achieving cross-domain transfer of semantic segmentation between labelled source data and unlabeled target data. These solutions have gained significant popularity; however, they require the model to be retrained when the test environmen…

Cited by 9PDFcodeScholar
2023

Mixed Samples as Probes for Unsupervised Model Selection in Domain Adaptation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been widely applied in improving model generalization on unlabeled target data. However, accurately selecting the best UDA model for the target domain is challenging due to the absence of labeled target data and domain distribution shifts. Traditional model s…

2023

TALL: Thumbnail Layout for Deepfake Video Detection

ICCV 2023poster

The growing threats of deepfakes to society and cybersecurity have raised enormous public concerns, and increasing efforts have been devoted to this critical topic of deepfake video detection. Existing video methods achieve good performance but are computationally intensive. This paper introduces a…

Cited by 68PDFcodeScholar
2023

Towards Understanding and Mitigating Dimensional Collapse in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Federated learning aims to train models collaboratively across different clients without sharing data for privacy considerations. However, one major challenge for this learning paradigm is the data heterogeneity problem, which refers to the discrepancies between the local data distributions among va…

2022

Are You Stealing My Model? Sample Correlation for Fingerprinting Deep Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

An off-the-shelf model as a commercial service could be stolen by model stealing attacks, posing great threats to the rights of the model owner. Model fingerprinting aims to verify whether a suspect model is stolen from the victim model, which gains more and more attention nowadays. Previous methods…

2022

Causality Inspired Representation Learning for Domain Generalization

CVPR 2022oral

Domain generalization (DG) is essentially an out-of-distribution problem, aiming to generalize the knowledge learned from multiple source domains to an unseen target domain. The mainstream is to leverage statistical models to model the dependence between data and labels, intending to learn represent…

Cited by 213PDFcodeScholar
2022

Contrastive Graph Structure Learning via Information Bottleneck for Recommendation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Graph convolution networks (GCNs) for recommendations have emerged as an important research topic due to their ability to exploit higher-order neighbors. Despite their success, most of them suffer from the popularity bias brought by a small number of active users and popular items. Also, a real-worl…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2022

Mimic Embedding via Adaptive Aggregation: Learning Generalizable Person Re-identification

ECCV 2022poster

"Domain generalizable (DG) person re-identification (ReID) aims to test across unseen domains without access to the target domain data at training time, which is a realistic but challenging problem. In contrast to methods assuming an identical model for different domains, Mixture of Experts (MoE) ex…

2022

Mimicking the Oracle: An Initial Phase Decorrelation Approach for Class Incremental Learning

CVPR 2022poster

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) aims at learning a classifier in a phase-by-phase manner, in which only data of a subset of the classes are provided at each phase. Previous works mainly focus on mitigating forgetting in phases after the initial one. However, we find that improving CIL at its initia…

Cited by 89PDFcodeScholar
2022

NUWA-Infinity: Autoregressive over Autoregressive Generation for Infinite Visual Synthesis

NeurIPS 2022accept

Infinite visual synthesis aims to generate high-resolution images, long-duration videos, and even visual generation of infinite size. Some recent work tried to solve this task by first dividing data into processable patches and then training the models on them without considering the dependencies be…

2022

NÜWA: Visual Synthesis Pre-training for Neural visUal World creAtion

ECCV 2022poster

"This paper presents a unified multimodal pre-trained model called NÜWA that can generate new or manipulate existing visual data (i.e., image and video) for various visual synthesis tasks. To cover language, image, and video at the same time for different scenarios, a 3D transformer encoder-decoder…

Cited by 350SourcePDFScholar
2022

Synergy-of-Experts: Collaborate to Improve Adversarial Robustness

NeurIPS 2022accept

Learning adversarially robust models require invariant predictions to a small neighborhood of its natural inputs, often encountering insufficient model capacity. There is research showing that learning multiple sub-models in an ensemble could mitigate this insufficiency, further improving the genera…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2021

Addressing Algorithmic Disparity and Performance Inconsistency in Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Federated learning (FL) has gain growing interests for its capability of learning from distributed data sources collectively without the need of accessing the raw data samples across different sources. So far FL research has mostly focused on improving the performance, how the algorithmic disparity…

2021

Bi-Classifier Determinacy Maximization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

AAAI 2021technical

Unsupervised domain adaptation challenges the problem of transferring knowledge from a well-labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. Recently, adversarial learning with bi-classifier has been proven effective in pushing cross-domain distributions close. Prior approaches typically lever…

2021

No Fear of Heterogeneity: Classifier Calibration for Federated Learning with Non-IID Data

NeurIPS 2021poster

A central challenge in training classification models in the real-world federated system is learning with non-IID data. To cope with this, most of the existing works involve enforcing regularization in local optimization or improving the model aggregation scheme at the server. Other works also share…

Cited by 423SourcePDFScholar
2021

Policy-Driven Attack: Learning to Query for Hard-label Black-box Adversarial Examples

ICLR 2021poster

To craft black-box adversarial examples, adversaries need to query the victim model and take proper advantage of its feedback. Existing black-box attacks generally suffer from high query complexity, especially when only the top-1 decision (i.e., the hard-label prediction) of the victim model is avai…

2021

Semantic Concentration for Domain Adaptation

ICCV 2021poster

Domain adaptation (DA) paves the way for label annotation and dataset bias issues by the knowledge transfer from a label-rich source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. A mainstream of DA methods is to align the feature distributions of the two domains. However, the majority of them foc…

Cited by 117PDFcodeScholar
2021

Unleashing the Power of Contrastive Self-Supervised Visual Models via Contrast-Regularized Fine-Tuning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Contrastive self-supervised learning (CSL) has attracted increasing attention for model pre-training via unlabeled data. The resulted CSL models provide instance-discriminative visual features that are uniformly scattered in the feature space. During deployment, the common practice is to directly f…

2020

A Balanced and Uncertainty-aware Approach for Partial Domain Adaptation

ECCV 2020poster

This work addresses the unsupervised domain adaptation problem, especially in the case of class labels in the target domain being only a subset of those in the source domain. Such a partial transfer setting is realistic but challenging and existing methods always suffer from two key problems, negati…

2020

Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

ICML 2020poster

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to leverage the knowledge learned from a labeled source dataset to solve similar tasks in a new unlabeled domain. Prior UDA methods typically require to access the source data when learning to adapt the model, making them risky and inefficient for decentrali…

2019

Additive Adversarial Learning for Unbiased Authentication

CVPR 2019poster

Authentication is a task aiming to confirm the truth between data instances and personal identities. Typical authentication applications include face recognition, person re-identification, authentication based on mobile devices and so on. The recently-emerging data-driven authentication process may…

Cited by 25PDFcodeScholar
2019

Distant Supervised Centroid Shift: A Simple and Efficient Approach to Visual Domain Adaptation

CVPR 2019poster

Conventional domain adaptation methods usually resort to deep neural networks or subspace learning to find invariant representations across domains. However, most deep learning methods highly rely on large-size source domains and are computationally expensive to train, while subspace learning method…

Cited by 130PDFScholar
2018

Deep Spatial Feature Reconstruction for Partial Person Re-Identification: Alignment-Free Approach

CVPR 2018poster

Partial person re-identification (re-id) is a challenging problem, where only a partial observation of a person image is available for matching. However, few studies have offered a solution of how to identify an arbitrary patch of a person image. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate matchin…