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Lichao Sun

73 accepted papers

2026

3D4D: An Interactive, Editable, 4D World Model via 3D Video Generation

AAAI 2026technical

We introduce DreamLand, an interactive 4D visualization framework that integrates WebGL with Supersplat rendering. It transforms static images and text into coherent 4D scenes through four core modules and employs a foveated rendering strategy for efficient, real-time multi-modal interaction. This f

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Can LLMs Move Beyond Short Exchanges to Realistic Therapy Conversations?

ICLR 2026poster

Recent incidents have revealed that large language models (LLMs) deployed in mental health contexts can generate unsafe guidance, including reports of chatbots encouraging self-harm. Such risks highlight the urgent need for rigorous, clinically valid evaluation before integration into care. However,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Dismantling the Illusion of Vision-Language-Action Models Competence via Explicit Distributional Shifts

ICML 2026poster

Given that simulation can never exhaustively enumerate reality, generalization is the determining factor for whether Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can translate benchmark success into real-world functionality. However, current evaluation protocols often incentivize mechanical memorization rath…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

IDER: IDEMPOTENT EXPERIENCE REPLAY FOR RELIABLE CONTINUAL LEARNING

ICLR 2026poster

Catastrophic forgetting, the tendency of neural networks to forget previously learned knowledge when learning new tasks, has been a major challenge in continual learning (CL). To tackle this challenge, CL methods have been proposed and shown to reduce forgetting. Furthermore, CL models deployed in m…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

RankLLM: Weighted Ranking of LLMs by Quantifying Question Difficulty

ICLR 2026poster

Benchmarks establish a standardized evaluation framework to systematically assess the performance of large language models (LLMs), facilitating objective comparisons and driving advancements in the field. However, existing benchmarks fail to differentiate question difficulty, limiting their ability…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Routing and Reasoned Evaluation with Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide automated assessment signals for evaluating model-generated outputs. However, practical deployment faces three persistent challenges: heterogeneous reliability across models, substantial latency and token costs, and the absence of princip…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TrustGen: A Platform of Dynamic Benchmarking on the Trustworthiness of Generative Foundation Models

ICLR 2026poster

Generative foundation models (GenFMs), such as large language models and text-to-image systems, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various downstream applications. As they are increasingly deployed in high-stakes applications, assessing their trustworthiness has become both a critical nece…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Vision-MoR: Scaling Vision Transformer via Patch-Level Mixture-of-Recursions

AAAI 2026technical

Scaling Vision Transformers (ViTs) has yielded remarkable advancements in diverse vision tasks, albeit at the cost of escalating computational, memory, and parameter demands. Existing efficiency techniques typically address only one dimension, computation, memory, or parameters, lacking a cohesive a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Analytic Energy-Guided Policy Optimization for Offline Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Conditional decision generation with diffusion models has shown powerful competitiveness in reinforcement learning (RL). Recent studies reveal the relation between energy-function-guidance diffusion models and constrained RL problems. The main challenge lies in estimating the intermediate energy, wh…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BadToken: Token-level Backdoor Attacks to Multi-modal Large Language Models

CVPR 2025poster

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) extend large language models (LLMs) to process multi-modal information, enabling them to generate responses to image-text inputs. MLLMs have been incorporated into diverse multi-modal applications, such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis, via plug-a…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

BadVLA: Towards Backdoor Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models via Objective-Decoupled Optimization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic control by enabling end-to-end decision-making directly from multimodal inputs. However, their tightly coupled architectures expose novel security vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional adversarial perturbations, backdoor attacks represent a ste…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Benchmarking Vision Language Model Unlearning via Fictitious Facial Identity Dataset

ICLR 2025poster

Machine unlearning has emerged as an effective strategy for forgetting specific information in the training data. However, with the increasing integration of visual data, privacy concerns in Vision Language Models (VLMs) remain underexplored. To address this, we introduce Facial Identity Unlearning…

2025

Both Text and Images Leaked! A Systematic Analysis of Data Contamination in Multimodal LLM

EMNLP 2025

The rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly enhanced performance across benchmarks. However, data contamination — partial/entire benchmark data is included in the model’s training set — poses critical challenges for fair evaluation. Existing detection methods

2025

Can LLMs Correct Themselves? A Benchmark of Self-Correction in LLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Self-correction of large language models (LLMs) emerges as a critical component for enhancing their reasoning performance. Although various self-correction methods have been proposed, a comprehensive evaluation of these methods remains largely unexplored, and the question of whether LLMs can truly c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DataGen: Unified Synthetic Dataset Generation via Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Llama3 have significantly impacted various fields by enabling high-quality synthetic data generation and reducing dependence on expensive human-generated datasets. Despite this, challenges remain in the areas of generalization, controllability, diversi…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

FinLLM-B: When Large Language Models Meet Financial Breakout Trading

NAACL 2025industry

Trading range breakout is a key method in the technical analysis of financial trading, widely employed by traders in financial markets such as stocks, futures, and foreign exchange. However, distinguishing between true and false breakout and providing the correct rationale cause significant challeng…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

First SFT, Second RL, Third UPT: Continual Improving Multi-Modal LLM Reasoning via Unsupervised Post-Training

NeurIPS 2025poster

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately unsustainable resource. This limitation has motivated a growi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

GUI-World: A Video Benchmark and Dataset for Multimodal GUI-oriented Understanding

ICLR 2025poster

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been used as agents to control keyboard and mouse inputs by directly perceiving the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and generating corresponding commands. However, current agents primarily demonstrate strong understanding capabilities in static…

2025

LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step

ICCV 2025poster

Large language models have demonstrated substantial advancements in reasoning capabilities. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to perform systematic and structured reasoning, especially when handling complex visual question-answering tasks. In this work, we introduce LLaVA…

2025

LongLLaVA: Scaling Multi-modal LLMs to 1000 Images Efficiently via a Hybrid Architecture

EMNLP 2025

Expanding the long-context capabilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is critical for advancing video understanding and high-resolution image analysis. Achieving this requires systematic improvements in model architecture, data construction, and training strategies, particularly to ad

2025

Merge Hijacking: Backdoor Attacks to Model Merging of Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Model merging for Large Language Models (LLMs) directly fuses the parameters of different models finetuned on various tasks, creating a unified model for multi-domain tasks. However, due to potential vulnerabilities in models available on open-source platforms, model merging is susceptible to backdo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Tackling Continual Offline RL through Selective Weights Activation on Aligned Spaces

NeurIPS 2025poster

Continual offline reinforcement learning (CORL) has shown impressive ability in diffusion-based continual learning systems by modeling the joint distributions of trajectories. However, most research only focuses on limited continual task settings where the tasks have the same observation and action…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Towards Building Model/Prompt-Transferable Attackers against Large Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Although Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit impressive multimodal capabilities, their vulnerability to adversarial examples has raised serious security concerns. Existing LVLM attackers simply optimize adversarial images that easily overfit a certain model/prompt, making them ineffective o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

TruthPrInt: Mitigating Large Vision-Language Models Object Hallucination Via Latent Truthful-Guided Pre-Intervention

ICCV 2025poster

Object Hallucination (OH) has been acknowledged as one of the major trustworthy challenges in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) indicate that internal states, such as hidden states, encode the "overall truthfulness" of generated responses. Howe…

2025

XAttnMark: Learning Robust Audio Watermarking with Cross-Attention

ICML 2025poster

The rapid proliferation of generative audio synthesis and editing technologies has raised significant concerns about copyright infringement, data provenance, and the spread of misinformation through deepfake audio. Watermarking offers a proactive solution by embedding imperceptible, identifiable, an…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

1+1>2: Can Large Language Models Serve as Cross-Lingual Knowledge Aggregators?

EMNLP 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable ability to process information across various languages. Despite their capabilities, they exhibit inconsistencies in handling identical queries in different languages, presenting challenges for further advanceme…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

ACT-Diffusion: Efficient Adversarial Consistency Training for One-step Diffusion Models

CVPR 2024poster

Though diffusion models excel in image generation their step-by-step denoising leads to slow generation speeds. Consistency training addresses this issue with single-step sampling but often produces lower-quality generations and requires high training costs. In this paper we show that optimizing con…

2024

AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Alignment has become a critical step for instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to become helpful assistants. However, effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluat…

2024

CodeIP: A Grammar-Guided Multi-Bit Watermark for Large Language Models of Code

EMNLP 2024finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code generation. It now becomes crucial to identify whether the code is AI-generated and to determine the specific model used, particularly for purposes such as protecting Intellectual Property (IP) in industry and preventing cheating…

2024

Decision Mamba: Reinforcement Learning via Hybrid Selective Sequence Modeling

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent works have shown the remarkable superiority of transformer models in reinforcement learning (RL), where the decision-making problem is formulated as sequential generation. Transformer-based agents could emerge with self-improvement in online environments by providing task contexts, such as mu…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

EditShield: Protecting Unauthorized Image Editing by Instruction-guided Diffusion Models

ECCV 2024poster

"Text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as an evolutionary for producing creative content in image synthesis. Based on the impressive generation abilities of these models, instruction-guided diffusion models can edit images with simple instructions and input images. While they empower users to…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

GTBench: Uncovering the Strategic Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs via Game-Theoretic Evaluations

NeurIPS 2024poster

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are integrated into critical real-world applications, their strategic and logical reasoning abilities are increasingly crucial. This paper evaluates LLMs' reasoning abilities in competitive environments through game-theoretic tasks, e.g., board and card games that req…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar
2024

HonestLLM: Toward an Honest and Helpful Large Language Model

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various industries and applications, owing to their exceptional generative capabilities. Nevertheless, honesty and helpfulness, which ensure safe and useful real-world deployments, have been considered as the longstanding cornersto…

2024

Improving Interpretation Faithfulness for Vision Transformers

ICML 2024spotlight

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for various vision tasks. One reason behind the success lies in their ability to provide plausible innate explanations for the behavior of neural architectures. However, ViTs suffer from issues with explanation faithfulness, as th…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

In-Context Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought

ICML 2024poster

In-context learning is a promising approach for offline reinforcement learning (RL) to handle online tasks, which can be achieved by providing task prompts. Recent works demonstrated that in-context RL could emerge with self-improvement in a trial-and-error manner when treating RL tasks as an across…

2024

LLM-as-a-Coauthor: Can Mixed Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text Be Detected?

NAACL 2024findings

With the rapid development and widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), the use of Machine-Generated Text (MGT) has become increasingly common, bringing with it potential risks, especially in terms of quality and integrity in fields like news, education, and science. Current research…

2024

MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark

ICML 2024oral

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention recently, showing remarkable potential in artificial general intelligence. However, assessing the utility of MLLMs presents considerable challenges, primarily due to the absence multimodal benchmarks that align with human pre…

2024

MetaCloak: Preventing Unauthorized Subject-driven Text-to-image Diffusion-based Synthesis via Meta-learning

CVPR 2024poster

Text-to-image diffusion models allow seamless generation of personalized images from scant reference photos. Yet these tools in the wrong hands can fabricate misleading or harmful content endangering individuals. To address this problem existing poisoning-based approaches perturb user images in an i…

2024

MetaTool Benchmark for Large Language Models: Deciding Whether to Use Tools and Which to Use

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their impressive natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Recently, many studies have focused on the tool utilization ability of LLMs. They primarily investigated how LLMs effectively collaborate with given specific tools…

2024

Pandora's Box: Towards Building Universal Attackers against Real-World Large Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of multimodal understanding tasks. Nevertheless, these models are susceptible to adversarial examples. In real-world applications, existing LVLM attackers generally rely on the detailed prior knowledge…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Position: TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLM…

Cited by 95SourcePDFScholar
2024

ReTA: Recursively Thinking Ahead to Improve the Strategic Reasoning of Large Language Models

NAACL 2024long

Current logical reasoning evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focus on single-turn and static environments, such as arithmetic problems. The crucial problem of multi-turn, strategic reasoning is under-explored. In this work, we analyze the multi-turn strategic reasoning of LLMs thr…

2024

Revisiting Gradient Pruning: A Dual Realization for Defending against Gradient Attacks

AAAI 2024technical

Collaborative learning (CL) is a distributed learning framework that aims to protect user privacy by allowing users to jointly train a model by sharing their gradient updates only. However, gradient inversion attacks (GIAs), which recover users' training data from shared gradients, impose severe pri…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

SpecHub: Provable Acceleration to Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding

EMNLP 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential in advancing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but their sequential token generation limits inference speed. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) offers a promising solution by using a smaller draft model to generate multiple token sequenc…

2024

Stable Unlearnable Example: Enhancing the Robustness of Unlearnable Examples via Stable Error-Minimizing Noise

AAAI 2024technical

The open sourcing of large amounts of image data promotes the development of deep learning techniques. Along with this comes the privacy risk of these image datasets being exploited by unauthorized third parties to train deep learning models for commercial or illegal purposes. To avoid the abuse of…

2024

Virtual Context Enhancing Jailbreak Attacks with Special Token Injection

EMNLP 2024finding

Jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs) involve inducing these models to generate harmful content that violates ethics or laws, posing a significant threat to LLM security. Current jailbreak attacks face two main challenges: low success rates due to defensive measures and high resource req…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Comprehensive Study on Text-attributed Graphs: Benchmarking and Rethinking

NeurIPS 2023poster

Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) are prevalent in various real-world scenarios, where each node is associated with a text description. The cornerstone of representation learning on TAGs lies in the seamless integration of textual semantics within individual nodes and the topological connections across…

2023

Benchmarking and Analyzing Robust Point Cloud Recognition: Bag of Tricks for Defending Adversarial Examples

ICCV 2023poster

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for 3D point cloud recognition are vulnerable to adversarial examples, threatening their practical deployment. Despite the many research endeavors have been made to tackle this issue in recent years, the diversity of adversarial examples on 3D point clouds makes them more…

Cited by 5PDFcodeScholar
2023

Learning Generalizable Agents via Saliency-guided Features Decorrelation

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In visual-based Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents often struggle to generalize well to environmental variations in the state space that were not observed during training. The variations can arise in both task-irrelevant features, such as background noise, and task-relevant features, such as robot…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

PointCA: Evaluating the Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Completion Models against Adversarial Examples

AAAI 2023technical

Point cloud completion, as the upstream procedure of 3D recognition and segmentation, has become an essential part of many tasks such as navigation and scene understanding. While various point cloud completion models have demonstrated their powerful capabilities, their robustness against adversarial…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

RAIN: RegulArization on Input and Network for Black-Box Domain Adaptation

IJCAI 2023poster

Source-Free domain adaptation transits the source-trained model towards target domain without exposing the source data, trying to dispel these concerns about data privacy and security. However, this paradigm is still at risk of data leakage due to adversarial attacks on the source model. Hence, the…

Cited by 95SourcePDFScholar
2023

SCALE-UP: An Efficient Black-box Input-level Backdoor Detection via Analyzing Scaled Prediction Consistency

ICLR 2023poster

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries embed a hidden backdoor trigger during the training process for malicious prediction manipulation. These attacks pose great threats to the applications of DNNs under the real-world machine learning as a service (MLaaS)…

2023

Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning with Class Prototypes

AAAI 2023technical

Data heterogeneity across clients in federated learning (FL) settings is a widely acknowledged challenge. In response, personalized federated learning (PFL) emerged as a framework to curate local models for clients' tasks. In PFL, a common strategy is to develop local and global models jointly - the…

2022

BOND: Benchmarking Unsupervised Outlier Node Detection on Static Attributed Graphs

NeurIPS 2022accept

Detecting which nodes in graphs are outliers is a relatively new machine learning task with numerous applications. Despite the proliferation of algorithms developed in recent years for this task, there has been no standard comprehensive setting for performance evaluation. Consequently, it has been d…

2022

Data-Free Adversarial Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks

IJCAI 2022poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in modeling graph structured data, owing to its impressive performance in a wide range of practical applications. Recently, knowledge distillation (KD) for GNNs has enabled remarkable progress in graph model compression and knowledge transfer. Howev…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

Distributional Reward Estimation for Effective Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has drawn increasing attention in practice, e.g., robotics and automatic driving, as it can explore optimal policies using samples generated by interacting with the environment. However, high reward uncertainty still remains a problem when we want to train a satisf…

2022

Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation

EMNLP 2022finding

Federated learning (FL) can be essential in knowledge representation, reasoning, and data mining applications over multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs). A recent study FedE first proposes an FL framework that shares entity embeddings of KGs across all clients. However, entity embedding sharing from F…

2022

How to Inject Backdoors with Better Consistency: Logit Anchoring on Clean Data

ICLR 2022poster

Since training a large-scale backdoored model from scratch requires a large training dataset, several recent attacks have considered to inject backdoors into a trained clean model without altering model behaviors on the clean data. Previous work finds that backdoors can be injected into a trained cl…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2022

Membership Inference via Backdooring

IJCAI 2022poster

Recently issued data privacy regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) grant individuals the right to be forgotten. In the context of machine learning, this requires a model to forget about a training data sample if requested by the data owner (i.e., machine unlearning). As an essen…

2022

Query and Extract: Refining Event Extraction as Type-oriented Binary Decoding

ACL 2022findings

Event extraction is typically modeled as a multi-class classification problem where event types and argument roles are treated as atomic symbols. These approaches are usually limited to a set of pre-defined types. We propose a novel event extraction framework that uses event types and argument roles…

Cited by 70SourcePDFScholar
2022

Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding

EMNLP 2022finding

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then interact them with query for reasoning.However, w…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2022

SplitFed: When Federated Learning Meets Split Learning

AAAI 2022technical

Federated learning (FL) and split learning (SL) are two popular distributed machine learning approaches. Both follow a model-to-data scenario; clients train and test machine learning models without sharing raw data. SL provides better model privacy than FL due to the machine learning model architect…

2021

Graph Entropy Guided Node Embedding Dimension Selection for Graph Neural Networks

IJCAI 2021poster

Graph representation learning has achieved great success in many areas, including e-commerce, chemistry, biology, etc. However, the fundamental problem of choosing the appropriate dimension of node embedding for a given graph still remains unsolved. The commonly used strategies for Node Embedding Di…

2021

LDP-FL: Practical Private Aggregation in Federated Learning with Local Differential Privacy

IJCAI 2021poster

Training deep learning models on sensitive user data has raised increasing privacy concerns in many areas. Federated learning is a popular approach for privacy protection that collects the local gradient information instead of raw data. One way to achieve a strict privacy guarantee is to apply local…

Cited by 278SourcePDFScholar
2021

Model Extraction and Adversarial Transferability, Your BERT is Vulnerable!

NAACL 2021long

Natural language processing (NLP) tasks, ranging from text classification to text generation, have been revolutionised by the pretrained language models, such as BERT. This allows corporations to easily build powerful APIs by encapsulating fine-tuned BERT models for downstream tasks. However, when a…

2021

Secure Deep Graph Generation with Link Differential Privacy

IJCAI 2021poster

Many data mining and analytical tasks rely on the abstraction of networks (graphs) to summarize relational structures among individuals (nodes). Since relational data are often sensitive, we aim to seek effective approaches to generate utility-preserved yet privacy-protected structured data. In thi…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2021

Subgraph Federated Learning with Missing Neighbor Generation

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Graphs have been widely used in data mining and machine learning due to their unique representation of real-world objects and their interactions. As graphs are getting bigger and bigger nowadays, it is common to see their subgraphs separately collected and stored in multiple local systems. Therefore…

2020

Mixup-Transformer: Dynamic Data Augmentation for NLP Tasks

COLING 2020main

Mixup is a latest data augmentation technique that linearly interpolates input examples and the corresponding labels. It has shown strong effectiveness in image classification by interpolating images at the pixel level. Inspired by this line of research, in this paper, we explore i) how to apply mix…

Cited by 184SourcePDFScholar