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Researcher profile

Hongfu Liu

Hongfu Liu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computer VisionMachine LearningArtificial Intelligencecs.CY

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Boosting Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Core Token Attention-Based Seed Selection

Text-to-image diffusion models can synthesize high-quality images, yet the outcome is notoriously sensitive to the random seed: different initial seeds often yield large variations in image quality and prompt-image alignment. We revisit this "seed effect" and show that attention dynamics over prompt core tokens, the content-bearing words, measured during the first few denoising steps, strongly predict final generation quality. Building on this observation, we introduce Attention-Based Seed Selection (ABSS), a training-free, plug-and-play method that ranks seeds for a given prompt by leveraging cross-attention to core tokens during the denoising process. ABSS requires no finetuning and does not alter the initial noise; it scores and ranks all candidate seeds, keeps only the top-k for full generation, and discards the rest, without relying on a fixed accept/reject threshold. Operating purely at inference time, ABSS can serve as a lightweight pre-selection add-on for existing seed-optimization pipelines, enabling additional gains. Across three benchmarks, extensive experiments show that ABSS enables consistent improvements in text-image alignment and visual quality for Stable Diffusion variants, as corroborated by human preference and alignment metrics.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Achieving Fairness at No Utility Cost via Data Reweighing with Influence

With the fast development of algorithmic governance, fairness has become a compulsory property for machine learning models to suppress unintentional discrimination. In this paper, we focus on the pre-processing aspect for achieving fairness, and propose a data reweighing approach that only adjusts the weight for samples in the training phase. Different from most previous reweighing methods which usually assign a uniform weight for each (sub)group, we granularly model the influence of each training sample with regard to fairness-related quantity and predictive utility, and compute individual weights based on influence under the constraints from both fairness and utility. Experimental results reveal that previous methods achieve fairness at a non-negligible cost of utility, while as a significant advantage, our approach can empirically release the tradeoff and obtain cost-free fairness for equal opportunity. We demonstrate the cost-free fairness through vanilla classifiers and standard training processes, compared to baseline methods on multiple real-world tabular datasets. Code available at https://github.com/brandeis-machine-learning/influence-fairness.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Exploiting Temporal Relations on Radar Perception for Autonomous Driving

We consider the object recognition problem in autonomous driving using automotive radar sensors. Comparing to Lidar sensors, radar is cost-effective and robust in all-weather conditions for perception in autonomous driving. However, radar signals suffer from low angular resolution and precision in recognizing surrounding objects. To enhance the capacity of automotive radar, in this work, we exploit the temporal information from successive ego-centric bird-eye-view radar image frames for radar object recognition. We leverage the consistency of an object's existence and attributes (size, orientation, etc.), and propose a temporal relational layer to explicitly model the relations between objects within successive radar images. In both object detection and multiple object tracking, we show the superiority of our method compared to several baseline approaches.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Label-invariant Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Graph Classification

Recently, contrastiveness-based augmentation surges a new climax in the computer vision domain, where some operations, including rotation, crop, and flip, combined with dedicated algorithms, dramatically increase the model generalization and robustness. Following this trend, some pioneering attempts employ the similar idea to graph data. Nevertheless, unlike images, it is much more difficult to design reasonable augmentations without changing the nature of graphs. Although exciting, the current graph contrastive learning does not achieve as promising performance as visual contrastive learning. We conjecture the current performance of graph contrastive learning might be limited by the violation of the label-invariant augmentation assumption. In light of this, we propose a label-invariant augmentation for graph-structured data to address this challenge. Different from the node/edge modification and subgraph extraction, we conduct the augmentation in the representation space and generate the augmented samples in the most difficult direction while keeping the label of augmented data the same as the original samples. In the semi-supervised scenario, we demonstrate our proposed method outperforms the classical graph neural network based methods and recent graph contrastive learning on eight benchmark graph-structured data, followed by several in-depth experiments to further explore the label-invariant augmentation in several aspects.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learnable Visual Words for Interpretable Image Recognition

To interpret deep models' predictions, attention-based visual cues are widely used in addressing \textit{why} deep models make such predictions. Beyond that, the current research community becomes more interested in reasoning \textit{how} deep models make predictions, where some prototype-based methods employ interpretable representations with their corresponding visual cues to reveal the black-box mechanism of deep model behaviors. However, these pioneering attempts only either learn the category-specific prototypes and deteriorate their generalizing capacities, or demonstrate several illustrative examples without a quantitative evaluation of visual-based interpretability with further limitations on their practical usages. In this paper, we revisit the concept of visual words and propose the Learnable Visual Words (LVW) to interpret the model prediction behaviors with two novel modules: semantic visual words learning and dual fidelity preservation. The semantic visual words learning relaxes the category-specific constraint, enabling the general visual words shared across different categories. Beyond employing the visual words for prediction to align visual words with the base model, our dual fidelity preservation also includes the attention guided semantic alignment that encourages the learned visual words to focus on the same conceptual regions for prediction. Experiments on six visual benchmarks demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our proposed LVW in both accuracy and model interpretation over the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we elaborate on various in-depth analyses to further explore the learned visual words and the generalizability of our method for unseen categories.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Multi-task Envisioning Transformer-based Autoencoder for Corporate Credit Rating Migration Early Prediction

Corporate credit ratings issued by third-party rating agencies are quantified assessments of a company's creditworthiness. Credit Ratings highly correlate to the likelihood of a company defaulting on its debt obligations. These ratings play critical roles in investment decision-making as one of the key risk factors. They are also central to the regulatory framework such as BASEL II in calculating necessary capital for financial institutions. Being able to predict rating changes will greatly benefit both investors and regulators alike. In this paper, we consider the corporate credit rating migration early prediction problem, which predicts the credit rating of an issuer will be upgraded, unchanged, or downgraded after 12 months based on its latest financial reporting information at the time. We investigate the effectiveness of different standard machine learning algorithms and conclude these models deliver inferior performance. As part of our contribution, we propose a new Multi-task Envisioning Transformer-based Autoencoder (META) model to tackle this challenging problem. META consists of Positional Encoding, Transformer-based Autoencoder, and Multi-task Prediction to learn effective representations for both migration prediction and rating prediction. This enables META to better explore the historical data in the training stage for one-year later prediction. Experimental results show that META outperforms all baseline models.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Learnable Subspace Clustering

This paper studies the large-scale subspace clustering (LSSC) problem with million data points. Many popular subspace clustering methods cannot directly handle the LSSC problem although they have been considered as state-of-the-art methods for small-scale data points. A basic reason is that these methods often choose all data points as a big dictionary to build huge coding models, which results in a high time and space complexity. In this paper, we develop a learnable subspace clustering paradigm to efficiently solve the LSSC problem. The key idea is to learn a parametric function to partition the high-dimensional subspaces into their underlying low-dimensional subspaces instead of the expensive costs of the classical coding models. Moreover, we propose a unified robust predictive coding machine (RPCM) to learn the parametric function, which can be solved by an alternating minimization algorithm. In addition, we provide a bounded contraction analysis of the parametric function. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to efficiently cluster millions of data points among the subspace clustering methods. Experiments on million-scale datasets verify that our paradigm outperforms the related state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access