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Researcher profile

Qiong Zhang

Qiong Zhang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Computation and LanguageMachine LearningMethodologyComputer VisionInformation RetrievalApplicationsCryptography and Security

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Published work

12 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Minimum Wasserstein distance estimator under covariate shift: closed-form, super-efficiency and irregularity

Covariate shift arises when covariate distributions differ between source and target populations while the conditional distribution of the response remains invariant, and it underlies problems in missing data and causal inference. We propose a minimum Wasserstein distance estimation framework for inference under covariate shift that avoids explicit modeling of outcome regressions or importance weights. The resulting W-estimator admits a closed-form expression and is numerically equivalent to the classical 1-nearest neighbor estimator, yielding a new optimal transport interpretation of nearest neighbor methods. We establish root-$n$ asymptotic normality and show that the estimator is not asymptotically linear, leading to super-efficiency relative to the semiparametric efficient estimator under covariate shift in certain regimes, and uniformly in missing data problems. Numerical simulations, along with an analysis of a rainfall dataset, underscore the exceptional performance of our W-estimator.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

PFN-TS: Thompson Sampling for Contextual Bandits via Prior-Data Fitted Networks

Thompson sampling is a widely used strategy for contextual bandits: at each round, it samples a reward function from a Bayesian posterior and acts greedily under that sample. Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs), such as TabPFN v2+ and TabICL v2, are attractive candidates for this purpose because they approximate Bayesian posterior predictive distributions in a single forward pass. However, PFNs predict noisy future rewards, while Thompson sampling requires uncertainty over the latent mean reward function. We propose PFN-TS, a Thompson sampling algorithm that converts PFN posterior predictives into mean-reward samples using a subsampled predictive central limit theorem. The method estimates posterior variance from a geometric grid of $O(\log n)$ dataset prefixes rather than the full $O(n)$ predictive sequence used in previous predictive-sequence approaches, and reuses TabICL's cached representations across rounds. We prove consistency of the subsampled variance estimator and give a Bayesian regret bound that decomposes PFN-TS regret into exact posterior-sampling regret under the PFN prior plus approximation terms. Empirically, PFN-TS achieves the best average rank across nonlinear synthetic and OpenML classification-to-bandit benchmarks, remains competitive on linear and BART-generated rewards, and attains the highest estimated policy value in an offline mobile-health evaluation. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PFN_TS-36ED/.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Uncertainty Analysis of Experimental Parameters for Reducing Warpage in Injection Molding

Injection molding is a critical manufacturing process, but controlling warpage remains a major challenge due to complex thermomechanical interactions. Simulation-based optimization is widely used to address this, yet traditional methods often overlook the uncertainty in model parameters. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework to minimize warpage and quantify the uncertainty of optimal process settings. We employ polynomial regression models as surrogates for the injection molding simulations of a box-shaped part. By adopting a Bayesian framework, we estimate the posterior distribution of the regression coefficients. This approach allows us to generate a distribution of optimal decisions rather than a single point estimate, providing a measure of solution robustness. Furthermore, we develop a Monte Carlo-based boundary analysis method. This method constructs confidence bands for the zero-level sets of the response surfaces, helping to visualize the regions where warpage transitions between convex and concave profiles. We apply this framework to optimize four key process parameters: mold temperature, injection speed, packing pressure, and packing time. The results show that our approach finds stable process settings and clearly marks the boundaries of defects in the parameter space.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Verification Mirage: Mapping the Reliability Boundary of Self-Verification in Medical VQA

Self-verification, re-invoking the same vision language model (VLM) in a fresh context to check its own generated answer, is increasingly used as a default safety layer for medical visual question answering (VQA). We argue that this practice is fundamentally unreliable. We introduce [METHOD NAME], a diagnostic framework for mapping the reliability boundary of medical VLM self-verification by decomposing verifier behavior into discrimination capability and agreement bias. Because the verifier and answer generator are capacity-coupled, the verifier can overly agree with the generator, creating a verification mirage: a regime with both high verifier error and high agreement bias, driven by false acceptance of incorrect answers. Evaluating six open-weight VLMs across five medical VQA datasets and seven medical tasks, we find that this boundary is strongly task-conditioned. Knowledge-intensive clinical tasks fall deepest into the mirage, simpler tasks are more resistant, and perceptual tasks lie in between. Verification also fails to provide an independent safety signal: logistic mixed-effects analysis shows that verifier error and agreement bias become more likely when the generator is wrong, while saliency analyses show that verifiers under-attend to image evidence relative to generators, a phenomenon we call the lazy verifier. Cross-verification reduces but does not eliminate the mirage. Moreover, when verification is reused in multi-turn actor-verifier loops, most initially wrong answers become locked in by false verification. Since our experiments use clean benchmarks, the observed reliability boundary likely underestimates failures in real clinical deployment.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Reinforced Structured State-Evolution for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-and-language Navigation (VLN) task requires an embodied agent to navigate to a remote location following a natural language instruction. Previous methods usually adopt a sequence model (e.g., Transformer and LSTM) as the navigator. In such a paradigm, the sequence model predicts action at each step through a maintained navigation state, which is generally represented as a one-dimensional vector. However, the crucial navigation clues (i.e., object-level environment layout) for embodied navigation task is discarded since the maintained vector is essentially unstructured. In this paper, we propose a novel Structured state-Evolution (SEvol) model to effectively maintain the environment layout clues for VLN. Specifically, we utilise the graph-based feature to represent the navigation state instead of the vector-based state. Accordingly, we devise a Reinforced Layout clues Miner (RLM) to mine and detect the most crucial layout graph for long-term navigation via a customised reinforcement learning strategy. Moreover, the Structured Evolving Module (SEM) is proposed to maintain the structured graph-based state during navigation, where the state is gradually evolved to learn the object-level spatial-temporal relationship. The experiments on the R2R and R4R datasets show that the proposed SEvol model improves VLN models' performance by large margins, e.g., +3% absolute SPL accuracy for NvEM and +8% for EnvDrop on the R2R test set.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Masking Orchestration: Multi-task Pretraining for Multi-role Dialogue Representation Learning

Multi-role dialogue understanding comprises a wide range of diverse tasks such as question answering, act classification, dialogue summarization etc. While dialogue corpora are abundantly available, labeled data, for specific learning tasks, can be highly scarce and expensive. In this work, we investigate dialogue context representation learning with various types unsupervised pretraining tasks where the training objectives are given naturally according to the nature of the utterance and the structure of the multi-role conversation. Meanwhile, in order to locate essential information for dialogue summarization/extraction, the pretraining process enables external knowledge integration. The proposed fine-tuned pretraining mechanism is comprehensively evaluated via three different dialogue datasets along with a number of downstream dialogue-mining tasks. Result shows that the proposed pretraining mechanism significantly contributes to all the downstream tasks without discrimination to different encoders.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Review-based Question Generation with Adaptive Instance Transfer and Augmentation

Online reviews provide rich information about products and service, while it remains inefficient for potential consumers to exploit the reviews for fulfilling their specific information need. We propose to explore question generation as a new way of exploiting review information. One major challenge of this task is the lack of review-question pairs for training a neural generation model. We propose an iterative learning framework for handling this challenge via adaptive transfer and augmentation of the training instances with the help of the available user-posed question-answer data. To capture the aspect characteristics in reviews, the augmentation and generation procedures incorporate related features extracted via unsupervised learning. Experiments on data from 10 categories of a popular E-commerce site demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, as well as the usefulness of the new task.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Robust Layout-aware IE for Visually Rich Documents with Pre-trained Language Models

Many business documents processed in modern NLP and IR pipelines are visually rich: in addition to text, their semantics can also be captured by visual traits such as layout, format, and fonts. We study the problem of information extraction from visually rich documents (VRDs) and present a model that combines the power of large pre-trained language models and graph neural networks to efficiently encode both textual and visual information in business documents. We further introduce new fine-tuning objectives to improve in-domain unsupervised fine-tuning to better utilize large amount of unlabeled in-domain data. We experiment on real world invoice and resume data sets and show that the proposed method outperforms strong text-based RoBERTa baselines by 6.3% absolute F1 on invoices and 4.7% absolute F1 on resumes. When evaluated in a few-shot setting, our method requires up to 30x less annotation data than the baseline to achieve the same level of performance at ~90% F1.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Robust Optimal Design of Two-Armed Trials with Side Information

Significant evidence has become available that emphasizes the importance of personalization in medicine. In fact, it has become a common belief that personalized medicine is the future of medicine. The core of personalized medicine is the ability to design clinical trials that investigate the role of patient covariates on treatment effects. In this work, we study the optimal design of two-armed clinical trials to maximize accuracy of statistical models where the interaction between patient covariates and treatment effect are incorporated to enable precision medication. Such a modeling extension leads to significant complexities for the produced optimization problems because they include optimization over design and covariates concurrently. We take a robust optimization approach and minimize (over design) the maximum (over population) variance of interaction effect between treatment and patient covariates. This results in a min-max bi-level mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, which is notably challenging to solve. To address this challenge, we introduce a surrogate model by approximating the objective function for which we propose two solution approaches. The first approach provides an exact solution based on reformulation and decomposition techniques. In the second approach, we provide a lower bound for the inner optimization problem and solve the outer optimization problem over the lower bound. We test our proposed algorithms with synthetic and real-world data sets and compare it with standard (re-)randomization methods. Our numerical analysis suggests that the lower bounding approach provides high-quality solutions across a variety of settings.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

SemEval-2020 Task 5: Counterfactual Recognition

We present a counterfactual recognition (CR) task, the shared Task 5 of SemEval-2020. Counterfactuals describe potential outcomes (consequents) produced by actions or circumstances that did not happen or cannot happen and are counter to the facts (antecedent). Counterfactual thinking is an important characteristic of the human cognitive system; it connects antecedents and consequents with causal relations. Our task provides a benchmark for counterfactual recognition in natural language with two subtasks. Subtask-1 aims to determine whether a given sentence is a counterfactual statement or not. Subtask-2 requires the participating systems to extract the antecedent and consequent in a given counterfactual statement. During the SemEval-2020 official evaluation period, we received 27 submissions to Subtask-1 and 11 to Subtask-2. The data, baseline code, and leaderboard can be found at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/21691. The data and baseline code are also available at https://zenodo.org/record/3932442.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Sequential Selection for Accelerated Life Testing via Approximate Bayesian Inference

Accelerated life testing (ALT) is typically used to assess the reliability of material's lifetime under desired stress levels. Recent advances in material engineering have made a variety of material alternatives readily available. To identify the most reliable material setting with efficient experimental design, a sequential test planning strategy is preferred. To guarantee a tractable statistical mechanism for information collection and update, we develop explicit model parameter update formulas via approximate Bayesian inference. Theories show that our explicit update formulas give consistent parameter estimates. Simulation study and a case study show that the proposed sequential selection approach can significantly improve the probability of identifying the material alternative with best reliability performance over other design approaches.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2018arXiv

Aurora: Providing Trusted System Services for Enclaves On an Untrusted System

Intel SGX provisions shielded executions for security-sensitive computation, but lacks support for trusted system services (TSS), such as clock, network and filesystem. This makes \textit{enclaves} vulnerable to Iago attacks~\cite{DBLP:conf/asplos/CheckowayS13} in the face of a powerful malicious system. To mitigate this problem, we present Aurora, a novel architecture that provides TSSes via a secure channel between enclaves and devices on top of an untrusted system, and implement two types of TSSes, i.e. clock and end-to-end network. We evaluate our solution by porting SQLite and OpenSSL into Aurora, experimental results show that SQLite benefits from a \textit{microsecond} accuracy trusted clock and OpenSSL gains end-to-end secure network with about 1ms overhead.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access