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Zhiyong Yang

47 accepted papers

2026

BlackMirror: Black-Box Backdoor Detection for Text-to-Image Models via Instruction-Response Deviation

CVPR 2026

This paper investigates the challenging task of detecting backdoored text-to-image models under black-box settings and introduces a novel detection framework BlackMirror. Existing approaches typically rely on analyzing image-level similarity, under the assumption that backdoor-triggered generations

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

GoodDiffusion: Proactive Copyright Protection for Diffusion Generative Models via Learnable Sample-specific Signatures

ICML 2026oral

This paper tackles the challenging problem of developing a proactive copyright protection mechanism that cuts off unauthorized use of diffusion generative models. Existing studies largely fall into post-hoc attribution (e.g., watermarking and fingerprinting) or degradation-only defenses, which offer…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Guiding Diffusion-based Reconstruction with Contrastive Signals for Balanced Visual Representation

CVPR 2026

The limited understanding capacity of the visual encoder in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has become a key bottleneck for downstream performance. This capacity includes both Discriminative Ability (D-Ability), which reflects class separability, and Detail Perceptual Ability (P-Abili

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Mind the Way You Select Negative Texts: Pursuing the Distance Consistency in OOD Detection with VLMs

CVPR 2026

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection seeks to identify samples from unknown classes, a critical capability for deploying machine learning models in open-world scenarios. Recent research has demonstrated that Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can effectively leverage their multi-modal representations for

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Quantifying the Potential to Escape Filter Bubbles: A Behavior-Aware Measure via Contrastive Simulation

AAAI 2026technical

Nowadays, recommendation systems have become crucial to online platforms, shaping user exposure by accurate preference modeling. However, such an exposure strategy can also reinforce users’ existing preferences, leading to a notorious phenomenon named filter bubbles. Given its negative effects, such

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

The Bridge-Garden Dilemma in LLM Distillation: Why Mixing Hard and Soft Labels Works

ICML 2026poster

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student. In language modeling, the student is trained either on tokens sampled from the teacher (\textbf{hard labels}) or the teacher’s full next-token distribution (\textbf{soft labels}). Despite soft labels app…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Devil is in the Condition Numbers: Why is GLU Better than non-GLU Structure?

ICML 2026poster

Gated Linear Units (GLU) and their variants are widely adopted in modern open-source large language model architectures and consistently outperform their non-gated counterparts, yet the underlying reasons for this advantage remain unclear. In this work, we study GLU by analyzing two-layer networks i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TuckA: Hierarchical Compact Tensor Experts for Efficient Fine-Tuning

AAAI 2026technical

Efficiently fine-tuning pre-trained models for downstream tasks is a key challenge in the era of foundation models. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) presents a promising solution, achieving performance comparable to full fine-tuning by updating only a small number of adaptation weights per lay

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ABKD: Pursuing a Proper Allocation of the Probability Mass in Knowledge Distillation via $\alpha$-$\beta$-Divergence

ICML 2025oral

Knowledge Distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model by minimizing the divergence between their output distributions, typically using forward Kullback-Leibler divergence (FKLD) or reverse KLD (RKLD). It has become an effective training paradigm due to…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Bidirectional Logits Tree: Pursuing Granularity Reconcilement in Fine-Grained Classification

AAAI 2025technical

This paper addresses the challenge of Granularity Competition in fine-grained classification tasks, which arises due to the semantic gap between multi-granularity labels. Existing approaches typically develop independent hierarchy-aware models based on shared features extracted from a common base en…

2025

DDNet: Exploring Dual Dependencies for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

ICASSP 2025accepted

Recent Transformer-based methods have advanced multivariate time series forecasting by focusing primarily on temporal dependencies (cross-time dependencies). However, these methods often overlook crucial multivariate correlations (cross-channel dependencies), leading to suboptimal performance. In th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

EDGE: Unknown-aware Multi-label Learning by Energy Distribution Gap Expansion

AAAI 2025technical

Multi-label Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection aims to discriminate the OOD samples from the multi-label In-Distribution (ID) ones. Compared with its multiclass counterpart, it is crucial to model the joint information among classes. To this end, JointEnergy, which is a representative multi-label O…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Focal-SAM: Focal Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Long-Tailed Classification

ICML 2025poster

Real-world datasets often follow a long-tailed distribution, making generalization to tail classes difficult. Recent methods resorted to long-tail variants of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), such as ImbSAM and CC-SAM, to improve generalization by flattening the loss landscape. However, these att…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LightFair: Towards an Efficient Alternative for Fair T2I Diffusion via Debiasing Pre-trained Text Encoders

NeurIPS 2025poster

This paper explores a novel lightweight approach LightFair to achieve fair text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs) by addressing the adverse effects of the text encoder. Most existing methods either couple different parts of the diffusion model for full-parameter training or rely on auxiliary netwo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

MixBridge: Heterogeneous Image-to-Image Backdoor Attack through Mixture of Schrödinger Bridges

ICML 2025poster

This paper focuses on implanting multiple heterogeneous backdoor triggers in bridge-based diffusion models designed for complex and arbitrary input distributions. Existing backdoor formulations mainly address single-attack scenarios and are limited to Gaussian noise input models. To fill this gap, w…

2025

One Image is Worth a Thousand Words: A Usability Preservable Text-Image Collaborative Erasing Framework

ICML 2025poster

Concept erasing has recently emerged as an effective paradigm to prevent text-to-image diffusion models from generating visually undesirable or even harmful content. However, current removal methods heavily rely on manually crafted text prompts, making it challenging to achieve a high erasure (**eff…

2025

OpenworldAUC: Towards Unified Evaluation and Optimization for Open-world Prompt Tuning

ICML 2025poster

Prompt tuning adapts Vision-Language Models like CLIP to open-world tasks with minimal training costs. In this direction, one typical paradigm evaluates model performance **separately** on known classes (*i.e.*, base domain) and unseen classes (*i.e.*, new domain). However, real-world scenarios requ…

2025

SSE-SAM: Balancing Head and Tail Classes Gradually Through Stage-Wise SAM

AAAI 2025technical

Real-world datasets often exhibit a long-tailed distribution, where vast majority of classes known as tail classes have only few samples. Traditional methods tend to overfit on these tail classes. Recently, a new approach called Imbalanced SAM (ImbSAM) is proposed to leverage the generalization bene…

2024

AUCSeg: AUC-oriented Pixel-level Long-tail Semantic Segmentation

NeurIPS 2024poster

The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a well-known metric for evaluating instance-level long-tail learning problems. In the past two decades, many AUC optimization methods have been proposed to improve model performance under long-tail distributions. In this paper, we explore AUC optimization method…

2024

Harnessing Hierarchical Label Distribution Variations in Test Agnostic Long-tail Recognition

ICML 2024poster

This paper explores test-agnostic long-tail recognition, a challenging long-tail task where the test label distributions are unknown and arbitrarily imbalanced. We argue that the variation in these distributions can be broken down hierarchically into global and local levels. The global ones reflect…

2024

ReconBoost: Boosting Can Achieve Modality Reconcilement

ICML 2024poster

This paper explores a novel multi-modal *alternating* learning paradigm pursuing a reconciliation between the exploitation of uni-modal features and the exploration of cross-modal interactions. This is motivated by the fact that current paradigms of multi-modal learning tend to explore multi-modal f…

2024

Size-invariance Matters: Rethinking Metrics and Losses for Imbalanced Multi-object Salient Object Detection

ICML 2024spotlight

This paper explores the size-invariance of evaluation metrics in Salient Object Detection (SOD), especially when multiple targets of diverse sizes co-exist in the same image. We observe that current metrics are size-sensitive, where larger objects are focused, and smaller ones tend to be ignored. We…

2024

Suppress Content Shift: Better Diffusion Features via Off-the-Shelf Generation Techniques

NeurIPS 2024poster

Diffusion models are powerful generative models, and this capability can also be applied to discrimination. The inner activations of a pre-trained diffusion model can serve as features for discriminative tasks, namely, diffusion feature. We discover that diffusion feature has been hindered by a hidd…

2023

A Unified Generalization Analysis of Re-Weighting and Logit-Adjustment for Imbalanced Learning

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Real-world datasets are typically imbalanced in the sense that only a few classes have numerous samples, while many classes are associated with only a few samples. As a result, a naive ERM learning process will be biased towards the majority classes, making it difficult to generalize to the minority…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2023

Building Bridge Across the Time: Disruption and Restoration of Murals In the Wild

ICCV 2023poster

In this paper, we focus on the mural-restoration task, which aims to detect damaged regions in the mural and repaint them automatically. Different from traditional image restoration tasks like in/out/blind-painting and image renovation, the corrupted mural suffers from more complicated degradation.…

Cited by 11PDFScholar
2023

DRAUC: An Instance-wise Distributionally Robust AUC Optimization Framework

NeurIPS 2023poster

The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a widely employed metric in long-tailed classification scenarios. Nevertheless, most existing methods primarily assume that training and testing examples are drawn i.i.d. from the same distribution, which is often unachievable in practice. Distributionally Robus…

2023

Feature Directions Matter: Long-Tailed Learning via Rotated Balanced Representation

ICML 2023poster

Long-tailed learning is one of the most challenging problems in visual recognition. There are some studies aiming to solve long-tailed classification from the perspective of feature learning. Recent work proposes to learn the balanced representation by fixing the linear classifier as Equiangular Tig…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Weighted ROC Curve in Cost Space: Extending AUC to Cost-Sensitive Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we aim to tackle flexible cost requirements for long-tail datasets, where we need to construct a (a) cost-sensitive and (b) class-distribution robust learning framework. The misclassification cost and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) are popular metrics for (a) and (b), respectively…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

A Sparse-Motif Ensemble Graph Convolutional Network against Over-smoothing

IJCAI 2022poster

The over-smoothing issue is a well-known challenge for Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). Specifically, it is often observed that increasing the depth of GCN ends up in a trivial embedding subspace where the difference among node embeddings belonging to the same cluster tends to vanish. This paper…

2022

AdAUC: End-to-end Adversarial AUC Optimization Against Long-tail Problems

ICML 2022spotlight

It is well-known that deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Existing studies of adversarial training have made great progress against this challenge. As a typical trait, they often assume that the class distribution is overall balanced. However, long-tail datasets are ubiquito…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Asymptotically Unbiased Instance-wise Regularized Partial AUC Optimization: Theory and Algorithm

NeurIPS 2022accept

The Partial Area Under the ROC Curve (PAUC), typically including One-way Partial AUC (OPAUC) and Two-way Partial AUC (TPAUC), measures the average performance of a binary classifier within a specific false positive rate and/or true positive rate interval, which is a widely adopted measure when decis…

2022

ER: Equivariance Regularizer for Knowledge Graph Completion

AAAI 2022technical

Tensor factorization and distanced based models play important roles in knowledge graph completion (KGC). However, the relational matrices in KGC methods often induce a high model complexity, bearing a high risk of overfitting. As a remedy, researchers propose a variety of different regularizers suc…

2022

Exploring the Algorithm-Dependent Generalization of AUPRC Optimization with List Stability

NeurIPS 2022accept

Stochastic optimization of the Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) is a crucial problem for machine learning. Although various algorithms have been extensively studied for AUPRC optimization, the generalization is only guaranteed in the multi-query case. In this work, we present the first…

2022

Geometry Interaction Knowledge Graph Embeddings

AAAI 2022technical

Knowledge graph (KG) embeddings have shown great power in learning representations of entities and relations for link prediction tasks. Previous work usually embeds KGs into a single geometric space such as Euclidean space (zero curved), hyperbolic space (negatively curved) or hyperspherical space (…

2022

OTKGE: Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Optimal Transport

NeurIPS 2022accept

Multi-modal knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) have caught more and more attention in learning representations of entities and relations for link prediction tasks. Different from previous uni-modal KGE approaches, multi-modal KGE can leverage expressive knowledge from a wealth of modalities (image, te…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2022

OpenAUC: Towards AUC-Oriented Open-Set Recognition

NeurIPS 2022accept

Traditional machine learning follows a close-set assumption that the training and test set share the same label space. While in many practical scenarios, it is inevitable that some test samples belong to unknown classes (open-set). To fix this issue, Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose goal is to make…

2022

The Minority Matters: A Diversity-Promoting Collaborative Metric Learning Algorithm

NeurIPS 2022accept

Collaborative Metric Learning (CML) has recently emerged as a popular method in recommendation systems (RS), closing the gap between metric learning and Collaborative Filtering. Following the convention of RS, existing methods exploit unique user representation in their model design. This paper focu…

2021

Deep Partial Rank Aggregation for Personalized Attributes

AAAI 2021technical

In this paper, we study the problem of how to aggregate pairwise personalized attributes (PA) annotations (e.g., Shoes A is more comfortable than B) from different annotators on the crowdsourcing platforms, which is an emerging topic gaining increasing attention in recent years. Given the crowdsourc…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2021

Dual Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings

AAAI 2021technical

In this paper, we study the problem of learning representations of entities and relations in the knowledge graph for the link prediction task. Our idea is based on the observation that the vast majority of the related work only models the relation as a single geometric operation such as translation…

2021

Seeking the Shape of Sound: An Adaptive Framework for Learning Voice-Face Association

CVPR 2021poster

Nowadays, we have witnessed the early progress on learning the association between voice and face automatically, which brings a new wave of studies to the computer vision community. However, most of the prior arts along this line (a) merely adopt local information to perform modality alignment and (…

Cited by 36PDFcodeScholar
2021

What to Select: Pursuing Consistent Motion Segmentation from Multiple Geometric Models

AAAI 2021technical

Motion segmentation aims at separating motions of different moving objects in a video sequence. Facing the complicated real-world scenes, recent studies reveal that combining multiple geometric models would be a more effective way than just employing a single one. This motivates a new wave of model-…

2021

When All We Need is a Piece of the Pie: A Generic Framework for Optimizing Two-way Partial AUC

ICML 2021oral

The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a crucial metric for machine learning, which evaluates the average performance over all possible True Positive Rates (TPRs) and False Positive Rates (FPRs). Based on the knowledge that a skillful classifier should simultaneously embrace a high TPR and a low FPR,…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2021

When False Positive is Intolerant: End-to-End Optimization with Low FPR for Multipartite Ranking

NeurIPS 2021poster

Multipartite ranking is a basic task in machine learning, where the Area Under the receiver operating characteristics Curve (AUC) is generally applied as the evaluation metric. Despite that AUC reflects the overall performance of the model, it is inconsistent with the expected performance in some ap…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2019

DM2C: Deep Mixed-Modal Clustering

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Data exhibited with multiple modalities are ubiquitous in real-world clustering tasks. Most existing methods, however, pose a strong assumption that the pairing information for modalities is available for all instances. In this paper, we consider a more challenging task where each instance is repres…

2019

Deep Robust Subjective Visual Property Prediction in Crowdsourcing

CVPR 2019poster

The problem of estimating subjective visual properties (SVP) of images (e.g., Shoes A is more comfortable than B) is gaining rising attention. Due to its highly subjective nature, different annotators often exhibit different interpretations of scales when adopting absolute value tests. Therefore, re…

Cited by 6PDFScholar
2019

Generalized Block-Diagonal Structure Pursuit: Learning Soft Latent Task Assignment against Negative Transfer

NeurIPS 2019poster

In multi-task learning, a major challenge springs from a notorious issue known as negative transfer, which refers to the phenomenon that sharing the knowledge with dissimilar and hard tasks often results in a worsened performance. To circumvent this issue, we propose a novel multi-task learning meth…

2019

iSplit LBI: Individualized Partial Ranking with Ties via Split LBI

NeurIPS 2019poster

Due to the inherent uncertainty of data, the problem of predicting partial ranking from pairwise comparison data with ties has attracted increasing interest in recent years. However, in real-world scenarios, different individuals often hold distinct preferences, thus might be misleading to merely lo…